July 2018

We kept things all digital last month, so I thought we could start this month with some watercolor! Even if gemstones or jewels aren’t your thing, this is a great exercise on mixing colors and how those colors can inform the depth of an object. We also sketch out the geometry from scratch without using a ruler and you can use these methods for other geometric-based layouts in the future, too! Since we’re using water-based brush pens, this is something you can create on the go with limited materials. Read on to paint a watercolor jewel using brush pens!

It’s the last Thursday in July, which means it’s time for your free August 2018 desktop wallpapers! This month’s wallpaper was entirely created in Procreate, with just the dates added in using Photoshop and my font, Miss Magnolia. I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with 3D lettering in Procreate this year, so it was time to bring it into another wallpaper 🙂 I used my custom monoline procreate brush for the lettering and doodle details, which is available for free in the Every-Tuesday Resource Library. For the dates, ‘R’ is for Thursday, to distinguish it from a same-sized Tuesday ‘T’ at a glance. 

The download includes the August 2018 desktop wallpapers in two common resolutions: 1280x1024px and 1920x1080px, with and without dates. I’ve left the year off of the ‘no-dates’ versions, so you can use it for any August in the future, too!

If you love lettering – whether it’s on paper or an iPad, you’re probably familiar with how powerful your lettering becomes when it’s vectorized. Vectorization allows your lettering to be infinitely rescaled without losing quality. This means it can be put on anything, at any size and look as great as the day it was drawn. Since it’s a digital copy, it can exist for forever without fear of it being buried in past stacks of lettering experiments, too. It’s also a crucial step in creating open type fonts!

In this week’s video, I’m sharing my favorite, most reliable Illustrator trace settings when it comes to vectorizing lettering. These are the settings I use every time I vectorize to keep as much original quality as possible. Read on for it all!

One of my most viewed tutorials on YouTube is how to create seamless patterns in Illustrator (though you should be using the pattern tool in this tutorial if you’re using CS6 or newer!). Once you create a custom pattern, though, how do you save it, or export it to sell? Illustrator actually behaves a bit differently than Photoshop, since the version of Illustrator the user is on affects their ability to see the pattern or use it. In this week’s tutorial, I share everything you’ll need to know and consider when you save and export patterns in Illustrator.

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