LETTERING + GRAPHIC
DESIGN LEARNING
Welcome to Typins #5! This post is where I share my recent favorite typography pins from pinterest. I’m obsessed with (and if you’re here, I’m sure you are too!) and have boards for general typography (phrases, quotes, full words) written beautifully, just letters and just numbers. I pull from those boards for these posts, so there’s even more over there if you’re craving a bigger type fix 🙂 Here are 8 of my current favorite pins to get your type on!
If you took my Watercolor Branding Skillshare class, you learned how to digitize watercolor textures – from scanning them in, to color adjustments, to removing the background correctly so they could be placed on anything. When a watercolor texture is scanned in, you’re limited by the greatest size and resolution your scanner is able to scan at. For large applications (think billboards, signage, posters), if a professional scanner wasn’t used, resolution is likely too small for the texture to reproduce as crisply as you might wish. Enter vectorized textures. Since vectors (which are point based instead of pixel based) can be rescaled infinitely without losing quality, they make a great alternative to finding a high res scanner and going through the process of color editing + removing the background again. Watercolor textures are super detailed, so finding a happy medium with file size and a similar outcome to the raster (pixel) based image is key when vectorizing. In this tutorial, I share my exact method on how to vectorize watercolor textures using two different textures. We’ll go over what to look for when you vectorize your own.
Happy Friday! I just wanted to post a quick notice of a Watercolor Branding Skillshare session I’ll be hosting for the next two weeks starting this coming Monday, July 27th and ending August 7th. Sessions are new to Skillshare, so I’m very excited to be a part of some of the first ones! If you love learning new things, but need a little more structure with completing a project associated with what you learned, sessions were made for you.
I’ve laid out a full schedule and I’ll be sending emails every few days so we all stay on task to complete the project of creating your own watercolor logo. These emails will ask you to complete videos from the Watercolor Branding class and then post a small task to your project. I’ll be available for questions, feedback – whatever you need to ensure you come out with a great logo and some skills you can use well into the future. You’ll also be with other students who will offer their feedback and will be posting their own projects. Since this session is paired with the Watercolor Branding class, it means every student in the session will receive a free mini watercolor kit, a resource pdf with every asset mentioned in the class, as well as a logo inspiration cheat sheet to keep the ideas coming. This session is a great way for all of us to collaborate together and have some fun with watercolors 🙂
I was going to say a few months ago, but I just checked, and last year (holy moly), I shared some geometric photoshop patterns. They’ve been downloaded almost 20,000(!!!) times, so I thought it might be time for some Illustrator ones! This week’s freebie is a set of 4 geometric Illustrator pattern swatches to use on whatever you please 🙂 I’m also sharing some quick tips + tricks on using them you may not have heard before – read on to see!
A few weeks ago, Kori emailed me asking how to create an editable pdf file. If you’ve ever browsed the template files on Etsy, chances are you’ve come across files for sale that come as editable pdfs. This is cool because you can offer a design file to someone who doesn’t have the programs and they can still work with and edit them to some degree. This is also useful to know if you ever need to send a client any kind of form you’d like them to fill out and send back – same rules apply – which eliminates unnecessary printing steps for the client. In this tutorial, I’ll share how easy it really is to create your own editable pdf. We’ll take a design created in Illustrator and transform it into that editable pdf using Adobe Acrobat. If you don’t have Acrobat (it’s the professional version of Adobe Reader) you can try it out for free for 30 days here. Let’s get started!
In celebration of my brand new Watercolor Texture Kit Vol. 2, this week I’m giving away 3 watercolor greeting cards! Fill them in and use them for whatever you’d like – they’re any occasion and can be printed using any home printer along with 8.5″x11″ or A4 paper or cardstock. The final cut + printed size is 6″x4″ which fits perfectly into any A4 sized invitation envelope. Trim + score marks are included, so cutting and folding are a cinch 🙂
Happy Tuesday! Chalk lettering is still going strong these days, from outdoor signage, to indoor wall murals, to photographed magazine ads. But! What if you want a digital, more permanent and quickly editable outcome without all the mess (or dealing with the perfect lighting setup for photography)? There’s actually a super quick way to accomplish a chalk typography style in Photoshop in just a few simple steps. In this week’s tutorial, I share my exact process of taking a nothing-special pencil doodle or sketch and transforming it into white chalk, then colored chalk typography. Use this same method for illustrations too! Whatever you can doodle, you can change into the digital chalk look, and in only ~10 minutes! Try doing that with real chalk 😉 Let’s get started!
As many of you know, I’ve been kind of crazy about watercolors lately (check out my new Skillshare class, this tutorial, or this one for proof!) and have started receiving emails asking what art supplies I’m using for creating my fine art assets – whether it’s textures, lettering, or just types of paper. Today I wanted to share the exact art supplies I’ve been using on a weekly basis to create everything you’ve seen here over the last few months. I hope this list will eliminate some of your own guess work (as I researched all of these supplies thoroughly before investing in them) – and help you to create your own future assets!
My new Skillshare class, “Watercolor Branding: Create Your Own Custom Watercolor Logo” is live! This class was close to a month in the making, and I’m so proud of how it came out! In the class, we go step by step in the logo making process, from establishing what our brand is, brainstorming brand attributes, then applying those attributes across the brand. We finish our logos off with a hand drawn vector element and some watercolor texture to bring our final logo to life. Because of how vibrant watercolor textures are, we finish the class with logos that will be definite attention grabbers on social media, blogs, online shops, stationery and so much more. As a bonus, everyone who enrolls gets a free mini watercolor kit so you can begin experimenting right away without feeling like you have to create a bunch of assets first 🙂 I also just released my second watercolor texture kit, so there’s even more fun to be had!
Enrollment in the class also gets you a resources pdf of all the fonts mentioned as well as a logo inspiration cheat sheet to get started in the right direction. For my youtube subscribers + blog readers this week, I’m giving that logo cheat sheet away for free!
I have been working well into the wee morning hours this past week preparing for my new Skillshare class coming early next week. I don’t want to give it entirely away, but there are some pretty vector elements + watercolor textures involved! I’m sooo excited about the class I wanted to give a tiny sneak peek of what I’ve been spending all that time on! Since vector elements play a big role in the class, I created a monster set of over 100 hand drawn vector leaves and flourishes. This set was created for people who may not want to spend as many hours as I did making them 🙂 Today I want to give away 5 of them for free!
We use cookies to customize and create content that’s most important to you. We’ll never share the info we collect.
