Will Terry's "How To Design A Drawing"

I'm so excited to have won a free copy of Will Terry's "How To Design A Drawing" video tutorial. Even though I've been a graphic designer my whole life, I still struggle with integrating characters into backgrounds in my illustrations, and I'm sure this will help me with that.

Having been taught by Will for a week at the Writing and Illustrating For Young Readers Conference in 2009, I know I will come away with some great insights. I love the way Will teaches - he just talks about different aspects of illustration based on his experiences - not some hard and fast rules read out of a textbook.

Check out his tutorials - he has a new series of 8 videos. You can find them on folioacademy.com I'll let you know how it goes - but I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it!

Add Copyright Info to Your Images: Photoshop Tutorial

We artists know that as soon as we create something, it is copyrighted, which means that as the creator, we own all rights to that image. Some other people may not know that, and steal our images (or they do know that and do it anyway, but I'm not going to talk about that). But if you find someone using your image and you want to take them to court, the lawyers say you have to have gone through the process of registering your piece at the copyright office (and paying a fee) in order for you to be able to collect damages. Doesn't really make sense to me, but ANYway...

Some of us are too money-impaired to do that with all of our stuff. Adobe has addressed this starting with Photoshop CS4, by adding a feature that may* help you protect yourself a little more. I think it would protect you against instances where people claim that they don't know who the creator of the art is, as stated in that ridiculous Orphan Works Bill that was introduced last year. 

 * I am not a lawyer, this may not mean anything in a court of law, blah, blah, blah.

So, with your document open in Photoshop, go to the File menu and select 'file info.'

You'll get a new dialog box. Go to the description tab and there are places you can enter your information. The most important area, in my opinion, is the copyright status box. Here you can say that it's protected and add your name in the box underneath it. I also add stuff in the next tab over, the IPTC tab, to protect myself even further. I don't completely understand the IPTC stuff, but you can read about it here. I don't bother with the other tabs but there are a lot of other options to add more info about the image.

Now, you have your info for your original PS file. To get it on your web-safe image, when you go to "Save for web & devices", make sure that you check that you have selected copyright and contact info in the Metadata box. Hit save and you're done!

What's really cool about this is that when you open your new web-safe image, there is a © symbol on the name of your file!

Get Rid of White in Your Scanned Drawings in Photoshop

If you want to use your scanned drawings and color them in Photoshop, here's a fast and easy way to get rid of all the white in the background.

Open up your scan in PS. It will automatically be on a layer called "background." This layer is locked, so double click on the word "background", then you'll unlock the layer and can rename it in the dialog box.

Then add another layer and move it under your initial layer. On the original drawing layer, go to the layers palette and change the layer state to multiply. This will get rid of the white!! Then you can paint on the layer beneath it. Easy Peasy!