Transcripts
1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Coloring pages are a fun and easy way to
share your artwork. You can make coloring pages for family and
friends as a gift, maybe for your classroom
if you're a teacher, or you can even sell them
as printables online. My name is Shana Cell, and I'm an illustrator
Skillshare teacher and I own an Etsy shop where I sell
digital prints of my work. Now, I love to make
things by hand. I prefer working with
pencil and paper, ink and pen, all those
types of things. Wasn't always
comfortable bringing my work into the digital space. If any of that sounds like you, you've come to the right place. Even if you're not experienced with digitizing your work, I'll show you different
approaches of how to do this for every skill level. I'll cover how to capture
images of your work with just your cell
phone or a scanner, depending on what you
have available to you. Then we'll bring your
images into the computer, and then I'll show
you how to start digitizing them using Canva, which is a free program, as well as more advanced tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Join me in this class today, and you can start
turning your works of art into coloring pages. [MUSIC]
2. Creating and Selecting Artwork: [MUSIC] To get started, we're going to need
some artwork that will work well as
a coloring page. First, I'm going to
show you an example of something that I made specifically for this class
to turn into a coloring page. I created an eight by 10 border. I'll get into why I'm using
that size a little bit later. So I'm designing this at the size that I want the
final coloring page to be. So what are some of the elements that make for a
good coloring page? One of the most obvious
things to me is to make sure to have plenty of white
space that people can color. So you can have a
very complex design, but you're still going to need gaps of white where people can actually color with a
crayon or colored pencil, marker, any of those things. But they need
something to color. I think that's pretty obvious, but it's worth stating. So in addition to a
lot of white space, you're also going to need
very distinct lines. Some pencil sketches
aren't going to work as well as something done
in marker or pen. Here I drew these
snapdragons with a light pencil and then traced over it with an
archival ink pen. Something else to
keep in mind if you're going to do a
process like that, or if you are drawing something
specifically to turn into a coloring page is to make sure that you
enclose your shapes. You can see that there aren't
a lot of sketchy lines. It's not a ton of
forms or shading. All of these lines
come together. This shape here is an
enclosed, not really a circle, but a blob, this petal here. That's consistent throughout. Now you can always
create coloring pages from drawings or sketches
that already exist. But you're just going to
have to be a little bit more careful when
you're selecting them. Where if you're
creating something specifically to be
a coloring page, you can keep all this in mind as you're
making your drawing. I'm going to show you a few
examples in my sketchbook that would make for good coloring pages
and some that won't. First we have these
coneflowers here, and these could definitely
work as coloring pages. I have some pencil marks here, so I'll have to
get rid of those. But for the most part, these shapes are
pretty enclosed. I wanted to show this example because I have some shading
and texture in the drawing. Not all of them have to have perfectly plain white spaces, as long as there's still some white space that will
work well for coloring. You can see here, we still see the white
in the background, but there will still
be shading here. The same goes for the
lines on the petals. Even with a little bit more
detail in the drawing, someone should still
be able to color this. Let me show you another example. This one has even more detail. This I think could
still work pretty well. I have some darker lines on these outer edges of the petals. Then there's some lighter
markings going up the petals. You would still be
able to color this. You could do one color. You could alternate
between these lines. This look might work better for an adult coloring book rather than something
for children. While this is quite
a bit more detailed, there's still plenty
of white space where someone would
be able to color. Then I'm going to show you a couple that won't
work as well. In this example, we have way more of these ink
strokes, ink markings. That's adding shading and
texture to these petals. But there's a lot more of them. I don t think this
would work quite as well for a coloring page. Now, the leaves, I think these will work fine. There's probably a way that we could bring this
into the computer and edit it maybe to get rid of some of these markings
or get rid of all of them. But I'm just not
sure if this one is worth spending a ton of time on. This is something that
I'd probably pass on or maybe I could
trace over it on a new sheet of paper
and just wouldn't add as many details
or shading here. Then finally, I
have this bookcase. For this example, I used a
combination of pen and ink, but also brushing on washes of ink to
create some shading. There is probably a way you could use that technique to make a coloring page if you went
really light on the shading. You can see here this candle
where it's partially shaded. That might work for
a coloring page. But overall, I
don't think this is a design that's a great option. But if you are designing
something to be a coloring page, you could still probably use something with a little bit of light shading as long as there's enough room for people to color and actually
see their colors. Once again, this is
one I may pass on. Now that we've figured out what artwork would work
well as a coloring page, I'm going to show
you two different options where we're
either going to take a photo of our work or
scan it into the computer. [MUSIC]
3. Photographing: [MUSIC] Once you have your
artwork selected, we want to make sure
that it's prepped for photographing or scanning. First I just
double-check that you've erased all pencil
lines on your page. That can just help keep
things pretty clean especially if you're going to
be photographing your work. First, I'm going to
show you maybe the easier of the two options and that's simply using
your smartphone to take a picture of your work. Once your drawing is
prepped and ready to go, the second most important
thing is making sure to take your photo
in good lighting. Here I'm just working
in front of a window. It's a nice sunny day. Something else to look
out for is making sure that you don't
have any shadows. If the light were
coming from behind me, then there would be a large
shadow cast over the artwork. But since the lighting
is across from me, there aren't any shadows or anything like that that
I have to worry about. You definitely want to
make sure that you don't have any shadows
because it's going to make things a lot more
complicated once we're working on turning this
into a coloring page. As you can see here, I have
my snapdragon drawing, and I'm just being
careful to try to line it up to the grid on my camera. I'm using the straight edges of the sketchbook to do that. That's just to make
sure that I'm level with the sketchbook or
the drawing itself. If the straight edge isn't
very clearly defined, so maybe you're working with a sheet of paper on
a white background, you can also use a ruler
or something in the photo, and then just crop
that out later. Now that we have our photo, I'm going to show you how
to edit it from your phone. [MUSIC]
4. Editing on Your Phone: [MUSIC] I want to preface this section by saying that I will show you how
to edit your photo in Photoshop to get it nice and clean and black and white. But I did want to show
you this technique. If you don't have Photoshop and you really want to do this all from your phone or
using free programs. I'm going to go ahead and start out by opening up my photo. I'm just using the native
camera app to edit this. I'm going to go to Edit. I'm going to start out by
desaturating this picture. Let me get over to saturation and I'm going to
move it all the way down. Now it's purely black and white. We have no more color. After that, I'll go over to black point and make that
as dark as possible. I'm scrolling it over
and moving it over to the left so that
it's at 100 percent. If you need to double-check, you can always use two
of your fingers to zoom in and just make sure that it's getting
nice and dark. Everything I'm doing
here is just to get this contrast
as high as it can be between the background
and the foreground, which are our ink markings. Now I'm going to go over
to exposure over here. I'm going to move my
slider until all of the other lines and texture
of the paper is gone. I still have some
pencil lines here. You can see a little
bit if I zoom in, like that and I'm actually going to moving
in all the way up. It's not totally perfect yet,
but we're getting there. You can see my
pencil lines here, and that's okay because this is our border so I'm not going
to include that in our final. But if you're only going
to use this technique, then just make sure
that you've really erase your pencil markings well, or that if you do have
any pencil markings, they fall outside of
the area of your design so like I have these markings
in this corner here. We'll cut that out
later when I'm on my computer or we
can crop it now. Here you can see that we
have a nice stark contrast. It's black and white, and it looks a lot more
like a coloring page. There are some funny
markings here and there which we can get rid of those later in Photoshop or Illustrator if that's how
you're going to work. If you're going to use Canva, you're going to have to
make sure that your drawing is pretty perfect before then, because it will take
some more editing if you need to clean up any areas. But if you have a
nice clean drawing and you're able to get it
black and white like this, then this might be all the
editing you have to do. Now you might have to
do some more editing if you have any weird shadows or you weren't taking a
photo in a well-lit place. But this is the ultimate goal, this nice black and
white contrasting image. [MUSIC]
5. Scanning: [MUSIC] Now I'm going to show
you how I would scan a drawing to turn
into a coloring page. It's going to be
somewhat similar to taking a photo of it. But I think scanning
is a little bit easier at least for me so I'm going to go ahead and
open my printers and scanners and open up my scanner. It's probably just
going to take a minute. I am going to mess
around with some of the settings on the
side over here, on this right-hand side. Normally I don't mess with
these when I'm working on other kinds of projects
but for coloring pages, I work a little bit differently. This is going to be a
little bit different than scanning in a finished
drawing or painting. We're not as concerned
about getting the highest resolution possible. It's really about getting a nice contrasting
black and white image. I'm going to go ahead
first and change this from color to
black and white similar to what we
did when we were editing our image on
our phone and then I'm going to change the
resolution from 600-300 and this just because we really don't
need something that large, I usually keep it at
the highest settings so for my scanner
that's 600 DPI, which is dots per inch. Basically, that means that
there are 600 dots of information in a square inch so that's a very
high resolution, and that works really well. If I'm scanning something
that is a painting or a very complex finished
drawing that I want to be able to scale at
different sizes. Here we don't need that
so I'm just going to change this to 300 DPI, which is still pretty high, but the file just
won't be as large. Then I can just change this to a custom size so
I'm only going to scan in the area that we need. I'm just going to create a
new folder really quick. I'm just going to change
the name and I'm going to leave this as a JPEG. Then this image correction here, I'm going to go ahead
and select "Manual" and this will help us create a nice contrast as we're
scanning in our document. This has the same settings
that I used last time, but usually, when you open this, it'll be set at zero. Basically, what I'm
going to do is just turn this contrast up really high and I don't know
if these settings, they may look a little
bit different if you have a different scanner than I do so these are really the
only options that gives you brightness and contrast. I don't really need
to mess around with the brightness too much and I am going to bring this
into Photoshop and Illustrator so I'm not going to spend too
much time on this, but it can just save
you some time later. I'm just going to increase
the contrast pretty high. I think that's decent and
then I'll go ahead and scan. Now that that's complete, I'm just going to go ahead
and take a look at our scan. It looks pretty good, you can still see some drawings that are on the other side of the page so this will still need some editing in Photoshop
or Illustrator. In the next video, I'll
go ahead and show you how to create a coloring
page in Canva. [MUSIC]
6. Canva: [MUSIC] Let's get started
with Canva first. Here I'm on their website, and you will have to create a free account in
order to do this. This is what your home
page will look like. I'm going to go over to the right-hand corner here
and click on "Create a design" I'm going
to go down here to custom size and
type in our size. In one of the earlier lessons, when I was looking at
my snapdragon drawing, I mentioned that I drew
it at an 8 by 10 size, so eight inches by 10 inches. The reason for that is I wanted
something that would work well at both US letter size, which is 8.5 by 11 inches, and also the A4 paper size, which is 8.3 inches
by 11.7 inches. That would work well for
selling online as a printable. That 8 by 10 ratio would work on both of
those size papers. I'm just going to go ahead
and I'm going to change this. It has pixels over here. I'm going to change
that to inches, and we're going to do 8 by 10, and then create a new design. I have my nice blank page here. We're just going to
start out by creating a nice border bounding
box for a coloring page. First, I'm going to go over to this left-hand side
and select elements. Then you can see under
lines and shapes, we have a nice
straight line here. I'm going to click on that, and that will show
up in our document. First I'm just going to
go ahead and drag this, and I'm going to make it the
full width of the document. I'm just clicking on
that one right end and I'm holding
down Shift as I go. Then I'm just going to
drag the other end, and I'm holding
Shift to make sure that it stays a straight line. You can see as I'm dragging, it says the dimensions, but it also has a zero
and then the degree sign. It means that this is going
to stay a nice straight line. If I were to drag down, you can see that
the rotation would be negative 15 degrees. If I go up, now it's
positive 15, 30, 45. You just want to make
sure that it remains at zero and that will make sure it's a nice
horizontal straight line. Then I'm going to let go. Now we have our first edge. I'm just going to move
that up to the top. Then I'm going to
make a copy of that. I'm just going to hold down the Alt key and click and drag. That's just a shortcut
to duplicate this line. Perfect. I'm just going to do the same thing with
this line at the top. I'm going to click on Alt, and then drag to make a copy. I'm just going to rotate
this to 90 degrees. Perfect. I'm going to move
it over to our right edge. I'm just going to make this the full length of the
document, hold down Shift. You can see that it does have the measurement in
that little black box. We've got a nice 10-inch line. Then I'm going to
duplicate this as well, so holding down
the Alt key again, and clicking and dragging. I can also hold down
Shift as I do this, and that'll just
make sure it stays nice and in line
with the right edge. Great. Now we have a
nice little border, and that will create a frame
around our coloring page. Now it's time to go ahead
and add our artwork. We'll go over to this
left panel over here, and we'll go to Uploads. Once we have uploads pulled up, I'm going to go ahead
and click on "Upload media" and locate our document. All of your uploads
will appear in this left-hand panel
under the Upload section. We have our image, so if
I just click on that, it's going to appear
in the document. Then all we have to do is click and drag
to make it larger. I added these dark corners to
my original artwork so that I'd have some guide when I
was working on this in Canva. Basically, we're just
going to enlarge it. I'm just clicking and
dragging on those edges. I'm just going to move it down. I'm basically just
moving this so I can get those edges completely
out of the image. But you can see in
the original that I have some shadows
on the edge here. The shadow doesn't go into
the drawing, so that's okay, but you can see why
Canva is maybe not the best option if
you have a lot of shadows or blemishes on your original artwork because we won't be able to
get rid of those. Now if this isn't
lining up properly, we can always rotate it. I'm just going to rotate. This is pretty straight already, so I'm not too
worried about that. I'm really just adjusting it
so it works in this context. That's something that
is helpful if you make a drawing specifically
to be used in this way. Because I purposely made
some things overlap, so they are going to go
all the way to the edges. I'm not worried about
them getting cut off. I'm just going to
move this down. Canva does this thing
where if you have an image fill the
whole document, it will automatically send it to the back of your document, so basically, it makes
it the background. It's lining up pretty closely. It's not perfect because
we didn't scan this in, I took a photo. Some things might be
skewed a little bit. I'm just making
some adjustments, widening my original so I
can hide those markings. It's not lining up exactly and that's because I
didn't scan this in, I took a photo, so it is skewed a little bit. If I wasn't holding my
phone perfectly level, then it's not going
to match up exactly. I'm basically just
adjusting this a little bit more because I want to get
the top of this flower in. A few things are
going to get cut off. That's one of the
disadvantages of Canva. I can't really make
too many big changes. It's really just resizing
and making it fit. You can see that the border's cutting it off a little bit. You can also use
the arrow keys on your keyboard to
change the position. I'm just using the down
key and I'm just moving it down a little bit because I want the top of that
flower to show. Perfect. Now we are pretty much done with
our first coloring page. We have a nice, clean border. We have our drawing. It looks pretty good. I'm just going to zoom in and show you that
there are some spots. This area that I'm moving my mouse around, it's a blemish. If I move around, you'll
see things just aren't really perfect. I'm
okay with that. This is a coloring
page I made for fun, so that's totally fine. But that's where you can see some of the downsides
to using Canva. You're pretty much stuck with whatever the images
that you upload. Now that this is ready to go, we'll go ahead and download it. We'll go over to File
over here on the left. I'm going to change
the name really quick. [NOISE] Then I'm just going to go ahead to almost the very bottom
and click "Download." By default, it wants to
download this as a PNG, which I do not want. I think I would much
rather have a PDF. It will just make things
a little bit easier, especially if you're
going to be selling this on Etsy or sharing it
with other people. PDFs are just really nice
for printing as well. I'm going to do a PDF Print. I'm not going to click any
of these, and download. Great. Now you can
see my PDF document. There you have it,
your first coloring page that's ready to print. Before we do that, I want to
show you one other thing. If we go back to our document, it's really easy to
duplicate this page. That can be great if you
want to make a whole series of coloring pages or maybe
a whole coloring book. We can just go ahead and in
this upper right-hand corner, click on "Duplicate page", and now we have a second page. Then you can just go
ahead and click on the image and hit Delete. Then you have a whole
another blank page, and you could just make
copies of this page. You have a bunch of
blank pages that are ready to add new drawings
and designs too. I will talk about printing
in an upcoming lesson. Hold tight for
that, but for now, I'm going to move on to how
to do this in Photoshop. [MUSIC]
7. Photoshop: Now I'm going to move
on to Photoshop. We're going to do something pretty similar to
what we did in Canva. I'm just going to start out
by creating a new file. I'm just going to name this. I'm going to change pixels to inches and just update the size. I'm going to do eight by
10 inches once again. I'm going to leave the resolution
at 300 pixels per inch. The color mode, I'm just
going to leave all of these settings down here
I'm not going to mess with. This is going to be a pretty straightforward
document for Photoshop. I'm going to hit Create and
now we have our new document. Just like in Canva, I'm going to start
out by creating a border for our coloring page. To do that, I'm
going to go over to the left panel over here and
click on the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to
make sure that I have no fill and that my
stroke is black. Now I'm ready to create
the rectangle border. You can just click anywhere on your document and then I'm going to create an
eight by 10 rectangle. In the width box, I'm going to type in eight
and then IN for inches. Even though this by default has pixels here, if you type in IN, that will work to create
a box using inches, eight inches by 10 inches. Going to uncheck that. Then it looks like the last
time I made a rectangle, I had rounded corners. That's what this means here. I'm just going to type
in 0 and then I'll have a nice sharp corner for
my box. I'll hit Okay. Great. Now I have my rectangle. Right now you can see I still have the rectangle
tool selected and you can tell that my cursor is showing this
kind of star shape. I want to get back to
the selection tool, the move tool, which is up here in the upper
left-hand corner. I'm going to click on that. Or you can type V on your keyboard to get
back to the Move tool. Now I'm just going to drag a rectangle and
then I'm just going to center align this up
here at the top bar, I can click on Center. You can see this will center
our rectangle vertically. I'm going to click that
and nothing happened. It's kind of hard to tell, but nothing happened when I did that because it must be
aligned correctly already. Then I'm going to go
over to the right, and I'm also going to
center it horizontally. If I click that, you can see
it moves the rectangle up. Now that we have our
border in place, we can move on to
adding our artwork. Now I'm just going to
go ahead and open up the artwork that I
scanned in earlier. Now we have this opened up here. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit by
hitting Command Plus. I could have easily
opened this in our working document over here. But I wanted to work with this separately because we
have multiple elements. I'm not going to create a coloring page with all of
these elements on there. I really only want this flower
on the left, this bouquet. Now if you were working
with a drawing that was arranged exactly
how you wanted it, you could open this up directly in our
document over here. To do that, we would go
to File, Place Embedded. Then I brought that into
this original document. But as I said before, I'm really only
concerned with one part of it so I'm going
to keep it separate. I'm just going to
cancel that over here and go back to
our cone flowers. I'm going to zoom in a
little bit to show you that we still have some
pencil lines here. Even though we made some adjustments when
I scanned this in, there are some leftover markings and we need to get rid of those. I think the black
looks good overall though there's a nice contrast
between white and black. Then you can see that my original drawing
isn't super clean. You can see there's kind of like these overlapping lines here. There are some things I could
also clean up a little bit before I turn this
into a coloring page. I'm going to zoom out
just a little bit and I'm going to make up a copy
of the background. That's just to
retain the original. I'm going to be
mostly working with this new background copy. Then I'm going to go down
here to the very bottom and add an adjustment
layer, for levels. First, I'm going to start out by setting our black point and that will make sure that
the blackest parts of our document are purely black. They're not gray or
kind of in-between. It already looks pretty good, but I'm still going to go
through this just to see if it makes the
contrast even higher. Over here on the
right-hand side, we have our adjustment
box for our levels. Then at the very top, you can see that there's this black dropper tool.
I'm going to click on that. I'm going to zoom in by
hitting Command Plus. Then I'm just going to select anywhere on one of
these black lines. Let's try here. You can already
see that the lines got a little bit thicker. There is a little
bit more contrast. That looks good to me.
Then now we need to get rid of those pencil marks. I'm going to go back over to our adjustment box and then you'll see this slider
all the way to the right. There are three sliders
here by default. The one on the far left
is for the black point, which we just set by
using the dropper tool. But you can also use these
sliders to make adjustments. If I move this to the left, it's making that
black point lighter. You can't really tell. But it's going to be
more obvious if I move it far to the right. It's making everything
much darker and kind of emphasizing
every single line. If I move it all the
way, you can even see the drawings that were on
the other side of the page. I don't want to do
that, so I'm just going to undo it by hitting Command Z, and that will just undo
resetting the black point. Now I'm going to go back to
the slider on the far right. We're going to move
this slider on the right towards the
left and that's going to brighten up our document
and get rid of all of those extra lines that aren't included in
that black point. If I just do this, that looks pretty good, but I have a trick
that I'll show you. If I hold down the Alt
key as I drag this, it brings up those
lines again that we saw before when I dragged
the black slider over. I'm just going to move this
over to the left until all those extra lines
disappear. Let's see. That looks good. I'm
just going to zoom in a little bit to look at
everything, altogether. Okay, there might have
been a little bit too far. You can kind of see that
this line is kind of faded. I could have gone a
little bit too far. I'm going to hold down the Alt
key again and move it back over to the right a little bit. Here is where the
lines appear again. There, that looks good. I think the lines
look pretty solid overall. I'm happy with that. The final thing before
I bring this into the other document is I'm
just going to get rid of some of these markings here or some of these awkward
overlaps of the lines. I'm going to make sure that I have my background
copy selected. Then I'm going to go over
and find my brush tool. I'll go up to the top bar
here to change my brush. You can see right now I
have this textured brush. I'll use it real quick so you can see that's not
what we're looking for. I'm just going to hit
Command Z to undo that. I'll go back up to the top here. I'm just going to
change it to one of the default brushes that
come with Photoshop. I'm going to use this
hard round brush. We can adjust the size up here. There's a slider, I'm just going to
make it much smaller. If I hover back over here, you can see it's much smaller, a little bit more manageable. Then I'm also going to
change the color to white. Down here at the bottom, you can see that
right now black is selected as the
foreground color, and white is selected
as the background. I'm just going to switch that by clicking on these arrows. Then now, if I were
to go like that, you can see that I'm
using the white brush. I'm just going to
Command Z to undo that. I'm going to go
through and just clean up some areas on here. First, we can just get rid
of this little dot here. Then there's kind
of a weird overlap here so I'm going
to make my brush a little bit smaller
to clean that up. I can also change the size of my brush using a
keyboard shortcut. To make my brush a little
bit smaller for this area, I can just hit the
left bracket key. You can see that it's
making it smaller. If I need to make
it larger again, I can use the right bracket key. You'll see me going back
and forth a lot here. You can see that
nothing's happening. I'm clicking and dragging
and it's not getting erased or covered over
by that white brush. I just wanted to point that
out because if you don't have the correct layer selected, this isn't
going to work. You can see that right
now, my background layer, the original background is a locked layer and
that's what's selected. That's why you're not
seeing those changes. You have to have the correct layer selected
that you want to work within. I'm going to select
my background copy and it should work again. I'm not going through a ton of ins and outs with
Photoshop here, because I want this to
be easily digestible. This isn't really
a Photoshop class. I'm just trying to show you how you can turn your
art into coloring pages, in a quick and easy way. But you can see already
that there's lot more we can do in Photoshop than
we could do in Canva. Canva really is better
for a finished piece. But Photoshop works well
for something like this, where I wasn't necessarily planning on turning this
into a coloring page, but I'm able to adapt
my work into one. I'm just going to go through and continue to clean this up. I think this is at a good
place where I'm ready to bring it into
our final document. What I need to do is
select this bouquet only. I'm going to do that
using the Lasso tool, which I'll find over
here on this left panel. I'm going to use the
Polygonal Lasso tool. I'm just going to go
ahead and select this. First I'm going to set my
first point of the selection, so when I click here, and then you'll
see that this line appears wherever I move my
mouse, it's going to follow. I'm just going to
click around this. Anything that's
within the borders of these lines is
going to be selected. Then you see, as I hover, I'm going to zoom
in a little bit. As I hover close to this line, this little circle appears, and that means that I'm going
to connect these two lines. That's going to complete our selection it's
going to close it. Once I click, you can see that I have what they
call marching ants, and that's showing that
this area is selected. Then I'm going to go to Edit, Copy Merged, and that's
going to copy everything. It will copy the levels layer, those edits that we made, and the background copy. Then I'll go back over to
our original document, and I can paste using Command V, or you could go back up
to Edit, and then Paste. Now we have our artwork on our coloring
page document now, I'm just going to re-size it. One thing I want to point out
as I'm making this larger, I have my ratio is constrained, so it's keeping this proportionate
as I make it larger. Up here at the top. This bar up at the
very top of Photoshop, you can see this link symbol. If I unclick that, it's not going to
constrain my proportions. If you have that unclick, you can also hit "Command
Z" to undo that. If that is not selected, you can always hold down Shift
to keep your proportions. As you'll see here
because we didn't really get rid of that
white background. If I move this up
over the border, it's blocking out that border. But that's okay,
I'll show you how we can get rid of that
a little bit later. I'm just adjusting this. I'm going to put it in
the center of my page. Then once you're happy
with where that's placed, I can just hit ''Enter.'' We can always change it later
if you're unhappy with it. Now I'm just going to move
this below our rectangle. This isn't affecting
anything right now, but let's say I wanted
this to be really large, and go right up, and overlap with the border. It's going to be
there real quick, and you can see that
there's no overlap. You can't see any white
space or anything like that. That's because we moved this layer underneath
our rectangle layer. I'm going to undo that. Before I go ahead and save
this as a PDF, first, I'm just going to
make sure that it is saved as a PSD document
so I can go back, and edit it at any time. I'm just going to go
ahead and save that. I've already saved it before
I'm showing you this, so I'm just going
to hit ''Cancel'', but I would just make
sure that this is saved, so you have this to go back to. I also wanted to show
you that you can save this as a template
for the future. In order to do that, we're going to make a copy of
this to save as a template. I'm just going to go ahead to our layer with the artwork, and I'm going to
click the ''Trash button'' down at
the bottom right. I'm just going to go to File, Save As and I'll rename this eight by10
coloring page template. Then you can use this again and again for future coloring pages. At this point, I'm ready to go ahead and save this as a PDF, because it's ready for printing. I'll go to File, Save As, and then I'm just
going to change the format in this
dialogue box here. Format, Photoshop,
PDF, and Save. Then this new dialog
box will show up. I'm actually going to uncheck, Preserve Photoshop
Editing Capabilities. I have my original
Photoshop document, if I do want to make edits, I'm going to uncheck that. Everything else looks
good to me so I'm going to click on ''Save PDF'', now we can find
our PDF document. Now I've shown you
two different ways to make these coloring pages. Next up, I'm going
to show you how to do the same thing
in Illustrator, which has even more options.
8. Illustrator: Image Trace Basics: [MUSIC] Now I'm excited to
show you how to go through the same
process in Illustrator. I think this one really gives
you the most flexibility, so let's go ahead
and get started. Like before, I'm going
to go to New File. We're going to set
up a new document. I'll change this to inches. This should all look
pretty familiar. I'll make this an
8 by 10 document. Then I'm not going to make any adjustments to
these areas over here. I'll hit ''Create'' and then we just need to
add in our artwork. I'm going to go over to my coloring pages
folder that I have, and I'm just going to
drag those images in. We have our cone flowers, and I'm also going to
bring in the snapdragons. When I bring those in, they're
going to be really large, and I'm going to have to
zoom out quite a bit. I'll hit ''Command
Minus'' just to zoom out, and then I'm going to just
make this much smaller. I'm going to hold down
the ''Shift'' key and adjust the size, just to constrain
those proportions. Should be a little
bit more manageable. This is already pretty small, so I'm just going to
drag that over here. I'm going to go over
two different ways that we can work in Illustrator to create
our coloring pages. The first way I'm going
to show you is how we can really retain the integrity
of the original work, and then the other option is how we can trace
over our work, so we can get a little bit creative and change the
look of the original. But I'm going to start
with the first option. First of all, I am going
to crop this because we're going to be using a
feature called image trace, and we aren't going to need
these excess elements. You can see at the
top here we have the edge of my sketchbook
along these sides, and then we've got these
shadows over here. I am working with Illustrator, the most recent version of Illustrator in the
Creative Cloud. This may not look
exactly the same. I can't remember if there
was this Crop Image feature before when you added in
a JPEG or some image. But I'm going to go
up to Crop Image, and then we can just crop it so that we don't have
anything that we don't need. I'm just going to
drag these edges. It's okay if we do include
some areas we don't need, we can always
delete those later. I'll hit Apply to
keep that cropping. Zoom in just a little bit. Great. Now I'm just going to make sure that I have my
selection tool selected. You can see that my cursor
right now looks like a pen, which is for the pen tool. I'm going to change that
back to this selection tool, and then I can go ahead
and select this image. Then we're going to use
the Image Trace feature. At the top, you'll see Image
Trace in this bar here. This will vectorize or
digitize our image. Now, you'll probably
get a dialogue box like this that will say tracing
may proceed slowly. That's okay. We're
okay with that. I'm just going to
click ''Okay''. Then we'll need to make
some adjustments here. I'm going to go to
this little box here and open up the
image trace panel, and we're already in black and white mode,
which is what I want. They do have some
other options here. If you're working in earlier
version of Illustrator, you can look for, I think there's an option
called black and white logo, which is probably the
closest to this setting. Then I'm going to
increase the threshold. What that means is it's
going to recognize more areas that I want to
include in the tracing. Let's see what I mean
once I increase it. These lines look a
little bit thicker, you should be able
to see more of them and where they connect. I actually like that
a little bit thicker because this is a coloring page, so I'm okay with this not looking super close
to the original. There are a lot of
different ways that you can use Illustrator. You can do the same
process and try to keep your distinct pen
or ink markings. For this, I'm not as
concerned with that. Then I'm just going to toggle to see our advanced options
to show you those. There's another option where
we can increase our paths. What that's going to do is, let me zoom in a little bit. You can see how
everything's smooth. If I increase the paths, it's going to create more
paths for those edges. It still looks pretty smooth, but you can see that these shapes just become a
little less, maybe blob like. I'm just going to move
it down a little bit. We don't need a
ton of paths here. I'm still happy with
the look of it overall. I'm not going to
adjust that too much. Then you can see that corners
are pretty high here, so that means it's going
to just add more corners, not really concerned with that. I'm going to lower
that a little bit. Some of these differences
are pretty subtle. I'm just going to undo that
to show you how that changed. I'm just going to
zoom in a little bit, so we can see how that works. I want to zoom in to
this area right here. I'm going to click on
''Z'' to get my zoom tool. I'm just going to click and
drag to the right to zoom in. But I want to show you with
this specific point here. You can see that we have
this really sharp corner. If I bring my corners down,
it should smooth out. That's what that does. It's not super noticeable, but it can affect
things overall. These are just my
personal preferences. I'm going to leave
that like that, and I'll zoom back out. I can do that by clicking and dragging to the
left to zoom back out. Something that I didn't
really go over before, but I'll cover since
we're in Illustrator now, is the difference between
raster and vector images. When we were working in
Canva and Photoshop, we were working
with raster images, which means that they are set in stone to their original size. If you make them smaller, or if you try to
make them larger, they'll become pixelated, and they won't look as crisp and clear because you're not really changing the
original image, you're blowing it up. Where a vector image is redrawn
every time you resize it. Every time you make a
vector image larger, it's going to look just
as crisp and clean, and every time you
make it smaller, it will do the same thing
without becoming pixelated. That's where Illustrator
can come in handy. Finally, we have our noise, which I'm just going
to bring down. I'll show you what it looks
like if I bring it higher. If I turn that all the way up, some of these edges
look a little sharper, and they're maybe not as smooth. It has a little bit more detail. Once again, for this coloring
page, I don't want that, I don't need this sharper edges to be exactly like my drawings. I'm going to turn my noise
pretty much all the way down. Finally, down at
the bottom here, I'm just going to click
on this ''Ignore White''. Even though when you're
looking at this, you're really only seeing
these black lines. But there are two colors
here because there's black and then there's
white in the background. We want to ignore
those white spaces. We don't need those turned into any kind of shapes or
anything like that. I'm going to hit ''Ignore White'' and it might get a little darker
when I do that, yeah. This looks really good to me. I think you'll see that compared to the other
ways we did this, this looks even more like a traditional coloring page and something that
you might purchase. It's just a lot cleaner looking. This is where Illustrator
is a really nice option. Now that I'm happy with
all of my settings, I'm going to go up to
the top here and click ''Expand'' and that's where we're actually turning all
of these lines into paths. [MUSIC]
9. Illustrator: Cleaning Up: [MUSIC] I'm just going to go back to my selection tool
by hitting "V". You can see that if
I click onto this, this is all in a group. Even these little
markings up here, if I click on that, it's
selecting everything. I need to get rid of some of these awkward areas like these markings and the
edge of my sketchbook. I'm going to right-click
and ungroup. Then now, when I select that it's its own little objects. I'm just going to delete that and take care of
those other corners. Now you can see that if
I try to click this, it's still selecting
this whole area here, because it's connected to this
branch or stem over here. But that's okay. I'm
going to select that, and I'm going to
use my Eraser tool. Similar to the Brush
tool in Photoshop, I can make it larger or smaller with the left
and right brackets. I'm just going to increase
the size of that. I'm just going to erase
and that's going to break the connection
to these areas. I'm just clicking and dragging
to break that connection. I'll click "V" to go back
to my selection tool, click over here to the side, and then now this
is an object on its own and I'll delete it. This looks really
nice and clean to me. I'm really happy with that. We would pretty much be done at this point with
something like this. Like I did in Canva
and Photoshop, I would want to make a
border for our coloring page so I'm going to go over
to my rectangle tool. This will be very
similar to Photoshop. You can see that right now
we have a fill color of black and a colorless
outline stroke. I'm just going to switch that. In the bottom left over here, if I click on these arrows, it'll swap the filling
stroke, which is what I want. I can just click and drag
to create a rectangle, or I can click and type
in my own dimensions. It's already set to inches, so I can just type eight
and 10 and hit "Enter". Then I can move that
onto my art board. If I really want to be sure
it's perfectly aligned, I can make sure that's centered. At the top bar here, I can center align
horizontally and vertically. Now, it's a little
bit difficult to see. I'm going to zoom in because this stroke is set to one point. I'm just going to increase
that up here at the top. I'm going to increase
the width to two just so it's a
little bit thicker. Then all I would need to
do is drag this over to our art board and resize it. I'm going to hold
down my Shift key and click and drag the
corner to make it smaller. I want it to come
up to the edges because I don't
want to worry about these leaves where we had
to cut off the sketch book, so I'm just going to make
it a little bit larger. Perfect. This is
almost ready to go, but there are a couple of errors in this original drawing. I'm going to zoom
in to show you. Here you can see that these
petals are overlapping, and I have to choose which one is in front and
which is in back. That was the mistake I made
when I was tracing over my pencil drawing with my ink pen. I can easily fix that. I'm going to select this first. It's hard to see the blue
lines to show its selected, but I did just click on this. All the lines
should be selected, and I can simply
use my Eraser tool. I'm going to erase one, either this line or this one. I think this would
actually appear in front, so I'm just clicking around. The computer's a little bit slow because it's
working hard right now. Okay. That's just an easy way
to get rid of any errors. If I had any other
weird markings, I could easily just delete
them using the eraser. Another option for areas
like this where you can see that it looks like I
overlapped a little bit, is to use what's called
the smooth tool. Once again, make sure that
your artwork is selected. Then over in this panel
over here you'll see either a pencil or maybe something called
the shaper tool. But if I right-click, I'll see all my options. We have the pencil tool over
here and the smooth tool, which is what I'm
going to use here. I want to smooth out
this edge over here, but you can see it's a
little bit difficult to see. We have all these
blue dots and those represent different anchor
points of our shape. Without going into too
much detail about that, we can hide our blue dots. In order to do that, I can go up to View
and Hide Edges. Then that way we just don't see that while we have it selected. I'm just going to click and drag around this area and you can see it's just
smoothing out that edge. I just want to get rid
of that bump there. I think that looks a
little bit better. But you can see that it did
affect this area over here. I'm going to undo that. I'm not going to drag as far. I'm just going to drag where
I need to over that bump. Perfect. I could do that here, but I have to make sure
this is selected first. Great. You could do
that all throughout. If I wanted to
make this nice and pristine and get rid of any
little bumps like that, I could go through the
whole thing and update it. But I'm happy with it as it is. I'll zoom back out, and this will basically
be ready to go. Actually, I can make a
couple more adjustments. It looks like over here
that's not meeting the edge. I'm just going to make
it slightly bigger. Now I'm going to go ahead
and save this as a PDF. I'll go to File and
I'm going to use Save a Copy rather than Save As. If I use Save As
it's going to change the file type that I'm
working with in Illustrator, and I don't want to do that. I'll hit "Save a Copy"
and rename this. Then change the format
from Illustrator to Adobe PDF and hit "Save". I'm okay with leaving
this Illustrator default. But I am going to uncheck preserve the editing
capabilities. That's just because
if I am going to upload this to a
site like Etsy to sell, I don't want people to
be able to edit my work. I like to leave that unchecked. Now there's probably ways
people could work around that, but it just makes me feel
a little bit better. I'm going to hit "Save PDF". It's just giving me this warning that I won't be able to edit it, but that's okay with me because I have my
original saved already. Now we have another version of our Snapdragon coloring page. Now I'll go back
to our document. There's lots of ways to work
in Illustrator to do this. I'm just going to show
you one other option that I think is easy. I want this class to be
approachable for people who maybe aren't as familiar with
Illustrator or Photoshop. I'm going to show
you how we could trace our drawings to
make a coloring page. [MUSIC]
10. Illustrator: Manual Tracing: We have this image over here which I'm
going to select, and I'm going to go over
to our layers panel on the right-hand side
and toggle that down. I'm just looking for our image, which is down here
at the very bottom, and you can tell
because I have this selected and it
has this blue box. It'll show you what is
selected and that can help you find where your layer
is when there are so many layers in this panel. I have this selected and I'm going to
bring up appearance, which is on my panel
on the right here. You can also find it
under Window, Appearance. I'm going to change the opacity. We just want to make
this less opaque so that'll make it a
little bit easier to trace over and see my lines. I think that is visible
enough for me to trace over, but not so dark. Then what I can do now
is trace over this. Before I do that, I'm just going to
lock this layer. I'm going to go
to Object up here and find Lock and Lock
selection. This is locked. It won't move around
as I'm working, and then you can
either use your mouse or I do have a Wacom tablet, which is basically a tablet. I can plug into my
laptop and draw on the tablet which
will just make things a little
bit easier for me, but you can definitely use
your mouse or a trackpad, whatever works for you
or is available to you. Now I'm going to show you how we can trace over a sketch or drawing using our
blob brush tool. Basically what this does, it will create a shape
but by using a brush. Instead of using
the rectangle tool or something like that, we are creating a shape
rather than a line. You can see that here that
there are distinct edges. I'm going to Command
Z to undo that. What I like about
this is that it can replicate a
paintbrush a little bit. Now I'm using a tablet connected to my
computer to draw this. You can use a mouse
or a trackpad, but basically all
you'll do is click and drag to draw on your image. Undo those. Now, I can change my settings. If I go over to the side over here and go to Properties
and Tool Options, and I can change
some things here. I can make this brush super smooth or
somewhere in the middle. The smoother I make it, the less hard straight
lines it's going to have, it's going to be a lot
smoother and I can also change different
settings for my brush. Since I am using a Wacom tablet, I can adjust my
pressure so the more pressure I put on the brush
and create a thicker line, less pressure, it's a
little bit thinner. These are the settings
I'm currently using, but you can definitely
adjust these. You can also change the
roundness depending on pressure. You'll see it's much
more like an oval. If I have it all the
way up, it's a circle. You won't have quite as many
options if you are using a trackpad or your mouse, so you'll have it set to
probably fixed there. You can play around with
some of these other options, but you won't have
that pressure option. I'm going to leave it as
it is because I do like to have that as an option for me. I'll hit "Okay".
Then all I really have to do is trace
over these lines. I'm going to make my
brush a little smaller. You can see that it's much smoother than the
line I originally drew. I can adjust that
in my settings. If I made this less smooth, it would retain more of the
shape I originally drew. I'll show you that real quick. If I don't have the
blob brush tool selected, that
option disappears, so I have to select
that once again and then I'll have my
tool options over on this Properties panel. I'm going to make it
a little less smooth, a little more
accurate, hit "Okay". It really kept that
curve that I drew. Then from here I could
just continue to trace and you can do it as organized or disorganized
as you want. Now, this isn't always how you would work
in Illustrator. If you're actually creating
a nice clean document, you would be more concerned with layers or how things
are overlapping. But our only goal
here is to make something that works
well as a coloring page. I'm just not concerned with that and I'm not
going into details about that in this
class on Skillshare, but there are plenty of
really good classes on Illustrator if you want
to dive a lot deeper. This is just what you
would need to know to create a coloring page by
tracing over your work. Definitely doesn't look the same as what we did earlier where we just use the Image
Trace feature or any of the things we used
in Canva or Photoshop. It's much more
cartoonish looking. It's a totally
different approach, but it's a nice way
to rework something, especially if you're
just going off of a pencil sketch that won't translate very well
to the computer. The nice thing is
you could just gloss over areas that you don't
want to bother with. If I wanted to leave
out this flower, I can. I'm just going to go through
and trace the rest of this. It looks okay at this point, I'm going to go ahead
and hide my background. I'm going to go
over to the Layers panel and I'm just going to find the image and
you can find it. You can see here there's little lock because we
locked that earlier. I'm going to unlock it, but I'm also going to hide
it by clicking on this eye. Cool. Now all we see is
everything I did with the blob brush tool and then I did this a
little bit sloppily. I did this pretty fast because I wanted to show
you how we can clean it up. Just like before, we can use our eraser tool to get rid of maybe some weird overlaps or we can smooth out some things
using the smooth tool. To do that, let's see, I need to erase some of these
overlapping areas here. I'm just going to zoom in and make sure that I
have that selected. Go to eraser and just
get rid of those. You can see that this isn't
erasing and that's because I don't have that part of
my drawing selected. Let me just Command Z to undo. I'm going to hit V to go
back to my selection tool, and I'm going to select this and I'm going
to select this. There's another shape here
because this is overlapping, so you can see that this is
its own stand-alone shape. This is also another shape here, so Command Z. I'm going
to select both of those. I already have
this guy selected. I'm going to hold down Shift
and select the other one. I should be able
to erase both of those overlapping areas
at the same time. Perfect. That already
looks much better. As I mentioned before, this is a very particular
way to work in Illustrator since
I'm not concerned about all these
overlapping edges or what lines are
connected to each other. Normally, you would be much more concerned about that
to keep your document clean and keep specific shapes together and some
shapes separate. Really I'm just trying
to get this to a point where it makes a
nice coloring page. I'm going to select this. Here's my eraser again, clean that up a little bit. I'm going to Zoom out, look for other strange overlaps,
got some there. Then you can also move
around your document, I haven't mentioned this before, but by holding down the Space bar and
clicking and dragging, I'm just going to go through
and clean up my document. Real quick I just wanted to cut in and
explain a little bit further that whatever I have selected
is what's going to erase. I can erase this whole area here without impacting this flower, which I want it to look
like is overlapping. Then I have a lot of
this cleaned up already. Now I could go through and
make some adjustments with the smooth tool
just to make things look a little bit more refined. Here I had to erase
some areas so it has these weird lobby edges. I'll go back to my smooth tool, so that's under the pencil tool, and just go over some of these
edges to smooth them out. I'm just clicking and dragging and it looks way better already. I could just do that
with any other areas that look a little wonky. Once this is in a place
you're happy with, I can go ahead and bring it
over to our document area, and what I'm going
to do actually is make a copy of this art board. Let me move this out of the way. To do that, I can go
over to my panel over here and click on "Art Boards". This is Art Board 1. We only have one art
board which is over here, and I can click on it and drag to this plus
sign to make a copy. I've got a copy right
next door to it. I can click on this
artwork and delete it and then bring in
what I just made. I'm going to zoom out and I'm just trying
to select it all. You can see that it keeps
selecting this outer edge, our border that I made earlier. To deselect that I can
just hit Shift and then now I just have
this area selected. I'm going to hold down
Shift and resize it. I didn't like it that large. There we go. Then now I
have another coloring page. The look of this
is very different. I did use somewhat of
a thicker blob brush. You could definitely make
it smaller if you want it to look less cartoonish. It just has a different look
than the other ones we made. It's a lot of it depends
on your preference. If you prefer working more in Illustrator or if you
want to work more with your hand drawing
and retain the look of your original drawing like we did using the
Image Trace feature. Since we do have two artboards, I can save this and both pages would appear
in the same PDF. I'll show you that real quick. File, Save a copy, and I'll change
the format to PDF. I still have this preserve Illustrator editing
capabilities unchecked, so that looks good to go. Now we have our document
with two pages, so you could do that
if you were making a full little book or
e-book of coloring pages, you could create them all in one Illustrator document and they would show up in one PDF. In the next lesson, I'll cover how to set up your document for
printing properly.
11. Printing: [MUSIC] Printing should be simple enough but sometimes
it can be a little bit tricky depending on your printer and your printer settings. I have one of my PDFs
open in Adobe Acrobat, and I'm going to
go to File, Print. Then I have this dialogue
box that comes up. Right now it's set to
shrink oversize pages. That means it's going to shrink my document to fit
properly on the page. This looks okay. You can see I can get a little preview in
this box over here. If I click on Fit, it'll do the same thing. It's going to make sure
that it fits on one page. If I click on Actual Size, it actually moves this over. So I want to show you
this example because when I use this actual
size on my printer, it always skews things over to the left and up a little bit. So you can see
that, that border, I know it's hard to tell
here, but is disappearing. The top edge and left edge
disappear off the page. That would happen when I print. Even though actual size
sounds like a good option, we designed this to be 8 by 10. It seems like it should
fit on an 8.5 by 11 paper. I just think that option is
a little bit misleading, so I like to use
this poster option. This is what works best
for me and my printer. So that's usually
what I stick with. It'll save tile scale and
also save this overlap here. We can ignore that area. I'm actually just going
to set that to zero. For me this print set at
a nice accurate size. I know exactly what it's
going to look like. So play around with your printer and your printer settings, and just make that
clear if you are sending this to someone
else for them to print, if you are going to be
selling these coloring pages, you want it to be easy
for your customers. But what I've found is that this poster setting is
what seems to work best for me and getting it to print at the actual 8 by 10 size. So test it out and see
what works for you. [MUSIC]
12. Class Project: Now that you're ready
to start turning your sketches and drawings
into coloring pages, I'd love to see your creations. Upload a photo of your
finished coloring page, or maybe pages under the Class Projects so we can
see what you came up with.
13. Thank You!: Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to see how you use this process to create some
coloring pages of your own. If you get stuck along the way, don't forget to visit the Projects and Resources
tab here on Skillshare and there you'll find
step-by-step instructions on how to digitize
your coloring pages. As a bonus, you can download the coloring page I use
as an example in class. If you want to take this a
little bit further and start selling your coloring
pages as digital prints, check out my other class on Skillshare that's all
about how to sell digital prints on Etsy and you can find that linked
in the class description. To see all my classes, follow me here on Skillshare
and also can be a follow on Instagram to see more of my
art, I'm @shaynasellart. Thank you so much
for joining me today and I'll see you next time. Bye.
Shayna Sell, Illustrator and Creator
