Transcripts
1. Create a Reusable Wreath Design in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class: create a wreath with re-usable objects in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to be creating a variety of wreaths in Photoshop. While on the face of it, it looks a fairly easy thing to do, it's not actually as easy as it looks. We're going to investigate a few issues that come up when you're trying to design wreaths and trying to do it in a repetitive and a very efficient way. You're going to learn some tips and tricks for working with brushes and how to get these wreaths created fairly quickly and fairly easily. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which will ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class and learning from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started making wreaths in Photoshop.
2. Pt 1 Understand The Basis for the Wreath Design Solution: Before we start on the actual solution, the actual wreath will be drawing. Let's have a look where the inspiration came from. This is little thank-you card that arrived with a parcel from a company in China and I like the little wreath and thought it was rather cute and it was prompting me to make a class on making wreaths. Because I haven't done a Photoshop class in quite some time, I thought it would be a good time to do so. Well, I struggled with the actual design a little bit and the solution that I developed relies on a few things and that's why we're going to spend a bit of time having a look right now at the problems that I encountered. The obvious thing that I thought of to start off with was to create a brush that I could use. I have created a little leaf brush that's going to be around my wreath. We're going to have a look at how we will create that in just a minute but we've got it to start off with. I also wanted this to be automatic. I wanted to be able to select something, and just apply the brush tool without having to place the brush shapes all away around the wreath individually. Automating the solution brings up a few issues. I thought about creating a path. I'm going to quickly draw out a path with the pen tools. I'm going to click and drag in two points to draw out a half of a wreath. We not to worried about what it looks like right now because this is not actually going to be used. But I do have a path here and I can select it with the path selection tool, this black arrow tool. Now that I've got a brush created, I can select my brush and over here in the bottom of the paths panel with a path selected, there's an option here for striking the path with a brush. If I click here now, I'm going to strike that path with my brush. Well, it's not working particularly well, but it is part of the way to the solution. Let me just press "Control" or Command Z to undo that. Let's go and adjust our brush. Well, we're going to need to obviously increase the spacing a little bit so that there is more space between each of these leaves. Let's go back to our path, and let's go back to stroking it. Our brush is not going around our path and it's a bit of breathing space between the leaves, but it's not following the path. Let's just undo that. Let's go back to the brush settings here, and we can make it follow the path if we go to Shape Dynamics. We'll turn shape dynamics on and then over here in the settings we're going to set the Angle Jitter. We're going to set the Angle Jitter to what's called direction in other words, follow the direction of the line. Let's go to the path's tool, let's click here. Well, it followed the directional line but it's following it in a way that we didn't mean it to. We wanted the lanes to look a bit more wreath like, not be pointing the way they are. Undo that again, go back to the brush settings panel and say what we can do about that. Well, the trick is to change the starting brush. Right now the brush is pointing upwards. We want it to point a different direction. In fact, I want it to point with the blunt end over here and the pointy end over here, so let's just rotate it around. I think that's going to be pretty good and you might be already able to say what my problem is going to be. Let's go and see. This is the problem. Now the leaf brush is going all away around the wreath, but it's not going in an attractive manner and we're not getting any variety in how the leaves are positioned around the shape. At this point in developing the solution, I was ready to throw that path out because it really wasn't giving me what I wanted. But there is a way of applying a brush to a single line. So let's go back to the pen tool. I'm going to draw two lines here. This one is going to be drawn from the top down, so just two clicks, press 'Escape" to stop it drawing. Now this next line I'm going to draw from the bottom up. I'm going to start here and finish up here. There's a difference in where I started and where I finished. Let's go back and let's go and grab both these lines. Let's go to the brush settings tool here, and let's just make sure that we've got our brush selected. We've got the same brush settings as we had previously, let's go to the path, and let's strike these lines with that brush. Just going to undo that, and let's just increase the spacing a bit because it's a little hard to see exactly what's happening here. This is what's happening. When I'm stroking these paths with a brush you can see that there's a difference depending on where I drew from. If I started at the top and drew it down, then the brush goes this way. If I started from the bottom and drew up, then it's going upside down. There is a method for me to control the direction that the brush goes by creating a line that is in the right direction. Let me just go and draw a line at an angle. I'll select it with the path selection tool, make sure I have the brush selected and click here once, and now I've got a leaf that's going in a particular direction. It's going in the direction of the path that I've drawn. Here is the secret source if you like, the secret to how we're going to create a reusable wreath design so that we can apply all sorts of leaves to our wreath. It's going to be dependent on some short-ish lines, and it's also going to be dependent on which direction the lines are drawn in. If we want consistency throughout our wreath, then we're going to need to be really careful that we draw them correctly. Let's now go and see how we can apply this knowledge to creating our actual wreath.
3. Pt 2 Create the Wreath Design: Now that we're ready to create our eighth solution, I'm going to give you this image and it's going to be in the class project area for you to download. What I did was I drew a circle on a sheet of paper and I marked out where I thought I wanted my wreath elements to go. Now I did two designs. I did a more sparse design and a more intense design thinking that I would make half of our wreath and then go back and flip it to make the other half of the wraith. This is a design I'm going to give you and you'll just open it in Photoshop. You could do something similar yourself if you wanted leaves of the wreath to come out at the same point, then you would just design it that way, but leave a little bit of space here between the line of the wreath and where you actually want the leaves to be. The lines, we're going to make them pretty much the same length, but just draw them out, something like this and you'll have a pretty good basis for creating a design. But as I said, this left half is one wreath style and the right-hand side is a totally different one. We're going to the pen tool and we're going to make sure that we have path selected here. There are three options here, you want path because we want to create a set of paths. We already know that we have to be consistent when we do our design and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the point that is closest to the circle, and then I'm going to create the second point. I'll click here and click here. You can click with a mouse or you can use the pen tool for this project, I'll press Escape to stop drawing. I'll come here and do this one, Click, Click, Escape. I'm going to do that all the way around the wreath on each of these lines. Now I might make some minor adjustments as I go if I think my pencil line wasn't as good as it could have been if the angle of the line was not what I really want. Now you could do a design like this in Photoshop yourself, but I actually just find pencil and paper sometimes it's just easier to design on and you can always just erase it if you need to and just get something that is going to work for you. Pretty much my lines are about the same length and I'm pretty much following the design that I had here and I want one at the very end. Again, I'm working from the base first and then the tip second. This is the set of lines I've got for my first wreath, let's have a look and see what we've got. We've got a work path here in the path palette, you can of course get to that by choosing Window and then Paths. This is the set of lines. Now it's a work path, so that is always under threat of being lost. When you have a work path, if you want to keep it, I suggest you just drag it onto the new icon and that turns it into just a regular path and now Photoshop won't lose it for you, makes it a little bit more robust. In the last panel here, we've just got the background. Now I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to hide the background because we don't need that right now. In fact, if we wanted to, we could add a white filled layer behind all of this so we would have something to look at our wreath on and I might do that. With the last selected, I've got white as my background color here, I'll press Control Backspace. That would be on the PC, Control Backspace, on a Mac you would press Command Delete. Now let's add another new layer because I want my lays of my wreath to be on a separate layer, that's always a sensible idea. Right now, I'm working in black. I have my new layer visible and I've got my path here and now we need a brush. Now we could use the brush I've just created, but let's go and create our own brush so you can see how easy that is to do. Let's choose File and then New. I'm going to make a really small document here, 150 pixels by 150 pixels. That means my brush is going to be about 150 pixels tall. If you want a bigger brush, make a bigger document, I'll click "Create". I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to make sure I have black here. I've got my brush tool, but this time let's use a circular brush. Let's go and get a circular brush, I want it to be pretty hard but not totally hard, something like about 80 percent hardness would be good. Now, the size is huge, I want to back off the size a lot. If you want to adjust the size of the brush, the open and closed square brackets are really good tip to use. The open square bracket makes it smaller, the close square bracket makes it larger. I'm just going to draw a line and then I'm going to draw the elements for my brush. It had three of these and it had some little bits in here and that is quite simply how I made that original brush. You might make the tail of it here a little bit longer. Now we'll go to Select All, we select the entire document. We'll go to Edit and then Define Brush Preset and I'm going to call this wreath leaf 1 and click "Archive". This is what the brush looks like. I don't need this document any longer, the brush is saved with Photoshop. Let's go back. We've got our path selected, we've got all wreaths little paths selected. If they weren't, we would go to the path selection tool and just make sure they were all selected. Let's go to our brush tool, let's go and make sure that we have the last brush, which is this one here selected, that's the one we just created. If we just go and apply it to our shapes, just to start off and say how things look, let's go and do that and of course it's not working. Press Control or Command Z to undo it, let's go to the brush settings. Again, if you don't see brush settings here, you can get to it by choosing Window and then Brush Settings. We're going to increase the spacing. Now, we only want one brush stroke for each of these lines. We want to push the spacing up as far as we can do, just to make sure that we're only going to get one of these per line. I'm also going to increase the brush size, I think it's probably a little bit small right now. Let's go to Path and let's try this again and see how it looks. Well, that size looks reasonably good, perhaps a little bit small, the direction is all wrong. We'll just increase the size of it a little bit and to make it follow these lines, we go to Shape Dynamics and we go to Angle Jitter, and we set the angle to direction. I know that I'm going to have to have this brush paint in a horizontal direction. Before I do anything else, I'm just going to rotate this round so it's painting from left to right if you like. Now let's go back to the Paths, let's go back to the Stroke Path with Brush Tool and let's see what we've got. That's what our wreath looks like, that the result of applying these leaves to the lines that I created. You can see the lines by going back to the path tool. If you think your lines need to be altered, you can go ahead and do that. What I would do is go ahead and move any of these lines that I think need adjusting. Let's go to the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool, let's move this a little bit and you can adjust the length, you can adjust the positioning of any of these lines. If we go back to the last palette, you'll say that they brush strokes went on this last. It's very easy to get rid of those, add a new empty layer, go back to your paths, make sure that you have your paths selected with the path selection tool. You have your brush still in place so provided you just click on the Brush option here, or if you press the letter B and I'd strongly suggest that you learn the letter B for brushes for this class because it's going to make life a whole lot easier. Then just click here on "Strike path with brush" and then you'll get an updated look to your wreath. You're going to get the wreath as it now looks with some changes having been made to the positioning of those lines, and you can go back and continue to make changes. You might find different results if you use a slightly smaller brush. I'm adding a new empty layer, I'm going back to the paths palette, making sure that I have all of these paths selected. I'll go back to my brush, make sure I have my brush selected over here or press the letter B, wind down the size of the brush a little bit and see how it differs when I create it this time. Once we've created half of our wreath, we can go ahead and create the second half, and we're going to do that in the next video.
4. Pt 3 Make the full Wreath: We've already created half the wreath. So it's going to be very easy to create the other half. I've got a layer here that has all those brushstrokes on them. I'm going to duplicate that layer by dragging and dropping it onto the new icon. That gives me two. All I'm going to do is to move this across. I'm going to start dragging on this edge of it. I'm going to look up here at the values, and I'm looking for this width value here. I'm going to adjust it to minus 100 percent, at the moment it was a little bit less than that. If I do minus 100 percent then it is exactly flipped over, and I can now move it across a little bit just using these smart guides to position it accurately, and I'll click this check mark here. Now I have two sides of my wreath and I'm ready now to add some filler elements. One of the filler elements I want to add is a brush that's going to add some little dots here. Let's see how we do that. I already have a lot of dot brushes. We can go to the brushes panel and we can create a dot brush. But we need to be a bit careful because if we want to continue to use this wreath brush, we may want to save it as a preset. Let's go across here to the brush settings panel. We still have this brush created and set up. I'm going to create a preset for it. I'll do that by clicking here on the fly-out menu and I'll choose "New Brush Preset". I'm going to call this "Wreath leaf setup". We know that the setup for the brush is already built in, so we'll click "Okay". Now we can get that back at any time, so what I'm going to do now with a dot brush is not going to lose that setup for us. Let's go now to the brushes panel and let's go and select one of these general brushes. I'm just going to use this big dot brush now, it's huge. I'm going to decrease its size considerably. I'm going to increase its spacing quite a lot. I wanted to paint as a series of different sized dots and I want them to go splat everywhere. This is not splat everywhere. Let's do it in a color as well. Let's give it orangish berries. Let's go and get an orange color. To make it draw more interestingly, we'll go to Shape Dynamics. I'll turn shape dynamics on, make sure I select Shape Dynamics. Now if I want the size of the brush to vary, I can increase the size Jitter. That means that the brush is going to paint in a whole series of different sizes. Angle Jitter is not going to matter with this brush because the round brush, it's not got any angle associated with it. But if we wanted to, we could use a roundness Jitter and then the Angle Jitter because the roundness Jitter would give the brush a little bit of flattening. I'm not thinking that I wanted to say much round this jitter at all, maybe just a little bit. I'll just increase that to a small value. We also want the brush to paint a whole lot more intensively either side of where I'm drawing. We'll go to scattering and I'm going to select here both axes. The scattering is going to half them across both axes and I'm going to start increasing it. Now when I draw you'll see it's scattering as it goes. If we want it to scatter more then we're going to increase the count. Now it's going paint more like this, and if you think that there are things that you want to change. I'm thinking that the maximum size is a little bit big right now, then you can go ahead and make those changes. I'm thinking the size jitter, I'm going to bring back to a smaller value but I'm going to start off with a smaller size brush. Once I've got my brush setup, I'll probably want to save that preset as well. I'll just make this scattered dots. Then we're including the color in it so it's always going to start out painting orange. You can make changes to that but that's how it's set up. Let's go to the last pallet. We want another new layer so that we're painting on an empty layer. I want the dots to appear behind the leaves here. I'm going to make sure that this layer is behind the other one. Now we can just come in and fill in this wreath shape by just drawing these dots. My dots are pretty conservative. You'll see that they're not moving a long distance away from where I'm painting. You may want to have them more separated. You can make adjustments to the brush to do that. We're filling in some of the gaps in the wreath in this way.
5. Pt 4 Make a New Brush and a New Wreath: Now that we've made they first rate, let's have a look and see how we could take the path that we've already created and use it in a brand new document. I'm going to choose File New and I'll create a new document. This one's going to be 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels. So I'm working again in a square document and I'll click Create. Now I want the paths from this document. So with this document, I can go to the paths here. If I select the black arrow or the Path Selection Tool, I can select either the paths. Now, all I'm selecting is the set of path lines. I'll choose Edit and then copy, I'll switch to the document that I'm working in, and I'll choose Edit and then paste. I'll paste in these paths now, they're bigger than this document. But if I go to the past selection tool and select either all of them, then I can re-size them. I can do that by pressing Control or Command T to bring up the transform handles, I'll hold the Shift key and just scale it down from the corner here, and then place that where it's going to be half of my wraith. Now, I'm thinking that my document actually should be a little bit wider. So let me just place it about here over the edge and I'll click the check mark. If I need to enlarge my document, I can do so with the crop tool. So I'll select the crop tool, which in later versions of Photo shop is just selecting the entire background. So now I'll just drag outwards and I'll do that holding the Alt or option case, I'm adding extra content to both sides of the document. Now, it's gone in black, so let's just undo that. Let's switch this colors around and do it again, Alt or Option Drag, and now the background is white. So this path this time is a work path, and work paths are not permanent paths, they're always temporary. So if you want to make sure that this path is going to be saved in this document, just drop it onto the new path icon and it becomes path one and it's going to be here permanently. We've got a document here that has absolutely nothing in it. Let me just select the regular Move tool. Let me de-select this path and you can see it's just an empty document, but hidden here in the paths panel is the secret to making a wraith, and that is the set of lines that we can apply a brush too. So let's go and create another brush, I'll choose File and New because I like to develop my brushes in smaller documents. Again, I'll work with small document this time, 600 pixels by 600 pixels, I'll click Create. Now for this particular brush, I want a little bit of dimensions, I want some dark elements and some not quite so dark elements. So let's see how we do that. I'm going to use the pentose, I'm just going to use that to draw out the main part of the element that I'll use for my brush. So I'm going to click and drag down here, Click and drag across a little bit, click and go back up to here, and I'll click and drag. What I want is something that looks a little bit like the stem of a set of leaves. So let's go back now to the direct selection tool, once we've actually created the starting shape, then we can start coming in and editing it. If you want to move one of these handles in isolation, then hold the Alt or Option key and that stops is teeter totter behavior. So here I'll hold the Alt option key, and now I can move this handle independently of the other. This white arrow key or the direct selection tool, allows you to just select and work on one particular point at a time. Here is my work path. Again, I'm working with paths here. When you go to the pen tool, you can say that I'm working with paths. I'm going to add some leaves here, and leaves are going to be based on an ellipse. So let's just go and get the ellipse tool again, making sure that we're working in a path, just going to drag out a tall ellipse. I'll go back to the pen tool area of the toolbar and choose the convert anchor point, till now if I click one step here, I get a sharp point. Then we go and just select and drag out these shapes a little bit to make it a little bit more lifelike. Now with the Path Selection Tool, I can come in and rotate it. To do that, I'll press Control or Command T to get these transform handles, and I'm just going to rotate it around and let's go and place it in position here. I'm going to make a copy of it, it's already selected, so I'll choose edit copy and then edit paste. Now that's pasted the copy on top of the original, so you can say I can just drag it out of the way, Control or Command T, and I'm going to rotate this around so that I can get a leaf on the other side here. Now it's also possible to Alt or Option Drag. So I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key down, you can say that the mouse pointer when I have this black arrow or this path selection tool selected gets a little plus beside it. Well, that's allowing me to drag a duplicate of this leaf away. Again, I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller here. I'll drag another one over here, Alt or Option, Drag it Control Command T to get my transform handles. Let's go and put that in position 2. We're going to select both of these and move them up as a pair, I'll press Control or Command T and then shift drag inwards. Now I can just select one of them and move them out. Going to shorten this stem a little bit, I think it's a bit long. I'll bring all the other shapes down. So I can just put one at the very top. You use the selection tool, this black arrow tool, provided you select either some element in the whole path is going to be selected. Limits also option drag this one away and let us just rotate it to go on the very top. Once you've completed drawing an element like this as a set of paths, you can again make this a real path. So just drag it onto the new icon, so it's now a path that won't be deleted. This can also be saved as a custom shapes, I'll choose Edit and then define custom shape. I'm just going to call this leaves. Because I've gone to so much trouble to design this, I'm going to be able to find lots of other ways that I can use it. I am going to save it as a custom shape. Now at this stage, I can just deselect it. Now to actually use that shape to create the leaves that I'm going to use as a brush. I'll go to the custom shapes tool. I'll go and select the last shape, which is the one that I have just drawn. I'm going to start with pure black. Now I'm using the shape options here, so I'll just drag out the shape, hold the Shift case Arts constrained if I do want it to be constrained to those proportions, I think I might actually make it a little bit wider, there is my shape. Now it's all black, but I want to make it a fill of more of a gradient. Let's go to the fill options here and let's select gradient and for the gradient, I want it to look like this, I want it lighter at the top and darker at the bottom. But I think the top needs to be a little bit less than white, so that's just double-click this stop and let's make the top stop a little bit darker. This can now become a brush. What I'll do is select everything with Control or Command I, and then choose Edit and Define Brush Preset. This then becomes my brush and the colors that I've applied, this graduated color from a light gray to a dark gray is actually being incorporated with the brush because brushes are black and white, but they're also gray-scale, so they will save lighter colors as well as darker colors. I'm going to call this leaf brush graduated color, and click "Okay" and so now we've created our brush along the way, we also created a custom shape because we've spent a bit of time making the brush. I can close all of this, I don't need to keep it because I've got my brush saved, I've got my custom shapes saved so I don't need any of that. Back here in this document, I have my path, so let's go and select the path with the path selection tool. We have our brush, so let's go to the brush tool. Lets go and select the brush, it's always the last one in the brushes panel. Now, it looks huge, so let's go to the brush settings and we already know some of the settings that we're going to want to use. We know we want it to be quite a bit smaller and we also know that we want the spacing to be as wide as we can because we only want one brush leaf for each one of these lines here, and I'm just testing the brush size here and looking at what size I might want. I'm going to use about 200 pixels here. Let's go to Shape Dynamics. Again, we want Angle Jitter on and we want it to go with the direction of the brush. But let's go back to the brush tip shape because we know we want it to paint from left to right, so we're going to need to rotate it. About there should be fine. Let's test it, let's go to our path and let's make sure that we've got a brand new layer to work on. Go to our Paths Panel and click here on Stroke path with brush. Now, I think my brush is too big, so let's go back and let's just reduce the size of it and try again. Now I've got a painting quite nicely. I quite like that, but I am going to undo it because while I'd like it to do is to paint in a green color. Let's now go and pick up a green color. Now I have my green color, let's go back and let's do that brushstroke again. Now you can see here, let me just click away that the brushes painting with dark green and light green. Going to undo that for a minute because we can go one step further. Again let's go and select our paths. Let's go back and select our brush. Let's this time change the color of the background, so let's go and get a green that's a little bit of a different green. Well, actually let's go and get a blue so that we've actually got something to look at here. Right now the brush is going to paint green because it always paints with the foreground color unless you tell it to do something else, so this is the tell it to do something else area. We'll go into color dynamics, so what I wanted to do it is to jitter between the foreground and the background color between the green and the blue that I just created. If I just click here on the stroke path with brush, you'll say that Photoshop right now is ignoring me. Well, the reason for that is that I'm doing a one-click hit always lines with the brush, and Photoshop is interpreting that as a single brush stroke. Now if I want a change for every tip, for every application of the brush, I need to click here on applied per tip. Now when I click here, we're going to get a range of different colors from the green to the blue.Let's just go and increase the jitter to a full amount, and let's go and apply that. Here we've got some greens and here we've got some blues, so this time with our wraith, we're getting a variety of different colors coming through because of the way that we set up the brush. Again, if we like this brush and we like these settings, then we can go back and save those settings so we can go and choose New Brush Preset. What I'm thinking of doing though, is just winding that back one step, so let's go and do that. I just want to change the angle of this brush a little bit. I'm going to tip it so it's a little bit of an angle and let's see what we get there. We're getting a little bit more variety that may be something that you want to do is just alter the actual angle that your brush is going out to get a result that you like. Let's just go and save that as a brush. I'm going to call that leaf brush set up, and I'm including the colors here so all of the color dynamic settings and everything is being saved with this brush, including the starting colors. Although of course, we can alter that should we wish to do so, I'll click "Okay." We already know how to finish this wraith off, we're going to take this layer here. Well, let me just get rid of the past selection because that's in my way, but go to this layer will make a duplicate of it. We're going to select it with Control click on the layer thumbnail, press "Control" or "Command T" to get the transform handles and now we can just transform it across the vertical looking here for this width to be minus 100 percent, and then click the Check mark and if necessary we can move it out of the way. But I'm thinking that the placement for this is pretty good. Going to add a new layer here and I'll brush some elements in behind it, so let's go and get the brush that we created, that doughty brush that painted orange, let's go and get that. Well, right now I've got something selected. I'm just going to press "Control" or "Command" day-to-day select that selection. But let's go to the Brush Preset, so let's go to the brushes here, and in the presets here, is this scatter dot brush. You can see its color is set up here too, so let's just go and select it. It's got its color already associated with it, but if we want to, we can change that, let's make it a more yellowy color this time and we'll just paint it in behind these elements. You can say that saving brush presets is a really good idea because it means they're going to be accessible to you at any time, you don't have to go to all the trouble of resetting up the brush and doing all that experimentation. Everything's going to be set up ready for you to go.
6. Pt 5 One More Wreath, Project and Wrapup: Before we finish up here, let's have a look at one final example. Now in this case, the wreath goes all the way around and I've added some text to it, and also some little flowers. I reused the dotted brush that I was using previously and this leaf brush. Let's have a look at the flower brush. For the flower brush, I just created a document and added some circles here. Then over the top, a dark gray circle and then a light gray circle. I saved that as I brush and I set it up to paint in blue and green, that same color dynamic setting in the brush pallets, so whenever I touch the brush to the workspace here, it would paint in a different version of the blue or the green. I also adjusted the size for it. That's how those brush strokes, all those flowers have been added to this design. I of course added some text to it. Now let me just turn all the text and the imagery off and let's have a look quickly at the path. Now, in this instance, the paths go all the way around and I've just offset them. There are the same number of elements inside as they are out. To apply the brush stroke, this circular brush stroke here, what I did was I used a path, so I just created a path and then I'd stroke that path with my circular brush to make sure that I got a nice even circular result. That's how this particular design has been put together and this wreaths obviously look really good with some text in it, so I just applied some text in a really nice little script font. Your project for this class will be to create a wreath design using the process that I've shown you. Set up a series of lines and then stroke those lines with a brush that you have created. Then finish off the design with perhaps some little dotted elements and some text. You might even want to create some little flower brushes that you can use as well. Post an image of your completed wreath design as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class. I hope that you've learned things about Photoshop of which you were previously unaware. Now as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned something from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. Recommendations like this help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link up here click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
7. Extra video for Photoshop CS6 users: I've had a question from a user who was using Photoshop CS6 , and they want to know if this is going to work the same in Photoshop CS6. Well, it is, but with a little bit of difference in that it's a little bit harder to see the paths as you're drawing them. I've opened my wraith image and I'm going to the pen tool here in Photoshop CS6. I'm just going to draw those lines exactly as we did in the other video. Clicking in the middle, clicking at the end, pressing the escape key. Now, I can't say anything as I'm working. I'm trusting that the process is working. If you want some visual feedback, then I open up the paths palette here. I use the drop down menu and I went to Panel Options and I made sure that I had the largest possible thumbnail size. It just makes it a little bit easier to see where you're going. Now I'm just going to continue putting in those paths. Click, click, escape, and go all the way around this shape. Now, I have already taken the time to make the brush that I'm going to use here in Photoshop CS6 because the brush is made exactly the same way as in later versions of Photoshop. There's no real difference there. Is going to finish up those last lines here. We're having a look here in the work path and we can see all the lines we've created. I can drag it onto the new icon, I get my path. Now, it's really important that this stage that you add a new layer to your document, because you're going to have to drop your brushstrokes into a new layer. I'm going to turn the background of, I'm going to add a new layer exactly as I did in the previous video. I'm going to it fill it with this white color with control backspace, that would be command Delete on the Mac. I am saying these lines here because I have this path selected. If I click away from the path, I won't see those lines. It is important that you click on the path here and the path palette so you can see your lines. We'll go here to the past selection tool and select either all of the lines so they get little handles on them. Of course, once they've got the handles on them, we can go and set up our brush. Let's just go and get the brush that I created. We're going to do it exactly the same thing with this brush as we did in the previous videos. I'm going to increase the size a little bit, make it point in the correct direction, go to shape dynamics, set it to direction. I think the brush could probably be just a little bit bigger. Let's go to the past palette. We'll make sure in the Layers palette that we have our empty layer with selected, which we do in the past palette or we need to do is click here on stroke path with brush, making sure of course that we have black paint as our foreground. Because otherwise, if we painted in white we just not going to see the results. There we are it's working pretty much the same in Photoshop CS6 as it was in Photoshop CC with the exception that it's a little bit difficult to see your path while you're working, but if you keep your path palette visible, you should be just fine. If you have any other questions, if you're using an earlier version of Photoshop, don't hesitate to ask and I will do my best to help you.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
