Illustration Masterclass: Minimalist Holiday Card Art

[Music] [Music] well everybody here we are for another illustration masterclass now this is the last illustration master class of 2021 and i'll be joining you again next year in mid-january as we begin another brand new year of illustration master classes here on adobe live thanks for watching this past year this was the first year that i was doing these and they've been well received and i'm really glad because i very much enjoy doing them it gives me a whole hour to really dive into topics that i love and share them with you and hopefully teach you a few things you didn't know that's the goal so today i'm going to do some minimalist holiday art and i'm going to be doing it on a 5 by 7 inch 300 dpi document in photoshop with the intention of printing these in the future if i wish if any of them turn out well enough and i'll just show you a few simple ideas for ways that you too can create a nice little card it doesn't have to be something elaborate it doesn't have to be anything fancy minimalism um has been and i think will be for a very very long time something that we all enjoy when it's done well uh and so i'll show you a few tricks and i'll show you a few ideas for the little cards that i'm going to make today and you can try them along with me if you have photoshop or fresco at home or you can just watch and enjoy the show i'll say hi to some folks here who are joining me uh we have michael and afroha and i see umikorn and mercurial and z sean hello and wade and fabio and bliss and cryo and steve christelle and um sorry i have to scroll up and see how many folks monica hi monica oh hi elizabeth nice to see you uh all these nice folks are joining here today from all over the world um oh thank you for the nice comment elizabeth about the fan art episode yeah i really enjoyed that um so uh we're gonna jump right to the drawing let's get to it okay and here's my document in photoshop this is my five by seven inch document at 300 dpi i've zoomed out quite a bit if i were to zoom in this is about how big i'd be working one of the things about working in a minimalist style though is i don't want to be working too close up i want to be seeing the entire canvas in front of me so i can be thinking about the size of what i'm drawing and its placement and not getting down into nitty gritty details with what i'm making here now the first thing i want to do is give you a little preview of the winter 2022 brush set which is coming out in mid-january in north america and will roll out by late january worldwide for everybody that has a creative cloud subscription with adobe um and for those of you who have seen my brush hour shows in the past you know that to get these brushes when you're working in photoshop all you have to do is come over to your brushes panel and then here in the top right corner of that brushes panel is a little drop down menu you go to get more brushes and that will take you to the sign in page where you just use your adobe id and then you're going to see what over 1 900 brushes to choose from that you can play with to your heart's content and make all kinds of cool stuff and i update that brush page about once every quarter so i'm always adding between somewhere like 15 and 25 brushes once a quarter for everybody to enjoy that's one of the benefits of having a subscription to photoshop or fresco is you get all these brushes all the time massive library to choose from there um and to enjoy so i'll be giving a little preview of the 2022 winter brushes because i'm going to use a couple of them to create some of the designs you see today i'll also be using some other brushes from some different sets and we'll get to it so a lot of what i'm going to show you today is really thinking about the brush you choose as well as the shapes you create right so the shape-based stuff and getting the most out of the effects that you can get from specific custom brushes all right why don't we dive right in so the first brush i'm going to use today is from this winter brush set and uh the first um 13 brushes in the set give you the ability to paint these sort of mid-century modern inspired tree shapes like evergreens or winter trees um and you would have seen these kinds of shapes in things like uh looney tunes cartoons or um in charlie harper's illustrations or in magazine illustrations or in advertising art or packaging and gift wrapping and whatever else so just to give you a quick example of what i mean you can do things like this you can create little pine trees like that um you can do things like this okay simple easy things like that and this is the one i'm going to use right now in fact i kind of like that shape i just drew right there may as well just use it as is looks pretty good um and this is the tree stack four brush and what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a little bird up on top of that so i'm going to choose a nice bright red to do this and all i'm going to do is make some simple shapes and put my bird up there so what i'll do is for the body i'll just kind of make like this sort of wedge shape like that and i'm going to create a new layer and just fill that with color there we go and then for the tail i'll just kind of do that that's easy and i think for the head i'm going to bring it up and around like that and the way i'm filling these so fast with the foreground colors i'm hitting option delete on my keyboard which if you're using a pc would not be the option key you'd be using the alt key alt delete okay and then right here i can just grab my uh this black color here and i'm going to add a little beak right there and then i'm going to trim off part of that with the red i'm just going to erase that top bit of the head there make that shape a little better and then come in here and round that out a bit more and use the red easy way to play with shapes here like that so there you can see if i scale down there's that little bird on top of the tree and i'll just slide him up this way and give him some little bird legs but i'll just do one like this so it's connecting with the tree and i'll just go ahead and make it red so it's part of the body like that so there's my little bird and i'm going to take both of these elements and just make sure that they're centered there we go and maybe slide them up a little ways what i'm going to do now is just use that red color from the bird and i'm going to draw a little tree trunk trunk down here one thing i want to do as well is i'm going to take this bottom part of my tree right here and i'm just going to reposition it right there so it's a little bit more to the left okay and what i can do that i just clean this up like so easy to do and if i want to add a bit more color right there to fill that in i can do so simple no problem there you go and for the trunk what i'm going to do is just use a pencil now there's a new pencil in this brush set called tilty pencil rough soft variant there are three odd versions of it i think i'm going to use the soft one or maybe the variant let me see what the variant one looks like yeah i like that that could look nice i'll test them all out first and see which ones i like better yeah that's kind of nice and the rough actually for this i kind of like the way the rough one is doing its thing here i like that so i'm gonna vary the pressure slightly that i'm drawing with and then just go ahead and slide that over here and move it behind my tree there that looks pretty good slide it up a little ways like that and there you have a little piece very simple minimalist right that's what we're going for a little minimalist piece of work that could be on the front of a card now what i want to do is add a little lettering here okay so i'm going to take these elements these three elements here and group them together command g or if you're on a pc control g all right and let's see how they feel about there's probably okay i'm going to add the type on a separate layer the illus the handwriting i mean on a separate layer i could use this same pencil that might look kind of nice i like that and let's try something like mary actually change that i'll change the style i'm writing with and make it more upright mary and bright like that and let's position that in the center here there we go and we can look at that we can say all right we want to just straighten that out a bit rotate it maybe resize it a hair give it some more breathing room from the art that might look nice and then we can take that group and we can just nudge it up a hair i gotta visually center it rather than mathematically center it what i mean by that is you can mathematically center something by using the guides and so on where whatever the width um farthest to the right and furthest to the left is of the area that you're selecting it's going to make sure that mathematically it's centered with the the document okay with the canvas but sometimes things look off-center when you do that you want to visually center them so you're just kind of using your eye to place it where you think it looks about right you know um and let's look at our little lettering there maybe slide that over a bit and position that like so and look at that you've got a simple little card um there's not much else you really need to do with this you can just leave it just like that that is a nice little piece of work and uh it could be perfectly at home in a um greeting card store or what have you so let's see if we have any questions i'm learning new features in photoshop can you provide me a tutorial photoshop and pdf oh um no i don't have any pdfs but there are tons and tons of videos you can watch as well as fantastic instructional content inside photoshop so what you want to do is go to help and go to photoshop help if you have questions and then if you want to do uh some some learning there is a there's learn content except that i've now forgotten where it is because i'm i'm not not paying attention anymore to where that is because i don't use it anymore but i should know we have learn content inside the app and if anybody can help me out in the chat maybe someone who's modifying at the moment um uh not modifying um moderating about where the learn content is it's wonderful there's is built in right here in the app all kinds of little walk throughs and things like that i would really appreciate that steve says it's also in hell but i didn't see it there oh my goodness hands-on tutorials there it is thank you here you go so you've got um these lovely little walkthroughs and things like that um there are 66 photo editing ones 40 different creative effects ones and then you've got these basics right here there are five of those um that'll really help you along but i want to say as well that if you go to the creative cloud channel and search for photoshop uh over on youtube and watch our classes here on behance you're going to find all kinds of great content as well all right you love the pencil annika says um yeah cool great thank you yeah the default pencil in fresco is quite nice indeed i agree all right i don't know who julia vaca is but yeah is minimalistic a word maybe i don't know if it is i said minimalist um you don't have to be able to really draw birds to draw birds i mean there's proof of that right here that was not any great work of art what i just did there with those little shapes so don't sweat it now that's one card right there so why don't we take that and we'll just call that number one there you go there's one you could try we're going to do something different now i'm going to do is make a snowman and i'm going to do this with my marquee tool my elliptical marquee tool right here okay so that allows me to make circles and uh allows me to make ovals and things like that and i'm going to start with the head of the uh the snowman here i'm just going to do this and i'm going to fill that with color and i'm going to make this really simple i'm just going to slide down don't worry about pixelating anything here i'm going to make that bigger i know it's going to add some pixelation don't worry about that you'll see why when i get done with this for now what i'm doing is i'm creating myself a little guide by the way the way that i'm doing this is quickly duplicating the layers i'm holding down option key while i'm using my move tool when i do that on pc that would be the alt key i believe it allows me to instantly duplicate anything that's on the layer okay and to transform it i'm hitting command t that's going to allow me to free transform and to transform from the center i'm holding down the option key and the shift key at the same time there we go so that looks like a pretty good arrangement right there i'll bring that down slightly not like that so this is the general shape i want to use for my snowman i'm going to take all three of these layers okay selecting them all and then i'm going to reduce their opacity to about 30 percent so i can see each of them individually and whatever they overlap it gets a little darker and what i'm going to do is i'm going to use a brush from last year's winter set which i hope you have all discovered and if you haven't let's check it out together because it is a beautiful one winter 2021 is the brush set and you come on down here right towards the bottom you're going to find a brush called drifter this is the drifter brush and this is what it does [Music] it paints on one side a clear solid line and on the other side it gives you this nice sort of gradient kind of effect okay so what i'm going to do is select a nice light blue kind of a color like so a little lighter than that there we go there we go nice and bright and light and i'm going to hit the cap lock c on my machine when i hit the cap locks key on the keyboard what this allows me to do is get a little uh cursor that looks like a target you know crosshairs if you will and this allows me to line it up okay like this and i can now over the top of what i've already drawn here using this as a guide okay i'm gonna draw along that circle i'm looking at it carefully i'm going slowly with my brush and i'm going to use less pressure as i come under like that okay i'm going to line it up here again and do the same thing i'm going to go slowly now so i make sure that i get it correct there we go and here i'm starting to lighten up the pressure again less pressure means it starts to fade out a little bit okay and one more time right here just hugging that edge so this takes a lot of concentration i'm just being careful okay now there you go now i'll hide these for a moment you'll see what i've done i've created this sort of um design here of the three snowballs stacked on top of each other with this nice effect of the uh this sort of spattering if you will that like that dotty pattern there where it's all gritty all right and what i'm gonna do now is let's bring those back i'm gonna actually grab them one more time i'm gonna knock them back just a bit more because i can see them just fine and i'm going to create another layer just to be safe and on this side i'm going to be doing the same thing okay except now that i'm moving down on the right side i'm always going to have my spatter on the left if i were to move upwards when i draw the spatter goes on the right so down stroke spatter on the left up stroke spatter on the right and i want the spatter on the left again so here's what i do i'm going to come in here and i'm going to start like this and create this sort of shadow on the snowball like this so okay except i have to be more accurate come on along the side and you know here's the thing my hand is getting a little shaky here so it's easy for me to fix that i come up to my smoothing and i just turn that up to something like a value of 50 and it's going to be a lot smoother as i draw so watch now i can really slow down take my time hug that line and be careful same deal here and again so you get this cool effect now if i hide these where you have on the left side the spatter is going outside the borders of the snowballs and on the right side it's coming inside the borders of the snowballs and you get this cool left and right kind of thing going on to create those stacked snowballs there okay so we can group those together and then we can slide them over here position them kind of in the center um and i'll grab that top layer now here's the things i can do now is i can sort of line it up like this so that the circles feel like they're in the same kind of alignment and if i see a little wobbly bit like right here i can take my eraser and i can just very carefully like just massage that a little bit here make a little tiny little adjustment like that right you don't have to be as crazy as i am with this kind of stuff but that's just how i am um here i can make a circle about the right size as what i had underneath and i can just take it there position it and i can go command shift i which means i'm selecting the outer edge and i can just come in here and erase any bits that i think are kind of wobbly see that what that does it kind of smooths that out nicely right so you could be as fancy with this as you want you can be as picky as you want right you can be kyle picky or you can be like normal human picky and uh probably the normal normal human picky is just fine but i can come inside this shape now right here and i can just like add a bit of action right inside there that helps me to get that to feel a little better do the same thing on the outside again you know just tidy that up like that could even leave some space if you want between them if you don't want to do that that's fine i can select that second circle from earlier slide it over here come back here and then just go ahead and just paint right inside of there like that so depending on how much cleanup you want to do you know up to you i'm going to try and bust out about four at least four cards for you all in the show today um if there's time maybe even five that would be amazing but but i'm not gonna correct every little thing but if i see a wobbly bit like right there i'm just gonna go ahead and select it and then with my eraser just trim that a little bit these kinds of things make a difference i mean anybody who's a graphic designer or illustrator knows that you get to a point where you just want things to be good and you can't help it you're going to want to like make these little adjustments right but there you go so now this is the kind of thing you could just leave it like this this could be it and that would be probably fine um but there's some other things you could do uh i'm gonna give them a little nose and some eyes and some buttons and things like that but just to point out some other options so you're aware of them okay another thing you could do is you could go ahead and select these original shapes that you made okay i've got them all selected i'm going to move my selection so it lines up nicely with my my art here pretty nicely like that and i could go command shift i so i'm selecting the invert inversion of that okay the inverse and i have a layer behind all of it i'm just going to go like this fill it with blue and you can see how nice that is and when you have these little areas that need to be filled in just go ahead and grab them with lasso tool no big whoop fill those in okay and this gives you this really lovely effect of the snowballs emerging from this this blue background so you can do it one way or the other it doesn't matter here's one option you can have it floating on the white so you can see both sides or you can just do this um it's up to you depends on what you like depends on what floats your boat right while i have that uh brush selected i can come in here and i can do things like say all right i want to add just a bit more texture down there and i can do that very easily just kind of scrub around in there okay that feels better so that is the basic idea now just for some other little details using the polygonal lasso right i can decide do i want to have the face going this way or towards the light probably towards the light and so to do so i would just go ahead and make a new layer and grab a nice orangey kind of a color fill that in and then come in with my eraser and just tidy that up a bit like that if you see that there's an issue here with with these colors being so similar in value this orange and that blue they're very similar in value how do you handle a problem like that well you have a couple of options one thing you could do is you could select the two layers beneath it that make up our shadows of the snowman so to speak i'm going to combine those into one layer command e just merge them together because right now i'm pretty satisfied with how they look i can lock the layer transparency right here just tap on that little guy and i can say let's try a lighter color i'll go here and i'll say let's just lighten that up okay and then come back to my background layer and lighten that up in the same way now i have no issues with this um working out and then i think where did i there we go here we go this wound up being part of that other layer i didn't mean for that to happen so i'll duplicate it and get rid of the original and then i can take this and i can merge it with the layer underneath like that and again we can knock that out so i could go lighter all around if i want or another thing i could do is i could go back to that original color i was using which is close to like somewhere around here and i could say instead what i'll do is i'll take that carrot and i'll lighten it up or darken it for more contrast okay so let's take the carrot and go ahead and lock its transparency and i can then take like a more bright or sort of a deeper red kind of a color and i could just kind of do this like that or i could go lighter so now we have sort of reds and yellows in there [Music] either of these is a fine solution you just want to look out for areas where you have issues with contrast like if something isn't reading you know you want to make sure it reads you want to make sure everybody can see what it is you want them to see so i think i'll go a little brighter here like this and what i'll do is then take that blue and lighten it ever so slightly we'll go like to about here okay and then let's try i also you'll see i cooled it down a little bit and cooled it down so that feels pretty nice right there for the eyes it's simple i'm just going to make a circle like that and then i'm going to come in here make a new layer and grab a darker blue i'm not going to go all the way to black just like that and i'm going to duplicate that slide it on over here and make it a little smaller because it's further away from us okay you're looking at this in three quarter view there shift that um that nose over a hair like that so nice to be able to make these adjustments so quickly and then what i'm going to do is because i've got these eyes in separate layers i'm going to merge them together lock the layer transparency once again and i'm actually going to fill these with blue and then i'm going to use that darker blue color with a brush that has some texture now that could be something easy like an airbrush airbrushes are default brushes you can find in photoshop and they're really cool give me a little bit of texture see that it's very subtle let me zoom in so you can see just a little grainy a little grainy it's kind of a nice thing to do and i'll take one of these right here and i'll just slide it on down here do it again and one more and that's it now let's do a little writing grab this white here and um i could use this inker versatile brush which is a variation of the mr natural 2017 brush in the mega pack ink box and i could write in white or i could write in black i don't know something one of those two is probably going to do it for me and we'll just say let's do this one with different kind of a lettering winter wonderland i like that song sleigh bells ring are you listening no one wants to hear me sing winter wonderland okay boom there you go um hey you want to get really fancy go ahead and add a gradient in there you know go ahead why not you could take this color it's already got its it's um shape locked in okay and i can well since we're pressed for time i'll just go ahead and do this quickly what i was going to do is make a um a mask and all that business but for now i'll just do this i'll grab this blue i'll go a little darker a little richer here take my gradient tool foreground to transparent throw it up like that and and do the same thing whoops with the uh the blue here we want that gradient to be consistent so i will use a mask i lied when i said i wouldn't use a mask or i could do this i could just select both of those like that make a new layer yeah this is easier i don't have time for masking right now hang on a minute watch watch kyle figure this out in real time my brain is going like figure this out man and we turn that off and we fill this with this color oh so close almost got it there we go see what i mean so you fade to white all the way up through the top and there's a very simple card i don't know maybe i'm getting too fancy with these techniques but um you know it's fun to experiment with this stuff hey here's a quick pro tip for you if you got issues with banding in your gradients you know where they kind of you can see the lines and all that one thing that sometimes helps not always but sometimes is go ahead and add a noise layer above it just go ahead and add a layer and you're going to want to add some noise you know you could also do it to that same layer you already have the gradient on if you want to save time i can go ahead and duplicate that layer hide the original and go to filter noise add noise all right so i'll just do an amount of like four and you'll see right away what it does is it adds just tiny bit of noise in your gradient little dots and stuff and when you go to print it um or even just look at it on screen you're not going to see so much banding i'm not a fan of banding um so this is just a cute little trick you can try hopefully you see the difference there over on the screen where you're watching um live here all right any questions what's up robzilla is here the one and only um i heard once to avoid banding and grading start the project at 16 instead of eight oh 16 bits um interesting okay that's cool i haven't heard that interesting then reduce to eight bits when you're done and you get rid of the banding cool tip i haven't tried that all righty there you go so let's take all this um and we will group that together and there is our second card first card second card let's do another one let's do another one for this one i'm going to use another brush from the old winter set from last year this is the 2021 now if you haven't tried these they're really fun these are the tubular brushes what they do is they paint tubes that when you overlap line as long as you're still drawing and you don't let up with the stylus they overlap each other and they don't um criss-cross visibly you can see that they leave the inside uh open the inside of what you're drawing open so i looked at this and i thought wouldn't that be kind of fun for um like trails of somebody skiing you know skiing down a mountain that kind of thing i thought that'd be kind of fun so i thought yeah just do that and then just get rid of the a little bit right there easy to then draw those two lines together um and so then what i would do is just add my little my little character there and again just keep it really simple really simple we're not going for anything complicated here uh and for this i just use like a really simple inker so i'll do something from the draw along show this is that doozy anchor very easy peasy and [Music] just draw the hat make a layer underneath that here's a body one arm there one arm there maybe a little make a little uh little pom-pom at the top of the hat there who knows does that look like a pom-pom maybe stick it in the back that's better like that um then go to some some green some nice green pants go underneath that so actually let's keep it really simple and just do that and just have somebody skiing down through the card you know i know rob yeah i know we need a vector version of that brush for sure i'm in total agreement with you i'm gonna talk to uh my friends over on the fresco team about that and then see what we can do about that because i think that would be so nice totally agree ah hang on make sure these these line up so there you go there's my little skier and then i thought what you could do is for the trees do really simple kind of a graphic solution where what you do is you just make a circle so it's good elliptical marquee tool here and we just go like this just just make a little a circle like that let's reuse that green we were using a second ago and just fill that in and then what i'm gonna do check this out is i'm gonna grab my um my lasso tool and i'm gonna draw in from the side here try to get to about the center oh why does it keep doing that to me it's so annoying that intelligent hub wants to update i don't care i don't need to do that not the middle of my master class come on now and you can just do this you can just make a darker darker color and i'm going to lock that transparency and just do that like there's some kind of a shadow on the side of it you know like this side's hitting the light and that's getting the shadow and if you want to get fancy you can do stuff like this you can like add some other little shapes like that so it's like one side's in light once it's actually kind of like the geometry of just keeping it really simple it's kind of fun like that kind of like that idea although it does look a bit like a pie chart so i guess another thing you could do is you could grab your regular lasso tool and just do this just kind of like come around the outside you don't have to be like uber precise with this it's not important and just get rid of that and that could be my little tree oh wait i just had a fun idea check this out let's duplicate that resize it hey come on photoshop do what i say command j thank you command j is duplicate and i'm gonna rotate that duplicate it again fill it with this color here and then make it smaller so it's like making a little shadow you know what guys i'm actually not i'm not not too fond of what i'm doing here with this tree i don't think it's working out the way i hoped so i'm going to do that again i'm going to solve this a different way in my mind it looked a certain way and then it didn't work out the way i thought that's not what i wanted so instead i'm gonna do this i'm gonna start with that cycle okay there we go circle fill it and then what i'm going to do is this i'm going to go into the center [Music] i'm going to leave a lot of space here and i'm going to take that airbrush there and lock the layer transparency and i'm just going to fill it darker towards the bottom and a little less towards the outside here whoops didn't mean to use white there i think that's better is it i adjusted the curves to give it a bit more contrast i wanted to put some of these dotting the landscape you know this kind of thing now i'm still not that excited about it something about it just doesn't jive with the style that i'm using here well folks you know what this is one of those cases where all i have to do is fall back on my brushes that's why i love brushes so i'll just go ahead back to that winter 2022 brush set and i'll just use a brush pop up up um there's one put one here yeah that's better already see look how easy it is to fix things with brushes tada fixed it was easy so there you go now do you have to have writing on all of these no for this one i wouldn't use any writing i'd probably just leave it alone just say that's it that's your card easy peasy keep it simple let's group that together one and a two and a three so far so good all right now let's do this take my marquee tool we're going to make a bell so i'm going to draw this circle shape first just fill it with black use my regular old lasso tool here make a new layer and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to kind of trace from here sort of like a bell shape i'm going to bring it down a little bit like this yeah there we go i'm getting really picky now but i can't help it is that bell like it's kind of like getting the perfect bell shape is going to be something that i'm going to struggle with here i'm going to hold down my option key which allows me to temporarily use my polygonal lasso tool see that nice little trick there that way you can use both your your regular old lasso tool and your polygonal lasso tool you can use them together i'm going to fill this with black this is a separate layer here and then i'm just going to trim off a bit of that like this and i think that's a decent looking kind of a bell shape right there take that same piece slide it on over here and i'm gonna flip it horizontally and then slide it in place make sure everything lines up so far so good i'm going to merge those together and then i'm going to use my marquee tool again as an oval though kind of like that get that up here and i'm gonna fill that with black use that marquee one more time and i'm gonna create a little little space in there like that and finally i'm going to use that same marquee tool lots of marquee action going on here and we're going to create the bottom of that that ringer there for the bell okay and there we have our bell now let's take all that and we're going to slide it about to the center of our card here now not the visual i mean not the mathematical center we want the visual center because the bell part really should be about in the middle that's what we want and as far as bells go i think this is pretty good but i want to shrink it just a bit like that that feels a bit better for me i like that shape now what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this okay i'm selecting that layer and i'm going to make a new layer and make a mask so just tap on mask and now everything i paint is going to just stay inside that shape and this is what i want to do i want to use a bunch of brushes to just do all kinds of cool stuff let's start with kind of like an orangey sort of base layer so just fill it like that but then i'm going to go in here and just use a bunch of textures so we're going to do this we're going to come into our winter 2022 brushes and you're going to find this great brush called winter bg and i'm just going to throw it in there and it's going to make all these little snowflaky kind of shapes it's going to use the same color but it's going to use color dynamics to change it slightly as i go and now what i'm going to do is just basically do a quilt kind of a thing i'm going to select part of it like this using the rectangular marquee tool okay specifically so i'll like come over here and i'm going to use a different color so we're going to do like a nice sort of a deep kind of a bluish kind of color knock that in stab at a little bit okay and then i'll come in here and i'll just grab another little bit right here change it up slightly we're going to use a little kind of a deeper kind of a reddish kind of a color like so and then i'm going to come across like this grab that orange and do like a more a brighter sort of a yellowy color like this and every now and again you see how like i won't use all the pressure i need to i just want to kind of keep it looking like this patchwork sort of a thing i do want the grid to line up though i want i want the edges to line up so i'm going to be picky about that that's going to be something that i care about and i want to look right so here i come right there and go even lighter for that little section and what i'm going to do is build this little quilt here and it's just going to be a cool graphic you know it's going to be nice see that now you can go as fast as you want you can continue to make little little chunky squares here and there little bits and pieces little odds and ends um you want there to be some you basically want to be irregular in uh you don't want it to look like a perfect you know this is a square this is a square this is a square you want to divide up the space in an interesting way that is the goal all right but something like that works quite nicely um and what you can do then is you can take that same mask and go on a layer above it go ahead and apply that and here you could play around with other things you could start using other brushes and draw little patterns and shapes in there and so on another thing i could do for example is i could i have these uh these other brushes in here that just make interesting little shapes i could grab like that dark brown and just throw some of them on there like that you know just go whoop i don't need to grab that yellow and throw that over there here and there you can just make these different little graphic elements like this see everything i'm doing is safely contained inside the mask i don't have to worry about it messing anything up we haven't used much of that blue so we can go ahead and do some stuff with that so there you go you just make a shape you make a mask it's a recognizable shape and then you can take all of that and make that little group let me slide it up a little bit like so and you can throw it on a nice background something that makes sense color wise so what we're not using yet is a sort of a green color but i could grab like this blue go a little lighter and throw that back there and then open up my hue and saturation sliders and start just playing with colors you know like reduce the saturation of that a little bit that's kind of got a nice feel to it maybe make it a little brighter make sure you can see the whole thing and really get a feel for how those colors played it play together all right that's kind of nice right there pump up the saturation see if that feels a little darker you want the edges to read you could go really dark you could go really light there that's pretty nice and then once again you know grab a color and why not do a little type you know so pick something really lovely and simple um and let's make that tallest italicized there bells will ring there you go come on guys it's too easy and that's it so you know of course i would keep playing around with contrast and stuff to make sure everything read clearly squint at your stuff see if it looks good when you squint you know try with or without the extra decorations etc continue to play um eventually you get it to exactly where it needs to be and you know this is the thing it's just a constant balancing act kind of thing you know when you do this kind of stuff um that's what design's all about and eventually you get to a place where you feel good and you say good done you know how does it look without that that looks good too i don't know hard to decide but there you go we made four little cards okay and uh let's take a look at them one and a two and a three and a four hope you enjoyed that well thanks everybody for watching and um hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season together with friends and family and whoever else uh in the meantime um i want to wish you all happy drawing too because that's important do some drawing make it a daily habit it's healthy and it's meditative and it's good for you so take care of each other and please remember to be kind i'll say ciao for now and see you in the new year thanks for joining everybody and take care [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 1,412

Keywords: Adobe Creative Cloud, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe Cloud, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags

Id: eR_z57Di6KQ

Length: 57min 0sec (3420 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021