Skip to main content

Add Watercolor Clipping Group: Save The Date Card

Lesson 4 from: Invitations in Photoshop

Khara Plicanic

Add Watercolor Clipping Group: Save The Date Card

Lesson 4 from: Invitations in Photoshop

Khara Plicanic

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

4. Add Watercolor Clipping Group: Save The Date Card

Lesson Info

Add Watercolor Clipping Group: Save The Date Card

We're gonna experiment and actually add some texture to this. Try something new, by turning it into a bit of watercolor type piece. So I happen to have, in the documents, and if you purchased the class, I included this in your bonus material. So I have this document that I made of watercolor splotches, I guess. So there's a number of splotches here. We've got this big one. They all have kind of a rectangular shape and then round shape and then a splattery kind of a shape. So what I'm gonna do is grab my move tool and I what I want is this piece right here. So I built this file so all these pieces are on separate layers. So I'm gonna grab this piece. I don't which layer it is, 'cause apparently I didn't name all the layers for you. So here's how you do that. The way to easily find out, if you grab the move tool, and then you hold down the command or control key and you click the layer that you want and that will automatically grab it in the layers panel. So we can see that in this case ...

it's layer 12. So here's what I'm gonna do. I've gotta get out of my fancy view mode, because the fancy view mode let's you move your document around but it doesn't let you see your tabs. So I'm gonna press f twice to cycle back to the beginning, 'cause it turns out there's three modes. There's this mode, there's the fancy mode, and then there's like super fancy, you don't even have tools or tool panels any more. So we want the view mode with the tabs. So I'm gonna put my cursor in here. So I have this and I'm gonna hold my mouse down, so this is key, hold your mouse down 'til the very end. I'm gonna drag up and pause on the tab for the image that is my target. I'm still holding my mouse down, then I'm gonna move my cursor into the image. I'm still holding my mouse and before I drop it, I'm gonna add the shift key. So I'll shift, drop. So I've added this watercolor texture. Now that's just pretty cool even to use as a background. So we could do that and then maybe we knock the type out and reverse it. So let's try that. So we want Lex and Luke, or no, we want tying the knot. Let's reverse that. So we'll have that be white on top of this layer and see. Ooh, that looks pretty. And then we could reverse out this type too, and just use that whole thing, the watercolor as the background. Or, what I was thinking we would do, which I think is even more fun, is I'm gonna take this water color layer, I'm gonna drag it in the layers panel, so it's directly on top of the tying the knot text. Okay they have to be right next to each other. We'll rename this call it Watercolor. So I double-click on the actual name of the layer and I can call it something else and then press enter. So what I'm gonna do is clip this Watercolor so that it only appears where it is says tying the knot, or that they are typing the knot. Okay, so I've got this highlighted. I'm gonna hold down the alt or option key, and you'll notice my cursor changes from the little hand, when I hold down option or alt and I drag my cursor between those two layers I get this funny square with a arrow. And then if I click, it looks like nothing happened because the blend mode is by default of that graphic is set to multiply. So you wanna change that from multiply to normal. And there you go. That was kind of anti-climactic I feel like. (laughs) I feel like that's a little anti-climactic. So let me just back up for a second. I'm command or Control + Z to do that. Okay, so the Watercolor is in multiply mode, so we can see it here, but when we clip it by pressing alt or option, and hovering in between these two layers and clipping to the Tying the Knot layer just below, it looks like it disappears, but that's only because it has the multiplied blend mode. So then we'll come up here in the blend mode options and change it from multiply to normal. And now we see that the Watercolor appears on top of the typing the knot text and it looks like this text is like watercolor painted. And what's cool is, with the move tool selected and the Watercolor layer active, I can actually reposition that Watercolor within the text however I like best. So I like being able to see the transition go from yellow to orange to red. So I'm gonna move that so we see that whole transition. I think that looks really awesome. So I think that's looking pretty good. Then I would probably wanna change the color of this other type. So I'm gonna choose a color, just sample it out of this Watercolor here by pressing i on the keyboard, for the eyedropper tool. And we have a question coming in from a student that says how do you remove the background from the Watercolor or is that a brush? That's a great question. Well I made this watercolor at home just by painting with watercolors. It's a cheap set of watercolors on white art paper and then I photographed it and I brought it into Photoshop and I just selected the white background and then removed it. So there's a number of tools you can use to do that. The easiest is probably gonna be either the magic wand or the quick selection tool. They're both with the w, is the keyboard shortcut for this family of tools. And then you just go about selecting that white background and removing it. We might have some time later, I don't think I have it with the background in here, so I can't show it to you with the original background, 'cause I already got rid of it. But you basically take one of the those tools, if you have the brush tool, then you just brush around the white background area and then to select it and then you can just hit delete on your keyboard and remove it. But you have to unlock the background layer first. So if you do that at home and you create your own, you wanna go to your background, which that's what you would have when you bring that into Photoshop and you wanna unlock this, then you can select the white area and hit delete. So that's one way of doing that and you can create it yourself. There are also, there are watercolor brushes for Photoshop that you can find that people have created. So there's a website called Brusheezy I'll just type it, 'cause I feel like that's hard to read so I'm just gonna type it. Or hard to like know how to spell, so I'm gonna type it for you. It's brusheezy.com. Can you all see (laughs) on my screen here? Brusheezy, it's kind of silly, but they have a lotta free brushes that you can install into Photoshop that you could use. But you wanna make sure that, with free comes the responsibility to check to make sure that anything you're getting for free that you can actually still use commercially. So it might be free, but they might say, only use it for personal use. So check on that. But otherwise, I think the easiest, I think best way, is to just go to something like creativemarket.com and if you search for watercolor Photoshop, whatever, you will find so many things that you can buy for like five bucks or 10 bucks, or something pretty reasonable and you'll get really high quality stuff that you can use for all kinds of things. So that's how that works. In this case I made my own, 'cause I just wanted to be able to tell people that that's possible, but it's definitely more work than just paying five dollars to find something or something like that from creativemarket. So, I made this one myself and it's included for you to use.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with RSVP

Birthday Mockup
Watercolor Mockup
Save The Date Mockup

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Class Images
Resource Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Nova
 

Khara is a brilliant instructor and I learned so much to improve my business. I'm running wild in photoshop with the tools and approaches that I gained from this amazing course! Thank you!

April S.
 

I have a Photoshop Bootcamp that encompasses a few weeks of learning but I just haven't had the time and focus to sit down and go through it even though I know there is a ton of useful stuff for me in it. One thing I have wanted to do for awhile is to design cards using some of my photography and graphics/lettering. Khara's Invitations in Photoshop class goes right to the heart of what I needed to know in PS for this specific kind of project. I am not a complete newbie to PS but seeing her use various functionality in this context hit home for me. I'm glad I picked up this course and look forward to working on some of my own cards. Khara's is well-prepared and direct, she speaks well, is clear, gets right to the things you really need to know. In my opinion, she's a very good instructor for the Creative Live teaching format.

user-f9ff5e
 

Khara packs a lot of info into this 2 hour class. She has the right balance of being friendly and conversational yet stays focused and on- topic. She shows several ways of doing actions or accomplishing a task. What I like the most is how she sometimes backs up and reviews what buttons she pressed or actions she just did. Even if you have been doing PS a while, you might learn some new shortcuts or new ways of doing a task. I could have written 4 or 5 pages of notes easily on tips. Sometimes she is a little fast and I couldn't see what exactly she did, but if you buy the class it would be great to pause and rewind a section several times. I would put her up there with Dave Cross as one of my favorite PS instructors who pack in info and won't put you to sleep.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES