How to Create an Art Print Based on a Photograph

Hello and welcome to another Every Tuesday tutorial. So a couple weeks ago Yasmine, I hope I'm saying that right, requested a tutorial on how to create an art print based on a photograph and I thought it was a great idea so this week that's exactly what we're going to do. So as you can see on my screen this is the final outcome of what we're going to be making this week and the photograph used is actually totally free so you can use the exact same one that I did and follow right along. So all that said, let's get started. I will leave links to everything that I'm using in this tutorial in the video description as I always do so make sure to check that out if you wonder where to get the textures, where to get the font that I'm using and also that photograph. So the first thing we're going to do is set up our document and I'm going to go file new and I'm going to make mine 8.5 by 11 and I'm going to make sure that it's CMYK. If you don't see this all you have to do is toggle down this little advanced arrow and I'm going to make sure it's CMYK since this would be used for print so this would be something that you'd print out and either sell maybe on Etsy or you could gift to a friend or relative. And I want to make sure that my resolution is 300 ppi, that's the standard print resolution so I want it to come out as best as it possibly can. So once you have all that in there just hit OK. Alright so now we're going to bring in that photograph and I will leave a link for this of course. Once you get to this page all you have to do is click this download for free and it'll show up big and all I do honestly is I just click and I drag it right into Illustrator. And once I'm in here I position it, I scale it the way I need to. This is pretty big. So I'm just going to grab this center node right here, I'm going to hold shift so it scales proportionally and then I'm going to click and drag it down and you can also hold shift and then hold alt on your keyboard and that'll scale it uniformly so that scales a little quicker. Alright so I want to scale it just a little bit more so it's within my page so that looks pretty centered and we can center it more once it's finished. So once I have this I'm just going to come over here to my layers palette and if you don't see this you can get to it by going window layers and this is the layer that I've got this photograph on and I don't want it to move as I'm recreating parts of it for my art print so I'm going to lock this layer. So all I'm going to do is click right here and now it's locked. Now I can't move it at all which is exactly what I want. So next I need to create a layer where all of my artwork is going to go on top. So it needs to be above this layer so I'm just going to hit this little icon right here create new layer and now I can even label this artwork. So now all of my artwork will be housed on this layer. So now we can get started. So I'm just going to zoom in here and I'm going to make sure that I am using a black stroke and I don't want any fills so I'm just coming over here and I'm just going to hit this little icon bring the stroke back to the front and now I'm going to hit B on my keyboard and this is my brush tool and over here I've got mine set at a five point round. Let me double click. I'm actually going to reduce this to maybe two point just so it's a little smaller and I can see it better and you can also change the color if you'd like. So maybe black won't show up too well because there's a lot of black in the background right here so maybe I'll grab like a cyan and that'll show up a little better as I'm drawing. So for this I'm using my Wacom tablet and I've got an article on my blog every-tuesday.com of affordable Wacom tablets if you're in the market for one I would highly suggest reading through that. I've got a few reviews on there too if you're kind of on the fence as to which one would be best for you and your purpose. So I'm going to be using the Wacom tablet in this tutorial but you can also use the pen tool so you're not limited to only using a Wacom tablet if this is something you want to create and you don't have a Wacom tablet. So definitely feel free to either use the pencil tool and use your mouse to draw or you can also use the pen tool in Illustrator if you're good with the pen tool I would definitely go that route. But for this and for time's sake I'm just going to use my brush tool using a Wacom tablet. So right now I've got my Wacom tablet I'm using my stylus and I'm just going to zoom in here slightly so I can see exactly what I'm going to do and the point of this is to outline the entire leaf right here. So I'm going to start from the very top and this is going to be really loose because it's meant to be this very organic shape to begin with. So I'm not trying to be totally perfect here but I'm trying to loosely follow along and here I drew two extra strokes which I don't need so I'm just going to select those and get rid of them. Okay so I want this path to continue all the way around and whenever you brush it creates a new path every time you lift your stylus up and put it back down but I want this path to continue so with it selected I'm going to hit N on my keyboard and this activates my pencil tool and my pencil tool will allow me to continue this path exactly as it's being drawn. So you just want to make sure when you begin your pencil that you start along the same path otherwise it'll just create a new stroke all together and we want to make sure we're continuing that path. So I'm just holding space bar and dragging and continuing around and once again this is very loose because this is an organic shape to begin with so it's totally fine plus it kind of makes it a little more artistic and by created by your hand anyway. So I'm just going to continue up really quickly and because this is a leaf and it's not completely symmetrical even though it kind of looks like it is I'm making a point of drawing both sides instead of just drawing one side and then reflecting it because that would be way too symmetrical for something that in nature is not that symmetrical. So this automatically closed itself which is fine. I'm just going to come back up here and kind of redraw it and bring it back down and reconnect and this is a little crazy so I'm going to straighten it out a little bit. Pencil tool really helps out a lot here. Okay and now's the time to like go back and if there's any funky areas that you felt like maybe you moved too fast on now's the perfect time to go ahead and correct those. Okay so now I've got the outline of my leaf and this will eventually be filled with watercolor texture but for now we're just going to leave it as is and we have to focus right here on this veining that is naturally occurring in a leaf. Over here it kind of gets lost by the exposure of the photograph so we're going to kind of freehand that but over here I'm going to do this side kind of first that way we can kind of get a feel for how the veining is created and then we can kind of replicate that process over here. So I'm just going to hit B on my keyboard once again and I've got my brush tool and I'm just going to draw these in and I'm not making a continuous path here. I'm just drawing all these separate. This one goes straight down. This one since it's got to continue I'm going to do the same thing over here. I just hit my N key, grab my pencil tool, now I'm hitting B to grab my brush tool so I can create another one and just drawing these in just following very loosely and the veining is pretty you know nothing is exact here so whatever you do no one will be able to tell that you didn't follow it exactly. So it's really up to you how many veins you would personally want to have in here and where you'd like to put them. There's quite a few up near the top and a lot fewer I'm noticing as you get down towards the bottom. So I'm just going to replicate maybe adding a few more up here and this looks really loose and kind of ugly right now but don't worry about it because I've got a little trick to show you that'll completely fix it. So if I zoom out it looks more like a human heart with all those veins than an actual leaf. So I'm just going to select everything but then I'm going to hold shift and then click my outline so that'll actually deselect the outline and keep everything else selected and now I'm going to hit command G or control G on a PC to group all of these together and I'm going to convert them to a stroke and I do this very very often with all my other tutorials because with a brush tool whenever you go along a curve sometimes it creates a little extra so it's not exactly monoweight and that kind of bugs me so I always change it to a uniform stroke. So over here I'm just going to toggle down my five point round and I'm going to change it to basic and the reason why I start with a brush instead of just a pencil tool to begin with is that whenever you're using the brush it creates fewer points which creates a smaller file size which is really helpful when you're working on really big projects. So I'd always suggest starting with a brush tool because your paths are more continuous less jaggy so there's less cleanup that you have to do and then later converting it to just a regular stroke path which is what we're doing right now. So I'm going to select basic and then over here in my stroke palette this is where I'm going to change. I'm going to change this to a two point stroke and then I'm going to I always apply a rounded cap and a rounded corner but for this it doesn't really matter it's just kind of my own habit. Over here where it says profile this is the kind of trick that I wanted to show you. Toggle it down and choose this width profile one and then as you can see if I zoom in here you can see it it kind of tapers on each end which feels a lot more vein like and organic within the leaf than just a mono weight capped end so that is really nice and it's actually a little maybe I'll go down to one point let's see that seems a little too thin so maybe we'll go 1.5 oops not 15 that's way too much 1.5 come on keyboard all right there we go that looks good all right so all these are grouped together so whenever we select them they're always together so right now we're just going to leave them as cyan because we're going to add our texture and we're going to actually hide we don't need to show our original photograph anymore because now we're starting to get our art print that's coming together this looks like I've got a small error right here you can see I've got an extra path occurring and all I have to do here is hit N on my keyboard and kind of redraw it and that'll fix itself there we go okay so now we need to fill this so I'm just gonna hit the switch arrow swap fill and stroke and now it's filled and you can't see the vein veining but that's totally fine right now we're gonna bring in our texture so I'm gonna go file place and the texture I'm using is one of the watercolor textures that a lot of you have already purchased these textures so it's perfect because you'll be able to use them for this and if not I'll also leave a link for these so the first one the one that we want to use is this number one PNG and I'll click place and if you want to use one of the other I did give away two free textures so you can play around with those too and if you really like them then you can check out the full set okay so I'm gonna send this to back so I'm just gonna right click arrange send it back and then I'm gonna select my leaf because we're gonna create a clipping mask so I'm gonna hold shift select my leaf right click make clipping mask and now it seems a little too orange so I'm just gonna hit and my keyboard select this texture you can see this gigantic bounding box and then I'm gonna hit V on my keyboard to select it and now you can see I've got these nodes and I can rescale it because I've got these nodes now so I'm gonna hold shift and I'm gonna hold all at the same time and then I'm gonna rescale it so it gets a little smaller and I can kind of reposition it so I get a little more variation in color so you can see part of the texture ends right there so I want to make sure it fills the whole texture but I'm still getting that variation so that looks really good I like that it's dark on the top and it kind of fades a little lighter towards the bottom okay so that's all set so now we need to take care of this veining so I'm gonna do is select the veining and then I'm gonna hit I and my keyboard hold shift because if you don't it'll think that it's a fill and it won't apply it to the stroke so definitely hold shift and then just select a color within your leaf so I'm just gonna select this light color and it kind of fades a little bit let's go come over here to the transparency palette and if you don't see it you can get to it by going window transparency and I'm gonna change the blend mode to multiply so this makes it appear a lot better and it looks like it kind of fades into the leaf but it's a little dark for my taste so I'm just gonna reduce this down to maybe 65% let's see maybe 50% we don't want it to be too noticeable it's got to be really subtle all right that looks really good so now I'm gonna bring in the topography that I used and for time's sake I'm just gonna copy and paste this over but I'll give you the exact sizes and the font for this so let me position it right in the middle where it looks good so all I did was type each of these words out separately and I just wrote hustle this is just a random quote that I found on Pinterest so the font that I'm using is called botanica and it's not the ornaments so it's botanica script and I'm using the regular instead of the dry brush this is a really really pretty brush script font okay so all I did was type that out and I'm using 72 point and then I just made a copy wrote out heart and then made another copy and in all caps I wrote out and but this one I made 27 point and then I just kind of positioned them so that's how I made this kind of lock up over here so all the larger words are 72 point you can see over here and all the smaller words are in all caps and they are set in 27 point and then I just kind of spaced them as I wanted them in between so that's all there is to it so if you enjoyed this tutorial please subscribe make sure you check out all the links in the video description I will have the link for the font the watercolor textures and that free photograph and I'll also link to the article on the Wacom tablets too so everything you need will be in the video description and make sure you subscribe and I release a tutorial every Tuesday so I will see you next week!