Brave the Woods, the husband and wife creative team, is known for bright style illustrations with a vintage flare. The texture used in their digital illustrations always put their work over the top. Turns out they were offering some in person workshops this summer around the Midwest so I hopped on the chance to check it out. I am a publications designer by trade so learning tips and tricks in illustration for my personal work turned out to be super beneficial. I am excited to work on this skillset more.
Brad Woodard led the workshop, he was joined by his wife Krystal and their two adorable kiddos. The workshop sold out and am I glad I got a spot!
We spent the first half of the class creating textures by hand with all kinds of items.
Designers getting dirty.
My sweet textures!
We then took our creations into photoshop and had a super quick run through on making our own photoshop brushes and we learned how to take the textures into illustrator as well. This part of the class went pretty fast and if you weren’t super familiar with the programs it might be too hard to follow. However, you are in luck, there is a tutorial that went through much of what was covered and you can pause and replay all you want.
Brad explaining how to format a file to create a brush.
Showing how to easily create moveable texture layers with a clipping mask.
We were provided with a brush set from Retro Supply Co., a discount for the shop at Retro Supply Co. and Brave the Woods, a discount with Jakprints, a free three month Skillshare membership (where I teach a class on quilling), and we also got a sweet swag bag!
The Never Stop Learning stickers are going on everything!
I learned so much in this short evening and can’t wait to put my new skills to work! I also got to meet some fellow designers and even some fellow in-house designers!
For any designers and illustrators out there, I highly recommend taking one of their courses online or in person. For their online courses CLICK HERE. For more about their workshops in June 2018 around the midwest CLICK HERE. And for a short tutorial of what we worked on in the class CLICK HERE.