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Lesson Info

Block Demo Repeat: Scanning Painting

We're going tow race the pencil line and then I'm gonna color, and then I'm gonna scan again so that I have my color scan and show you how I put it into a tile. Repeat on, then we're going to talk a little bit about some places where you can test out your products online without without much commitment and see what your what your patterns you're creating look like on everything from wrapping paper, teo do they covers and shower curtains and pillows and all kinds of stuff? There are a lot of really cool resource is online these days for all that, and we're going to try to pull together a list of my tools at lunchtime today, so when you come back, we'll hopefully have a list of all the things that I'm using with specifics, eh? So that you can go out and buy them yourself, so I'm just using that eraser it was the prisoner color magic. Hurry, sir, it was a white eraser to erase the line and it's probably really hard for you to see what I'm doing behind the scenes because it's so subtle but...

it's not so subtle when you see it reprinted on a do they cover blown up toe twice as large um, so I'm going to just erase all of those pencil marks. And when I'm doing a lot of pattern work, I end up with a ton of a racer like in my lap. At the end of the day, you'll find an eraser that you like this. These harder white eraser seemed to work better for this paper on dh it's amazing! It really doesn't leave any impression behind. I think you really get ah, clean page at the end of the day, the sara ll transfer paper that I mentioned earlier, if you're drying, using that as your initial sketch, it can leave a sort of ghost image of the red behind, and so khun require some additional clean up once you scan the image on photoshopped, uh, and used in photo shop, but you can pretty easily erase that red sort of halo if there is any left, it just takes a little more time than a pencil. I'm not going to be going over that today with a sarah ll transfer paper, but, you know, I think we could probably, um, I could probably follow up with some information or maybe that's another class we'll see collage into, uh, surface design, getting there almost done. Tad perfect, suitable, thanks, great, beautiful, so you have to take a close look and make sure that you're getting it all takes a little bit sometimes. But now you can see I um maybe you can see it's probably a little bit challenging you see but I've erased that whole border that I put out so it's now just this this artwork let's free of ah of an edge because I don't really want that hard edge in the pattern that was just for me going to know what toe work within that eight inch by eat inch square so I'm gonna clean up my space and I found my square for outlining the page so when you're you know it's really nice to have a square with measurements on it this one doesn't actually have measurements on it so I would have had to use the ruler anyway but to make a nice clean edge are square it can be really helpful to have that tool and so once you're done um scared with the racing you can remove it from your pad and this is actually perforated right at the edge I'm just going to get rid of that well this is the most exciting part of the entire day tearing paper perforated paper it'll just fit into your scanner a little bit better and I find that one of the frustrating things for me about this paper actually is that which is again for those of you I can show you one more time here the borden and riley um two three four five paris paper for pens is that one hundred eighty pounds nine by twelve inches it's just that it's a smooth paper so it's going toe help with its archival quality so you can you know if you were doing really beautiful artwork and you wantto sell the originals are archived the originals you can have them but it's just that smooth, toothless surface that I'm going for and I've used other kinds of paper with total success too so just you know, sometimes you don't have like if you're around the world in australia are india you might not have the same paper um that you can access, so try and figure out what works best for your process um and you can chat about it in your in the chat room that might be a good place to suggest things, so I'm gonna move over uh to scanning I'm gonna bring my computer around so I'm gonna while I'm not going to be coloring this image in um photo shop I'm going teo scan it as a black and white original document so that I have access to it again if I need teo and I'm actually going toe not even color this particular image on a color a print out of it, so I have ah this is this is an hp photosmart sixty five twenty, which has just been all in one scanner printer photocopier andi it's I use something very similar in my home studio and I'm going to scan it um see if we can get the details here right so I just brought up the scanning equipment teo um and I think you guys are seeing what I'm seeing I want to scan it if you're wanting to archive this as a black and white you can scan it is a black and white image so I don't know if you just saw what I did there but I selected black and white I wanted scan it at three hundred d p I and that gives you enough resolution for just about anything that you're going to print sometimes people will scan it at six hundred but you don't really three hundred seems to be just fine for everything that I've been doing and I haven't have I only once needed something a little bit larger and it was when I was working on designed for a rug that had to be a twenty five percent of scale so a nine by twelve rug you're working on a twenty for inch by thirty you know like it's a big piece of paper that I was drawing on so I had to scan that at slightly higher resolution and everything but I was working on a much larger piece of paper so one of the things that you know just you know that three hundred d p I is usually pretty pretty good and I'm just going to hit its done are gonna scan it to preview you can sometimes scan right into photo job, but in this case, I'm just going to scan right to preview, and I apologize to those of you who are non mac users because we're using them back today, but I'm sure you can sort out a similar situation in your non mac computer, so now I've got a preview of that, so it'll come up automatically and that black and white and you can see that at the edge here, there is a little bit of noise from the scanner. I pressed down a little bit on that toe, hopefully help flatten the paper because the paper, even though this is this is like a nine by twelve scanner bed. It actually isn't quite nine by twelve sort of obnoxious, but paper people on the computer, people need to get together and make the right things happen, so I don't need that in the in the machine anymore. I can actually now save this, I'm gonna export it and save it as, uh, j peg going to export it to my desktop, actually, and I'm gonna choose the best quality, and I'm gonna save it, um, to my desktop, and I'm going to call it, um, creative live block, um, original and that will start to help me organize my files like it starts to so I might create a folder for creative live and then start to understand where those things live on my desktop on dh I'm just going to say that there should show right up, um, which is great. And then, um, this khun go into photoshopped and exist as a black and white original file. You can sort of see as I zoom in there's a little bit of noise here on the left and also there's a little bit of a color shift, you know, right where that page ends. So what I'll often do is actually to clean this up. I'll take the magic or race or tool and just magic erase the background, and then I will sometimes even go through and do this there's a short cut that you can use to select everything and erase the background, which which, if you know the shortcut, you can go ahead and do that. But I you can also manually go through sometimes this can affect the line quality, and I'm gonna undo that just so I can see it again. It's the original sometimes I will also adjust the image so that it the levels are a little bit stronger so the black is much more true black and the white is a more true weight and that sometimes does it it'll get rid of the noise so you can kind of see that edge is kind of is gone now on the left there's not really any noise left there a little bit if I wanted to get rid of that I could so I'm gonna I'm gonna save that for the short cut off in a less and so that should be um on my desk huh saved with that original so now that white that noise has gone a little bit more and I'm gonna actually print this using the it's just an ink chat right? Normal printer you can also if you don't want to have to go back in and be printing you you khun one of the nice things about the all in one printer is that you can you can just photocopy it if you want but I like to clean it up a little bit and get that black line a little bit stronger um before I start coloring so I'm gonna set this is gonna be set aside as my original and I'm gonna work off of the printed out image at this point for coloring do you have any questions at this point? I mean are there yeah are you using regular printer paper yes. Ok, I know some people out there going what isn't it gonna buckle and yes it's going to buckle and do weird things and it's ok, I know every graphic designer out there is kind of oh my god uh but it but it's worked for me so far sometimes I there have been a few times when I've had a hard time with some of the buckling but it's pretty easily correctable and photoshopped, so um, yeah, I think for me, this was the most straightforward way to do and quick way time saving way to make as many color iterations as I needed. So if the advantage to scanning that image in black and white before and having the original is that you know something, I could spill coffee on this now and I'm okay on dyken save it and, um, this can also act as a sketch for clients like a lot of my clients will say, ok, I really want to see what you're doing before and I can say, ok, this is going to be the repeating tile and I haven't invested a huge amount of work, and I mean, I've done the research and yes, I've invested a lot in it, but it's not any more than I would have generating an image on on illustrator photo shop and this I can send over to them and they get a sense of where I'm going and they could say, ok, great, I want pinks and greens and purples or whatever the fall color palette is, I can start to play around with that, and there isn't a commitment yet, and they get a real sense of what the final artwork is gonna look like, um, and I also have this ability to print out as many of these as I need, so if they come back to me and believe me, it took me a really long time to figure out that I needed to be able do that so I would color this, and then they be like, we need to do it again, and then I'd have to, like, trace my line and, like, do it again, I really learned this the hard way, so all my blood, sweat and tears have been narrowed down, tio some of these time saving techniques, but still retaining the hand so the, you know, I can also take this artwork and shift to the repeat, or take a section of this artwork on dh make it into a like I could take on ly that and make that into more overall repeat instead of a black repeat that, you know, so you can start to build whole collection's out of the artwork that you start with and then pull elements from them and start using computer skills teo expand on what you're doing with your hand if you're not a computer skilled person don't worry about what I just said and if what I just did on you in a photo shop was a little more you know there's a it's pretty straightforward on dh you can read you know by the class and rewind and start over again and watch what I've done a few times because it'll it'll be worth the reminder or the step by step just to know how to make it into the black and white and they know that you have that archived file as your original it's so nice like if you are someone who works typically with original artwork all the time that taking away the stress of it not being like like having to do it over again or you know the labor intensity of doing something by hand like it's it's not necessary you can you can save yourself by doing it this way so I'm gonna put my computer aside backto coloring um yeah well where while we're on that topic this came from dez still does stills you mentioned scanning in much larger works do you have any pointers to how to split up a large scale work in order to scan it? Yeah that's a really I have chosen to live nearby, eh an amazing commercial photo. Yeah, I left graduates school, and we've decided we're going to move to vermont and, like, inherit some property for my parents. And this is very tangential way of answering your question, but I'm gonna tell you anyway, um, and we were, like, gonna live off the grid and build around my husband's a builder, and we're gonna build our own house, and it was gonna be amazing. And then we moved there. And, like, within three months, we were like, wait can take this. So we moved to north hampton, which is sort of ah, best of both worlds kind of rural and think that it's been a strategic move. I live close to new york was boston, but I think I know that if you can find a local printer print house that does photocopying and small scale printing that has a large bed scanner for for doing things like this it's really important, like it's, um, it is going, teo, make it impossible for you to do projects like that, and I could just zip downtown and be like, hey, can you quickly just, you know, scan this for me, and usually that they know me, now they'll, you know, do it pretty quickly and the only thing that I would say that's a disadvantage toe having, I mean, know what? We can't afford ten thousand dollars scanners, right? Like those huge, like they can scan, you know, eighteen by forty images or some, I think, is that they're dirty, like, every time I go, I'm like, could you just clean it? Firstly, you felt like they can't, so I have a lot of clean up to dio usually when I go back and I actually just did a collaboration with a company in texas for a bunch of wall art, and it was the same problem they wanted, like pretty much one toe, one scale so that they could blow up tio really large scale reprints of these digital digital prints of the original artwork, and so I was working on a one to one scale so that it could be made larger if needed. And again, it was like there was a lot of noise and cleanup involved, and it was a little bit of a challenge in the photo shop end of things to make it work, but think I just can't afford to have, you know, and I think this scanner that I mentioned, the all in one scanners, they're good enough like you don't need fancy equipment, you do not need to go out we actually yesterday we were setting up and I was talking with one of the creative live folks, and we're both saying, like, how we had recently bought larger, like I bought a scanner was something of an advance for my book because I am thinking that I was going to want to do larger images and scan them larger and within, like, a two years, hp was like, yep, we're not supporting that anymore, and I was like, I just spent eight hundred dollars on this scanner and it's, like now out of date, and I was like, okay, don't invest in expensive equipment because it's not necessary, so I hope that answers your question. And, you know, I think it's easy to be prepared if you know and trust a local company to help you at times when you can't do it in your studio. That's great on that sort of the story of my life, I think really e I don't know how to do this, can you? E? I have never done this before like I've never taught this class before, so here I am with you. I don't know what I'm doing, but we're figuring it out.