Turn Your Watercolor Florals into Etsy Clip Art that Sells

1. Class Intro: I'm artists. Shelly's Ellen Kristiansson. I'm a surface pattern designer and fine artist who has a special love for watercolor florals. Join me in the sculpture class as I teach you how to turn your watercolor paintings into digital clip art that you can sell on Etsy. In this course, you will learn how to take your watercolor paintings into Photoshopped and turn them into individual P and G files. You will also learn how to create beautiful preview images that will showcase your clip art and sell your product on etc. As well as a mock up wedding invitation to show your customers how they can use their clipper in real life. Finally, you will learn step by step, how to create an etc. Listing with all the relevant titles and key words that were really set your product. 2. Scanning & Cleaning: the first thing we're going to dio. Let's start with the scan of your watercolor floral. I recommend scanning at both right side up and upside down and then merging the two together to help remove some of the water color texture. We'll show you how to do that. Life scanned one of mine right side up, and I've also made another scan upside down, and I've placed the two documents together and photo shop. Go ahead and rotate upside down one, 180 degrees to make it right side up. Then you could fly in the opacity and merger to together. Just get them in the right spot. You can see that it's not blurry anymore. You get it in the right, then change mode to land, and you can see that it helps to get rid of some of that texture. Go ahead emergencies to together. In order to clean up your scan, we're going to play with the levels in the hue saturation. Make a new levels layer so that you don't heard the integrity of the ritual original scan. It was the white balance that will help get rid of the rest of the texture that you don't want your image kind of trouble it on and off. See the desired result. If you feel like you're images getting to light after adjusting the white balance, go ahead and bring the great up just a little bit to help bring back some of a color. If you feel like you're scan didn't turn out as bright or saturated as you want. You can always play with the hue saturation. You can adjust the colors to be a little more vibrant. What's your satisfied with your image? Go ahead, emerged them all down again and then make this background layer layer zero. Now we're going to select color range. You can do sample colors. Just select the white background Well found shift to select some of these areas in the background that weren't exactly white, but a little bit of the watercolor paper texture. Just select around a little bit until it looks like you've gotten all of the white. You can go inside some of your images if you need to, was well, okay, so once you're satisfied with that, I would zoom in and make sure that you're not deleting any parts. They're actually watercolor that you want to keep. It's a God and selector, a lasso tool. The hockey is l make sure that it's not the polygon or the magnetic. Just do the regular lasso tool. Well, then shift when you can add it to the image. Well, actually, hold down Option because the white is selected. So you want to minus watercolor part Whatever you don't want to be deleted will be what use Select. If you accidentally select a part that you do want to be, why you can hold that shift, Just re select in that area, and that will add to the part that will be deleted. Don't be afraid to take your time on this to make sure that you get only the parts selected that you actually want to delete. You can always leave some of the white there as well, because I can act like a highlight. Zoom out and double check. You have all the pieces you want. You might also be pieces on the art birth that did not get selected that you want to delete . So go ahead and select anything outside that you don't want to keep your image once you feel like you have everything I recommend creating a copy of your layer just in case. And then on that copy layer, go ahead until the Alfa selectors parts. Now, if you find the button earlier, you can see what is left. No, you need Teoh. See behind it. Go ahead and add Phil later. A feel layer of white behind your image so that you can see what's going on set of the transparency boxes. No, I didn't get my image exactly. Aligned. It looks like I'm part of this, so I'm just gonna come in on this part where wasn't exactly aligned. And just delete some of that extra copy of information. Okay, to be a little more careful when you're aligning the two pieces before you emerge to make sure that they're exactly lined up. But if you don't, you can always use the clone stamp tool to fix or just go ahead and delete like I am. Use the clone stamp tool in some of these pieces because I don't want to delete them. But you can just hold out. Look on the clone stamp tool and they just hold office like the area you want to clone and then just click on that part. They want to cover up. That should help get rid of any ghost imaging that happened. Now, if you have any unwanted blemishes in your painting, go ahead. Use the Kohnstamm to look at any you could discover those right up takes out some of those dark spots or any little dirty spots from your scanner. Just kind of look and see. Is there any spots that you want to cover up? Don't get too picky. It's OK, tohave imperfections in your image. I would just recommend being a little more careful about one here. Image. I should have zoomed in a little bit more. Makes it easier in the long run to take a little more time to align your image than finitely all these pieces. But I think that will suffice. We will move on to separating our image, so go ahead and save this document. So they say that's a colorful scan. In the next lesson, I will show you how to separate the florals into individual PNG files 3. Saving PNG Files: this lesson. I'm going to walk you step by step through the process of separating your watercolor florals into individual PNG files. So I didn't open a new document. Photo shop. The in inches about 12 by 12 should be sufficient. You can go ahead and leave it up 300 go ahead and leave it at our GP. Because we will be saving these images as RGB when we export them to PNG files. You're going to select this top player. Just do command A. You could select all and then copy it into your new document. Go ahead and get rid of you again. Any little unwanted images? No. You're gonna want to make several copies of this image so that you could make different individual floral pieces. So I want to show you from this first copy, we're going to separate the three flowers into individual PNG's just simply trace around 40 I want to be careful not to get believes. I just want the for all of this one drone your 40 and then control quick and say layer via cut. That will create just a separate image of that for oh, and it's best to name it, so you don't forget what the individual files are. So we'll just call this purple flower, do the same thing reaching that other flowers, we'll zoom in a little bit and make sure that we got Oh, but just that you want go ahead into the same thing. Well, we're be a cut. Actually, we were on the wrong layer, so make sure that you're still on that layer. Copy, then do then cut it again, layer, be a cut. You can see if between these layers off those flowers, no longer there, we turn those off. It'll make it a lot user to save some of these leaves separately as well. So go ahead to make sure that your again on your copy layer select relieve manoeuvres you cut. I usually just like to need these leave one week to Week three and so on. Given clean this one up just a little bit because I had information from the flower still on it. Just go ahead and erase any little parts that you don't want to show up. I'm going to save these two leaves together. These two leaves together behind those players then we can save some of these little buying type of please. Okay, so once you have all those separate pieces, I would group them. Make it easier to know what's what group of leaves and vines. It marks into one folder. Well, we use, then the flop floors. You can group into a flowers folder. Now, before we go any further on this, we want to save or file. So go ahead and save this. That's individual flowers. Then we can go ahead and pull our flowers, just like that whole group. Pull it off to the side a little bit so you can have separate, he says. So now, if you want to clean anything up in these flowers, go ahead. I might get rid of the screen. Mark says It's not next to a leaf. It might look a little strange. Now, go ahead. Use that clone stamp tool near Racer. No. Here it got a little bit skinny. So I am. I just still from some of this flower and try to paint in a little bit more with this red. Just kind of speak it. No. We're going to make a few more floral clusters make sure that you copy these. Let's make a folder that says clusters. What? Copy our quarrels. Flower. Do the cluster folder move. Maybe you want to reflect this one so it doesn't look exactly the same. It was turned into a bit, so it's a little different. It was kind of how you can get away with getting the look that you painted a lot of flowers . But Onley having painted a handful, just play around and tell you like what you're getting. Okay, let's make a purple cluster, make a group, make sure that we get the right. Imagine here. This time heaven turned this. You will resize it just a little bit just to give it a little variety. Make it a little bit smaller. I want this leave to curb a little more. So there's a trick. You can quit this little icon up here. You can move sections of it so they could get that to curve a little bit more. It's kind of a fun trip a little bit. Go out and save this again. I'm sure we'll go ahead and murder purple clusters since with that one, like it's a little bit more variety in the different types of clusters that you have. You can do as many rescues you want. - After you've gotten some finds in there, let's go ahead and place of flowers back in. You go ahead and save that. We have a few different cluster options. Sense of individual files. So now that we've separated all of our individual floral pieces and created our clusters, we're going to export our images as transparent PNG files. Go ahead and turn off all of your layers except for your flowers. We'll go into this folder inter enough everything except for the first flower there. Purple flower. So now that you're on the purple flower layer, go up to file export quick experts PNG. Well, let's make a folder named PNG Tiles and then name each separate P and G is something descriptive. So for this one, we can name it Purple Flower. And then I like to put my name so that they remember that's from my shop when they have saved it to their computer and may want to purchase something for me again, go through all of your layers, turning one on at a time and do the same file. Export. Quick exports, PNG. This will take a little bit of time, so just be patient. They were going to open one more time those individual files to go to the folder where you have all your individual files saved. Go ahead and open them up and I just open them in preview and we're going Teoh quickly crop all of these so that we don't have a big file. Just go ahead and crop and save. Check your size. Make sure that it's at 300 pixels and make sure that it's an appropriate size for what you would want that piece to be. I think this is a little big for one leave, so I'm going to change that. Only 2.5. We'll make this by a little smaller. Continue to make your files an appropriate size, and I'll see you in the next listen 4. Creating Etsy Previews + Wedding Mockup: this third lesson is, my favorite part is where you get to bring your flowers to life by creating preview images of how your product is gonna look on Etsy. Here, you can see finished previews for my bill arose Clip Art set. These are the floral PNG's that we created in the 1st 2 lessons here. I'm going to walk you step by step through the process of creating these beautiful preview images. First, you're going to start by creating three our boards that are 2000 pixels by 1600 pixels. Then you're going to make another art board that is actually an inch is that you can change your measurements two inches. This is going to be a 5.25 by 7.25 inches, and this will be a become a wedding invitation. Once you have your art board set up, you can place your florals into your document by going file place. Find the PM two files that we saved in the previous lesson and pull them into your document . We will arrange these florals on her art board to show what's included in our set. I like to show the main cluster at the bottom and then some of the other clusters to the side, along with all the individual flowers and leaves, so that the customer can see everything that's included in your set. In addition to the PNG files that we stayed in our previous lesson, I've also created a drop header. You can do this by combining multiple instances of the flora clusters into one large cluster to make a beautiful drop header. Once you have these images placed on your our board, you will want to add a title for your collection as well as a description and your logo. I've done that here. I've decided to call this collection Bela Rose. It includes 16 individual floral pieces to large and three small floor clusters, one drop header and then one invitation background, which we will make shortly. Then I've included my logo as well. This is the page that look of your customers, all the information that they need to decide if they want to purchase your set. The first image on this set will be the title page. This will be the page that will really stand out and grab their attention. This is one that you want to make sure stands out from the crowd. Here on the side, you can see I've made a palette of colors that are based on the colors in her floral clusters. This will help me know what colors to use in my preview image. I've decided to use a dark purple for the background because I thought that would really make the colors of the flowers stand out. I've placed two big clusters in each corner, and once again I've done the title. Bela Rose on the description. I'm calling it hand painted watercolor clip art set and again I'm showing my logo. You can play around with different color backgrounds. Maybe you want to just do white. Or maybe you want to do a dark pink or dark green. It just depends on what you find attractive. I think I'll stick with the dark purple. Those are the two main preview images that will show the customers what you're setting tills and the feeling that it gives the next preview image is going to meet be a mock up wedding invitation. The first thing you want to do is actually create the wedding invitation on the five by seven art board that we created. I've decided on my invitation that I want one large closer at the top and then the information on the left side. Of course, I've called the bride Bela Rose, because that's the name of our collection. But you can put it whatever names you like. Once you have your wedding invitation created, go ahead and save it as a PNG. So you want to do export expert has P and G and then click usar boards and you can choose which are reported on by our boat is number three. So you're gonna export that and you can go ahead into a white background. Then you'll be ready to put on your wedding invitation mock up. You can get a free wedding invitation mock up by going to the B hands site that is included in the links of this class. Opened the wedding suite mock up in the photo shop and here we're going to change the color of the envelope as well as place are running invitation on top of the mock up. So go into the envelope folder and double click the color. Go ahead and choose the color that will match your wedding invitation. I've chosen a dark green. Then go into your wedding invitation card. You'll see mine is already placed. But in order to place yours what you want to dio is a double click on your designing here. And this will come up with an area that you can paste your wedding invitation from Illustrator into photo shop. Grab your wedding invitation. Copy, control. See and go to photo shop and command V pastry wedding invitation Place as a smart object. So you can still edit an illustrator because that there is a floral placed in here inside a clipping mask. It's making the imitation size kind of strangely. So just go ahead and size it up to fit the bounding box. Then go ahead and command s to save this, then closed the file and go back to your original, and you will see that it has appeared in your document. Now you're going to save this. Save this as a J peg or a PNG and I like to do my quality at nine. So it's not a huge file. Then go back to Illustrator. We're going to place this image on Earth Last Art board. So go file place. Find your mock up. Place that image. You will have to scale it up. Go ahead and scale it larger, and then you can crop your image to fit. Go ahead and make a rectangular bounding box. Then hold shift and click on the image right. Click and say make clipping mask and that will just place your image inside the rectangle to figure art board. If you want to enlarge the image inside the clipping mask even more selected with the direct selection arrow and then make it a little larger. You want people that haven't really good view of your wedding invitation mark up. Then we're going to add text. I've already out a text of mine, so I will just show my layer so you can see. And that will hide that. I like to show what kind of uses it's good for, so I put weddings, showers, branding and more. Then you might also want to include the terms of use, I say personal and commercial use, and then a little ass tricks with C terms for details. Then again, I add my logo so they'll remember who shop. It's from once you finish all of your preview images. Export them is PNG files. It's a usar boards and I'm going to save range one through two and four. Since my invitation is on arbor three to save those you want to do, a white background medium is fine for the web. Then go to the folder where you have your previews. You could push the space bar to get a good view of your preview, but without opening up, you can see what they all look like. I think they look pretty good. Now join me in the next lesson where I will show you how to upload them to your Etsy shop. 5. List Your Item + Promotion: here you can see my Bela Rose listing with the preview images that we just created, as well as the title and some description information. So what you want to do in order to create a listing is go to your shop manager listings, and then you can copy one that you have created. Or you can create a new listing so we'll do at a listing. The first thing you want to do is add the preview images that you created, so go to your folder and select your preview images. Once you were preview images have uploaded. You can drag them to put them in the correct order, and you can also justice thumb. Now, if you want it to zoom in more, or you could just leave it, how it waas and it will show the whole thing. Then we want to add a title. You want the title to help your customers find your product when they search for it. So think about keywords that they would search for, so we'll call this one watercolor for flowers. The larose. Then you can separate your information and write something like hand painted quarrels. Wedding invitation quit part Let's remind ourselves, will be a row in the description in the listing we already created. So I wrote Watercolor Flora Clip Art, Bela Rose, elegant Wedding Clip Art perfect for wedding invitations, and I listed the colors coral, lavender, light, yellow and green. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this information and we'll put it in here. You don't have to write it exactly like this, but it is good to be a descriptive so that your product will come up in, uh, when people search for it. Who made it? I did. And then what is it you can say? A finished product? When did you make it? Recently and then category. Go clipper. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out what to put in category. So if you do, too, just to try a couple of things until you feel like it's the right fit. So card making and stationery scrapbooking collage probably do card making and stationery, since it's for wedding invitations. And then here we can put flowers. Don't worry about the length and the width. The primary color. Do purple. Remind ourselves of the colors, maybe purple and quarrel or green And if you don't want to have the colors, you don't have Teoh these air just options. You don't have to select everything. You could do the automatic renewal and then it's a digital items to make sure that you select that, then in the description, we're going to be as detailed as possible so our customers know what they're actually getting. It's very important that you have a good description. Otherwise people might get confused on what you're offering. They might think that you're actually offering a wedding invitation when really you're just offering the clip art for it. I will copy this, and then we will talk about it one by one. Create stunning wedding invitations with this hand painted watercolor flora clip art Bela Rose and I get I listed the colors. This kind of gets to their heart strings. So you want to say something that helps him understand how they will use it in their life. Then this is the part that you want to be very detailed on what you get. 16 individual floral pieces to large floral clusters, three small floor clusters, one drop header and then one invitation background. I put it includes 1/4 inch, believes for printing and does not include text. That's really important so that they know it does not actually include the wedding invitation. It's just the background. Then I put the format P and G with transparent background and then a J Peg invitation background in the Resolution 300 dp I This way. You're just super clear what they're getting. Hopefully, there's no questions. I told them you will receive two ZIP files with this order where the PNG's and J pegs will be included. P and G and J pay can be open with most graphic editing software. Please check yourself for for compatibility for further help on downloads. I refer them to this article. So that's just an article on Etc. That they could go to. And then I love the melts, an instant download and how they will receive the link. And then again in big, bold letters, I put no physical product will be sent with this order. I just want to ensure that they know it's a digital order and then I like to put my terms of use. Um, you don't have to do that, but I just like putting in there just to be safe. So I just put that, um they're going to my terms of use is written in my store policies and then just kind of explain the business license that if they need to use it for commercial, that they'll have to purchase an additional commercial use license. And I put the link for that. Then I like to just reach out to them about my social media channels. Taken tag, actually see Lynn so I can see things that they've created that I put my website as well and then just a copyright, which I need to update Then you don't need to worry about the production partners that is more for printing the section. I'm going to put it in floral clip art, and then the tags are really important. So the tags, you want to make sure our things that they would actually look for when they're trying to search So a good idea in order to know what kind of tags to put is actually just goto, etc. Yourself and start typing in, um, maybe wedding clip art. Does that look like it pulls up something that would be in the category, and maybe you want to get more specific, maybe like wedding floral clipper, and so you can see that that pulls up things that will be the same as what your listing. Sometimes you can't put us long of tags as I would like. So sometimes I break it up like I'll put wedding floral, and then I'll dio laurel with art and wedding clipper. Then it's good to put the colors as well. You have to play with these tags to get all the versions of the words that you want. Let's see what comes up when we put right for all the bark, it was kind of colorful, so bright, colorful might be good keywords. We want to do watercolor, floral do watercolor wedding. So just play around with those keywords until you feel like you have an accurate description of what your item is that people would search for the materials. I just put water color than the price. Sometimes pricing can be hard. Sometimes you don't know what to sell your watercolor collections, and so it's not a bad idea to look around what some other people are selling. Their is for, um, sometimes people have been priced lower than I value. I think that you need a value your work, because it takes time and effort to create it. So I don't like to price mine extremely low. But you also don't want it so high that they won't be by anything from you. So I like Teoh put mine somewhere around. I think that this one is 99 then sometimes I'll put it on sale. So that's always a good thing to Dio. You can price it a little bit higher, and you can always run a sale toe, have better perceived value just to 999 and then skew. You can write the name Bella Rose. Allow restock requests. Um, this doesn't really apply for digital items. We don't need to worry about that, and you don't need a click Personal information, and this is where you need to add the digital files. What you want to do is select some of your PNG files and compress them into a zip folder so we'll slow it down to this leaf cluster. Do right, click and then compress 12 items, and then you'll see the size is about 15.1 megabytes. So then we left off at the leaving cluster. We'll go ahead and right click that compress, and then that was about 14.7 megabytes. So that's great, cause that is just the right size. So Neymar archive folders, the name of your clip art set. Then I put watercolor clip are And then I also like to put the name of my shop at the end so that when they download it, they'll remember whose it is, in case they want to go back to your shop. Okay, so we have our ZIP files right here, and sometimes I actually like, including one of the previews in those up folders just so they remember what you get. So that's actually something you could do to is you could just dio another zip folder with the previews. Then you come here and do upload files and you select your zip folders. They're gonna take a little bit of time, so just go ahead and wait for those to upload. Once those files upload, go ahead and click preview and you can see how your file will look when it is really listed . Then go ahead and publish. And then it will say there's an understandable 2070 for interesting and just hit publish, and then you can go to your shop and see it listed right here. You can click into it just again. Double check that all the information is correct to make sure you don't have any typos and then make sure that you like how the images look and then you are ready to share on your social media tech channels. I like to put on Pinterest because that's a great place that people look for a wedding ideas. So I have a wedding board. I have wedding inspirations, so I like to pin it there, so you just want to pin it. In a few places, Sharing on Facebook shared on instagram. Just get the word out because there are so many products list down, etc. Sometimes you want to run ads so your product will get noticed. So the way that you can do that is just go to the marketing and then you dio if he adds, and what you could do is manager advertise listings. So here's where you can. Whatever is selected will be running ads so I have a couple of products selected. Just make sure that your clip art file is selected. Do update and then you can set your budget so I usually just do a dollar a day. If you really want to advertise heavily, you could do more. But I just like Teoh get mine up there in people's eyes just a little bit so that I get noticed but not necessarily spend a ton of money. Sometimes I'll change my budget just depending on what I'm trying to achieve, so you can play around with that. This is a good way to get your, um, your work noticed. So here you can see on some of the products that I've already been advertising how Maney ad views they have, how many clicks they have, how many orders they have and how much money that's brought in compared to how much money I've spent. So sometimes you will be spending more than you might be earning. But it's not a bad thing just to get your shop noticed, because people will continue to come back and you will eventually earn earn more money from it. So don't be afraid to spend a little bit of money, even if you're not necessarily making it back right away, because it is something that's good for your shop and just to get your product noticed and toe have it stand out from all of the other art that's on, etc. And last of all. One other good way to promote your work is to sign up for some teams. So under your profile, little icon, you can go to your teams. And this is something I did quite a bit when I started. And I think it's the way that I got a lot of cells in the beginning. It's a way that people can like your products so that they'll come up in other customers, searches and feeds. So this is something that's really good to Dio. So you can join a team, and I like to look for teams like promoting or advertising and promotion team promote anything the crazy advertisers team. So this is a really great team to advertise any kind of product. I like to look for posts that have pretty high numbers of post on it. It just means that they're pretty active and involved, so I like to do it. Promote your items here, and what I'll do is go down to the bottom of the chain. And there is a place where you can reply to this post. So what you do is just copy the listing You actually want to copy just before that question mark, because the rest of it is just for your information when you're on your page, this is the part that will come up as a searchable product. So go ahead and copy that. And then it will go back to promote your items and you'll just haze that right there and you reply, and then you will see your product come up in this team feed. And what happens is that people will like your product. It will make it show up for other people. So go ahead and give some good karma back to others. So I like to like other people's post when I'm on this team page just to give some, you know, feed back to them and share some love. You know what goes around, comes around. So yeah, I just get involved in teams. It's a great way to learn things about etc. And how toe. Great better listing is how to make your shop better and haven't advertised. And then also, it's a great way to get people to notice you and give you like so that your items will show up better. So those air the ins and outs of listing a product on etc. Creating relevant titles, descriptions and keywords, and then also doing a little bit of marketing and advertising and getting your product noticed. I hope you enjoy this class, and I would love to see your projects in the project section. I want to see the Clipper that you've created, as well as a title and a description, but also feel free to put your header image and your market putting invitation. Good luck. I can't wait to see your products, en, etc.