Transcripts
1. Intro Rex Ray Inspired Lucrative Wall Art: Hi guys. My name is Dolores Nas cringe. I'm coming to you from sunny, Manitoba, Canada. If you've been following my lucrative Walmart series, this class should be of real interest to you. I'm taking the work of Rx Ray as inspiration and Claire be cots and, and producing collage piece that takes in a lot of natural media as well as digital media. We're taking a lot of painterly backgrounds, textural backgrounds that I've created, both with national media and digital. And we're going to combine all of the different components to create one of these digital masterpieces. The two artists I mentioned have always been a real inspiration to me. Rx RY, I felt I could really relate to. He was approximately by age, maybe a tiny bit younger. He passed away unfortunately at the age of 56. But his work was really iconic. If you've followed the poster industry, the music poster industry, and album covers, you've probably seen some of his work, especially if you're into classics. It's not contemporary as in the sense that it was produced in the last ten years. But you'll see that this work is something that is highly recognizable. A couple of the other things that I could really relate to was the look of his studio, kind of like mine. A little bit messy. It's not one of those antiseptic looking white, beautiful, clean backgrounds that you see on a lot of these videos. And the other thing was that he worked as a graphic designer by day and then wanted to find some kind of a release from that at the end of the day. So he go home and start creating. And through years of development and process, he figured out this particular technique, which is beautiful, large canvases with intricate mixture. The funny thing is, as he was going through the process of creating these with natural media, he was trying to sometimes capture the kind of things that he could do digitally. So I thought that was really ironic. So we're drawing on his work for inspiration. We're not copying. The challenge is to produce something that's really original to you. So trying to come up with your own iconic shapes and of course your own textures. And putting them together in a way that's different, that really is truly your own. So I'm going to walk you through the steps of that whole process. And I'm really hoping that at the end of this you have a beautiful wall art piece and that you've learned the workflow that you can then apply to producing a whole series of these for your art licensing. This is definitely a fit for you if you are into collage. I think this would be kind of an intermediate skill level, kind of a class. Intermediate too comfortable with Photoshop sort of a thing. Ok, let's meet in lesson one. There we'll take a look at rx ry is work and maybe a little bit of work by clear because let's get started.
2. Overview and History of Rex Ray Art: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson one and less than one here we're gonna take a really good look at this work and I'll give you an overview and history of x-ray. Let's get started. So you don't have to go very far to find some really fascinating and great examples of Rex raise work. So you just do a quick search online and you'll see that this man was highly prolific. He worked as a graphic designer by day and history is super fascinating. I have actually included a bunch of links in the course outline. When you open that, you can just click on the links and Bill open you right to the page that I was intending for you to see. There's so much to read about him. There are documentaries. One of the things that I've found most fascinating about him was how he combined his graphic design knowledge and then used it to create his paintings. And his paintings were massive. The one documentary I was watching, it looked like the paintings were at least four by eight or six byte each feet. What's the most fascinating about them is that most of them are a collage of sorts. And I described myself, that's a good question. I wanted to always describe myself against what we circuits. It's, we're returning your character arrays is prevention retrospective of large buildings and also most popular were the largest. You need to watch this entire video to really get a feel for what he was aiming for. This other one that you can watch the full PBS presentation. But even the short one really shows his process. So he created lots of campus and paper bits that he would then apply glue to. It looks pretty much like wallpaper paste. I've done a ton of collage in the past. This is a different technique than what I've done. I've never worked directly onto canvas or rarely works directly onto canvas. But one of the things he did was glue directly onto the canvas and then start cutting away bits. I'm absolutely blown away by how he was able to really compose these. He just had to have such a brilliant mind to be able to do this. He basically just would go for it, which was just simply amazing. What I plan to do in my class is to offer you some suggestions. And God knows, I'm not rex Re, but I want to offer you some suggestions for producing something similar to this. We're going to use a lot of textures. We're going to create a lot of the textures ourselves, and we'll do those digitally. And I'm going to show you the use of some of the textures that I've scanned in that I've done just with a paintbrush shirt, just with a credit card, and believe it or not. And then we're going to.
3. Prepping Textures for Collage Fills: Hi guys, welcome to less than two. So less than two here we're going to start prepping our textures. I'm going to be showing you that with the Adobe Photoshop program and the Corel Painter program. And then we're gonna take a look at some layering technique. Let's get started. So here in Photoshop, I've created Document 16 by 20 that I'm going to be using for drawing my textures on. So I've already started, I've caught several brushstrokes here that are done with different brushes by Kyle, these pressures were included even before CC. I've got his whole megaparsec installed here. It actually comes with Photoshop pre-installed, but if you don't have his collection here, you can download the brushes going Develop menu here and get more brushes or load more brushes. I've experimented here with a couple of different brushes. This one here is one of the prayers that he has, which I really loved. I've actually made a little set for myself down here of my favorites. And that makes it just easier because, I mean, look at this selection of brushes here, it's very easy to spend all day testing bees out. Believe me, I have had to do it before. So basically you could just grab any brushes. What you're trying to do is figure out ways to emulate. You're trying to create textures that you could use in these artworks. So let's just say we were going to use this one here as our inspiration. You can see the different sort of textures that he has created just with brushstrokes. So he's done this on paper or canvas, and then he has used it in the collage work that he's done. So you can see it here. We're also going to talk about these kinda textures, but that's going to be in an upcoming lesson that looks like a wig grain texture there. So we're going to be experimenting with creating that kind of texture. Now, this is another artist whose work I love and who in my opinion, has worked very similar in that it uses this kind of texture to really create interests. And even though this is not collage work, not as far as I know anyway, I think this is all painted, but this is the idea. So we're going to be creating all kinds of textures. By the way, if ever, you are trying to find really good, better resolution references to look at here, make sure you go to your tools after you've chosen images here in Google, and then go to large, and you're going to get the highest quality images filtering here to the top. So you can see that in this kind of a style, anything goal is known. Layer Style is a lot looser than Rex's. Rex definitely had a very tight style, but the idea is the same. So that's what I'm doing here in Photoshop. I'm trying to create some really interesting textures that I could use. It doesn't really matter what color you using because you're going to be able to do changes with the color once you're in the document where you're layering. And you can see here, I'm choosing a pretty large brush size. You can use the bracket keys here and Photoshop to enlarge or reduce your brush size. And I'm trying to find white textural brushes. So that's one of the reasons I'm going solars is. You really see the texture. So if we enlarge here and take a good look at it, we can see the texture that's resulting. Now, of course, you can go in and change all kinds of settings in the brushes. I've got a few courses that talk about making adjustments to the brushes just to move it along a little bit faster today, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But you can see here that you could easily try to emulate or come up with your own really cool textures and do a lot of work with the layer in. One of the things I do experiment with sometimes is this because a lot of times you can get a much streaky or brushstroke, which might be more suitable for what we're doing. So you can see there that we're getting a lot more of the bristles of the brush showing. So that would be really great, especially if you're trying to build up. So for example, I could use this straw here and go with a slightly different color and build up. And you see I'm kind of overlapping the brush strokes. And you can see that if I keep going with this, I could get a really nice Lai Ni texture happening similar to what we saw in the background here. Where you see here in these pieces, like every piece of artwork that I look out here to blows me away. I just find that to so incredibly amazing. Now I am basically just sticky with straight brush strokes. But you can see here that almost anything goes in here. You could definitely create patterns and then use those patterns as fills. I'm going to be kind of sticky more to that original look with the lines. But who knows? We may, we may experimental little bit as time goes along. Now in this little area here you can see a lot of different textures. Brush texture is very similar to what we were just doing now in Photoshop. Before I used Photoshop for this kind of thing, I did use the Corel Painter program. I'd still do have that on my computer here. And I occasionally go back to it. There are some brush strokes that I was able to accomplish there that I haven't quite been able to replicate yet here in Photoshop, like I said, go in and do some experimenting with color and flow. Here I might reduce the size of my brush to produce even more lines. What I found interesting about Rex raise story to whisper that he started his art practice or continuous evening arch practice to get away from the computer because he spent all day long doing graphic design. He did a lot of work for the music industry, like I said, doing album covers and doing posters. And then at night he would just play with whatever paint he had and all kinds of different experiments. You would spend a lot of time just cutting textures and shapes out of magazines. And that I could really relate to because that's one of the things that I do. A lot of, a lot of my journals are filled with collage and a lot of my raw canvases that I use for painting are started with collage. So it was really interesting to me that one of the things he said in one of the articles I was reading was that he would switch to natural mediums at night and then he'd be trying to replicate some of the things that he could create digitally. So I thought that was really ironic and very interesting. I really think that that's something that is really Laika blueprint for artists who are working digitally, but creating work that appears to be handmade are hand done. I worked mostly digitally now to produce my art canvases that I sell through art licensing. And sorry about that. That was security. That just is now my new roommate until my house is built by Goddard's living in here with me. And this count has decided that my computer desk here is his favorite Hangout. But yeah, like I said, I'm in photoshop here trying to replicate what I would do with national media. So I think that's funny, ironic, and semi fun. Let's face it. Let's meet in the next lesson where we're going to start gathering some more collage content. I'll see you there.
4. Gathering Additional Collage Content: Hi guys. Welcome to lesson three. So I figured that I should take you through and show you some of the ways that I collect my collage pieces as well. I want to talk to you about some of the natural media that I use. You'll see them all sitting here behind me. I'm going to go through and explain some of his step-by-step. Sorry about the shuffling paper. Noyce is let's get started. So I wanted to show you here a bunch of the different things that I do when I'm preparing for a project like this or for one of the visual works that I do. I've got this little box here, which is full of all kinds little bits that I've saved. And sometimes I literally just sit with my patients and my ink and everything surrounding me. And I just go through and I create these crazy little paintings that hold all kinds of texture, all kinds of layers. Sometimes this one is just painted, but there's, there are plenty of them. There are also covered with little bits that I've cotton glued. And you can see that these are just, I mean, this isn't a finished artwork. This is just a component that I would use when I am producing the kind of work that you'll see that I've done. I've gone into playing painted pieces. This would be one that I did with looks like a really bad paintbrush, maybe an old house paint brush, something that's pretty much erect. And then I would take it and just produce some textures. You've seen me use these in a couple of clauses. This particular one I remember actually from school and it was a shaving cream artwork that we did where you would you're shaving cream, drop bits of ink and paint all over it. And then you can either scrape it right off. And I often use credit cards or just whatever, something that's flat and flexible. Or I would just use a paintbrush and push the paint off. But I can produce some really interesting textures like that. These are some that I've printed and I use cut-out and put together onto a collage. Here's one that's obviously been cut out for almost the same kind of Rex raised style artwork that we're gonna be doing today. So this is in a collage, somewhere in one of my sketchbooks. Who knows where? And here's just some funky lines that I've drawn using really rough brush. Again, these little streets and bits that you see in the blue, We're done with scraping out credit card across and basically scraping all the paint off and leaving those really cool textures. All of this stuff is stuff that I can use those components for my art. So even though I am doing digital art, a lot of the components, I've either painted myself in Photoshop or I've painted like this and scandium or photograph to be used. So all kinds of crazy stuff. Here's another one, almost like the same RX RY and inspired shape. Here's some rubber stamping that I would have done as an experiment. Little bits that I cut out of magazines. Again, just one of those big experimental pages that I've done. Lots of really nice little usable areas. I could easily scan and use that the component for my artwork. Again, this looks like Breyer marks something that I've done. Maybe I was actually cleaning off my Breyer, But I saved this and beds like look how delicious that little bit is up there. And then, you know, more of that. Here's some of that collage. So this would've been a collage bit that I cut out and paste it onto this. Actually remember this doing a bunch of these and creating Christmas gifts when year for a bunch of my friends. And all prints. Something like this would be perfect texture with the lines. And then this is one of the things that my husband just shakes his head when he looked at me and he I picked this up off my mom and dad's farm and he thought I was actually throwing it out. And I said, are you kidding? Like this is just the amazing look at this beauty. So you can get these sources of artwork or sources of bits for your art work anywhere. You just have to keep an eye out. And this is only one of like 20 bins that I have, all of this kind of stuff. And then all of my sketchbooks. Sketchbooks with experiments. This is a project I did with a special needs aren't class. And I was given the result, which was amazing. Here's just some crazy texture. On this corner you can see actual mesh that's used in house repair and then more sketchbooks filled with collage. This is layer upon layer of magazine. Lots of experimentation. So all of this amounts to usable bits. It's kinda thing I can scan in youth and all of it can be used to create this layered textural art that I do. So keep your eyes open and make sure that you have an archive or a collection. We used to call it a morgue full of the stuff that you can use for this kind of project. Now if those methods don't seem doable, you can always go to slightly creative markets. Here I just typed in texture and I got this ginormous grunge texture pack, actually have purchased this. This is one that I have used myself. I was maybe in a hurry for some reason, but I do have this one and I have gone to it and used it frequently. You've probably seen the use of some of these borders in my Luchador wall art classes. And I've also created a ton of them like this. So, yeah, go into, just go into creative market, type in texture. And you'll see a ton of textures. And a lot of them are really reasonably priced. So if you're not really into creating that big mass and during the scanning, you can find some really amazing textures. Now, I was looking for that specific luck, that kind of lined look. So that's why I decided to go in and create these textures myself. But there's three ideas for you for getting these textures. So that's two, you just decide what you wanna do. And a lot of these, you know what, you don't even need to have paints if you create the ones that I showed you at the beginning might own textures. And I've done, a lot of them were done with paint markers. So let's say I was sitting and watching TV at night. I can easily just go in and draw a bunch of textures that I could use in the future. Alright, so I think we're ready now to go into Illustrator and start creating our vector shapes. I need to stop for a quick cup coffee and see if I can distract this cat somehow and get them off my table. So I will see you in the next lesson.
5. Creating Vector Shapes for Masks: Hi guys, welcome to lesson four. So we've created and talked about all of the texture fills that we're going to be using. And now it's time to take a look at how to draw our vector shapes that we're gonna be using for masks. Lets get started before going into Illustrator as S1 to show you the kind of work and sheeps that Rex raise, so famous for using, you can see here that he uses a lot of curves, a lot sort of swooping lines. And this kind of weird, I don't know, looks like a plant or corals very common in his work. I'm going to probably do a bit of a hybrid of different shapes. And we're going to keep it fairly simple to make it easier for us to deal with in the Photoshop document. So I'm going to try to limit it to maybe six shapes, give or take. And this is the kind of shape or look that I'm going for. So I did a bunch of drawing of shapes like that. And I want to show you how fun and easy they can be to do. If you've been in my blob brush courses, then this is going to be pretty easy. Something that you've already practiced with did a little bit of experimenting with going to move these out of the way here and grab the blob brush. B for the blob brush itself, double-click on it and set your fidelity pretty high. In this case, generally I work about here so that I get a little bit more accuracy with my drawing soul, a little bit more detailed. But for what we're doing here, this kind of smoothness is really great, doesn't matter what brush we use here really, and doesn't have to be that big. You can make the brush bigger if it's easier for you to see it. I'm working on an art board that probably ten by ten. I don't remember. It doesn't really matter. Oh no, this is a 30 by 30 into R four. So this is way bigger than I would really need. And I can actually just take and reduce this down. So it's just basically a corner here of my art board. And I can use this art board to draw all my shapes. The beauty of vector shapes is that they can be enlarged or reduced infinitely and they won't lose qualities. So I'm going to just hide my art boards though. Command option each highs the art board. Let's make it a little bit bigger. Grab that brush again shift to be, I'm going to go a little bit smaller and I'm gonna show you how easy it is to really draw shaped like this. I've got a thicker brush here than what I used on the original ones because I wanted you to be able to see it better. I finished drawing. You can see that the shape is very much smooth out. Let's go to the full smoothness and draw another one. And you can see that gives such a beautiful shape. I don't need a double line like this. So I am going to add to these shapes. And I can do that by d selecting merge only with selection. And it's going to merge with the shape that I have there. So I'm just drawing a line straight across and you can decide which part you want to save. Do you wise interior part. I was in Preview mode there, but here you can see that I've got an inside shape. I could choose to keep it. Or I could choose to keep the outside shape. They're pretty similar, but I think I'm gonna get rid of that inside shape on both again. And I've got two really nice clean shapes that I can use. They don't need to be filled because we're just going to be using the pass. If they're filled, it doesn't matter. You can heat them filled or you can just stroke them. It doesn't really matter. I'm just leaving the stroke on it just so you can see it. But the stroke and the fill are going to be eliminated or aren't going to be seen when you bring them into Photoshop. My bottoms here or a little bit sloppy. It's really not that important. We really don't need to have them perfect. But if you are a perfectionist, You can definitely fix those up. You could use the Rectangle tool, drag over them and then select them. Use your Pathfinder. I think I'm just going to divide them and I can just drag it over and delete. And I've got a perfectly straight bottom. Now the other shapes that Rex used a lot was this sort of a teardrop shape with an inner section that you could draw. Again, you could use the blob brush if you wanted. You could use the pencil tool, which is n on your keyboard, and you could draw it again. I've got the fidelity set at very smooth here. So that's a method. Let's get rid of that one. The other way that makes a really accurate one is probably my favorite method would be to just grab the Ellipse tool and then use your shortcuts shifts C to get your anchor points. That's the same here. The convert select an anchor points to corner tool. It'll shift see, grabs it faster than going up here it's up to you. Mean everybody has their preference for grabbing their tools. Then you could either do another one or copy that one and they sit in front. So Command Shift v would paste a copy of it in front. And then you could hold down your Option key and you can see that it's reducing it down but keeping the center point the same so that it's perfectly centered. And then just line them up at the bottom so you could drag, select over them if you wanted to, Option Shift, drag and select to make sure both shapes are selected and use your aligned tools, whatever is your favorite method. So you can go ahead and draw a few of those. And there's this other shape that i've seen him do a lot, which is a really sort of rounded rectangle with rectangles, other rounded rectangles inside that you could do in a number of different ways. I'm just going to the Rectangle tool, which is M on your keyboard. And then we're gonna grab the widgets and pull them in. If the whole shape is selected, it pulls all the widgets in at the same time. If you do select and just grab one of the corners at a time, you can alter the corner independently of the other corners. So that's a way that you could do it really quick. Always trying to show you the quickest way to do things. Some people don't like really working that way. I did definitely have students who found that, at least at the beginning, trying to work quickly wasn't the best way for them. So if it's something you want to take your time doing, then of course by all means, take your time. I'm just always trying to show you the most efficient methods because I know that as a graphic designer, sometimes the faster you do something is really more money that you're making rate, especially if it's something that you're going to sell or if let's say you want to do a series for art licensing will then it's probably good to learn how to do it quickly. So to grab and just change the whole corner, I've used the last WHO tool, which is q on your keyboard, then you can grab those points. So I would switch using AI on my keyboard and then I could move that corner independently. I would probably then alter this one. And then this is something that I could rotate within the space and enlarge, maybe make some adjustments. And you see how you could pretty quickly draw this kind of a thing. So I'm going to take some time off camera to draw a few more shapes and you can go ahead and do that as well. You could grab some circles, do more rounded rectangles, whatever you think you might want to include in your composition. And now you can definitely sit down and sketch these out before you start. And sometimes that's a really nice way to formulate your composition. So I might come back with a sketch as well, just so that you can see how I might go about planning my piece. Before I get started, I will meet you in the next lesson where we're going to start working on our composition a little bit more.
6. Setting Up the Photoshop Document: Hi guys, welcome to lesson five. So less than five here, or going to be importing the math into our Photoshop document. Let's get started. So to do your sketches, you can definitely do them on paper with pencil. I have been basically going to Kyle's paint box here and grabbing myself a pencil in his drawing box set of tools here. And that's what I use for my basic drawing. So, yeah, you can just go through and decide what feels the most like a pencil to you. I generally do my drawings in kind of a light blue because then I find that I can use them in the background of my compositions without being too distracted. Now you can also, just like an illustrator, go in and set your smoothness really high if you want to be able to get those really organically smooth shapes. So you can go through and do a quick sketch if you'd like. I would suggest you do that on the background layer or on a movable layer that has no white fill so that it would be easier for you to bring it into another document and not have to worry about the transparency in the background. And I'm going to be keeping mind pretty simple. Mainly with these really organic curvy. Like I said, they're kinda like plants, but they're kinda like coral. I don't even know what you compare them to, but I'm looking to create something somewhat like this. So if you're more comfortable with a sketch, then you go ahead and do it this way. I am going to actually be just grabbing my shapes that I've drawn and then using them and moving them around to create the composition that I want. Generally what I would do there is to copy, to select the shape and hit copy. So this is the beauty of working with Illustrator and Photoshop in tandem is that it's simply that easy to grab your shape and all you have to do. Now here you can paste it in as a path. And the nice thing about it is you're not having to import or place your other artwork here. Like if you had created this and procreate, you'd have to go now to file an operon and copy and paste it and bring it in. Or if you had created it in another program like Affinity Designer, thats one of the advantages of having Creative Cloud and being able to have both of the programs and just be able to work like this back and forth between them. Now you can see here that it has pasted it in as a mask. Mask is on a single layer here, what I would do is create a group and then I would drag that to the group. You can click on the mouse here and use your Move Tool to move it around. You can see it's moving. And just to make that a little bit easier for you to see, I'm going to just grab one of my textures here is cut a section of this one, copy it. Go here. I'm going to this document and as long as I've got that group folder selected, I can paste. And my back here, if we on the right layer, I was on the wrong layer. Ok, copy. And then go here to this document, paste. And you can see my texture showing up within this mask. And now of course, I can just decide where I want to position that. And the great thing about creating a group mask like this is that you can grab other textures, will just grab this one copy as long as you're still in this group here or on this group, just paste and your new texture is pasted in here. So I grabbed that red one just for the contrast. And when you do that now, copy paste, I could resize that this is not going to be my final document. This is just a small version I wanted to use. It's only 72 pixels per inch, so definitely wouldn't be my final document. But just for a quick demo, I thought this would be perfect. And now you can see that I can go through and apply any sort of blending mode to create different effects. That's what we'll do in one of the upcoming lessons. The next lesson is going to be about the composition. So we're going to spend some time with a new Photoshop document at the same size as this one, probably 32 by 40. And we're going to do some of the composition to create this kind of an artwork. Now the reason I worked 32 by 40, so it's a good quality for me to send in for art licensing. So 32 by 4300 pixels per inch is a decent quality and sighs, I sometimes work larger. It really depends on the kind of work that I'm doing. And what we're going to be doing as we're composing is we're going to be creating these documents with masks, groups. And these documents can often be reused just by keeping the textures inside them intact, but by copying and placing and new Vector Mask. So that's a really cool way to be able to streamline your workflow and have you producing more work in less time. So I'll meet you in the next lesson where we're going to do the work on that composition.
7. Composition and Design Strategies 1: So lesson six here, taking a look at some of the compositional strategies that I use. And I'm going to show you ways to make that vector look a little bit more natural by adding a textured edge. Alright, so I'm going to grab a couple of these shapes to bring over into our documents. So I just simply grab them, copy them, go into my document and paste. I'm going to paste it as a path here. Make sure you're not on an artwork because this will happen. So not on an artwork with content, I'm going to make a new layer. Or you can even make the group and how the group selected and pastes as paths. And you can see that you could then resize it. It's invisible, but if you do Command T, you can enlarge it. You can wait till you have them all in there if you want. Sometimes it's nice to just drag something into that layer so that you can see it more easily, will go back and grab a couple more, not really sure which ones I want yet. So here I'll make a new group, pastes path Control T or Command T. This resizing can be done afterwards and have to do all of the stuff that I'm doing all at once for this particular shape, what I might do is copy a duplicate of it. I'm going to use the Rotate tool. Click right here, option click rate at that intersection. And I'm going to do a 180-degree copy and then select both of these at the same time, go into Photoshop, New Group piece, and again transform that 5s is probably good. Let's just put this one in the corner. Again, like I said, you can grab a texture to slide in there just so you've got a better visual BB. I will delete that Lear mouse in an old grab that texture to throw into this. And you can see how I would go ahead and start composing my document at the moment, I don't have the inner part of this shape opened on the mask or separate. And that's because this is a vector mask. So effector mask is a little bit different than a Layer Mask. And because it is made from the paths that we originally imported, and it is a vector, so it is just simply an outline shape and it's not exactly what I need here. What I actually need is to have the inside separate. So what I'll do here is go back into the paths. I'm going to highlight that one. If it was more than one, I would highlight the one that I want and I'm going to select it. And usually if you just click on that arrow, it will select it. And I can then make it into a selection. So down here at the bottom of the layers panel, not select the inside y-naught. And now I've got the inside bits here, selected as well. Back to the bottom of the paths panel here, click on Make selection. Now you can see that the insight has been made into a selection as well. And here what I can do is Rasterize the mouse because it's a vector mouse. But now what it does is it changes it from a vector to a pixel based mask and you see how it then turns it pure black. I can just simply filled with block here and you see that has taken out the middle part. So I would have to also do that here. If it's a little bit confusing that you're working here with these vectors and what's being affected as the mask. You can go straight into the mask by holding down your option key and clicking here. And then you can do your Filling. So I could have filled also by going under edit to fill. Either way works. Look back to your document and you'll see your mouth because working properly here, I could go through and do that with these others as well. It's not as necessary simply because I don't have inner shapes here at the moment. And sometimes I really like to keep them as vectors because the quality is good iOS to enlarge them. So had I brought that in and it was a little tiny shape in the corner here as a vector mask. I could, in the future or later on while I'm designing, I could enlarge it and the quality would be excellent. I'm thinking I'm going to go into this one here and steal a couple of these texture. So I'm gonna select all copy. I'm going to be changing all of this up in one of the following lessons. But this way you can actually see the full shape. It wasn't just the lines. And so I'm going to time lapses next bit while I go in, grab a couple of other shapes. Now one of the things I do want to caution you is that these shapes are iconically Rex Ray. So if you want to be really original, You're going to come up with your own ideas here. That's what an artist like. Clear cots here, Claire be cots has done is she has she has technically created her own luck here. And who knows, maybe x-ray wasn't even one of her influences. Now, so I'm just going to continue copying from Illustrator and pasted here into four shop. In this case, what I've done is I've pasted it as pixels. Option click into this one and fill the black. And you've created a mask, just a slightly different technique, but you've still got the mask. I'll go back to the other document and fluxed all and copy and then come back to this document and paste. And let's just change the color of that one a bit so we can have a bit of contrast. Now you can see here my path is still visible. I can go down into my path. No, I guess I was on that layer and this layer, I think here yet let's just delete that layer. And you can see I'm starting to build up my shapes here. Now it's gonna take me awhile to start really thinking about my composition. You're more comfortable working with a sketch. This is a good reason, I'm sure is the fact that you wouldn't have to be doing this kind of design work on the fly. And it does take a lot of time, I think, before you really get comfortable with compositions on the fly like this, you might prefer to have a guide. It's completely up to you. And now what I'm gonna do is a bunch of this work off camera. I'm gonna come back to you with more complete composition. And in the next lesson, we'll take a look at a few things like adding a textural edge, using the blending Modes and anything else that I can remember or think of to tell you about how I go through this process of creating this kind of licensable Walmart. All right, so I'll see you in that next lesson.
8. Using Brushes to Add Textural Variety : So unless the seven hair we're going to take a look at brush settings. Let's get started. Alright, so I went through and did a ton of work adding textures to my artwork here. If you hear any weird noises in the background, if that cat, again, he's decided to I don't know what his problem is, but he wants to be Laker right near my computer literally yesterday I had to move him off my tablet so that I could use my Aeschylus. Anyways, I went through and created a bunch more layers, as you can see here in my layers palette, each of these groups has multiple layers. You can see that I've built up and one of the things I sort of felt late I had run out of was layers with texture that I could use. I opened up a few that I have here that you can see, and I borrowed a few things, but I decided that I wanted to go in and to painter. And I know I mentioned that earlier in the class. I just wanted to show you. I'm sure that there are brushes, but Kyle has that could do the same thing here. But because this is a program I've used, I know the settings, I know how to control all of this. I am not going to be able to explain everything today. You can see here how much variety or how many controls there are on each of the brushes. But I loved the choices of some of these brushes. One of them that I really wanted to use Wise scratch board rate. So that's the one that does these lines here. And you can see, I'll do it a little bit over here. You can see why I'd want this. It's got some really great lines and I think that, that really ends up feeling a lot like some of that work that we saw of Rex raise, and Claire cots. So I created a bunch of layers here. You can see them here in the Layers panel. And I decided I would just spend a couple of seconds here explaining some of the different brushes and why I love this program. And by the way, this program is not super expensive. It's not as expensive as Photoshop for the program. I was lucky enough to win it at hockey game, believe it or not. That's how I got my first copy of it and then I've just done updates since and I think, you know, I maybe spend a 100 every time I update it and I've only updated it every two or three years because the tools remain the same. So I'll show you a couple of the other sort of favorite tools that I have a love, the acrylic that they have here, I find that they're really intuitive and true to the original media. So very organic. Long before photoshop every hat at the resizing of the brush with the option in command keys. Now here's one that's really nice. It's wet acrylic brush, so it picks up whatever color paint of course, that you're specifying. And and she's got a really nice buttery sort of a texture to it. You can see how realistic it looks. You can get those great, those variations, almost like shadows in there. Try another one here and you see how that really has a nice green to it. And I liked that when you change the color, it totally interacts with the color that's underneath. You see how it's almost like smearing the original color. So that gives you some really nice textures, all of the same settings as you'd get in Photoshop if you've Studied Photoshop brushes. You can do all kinds of changes here that make a difference with what the result is. So if I was to change the viscosity for example, you can see how I'm starting to see a little bit more of that grain coming through. Now if you were to just do a bunch of repeated strokes here, you would probably end up seeing a really obvious stroke pattern. But I find that, you know, as long as you build it up kinda hidden layers and vary the way you're using the brush. You can get some really nice, sort of different looks now that looks really what I consider quite natural. So another one that I really like is the oil pastels, and they've got several different oil pastels. You can use variable. Let me just move this up a little bit of variable oil pastel, which does that lovely Q shift. Now, I feel like it just feels really natural to me. I find that this is a lot more responsive to me as, as an artist. Knowing how these tools work in the real world. The real tools, if all the settings, even just without changing anything I find are really intuitive, they're very much like how they would work in real life, use these pastels a lot. So I'm kinda used to the way they work. This is an acrylic bit that I dropped down yesterday. You can see that if I press very softly, I get a really thin line and if I press really hard, I get her really opaque line. But this is what would give me more of that feeling of the real Rex raise style. Now another one I really like is the palette knife. If you get a dry palette knife, you can get the effect of, I'm gonna put that on weight here at him with that makes a difference but not sure if you could tell I'm gonna move to another move up here. You can see that I can spread the color around with the dry palette knife, loaded palette knife. Let's change the color. Gives me some really gorgeous texture. And this one is nice for almost scraping away the color you see that it's lifting. So it would be as if you took the back of your brush and scraped off some of the color, you can definitely go in and make adjustments here in the Control Panel or control bar at the top. And then let's go to the pen tools here. Scratch board tool. I'm going to bring it down really small size. You can control that over here as well. So we can do a minimum and a maximum size based on the pressure. And you can see that if I press really hard, I get a thicker line. And if I press softly, I get a thin line and would go even smaller here. And this is also a nice way to add that sort of lining texture that looks like with scraped away. And then my all-time favorite, the scratch board rate. And that one gives, depending on the settings, gives you a really nice lined texture. Now, I'm going to put this train at less and I'm going to reduce the spacing here. And now you don't see the, see how here. On the first one, you can see the spacing of the actual brush stamp or the brush tip. And now you don't see it. Now again, depending on how hard I press. More thicker lines. And I could go through all these settings and show you a bunch of different stuff with that. But I've spent enough time now on Painter. I just wanted to show you that so that you would see how I produced a bunch of the textures that I brought in. So I save that document as a PSD file, which you can do in nature actually, maybe what I'll do is I'll close this one, save in painter. And by the way, I've done this file on half the size that I need, because the textures can be enlarged and still work just fine in Photoshop here for the kind of thing that we're doing anyways, let's open that up so that here's a bunch of my new textures. Easily just grab a section of it. Probably should have done this a little bit bigger, but I like this little area here. So I copy it and then go into my main arch and figure out which layer I want to put it in, in a picker wanted into this layer here, when you pay something, it always ends up in the middle of your screen approximately. So I'll just resize it and thus made a really nice texture. I like that a lot. Like I said, I would probably have done it bigger, but I really liked the lines in that. Of course, I can still mess around with the blending modes here. Now one of the things I do want to caution you about is that as these documents get so full of layers here, when you go to try to save them, it could be a problem. You'll see in a minute that Photoshop here is going to tell me that I've got to larger document for saving. So I hit OK here and I don't know about you, but that kind of scares me. I don't want to lose all of this work that I haven't done. So what I usually do is I go in and make some decisions about which layers I am presently happy with and can collapse. So this is this upper one here. I think I pretty much like what that's looking like. I can still go in and effect color and levels and that sort of things. So I'm going to select all three over here and hit Command E. And what that does is it collapses it into one layer. Another thing that I do is I select all and I go under image here to crop. And that will crop anything that's way out here in the extended art board area because I'm fairly happy with my layout at the moment, at least for this class and cropping this will also free up a lot of the data that's being stored or the information that's being stored with this document. I usually do a couple of these and then try to save again. So after this crop, I'm going to do one more thing and then we'll try to save and we'll see if that has brought my limit to below the two gigs. Come on, Photoshop, come on. You can do it. That's one of the things about doing art for art licensing is you're working with a really high res and large files. If you have a choice when you're buying a computer, if you could afford it, put as much processing power in there as possible. I'm going to hit Save again and let's see what happens. Ok, so I've gone through and I have eliminated anything that was extraneous, but I absolutely knew I wasn't going to use again. And I have flattened the layers within the groups. So while I was doing that, I made a few changes. You can see here to the blending Modes and colors. So let's try saving again. This time it seems to be going a lot faster. I think we might be in luck. So I think this lesson has gone on long enough that I should move on into the next lesson. And in the next lesson we're gonna talk about color schemes and how they can really help to make your art more original TU, alright.
9. Layer and Color Adjustments: So I've got my document here open and I want to start working on my color. So one of the things I did was go back to take a look at Clairvaux work clear be caught because I'm thinking I might want to work with that kind of a color scheme. So what I've done, and this is kind of a fun thing to do, is I've gone to the color dot adobe.com site and I'm going to select a file and it's an image that I see a Claire's. So this is just to extract the color theme from. And as I drag around these, I can change my colors that I'm choosing from her artwork. And then when I'm done, I can save it. It will save into my Adobe libraries. And here I've got other ideas, 2021. And what's great about that is I can go into Photoshop here and open up my libraries. And within the libraries, here are the themes that I have saved. So you can see here that theme has shown up here a little bit different than the one we just did, because that's the one I did first. So you see two of them here. And what you can do is just hit this ellipsis and add the colors to your swatch. And once you go into your swatches, let's just close that. You'll see that those colors have been added. So this area here, or the colors, and I think I'm going to use those to start playing with my color a little bit here. And so now that I've got these kind of flattened into individual layers were colors, I'm going to use a solid color adjustment layer. And you can see that the color I have selected over here is the color that ends up being visible or as the overlaid for that particular layer. And that was one of the colors that I picked here that was originally part of that color group that I, a couple of the cult color groups that I have created from that image by clearer costs. So let's go for that again. Let's actually change the color a little bit just so you can see how it would adjust. So non changing to a different color here. And you go to the solid color. And again, you can see that that's what is now affecting that layer and a good way to put your coloring for sure. So now the great thing about these salt color feels or adjustment layers is that they are non-destructive. So my original layer is there to exactly as it was before I put the color on there. And the neat thing about it too, is that I can double-click on this and make adjustments to my color if I see fit. So if I want to lighten it, for example, I can do that and the adjustment will be made right here. Now if I wanted to just effect that one layer, like let's say I had four liters stilling here. I could Option click on the line in between. And I could tie that Teller overlay to that specific layer. Now that might work great if I do something like, let's say, let's grab this section copy, go back to the Art Pace, Sherman, the rate layer, copy and paste. And you can see that this layer interacts with that green color, less just Memphis fit. I can actually do the same thing. I'm going to make an adjustment layer on that one as well. Let's make a gradient and let's choose the colors here. Know that color is one of the colors that clear uses. Double-click on here and grab maybe a different color that works with our scheme. And you can see the cool thing about it is that gradient that's applied here does a really nice, as a really nice effect to that layer. And of course you can add more, just click below and you can add additional colors. So here I could even add this reddish color. So if you wanted to specifically add one that's in your colors here, you can just hover over and select Color directly and hit OK. And that's also a very neat effect, no, ongoing too. Okay, here. And then I'm going to lock that layer to this one. So before I did that, you can see that it's affecting everything below those affecting this layer as well. If I do this, it only affects this particular layer. And I can still go in here and make adjustments just the regular way. Or I can even go back and add a different adjustment. We could try something like levels and really increase the contrast on that. And you can see here that that locked to that layer. So I'm going to get rid of this one here, somehow got to duplicate there. But you can see that these two are both locked to this layer. And you can tell because it's underlined here and you see this little arrow. And so you can really start building up more texture again by just bringing in new ones and adding adjustment layers. So I could do is some work off camera. I want to try out a couple more color schemes. This is one that I like and I'll try also this one. And you can see I'm saving. And I will meet you in the next lesson and you can see my results. Alright? See you there.
10. Final Touches and Originality: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson nine. So this lesson is full of a bunch of strategies that you could use to really make your art unique. We're gonna be looking at adding a textured border. I'm going to use strategies like burn and dodge at darkening, enlightening to really give our apiece that real Jenna se qua. Let's get started. So as is bound to happen when you are an artist and you're doing an experimental process, you can easily change your mind along the way. And That's exactly what's happened to me. I had taken another look at Claire's work here and was somehow drawn to this one here. I really liked these colors, so I have made a unilateral decision to change my color schemes, so it will be a lot more neutral and you'll be surprised when you see it. Just hang on. That. So that's how it looks now, I will explain a few of the things that I've done here. Mostly what I did was I went in and be saturated each of the icons. And then a couple of them, I have really softened up and really neutralized. Most of, most of what I see here are what I've done here is desaturating. And then I've also just played with the level of brightness so that I have more of a contrast, I guess you'd say. So you could tell which items were sort of more foreground, which ones are more background. And of course, I have added these patches in the background. So at the moment I have these three. And you can tell that I really desaturated that original background that was there because it was really gold. So even though I was going for the brighter and more saturated colors originally, I have changed my direction and I'm allowed right? We all are to do that. And one of the reasons I was really thinking about it, and if you were to look at my sort of current line of artwork that I'm doing. I have been sort of more successful with these neutral kinda pieces then the brake pieces. So that's kind of one of the things that I've done. So these are, you know, maybe the last two or three months of work. And you can see that I've gone with a lot more desaturation than what I used to do in the past. So that's my rationale for changing my direction completely. So it may seem like I'm super flighty by it's, hey, if the process rate, and I'm sure you have found that in the past as well. So generally what I would do here is I would save file, a copy of the file. So I'm going to do a quick save here. Let's hope that it does actually save because I still do have quite a lot of layering going on over here. I'm going to save a duplicate of this file because I'm gonna do a couple of things. One of the things I want to do if you were in my other classes for the lucrative Art series while Art Series, one of the things I want to do is something that I did were over the limit. One of the things I wanna do is add textural edges to these shapes. So I'm going to off-camera hey, with this and reduce the amount of layers so that we can do that particular thing. And I will come back to you in a couple of minutes. Okay, that worked. I just ended up just flattening the background. I did a little bit of adjustment on my edges here. So this is still my original file. If you look into my folder here, I've got two copies, so interim copies that I've done that I could use as master documents in the future for other similar artworks, What I wanna do now is flattened each of these, so I'm selecting the Layer, Layer group command E will flatness, and then I will control click and apply the layer mask. Because this is a duplicate, I can throw away all of these groups anyhow, I'm going to and this one as well. And apply the Layer Mask. Make sure that you click right on the mascot cell. If you saw that, I accidentally clicked right on my layer and then I don't have that option. So here I Layer Mask pay, so those are all cleaned up. The previews aren't great, but I'm going to continue merging layers here, getting rid of the groups that I'm not using. And I think that now I can convert to CMYK for my particular company that I deal with. It's not necessary for me to submit in CMYK, but that really depends on who you are working with. So that's something to keep in mind. And the reason I would switch is if you keep an eye out here on my Layers panel, you'll see that once it's in CMYK, that the icons or motifs appear exactly as is. But I'm not sure I like what that's done to the colors with the company to switch back and switch back again. And then I'll just adjust the levels. So I think it was just the levels that were affected. And I think I could do a Levels adjustment on everything takes. So my motifs are all here. I'm going to at a Levels Adjustment above all of these layers and just make the adjustments until I am happy with the way it looks. I think that's pretty good. I mean, my history palette here just so I can go back and check. So that's what it was like before and that's what it is with the levels modified. So I might have gotten just a little bit too deep because it's an adjustment layer here. I can make the adjustments in a non-destructive way, K. So now there are a couple of things that I noticed right away that I wanted to do. I definitely need this motif here to stand out against the one behind it so that one, I could lighten. Probably this one and this one combined, I believe. Isn't it funny how, when you turn some of the layers on and off, it gives you like other ideas, or is it just me? Or I could just lighten this one and it might be enough or I could turn it off completely and that might be enough. Or I could just do something that I've done in the past before. I've got a white block here. So I drew that block, it'll make it for you so you can see so that above this layer here, add a layer. I've got a feathered edge on my marquee. So 444. Again, a round number kids, I'm too lazy to move my fingers to another number and I'm just going to pour that white in there and use it for adjusting. So that's kind of a lazy man's way of doing it. You could do an Adjustment Layer and all that kinda stuff, but that one's really fast. I kinda like that method now the other thing I can do is go in on this one and darken this edge a little bit. So I would do that with the Burn tool and see what it does is it darkens wherever I paint and I can keep going until I get it as dark as I want it to burn and dodge tools are something that just from the dark ages to if you were ever lucky enough to work in traditional darkroom, those were just little tools that you could use to push more light onto your exposure on your film. No, cat is always trying to jump on my table. Okay, so those are a couple of little things I can do to adjust. That was pretty quick. And then the last thing I wanna do here, now that I've got all these layers flattened to go in and add a rough edge because I think about this Vector3 edge is not what I want overall from my look. So I'm going to enlarge that so you can watch the process. I've got it selected. Sorry about that noise. The cat has stuck around in different way and has joined me on my desk here. You'd like a bull in a china shop as one. Ok, so I've got a rough edges automator that I bought. It's a series of or a set of actions, well worth the money. I bought that on Creative Market. I've set it to medium. So I think I'll go heavy because that's a bigger one. And you'll see as it goes through the actions, that it's going to add a rough edge, which looks a lot more natural in my opinion. You see that? So I can go in and do that on each of the layers. This cat is can't be quiet, even cleaning himself. He is noisy. So you can see that the automation has worked on the edges have been applied. Once you see this layer mouse come up. Now these, I'm going to merge before I do the rough edges because I only want the rough edge on the very outside. And I picked that looks great. I've got rough edges on most everything here. And I don't even mind that there is a little bit of noise in there. Afterall, Rex Ray, if you really take a super close-up look at his work, had some flaws and imperfections like that, which is what made it so interesting. Like if you look in the background here, this is a real close up and you can see that sometimes the lines didn't exactly meet or It's cutting was rough. And that's just part of the charm of this kind of a piece. I found this website actually pretty interesting because there's a wallpaper website. And here you can actually experiment with different backgrounds, which is a really good way to get ideas. And there are quite a few different pieces of his on this site here. So you could check out a different art piece. And looking at this here, you can see that we're basically accomplishing the exact same thing with the techniques and procedures that we're using. So then you can also, now at this point, think about what you could do to further personalize or change this artwork. That you're very different than what you see specifically of Claire's or Rex raise. I thought this was an interesting piece here. This is by Jane dBs, another one of my absolute favorite artists. And I love that white release that's around the shapes. So that's an idea. You can get lost just looking at ideas and looking at ways to modify your artwork. And really at this point to, you could definitely go in and add some additional details. I love these sort of water droplet things that she's got going on in the background, dripping paint. And I love personally just going in and now, but these have masks. I usually at the end go in and apply the linear mouse like I showed you before by control clicking on here. But before I do that, it's also very fun to go in with a really fine brush. I like to either the ultimate inking brush or the Belgian comic smoother and then just grabbing a colour. And what Lear my eye on this one here and then just adding some additional detail in here. This is one of my favorite Kyle Webster brushes, and I've used this a lot. If I had my two masks there, I could keep that separate. I can also go in on the mask itself. So I'm going to option click on that mask. And then here, if I wanted to, I could get rid of those little artifacts that were caused or ended up. They're going to use the eraser tool up, got it on white here. And I can go and get rid of those artifacts if I would like to. Sorry about that train going by. And then I could grab that Belgian for that comics background brush and just add a little bit in there. You can actually be on the layer as long as you've clicked on the mouth care, you can paint in here. So you could use a gray color if you didn't want to be quite so old and you see what that's doing there is just changing that mass. So if I click back into the mouse, you can see there. And this is the technique that I used to do the sort of rough white borders that I had around a lot of those other artworks that you saw. I'll open one of those up and we'll take a look. So in this kind of artwork that I have created for art licensing, I have added a ton of extra texture and there are a couple of really easy methods to do that. So I've obviously clicked to get myself into the mask layer, select all uncle back to my main art document here, and you can see that I've actually grouped everything into the one group. I'm going to apply a layer mouse to the group. And then I'm going to and click into the mask. Make sure you click right on the mask as you see it there. And I'm just gonna paste and position that resized, hit OK. You can make any changes you want here. If you wanted to read some of it, you didn't want quite this much, you can take some of it out. You could paint additional details onto it. I'll leave that up to you and I'll click back into my me document and you can see that texture has been applied there. And then I could go ahead and do the same thing for additional texture. If I wanted to, I could go into and I'm just going into something that I've got existing just because it's easier, but you can definitely buy these textures or create them yourself. And I'm going to select all and copy. And then I can do the same thing here. I could. Let's take these motifs, put them into a folder, add the mask option, click on the mask Pastes, and you'll see when I click out that that rough texture has been applied. So there's a couple of other methods that you can use for adding some additional texture def, it's too much, don't like it. You can also go into the mask itself, enlightened, such as hit your levels and you could brighten, less of it would show. And again, you can also erase sections. So let's say this part was just too much for me. I could erase. I've got a feathered edge on my last Sue. I'm on the mouth. Make sure that you've clicked on it and then hit Delete and you'd be getting rid of some of that if it was just a little bit too much. So there are some additional methods for you to add some originality. Alright, so let's meet in the last lesson where we're going to have a little bit of a wrap up. I'll see you there.
11. Wrap Up, Wisdom and Next Steps: Well guys, you've made it to the end. I can't wait to see your pieces. I know it may take awhile to wrap your head around all this and that's good. You saw how many different strategies I used. The important thing is to take the reference of these two artists really study them. X-rays specially he's got such a huge body of work. And take a look at Claire's as well just to see a real contrast. Once you search in artists, Pinterest is going to show you all kinds of related artists. And I've seen a lot of artists using a similar technique and the work is completely different. So that's the important thing. You saw all the different ways I could have gone and you saw a different kind of color schemes I applied. And what I ended up with in the end was completely different than I expected to come up with. Check out my two Pinterests sites. I've got the one Dolores art Dolores now aspirin and the other one called T-Shirt dollars gas grant. In there. I have lots of artists resources. And if you check out my surface pattern design board, you'll see a section. They are just on our x-ray. I've also put together some of those textures that I used and I'm giving them to you at no charge. You'll find those on my website. The link will be in the course materials. Make sure you add yourself to my mailing list that we'll get information about my new postings as I make them. Definitely check out my blog and all of the other things that have gone on on that site. Also, if you haven't done so already, make sure you hit that follow button and feel free to check out my stories. My biggest one is that Southall.com, but I've got one at art of where here in Canada, one on red bubble and one on societies six. And I just want to encourage you to just keep exploring and keep experimenting. That's how you get comfortable with your skills. And that really helps you to produce some really different and unusual works. I guess, until next time, bye bye.
Delores Naskrent, Creative Explorer
