What's in my Bag: A contemporary take on the classic self portrait.

1. What's a What's in my Bag Portrait?!: Hello everyone and welcome back to another class with me, Christina [inaudible]. In this one, I'm going to step away from pattern-making, and go back to my first class which is illustration. I'd say that I've mainly worked with illustrations, but I think this makes more sense that I create a class for that. In this class, we're going to discuss making a, what's in my bag portrait. It's like my take on a contemporary fun twist of the regular self portrait because you're not actually drawing any faces, but you're somehow capturing your personality, and they're really fun to draw. I started drawing these in 2011 because I was actually commissioned by a magazine to create these what's in my bag portraits for celebrities. People from old Hollywood, like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. Then when I was doing this project once every month for their issues, and I thought it was so much fun that I wanted to continue this project, so I started doing for bloggers, and I reached out to all kinds of different bloggers, and I was able to work with so many interesting girls. It was so fun to see that every single one of them was different even though they had the same elements. There was always a beautiful handbag, or a pair of shoes, and an iPhone or things like that. But then there's also lots of personal items that everyone chose themselves, what they wanted in the portrait. They're usually around ten items or so, and I think that they're really nice now, I've also opened up my what's in my bag portraits for clients as well, private clients. I have created now maybe around a 100 of these, and they're all different. You can see them on Pinterest if you like. I have a couple of boards at the one for, all my bloggers that I created, where you can see examples of all the amazing bloggers that I collaborated with for a couple years, and then I also have another board that have what's in my bag portraits of private clients that I've had. You can also see the difference in the people's personalities, and what people choose to have in their portraits. Also can give you inspiration for your own. Obviously, for this class, the class project is to create a what's my bag portrait for yourself. You can also do a celebrity if you don't want to do yourself, or a favorite character from a book, or anything like that for your mom or your sister, brother, doesn't have to be a girl. This class is geared towards students who are very comfortable with drawing, but not necessarily have to be an expert drawer or whatever we can say. I will be going through my process of choosing items for my illustration, I will also be going through how I go through the process of creating a beautiful composition that's interesting, unique, has good flow, and then I will also be discussing how I digitally color in Photoshop, and create the final illustration that's ready for print. I really hope that you will enjoy this class. That you'll find it inspiring, and fun, and let's get started. 2. Supplies & Inspiration : The first section of our class is to discuss supplies and inspiration. The only supplies you'll be needing for this class is a regular piece of paper, I'm going to be using an A3 size because I think it's way easier to work on a larger surface. You'll also need a pencil, an eraser, and a fountain pen of your choice. My favorite way of drawing is line-drawing and then digitally coloring in it like flat colors on the computer and Photoshop. But you can of course use whatever technique that you want to to create yours, but this is the process that I will be showing. You can of course color your illustration directly on the paper, in traditional media, either with watercolor or with colored pencils, or paints, or anything like that. Then, of course, you can also use a different program to create the digital illustration. The end if you'd like, we prefer Illustrator. This completely up to you. But like I said, this is the process that I will be showing, my personal process that I have been using for years. I like the mix of using traditional media, having my hand-drawn lines and a little scratch and a little wonky, and then bringing them into the computer to give them flat digital color that's beautiful and perfect and it gives it a good mix, I think. Minimalistic, simple, all of that. Then inspiration. Like I said in the intro, I welcome you to go look at my Pinterest boards that I have linked in the class description so that you can go and get inspired by the portraits that I have created previously. You can see different items that other people have chosen so you can get some ideas like there's some items that are quite silly and funny that people have added. Maybe they've added a photograph of their dog or their favorite snack or a drink or something like that. Pretty much the sky is the limit, you just have to keep the items all quite small. If you have 10 items that are all huge, it's going to be a little bit more difficult so I like to mix items from like the biggest item being the handbag or backpack and then moving down to smaller and smaller and maybe the smallest item is a ring, or a bobby pin or something like that. Then you have medium items like a wallet, lipsticks, your phone, headphones, snacks, stuff like that. You can add pretty much anything. I do these for private clients as I told you. I have an Etsy listing if anyone's interested in seeing or interested in one, a little plug for you. But when I do these portraits for other people, they will send me a list of their 10 items that they would like in the portrait and I usually ask them to send me links to the items from web shops or if they send me photos of the items. That helps me so I know exactly what they want. Also some of the items I can research myself if they're very specific like the Chanel flap bag quilted 2.55, I've drawn that so many times now, I don't even need to look at photos. But if I want to look at different angles and stuff because they don't have one in front of me, then it's very helpful that they send lots of photos. What you should do is either find the items in your house that you want to be drawing and use those in real life and draw them from a still-life or choose the items from the web. I think I'm going to do a mix of two because I want to mix that when I do my portrait because these also are a way of describing my personality, but it doesn't have to be completely realistic. If I did what's in my bag of what I actually bring, it would be really boring. I thought it out, do you like fantasy, what's in my bag? Because when I go to town, I usually only bring like my wallet and my phone and that's it. It won't be much to draw so I'm going to make it a little bit beefed up with some fun items that I enjoy. I'm going to look at the Internet hence save lots of images of 10 or so items that I want to put it in my portrait that I think describe me and what I like. Just gather all of your images and save them into a folder that you can then open up on your computer in preview or some program like that so that you can see all of the items at the same time in front of you when you're working. If you have the items in front of you, I invite you not to create a still-life right away, I think you should see the items separately. That's how I work and how my brain works better. I think you should try that too. I can show a couple of examples, ones that I have created previously with items that they chose. Here's one of the bloggers that I worked with and she just a pianist. She goes very descriptive of her and a notebook and lipsticks and her favorite mascara and favorite handbag and glasses and perfume and shoes. It's very feminine and beautiful, and I was able to find places for all the items and I have everything stacked up for. I usually choose one side or the other to put the handbag so it's not exactly in the middle. That's one of my ideas of how to make a good composition. Here's another one with the 3D term, never folded. I've also drawn like 50 million times. This one was a little bit more difficult because there was so many larger items in same size so I did like choose how to place them, like music notes that are coming out of the bag and two books stacked, and then two wallets onto the side. Here's another one with flowers and even a vase, those fun to add, and a camera and shoes and a book magazine became very sheek, I really like this one. Here is another portrait that I painted. I think this is for a private client and this one I enjoyed. I like the process of this one because there is a scarf to include and a necklace so I thought that there was a good way to hang the scarf from the handbag and the necklace as well. One thing that's also great about using your imagination instead of building a still up, is that I wouldn't be able to hang the necklace on the handbag like this because I threaded through. Maybe it wasn't one of those necklaces that has an opening here, so you can fit it into the illustration in a different way that gravity doesn't allow and stuff like that. I also had flowers and little earrings here, little detailed earrings and so that's really fun. Also, another thing to know is I always include brand names and things like that in these portraits because they are for private use. This isn't something that you will be selling on products and stuff like that. It's completely fine, you're not going to be hit with counterfeit, infringement, things like that so that's good. Just make sure that this is just for your own personal use or just have a poster up there on your wall. It's completely fine to keep out the brand names and that's what makes it also personable and fun. It's also fun to write out all of the little nail polish names or your perfume bottle if as beautiful text, and I think those are the important details to remember to include. In the next section, we're all ready to get started on the sketches. 3. Start Sketching: Now that we have our piece of paper to draw on, and we have our supplies ready, I have my curve cal mechanical pencil that I like to draw with most and it's a matter of getting started. Sometimes it can be intimidating with a piece of white, fresh paper, you want everything to be perfect right away. But what's really cool is that you can erase, it's not that big of a deal if you mess up. I think before you start drawing we should go through the items that I chose for my self portrait. I chose a couple of fantasy items, things that aren't necessarily on like Chanel handbag, I think that would be pretty and glamorous, and other things that symbolize me. If I were to get a luxury bag I think maybe that's one of the ones that I would be interested in, its classic. Then I chose things like my bee earrings, I think those are my favorite earrings that I have and they're really sweet. Then bobby pins, there is always bobby pins in my bag, or hair ties because they go, I don't really like the band and putting my hair up, I'm not hair down kind of girl usually. I also thought it would be fun to include maybe a dahlia, because it's my favorite flower. I have done that for other clients, and I think it's really beautiful to add in something a little bit natural into your portrait. Then of course, I had to have a couple of beauty products. I chose two lip products, one, Laneige is sleeping mask, which I think is really nice, usually wear at night but sometime I like the milky texture, and then Kate Moss lipstick. I think that's really nice, and I thought it would look nice with the bag too. I have a lot of those, something that symbolizes me as well. I also chose a pair of ballet flats, because, it symbolize my years I used to be a ballet dancer, I danced ballet whole night [inaudible] but also I think they're cute feminine shoes that I used to wear. The last item is Harry Potter time journey, if you have read the third book, then you'll know what I'm talking about. That's my nerdy side, and that's pretty much the only necklace I ever wear ever. Those are the items they looked up on the web because they don't really have them on hand, or some of them like the shoes are not necessarily, something I own but something that symbolizes me and I have similar pairs, and the handbag and flowers I don't have in front of me. I might, also include my glasses because for the most part I do wear glasses, I'm pretty blind. Then, maybe I'll add my keys. If I think that will work well in the portrait, because I think they show my personality I guess, or the story of my life. I know there's a lot of red items too, and I have never really considered red as my favorite color, I'm more of a blue and pink person but this portrait will be very red, which is interesting. Then I also have a wallet because even though this is like a fantasy, what's in my bag, that you don't really include your receipts, and candy wrappers, and all the credit you usually have in your handbag, they're to show maybe I have some practical items. Maybe, I should even show up my really awesome library card, okay. Now that I've shown you my items, and the my thought process when I chose them, let's talk about what I think about when I'm going to create the composition. Because I've already created quite a few of these already. I can envision how it's going to look in my head before I start, but that's me. I have an image in mind, in my head before I start, on just looking at the item. But how I do that is, I usually build from the largest items, and then fit in the smaller ones, and then the smaller ones, and then the smallest ones. In that way, you're able to fit everything in a nice way, and you know everything's going to work. That's my tip for you to start with the largest items. I also like to work with some flow patterns. I like to have the weight on one side, so maybe the large handbag on one side and then the stuff flows out in a diagonal at the bottom, or it can be some kind of like weird S4. I don't like complete symmetry, and think it's more interesting to have asymmetry off to one side, but it could be of coarse very striking if you drew head on something. But I'm going to choose to draw from one side and the rest of the items are going to flow out in some way. I think I'm going to choose to draw with my heaviest things on the left side, today. I think that should work, maybe not. [inaudible] it is very hard. Yes, I think I will. What I'm going to start off with is drawing the bag and this time it is just loosely placing the items. Then I will go in and do a second sketch on top of this first initial one. The bag is the biggest item and the second biggest item is the shoes and I think I'll have those lying somewhere here. I'm roughly putting the general form of everything, so I don't have to worry about it looking amazing at this moment. I have to figured out the shoes I made them too big and I should make the hand bag a little bit bigger. It doesn't look dwarfed by [inaudible] we can erase a little bit. Then another item that I have this big is the flowers, but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to put them in. If they're going to be maybe here, with the stems. Not sure how that will look. Well, I'll just sketch that in right now to see how that goes. Then another thing that I really like about the Chanel bag is that it has those chains. They've got handles whatever they're called. Those you can use to add some fluidity in the piece as well. Now I had this that I was talking about. I want it to move across the page a little bit more, not just straight down or straight across or something like that or everything to one side. Here I have it moving around a little bit. There's nothing that gives height so it could be nice if one of the flowers is up here as well. Let's see if that works better. Have it like this instead. That could be nice. Maybe I'll get rid of this one, and then you can see that the handbag sticks out and the edges fall. There we go. The shoes are still slightly covered. Then we have other items, like glasses. Where should I place them? Sometimes I like to place glasses across shoes or one side here besides the handbag. I think I would like them to sit across the shoes as well. As we have these things are going this way, so I want something that goes this way, just constantly changing the position. I have these in front of me. I can use those density guide. Not they are a guide, as to what they look like. I can't remember from memory. Sketch out their form and size right now like so maybe a little too wide there. I'll fix that later. I have the glasses in there, and then next item I have is this man wallet that I could put in, and that can just lean here next to my shoes. Then there is the scrapes on it and that's not necessarily drying right now. We'll see if my library card fits in somewhere nicely. It could either have it here sticking out underneath the wallet. It could be nice. It could be also nice over here. Not sure. I think I'll keep it over there to keep this more open. Let's space over there. What else today I want to put in? Going on to my smaller items, like the lipsticks, one lip gloss or lipstick, a pair of earrings and a necklace and some bobby pins. I guess the necklace is the biggest item here to figure out where that should go. That also has a long necklace band. That can be something that we can use to flow around portrait. For them it has a round you may want to place it, here. A necklace one side can be hidden over there and go over the shoes or something. No that didn't look good. Scratch that. Let's go down here and just sill simple overlapping the stems. Interesting, might be too busy, but we can cover a little section of this part with the glass and the lipstick. There's that necklace, my glass is up here and the shoes are starting to get a bit too covered. But I think there's enough air and that the will be fine. They won't be too lost in the future. We have a lipstick. I usually like to have this standing up, but they can also be lying down slightly. Sometimes they feel unnatural when they're just playing around. We'll see, what if I just put it straight in the middle here? I'm not sure if it's going to look too in the middle. Especially if I put the other one also here. It might look strange that the stems are getting crushed weirdly there. You can move the stems a little bit. Bring out my other eraser that's a little bit smaller. The lip-gloss and the lipstick in the middle over here. So that they look like that. Now you have just a couple of more small items, such as my earrings and they can go right here. There's an open space for them. Then I'll just toss a couple of bobby pins around the picture just to add [inaudible] maybe three is enough. That is my initial sketch, and I think that I am pretty happy with the flow. So far I have a little height in the middle, and then the bulk of the larger items are to one side, and then it flows to the other side for another boggy item. Then smaller items starting it gets scattered. I also have some items that are in different angles. These are this way, these are this way, these are this way. These ones going up and up. There's a variation of different placements and then have smaller items that are scattered around. I don't think that it's too busy, or unbusy. I didn't add the keys, but I think that I don't really have a space where I can put them. I think that just feel crammed, so I'm just going to leave them with these items. The next step is just to go over this sketch, just to fine tune a little bit, so that when we are going with ink that we have a little bit more hap. 4. A Sketching Timelapse: way. 5. An Inking Timelapse: Experian uses a guest. Oh, home it now living better based. Check in that way, way. - Maybe EVC invasions once, in a way, just want to get away faded. But it's okay, Let's bring it back to the seventies way. 6. Editing in Photoshop: Everybody, we are in Photoshop now, and I'm going to open up my scanned image. I will do that by going open. Here you are, open. What I'm going to do now is just make any changes, and we'll edit some things that if I messed up any areas, or feathers, or ink smudges when I was drying, or if I need to move anything around, and make sure that the paper size is the size that I want it for print. For this image, I thought that I would keep it at that A3 size, let's make sure that it is. It isn't quite great so I'm going to change it to 400 millimeters by 300 millimeters that is an A3 size. Here it's okay, and then go into Canvas size, and change that width to 300, so that that will be correct. We're going to maybe adjust the positioning of the illustration on the page. I'm just going to select the whole thing, and then move it slightly so it's more centered and slightly lower on the page. I think I'm happy with that positioning it looks nice there. Now our job is just to go in and edit all the smaller mistakes and smudges on the screen. It'll raise your marks and stuff that got caught in the scanner when we scan and then surges from. Right here I put it through or the mess ups with my pen anything that just makes it a little bit too messy and ugly. I can also move things around at this point. Take the regular Lasso Tool. I can select a little bit here to just move it down slightly because I think it will form a crent. But for the most part I drew everything in place, and it's nothing I can't really move or edit, so much. Let's find, here on the lipstick, there's a little piece that I drew, slightly too large, so I'm going to erase that. I know that it's not very good practice in Photoshop to do things destructively, but I'm not going to want to go back and get back these eraser marks and things like that. There is steps that I want to get completely rid of. It's fine that you don't use a mask for this. I think in my opinion I might go back in time. I see this is like a painting, and what I do to it is what's going to happen. Just color it flat and we'll be able to trick it so much but it's a finished piece and it's been made together in one go. Let's get editing. I think that's all this small little marks and margins that I want to get rid of. There are some little grayish, like pencil marks that are still left but when you color, the coloring will get rid of those smudges for the most part or definitely. We don't have to worry about getting rid of absolutely every single little smudge and pencil shaving and everything like that, because it will go away when we use the colorful option later. This is it for the editing and we're going to move on to the coloring in the next section. 7. Digital Color in Photoshop: All right now we're moving onto the super fun coloring stage and this is of course the best part because now your illustrations could and come to life and I just work mainly with the colors that the items are, I don't change them from what the are in real life. That makes coloring quite easy. We're just going to go through and color all the items. My preferred way of coloring is using the color fill option so that we get really flat color. That's very clean and minimalistic and I like how it looks with my lines and my lines I usually don't fix the contrast of them, I keep them as a gray that they become after I scan. When I scan it, they're not completely black and white. This helps when I'm going to color with either a really dark black or another really dark color, because then the lines will show up because they're slightly grayish and this, I think is a nice look for my illustrations, at least. I like this lightly softer off black color. I also, since I scanned it in, in black and white, I'm going to have to convert to color. I'm going to do that in the convert to profile and have it as a working RGB, which is good for items that you're going to be having on the web. If you're going to be printing, you can have it CMYK, but you can always convert after you're finished. It's just a matter of starting coloring and I like to use the Paint Bucket tool like I told you, color fill and then I just go in and pick colors. When I pick a red, for example, I never take the one that's fully saturated, I like to pick a color that's slightly on the lighter side or I think they pop more for me or are like muted, I'm not sure how to say, because they're still quite bright. But that's my favorite red that's slightly off, maybe on the colorly side. Now let's just get to go in color all the items and I use different tones of the same color, just so that I create some shadow and dimension even though my work for the most part is really flat, this helps with that, so that it isn't completely flat so that there's some changes and then I notice now that I have my settings on my pink bucket tool too low, I have the tolerance at 15 and I usually have it at 65, so I'm going to just change that quickly and that will make sure that more of the white areas will fill up when I click. There weren't be as much missing areas and this will help. If you want to hit the eyedropper tool to select a color that you already use its "i" on your keyboard and the paint bucket tool is "g" on your keyboard. If you ever forget what the shortcuts are, you can just hold on the icon and they come up there on the side there which is very helpful because it's hard to remember all of them and they're not the same as in Illustrator always, so that's also slightly irritating. They should change that. When I'm coloring the piece, I make sure to use the same color around the illustration in different areas. Even if one item is slightly different, such as the red lipsticks are certainly darker in real life. I'm going to use the same color as the purse, just so that the whole illustration is tied together and my color palette isn't huge. I think it looks really nice when you have a color palette is slightly more limited. Yeah and also make sure to use different tones of the same color, so that they match the other colors, so there's nothing really clashing or anything like that. The way that I color since I am just filling with colors, you can't really tweak this set up that much, but there's a couple of tricks that I use, such as the recolor. Artworks, you just select the code that you wanted to change and then you can tweak that color slightly. It goes crazy if you try to change dramatically, it's like, such as blue, see you have the red shows through some places. This is better if you just want to tweak the color slightly a few. But at the end when you've finished your piece and you think maybe the purse should be a little bit more red or a little bit more pink. This way you can change that without having to clicking in and re-coloring all of the little sections and if you recolor clicking in all the sections after a while, you might be getting rid of the black lines. So this is a good way to just make sure that you get the tone that you like, you could also have change the saturation as well as I showed you there. But yeah, that's the only thing that's a little bit irritating with this process in Photoshop rather than in Illustrator, which is much easier to change colors. There are ways of creating colors that you can change in Photoshop, but I'm not going to go over that in this course. Just be consequent and choose colors that you like. Let's get coloring. Okay, here it is the final piece. It's all colored, it's all digital, it's all finished and I made sure when I was coloring to have a couple of the colors in different areas such as I reuse the red for the lipstick, MEC packaging and and the handbag and the golds, I made sure to have those mixed around the entire piece, such as in the little b earrings and then the centers of the dahlias. I finally realized that that would be a good touch to tie in the flowers into the rest of the piece. Overall, I think it's great with a small pallet, I think it becomes quite chic when you only have a few colors and yeah. Now it's just a matter of choosing a background color and I think I'm gonna go for a white and even though it is white already, it's a good idea to fill with white also just to make sure that you get rid of any paper texture or little mess ups that I didn't manage to get rid of while I was doing the editing process. This is just going to make sure that everything is super white and crisp. If you had chose a different color then you'll, of course, fill all of those areas then. That's it. Now it's just a matter of getting your poster ready for print and I suggest changing the color profile to CMYK instead and you do that by going to convert profile and then selecting CMYK or CMYK and the colors do get slightly more dull on the screen at least. But I've noticed when you print that they're usually very vibrant. I'm just going to cancel that for now and I can't really tell you what kind of printer's settings that you should save your file for your printer because most print shops are different, so you'll have to contact your printer and see what printer settings and what format that they would like and that way you'll get a good quality print. That's it for this section. I hope that you found this very inspiring and that you found some tips and tricks from how I create and do things in Photoshop. I really like my portrait. I think maybe I'll print a copy and have it in my studio I think that could be fun. I can't wait to see yours as well. That's it for this section. Thanks so much for watching. 8. Thanks for Watching!: All right, we're all done. Now, you've finished your own what's in my bag self portraits were portraits or someone else, if you chose to do that instead. I hope that you found this class inspiring fun. If you learn some tips and tricks from me and how I think about when I'm creating beautiful compositions or if you thought my technique for creating those striations was interesting or if you're going to take some tidbits from me here and there, and then mix it with your own natural hand style and how you draw and then take from other people that you're learning prompts that you always remember to keep your style alive and try to be unique and different. Don't want to be like me, don't want to be exactly like someone else might be like you, even though that sounds insanely dorky but it's true. Yes, thanks so much for taking my course. I will be back with more courses soon. I'm really enjoying this process and sharing. I think I have a lot to share. In the meantime, please follow me on Instagram at Emmakisstina. I also have free video content on my YouTube channel, which is also under the name Emmakisstina. You can find there. Like I said before, if you are interested in one of these portraits drawn by me, by yourself, then you can find a listing for that in my Etsy Shop. I can't wait to see your class projects. All of your different portraits. In the project gallery is going to be fun to see all of your different items and what you've chosen and learn more about UK. Please, do share those. Thanks so much again, bye.