Watercolor Textures for Graphic Design

1. Intro: Who doesn't love the vibrancy, the handmade feel, and the punch of color that watercolor texture's provide in graphic design? They seem to be everywhere these days, from business cards to full stationary sets, web graphics, social media posts to even logos. Check out my Watercolor Branding class for that one. My name's Teela Cunningham, and I love incorporating watercolor textures into such a structured environment like graphic design. In this class, I'll walk you through my process for creating the watercolor textures from scratch, the exact scan settings I use to scan them into the computer, enhancing color and vibrancy in Photoshop, and even removing their background so you can place them on any color background that you choose. At the end of this class, we'll even create a seamless, repeatable texture pattern, so you can apply your texture to typography, vector elements or backgrounds with just a couple of clicks. As a bonus, I'm including a free PDF with links to every supply and product mentioned throughout the entire class, so you'll have everything you need to create your own digital watercolor textures for graphic design. Hit enroll and grab a brush. 2. Supplies Overview: Before we can begin creating our watercolor textures, I want to walk you through the exact supplies that I use whenever I'm creating watercolor textures to use in my graphic designs. I've got two options here, you by no means need to purchase both of these. I just wanted to provide one more affordable option between the two. I've got two types of watercolors. The first one is this Dr. Ph. Martin's and I actually just started using these and I'm really loving them so far. They're extremely vibrant because they are so concentrated. Sometimes you'll have to mix a few colors together so it's not looking like a highlighter, like this crazy yellow here. But so far I've really enjoyed using them. They are on more pricier side, but you only have to use a couple of drops and it goes a really long way. That's what I have in this palette right here, just a couple of drops and you'll be good to go. We will be mixing a little bit of water into these two, so I'm going to walk you through a more creating the actual watercolor textures. I'll show exactly how I use the Dr. Ph. Martin's compared to these two Pentel watercolors. If you took my water brush lettering class and you purchase supplies for that, we're using a lot of the same supplies, so there's actually no need to go out and purchase some more because everything you have for that class you'll be able to use for this class with the addition of a paintbrush. Over here, this is my palette that's filled with Pentel watercolors, just the tube kind, so they look like this. All I did was squeeze a little bit out of the tube and those go a really long way as well. You'll need a cup of water just to clean off your brush with the different colors that we'll be using, and then I use a napkin or a paper towel just to get the color off of my brush as I'm going. I want to show you the Pentel tube watercolors. I use the 24 set, but it comes in a 12 set too, so whatever you've got in your budget, it's nice because you have a couple of options right there. For my paintbrush, I'm actually only using one paintbrush for all of the textures that I create, and I found out of all the ones that I've tried, this number 12 round brush has been really awesome. It's super affordable to create all the different kind of squashes, if you want some circular textures that covers everything. I even ever needed to use anything else and I've been really happy with this. So I just use this one paintbrush for everything. As far as paper goes, if you took the water brush lettering class, you will likely already have this Canson watercolor paper. This is really excellent if you don't plan on using a ton of water with your textures, if you are a heavy water user, I've got another option that I would recommend. But if your water usage is a little on the lighter side, this is the perfect option. It will swell a little bit so you'll get some color that goes in a diff if you use too much water with this particular paper. But this is super affordable. It's got a little less tooth on the paper, so once you scan it in, the texture of the actual paper won't show up or be as obvious, I don't know if you can see the texture in here, probably not. But I found this to be a great paper if the texture of the paper within your watercolor textures doesn't bother you that much. If you're a bit of a heavier water user with your watercolors, this is the paper that I would recommend. This is Strathmore, it's also pretty affordable and it's got a lot of tooth in the actual paper, maybe you can see this one. When you scan your watercolor textures and you're definitely going to pick up the texture from the paper if you go this route. Either one can't really go wrong here, it just depends on your water usage. If you choose the Canson, you're just going have to go a little bit lighter; Strathmore holds up a little bit better, so either one of these is perfectly fine. That's all the supplies that I'm going to be using to create the watercolor textures in the next video. 3. Watercolor Textures with Concentrated Watercolors: Now that we have all of our supplies together, we can start actually creating our textures that we will later digitize. In this video I want to walk you through how I use the Dr. Ph. Martin's Concentrated Watercolors. Then in the next video, I'll go over how to use the Pentel tool watercolors. There's a little bit of a difference between the two, but nothing huge. I'm using these Dr. Ph. Martin's, super awesome, they have an eye dropper. So when you undo them, all you have to do is do one or two drops. That's all you need to do, and they go really long ways, so I like that aspect of using the concentrated watercolors. You also use, in my opinion, far less water than you do with the Pentel. I'm using the Canson watercolor paper because I don't plan on using quite as much water. I'm going to be using the Strathmore watercolor paper with the Pentel's, because we're going to use a little more, but either one is perfectly fine with these. I've got a couple of drops of each color in the wells of my paint palette, and I've got my cup of water right here already. I've got my number 12 round brush and I'm ready to go, and I've got my paper towel, because that's really important too. I'm just going to get some water on my brush. For this first one, I just want to do this really big swash that I can set behind. If I was doing a wedding invitation or an announcement, this would really enhance the message. I do want to mention that I'm also not using bleach or any salt to add that fine detail in my watercolor textures. Because when watercolor textures are being used in graphic design, you want to enhance the message, you're calling attention to the message that your graphic design is portraying. So I avoid putting too much detail in my watercolors, I intend my watercolors to bring vibrancy and color to the layout to enhance the message, not to detract from it, and I feel like putting too many details with salt or any other solution that could add those really beautiful details, could detract from the message. Small ran on that, but that's why we're not using salt here. For this example, since these ones are much more vibrant, I want to show you how to create the more swash here looking textures, and then with the Pentel colors, we're going to be creating a more soft and color streaked texture. Just hopping right in here, I've got my number 12 round brush right here with some water. I get it pretty wet and then I'm going to use the red purple right here. I'm just going to grab a little bit on the edge, so I'm bringing up the concentrated watercolor, getting a nice little corner, my brush is pretty full. Then I'm just going to swash it out really free handing it, just an interesting, brushed, edged shape. You can see right away that these Ph. Martin's are very vibrant, which is great. With your watercolors still wet, this is where I bring in some other colors, and I generally use three or four colors for my textures, and the colors that I use are, if you are looking at a color wheel, I choose colors that are next to each other in a color wheel, because if I go too far away, then they become too opposite and then your colors start getting pretty muddy when you use them together, so I found that 3-4 works really well. I sometimes use two, but three and four is a pretty good count. When I'm introducing another color into my texture, I like starting it off in a corner and then seeing how it'll play into the whole thing. I do this thing that I just call franklin ride, I'll just put dots of the color around the texture, and then by adding just a little bit of water, they can blend into the background. I just dabble up just to mix the color really nicely to give it some interesting areas, just color wise. Then I'm also going to bring in a little bit of red. I'm not using very much water. When I do use the water, it's just to clean off my brush. Then maybe I'll even bring in a little bit of blue, let me do the dark blue. This is just blending them all together. This is the technique that I use to get some interesting color mixtures within my textures. I usually do one more thing. If it's looking like I've got too much water in some areas, especially with this paper you can see along this edge, there's quite a bit of color build-up right there. The easy solution to this is if you just grab a tissue and you tear off a corner of it, you can come in and just soak up a little bit of the extra, that way you don't get these giant splotches of color build-up. It just keeps the texture a little more consistent and uniform overall by picking up any extra color or water along the edges. This sucks right up really easily. That looks good. The other shape that I want to show you how to create, I use circles quite a bit, and I really like the circle because it works well for logos and if you would like to create a logo using your watercolor texture that you create in this class, I've got another class called watercolor branding. In the class we go over exactly how to create a logo using your watercolor texture. Circles are really good for logos and for invitations, like a wedding invitation, it's really nice to set the couples name on top of. These circles can be really handy. I'm just going to grab a little bit of green, and I'm just going to paint a circle and fill it in. I like that it's not totally perfect circle, it goes right back to having that crafty feel of being created with a watercolor. I love the handmade look within a structured setting like graphic design. Once I have my circle, then, just like I usually do, I go back to colors that are close to it in the color wheel. I've got some blue here, and I'm just going to dabble it in. This dabbing process is nice, I've found in smaller shapes, you can get a lot of interesting color blends in a small area. Let me bring in some darker blue right here, and I might even bring in a little bit of yellow. Let's see how this looks. That's looking really interesting. I'm just going to grab my tissue again and pick up a little bit of the excess up here. I'm going to let this dry. In the next video we will go over creating watercolor textures using our Pentel tool Art watercolors. 4. Watercolor Textures with Tube Watercolors: In this video I want to walk you through how I use the Pentel tube watercolors, to create watercolor textures and I've found that softer textures and color strict textures work really well with the Pentel watercolors. I want to show you exactly how I create those kinds of textures and I'm using this Strathmore watercolor paper for this one since I typically use a little more water with the Pentels than I do with the Ph Martin's. I've got my paper towel, my 12 round brush, and I've got my paint palette. I've got some watercolors already in there and I've also grabbed my masking tape for this video just to show you if you get annoyed by how the paper might be bowing or bending, or swelling, a nice way to keep everything really balanced and even as your water builds up, is to just take down the corners of your paper and that will keep it a little more even so you don't get these huge areas where the water pulls up. So it's just plain old artists masking tape and I just grab the corners and then I'm ready to go. So the first one that I want to go over is the softer texture, so it's a natural gradient as you work your way down. So I'm going to use this teal color for this one. So I'm getting my brush nice and wet, waking up my watercolors a little bit since they were getting a little dry and then all I do is draw a streak across and then I bring it down. Nice and easy. Nothing crazy about this. Then I'll dip in the water and I'll just start creating this natural gradient with the water. So keep the majority of my color up towards the top and as I work my way down, I'll bring in more water just to soften it. Okay. That's looking really good and this is where I'll bring in an extra color. Like I mentioned in the last video, I usually stick between three and four colors, sometimes I only do two. Anything more than four can get pretty muddy. So I'm just going to bring in this cobalt blue and just grab a few areas where I think it would look pretty to have a little extra color in here, and then I just dab around to blend because I already have a lot of water on the paper. As that dries, I'll get some really nice textures going in there and you can see the texture of the actual paper coming through as well. I'm just going to put a little couple of dabs of water on here. The next one I want to share is how to create those color streaked, watercolor textures. So for this one, I'm going to grab some more vibrant colors. I'm going to start and lay a base of red purple for this one. I'm going to do the same thing we did with the soft watercolor, only I want an even amount of color all the way through. So I don't want it to naturally get softer at the bottom. I want everything to be an even color all the way through. So I'll use a lot more actual watercolor on here than water. I like these kind of brushed edges on the sides because sometimes I use those and crop them off of designs. A nice painterly effect. Okay, so that's looking pretty even. So now I will grab another color. I'm going to grab orange right here and do the streak. I'll dilute it a good amount and then I'll just throw in a line in some different places and if I want it a little darker, I'll add it a little more. If I want to dilute it, all I have to do is dab it with a little water here and there and that'll break it up so it's not super obvious. I'm going to bring in a little bit of red too. As these dry, I'm going to get some nice texture in here where they're kind of hitting each other. So that's how I create soft and streaked watercolor textures using the Pentel watercolors and in the next video we're going to scan everything we just created into the computer and we'll take it from there. 5. Scan Settings: Now that our watercolor textures have had a chance to dry, it's time to scan them in and begin digitizing them. If you don't have a scanner, you can take a photograph, a high-rise photograph of your textures, but I would highly recommend that you scan them in. I'm using just a basic printer scanner combo. You can get them for like 100 bucks these days, mine is a Canon MP480. The printer doesn't even work on it anymore, and I've had it for like eight years, but the scanner is amazing so I can't get rid of it. With such a basic printer, I'm actually able to scan at 600 PPI, which is a really high resolution. The typical print resolution is 300. That you want to have a really crisp outcome. But I always scan in at 600 just so I always have a really high-quality texture in my reserves if I ever need them. We're just going to scan these. Because my paper boat a little bit, I literally just put a five pound free weight on top of my scanner just to hold the top down as much as possible, just to flatten out the paper. I'm just going to hit "Scan". This is what always happens whenever I scan at home. These are the textures that we created using the Dr. Ph. Martin's concentrated watercolors. As you can see, I've chosen color up here. My resolution is 600. I always go the max here just so I always have the highest possible and then you can always save down. But if you save up, you're always going to lose quality. That's why I always start with the largest one. Choose the folder where you're going to scan them to, name them whatever you'd like. Somebody call these ph-textures, since they're the Ph Martin textures. I actually saved mine as a JPEG. Just a JPEG, 600 DPI and then I just draw a rectangle around my textures, hit "Scan" and now they're going to go into this folder which I've already defined. This is going to take a little bit, so I'll be right back as soon as this finishes. Now that these are all done scanning, I'm just going to close out of this and I'm going to put the watercolor textures that we created using the Pentel to watercolors into my scanner bed. We're going to follow the same steps again. I'm just going to hit "Scan". One thing I did want to mention is the watercolor paper was actually larger than my scanner bed. As you can see, I've cut it down a little bit so it fits in there. Don't be afraid to do that because you want it to fit really well on there because you'll pick up the best detail if it's lying as flat as possible on your scanner bed. Once again, I'm just going to define the area that I want scanned. There isn't a texture lines because we're scanning this at such a high resolution. I'm just going to label these pentel-textures. All the setting is the same, 600 DPI. I've got the same place where I'm scanning them too, hit "Scan" and then I will see you in Photoshop in the next video. 6. Size + Color Adjustments in Photoshop: I've just opened the watercolor textures that we just made in Photoshop. What you're looking at right here are the textures that we created using the Dr. Ph Martin's concentrated watercolor. Over here I've got the Pentel watercolor textures that we created. Right now is the perfect time to post these to your project because it would be really cool to see the before and the after, because in this video, we're going to up the color saturation and the vibrancy and really bring our watercolors to life. So it'd be cool to see the before and after of your watercolors. Head on over and upload this to your project, and then after you do that, come back here and the first thing we're going to do is hit "M" on your keyboard and that will activate your marquee tool, and you're just going to draw a rectangle around your water color. We'll just do one at a time here. Once it's selected and now we're going to hit Command C or Control C on a PC to copy it, and then we're going to go File, New. Right here, it's already taking the width and the height that we just determined with our marquee so we don't need to do anything here. For resolution, the standard resolution is 300, so we're going to change this to 300, but we'll always have the scan at a higher resolution if we ever need anything larger than what we're using it for right now so it's just nice to have in your reserve. Next you're going to make sure your color mode is RGB. Right now, we're going to intend this for web usage, and later on we can always change it to CMYK, but you're always going to be able to have far more vibrant colors working in RGB because we're able to have more vibrant colors on screen than we are in print than what CMYK is able to accomplish. Just a heads up, if you are intending these for print, you'll have to change your color mode later on to CMYK and maybe adjust a few things just to keep your vibrancy up. But for now, we're going to stick with RGB. Once you have all that, just hit "OK." Now that we've got the document the size that we need it, we're going to hit Command V or Control V on a PC to paste our texture in. If you don't like it being vertical like this, you can change the orientation of those by just going Image, Image Rotation, and this will be 90 degrees clockwise. Just like we painted it. Now we're going to up our contrast. The way we're going to do that is by adding a levels adjustment layer. If you don't see your adjustments panel over here, you can get to it by going Window, Adjustments. We're just going to click on this little icon right here for levels. The black slider, we're going to start sliding to the right, and when you move the black slider it basically means all the dark colors are going to get darker, and your white colors, when you slide this one to the left, your white colors are going to get lighter. I'll show you how that works. I'm just going to click on this little node and I'm going to drag it to the right, and as I do that, you can notice this color getting very saturated and very vibrant. We don't want to go overboard, we still want it to look realistic because if I go too far, we know right away that no one ever painted the water color and had it look that way, and it looks pretty ugly anyway. We're just going to find a realistic but still very vibrant and beautiful setting. Now we're going to slide the white one and see how that affects our color. I don't think I need to slide the white one too much. That's feeling pretty good, pretty realistic. If you're still feeling like you're not getting quite enough contrast with your coloring, you can come up here and click on Brightness/Contrast. When you do that, you can up your contrast a little bit just to pump this up, you can make things a little darker, which brings some extra life to your darker colors. You just don't want the colors breaking down because if I zoom in here, if you watch this area over here, it starts getting a little pixelated. The darker I go see how ugly that looks, so we really want to avoid that happening. Just pay very close attention to some of the more detailed areas of your texture to avoid having that happen. I'm going to bring my contrast down a little bit, and that looks a little more balanced. Actually, I don't think we need this brightness contrast at all, but it's definitely a great option if you're not getting the results that you're looking for with just the levels adjustment, brightness and contrast is also another great option. I'm going to delete this one because I don't need it, but you may need it for yours. Once you have your settings all taken care of, either save a copy of this so you can come back later and change these adjustments. Because whenever you use an adjustment layer, it's really cool because you can always come back into it and it saves your settings. That's why I always recommend doing an adjustment layer, it's non-destructive editing. Whereas if you would come up here and gone Image, Adjustments and apply this, it would be a permanent application of these adjustments. Once you have your copy saved with this adjustment layer, now we're going to merge these together. Once we do this, you can't change the settings anymore, so just a heads up to save it now if you want to keep those adjustments. I'm going to hold Shift, click on my art layer, right-click Merge Layers. Now that I have the coloring exactly the way I need it, I'm going to go through my other textures, make the same adjustments. Then in the next video we're going to cut out our texture just so we can place it at any color background. 7. Removing Backgrounds: Now that our watercolor texture is all color adjusted and looking really good, it's a great time to put it in your project so we can see the before and after of the pre-color adjustment and the post color adjustment. Once you have your adjusted watercolor texture, now it's time to cut it out of the background so then you can place it on any color background that you choose. For this, we need a new color background. Right now we just have this white background right here, and we need another color so we can test what it looks like on a different color. I always use black just because I can see white and black, and then I can test a color later on. With the background layer selected, just come down here and click this little icon for a new layer. Next you're going to come over here and if you don't see this white and black right here, just click on this little icon and it will reset to your black and white. Then you can either hit X on your keyboard to switch the white and black, or you can hit this little arrow and it'll switch it. You just want to make sure that the black is in the background and the white is in the foreground. Next, you're going to hit Command, Delete or Control backspace on a PC, and you'll notice over here in your layers palette now it fills it with black. It's just a nice keyboard shortcut for filling an entire artboard with color. If I turn off my artwork layer, you can see I've got a black layer. As I remove the white on this layer, you're going be able to start seeing the black and then we can test things really easily. From here we're going to select our artwork layer, and then you're going to come up here and you're going to go Select, Color Range. From here you're just going to take your little eyedropper that you have and you're going to click on the white. Next you're going to come down here and make sure Selection Preview has black matte selected. Don't select any of these other ones because it'll be far easier to see what you're actually deleting by having black matte selected. I also always have this invert checkbox checked because otherwise, it's also difficult to see what's really happening. Make sure that this little checkbox is checked. This part doesn't really matter, it's just a little preview for you to look back and forth. The amount of white that's being removed is determined by the slider right here for fuzziness. If I reduce it, you can see more white is coming through. If I increase it, that has the least amount of white showing. But the black is starting to peek through our watercolor and that's making it a little darker looking and we want it to be nice and colorful and vibrant. We need a happy medium. How I usually determine because it's going to be different for any watercolor texture, how I determine what's best is by sliding it, I look at some clean edges that I really like that are part of the watercolor texture, and I make sure that there's only a slight sliver of white that's showing right there because it's really easy to remove. That tells me that's a good happy medium. Now my watercolor texture isn't having any black show through and I've got that little white line. I'm feeling really good about my selection, so I'm going to keep mine. Let's see. I think 105 is perfect for this particular watercolor texture, so I'm going to hit "OK". Once you do that, you'll have a selection. It's not going to be permanently applied yet. What we need to do before we apply this selection, is remove that white little sliver up on our edge. If I zoom in here, you can see where the selection is. In order to remove that little line, we just need to move our selection in just slightly. In order to do that, all you have to go is Select, Modify, Contract, and I'm going to input two pixels and just watch this dancing ants line as soon as I hit OK. As you can see, it moved closer to the inside so now this part will be removed. If I zoom out and I hit this little icon down here in the bottom of your layers palette for a layer mask, you're just going to click it once and now we have our selection applied. Everything's looking really good, but there's a few spots where we can improve things. This is a nice quick way to remove your background. Now we can just go in and improve the little details, and then we're going to be all set. Once you start dealing with a layer mask, it's a non-destructive form of editing, which means everything you do using a layer mask, you can undo. Whereas with the eraser tool, you're permanently deleting artwork. The mass tool allows you to remove it from being seen, but you can always bring it back later if you change your mind. I use layer mask all the time, I highly recommend it for any form of editing because it's really nice to always be able to go back if you need to. When you're using a layer mask, you generally use a brush and the brush is either white or it's black. The phrase that you can remember as to whether you're supposed to use white or use black is, white reveals and black conceals. When you paint with white, things are going to come back and reappear that are on the original layer, and when you paint with black, it's going to conceal it or hide it from the original layer. I'll show you exactly what I mean. It's not that scary at all, I promise. I'm going zoom in here, and as you can see, I got some jaggy edges right here that I'd really like to remove. The way that I can do that is by hitting B on my keyboard for my brush tool, and I know that I need to paint with black because the black will hide these areas that I want to get rid of. You want to make sure that the layer mask is selected as you're doing this. In my palette, I'm going to choose this brush 36 because it's a rougher brush, it's got a lot of different character and I'm looking for something very organic for my edge. The other thing I want to make sure is that it's going to rotate as I use it. If I make sure my black is in front right here, and you can do that by hitting X or you can hit this little arrow switcher, and I'm just going to click once. You can see my brush is not moving, so the edge will always be the same if I just keep clicking. I can make this a rotatable brush if I come over here and click brush. If you don't see this, you can get to it by going Window, Brush, and over here you're just going to check Shape Dynamics. once you check shape dynamics, you wanted to make sure your size jitter is at zero, unless you'd like it to change size as well as rotation, that's perfectly fine. I like keeping mine at zero, minimum diameter I keep at zero percent. My angle jitter, I've got all the way to 100 and my roundness jitter is zero. These are the settings that I use. Once I've got shape dynamics checked, I can close this, and now when I click and use it, you can see that it's rotating. It's changing directions. If I zoom in here and I want to start removing parts, I can just start clicking pretty quickly. You can hear my mouse going crazy. It's starting to give me that rough watercolored edge, which is exactly what I want. If I just click and drag, I can use it just like an eraser. Only it's a layer mask, so I can always bring it back if I need to. I'm just going to come through here and I'm just paying attention to my edge. That's what's most important to me because these other areas that aren't part of the edge, I can just click and drag and erase those like an eraser. What I will do is come through the entire watercolor texture and do that to the edge, and you can see already how organic it looks and how realistic it looks. If I want to keep transparencies and areas, that's totally fine. If I want to maybe keep this darker area right here, I can come in and if I want to keep this edge, all I have to do is once I delete my areas, if I want to bring it back, all I have to do is hit X on my keyboard and that will switch it to white. It means I'm bringing it back. If I click, you can see I can bring back those edges. But obviously I don't want white, so I'm going to hit X. Now I can paint with black and organically form those areas. As you can see, I found a little maybe bristle hair in my artwork and I definitely don't want that there. If I select my artwork, so if I come over to my layer and just click on my art, and then come over here to your layer palette and choose your healing brush, and up here, just make sure Content-Aware is checked. Then when you brush over it, Photoshop will automatically fill that in and remove it. Let's go back to our layer mask just by clicking on our mask, hitting B on our keyboard, and now we can resume our editing all the way around the texture and we can get it exactly how we want it. I like these hard edges here. I will literally go around this entire thing following that process until my entire watercolor texture is cut out. But it's totally worth the time because once you start using your textures, you'll use them a lot and you definitely want them looking correct every time you use them. That's how to cut out your watercolor texture so it can be placed on any color background. 8. Saving Your Textures: Here's what that watercolor texture looks like, fully cut out in Photoshop, and as a final test before we save this out for use on other projects, we just want to see how another color will look underneath it. We're just going to click on our black layer, we're going to create a new layer and click on the black background color right here, and then you can choose any color you want. If I want maybe a medium blue, I'm going to hit "Okay", and then I can use that keyboard shortcut once again, which is Command Delete or Control Backspace on a PC, and that's looking really good. My edges are looking nice and I'm really happy with how this came up. Once I've tested my watercolor texture out in different backgrounds, now I can save it as a transparent file. I'm going to hide all of my different background colors and you can see I've got a transparent layer now. I'm just going to come over and go "File", "Save As", and once your screen pops up, you're going to come over here and you're going to choose PNG from your format and then hit "Save" with whatever file name you'd like to save it as. I'm going to call mine pink adjusted. I'm going to hit "Save", and once you do that, you're going to have this little dialog box that shows up. You want to make sure smallest and slow is selected for a compression so you don't lose any type of file information once it's saved. For interlace, you're just going to keep it selected at None, and then hit "Okay". Once you have that, now you can place that PNG on anything you need and your file will always have a transparent background to it. You can also save it as a PSD file with no background color showing. However, your file size will likely be far larger using that PSD than it would if you were using the PNG. That PNG allowed you to keep the resolution of our watercolor texture which is 300 PPI. If you need to use this for Web, you'll want to come over here and go "File", "Save for Web", and this will make for a much smaller file size and you can still keep the transparency for web use by over here selecting PNG-24, and you'll get a little preview after you select that. This one is on the fairly large size, so sometimes it'll take a little bit longer. But if I zoom out, you can see it's definitely on a transparent background and here's where you can hit "Save", and this will be a smaller file size because it's going to be saved at 72 PPI for Web instead of the 300. Just a heads up about that. Those are the different file formats you'll be able to save this and keep that transparency present. 9. Create Seamless Watercolor Texture Patterns: Now that we have our watercolor texture all cut out, thinking about different things that we can use it for. One of those things is actually creating a seamless, repeatable pattern which you can apply to texts, to vector elements, to backgrounds, to really anything. It can be a really, really powerful asset moving forward with your design. I want to take this texture and I'm going to show you exactly how to convert it into a seamless, repeatable pattern that you can use on any of your designs anywhere for years to come. We're going to start by going File New, and we're going to create a document that's 1000 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high, 300 ppi resolution, and we're going to keep our color mode at RGB, and we're going to hit "OK". Next we're going to come back over to our texture, and with your current layer selected, your artwork layer, you're just going to click and you're going to drag it up into your new file and you're just going to release. This file size is smaller than our original watercolor texture, and that's really important because we're going to maintain this really beautiful texture that we've got going on within the colors. We're just going to move this around and find a good spot where it feels like we're getting a good mixture of color and variation. I think right around here is probably the best spot where we're not running into any edges, and once you find your spot, you're going to hold Shift, click on the background layer, right-click and select merge layers. Once you do that, you're going to double-click, hit OK, so your layer becomes unlocked. Now if you move your texture, you can see it's already cropped it, which is really important. If we were to just create a pattern right now, let's create a new document by going File, New, and we're just going to choose a US paper size document. It doesn't really matter what size it is. Hit "OK". I'm just going to type out, testing the pattern. Actually, I'm going to put this on two lines. The font that I'm using for this is called Tuesday Script. I actually just released this. This is one of my fonts. You can see if we come back to our pattern, if I my go Edit, Define Pattern, and we can say Test 1. If we come over here and double-click on our text layer and choose Pattern Overlay. These are all my other patterns, but this is the one that we just created, it'll be the one at the very bottom. If I click on that, if I zoom in here, you can see I've got a bunch of lines breaking it up. Even if I move it around, I've got these horrible lines, vertical and horizontal, and that looks pretty awful. I would have to have a really small size text in order to use this and we don't want that. We want something that can be used on anything. After you have your square already, this is the part where we create a seamless pattern. All you're going to do is come up here and go Filter, Other, Offset, and you're going to get a horizontal amount and you're going to get a vertical amount. If you move the slider, you could change that amount to determine where all of this meets. The point of this is to try and get all of these lines that are appearing in the same place so you can fix them. I always try and make a bullseye, so it goes right into the center and then I hit "OK". Now we're going to grab our rubber stamp tool because we're going to fill in these hard lines with information that we already have in our texture. We're going to hit "S" on our keyboard for our rubber stamp tool. We're going to come up here to our brush or our stamp settings, and we're just going to make sure that this first one is selected. Your hardness should be zero percent and your size can be anything. To increase or reduce the size of your brush, you can hit the close bracket key on your keyboard to increase. You can hit the open bracket key on your keyboard to decrease. Whenever you're using the stamp tool, you need to define a source point for your texture that you will fill these hard lines in with. What I always do is I look at the two colors that are hitting each other. Right here, I've got a purple on top and a pink on the bottom that are hitting each other. If I look over here, this is a nice representation. I've got a purpley color and a pink color. If I hit Alt on my keyboard and I click once, that's telling Photoshop that's where I want the source to be in. If I come over here and because it's soft, my edges won't be hard and I can just paint over right here. But I want to avoid these hard lines from showing up again so I'm going to hit "Command Z", and I'm just going to do a little bit right here, and then I'm going to define a source point that's a little bit lower. I'm going to hold Alt, click and then I can paint a little bit. Now I've covered up that hard line. Right here I've got a blue and a pink that hits, and this is close right here. I think this is about as good as I'm going to get. I'm going to grab this portion right here, and I'm just going to paint it in. Once again, we've got purple and pink hitting and I'm going to grab from over here this time, and you just have to move along and find different areas that can fit the need for that without totally ruining your original texture. Definitely don't feel bad hitting Command Z or Control Z to undo what you've done. It's a lot of experimentation, I've been doing this a really long time and I still have to go back and forth playing around and finding the happy medium between the two colors. But it's well worth it once you get through it. I'm just going to come around and I will speed up the video, but I will continue working so you can see my every move. I've gotten rid of all of my really hard lines and now I want to test this to make sure I've actually removed all of my hard lines. What I do is I always come up here and I go Filter, Other, Offset, and I'll move these numbers around one more time shifting my whole pattern, making sure I don't have any hard lines left. This one seems to be passing this test so I think I'm in good shape. I'm just going to hit "Cancel", and now once again I'll go Edit, Define Pattern and this time we're going to call this Test 2 and hit "OK". Now we can come over to our test file. We can double-click on our text go Pattern Overlay and we can select our new pattern and it's passing the test. I can even move it around and I'm not getting any hard lines anywhere. If I come over here, I can click on my original and you can see there's hard lines everywhere in this thing. Even if I move it around, I've got them up here and down here. But as soon as I click on the new one, you can see they're all gone, I can move this all over the place and use it on whatever I need. That's how to create a seamless, repeatable watercolor, texture pattern in Photoshop. In the next video, I'll show you how to use our original watercolor textures if you prefer not to use a pattern on the same types of elements and topography. 10. Applying Textures to Design Elements: In the previous video, we talked about applying a seamless, watercolor, texture pattern to typography. In this video, if you prefer not to create a pattern, I'm going to share how to use just your regular texture which you found right here, and applying it to typography as well. I'm going to select the artwork layer right here, and I can either drag this into my file or I can go "File", "Place" and select the saved PNG or PSD file from earlier. Since I have it readily available, I can just put it right in here, and now all I need to do is right-click, make sure your artwork layer is above your text layer, or if you have vector elements or any other artwork right here, just make sure that your texture is on the layer above it. Then you can right-click, "Create Clipping Mask", and that will mask it right into the typography so you can move it around, you just need to watch out for the edges since this isn't a seamless pattern, you are going to get edges in this. You just want to find a healthy place where everything seems to be lining up really well. It's as simple as that, if you want to bring in any other shapes or elements, anything below this clipping mask, the texture will be applied to. It's as easy as that to use your regular texture or the pattern that you created. Now's the perfect time to share how you plan on using your watercolor textures with typography or vector elements or as background elements. So head over to your project and share those now. 11. Thank You!: That's our class. Don't forget to hit class project right below this video and scroll to the bottom for that free PDF with links to all the supplies and products used throughout the entire class. You'll also find a discount code on my own watercolor texture kits. If you're short on time, it needs some watercolor textures first. Don't forget to also head on over to the projects section and post your own watercolor texture creations so we can all check them out. Thanks so much for enrolling, I hope you enjoyed the class, and I will see you next time.