Transcripts
1. Valentine Inspired Hearts in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Valentine's Day Inspired Hearts in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're having a look at a grab bag of heart-inspired Photoshop techniques. Now you can use these in your own projects. Most of these can be extended to other shapes as well so they're not Valentine's Day only. As you're watching these videos you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started with our Valentine's Day inspiration heart projects.
2. Pt 1 - Create a Heart Custom Shape: The first of our Valentine inspired projects in Photoshop is to create a heart-shaped that we can actually save as a custom shape. I'm going to choose "File" and then "New". I'm going to just create a document that's 800 pixels by 800 pixels in size, and I'll just click "Okay". I'm using a white background because it's going to be easier for you to see what I'm doing. I'm going to the pen tool, I'm going to make sure that the option here is set to path, because right now all I want to do is to create a path. So I'm going to start drawing out my heart, so I'm just going to click and drag to start it. Now, I want this particular point to have a handle in the direction I'm heading in, but I don't want it to have a handle in the direction that I've come from. So I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on a mark, until I say this little angled mouse pointer, and I'm going to drag inwards and just drop that handle right on top of this starting anchor point. Now I'm coming out here, and I'm just going to click and drag to create this part of the heart. I'm going to come down here and my heart's going to be a little bit off center. I'm just going to click here, so it's not directly underneath this point. Now I'm headed out here for the next point. I'm just going around that up a little bit by clicking and dragging, and let's go back to our starting point, and I'm going to click and drag into that point because I definitely do want a handle there. Now I'm going to the direct selection tool or the white arrow tool, and I'm going to click on this point because I want to edit it, and you can see all the other points have got little empty boxes, this one's got a filled box, which tells me that I'm editing it. So I'm just going to reshape my heart, and I can come to any of these points and reshape them, by just dragging on them with this tool, and when I'm happy with the heart shape I've created, I'm going to the past selection tools. I'm just going to select over this path, and then I'm going to edit and I'm going to click here on define custom shape, and I'm just going to call this Heart, and click Okay, and this is now my heart. It's going to appear in the custom shapes list in Photoshop, and we can use it for anything in future, and of course, it's a vector shape, which means that it's going to be able to be scaled to really large sizes. So the fact that we created it quite small is not going to be a problem.
3. Pt 2 - Draw a Dimensional Heart: Our the next heart project is going to be to create a glossy heart and we're going to use the heart shape that we created in the previous video. But if you didn't make one, it's okay, I'm going to show you how you can get one that you can use. I'll choose file and then new. I'm going to make a document that is relatively small, just 800 pixels by 800 pixels and I want it to have a black background. I'll click okay. Now I'm going to the custom shape tool, which shares a toolbar position with the rectangle tool. With the custom shape tool selected, you'll find that your shape is going to be the last shape in the shapes panel. That's the one that you just created. Now, if you want to use one of the shipped heart shapes with Photoshop, you'll see that there's one here and there are a couple here. You want the filled one so you want this one here. If you don't see your heart symbol here, just click on the flyout menu, this little gear menu here, and click shapes and you're going to append those shapes and the shapes, Shapes include these hearts. I don't need to do that because I've already got the hearts. Anyway, I'm going to use the heart that I created. I'm just going to click away from that dialogue. In Photoshop Cs6 and lighter, you can choose a fill and a stroke. So you want a red fill, so just come in here and choose a nice red and you don't want any stroke and also just make sure that you select no fill as your stroke. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll be able to just select the color to use. Now, I'm not happy with that pink color at all. I've got shapes selected here from my drop-down list. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll have three icons here and you want the shape icon. You're just going to click and drag the heart shape. If you want to constrain your heart to the same aspect ratio, the same ratio of width to height as it had when you create it or when it was created, hold the Shift key as you draw out your heart. Otherwise, you'll be distorting the heart slightly from how it was created. But if you draw your own heart, nobody's going to know that you just distorted it, so just make it look the way you want it to look. When I let go the mouse button, it's now filled with my red color. I'm going to the last pallet here because I'm going to apply some effects to this shape to get some dimension in it. I'm going to, firstly, just click away from a shaped tool so I lose the outside edge here. I'm going to the FX icon and I'm going to choose Bevel and Emboss. Now, I'm not sure what settings you're going to have for this because I've been fiddling around with mine and I've lost most of my settings, but I think this is going to be a fair approximation. Firstly, you want an inner bevel. So make sure you select inner bevel and you want it to be smooth, not chisel hard or soft. As far as depth is concerned, you want it to have a reasonable depth, but until you set some of these other settings, you probably won't see the effect that depth is having. For direction, you want it to be up because you want this to be a pillow look to your heart, not sucked in. We're going to dial up the size and you can see that once we start dialing up the size, we are getting an effect. What I'm not liking is where I get these points. I'm going to work between size and depth to try and flatten out these points a little bit and get a smoother look to my heart. It appears that bringing down the depth somewhat and keeping the size up at a reasonable level is giving me a smoother effect for this Bevel and Emboss. Now, highlight is going to be these highlight areas here. You'll want a white or a very light color there and you'll want to just work on the opacity. You don't want to put too much color in at this point because we're going to put some additional color in later on. The highlight mode, will want to be screened because you want to lighten it. Here's the shadow. Well, for the shadow, I'm actually going to choose a sort of darker red and it's set to multiply and the opacity is really low. I don't want it to be very high at all. Now, if I go into contour here, we can adjust the contour. Let me just show you what I did. Just clicked on this contour thing. We can adjust the contour of the bevel. Look what happens when I drag on this curve here. If you're finding it a little bit difficult to get a really smooth look to your heart, you can come in here and just adjust the contour. Then you may want to go back to the basic Bevel and Emboss settings and perhaps dial this up a little bit so you might be able to get a little bit more dimension, a little bit more depth, but without the pointy bits by adjusting your contour. Now, before we leave this dialogue, I want to put a little bit of a darkening effect inside this heart. Now, you might think that that would be a shadow, but there's not actually a shadow that's going to work on the inside of the heart. The drop shadow works on the outside. What we're going to do is we're going to use an inner glow and we're going to customize it to our own needs. Well, you can see that mine's already jumped into what I had already set up when I was working on this class. What I've done is I've set the blend mode to multiply and I've set a dark color. The combination of a dark color and blend mode set to multiply is going to darken the edges of your heart. The default for this is going to be a yellow color and it's going to be screen blend mode. You're going to have to set these settings up here. With opacity, that's how transparent or opaque this effect is and I've got it wound up to a 100 percent opacity. I've got no setting for choke at the moment, but I think in actual fact, if I add a little bit of choke, I might get some interesting effect around the edge here. Size, well, you can experiment with size, but you just want a slight darkening around the edge. For range, you get the ability to push this darkening effect just over to the edges of your shapes. Again, just play around with the settings in this dialogue, looking to get this general darkening of the edge of your heart. When you're done, you can just click okay. This is the heart before the effects. It's just a filled shape. Then with the effects turned on, this is what we've got. We've got this inner glow, which is in fact an inner shadow effect and the Bevel and Emboss, which is giving the shape some dimension. In the next video, we'll come back and put it in some highlights and a little bit of extra shadow for this heart to give us a glossy look.
4. Pt 3 - Add Highlights and Shadows: Now, for us to make this heart look a little bit shiny, it's going to help us if we add some shadows and some highlights. I've already taken the time to make the path, so I'm just going to select the first of the paths that I've made. All I did was I went in with the pen tool and I created a shape just like this. I'm going to add a new layer to my document. I'm going to make a dark red my current color, and with this path selected, I'm going to click here on "Fill the path with the foreground color". So I'm getting this darker shape here. For each of these shadow and highlight layers, I'm going to select soft light as my blend mode, I'm going to dial down the opacity to an appropriate value. Well, I'm not sure. Let's just go to an empty path here and just see what a good value is going to be for this. You want to blend it in a little bit, but not too much. These little shadow elements here will look better still if you blow them, so I'm going to choose "Filter", "Blur", and then "Gaussian Blur". I'm just going to apply about a three-pixel blow, that's going to be a really nice little blow for this. Each of these highlights shadows, I'm going to put on a different layer just for convenience. This is a second shadow. Again, I've got it selected. I'm going to fill this area with my color. I'm going to set it to soft light and a low opacity, I'm going to blur it with the same blur that I used previously. I'm just going to target a non-existent path, so I can just go and have a look at this in situ. Well, this one can take quite a lot of opacity because it's in a darker area of the image. Again, now a new layer, I'm going put in the two highlights that I created, this one that goes in up here, and I'm going to select white as this color here. I'm going to make it my foreground color, I'm on a new layer, I'm going to fill this area with white. While I'm here, let's just go and do the next one as well. There's a highlight over here that we're going to add in as well. Then I can get rid of my paths palette because I don't need that any longer. But again, all of these are just paths that are just made with the pen tool, and for these two, I'm going to select both of them at the same time because you can in Photoshop, and I'm going to set both of them to a soft light blend mode, and I'm thinking around 70 percent works pretty well for the highlight opacity, maybe a little bit less than that. Let's just set the blend mode and the opacity for both layers at once. We're just going to finish this off with a little brushed on style, so I'm going to add a new layer. I'm just making sure that white is my foreground color. I'm going to the brush tool, and I want one of these little star brushes. There's a couple here. This is the one I'm going to use, it's a 50-pixel Starburst-Small brush, and I'm just going to do it on a new layer just in case it needs adjustment afterwards. There we are, we've got our glossy heart.
5. Pt 4 - Heart Shape Bokeh Brush: Our next art inspired project is going to be to create a bokeh or bokeh brush of a heart-shape. So I'm going to choose File and New. I'm going to create a document that is about 800 pixels by 800 pixels in size, it can be any size really and I'm going to make it white background. So I'll just click "Okay." Now, I'm going to the customs shaped tool, I'm going to select it, I'm going to select a heart-shaped now, I drew a more regular heart shape that I'm going to use, but you can use any heart shape. So I'm going to set this to path as we drag out a heart shape because this is going to cover all versions of Photoshop, so I'm just going to drag out my heart. I'm going through the layers palette, I'm going to add a new layer here, and then I'm going to paths palette and I have my work paths showing here. I'm going to select a gray, so I'm clicking on the foreground color here. Now, when you're in this color picker, every one of these little options that you click gives you a different look to your color picker. So if you want your color picker to look like mine, click on H or Q. What I want to do is to select a light gray from this side of the palette. The grays are all going to be down this wall of the color picker when you have H selected, so I'm just going to click "Okay". I'm going to click here to fill this shape with my gray. I don't need this work path any longer, so I'm just going to trash it. So here in my last palette, I have two layers of background white layer and a layer that has this gray heart on it. So now, I'm going to target this layer. I'm going to the FX icon and I'm going to add stroke. I'm going to add a darker gray stroke. So here is my stroke, I want to select Fill color, I want to select a darker gray, but I don't want it to be black and I want it to be a reasonable thickness. If I put it on the outside, I get this nice little pointy bit in my heart. If I put it on the inside, I get a smushed edge to my heart. So you can experiment with inside, outside and center it to see what you like best. I actually think I like the center best. I'm just going to wind up the size to about that size, and then I'll click "Okay." So this is going to be my brush. So I'm going to select this shape, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to choose Rasterize Layer Style and that just gives me a single shape on this layer, it doesn't have a stroke any longer, the stroke is actually built in through this shape. So with this selected, I'm now going to choose Edit and then Define Brush Preset, and I'll click "Okay." Now I can delete this shape. I'm going to fill my document with blacks, so I'm going back to my default colors, going back to my background, let's unlock it by just double-clicking on it or click on the lock to undo it, in some versions of Photoshop, you'll have to drag and drop the lock into this area here and it'll disappear or backspace option delete to fill what was the background layer with the currently selected foreground color. So now, I'm going to the brush tool and in later versions of Photoshop, your brush is going to be selected automatically for you, in earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll find your brush at the very bottom of the brushes palette. So I'm going to size this down quite a bit. I'm going to add a new layer and because this is a bokeh or bokey brush, I want to it paint in a certain way, so I'm going to open up the brushes palette here. I don't want it to paint like a paintbrush, so I want to increase the spacing so I can see the individual hearts. I'm going to also select a color for it. So let's go to a pink color here and right now this is how it's painting, and this is the kind of bokeh or bokey that you get from a lens on a camera where you have a very narrow depth of field and you get these bokeh shapes in the background of your short. Well, this brush is meant to give you that effect. So I've got my pink color here, so that's how my brush is painting. If I go to shape dynamics here and adjust the size jitter, then I can get this to paint at different sizes. If I change the angle jitter, I can get it to paint at different angles. If I want lots and lots of this brush, then I can go to scattering and I can increase the scattering and set it to both axes. Now, my brush paints with the angle and with the change of size, but also scattered over multiple axis. Now, you can also increase the count, but things are going to get pretty crazy pretty quickly there. If that's the effect that you want, that's what you're going to do. Let me just wind that back. Let's just increase the count here and increase the scatter and you can just see how it's going to paint. Now, if you want it to be a little bit more transparent than it is even now because we made it light gray and mid gray, that's affecting the transparency of the brush or you can also just dial down the opacity so it doesn't paint at full opacity. So there's a rather cute little bokeh or bokey brush that you can create, again, inspired by our Valentine art shapes.
6. Pt 5 - Heart of Hearts: For our final heart-shaped inspired project, we're going to make a heart shape of heart. I'm going to choose File and New and I'm going back to my standard 800 pixel by 800 pixel document. I think we're going to work on black again, so just make it a black one and click "Okay". Now I'm going back to Custom Shape, the heart shape, and grab any one of the hearts that you'd like the shape of. I'm just going to click on this one. You will want to be working with path. It's really important that you're working with a path, and just drag out your heart shape into your document. This is a path, so it's going to exist in the Paths palette, but it doesn't actually exist in the document itself. I'm going to add a new layer here. I'm going to select a color to use. I'm going to my Brush tool because I want to use the brush that I just created. I'm going to open up the Brush panel. I'm going to use some different settings for this one because what I want to do is paint all the way around the edge of this path with my brush. But firstly, my brush is really, really big. You can see how big it is. I want it to be a lot smaller. I may not want it to be scattering at all. Also, I may not want the angle to be changing, so I could change that back and just drag the angle jitter down to zero so that the angle is not altering at all. I can also take out the size jitter. So effectively, what my brush is going to do is just paint in a regular set of hearts. Let's see how we're going to get it to do that. I'm going to the Paths palette. I have my work path here, my heart path selected, and I'm just going to click here on "Stroke path with brush". What we're getting is the brush that we had set up is now being used to stroke this path. You can see that we've got a little bit of overlap in the bottom here. I'm also still working at the 71 percent opacity, so this is the point at which you start sitting on the Control Alt Z key and just wind it back and then go and make your changes. First, I'm going to bring the opacity up to 100 percent. I'm also going to dial down the size a little bit from 31 to 30. I'm going to try that again and see if I get a better result, which I do. Now, at the moment, my hearts are following the shape of this heart but they're all up the right way. If I want them to rotate as they go, I can do that. I'm going to undo this. I'm going back into Shape Dynamics and I'm going to the Angle Jitter and I'm going to set it to direction. What's going to happen now is that the heart is going to rotate as we apply it to this path. I'm going to click here again. You can say that the heart is rotating around, so we're getting a different effect. Now once you've got the heart shape effect that you want, just come in here to the work path and click on "New Path" and that will just get rid of the path and you're left with your heart shapes. Here, we've got a heart shape made up of a heart-shaped bokeh brush. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned a few things about Photoshop that you didn't already know. Hopefully, you've got a few things that you can use for Valentine's Day as well. Now as you're watching this class, you will have seen a prompt to recommend it to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write in just a few words about why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, so I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
