In this video,
I'm gonna show you how to take a free image or photograph like this and convert
it into an image like this, then into an image like this. Now,
why would you want to do this? Well,
it means you can create your very own original, attractive,
copyright free images that you can use commercially.
So you could take the first image that we create and use it on things like
covers of your books that you publish on Amazon.
You could use them to create things like logos. And in fact,
I use this very technique I'm about to show you to create the logo for this
YouTube channel.
You could use this technique and provide it as a service on sites like Fiverr
and Upwork. You could create images to sell on merch,
and also you could take images that you create and sell them on sites
like Creative Fabrica.
And then what can you do with the second image that we're going to create? Well,
you can use these on the interiors of your coloring books that you publish
on Amazon. And the advantage of this, as I said earlier,
they are able to be used commercially.
But one of the biggest things is that you're gonna be able to create an original
image and so not have any issues with things like duplicate
content. And again, you could take images like this,
sell them as digital products on sites like Etsy and Creative Fabrica.
Provide this as a service to people on sites like Fiverr
and Upwork.
So this video is aimed at self-publishers on Amazon
and any of the other self-publishing sites.
And it's for those that are interested in creating digital products
to sell online and also provide digital creation
services to customers online.
Now we're gonna be using the software Affinity Designer,
but the technique I'm gonna show you is using the pen tool.
And so you can apply this technique to any of the vector editing pieces
of software out there. So things like Adobe Illustrator,
and free software like Inkscape, the basic version of Gravit Designer.
And you may actually be able to do similar technique that I'm gonna show you on
Adobe Photoshop. Now,
if you find that you watch this video and you're not sure how to use the pen
tool in the same way that I'm gonna show you now,
then all you need to do is go into a site like YouTube and just do a search for
pen tool and Adobe Illustrator or pen tool and Inkscape,
it's as simple as that. And then, as I said,
the technique I'm gonna show you is pretty basic,
so this is suitable for beginners.
So I'm gonna show you where to get some copyright free images.
I'm gonna show you this technique to convert them into the colored images
and the black and white lined images.
Then I'll quickly show you at the end how to then go on to use those images in
your publications. So first of all, we need our copyright free images,
and here we're on a site called Unsplash.
Now there are other sites that do provide copyright free images.
There's Pixabay and Pexels. But we're gonna be using Unsplash today.
And here you can see it says there's over 3 million curated photographs here.
And in the license it says all photos can be downloaded and used for free
and for commercial and non-commercial purposes, and no permission is needed.
However,
I'm going to show you a step I think you ought to go through before using any
image just to reduce the chance of having any copyright
issues.
So at the homepage we're going to put in Lion because this is the image we're
going to be creating. And I like this one here,
which I'm just going to click on download. Now before jumping in to use it,
what I suggest doing is going to Google images and just dragging in the
image that you've just downloaded.
And what this is going to do is do what's called reverse image search and find
any instances of where this image is also being used on the
internet. And if you look on the right hand side here,
you can see there are these visual matches and these are all the other websites
where this image is actually appearing.
And what you are looking for is whether the image appears on any of these
big stock photo websites like iStock photo,
et cetera. And here we can see there's an image here on iStock photo,
but it's not this one that we're about to use. So it all looks pretty good.
So the next step is to take the image we've just downloaded and drag it across
and into Affinity Designer. Now we're going to be using the pen tool,
and this is over on the left hand side.
So you can either select it by clicking on it or just type the letter P.
Now at the top here,
you'll see the snapping tool and I suggest switching the snapping tool off.
Now over on the right hand side in the color tab,
select the stroke button and then select the option that has the red
slash through it. Now normally with the pen tool,
you would left click of the mouse, create an anchor point,
and then click somewhere else, create another anchor point,
and then holding down the left button of the mouse,
you can drag and you have these, what they call bezier handles.
And as you move the handles out and around,
you'll create a curve on the line.
So if you wanted to create a curve here on the lion's nose,
you'll create an anchor point, another anchor point,
and then just holding down the mouse left button, just drag.
And you'll see here that you'll create a curved line. And then hitting option,
remove one of those handles and then just create another anchor point and
again, dragging and create another curve.
And then you can create an outline of something just with these
curves alone. And you'd be able to do that, as I said,
on sites like Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape and Gravit Designer. However,
Affinity Designer has this useful feature and that is at the
top here. Click on smart mode. So instead of having these handles,
all we need to do is left click of the mouse and create these anchor points.
And Affinity Designer will automatically create the curves for you.
So you can really go quite quickly and outline a shape.
Now just one quick thing as well, before you start drawing,
just make sure that you have the fill button selected.
Now click and draw around the outline of this black
pupil and then choose the color picker tool or click I.
And then just hover over the shape that you've created and left click of the
mouse,
and you'll see that it fills in the shape you just created in the color that
you've clicked on. Next, you want to go back to the pen tool or press P.
Now we're going to select the iris.
Now this iris is blue, which I'm sure has been photoshopped.
Now when you are creating a shape,
the last click must be on the first anchor point that you created.
So then it creates this full shape, click I,
and then we'll just click on this blue area.
Now you'll notice that our black area that we've just created is underneath
this layer. So in the right hand side,
you can select that layer that you've just created and drag it to below
the black layer that you've just created.
So now you can see the pupil appears over the iris.
Another way to do that is just to hit command or control and hit the left
bracket and it will automatically move the layer down.
So now let's go choose a pen tool again and start clicking on these
other shapes.
So you want to select areas that are of the same color or shade.
I for the color picker. So this is the black area.
And so we're just gonna continue doing this. P for the pen tool.
I for the color picker, P for the pen tool.
I'm gonna drag that down. If we reduce the size,
we can see we're starting to build up our image image, go back to the pen tool.
I'm just gonna keep doing this over the different colored areas.
And slowly our image will build up. Again,
I'll just show you some of these areas.
And actually once you get used to this, you can do it quite quickly.
Now just zoom out and you can see how the image is building up. Now,
if the image is com quite complex, like this one is a little tip.
Go to the effects tab, select goum blur,
and then just add a slight blur to the image.
And what you'll see is you'll be able to see the different shades and colors
a bit more easily and not get overwhelmed by the complexity of your image.
So what I'm gonna do now is just speed up this video and select all these
areas and then arrive at our finished image
So there we've finished. Now this is quite a complex image.
What I suggest doing is if you're doing this for the first time,
start off with much simpler images.
So here we have our lions or just reduce the size of that.
And what we can do is switch off our background layer and we're left with the
face of our lion. Now this is what we can do next.
If we left click on our mouse and just drag.
We'll put a bounding box around our whole image. Top right in the color tab,
just click on that stroke tab,
then move the slider across to black.
And you can see if I just enlarge the image,
we're already starting to get an outline around all the different shapes that
compose our image. Then top right, if we go to the stroke tab,
and now we can increase the width of our stroke.
Just need to put another bounding box around there enlarge that again,
and then increase the width of our stroke. So what we'll do next, go to file,
click export, and we'll just save this as a png.
So we'll preserve our transparent background. So we'll go to export,
name this lion one. Then once we've done that,
now we can easily create the image that we would use for the inside of
our coloring books. Again, reduce the size slightly, left click the mouse,
drag a bounding box around the whole image, click on the color tab,
the top right,
and this time just select the fill button and then move the slider
over to white.
So now you can see we've got an image that could be used in a coloring book
page. So we're gonna save that again as a .png image. Okay,
so next we are going to go to our favorite Canva.
So I've created a document for our book cover,
17.52 inches by 11.25 inches.
That's assuming this is going to be an 8.5 by 11 inch,
120 page coloring book.
So I've opened that and I've already got the the template file that I downloaded
from the KDP help section. So first of all,
what I'm gonna quickly do is in lines and shapes, choose a square.
Just drag downwards and across,
and we're going to change the color of this to black.
Then I'm just going to drag in the colored image of our lion's face.
Click on that and it will transfer that across to our
book cover. And we can increase the size of that as we wish.
And what I'm gonna do is just
make the black background layer transparent.
So now we can line up our line's face a bit more easily.
Then what we're going to do is add another square.
We're going to drag this again to the top left hand corner,
drag down to the bottom.
Now we're just gonna drag this across until it meets that second
dotted line of our spine.
I'll just enlarge that so you can see what we've done there.
I'm just gonna drag that across.
I'm gonna change the color from yellow to black.
Now I'm just gonna click outside of the line and on our background we're gonna
increase the transparency.
So now you can see we've got the lion's face on the book cover,
and all you need to do is add some text. So next, what about the interior?
Again, we can do this in Canva. I've got a page here that I've already created.
This page is going to have bleed because the image is gonna go right to the
edge. So this page for an 8.5 by 11 inch book is 8.625 inches by
11.25 inches. So now all we need to do is just drag in that image,
click on it,
and now you can just increase the size and position it in
whatever way you'd like.
You could enhance this by adding a background image to
this.
And in the same way I've showed you how to create the lions face in this manner,
you could also create a pattern background in the same way or maybe a
jungle themed background in the same way.
Add that underneath the layer of this line's face.
You could also do the same in PowerPoint or Keynote.
I'm gonna show you in Keynote because I'm on a Mac.
And all you need to do is just drag in the image onto the first
page of your coloring book. And again,
you can increase the size of it and have it on the page like this.
Now what a lot of coloring books do is on the second page,
they leave this blank just in case you get bleed of any pens going through
the coloring side of the page.
So you then put the second image on page three,
the book leave page four blank. Then put your next image on page five.
And then in Keynote you would just save this as a PDF file,
which is then ready to upload to the KDP platform.
If you are in Canva, you just hit the share button at the top right here,
hit download, file type. You choose pdf print,
and then you would just download that to your computer,
once you've added all your other images, that is. We've just got the one here.
And then you'll have your interior, again to upload to the KDP platform.
And same for the cover. Once you've added some text, again, hit share,
download, file type, pdf print, download your computer,
and again, that's then ready to upload as the cover of your book.
Now,
if you want some other videos on creating different types of KDP
coloring books, then I've got this playlist here, which I recommend watching.
I hope you find that useful. If you did find it useful,
please do give it a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button.
Thank you much for your time and until next time.