Transcripts
1. Introduction: I am very compelled by illustration because illustration is visually representing an idea. And it is the most direct output of the artist's mind, and what they're seeing and what their ideas are no matter where the artist is coming from in making that are or where I'm coming from. It's always very interesting to see what that output is. Hi, I'm Carolyn Wiedeman. I am an artist in Brooklyn, New York. Today, we're going to talk about branding and we're going to design an entire wedding suite. We're specifically going to use gwosh and watercolors, and it's going to look like a lot of work. But the secret is that we are really just making one kind of [inaudible] piece of artwork, and blowing that out into different pieces that all make a cohesive set. It's really just identifying the concept, turning that into a set of visuals and taking that all the way to an output. When I was starting out, the hardest thing to grasp here and to do right was the transition from beautiful analog artwork into a beautiful digital result. I loved how it turned out on the watercolor paper, but it was really hard to mimic that sensibility digitally. So, this class is going to have a lot of tricks to optimize for that and make sure that we keep that in your work because there's a reason that you're using watercolor, and there's a reason that you're using gwosh and not just the pen tool in Photoshop or in Illustrator. Everything from Photoshop, to file sizing, to setting up files for print, to digital layouts, we're going to cover it. So this isn't really just for a wedding. The same process applies whether you have an Etsy shop you want to brand. You want to brand a personal website. You're starting your business. By all means, come to this wherever you feel benefits you most.
2. Project Brief: So, let's talk about the projects we're going to do today. I'm using word brands. Basically what I mean by that is we have a theme and a concept that we're going to develop and turn that into a set of visual assets. In this case, it's going to be a set of items in a wedding. So, we are going to go into every single piece that you need for basically an entire wedding event. So, the key to a great brand is to create consistency with variation. So, we have the items that we need for the wedding suite. But, what I'm also going to talk about is a set of assets. So, that's the artwork that we're going to be making, and there are five of those that we're going to focus on: first is the hero image, second is the crest, third is the monogram, fourth is the secondary illustration, and fifth is working with typography. So, from these five assets that we're going to work with and create, we're going to use those to create the seven items that you need in this wedding suite. So, if this is a branding project, again, for you, this could just be seven items that you need in your set whether it's a business card, an envelope, stationery. There are a lot of different ways to slice it, but for our wedding suite, we have the mail items, which is the Save the Date, the Invitation, the RSVP Card, and the Stationery or a thank you card. Then, there's the day of items and that's the program, the menu, and the table card. A lot of people will have more or less in this suite of items in a wedding. But, I think this is the most simple, straightforward list of needs. So, jump in to this projects wherever you want. If you want to create every single asset, if you want to focus on the hero artwork, it's all there for you. Hopefully, you will dive in.
3. Inspiration: I'm working with a bride and she is getting married at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs, California. She has a modern hip vibe, but also comes from a traditional background in Kansas City. So, the idea is to combine both of those two. She really likes botanicals, there's a lot of those in California and in Palm Springs, a lot of cactuses, and beautiful palm leaves. A great place to start is just like a stream of consciousness wordless whether it's words that they're telling me or really just what's popping into your head. I think that's a great place to start. There's a photographer that is well known for capturing the aesthetic of that in the '50s of Palm Springs, Slim Aarons, a lot of azaleas, and it's more desert flowers. I really like to just look at my tried and true books that I have on my bookshelf because it just feels nice of flip through book versus flipping through Pinterest, and I will always try to maintain a healthy collection. Illustration is visually representing an idea and the importance there is that we really focus on what is going on in your brain and in your hands between the reference material that you're using, or what you're looking at, and what comes out on the page and the idea is that it's your own, of course. So, whenever we use reference material, a lot of it is just to get inspired, see how other people approach illustrating the world around them or the concept that they're working in, definitely not to copy. The first book that I tend to start with and refer to a lot is called The Zen of Seeing by Frederick Franck, seeing and drawing as meditation. Ladies Drawing Night is another favorite book. This is a new book that Julia Rothman, Leah Goren, and Rachael Cole came out with. They have a group called Ladies Drawing Night and they actually have a Skillshare class, that we worked with them on, and I just love these illustrators and follow their work all the time, and I think it's very fun to look at. This is Grace Bonney's recent book, another one that I continually reference. It's a series of women in creative fields, makers, artists, and entrepreneurs telling their story and giving advice, and I tend to look at the illustrators that inspired me because you also get a glimpse in their studio and their work process. This artist, Lily Stockmann, she works in Joshua Tree and it's very inspired by the desert and their textiles are just really beautiful, and I have a couple of their items pinned on our Pinboard for this. I just love the colors. I think it's especially helpful to look outside of the category of illustration for stuff like this, like artist and if we're working in the desert and we're doing an event out there, how are people representing that place? What does it look like? So, it helps to go across mediums to get inspired. Lastly, Maira Kalman she's just a legendary illustrator and I most often refer to her books, I have a bunch of them. This one's my favorite and it's called My Favorite Things and she just illustrates a series of her favorite things and I love her copywriting. But, basically this is a great reference for not being too precious with your illustrations, so I think there's a fine line between being very tight and just being loose and messy, and the way that she is able to gently refer to something, and have her own looseness with lines I think is amazing. What I like to do in illustrations is make sure that in my mood board and on Pinterest board that I capture, I really stay between like 20 and 30 images. More than that and it just gets a little bit overwhelming. I also like to make sure that there's a variety of mediums in there, so we're not just looking at illustration or not just looking at paintings, sometimes just more technical things like what leaves look like. So, there are a couple of botanical illustrations in here, but really the idea is that also there's some architecture. But, the point is that you're capturing a general mood and also capturing things that are going to be useful to you when you're painting. So, there's a couple of photos in here that Slim Aarons took, kind of the Palm Springs vibe, this captures that really well, the yellow overhang, I believe this is Slim Aarons. So, there's the palm trees, the wire wicker furniture, the 1950s stuff. Alexander Girard who I actually have admired for a long time and didn't know, attach his work to him, until Olympias Agnoli doing a classic of her. His colors are just so beautiful and I think really capture the saturation and warmth of California that I really want to capture. I also love the geometric patterns and want to make sure that we capture a little bit of geometry in our illustration because we still want it to feel a little bit modern and not just floral. Again, Lily Stockman's paintings are really beautiful. They remind me of the patterns of a garden and if you're overlooking a garden from an airplane what that would look like. I think the colors are nice and desert-ish. Then lastly, to really throw it back on Rie Rousso, I believe, is how you pronounce his name. But, he was a painter that did these incredibly beautiful graphic paintings of the jungle. A lot of light variation in the green tones here and they almost look storybook-like, but very realistic and I think his work is really, really great to look at for botanical inspiration. I just want to live in his world. So, we have this, what I will do with this is continually reference it as I'm going, sometimes it's just nice to know that it's there. The last thing with this is I did want to make a separate board for the monogram because lockups with lettering can just be its own beast and there's a lot of really beautiful old inspiration there so I made this as well. So, when we get to that part where we're doing the monogram and sketching ideas, I will definitely refer to this board. It can be really helpful if you're working for a client or a person or a bride to actually share the mood board that you came up with, just so they know the direction you're going in, what you're working off of. Obviously it's not going to be your actual work, but just say you guys align on where you're at with the visuals.
4. Paints & Tools: So, before we start, I'm going to walk you through the materials and tools that I find very useful. I try to keep it as simple as possible. But also, I like to use what's nice and very functional. So, the gouache watercolor that I prefer to use comes out of a tube. You can just as easily use like a nice pink prisma color like set of watercolors that's in a little tray. I also find that splurging on repaints is worth it because you will find the consistency is really nice, these last forever. So, this feels like a really big too for what we're using. I find that you need less color options with watercolor because so much of that medium is about mixing. So, basically, the difference is gouache is a lot more opaque. It has like a little bit more pigment in it. It needs a little bit less water and you can layer it, you would with acrylic paint or any other kind of paint, tempera paint, whatever you're kind of used to using. It functions like a normal paint but at the same time, you can also break it down and make it really transparent. It's really preference. I didn't know about gouache until many, many years in to using watercolor it's a little bit more of, I don't know. Next step after you learn how to use watercolor, not because it's any harder but just because it's a little bit more expensive and there's a little more variation with it. So the primary colors are worth investing in because they're the purest form of color. Then, if you think of secondary colors, green, orange, purple, those are all results of mixing the primary colors. So, if you're trying to save a little bit on what you're buying, that's fine because those are mixed colors anyway. This tray is really useful tray for guoache especially and watercolor because we're going to use that out of a tube. It's like 10. It has like a nice enamel, it's really easy to mix. I always use this. I like to, not always paper towels, so I use like a dish towel for wiping paint and water always a nice full glass of water. The smaller your glass of water, the more concentrated. Obviously, it will become with paint sooner. So, I like to keep it pretty full and pretty clean as often as possible. I like to use a hands sharpener for pencils. This is like a next heavy one because the pencil that I prefer to use is also just your regular old black wing Palomino pencil. These are just really nice. They erase well and they glide nicely. Just a wide eraser. You can erase over the watercolor and guoache, which is really nice. Brushes that I use, I usually use like a medium size watercolor brush and I could use this for a really thin line too. That's a good thing about watercolor brushes is they get a nice point. If you take care of them, usually, just a good like medium size like this does the trick. I even prefer it to the smaller ones but sometimes these are good for details. But you definitely want to get a natural bristle watercolor brushes. I think that it makes a huge difference. Synthetic just kind of where it's really fast and doesn't get a very nice consistency. This is a good ruler. I like because it has all different increments of measurements. So, when you're like laying out your work, it's helpful. Also with that, sometimes I mask off the area that we're going to work in. So, I like to use artist tape. If you used like blue tape or masking tape, it usually interferes with the watercolor paper so you have to get this kind of white, there are actually other colors but it's artist tape. So it's archival and it sticks pretty well but it also removes easily. Then, I also always keep like scrap pieces of watercolor paper because as I go all you they're like test the amount of color on the brush, try to get some off or just like test shapes. Finally, the watercolor paper. One of my teachers, my first teacher always told me that, to use these arches watercolor paper and I'm not using it now because it's extremely expensive and it's really, really beautiful but I haven't really noticed much of a difference. If I'm trying to make a like final piece of like watercolor artwork, I'll probably use that. But for something like this where the output is like optimally digital, you'll still get the nice texture of watercolor paper and not be too precious about it. So this is just like Canson watercolor paper cold press. Hot presses usually has a texture that I'm not totally found of but cold press is really nice, it absorbs really nice and nine by 12 is the great size for what we're working in. You're also going to need Photoshop for this class. You can get a free trial at Adobe. It will be very useful. So I'm going to put the colors that we're going to use on this palette. We're not using any blues because I know that I don't want to use blue in this. That doesn't feel like it connects for what we're going for. So, we're just basically going from like red to green. Then, with watercolor, we are going to use four different colors. I'm not really sure when we're going to incorporate the watercolor but we will at some point but I just want to show you the difference. So, I'm doing like a pretty small drop and will probably not even use like half of it. So, you imagine that this drop is going to dry and you're going to mix it with water and it's just going to be go a really, really long way. So, like less than a dime size. So, there's a lot of mixing that goes on. I actually, it might be kind of obvious but when I was first learning how to paint, I just kind of thought you paint it out of the tube and watercolor. But, you rarely paint from like the paint basin or if you're working on like a palette, you rarely take it straight out like you shouldn't accept the color as it is, you should like work with it and mix it to get it to be what you want. So, you'll notice that all of the colors are on the edge of this tray and that's no matter what kind of tray you're using that's what you want to do. Mix the colors and leave a lot of space to do it on your palette. So, we have our palette all laid out how we want and is now ready to go into sketching and creating the hero image.
5. Asset No. 1: Hero Image: So, now we're going to begin making our actual hero artwork. We're doing the save the date for this hero image and I know that we're working with a five by seven, so I'm just going to mark that. We'll get a little bit more into sizing when we like open the art board and digital files, but I think five by seven works really well for artwork. Okay, so I'm going to do a quick sketch of what we're thinking. So, I really like the look of like a lush kind of border where everything is kind of crowding in on the design. I think that would work, that works really well with botanicals and with flowers. So, I'm imagining you're like walking into a garden. I've seen pictures of this park or hotel and there just like a lot of little kind of passageways framed by bushes and plants and that's really what I want to capture in this. Like you're kind of going into this beautiful event. So, I'm thinking like banana leaves, those are really fun to kind of, it's like you're in the jungle book or something. I love those like cool weird dandelion, like spiky plants. I don't- I'm not sure how deserty those are, but I think those always like add a lot of interest. There's like a sort of cool, like wisteria look that goes over. I don't know, I imagine that like hanging over something. So, we'll kind of do a little like Viney plant on the top then we can do some florals. Then I'll just kind of do a little bit of suggest some flowers here and they're. Thinking agave, all of these different kinds of greens, we have the banana leaves here, some florals on both sides up here. This is our little drapery and then we're going to do some like wisteria, like hanging flowers up here. So, your goal for your sketch is to just really mark this space off. I think you want to strike a balance in your sketch. So, I know here for example that I have like big leaves on both sides and I want to make sure that like that feels equal, I know I have kind of medium sized plants on the bottom and then the little bit more delicate on the top. Generally speaking I like to start with the darkest first and with the biggest items on the piece. The reason for that is the darker the color, the more possibility there is to like draw attention to it. So, with gouache you need a very little bit of water and then you're just good to go. We want to kind of test out if this is the right color that we're going for. So, I'm just going to kind of look, I really want like a rich kind of dark banana leaf color that we're going to start with and this is going to be kind of our darkest. So, you can see that it's pretty- It's a little bit more translucent but the more water you add, the lighter it gets. Yeah, I think a good rule of thumb is just stay, like start light and then as you're painting you can add layers that darken it. But I do know that I want this color to be pretty dark. I think I'm just going to keep mixing a couple of colors so that we have a lot to work with. So, this is kind of more of an emerald green. I know I want like a bright green for some jungle colors too in these leaves. Okay, so like I said, we're going to do kind of our larger leaves first. So, I'm just sort of going for this. I'm trying, I'm going to try to be pretty loose with it. I don't think it helps anyone to be super tight with, your drawing. Sometimes you want to just like make it perfect, but I think there's like it's more interesting when you keep it a little bit loose and just like let it flow. So, I'm really focusing on giving it enough like whitespace to give it lines. For example, like you could do banana leaf that's just like this and you know it's just like a leaf as it is. But we're missing like the veins and all of that. So, with something like a nice loose illustration I like to kind of let the lines be whitespace. So, we kind of have- this is obviously just kind of a little rough thing but it just is a little bit more interesting when you just kind of leave it like that and then you can like mix color and make it darker in places. So, that's kind of what I'm trying to do here, is not overdo it and sort of let the thing breathe. I also don't want to do the entire thing in one color of green. Like I'm thinking maybe we'll bring some yellow in here just to like make it have a little bit of variation. Maybe like the other side is just a little bit lighter and we can like let it bleed a little bit. This is what's so fun about water. Using like water soluble materials is that it just looks so beautiful and so pretty when you're working with like trying to get an organic look. Like starting with flowers is so great because they lend themselves obviously to color very naturally and whenever I'm not inspired to do anything, I'll just do a still life of flower. I'm sort of breaking my own rule a little bit on this because I generally like to keep the largest, do the largest items first. But I also think it's important that you get a balance of color and I really want to have this like earthy tone. So, I'm going to put in some of the smaller leaves. Now we're going to work on this other side. So, we're not doing banana leaves because it's not supposed to be, I don't really like to make things symmetrical. We're going to do this kind of like Magnolia tree type of thing. I keep saying Magnolia even though that's not a desert flower. I don't know what this would be called. But basically I just want to do like a large leaf plant that's not a banana tree. So, that's all this kind of like earthy tone but I'm kind of like, oh it might be kind of cool to add a little like light yellow in there. So, we'll just like put that on the tip of this little shape and see what happens. Now it has just like a little bit more variation in there and I think that's kind of a nice way to do it. Like as long as you leave space for the color to do its thing. So, right now I'm just sort of painting this like leaf shape here, and you can see it's really full of- Water. So you're kind of like, "It would be cool if I added a different color to that to see if it would bleed a little bit." If we're playing around in this dark green, I'll pull a little bit of this earth tone and see what that does. That just looks nice. That looks like nature and I think that's a fun way to use these colors. But for the next round we've done our main larger shapes, so we're going to go a layer down and do the secondary plants and we're also going a layer smaller and a layer lighter. We don't want this entire thing to be dark, so I'm going to start mixing a couple of lighter greens. This will not only help with getting just nice coloration, but it's also really good for balance. So, I'm honestly using the exact same greens. You'll notice I didn't use one thing of white the last time because we were going for saturated dark greens and now that we're trying to go a little bit lighter, I'll probably use some light. But a very interesting note is that there is I don't even think there is a white watercolor because watercolor is meant to breathe, and if you want to create white space with watercolor, you just leave it white. You just leave the paper blank. But with gwosh, since it's a little bit more opaque, you can add white to a color and it can have this kind of milky opaque color that I think is really pretty and it's really nice to layer. I also love the transparency of watercolors, but you don't want to just haphazardly use white because it also just distills the color down. You just want to be doing that intentionally and not just because you're messing around with white. We want to do this bottom plant. So that's in agave. I feel that has a turquoisey teal, pretty light color. So we also just want to mimic the color of what the plant is. The banana plant is really rich. The agave is really light and beautiful, but again, we're trying to suggest veins and white space with just leaving it white rather than drawing it in. I have this prickly pear that I want to do those kind of pancake looking cactuses. So, I'm going to do that and if I have this teal-ish color, I think I'll go for more of the Earth's green. So again, I'm just trying to make this fit into this space. If you really want to make one leaf stand out more than others, give it a little bit of a dimension, you can imagine that if the sun was looking down at these plants where will the light go and not go? So for these prickly pears, it would be shadowy at the bottom. This banana leaf in the front right here, I think that that should have a little bit more dimension because it's at the front, and we want it to stand out and the others to pull back a little bit. So, I'm just going to make it just slightly darker, and I guess you would call it more detailed. That's going to be how you bring out dimension. Again, I could keep refining and keep refining this but for the sake of this class, I'm just going to do a little bit of the floral on the top. The tray is very dirty so I'm just going to use the very professional method of making this all into a muddy slog and just wiping it. So we want to do flowers up at the top, and I said, I really wanted this to be a crazy mash of green, but I do want some flowers to come in here and then be hanging off the top. Alizarin crimson is the best red color. You'll find it in oil paints like in gwosh and acrylic and everything. It's really rich and beautiful, and that's a great place to start. So if you just add water to that it's just a really pretty color. Okay. So if the flowers since they're just a little bit more delicate, I kind of wanted it to just be really light on this first layer and we'll go in and add the details similar to how we did with the leaves on the last one. So those I'm imagining piany type of plants. These I imagine as more azaleas, even though it's going to be a different amount of florals, the color you can strike a balance there. That's looking good because it feels balanced, even though it is unfinished and I think that's a really good sign. So at this point, I feel we have every all of the information we need. We're going to repeat some of the plants from down here that's grounding it and bring them up here. So this was the Venus flytrap type of thing that I wanted to have some spindles just to have a little bit more detailed lines so we're going to bring some of that up there and then here I want to bring this cactus up here too. So for the most part, we follow the rules here on how to get a nice feeling composition. We started with the largest shapes first and went back and forth to each side. We also started with the darkest color first, and then went lighter and lighter. That goes for the green and also the pink. Typically, when I do something like this, I'll do the whole first layer first. We're almost there with this one, but usually, I'll let it dry, let it sit for a day, then the next day, go in and add a little bit more detail. Since this would take much longer in this class, it's going to go on for, I have already done iterations of this and it's painted sketches so, I'll walk you through that process and show you the final version. These were just iterations of the idea. So like compositions that I was playing around with. So, this one is a little bit more of a story going on. The one we have here is much more of a frame of florals. This was what it was based off of. I tried to experiment a little bit with the black outline and I just didn't really like that. This was just going to be all greenery surrounding the artwork and I think it's really pretty but I like that this is more how a garden grows and this is just everything's turned together more collage-ish. I think there's a little bit more story being told when there's variation and where things are growing and why and you know that there's a bottom and a top whereas this is very much like a border. These are a little bit tighter. I really liked this one. This was sort of the more abstract version. This was the outcome of that, and I do really like how that ended up. The bride preferred a little bit tighter drawing. So, I definitely think I'm going to use this for something else. I just really like how the colors bleed a little bit. I like how some of it is abstract shapes like you don't really know if that's a flower but you do because it's pink and it has that suggestion. So I definitely like that. The good thing about doing iterations like this is that you can use it all again and if you just take a picture and scan it and keep it, you can use it for a different project. This is what we landed on and it's essentially you can look at what we just did. This was pretty much getting there. The only difference is, this had two layers. So if we were just to build out the flowers a little bit more, I would have taken a darker pink to each one of these and added a little bit touches of darkness. You don't want to do it on every petal or every edge of a shape by any means because that's sort of overdoing it. I think these have a really, really nice depth because you see it's only on one corner of the entire flower and this is only on the bottom, and these flowers right here only one of them is dark. So, you really want to be sparing with the depth that you give it or you remove depths totally and completely. I'm really, really happy with this as our final artwork. We're going to use this to base all of the pieces of the wedding suite off of this is where most of the work is of the entire process. Now that we're there, we can continue to build off it and much more, it's like step-by-step straightforward ways.
6. Assets No. 2 & 3: Monogram & Crest: So, now we're exploring our next two assets and that is the crest and the monogram. So, step one is to just identify what the lock up is for the letters. I pulled a lot of great inspiration on that Pinterest board. I'm going to go use some of the inspiration from that. First, I should write the letters. So we have an M and a D. An M is generally wider and I think we could get away with the D being a little bit more narrow. So, I'm going to play with that. This doesn't really feel right. I feel like the M needs to be a little bit wider. So we could do that more modern look, but open up the M a little and make the D higher and longer. This could be cool if we squared it off and made it blockish. We could also do something a little bit more look feminine. I do generally like the flourishes. Sometimes readability gets in the way like that, and you definitely need to prioritize readability. So really, there's no real rhyme or reason as long as you can tell it's an M and a D, it's fun to play with lockups. That's what they call two letters coming together. I like these edges here, so I think something like that is what I'm going to do. Right now, this M and this D, it would be cool if this point in the M somehow interacted with the D maybe and like it looped together, so that it was like a little bit more of a whole. So that's what I'm trying to do here. I want them both to look like part of the same set of letters, but also connect and link in a cool way. So that's cool. I like that. If we just refine that and maybe made the loop a little bit longer. So, I'm not necessarily an expert monogrammer, but I do think it's fun to play around with this and I think I'm going to go with something like that. So, now that we have the look of our monogram, I'm going to go into the actual crest. A lot of people in Kansas City have been using this, which is why I've been using them a lot in my work, but it comes from like old heraldry. I looked at a lot of old shapes of crests to come up with some ideas, and I think it's cool. I mean, if you keep it fresh and young and not stuffy and traditional, but there are a lot of options for cool ways to frame your monogram, and then you almost have like a little logo for your wedding or for your brand or whatever. It's an insignia which I think is neat. I like this one. I want to make sure the M and the D fit, so I'm just going to sketch it in here, but I think this is the shape that I'm going to go for. So, you typically want to make the words within the crest a thicker weight than the actual shields thickness, just so that they stand out and you're aware that it's a monogram and a crest, and the focus isn't necessarily on the whole shape but on the monogram inside. But they should definitely go together, like a cohesive whole. So, I would do something like this. I do the monogram, we get the shape for the shield or the crest, and then since this is going to be a piece of our hero image, we're already using the colors. I think the pointy little ends of the monogram suggest the garden like leafy desert flower thing. I also want to bring in some of those banana leaves, so I always add a floral element on the side. It just looks like very regal and cool like a big fan or something. So I think I'm going to do the banana leaves on the side and then we had that yellow overhang. Then, I know that the groom is from Australia and I just think it's quirky and cute to add little elements like that that are personal, so I think we should just do a little kangaroo here. I know that the bride wanted to do something personal and I was thinking, "Okay. Well, we'll do the California flowers and all that." but I think you can just go ham in a wedding. I always incorporate all of these elements, so we have the monogram, we have the crest shape that worked together, and then we have the matching floral elements on the side. So I said I don't like to be a mirror image in the hero, but in the crest, I think that's really important. I think they should be the same on both sides. So, we'll do the banana leaves on the sides, the little kangaroos, and we'll pull some of the browns from the hero image, and then we'll do this little palm tree up here, maybe we'll do some florals. Oh, I'm sorry, not palm tree. The little overhang up here. Then, I always do the little banner. So, really it's those elements. So, I just pulled these out of my sketchbook for the sake of showing, but these are a lot of just sketches of crests and combinations with flowers and stuff. Again, I don't like to do them very, very tightly, but a nice suggestion of the shape. These are all actually really interesting shapes that I didn't show before. These are some M and D, other sketches. Very loose ones. Sometimes it does help to take a paintbrush to it just to see how it works. I would never be able to create these kind of lines. I just looked at the calligraphy book to try to draw this. I wasn't using a calligraphy pen, I just used a brush. So, yeah, if you're just trying to experiment with representation and honestly graphic design, just drawing like type over and over again and even copying it I think is really, really useful because you get a sense for the spacing and how a letter should look and where the flourishes should go. So, it's a good exercise. I'm going to paint this monogram and it's a very different style of painting than we were doing the before. I want to be a lot more precise with the sketch because it's almost like doing a coloring book this time, where I'm really just trying to get very precise lines and fill them in with as much detail and precision as possible and not really leaning into the versatility of the medium. You could almost scan this and it could look like a digital illustrator file because the colors would be pretty straightforward and the details very succinct. The D is going to overlap here, it's going to go under here, it's going to go over here, it's going to go under here. Yeah. So, I have the whole thing marked up, so I think we should just go in. So, I picked up much more tight brush. I'm not going to use my smallest one because sometimes it doesn't come to the most direct point, so I'm just going to use this but I still want this to be very straight. Sometimes that's the trickiest part. It's really easy when you just start loosey-goosey with it, but the point here is to be very detailed. Again, you can clean this up in Photoshop easily, but it's so much easier to just do the work you want to do on the paper than rely on your Photoshop wizardry. We're alternating, so each time M crosses the D, we're alternating the over and under. So, you'll just see that coming to life in here. This is also really saturated paint, so we're not using that much water because we want this to really stand out. Because this is also going to be the standalone logo in this monogram. Because remember, we're pulling it out to be simplified on its own, and that is just as important if not more important than it existing within this crest. The crest is just the fun detailed version of just this simple wedding monogram that serves as the logo. Okay. So, we have the D there and you'll see that we left the M exists on it's own. Now, I'm going to do the light green. Don't worry about the pencil, it can always be erased. We're just trying to coloring lines here, so keep your sketch as thorough as you want. Then, this part's easy because you already suggested where the over and the under goes. So, you just follow the lines. If you really like monograms, there are people who specialize in that and go really deep into it like, Will Pay on Skillshare. It's a pretty good class. I'm much more fluid with it as much as I'm saying this is detail. I like a more fluid approach to almost everything. So, this is one of those things too. Yeah, I think that's good. I'm going to let that dry a little bit while I do paint the crest on the outside and the elements. For the sake of this class and timing, I'm not going to go into painting this entire thing, but we already painted. So, really, the difference is that we're being a little bit more detailed and precise with our paintings. So, I'm just going to walk you through my process from here till the end. This is the one that we landed on. It's nice and tight, but it also has a little bit more of an organic feel with the corners. In doing the crest, so our first step was making this monogram and then pulling colors from this hero image. So, we have the dark green and the light green, and I think it looks really nice. So, I can imagine that this monogram will go really well inside of here. That's what I'm envisioning because this is like the brand, like the real brand of the wedding is the M and the D because that's, in this case, the bride and groom. So, then when we drew the crest, I pulled the same colors for the outside and then a little nice inside line. I think it gives a crest a little bit of depth again using dark and light green, and then we pulled these banana leaves because I think those are a nice touch reflecting the place and put those symmetrically along the sides and did a little bit different of a version of the yellow drape, and then some of the same like Azalea florals. So, first, you pick your monogram, you create your lockup, then you pick the shape of your crest and make sure it complements the monogram. Then, we're going to look at the hero image and pick two main colors from that. I love the dark green and the earthy lime green, so we use those two colors, and then look at your hero image and pick what's your favorite shape or the shape that stands out the most. I was really adamant on having these banana leaves in here because they're really pretty, they're all over Palm Springs, so I made those symmetrical shape. The other aspect is a personal item. So, if you're from Kansas City and love sunflowers, put a sunflower in there. In this case, the groom was from Australia, we put the kangaroos. The last portion is really bringing one other aspect from the hero image in here. I wrote in the yellow drape and the pink as well, I guess, you could bring in anything else.
7. Asset No. 4: Pattern Border: What we're going to do today is a border because our hero is really involved in complicated and has a lot of elements, and then our crest, they are detailed in their own way. So, I really want to pull back and add a fresh element that isn't present in either of them. I think that going kind of geometric and graphic with it is a really good option because it's easy on the eye. It's a really nice border to look at. When you're working with paper, borders just line themselves really well to that because you can almost just slap it on and it creates a really cohesive whole. I think it cool like line would be nice. I'm going to just see, I think the trick in this, when you're doing something really simple is to make the craftsmanship of the painting really nice. So, that means getting it really wet and giving it a lot of opportunity to soak in variations of color so that what's most interesting about looking at it, isn't just that it's a simple line or a simple geometric shape, but the paint's doing cool stuff. So, I'm just going to play with inconsistent line here. That could look really cool. Then you can add like darker paint. We'll probably add more water. So, that's not just the line, looks like a beautiful kaleidoscope of color in green. It's really pretty. We could also do something that like plays around with a repeat. You want to be tight with it so that you're still doing a pattern but also keep the variation of colors. So, we could just, something simple like this. We could almost do like a floral, repeat the same thing over and over again. But you want to make each one slightly different since it's handmade. We are going to end up combining this and manipulating it in Photoshop so that you don't have to paint the entire border as a pattern, but it is really nice to have variation. So, you would never want to just do one of them and then repeat it over and over again in Photoshop. Because then, it just looks boring and like wallpaper or something. I'm just going to do, I like this kind of rick-rack geometric-like look. So, I'm just like painting squares. This is a loose suggestion of it but I'm keeping a lot of water in there because it could be cool like I said in this, since the form is really simple. If we just play up adding color so that it's really nice and varied in there and I do really like this one. I like how the geometry of it. It just feels a little bit fresher and tighter than the looseness of the florals. I think that's a really nice balance to strike. It widens the breadth of the work where it gives the eyes a little bit of calm, to like breathe in, and thinking of doing a cohesive set. If this was just a bunch of florals or like cactuses, you would just be like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so tired of cactuses." So, I repeated this idea over and over again of this sort or rick-rack. You can also see a lot of variation in the colors like I added a lot of dark and let them bleed, a little bit more than in here. I think that's going to look really, really good because it's such a straightforward illustration. But within it, it's more interesting to see how the paint's working. We're going to retain some of that in Photoshop. So, before we go into the digitizing phase, which is going to bring all of this together, I really want to explain what we have here and why they work. So, we have our hero image which is the first asset. This was what we did to anchor the entire suite. So, from here, we then made the monogram and the whole crest. I think that works really nicely because this is a little bit more of a quirky, fun representation of our really nice botanical artwork here. Then we went in and made the border. This grounds it with a really simplified geometric shape. So, this doesn't look like a lot. We really focus on making a few good pieces and few good assets, and then are able to blow that out and make a brand that feels cohesive and whole. All we need to do is do a little cleaning up in Photoshop.
8. Digitizing for Photoshop: So, we're going to start the digitizing lesson with the most technical method possible of getting this into the computer. Honestly, a lot of people have scanners and really a $60 apps on scanner is great, but I think it does the exact same as a photo with your iPhone. So, as long as you have reasonably good light and a flat surface, I think you're fine to use a phone to bring into Photoshop, so that's what we're going to do. Stand up and get an overhedge. Make sure it's straight. That's the most important part. So, I'm just going to email those photos to myself and bring them into Photoshop and clean them up. All right. So, I just opened Photoshop and I'm going to bring the image that I captured on my phone into Photoshop to clean it up. Just dragging from my desktop and I'm going to straighten it out. I don't feel like I need to get it at the exact size but large enough that pixels won't be compromised. If you bring in an image and it's live, before you rasterize it, the pixels can be adjusted. You can make it really small and make it really big. But once it's rasterized, the number of pixels that it is at at that size is burned into Photoshop. You just want to make sure that you've got it as big as possible. So, I have it in Photoshop, and it actually looks really good. You can tell that it's very easy to get a nice image with your camera. So, what we're looking at is the white space, and it looks like there's a pretty consistent white color around the entire image, which is what we're looking for. So, when you're taking the photo, you want to make sure the light source covers the entire image, because that's what a scanner would do, so you want to mimic the uniformity of a scanner. Sometimes, if you're taking it on your desk and you have a light in the corner, you'll get a dark corner on one side of the image or another, and you just want to avoid that because it makes it very difficult to re-color. But you can also see the texture of the paper in here very nicely. My illustration is in watercolor, and that medium I want to maintain. Whereas, if I was doing this with a Sharpie and with uniform colors, I would probably recreate it in Illustrator because I wouldn't need the variation in tone and color and texture. The first thing with cleaning this up is we're going to go into the levels and you can do Apple L as a shortcut, and it basically levels, controls the exposure of the image similar to if you're working with a camera. You see the levels exposed here as input. On the left, it's dark; on the right, it's light; and then you can control the gray in the middle. I look at levels as a way to control your whites, and I think that's really important because if you get the white to a good spot, you can get all of the colors aligned where you want them. So, a really good trick is using this dropper tool. This one on the right is white, the middle is gray, and the left is, I guess, your darkest dark. What I'm going to do is I want this to be as wide as possible, this background. So, I'm going to select among this white space where it feels darkest. It looks kind of darkest on this side of the image, so I'm just going to click it. See, it just immediately went light. So, the thing to look out for in doing this is if you're losing any of the sensibility of the paint. I can see that I missed I'm losing a little bit of this gray right here, but I actually- I don't think it's killing anything. I like how that image goes in and out, so I think that was really good. So, we've pretty much evened out the whites, that's the first step. Now that we've done that, it's really just cleaning up around the image. So, since we're going to turn this into a digital asset, we want to take it off the paper and make sure that it can move on its own. So, I can see a lot of the like paper variation on here and I'm just going to use the eraser tool and the crop tool to get those miscellaneous pieces out. Again, the idea is that levels trick with the dropper tool removes most of it so that this isn't a ton of work, but sometimes it doesn't remove all of it and you just have to do it by hand. So, we're going into a little bit of that by hand. First, I'm going to set a completely white background, so I'm going to set a rectangle. That's white, and I'm going to remove the paper around this edge so you can see that paper texture, and I'm just going to crop it out. So, I'm just going to use this selection tool that the image isn't actually rasterized yet, which means that I can't cut it up or do anything with it. So, I'm going to rasterize that, which means that it needs to be at a high enough resolution that we can work with it however we want. I know that this is going to be the biggest size that this has really ever going to be, so I'm going to rasterize it as it is. I'm going to use to control click, and it says rasterize layer right here and you just push that, and you'll notice now that it's not a live image and it's just built into Photoshop. So, I'm going to crop this out. So, you can see this edge right here is a little bit gray, and we might actually do the levels tool again. Sometimes if you want to focus on a certain area, I might just highlight this area with the lasso tool, select this layer, and this light color that supposed to be white, and click it, there. So, we've brightened that up. But here, there's a little variation in this yellow, so I think we might take the stamp tool and even that out. You could really just spend forever doing this. My goal in all of these, whenever I clean up artwork, is to just make it fast as possible because working with what you made and not adjusting it so much in Photoshop, I just really want to keep the dignity of the image. So, I think it's in a good spot. There's a little bit of extraneous little items that probably came in with the scan or that I want to fix of my original illustration that I'm going to do right now. So, one of them is just getting rid of this inside right here, so I'm going to just do a big eraser tool and get rid of that white space. So, it removes that texture. Remember we want to keep the texture and the actual illustration, but in the background, it doesn't matter because it's going to be printed on paper anyway. Nothing will ever be totally perfect, but it's worth going to the extent that your eye doesn't immediately jump to a poorly created digital file. So now, we step back and it looks fine. There are some things that you won't be able to catch unless you zoom in. So, we're just going to do one final scan of the whole thing where we zoom in really close and make sure that there's no edges or weird textures that we want to get rid of. The very last thing is if you want to make any adjustments in the artwork, I'm looking and I don't really like this leaf right here. I'm not sure if I did that on accident or what, but I think I want to remove that. So, this is our layer and it's just this frame, which is exactly what we want it to be. So, I'm going to save that as the hero artwork. You definitely want to keep your PSDs. If you save it as a JPEG, it just flattens the image and makes it smaller. Now that I've done that, I'm going to go into the other piece that we made; the border, the crest, and the monogram; and do the exact same process. So, I'm going to clean up the other ones, and then we'll open up the art board with our final artwork in it.
9. Layout, Composition, Branding: We're going to bring our assets into Photoshop, clean them up, and get them all onto our art board. So, what we're looking at is each asset separated out. From there is a really fun part because we know what the items are in our wedding suite. Those seven items that we need to create, and we have everything we need to create them in the artwork. So, it's going to be a lot of playing and moving things around. In my mind this is the branding aspect because you're pushing and pulling how all of these pieces go together. I have created an art board that is my go to template for organizing these assets that we're working with and then the items that we need to apply them to. I'm just going to drag them into the art board, so we don't need the individual files anymore. So now that I brought that in, I'm going to do the same thing for the other artwork pieces that we have. We have the border, we have the crest, and we have the monogram. What I've made here and what I use often is this art board with all of the different items. So, when you're doing something with multiple pieces it can be a little overwhelming to know what size is what, how they combine, which pieces go together, how to make them kind of feel cohesive. So, this is a really good solution because you can just look at everything at once. I know that for this wedding, the items that we discussed we have the save the date, the invitation, the RSVP card and the stationery and those are the mail items. So, I have those all on this first line here. The second line as the day of items it's just the program, the menu, and the place card. You never really want to go rogue with sizing something because it's really hard to get custom envelopes or custom really anything for paper. So, it's always best to use standard sizing and it's very easy to look that up. Since there is so much that you're collecting in one art board, it's helpful to group the items that you're bringing in. So, all of these here that I have on the right side are grouped. If you don't group them, it's going to be a nightmare to find what you're looking for. So, I have these groups, I have the save the date, I have the RSVP, I have the program, I have the menu. So, once you bring items in there, you're going to just organize it within the layer. The first thing that we're going to start with is the save the date item. So, with the save the date you really only need like a couple of lines telling the person to save the date, and where it's going to be and what the date is. So, I think that's always a good opportunity to go a little bit ham with the visuals whereas the invitation is usually much more understated and more about the information that's listed there. We want to keep all of our assets here because we're going to use them again. You're just going to want to copy this layer. You just push "Option" when you've selected the layer and drag a new one and it doubles it. So, now we have two. So, just drag it over into this image and we're going to size it down. This is sized at 5x7. Something that you want to keep in mind is that you want to leave the borders clean. That's why we painted it this way, so that it's easy to deal with in the printer. Like I said I think a really good rule to follow is just do as much as you can by hand, so that when you deal with the digital stuff like in Photoshop or with the printer, it's easy, you don't want to have to like keep adjusting things. Okay. So, we have that set. I think it looks great. I think it looks really beautiful. Item one is done with the design layout. So, the next one is the invitation. A lot of invitations have just a header up on top, like stationery and then are all about texts. Some of them are really even just only text. I think I'm going to play around with this border, and again do that really easy thing where you just like option click and drag a new layer. So, let's just try that and see how that looks. I'm also going to bring over the monogram, the crest, might be nice to just zoom out. We're going to option click, bring that over. Again, this is where we play around with things and can mix and match and see what works. This is going to be much smaller if we do use this, so we'll keep it at a manageable size. I know that we designed this crest because the bride just really wanted a fun slightly cheeky representation of the wedding. It feels a little too fun for what the invitation would be. I could see that kind of more living on the other assets like the program or the menu or something like a little bit lighter. The invitation, again the focus is really about the text but maybe we'll try the monogram. This could be a little too stationary like, like a notepad. So, we'll leave that there and then if we want to move it around or move it off we can do that, but I do really like the border. This is another fun thing about the art board is you just move stuff around and it's really an easy like workspace. Okay so the RSVP card. So, what we need to include in this I know is RSVP and then a line for the person's name and then sometimes there is a checkbox if you want like a type of food, or dinner. So, that's really just about three lines and that's it, and it's usually pretty small. And I think an interesting experiment we could do with the RSVP card is let the font do the talking here. So, when we talk about that we'll get a little bit more into it where you don't have to use the exact same fonts for every single one, but be a little bit discerning about okay, we want this really fancy one to show up maybe in the fancier items and then the more simple one to show up in all of them. So, I'm going to leave that blank for now and see what we can do with the font. The stationery. So, this is just I think a fun add-on that people really like to use. We want it to feel a little bit more casual and like low key as a follow-up to the wedding as you can imagine somebody is using this to like as a thank you note, or to remind people of the whole experience, the whole wedding, that sort of thing. So, it should lightly suggest it but be a very very small part. Since we haven't used this main monogram, this might be fun because you don't want to write a super long thank you note. Also, I think that it is fun, it captures the entire vibe of the wedding more than just the monogram does. It's a little bit lighter too. So, for the program, that's also usually a lot of text. I think the date of item should be pretty consistent. I think this is another really good opportunity to use this more fun piece. So, I think this is going to be pretty font heavy. So I left that there. I really think since the program and the menu are the same size, we do that and it's the same day, I think it is a nice opportunity to use the same layer. So I think we should try that. And then we definitely want if that's the case we want to keep in mind to make the font selection a little bit different. I think it's cool to have a little like twin item in there. But now that I'm looking at this full thing, I notice that the stationary is also that. So, we'll go back to that after we finish all these. So, the last item is the place card, and what I'm going to do here is I really want to use that border again. I think that this will look really pretty on the table. So, what we're going to do, I painted this as a full border but a magic of Photoshop thing is that we're just going to separate this into pieces and build a smaller version. So, what we could do here is just take this and make it smaller. But even though it's the same piece of work, the consistency doesn't hold up because it just looks like it was shrunk, and I just think that is a half-arsed effort. In order to train the eye to see that consistency, you need to keep the pieces the same size. So, it doesn't apply as much to the artwork, but when you work with geometric like shapes it just looks like a totally different piece that we don't want to introduce here. So, what we're going to do instead is keep the same size of those squares in there, and just break this up. In this case I know I've said do as much by hand as possible, but in this case Photoshop is actually much quicker than drawing this by hand. So, we're just going to separate, I'm going to lay that out and then cut it, and then paste cause we want to keep these pieces. So, we copy this and I'm just going to flip it now around the other side. And I'm really just eyeing it because it would be one thing if this was a really intense vector illustration but since this is water color, there's a lot of give with sizing and all that I think. So, a rule of thumb that I use here is that if you're going to have this hero artwork, you have that show up once, everything else should show up at least twice. So, that's like a good gut check. So, we have the crest that's appearing twice, actually three times, but the stationary isn't something, that's kind of an after piece so I think that looks good. The monogram actually only shows up once, which makes me think that we should bring that into the save the date actually to give it a little bit of a cohesion that fits with the rest of the assets. I think that's a really good addition and that way our monogram is now showing up in two places, and then we also have the border in two places. It also allows that hero artwork to stand out which I think is important. To go back to our goal here, it's consistency with variation which is how we're describing the execution of a brand within a wedding suite. So, I think that really appears because we have the consistency among these four items. If we did more than four and we had seven assets, it would be all over the place. The sandbox we created is four very simple items that are going to be repeated. The second level of that is that each one is repeated at least twice. So, you never want all of them to be present on every single piece, but you want it to be within two and three appearances. When we say consistency with variation, I like that there's one piece that stands out which is the hero artwork. That's our special piece that isn't repeated, but gives us the open door into this sandbox of assets. So, I think this works really nicely.
10. Typography & Printing: Now we're going to talk about fonts and typography. So, the goal of this portion is to select a font or a couple of fonts that complement and kind of optimize the way that your suite of wedding items come together. So, this isn't a typography class, I'm not an expert in that at all but I do know some simple tricks, to make sure that font selection is really easy and makes it feel whole and cohesive and clean, and I will share them with you now. I don't start inside the actual items that we're working in. First I just like to get a feel for different fonts that I like. Over the past few years, I've assembled a list of those that I like and I'll pull from that. So basically, I always pick a set of San Serif or kind of very very discreetly Serif fonts on one hand, and then pick some script fonts on the other. There aren't a ton of script fonts that I like and sometimes when I do want to use a script, I'll just do it myself like I have this example here. I'm not a master calligrapher. I would love to learn, but I can imagine them being in calligraphy. It's probably extremely hard to set a script type as a font, so you can see I have this highlighted here. See this space like in the your're, that just feels really really big. And that's because the computer is having a hard time accommodating connecting letters. So, you'll see like in reality, if you are actually writing this, the end of the you would connect with the R and then you would add the apostrophe. So, when you use script you often have to adjust it a little bit, and account for the mistakes there. So, what I'm doing here is just option and then using the left or the right arrow to change the kerning, and you're just going to have to be aware that that's going to need to be adjusted if you use a script font. So that's something to be aware of when you're using font and once you pick these scripts, just look. This is true. This is actually just a built in Microsoft one but I thought it would be useful to look at. Once I have this down, I kind of think through okay, what are the rules for combining fonts and combining lettering here? So, I generate. I would like to pull a very simple San Serif font to be there for the more secondary types that we're going to use. I've pulled a couple of those, this champagne and limosines is a good one, riesling is really nice. I really like this because it has like the art deco but it's a modern version of that. I just think that's really pretty. I just downloaded this montecatini font from Louise Fili. I think it has a nice modern elegance that captures the wedding really well. You'll notice that this montecatini, copperplate, naive, they have a slight Serif in there, it's nice to have a little bit of that. They're not over the top with the Serifs but I think it adds an elegance that still could stay in the bucket of sensor, because it's very simple with a script. I like this Hollyhock one because it feels really natural, it feels like it's handwritten. I like Asterism. This is the best version of a calligraphic font that I've found. Like I said it can be tricky to find one that looks good. I think this, it looks natural enough that I think we could get away with it. So, I made a couple of tweaks here in the art board as you can see, I just pulled these bleeds out of the- I actually forgot to do that. So, we just pulled the bleeds out in the border, and I did put the monogram on the RSVP card but, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep them. I'm just going to go through each one of these, and it's not going to be a demonstration. It's just going to be an explanation of the selections that I made. The ones that I've selected for our suite are, Montecatini. That's going to be our decorative or script font. It's technically not a hand drawn script but it has a lot of decorative elements for example, like these you can choose those to come in at different times. I think it's all vowels that you can change the size of. It's just really beautiful. I wouldn't use that too much. So, that's really good for the primary font because we're only going to use it for the really important details. The secondary, we're going to use copperplate light. This is really really a good heavy hitter for invitation's because it looks really great if it's small, it looks really great if it's large. It has a nice consistent traditional aspect to it. So, if we have copperplate and we have Montecatini, those both look a little bit elevated, so I definitely want to make sure that my next choice that tertiary font is something a little bit more unexpected. So, I'm looking at this, and if I used a script I think that would be a little bit too traditional too, since we're already in that realm. I really like Riesling because it has a variation on this line, and if you look at montecatini and copperplate, these two that we're using, there's really no variation in the thickness of the lines of the letters and I like how this adds a little bit of interest with that. So, for our Save the Dale, we're using the primary font for the names Molly and David, and that's it. So, I'm not going to use that again. I was playing around with the idea of making these vowels using the feature of the font and playing with them, but I think that that would be, it doesn't really fit since we're not using too many of these. I think it looks nice and clean and really shows off how beautiful this font is. Also, this ampersand is so beautiful and I want to keep that. If I had made the A smaller, I don't think it would highlight that. So, you'll notice that I'm not using the secondary font here, since the Save the dale is a little bit more playful, and it has a little bit less typography in it, I only want to use two fonts here. The three fonts are good when you have a lot of typography to play with and want to establish a hierarchy but there are really only two levels here. There's the Molly and David and then there's the Save the Dale are getting married, and then the details. For the invitation, were using all three fonts in this. I'm going to walk you through how that works. So again, we're using montecatini our primary font for the most important information which is the names, and we're not using it again. You'll notice that that is consistent throughout this entire thing. It's only used for the one most important piece in the whole item. The second most important piece of this is going to be the information of the wedding. So, that's a good opportunity to introduce this workhorse of a font that is the copperplate. Like I said, it's super easy to read when you have a lot of text that is trying to be laid out and explained. It's a really good font for that. So, here we have four lines of information. So, I'm going to use the copperplate for that. I like how this is a lot airier. There's a lot of breathing room so you can really focus on the name and the information of the event. So far we have one asset with all three fonts, the invitation, and then we have the other two with two fonts. Okay. So now the day of items. There's a lot more information on these. So, we're going to talk through how to make those decisions. We have the names in there. That's our first step. We are introducing the wedding, the Parker Hotel, and then we have all of the information of what is going to happen in the wedding. We can group these by information of the wedding and then simple details. I would say we should use our workhorse, and we have used our workhorse font here, because this is where all of the information is going to go. So now that we've made that decision with copperplate, we're going to do the same thing with the menu. For the 11 lines of text that capture the food, we're going to use the font that's easily repeatable, the copperplate, and then for the headliners there, we're going to use the riesling. Lastly, with the table card, I think this is another great opportunity to use montecatini because again it's a name, it's the most important information. There's going to be a lot of names, so a lot of fun potential to play around with combinations on mockups that she designed so nicely in a font like this. So, we're going to use montecatini for the name, and then just the simple riesling for the table detail. So now onto the Save the Dale. So, you'll notice that we didn't use or I mean sorry, the RSVP. You'll notice that we didn't use the montecatini font because the RSVP headline isn't as important as a name would be. So we're going to use the next best thing. We're going to use the nice modern riesling font, and I think that looks so beautiful. I love how the capital letters look, it's nice and airy, again we want to combine it with the copperplate. The last step in all of this is how you bring this into the printer so that the printed version which is ultimately what we're going for here, is as beautiful and crisp and close to the artwork we have here as possible. Over the last few years with the printers that I've been working with, I've learned a couple of little things that have benefited me. So, one of them is to just always go and get a proof. That means just like one or two to make sure that the color is right, to make sure that the spelling is right, it's just a really good safety. Usually printers will require that you see a proof but it's a good rule of thumb. Another one is that I've never really had too many issues with color. If you're working with vector, a lot of times you need to provide a pantone color to make sure that they pick a uniform similar color that is the exact same as the one that you're working with in illustrator, but when it's hand done artwork, you really only have to rely on your eye, and that's why a proof is really good because you don't have a pantone color to tell them exactly what the green should be for example, or the yellow or the pink. So, you just have to do it by your gut. Then the last thing is just getting bleeds down. So you'll notice between these two. We have a little bit of breathing room between the crop marks and the border in this artwork. We should probably create a little bit more even, but you always want to have at least about 0.25 Inches. So, a fourth of an inch, between the edge of the artwork and the border of the print. It's just a really good thing to keep in mind. So, when you're giving the printer your artwork, it should have that breathing room. The second thing is if your artwork does bleed off of the image, you don't want it just to go up to the crop mark, you actually want to extend it beyond. So, you'll see here that the edge of this entire thing has a bleed, and it's the same size. It's 0.25 Inches. So, that just ensures that when the printer crops this card, they don't miss anything. So, you just want to kind of overextend the artwork so that the crop goes all the way. The golden number of cropping is 0.25 Inches. So, whether that's 0.25 inches inside or outside of the trademarks, that's really what you have to remember. So, we have the final art board in front of us, and it is the gold mine of all the work that we've done. We have our original artwork in there, we have the cleaned up artwork, we have the designed layouts, we have our front choices, we have all of the sizing and print readiness that we need from these wedding assets. So, this is a really good resource to use. I'm going to include it in the resources as a template for if you want to create a wedding suite, you need to know the exact sizing, how to set up a print file, it will all be there. I will also include one with my artwork in it, just so you can explore that and check out the resolution and all that. This is going to be the thing that you keep going back to. I promise you once you start using this, you never going to go off and make desparate files. It's the best way to organize and keep your work and be able to have it to go back in reference.
11. Closing: I hope that this class inspires you to explore with your hands, and keep painting, and keep drawing, and keep sketching, and know that it's really really easy to transition that into a digital output. I also hope that this excites you around, not just thinking about one piece that you're making or one way to represent something, but all of the different ways. This is a really really good exercise if you're trying to hone in on your style and explore what you're really trying to say with your illustration, and to make it consistent. I think that that's what any illustrator would say is, kind of the secret to getting hired for something is consistency and being known for something. So, again while this is a wedding suite branding class, that's really just the vehicle for showing you the many ways to create a brand, and create a cohesive set of items that you're proud of. So, the community here is what will make this class, and what makes every sculpture class. I will be very excited to see your feedback, to see the projects you do. If you're just sketching, upload it, if you want to create the full thing I would love to see. I'm very compelled by illustration because it is the most direct output of the artist's mind, and what they're seeing, and what their ideas are. And while it's usually communicating type of message, there still is a lot of kind of personal investment and interpretation in that. And no matter where the artist is coming from in making that, or where I'm coming from, it's always very interesting to see what that output is. So, you don't have to have done the whole shebang of the project, I will be very excited to see whatever you upload, and will be there to answer any questions, and give you feedback, and hear what you would like me to teach next. So, upload your projects.
12. More to Explore:
Carolyn Wiedeman, Artist, Illustrator
