Hey guys, I'm Will Paterson, and today I'm going to be showing you
how you can create a really cool playing card design.
A really intricate vintage or modern, if you like,
directly on your iPad with Procreate and Vectornator.
We're going to use Procreate today because it's the easiest
way to draw without it being vectored.
So Procreate generally isn't about vector work.
It's more about the actual drawing of it.
Now, I've got this sort of playing card shape here.
All you need to do is just draw a playing card shape out, go to
the settings, and we're going to be using Symmetry.
We go to settings, Canvas, Edit Drawing Guide, and we've gone
to Symmetry with the options of a quadrant.
And we just made sure that the actual quadrant is in the
center of the playing card right there.
Now, the cool trick about playing card design is that
we don't actually have to design the whole thing.
We only have to design one quarter of the card, because
the way that playing cards work, you can turn them around a full 360° or 180°.
It should just reflect nicely from both sides.
This is the easiest way of doing it and also the most effective.
I've already got a couple of shapes, I'm going to just add to this.
This is the idea here.
All I've done is I've worked on this one quadrant and
it's created this amazing masterpiece right here.
So I've already created these shapes here.
They're very easy to do.
They're just simple shapes. Generally speaking
you want to have one big shape in the middle that is also
symmetrical on all sides.
That helps guide the eyes and sort of frame it out a bit more.
From here, all we need to do really is draw some straight
lines in different places.
Again, we're only working in the quadrant, and we don't need
to be perfect here because we're just sort of sketching around.
We can just create some nice lines going everywhere.
In fact, what I'm going to do is take the pencil tool and
we're going to go ahead and put some more streamline onto the
pencil tool just so we get a nicer lines that smoother all
the way across.
What you'll notice is that it's happening on all the corners.
You can see it's working wonders already.
Now, if you're struggling with the lines, I would always say
just to bring down the size of the pencil tool quite dramatically.
It actually helps you be more intricate.
From here what I'm going to do is draw a circle, I'm going to create it here.
I'm going to bring the circles around here, and I'm going to just get rid
of this here to give it some dimension.
And again, we're working in this one quadrant.
I'm zoomed right in, but it's working everywhere else the same.
We've got some wavy lines going on in here as well.
The cool thing about playing card design is that literally,
you can go as intricate as you like.
Most of the time you can do quite a lot with small spaces
and it's more fixated around patterns.
So, for instance, we've got these sort of leaves going here
and we're trying to keep it one line weight for all of the intricate parts.
So you can see it's starting to build here and it's starting to look good.
Now we've got some white space over here and I'm just going to
move to this section here because I think we can start to
add some cool things here.
You can see how the mirroring is working, creating that nice pattern.
And the idea behind this is to fill it out with simple shapes
and patterns to make it look intricate.
The more there is, the more intricate it can look.
And it doesn't need to be perfect.
It's just a sketch because we're going to be going into Vectornator
to finish this up. Here I'm going to go for like an ornate look.
Create some thickness here.
Honestly, it's the best way of doing it.
But what we don't want to have is loads of negative space all
the way through.
So I want to speed run through this.
I'm going to create some cool patterns and then we're going
to go bring it into Vectornator.
You can see on the outside here, we've got lots of detail.
In fact, all we've done is just draw some random lines, but
we get these really cool patterns.
Anyone can do this and in the center
we can really go ahead and go crazy because the further we
get to the center, the crazier the design can be.
Feel free to go as intricate as you want.
The more intricate you get, the more busy it will seem.
But that's not a bad thing when it comes to playing card design.
I'm going for an ornate look because it looks cool.
All these calligraphy flourishing going on here.
Okay, so now that we've got the actual sketch, what we need to
do is bring this into Vectornator.
And there's a few ways of actually vectorizing this easily
no matter what your skill level is.
So first of all, take your layer.
So we're going to take, I'm going to copy this one because
this is kind of like my base layer.
I'm going to merge these two layers down.
I'm going to go ahead and save this just as a normal picture.
Just save the image and we're going to import it into Vectornator.
I'm going to choose an A4 sheet like so, on the iPad
I'm just going to bring this image up like so, and then
I'm just going to drag it in and it will just appear in Vectornator.
We'll just scale up, making sure you're keeping the actual
aspect ratio the same.
Then I'm going to just bring the actual layer opacity down like so.
Go to the layer, the actual sketch layer.
I'm going to lock that and make another layer on the top.
Now in that layer on the top, what we're going to be doing is
drawing in one of those quadrants again.
But first I want to create some guides.
So make sure that you've got guides on.
So by doing that, you want to go to the System Preferences up here.
Make sure you've got guides turned on and that you've got
the rulers on the outside.
And simply all we do by going up to the top here and just go
straight down the middle like so and straight across exactly
where it sort of intersects.
Try and get it as perfect as you can.
Now again, we're only going to work on one of the quadrants
through this to make it easier.
Essentially, there are two ways to do this.
You can pen to it in, but that's a bit hard, it's a bit of a waste of time.
So I'm going to use a pencil tool.
Pencil Tool is great.
And we're going to increase the smoothing just a tiny bit.
And essentially we're going to trace over this.
So for areas like this, we can actually just use the pencil
tool with a bit of smoothing to create these nice vectored lines.
And it's really important to be vectored when it comes to
playing card designs because they need to be printed off in
the highest quality.
And this is how you do it.
Again, you can go through this afterwards and change the nodes
if you're not happy with it.
All the smoothing does is it takes away some of those jagged
edges for when you're drawing.
Because this is vector, it will feel slightly different.
For any straight lines or geometric lines, go to the
Shape function, go to the Line Tool.
Create the line, but just put your finger on and it will
constrain it like so.
Then go back to the pencil tool and we can carry on.
In areas like this where we've got these lines intersecting,
but they're not sort of joined.
We need to make sure they're joined together to make it look
as nice as possible.
So to do that, I'm going to select both of these.
I'm going to go to the Path option and just press Join Path.
I'm going to do the same here.
Again, select both of these.
Join the Path so they become one. For any small circles
Again, same line weight.
Because we've got no fill, we're just using a stroke here.
We just bring that in.
We can actually as well get rid of smart guides because that
will make it snap to paces that we don't want it to snap to.
For a circle like this, we want to get a perfect circle out and
we can change the size of it and shape of it
however we like but making sure it's a perfect circle that matches.
Now we don't want the rest of the circle here.
We're going to go to the Scissors tool.
When we just cut where we don't need it, select this shape and
just delete it.
And for any of these wavy lines, again, just use the pencil tool.
It's the easiest way of doing it.
Make sure you've got the correct smoothing for you
depends how steady your hand is.
I'm going to actually draw some more lines here because
we need these lines to be quite thick as well.
So we're just going to increase the thickness slightly.
You can do that easily down here in the quick menu, like so.
And again, we highlight both of them.
We're going to join them together, and then we can just
change this here just to match it up.
We do another line here as well.
Again, because we're working within the constraints of just
one segment or one quarter of this, we don't have to draw the full shape.
You don't have to worry about everything else.
I'm going to go power through this so you can see how simple
it is really for you to do yourself.
Okay, now that we've got the majority of it done, it depends
how well you want it to be and how much you want to do.
What we're going to do is actually just highlight all of the work
and we're going to group them.
This means that if we move them, they all move together.
What we need to do now is actually copy and paste them
and reflect them.
And it's really easy to do.
All you do is press this button on the left, and we're going to
just move it to the right ever so slightly till it fits.
Then we want to go to Arrange.
Deselect his button over here, the Copy button, and we're just going to
reflect it by pressing this button.
And it will reflect it all the way around perfectly.
Now we need to sort of match it up exactly to what it should be.
When we match it up, you can see how well it does.
Now to make it even quicker.
What we need to do is highlight both of these same again.
We're going to group them, press this button, drag them
down holding to keep the aspect ratio, to keep it in the vertical axis.
Then we're just going to reflect it upwards,
get rid of the Copy button,
and we're going to match it up perfectly
to this line here.
And instantly we've got a card design that's looking really good.
And if you spend enough time inside of this, you can create
literally anything you want.
And it looks like you spent hours.
Thank you Vectornator for sponsoring this video.
If you want to try it out, it's an app that works on the iPad,
the iPhone, and the Mac.
It's completely free and it's completely vector as well, so
it's got amazing functions and tools.
To learn more about Vectornator, make sure you subscribe.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Will Paterson, and I'll see you in the next video.
Goodbye.