Screen Print Effect ｜ Japanese Geisha ｜ Photoshop, Illustrator Tutorial

Hello and welcome to this video tutorial brought to you by TastyTuts.com. In this video I'm going to be using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to demonstrate how you can achieve a screen print effect. Now I will be using CS6, though don't be discouraged if you're using an earlier version as you should be able to follow along just fine. No new features are going to be used here. So for this tutorial we are going to create this composition of a Japanese style screen print. To the left here is my preparation composition and to the right is my finished artwork. Soon you're going to find out how I got from the image on the left to the finished artwork on the right. If you would like to take a closer look at these examples you can download the PSD docs, the links are in the description. So to create this artwork I have broken the process down into three main steps. Stage one preparation, stage two rendering and stage three applying color and texture. If at any point you wish to skip ahead or back to any of these steps you can find the times displayed in the description. So let's get into it and start with the preparation stage. The first step in creating your screen print is to think about your composition and then source the images you want to use. Here is the folder of images I have sourced earlier. I have a picture of a traditional Japanese female geisha, an image of a Japanese style illustrated fish and some Japanese text examples. Now I have actually acquired these images from a simple google search. One thing I need to stress at this stage is whatever images you plan on using try and get the highest quality and highest resolution images as you possibly can. The better the quality of your images the better the effect you're going to achieve later on. So once you have your images it's time to create a new document in Adobe Photoshop. So in Photoshop I'm going to come to file, new and create a new document. I'm going to set the preset to international paper and select the size of A3 and set the resolution to 150. This will ensure we get a really high quality image though if you plan on printing your artwork you may want to go with a resolution of 300 dpi. Lastly change the color mode to grayscale. Now this is really important so remember to change your color mode to grayscale and okay. So with my new document I'm going to start to bring in my images. I can do this by opening the images and dragging them into my composition like so. What you will notice is that if your original images are in color when you drag them into your new document they will now become grayscale. This is exactly what we want at this stage. You might also find that the images are either too big or too small for your canvas so by pressing command T on the keyboard we can activate free transform and scale images up or down and rotate depending on what you have in mind for your composition. Once I have all the images in my composition I'm going to come to image mode and then select RGB. This is going to change the document into color. For our artwork to work later on I'm going to need to have every element cut out and prepared separately in the layers panel. To make things clear here I'm going to come to the bottom of the layers panel and create a new layer. By pressing command shift N I'm going to fill this layer with a green color. Now I can see the white area around some of the images I have copied in here. So to cut out some of the images I'm going to use the pen tool. I'll just give you a quick demonstration. I'm going to cut out the head of the Japanese female geisha. First I'm going to start with the pen tool. With the pen tool active I'm going to click and drop down some points around the head like so and once I've created my path around the head area and joined the path I'm going to click and hold on the pen tool in the menu and select the convert anchor point tool. I'm going to use this tool to click and drag to pull out some holders on each point and use these to add curves to my line to get a nice accurate path around the head. Once I'm happy with the path around the area I want to use with the convert anchor point tool still active I'm going to right click on the path from the menu that appears I'm going to select make selection. Upon click the path has been made into a selection so with the selection around the head I then need to make sure I have the right layer selected in this case the head layer and once I have the correct layer selected in the layers panel I'm simply going to press command c to copy and command v to paste. Once I have done that I can delete the original layer and now I have the head on a separate layer nicely cut up. Great! If we take a quick look at the finished artwork we can see also we have this yellow area of the flowers. To get this area I simply duplicated the head layer I just cut out and toggled the visibility of the first layer and then used the eraser tool with a hard brush to remove all the face parts from the flowers. So eventually I ended up with just the flowers area above the face like so. Now depending on whatever images you have in your composition you may need to use these techniques in order to cut out the images. Though for the next example I have this illustration of a fish. As you can see it is a simple black and white image. To cut this out all I need to do here is just use the magic wand tool and select the white area around the fish and press delete. Simple! And I might have to click into some other areas to remove some extra white space I do not need. With regards to the Japanese text below I will use the same technique as earlier though this time I'm going to use the lasso tool to draw an area around what I want, copy and paste onto a new layer and remove the original. So now I have all my images carefully cut out and prepared in my document. I'm going to spend a little time fine tuning the placement of my images on the canvas until I am happy with the overall composition. For this I'm going to have to change the scale and rotate some of the images. So once this is final I'm then going to name and group the layers so I can clearly identify them later on. I can do this by double clicking on the layer name and typing in the new one. With the head layer selected I'm going to press command g and this will place this layer into a group. I will call this group head and also drag the flower section into it as well. I will group the Japanese text layers into a separate folder called Japanese text and the fish illustration into a folder called fish. So now I have a neat and organized Photoshop document. So this concludes the preparation stage it's now time to move on to the rendering stage. For this stage I'm going to be using Adobe Illustrator. Now I'm going to use Illustrator because there is a particular tool in Illustrator I want to use and this is the image trace tool. For this tutorial I'm using CS6. In CS6 Adobe seem to have changed this tool that in earlier versions of Illustrator has been known as the live trace tool. So if you're using an earlier version of Illustrator then keep in mind this tool is live trace and if you're using CS6 it will be image trace. Now some of you may already be familiar with this tool if not then you're about to see how clever this is. So next I'm going to make sure I have Adobe Illustrator open and I'm going to create a new document and set this document to A3 portrait to match my Photoshop document. With this setup I'm going to come back into my prepared document in Photoshop and select an image to start with. In this instance I'm going to begin with the head area with the head layer. So with this layer selected I'm going to press command A to select all, command C to copy, then come over into Illustrator and press command B to paste. This should paste in the image like so. Now I'm not going to worry too much about where the image is placed at this point I'm only going to use Illustrator to render the image. Okay so with the image now in the Illustrator document I'm simply going to press command V to paste again. This will create another face object and I'm going to move to place this just next to the other like so. Great! So now I'm about to use the image trace tool. So I'm going to select one of the images and I'll start with the image on the right here. Once I have the image selected I can see this blue frame around it. With the image selected I'm going to come to the top where I can see the control panel. This is the main panel going across the top here. In this control panel about halfway across I will click the image trace button. If you're using an earlier version of Illustrator you will need to click the live trace button. So once I have clicked this I can see the effect that has had on my image. What this tool does is effectively take a bitmap image and attempt to split it into a black and white vector image. So if we compare this to the original image here on the left we can see it's looking more simplified and has lost some of the detail. Next we are going to customize this effect. So for those using CS6 you can come up to the window menu and select the image trace panel. This is going to enable me to configure this effect. For those of you using an earlier version of Illustrator if you look closely up in the control panel at the top you should see the threshold and min area options. So I have now just applied the image trace effect to this image. Here in the image trace panel I can toggle the threshold value. If I push the value up I can get a solid shape of the head. If I take the threshold down I can capture some of the finer detail on the face. Using CS6 I am also going to toggle the advanced option down and push up the paths value. This will add more finer detail to the vector. If you're using an earlier version of Illustrator simply toggle your min area down and tweak your threshold until you get something similar. Okay so for this example I'm going to push the value of the threshold to around 160. This is going to give me a solid bit of detail here of the face. Next I'm going to click onto the face image on the left and again press the image trace button up in the control panel. This time I want to get some finer detail so over in the threshold property I'm going to pull this down to around 40. Be sure to also tweak the paths to push up the detail. On previous versions of Illustrator you will have to tweak the min area down to achieve more detail. So now I have two examples of the same image. One has light detail and one has more solid detail. That's exactly what I want. Once I'm happy with the level of detail in each I'm going to select one of the images and by pressing and holding shift on the keyboard I can select the next image. With them both selected I'm going to come to the top in the control panel and look for the expand button. Once you can see that simply click it once. Now what that button does is separate the black and white vector shapes that make up the image and now you can see the paths around the black vector areas. Great. Next with the mouse simply click into the white canvas space to deselect the vectors. Then in your menu select the magic wand tool. With that selected simply come to one of your images and select a white part of your image. I'm going to click inside the face here and upon click you should now see that all the white has been selected in both images. Next I'm simply going to press backspace to delete the selection and all the white and now I have effectively deleted the white area and all I'm left with is the black vectors. Perfect. So using this technique I'm going to do the same to the rest of the images in my Photoshop composition. Next I'm going to select the fish illustration, copy this and paste it into illustrator. With the image selected I'm going to press the image trace button and toggle the threshold property and the paths until I have a level of detail I'm happy with. Then I'm going to click the expand button, click off the image to deselect, choose the magic wand tool from the menu, select the white area and press backspace to delete the white and voila I am left with the isolated black vector. So using the same technique again I'm going to convert my Japanese text and flower detail into vectors and soon I will have an illustrated document full of black vector images. So it's this tool in illustrator that I have used to break down my initial photographic images into flat bold sections. It's these sections that are going to build up our artwork in Photoshop and give us that screen print feel. At this stage it would be wise to save your vectors should you wish to use them again in future and that concludes the rendering stage of the process. It's now time to move on to the coloring and texture stage. So once all the vectors are prepared it's time to bring these into my main comp in Photoshop. So I'm going to start with the head area. Now as you can see we have two head parts in our illustrated document. What we need to keep in mind here is that I'm going to use these vectors to build up my screen print effect. So I need to start with the boldest parts and work up to the smaller detail parts. For example I'm going to choose this section here on the right as it's the boldest section. Using the selection tool I'm going to select this image and press command c to copy. Then I'm going to come into my Photoshop comp. In the layers panel I'm going to paste this layer just above the head layer. So I'm going to click into the head group and select the head layer and press command b to paste. Photoshop will then ask me how I want to paste. For now let's just paste in as pixels. Then I will see the vector shape appear in my document. Next I need to position my black vector shape just above the head image to get the right positioning and once it's there I will press enter to commit. Next I can simply toggle the visibility of the original head layer as I do not need this any longer. If we take a look at the finished artwork we can see that this block is actually a light gray. So back in the main comp I'm going to come to the layers panel and double click on the new layer to pull up the layer styles. I'm going to select color overlay from the left, click the color selection box to the right and up should pop the color picker panel and in the web color box I'm going to type the color value d0d0d0. I will press okay and that will apply the light gray color to that shape. Right so it's looking a little strange now with the green background so I'm just going to toggle the visibility of this. Okay so that's the first part in. Next I will come back to illustrator and copy the next part and come back into photoshop and paste this on top of the gray layer. I will then carefully place this into place and on top of the gray layer and press enter to commit. So if I zoom in here we have these flowers set on the top. If we look at the finished example we can see that these have been turned into a solid yellow color. So back in the main comp I'm going to come to the flowers layer in the head group, double click on the flowers layer and apply a color overlay and use the color ebf487 and that's looking nice. Back in the illustrator dock I'm going to select the detail parts of the and copy this and paste these into my photoshop dock just above the flowers layer. I will place this accordingly and press enter to commit. Now that's looking a little dark so on this occasion I'm going to toggle the opacity of this layer and pull this down to around 15% and that's looking just fine. So next I'm going to do the same for the fish. In the illustrator dock I'm going to copy the fish vector. Back in my photoshop dock I'm going to navigate to the fish layer in the fish group and paste on top like so. For the original fish shape I'm going to apply a color overlay and set this to a light orange color fbe6d7. Now the illustrated fish on top is looking a little bit intense so I'm going to toggle the opacity of this layer to 40%. So as you can see the fish artwork is now crossing into the face section and I'm not really liking this. So now I'm going to remove this part of the fish. To do this I'm going to come to the layers panel and select the fish group. With the fish group folder selected I'm going to come to the bottom of my layers panel and click the add layer mask icon third from the left. Upon click we can now see a white layer mask thumbnail appear in the group layer in the layers panel. With this mask layer thumbnail selected I'm going to choose the brush tool. I want to make sure I set the foreground color to a solid black, select a solid brush, set the opacity up in the control panel to 100% and I'm going to start to draw and mask away the fish area from the face like so. And soon I will have something that looks like this. So I applied the mask to the group folder in order to remove both the fish illustration and the orange background contained. Much cleaner. So once I'm happy with that I'm going to paste in the Japanese text from the Illustrator doc into my Photoshop doc and place them accordingly and toggle the visibility of the old layers. Looking at the finished version we can see there are these red elements of color. The lips are red, some of the Japanese text is red and I have this nice red circle above the head. So back in the Photoshop doc I'm going to start with the red circle. Now I'm going to place this circle between the head vectors and the yellow flowers. So in the head group I'm going to select the layer below the flowers, press and hold command and shift and press n to create a new layer. I'm going to name this layer red sun. Then I'm going to come to the menu and select the ellipse marquee tool. By pressing and holding shift on the keyboard I'm going to click and drag to create a perfect ellipse. Once I have the selection I'm going to click on my color selection and use the color e0 2e71 and fill the selection like so. I will then move the circle into a place I'm happy with and then apply a blending mode of multiply clicking the option on the top left of the layers panel. Now if I zoom in I'm not liking how the red is overlapping the orange color of the fish so I want to remove this part of the orange here. An easy way to do this is to press and hold command on the keyboard and carefully select the image thumbnail of the circle in the layers panel. Upon click I will see I have made a selection of the circle. If I navigate to the fish folder and select the orange fish layer I'm simply going to press backspace and delete that part of the image. Great! Next I'm going to come to the Japanese text folder and select the large text. I will double click on the layer and choose color overlay. By clicking on the color pickup box I will simply move my mouse cursor over and click to select the color from the red circle and okay that. Lastly I want to change the color of the lips so I'm going to zoom right in and in the layers panel I'm going to come to the gray layer and use the lasso tool to click and draw a selection around the lips like so. Then I will press command x to cut and press command shift v to paste them back in place. Then I'm going to double click on this new layer and apply a color overlay and again click the color picker and move my mouse cursor to select the red color from the red circle and soon I will end up with something that looks like this and that is looking pretty cool but now I'm going to tweak my artwork to look more like a screen print. I'm going to move some elements around and add some texture so I'm going to start with the fish here. If I zoom in we can see that the fish illustration is perfectly placed on top of the orange background. Now what I like about screen printing is that it's it's never perfect. When various layers are printed on top of each other they are sometimes out of sync so I'm going to select the orange background layer in the fish group and with my arrow keys I'm going to move this out of sync with the illustration above. Now zooming out I have this white gap between the orange layer and the red sun layer and the orange solid background is now not perfectly aligned with the illustration above so that's looking quite nice. I'm going to do the same with the yellow flowers layer. Select the yellow flowers layer and move this around just subtly and that's looking quite nice though the colors are now looking very flat. Also with screen printing I find sometimes the print is never perfect. Sometimes you get speckles of white where the paint has not made contact with the paper. If we look in the finished example we can see I have this white but very subtle speckle texture. Well to create this I used a pre-made texture. In the downloadable folder you will find in the brushes and textures folder this gritty texture document. This is a simple black and white image. What I'm going to do here is press command a to select all and command c to copy. Next in my main comp I'm going to select the red sun layer and with this layer selected I'm going to add a layer mask by clicking the add layer mask button at the bottom of the layers panel. Next I'm going to press and hold alt on the keyboard and carefully click on this new layer mask thumbnail. What you will see next is the screen turn white or the canvas turn white rather. We are now looking at the layer mask. Now I'm going to press command v to paste in the black and white gritty texture image and I can press command t to activate free transform and toggle the size of this on the canvas area. Once I'm happy I'm going to click onto the image thumbnail to come back to the main comp and I can now see I have this white speckle texture applied to the red sun layer. Now in the layers panel you will notice a little padlock symbol between the image and the layer mask thumbnail. If I click this once I will release the lock and this will enable me to click on the mask thumbnail and with the move tool active activated I can move the texture around until I'm happy. So I'm going to do the same process to the orange fish background. I'm going to select layer, add a layer mask, press and hold alt on the keyboard and select the mask thumbnail. Then I'm going to paste in the gritty texture image and I can resize this on the canvas area. I'm going to click back onto the image thumbnail, click the padlock icon to release this and move the texture around until I get something I'm happy with. I'm going to apply the same technique to the black head area and soon I will end up with something that looks like this. To finish this artwork I need to apply one last effect, one last texture effect. If we look in the final comp we can see on the black area of the head I have this nice gritty ink texture. You will find this black print texture image in a downloadable folder. So again I'm going to select all by pressing command a and I'm going to press command c to copy. Then I'm going to come back into my photoshop dock and I'm going to paste this image by pressing command v directly on top of the black area of the face. By using free transform I can change the size to fit over the area. Then I'm going to press and hold command on the keyboard and carefully select the image thumbnail of the black area on my layers panel, the black area of the head and that will make a selection of that black area. So with the texture layer selected and the current selection area live I'm going to add a layer mask and click the layer mask button at the bottom of my layers panel and that will apply a layer mask to the texture layer like so based on the previous selection. Now I'm going to toggle the opacity to reveal the dark layer below and allow that to come through a little bit so the texture blends in with that nicely and that's looking pretty cool. To finish off I'm going to use the same technique and apply this to the fish illustration and tweak the opacity of the layers until I get something that looks like this and that's it. That's how you can create a screen print effect using the tools of illustrator and photoshop. Well I hope you enjoyed this video tutorial if you liked the tutorial hit the like button on my facebook page. Don't forget you can download the documents you saw in this tutorial all links are in the description. Well that's it for another video brought to you by TastyTuts.com Thanks for watching have fun guys and I'll see you next time.