Slo-Fi Illustrations: Create Beautifully Imperfect Art with Handmade Layers

1. SLO-FI Illustrations Class Trailer: It's time to make illustrations that feel more handmade, more human, and way more fun to create. Hello, I'm Mr. Tom Froze. I'm an illustrator and a top teacher here on Skillshare. And in this class, I'm excited to introduce Slo fi Illustration, one of my favorite ways of combining analog and digital illustration techniques. It's much less efficient and precise than working digitally, but it's way more fun, and I think you'll love how it looks. And you're done. We'll work with just a few colors, inking them on paper by hand, and then we'll bring them all together in Photoshop to create bold, vibrant artwork. If you're hitting a wall with your digital art or if you're looking for ways to make your work looser and more energetic, I made this class for you. Join me in Slo fi Illustration on Skillshare. I'll see you in class. 2. About the Class and Project: Slow fly Illustration is about slowing down. It's about stepping away from the polish and perfection of our digital tools and embracing a more hands on analog process. It's slower, messier, and way less efficient, but the results are undeniably more interesting. I love this process because it's a chance to experiment and play and literally get my hands dirty. For the class project, we'll make custom cover art based on our favorite album, or you can base it on an album that you make up in your imagination. But you can use the slow fi technique for any kind of project, whether it's an editorial illustration, a poster, a package, or anything else you can imagine. This class is for anyone who wants to bring a more handmade human look into their work. Whether you're just starting out or you've been illustrating a long time and you're looking for new ways of working, I think you'll get a lot from this class. You don't need any experience working in analog media. I'll guide you through the process here step by step. You should be familiar with digital tools, though, especially photoshop. But if you're not, I'll walk you through every step along the way. In this class, you're going to learn how to plan and sketch with limited colors in mind, how to create and ink separate layers for each color by hand, how to digitize your analog drawings using a scanner and Photoshop, and how to add color digitally and make small edits without losing the spontaneous charm of your handmade art. In terms of tools and materials, you're gonna need plain paper or a sketchbook with easy to tear out pages for sketching, mixed media or marker paper for inking, a pencil and eraser for sketching, color media like markers and pencil crayons for the color sketch. Scissors or an exacto blade and cutting mat, a glue stick or clear tape, a fine white paint pen, correction fluid or white paint for making corrections, green painter's tape, and a ruler. Of course, all the physical art will be drawing will be in black. So you're going to need various black inky drawing tools, including paint pens, markers, micron pens, black India ink, nib pens and brushes to use with the India ink. And, of course, a jar of water. I recommend trying a broad range of types and sizes of these things from broad tips for larger fill areas to finer points like micron pens for smaller details. You also need a light box for tracing and a scanner for digitizing your work. Now, if you don't have a light box, you can use tracing paper, and if you don't have a scanner, you could use your camera or your phone, but results will vary. And, of course, you're going to need Photoshop or an equivalent digital art app, such as Procreate. Know that's a lot of tools there. So bring whatever tools you have that make work for this project. I actually encourage you to just use whatever you have as best as you can, because I really think that your creativity shines where you're working with what you have and working with in constraints and seeing what you can do without all the fancy stuff. By the end of this class, you'll have a finished illustration that you can share on the class projects page here on Skillshare, as well as on social media. But more importantly, you're going to be able to use the Slo fi method for any future projects to come. We're going to spend most of the class on the hands on project, but I always like to give some background information and even a bit of theory to start. I believe that it's important to understand why you're doing something as much as how to do it, because this helps you connect more to the process and know why it's even worth the effort. I also believe that it will help you apply what you learn in a more personal way rather than just doing what the teacher tells you. By understanding why we're doing stuff, not just how to do it, that will make you a better illustrator. And that's what we're going to do in the next video. 3. What are Colour Separations?: My inspiration for this class, and for the methods you're going to learn here is the inventor of the modern record album cover, Alex Steinweis. Before him, albums were sold in plain sleeves with basic lettering or in box sets that were nicknamed Tombstones because of how they were displayed on shelves, like books with only their gray spines and their plain engraved titles visible. Steinweis was the first to see the album sleeve as a creative canvas. He saw it as a way of making the music look as good on the cover as it sounded on the vinyl. Columbia Records was the first to entrust Steineiss with his innovative vision, and I think it paid off for them because sales skyrocketed by almost 900% in some cases. And while the rest is album art history. In Steinweis's day, full color CMYK printing existed, but it was expensive and therefore, very uncommon. Most printers in those days were set up to do simple one color jobs such as industrial catalogs, and these would be in black and white only. Rather than letting these constraints limit his creativity, Steinweiss embraced them. He designed his covers using color separations, meaning there was a separate layer of artwork for every single color, and each was printed individually and aligned precisely onto the same surface. There were no half tones or photographic effects, just bold flat shapes filled in with solid colors. New colors could be made by overlapping different layers and areas where no ink went down would be white. This limitation became a huge part of the style we now associate with mid century commercial art. Fast forward to today, and we have unlimited colors, perfectly aligned layers, and tools like Photoshop and Illustrator that do all the technical heavy lifting for us. Well, this saves us a lot of time and requires far less skill. It's also the reason our work can lose its soul because we're not responding to any sort of real world constraint. We just draw something on our iPad or in Photoshop, and off it goes to the printer. Whatever artistic skills artists like Alex Steineis probably had, they had to make them work in a very restrictive and very technical printing process. Limiting themselves to just three or four colors and working in flat or solid shapes and colors weren't stylistic decisions. Weren't going for a lo fi look, but instead, the lo fi constraints forced them to work in a certain way that resulted in a certain look. Today, many artists try to recreate this look by applying filters, brushes, and other kinds of effects on purpose. But back then, it wasn't an effect. It was a natural quality or result from a physical process. Now, unlike designers like Steinweiss who train for years using analog techniques to create highly precise commercial art, we can turn to analog techniques for the opposite reason. If we want precision, that's what our digital tools are good at. That's what they're for. On the other hand, by intentionally limiting ourselves to flat colors, a handful of layers, and the corks of working by hand, we get results that feel more human and more alive without having to fake it with digital effects. Why does this all matter? When I started out, I worked in a mix of analog and digital techniques, and I love the surprises that could happen along the way. It was frustrating sometimes as I burned through paper and ink, trying to get the perfect results. And over time, I actually shifted to digital tools, you know, thanks to the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. And this overall has helped make me a better artist. But it's also made the process more predictable. And to be honest, making work in this way is just not as fun for me. I found myself less excited to make the work. There was no longer that bumpy, unpredictable ride from sketch to final. That's why I came back to Ink analog techniques. They forced me to loosen up and to let some accidents happen, and those accidents often make the process and the piece more interesting. This class is the result of a few years of what I've been calling going back to Inky. At a time when computers are increasingly capable of doing our creative work for us, I believe it's a timely antidote for others who, like me, are experiencing a similar pull towards physical elements in their work. It's no accident that I'm making this class ten years after I launched my first class Inky Illustrations. And for me, this is really part of me returning back to these handmade techniques, and I'm really excited to share this journey with you, starting with this class. 4. Project Brief: In this video, I'll introduce you to the project brief, giving you all the details you need to start the project. So for the project, you're going to design or illustrate custom artwork for an album of your choice using the slow fi techniques I'll be showing you in the coming lessons. We're not aiming for precision or perfection here, but something more human and imperfect. We want it to be full of character. You can work in two to four colors, including black. To start, choose the album you'd like to work with. It could be an existing album that you'd love to interpret in your own way or a totally fictional one based on a theme or style that you're interested in. Or you could even choose to try to remake or reverse engineer an existing classic album cover, even one that Alex Steinweiss himself made. This is a great way to overcome any creative block. Like, if you have a hard time coming up with your own idea here, trying to reverse engineer an existing album cover is a great way to learn the techniques in the class and still have a lot of fun. Cover art for vinyl usually has a few key elements, including the album title, the artist's name, the record label, the logo, and artwork itself. If you're going for a more retro look, you also find extra elements like the LP logo, a catalog number, and, of course, the artist's signature. And for some reason, they always seem to make a big deal about stereo sound in those days. Modern album art tends to be more minimal. So how many details you include are truly up to you? Now let's talk about some specs. The final album art should be in square format, 12 by 12 " at 300 DPI. That ends up being 3,600 by 3,600 pixels. In the real world, if you were designing for print and the artwork goes all the way to the edge, you'd have to create art that extends about an eighth of an inch or 3 millimeters. Past the edges. This is called bleed. So that means your final art should actually be 3,675 pixels by 3,675 pixels. Later in the class when we get to that point, I will show you exactly where and when to pop in those numbers. To successfully complete this project, please share the following deliverables on your project's page for this class. Image of the existing art of your chosen album or just a description of it if an image doesn't exist, your rough and refined sketch plus a color comp if you did one, scans of your hand ink color separations, your final album art, and all images should be posted in PNG or JPG format. And please post your projects to the class Projects page and not to the discussions page. These, of course, are just the minimum deliverables. You may share anything else you'd like, including additional concepts, sketches you didn't end up using and photos of your process. For your convenience, you'll find these instructions in the class Projects page, and you can also find it there as a downloadable PDF. You can also look at my own project example in the class Projects page to see how I structured my project. Now, let's begin the process. 5. Step 1: Planning and Research: In this video, we'll start planning our album art, and that means choosing an album to illustrate for, and then some initial brainstorming and visual research, moving between thinking on paper and gathering visual inspiration online. And by the end of this lesson, you'll have a good sense of direction for your project and be ready to begin rough sketches in the next step. For this step, we'll be using a pencil and paper to write down our thoughts and we'll also be doing some visual research online using our computer or devices and optionally, we'll be drawing from our inspiration in some very preliminary sketches that I call O Md sketches. Let's start off by declaring the album we'd like to illustrate for. I'll just write down what I'd like to do. The album that I've chosen is called Everybody digs Bill Evans, this is an album by the jazz piano player, Bill Evans. So I'm drawing this all down on a piece of paper in a star chart. This just helps me get my overall information down in something that I can see in front of me. The year of this album is 1958, that just gives me a sense of the period and perhaps what the look and feel of an album like this might be. Then the label is Riverside Records. Then maybe we'll just talk about what's notable about this particular album. Say the most notable thing on this album is the song called Peace Peace. This is the most famous song, one of the most famous songs by Bill Evans, probably, and definitely the most famous on this piece. I got the most critical attention at the time. I'm just going to start by looking at the original album cover for this album, the one that already exists, and that will just help me know what info or elements to include in my own version of this cover. I'm just over here on my browser and looking at the original art here. As you can see, it's this gold color we have the album name. Everybody digs Bill Evans, and of course, that doubles also as the artist's name. Bill Evans is built into it. I'll probably be more pictorial, more illustrative in my own version. So I'm just going to go ahead and write down what those elements are from my own cover. We have the album name and the artist's name kind of in there. And then the artwork, whatever that's going to be for me. In this case, it's the lettering, but mine will be more illustrative. And we have the words stereo and stereophonic. We have the Riverside logo and catalog number at very least. Then in terms of colors, this one is gold, kind of a red color. And they have black as well. Then we can just assume the white is just the color of the paper beneath and so we won't count that as one of our colors. This is just for color inspiration. I can use whatever colors I want. I don't have to go with what's been done before, but that's just something to make note of here. Now, we can go back to our computer. I'm going to head over to Pinterest here and just look for some keywords. Here. These are very specific to my album, but you can translate this to whatever your album choice. Of course, the first thing I want to do is just look up the artist himself, Bill Evans and right away, I get a sense of what does Bill Evans look like? Here's a classic Bill Evans photo where he's hunched over his piano, just lost in the music. I would say that out of all the photos that I've seen of Bill Evans, they tend to be of him in this hunchy position his piano. What I'm going to do is just take these and bring them over to a folder I have here on the side and just start collecting these reference images. Another keyword that I'm going to look up here is Paul Bacon, the designer of this particular album and just see what his own designs look like. I'm just going to pop this over into my references folder as well and gather a few more of those as I go. I'll also just look up jazz album art, maybe from the 1950s and 1960s. And look for some images that inspire me along these lines as well. I'm looking for design cues that I can incorporate into my work, especially around this process we'll be using where we're doing these color separations, so I'll poke around at some of these with you here as well. What I notice in these album covers is that there's very limited colors. Here we have just whatever the background color is and then we have red and black and this browny color. We have this green as well, and I think that we can assume that some of these browner colors are made by overlapping the red and the green and you can see that right here at the elbow of the drummer. Now looking at another example that just came up here in Pintres and this is a very simple red or orange and white and black composition. Really only two colors going on here and it's just these abstract shapes with a few little line details. And this is just a quintessential album style that I can pull from those days and use that as some inspiration. I'll just keep going down, looking at other keywords around here that will help further inspire my own lm, both in terms of the era of Alex Steinweiss or the era of the album in question. And of course, what kind of design and composition techniques are they using that work with this kind of slow fi technique that we're doing in this class. So, of course, I want to look at some art or album covers by Alex Steineis, the inspiration for this entire class. And Steinweiss of course, being the pioneer of the album cover art, as we know it today, he's a great inspiration. No matter what technique, what album you happen to be using, I think that it's well worth looking and being inspired by. Now, another keyword that comes to mind is the idea of peace. This is just another concept because the song that I love on this album the most and the most notable song on the album is Peace Peace. I could look up just the idea of peace on Pintres just to get a sense of what does that look like as an image? Of course, you see a lot of doves and peace signs and maybe the peace symbol with your fingers. All of these are very inspiring images that I can pull from perhaps in my own concepts later on. I might go a little further into this piece dove keyword and just let this show me some visual inspiration for how I might bring the idea of peace to my own Alva Mark. Now, what I don't want to do is copy someone else's dove. I don't want to spend too much time absorbing other people's interpretations of this piece Dove. I want to be inspired, I want to see what's possible, but then I want to quickly put it away so I'm not overly influenced and end up accidentally or on purpose copying someone else's ideas or their style. I'm looking back here at my brainstorm. And I just want to add another line here and start thinking about possible ideas in word format or list format that I could explore in my rough sketches in the next step. There's the idea of Bill Evans hunched over piano, question mark because maybe I'll put him in something less expected, just maybe a portrait, something like that. Another idea or direction to chase down. Will be the piece Dove being a take the song on the album, so it's maybe a Dove alone, maybe a Dove plus Bill Evans in some way. At this point, these are just words. These are just jumping points for me to start drawing from in the next step. I could go even deeper into my research, go on to Wikipedia, and read about the album, read more of the background of this particular song that's interesting to me, and see what imagery comes up that way. Either way, I've gathered my inspiration images, mostly found on Pintrast and I put them into folders in finder on my Mac. The next thing that I'm going to do is do what's called O mode drawing. This is an optional step for you, but I do recommend it, especially if you have a hard time coming up with ideas or if you feel yourself getting stuck at this stage where you start to transition into trying to draw rough sketches. And so I like to spend a few minutes at least just going through my reference images and drawing from them. I'm not trying to come up with ideas. I'm not trying to be clever. Drawing what I see from my reference images helps me absorb that inspiration more. I like to say that I'm downloading information into my brain so that I can actually put that reference information those images away and actually draw more from eye mode or imagination mode. And this is where I come up with my own ideas and do try and be more creative later on. So spend maybe ten to 15 minutes brainstorming and drawing from references. You can take as long as you want or set a timer if you'd like to avoid overthinking it. 6. Step 2: Rough Sketches: This video we'll do some rough sketches. This is where we work out on paper, some possible ideas for our finished art. By the end of this lesson, you'll have at least one strong rough sketch to build on and refine in the next step. For this step, we'll be using pencil and paper. I usually like to draw my ideas out as smaller thumbnails around two by 2 " square, in this case. For this, I'll be using thumbnail template. This is something that you can download and print on your own from the class resources page. When I'm sketching, I like to start out loose out of the grid, so I'm not sketching in my thumbnail squares just yet. This just helps me think about ideas without worrying about composition in too much detail just yet. So as you remember, I was thinking of doing something around a Dove in my brainstorm, as well as something more around Bill Evans himself in a more direct way, probably something with him hunched over the piano. I've already done some O Mode sketches, meaning I've drawn just from my reference photos, and I've set those aside, so hopefully that will help me be more fluid at this stage. I'm just going to free sketch out some possible ideas with the dove, something around wings, probably an eye in there. I'm not sure if it would just be the symbol of the dove alone with some titling, but maybe something to do with a dove mixed in with Bill Evans in some way. That would be a little bit more conceptual, trickier to do for sure, but it's kind of exploring. It could be something like the eye of the Dove is also the eye of Bill Evans. Again, abstract. Not sure if this is exactly where I want to go, but that's what the stage is for. I recommend that while you're doing this, you listen to the music that you're illustrating for. Get that album on, put on your headphones and just enjoy getting into it. Once I have a few directions that I've done in my more free loose sketching, I'll start thumbnailing in my squares, thinking more about rough composition. I'll be thinking about how to fill the space in that square and where things like type and other elements are going to go. So I'll try six to 12 roughs, working as quickly as I can without getting stuck. But basically, I have two directions. One is just the idea of the dove and the other is the idea of the elevens hunching over. In my free your sketches, I started thinking about maybe combining those two. I'm going to try not to think about it too much, just roughly trying different sketches. I just like the idea of this shape of the dove, it's just such a peaceful shape in itself. It's actually been a recurring theme in some of my illustrations over the years, especially Christmas cards. I've often incorporated the idea of a dove, like a peace dove. As I'm sketching, I am having a mind. I'm thinking about how I'm going to translate this into the art that this technique is best at, which is shapes and simple lines and flat colors. I'm thinking very roughly about my typographic elements. As you go, keep your composition simple and mostly shape based. Avoid realism in overly detailed elements. The more complicated your art, the harder it's going to be to make this technique work. T in terms of simple solid colors and flat shapes. Line based art can work too as long as you provide a clean enough background for it to pop. This stage could take you as little as 15 minutes or you could be at it all day. I recommend sticking maybe to 30 minutes or less to avoid overthinking, of course, you can draw as many roughs as you'd like, but you should end up with at least one strong rough sketch to take into the next step. So I'm done my rough sketches and my thumbnails here, and I ended up doing 12. I could have kept going all day, but I seem to have just kept iterating over the same idea over and again. The dove itself wasn't really going anywhere for me. I was doing various versions with the idea of the dove and Bill Evans. There's something about them that I couldn't quite resolve, and I don't think it would make very strong art unless I could do that, unless I could get this real nice kind of combination of the dove and Bill Evans. Now, the closest I did come to that was Bill Evans here, hunched over the piano with an angel wing. I really like that. It also references one of my favorite album covers of all time by another artist. His name's Ben Shen, where he draws the composer of that album with angel wings and he's playing a pipe organ, and I really like that. Other one that kind of seemed to work, but I don't know. I'm not very confident it's going to work. It's this guy, or it's Bill Evans, I should say, playing a dove. So I think there's something lost in translation there. So I think a more straightforward approach is going to do best for this particular album cover. So it's going to be probably this one here where we have Bill Evans playing piano, just from the side, and you see kind of it's pulled back. It's more of a full body shot with a bit of the piano peeking in. And I included a bit of space at the top for text or, like, the title. And then a few other elements down below there. I do like the one that I was just saying before where he's got the angel wing, because that's the clearest representation of the dove mixed with Bill Evans. And then earlier here, the closest I have to a strong concept is Bill Evans just kind of peeking in here, and then there's a piano shaped and some black lines. Those would be like the black keys of a piano. So I'm playing around with that idea, and then maybe the title goes along the side here kind of sideways and going vertical. Those are my three chosen concepts there, and I will choose one of these to go into my refined sketch in the next stage. 7. Step 3: Refined Sketches: In this video, we're going to be creating a more refined sketch. That means choosing one of our roughs and redrawing it larger and giving more attention to the details. We're going to continue to think about how the art will work with the slow fi technique, including working in flat shapes and simple colors. By the end of this lesson, you'll have at least one larger refined sketch to trace over for the remaining steps in the project. The tools we're going to be using are still paper and pencil, but we're going to probably need a ruler for this stage, as well as an eraser just in case you want to erase this, I'll also be using my printable six by six inch sketch template, which you can download and print from the class resources page. We'll also begin using a light table, which you can see here, which we'll use to iteratively refine our sketches, basically tracing over sketches to make them even more refined. So refined sketches often take me a few stages or what I call passes. In this first pass, I'm going to start larger because later when we go to do the hand drawn separations, we'll be tracing over at this size. So we're going to be using a ruler to draw that perfect six by six inch square or use the template provided in the class. Now this is where we're going to think more in terms of the overall composition and all the things we're going to include in our album artwork, including the main artwork, the album title, and artist's name. And in my case, the record label and catalog number and the word stereo on there as well just to give it that kind of retro vintage record album cover vibe. Oh, I'm not going to need my light table just yet. I'll need this as I get into my second pass. So the sketch that I decided to go with my rough sketch is going to be Bill Evans as the angel. And so that's this one down here. It's a little bit risky for me. I feel like it may or may not work out using this technique, but I'm going to give it a try. See what happens. I'm just going to do my best to copy what I see. I'm not expecting it to be exactly reproduced. It's just a reference, so I remember what my idea was, and I'm doing my best to just keep it loose and not get too tight here. I'm really letting myself exaggerate the feeling of Bill Edins hunch. I'm making it even more expressive than what I might have seen in my photo references or even in my rough sketch. Again, it's okay to be a little bit rough. I feel like I want this to come up a little bit. The nice thing about working large now is that once we move to our second iteration, we can just trace over at this size. This is just a nice way of getting that started. I'm allowing some of my shapes to just float. I'm not sure I'm going to be including any of Levin's legs there. And use a smoke trail here to lead us to the angel wing. Even though I'm not really thinking in terms of darks and lights and tones and stuff, just yet, that's the next step. I'm putting it in there just because it's happening naturally. We're going to get more straight and probably think about using a ruler or some kind of guide for the lettering. But to start, I'm just going to rough it in. This is where I'm going to put that badge logo and then at the top here, hopefully somewhere near the center, all right, stereo. Not exactly sure how the lettering is going to fit here. I'm going to just free ball it here and hope that I find it landing in a good way in a way that fits and has a nice feeling to it. I have my first refined sketch down here. Maybe while I'm at it, I will consider adding some of that herring bone pattern in the photos that I've seen of Bill Evans jacket. This could add a very nice expressive element in the work or complicate it and make it un usable for me. Depends how tight or loose I want my final composition to be in terms of the linework. In this first pass, this is a good opportunity to try the more detailed part. So if it doesn't work, I'll know sooner than later. I can start ruling it out of my concept. I'm thinking I kind of like it. It just depends how it's going to work. Okay. Now it's time to turn on my light table and get a second sheet of paper over it. What we want to do is use some masking tape. Painter's tape works great for this. So I'm securing down my first sketch to the light table and then putting my second sheet over top and trying to line the actual pages as much as I can. And because after this, I'll be tracing over my second sketch. I'm going to get a ruler and redraw those guides, and I'll use my mechanical pencil because it's got a finer point. And I'm tracing those guides that I printed and I'm overshooting bounds or the edges of the square there so that I have these registration marks here. These intersections of these lines, I'm going to use as targets to line up my separations as we go. You'll notice that I'm drawing things past the edges, and this is where the idea of bleed comes through because I want my colors and my artwork to extend past the edges of this artwork I'll need to be drawing pass less edges so that when I bring them into Photoshop, I'm not getting a little tiny gap along those edges. With every pass, I'm getting more detail oriented, but also there to be a little variation between each to keep it fresh. Now I'm going to start using my ruler to measure things like where the center is. I have my 6 " here. Here's my center mark and that'll help me align some of my text, thinking more like a graphic designer here. I'm going to be using some unorthodox materials here to get some of my shapes. I want a perfect circle here. I'm just using what I have on hand just for now. That's not quite the right size. But it will do for now. I'm creating an area for my type, and I just want to create some nice even lines for that. I have this interesting little ruler here that I picked up. It's called an AMS lettering guide. It's an optional piece of equipment here. It's just a really easy way of creating lines that you can create some rules and do your lettering with it, which I find really useful. You got to be careful. If you're being too sloppy, you will slip and slide. But something like this is going to help me just make even lettering and even spacing between while this technique is all about loosening up, it's also important to be accurate to some degree because of how things need to align later on. But also the harder you try to align things by hand in this analog way, I find the more interesting the results because we're not going to get perfect alignment here at all. Nothing's going to be perfect. It's going to look handmade, but I think we'll get more interesting results if we try our hardest to be accurate with some of these shapes and lines because that's where that contrast between loose and tight starts to happen. This art here is a little bit too fine for this technique. I don't want to spend too much time doing all those little details. So I'll do some kind of a badge there, but it's not going to be exactly like what I see on the artwork on the original album artwork here, but I can keep going and figure that out later. I'm just eyeballing the alignment here. So I've conceded that the lettering in this pass will just be pretty rough. I'll figure out what to do in a third pass. I've almost forgot the catalog number. So you're looking at my third iteration here. There's not a ton of evolution from my first, other than it being just a clear line quality that I'll be able to trace over more accurately later, and my lettering is more clear. Now, I've done my best with a pencil to do this lettering the size that I want, but I'm probably going to want to use a thicker marker or something to just get the thickness and the even lines and stuff that I want. And that's just going to have to happen in the inked separation in a few stages from now. I think I've taken this as far as I can, and now in the next step, I'm going to start trying to figure out how my colors are going to work. And if I can't think in color, I'll think in terms of tones, like what are going to be the darkest parts? What are going to be the lightest parts, and what's that in between tone as well. So we're going to do that in the next step. 8. Step 4: Colour Comp: In this video, we're going to start thinking in color. We'll choose colors and begin to lay them down in either a tonal or a color sketch, also called a color comprehensive or just color comp. This will help us think more concretely about how our limited flat colors are going to work, and it's going to make the next step when we're actually inking our separate colors much easier. By the end of this lesson, you'll have at least one color or tonal comp to work with in the next few steps. In terms of tools, we're going to continue with a light table and now add in some color. You can use any color media you have on hand. I'll be using alcohol sketch markers and marker paper for the most part, and I might have to use a few additional tools as we go, but we'll see how things go just with the markers to start. So I have my final refined sketch taped down here onto the light table, and now I'm going to get some marker paper. This is a different paper, and this is what I'm going to use to just start planning out my color. Again, keep in mind, this is just to plan color. The art we're making at this step won't be used in our final composition, but it still helps to be as careful and accurate as possible. The marker paper I'm using here is just karyoka plus marker paper with a smooth grain, and the Markers I'll be using. They're not the perfect thing for working at the smaller size because they're very broad tipped, but I'm going to do my best with them. These are karaokaPlus sketch markers. I just got these at my local discount fashion store called winners, and they were a fairly good price, and they're actually good quality. So I'm going to just work with these. But again, you can work with any color media you like. Now, before we start, let's just take a look at the refined sketch here. Thinking about where lights and darks are going to happen. I'll probably want to work in three colors just to keep it simple. And one of those is going to be something like black, and then there'll be some kind of a mid tone. So black will be the darkest, then there's going to be some kind of mid tone and then something that's the light tone. I think his hair will be the darkest. I imagine that this part here, this piano shape will also be the dark. Other than that, I'm not quite clear. So we're going to figure that out using our color media here. So I'll put my marker paper down here and use a bit of tape to secure it down. The nice thing about the marker paper is that it won't bleed. I'm also going to use some of my pigment liners here. These are just micron pens basically, and I can use those for some of the dark areas as well. Because I know that I'll be working in black, I'm just going to start with that color and I'm just filling in those broad areas to start. I can use my broad tip on my alcohol marker. For these broader areas. I don't know what the color will be yet and I don't want to have to get distracted by that. I'm just going to use gray as my temporary mid tone. I'm being careful wherever there's white areas that I think will be white, I'm going to leave those white and it's going to feel funny filling in these shapes without there being any outline to them, especially if you're used to having outlines rather than just pure shapes. Elements. Now I want there to be a difference between his jacket and his hands. Right now we just have two colors. I'm going to introduce another tone here so it's really visual here. I'm going to go with red. I said that the gray was our mid tone, but in fact, right now it's acting more like our lightest tone. So we'll just call that a light tone. For now, we'll call the red the mid tone, and then we have black, which is our darkest tone. Because these will probably be flat areas of color, I'll just fill them in solid. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with that wing, so I'm just going to draw the whole back there and figure out what to do with that wing later. I don't think I want Bill Levin's shirt to end up being actually red or his jacket to actually end up being red. In the final art, it's the wrong feeling. I could almost see the background being red and his jacket being either black or gray. But just turning off the light table for a moment, you can see how his hands and his face are just a shape. Almost like a white silhouette and that's going to be a very interesting effect to work with on our layers. This is where the tricky part comes with details. How are we going to work these things out? Now, I'm using my white paint pen. It's not going to be very easy to see, but I want to go back over with the white areas that I think will be white. If this doesn't work, I'll have to use something stronger like actual acrylic paint or even cutout paper could work here. I want some white text down here. So that some of that background paper color comes through, it will make the overall art feel lighter. This is where having a marker is actually handy for figuring out what do these letters look like once they're actually thick? I want them to have a presence. I'm not worried too much if they look hand lettered versus a real font. If I wanted a real font, I could do that in Photoshop and save myself a lot of time and effort. But for this project, I'm trying to go more for a handmade look. I'm working with a thicker tool here. I'm finding myself running out of room between these ladders. I might have to space those out. I'm finding myself getting thicker as I go as well. I have to keep reminding myself this is exactly what I want. I want imperfections. This is handmade art here. I'll just take a little look just to see how it's looking without having light shining through. I like that he has a little wing. I wonder if it could be a little bit more expressive somehow. I'm going to just risk ruining this whole thing. Okay. So now I'm going to go in with a fine liner or a micron pen and just start thinking about how I'm going to bring in some of the details. Adding in lines for me is always scary because that's where you can just put in too much and you have to start again. I find lines if you keep them open as much as possible and only add them where you need them, it keeps you overall feeling open. Using the broadness of this brush tip to give me the thickness of these letters. This is just a color study. Nothing here is committed. This is just a way of planning up my colors. I'm going to go in with my red here and just polish off the lettering, tighten it up a bit just by using the red tip to chisel off the ends or the terminals of these letters, almost like I'm erasing them away. This is just a nice way of getting the letters to look a lot more confident. I'm using my white paint pen a little bit as my correction fluid, making these thick lines less thick. Now, I'm starting to think about maybe where some of my overprints will be. So I'm going to carry the red over, but it's going over that grayer color, that mid tone, whatever that color is going to be, and it might create enough contrast. So it's an extra color there. Alright, I have done pretty much everything that I think I can do in this color comp. I managed to get it all done just in one pass or one iteration. As you can see, I've used red just to represent my mid tone, and then I have black, which will be black in my final. And then some kind of light tone, which is indicated by the gray. And so I'll just figure out what those colors are later. But in terms of tones or values, those are working. I added just the leg of the piano to create a little bit of something there to anchor the text because it was left justified, but I didn't really know what was going on with the rest of his leg or body over there. So the leg or the piano kind of creates a nice break there. And I included the catalog number just up there, refined some of the lettering as best as I can at this point. And just worked out a few other details, added his hairline. I also added my border and included my registration marks there. And that's just in case I want to use this as a reference for the color separations that we're going to do next. I did say that we'll probably want to use our refined sketch for that part for tracing over our color separations. But I might actually end up just using what I've done here in the color comp instead because that will be easier for me to keep track of those color separations once I'm using black only. Another thing that I might do and that you can do if it helps is just trace over your color comp with another just line art sketch, and that will just make it easier to keep track of what your shapes are in the next stage. 9. Step 5: Inking the Separations: In this video, we're going to create our color separations by hand. We'll use a light table to trace over each area of color separately using whatever drawing or inking tools you have on hand. By the end of this lesson, you'll have as many hand drawn separations as you have colors ready for scanning in the next step. As for the tools we'll be using in this step, we'll continue using our light table, and we'll also now start using our black inky tools and water. Now, in terms of your paper choice, you can use mixed media, wet media or marker paper here to make sure that it can take the ink or pigment without wrinkling or bleeding too much. You can also just use printer paper if that's all you have on hand. So after I made my final color comp, I took it off my light table, and I'm just going to put this up here where I can look at it for reference. But I will be tracing over my refined sketch on the light table here. So after I made that color comp, I traced over it again just to make sure that my lines lined up with what I ended up resolving in that color comp. So this is the most accurate version of my sketch that I have. I've taped onto the light table. I put my marker paper over top for my first separation, and I've drawn on my registration marks here, basically a box that has these intersecting corners. Now I'm going to carefully go in on any area that will be black. I'll just put a color reference here as a reminder. At this point, anything dark or black that goes down here is going to work certain types of tools, whether it's a paint pen or a paint brush or anything else, even a pencil, if you draw over it, dark enough, it's going to end up being black in the final scan. It will just have different textures and qualities. Really, what I want to do is just get this as black as possible anywhere where I anticipate the being black art. So I like to start by doing the edges, any hard edge as carefully as possible. I'm free handing it, not going to use a ruler. You can use a ruler at the stage if you want to be more precise, but I like to keep things a little bit more hand made and just see how that goes. Remembering to extend past the border for a bit of bleed. Also trying my best not to make any mistakes. Anytime I am in doubt about what part is my current color, I'll just look up at my color cont there. This is a little tricky because I need to keep my head out of the way of the overhead camera so you can see what I'm doing here. Those are good for now. This is where I really wish I had a fill tool that I could just drag and drop my paint bucket and fill this, but I have to do it all manually by hand here. This is where we're going to break out a few of my more inky tools. I could just use marker to fill in these areas. I'm going to have a little fun here and use India ink and some water and some paint brushes. It's a little harder to control, but it also can be more fun to work with, a little bit more unpredictable and we also can maybe get a little bit of extra texture in there by accident. We'll see what happens. Also, it's nice that with a brush, you get this nice broad stroke automatically. I'm noticing just using this water based media, I can see a fingerprint that was left by my finger. Marker paper and the marker paper doesn't absorb grease too well, so like I guess I had a bit of a greasy finger. This is a little bit scary because this is very watered down ink right now. I need to get it thicker. I see a drip about to happen. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to prevent it. Let's see what I can do. I got a little bit of tissue paper here and I'm going to blot, very carefully this drippy area. Take a corner that I rolled up with my fingers, like a little corner here and I'll have to go back over that darker later and remember not to be so watery. The marker paper is very good about taking in wet media and alcohol media, but there is a limit. This would be a lot easier if I was just using a paint pen or even a fine point sharpie. I'm going to try using my paint pen for the lettering here. So I'm going to continue inking my black here and just stop the camera here and keep going so that I can just concentrate on being careful here rather than trying to talk and ink at the same time. I've done my best to do as much of the black as possible that I can see on my color comp and now I'm going to remove this, put it up where I can see it and reference it if I need to, put my second sheet of marker paper here and do one of the other colors. I'll do the mid color that I was drawing in as red in my color comp. Since I used red as my color in the color comp, I'll just use that as my indicator for the mid tone separation. Again, the color I draw down here will be black and I can change this to any color I want once I get it into Photoshop. I have my border drawn in with the overshooting lines at the corners so I can line that up to other layers and of course, to the refined sketch below here, and I will continue this separation. I'm going to go back to my paint pen here and bring in just those areas that I anticipate will be the midtone or what we're seeing is red right now in the color comp. This will probably take a little bit of extra concentration. Now, I'm going to bring this red a little further into this black piano leg. This will make sure that when I bring this into Photoshop and align the color separations, they'll overlap and there won't be a white gap. I'm remembering to extend past the bleed. I just want to remember that now this area here is going to be black, not the piano shape. By black, I mean, whatever color this separation ends up being. You can see how it can get very confusing. The lettering is definitely going to be a tricky part for me because I want that to be white. I think the best thing to do at this point is actually just block in for now and I'll probably have to go back in with white and then black and white and black later. I'm going to continue filling in all those red areas and one thing that I'll be looking out for is where this wing is, where the smoke is. That's going to be white popping out or cutting out rather of that shape. I'm going to fill it in with black probably and then draw back in over with white to fill that out or to knock it out so that it's white again. Lettering, I'm just using boxes as placeholders for each of the letters. Just because of the way this technique works, it's going to be easiest if I just use a certain kind of blocky letter shape rather than trying to do something a little bit more refined. I'm hoping the effect will look great, and we'll see how it goes. Mm. I finished my second color separation. I have it right here and I'm still letting it dry, but that's about it for that one as far as I know. I guess some talking points here are just that I messed up when I was doing the word digs at the end here, and I guess I forgot to make space for the eye in that word, so I had to go and white that out with my white paint pen and then fill it back into black. The lettering is very blocky and funky, and I think that's okay. I think it's going to actually work for this. Piece nicely. I'm going to just tape this up here to dry and then continue on with my third and final plate, which will be all that background color. So this is my light plate. I'm almost done, and as you can see, I use just a crumpled up sponge that I've had lying around for years. It's a weird looking thing, but I basically use it as a splatter brush, I guess, or to add a bit of a grainy effect. And I just dabbed in some ink to create a sense of shading. So whatever this background color is going to be, maybe it's going to be gray, maybe it's going to be blue. But it's going to fill in there and almost act like a gradient and fill back in where the red is. I think that's going to just soften that hard edge of where the piano leg is. We'll see how it works, and if it's really not working, I can do some correcting of the thing I'm thinking about now and I'm going to have to do this on the previous plate or separation as well. If I can find my white marker here, and my white paint pen, there is this smoke that comes over this color and I want it to come through. I've just added it in there. I'm not exactly sure if that's exactly the right look, but sometimes you just have to wait and see how things turn out in a later stage with this process. Same with the lettering, whatever this color is, it might get too dark and I'll have to figure out how to back paddle a bit. But otherwise, that is my third and final plate, I'm going to just go back to the previous plate, the mid tone. What I was coloring was reading I'm going to line the registration marks here as accurately as I can, and they're not lining up super accurately anymore because the wet media buckled and wrinkled the page. If I want to make it a little bit more accurate, I can try to tape down another edge. Hoping this is dry at this point and just get it somehow reasonably in there. Again, I want to get in some of these smoke lines. Smoke is wispy and inaccurate, so I'm not going to be too accurate in exactly how they look here. The other part here, of course, is the wing. I want that wing to be a lot more organic and wispy than I can get out of my posca paint pen here. I think what I'm going to try and do is get just some regular white paint. This is what I have on hand. I do have white ink as well, but it's a little bit more transparent and this might actually do the trick. Now the problem with acrylic paint is it's very wet and it's going to make my page buckle a bit, but I'm just going to try and be careful and I'll work with it. I'm going to get kind of a round brush here. I'm not going to water down the paint at all. I'm just going to wisp in that, and I'm hoping that it'll be thick enough. Obviously, it doesn't need to go up where it's white because it's already white, but I'm hoping that it'll be thick enough to carve out a wing there. I mean, feathery wings are feathery and inaccurate, kind of like smoke. And so if I were to create a hard edge there, it might not be as wingy as I want. I might go over there once it dries, just with one more coat. And while that's drying, I'm going to go back to the previous one that I was working on. This is the lighter plate, my third separation. And what I want to make sure I get in, which I forgot before, is the smoke coming up here. Almost forgot that detail. So of course, anything over white doesn't matter. I'm going to leave a hard edge here just for a bit of contrast. So the other plate is going to be wispy and feathery. This one with the background color is going to have a more defined edge. And hopefully, I'm hoping those will play off of each other nicely in the finished illustration. Now, I'm going to take the opportunity back on my original black layer here, the first one that I worked on, line those layers up as best as I can, line those registration marks, I should say. On this black plate, I wanted to see if I could get a bit more hair lines here. So what I was thinking is maybe if I dot some wet ink, well, it's wet, go like that. Let's see if that works. And then another thing I wanted to do with is black hair. I just give a little bit of an undulation. It's a bit flat. It seems that I also missed on some parts here on the Riverside Reeves badge. So I'm going to go back to the red shirt here. I'm gonna need to go back over that with the white paint again, anyway. And try and get it aligned. It is really buckled. It's gonna be definitely come through in the scan. But this is what we have to work with. I probably could have used better paper for this thicker paper. So I'll get on one more coat of this white just to make it thicker. I feel like I've overdone it. And then the part that I was missing was on the logoe badge thing here, right here? I'm going to white out just some elements that I had seen or observed on the original cover, the actual cover for this. So all that's left to do next is wait for the paint to dry. And I do highly recommend that once you're done your color separations, inking them in this way, you do let them dry before we go on to the next step, otherwise. You might wreck your inky stuff and you might get gunk on your scanner bed. So that's the end of this stage, and I'll see you in the next video. Where we're going to start scanning them in and turning this into digital art. 10. Step 6: Digitizing the Separations: In this video, we're going to transition from the analog world into the digital. We're going to scan each separation onto our computers and then use Photoshop to enhance and prepare the artwork for colorizing in the step after this one. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a high res cleaned up and high contrast scan of each of your analog separations. In my case, I'm going to have three because I did the three color separations. This step we're going to be using a computer, a scanner, and Photoshop. This could work with an iPad and Procreate or Fresco or something like that, and by using a camera, but the results will definitely vary from what I'm doing here at the scanner. I have image capture open. This is just the software on my mac that I use to scan things in from my scanner. And I'm just going to make sure that we're in black and white mode. We're not going to need color, and I'll just set grays to 250 6 grays. If that's an option you have, that should do. We'll set the resolution to double what we need in the final. If we want a 12 by 12 album cover at 300 DPI, we'll scan in our six by six ink color separations at double that resolution at 600 DPI. I'll just place my black separation first onto the scanning bed, try and align it. And we'll just do a quick little preview here. I will scan in the entire platin. I'll just select everything here and just scan the whole thing in. We'll do that with the remaining two separations. When you've done everything by hand and then you bring it into digital in this way, it feels a little bit like Christmas because you just don't know what you're going to get when you open these files and put them together. Maybe just to start, we'll rename our scans so we know what they are. I'll call one black, know that one will be black. Then we'll call the second one color one, and then the other one color two. Black, color one, color two, and then I will open those up in Photoshop. We'll go with the first file we see here, color one. The first thing I'm going to do is rotate it, so it's the right side up. We'll just go to Image, Image rotation. And 90 degrees clockwise. Now, the first thing that we want to do here is adjuster levels. I'm down here in the Layers panel. If you don't see your layers panel, you'll find it in Window layers. I'll bring it up here so we can actually see it closer to the art and just see what's going on. While I'm at it, I'll also bring my channels panel up and just create it as a second tab there. We're in the Layers panel and I'm going to go at the bottom here in the middle and create what's called a Levels Adjustment layer holding option on my keyboard and dragging the white slider on the very right, I get this very black and white thing. If I let go of option, I can see the effect happening, but it's less subtle. By holding option, I can see a lot more clearly what I'm changing the contrast with here. That's really what we're doing with levels. We're making this whole thing a lot more contrasty. I'm going to stop it just about there when I start seeing the white smoke pop out of the body there and I can see some of the wispiness of the wing as well. Want a little bit that texture to come in, that black texture, but mostly I want that white. Then we're going to do the same on the left slider. By sliding it, you get ultimately darker black tones here, and by holding option, you can really see that in a more dramatic way. Just a nice way of seeing exactly where your contrast is headed. I do want there to be a little bit of texture in there, but not that much. I want to have nice deep black color here. In the most extreme sense, I could do something like this. The other thing is we want to be able to see our registration marks. That's something that we definitely want to keep track of. What I think I'll do here is just pull back my slider bit so I can see those registration marks just ever so faintly. Once I have things lined up in the next step, I can go back and change the contrast so it's more stark again. That's pretty good for now. Now we're going to do the same adjustment on the other separation, so we can just save what we have for now. Just as a shortcut, I'm going to take this levels adjustment in the Layers panel. It's a separate layer. I can just make sure it's selected and then copy it. I can go edit, copy or I just hit Command C and then go to my next file here and paste and it will paste that adjustment layer over this file retaining this exact same sense of contrast. Of course, the other thing that I want to do is rotate the image 90 degrees clockwise. I'm at image, image rotation, 90 degrees clockwise. Now looking at this file, I don't see those registration marks quite as clearly and that's just because the black is covering over it. I do see the lines extend past where the black is, which is useful. Maybe what I'll do is just take that white contrast down enough that I can see those ever so faintly. And those will help me line things up later. I'll save and go to the next file, which is the black one. For this one, I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm going to go to paste and that will paste my levels adjustment down just like it did before, and I will also rotate the canvas. This one I can see my lines fairly well. There are some defects here, but we can figure those out, troubleshoot them later. For now, this is good enough. I'm going to save my file. And that's all three of my color separations that I've inked and scanned and digitized, and I've enhanced the contrast. And in the next sep, we're going to colorize them and bring them together in a final photoshop file. 11. Step 7: Starting the Finished Art: In this video, we're going to complete our artwork by combining our separations into a single Photoshop file, and in there we'll add color and align the layers as best as we can. It's not going to be perfect, but that's just the point of everything we're doing here. By the end of this lesson, you'll have your nearly finished full color digital album Artwork. Now, for this lesson, the only tool we're going to need is Photoshop, and I'm going to be just using a mouse for everything. There's not going to be any need whatsoever for using a stylus unless that's just what you're used to using as your mouse. So first, let's just create a new file. We'll hit Command N or you can go to File New, and this will bring up the new file dialog, and I'll just give it a descriptive name here, and I will make the dimensions 14 by 14 at 300 pixels per inch. You don't need to fill anything else in here except of course, here, my color mode is still in Grayscale. I want to make sure that's RAGB. 14 by 14 " resolution is 300 Color mode is RGB. You can leave other settings as they are. The reason we want 14 by 14 " is that we'll have some room to align our artwork before we crop in to our final 12 by 12 " towards the end. You can hit and then go to view guides and new guide layout, and we're going to just set up some guides to see that bleed area and what our 12 by 12 area is as clearly as possible. We're going to create a 1 " margin all around and you can make sure that columns and rows is disabled and hit okay. The area within these guides should now be 12 by 12. The other thing we want to do is just lock our guides by going view, lock guides, and this will prevent any accidental moving of the guides. Let's save this file and then we'll continue. I'm going to start with color one and just use my Marquee tool here, my rectangular Marquee tool or hit M, and just select as much of the artwork there as possible, catching the registration marks at the four corners and going beyond. But what I don't want is to get too much of the stuff beyond that, especially not the black stuff at the very bottom there. I'll just make my selection and then go to Edit, copy merged or Command Shift C. Now I'm going to head over to my new file, and we're going to head over to the Channels panel. If you don't see that yet, you can go to Window Channels and we're going to hit the little plus line at the bottom of that panel to create a new channel, and we're just going to invert that channel by hitting Command I or Control I, and then we're going to hit Command V to paste our artwork in there or Control V. We're going to align those registration marks in there as best as we can and for now, this will be fine. The next thing we want to do is hit Command I while our Alpha channel is selected and that will invert it. Our goal here is to make a selection of the shapes and artwork that we want to fill in with a color. Basically, when I hit Command on my keyboard and then click the Alpha channel thumbnail, it will load anywhere in white as a selection. That's what I've just done. You can see the Marquee tool there. Now I'm going to head over to the Layers panel and back to that little menu thing at the bottom of the Layers panel, I'm going to create a new solid color and we'll just make that cyan for now and hit Okay. As you remember, this was the layer or the shapes that were red in my color comp. I'm also just going to do one final thing before we do the next separation and I'm going to set the layer blending mode of this color to multiply. That will be important later, even if you don't see it having an effect just yet. Let's save our work and then go to color two and do the same thing. I'm going to go to Marque or hit and just select as much of that artwork as possible without going beyond the edge of the page at the bottom there, and then I'll Command Shift C to copy merged or you can go to edit, copy merged. Then we'll go back to our file and do the same process again. Now, if you're in your file and you don't have a layer selected, for some reason, Photoshop needs layer, any layer selected to do this next step, just make sure a layer is selected and then go to channels and we're going to go back to our Alpha channel. We can delete that. You can make sure it's selected and click the garbage can and we can say yes and we're going to create a new Alpha channel. It's just cleaner to do it that way and we're going to invert it, Command I, and then we're going to paste from our clipboard and there's our next piece of artwork. I'm just dragging it with a mouse so that those registration marks, as far as the ones that I can see at least, are somewhat aligned with the guides in my file. Then once I've done that, I want to invert the Alpha channel. The Alpha channel is still selected and I'm going to hit Command I, and then anywhere in white is where the selection is going to load with this next step by holding command and then clicking on the Alpha channel thumbnail. Once that marquee is showing, I'm going to go back to my Layers panel. And create my next solid color fill layer. With this, going to I'm just picking an arbitrary color. Something that I like, at least. I don't know. I'll just choose pink for now and then hit Okay. Then of course, I want to set the layer blending mode here to multiply. That's where you start seeing the magic of these layers overlapping one another start to happen. It's so satisfying. Right, so now we just need to do our black layer. Let's head over to the black separation and we'll use our Markey tool once again, selecting as much of that art and the registration marks as possible and then copying merged. Then we're going to go back to our art file. We'll go to channels, delete our existing Alpha channel, and then hit the plus sign to recreate that Alpha channel, Command I to invert, Command V to paste, and then just use I want to move this, but I'm getting an error and I didn't do what I told you before, which is to make sure that one of these layers is selected first. I'm just going to undo a few steps. I'm going to head over to any one of these layers and select it. I'm going to go back to channels and create that Alpha channel, I'm going to invert it and then I'm going to paste Command V, and then I'll move that so that it's more or less aligned and where I need it to be in the center there. Then of course, going to invert it. The parts that I want to fill in with black are actually white here and then holding command and clicking on the Alpha channel thumbnail, I load that as a selection, and then I'm going to go to the Layers panel and fill this in with some dark black color. Now, I like to use colors that are not quite black so that when you overlap and multiply your colors, you can see more of the colors behind the black and the black doesn't totally override it. I'm just going to hit ok for now. This is a dark blue that I tend to use a lot and I'm going to set the blending mode of this also to multiply and hit Save. So right away, all that hard work that I did in my layer separations earlier is just coming together here and there's not a whole lot else to do. I could see a few places where I'd like to correct, but overall, I'm pretty happy with this. I'll probably want to play around with the colors, so maybe that's what I'll do. Now is just see what colors are going to work for this. Okay, so I think I've figured out what colors I want to use. I have this gold in the background that reminds me of the gold in the original artwork and I like having that reference. And then I have a very dark blue that is almost black and, of course, the red. I actually ended up going with the red for his jacket anyway. I think one reason is that the little coal of his cigarette was red as well, and that was part of that layer and I wanted that little element in there. So once you have your colors selected, and you are happy with everything so far. We can do a little bit of small adjustments here just to make sure layers are as aligned as possible. I am seeing some areas where the artwork is really not following what I intended and that might be a bigger problem than alignment, and we'll fix that in the next lesson when we do some further more advanced edits. But for now, let's just make sure that our layers are aligning. Layer by layer, I'm going to make sure that the registration marks all line up as much as possible on some of them I can actually see very clearly in all corners. The only thing we can do is align one corner at a time right now and we'll deal with the gold one a little later. Let's just hide the gold layer and start with our black layer or nearly black layer. What we want to do is use the free transform tool. You can hit Command T or Control T to call that up and you should see a control box all around your layer. In the middle, you'll have a little Target. That's your rotation pivot point. I'm going to put that pivot point right exactly where those guides are in the middle. If you want, you can snap so that'll snap perfectly in there. And before doing anything else, of course, you want to rotate. I've zoomed out and with my cursor outside of that box, I can now rotate that entire layer from my new pivot point. What I want to do is just make sure that top line is aligned to that top guide as much as possible and that's about as good as I can get with alignment for now. I'm going to do the same with the red layer. I've selected my red layer and the layers panel. I'm going to hit Command T and just bring that rotational center pivot point up to where those guides are where they intersect. Again, we're going to try to align these guides as much as possible. For now, that's about as good as we're going to get. Now we can go into the gold layer, let's just see if there's any hope of aligning something. We have this faint bottom layer here, but nothing else other than a very faint top line. At least I can just select that layer and move the whole thing down a bit and then over on this side, on the right side, I can try and rotate it so that it's back up aligned. I can see that it is quite misaligned. So we'll go back to our free transform tool. I'm hitting Command T, and I'm going to move that pivot point up to where the guides are. I'll just zoom in and then zoom out once I have that kind of centered to my guides and then zoom in a little bit so that I can see what's going on on this side. And as I rotate around that new pivot point, hopefully that line will be aligned all across the top. And it more or less is. So if I turn back on all the layers, I'm hoping things will be more or less aligned as I planned, and anything that's not, we can do some repair work. In the next step. So at the end of this stage, you should have your layers colorized and a separate layers multiplied over one another, all your colors interacting, and hopefully you're seeing some delightful results. And you'll probably also see some quirks that you really want to try and change at least a little bit. So we're going to do that in the next step. 12. Step 8-2: Adding in New Elements: So I've made some final touches just using whatever I could in Photoshop without actually going in and drawing stuff with my hands or getting my tablet out. But what I ended up doing was creating a few more inky things, including new lettering for spectrosnic and some smoky swirls and some wing elements. I've experimented with some lines for the hair. I'm not sure how that's going to work. And then I've made some of these blotty kind of spongy splats that I can use to fill in with grain if I need to. And so this is a little bit of extra step that is totally optional with this technique. But because I've come so far with my, I just want to make it a little more I just want to level it up more. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to scan this in and then use pretty much the exact same techniques we've been using to bring this all in to my final file. So I have scanned in my new little inky bits here, and I'm just going to rotate the file and do exactly what we did before. In my layers panel, I'm going to create an adjustment layer for levels and just make that contrast nice and contrasty as best as I can. And I don't need to be quite as careful now that I'm not working within those registration marks. This is going to be a bit more loosey goosey. Think what I'll do is do this part by part. The main concern I had originally was that smoke. So I select the smoky lines that I made, and I'll just Command Shift C to copy merged and I'm going to go over to my final artwork here. Now this is where I'm going to have to do a little bit of extra surageri. I'm going to make sure that I'm only working on my gold layer here. I use my pen tool to quickly create a mask in these two places here, and then I'll hit Command Enter or Return, and then fill those in with a paint bucket tool as best as I can. And if it's stubborn, I can just go in, fill it with a brush if I really want. So that kind of gets rid of the smoky swirls. I'm going to do the same with the red. I'm just going to on my red layer, create a selection area that will fill in those smoky swirls. They just didn't work out the way I wanted them to. I'm just going to very roughly create this pen tool shape, close it, command, return, and then just fill in with that red. Then if any of that's being really stubborn, again, I can go and just make a big brush and fill that in like that. I'm going to do the same with the wing. I'll leave some of that mess there. I think already it looks better, but I do want to make this wing all around more expressive. I'm now on the black layer just so we can see it clearly. What I'm doing, I'm selecting around just those wing lines and I'm going to erase that as well. I'll save my art. I'm going to go to that scan that I just made and I had selected it. Now I can't remember if it's on the clipboard, so I'll just do it again, copy merged, head over to my new artwork and first we're going to take on the smoky lines. As a separate layer, we're going to just go into channels. We'll remove that old Alpha one layer and create a new Alpha one, and then Command I to invert, paste that smoke down, and then Command I to invert, it's white, Command select Alpha thumbnail and that loads the selection from it. Now we're going to go and create a new solid color layer in white over top, everything else. I'm just going to put that there for now. Already, that's just looking so much better, isn't it? I'm going to put that there, but I do need to go back now and repair this line that I had edited. We'll bring that smoke over top. I think that's working out pretty good. I'll just save that. I'm happy with that. Now we'll tackle the angel wing. I didn't trace it, so it's not really aligning with anything, which is fine. We're still improvising here, which is exactly what we want to do. I also want to get it underneath that black layer. I'm going to turn that into a raster layer the way we've been doing and make some of these a bit cleaner, some of this part. I actually don't mind how that's looking. I like the size as well, but it's not quite fitting. That might be better. Then I'm going to go back to my new parts and find some lines to put back over it. That would probably be these ones here. We'll see if this works in the black, might actually work in the gold. Now I'm breaking all kinds of things here. We'll try different colors. Set that to multiply and see if that has any promise or whether it was better in a different color. I think it's definitely working best in gold. Now, I have to make all of this work again in my three layer separation, and I'm going to bring everything back together. This is a little bit of an advanced technique that I hope you can follow along. What I'm going to do is use this shape to start adding to certain color layers or taking away as I need. I'm going to first start with the white wing part. Let's take off the gold wing, and we're going to do this white wing part first. Basically, this white area needs to be cut away from any areas where there's currently color. I'm just going to load a selection from this layer of the wing by hitting command. Then hitting that layer. I'm going to hide that layer. Now we're going to go into the red and hit Command X. We're also going to go to the gold and we're going to re select by going select. Reselect and that will reload that wing shape without having to re select that actual wing shape again. I'm going to go to that gold layer that I'm already on and hit Command X, and that gives us the white part. Now what we want to do is add in the gold part, this part. I'm going to just do the same thing. I'm going to use this layer mask as my way of making a selection. I'm going to hit command and select that layer mask and it does just what we did with the Alpha channels. I'll hide that gold layer. What I want to do is fill back in gold on the original cold layer, this one here. To do that, I will basically create a solid color in that gold and then merge it, merge this new layer that I made with the original gold. I will now multiply. We now have the single layer. I just need to cut away some of that business that I inadvertently added. I think I like how it's messy back there. I want to feather it a bit, and I think one way I can do that is actually just use my selection tool and just roughly make a selection there just where it's overlapping the red. It's a bit janky. So go with that? I'm just using my eye to see where it seems to most naturally fit. I think it needs to just be a little less precise feeling. Feel like there's just extra stuff here that I want to see more wild. I'm just going to take some of this wing stuff here on this layer and just copy it over. Again, not being too thoughtful about it. I don't want to overthink it. I can always correct it later. I just want it to feel wild feathers are wild and hard to control and hard to draw. I'll be something like that. I don't want to get too picky here, everybody. This is the thing that I could go back and ink and redraw or I could just treat my Photoshop brush as though I'm using ink and pretend that I don't have that much control. Okay. Now what I want to do is get in and replace that text that got all cut off. I'm just going to use a regular rectangular marquee here, select my lettering. I'll start with this bigger lettering and see if that solves the problem. I'm going to get it ready to paste over here. Ideally, if we've done everything right, we should see all the artwork here on just three layers. I'm going to delete any of the layers that I don't need now that I made. The only extra layer that I have aside from the white background is this smoke. I'm going to give myself a pass with that because it seems to look natural layer. It's fine. I'm going to work with this as it is. Now, you'll notice that I made this little spongy bit here, a little bit of spice that I'm going to add in to the darker piano part because it's just a bit too solid. So I'm just going to copy that just as we always have been copy merged. We're going to go to the art, making sure that I'm going to be working over this darker area. I'll select it. Go to the channels and do the whole thing again. In this, I could make this gold color so that it creates I'm just copying and pasting here by holding option and moving. This is just a quick little test. I could do that, or I could make this white so that I'm basically adding texture to this piano shape just a little bit. Here's just one little extra trick that I'll show you. I have this layer of white over top the piano, that black layer. If I hit Command Option G or if I just right click on that layer and select Create Clipping mask, this basically clips this white layer only to the shape below. I'm going to play it a little safe and just do a little sparkle there and that's it. Just that. It might be just enough. Of course, if I want to be strict about my layers, I could just use that Alpha channel itself to make a selection and then I'm going to delete it from the layer below and I can just delete that extra layer that I made, and now I'm back to my more strict free layers except for the smoke on top. Okay, so there's one more little thing that I wanted to try with his hair because I do want to get a little bit of the comb lines, the way his hair looks always so brill creamed or something. And so I made some of these little wavy bits for that purpose. So let's just see what I can do with these, again, using the exact same inky technique. So this is looking pretty rad already. Seeing it in his hair. I think it has a really nice effect. So, again, I'm gonna do this little clipping mask thing and just ask myself, do I like it white or more gold? Let's just go gold. I like that. Adding a bit of texture here really adds something, adding too much kind of starts stealing the show. So it's starting to look a little bit forced. It has some promise, but I need to work with it a bit. So I'm going to see if there's a way of just making an accent out of it, right here, keeping it minimal, just like what I did with that little bit of extra texture over the piano. And if I can't make it work, less is more. I think that's good. And I will just use a brush here and cheat. Yes. 13. Step 8-3: Consolidating Layers: Okay, we are almost done these finishing touches. I'm being pickier than I should be for this class project, but I'm having a lot of fun and I'm getting into it. So here we are, and hopefully you're learning a lot because of these extra steps. So I want to do two main things. And the first is just getting these backbowd to my minimal three layers just because it makes me feel good to have this beautiful art just on three layers. And then after that, we'll crop the art and make it just 12 by 12. So let's go and do that first part. I'm going to just do everything that I've been showing you already. I'm going to use the white layer with that smoke to make my selection, and I'm going to cut it out basically out of every layer. So that's done. I'm going to delete that reference layer now that I have exactly where I want it in all the three layers. I'm back down to just the three layers plus my background. I wanted to show you one extra step before we crop just in case you want to change some of the colors later on and you can do that. Why don't we just name our layers descriptively? We'll just call it one, two, and black. Black can be basically your dark color, whatever it is. What we're going to do next is just double click into one of our layers to call up the layer style box, and we're going to do a color overlay. That color overlay should be normal blend mode opacity of 100%. And then whatever color you want. We'll also just want to go to blending options just near the top there and click this little checkbox at the top middle where it says blend interior effects as a group. That just makes sure when you set your layer to multiply, that multiply effect will take place. We're going to do the same with the other two layers. Double click onto the layer in question, go to color overlay, change the color to anything really. And then we're going to go up to Blending Options, select blend interior effects as a group, and hit Okay. And then we'll do that with our last layer as well. Double click into the layer, go into color overlay, choose whatever color it is that you like to use for your black, even if that's something totally wild like this, and then make sure that your blending option there is set to blend interior effects as a group. And you can have just so much fun experimenting with all the different colors. I'm going to go back to something a little darker here. You know, I'll probably stick with the colors that I had in the first place, with a slightly lighter blue there. So I'm gonna save that, and then now finally we'll do our crop. 14. Step 8-4: Cropping and Sharing: W photoshot if you press C on your keyboard, you'll get the crop mode and you can set the constraint for this up at the top bar if you have it there to one by one square and just start cropping. Now, if your guides are locked, your guides are going to follow your crop like this, which I find really annoying. Maybe what we'll do is unlock our guides just for a sec. We'll go guides and then uncheck lock guides. Now what we can do is hit C and then drag that corner in so that it's perfectly aligned. This is a good place to have SNAP enabled. That just helps your cropping snap to the guides there almost automatically. If you just crop from the top left corner in and then from the bottom right corner in, you should get your perfect 12 by 12 artwork. It's almost totally cropped. There's just one little extra step that I'd like to do, which is to get rid of the faint registration marks along the edges here. I'll just go layer by layer and clean those up. In the red, we definitely don't want any of that faint line at the top. I'm using the selection tool. Making sure I'm in the red layer and just kind of hit Command X to get rid of it. Just that little one pixel or so up and down. Same with the gold layer here, it probably doesn't matter because it's all gold around those layers anyway. Then on my black layer, I'll definitely want to get rid of anything too obvious there around the very edges and certainly what's going on under the piano here. I'm going to leave in some of these little accidental marks. I think they add a little bit of character, and now we see it together. There's none of that weird edge anymore, I don't think. And there we have our perfectly imperfect artwork that we made through this elaborate, unreasonably slow process. But I don't think there's any other way of getting the look that we're getting here, which is this blend of really handmade analog parts, but it's also elevated. The digital part helps us make it more controlled and gives us that flat solid color and those multiplies and stuff like that. To me, this is a perfect partnership between analog and digital techniques. I almost forgot the final step. I'm going to save this as a JPEG. You can save it as a PNG, if you want. I'm old school and I like my uh, JPG files, I guess. So I'm just going to save this out. And now it's ready to share on the class Projects page, and it's also ready to share on social media, if I want. I'm really happy with how my album artwork turned out. I could not have predicted it looking like this from the beginning. And so I'm pleasantly surprised. I hope that you're pleasantly surprised with how yours turned out. Please share on the class Projects page. Please share on social media and tag me at Mr. Tom Froze. Be sure to share all those steps along the way from your process on the Class Projects page. I'll see you in the next video, we'll wrap things up and then we're done. 15. 13 Wrap up FINE2 1: Alright, you've just completed your slow fi Illustration project from sketch to hand drawn color separations all the way to your final digital artwork. I hope you enjoyed working in this blend of old and new techniques as much as I do. Now, if there's one thing that I want you to take away in this class, it's this. Understanding older analog processes can make us better digital artists. Instead of replacing your digital tools, this knowledge helps you use your digital tools more intentionally. All digital tools were originally designed to mimic analog ones. So the more you understand the source, the better your digital work will be. Sometimes digital really is the smartest choice, but if we rely too heavily on it, our art can lose some of its spirit. Now it's your turn to share your project. Post it in the project's gallery so I and other students can see it and include a little bit about your process and what surprised you along the way. If you share on Instagram, please tag me at Mr. Tom Froze so I can check it out. Now, if you'd like to go deeper, once you finish this class, try using these techniques for posters, packaging, book covers, or anything else that you can imagine. Experiment with new subjects, new color palettes, textures, and other analog tools. Thank you so much for spending your time with me in this class. If you found it helpful, please leave a positive review. It really helps other students discover it, and otherwise, it just makes me smile. And, of course, keep experimenting with this technique to find ways of making it more your own and be sure to share it with the world along the way. So I guess that's it. I will see you in the next class. A 16. 12 Step 8 1 FINE2 1: In this video, we'll look for any areas that need a bit of refinement in the final art. Perhaps your layers aren't lining up correctly or there are some really distracting bits that need a bit of taming down. We'll take advantage of our digital tools now to make those minor changes with ease while doing our best to leave in the mistakes that make this kind of work so charming. So we're still in Photoshop and we're looking for areas that need further refinement or areas where edges don't touch or where they should or elements that didn't land in just the right place, and it's distracting. The trick here will be, how do we preserve that handmade feeling but also make it just a little bit more tight. We ultimately want this to look pro. So I think the worst part for me is the collar just missing this smoky stuff altogether. I don't mind some of the misregistration, but I wonder if I can tame a little bit. Then one of the worst parts I think is just what's happening where I totally cut off the top and bottom of this word spectrosonic. I also feel like maybe the shapes of the letters should come through the splaty gold. There's a few things we'll try I think to start I will focus on the black layer. Let's go to the black layer here, what I'm going to do, now that I know it's going to be in this color, I'm happy with it. I'm actually going to flatten this layer so that it's easier to edit. To do this, I'm just going to create one new layer above it and then select that new layer and the color layer that I'm trying to edit. Then I'm going to merge those layers. I can go to merge layers or just hit Command E. Now this artwork is just flat. I can set that back to multiply because the blending load changed back to normal. But now I can take the Lasso tool and just select around the parts of the artwork and drag them around. I think that's better. Now, p here, if it was being really picky, I would take up my iPad and actually draw in with my Apple pencil this line and make it interact with the smoky lines as I've drawn them instead. But I'm going to do my best with my mouse. I'm going to go and select that color at exact same color ba these lines are made with. I'm going to go to my brushes and just choose a simple brush. Just a very simple brush. This one's called Brush Beauty. It's by Kyle Webster. It's in one of his brush packs that came with Photoshop. I'll set the pixel size to something equivalent. It's just a little bit too fat. I'm going to bring it down to ten and he used my mouse to, uh, fill this in here. It might not look great. We'll see how it goes. I don't want it to look obviously digital or edited. I'll just draw the whole thing in and then I'll erase out. Let me start again there. I'm just trying to make it a little bit rough just by wobbling my hand. A little trick here is if you're in a brush, setting, I'm using brush beauty. If I just hold the tilda key, which is under the escape key, it turns my current brush into an eraser and I can just use that to take out some of the bits there and I can go back and forth drawing in erasing out, trying to be as loose and organic there, mimicking the quality of line from my handmade art. Then I can now see where I want to erase it. Using that tilda key trick and just erasing out where that white is and letting there be a little bit of a looseness there. I'm also going to use my selection tool to move the jaw line down a bit and then I'll continue making some corrections elsewhere. Let's get into this one here. First thing I can do is align these little circles. These are tape reels basically in this logo and get them more centered to the white below. Then this spectrosonic here it's too unintentional. I'm taking that out. I have different options. One is to redraw that in a separate little inky bit, scan it in and just paste it in. That's probably what I'll do. We're kind of at a place where it's tempting to make everything more perfect like I'm used to when I work digitally. And so one way of preventing things from being perfect is by just sting with my mouse and resisting the urge to break out my iPad. But I also need to be careful not to get carried away with even what I'm doing now, which is using my brush and the eraser and Photoshop to make edges perfect. My goal here is just to in a little bit of that wildness in just a little bit. I can even use my selection tool to improve corners a little bit. I also see that by nine up here is a little bit deranged, I'm going to px these numbers a bit. I'm going to go and make my signature smaller as well. Then I can move on to some other layers to fix. We'll now move into the gold layer, and I'll do the same thing where I'll turn this into a more editable layer. So I'm going to create a layer just above it, select them both, merge them with Command E, and then turn back on multiply. And now I'm just going to go in with the gold color that I used and make edits in the same way. So I want to get some of that white gap between the colors where it's misregistered, the hair here, I want to see a little bit richer of a dark. What I'm going to do is just use my selection tool. If that's proving a little awkward, actually, just use my pen tool. I've hit P to select the pen tool here and then I can just start drawing a shape in and I want to get this gold color under the hair so that is overlapping. Basically, anywhere where I've just drawn this path, I've just made this path, I'm going to hit Command Return. That will create a selection out of my path. Then I can just use my bucket tool and just fill in to that area. Now I got this nice area of overlap. When I did that, I see that there's a little bit of a hairline there and I can actually get rid of that just by hiding the darker layer. I'll go to that gold layer and I could just draw over or I could also just select a general area of that hairline. And use my Fill tool again just to fill in that space. I'll continue to work in some of these areas where there's a bit of misregistration. There's a bunch of these flaws here as well. I'm going to do the same. I'm going to take my Pen tool and just create a selection where I want to fill in a bit more. I'm using the Pen tool. I'm closing that shape. I'm going to hit Command Return and then fill it in with the bucket. There seems to be a little bit of something here. I'll just fill that in by hand. What we're doing is we're using the digital tool and not to create the art itself, but just to improve the art that we made by hand. There's nothing wrong with digital, even if you make your art totally digitally. I'm not against digital, but this is just one way of setting some limits for yourself in a process to see what's possible and you might even find that a style can emerge from it, or just something really cool happens that you're happy with. Now, in my editing here, I seem to have chopped off this little thumbnail, so I'm going to go back and just select that little straggler there and reunite it to where it should go. While I'm on the Black lay I'm going to move this little bit of cigarette ash. I'll go to the red layer now. I'm actually going to flatten that as well, create a new layer above it, select the red layer and the new layer, Commande to merge and making sure that my color is set to red, that same red. I can go in and make edits on that layer as well and get rid of this little straggler. I'm not quite happy with how the wing turned out here. Again, I wasn't happy with what happened with the word stereophonic there. I'm going to probably make some changes separately and bring them in. But there's just one other thing I want to do here before I do that. So I'm going to go back to my gold layer. I want to clear out so I see that lettering totally clearly. There's different ways of doing this. I could actually go to my red layer and use my wand by hitting W and just select inside those white areas while holding Shift and I can create a selection from those negative shapes. This is one way of doing it. As well do them all and then I can go to my gold layer and I could just hit Command X or delete and if I deselect, you can see that lettering is totally perfectly cleared out based on the selections that I made. I can just delete some of the little strangular bits here on both layers. One thing that I want to do with this piano shape is make it a little bit crisper. I'm going to take my pen tool and do that selection technique that I've been showing you where I draw the shape. Now, if you've never used the Pen tool before, I'm probably making it look really easy and it takes a while to get the hang of. If it's not working out for you, you can use the selection tool, draw things in with a brush. There's always so many different ways of doing the same thing. It might take you a day of determined practice to get used to using the Pen tool and feel like you're functional at it. I've closed my shape here. I'm going to create a selection from it and then I'm going to make sure that dark blue color is selected and that my layer of that dark blue is selected. Just gonna use my fill tool and fill that in, and I'll just fill summer in one more time just to commit to that change. I'm just going to go to my gold layer, draw in a shape where I want there to be more gold, more confidently. I don't necessarily want to fill in the whole thing. So I've closed my shape. I'm going to hit CmmandRturn. That turns it into a selection. G to go to my bucket. I hit G, and I filled it in with the wrong color. I'm going to go back to my gold color in my swatches and just get that nice clean edge in there. So I have one clean edge made by the gold. Where the gold and the white interact. And then I have one rough edge made by the red. And that chaos and order, that clean edge and that messy edge together support one another more than if they were both clean or both rough. And now, lastly, I want to fix what's going on here.