In this video, I'm gonna show you how to take a free
image or photograph like this and convert it into an image like this, then
into an image like this. Now, why would you want to do this? Well, it means you can create your
very own original, attractive, copyright free images that
you can use commercially. So you could take the first image that
we create and use it on things like covers of your books that
you publish on Amazon. You could use them to create
things like logos. And in fact, I use this very technique I'm about to
show you to create the logo for this YouTube channel. You could use this technique and provide
it as a service on sites like Fiverr and Upwork. You could create
images to sell on merch, and also you could take images that
you create and sell them on sites like Creative Fabrica. And then what can you do with the second
image that we're going to create? Well, you can use these on the interiors of
your coloring books that you publish on Amazon. And the advantage
of this, as I said earlier, they are able to be used commercially. But one of the biggest things is that
you're gonna be able to create an original image and so not have any issues
with things like duplicate content. And again, you
could take images like this, sell them as digital products on
sites like Etsy and Creative Fabrica. Provide this as a service to
people on sites like Fiverr and Upwork. So this video is aimed at
self-publishers on Amazon and any of the other
self-publishing sites. And it's for those that are interested
in creating digital products to sell online and also
provide digital creation services to customers online. Now we're gonna be using the
software Affinity Designer, but the technique I'm gonna
show you is using the pen tool. And so you can apply this technique
to any of the vector editing pieces of software out there. So
things like Adobe Illustrator, and free software like Inkscape, the
basic version of Gravit Designer. And you may actually be able to do similar
technique that I'm gonna show you on Adobe Photoshop. Now, if you find that you watch this video
and you're not sure how to use the pen tool in the same way that
I'm gonna show you now, then all you need to do is go into a site
like YouTube and just do a search for pen tool and Adobe Illustrator
or pen tool and Inkscape, it's as simple as that.
And then, as I said, the technique I'm gonna
show you is pretty basic, so this is suitable for beginners. So I'm gonna show you where to
get some copyright free images. I'm gonna show you this technique to
convert them into the colored images and the black and white lined images. Then I'll quickly show you at the end
how to then go on to use those images in your publications. So first of all,
we need our copyright free images, and here we're on a site called Unsplash. Now there are other sites that
do provide copyright free images. There's Pixabay and Pexels. But
we're gonna be using Unsplash today. And here you can see it says there's
over 3 million curated photographs here. And in the license it says all photos
can be downloaded and used for free and for commercial and non-commercial
purposes, and no permission is needed. However, I'm going to show you a step I think
you ought to go through before using any image just to reduce the
chance of having any copyright issues. So at the homepage we're going to put
in Lion because this is the image we're going to be creating.
And I like this one here, which I'm just going to click on
download. Now before jumping in to use it, what I suggest doing is going to
Google images and just dragging in the image that you've just downloaded. And what this is going to do is do what's
called reverse image search and find any instances of where this
image is also being used on the internet. And if you look
on the right hand side here, you can see there are these visual matches
and these are all the other websites where this image is actually appearing. And what you are looking for is whether
the image appears on any of these big stock photo websites
like iStock photo, et cetera. And here we can see
there's an image here on iStock photo, but it's not this one that we're about
to use. So it all looks pretty good. So the next step is to take the image
we've just downloaded and drag it across and into Affinity Designer. Now
we're going to be using the pen tool, and this is over on the left hand side. So you can either select it by clicking
on it or just type the letter P. Now at the top here, you'll see the snapping tool and I
suggest switching the snapping tool off. Now over on the right hand
side in the color tab, select the stroke button and then
select the option that has the red slash through it. Now
normally with the pen tool, you would left click of the
mouse, create an anchor point, and then click somewhere else,
create another anchor point, and then holding down the
left button of the mouse, you can drag and you have these,
what they call bezier handles. And as you move the
handles out and around, you'll create a curve on the line. So if you wanted to create a
curve here on the lion's nose, you'll create an anchor
point, another anchor point, and then just holding down the
mouse left button, just drag. And you'll see here that you'll create
a curved line. And then hitting option, remove one of those handles and then
just create another anchor point and again, dragging and create another curve. And then you can create an outline
of something just with these curves alone. And you'd be
able to do that, as I said, on sites like Adobe Illustrator,
Inkscape and Gravit Designer. However, Affinity Designer has this
useful feature and that is at the top here. Click on smart mode. So
instead of having these handles, all we need to do is left click of the
mouse and create these anchor points. And Affinity Designer will
automatically create the curves for you. So you can really go quite
quickly and outline a shape. Now just one quick thing as
well, before you start drawing, just make sure that you have
the fill button selected. Now click and draw around
the outline of this black pupil and then choose the
color picker tool or click I. And then just hover over the shape that
you've created and left click of the mouse, and you'll see that it fills in the
shape you just created in the color that you've clicked on. Next, you want to
go back to the pen tool or press P. Now we're going to select the iris. Now this iris is blue, which
I'm sure has been photoshopped. Now when you are creating a shape, the last click must be on the first
anchor point that you created. So then it creates this
full shape, click I, and then we'll just
click on this blue area. Now you'll notice that our black area
that we've just created is underneath this layer. So in the right hand side, you can select that layer that you've
just created and drag it to below the black layer that you've just created. So now you can see the
pupil appears over the iris. Another way to do that is just to hit
command or control and hit the left bracket and it will automatically
move the layer down. So now let's go choose a pen tool
again and start clicking on these other shapes. So you want to select areas that
are of the same color or shade. I for the color picker.
So this is the black area. And so we're just gonna continue
doing this. P for the pen tool. I for the color picker,
P for the pen tool. I'm gonna drag that down.
If we reduce the size, we can see we're starting to build up
our image image, go back to the pen tool. I'm just gonna keep doing this
over the different colored areas. And slowly our image will build up. Again, I'll just show you some of these areas. And actually once you get used to
this, you can do it quite quickly. Now just zoom out and you can see
how the image is building up. Now, if the image is com quite complex,
like this one is a little tip. Go to the effects tab, select goum blur, and then just add a
slight blur to the image. And what you'll see is you'll be able
to see the different shades and colors a bit more easily and not get overwhelmed
by the complexity of your image. So what I'm gonna do now is just speed
up this video and select all these areas and then arrive
at our finished image So there we've finished. Now
this is quite a complex image. What I suggest doing is if you're
doing this for the first time, start off with much simpler images. So here we have our lions or
just reduce the size of that. And what we can do is switch off our
background layer and we're left with the face of our lion. Now this
is what we can do next. If we left click on our
mouse and just drag. We'll put a bounding box around our
whole image. Top right in the color tab, just click on that stroke tab, then move the slider across to black. And you can see if I
just enlarge the image, we're already starting to get an outline
around all the different shapes that compose our image. Then top
right, if we go to the stroke tab, and now we can increase
the width of our stroke. Just need to put another bounding
box around there enlarge that again, and then increase the width of our
stroke. So what we'll do next, go to file, click export, and we'll
just save this as a png. So we'll preserve our transparent
background. So we'll go to export, name this lion one. Then
once we've done that, now we can easily create the image
that we would use for the inside of our coloring books. Again, reduce the
size slightly, left click the mouse, drag a bounding box around the
whole image, click on the color tab, the top right, and this time just select the fill
button and then move the slider over to white. So now you can see we've got an image
that could be used in a coloring book page. So we're gonna save that
again as a .png image. Okay, so next we are going to
go to our favorite Canva. So I've created a document
for our book cover, 17.52 inches by 11.25 inches. That's assuming this is going
to be an 8.5 by 11 inch, 120 page coloring book. So I've opened that and I've already got
the the template file that I downloaded from the KDP help
section. So first of all, what I'm gonna quickly do is in
lines and shapes, choose a square. Just drag downwards and across, and we're going to change
the color of this to black. Then I'm just going to drag in the
colored image of our lion's face. Click on that and it will
transfer that across to our book cover. And we can increase
the size of that as we wish. And what I'm gonna do is just make the black background
layer transparent. So now we can line up our
line's face a bit more easily. Then what we're going to
do is add another square. We're going to drag this again
to the top left hand corner, drag down to the bottom. Now we're just gonna drag this
across until it meets that second dotted line of our spine. I'll just enlarge that so you
can see what we've done there. I'm just gonna drag that across. I'm gonna change the color
from yellow to black. Now I'm just gonna click outside of the
line and on our background we're gonna increase the transparency. So now you can see we've got the
lion's face on the book cover, and all you need to do is add some
text. So next, what about the interior? Again, we can do this in Canva. I've got
a page here that I've already created. This page is going to have bleed because
the image is gonna go right to the edge. So this page for an 8.5 by
11 inch book is 8.625 inches by 11.25 inches. So now all we need
to do is just drag in that image, click on it, and now you can just increase
the size and position it in whatever way you'd like. You could enhance this by
adding a background image to this. And in the same way I've showed you how
to create the lions face in this manner, you could also create a pattern
background in the same way or maybe a jungle themed background in the same way. Add that underneath the
layer of this line's face. You could also do the same
in PowerPoint or Keynote. I'm gonna show you in
Keynote because I'm on a Mac. And all you need to do is just
drag in the image onto the first page of your coloring book. And again, you can increase the size of it
and have it on the page like this. Now what a lot of coloring
books do is on the second page, they leave this blank just in case you
get bleed of any pens going through the coloring side of the page. So you then put the second
image on page three, the book leave page four blank. Then
put your next image on page five. And then in Keynote you would
just save this as a PDF file, which is then ready to
upload to the KDP platform. If you are in Canva, you just hit the
share button at the top right here, hit download, file type.
You choose pdf print, and then you would just
download that to your computer, once you've added all your other images,
that is. We've just got the one here. And then you'll have your interior,
again to upload to the KDP platform. And same for the cover. Once you've
added some text, again, hit share, download, file type, pdf
print, download your computer, and again, that's then ready to
upload as the cover of your book. Now, if you want some other videos on
creating different types of KDP coloring books, then I've got this
playlist here, which I recommend watching. I hope you find that useful.
If you did find it useful, please do give it a thumbs up
and hit the subscribe button. Thank you much for your
time and until next time.
