Transcripts
1. Vintage Hand Lettering on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi,everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer, and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create vintage style, hand lettering layouts, and decoration on your iPad in Procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of the tools and inspiration I use to create my vintage lettering. The Procreate brush set includes five vintage style borders, 18 flourishes, nine vintage textures that you can use to add some grit and scoffs to your background, and six chain brushes to help you space your decorations. I'll also show you how to create your own vintage style brushes, so you can use shapes that fit your personal style. First, we'll look at some resources for finding vintage lettering layouts. I have a ton of resources both online and in print that I want to share with you. We'll talk about how to use the layouts as inspiration without copying directly. Next, we'll use a vintage cigarette ad as inspiration for a lettering layout. I'll share with you my favorite vintage color palettes and a Procreate document that you can adjust to fit your personal style. I'll show you how I plan the layout of the quote and design elements and how I add borders, flourishes, and textures to get the piece of vintage feel. Next, we'll create a quote surrounded by playful vintage borders and flourishes. I'll show you an easy way to type texts on a path so your lettering is perfectly curved around the shape. We'll look at how to create detailed border and flourish stamps, so you can create your own library of vintage elements for your work. Next, we'll create a detailed hand-drawn border around a quote. I'll show you some tricks for overlapping flourish elements and adding a vintage print texture to your piece. What I really love about this process is that we can essentially study with the masters of hand lettering. We can look at vintage ads and posters to see how they combined weathering and decoration to create beautiful compositions. Once you start looking at the inspiration images that I'll share with you, you'll see how easy it is to find tons of vintage patterns, flourishes, color palettes, and layouts to decorate your lettering. All you need to take this class is your iPad and a stylus. I'll be using the Apple pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. We'll also be using the Affinity Designer app for one of the projects. But you don't have to have that app to do the project because I'll show you a workaround in Procreate. Let's get started.
2. Downloads: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to the downloads page in the project section on the skill share app or website. Once you get into that page, you'll find that you need a password to open it, and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see that there is a big list of downloads and resources, and I'll be using Safari as my browser for this. If you have any trouble with these steps, just switch to Safari and that should help. The first download is the procreate brush set. I'm going to click and hold on that, and then click open in a new tab. That'll take just a second to download. Once it's downloaded, you should see open and procreate, or if you don't see that, you can click more and then find procreate on that list. I'll click open in procreate, and then the brushes will show up at the very top of your brush set. It'll open whatever you had opened last and you can just click on the brushes and you should see it there. Everything I reference today, the brushes, the templates, borders, flourishes, and textures are all within this set. If you head back to the downloads page, you'll see that there's a vintage color palette link. I'm going to click and hold on that and click open in a new tab. Once that new tab opens, you should see the option again, open in procreate. Mine is open in designer because I've been using that program. I'm going click "More" and then click "Add" to procreate. Then you can go back to procreate, and you'll see that it's importing the file. It'll take just a minute because it's a large file, and then you can go back to your gallery, you'll see the vintage color palette. It should be at the very top of your gallery. I pulled together some color combinations that I like, but you may find that you like some of these colors and not others. I set this document apps so that if you click the layers panel and then click on one of these colors, you can actually change a color. Let's say, for example, you like this set, but you wish there was a little more variation in terms of the pinks and browns, you can scroll and find that group on the layers list. It's right here, and then just click on the color you want to change. I want to change this rose color. I'm making sure that layer is selected, clicking adjustments, use saturation, brightness, and then I'm just going to drag this little dot around until I get a color I like. Once you're happy with the color, you can just click on the layers panel to set that. Then you can repeat the process with any other color palettes that you want to change. I wanted to give you some starting points here, but obviously, you'll want to make this your own and add in some of your own favorites. Once you've decided on a few color palettes that you like, you can save those in your palate. I'm going to click palettes, and I'm going to click plus, and then click on that new palette. Let's change the name. I'll call that vintage colors, and then click done. Then by default, if you go back to your disk, vintage colors will be the palate that's right here. Now we can just click and hold on a color and then add it to your palate. I would say maybe choose three or four sets that you really like. That'll make it a lot easier when you start making these compositions so that you don't have to think so much about color. You've already laid out all the colors that you like. Back to the downloads page. There are a lot of other resources on this page and I'll be referencing these throughout the class and we'll be using some of them for other projects, but for now, let's go ahead and get started with our first project.
3. Brainstorming and Resources: For this first project, we're going to use a vintage lettering layout as our inspiration. The first step is to choose what to put in the center of your layout. It couldn't be a letter or a word, or you could choose a whole phrase. I have chosen to do a single word because I had the idea to do my nine principles of creativity, so I'm going to do nine different pieces all along these same lines. You could do something like that. You could do your three principles for parenting or cooking, or whatever it is you're passionate about. You could also just choose a quote that you really love and do that. You could do your initials, really anything at all that works for your personal style and skill level. So the first thing I like to do when I'm planning out a lettering project is take out some paper and just brainstorm ideas for my words or phrases. I usually write 10 to 20 ideas down and then circle the ones that I really like. I find it's a lot easier to choose good ideas from a list rather than trying to come up with just one good idea. I'll take just a minute here to write down some ideas for my nine principles. You can see how starting with a big list rather than trying to just come up with nine good ideas is a much better approach because if I'd only done nine words than I would have missed out on a lot of these better ones that I did later on. I really recommend trying this out, even if you're doing a quote, maybe write out a few different versions of the quote and then choose the best one. Now that I have my words planned out, let's go ahead and take a look at a few resources for lettering layouts. Back on the downloads page, you'll see that the third item is Flickr Commons Lettering Images. I'm going to click and hold and click open in a new tab. The Flickr Commons is a place where images that are in the public domain are stored. These have no known copyright restrictions, which means you should be fine to use any of these in your work. But of course we don't just want to copy these directly. We want to use them as inspiration or as learning tools, and then turn it into something new and modern that fits your personal style. So most of these that you'll find are from the 1800s or early 1900s. You're going to see a lot of interesting styles that seem to be becoming popular right now. These vintage flourishes are beautiful so you can get some beautiful ideas for borders, flourishes, types of letters, styles for weaving flourishes in and out of the letters. This is a great resource, and it's also nice because they list the resource so if you click on the image, you'll see they tell you exactly where this is from. This would be something interesting if you posted this online. You could say, "here's my lettering piece. It was inspired by the 1874 Sybelle's Dream," the name of this book. An interesting take on studying lettering, looking at historical styles. If you'd like one of these images, you can click the download button here. Then I always click original because that gets you the largest file. It's a pretty small file, so we're just using this as inspiration, we're not going to use the actual image itself. So 200 pixels wide is going to be fine for our purposes. I'm going to click and hold and then click save image and now that saved to my camera roll. So the next link on the downloads page is the British Library Lettering Images. The Flickr Commons had hundreds of pages of ideas. If you click open in a new tab on British Library, you're going get another few 100 pages. So there's absolutely no limit to the number of inspiration images you can find on these two sources alone. We're even going to look at some more later. If you're just looking for ideas, for flourishes, platforms, borders, this is a great place to go. You have to be inspired when you see these because so many things stand out with each image. These flowers, the thick lines, the way that the plan forums weave in and out of the letters. You can see there are 17 pages of just these types of images. The images that I want to use are these ones on the second page towards the bottom. I really love the look of these sets. They have so much detail and contrast. I'm going to use some of these as inspiration. I'm going to start by saving the one that I like first, so I'll click the download, click original, and then click and hold save image. Now I can have the procreate and start playing around with this image.
4. Backgrounds and Text: I'll start by creating a new file. Create custom size.I'm going to work in inches, 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. That's just the size I like to use.I find it works well for most of my users. But pick any size that works for your project here, I do recommend working at 300 DPI and also working at a size that's as big as or larger than what you'll need. You never want to work at a small size if you think you might need a larger later, because you can't size up, you can only size down. I'll click Create. The first thing I like to do is just make this more of a vintage paper background. I don't really like working on a pure white background. I'm going go to my color palette. I've just pulled together some colors that I like. I use that document that I showed you in the first video to do that. The first color, I'm just going to put down a cream. On that first layer, I'm just going to click one time and then click Fill layer. I'll create a new layer and get a slightly darker color. I just went from a light cream to a slightly darker cream on the color circle. On this new layer I'm going to grab a texture brush. There's a paper texture brash, there is an ink texture, there is some variable or consistent textures. You can just play around with these and see what works best for your style of your piece. I'm going to use the paper texture and put that down one time. One thing to note about these textures, if you don't like how the size of the texture looks, like if you want these little pieces to be smaller or bigger, you can click on that texture one time and click Grain. Grain is going to adjust the size of your texture. This will only adjust the size of your brush, the circle of the layers down the texture. But if you want the actual texture to change, you have to change the scale of the grain. Feel free to do that with any of the texture brushes. I'm going to zoom out and make sure I liked the look of that texture. You can always reduce the opacity by clicking on the layer and clicking the n symbol and then reduce the opacity, that way the texture is just not quite as intense. If you want it more intense, you can swipe left to duplicate it, then you get even more of a paper texture. This just depends on your style obviously. I'm going to create a new layer and I want to go ahead and add in my text. I like to do this first because the text is the most important part of this composition and everything outside of it is just decoration. I want to make sure that my decoration fits perfectly around my text. I'm going to click the tool symbol, click Add text. I'm going to turn on Caps Lock here because I want this to be an all caps. I'm going to type my words, so my word is guess. Then I'll click Edit, Style, and find a font I like over here on the left. You can also play around with making these more bold. I might go with the black version of the Hoefler text. You can play around with the size. You can also play around with the kerning, which means how the letters are spaced apart from each other. If you think you're going to thicken this up a little bit, you probably want to bump up the kerning a little. I'm happy with how this is. I'm just going to bump it up a tiny bit, so I have a little bit of space to thicken my letters. Then I'll also set the color. I'll just click on the color down and, and click the color I like. You can always change the color of that layer too by clicking one time, clicking Edit text, and then click on the color you want to use. Once you're happy with that, you can put it wherever it needs to go on your Canvas. You can see that the magnetics is helping me place it in the very center. I want it to go in the absolute center of this, but I'm going to go ahead and trace it first then worry about centering it later. I almost always trace my fonts because I don't like these hard edges. It looks more like a graphic design piece than a hand lettered piece. What I do is go to the text layer and reduce the opacity a little bit by clicking on that N symbol. Then, on a new layer, I'm going to grab my smooth variable lettering brush and set a size for that. I'm going to go with a size that's small enough to let me do some of these sharp corners. But big enough that it's not going to be too hard to fill these N. I'm just double checking that I'm on a new layer. Then I'm going to go through and just really loosely and quickly trace this. You can see I'm adding these rounded edges. I'm adding some inconsistency. I'm not trying to perfectly trace this letter. That's going to give it more of a handmade feel. Obviously at this point, if you really like lettering by hand, just do this by hand. You don't have to trace the font like I'm doing. You could certainly map out a grid and create your own letters. For this project I'm not going to do that, but that's an option with any of the projects that we do today. If you're really under hand lettering and you're studying topography, then go ahead and create your own letters. Use this as an opportunity to practice your lettering. Now that I have that traced, you can see, if I go between the two options. This is the hand drawn version and this is the font version. It's just a little bit more harsh, whereas this one has a little bit of softness to it. I'm making my original texts layer invisible. Then I want to be sure this is in the very center of the Canvas. I don't just want to gas about putting it in the center. I'm going to click the tool symbol, click Canvas, turn on my drawing guide, click Edit Drawing Guide. Then, you can just suggest the grid size right here, so that you have a perfect square in the center. I'll click Done, and then on my text layer, I'll click the Move tool. That's going to allow me to be sure this is perfectly in the center of my Canvas. Sometimes the magnetics tool can make this difficult. I'm going to turn off magnetics and just take a minute to carefully place this. What I'm doing here is using these blue dots in the center and wind this up with the grid that goes from top to bottom. If you're having trouble seeing your grid, go back to edit drawing guide and just change the color of the grid so that it's something that's a little bit easier for you to see. Let's do a black, so it's easier for you to see on the screen. You can really see how that lines up with the lettering. Just using those dots to line this up in the center.
5. Tracing and Decorating: Now I'm ready to insert my image. I'll click Add, insert a photo, and then find that image, and you can see that it's really small because it's a tiny image. I'm just going to use the move tool here, and I don't have magnetics on, because as you can see, this image is actually not a square, it's a rectangle. But I'm going to turn it into a square as I use this piece as inspiration. I'm just going to increase the size of this, and I'm trying to line it up so that it's basically a square, it's not going to be perfect. It doesn't need to be perfect, because we're not copying this exactly, we're just using it as a framework. Next thing I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer, so it's barely visible and then create a new layer and get the smooth variable lettering brush, and I'll just start by choosing my brush size. The first thing I need to do is make sure that this canvas is set to symmetry, so that I can just work on one corner, and it's repeated in the other four corners. On that new layer, I'm going to click Canvas, edit drawing guide, make sure assisted drawing is on. Click on Symmetry, and then I'm going to choose the quadrant symmetry option down here, it shows the four quadrants. Again, you can set the color of your grid to be whatever is easiest for you to see, then click done. On that new layer, I'm going to use my smooth variable lettering brush, and just loosely trace this image as a starting point. I'm going to probably make a lot of changes as I work on this, but this gives you a nice place to start, even if it's just a square with some circles around it. I think it's a lot easier to start from somewhere and then work from that than to try to start from scratch every single time. One thing I do when I create a straight line is, draw the line and then put down two fingers and now, I'll make sure that it's perfectly horizontal. I'm going to do the same thing on the side. Draw a line, two fingers down, and then it's perfectly horizontal. I'm using the variable lettering brush here, because I liked the variation that it creates from thick to thin. But if you don't, then go ahead and maybe use the mono-line brush so that you can get a steady, consistent line. For me for this project, the smooth lettering brush works well. If you find it's hard to see your piece that you're copying at all, just increase the opacity a little bit to make it easier to see. I'll take just a few minutes to continue using this piece as a reference. Sometimes I don't use the straight line tool because I think it actually looks nice sometimes to have a line that's not perfectly straight, so sometimes I'll use that just for the border and then for all the other lines, I'm just free handing everything. If that's difficult for you, then you just need to practice a little bit more, and you'll find that the more you practice, the easier it will be for you to create smooth, consistent lines. Now that this area is all box then with color, I can just do a color drop by dragging and dropping. Then I'm going to just go through with my eraser using the same brush, and just clean up some of these shapes. At this point I've really used all I'm going to use from that historical image. If I increase the opacity here, you can see that there's some really beautiful line work in the center with a very thin brush. I'm going to mimic that, but I'm going to do my own line work, and then I'm going to make some changes to this flourishes, and add in some more decoration. For the purposes of this piece, I don't really need that image anymore, I can just start working from this piece. What I'll do first is start working on some decoration in the center, and I want to get something that's thinner than everything else that I've done so far, but something that's thick enough to stand out, so I think that line thickness is going to be nice. I'll start by just creating some vines, and I'm keeping an eye on where these vines meet. The letters that are in the center, and I'll probably have to go through and adjust some of these meetings spots. But I at least want to make it appear that all the flowers are coming out of the word. I always start with these big main vines and then start adding in some petals, and these are going to be really variable, I'm not trying to make these perfect. In fact, I'm trying to make them imperfect, so they appear more realistic. I'm also going to add some leaves and I'm doing the same thing where I'm trying to make each leaf very different from the one before it. I'm also keeping an eye on how these are meeting up with the symmetry, so I wouldn't want to do something that got too close to the edge like that, or something that just got close. I just think those are a little bit too tight, so I'm going to keep an eye on that as I add all of the flowers, and leaves to this interior space. I do like to zoom out on these often, because I don't want to go too far. I don't want to fill this up so much that it feels like the plants are strangling the letter. I want it to be open and spacious enough, so that it really has a lot of contrast between this thick area, and this thin fine line work. I'm happy with how this interior looks, but now I want to start adding some more decoration to this piece. The first thing I'll do is with that same thickness that I used in the center, I'm just going to add some lines here to decorate these circles, and I use that same thickness, because I want to bring some cohesiveness to this piece. Using this same size line for some decorative elements is a really good way to keep your piece cohesive, and so I'm doing that in the center with those flowers, and then in this outer place with these lines, so your eyes drawn from the inside to the outside, because of the similar size line work. I'm going to do the same thing with these little peaks.
6. Adding Details: I don't really like how this top and bottom was in the original image. So I'm going to totally change how that's laid out. First, I'll get a brush that's the same size as this line. Then I'll just play around with some different options for this. I'm also just going to add some simple linework to this flower. I'm just continuing to go through this piece, and find things that I can alter. I'm just trying to add a lot more detail, and bring out some of the boring areas. For example, there's a lot of solid green here. What if I broke that up with some dots just to give that outer border a little bit more of an interesting feel. Another thing I like to do is play with the letters a little bit. I'll get my eraser with that same brush on a slightly smaller size, and just come through, and add some linework to each of these thicker areas. You can see there's an unlimited number of changes that you could make to this piece. Something you might add is what could go in this little open border space. Something could fit in there. For example, you'll find these chain brushes, and you could use any of those. I'll just grab the circle chain, and then drag that circle chain down an area. Actually let's go back to our assisted layer so that, that repeats. Drag that down, and then hold to get a straight line. Then you can go up and down to get that spaced correctly. That looks good. I'll do the same thing on this area. I think I'll make these circles a tiny bit smaller. You could do the same thing with one of these other chain brushes. Another nice thing you can do with these chain brushes is use them to help you space something correctly. You'll see this piece here, I did a circle border all the way around this piece. With the chain brushes, that's really easy. You just grab your chain brush, and get it to a size you want. I'll turn this to orange so you can really see what I'm doing here. That's a good size. Just let this go down around your decorative elements. We can use it as it is, like that or you can use it as a guide. Go to a new layer. Get a new color. Maybe get your monoline brush or smooth variable brush, and then just circle each of the circles. Then you're going to have a nice outline rather than a solid circle. That's how I created this piece here with this nice even border. If you find that you need a certain shape in one of your chain brushes, then you can just create that shape, and put it in as the shape for one of these brushes. It's a super quick process. Get pure white as your color on a new layer, click "Fill." Create a new layer. Get black as your color, and get whatever brush you want to use, and then you can draw a shape. I'll go to my Tool symbol, Canvas, turn-on Drawing Guide, turn on Symmetry. I'm just going to do vertical symmetry here so that it mirrors left to right. Let's just do with a slightly larger brush, a fan shape. We could even get the eraser, and give that some interesting interior spaces. Once you're happy with that shape, click the "Tool" symbol, click "Share", save it as a JPEG, Save Image. Then we can go to our chain brush. Any of these chain brushes will work. Swipe left, click "Duplicate", click on a "New Brush", go to Source, click "Insert a Photo", and then insert that image that you just created. One important part of making these brushes is making sure that they're spaced correctly. You can see these are all jammed together. That tells you they need to be spaced. I'm going to stroke Setting, and I'm bumping up spacing. You can adjust that on your own brushes, but you can also adjust that on any of the brushes that I created. You'll find that these brushes will work differently depending on how you turn the canvas. If you turn the canvas this way, they go top to bottom. If you turn the canvas this way, they're sideways. If you have trouble with these brushes, turn your canvas or adjust the spacing or put a new shape in. You can see how this type of brushes are really flexible, and great for creating these vintage lettering formats. I also wanted to show you a few other pieces that I did using the same process. You can see I started again by just tracing the border, and then I did something totally different in the center. I made leaves that are coming from the outer edge rather than coming out of the word. Then made a few more changes to the outer border of the composition. Then for this next piece, I really totally changed the composition. I started by tracing the leaves and border, but then I realized that I didn't like those leaves at all, and I tried a few different shapes, and decided to just go with some shapes that are totally my own. Just some flowing leaves that come from the interior, and cover the whole piece with some dots and a botanical feel with some geometric shapes in the border. Then for this last piece, I stuck pretty closely to the original. It had some beautiful patterns and geometric shapes that I really liked. I made a few small changes to the border. Again, I use that chain brush to create that circle border around the word. Then I chose a really thin brush to do this interior pattern and just put some little dots there to create a geometric repeating pattern on the piece. You can see how these pieces are great starting points for a composition. They look beautiful when you combine multiple pieces like this together. I will post these one at a time on Instagram, and maybe write a little caption about each one. Also I reference the original resource. I think people find it interesting when they know what your inspiration was for the decoration around the word.
7. Vintage Layouts: [MUSIC] For this next project, I want to use a vintage cigarette ad as my inspiration, and rather than tracing like we did in the last project, this time we're going to draw by hand. And I'm really going to focus on differentiating between copying and making something your own. Copying is a great way to learn the skill that's shown in the piece. But making it your own is great if you want to share the piece, put it online or put it up for sale, you really want to add some of your personal style and combine that with the layout and decoration that's in the vintage image itself. You can even combine multiple images. Let's say you find a beautiful border on one piece and then maybe some lettering on another piece and you can combine those. Let's start by just taking a look at some inspiration. Back on the Class Resources page, you'll see a vintage lettering Pinterest inspiration board. I'll open that, and you'll see that there are so many incredible vintage ads and magazines, spreads and logos that you can pull elements from for your lettering. You may see something small, just this border could inspire a whole lettering piece. This is also a great place to get color ideas. You might want to do something with a single color like this piece and maybe you just get that one flourish that you like here. Also, vintage stamps are great inspiration. They contain so many beautiful borders, flourishes, and images. You can pull from this page to get ideas for single elements, or maybe even a lettering layout. This is a beautiful layout. You've got that ring, and then you could also have some texts in the center. Here's another beautiful layout. We have some texts on the top and bottom, and then you could have some imagery in the center or these could contain text, maybe some texts on the sides as well. You may even want to incorporate some illustration into your pieces. You could do some circular border on the top and bottom and then add in some illustration element in the center. This is the piece that I'm going to use. I love this layout. There's texts on the top and bottom. There's this beautiful circular piece that highlights some texts in the center. But there's a ton of room for flourishes and a border. This peaceful be my inspiration today, and what you can do is just take a screenshot. Just click your home button and your power button at the same time to take a screenshot and then we'll pull that into procreate for our inspiration drawing.
8. Sketching and Planning: I created this canvas at the exact same size as the last piece. This is 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I want to bring my image up here on the side so I can look at that as I create my drawing. I'm going to go to my photos app and find that image and make sure it's open like this. Then I'll go back to procreate and just slowly swipe up from the bottom to get that little arrow and then swipe up again to get this menu. Then I can grab that photos app and just slowly place it over on the left. Now I can see my photo and my sketch. You can do this option to just have the piece digitally here. But one thing I like to do is print out some inspiration. I really like having these nearby because just with these three pages of images, I could probably make 50 lettering pieces just pulling from some of these ideas, several different boxes. This is the one I'm going to use today. There's so many ideas here that, I just love having these on the wall and being able to just look up while I'm working and just pull something out of there. I just printed these out and I'll be using this image today. I'm just going to have this beside me. I'll go ahead and remove this. The other reason I like to have it printed is because the split screen function will drain your battery much faster than just using procreate. For the purposes of filming this class, I'm going to go ahead and move to the paper version. The first thing I'm going to do is just sketch out the basics of this shape. I'm going to grab my narinder pencil, which is here on the brush set. Just a new layer, I'm going to take just a minute to map out the basics of this layout. I've got a circle and I'm not trying to do this perfectly at all, I'm just getting the basics. I've got a rectangle behind my circle. My circle has a couple of levels and this interior level is solid. Then I've got these nice little boxes on the top and bottom and then a border here on the outer edge and some nice flourishes on the outside. A little border around this rectangle. That just allows me to get a basic layout of this piece and also start thinking about my quote. I'll reduce the opacity of this and then I can go ahead and do my quote on a new layer. If you're having trouble getting ideas for a quote, I created a Pinterest board with short quotes. This is a group board, which means that you can join the board and you can add things to the board. If there's some quotes that you want to add here, you can add them in. There are 36 people so far, but there will probably be a lot more. When you click this link, if you're logged into Pinterest, you'll see the option to join the board. You can just scroll through here and see if there're any quotes that speak to you. There are some positivity quotes, quotes about crafting or sewing or lettering. Choose one from here, or you can always create your own quote. I want to do a quote that is surprising because it'll have some big text in the center that you see first. But then it'll have some small text that's like the secret message that comes out. I'm just going to erase the drawing that's in the center here, so I have plenty of space to write my words. The center here is going to say, "Make something beautiful". Then the hidden smaller text is going to say "Stop trying to make something beautiful just make something". I'm going to get my selection tool, circle that text, click the "Move" tool and I shift that over. That shows me that my box needs to be bigger, so I can go back to my first text and get my pencil and just redraw that box so that it fits all of my text. You can see how the sketching process is really important because this is where you layout everything. This is where you decide how big to make your text, what words you're going to use, what lettering you might want to use. I think what I'm going to do is have a more formal lettering with a lot of serifs here and then a really simple print lettering on the top and bottom. One thing to think about as you're choosing what letters you want to use is contrast. It's nice to have various types of contrast in your work. For example, you might have some chunky text mixed with something thin. Or you might have some really spaced lettering mixed with some really tight lettering. We can contrast uppercase and lowercase lettering, print and script, or something chunky and something more traditional. As you're creating these pieces and mixing two types of fonts, two types of type, you can consider how am I creating contrast between these two types of letters. What I'm going to do is have a decorative serif font here, and then a very simple all caps print font here.
9. Text and Guides: Next step, is to go ahead and add in that font. I'll click the tool symbol and I'm on a new layer, click add, add text. I'm going to get all caps. I like this really simple font called aI nile. I'm going to trace that would make it a lot more rounded. Since I know I'm going to trace it, I want to leave a little bit more space in between the letters just so it's a little bit easier for me to trace around these. I'll go ahead and put that in place, and then I'm going to swipe left and duplicate that layer because I know I want the exact same font and size on this bottom layer. Then I can just click the move tool and put that down here. Now I can just change the actual word. So I'll click one time, edit text, click on my keyboard and delete that and retype it. You can use these little bars here to lengthen the amount of words that fit in that space. I'm going to click the magnetic tool to just move this into the center of the canvas. Again, I'm going to turn on that grid because I really like to see where my true center is as I work on these. I'll turn on my drawing guide, edit drawing guide, turn up the grid size and click done, and then I can really be sure I'm getting this texts in the very center by just lining up those little blue dots with the center line. Now I'm going to repeat the same process, put the text in the Center. For this one I am going to use New Roman on bold and bump up the size a little bit. Make sure it fits within that little circle. I think I'll also bump up the kerning just saw a little bit so that I have plenty of space to work on those letters. The next thing I want to do is start tracing these letters. I'm going to each letter layer and just reduce the opacity so that it's easier for me to trace around these. I'm also going to make my sketch texts layer invisible and my regular sketch layer invisible. So that it's really easy for me to see what I'm doing. Just going to make sure all of these texts layers are in the very center, and then on a new layer, I'm just going to use black as my color for now. I'm probably going to change that later, but I just like to start out with getting the shapes down and then worry about color later. As I mentioned, I just want to add a little bit of rounding to these. I'm really loosely tracing and not worrying so much about making these a little bit wobbly, or off kilter. You can see if you look at these pieces on Pinterest that are on the list, the lettering is not perfect. It's quite variable and a little bit off, different letters won't really match each other perfectly, but that's makes the handmade and unique looking. I'm going to add that in as I use these letters as my guide. Now that I have my text traced, I'm ready to go ahead and start formatting my final layout. I'm going to bring back my original sketch just to remind me how this should look, and then on a new layer, I'm going to start using these guides. These are really helpful for just laying out your format. I'm going to do this with a different color, so it's really easy to see. I'm just going to grab pink. First I'm going to get my square guide and may have to reduce the size of that a little bit so it fits on the canvas. Once I lay that down, I can click the Move tool and then just get it into place. I'm just going to size it to be exactly where I wanted to be on the canvas. Again, I'm keeping in mind those blue dots winding up with my grid. If I click the Move tool, you can see that blue dot is right along migrate here. I'm going to repeat the same process with all the shapes doing each shape on its own layer. I'm going to grab my circle guide, click the move tool, make sure magnetics is on so you don't distort your circle, and then let's put that around the tags and get that in a nice part for this format. I want this box to be the same size on the top and bottom. I'm going to size the box for the bottom, and then I'll just duplicate that layer by swiping left and clicking duplicate, and then turn on magnetics to move that to the top. When you use magnetics, you'll get that little blue line that helps you put it perfectly in the center of the canvas. I'm making those boxes the same size on the top and bottom because I just want to have that nice symmetry to this piece. Once everything looks good you can go ahead and remove your sketch layer and just take a second to take a look at this layout. Because once you commit to this, you have to finish the whole piece. I always take a minute here just to make sure everything spaced well. Like I've noticed there's a lot more space here than there is here. I'm going to select that rectangle and a shift that up a little bit, then I'll go to my text layer, get the selection tool, circle that text and move it up into the correct space in the center of that box. At this point I'm just making some tiny little adjustments. I've got just my text layer and my pink guides here to help me get all of this laid out exactly as I want it to be.
10. Borders and Flourishes: Once you're happy with that, it's time to start adding in some decoration. You could start by sketching all of this out, or you could just go for it. It's totally up to you. Depends on how confident you feel with your drawing skills. I'm just going to go for it, but feel free to start with a sketch if you're feeling a little bit of apprehension when it comes to creating your hand-drawn elements. On a new layer, I'm going to get black as my color and get the smooth variable lettering brush again. Then I'll just set a size for that. I just want to do is then border here. The first thing I need to do is make sure that layer is on symmetry. So I'll go to Canvas, edit drawing guide, symmetry, quadrant, and click "Done", and then I always double check my symmetry to make sure it's right before I zoom in and start drawing. I'm just going to take some time here to create a border. So I'll click and hold you get a straight line, two fingers down to make it perfectly 90 degrees. Same thing here. I'm just going to add this little circle element. So I need to just erase a little bit of that corner. Again, if you're having trouble making certain shapes, there are some shape brushes here, for example, this circle brush. You can make that a small size click it one time. I'm doing this on a new layer. Reduce the opacity, and then go back to your assisted layer, and then you can just trace that circle. Rather than having a solid background like they have here, I'm going to have the hand-drawn elements be solid. I'll go ahead and start drawing in some of these flourishes. I think the key to these is just going quickly. If you draw a flourish quickly, it has a prettier smooth line. Whereas if you try to draw it slowly like this, you're going to see a lot of those little inconsistencies. So what I recommend when you're first starting out is just try to go quickly. Don't worry about if it looks perfect, worry more about getting that movement of a quick line. I'm going to take my time here and create a bunch of flourishes, just looking at this image but not copying it perfectly, just using it as a guide. I'm going to go ahead and draw in my boxes because my flourishes really need to fit perfectly around these boxes. I just want to make sure they're really visible, easy for me to see so that I'm using those as a guide as I create these drawings. Now that I have that basic format, I can go ahead and make all of my pink guides invisible. One of the main things I want to do here is be sure that I'm using a lot of variation. For example here, I'm going to do a thick border, and then inside it, I'm going to do a thinner border. I'm constantly thinking about variation as I create these pieces. The actual image I'm using doesn't have that double border, but I just think it would look nice so I'm going to add that in. Just like we did on the first piece, we're using this as inspiration, we're using the layout and some other flourishes, but I'm not copying it directly. I don't want someone to look at it and think, "Oh, I've seen that vintage cigarette ad." I want them to think, "That reminds me of a lot of vintage images that I've seen." Because I've got that symmetry tool on, it's repeating it down here. I'm going to repeat that same process of adding variation with my circle. I also want to add in an inner circle for a border here. So I'm going to go back to my circle guide, click that one time, and then make sure magnetics is on, reduce the size of that, and get that in place using the guides. I turn on magnetics when I'm resizing and I turn it off when I'm lining up the shape with the guides. Because I did a thicker border on the outside, I'm doing a thinner one on the inside. I really liked these little marks that were along the outside of this border here, but I just wanted to make them a little more prominent, so I made them larger than they were on this piece. I also like this thicker inner border, so I'm going to use that. I'm just going to do that by hand without using the snap guides to make it a straight line. Because I want it to really be loose on the inside there so it's like a hand drawn border, and maybe add in a little bit of variation on the corner here. Then I really like that dot pattern, so I'll get a medium-size brush and just speckle that in. I want to add some flourishes here, and I want these to be really thin. So I'm going to take just a minute to really carefully create some swirls and there's a happy medium between going too fast so that it looks messy and going fast enough so that it looks smooth. So you just have to play around with it and see if your ability and your hand what speed works best. Something we could add in here is a little circle at the end of each of these. I also want to add a little circle border around here and so I need a guide to help me with that. I'm going to make this guide layer a symmetry layer, just like we did the last one, edit drawing guide, quadrant, make sure assisted drawing is on and click "Done". Then I'm going to grab my circle chain and set that to a size I like. That looks good. I'm just going to take a few tries to get this nicely spaced around the circle. I like to zoom out with these, and make sure they look good from a zoomed out level before committing. Sometimes it looks good up close and then you zoom out and it looks totally wrong, so I definitely zoom out like this a lot. I'm happy with that, but I need one more circle here. So I'll just get my selection tool, circle that one circle, drag down three fingers, copy and paste, and then the move tool's automatically selected and I can just put that in place. I'll do the same thing on this side. I have to make sure I go back to that guide layer. We can leave it like this, as solid circles or I could reduce the opacity of that, go back to my drawing layer, get my smooth variable lettering brush, and circle each of these. Then you can turn off that solid layer on and off and see which one looks better. I do this a lot, turning on and off layers to see if you like the piece one way or another way. I like the solid, so I'm going to stick with that. Now that I have that basic layout taken care of, I can start working on my flourishes without worrying about encroaching on any of my most important design elements, which is the text. I'm going to come through here and using this space as a guide for how close my elements can be, I'm just going to take my time here to draw all of these little curves. Then I usually grab my eraser with some of these and just add in these little dots that you see on the flourishes. Then as usual, just zooming out, make sure everything looks good. I'm looking at this curve here and just making sure that I'm following the shapes that I have here. I want to fill this space, this outer space that I have, so I'm using the ideas that they have here, the certain types of swirls that they've created to fill this space. I start by just outlining them all and then I'll go back and fill them with some thicker areas.
11. Color & Detail: I'm getting to the point where color is going to become more important because it's really going to depend on what color I use, how deep I want to go with all of this detail. Because if I'm using a really bright color, I could do a lot more detail without it being overwhelming. Whereas, this black and white, such high contrast, it gets really intense quickly. I want to go ahead and set my colors so that I don't get too out of control with all of my decoration. I've already gone ahead and chosen my colors, and I just did that from the Vintage color palette document that I already showed you. I'm going to do a mustard for my design elements. I'm just going to the layer, I want to change swiping right, to put it into the Alpha Lock state, click on it one time and click, "Fill layer". I need to do that for each of the elements that I want to be that mustard color. I'm going to my text layer, swiping right, clicking one time and clicking "Fill". Now I've got everything in mustard. I'm going to create a new layer below everything else and get this dark blue color, and click on that layer and click "Fill". I'm using this blue mustard contrast, and you can see how this really changes how the design elements appear. Because it has less of a contrast than black and white, so that allows me to add a little bit more funkiness to these decorative elements without getting too overwhelming on the page. I'll take just a few minutes to continue working on these flourishes. I have to be sure to remove that from the Alpha Lock state, so I can draw again. I'm just swiping two fingers right to Alpha Lock the layer. Obviously, you can keep going with this. I could do this process all day and made this piece in incredibly detailed and keep going. But there's also a place that's good to stop. Sometimes you go too far and it just looks too overwhelming. I recommend at this point taking a breather, stepping back, making sure you're not hungry or thirsty and making the decisions, and just really thinking about how this is laid out. For example, I think my text isn't quite lined up properly. I'm going to get my Selection Tool, circle that text and I'm on that text layer and just bump that up a tiny bit, and then I almost feel like this text could be a little bit smaller. I'm clicking the Move Tool and making sure magnetics is selected, bumping that down just a little bit, and then making sure that text is in the very center. Like this piece, I want the text in the center to actually be a cutout of what it currently is. To do that, I need to first create a solid circle in the center. I'll get my circle guide and set the circle to be the size that I need. I'm making sure magnetics is on, so that they don't have stored the proportions of my circle. That looks good. Now I can go to a new layer, and make sure that layer is set to cemetery, edit drawing guide, symmetry, quadrant, and click "Done". Then with that same yellow color with the smooth variable lettering brush, I'm just going to make a solid circle. Click and drag the fill that circle. Now I need to cut my text out of that circle. I'm going to go to my text layer first, so I'm on this text layer. I'm going to click the Selection Tool and circled around that text, draw down three fingers and click "Cut and Paste". I'm cutting it off one layer, pasting it onto a new layer. I want to select this layer and then cut it out of this layer. On my text layer I'm going to click one time and click "Select". That's selecting everything that's drawn on that layer. Then I can make it invisible, and make sure my solid circle layer is selected. Click over here to get rid of that Layers menu, click down three fingers and click "Cut". Now I just cut that text out of my circle, and see you can zoom out and make sure that looks nice. I think that adds a nice bit of contrast. Previously, I was being pulled in a lot of different directions, and now your eyes definitely getting pulled to the center of this. I really like that. One thing I don't like is that there's not a ton of variation in terms of color. I'm going to get wide as my color and I'm going to just be honest circle layer that's already set to assisted cemetery, just get my ink brush, go through and add some medium-sized white dots to seize a little bit of decoration. I'm happy with that, but I do feel like this text is really being hidden. I'm going to go to that layer, where these two lines of text are, swipe right to Alpha Lock them, click one time and click "Fill". Now I have that text on the top and bottom standing out just a little bit more than it was before. I think you can see, if you look at the original and you look at my piece, there are some similarities. But you couldn't necessarily say that I copied this piece directly. There's different colors, there's different shapes. I use their flourishes as inspiration, but I didn't trace them or copy them directly. This is a great way to take inspiration from vintage pieces, even though this isn't the Creative Commons you could freely copied out with no problem. You really want to bring a modern feel to it and make it your own bring your own style into it. This is a really nice way to do that.
12. Texture and Color Versions: One last thing you may want to do to finish this off and give it a little bit more variation, is add in some texture. I'm going to click and hold to get the color of my background, and then create a layer above my background layer. On the color wheel, I'm just going to get a color that's slightly lighter than my background, so I'll just move my pencil up the color circle a tiny bit, and then under this texture brush sat and just choose a texture. I think I'm going to go with the vintage ink fine lines. If you lay those down and you don't like the thickness of the line or how close they are to each other, just click on the Brush, go to Grain and reduce the scale.I want those lines to be just a tiny bit closer to each other, so I'll swipe over the whole Canvas, and then if those are intense enough for you, you can duplicate them. That'll double the intensity. Another thing you can add is a vintage ink texture. Before I do that, I'm going to create a new document because I'm going to have to start merging layers to do this texture, and I want to preserve this document because I may want to go back and play around with it at some point. I want to keep all these separate layers, all separate as they are here. What I'll do is go to my Gallery, click Select, click on the item and click Duplicate. Click the X symbol, to set that, and then on that new document that's been created, I'm going to merge layers together so that the white is one layer, the yellow is another layer, and then there's the background. Then I'm just going to delete everything else, so just go through and get these all organized. Anytime I see something yellow, I'll merge it onto that layer. If you notice something's not on the right layer, for example, here I've noticed that this yellow circle and the white dots are on the same layer, and I want to change that, so I'm going go to that layer, click the Selection tool, go all the way around that circle, swipe down three fingers, cut and paste. I'm cutting that circle off of one layer and pasting it onto a new layer and now I can merge it with this other yellow layer, and then the white is on its own layer. I'm just organizing my layers here and making sure everything is in order for me to do this texture. There's my white text, and my white dots, and we're going to merge those. I'm going to delete all my old texts layers and my sketch layer, so now I've got one layer that has all my yellow, one layer that has all my white, and I've got that background layer below it. On my yellow layer, I'm going to click and hold to get that yellow color tab to get a slightly lighter yellow. Then I'm going to use the vintage ink texture consistent. What I like about this brush is it gives a vintage ink feel. You'll see if you look at some of these prints, especially like this one, you can really see where the ink was pulled off of the paper. I try to mimic that with this brush, I'm going to go to this mustard yellow layer, swipe two fingers, to put it in the alpha state, and then just swipe over it with this texture rash. If that's too intense, you can get a slightly darker color and go again. Just try that a few times to get to a texture level that you're happy with. This is also a great time to start playing around with color versions. On this layer, I can click Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and just start playing around with this color. The original color that you choose doesn't have to be the final color that you end up with, really is just a starting place. You could play around with doing a lot of different color versions. Usually the way that I do that is to set my texture exactly as I want it to be. Click Select, click on the item, click Duplicate, and then this new document will be my first color version. I do that because number one, I like to keep the color version separate so you don't lose any past colors that I liked. Number two, so that I can see the color versions in my gallery because sometimes when it's hard to choose a color, it's nice to look at them all laid out in front of you. Then sometimes that'll help it become clear what color is best. Let's go ahead and call this project finished, and move on to the next one.
13. Border Inspiration: For this next project, the inspiration is going to be a simple border that I found. You'll really see how you can take one border and that can become a whole piece. You don't have to copy the whole layout of a piece, you can just pull one little element. I'll be pulling my border from this book, and there's a link to this in the class downloads and resources page in case you want to take a look or get the book. You could also just pull something from one of the Pinterest images. If you see a beautiful border there, you can grab that and do the same process that we're doing here. If you're looking for a book that has some beautiful examples of vintage topography and graphics, this is a great book. It has so many ideas for borders and fonts, and you'll find all kinds of flourishes, and ideas in this book. This is a great one to get if you're looking for something on paper and some unique things that you can't necessarily find online. I found this border here. This is a really tiny image, but I was looking at this border and realized what beautiful detail it has. I'm going to create a quote that's all based around that border, and I'll turn this into a square format and copy some of these elements and then turn some of them into flourishes as well. I started by taking a picture of that border. I'm going to click "Add", "Insert a photo" and then get that picture. You can see this is a rectangular image, but that doesn't matter because I really only need this one corner to help me make the entire border. I'm just looking at this corner here and making sure that looks right. I'm happy with that. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer, and on a new layer, I'll turn that into a symmetry layer, drawing guide on, edit drawing guide, symmetry, make sure assisted drawing is on. Then I'm going to use the radial symmetry this time. Previously, we used the quadrant symmetry, and now I'm switching to radial because I really only have one little chunk of border that I like and I want that repeated around the whole Canvas. Click "Done" and let's just get black as the color for now, and the smooth variable lettering brush. As usual, I check my symmetry tool first to be sure that setup exactly as I want it to be, and then I'm going to use this little guide that's shooting down the middle to make sure that I have my border in place. I'm turning off magnetics, selecting the "Move" tool, and just suggesting this border to make sure this looks nice on the Canvas. I'm happy with that. On my new assisted layer, I'm going to start drawing this border. As usual, I'm not copying this perfectly, I'm just using it as a guide. The nice thing about this radial option is we're getting this repeated and as we create the rest of this border, it's repeated in the six quadrants, and as we create the rest of this border, it's repeated in all the other areas. I'll continue this same process for the whole piece, and I'm just going to drag and drop to fill that area that I just outlined. Now, that I'm happy with my border, I can remove that image and let's see, really love this border and you think you might do a series of these or you think you just might use this in some other capacity at some point. What I do if I create something like this that I really love is I'll save it as a brush. I'll click "Share", "JPEG", "Save image", and then on any of these border brushes, you can swipe left and click "Duplicate". Click on it one time, click "Source", "Insert a photo", and then choose your border that you just created, and now you have that border saved. Anytime you want to start a lettering piece, you could have this ready. If you don't know what to create, this as a great project. Just go online, find 20 different borders that you'd like and just make some border stamps, so don't even worry about making a final peace. Then maybe make some flourishes using the exact same process. What I might do with the same border is duplicate it, make that first one invisible, click the "Move" tool and upsize this a lot. I think this little flourish would be a perfect brush. I'm going to create a new layer and reduce the opacity of that layer, and on that new layer, I'll set it to symmetry, vertical, so I am just getting a mirror image and then on that new layer, I'm just going to redraw this. You wouldn't just want to use this existing image because we upsized it so much that it's going to be blurry so we really need to redraw this in order to get a clean, smooth image that'll be a beautiful stamp that you could use any of your other projects. Now, I can make that guide layer invisible. Same process: "Share", "JPEG" "Save image" and go to any of these flourish stamps, swipe left, click "Duplicate", "Insert a photo" and choose that image. What I might do is create that border and then create 4-5 flourishes out of that border, and then we have a nice cohesive set of elements that would look really beautiful with a quote. If you decided to get this book, you could do that with so many different elements in this book and what you'll notice is that even comes with a CD because they encourage artists and designers to take elements out of this book and just copy them, use them in their work, and change them, and manipulate them. I really recommend trying that out. If you're just not finding what you need online, this is a great resource.
14. Text on a Path: Now I'm ready to start working on my quote. I've got my border layer ready, on a new layer am going to start sketching out my layout. The first step is to figure out your quote and then figure out how you want it to play around the canvas. I'm just going to guess here, what might be a nice layout. My quote is make whatever makes you excited to get out of bed. I'm just coming up with some shapes here, and using the selection tool to move these pieces around and adjust things as I think it would look good. I just wanted to feel like everything has a space, everything has enough space on the canvas, and because I've got these curved lines and swirls and diagonals and all these odd shapes for my text, I need some help with that to keep them on a straight line. What you can do is just type just like we've done in Procreate previously. And then go to each letter and just adjusted to get it on a curve. One letter at a time, that's an option, but with this many letters, that's going to get a little complicated and it may not be perfectly spaced. What I like to do is use another program for that, and the program is Affinity Designer for iPad, and I'll put a link to this on the class resources and downloads page. I have another class where I go through in detail how I use this program from start to finish. Today, I'm just going to show you the basics, but if you want a more in depth look at Affinity Designer, checkout that class. But for this class we're just going to go straight into creating a document. I'm going to click the plus symbol, click New Document, and then on the left here I need to choose pixels as my size. My lettering pieces 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. 300 times 10 is 3000. My document needs to be 3000 by 3000 pixels. I don't recommend working in inches in this program. I've tried it before and it didn't translate well to procreate, so I recommend sticking with pixels for this program. I have 3000 by 3000 pixels at 300 DPI, and I leave all the other settings the same RGB, and click "Okay", and now I want to place my sketch here because I want to be able to see that image on the canvas as I line up my text. In procreate, I'm just going to click Share, Save Image, so that's saving to my camera roll. I'll go back to Affinity Designer, click on the little menu symbol at the top here. Click "Place Image", import from photos, click on my "Camera Roll", and there's my image. This program asks you to drag, to place an image. I want to drag it a little bit bigger than I need, and then I can just get it into place once it's placed. Quick, the magnetic tool, I want to be sure that's blue, so I don't distort the proportions of this image. Then I'm just going to use my fingers, or you could use your stylist to get this in the place. You want to make sure this is perfectly in place. I'm going click the Transform tool over here and make sure the size that this image is 3000 by 3000 pixels, and make sure that position is 0-0, which means it's perfectly in that corner. If those aren't correct, you can just click on it and enter the correct dimensions, 3000 by 3000, at 0-0. Next time when you go to that layer, click on the menu symbol, and just reduce the opacity of that a little bit because I want to be able to do my text without that being really distracting. Now I'll go back to my layers panel, click plus and click vector layer. I'm going to create a new layer and making sure that I don't do that on my photo layer, it's on a new layer here. Next thing we're going to create a shape. I click my rectangle tool and then click it again to get all of the shape options. I'm going to use the Ellipse and just click and drag to get a shape that's close to how I want this curve to be. Next I'll click the "Move Tool", and just like in Pro-Create, you can use your two fingers to set back. I excellently drew a shape and then I just have two fingers to set back. You can decide here how intense you want that curve. I'm going to stick with this and you can see we get a little green line because we've got the magnetic sign, that green lines going to help us get this perfectly in the center of our canvas, and next I want to just remove the fill from the shape because it's distracting right now. I'm clicking on the color dot here, then I'm going to click on the No Color symbol, and you can do the fill. You can also do the stroke, which is the outline of the shape. That's what I like to do is know fill and no stroke. Because I like to just be able to see my image and I'm just using this blue as a path. Zooming in here so we can see a little bit better. I'm going to click the text tool. The nice thing about this tool is you can turn a path like this into a text path. I'm just going to click on that path one time, and you can see that now I can type and it shows up on that path. The first thing I'll do is set my font, I'll turn cap-locks on here, and then type the word "Make". Now I can use this little green triangle to move this into the center, and I can just drag my finger over that word, highlight it so that I can bump up the size as I work. You can also just click on it and type a number and click "Okay", and again, using that little green triangle to put it in place.
15. Formatting Text: I'm happy with how that turned out. Now I'm going to create a new layer. For each of these pieces of text, I'm always doing this on a new layer. I'm going to get my text tool again. One tricky thing is once you create a path, it's hard to make texts in other areas, what I'll do is just make that path layer invisible, and then go to my new layer, and then it will allow me to click and make my text. I think I'm also going to do all caps for this bottom one, and you can see it preserved the font and size that I use for the top one, so that's why I do this word and this word at the same time because I've already got that font set. I'll click the move tool and put that in place, and then I'll make that one invisible. I find that this program is a little bit easier to do this, if you just work on one layer at a time and keep the others invisible while you're doing that. You can always return them to visibility to check your spacing and sizing later on. On this new layer, I want to create a curved path. You can see this curved path here that I did for the word whatever. I'm going to click my pen tool and click one time then click one more time, and the second click I'm dragging after I click, I don't release immediately, I click and drag. Let me do that again. Now, click one time, click and hold and drag. You see this curve being created here. This is where my text will be typed. I want to make sure that curve is exactly as I want it to be before I release, and then let's do the second curve here in the opposite direction. Again, I'm just clicking and holding. If you're not happy with how that path turned out, click on the node tool here. If you have trouble finding a tool, click the question symbol here, and hold it down and you'll get the menu with all of your tools. I've got the node tool. You can see all these little bars can be adjusted, I can just play around with how that curve should be. I'm happy with that curve. Now I can get my text tool, and click on that curve. Let's choose a new font for this one. I like this text, but I want it to be a little bit bigger, so I'm clicking and dragging across the word, and then just slowly bumping up the text until it curves nicely around that path. You might find that some letters get jumbled up, and what you can do there is just add a space in between any letters that get jumbled up. It's not going to fit on my path at that size, I'm going to make a little bit smaller, and then I can add in those spaces. As you can see, it's just a matter of playing and adjusting. I may shift these around a little bit more and procreate, but I do find that doing it this way is a little bit easier than trying to letter by letter adjust these and procreate. I'm going to repeat the same process for the word excited. I made those invisible, creating a new vector layer, and now I want to do the same thing with this diagonal taxed. Click the pen tool one time, and then click it again. Now I just have a diagonal straight line, click my text tool, click on that line and type my phrase. Now I'm just going to return visibility to all of my text so that I can take just a minute to adjusting. I click my move tool and just take a few minutes to adjust everything. Then, I want to duplicate this layer over here because I want to use that same font over here, so we've got that layer that says bed selected. I'll click the menu and click duplicate, and then move it over here. Then I'm just going to zoom out because I want to take a minute to be sure that's exactly how I want it to be. I can always make little adjustments and procreate, but I like to have my overall layout set up before I move into procreate, especially when it comes to the things on a path. I want to really take time to make sure my paths look good, and maybe even play around with the move tool to adjust those a little bit, or maybe adjust the size of some of these fonts, but I'm happy with how this looks. I'm going to go ahead and export this. One thing to keep in mind is that you just want to export the text. You don't want to export your photo. You already have your photo on procreate. I want this to be a transparent image that I can just put right on top of my existing drawing. I made my photo invisible. I need to select all of these in order to properly save this. I'm swiping left on each layer. You can see when I do that, then the layer gets highlighted with these blue dots and lines. That means that's all selected. Once that's all selected, you can click the menu over here, and click export. Then over here there's a little setting that says area. On area, I'm going to scroll down to selection without background. Make sure PNG is chosen as your file type. Click share, save image. Now that should be saved to your camera roll. You can open procreate, click add, insert a photo, and then insert that image. One thing you might find is that when you export something from affinity, if it gets squished, there's a little bit of a problem with the image being saved. Go back to that image. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to make a rectangle using the rectangle tool to just cover that whole image. Again, I'm going to check on my transform tool to make sure that's 3,000 by 3,000 at 00. I've got that rectangle selected along with all of the other layers. Same process we did before, I'm just selecting that rectangle this time. What that's doing is changing the shape of the selection to be a square. Same process, export, selection without background, PNG, share, save Image, and then we'll insert into that procreate document. Depending on your image, you may not end up having that same issue, but if you do, that's a quick work around. We can remove our sketch layer now because we have all of our text in place, and you can decide here if you want to adjust anything before you start doing your tracing. I don't really like that V, so I'm gong to get my selection tool and just shift it a little bit. It just didn't look like it was in between those two letters perfectly. Same thing with this X. You just want to take time before you go through the trouble of tracing everything to make sure that everything's lined up just like you want it to be. I'll create a new layer and then choose my color. I'm going to use a blue gray color. Get my smooth variable lettering brash, and I'll make my text layer semi-transparent by just clicking on it and reducing the opacity. Then, I'm just going to go through and take my time to get this text to look exactly as I'd like. As usual, I'm not trying to do this perfectly. In fact, I'm trying to add in some hand-made elements, some really loose lettering and not worrying too much about getting every little curve or every little angle.
16. Flourish Stamps: Now that I've finished tracing my text, I'm ready to start adding some color. I'm going to choose an orange as my background color and let's pull this border up above the background color. I'm going to use a light pink for my border. I'll swipe right to Alpha lock that layer. Click on it one time and click "Fill". Now I want to start adding in a little bit of decoration and some visual interests to this piece. The first is a circle around the words makes you. I'll get my circle guide, tap that one time and then get that in place. Remember to have magnetics on anytime you resize a circle. Once that circle's in place I can get my smooth variable ink pen and just trace around this and it doesn't have to be perfect. It can be really loose, flowing shape here. I'm going to duplicate that layer, click the move tool, then just pinch to use my fingers to make this a tiny bit smaller. I get a ring effect. Merge those two together and make my guide layer invisible. Then on that same layer I can start using just some simple lines to break up the shape as a border. Now I can start adding in some decorative elements. At this point, if you haven't already created some flourish stamps, you could do that now just like we did before. But you could also use some of mine that are in the set or you could make some of your own. I'm just going to use some that are already in my set and just play around with making these interact with the border a little bit. I'll just suggest them with the magnetics tool off so that it's flowing out of the border like that and then I'll duplicate that, flip horizontal and then move it over to this side. I'll repeat that same process in the bottom corner. One note here, you always want to duplicate the bottom layer, which is your original. You never want to duplicate a duplicate because that's going to lead to blurriness. I'll put that in place and I'm going to continue the same process with some other flourishes that I pull from this set. If I use a flourish in one area, I try to use the same one in another area on the same composition. The reason for that is it just adds a little bit more cohesiveness to the piece. If every single thing you create is different than all the others, it's going to be a little overwhelming visually. Same thing with this piece. I'll duplicate it, rotate it and then find a nice spot for it. I'm also going to add in some hand-drawn elements. I'll create a new layer. Let's say for this phrase to get out of, for example, I'll get my smooth variable lettering brush and let's just do a line and I'm holding to make that line straight. I'll click the "Move tool" because I want to move that a little bit further away from the text. Then let's do another line right on top of that. What I might do to add just a little bit more interest to the ends of these is some little dots. All these things I am doing, I learned from copying these vintage images. If you're thinking, I don't know what to do next, I don't know how to break this up, that's a sign that you need to go back and look at some more vintage images and get some ideas. The best option is to pull from a lot of different images. Maybe you're getting a border from one flourish, a font from another, so that when someone looks at your piece, it just has a vintage feel but it has a lot of your own personal style and it has some varied elements to it. You can see how that border really breaks up that text from all the other pieces of text and just gives it a lot more breathing room. I'm going to add a few more flourishes to this piece. You probably get to the point where you just can't really fit in any of the pre-made flourishes and that's a great time to start making some of your own. I'm going to try to make something here that just fits really well within this space that I have laid out. That's one idea of what you can do with these flourishes that I created for you. You can use them as inspiration. You don't have to use them as they are. You could take one like I'm doing here and trace it so that all your flourishes in the document have the same line width. Then you just get a little more cohesiveness between all these flourishes. We could keep going with this, you can add in even more detail. But obviously there is a good place to stop where it's not overwhelming, but it has a lot of character to it. What I like to do at this point is usually just add in some little filler dots to draw the eye around the page. I'd also like to add a little bit more visual interest to the text. I just want to work with the word make right now. I want to move into its own layer. I'm selecting that text layer, click "Freehand selection" and then just circle all the way around the word make, drag down three fingers, cut and paste, cutting it off one layer, pasting it onto another, swipe left and click "Duplicate". Then on that bottom layer, I'm going to get white as my color, swipe two fingers to the right, and then click "Fill". I'm filling that layer with white. Then when I click the move tool, I can get that nice little offset effect. Let's do the same process with the word bed. Another thing I want to do to make that text stand out a little more, is give it a little bit more decoration on the letter itself. I think I'll do a line, a dot, and a line. I'll do that in all the thick places on the word make and the word bed. I also want to add a little bit of texture to this, so I'm going to go on the layer above my background layer and let's try one of these vintage lines stick faded with a slightly lighter orange. I think I can go even lighter with this orange. This gives a nice printed paper look to it. Then I might add a little bit more texture to the text. This is always my last step in the process is to add texture to everything. I'm doing this the same way that we did it with the last one. Alpha locking it, getting a slightly lighter color, and then just sweeping over that text. Because I had the words make and bed on separate layers, I have to do those separately. I'm happy with how that looks. I think I want to add a little bit to the border and flourish. What I need to do is merge all the border and flourish layers onto one. All my pinks on one layer, then I can get a slightly lighter pink and get one of those texture brushes to just dirty it up a little bit. You can see that adds a nice vintage printed effect. If we go back to our gallery and duplicate this, we can do a couple more color versions. I'll click "Select", click on the item, click "Duplicate", open that new one. We could change just a single color or we could change the whole thing. I'm just going to merge everything together on one layer, click Hue, Saturation, Brightness" in the adjustments panel and just play around with that. I like this blue and then reduce the saturation to give it a little bit more of a vintage feel, then you get this nice brown blue effect. I like that piece, maybe also we could do blue green tie piece. Then as usual, I'm going to go back to my gallery, click "Select", click on that item, duplicate it, and then I can create a new color version. I think you can see with this process, there is a never ending amount that you could do and this piece all just started from a single border. Don't feel like you need to have some big, amazing idea to get started. You just need a single border and just start playing around with that, creating some flourishes and just seeing where it leads you. So let's go ahead and move on to our last project.
17. Sketching Your Layout: For this next piece, I'm going to start by creating my frame. I found a really beautiful layout that I want to use so I want to start with that layout and then find a quote that fits within that layout. If your quote is where your starting point is, then obviously you'd start by creating your lettering. But if you're starting point is a frame or a border, then you can create that and find a quote to fit it. It really just depends on how you like to work and what inspires you first. For this next piece, I'm going to work from this ad. I love this border, it has a really nice flowing feel and I love this line work that's outlining the lettering. I'm going to use this as my inspiration but I'll be working in the same side 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. Meaning the black is my color, then on this new layer, I'll get the Narinder Pencil. I'm going to be working in symmetry, so I'll turn on the Drawing Guide, Edit Drawing Guide, Symmetry and then I'll just do vertical symmetry for this piece. I'm looking at this image as I draw, but I'm not trying to perfectly copy it. I'm really just trying to get the general overall shape. I'll take just a few minutes here to do a quick sketch of this image. After that first sketch layer, I'll reduce the opacity of that layer, create a new one above it, and do a more refined layer. This is how I sketch. I create one layer, work at as much as I can and then reduce the opacity of it and start a new layer. Then I just want to be sure I always put that layer in symmetry before I start drawing. So every time I create a new layer, I just needed to double-check that it's symmetrical. You can see when it comes to pieces like this that overlap what I like to do is go ahead and draw the image as it would be if it wasn't overlapping, so that you have the smooth line then you can come through an erase whatever you want to be overlapping. That's one trick for keeping the smooth lines even in you're overlapping areas. I'm happy with that sketch layer, so I'm going to reduce the opacity and do one more sketched layer and again setting that to symmetry. The reason I do this is because as you can see each time I sketch it, it's a little bit more refined. The first one was very just loose and messy, the second one's a little bit more refined, and now this last one is going to be the final sketch before I start doing my inking. On this one, I'm really thinking about exactly what I want this to look like when I do the ink. I'm also trying to not pick my pencil up when I do a single curve. This line here is one single curve, so I'm going to try to do all of that without picking up my pencil. The reason for that is it just makes a smoother line. If you try to do things like that in parts, it's always going to be clear that you did it in parts and I want this to look really smooth. I'll take a few steps at that before committing to a final line. Now, I have my final sketch layer and I'm happy with how that's laid out but I just want to make sure my text is going to look right. I'm going to go ahead and sketch that in. Now I can take this into Affinity Designer, or you could do it in Procreate like we did in the first project and then just shift each letter but I'm going to go ahead and use Affinity Designer to get that nice curve.
18. Inking: So now I'm ready to start doing my inking, and so I've made everything transparent. I'm just going to choose a color here, get my smooth variable lettering pen, and then go through an ink all of these lines. So I'm going to start with the outline. I just want to be sure this is on symmetry before I start, vertical symmetry. Then I'm going to trace all of my border. Now I'm going to create a new layer and do the same process with all of my text. I can go ahead and make my sketch layers invisible because I don't really need those anymore. So now I can make my text layer invisible. So I just have these nice outlines and then a solid piece for that line. I'm going to go ahead and add in my paper layer just so I have a nice background or graphs. So again, I'll just click fill to add a cream to that layer, create a new layer and get a slightly darker color. Then I'm just going to dirty this up a little bit with the, let's do the vintage ink texture consistent. Then I'll reduce the opacity of that a little bit, create another layer and then do it again. So I'm just trying to get a lot of variation in that background just so it's like that spotted vintage paper that you see when you look at these old photographs. I'm going to create a new layer, that's going to be my lined decoration layer. So I'll click on that color to copy it. I'm going to use these vintage inclines fine, and just fill everything with those lines. I'm going to go through in a race where I don't want it to be, but for now I'm just going to fill everything. I want the signs to be a lot darker, so I'm going to duplicate it. Then click the move tool, and up here outside of the Canvas, I'm just going to click once or twice. Each time we click, it's moving that one pixel. So it just thickens that line up a tiny bit. So I'm happy with that level of thickness for now. I can always increase it later, but I think I'll leave it like that for now. So I'm going to grab my eraser tool and set this layer to a symmetry layer, edit drawing guide, vertical symmetry, so that when I erase part of this, it erases both sides. So I'm just going to go through and decide what areas should and shouldn't have these lines, and I'm really just going from my reference image here. They just have a few little highlights that have these vintage print lines shown. So I'll take just a few minutes to erase all that extra stuff. So I'm just going through first and are moving big chunks, and then I'm going to go through later and do the more refined erasing. So I've got the monoline eraser right now, and I'm just showing myself here with these little marks where I need to erase because once you zoom in, things can get confusing. So I'll just show myself here with little big chunks of erasing where I should be removing these fine lines. So I'll take just a few more minutes to clean all this up. Now I want to remove the lines just behind the tags. So I need to turn off the symmetry feature. I'm going to go to edit drawing guide, turn off assisted drying, click "Done", and now I can go in with the eraser and just remove all those lines from my letters. One way that you could do this a little bit faster, rather than doing this by hand, you could use the texts layer that we made in affinity to cut out the line's layer. So the first thing I would need to do is click on that layer one time and click "Select". So I'm selecting that text layer. Now I need to go to my line's layer. Click once to get rid of that layers panel. Drag down three fingers and click "Cut". So what that's going to do is, cut the lines out of all of those areas where we had our font. So that's just one little trick to speed up your process. So now we've got our texts and some decoration. What I've noticed is that these fonts up here and down here aren't showing up very well. So I'm going to grab my ink, variable lettering brush, and go through and just thicken the right sides. Let's get something slightly larger to add a big chunky thickness to the right sides of these letters. I'm going to zoom out and just make sure that's thick enough. Honestly, I think I could go even a little bit thicker and zoom out and I think that looks good, that really helps us stand out. So I'll continue that same process with all of my letters.
19. Refining and Color Versions: So I think I'm going to remove the lines from the interior here so I can add some more varied decoration. So I'll just go through here and erase these in big chunks. Remember if we turn that on the cemetery, then we only have to do one side. On that same layer, I'm just going to go through and add some of these delicate swirls with a line that's thinner than what I've already been working with. So I like that thickness and I'm just going to try to fill the space that I have. Then when I get to the end of one of these, I'm just going to curve all the way in and turn that into a circle. So I continue the same process, just building off of these swirls, adding swirls and all the different areas and maybe even incorporating some swirls that come out of a straight line. Maybe I can do one straight line here, another straight line below it and then maybe a swirl comes out, of that line like that. I'm really just playing, I don't have a really specific plan. That's the great thing about this feverish style, is you can fill any space with these. You just keep adding swirls and maybe even some leaf shapes and circles and it just fills up the space with nice decoration. So of course you could keep going with this. What I might do at this point is try out a few different colors. By going back to the gallery, click "Select", click on that, and click "Duplicate". Then I can merge all of my blue stuff under a single layer so that I can then try some different color versions. So there are some colors that are hard to get with the hue saturation tool, especially the primary colors, yellow and red. What I would do in that case, if you wanted the red is swipe right to turn that into an alpha locked layer. Make sure red is in your color palette click one time and click fill. Then maybe go to hue saturation brightness and just make some tiny adjustments. Otherwise, it would be really hard to get up here red. I kind of like this red, but I also like the blue color. So I would just sit this point, play around with some different options and maybe even add on a few more flourishes. I think I'm going to add in a little bit more detail into this text right here. Maybe some single thin lines in all the thick places. Let's go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own vintage lettering. If you'd like to this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how do you use Affinity Designer to create seamless repeat patterns, and how to create detailed metallic tiles using the free downloadable brushes I created. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads and resources on my website. If you'd like to get more like the resources you've got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the vintage lettering that you create after you watch this class. So please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You can also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you loved creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work. Check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you've learnt in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
