Turn your Original Art into Typographic Artwork with Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Learn to turn your artwork into a unique piece of typographic art. Hi, my name is Hattie Linton and I'm a digital artist and ink illustrator based in England. I've been working in art professionally for the last few years, but my interest in digital art started when my dad introduced me to Adobe Photoshop at a very young age. I've now been creating digital art across a wide variety of software for over 20 years. In this class, you'll learn how to digitize your artwork by importing it into Adobe Photoshop so we can turn it into a piece of art. We're also going to be exploring clipping masks and how they work within Adobe Photoshop so you can apply your artwork to a series of other things including shapes and text. This class is best for those who are brand new to Adobe Photoshop or who are just starting out and aren't that familiar with clipping masks yet. Don't worry if you don't have a copy of Adobe Photoshop, there's a link in the class description for a seven-day free trial direct with Adobe. By the end of this class, you'll have learned all the skills needed to digitize your artwork and to apply it altogether to create your own piece of unique typographic art. I cannot wait to see what you create in this class. Let's dive in. 2. The Class Project: [MUSIC] At the end of this class, you'll be creating a unique piece of typographic word art using your own artwork. As we progress through the lessons, we will be importing our chosen artwork into Adobe Photoshop, selecting a suitable and creative font for your word art, and learning how to apply clipping masks and stroke effects to get the most out of your chosen font. Once completed, don't forget to upload your project to the project gallery. In the next lesson, we're going to be covering everything that you need to get started, including which bits of software you need and which tools we'll be using. 3. Getting Started: What You Need: [MUSIC] Before we dive into this class, let's quickly go over everything that you need to get started, complete this class, and take part in your class project. [MUSIC] For this class, I'll be showing you how to apply clipping masks to your artwork using Adobe Photoshop. Whilst you could apply the same effect in other pieces of software, this will be specifically focusing on layers and effects using Adobe Photoshop, so I do recommend you follow along with the same software. Don't forget if you don't have a copy of Adobe Photoshop, there is a link in the class description for a seven-day free trial. [MUSIC] In order to complete your piece of typographic art, we're also going to need one of your own pieces of artwork, whether that's a painting or a drawing, a photo, or digital art. I will show you over this course how to apply that to your text. [MUSIC] If your plan is to use either a photo or a piece of digital art for this class, then your art's also already digitized, and you don't need to worry about finding a way to import it. However, if you want to digitize one of your drawings or paintings or something similar to be able to apply to some art, then we are going to need to digitize that. You can do this by using either a scanner, a phone, or a camera. My personal choice is a scanner. This is my scanner, the one that I use. It's a Canon CanoScan 220. It's super easy to use, and it gives me great results. If however, you don't have a scanner or access to a scanner, don't worry, that's fine. The camera you can find on any smartphone is more than good enough to be able to take a good quality photo to digitize your artwork. Later on in this class, there is a lesson on importing where I will go over all of my personal tips, and tricks on the best way to digitize your artwork, whether you're using a scanner, a phone, or a camera. [MUSIC] 4. Adobe Photoshop Basics: In this lesson, we're going to go over some of the basics in Adobe Photoshop so that you are completely comfortable using the software in the upcoming lessons. If you're more experienced with Adobe Photoshop or you already know your way around the workspace and the tools involved, feel free to skip ahead to the next lesson on clipping. I've been using Adobe Photoshop since I was a little girl. I've always had an interest in art and digital art was fascinating to me. It was this idea that you could create something out of nothing. There were no materials, no canvases or tools or media, just a screen and total creative freedom. In this lesson, I'm going to cover creating a new document, what layers are and how they work, and which tools we're going to be using over the next few lessons so that you're completely comfortable with the software. This is not an in-depth lesson in Adobe Photoshop. There are tons of great courses on everything you would want to know about Adobe Photoshop on Skillshare and I've linked some of my personal favorites in the class description. The last thing to bear in mind, I'm on an iMac and using the most recent version of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop 2022. If you're on a PC or using an older version of software, some aspects may look slightly different to what I'm showing you, but the general concept should remain unchanged. If you have any questions, please add them to the discussion section of the class and I promise I will read every question and every comment and get back to you as fast as I can. When you first open Adobe Photoshop, you get this very handy dashboard view and the big blue button on the top left here is New File. When you click on this, you get this popup which shows loads of different fantastic templates and default sizes, everything you could possibly want for all projects and designs and everything. I myself, I love to create my own sizes for documents depending on what it is I'm working on. In this instance, we're just going to create it as 2,500 pixels across and 1,500 pixels tall. I'll set two pixels an inch. This is my go-to for starting on creating something. You can always increase the canvas size later. Another way to create a new document is to go to File and then New and you get the exact same pop-up where you can pick your sizes again. When you're working in Adobe Photoshop, the workspace is everything that you see on the screen within your Adobe Photoshop window. I'm going to quickly run through the different areas and how I have my settings and how you can have them the same as me right now. Within the workspace, there are three core areas, the left, the right, and the top. On the left we have the toolbar. This shows us all the different tools within Adobe Photoshop as well as a quick summary of what each of them is and how to shortcut to it. At the top of the workspace we have the options. These options up here change based on which tool is selected. I have the Move Tool currently selected and these options are showing. If I change to the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the options change and this goes through every tool in the toolbar. On the right, we have different tool windows. You can customize this any way you like by using the Window menu at the top of the screen and selecting which tools you actually want. There are also workspace options to pick certain workspaces depending on the work you're doing and what Adobe Photoshop recommends you use. You could also reset the workspace you're in changing the settings back to the beginning. If I were to reset essentials now, some things have changed size including the toolbox on the left here, which I can put back to two columns by clicking this double arrow. Obviously in the center of the workspace is your creation. This is the piece of art or artwork that you are currently working on. Layers are very powerful aspects of Adobe Photoshop and you will find something similar, if not called the same layers within other digital art softwares such as Procreate. Layers allow you to organize your work. Literally if you imagine them like the layers of the cake, the ones that are at the top if you are standing up and looking down on your artwork, that's the layer that you're going to see the most off and then the one underneath and so on and so forth. If you move your layers around, you are actually changing what's being seen at the top of the page. In this way, we can actually influence how elements of our digital art interact with each other. When you apply effects on top of that, such as clipping masks, which we're going to go over later, you can then apply even more effects but the order of those layers remains incredibly important. As well as opening images directly into Adobe Photoshop, we can import them using a device that is plugged into a machine such as a scanner or a camera. You can find the dialogue box for importing from a scanner by going over to file and then import and then images from device. Don't worry, I'll be going through the exact steps needed and all the settings that you need to include in our upcoming lesson on importing. There you have it, a quick summary of every aspect of Adobe Photoshop that we're going to be covering to create your final class project. Don't worry, some of this may have gone a little quick. I will be covering each of these in more detail in the upcoming lessons. This was just to give you a brief overview and a bit of a familiarization with the software. [MUSIC] 5. What is Clipping?: [MUSIC] Clipping masks, as the name suggests, is a way to mask your artwork in a certain shape based on what you've chosen to masks. When working with clipping masks in Adobe Photoshop, there's a very simple recipe or template to follow regardless of how you're creating it, what type of artwork you are making. If you look at the layers panel on my window, this is the recipe that you need to follow. Your topmost layer is your artwork. Then this is applying the clipping mask downwards to whatever the layer is directly beneath. In this instance, it's some text saying the word "Hello." Then you have a final layer at the bottom, which is your background. If you follow these steps in any scenario, in any combination, you will be creating beautiful works of art using clipping masks. I'm going to be showing you some examples now of different ways to mask your artwork. If you want to, you can feel free to follow along. In the resources tab of this class, I have provided you with some royalty free images for you to use to practice with. What I'm going to do, I've got forehead that I provided to you as well. We've got a milky way image, some roses, some wall tiles, and clovers. I'm going to drag one of these. With this one, I'm going to drag the roses image into my blank document. Using the Move Tool, I'm just going to drag this up to where my new document is and back down again. Let go. You can see it's created a new layer above my background, so I'll just reposition that bar. In this first example, I'm going to show you how to use clipping masks using shapes. In the toolbar to the left, we have this shape tool here. If you click and "Hold," you can see there is rectangle, ellipse, triangle, polygon line or custom shape tool. For now, let's just draw a rectangle. Going to make the fill any color at all. It's irrelevant because we're going to be using this as a mask. But I am just going to turn off the stroke option here because we're not interested in that at the moment. That's by clicking this "White Square, " With a red line through it, just so there's no line around our shape. I'm just going to draw a big square over our document. There is our box. Over in the Layers panel, if we drag the rectangle underneath our roses layer, the shape is now disappeared. Because as I explained previously, the topmost layer is layer that you see. However, we are now going to apply the clipping mask and this is where the magic happens. If you right-click on your first layer and then go to Create Clipping Mask, it's as easy as that. We now have our roses layer interacting with the shape underneath. If I now go back to the Move tool and I select the roses layer, I can now move the roses around to get the bit of the image that I actually wanted to show. Alternatively, if we select the rectangle layer, we can move the rectangle around. We can center it on the page. We can make it stay in a corner. By switching between these two options, we can actually get the perfect layout that we're looking for. I'm now going to show you that exact same technique but using text instead of shape. Again, we're going to go into one of the world's free images that I provided in the example files. In this instance I'm going to use this clovers image. Again I'm going to select the Move tool. We're going to drag this image up and then back down again onto our new document. It going to sit back nicely in the middle. This time we're going to type a word out. So I'm going to select a font here. In this case, I'm going to use impact because these are clovers. That's quite lucky. I'm going to just write out the word lucky. Using the Move tool again, I can now drag this to the center of the image. Just like we did last time, we're going to drag the text layer under the image layer. Again, we now cannot see the text. We can only see the image because that is our top-most layer. Exactly the same as last time, we're going to right-click create clipping mask. There we go. You can see exactly how we're going to be creating our unique piece of typographic words out because that's exactly what this is. In a later lesson, I'm going to be showing you how to make the most out of these settings to really make your letters pop. In our next lesson I'm going to be covering how to digitize your artwork. We're going to be doing this by using either a camera or scanner. But if your artwork's already digitized, such as a photo or a piece of digital art, feel free to jump ahead to the next lesson, finding a Farms. 6. Importing your Artwork: [MUSIC] To be able to turn your artwork into a piece of typographic art, the first thing we need to do is digitize it. If your artwork is already a piece of digital art, or you're already familiar with digitizing artwork, feel free to jump ahead to the next lesson on finding a font. In this lesson, I'm going to be digitizing this pattern piece of mine, which I drew using markers. I'm going to be digitizing this using a scanner first. Then I'm going to show you the best way to digitize art using the camera on your phone. At the end of the lesson, I'm also going to be going over some of my own personal tips and tricks for cleaning up digitized artwork so you can get the absolute best out of your colors and your depth and your contrast. [MUSIC] We are here in Adobe Photoshop. I've created a new document and I'm ready to scan in my pattern. In the main menu at the top, I'm clicking on "File", and then "Import", and then "Images from Device". This dialog box now appears, and this will let us run an overview scan to make sure we are happy with our scan before we actually pull it in. I'm going to click on "Overview" right now. [MUSIC] This is my overview scan. It looks good. I'm just checking through these settings here on the right before I click on this Scan button. The resolution to 300 DPI, that's good. That'll give us a nice big image to work with. The size is A4 because we're using an A4 scanner and it's the whole piece that we are scanning in. This section is just telling me where the scan is going to get saved. Make sure you know where that is on your computer so we can get to it later. I'm not going to do any image correction or anything because I'm actually going to show you some of my own tips and tricks for cleaning up scanned images to make them really bright and vibrant. All of these settings look good. I'm happy with the image. I'm now going to hit Scan. [MUSIC] There we have it. Our scan is all ready for us in the topmost layer of our new document and ready to be used in our piece of art. [MUSIC] Now if you don't have access to a scanner, that's fine. As I've said before, you can still get a great result using the camera on your phone. I'm going to show you how to do that now. First off, you're going to want a nice bright area space, preferably with a lot of natural daylight and place your artwork flat on a clean and uncluttered surface. Then line up your phone directly above your artwork and make your phone as flat as possible to get a nice clean squared off image. Take several shots to make sure you're happy with them. Then upload them to your computer the way you normally would. Once the photos are on your computer, you can then open them by going to File and then Open and navigating to where your photos are. Whether you chose to scan your artwork or take a photo of it, chances are it's not going to look absolutely perfect. These are my personal tips and tricks for cleaning up your digitized artwork. Brightness and contrast is exactly what it sounds like. You can tweak how bright or dark your work is and increase or decrease the contrast between lights and darks in your piece. To access brightness and contrast, go to Image and then Adjustments and then Brightness Contrast. You can play with these sliders to adjust the brightness and the contrast in your piece until you reach a level that you are happy with. Make sure so you can see in real time that this preview option is ticked. [MUSIC] Levels are a great way for balancing out darks and lights in your piece in a much more precise and involved version of brightness and contrast. To access levels, go to Image, and then Adjustments, and then Levels. You get a graph that looks like this, which is actually quite handy if you want to take some recommendations. You see three triangles at the bottom here. You've got darks, mid tones, and lights. Then normally in any given piece you would have three spikes throughout your pace. If you were to line up your dark level with the middle or around the middle of the leftmost peak and then line up the lights triangle with the rightmost peak, you can keep the mid tones where they are or tweak it slightly to line up with the middle peak, then that would be the most recommended amount of levels. Again, make sure that the preview box is ticked so you can see these effects in real-time. [MUSIC] Finally, one of my favorite tools to play within Adobe Photoshop is hue and saturation. To access hue and saturation, go to Image, and then Adjustments, and then Hue Saturation. Again, you get some sliders up to play with. Saturation is about how bright the colors are. If you knock it all the way to the left, your image becomes grayscale. To the right, makes the colors brighter. The hue setting actually changes the colors in your piece. This is a great tool for making different color variations of your work. [MUSIC] Adobe Photoshop is an incredibly powerful piece of software. While I love these three tips, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to editing your artwork. There are so many other possible settings and ways to explore and play and be creative with your art. I really recommend you having a go and getting familiar with Adobe Photoshop and experimenting some more with the effects available. Once you're done cleaning up your artwork, don't forget to save it as we'll be coming back to this later to create your unique piece of typographic art. [MUSIC] 7. Choosing a Font: [MUSIC] The final step in our preparation is choosing the right font for our piece of typographic artwork. There are loads of different kinds of fonts out there, including serif fonts, sans serif, black letter, handwritten brush, and so much more. There are also lots of places online to get fonts. But one place I would recommend you start looking, that I love to look at is Google fonts. All the fonts are royalty free and you can filter by font type. You can type in your own text to see what it would look like. You can download the font right from the website to install on your computer. One recommendation I would make for our project is to think about the thickness of the font. You don't want a super skinny font because as we mask our font over artwork, you want your artwork to show through. Really skinny font isn't going to show much of that. Try and think of something with a little more weight to it. You can use this thickness filter here on the website to only show you the thicker fonts. Picking a font that suits both you and your artwork is a very personal choice. One of my own favorites is a Google font called Pacifico. I use it in a lot of my projects and it's actually what's on the screen here behind me. I've included a link to it on the Google Fonts website so that you can download it for yourself in the class description. [MUSIC] 8. Creating Your Final Project: At this point, we know how a digitized piece of art work, a font for using our typographic odds, and the copy of Adobe Photoshop open and ready to use. We are now going to go through every single step needed to create your final project piece. Feel free to follow along as we go through each individual step. We're going to create a new document in Adobe Photoshop with these settings. We're going to set the width to 2,500 pixels and the height to 1,500 with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch and we're going to hit "Create". Now we need to open our artwork that we imported in cleaned up earlier from the scanner. We go to File and then Open. We're going to navigate to where our cleaned up images and open it up into Adobe Photoshop. We then need to unlock the layer so that we're able to move it. The easiest way to do this in your layers panel is to double-click the "layer" and then just say, "Okay". This converts it from being a standard background layer to a layer that we can actually move around. Then using the Move tool, we are going to click and drag the design up to our new document and drop it in. From here, we can resize it or reposition it over the document by moving it around. We're going to edit and then free transform. Then whilst holding down Shift, I can keep the proportions, I can then just resize this to fit my Canvas. Then hit "Enter". Now, I'm going to create a new layer by selecting the text tool. Clicking in the center of my pace. I'm just going to write out, for this piece I'm going to write out the name Hattie. So for now we don't really mind so much about the font or the other color or anything. We're just going to size it and put it roughly in the middle, so we can edit it later. Just to check how it looks, we're going to move that text layer underneath our image. It's ready to apply the clipping mask. Now, same as we did in the clipping mask lesson. We are going to right-click on our first layer and go to "Create Clipping Mask". Now we can see that our text and our pattern layer are interacting as expected. So I can move this around to get to a point where I want it to be within the image. Now we can go ahead and format the text, including adding some effects to really make our letters pop. I'm going to start this by changing the font. I'm going to go back to my old favorite Pacifico. There we go. But as you can see, the white background, the yellow from my design, it's not really standing out all too well. I am going to apply some strike effects to this, just to give each of the letters something really strong to contrast with the background. How we do this is we double-click on our text layer over here. You can see mine says Hattie. I double-click, and this brings up a layer style pop-up. There's all these different effects and just the same as with editing your pattern pieces, I recommend you having a play with these and finding something that works for you. In this instance, I'm going to be taking this option here, which is stroke. Can you see how it's created a line outside the letters? The stroke does that. If we click on strike and select it, we can actually change the thickness of the stroke. We can change the color of the stroke. I'm going to keep this on black. I'm actually going to put this in as 10 pixels, just to give it a nice big effect. You can add multiple strokes on top. So if we created another stroke, we made this 120 pixels with another color. You can see now how you've got your original black stroke and then this new gray one that we've added to go farther out again, lots of different ways that you can play with these effects. I'm going to keep just that original stroke for now. Then we have it. One unique piece of typographic art featuring original artwork. 9. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking my class. I really hope you've enjoyed turning your artwork into a unique piece of typographic art. Over this course of this class, we have learned how to import your artwork using a scanner or phone. We've been looking at choosing fun and creative fonts and how to put the two together in Adobe Photoshop using clipping masks. You can apply these skills to create a wide range of designs from personalized products to creative messages, to unique pieces of wall art. Don't forget to upload your project to the project gallery. I can't wait to see what you've created, and thanks again for taking my class.