Watercolor Crests: Step by Step Design Process

1. Introduction: I'm Ciarra Claire, a luxury stationary designer based out of Northern Michigan, and this is my latest Skillshare class all about watercolor illustration. I'm a self-taught artist, calligrapher, and letterpress printer, and I learned so much of what I know now from the classes here on Skillshare. I'm very excited to be able to give back to the creative community in a way I didn't even think would be possible only five years ago. I'm going to teach you my entire process for watercolor illustration and design from beginning to end in this class. It's a big class, but don't feel overwhelmed. Feel free to pick up wherever you feel comfortable, and take a break whenever you need to. If you're brand new to watercolor illustration and painting, I'd recommend taking my first class, which is an overview of watercolor and will help you to really feel more comfortable with the medium, painting and color mixing. Those are skills that will be really useful as you dive into this class. I'm really excited to share this knowledge with you because there's a lot of tips and tricks that I've learned along the way that can make a big difference when it comes to watercolor paintings. We are going to discuss the very basics of brainstorming a concept and coming up with a composition. We're going to be designing a watercolor crest in this class, which I think will be really fun because no matter who you are, this project will apply to you and it makes a great gift for a loved one, a piece of art for your home, or a skill that will help you as a stationary designer as well. We'll also discuss taking your initial sketches and transferring them to watercolor paper to create a final pencil reference drawing that you'll then paint with watercolor. We'll also discuss how to digitize your watercolors. We're going to scan the watercolor illustrations, bringing them into our computer, remove the background, and then create a composition digitally with all of our individually painted components. I'm super excited to get started. Our next video, we'll discuss all of the supplies that you need, and there aren't that many, so I think this will be really attainable to everyone. Without further ado, let's jump in. 2. Materials: This class will have two portions.There will be an analogue section, which means using pencils and paper and watercolor and then also a digital section. That is section will require a computer as well as a subscription to Adobe Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, you can try Photoshop for free for 30 days, which I recommend. We'll also need a scanner to scan in your watercolor illustrations. Now I'll share with you the actual artists tools that I use in my studio every day and that you can also find on my website. Now let's discuss the physical tools you'll need for this class. First you'll need at least one pencil. I prefer using two pencils in my sketching process, a harder lead and a softer lead, usually a 2B or a 2F, is what I'll use for my initial sketch and then something like 4B or a 6B for refining my sketches. I really love this set of Faber-Castell pencils. It comes with an eraser as well as the pencil sharpener. That's really all you need for the sketching and you can find these in my shop, along with the paper pads we'll be using and the watercolor paints. For painting, you'll just need a basic set of watercolor paints. I really love this travel set from Winsor and Newton because it comes with a really nicely selected color palette to start from. If you've taken my other watercolor class and watched the videos about color mixing, you'll know that I always like to have a cooler and warmer toned yellow, red, and blue for color mixing. These comes standard this set. It also has two greens, which makes it really easy to start using green's right away without mixing or to be able to start from one of these and adjust it as needed, as well as some neutrals. For starting out, I think this is a really perfect set. It also comes with this travel brush, which is pretty cute. You can store it like this to keep it safe while traveling and it's just a nice basic round brush. That's what I'll be using in this class. If you have brushes at home, that's fine too. I just recommend this. Just a medium-size pointed round brush is going to be your most versatile brush for this watercolor illustration. This also has part of the top that acts as a palette so you can do some color mixing there. But if you feel like you need some more room, you can also use and separate palette. This is a butcher's tray, I believe that I got online from, I think Dick Blick or another art supply store that you can use for two watercolors and mixing. You can also buy a plastic palette or you can just use a small dish that you might have from your kitchen, something that can be thoroughly washed afterwards, but just something small like this works great as well. Then you'll need a couple different kinds of paper. First we have watercolor paper. It can be Sheets or a block. It doesn't really matter and the things that are most important are that it is cotton. Look for something that is cotton, paper or something similar. Something that is around 300 GSM. This one is 280 GSM, or a 140 pounds. This one's great because it's a really affordable, has a nice texture that's not too textured so when we scan it in, we won't get as much of that paper texture to deal with. It also blends really nicely and you can easily tear out the pages. These are some of the sketches that I did. You're getting a peek at what I'm going to paint later. That's what I recommend for watercolor paper. Then you'll also need a sketchpad or sketching paper. If you don't have a sketch pad, this one is my calligraphy and lettering sketchpad, which has really nice smooth paper that I like to use and so that's what I'll be using in this class. But really you can even use computer paper if that's what you have on hand. The last two things you'll need is a container for water. I like using mason jars and some paper towel, and that's it. Once you have the needed items, let's get started. 3. Class Project: Let's talk about your class project. I'm pretty excited about this one. You already probably learned that we'll be painting a watercolor crest. We'll be painting individual items, and then we'll be scanning them and creating the crest digitally. But what I'd really love for you to do in this class is to create your own crest that represents you, like a self portrait in the form of a crest, or a family crest for your family whatever that may look like. We're going to take items that are personal to you and your story. It could be your favorite food, it could be a hobby. If you're married or you have a significant other, maybe there's a place that's special to you. Maybe you have a wedding date, anniversary, a place that you grew up. I want you to really think about things that are personal and meaningful to you and use that to create your custom crest. I'm really excited to see what you guys create. So once you've completed your project, I really hope that you'll share it on Instagram and tag me so that I can see it. My handle is @Sierra Claire, and I'd really love to see what you create. Now I'm going to give you a peek into how I started the process for designing my own custom family crest. 4. Planning: Here's an actual look at what that process looks like. Here's my sketchbook. I started with a list. I wanted to do a family crest for me and my husband, so I knew I wanted to do our initials. I also wanted to have a banner and I thought maybe the banner could say Rouwhorst, which is my last name, or it can have our wedding date on it. Then I wrote down Michigan, we live in the State of Michigan and we really love it here. Then golf, books, an artist, it can be super vague. I just wrote down artist because I'm an artist. Really don't think too hard when you're making these lists. My husband loves golf, I love books. I thought those would be things that would be meaningful to each of us as individuals. Then I put Est 2011, that's our wedding year. I thought that would be cute. Lake Michigan is important to us. Our dog Atlas is really important to us. Then I also wrote down what colors I want to use. This wedding crest is going to look really different from the ones that I do for wedding clients because those are usually really soft wedding colors, but this is something that I want to hang in my house. I'm going to be using black, green, and gold as my primary colors for the illustration because I want it to go with our home decor. I'm going to keep that in mind as I start making design decisions. Then I have three really rough concepts. These illustrations are not pretty, I mean, that's me, that's supposed to be me. It's not good, and that's okay. I really don't want you to take yourself too seriously at this phase. You're really just trying to get ideas on paper and start seeing what ideas work and what ideas don't. First is a sketch of a shield shape and I kind of like the idea of having an X and having different icons in the four corners. I had seen that in a historical reference. Then I like the banner at the bottom with some sort of like greenery. Another idea I had would be to do a golf club and a pencil to represent art and golf for my husband as hobbies and then our initials and the shape of Michigan, which looks like a mitten and a book. That was another idea I thought of. I also thought of doing maybe like a cute little illustration of my husband and I with some greenery as like a wreath and then our date at the top. These were all three very different concepts. I just wanted to see what it would look like. Just a very rough overview. Then I took the components that I liked the most and I transferred those over to a final sketch. Let's look at that. This is my final sketch. You can see it's still not great, but that's okay. I really just wanted to get the ideas on papers that I had something to work from when I'm painting. I liked the idea of having that shield shape. I made it a little bit more rounded and feminine. Then I still use that same X shape from the previous sketch and I liked the banner with our wedding day and then I was going to do some eucalyptus. But I think I'm actually going to do some roses. We'll see once I actually start painting. The roses might be a little bit more challenging, but I think it'll be fun. This is the concept that I have decided to go with for my illustration. I also have my dog and a mitten and so what I'm going to do now is, now that I know that this is what I want my crest to look like, I'm going to paint all of the individual pieces separately. I'm not painting one big crest. I'm going to paint the shape of the shield, then I'll paint a calligraphy pen, then I'll paint a golf club, then I'll paint the banner. I'm going to paint everything individually. But that's how I came up with a final concept for my crest. Now it's your turn. I want you to turn off the video and take a few minutes to do your own brainstorming session and start working through some ideas and concepts for your personal watercolor crest. Start with a list, write down as many things that you can think of, that you could paint, then look for some inspiration, try to figure out what you actually want the crest to look like, and then start putting the ideas together. Start putting together some rough concepts, some rough sketches of things that you might be able to do and then refine it into a concept that we'll be using for painting. 5. Sketching Banner: For our first item, let's start sketching with the banner. This is a nice place to start because it's a pretty simple concept. I start all of my watercolor paintings, almost all of them with a sketch and I refine that sketch into a drawing because I've found that it makes my watercolor illustrations 1000 times better. When I first started out, I used to try to draw everything freehand and it didn't work out so good. For the banner, you start with this nice little S curve. Then you add those curves that go around the back into the front for the tails. One of the keys to getting your banners to look good is to try to avoid using straight lines. When you use curved lines, it gives the illusion of movement. As you're going, try to avoid using straight lines. It just gives it much more dimension and really brings your illustrations to life. I'm using a 2B pencil. It's one of my harder leads. You can also use an 8B or a 2F or a harder pencil, but that's the one that I'm using here. I like a light pencil for my initial sketch. Then once I'm pretty happy with the overall shape, I like to go back over my drawings with a softer pencil. This one is a 4B, and as I'm drawing, I just go back over the things that I had sketched before. But now, I'm really solidifying it with a darker pencil. I like leaving my pencil lines in my watercolor illustrations. It's really not that visible once the illustrations are completed and digitized, but I think it looks clean and it also looks like a real illustration if you look at paintings oftentimes. If you look close enough, you can see the pencil marks. I like that because it makes it look like a real waterfall illustration and not something that was done on an iPad. Here, I'm just adding a little bit more curve to these lines. I think I want to extend this tail a little bit to just give it a little bit more movement and a more whimsical look. I'll go ahead and do the same thing on this side. I'm leaving the tails on the side just a little bit longer and wider because it gives the appearance this end is a little bit closer to the viewer than the other end. Again, nice curved lines. Adding a little bit more movement here. I really want this pencil drawing to be exactly what I want to paint. I'm not super happy with this tail, so I'm going to erase that edge and draw it in again. This is the opportunity for you to make any changes that you need to make. Then I'm going to tap a little bit more movement. I like how it's asymmetrical, but each side matches the other. I think I'm happy with this. Now I'm going to soften these pencil lines. This is a kneaded eraser which I love. It's fun because it's squishy, like stiff patty, which is really nice. But it works well on watercolor paper because it's not very abrasive. So you can just dab the eraser onto the watercolor paper and it will remove some of the graphite lines. It just softens the look of your sketch a little bit. You can also rub it across the surface of the paper, just be really gentle because you don't want to cause damage to the surface of the watercolor paper because it will affect your painting. Then I'm use my regular eraser to erase any of the lines that I don't want to see. I want to make sure that this drawing is really clean. Because once I go to painting, I don't want to have to think about anything but painting. So I want to make sure that the pencil drawing is exactly what I want. Now if you've erased too much, you can go back in with your fine pencil. I'm using my 2B and just slightly sketching back in anything that I feel like the eraser removed too much of. That's it.We're ready to paint. 6. Sketching Flowers: Next, I'm going to share how I create a reference drawing for something a little bit more complicated. So here I have some Pinterest inspiration images. I'm just going to take some screenshots of these so that I can keep them on hand to use as I'm working. I like a variety of images, you can see it here, I have some close-ups of individual flower shapes. I also have sun vintage illustrations, which I just really love the style of. But the point is to get a variety of images to use as a reference so that you're not copying one specific image, and I'm really just using these to study so I can get a better idea of the shapes and the movement, and of the flower shapes and some structure, and things like that so that I can have a really good basis for the illustration, and the sketches that we are going to be doing. Before you do anything more complicated like this, go ahead and do some research. Get some images that you really love. Collect a variety of images. It'll be really helpful to start. I'm going to be using one of my finer pencils this is a 2B. When I first start out laying out my sketch, I really like to start with basic shapes and lines, just getting a really rough idea of where I want everything. I like using a light pencil so that none of them marks are really permanent because all of these will end up being erased eventually, and I'm trying right on the watercolor paper right now. I want to make sure that I'm using really nice light lines and really just putting in basic shapes here. This is how these basics sketches always start. You can see I'm really just figuring out where I want leaves and flowers, and stems and the basic shapes. Once I figured that out, I go back to my references. So now I'm taking a closer look at the individual shapes and details. I'm going to take a look at the individual flower shapes and leaf shapes, and see how they interact with each other. I like to take a look at these close-ups here, and take a note of the details like this has five petals, and just some of those finer details that I want to make sure I capture once I start refining the sketch. I'm going to go in with my softer pencil to 4B, and I'm going to start laying in some of these finer details. So I'm going to start refining the shapes of the flowers and the petals, and placing in some of these more defined shapes. I like to keep in mind the shape of the flower and what direction the flower's facing because that will change where the petals lie and where shadows go. I've worked pretty slowly through this process, really solidifying these finer details. I also like to check back in with my references pretty often. So right now, I'm looking at these flower buds and how they're laid out, and also some of these details. I want some of these details like those little sprigs on the end of the buds and how the leaves are shaped, because I feel like that's pretty important too. So I'll go back and forth between these references and my sketches because I really want to make sure that I'm capturing some of these details in a realistic way. I always like to start with the flowers as the focal point and then add in the leaves and stems afterwards. Since I know generally where they're going to go because of the initial sketch. I think it's a great tip as well to try to make things overlap as much as you can, because it makes it look a little bit more realistic and more three-dimensional. Also, make sure that the leaves and flowers, and stems have nice curves and movement because that will make it look more natural as well. So now I just continue to refine this sketch. I've gotten all my pencil lines in place, but I'm just erasing some of those early sketches or early pencil lines, and then going back in with this 4B pencil, it's again the darker lead and filling in anything that's been erased and just continue to refine as I go. You want to make sure it's nice and sharp for this part, especially since it's a softer lead. The 4B pencils are softer, you'll have to sharpen them pretty often. As I go in, now that those initial sketch lines have been erased, I'm replacing the lines that I want to keep for my painting, but I'm also going to be adding in even more detail than I had before. So last time I was solidifying the shapes of everything and now I'm going to continue to add in some more details. These lines that I'm drawing now are going to be the lines that are going to stay here while I'm painting. I want to make sure that this pencil sketch is nice and refined because these pencil lines are going to guide me as I begin the painting process. This process can take awhile, but just try to enjoy it and be patient because the more careful you are here, the better your painting will turn out. So once you're finished with this, we'll start painting. 7. Painting Basic Techiniques: Before we actually start painting, I'm going to show you some of the techniques that I used to paint the banner. There are two basic techniques for watercolor. One is wet on wet, and the other is wet on dry. Right now I'm showing you wet on wet. I'm just painting little watercolor wash here, you can see that when I put wet paint onto the wet page, it leads into itself and spreads out organically through the water. The water is what's moving the paint around. You can also use a little bit of paper towel. I like to always have paper towel on hand, you can just tear off a little piece hand wanted up and dab it onto the paper. It's a great way to remove a mistake. If you've just made a mistake or if you want to lighten something that you've just put down. It also helps with blending it's something that I use in the banner. Next, I'm going to demonstrate wet on dry. But first, I need to create a little water color blob that you'll see will eventually turn into a banner. I'm going to use the same technique that I used in the banner, but I'm just going to create the basic shape for like half the banner here. You can see that because all of the paint I'm using right now was wet, It just kind of leads into itself but I don't want that. I want clean lines like this. I want a shadow here that's nice and crisp. So in order to do that, I'll have to wait for this to dry completely before I start adding more. All the paint is dry. So we are going to go ahead and add in some finer details. Now the technique that we're using is called wet on dry, we are using wet paint on a dry surface. I'm going ahead and paint in this little triangle here to show a shadow. It's really fun because as you're painting, you can kind of see it come to life. It kind of creates this little 3-D illustration. You want to make sure that the paint underneath is completely dry, otherwise, it will bleed into itself. Now, this corner here, I don't really like how this dried. It looks like the water kind of cool than it's uneven. So I'm going to show you how to fix it. I am just taking a little bit more paint and water, and I'm painting right over it. Now It'll take a little bit more than just painting over it because you can still see that line there, right? So I am blending it out into the dry paint, making sure I don't touch anything I just painted, and I'm adding a little bit more paint and water here. What I'm doing is, I'm essentially loosening up the paint that had already been painted on the paper and softening that line. But I'm also making sure I don't touch the paint that I just painted. Now is able to blend it. You can see here this is the wet on wet technique. That's how you get a nice blended smooth shape and then this is the wet on dry. For our banner I used both. So I use wet on wet here for a nice smooth layer, waited for it to dry, then I added in these dark shadows, and then I use wet on wet for these tails to create a blended shadow. 8. Painting Banner: Now, we're ready to paint, but before we get started, we need to get our paint wet. I really love this little plastic pipette and I will put a link to this in the resources for the class. But if you don't have a pipette, it's no problem. You can just use your paintbrush, you just get it really wet and make sure that you have at least a couple drops of water on each little square of paint. I know there's better name for them than that, but that's the basics of it. You just want to make sure that all of your colors are moist. Now, I'm going to be using a little bit larger brush. It's still a pointed round brush from Princeton and Co. I'll leave a link to that in the resources for this class. But I want a bit larger brush to cover a little bit more area and make it easier to spread the paint around. First, I'm just going to do one layer of paint. I'll mix my color first. I almost never use the colors straight out of the palette. I always like to mix them and tweak them a little bit. If you're new to that concepts, then you should definitely recommend taking my other watercolor class because we go pretty in-depth on the whole color theory and color mixing process. I'm just grabbing some of this golden brown color and I'm putting it over here and then, I want to take some of that orange and yellow out, so I'm going to add a tiny bit of blue. I'm just seeing how much I'm picking up with my paintbrush and adding just a little bit at a time to this mix. The blue is really great because it neutralizes some of those yellows and oranges, so it just makes it more of a subtle color, more natural. As you're moving, you're going to want to be fairly quick because you just don't want any of the illustration to dry. You want to keep it nice and wet and move quickly across the whole piece to get an even layer of paint down. Now, I'm using a little piece of paper towel just to dab up some of the parts that I want to look a little bit lighter and just removing some of that paint in water and then I'll let it dry completely. I allowed that first layer to dry and now, I'm going in to add another layer of wet-on-wet paint. With watercolor, the goal is to just build in layers and be patient. But here, I'm just applying more wet paint and some subtle shading to the areas that I feel need a little bit more depth. Alternate between adding more paint and lifting paint with a paper towel to lighten areas and darken areas as needed. Now that that first layer and second layer are dry, I'm going to add some more shadows and depths. I'm darkening the same paint mixture that I've been using, a little bit of dark brown. I'm using a wet-on-dry technique. For this to work, you really want to make sure that that layer of paint, that's already been laid down, is really dry. I'm going to make sure that there's no moisture left in that paper. Otherwise, you can end up with some bleeding and you're not going to get those crisp lines that you want. Here we have it, our finished banner. You can see some of the different techniques that we used here. We have a nice clean wash here at the top, and we also used some wet-on-wet techniques to get a nice blended effect. We also have some nice clean lines where we used the wet-on-dry. 9. Painting Roses: Now, we are going to start painting these tentacles. Same principles I'm using here will apply to anything that you're painting. First let's start with the flowers. I like to start with one thing that is going to be painted the same way throughout. I'm mixing a blush color. I'm just adding a little bit of a green to this red to tone it down a little bit and make it feel a little bit more natural. As I paint, I want these flowers to be really light. I'm going to be adding a lot of water to this color mixture here, but I like to just mix the colors in my palate and then test them on the side of the painting to make sure that the colors are turning out the way that I want. Once we scan everything in and digitize everything, we won't see these little color swatches on the side so you can play around as much as you need and we can just delete those later. I'm going to start here with the pedals and florals first. I'm really just painting between the lines. That's one of the nice things about using a pencil drawing first is that really I feel like much of the work is done in the drawing stage. Then when it goes to painting, you're really just filling in the lines. It reminds me a lot of coloring when I was a little kid. I'm trying to stay within the lines so you don't want to overlap with anything that will need to be clean. I'm painting a really, really light wash here of just a really pale brush color and just getting a nice even coat to all of the florals. Now that I have mixed my perfect green color and I go in and paint all of the green areas. Something to keep in mind here is that I have waited until all of the flowers are completely dry. To make sure that I can get as close to the brush as possible. Maybe even overlapping a little bit with the green paint without any bleeding. This is a wet on dry technique. I'm just going to continue to move through the painting and giving a nice base layer to all of the greenery. Here is a little tip for you. The tip of your brush, especially with a pointed round brush, is where you're going to get the finest details and then most control. For these leaves that have rough edges, I'm using the tip of the brush. The base of the brush or the heel of the brush is getting give you more smooth lines. It's great for blending and things. But for those details, you really want to use the tip of the brush to get in those little finer bits and points. At this point I've actually done two layers of green. But I didn't want to make you watch that much video content. The second layer I did, I just went over all of the green again with another layer, but I left some empty spaces and some lines on the leaves for some detail. Now I've waited for that dry again and I'm going back in a third time, adding another layer of green to all of the shadows and things that I want a little bit more detail or darkness to. I try to emphasize anything that's overlapping with adding more shadow behind. Once that green paint is dry, I switch back to painting the florals. I like to give everything that first coat of color and then focus on adding the details until I'm happy. I'm pretty happy with how all of the greenery looks. Now I'm going to finish the florals. I'm starting on my first layer of additional color, just continuing to add in some shadows and some details, some lines. Nothing too crazy. Continue to use that paper towel if you feel like the paint is too dark. It's really just a continual process of adding more layers and more details until you're happy with the results. I'll continue to paint the florals and show you the process. Again, I'm essentially doing almost the same thing that I did before. But it's just really important to be patient with the watercolor process because all of these layers add a little bit more depth and realism and detail. If you can be patient and just let them dry and continue to add more details and more shadows. It will improve your paintings so much. This is the third layer of color for the flowers. I'm just going to keep going. Now I'm just going to add those final little yellow details with the stamen and the pollen in the center of the flowers. Then we'll be almost done. Here is my completed wild rose illustration. This will be part of my custom family crest. I cannot wait to see what you guys create as well. 10. Scanning: This video is going to cover my full process for scanning artwork onto my computer, removing backgrounds, and making edit. First things first, I'm going to set up a folder on my desktop, and this folder is going to be where we store all of our files. I like to have three folders inside of the main folder just to keep things organized. I named the large folder watercolor crust, and then I have a folder for the actual finished crest files, the edited artwork, and the raw scans. First I'm going to open up my scanner. I have an Epson perfection B39 scanner. You don't need anything too crazy. We're going to make sure that we are scanning in color. Dpi is the resolution that you're going to be scanning, and you want to make sure you're always scanning, and at least 300 dpi, that's the lowest resolution you want to scan anything in, because that's the resolution that things will be printed in. I always like to scan things little higher depending on what it is. For this I'll do 600 dpi, and then I'm going to scan too, this file over here. I'm going to make sure that all of my scans are going at the same place, into the folder for scans. File type, I'm going to do the TIFF format, T-I-F-F, because I know that this is a pretty high-quality file. I'm not going to do any image correction or anything else, this is all I'm going to do. You're going to select the area that you want to scan. Now, you'll see your artwork in this folder here. I'm going to keep going, and I'm going to scan each piece of artwork that will be part of our crest, and you can see a little time lapse of how that goes. I find it really helpful to use the same settings for each scan, to make sure that all of your artwork is coming in the same way. Here you can see we have two pieces of artwork on one piece of paper, and since I want to be able to manipulate them separately, I'm going to scan them separately. I'll just select one, and then select the other, and you can scan them in at the same time. You can see here it was able to scan both items, but they're separate once you find them in your file of your scans. I have one more icon to scan in, and then I will meet you in the next video, to show you how to remove all of the backgrounds. 11. Digitizing P1: Here we are in Photoshop. I'm going to show you how to edit your art work. You can see some of the things that I had been working on recently here. As soon as you open the app, it's going to look something like this. We're going to click the "Open" button. Then we are going to select from the "Desktop", this "Watercolor Crest" folder, and this folder here that says "Scans". I like to go ahead and open them up all at one time, but I have a pretty big computer so it can handle a lot of files open at once. If your computer is slower, I recommend opening just one file at a time, editing it, saving it, and closing it, and then moving on to the next one. I like to open them all up at once, so that as I am working and saving them, I can pause it off. It helps me to see exactly what I have going on at once. So once you open your files and this is what it's going to look like, I'm going to close out some of the things that I don't need here. Let's just go to "Window", "Workspace" and "Essentials". I'm just going to minimize some of those things over there that I don't need. So let's start with this image here, because this is going to be the most simple one to edit. Then we'll go from there. You can also name all of your scans as you're scanning in the artwork, so that you can see at the top what each item is. I used to do that in the past. Now that I've gotten quicker with this process, I will do that with the edited files. But you're welcome to do that when you're scanning, or after your scanning, so that they can help you to stay organized. But these are all the files up here so you can click through and see the different pieces of artwork that we have. So let's start with this black and white image. I'm going to show you how to remove backgrounds from a black and white image. I'm going to go up to "Image", "Image Rotation". I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise so that it straight. So this right here is your tool bar. It's usually attached to the side over here. But I'm going to move it out a little bit, just so that I can see better because I have a little record button for my screen and it was covering up some the tools. So you can see some of the tools here. I'm going to click the "Magnifying Glass", and zoom in a little bit. So we are going to want to see our "Layers" panel. This will be really important as we're working in Photoshop. If you don't see any of these panels here, you can go to "Window" and we want the "Layers". So you can see this is the layer that we're working on. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to create a new layer called "Levels." This layer is going to control our darks and our lights. We're going to be using this layer, and we're going to create another layer for "Hue and Saturation". So what this does is it controls your color. If I'm editing something that is black and white, I want to make sure it's completely black and white. So I'm going to take the "Saturation" button here, and then bring it all the way to 0. So you can see that it's changed it to a completely grayscale image. If you move it up, see how it shows all of this color. We don't want that. We're going to go back down. Now you can see that there's this "Hue and Saturation" layer above your artworks. Now we're going to click the "Levels" panel. These indicators here are your whites and blacks and your grazer in between. A nice quick way to do this adjustment to make this completely black and white rather than grayscale. Still click this "Black Eyedropper" and click around in the black looking any gray, areas to make sure they're completely black. So now my blacks looks pretty good. I'm going to click the "White Eyedropper" and to select some of the white area near the black, to brighten it. Now that to me, I am pretty happy with. I like that it removed even more of the black so that it's more white-showing. I like that it looks sketchy. But this here looks a little bit rough. So I'm going to go back to the "Black Eyedropper" to select a little bit more of that. Here we go. I think that looks pretty good for the levels. So I'm going to select this level. I'm holding down the "shift" key on my keyboard to select the rest. Then I let go of the "shift" key. I'm going to combine these into one layer by hitting "Command" or "Control", I think, on a PC, "Command E". Now I just combined all of those layers into one. I won't be able to go back and edit any of those layers that were there before. This is now like one flattened layer. Now I'm going to go over here and click on the "Magic Wand". This little tool right here. I'm going to click on the white background. So now it's selected everything that's white. You want to make sure up here that contiguous is not to selected. That way you get all of the white, even inside of the letters or your artwork, whether or not it's connected. Then, I am going to hit "Command" shift "I". Now it's going to select the black rather than the white. I'm going to click this button ring here, which is going to create a layer mask. Now it masked all of the white and we're only seeing the black. A nice way to be able to edit this is to create another layer here, "Solid Color". It really doesn't matter what the color is. That's pretty. Then we're going to drag it underneath this layer so we can see what we're working on. This allows us to see if there's any remaining pieces of the background, that need to be deleted. So here we have these little pencil marks, that I had used when I was sketching. So I'm going to click this mask. Masks are a great way to edit your artwork without actually deleting anything. What you're doing is you're concealing and revealing parts of your artwork, but you're not actually deleting it. So it's a non-destructive way of editing your artwork, which is great because it's really easy to undo things. So I'm going to click on this mask. Then you want to use a "Paint Brush". I'm just going to use a regular old round paintbrush. You want to make sure that these colors over here are completely black and white. So depending on what color you are on, what color your brush is on, I'm on black right here. You can see that it's concealing that little mark there. Now you can easily switch back and forth between your brush being black or white by clicking the "X" key on your keyboard. So now, you can see that white is selected here, and white is going to reveal the artwork. See that? That is revealing what is right here on this layer of the artwork. So I'm going to click "X" on my keyboard and I'm going to conceal that again because I don't want to see that. Now, I'm going to go over here, and do the same with this. Those are the only little bits I see. Sometimes it's helpful to change the color here to white. You can see if there's any little dark spots that you're missing. Same thing goes, you can also change it to black to see if there's any little light bits that are still remaining. There are some little light bits in the actual lettering, but I'm okay with that. That won't be a problem. So now I'm happy with how the artwork is edited. We've removed the background. I'm going to zoom out, a little bit, so I can see better. I'm going to remove this layer so we have a transparent background. When you see this grid, it means the background is transparent. I'm going to take this mask. I'm going to drag it to the "Trash Can" here so it deletes the mask. But before it deletes it, it's going to ask me a question. Says, "Apply a mask to layer before removing." I want to click yes. If you want to get rid of the mask altogether and you don't want to keep any of the edits that you did while using the mask, then you would just delete it. But I want to keep all of these edits, so I'm going to apply before removing. I'm going to crop the artwork using this "Crop" tool here. Because I just don't need all of this extra space around it. It'll make it a little bit more difficult to edit. Move this out of the way. I'm going to crop it as close as I can, so I don't have any extra space around it. That will make aligning and things easier in the future. I'm going to click "Enter" on my keyboard. Now I'm going to go to "File", "Save As", and here's where I'm going to name my files. Instead of saving this to "Scan", I'm going to save this back in this file, to "Edited Art". I'm going to name it "TheRouwhorsts", which is my last name. I'll save it as a "TIFF". It's going to have a warning here that including layers will increase your file size. That's fine. These are the settings I use here. Under "Image Compression". It's on "LZW", pixel order is "Interleaved". A lot of these were just what the default settings were, which is fine with me. So now that I've edited this one, I'm going to exit out of that file here. I'll be doing the same with this monogram here. Let's go to an image that is a little bit more complicated because we're going to be using color. 12. Digitizing P2: All right. Here we have our banner. First thing I'm going to do is adjust the image to rotate it so that it's the direction that I want. This one will be really pretty easy. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, so that we can see it good and I'm going to select the "Wand". We're going to use the quick selection tool. So up here you can see some of the settings here, I want to make sure I'm on the plus sign because it's going to be adding what I'm clicking onto my selected artwork. This controls how large the brushes, basically how much of the artwork it's picking up. I'm just clicking and dragging over the artwork to select the artwork from the background. You can just keep clicking to add more. This is why it's really important when you're painting to make sure that your colors are dark enough for the computer to differentiate them from the background. Because when that's the case, you can get a really easy digitization process here. It just makes things go really smoothly. So make sure I have all of those little pencil lines because I like them and I might get rid of this extra water color here, we'll see. Now you can see I've selected the banner. However, there's this white bit here that I don't want. Now I'm going to use this "Minus icon" and this is going to de-select whatever I'm clicking on. So now I'm going to click on the white and click and drag to de-select that. Okay. Let's see what this selection is going to look like. I'm going to click over here in the layers and create a mask. Now you can see it's masked; the background. I'm going to create another layer just because it makes editing easier. I'm going to create a solid color layer of white and then drag that below the banner here. Okay. So now you can see that the background is gone but some of these edges are a little bit rough. I'm going to use this "Clipping mask tool" to be able to add and remove a little bit of some of the artwork and the background, so that I have a little bit cleaner line. First I'm going to go over here and select the "Paintbrush tool". Remember, the black and the white have different functions. So right now it's on black, which means it will conceal. I don't want to do that but you can easily undo anything you've done by hitting "Command Z" or "Control Z". Okay. This brush is a little bit too big, so I'm going to go up here and make it a little bit smaller. That's a little bit better. I like the hard edge. I don't want a blurred edge. I'm going to come up here and just start removing some of this excess water color that I don't want. You can zoom in really far when you're doing this too, go back my brush tool. I'm just clicking and dragging with my paint brush, so basically paint over anything that I don't want. Am trying to just smooth this out. It doesn't have to be perfect because it's going to be part of a bigger piece with the crest. Now I want to reveal some of this. I'm going to click on the "Black" or hit "X" on my keyboard to switch. See, this is a good thing to show you. Right now, I am on the artwork and not the mask, which is going to delete the artwork here, which I don't want. So make sure whenever you are doing this, like hide-revealing and hiding and all of that, that you're not on this artwork layer but you're on the mask itself. I just wanted to reveal a little bit, I may go around and do the same to some of these patches, that just look a little choppy to me. Just want to smooth out some of those edges. I'm going to go around the artwork. Just working my way around. Just smoothing things out as I go. I'm just using my regular mouse that comes with my Mac. I'm not using like a pen tool or an Apple pencil or anything real fancy like that. All right. So I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to zoom out and see how that looks. I think that looks good. There's a couple of things that I don't love right now. You can see here there's a little black speck in the paint and there's a couple little like spots here and here that I don't love and I also don't really love how you can see some of this pencil sketch here inside, so I'm going show you how to fix some of those little things. So we're going to go over here and click on this tool, which is the healing brush tool, am going to click on the spot "Healing brush". I'm just going to click on those bit I didn't like. But here's another thing. You can see I'm clicking around and it's not really doing anything.That's because I'm currently on the mask. So click back onto the artwork itself to be able to edit the artwork. So I'm just clicking on the spot, so that my eye is drawn to that are a little uneven. I like these yannick lines here that are formed from the watercolor drawings or drying in the layers. I'm just going to get rid of some of this stuff right here. Okay. See how I also blended in some of the pencil lines, I don't like that. So I'm going to undo that. Just want to soften this a little bit. Zoom out. Here's our banner. All right. You can see this little bit of white here after I've turned the background layer off and I don't want that. I may have been using the paint brush on this artwork layer rather than this mask layer. So let's fix that real quick. I'm going "Zoom in". To remove this bit here, I'm going to use the quick selection tool, making sure that it's on the plus and grab all of that white. I could put a mask on that but I'm just going to try deleting it. I just pushed "Delete" on my keyboard. I think that looks better. Let's "Zoom out". Take a look at this. I think this looks pretty good. Turn this back on and I'm going to remove the masking layer. I think I want to edit the color of this a little bit. I'm going to go up here and add a layer for human saturation. I think I want it to be just like a little more vibrant. I'm going to increase the saturation here a little bit. That's a little too orange and maybe make it just a little darker. It's more like tan, brown color. I don't like that. I think I'm happy with that. But as you can see, when you're sliding these things around, it's changing everything. If I bring this down, do you see how it makes even the background dark like that, which we don't want. So am going to bring this back to where I want it. Once I'm happy with the color adjustment, I want this back to 0, I'm going to right-click and select "Create clipping masks" or "Clipping Mask". So now it's going to take this color adjustment and clip it just to this artwork. Now I'm going to turn this off, delete that layer and crop it and then this artwork will be ready to go. So I'm going to crop it and then name it, as I'm saving it. Going up here to "Save as", we want it to be edited artwork, Banner. Now we're going to do a piece that's a little bit more complicated. 13. Digitizing P3: Let's remove the background from this little dog. This one is going to be a little bit more complicated. We are going to take our image and rotate it, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. What I'm going to do here is, I'm going to use the Magic Wand. Up here you can see the tolerance is at five, that's pretty small. That's taking a small area as a sample. I don't want to click contiguous. What I want to do is I'm going to click on the background and see how it's selecting all of this. That's not really enough. I'm going to change the tolerance to 15 and try again. Still not enough. I want to make sure that almost all of this background here is gone. Let's go back to 40. Okay, much better. You can see there's just some little specs here and there. It's selected the artwork of the dog, and you can see that some of this in here is also going to be gone. But it's easy to fix. What we're going to do is take the selection that we have right now. Since I'm happy with this, I'm going to click "Command Shift I" to select the inverse, not the white, and then create a clipping mask. You can see some of the stuff disappeared, but we're going to use this Clipping Mask tool to fix it. It's no big deal. I'm also going to add a solid color layer. It doesn't matter what the color is, just something that's different from your artwork, and something dark is helpful to me because then you can see what you're doing. Because you see all these little dots around here, I want to get rid of those. When I click on the "Mask", make sure you're not on the artwork, but you're on the Mask, and click on my "Paintbrush" tool to get rid of these. Now, I'm going to make my paintbrush larger so that I can just get rid of a bunch of these things. I'm just clicking and dragging around, trying not to get the actual artwork, just getting some of those little bits and pieces, and then make this a little smaller and get a little bit closer to the sky. It's really hard sometimes to see what is dust on your screen and what is from the background. Now, I'm going to click "X" on my keyboard to switch the color to white to reveal. I'm going to paint in all of these details that had disappeared. Very careful as I go around these edges, because I don't want to reveal more of the background because that was the whole point of doing this is to remove the background from the artwork. Perfect. Then this is going to be an art print that I'm going to print on white paper. I'm not too concerned with how any of these looks because it will blend in with the background of the paper. But I do, I'm going to just make sure that this is soft. I'm going to change the brush to this soft round brush, and that one has a more blurred edge to it. I'm just going to go around here and paint this in to just soften this up a little bit so that I don't have those really harsh lines. Now, let's change this background to white to see how it looks. I think I'm pretty happy with that. I don't really love this. I think I want to blend it more, so I'm going to go back to the "Mask", and I'm going to reveal more here, and then I'm going to go up to this Brush settings, and I'm going to lower the opacity so it removes less. Click "X" on my keyboard to start covering stuff up a little bit. I'm just going to click and go back and forth a little bit to just soften this a little so that it blends out little more. I think I'm happy with that. Let me zoom out. I get that. Thank you, dogo. I'm going to remove this mask, hit "Apply". Now, I just want to fix a couple of those little things. So I'm going to zoom back in. I'm going to fix this little hair, so I'm going to go over here, use this little Spot Healing tool, and this is too big see. That's going to be weird, so I'm going to undo that. Look at the brush I'm using and make it smaller. There we go. We're just going to fix that little guy. I also don't like this pencil mark here. So I'm going to get rid of that. It's little spot here, spot there, this one here, got that. Zoom out, see how it looks. I'm going to remove the background and crop him, and I'll save this file. Save as an edited art, puppers, and "Save". I'm going to continue working on all of the other art pieces by removing the backgrounds, and I'll see you in the next video as we start putting together our art crest. 14. Designing P1: Now we come to the fun part where we get to put all the pieces together and create something really special. We are going to start by creating our document. I'm going to click 'Create New' and I'm going to select inches and then name this family crest print. I'm going to make it five inches by seven inches so that it's really easy to frame. Resolution will be 300, that is the resolution for printing. For color mode, I'm going to select CMYK. That's what you want if the document you are creating is going to be printed. If it's going to be used on screens like for social media, then you would do RGB. Also there's some little templates in here. Under web, photo, etc, there's some different options here. Under mobile, it gives you options for different screen sizes if you wanted to create a wallpaper or something like that. If you want to create a square for Instagram, I believe you would do pixels and the dimensions are 1080 by 1080. Here we go. The first thing that we are going to want to do is going to be to create the actual crest shape, at least for how I've put together my print. I'm going to go to File, Place Embedded. I'm going to select from my folder with all of my edited work that has the background removed, I'm going to select this crest frame. Right now if I hold down the Shift key, I can do really weird stuff, but you don't want to do that. Depending on your computer and your settings, you might have to actually hold down the Shift key in order to make everything scale appropriately. I'm going to make it smaller. I want to make sure I have enough space because I'm going to duplicate this to create the whole frame. Then I'm also going to have those roses. Let's make it, not this big, I think. Again, I want my Layers Window open. This is the size that I want now, so I'm going to hit "Enter". Now, I'm going to take this layer right here, which has our frame, I'm going to click it and drag it down to the square with a plus on it and it's going to duplicate it. Now I'm going to click on the duplicate. I'm going to click on the copy and I'm going to hit "Command T" to transform it. I'm going to right-click. I want to flip horizontal. I'm going to drag it over here, until I'm happy with where that's up. I think I really like the shape. I think it looks good and everything is even. If you're not sure if everything is lined up correctly, you can select both of these layers and go up here with the background, you want to be on this tool right here, the art board tool, so now we can align this art. Let's align vertical centers. Now it's centered on the page. I like how this look. I'm going to "Command G" to make them a group. Now I can control them together or I can separate them again if I want to. Dislodge this and the background, and up here, I'm going to center it. So now this crest is centered on my document and then I can build everything around it. Since I don't want this to move as I'm adding more artwork, I'm going to select these two layers and go up here to this menu. I am going to select lock up layers. I'm just going to lock everything. Here you can see in my full crest design after it's been completed and I'm going to show you the process of how I put it together. In order to show you how I put all of this together, I will remove this banner and show you how to place your artwork, and adjust it. You'll go up to File, Place embedded. In my folder it has all of that cleaned up artwork here. I'm going to click on the image for a banner and place. You can see for one, that is underneath some of the artwork and also it's too large. Over here in the layers panel, where you can see all of the artwork, I'm going to click on the artwork for the banner. I want to try it all the way to the top because I really want the banner to be on top of everything else. Now I want to make it smaller. I'm going to click on the banner, I'm going to shift. I'm going to click "Command T" to transform and scale it down. Depending on your computer and your program that you're using, you want to make sure that you don't change the appearance of the artwork. On my computer, if I hold down the Shift while I'm moving it, it can distort the image. So I don't want to do that. For some computers, you actually have to hold Shift while you're scaling for it to maintain its proportions. You'll have to play around with that and see what works well for you. When I was putting together my crust, I really liked the banner, but I wanted to play around with some different layouts so I also tried putting it at an angle like this and I really liked it. I felt like it looked a little bit more romantic and organic. That's what I'm going to do here. Now I want to layer my lettering on top of it. I'm going to go back to File, Place Embedded, I'm going to click on the route whorsts lettering and drag it to above the banner. I'm going to make it smaller. I like that. That's how you place your items onto your artwork board. Then aligning your items sometimes can be a bit tricky. We're going to take a look at this section right here, which I'm calling them monogram section of the crust. When I go over to my layers panel, I have them organized in a little folder. In order to put multiple things in a folder, you're just going to click on the artwork and hold down the shift to click and select more, add more to your selection, then you click this little folder here. I'm going to name that Banner 2. Now let's see how closely this looks compared to the one that I designed before. Pretty close, just a little bit smaller. For the monogram, in this folder, I'm going to select some things that I want to make sure are straight. I'm going to select the dog, this little X, and the mittens. Move the dog, mittens, and the X. Then I'm going to go up here to align. If you don't see these. Sometimes you have to be on this tool here and it might be hidden there. I'm now do horizontal centers, nice. Then I'm going to do the X with the M and the C. I'm going to make sure that they're straight, the other way. That looks good. Now I'm going to select the whole monogram and I want to align it with everything else. But in order to do that, I have to select something to align it too. I'm going to drag the whole monogram all the way to the bottom since it won't be covered by anything. Then I'm going to select this background and align it to that. Now you'll notice a couple things. This does not look centered. There's a couple reasons for that. One of the reasons is because of this M over here. It really goes beyond the bounds of where the other artwork falls outside of this little X situation. Also, there's more white space up here compared to down here because of the banner. I'm going to now adjust this manually based on what I think looks like. Now I know it's mathematically centered, but I don't really like it. I'm going to click on the monogram file, Command T. Now I'm going to move it over a little bit so that it's a little bit more centered compared to the white space. I think that that looks better, so I'm going to leave it like that. Now to adjust colors, we went over this when we were editing the individual pieces, but I'm going to show you again on this little man. I'm going to find the layer with the Michigan, and what I did was I added a layer for hue and saturation. You can see that here. You can slide these bars. This line changes the color, this one changes the vibrancy of the saturation. Last we'll make it all the way to gray scale more and makes it really bright. Then this is lightness and darkness. Now, I like it being a little bit lighter. 15. Designing P2: I think I like that a muted dark sage green. I'm going to leave that there. Now I'm going to show you how I made these floral elements look like they're wrapping around the frame. Same here with this banner. I find that using a mask to hide portions of your artwork create a really fun illusion where it looks like the different pieces are interacting with each other, and they're like weaving in and out, gives it more of a 3D effect and really brings it to life. I'm going to find the layer over here for the roses. This is the layer for the roses, and all I did was add a clipping mask. I also used the clipping mask to hide portions of the flower. I'm going to get rid of this so you can see what I did. This leaf was overlapping with some of the other artwork over here, and so I didn't like that it was bit too crowded. If I zoom out, you can see that. That didn't look great. I wanted to remove it and then I also wanted to create that bit of a 3D effect. All I did was while I was on this layer right here, I clicked "Clipping mask", and while you're on that mask, you want to click the "Paintbrush" button, and you can hide things. Remember the black and white over here is what makes the difference, and you can switch between the two with just pushing the X on your keyboard. If I click "X", it changes by paintbrush to white and then it reveals things. Again, this is a great way to edit things so that you don't lose all of your artwork, but rather you're able to edit as you go. That way, just like you saw, I was able to undo what I had previously done. Which is great because if you want to move a piece of artwork around after you've already done this, it's easy to adjust what parts of your artwork are showing and what parts aren't. This is the part that I want to look like is behind the frame of the crust. I'm going to make my brush smaller, and I'm just going to remove all of the part of the floral artwork that overlaps with this crest here. I can see that there's too much white showing. So I'm going to click X, and try to bring some of that back. Now, once I zoom out, you can see that it looks like the floral was going around. I think I might add some text. I want to play around with adding some texts, but says like established date. I'm going to click here on the "Text" tool, and when you're on a Text tool and then you click on your "Artboard," it's going to create a new layer. I want to delete this layer and start over. I wanted to say established 2011. Now you can't see anything because it is the text you can't see. Let's fix that. Now double-click this. Over here in these special effects, we're going to click "Color Overlay". Now you can see that this color overlays text. One thing that's really cool is when you're in this toolbox under Color Overlay, you can double-click the color, and it'll even let you see it. If you move your cursor over the artwork, becomes an eye dropper. I can actually select color directly from my artwork, and that way the text matches perfectly. I think I'm going to select this gold color, and I'm going to go Command T, click "Okay", Command T to move this, and I want to edit this text. So I'm on my Text tool. I'm going to highlight this, and go up here and adjust some of the settings. I think it's space too far apart, so I'm not adjust that, and I'm going to move it, Command T and I try the full date. I like this. I just wanted to nest in this space where there's some nice whitespace around that. I'm going to try, and also get back to your Text tool just by pressing the T on your keyboard. I want to change this to be lowercase. Now I have my completed crest. I'm really excited about it. I can't wait to print it. Now I'm going to show you how to save it and export it. One thing I'll do probably to make things easier for myself is I'm going to take all of this stuff and put it in a folder, and name it crest. Now I'm going to duplicate that, and open it. I'm going to take all of those files that I just duplicated, and then I click Command E, which flattens them into one object. This will be much easier to save a much smaller file. I'm going to save this whole thing as RaowhearstCrest. Emergent and then delete it. Now we have just this one flat in edge of our crest that's going to be much easier to use. But if you want to go back and make any edits, you can use the larger file. Now I have this crest and I'm going to select the background. Make sure it's centered this way, and then I do want to move it down a bit there, and I want it centered. Now I'm going to save it as RaowhearstCrest, I'm going to say that as a JPEG. This is a print ready file, and the highest quality possible is great. If you want to use your crest without the white background, you can turn the background off, and then save as a PNG or a TIFF file. I think I'd also like to create a square image that I can share on my Instagram profile. I'm going to go to Crop, and I want a one to one square, and makes sure that everything fits in the square, and I will press "Enter" to crop, and then again, I'll probably go up here. It's like the background and center it. Then I'll turn the background on. But it looks funny because of the crops. I'm going to delete it and add a new solid color, and place that below the crest. Then addressed that. I want it to be really light because I can see I have some little dots here that I hadn't removed, and the dog looks funny on a dark background, but I think really lights background that might be pretty. Now I'm just going to save this as a JPEG image, and it's something I can use on my Instagram feed.