TraDigital Art: Using Traditional Elements in Digital Art

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to TraDigital art. I'm really loving that pun. Anyway, my name is Melissa Shaw and I'm an illustrator based in Sacramento, California. You may know me from my first class on watercolor portraits. In that class I referred to myself as a water color painter and a digital artist. Since in my first class I focused on watercolors, in this one I'll be focusing more on the digital side of things. In 2010, I got my first tablet and it didn't take me long to really start enjoying digital art. But I often found myself wishing that I could more easily incorporate traditional elements, such as pen and pencil line art, watercolor illustrations into my digital drawings and designs. Luckily, through my years of experience, I've picked up some useful and fairly simple tricks for mixing traditional elements with digital. In this class, I will be going over such things as removing the background from traditional line art, using Alpha channels in Photoshop, and vectorizing your handwriting and watercolor illustrations so that they're usable on Illustrator. Whether you're seasoned pro at Photoshop and Illustrator or you've never opened programs, I believe you'll feel comfortable in this class. I think that all levels of skill can benefit in some way. By the time you finish the video lessons, you'll be ready to seamlessly mix traditional elements with digital in your own unique illustrations. So all you got to do is enroll and let's get to drawing. 2. Class Project: These are a few of my favorite things ~: Hello, welcome to the class. Before we get into things, I just want to quickly go over the class project and the materials you'll need. Your assignment is to create an illustration utilizing one or more of the techniques taught in the videos and which is inspired by one or more of your favorite things. It can be a fully rendered illustration, a simple motif, or even a repeating pattern if you want, as long as you mix traditional elements with digital. I know it can be difficult to come up with an idea for your project. I've provided some ideas of different favorites that you can use, such as your favorite animal, you favorite quote. This is one of mine from the podcasts, Welcome to Night Vale. There is a thin semantic lines separating weird and beautiful, and that line is covered in jellyfish. Your favorite food, your favorite flower, your favorite musical instrument, your favorite color, or your favorite activity. Of course, you are welcome to choose anything you want. Those are just some ideas. The first step is simply to share what favorite thing you're thinking about drawing and what technique you want to use. Then upload your traditional sketch or painting before it's been true digitized, if you will. Part of the fun of Skillshare is sharing your process. Then finally upload your finished illustration. As for materials, all of the techniques I'm going to cover will require the use of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or both. Some of them will only require one. If you just want to use one, that's fine. It's up to you. If you don't have either of them, you can get a free trial of each. You'll also need a tablet, access to a scanner, pencils, pens, and paper. There's a section on digitizing your handwriting in the next unit. So pen nibs and/or a brush pen are good to have. Then you'll want watercolors or, gouache, or whatever traditional medium you like to use. There you have it. See you in the next video. 3. Using Alpha Channels in Photoshop to Remove the Background From Traditional Line Art: In this video, I'll be covering how to remove the white background from traditional line art. I really like to draw something traditionally and then color it in Photoshop, but it used to be a huge pain to try to remove the white surrounding my line art. That is until I discovered Alpha channels in Photoshop. I use it all the time now and It's seriously the best, and it's really not that hard. Without further ado. These are some sketches that I did for a character I was designing, and I scanned it in at, I believe, 600 DPI, either that or 300 DPI. If you don't know what DPI means, it's dots per inch, I believe. Other people refer to it as PPI, which means points per inch. The higher it is, the more high-quality. What you need to do first is make sure that your line art is as dark as possible and the white is as white as possible. What I need to do first, since I like to use blue LED, is make sure that this is all black and white. I'll desaturate it by clicking "Shift" command or "Control+U". Except that first I need to select it, Shift command U, and there we go, now it's black and white. Either that or you can go to "Image", "Adjustments", "Desaturate". Now, I'm clicking "Command L" to bring up my Levels panel, which you can also find in Image Adjustments and then Levels. But otherwise, it's Command or Control L to bring this up. The easiest way to do it is to use the eye dropper tools. Use the white one, click on the white of the page, and then take the black one and click on the darkest area. That looks pretty good. Sometimes when I do that, the dark lines are a little bit too dark and a little bit too noisy, so I will undo it and I did that whether you're in Command Z, and I'll manually do it. That looks pretty good, and click "OK" and it's applied. I'm going to undo that now. Because I want to show you how to work non-destructively. By which I mean, you're not permanently applying changes to the layer that you're working on. To do that you go to your Layers panel and click on this button, which is an adjustments button, and find Levels. It's the same panel, it just looks a little different, has all the same commands. The difference is that they've applied it to a new layer above the layer that you are selected on. That way you're not permanently changing that layer, and you can adjust this at any point in time. Since I know I really want this to be dark, I wouldn't use it for this instance, but it is a good thing to know. If you want to affect just one section of your piece. I'm going to go ahead and make this dark again. Now, I want this to be as dark as the drawings above it. What you can do is go to your rectangle select tool or you can use your lasso if that will work. I've selected just these girls down below. Now, when I click command L and bring up my Levels panel, I will only affect what I've selected. It'll make like a mask almost. Just these girls will now be affected, and to de-select that, I clicked "Command or Control D". This is a little bit messy. I don't want to have to make you guys sit through me erasing the messy bits. I already made a nice clean version. Here is the line art ready to be separated from the white background. What you have to do is select the entire thing by doing command A or control A, copy it, command or control C. Now you want to go over here into your Channels panel, which is right next to your Layers panel. This isn't going to work if for some reason your pieces on Sam were okay. You have to make sure that it's on RGB. You do that by going to Image Mode and then make sure that RGB color is checked. Now you want to make a new layer in your Channels panel by clicking this button down here, which looks exactly like the New Layer button, but it's the New Channels button. It automatically makes a new layer called Alpha 1. The hides the RGB, red, green, and blue layers above it, which is convenient because you want them to be hidden. Now you're going to want to paste your art into this layer, make sure selected onto Alpha 1 and paste it command or control V, there we go. Now we needed to be inverted, which you do by clicking "Command I". Or you can go to believe it's "Image" "Adjustments" again, "Invert". The reason why you need to do that is because later on we're going to be loading an Alpha 1 channel selection. The selection are going to be the pixels that are white or rather not black because not all of them are white, some of them are gray. If I had kept it this way, the selection will select the white background, but we want to select the lines, so that's why I'm inverting it. Now, go back to your layers, you click on your layer and it will get it back to the view you want. I'm actually going to go ahead and delete this because I don't need it, It's scary. You don't have to delete it, just hide it, but I know I don't need it. Then create two layers If you didn't already have one that was like a blank layer with white on it, you should make that. But since I already have one, I don't need to create it, and then just make a blank layer above that. I need to deselect so I'm clicking "Command D". Make sure you're clicked into your blank layer, and go to "Select", "Load Selection", and in the Channel drop-down menu, select Alpha 1. Now it has selected those white pixels in the Alpha 1 channel. You'll just want to get your paint bucket tool and click within the dotted lines. I'm clicking "Command H" to hide the dotted lines that I am still selected on it because I want to show you something else. Now you can see exactly what I did, and if I remove the white background, you can see that I only filled in the lines and I can now color behind those lines. One thing that I think is super cool, and I clicked "Command H" to get the dotted lines visible again. Anyway, one thing I think that is super cool about this is that you can fill it in with different colors. Now everything is in red, which looks neat actually. I'm going to go ahead and fill it with black. I'm deselecting now by clicking "Command D". Another way that you can change the color of the lines if you want to is by locking the layer. When you lock the layer, it's the little checkerboard button here. It makes it so that your brush will only affect pixels that have pigment on them. The transparency around the lines will not be affected. You can take your brush and then color the lines. This is neat because you can just color only certain areas if you want to. Like, I could color her hair in dark brown and her eyes in turquoise and etc. It's just to show you an example of how I use it. I ended up picking this girl from my final character design. I'm clicking "Command space bar" and dragging to the right to zoom in and command space bar drag to the lift, zooms out. I colored the lines a dark brown as you can see, and then colored underneath them in Photoshop. I really enjoy this because it gives you the really lovely, rough quality of your pencil. I just think it looks really neat. Of course you can do it with pen lines as well. There's Tony. In the next video, I'm going to repeat this process with a black and white watercolor painting. See you there. 4. Using Alpha Channels in Photoshop to Remove the Background From Black and White Watercolor or Ink: The thing that makes using alpha channels so cool as compared to the myriads of other ways you can remove backgrounds in Photoshop, is that you can also use it with art that has shading. So for example, here is a watercolor that I did. Again, select it by clicking command or control A, copy it, command or control C. Go to your Channels Panel create a new layer or channel, copy by clicking command V and invert it by clicking command I. Then go back to your Layers panel, create two new layers, go ahead and hide the background layer. In the bottom layer, fill it with white or whatever color you want. I just had to de-select that, for some reason it wasn't letting me fill it. Anyway, so I de-select it by clicking command D and I filled it in with white and then be sure to click on the blank layer at the top. Go to select, Load Selection and in the channel drop-down, click Alpha one. So now I've got my tiger and I'll go ahead and fill it in turquoise since I've already got that color. Be sure to click within the dotted lines and deselecting by clicking command D. Now, I have this really cool tiger. Again, I can lock it and color it however I want, which is what I did over here. So yeah, I did the same technique for all these different drawings and as you can see colored it differently within. I love it because it picks up on all the nuance of shading and really just gets everything and takes out all the white. It's just great. So that is removing the background on black and white drawings or paintings, with alpha channels. I really hope you find that useful, see you in the next video. 5. Using Alpha Channels in Photoshop to Remove the Background From Illustrations with Color: In this video, I'm going to be covering how to remove the background from traditional work that has color, in my case, watercolors. First, you need to make sure that your edges are as clean and white as possible. I needed to erase the visible blue of my pencil lead. Then scan your work in at 300 to 600 DPI. If you're just going to be working in Photoshop, 300 DPI is fine, but if you're going to be vectorizing it in Illustrator, I suggested using 600 DPI. I've found that the higher quality your scan is, the better your image will turn out in Illustrator. Then you'll need to open up your scan. This is how mine turn out. If you view the actual pixels, that's how large it is. I actually went ahead and separated the whale out just so that you can see more clearly what I'm doing. I want this to have a little bit more contrast. I'm going to go ahead and open up my levels. That looks pretty good. There are a ton of different ways to remove backgrounds from pieces with color. I'm just going to show you the way that I prefer because I think that it does the best job at really cutting close to the edge without taking away any of the texture. It's really similar to the technique that I already showed you with one major difference, and I'll explain that when I get to it. First, you'll need to duplicate your layer by clicking Command J, and then de-saturate it by clicking Shift, Command U. Now, you want this to be super dark; so dark that you can't really see any of the details. That looks pretty good. Then select it, copy it, go to your "Channels" panel and make a new Channel layer, paste, and invert. Now, the difference between this and the technique I already showed you is that instead of filling in the selection with the Paint Bucket tool, you're going to want to select from your scan. Because obviously if you just fill it in with a Paint Bucket tool, you will only be able to fill it in with one color, and we don't want to do that. You can go ahead and delete the black and white layer, and make sure that you selected on your original scan layer, go to "Select", "Load Selection", makes sure Alpha 1 is selected in the Channels dropdown, click "Okay" Then as you can see, it's selected perfectly along your painting. Again, making sure that you've selected on your original scan layer, click Command J to duplicate just the selection. If you hide the bottom layer, you can see that it has gotten rid of all the white. The only issue with this technique, if you have a drawing that has white in it, is that it takes out all of the white. Just to show you what I mean. So as you can see, this white is now missing, which would not really work if you're going to be making a pattern in Photoshop or whatever. You're going to be pasting it over something in Photoshop because you want to keep that white section, but will be fine if you're going to take this into Illustrator because even if you save this as a PNG, when you bring it into Illustrator, it will still have the white. You can skip this section if you're going to be vectorizing your piece in Illustrator, and I'll show you why later. If you do have a piece that has white, what you'll need to do is, just going to go ahead and delete this layer, duplicate it, saturate, and darken. Then you can just take your brush and color over the white because what's really important is that it's selecting the edges. Now, do the same thing, select it, copy it, paste it, and invert, delete the black and white layer, and load your selection, and then click Command J to duplicate just that selection. Now, it's picked up on the white. As you can see, and you may need to erase some messy bits around it, but for the most part, it should work fine. I have actually created an action in Photoshop that will do this whole thing for you since actually I'm coloring in areas with white. But if you do have a drawing where there isn't any white within, this will save you some time. Actions can be found over here where the Play button is. I've named my Background Removal With Color, and then just click ''Play'', and it goes ahead and does it for you. I've uploaded the action that I made under our class project. You can download it, and import it into Photoshop, and use it yourself. I've also included a PDF that instructs you on how to load the action into Photoshop. But like I said, it may not always be the perfect solution for removing the background from color. It can still be useful for a bunch of different things. Some of my paintings didn't have any white in it, so I just used my action and didn't have to go through the whole rigmarole. But I figure it's good to know the step-by-step process on how to do it, so that you can then edit it to your preferences. Just to be clear, the reason why when you duplicate it, desaturate it, and then darken it with levels, the reason why I darken it so much is because the channels picks up on every single level of opacity. If I didn't darken it very much and I went through the same process, now it's very light which you might like, I don't know. If you want something to be a little Opacity, you can always also just duplicate it a few times, merge it. It's up to you. I haven't noticed that when you do it that way, the edges are any cleaner than if you just darkened it from the get-go. When it looks about the same to me than it did before. I would have also included an action for removing the background from just a black and white line art or black and white painting, but it doesn't work with actions because you have to take the Fill Bucket, and click within a certain area. The action will read that specific area. If you don't have a selection within that specific area, it's not going to be able to fill it in. Really, the only way that you can do that technique is through actually doing it rather than skipping the process with an action. But for removing the colors, that works because you're not clicking within any specific area. That is how you remove the background quickly and easily from a piece with color. I really hope you find that useful. 6. Vectorizing Watercolor Illustrations: I really like using Illustrator for patterns in particular, because of the pattern swatch feature and just all of the ways that it makes making patterns and previewing patterns much easier, in my opinion, than in Photoshop. Photoshop has a lot of features that are very helpful and you can certainly do it there as well, but I just really prefer Illustrator's tools. However, I love working in watercolor and gouache, and neither of those mediums are particularly ideal for illustrator. But I figured my way around that, so I will show you how. Open up Illustrator, and I'm just going to create a new document. It has all these different settings. For size, it's asking you what size your artboard is going to be. I wouldn't really worry about it unless you know exactly what size you want your artboard to be, because you can always make another artboard within the same document. You can delete the original artboard. As long as you have one, you can delete the others. I usually end up making one later on and deleting the original size just because I'm not quite sure what size I'll need from the get-go, which is another really great thing about Illustrator. Because of the infinite size and capability, you don't have to worry about that, which is obviously not so in Photoshop. Anyway, I'm just going to keep it at Letter. You can change the units from points to inches, millimeters, centimeters. I like to keep it at points. I generally think the default settings are fine, so I'll go ahead and create that. I like to work white on white just because I think it's clear and easier to see things, and you can change that if you want by going to Preferences and User Interface. I have it set on white Canvas, and you can also change the brightness of everything else. I'm going to keep it at the medium dark. So that is my workspace. Then you want to import your JPEG. I like to just drag it from the folder. All right, so there is my JPEG. Make sure it's selected, and then you'll want to go to Image Trace. If you don't have Image Trace already in your workstation like so, you can go up to Window and click it, and then it will bring it right up. Once you're in Image Trace, all you need to do is select the High Fidelity Photo preset. This comes up just telling you that it's going to work slowly and that's fine. Don't worry about it, it will take a while. Now that that's loaded. You can change the amount of colors that it reads. I actually really like how it looks at 85, so usually I just keep it at the default, but you can lower it. It looks slightly different, but it doesn't pick up on quite as many details as I want, so I'm going to go ahead and undo that. With it still selected, you're going to need to expand it. In the version that I have, which is CS6, the expand button is on the dock. I don't know about older version though, so if it's not there for you, just go to Object, Expand. It has now turned your illustration into vector objects, and in my case, since I had 85 different colors, it has turned every different color blob into one little object, so there's tons. It's automatically grouped, so you'll need to right-click it and ungroup it, and for some reason, you need to do it twice. I don't know why, but that's just how it goes. I zoomed out a bit so that I could see the whole thing, and then deselect it and then select the background. Then you're going to want to select Same and Fill Color and delete. Now, when you select over the entire thing, it's just selecting the whale. Then you'll need to group it by clicking Command G. So when you click it, it selects the entire thing. I want to be able to actually view my illustration while I'm selected on it. To do that, you hit Command H and it hides the object selections. Then I have this big, huge object that looks really beautiful. When you zoom in on it, I'm clicking Command Space bar and then selecting the area, you can see all the teeny-tiny little objects that it has created. But from far away, it just looks like regular watercolor. I think it is just really beautiful, it looks really cool to me. Because I didn't actually clean it up in Photoshop, you may need to go in and clean some of the little bits and pieces on the edges and everything. But otherwise, it is now ready to be put into a pattern or whatever illustration you're working on. I'm currently working on an under the sea pattern, so yeah, that is how I've been using my various different motifs that I've created. I'm not quite done with this pattern yet, but you are just seeing the work in progress. Again, to zoom in, I'm clicking Command Space bar and then highlighting the area you want to zoom in on. As you can see, here's my whale, and the edges are nice and clean and lovely. There we have it. Again, I stress the importance of making sure that your edges are super clean, because if you don't want to go through this step of removing the background in Photoshop, Illustrator will pick up on every single color that isn't perfectly white, then when you select Same, Fill color, it's not going to pick up on the off-white, and you might have a bit of trouble deleting the entire background from your piece. Sometimes you can get some weird off-white edges, which sucks to have to go around and delete. Just make sure that it's very clean and crisp around the edges so you can get a nice, clean result. 7. Digitizing Your Handwriting: When it comes to digitizing and vectorizing your handwriting, the process is pretty much exactly the same. I did this for the cover image for my first class on watercolor portraits. I wrote it out, scanned it at 300 dpi, and then imported it into Photoshop. Also, I think I adjusted the levels on it, so it's a little darker. You need to select it, copy it, bring it into channels, paste it, and invert it. Create a new layer, load your selection, you should hide your original scan as well, and fill it. This is a little light, so I'm just going to duplicate it by clicking "Command J" and one more time is good enough. Then I'm going to merge those two layers by hitting "Command E". Here we go. Then what I did was drag it over into my other document. But obviously, I don't need it because it's already there. Change the color and position, and that is how we do that. If you want to vectorize your handwriting so that it's usable in Illustrator, you should save it as a JPEG or a PNG, and then open it in Illustrator. To zoom in, I'm clicking "Command Spacebar" and then dragging over the selection. Then you want to open up Image Trace. In this case, we want something like black and white logo. It's a little less detailed than I want, so you can just go through the presets and see how it should work, or you can go to Advanced and maybe up the Paths. You'll just have to play around with it, see what you like. Otherwise, I'll just go ahead and keep this for now. Then you select it and expand it, ungroup it, select the white. Do Select, Same and Fill Color, and then delete. Now everything has been separated. But, I wanted all together, so I'm just going to select the whole thing and click "Command G" to group it. Now you have one lovely vector object. Something that I use a lot is, select same fill color. So I actually have it as a keyboard shortcut, but the default Illustrator settings don't have it under a keyboard shortcut. If you want to make your own keyboard shortcut, you can go to Edit, Keyboard shortcuts, and then go to Menu commands, Select, Same. Here is Fill color. It doesn't have one, so what I have been using is command four. You just type it in. It's telling me that the shortcut command four was already in use by the Repeat Pathfinder command, but I rarely ever use that. I just decided to override it. You can kind of go through and just see if there's any command that you don't use. If you want this to be a keyboard shortcut, because if you're going to be vectorizing things, Select Same Fill color is going to be something that you're going to be using a lot. Yeah, I recommend command four and then click "OK". Then it wants you to save the keyset files, so I'm just going to put Custom. When you come back in, you can go to Edit, Keyboard shortcuts, and go to your Custom one. If it's not automatically up, I think it'll automatically do it. From then on, once you select a color, and I'm clicking "Command four", it's now selecting all those colors. There you go. 8. Taking a Traditional Piece and Enhancing It Digitally - Color Balance and Textures: In this video, I'm going to go over ways in which you can take a traditional piece and enhance it digitally. I created this diptych by first drawing it with pencils and pen, then coloring it with watercolors, and scanning it in. I scanned this in at 300 DPI at least. One really important thing to keep in mind when you're opening something that you've scanned into Photoshop and then directly working over it, or especially if you're directly working over it and not opening a new document, is to make sure that the document size is high-quality. To do that, you can go to Image, Image Size. My resolution is at 300 pixels per inch or PPI, which is good, that's nice high-quality. To scan something in at 72 DPI, it will come into Photoshop at 72 DPI, and then it's just not going to be very high-quality which would really suck if you then proceed to make a lot of edits to it, and then realize that it's low quality, and you can't really save it at a large size or print it at a large size. So just make sure that your piece is at 300 DPI. If you scanned it in at 300 DPI, it should open up at 300 DPI, but I would check it just in case. I don't know if when I colored it I just did not use very vibrant colors, or maybe it was just the scan, I'm not sure. It's been a while since I scanned this, so I can't remember. But it did come out quite dull, but I knew that I wanted it to be a diptych. I wanted one half of it to be pretty much what I painted, and then the other half I wanted to add to it with digital drawing and textures and such. However, I really wanted it to be much more vibrant, so I used a few adjustment functions to achieve that. The first one that I used is Color Balance, and I actually have them here. As you can see, I made the background much bluer by adjusting the Color Balance. In order to just select the background, I just took the Magic Wand tool, and to select it, you can hit W on your keyboard click the background. You pretty much got the whole background. Some of these big areas I wanted to change as well. So to add onto your Magic Wand selection, you can hit Shift, and you see the little plus sign shows up underneath the wand, and then select the area and so that adds onto your selection. I'm not going to bother selecting every little piece that I need selected because I don't want to bore you. But that is how I affected just the background. To zoom a piece back to the Canvas size, you can hit Command 0. Then I went to the Adjustments on the Layers panel, because I wanted to work non-destructively and not permanently apply changes to the layer. I went to Color Balance, and just fiddled around with the colors. I knew I wanted it to be a little bluer, so I tried blue first, and that looks pretty good. As you can see, it applied the color balance layer off of the layer that I was selected on. Sometimes you'll have multiple layers underneath your adjustment layers. If you want this adjustment layer to just apply to the layer below it, hold down on ALT and then click right between, and it will give you this little arrow, indicating that it's only applying the color balance to this layer. Then I changed the levels, and I don't really think I need to show you how to do that again. Essentially, I just played with this slider until I got it to a point that I liked. Finally, I adjusted the brightness and contrast. These are all found in here. This, I believe, I just changed the contrast. Makes it a lot more vibrant. That is how I brought this to this. Now, as for how I got to this point, the two biggest changes that I made were that I drew the flowers, eggs, and berry branches, and I added the wallpaper texture. First, I'll demonstrate how I put the texture on. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the visibility. I got this wallpaper from lostandtaken.com, which is a site that provides free high resolution textures. I've provided a link to it under our class description. I'm going to open it up, and then unlock it by double clicking it, and clicking "Okay", and then drag it over to your document. The size on this is pretty tiny. Not really there. Much higher resolution, but that's okay. I didn't need this to be super high quality as it is. You should make sure that your texture is above everything you want to be effected. If you want to, you can also make it so that your texture only applies to the layer below it. You do that the same way you do with adjustment layers, by pressing ALT and clicking between the two layers. Then you'll need to set your blending mode. Blending modes can be found in this drop down menu, right here next to Opacity. The ones that I use the most are Multiply, Soft Light, and Overlay, just because I like how they look the most. Let's see. I'll probably put this on Multiply, and then I put the Opacity to somewhere like 50 percent or something like that. Actually, I guess more than that. In order to select for just the background, I'm going to make that invisible, click on the layer that has your scan on it, and I'm just selecting the Magic Wand tool, going into the bigger areas that'll be pretty noticeable. I think you really have to worry about the small ones necessarily for something like this. That's probably good. Then you go back up to your texture layer. I want to delete the portion of the texture that is over the figure. I will need to select the inverse. It is now selected on the person, and then hit Delete. That's not quite the effect that I want. I liked how the color of the texture affected the drawing as well as the background, so instead of deleting it, I'm going to click Command Z to undo that. Now, I'm just going to cut this portion of the texture from the rest of it to a new layer. To do that, I can click Command X to cut it, create a new layer above it, and click Command V to paste. When you paste a texture into a new layer or you duplicate a texture layer, it's going to automatically turn the blending mode back to normal. So all I need to do is just go back up to the bending mode, drop-down menu, and click "Multiply" again. Now both of these layers are on Multiply. Now I just want to change the texture over the person. I can try changing the Opacity. That's nice, but I still see the lines everywhere. What I ended up doing was smoothing it. I took the Smudge tool, which is right over here, underneath the Paint Bucket tool, and just smoothed out these squares, so you couldn't see the crisscrossing so much. Because I liked the color and I liked how the color affects the person, but I didn't want the tattoo over the wallpaper to be on them, so I ended up smudging throughout. I still get that really nice color but you can't see the squares. I went through the whole thing and did that. Then I believe what I did was I just merged these two layers. Again, I merged them so they'll turn it back to normal, put it back on Multiply. That's how I got that. 9. Taking a Traditional Piece and Enhancing It Digitally - Stumpy Pencil and Hue/Saturation: Now for the fun part, I wanted the digital drawings to look as close to the traditional piece as possible. So I used what is probably my favorite Photoshop brush ever. I'll seriously change your lives with this brush. Anyway, it's called the stumpy pencil brush and it's the closest thing to a pencil brush that I've ever been able to find. You can download it for free at stumpypencil.blogspot.com. I provided a link to it in the class description. If you do download it please leave the creator a comment showing your appreciation because it's just awesome. I don't know, I really love how it looks. It has pressure sensitivity, and just gives this beautiful sketch quality. It's beautiful, isn't it? That my friends is the beauty of the stumpy pencil brush. That is what I use to draw the flowers and the eggs here. So it gave me that roughish looking quality. It was a good example of how it just matches the quality of the pen that I used in the scan. Just one other thing I wanted to go over, another adjustment function that I use a lot is called, hue saturation. It's just really fun to play with. You can get inchoative, graphic, wacky results. Completely changed the mood. If I wanted to apply it to just this texture layer, hold down "Alt" and click "Between". Now it's only applied to the texture. That my friends is how I got to this point. 10. How To Bring Your Photos From Dull to HDR In 10 Easy Steps: I've decided to count photography as traditional art here, even though a majority of people use digital cameras nowadays. But I really want to share this cool HDR trick that I learned. So I'm ignoring that fact. First you'll want to duplicate it by hitting "Command J". You might want to do it just one more time and then hide the bottom layer, so that you have that one to refer to later. At the top layer you're going to want to put it on overlay, and then set the opacity of it to about 50 percent. Then you'll want to flatten those two layers. "Command E". Now duplicate that layer that you've created, and desaturate the top one, and then invert it. Then go to your Filter, Blur, and Gaussian Blur or however you pronounce that, I'm not sure. Then set it to 40 pixels and click "Okay". Then set that blurred layer to overlay, and you can merge them. Now just to see the difference between the two, here's the original and here's the HDR version. So just in 10 easy steps, you have heightened the quality of your photograph. Here's another example. This is already pretty bright, but if you duplicate it, overlay to about 50 percent, merge, duplicate again, desaturate, invert, and set the blur. For filters, if you have set a filter, it will automatically put that setting that you did at the very top of the menu the next time you click on "Filter". So I'm just going to click this again, and set it to 40 percent, and then overlay it. So that's what it was before. This is what it is now, and now that I've done that, I want to try it on my artwork. Overlay 50 percent, merge, duplicate, desaturate, invert and blur. It's pretty cool. Looks pretty good, actually. I want to change the colors a little bit, but that actually might save me time for future scans that I have. There you go. That's how you bring a photo or scan the artwork from dull to HDR in 10 easy steps. 11. Final Thoughts: That was tradigital art. Thank you so much for taking the class. I really hope you find those techniques useful, and I can't wait to see what you do with them. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the community section. Otherwise, have fun making art.