How to Design and Print Greeting Cards in Procreate

the first step is determining the dimensions of the front of the card so I'm using an example for this if you have an example card you can measure your card and use those dimensions it's also a good idea to check that you have an envelope that's going to be the right size so you can take an envelope and take the size and make sure it's a little bit smaller just so that the card can fit you'll want a little bit of extra size on each each side of the card okay so I'm using this card as an example so the front of my card is about four and a quarter inches by five and a half but we're actually going to need to double this dimension making this eight-and-a-half inches tall yep so from here to the top is eight and a half inches tall because we're going to need the full size of what will end up being cut out after we print it so I'm just gonna jot that down my dimensions were eight and a half inches by five and a half inches you're probably going to end up printing your piece on a full-sized piece of paper if you're in the u.s. you'll probably use eight and a half by eleven I'll talk about that later but for now all you need is the actual size of the card then we can go in to procreate to create our canvas to create a new canvas and procreate in your gallery view tap the plus in the top right corner we're creating a custom dimension for this project so tap on this little icon in the top right to create a custom size the first tab is your dimensions now the first thing I recommend doing is here at the bottom change your dimensions from pixels to inches unless you want to use centimeters or millimeters I'm using inches then we want to enter the width and the height so my width was 5.5 and my height is 8.5 make sure that the DPI says 300 dpi stands for dots per inch and having higher number will produce a higher quality results when you go to print it depending on what your goals are for this project you may need to change your color profile if you are just printing this at home your home computer and especially if you're not using tons of colors in the project you can leave the color profile to the default which is RGB typically RGB is used for displaying artwork on screens because of the way the color is displayed using light a lot of professional printers use CMYK that stands for cyan magenta yellow and key or black and that corresponds to the ink cartridges in a printer so if you do intend to get this printed at a print shop they'll probably require CMYK and if you want to use tons of bright colors then choosing CMYK will make it so that your artwork on screen looks more closely to what it will look like on paper I'm going to stick with RGB just because I'm only using black for this project and even if I did want to use colors my printer is pretty good at being able to interpret the RGB okay and then lastly under canvas properties if you want you can name this to let's say greeting card or maybe you can even put the exact dimensions if you'd like just tap on untitled canvas and change the name and then choose create so next time you want to create a canvas with this dimension you can tap the plus and then scroll down to the bottom and then you'll see the greeting card which we just created okay so let's go back into this piece and now we can create our artwork something important to remember is that on your card your design it should be on the bottom half if you're printing it like there if you're going to be folding it like this if you want to have your card open this way then it'll need to be on the right side and you can flip your canvas like that for this example I'm going to stay in this orientation and keep my artwork in the bottom half so that it prints on the front of the card I'm also only going to be making an artwork on the front of the card but you could make it on the back as well after you print it you'll just fold it in half to make sure that I'm staying in the bottom half I'm going to turn on my drawing guides by going to actions canvas and then toggling on the drawing guide right there you'll see a grid appear to make it so it just splits it in half I'm going to go to edit drawing guide at the top here I can change the color of the guide maybe I'll make it black just so I can see it a little bit better and then the grid size I'm going to increase all the way to max so that it just is splitting it in half like this okay and then choose done so now I know that I want to focus my artwork on the bottom half below this line so at this point you can create your design remember that if you choose a ton of colors then when you print it you're gonna have to use a lot of ink for this design I'm going to stick to using black and make it pretty simple so after I finished my design I will check back in with you on how to finish up preparing this to print all right so I'm done with this fairly simple design if you want you can reposition it so that it is centered on your page and also centered in the middle of this bottom half of your card so I would recommend making a copy of this canvas because the next thing we're going to do it's a little bit hard to revert this back to this size so just in case you ever wanted to come back to this to original design what I'm going to do is go back to my gallery and then this canvas that I just created I'm going to make a copy of it I'm going to duplicate it by sliding it to the left here and choosing duplicate okay so that's just a copy and then I'll choose this first one okay for this step we're going to be increasing this size of the canvas so that it matches the size of your piece of paper just so that when you go to print it you know that it's going to be the right dimensions so there's a lot of kind of weird things that we're going to do here but just follow along and it will make sense so the very first thing I'm going to do is create a new layer and drag it down to the bottom of my layers stack and then I'm going to fill this layer with white an easy way to get white is to just tap and hold your finger on the screen on the background if your background is already white then you can choose white here and then fill this layer with white this will make more sense in a few minutes okay and then I'm going to turn off the drawing guide by just going to actions canvas and toggling off drawing guides so that that cross in the middle goes away the next step is increasing the size of our canvas to match the size of the piece of paper to do this go to your actions and choose canvas then choose crop and resize right now mine says five-and-a-half inches by eight and a half that's exactly the size of the card as it will be printed out but I'm printing mine on eight and a half by eleven size paper so I'm going to choose my in half is actually already correct I'm going to change my five-and-a-half to 11 and then choose done okay the next thing is I'm going to open my layers and uncheck the background color so this is showing me what it's going to look like when I go to print this piece okay so just for reference its if I have my piece of paper here of where I'm printing it then I know I'm going to just be printing it on this half of the paper because that's the size of my card okay so I'll I'll end up needing to cut the paper in half to make it so that it's the right size for my card I like to turn the background color off just to give me a better visual of what this will actually look like when I print it for me because of the size of my card it's going to be really easy to know where to cut my paper I'll only have to make one cut down the middle I'm gonna change this up though just in case you are having a little bit more of a situation like this where the size of your card isn't exactly the size of your piece of paper to give you some tips on how you'll know where to cut your paper after you print it okay so here's something you can do you can create guides for yourself on where to print at the top of my layers menu I'm going to add a new layer and change my color to black okay and then now wherever the corner of my card ends I'm just going to draw a straight line up so it's kind of like following this line up and then another straight line this way and you can go all the way to the edge of the paper if you want to just trace the whole top of the card like this remember if you draw a line and hold it then it turns into a straight line so I'm just going to basically outline the whole card with black because this is going to be where I will end up cutting it okay I'm gonna move this layer down below that white layer just because that's kind of denoting where the edge of my paper is and then also because this is just going to be a guide for me aware to cut it I'm going to I could have used a really light gray instead of black or I can just reduce the opacity of this layer so the reason for this is because when you actually print it the background color will be white it won't be transparent like this you'll just be printing it on paper so if you didn't have these guides you would have no idea where to cut it so putting these guides and making them outside of the bounds of your actual card will tell you where to cut it I probably could have made mine a lot thinner and less noticeable but anyway you get the point okay so now we are ready to export this and then print it so if you have there's a couple different ways that you can do this I will show you a way to do it to print directly from your iPad to your printer without having to do it through your computer but I know that you may not have that option so if you have a printer that is enabled to print wirelessly then you can follow this method go to actions and then share under share image find PDF and then I always choose best quality it's going to give you some export options I'm as I scroll down here I can see there's a bunch of different options here and I see print as an option so you should see that if you don't you can click Edit actions and choose print okay so I'm going to choose print so it will give you a preview of what you're going to be printing select the printer you'd like to use if you want more than one copy you can and then other options here I'm just going to leave all the defaults and then choose print and then it's going to start printing I'll show you what it looks like if you don't have a printer that can connect to your iPad you can save this file as a PDF or the same way by going to share share your image as PDF choose best and then instead of choosing print from this menu you will need to send this PDF to your computer you can do this a couple different ways you can use airdrop if you have a Mac you can use email email yourself the PDF save it to Dropbox and then open it on your computer that way so your gonna know what works best for you but just send this PDF to your computer and then from your computer you can open the PDF and then print it like you normally would just make sure in the print preview of your computer that it looks how you're expecting it to look so in this case this is exactly how I would expect if for some reason it's really small or really zoomed in you may need to check your printer options and scale it that way okay and then once you print it I'll show you what it will look like so I've just printed this piece now this is what it's going to look like at first you'll have your design and then you can kind of see those guides that we drew so just to go over in pencil so you might be able to see a little bit better you can see the guides that we did that will help us figure out where to cut this out so if you have a paper cutter you can bring this over there and then cut it down to size and this is what I did with this pink piece then all you do is fold it in half like this and you're ready to give it to someone another little fun tip you can do is take some other supplies that you use for lettering like I'm gonna use this white gel pen and do some extra accents on top so it's kind of like combining your digital calligraphy with something handmade and then you can write your greeting inside and hand off a perfectly handmade gift now just a reminder I did print this on pink paper if I were to change the background of my piece and procreate to this light pink and then print it like that I would use a ton of ink so that that's fine if you don't have colored paper you can do it that way but it is a fun idea to print it on colored paper and then anything that would be white on your screen is going to show up as the color of your piece of paper I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to turn your procreate artwork into a real greeting card

Channel: Loveleigh Loops

Views: 39,638

Keywords: how to hand letter, calligraphy tutorial, calligraphy for beginners, procreate, procreate tutorial, lettering for beginners, ipad lettering, procreate 5, procreate lettering, how to do ipad lettering, procreate beginner tutorial, youtube procreate for beginners

Id: ECyzEYh_vxQ

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020