Transcripts
1. Create A Signature Stamp + Protect Your Artwork: Hey there my creative friend. I have a really important
question for you. How often are you
signing your artwork, especially your digital artwork? Did you just say
never or sometimes? Then this class is for you. I used to fall into
that never category, too because I just didn't like
the look of my signature. It felt like it never
looked the same. It felt really inconsistent. In fact, sometimes it even
look like a kindergartener who is still learning to write with signing my
name to my artwork. If that's you too,
let's fix that. Together, we're going to make
a digital signature stamp that's going to make signing your artwork easier than ever. This class is for
any digital artist that's familiar with Procreate. But you don't have to
be an advanced user. Hi there. I'm Melanie. I'm a professional
artist and educator, and really, I just want to be your creative cheerleader
here at Skillshare. I love to create
happy whimsical art, and it's usually for coloring
books, picture books, and various other
products at my art shops. If you're looking for
more reasons to smile, then make sure you
follow me on Instagram for almost daily
doses of happy art. Don't forget to follow me
here on Skillshare as well by hitting that green
follow button up above. That way, you'll never miss an announcement about
a new class from me. For bonus points,
you can sign up for my artist newsletter
over on my website. When you sign up, you're going to immediately
get 23 coloring pages and then you'll also
get announcements from me occasionally about
new products or new classes and anything that might
be exciting for you. Notice spam for my friends. Go grab your Apple
pencil and your iPad and let's get started and let's make you
a signature stamp.
2. Your Project: In today's class,
you're going to make your very own signature stamp, so that signing your artwork will be a breeze from now on. You will download a
brush stamp for me to act as your base, and then add in your
own signature image in the brush settings to create
a reusable signature. After you complete
today's project, you can go on to
create as many stamps as you would like with alternate versions of your signature, or even stamps with shapes
you use frequently. I like to redo this project
for myself every year so that I have a clean
brush stamp to use with my artwork for the
year that it goes with. When you're done
with your stamp, please share an image
of your artwork with your new shiny signature in the Projects
and Resources tab. We all would love to see it. Let's go make it.
3. Supplies: For today's class, you're going to need your iPad, your Apple pencil, and the
latest version of Procreate. Lastly, I have provided a brush stamp that you will
need to download as well. You can definitely get by without downloading
the brush for me if you use another
brush as your base, but the settings
may not be correct and you're going
to need to go in and edit the settings
in the brush studio in order to get it to work. The brush studio can be
a little bit complicated and intimidating if you're
not sure how to use it. I recommend downloading
that brush stamp from me. To download your brush, make sure you are
in a web browser and not the Skillshare app, and then click on the "Brush" and the "Projects"
in "Resources" tab. I recommend then saving it to a storage system
like Dropbox. Then once you're
inside Procreate, you'll go to any Canvas, open up the brushes, hit the plus sign, and go to Import and locate where you have
saved that brush for me, and tap it and it will
automatically pull in. It should look like this. When you use it, it will
make a stamp like that. We're ready to go make our own. I'll see you in the next video.
4. Canvas Set Up - Size + Background Layer: First thing we need to do is
set up a brand new canvas. Inside your gallery
in Procreate, I want you to go to the plus
sign up here, tap that. We're just going
to use the square that Procreate provides for us. Go ahead and tap that to
open up a square canvas. Once we have that open, we're going to add a black
layer to be our background. Now, there are two
ways you can do this. You can just tap right here where it says background
color and set that to black. However, I like to make
my own background layer so that way I have
more options later. Instead I'm going to make
this Layer 1, my background. Come up here to the color and we want to
select pure black. I'm in the classic color picker and I'm going to drag the circle all the way down here
to the left corner, that will give me pure black. I can also make sure that all of these two bottom sliders are
all the way to the left. If you're in the
color disk mode, you can try double tapping
down here at the bottom, and that will also
select pure black. I find this to be the
easiest way to do it though. I'm going to drag and drop that over to fill in that
layer with black. Now we are ready
to make our stamp. I'm going to make a
new layer above this. In the next video, we're going to start
crafting our stamp.
5. Make Your Stamp: Now that our canvas
is all set up, let's start crafting our
custom signature stamp. First, make sure you do have a brand new layer above
your black background. Mine says Layer 2 here, so I know I'm good to roll. On this layer is where
we're going to make the image that's going
to turn into our stamp. First thing we're
going to do is go ahead and select pure white. We're just going to
drag this little circle all the way up here
into the top left, and now I have pure white. Now, the more tricky
and difficult decision is you need to
decide on a brush. I love using the
dry ink brush to create my stamps
because it has a bit of texture and feels like using a mixture between a real
pen and pencil for me. You can use pretty much
any brush, though. Each one will give you a different look
for your signature. Keep in mind that the
texture and opacity of your brush will come
through in your stamp. I'll just show you really quick the dry ink, which if
you're looking for it, is going to actually be
in the inking section. If you come down here to ink, you can see studio
pen or dry ink. I have a different version saved in a group of brushes
that I constantly use. I actually have a group of brushes here that I've
made and drag things into. What I also did to this brush
is I upped a little bit of the streamline and stabilization because I have a little
bit of a shaky hand. If you need to also increase the streamline
and stabilization, how you do that is you
just tap your brush, find Stabilization, and
come to Streamline. You can bump that up a bit, and then also bump up
the stabilization a bit. You can even bump up motion filtering
if you'd like and just see how that responds. But if you have a little
bit of a shaky hand, these features here
are going to help you out a lot and smooth things out. When you're doing some lettering or trying to sign your name, that is a very helpful feature. That's just how I
have my dry ink customized just a little bit. I encourage you to pick
a couple of brushes, make some marks, and see if you like the textures
that it's making. I really like this
rough edge and speckled look inside the line. It just feels real to me. But like I said, take your time. You can pause the video here, go through, try out a bunch
of different brushes. See if there's one that you like that you would like to
sign your name with. Now, once you've
selected your brush, it is time to create
your signature. This can be your
initials, your full name, a symbol that represents
you or your name, a simplified version of a logo, or a combination
of these things. Really, whatever you want to be your mark on your artwork. For the last year, I have been using a stamp with
my name and the year 2022. So it looked like this. What I'm going to
be doing today is updating that and making it a 2023 and probably changing
the box a little bit. I know I want to add a
little star at the top of my I since I tend to add a
lot of stars to my artwork. That's my idea for today. If you're having a hard time
coming up with something, you could do a little research. How do your favorite artists
sign their digital artwork? How have you signed your
artwork in the past? Is there a signature
you used in the past that you like and you
would like to replicate? You could always take
a picture of it and pull it in and trace
it and go from there. For mine, I'm just
really going to be doing a clean version of
my handwriting. Basically, I'm just going to take my time signing my name. Now we can hold down on the eraser to choose the same brush I was
just drawing with, and I'm just going to clean a
few things up a little bit. Remember, we can take as
long as we want on this. There isn't a rush. You want to go ahead and take the time to get this right since hopefully you're
going to be using the signature for the
foreseeable future, and in my case,
for the next year. So I want to make sure
I'm happy with it. Then I think I will tuck the
year in maybe right here. Now, I'm going to go
ahead and size this down a little bit so that I
have room to draw my box. But when you're making
your signature, you do want it to
fill this whole box. If you need to, if you
write small naturally, go ahead and do
that, make it small, then resize it to fill the screen and make a new layer, and re-draw over the whole thing so that everything
is nice and crisp. I'm just going to size mine down actually because I need a little bit of
space for that box, and I'm going to center
it while I'm at it. I'm going to move
this around until I see both yellow bars show up, and now I know it's centered. Tap off of the arrow. Now I'm just going to
put my box in here. I'm okay with this being wobbly because that's a
part of my style, is having actual
hand-drawn lines, and a broken line is
also something I do. I might make this star. I'm going to rotate
it just a little bit. To do that, I grabbed the freehand selection
tool. I'll show you again. Grab the ribbon, make
sure it's on freehand. Then I just drew
roughly around that, tap the arrow, and then I can rotate
and move this around. Then I'll clean it up
just a little bit. I think I like the look of that, and I think that will be
my new signature for 2023. Again, take your time and add in anything that feels like you. If there is a recurring
theme in your artwork, you could try to
find a way to fit that into your
signature as well. Perfect. Now, I do want to say, if you're not comfortable
with your handwriting at all, you can absolutely
use the type tool. To do that, you would
go to the wrench, go to Add, and go to Add Text. Then you could do your
initials or your full name. You would type that
out right here. Let's just say I was
going to do my initials. What I could do
is put this down, resize it to be much larger. I could either leave
it like that with just the type and
make that my stamp. But that's a little bit boring and I think we can do better. What you could do is make
a new layer above this, turn down the opacity on that, and trace over this with
your brush of choice. But you still have
a guide here so that you're getting
cleaner letters. But at least now it still
has your hand's touch to it. Then you could
also do what I did and add in little
symbol somewhere, little extra embellishments
to really make it special. Whether that'd be some
kind of boxing in your signature or
some little symbols and shapes in here or, again, adding in a year. Whatever you can do to make
it special and make it yours. Again, I want to
encourage you to take as much time as you
need to perfect this. If you need to, go ahead and pause
the video here, play around, try several
different signatures out until you get
one that you like. When you're done, come
back to this video, and I'm going to show
you the next step on how to actually turn
this into the stamp. Now that your signature is done, we want to double-check
that it's centered. Make sure you're on
your signature layer. Grab the arrow tool. We're going to move this
around until we see the two gold crossbars. There we go. You see how
they both pop up like that. I know that I'm now centered. That way, when I make my stamp, it will actually show
up in the center of where my brush is tapping. The next thing we want
to do is save this as an image to our camera
roll inside our iPad. Come up here to the wrench, go to Share, we want to hit JPEG, and then we just want
to choose Save Image right here and it's going
to save to our iPad. Hopefully, that says
Export Successful. We are ready to go
create the actual brush. I want you to open
up the brush panel here and locate the custom stamp that you downloaded for me. You're going to see multiple
versions of my signature, but the one that on mine. But what it should
look like on yours is just this custom stamp
with the little hearts. I want you to swipe it this
way and hit "Duplicate". I want you to make sure
to always keep a copy of that custom stamp for
me that's not changed. That way, you can
always go back and keep duplicating and to
make your new brushes. Instead of accidentally erasing a stamp that you've made
and writing over it, you'll just always
make a duplicate of that custom brush
stamp that I sent you. Once you have a duplicate, tap it to open up
the brush studio. What we need to do is change
the shape source right here so that way it's
actually your signature. Come over here to the
left, go to Shape. Right here it says Shape Source. We want to hit the button
that says Edit. Tap that. Then come over here
and hit "Import". We want to import a photo
because remember that's where we saved our
image, is to our iPad. Import a photo and select from your photos the
signature that you made, and it should update the
stamp with your new picture. The next part is
really important. Make sure you hit "Done". Otherwise, it's not going
to save your image. Hit "Done" and you will
see it update right here. The new stamp is going
to look like this. It should be whatever
you just drew. If it's not, try again, go back to Shape, Edit, Import, and make
sure you hit "Done". Now this is all looking good. I'm going to hit "Done" again, and now my new stamp is here. Now we're ready to
go test it out. I'll see you in the next video.
6. How To Use Your Stamp In Your Artwork: Let's open up a new canvas, or you could even go
open up a painting or a sketch of yours
that needs a signature. I'm going to come back
to my gallery here, and I'm actually going
to use this piece here, just this wild
painterly piece I made while testing out some brushes. I'm going to show you how I use my stamp in my
day-to-day art making. I'll open this up, and
currently you'll see the little custom
stamp was used down there as I was testing
out for this video. I'm going to go ahead
and get rid of that. The first and most important
thing is we always want a brand new layer
to put our name on. I've created a brand new layer. I'm going to make sure I
have my stamp selected. I do up here. For now I'm going to choose
a middle gray color. What you could do is
just choose a color and stamp your name on and make sure you're always
tapping nice and hard, because there is a little bit
of opacity to this brush. If you tap lightly, you can almost barely see that. But if I give it
a nice solid tap, it shows up really well. You could just choose
annual color that suits your art work just like that and put your name down
at the bottom corner. If I were doing that for real, probably I should
have chosen a dark blue or something that
would show up really nice. That's one way to do things. However, let's get a little fancier and
let's use a blend mode. That's what I do 100
percent of the time. I like using either
overlay or color burn. Overlay is going to make a lighter version of whatever
color is behind the stamp and color burn will
make a darker version and I love the look of it. I'm going to show you
a color burn first, since I have a
middle gray chosen. To do that, come to the
end here on your layer. Open up your Layers panel,
find your signature. Tap this n that stands
for normal blend mode. I'm going to come up
here to Color Burn. Let's zoom in and look at this. I like how it makes varying color within
my signature here. If this shows up on
screen properly, it's a little lighter over here because my paint
color was lighter and then down here it's darker. It just makes a
really pretty blend. That is my typical go-to. The next one would
be color overlay. I could try right now,
but with it being gray, it might not work as well. It needs to be a lighter color in order for overlay to work. For now, I'm going to put this
one back into Color Burn. Then I'm just going
to hide this layer. I'll make a new layer. This time I'm going to
choose something up here. A nice bright color. I still have my
signature chosen. I'm going to come up here
to the N and go to Overlay and I will tap my signature. I went off the canvas. I'm just going to come
over here and tap and then drag it into place. I'll just size that
down a little bit, and that looks really pretty. It's got nice brightness
over here, a little darker, the texture of my canvas
is coming through, the different color variation
is coming through it. It just looks really pretty. If for some reason it
wasn't bright enough, you could also
duplicate the layer to double up on the effect. But that looks almost white. There's a bit of color coming
through, but not much. I'm just going to go ahead
and get rid of that. Those are the ways
that I normally like to sign with either
overlay or color burn. I encourage you to test out these different
options and methods until you find the option that is just right
for your artwork. Don't feel like you
always have to do the exact same method
or the same spot. For instance, I generally will use the
bottom-right corner, but sometimes that just
doesn't suit the piece, and there's not a
good space for it. So I might tuck it in somewhere slightly up here or
down to the left. Feel free to change that up. That's the beauty
of a digital stamp. We can adjust it. Go test out your
signature, my friend. In the next video,
we're going to talk about how you can export this stamp so you can use it in other pieces of
software or formats.
7. Save A PNG Version To Use Outside of Procreate: Lastly, I would
like to teach you how to export this stamp so that you can use it in other software or
programs like Photoshop, Canva, pretty much
really anything else, even Microsoft Word. That way you can
sign your work in other places besides Procreate. What we want to do is export
a PNG version of our stamp. Go back to your original
file, open that up, I'm going to get rid of these
layers that I don't need, and then I'm going to duplicate my signature layer
just to make sure I don't make any mistakes here, I'll turn off the original. The next thing we need to
do is make sure we turn off our black layer and our
white background layer. Make sure the checkboxes are unmarked for both of
those and you should just see your stamp with this gray of the Procreate
screen behind it. What that means is
when we export a PNG, it will just be
the signature with no white background behind it and that's going to
allow you to place it over the top of
literally anything and the background will
show through of whatever it is you're putting it onto. Now, if I were you, I would save a white version, a black version and
then you could do, if you had a particular
brand color, you could save it in
your brand color. But definitely save a black and a white version
for yourself. In order to do this, I'm going to come to the wrench, go to Share, hit "PNG", and then just save this wherever you like
to save your files. For me it's always
going to be Dropbox and I would save this into
a folder for my business, so in my logo folder or
something like that. Mindset export unsuccessful simply because I didn't save it, but you're going to actually
save your somewhere. To make a black version of
this, that's very simple. Find your signature layer here, tap it and go to Alpha Lock. You should see a
checker box pattern behind it and that tells
you Alpha lock is on. You can also use
the swiping motion in order to turn Alpha
lock on a layer, so two fingers, swipe it. Now it's off. You can see there's
no checkers there. Do that again, Alpha Lock's on. That's two different
ways to do that. Now select black, come
back to your layer, tap it and hit "Fill Layer", and it's going to
turn that black. Now the other way
you could do it would be to come to
the one, go to Hue, Saturation and Brightness, and you can change the color and saturation there as well. I like to do it this way. Now again, go to the
wrench, go to Share, PNG, save that to your safe file and now you can go and
put your signature on anything in any
other program. Isn't that cool? You have PNG versions
of your signature to use on your artwork. You did it, you have
made your custom stamp. You have multiple
ways to use it, now, go use it, sign your artwork, protect it.
8. Now What? Thank You! : Now that you have your custom
signature stamp, go use it. Sign your artwork, my friend. Be proud of your art and
protect it with your signature. Once you've mastered
this process, you can go on to make stamps
out of just about anything, any shape that you could desire. You can make more named stamps. You can make shapes like
stars, leaves, hearts. You could even do
custom textures. Really, there's no limit here. Thank you so much for joining
me in this class today. I hope that you
will go on to use your signature stamp on all of your pieces moving forward. Please share your new
shiny signature with us in a piece of your artwork in the Projects and Resources tab. Just upload a project. Make sure to upload a picture to both the cover photo
inside the project, we would all love to see
what you come up with. If you have a moment, please consider leaving
a review to let me and other students know that this class was
helpful for you, I would really appreciate it. If you have any requests
for future classes for me, you can also let me know
that in the discussions tab or feel free to shoot
me an email anytime. Happy brush making for today and until next time
my creative friends.
Melanie Bess, Painting By The Light Of The Moon
