Transcripts
1. Intro: What if you could learn one of the fastest and simplest ways to create professional and sell-able artwork using Procreate. By the end of this class, you'll have the skills to do exactly that. I created all of these designs using Procreate and now they're sold in stores like Target, Urban Outfitters, HomeGoods, Nordstrom, and more. So not only will you be learning exactly how I use Procreate, but I'll be peppering in some of my best tips when it comes to monetizing artwork and making a living as a commercial artist. My name is Cat Coquillette and I'm a professional artist and surface designer. I'm originally a watercolor artist. To be honest, I was a little bit intimidated to learn a new program like Procreate. But I am so glad I took the plunge because now I can create gorgeous illustrations on a whim whenever and wherever I want. Guess what, it was incredibly easy and intuitive to learn how to use Procreate. Bonus, all of the artwork I create in Procreate is already digitized, which means I have ready-to-go files to upload to print on demand sites like Society6 or share to my Instagram. Procreate has all the tools you need to create expressive sketches, lewd paintings, detailed illustrations, and engaging animations. It's basically an entire art studio located on your tablet, so you can take it anywhere. This class is a comprehensive, all in one Procreate class. We'll start with the basics and by the end, not only are you going to have a solid understanding of how to create your own incredible artwork, you're also going to have five super cool projects to add to your portfolio. This class is for beginners and experienced illustrators alike. If you've never used this platform before, we're starting right from the beginning, so you'll be able to keep up and learn. If you've dabbled with Procreate but want to learn some time-saving tricks and professional tips, this class is for you as well. As an extra bonus, when you take this class, you'll score a bunch of freebies, including custom color palettes plus three totally free brushes, thanks to Lisa Glanz. Lisa's brushes are among the best in the market, and I've teamed up with her to give my students three of her most versatile brushes. Last but not least, don't forget to follow me on Instagram. That's where I post new announcements about upcoming classes, workshops, plus, it's where I share all of my new artwork and collaborations. You can also follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button up top. This means you'll get notifications as soon as I launch a new class or have a big announcement to share with my students. All right, so without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right in.
2. Getting Started: This lesson is all about getting comfortable
with Procreate. Throughout this
class, we'll start simple and get more
advanced as we go, so it'll be easy to follow
along at your own pace. Each project will teach
you an important skill, like how to use texture
effectively or how to utilize specialized drawing tools to create truly stunning artwork. By the end of this class, you'll come away with
five new illustrations and a whole load of new skills. I have a bundle of
class resources for you to download
for this class. These freebies are totally
optional in this class. Think of them like
an extra perk. You're welcome to download these freebie assets
to use today, or you can follow up and complete your class
project using your own favorite Procreate
brushes and color palettes. It's entirely up to you. Either way, you're
going to wind up with a gorgeous class project. You can find them by going
to catcoq.com/procreate, and entering your email
to unlock the bundle. This will open up
a Dropbox folder that contains all
color palettes, reference photos, and brushes that we'll be
using throughout this class. I want to give
another shout out to Lisa Glanz for providing
these free brushes, which are normally for
sale on her online shop. If you want to check out the rest of her
brush collection, which I have purchased most of, I'm providing a link to her shop down below in
the class description. You can also go to lisaglanz.com
to check them out. Heads up, submitting your email also unlocks access
to my newsletter, as well as Lisa's. You can unsubscribe it anytime. Let's chat supplies. In addition to downloading
the class resources, you'll also need an
up-to-date Procreate app, a device; I'm using an iPad, and I also recommend a stylus. I'll be using an Apple
pencil for this class, but you'll be able to
create all the lessons in this class with just
your finger too. However, if you wants to
get serious with Procreate, I do recommend using
a stylus if you have one and the Apple pencil
works out great for me. I included a link to purchase down below in
the class description. Let's go through a
quick exploration of the Procreate Interface, so you get an idea of how
things are laid out in Procreate and the
basic navigation. If you're already familiar with Procreate and know
your way around, you can go ahead and skip
to our first drawing, which is the next lesson. When I open up this app, this is what it looks
like on my end. I have a lot of
existing illustrations. Some things are
grouped together and some things are solo
and on their own. When you have things
grouped together like this, for example, it's
called a stack. Stack is just a fancy way of saying a grouping
of illustrations. To go back, just
click your stack, and we have all of these
individual thumbnails. You can click your
stacks and pull them around and rearrange them to other areas
within your space. For example, you can
click something, bring it all the way back to
the bottom, drop it there. You can do a lot of rearranging. If you want to add some
art work together to create a stack, go
up here to the top, click "Select", and you can take two pieces of artwork
and then click "Stack". What it's done is it's
added them together. To get out of this
preview screen, go ahead and click this
"X" on the top right. If I go into a stack and I want to move
some things around, same thing, I'll click this, move it over and do
some rearranging. Let's go back out. If there's any artwork
you ever wants to delete, you can go to Select, what's one I'm no longer using? This guy over here. I can select that artwork and
then press "Delete". If you delete it, it
cannot be undone. Just keep that in mind. You can clear up
some space that way, move some things around. Go ahead and press that "X"
to get out of that screen. I'll show you one more
tool I use with Select. Select. Let's grab one piece. You can duplicate this artwork. If you ever have an illustration and you really
like how it looks, but you want to make
some modifications without overriding
this original file, duplicating is a
great option for you. Now you've got your
original over here, make as many changes
as you want to without worrying about
overriding that original file. Anytime you want to go back to see all of your
original artwork, that's called your gallery. You'll always see it up
here on the top-left. Go ahead and tap that once and you'll be back
to the home screen. You can also name artwork
directly from your gallery. To do that, all you need
to do is tap where it says "Untitled Artwork" and
type in a new name. These are hibiscus. Let's do the emoji
and press "Done". Now you have a file name associated with that
piece of artwork. If you like being
really organized, that's the way to do it. Clearly, I'm not that
organized because all of mine are titled untitled artwork
or stack if it's a grouping. If you're brand
new to Procreate, just know that you can
move these things around, group them together, rename. Practice doing some
of these things, and really just get comfortable
with the interface. From this primary screen, from this gallery, this is also how you
set up new artboards. The way you do that is with this plus symbol up here
on the top right. Procreate comes with a lot
of default canvas sizes. But if you want to
create something that's your own custom size, you can use this
little icon up here. It's a black rectangle
with a plus sign in it. From here is how you
set up a custom canvas. We'll be doing this
in the next lesson, but I just want to show you
what that's looking like. Go ahead and press
"Cancel" to get out. If I'm doing basic
thumbnail sketches or really any sketch
where I'm not going to be exporting this final
artwork to a high res, final piece, I usually
just go with screen size. Screen size is always
separated from the rest. If you tap on that guy, if I ever just need to get
some ideas out onto paper, maybe make some boxes if I'm
putting my website together, see what things look like, I usually work with screen size. Screen size is pretty low res. This is a great tool if you just want to sketch something out, get your vision out of
your head and on a screen, screen size is a
great option for you. If you're creating a
final illustration that you want to have
printed nice and big, maybe it's on a tapestry, that's when I go
for larger sizes. This is not screen size. This is about probably 40 times bigger than
screen size when all is said and done because this
is 27 inches by 27 inches. Yeah, just something
to keep in mind. Screen size, great if it's not going to
be a final output, if you're just doing
some doodles that are pretty much just going
to stay on that screen, go with that option. If you're going to be creating
artwork that you want to upload to a website
like Society6, or maybe sell as art
prints on your Etsy shop, that's when you
would want to go for a larger canvas size. Again, we'll dive in how to make those larger canvas sizes
in the next lesson. Consider this gallery like
the first level of Procreate. You open up the app, this is going to be the
first thing you see. The next level is
when you go into your stacks and you see these
thumbnails of your work. Layer 1, gallery, Layer 2 is you've
gone into a stack, and the deepest layer
of procreate is when you're in that
actual artwork itself. Just think of it as going
deep into Procreate or back out when you
see that gallery. Anytime that you see
your artwork like this, do you want to go back
to that next level? You just click "Gallery". It'll take you out, click "Stack", and it'll take
you back to that homepage. You go in and go out. I'll go into this
artwork and I'm just going to explain a few things
about the basic menu bar. Again, gallery here
on the top left, that will bring you back out of Procreate to see all of
your artwork in one page. This little wrench icon will
open up your Actions panel. We'll be diving into these
actions later on throughout your lessons so you'll learn a little bit
more about these. The next one over
are the adjustments. It looks like a magic wand icon. We're not going to go into every single adjustments
in this class, but instead, I'll show you the ones that I use
the most frequently. Next up, this s that looks like it's a piece of tape or ribbon, this is called your selection. Freehand selection is a
tool I use all the time when I want to move things
around, cut them out. It's a pretty powerful tool, really similar to Photoshop, if you're used to using Adobe. Two fingers on the screen will always undo your
previous action. Three fingers will redo. Two for undo, three for redo. Then last but not least, on the left side of
your upper menu bar is your transform tool. Again, if you're
used to Photoshop, you probably already
know this tool. This is the tool that allows
you to move things around, it allows you to rotate, flip horizontal, flip vertical, fit to screen, etc. You can always reset your transform if
you're getting a little bit too far ahead
and you want to go back to where it was previously. Now let's talk about this
menu bar on the right. The first icon over here
is your Brush tool, which will open up
your brush library. Procreate has a lot of amazing defaults
brushes to choose from. We'll be using a mixture of default brushes in this class, as well as a few
imported brushes. You'll learn how to work
with both of those. Next up is your smudge tool. I'm going to be completely
honest with you guys, for the types of
illustrations I do, I rarely use this tool. We're just going to skip over it because this class
is going to be focusing on the tools that I use the most and
recommend for you. Next up are our layers, these two overlapping squares. If you're familiar
with Photoshop, this one's going to be
really intuitive for you. If not, no problem. We'll be diving into this in
the first lesson as well. But the gist with layers is
you can turn them off or on. You can build on
top of each other. It's a pretty powerful tool. Last but not least, over here on the far right, is my absolute
favorite menu bar, it's the color palettes. Let me show you what
these look like. I have a lot of color palettes. Every time I do a
new illustration, I come up with a
custom color palette for that illustration. For this class, I put together five custom color
palettes that you can import into
Procreate and work from. If you don't want to follow the color palettes I provided, no problem, you can come
up with your own colors. Within color palettes, you have a few options down
here at the bottom. The default is
just your pallets, which is exactly what this
looks like right here. Just to the left of
that, you have values. These are where you have
very customized sliders, where you can move
things around and get a very precise color. Your color will always
be indicated up here on the top right so whenever
you choose new colors, keep an eye on this circle, that will change based off
of what you're selecting. Next up we have harmony, and this will help you
determine complimentary colors. To be completely honest, I rarely use this tool. I'm much more inclined
to use what's right next to it,
called Classic. This is one where you can
drag your slider around, keep an eye up here on
this top right corner, and you can see
how that color is changing as I move around. You can move that scrubber along the hue scale and get a
bunch of different colors. You have a lot of
flexibility here. Last up is disk. This is just another option
for finding a custom color. A lot of these are doing
the exact same thing, they're helping you
choose your color. I recommend going with whatever one you feel
most comfortable with. For me, it's classic. But for you, it could be value, it could be harmony,
or it could be disk. These four, again, all
do the same thing. They help you
determine a color that you can then build
into a pallets. Just play around with
colors and pallets and just get comfortable
using this interface. If you want to create
a custom palette, you can click this plus sign
up here at the top right. That will give you a blank
slate for creating a palettes. If you want to go
over to your disk, it's quite a nice pee green. You can then go back to
your palettes and just tap, and it will automatically add in whatever color is up here. You can also grab from other palettes and drag on
in to your own new palettes, which I do all the time. A lot of these are repeat colors that get added to new palettes. The final way that
I add colors to palettes is by using
this color picker, which is over here on the
left-hand side of my screen. It's a little rounded rectangle. You can drag this around until
you find a color you like. Let's stop here on this blush. You can see automatically it's changed my main color up here. I can just click
once and add it in. That is a basic overview. Let me head back out to my stack and then to my main gallery. Let's go ahead and dive right in with our first illustration.
3. Doodling on a Photo: In this lesson, we're going to get warmed up with illustrating and procreates. Instead of starting from a blank Canvas, we're going to be building up some doodles on top of a photo. In this case, a vintage desert scene with a big beautiful soro. We're starting out like this for a couple of reasons. One, this is a great way to get comfortable drawing digitally. It's fun, playful, and it's a quick intro to using basic tools like brushes, colors, and layers. Two, being able to draw directly on photos like this is one of the coolest aspects of procreates. Sure, you can always superimpose illustrations on photographs using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, but procreate is what gives you that hand-drawn vibe over photography. Because we're literally drawing over that photo, we can weave our line work through elements of the photo to feel integrated and quirky. I see this aesthetic commonly used in head shots for professional Illustrators, as promo materials, and as cool animations. While this is great practice for us, this art style also has very real-world applications. Let's go ahead and dive in. For this lesson, there are two things you need from the Class Assets folder. One is the color palette called desert cactus. If I were you, I'd go ahead and select all of these and send them to your iPad all at once but just keep in mind, desert cactus is the one we'll be using for this lesson. The other asset you'll need for this lesson is in the photos folder, and it's called cactus Cody Doherty Unsplash. Go ahead and send that to your iPad as well, and we can go ahead and get started. When I open up a Procreate, this is what my screen is looking like. It's a lot of artwork, some are individual pieces and then some are groupings of similar pieces of artwork that I stacked together to create collections. It just helps me keep all my Artboards organized. Keep in mind, this is a warm-up lesson to get us used to using Procreates. The first thing we're going to do is up here on the top right, go ahead and click photo, and we are going to be importing in that photo from the Class Assets folder. The one titled cactus Cody Doherty Unsplash. What Procreate has done is created this Artboard around this photo. The dimension size, DPI of this Artboard is based of the photo itself. In our next lesson, we'll be learning how to create custom artboards, but for now, we're just going to be working off this photo and the dimensions of this photo. The first thing we're going to do is go up here on the top right and click these two overlapping squares. That opens up your layers palette. Right now, it's just two layers, we have the photo itself, which is called Layer 1, and then we have this Background color layer. Background color layers are defaults and procreates, you can't get rid of them, they will always be there. If you click this little checkbox next to the layer, it will hide it, and you can click it also to turn it back on. If you turn it off to hide it, you're just seeing that background layer, and if you turn it on, it's visible. If you ever accidentally uncheck the layer, just know that it's never deleted, it's still there, you just need to toggle that checkmark back on to make it visible. What we're going to do in this lesson is be adding doodles on top of this photo. We could add them directly on this layer itself, but I prefer non-destructive editing techniques, so we're going to be adding a layer on top of this so that we'll have our doodles all on one layer. We'll have the photo on a separate layer so we can turn them on and off, and we won't be overriding any data on this photo layer itself. To add a new layer, go ahead and click this plus sign, and now, we have Layer 2 added over Layer 1. On the Artboard, it doesn't really look like anything happened, but that's only because there's nothing on this layer yet, it's completely blank and transparent over this photo layer. Next up, let's go into our brushes palettes. Go ahead and click the brush on the top rights, sometimes you have to click it twice for the Brush Library to pop up, and over here on the left, we have all of our brush categories Inking, Drawing, Painting, Artistic, etc, and within each category, there's a collection of brushes that fit that theme. For this, I want to go over to my Inking brushes and find the brush that's called Syrup. Go ahead and tap it once. If you accidentally tap it twice, what it does is open up your Brush Studio where you can make a lot of adjustments, but for now, we don't really need to do that, so just go ahead and press Cancel and make sure that that Syrup brush is selected. The last thing I'm going to do before we get started drawing on our photo is select the color palette, so go ahead and tap this circle over here on the top rights, and that will open up all of our pallets. As you can see, I've got a lot of pallets and procreates, I create new ones all the time based off of the artwork I'm making. But if you've already imported in your color palette, you should find it, it's called desert cactus, it looks like this. Go ahead and click Set Default, and that means that this will be the palette to pop up first as we're working on our illustration, and select any color within this default pallets. I'm going to start with this kind of rosy pink. When I selected that color, you can see up here on the top right in that circle that the color has changed as well to match the color I've selected. So if I tap green, the circle at the top will change to green, white, etc but I want to start with this rosy pink. To close your palettes, just go ahead and tap anywhere on your Artboard. Cool. Let's go ahead and open up layers one more time. Just double-check that we're working off of Layer 2, that blank layer and not working on the photo layer itself, so Layer 2 is selected, we're good to go, tap anywhere to close, and now we can get started doodling. Again, this is just a practice lesson to get us comfortable using Procreate, so there's not really a right or wrong way to be doing this. As I'm using the Apple pencil, I'm varying the pressure that I'm putting on that pencil. Really, heavy pressure gives a really thick stroke, light pressure gives a very thin stroke. If you want to delete any brushstrokes as you're going, you can either go over here to the far left-hand side of the screen and tap this undo button, you have a redo button underneath it, so you can do redo, undo, undo, redo. Another trick I like to use is just tapping with two fingers on the screen, which will undo an action, so one tap with two fingers will also undo. With three fingers, it will redo, so undo, redo, undo redo. As you can see up here at the top, we're getting pretty close to the edges, all you need to do is pinch into your screen and you'll give yourself some more space around that. It's pretty intuitive the way that you work around that screen and draw. You can pinch end to make it smaller and then pinch out to resize. If you ever just want it to go back to fitting in that frame, just do one quick pinch and it will immediately snap back into position and lock to frame. I'm just going to do some more doodles, get used to using this brush. Do you want to change the color palettes? Go over here to the top right, click that circle, and I'm going to try the whites, so just tap once, you'll see it changes up here, and now you can continue drawing. I'm going to add some little prickly spines to this cactus and change the color one more time to this peachy orange to make a sunset behind the mountains. As I'm going, I'm varying the pressure of my strokes to get some thin lines and some really fat lines. Awesome. Think I'll change my color palette to white and add some clouds up at the top. Keep in mind, this is a complete practice lesson, so just have fun with these doodles and get used to the varying pressure with your pen or finger if you're using your finger instead. Cool. We have some fun exploration with these doodles. Over here on the far left, we have these two scaling sliders. The one on the top will adjust the size of your brush, so if you bring it up to the tip top, your brush will go to a 100 percent, which is a pretty fat brush stroke, and if you bring it all the way to the bottom, your brush will go to one percent, which is a much finer, thinner stroke. I'm going to tap with two fingers to undo both of those. Then this bottom is lighter, affects the opacity of the brush. I've been using a 100 percent opacity, which means this white is pure white, you don't see any of that background coming through. If I were to bring it to about 50 percent, then you would see some of that background layer coming through. But I usually like working at about a 100 percent unless I'm doing some blending, so two-finger tap, two undo. Cool. I want to show you one more fun thing you can do with color. We've been using these colors that are in our predetermined palettes, this desert cactus palette, but let's say that you want to change these colors and see what it could also look like. To do that, we can play with Adjustments. First things first, let's go to Layers and make sure that our Layer 2 is selected, we don't want to have Layer 1 selected because we're adjusting the color of just our doodles, so Layer 2 is selected and go up here on the top left and click this little magic wand and that opens up all of our Adjustments. Since we're playing with color, go ahead and tap Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, and now, you can toggle this slider along the hue scale and see what different colors might look like. This is just a really cool way of exploring color after you've already put your marks on that layer. You can also adjust your Saturation to make it really saturated versus completely desaturated and then the Brightness itself. Full brightness will turn everything white and then when you bring it all the way to the left, it will turn everything black. But I just wanted to show you that as an option to play with color. Another fun thing you can do in that Adjustments panel is go to your Color Balance. This is a similar tool, but it's working off of these existing Hues. Right now, everything is smack dab in the middle of these color scales, but let's say we bring it to a much more red tone. You can see very slightly that these colors have adjusted to add more red into the hues, you can add more magenta and maybe more yellow, and you can see that it's a much more subtle difference than the Hue and Saturation scale. Color Balance is a really great tool if you want to work with your existing palettes and just make some slight tweaks to those colors, so I'm going to tap my screen once and click Reset. Cool. To get out of this panel or anytime you're in a panel that you don't know how to get out of, just go ahead and click your Transform Tool and that will get you back to where you need to be. Before we exports, I want to show you one cool trick that I use all the time, and that's the Time-lapse Replay. On the top menu bar, go ahead and click the Wrench, that's your Actions palettes, and go to Video, and now you have these options for Time-lapse Replay. Go ahead and tap that option, Time-lapse replay, and it will show you everything you did to get to that final illustration. It's pretty quick. This one is only about three seconds because we did a very quick doodle. If you spend hours and hours illustrating, that be a little bit longer, press done to get out of there and then go back into it, so actions, Time-lapseReplay, you can export these time-lapse videos between full-length and 30 seconds. Obviously, this one is pretty short, was only three seconds long, so full length is my only option but if you have a really long illustration that took you hours to make, you can now go ahead and cut it to 30 seconds, which is ideal for social media. Last but not least, exporting. Go ahead and tap that wrench and go to Share. Now, you have a lot of options for how you want to share this image. The two I use the most often are JPEG and PSD. We'll be diving into the PSD option later, but for now, I just want to save it as a JPEG, which means everything is flattened and it's a pretty small file size. I have my AirDrop options up top, which is what I usually end up doing and I will send it to my computer. Cool. That was just a quick lesson to get us comfortable with using brushes, understanding layers, choosing from color pallets. Now that we have a basic understanding of how to use this platform and the tools that are available for us, let's go ahead and get started on our first real lesson, which will be the tropical leaf.
4. Tropical Leaf: In this lesson, we'll be creating this tropical leaf illustration. I chose this motif because tropical are huge sellers, especially in summer months. A huge chunk of my portfolio is tropical leaves, plants, flowers, animals, all that jazz. If you're getting into surface design, I highly recommend dedicating a section of your portfolio to a tropical theme. It's a great way to boost your sales and gain attraction. Our goals for this lesson are going to be using a photo as a reference for an illustration. Within that, we'll be playing with canvas size, sketching over a photo, working with multiple layers, using brushes, filling in color, adding vibrant textures, using the eraser tool, and more. It sounds like a ton, but it's all broken down into simple steps. Being able to trace directly over reference photos is another one of my favorite aspects of illustrating and procreates. For example, when it comes to sketching out animals, I'm really not the best. I rely on reference photos to make things work out well or proportionately. This doesn't mean I'm stealing or copying from a photo, but instead I'm using this to get a solid starting point for my sketch. In this case, I use reference photos of bunnies to sketch out their bodies, but all of the other aspects of this illustration are what make it uniquely mine. The colors I chose, the brushes, the stylization of the characters, and the way that I arranged them all into this composition. If you want to start your illustration by referencing a photo, that is perfectly fine as long as you infuse elements to make it truly your own. I never copy a photo directly, but I do rely on them as a starting point with my sketches. Again, procreate is awesome for this, because you can pull out reference photos directly onto your screen and then delete them as soon as you're finished. If you're wanting to get realistic proportions for anything, this is a great method for you. Let's learn how. First things first, here are the class assets we'll need for this lesson. Within the brushes, we'll be using Lisa's pencil and roasted. But if you're already in here, go ahead and grab all three of these and send them to your iPad. The color palette we'll be using is the tropical leaf palette, and last but not least within photos, go ahead and select this photo, which is called Leaf-Kara_Eads-Unsplash.jpg and send that to your iPad as well. Cool, let's go ahead and get started. This is again, what procreate looks like when I open up the app, and what we're going to be doing is creating our own custom canvas. Last time we just clicked photo and broaden our photo directly, but for this I'm going to show you how to create this really high res large canvas file. This is really important if you're going to be printing this artwork out really high res. Maybe you'll be printing it as large art prints or tapestries, wallpaper, you get the gist. To set up a really large canvas, we're going to tap this plus in the upper right-hand corner. Procreate provide some default canvas sizes, but what we're going to do is make our own, so go ahead and tap this gray plus icon next to new canvas and this opens up the options for creating our custom canvas. The first thing I'll do is change it to inches, and the largest size that I can currently do and procreate is 27 inches by 27 inches. I want to keep it at 300 DPI, this is the standard size for printing high res. But as you can see by making such a large canvas size, the layers only go to a maximum of four, which means we only have four layers we can work with. If it's a much smaller size like say it's one inch by one inch, we have 250 possible layers. By making such a big canvas, we are limiting that, but in my opinion it's worth it. I'm going to put that to 27 by 27, I'm not going to change anything over here with color profile or timelapse settings, everything's pretty much good to go. Last but not least I'm going to change the name to large square, and go ahead and press create. Cool, so that will automatically open up our canvas, this is a huge, huge canvas file and that's perfect for what I'm looking for. Now with our canvas in place, let's go ahead and pull in that tropical leaf photo. To do that, I'm going to go ahead and tap the wrench, which opens up actions. Click, "Add", insert a photo. It's in recents, click it once and it will automatically pull in. As you can see it defaults to that transform tool, so I just want to pinch outwards and really fill that leaf to the size and go ahead and tap that arrow to set the transformation. When you crop a photo like this in Procreate, all of the data from that photo that was on these edges is now lost, it's been deleted, and this is just how Procreate works. It's a little bit different from Photoshop in that way. For example, if I try to move this photo around now, everything that was on that left edge is gone and everything that's on that right edge is gone. Just go ahead and keep that in mind when you're cropping or working off of the art board. I'm just going to go into my transform, which is that arrow and just bring it over a little bit more to center it and press that arrow again to set the transformation. I'm going to go ahead and open up my layers, which are those two overlapping squares, and I'll tap this plus sign to add a new layer above the photo. Let's go ahead and open up our palettes by tapping this circle on the top right, and the palette I want to use for this is called tropical leaf. I'm going to tap set default, so it's always there when I need it. The first color I'm going to start with is this Kelly green, so it's the lighter green of the two and by tapping it you'll see that that green color changed on this upper right circle. Now I go into my brushes, and the brush I want to use for this is called Lisa's pencil. Remember we imported this at the beginning of this lesson, so go ahead and tap that once to get Lisa's pencil. If you're having a hard time finding it in the brush library, it might be down here at the very bottom under imported. These are all the brushes that I've purchased online. Lisa's pencil is what we want to start with, go ahead and tap outside the art board to close that panel, and let's get started outlining. For this, I want to keep my brush at about 10 percents, I want that opacity to be up at 100, and let's go ahead and start outlining. This doesn't have to be perfect, it can be a really rough interpretation of that leaf, but I'm just going to go around the edges entirely. Not worried too much about pressure right now because the thicks and thins aren't going to matter since I'll be filling this in, so I'm just doing a really loose outline of this leaf. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Cool. Just make sure that you're closing that line entirely from where it started, and the reason this matters is because when we fill it in, we want to make sure that it fills in just to the shape and not to the outer edges. I'll show you what I mean. To fill in that shape, we're going to basically grab the circle, so press your pen down, click it and drag it over, and then release it inside that shape, so now it's been filled in entirely. If we hadn't connected that line all the way right here, I'll show you what would happen. Let's just say it's a circle but it doesn't quite connect on the edges. If you try to fill it in, it's going to fill in your entire art board which we definitely don't want. I'm going to do two taps to undo, and I also want to undo that circle so another two taps. Cool. If your entire art board is filled in, it just means that that shape hasn't fully connected so go ahead and make sure it's connected all the way. Next up, the original leaf photo, here let me show you, I'll go ahead and hide this layer, had some areas that were cut out like Swiss cheese. I want to add that same effect to my illustration. To do that, I'm going to tap this N that's right here on my layer. That N stands for normal as a blending mode, and I'm going to grab this opacity, it's at max right now, and just bring it back enough so that I can see these areas coming through, and just bring it back enough so that I can see this photo coming through behind it. Tap anywhere in your screen to close that layers panel. I'm going to use my eraser for this. Your eraser is this tool right up here, it's this rectangle. It looks like a vinyl eraser, and what I want to do is tap and hold it, and that means that it's going to erase with the current brush, which is called Lisa's pencil. The reason I want that eraser to be the same shape as the brush is because if we zoom in here, you can see the edges of this brush have this really subtle texture, so I want to make sure that when I'm erasing, that subtle texture is also showing through. If I used a really clean eraser, it would just not really align with what's going on on the outer edges of this illustration. Two taps to undo. I'm going to pinch in to see my full illustration, and I'm going to make that eraser a little bit smaller. I'll bring it down to about 10 percents, and now I'm just going to begin erasing. This brush has a little bit of texture to it, so if you zoom in you can see that we're going to have to go over this a couple times just to get rid of all of those little texture elements in here. Cool. Now we'll do the other one. You can see it's not absolutely perfect, it doesn't have to match that photo exactly. That photo is really just a guide in my mind. I've seen what the basic shape of that leaf looks like, but it definitely doesn't have to be exact. Cool. I'm going to add one more little hole right down here just to break it up a little bit and make it not so symmetrical. Awesome, cool. This is what it's looking like. The next step is going to be adding this vein in coming through on that leaf. To do that, I'm going to go ahead and open up my layers panel and add a layer above this. Click that plus sign and it will add layer 3. I'll go into my pallets, so I'll click in that circle and I want the veining of this leaf to be white. So I'm going to tap my white square, make sure it changes up here. Go ahead and go into my brushes, make sure Lisa's pencil is selected and tap anywhere to close that brush library, and just start drawing. I can already tell that's a little bit too thin for what I'm looking for, so I'm going to use two fingers to undo, and I'm going to bring up that brush size. Let's see what 32 looks like. That's much better. I'm starting out with heavy pressure and then I'm ending on light pressure, and that's how I'm getting this variation in stroke. Heavy to light, heavy to light. Remember, it doesn't have to be totally perfect or follow that photo exactly. In fact, if you want to branch off a little bit, it'll make your illustration more dynamic. Perfect. So we're actually finished using this background photo as a photo reference. So I'm going to go ahead and just get rid of it. We only have four layers to work with. So any opportunity I have to get rid of one when I'm no longer using it, I will absolutely take. So to get rid of this layer 1, all you have to do is slide left. Then you'll have options to lock, duplicate, or delete it. In this case, I want to go ahead and delete it. Cool. I'm going to select layer 2, tap that N for normal and bring the opacity back up to a 100. Awesome. As you can see, there's a little bit of an area in here that I missed with my eraser tool. Now's the time to go ahead and clean that up. So I will get out of my Layers group, tap and hold that eraser, and then just go ahead and clean up those edges that I missed. Perfect. I'm going to do that quick pinch to reset everything to my art board. Next up, I want to add some texture behind this leaf. So to start that out, I'm going to open up my Layers panel, add a new layer by pressing the plus sign, and right now you can see that layer is in between the vein and that background. Anytime you want to rearrange layers, all you need to do is click, hold, and you can bring it around and release it wherever it needs to go, but I want this one to be right in the middle. So first things first, let's go to the brush we want to use for that texture. Open up your brush library. The texture I want to use here is called soft pastel. You'll find that in the sketching sections. So if you tap sketching and sort through, it's down here at the bottom, soft pastel. So I'll tap that once, go into my color palettes, and I'll be selecting that darker of the two greens now. So tap once, make sure it changes up here, and then tap to get out of the library. I'm going to bring that brush way up and see how this looks. Cool. So it's a pretty subtle texture, but you can see it coming through really well. Only thing here,is right now when I'm laying that texture over it like this, it's covering this background as well. I only want that texture to be applied to this leaf. So I'll show you how to do that. Go ahead and open up your layers palette, top your layer once, and now you have a bunch of options over here on the left. The option that we want to go with for this is called clipping mask. So go ahead and tap clipping mask. As you can see, that texture is no longer in that white area over here at all. It's still there, it's hidden, it's just been masked behind this layer. So now when we click, let me tap out to get out of layers, and now when we start drawing along that photo, you'll see that it's not drawing on that whiter part, it's only drawing within that area, the layer immediately underneath it that's been masked out. So I'm just going to fill in some texture around here. I want it to be a little bit darker in the middle of the leaf where it bends inwards, and they can bring down that layer opacity. I'll bring it down to about 40. Do a little bit on the edges over here. Just to add a little bit more variation. Cool. Let me zoom in so you can really see what that looks like. In the areas that I've gone over multiple times with brushstrokes, it's almost changed the color entirely. You're seeing that texture come through a little bit, but for the most part, it's pretty subtle. Over here is where you can really tell the difference. So I'm going to do a quick pinch to set it to my screen and the last thing I want to do is go ahead and open up the layers palettes. I'm going to be consolidating these two layers, but before I do that, I want to show you something pretty cool. So with that texture layer selected, you tap that N, which stands for normal as a blending mode. You'll see that there's actually a lot more options for blending modes. There's lighten, screen, color, dodge, add, lighter color. It's just a lot to play with. The one I use most often besides normal is multiply and what that does is it shows this top layer with a multiply transparency over that bottom layer. So it's really going to sink in and key and with those colors a lot more. It looks cool here, but it gets a bit too dark for me. So I'm actually going to keep it at normal, but I just wanted to show you that as an option. So now to consolidate these two layers, it's pretty simple. You're just going to put your fingers on both of them and pinch in. Now those layers are flattened together. So it's all one layer, this background green, and then that texture that goes over our leaf. The last thing I want to do is change this background color and add a really subtle texture to that background. So go ahead and tap background-color and what it does is automatically open up all of your palettes, and anytime you tap a color, that'll show you what that looks like as the background. So you can see a lot of different options here. I'm pretty partial to this orange-y yellow color and think it looks really nice. So I'll make sure that that's selected, tap anywhere in my our board to get rid of the pallets, and I'm going to pinch a little bit to see what the overall composition looks like. Awesome. So now I just want to add that background texture. So I'll open up my layers pellets. Top that plus sign to add a new layer. I want to click it and drag it underneath, so it's just above that background color layer. I'm going to change the blending mode to multiply. So I'll tap that in. Bring it on up to multiply. You can tell nothing's really happened yet because we don't have anything on that layer and just getting ready for it. I'm going to click my color palettes. Use that exact same background-color. Last but not least, open up my brushes under imported. I want to use this brush called roasted. This is another one of Lisa's free brushes that she's offered us for this class. So tap anywhere to get out of the Brush Library. I'm going to bring my brush size up to the maximum, a 100 percent. Now I'm just simply going to click and brush in this texture. It's one tap at a time. Cool. I really like the way that looks, but I want to make it a little bit less intense. So I'm going to tap my layers pellets. Go ahead and tap that letter M. Remember that blending mode is changed to multiply, which is why it's an M now, not an N. I'm going to bring that opacity down to something that looks a little more subtle. That's nice. Right at about 40 percent. I'll tap to get out of the Layers palette. I'm going to go ahead and call this one finished. So when you zoom in, you can see some really nice details happening here. We have some nice textures, both with this brush and this background charcoal that's coming through on that leaf, as well as the background color of the art board itself. So I'll do the quick pinch to get back to normal and fit to screen. Let's go ahead and get started with our next lesson.
5. Mandala: Let's dive into one of my most popular Skillshare class requests, learning how to illustrate mandalas. There is a reason I get asked to do a mandala class so frequently. It's because this motif is a massively popular seller. You'll see these guys everywhere, like adults coloring books, on apparel, especially yoga tank tops and t-shirts, and in the home decor category on products like tapestries and bedding. ModCloth commissioned me to create a mandala them bedding set a few years ago and the sales were massive. In addition to drawing mandalas because they're great sellers, I also love creating them because it's such a relaxing, creative exercise for me. If I'm chatting on the phone with my mom, there's a 50 percent chance I'm curled up on the couch doodling mandalas while we talk. It's a great way to zone out creatively. Our goals for this lesson are learning how to use drawing guides and assisted drawing. When I discovered these tools, my world was shaken. Before this, I used to hand draw mandalas by placing varying sizes of bowls on a piece of paper, sketching around them to make concentric circles, and then using that as my guide. But in Procreate, it is so much simpler. Not only are there drawing guides like this built into the app and only a couple of taps away but there's also this incredible tool called assisted drawing. You can customize this so that whatever you draw in one section of your canvas is repeated in another section automatically. So for mandalas, this means that I can draw in one quadrant of my illustration and the others will fill in automatically. It's pretty cool. I also use assisted drawing when I'm illustrating butterflies and moths. Basically, if you want to anything to match symmetrically, assisted drawing is your best friend. So let's learn how. We have no class assets that we need to import for this lesson, we'll be using defaults brushes, and we're not going to be using any photos as practice so everything we create will be right here within the Procreate app. Let's go ahead and get started. Go ahead and tap that plus sign at the upper rights to select a new canvas. We're going to be using the same large square canvas that we created in our previous lesson. Go ahead and tap that once, that's the 27 inch by 27 inch canvas. It'll go ahead and open it for us. First, let's go ahead and set our pallets. Go ahead and tap that circle on the upper right. The pallet we want to use for this lesson is called retro mandala. We imported it in earlier. It'll be somewhere in this stack of pallets. Here we go, retro mandala. Go ahead and top set defaults. Now let's go ahead and open up our layers, those two overlapping squares. I'm going to tap the background color layer, which is automatically going to open up our palettes again. Remember, this is where we can tap through these colors and choose what we want our background to be. For this, I want to go for this creamy tan color as the background. Now let's go select our brush. Tap that brush icon. The brush I want to use for this lesson is called syrup, it's one of Procreate default brushes and you can find it in this inking category. Here it is right here, it's already selected. The reason I want to use this brush, here I'll show you some examples, is because the pen is really smooth, there's no texture on these outer edges it just feels like a very clean, crisp line. It also has the slight taper to it so that if you adjust your pressure you can have a lot of variety within that line weight, it's not just a monoline brush, you have some options for the thicks and thins. I'm going to double-tap a few times to get rid of all those practice brushstrokes and then do a quick pinch to resets my art board to fit to screen. Like I mentioned, our goal here is learning how to use the assisted drawing guide. To get into that, go ahead and tap your wrench on the top-left to open up your actions. Now if you select canvas at the top, you'll have some options up here. We have crop and resize, animation assist, drawing guide, that's the one we want right there. Go ahead and toggle on that drawing guide. Now you can see that this grid has appeared on my art board. If we were going to print this image or export a JPEG, this grid isn't visible, it's not going to show up. It's just here for us right now as a reference so that we can help align and set our illustrations well on our art board. I use this drawing guide all the time if I'm doing something with the topography and I want it to line up perfectly. It's a really, really, really great tool for that. But we can use this guide for a lot of different things, it doesn't necessarily have to be a grid. Under drawing guide, go ahead and tap editor drawing guide. Now we have all of our options. Starting right here at the top with this spectrum and the rainbow, you can adjust the color of your guide. Like I said before, this drawing guide is just for our eyes only it's not going to export in any JPEG, you only see it when you're in the app itself. Our defaults is the cyan blue. But let's say the illustration we were drawing and referenced a lot of cyan blue colors it might be difficult to see this guide, in which case you just might want to change the color to something more magenta orange. I don't really change the color of the drawing guide that often, usually cyan blue works just fine for me, but that's an option if your illustration is really heavy in cyan. Next up, let's take a look at these options down here at the bottom. I don't really adjust the opacity or the thickness of the drawing guide. Grid size, I use sometimes if I'm going to be doing a lot of really fine work and I want to line up perfectly. You can get a much tighter smaller grid or you can bring it up to the top and just get a much fatter thick grid. I honestly usually leave that at about defaults and it works out just fine for me. But in this lesson, we're going to be drawing a mandala, so this 2D square grid isn't actually the grid we'll be using. We're going to go all the way over here to symmetry. Go ahead and tap that once. As you can see, that grid changed. Now it's just one line with a circle in the middle. Go ahead and tap options down here on the bottom rights and what we want is radial symmetry, so this option on the far right. Now you can see that all of these lines converge right here on the center. That's exactly what we want. Last but not least, go ahead and make sure that rotational symmetry is unchecked, just like it is right now, and assisted drawing is checked. These are the exact settings you want on your screen as well and I'll show you exactly what that does. Go ahead and press done. Now we have our guide. Real quick before I get started, I want to go into my palettes and choose a teal green, just any color from this retro mandala pallets. Tap my screen once to close that panel, and this is what the drawing guide does for us. It repeats all of our strokes on this radial axis. It's pretty cool. I'm going to go through and change some colors rounds. Now, whatever you draw, it is getting repeated along this radial axis. It's pretty cool. Now's a good time to just play around. Based on that brush, see what shapes are looking like as you repeat them along this radial grid. Yeah, and just have fun with it, play around. I'm going to change my color again. Let's try this bright yellow and bring some more shapes in here. Now I want to have a shape behind all of these, and I'll show you how to do that as well. Go ahead and open up your layers palettes, and let's make a new layer. I'm going to change the color to that blush pink, and then open up my layers, just go ahead and make sure I'm on layer 2, tap and hold and bring that underneath layer 1. That way whatever we draw is going to be underneath this illustration we've already created. If I were to just go ahead and draw on my screen right now, like this, you can see it's only drawing in that quadrant, it's not drawing in the others. The reason that happened is because the drawing guide isn't turned on for this layer. You can see under layer 1, underneath, in small lettering it says, assisted. Layer 2 doesn't have the same thing. This drawing guide is applicable per layer only. If we want to do the same thing on layer 2, we need to make sure we turn that drawing guide back on. Let me get out of there and just tap with two fingers, get rid of my illustration and go back into my actions, tap in that wrench, hit edit drawing guide. Everything's pretty much where we want it to. Go ahead and tap options and make sure assisted drawing is turned on. Go ahead and press "Done". Now when we open our layers, we can see Assisted is back on there. Now, whatever we draw will be repeated throughout all of those quadrants. Remember that fun tip earlier where you click and drag that color palette, release and it will automatically fill in. It's pretty cool. Now I'm going to go back into my pallets. We haven't used to this orange yet, Let's see how that looks. I'm just going to fill in the space for that illustration. Some abstract shapes that are looking pretty cool. Sometimes I like to fill in some of his negative space with dots and break it up a little bit. Awesome. That is how you create a mandala. I'm sure yours on your iPad is looking completely different from mine. That's the fun thing with this, no matter what you're creating, it's going to look entirely different every time. Last but not least, I want to add my signature to this. I'm going to open up my brushes, select sketching, and peppermint is my favorite sketching brush to use. I want my signature to be in that teal green. If I were to draw my signature right now on that layer, here's what's going to happen, it's repeating all along these axes. That's not going to work for me clearly. What I want to do is go over to my layers, start a new layer. Remember when we start a new layer, assisted drawing isn't on there, that's not defaults. Now, if I just start a new layer, come down here and zoom in, and write my signature. It's only going to be there, it's not repeating across the rest of this board, which is great. If I were to turn on Assisted Drawing, that would be repeating like I just showed you. You have some flexibility here whether or not you want to use assisted drawing to have things repeat along all these different axes. Or if you want to have that not on and just create something that's not going to be repeated symmetrically. All right, so that was a pretty simple lesson. I just wanted to show you how you can use Assisted Drawing to create things like mandalas. Real quick, before we end this lesson, I want to show you one more way to use this tool. I'm going to go ahead and select all of these layers together by swiping right and selecting Group, I'm going to name this Group, rename Mandala, Enter, tap that arrow to condense the group, select that checkbox next to it to hide it, and create one more new layer. We've been working on this radial axis. What I want to show you real quick is what it looks like on a horizontal axis. Let's go back into our Actions, select Drawing Guide, and I'm going to change it to Symmetry, Options, Vertical. Now, you can see before we were working on a radial axis with all these different access points but now I just want it to be vertical, and don't forget to toggle on Assisted Drawing and then go ahead and press "Done". Now I want to select a brush that you can actually see from your screen. Let's see, I'll change it to, let's try Salamanca, just because I like that name. Now as you draw, you can see that everything is being repeated just on this vertical axis. This is great if you want to create something like butterflies, which is exactly how I illustrate my butterflies in Procreate. I use the same tool where it's working on the vertical axis. Just like you can do the vertical axis or the radial axis, there's a bunch of different ones you can play with just depending on the type of illustration you're trying to create. Remember if it's ever not working for you, just go ahead and open up your layers and make sure it says Assisted underneath that layer name. If it doesn't say Assisted, then that means that the assisted drawing guide is not turned on. If it's not working on your end, just double check those layers to see what's going on. Now I'm going to tap that checkmark next to that layer to turn it off, turn my mandala back on, go to Actions, Video, Time-lapse Replay, and now we can see exactly what that looks like on our screen. A little bit more dynamic than our last Time-lapse Replay. All right, press "Done". Now when I export, I'll go to Actions, Share, and this one I'm going to be exporting as a PSD. I mentioned that I export to Canvas types, PSD and JPEG. For this one, what I want to do is have the options to edit all those colors in Photoshop. Yeah, I'll go ahead and send that to my MacBook. By exporting as a PSD, that means I can open it on Photoshop really easily on my computer and all of these layers will be here and intact. Instead of just receiving it as this flattened file, I'll be getting all these separate layers. That's pretty important, it just makes it a lot easier to adjust color. I can turn that background on and off really easily to be transparent, it just gives me more flexibility on my end. If you're going to be editing this in any way, shape, or form in Photoshop, don't forget to export it as a PSD. Well, that wraps up this lesson. Let's go ahead and get started with the next one.
6. Hand-Lettering: This lesson is all about best practices for hand-lettering in Procreates. As far as commercial art goes, hand-lettering inspired quotes, inspirational messages, and words of wisdom all do very well in terms of sales. In fact, my brush lettered Shakespeare quotes is the one art piece in my portfolio that pushed my brand into relevance back in 2014. Before then, my artwork wasn't very well known, but after I painted Little in Fierce and published to my Instagram, my following blew up and my brand was truly taken to the next level. Now that print is sold in target and is still one of my best sellers on Society6. Using words in your artwork is a great approach because they can appeal to a much wider audience. There's a reason half my friends from college have Lived, Laugh, Loved in their living rooms. That message speaks to them. In this lesson, I'll be walking you through what a basic hand-lettering exercise looks like. The big focus of this lesson is going to be on composition. Composition is a huge part of hand-lettering and I do a lot of this, especially in Procreates. In this lesson, I'll be showing you exactly how I approach hand-lettering projects in Procreates specifically. You can follow along directly or add your own interpretations as you go. If you totally jive with this lesson and you want a deeper dive, I encourage you to check out what am I previous classes, Modern Brush Lettering and Calligraphy from sketch to screen. In that class, I teach you hands done brush lettering techniques, then show you how to digitize your lettering, and edit on your computer. But before you jump over to that, let's learn how to hand-letter in Procreates. First things first, let's go ahead and click that plus sign and we're going to be working with the large square canvas. This one is going to get pretty interesting because I like using a lot of layers when I'm doing hand-lettering. Obviously as we've seen, our max layers for this large canvas are four. We're going to have to be a little bit creative and how we deal with that. This is just a basic challenge with Procreate. Working with large art boards limits your layers. I'll show you some good work around. First I'm going to go to my pallets on the top right and just choose any bright red hue. The reason I like sketching in bright red is because it's a really vibrant primary color that's hopefully going to contrast the actual illustration. If I were doing this by hands, I probably just be sketching with a normal pencil, which is gray. I find that a little bit boring. Here in Procreate, why not use a bright color? Next up, I want to go to my brush and it's already ready for me, it's Peppermints. Within sketching as a category, go ahead and select Peppermints. There's a lot of different brushes here that you can sketch with, but Peppermint is my absolute favorite. In my opinion, this replicates a really sharpened graphite pencil more than any other brush in this app. Now it's time to create some thumbnail sketches. If you're not familiar with thumbnail sketches, it's just really rough sketches to help you loosen up and find a composition that's working best for you. The quote I'll be doing is "Do what you love". I feel like that's very applicable to anyone in a creative fields or if you're using Procreate right now, chances are you probably really love illustrating. Let's go ahead and work with that. The first thing I'm going to do is just write it out. This helps me loosen up. As you can tell, my handwriting doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just kind of seeing what those letter forms look like, looking for some ideas of how they could lock together in a really interesting way. Let's try cursive, see how that looks. You know what, I'm really liking the cursive "Love", but I think I like the normal stack lettering "Do what you". Let me zoom out a bit and as you can see, thumbnail sketches do not have to be perfect. They're supposed to be really loose. You're just getting your ideas out of your brain and onto paper. Well, in this case screen. Let's try some stuff at an angle. I'm just going to make up a grid right here, again, very loose. I've been doing all of these, I've have been starting with different words and seeing how the rest flow around it. Let's try starting with "Love". That's nice, you have this bottom bar of the "L" locking around "ove". This seems like a good spot. I'll write "You". Again, you can completely work backwards here and a lot of cases that helps you find an interesting composition. What if "do" were here. "what" were over here. What if the curve of this "L" wrapped around due to contain it so that it's containing this part of "ove" and the upper part of the "L" is containing "do". I really like this composition. I think it's pretty interesting. I think this is going to be the one that I focus on refining. Let's go ahead and isolate out this thumbnail and have that be the primary thumbnail that we focus on. I'm going to use my Select tool. It's the "S" up here that looks like a piece of tape or a ribbon. The selection that I use most frequently is Freehand. Go ahead and make sure Freehand is selected and all we're going to do is just draw around it, get a nice blobby shape. Then I'm going to use three fingers, pull down on my screen and select cut and paste. With that's done, you go over here to your layers, is it's created a whole separate layer just from that selection. We had our original layer here, but we have gone ahead and cut out the selection, which is now on a second layer. So these original layers, I don't need them anymore. Again, this whole exercise is going to be working within that limitation of only having four layers. Anytime we can consolidate or remove layers, we want to jump on that opportunity. Since I no longer need these other thumbnails, let's go ahead and swipe left on that layer and select deletes. Now we just have this guide. Now what I want to do is take this guide and center him in the screen. What I want to use is my Transform Tool, which is this arrow up here on the top left. Now I can click, drag this upwards. For whatever reason, I always sketch it a pretty heavy diagonal. I can grab this little green circle right here and bring it back to the horizontal axis. Go ahead and bring it, make it a little bit bigger and hit that arrow one more time to set the transformation. Remember in that previous lesson, we worked with a drawing grid. We used it to do assisted drawing to make a mandala that repeated in all the different axis. But in this case, I want to use that drawing grid again just to help me out with my hand-lettering. Tap that wrench up here on the left. Go to Canvas and turn on a drawing guide. Now we have these gridded outlines that are gonna help us draw so that it feels a little bit more perfect. If your drawing guide for whatever reason doesn't look like mine right now, go ahead and tap Edit Drawing Guide and make sure you're working with a 2D Grid, not anything with Symmetry or Perspective or Isometric, 2D Grid is the one you want. Remember, you can adjust the thickness of those bars as well as the grid size itself. What I want to do is have this grid size match these letter forms, where it says, "Do what" I want to make sure the squares are matching as tall as I want those letter forms. That's actually feeling pretty good. Go ahead and press Done. Now what I'm going to do, it's a pretty sloppy sketch. I want to refine it just a little bit. I'm going to go to my Layers Palette, click that plus sign to add another layer, then go to my brushes. Peppermint was a great way to start those initial thumbnail sketches. But now I want to select a brush that's a little bit thicker. Soft Pastel, that's going to do it for me. As you can see, it's all Monoline, which means the weight of the brush is very consistent. There's no big disparity between thicks and thins. I'll select Soft Pastel. Make sure I'm working on a separate layer, a completely blank layer, not that original layer. In fact, I'm going to tap that N, bring that Opacity on my original layer, pretty far down, like 20 percent so I can barely see it. Actually, I'll amp it up for you guys just in case you can't see it so well from the screen up here. All right, layer 2 is selected. I have my brush, Soft Pastel, go ahead and tap on the screen to close the Brush Library. Now what I'm going to do is a more refined sketch on top of my really rough pencil sketch. I'm going to starts with "DO" and then using this grid to help me figure out how tall these letters should be. Now I'm going to start the "L". If we need to adjust that later, we can. Now we'll do what. Again, doesn't have to be perfect, this is just another sketch on top of our existing sketch. Now I'm going to write, love. That's a bad Y, and finally, you. Do what you love. Perfect. Let's go back into our layers. We are now finished with our original pencil sketch. Again, anytime we don't need a layer, let's get rid of it. Swipe to the left, press delete, and this is going to be our new thumbnail sketch. I'm going to tap that layer name once, select rename, and change that name to thumbnail and this just helps me stay organized. If you're a very type A person, chances are you're really going to appreciate having a lot of organizations within your layers panel. So we have our thumbnail in place. I'm going to click that N, bring that opacity down to about 40 percent, that looks great, and add a new layer. Hit that plus sign to get a layer on top and this is going to be the final illustration layer. Now it's time to get into our pallets. The pallet for this one is called Rosie Navy. You can either follow along with this pallet, or choose your own to work from. I'm going to start with this pink color. As you can see when I tapped it, the color changed up here on the top right. Then I'm going to go into my brush and we are going to use one of those imported brushes. Down here at the very bottom where it says imported, we want to work with Lisa's pencil and this is another one of those freebie brushes that Lisa provided for us for this class, so thank you Lisa. Lisa's pencil, then go ahead and click out. I want to show you something real quick so you can either follow along with this so you can see it for yourself, or just watch. This won't be part of the final illustration. Remember earlier when we were filling in shapes, we drew a shape, grabbed up here from the palette, and dropped it in. That's definitely one way to fill in a shape, but there is a problem with that. You can see here, let me zoom in. You see that on those inner edges of the shape, it almost makes this halo. It's this white area and it doesn't really fill in completely and the reason that's happening is because of this type of brush. It's a really texture brush, look how rough those edges are. Even in the heart of that brush, right in the middle, there's still some texture in there. If you're trying to fill in a shape, it doesn't really know when to stop, and when to start filling in this area and that's when you get these kind of white halo effects. There's a couple ways around that, and I'll go ahead and show you two of them. So two fingers to undo. The first is with the color threshold. Same thing as before, just grab that circle, bring it over, but don't release. Keep your pen connected to the screen. Don't lift it up yet. Up here at the top, you'll see this thing that says color drop threshold. As I move my pen from right to left on screen, you see the percentages of that threshold are changing so if I bring it all the way to the bottom, you see that white line is much more apparent, whereas all the way to the right it starts filling in a lot more. So that does give you some flexibility. When I bring it much further to the right and get a color threshold of around 90 percent, it's going to do a better job filling in those edges. It's still not perfect and you see that line a little bit, but that color threshold is helping quite a bit. Here, I'll show you real quick. This one looks pretty smooth on the edges, Smidir. Let me show you. If I were to draw a circle here, you see the texture is not nearly as rough as our original brush and if I were to drop in a color this way, it does a much better job filling in the edges. You still have a little bit of that halo, which means I need to adjust to that threshold. So pull it in, don't release, bring it much further to the right. If you go to a color threshold of a 100, it's going to fill in that whole layer. So there's some wiggle room here. But there we go, 92 looks pretty good. You can barely see it on those edges. Just know that you have some flexibility with that color threshold as long as you keep your pen on that screen. As soon as you lift it up, it's going to set that fill, but you have some wiggle room to the right and left. That was a long explanation for me to get to the point of saying we will not be doing color fills in this lesson. I just wanted to show you what that looks like. But for this lesson, we're actually going to be skipping color fills. We'll be filling in manually like this instead. Let's get back into our illustration. So a bunch of double taps to get back to where I was. I've got to change my brush back to Lisa's pencil and let's go ahead and get started. Way too thick, let's bring that back down. There's a lot of trial and error with your brush sizes here, let's try 16 percent. Perfect. So now what I'm going to do is just start sketching this in. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but this is just a nice way to get that organic texture coming through without doing fills. So if you fill it in manually like this, you still see that nice texture coming through which I absolutely love. Up here I filled it in a little bit too hard, so I want to use my eraser. I'm going to press my eraser and hold until it says erase with current brush. Way too big, double-tap. Let's bring that way back down. Now we can get some of that white space back in. Let's go back to my brush and that's what I'm going to do, I'm just going to start filling this in, drawing it out. If I use a really heavy pressure, some of that texture will be removed. Let me show you what that looks like. Heavy pressure, not a lot of texture. Really thin, light pressure, you see much more texture coming through. Just something to keep in mind either one is fine. It just depends on your personal preference. I'm just going to start filling these in using that pencil sketch as a rough guide for how I want my letter forms to feel thickness wise. Let's just go ahead and fill this bad boy in. It doesn't have to be an absolutely perfect fill. In fact, that's what I really like about using this particular brush and using this method for hand lettering. It feels imperfect. It feels like something I did with a piece of charcoal on a rough piece of paper or even with chalk on a chalkboard. It just feels really nice. It doesn't feel like a digital illustration. It feels very hand done and that's exactly what I'm going for here. If I wanted it to be absolutely perfectly polished, I would be using a different brush or I'd be doing this in Adobe Illustrator. But I want it to feel very hand done, so this is the method for me. Again, these sloppy little accidents, I kind of like that. So I'm going to keep some of those guys. Not too much, but enough to feel very organic and hand done. A good way to test this and see how it's looking, is to go back into our layers. Let's go ahead and uncheck that thumbnail so we can see how it looks. I know I like sloppiness, but not overly sloppiness. So I'm just going to fill this in a little bit more. Clean up those edges. Again, we can choose our eraser and refine those edges a little bit to clean it up. Go back to my brush and just make a few more touch ups. But I'm leaving a lot of that roughness, like I mentioned, that's the aesthetic I really like for this. Let's turn that thumbnail back on and go ahead and fill in the lettering for love. For that I'm going to make a new layer so plus sign. Let's go into our palettes. I'm going to do this bright red, so I'll make sure it's changed up here. Quadruple check to make sure that we're working on that blank layer. I can't tell you how many times I've made this really meticulous, beautiful illustration, but I'd accidentally done it right on that thumbnail layer, and I had to start basically from scratch. So you cannot check your layers palette to many times, it's really easy to get caught up in your illustration and forget to work with layers. But you just want to make sure we're on a brand new layer because we'll be deleting this thumbnail layer when we're all set and done. Okay, so layer 3, let's make sure brush Lisa's pencil, color is red, and let's do the exact same thing. So I'm not changing my brush size and the reason for that, here let me show you, so right now it's on 17 percent. If I bring it up to a 100 percent, I'd be able to fill in those letters much faster, but check this out, the edges of this brush aren't matching the edges over here, that looks inconsistent. I want this to look like it was all done with the same size of chalk or crayon, so that means I'm going to be using the same brush size throughout. It was around 16 percent. So even though that's a little bit more work on my end, it's going to look better in the final piece. It'll just look a lot more consistent. All right, and remember, you can rotate this canvas around so that it feels more natural with the way that you're doing your brushstrokes. Lots of rotation going on. As you can see if I paint with the side of my brush like this, it's a lot softer versus the very tip top of my brush which is sharper. So just things to keep in mind. That's a really intuitive way to design brushes, it makes it feel like you're using a real piece of chalk or piece of charcoal. Because of course, when you draw it with the tips of that charcoal, it's going to be much sharper versus using the edge where it gets a little bit softer. Let's fill this guy in. Again, I don't want it to be perfect. I like having a little bit of roughness here, it just fits that overall aesthetic. As much as possible, I'm trying to draw in the same direction as the strokes of these letter forms. What I mean by that is I'm not filling them in like this, no, no, no, I'm filling them in right along the way that you would typically draw them, and that just helps it feel a lot more natural. In this first run through it's always a little bit sloppy. I'll clean it up with the eraser after I get these basic forms down. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and go back into layers. Toggle off that thumbnail, and that really helps us get a better vision of what's going on here. I know I like these rough, sloppy letter forms, but this one's a little too sloppy. I'm just going to go through and clean it up a little bit, make those edges a little bit more refined. It's really helpful for me to turn off that layer thumbnail while I'm doing this, so there's nothing in the background distracting me. Lots and lots of rotation. Awesome. That's feeling a lot better. You still have those naive brushstrokes but overall, it's feeling pretty locked in and tight. You know what? We can go ahead and turn that grid off. Click that Wrench to get your actions and go ahead and toggle that grid off. We don't really need it anymore. All right, so looking pretty sharp, The next thing I want to do, is add a bit of a drop shadow to this type to give it a little bit more dimension. Let's go to our layers. Here's an opportunity to go ahead and get rid of a layer. Let's take that thumbnail, swipe to the left, delete it, we are completely finished there. We're no longer needing to reference that. Let's start with the drop shadow on ''DO WHAT YOU. '' We have that layer selected, swipe to the left, and select duplicates. What that's done is it's made an exact copy of that layer right on top of it. Let's go to our palettes. I want to select red. Click that Red, bring it right on top of that pink, but don't release the pen, bring it all the way to the right until all of those letters change to red. I'll go back to my layers, click that Layer, bring it underneath the pink layer, so it's completely hidden now. Now we're going to go to our Transform tool, which is that arrow and just bring it down slightly. Actually, you know what? I'm going to bring it to the left. Slightly to the left down a little bit to give it some dimension, press the arrow again to set the transformation. Voila, we have a shadow on there. I'm not quite done with that yet. What I don't like are seeing these gaps over here in these corners, I want to fill those in. Let's go to our layers, make sure that's selected, make sure that our color pallete is on red. Let's go to brush, [inaudible] pencil. Everything's good to go. Now what I'm going to do is connect these corners like this. I can also smooth out that shadow a little bit in areas where it's a little too rough or fill it in, in areas where there are some gaps. Check this out. Now it's all connected. It looks like one shape that's fully connected and fully 3D. Just connect those corners so it feels like one cohesive shape. This is also a good opportunity to smooth out those edges if you'd like to. Anytime there's a corner that's not connected, go ahead and connect that bad boy. Again, we can smooth out some of these edges to make it a little bit nicer. But basically what we're doing here is connecting these corners so it feels actually 3D, perfect. I'm going to feel that in a bit, awesome. Now it feels like it's an actual 3D blocky shape. I want to do the same thing for ''love.'' Let's make a copy of that layer by swiping left, hit Duplicates. I want the shadow on love to be this navy. I'm going to select navy, click my Circle, drag it into love, pull it all the way to the right with my pen still touching the screen, so the whole thing fills in. Go back to my layers, grab this guy, drag it underneath, go to my Transform tool, bring it slightly off center to the left, hit it again to set that transformation. Now do that exact same thing so we're connecting corners. Or in some areas like this, we're filling in that whitespace. Awesome, that feels pretty good. I'm really happy with this illustration, I think it looks pretty nice. One thing I'm noticing is it's not really perfectly centered on that screen. Let's go ahead and go to our layers, swipe right on all of these guys so that they're all selected, then go to your Transform tool, which is the arrow, and let's go ahead and bring it up just a little bit so it's perfectly centered on that screen. Just a slight adjustment. Again, arrow again will finish that transformation. Now you can see that it's perfectly centered here. Let's go into our Layers. I want to add a background color, I want to use that light cream. Select Backgrounds, just by tapping at once, I'm going to hit that cream, that looks really nice to do. Navy, red, you can explore a bunch different colors here. I love using backgrounds like this, because you can have a lot of different options. But, I want that cream from that pallete. Let's see how that's looking. Really nice. Now that's just a rough and quick way to show you how I approach hand lettering in procreates. One more thing I want to show you before we end this lesson though, is going to be showing you how to adjust color pretty easily. Let's go to our Layers, and let's say we want ''DO WHAT YOU'', the pink version to be a different color. We select that Layer, then let's go to adjustments, which is the magic wand icon, and let's go to hue saturation and brightness. We can toggle that scrubber along the hue spectrum to see what a lot of different colors are looking like. Let's go all the way to the left. You know what? I like that blue, it plays off that navy really well. Let me bring down the saturation so it's not too overwhelming. Bring up the brightness, here's full white, full black, probably something around 53 percent so it looks nice. All right, that's pretty cool. Let me go ahead and get out of there. I'm just going to hit my brush. If you want to see what it looked like before, two fingers, it took a couple times. Sometimes my fingers don't connect on the screen. If you want to see what it looks like with that color, three fingers. There's the blue, and there's the pink. Blue, pink. You know what? I like the blue. Let's do three fingers and keep that blue there. It looks really nice. Just keep in mind whenever you're playing with color like this, you always have flexibility. You can always change those colors later on. But that's one of the reasons why I like to keep colors contained all on their own individual layers, so that only that color is being changed, nothing else in the composition is. All right. Let's go ahead and just for fun, go to actions, video, let's watch that time-lapse replay. These time-lapse replays are amazing for sharing on social media. Video usually does better content-wise than just still frames, especially on Instagram and Facebook so these are great things to share with your audience. In addition to being prioritized by the algorithm, it's also showing people your process that goes into something, how you started with sketches and then wound up with this final beautiful illustration, so keep in mind. Let's go back to actions, video, you can export these time-lapse videos and send them right to your phones that you can share on social media. But for me, I want to go ahead and click Share and export this as a flattened JPEG to my MacBook. Here we go, Costco MacBook Pro. In addition to sharing the JPEG with myself, I'm also going to be exporting that PSD because that will keep all those layers intact. That gives me more options if I want to be editing it in Photoshop. PSD stands for Photoshop file. Cool. All right. Let's go ahead and move on with our next illustration.
7. Textured Citrus: In this lesson, we'll be creating some abstract citrus shapes and the goal here is learning how to use textures on contained shapes plus texture editing backgrounds and we'll be using citrus as our motif for a couple of different reasons. One, it makes sense, the rhymes on oranges, grapefruits and lemons have such excellent bumpy textures. That's going to translate over very well with our texture brushes and procreates. Two, just like we focused on a tropical theme earlier, because tropical motifs are on trend in the summer, so is citrus. I can't tell you how many requests I have had from licensing partners to create collections of citrus inspired motifs. One of my partners even created an entire collection around some of my citrus watercolors and Barnes & Noble just picked up the spiral bound planner. If you subscribe to the Society6 e-mail newsletter, you've probably been seeing their trend reports. In the summer, those reports are filled with citrus designs, color palettes, the works. A quick note on trend tracking. It is an incredibly valuable tool. I incorporate trend research into nearly all of my designs. After all, I want to create artwork that will sell well and generate income for me. If you want to learn how I trends track, check out my previous course, How to Discover Profitable Design Trends Before Anyone Else, and create artwork with mass appeal. Let's go ahead and dive right into our projects. I'm going to start a new canvas by clicking the "Plus" on the top right. Let's go ahead and keep this theme going and do this large square, 27 by 27 inches. All right, first things first, let's go ahead and open up our pallets. I'll tap that circle on the top right and the palate I'm looking for is called juicy. Oh, here we go. This guy right here. There's a lot of colors within here, so you have a lot of options to choose from. I'm going to start with this light yellow, the lighter of the two yellow options and then I'm going to go into my brushes. The brush we'll be using for this one is Lisa's pencil. This will be our starting brush. With that selected, I'll tap "Out" and zoom in a bit. Let's see how this size looks. Let's go a little bit bigger. The two fingers to back up. I'm going to bring Lisa's pencil all the way up to 100 percent, and I'm going to bring that opacity back up to 100 as well. Now I'm just going to start drawing some shapes. I'm going to do some circles, varying sizes. I'm going to zoom out a bit, so we have some more options for scale here. Maybe we do one where it's a half or just do the rind for now and we'll fill in the rest later. I'm going to make a new layer. Tapping those overlapping squares, hitting the "Plus" sign and with this new layer, I'm going to fill in that more reddish orange. Again, just making circles. Nothing has to be absolutely perfect here. We're just getting a basic idea for shapes. I want to add a little bit more orange down at the bottom, so I'm going to open up my layers, my orange layer. Then here's a quick tip. If you want to select a color from your art board and not have to go all the way back here to your palettes, there's this little square over here on the far left. Go ahead and tap that, and you can see the circle up here. This is the sampler. I'm going to click this, pull it over, and sample from this orange, and as you can see up here on the far right, my palette has changed to that sample's color. This is something I do all the time because instead of having to stop what I'm doing, go to pallets, select new color, all I can do is just click here, sample from the parts of the screen I want a sample, it's just a lot easier to do. Let me continue drawing a few more shapes in here. Oops, it's little too matchy. One more. Perfect. This looks pretty good. These are going to be all of the rhymes or those peels of these literacy shapes. Zoom in a bit. Now it's time to add some texture to them. I'm going to open up my palettes and before, on that leaf, we added texture by making a separate layer above it and then using that clipping mask. We already know how to do that. You remember what that clipping mask does? Let me show you real quick, is it means that whatever you draw will be contained to the shapes of the layer beneath it. In this case, these shapes are being contained by this layer because there's a mask in place. Whatever you draw, you will only see it on that layer immediately under. This is what we already did with our leaf illustration, so we know the way to do that. We're going to do it in a slightly different way this time so you can learn a couple of different techniques. First, let me delete that layer. First, let's go ahead and grab our texture brush. Go to your brush library, and we're going to be using salt shaker. This is another one of Lisa's brushes that she's given us for this class. Thank you, Lisa. Yes, salt shaker provides a great texture and it's going to be really good for the citrus. Have that selected. Go ahead and tap that side of the screen to close your brush library. Okay. Opening up our layers, what we're going to be doing, I mentioned it before, we made the layer above it, we did the clipping mask. Let's do something different this time. Go ahead and tap that layer once and turn on alpha lock. Just tap that once and now alpha lock is turned on on that layer. The way that that's indicated in our layers panel, as you can see, this slight checkered box behind our layer. Anytime you see checkered boxes in Adobe programs and procreate, that usually indicates a transparent background, and it's the same thing here. What that does is, don't follow this stuff, because I'm just going to show you real quick. Now with that layer selected, with alpha lock in place, you see that check mark next to it. It's that same concept. Whatever you draw is contained within the shapes that are already existing on that layer. Pros and cons real quick of using alpha lock instead of using the clipping mask, alpha lock is good because you don't have to make a new layer. If you're already crammed for space on layers, alpha lock is a really great compromise. The con here though, is when you keep those textures on a separate layer, it just gives you some more flexibility in editing. So if you decide later you want to get rid of the textures, you can, and your basic shapes will stay the same. But when you do that texture on top of the shapes, everything gets flattens together. I honestly use both interchangeably. If I'm working on a much smaller art board and I have a lot more room with my layers, maybe it lets me add 10 or 15, then I'll add the clipping mask above it just to have some more wiggle room. But if I'm working with a big art board like this, 27 by 27 and I'm already cramped for space on my layers, then I'm going to do alpha lock. Those are the two ways to get textures. But for this one, let's go ahead and stick with alpha lock. Let me go ahead and two tap to delete that step. Go back into my brushes. Like I mentioned, salt shaker will be the brush for this one. So go ahead and have that selected. Quadruple check that we're on the correct layer, tap that once, let's make sure alpha lock is in place. Everything looks good to go. Let's go ahead and start brushing. Make sure that brush is selected. Now what we're going to do is fill in some texture on the shapes. The really nice thing about this brush here, salt shaker, is it's really nice and subtle. It's a great texture to work with when you don't want to be too overwhelming, but you still want to get some nice texture in there. What I'm doing is I'm just going over and over again and picking up my pen, putting it back down on the screen and buildings in this texture layer slowly on top of it to get this rounds. I guess this is an orange or a grapefruit, a little bit more dimension. I'm going to zoom back out, do that for some of the others. I'm not applying the texture to this entire shape, I'm just doing it here on the edges so it looks a little bit more 3D. Again, I'm picking up my pen, setting it back down, picking it up, setting it back down. If I just leave my pen touching the screen this entire time, it's not going to build up the same way it does when I start a new stroke every time. Let's go ahead and fill in some texture on these guys. In this case, I'm going to add most of it to the bottom. Same here. Again, picking up my pen, setting it back down. I'm also putting quite a bit of pressure on here as well. I'm not going to break my screen with my pen, but there's a fair amount of pressure getting put down on the screen right now with this pen. I'm going to build it up a little bit more. Cool. Now you can see that's a really nice texture. It's added a little bit of depth to this illustration. Before it was fairly flat, but now it looks like these are really round ball shapes, which is nice. I've only added this texture to the orange ones because remember these are two separate layers. One more thing I want to do is change my color palette to whites. So let's see, within juicy, I'm going to select this white on the far left. This is going to be a highlight texture. Now, I'm going to do the same thing and a little bit up here. We have that darker edge on the bottom left corner and this wider edge on the right. This is just really helping us add a little bit of dimension. Cool. If I want to be a little crazy and make this a bit more unexpected, I can pick a dark color like maybe one of these denim blues. Let's see how that looks in here. Just really slightly on the far edge. I'm actually going to bring that brush down to about 26 percent and then add a little bit of navy to this very far bottom corner. Again, this is just helping us with depth. It's also making for a more interesting texture composition. Let me zoom in so you can see. So we have these three different colors of the texture. We have the whites were the light is supposedly hitting and we have this darker orange that helps provide some depth into the peel. Then we have this dark navy down on these corners that are almost look like the shadow for these oranges. I think this came together really well. So let's go ahead and do the same thing now for these darker orange peels. I am going to go to my layers, tap layer 2 once, go head and turn on Alpha lock. You can see Alpha locks on because, again, we have that grid behind our thumbnail and let's decide what color to use. Let's try this burnt sienna color right here. The brown next to that bright orange. I'm going to do the same thing. Let's bring it back up to about 100. I'm just going to lift my pen, slide it back down, lift it, slide it back down and build some depth within these circles. Here, I'll just do it on the bottom. Cool, now let's put some highlight areas in. I'm going to select the same whites and same thing as before. Just apply that whites to these upper right-hand corners. Again, there's no wrong or right way to do this when you're working with texture, the whole point is just to be pretty fluid and loose with it. Same thing here. I want to add one color that's slightly unexpected. Let's go with this bright blushy pink. I'm just going to add that up here at the top and see how that looks. It's nice and subtle. It bridges that darker texture with the lighter white texture. So I'm just going to add a little pink in here. I'm going to just scribbling it in. Cool. I really like how this is looking. Again, we can see a lot of really nice depth within these shapes and this texture now. Now it's time to add some wedges within these C shapes, these side peels. For this, I'm going to go to my brushes, select Lisa's pencil again. You know what, I think I'm going to keep that rosy pink. I really like that and see how big this is. There's little reason we have Alpha lock. So as you see, I'm trying to draw, but nothing's happening except over here. This is why it's important to always check your layers. Let's add one layer above this. If anytime you're drawing and nothing showing up and you've been working with Alpha lock, chances are you just forgot to add that layer on top. I do this all the time. It's just a thing to keep in the back of your mind. Always go through, check your layers and make sure you're working on the correct layer. So I press the plus sign, started a new layer. Now, this layer is going to be above everything else. So whatever we draw, it's going to cover the rest of the shapes. So two fingers to undo. I'm just going to bring that brush down to about, 34 looks great. Now I'm just going to draw in the wedges for, I guess, this is a grapefruit. The reason I'm doing these wedges on a separate layer is because I don't want that same texture to be going on top of these wedges. This texture is just for the rinds of the citrus. I want these inner areas to have no texture. None of this splotchy texture applied because the inside of a citrus, it's very shiny. It doesn't have that same rough peel on the edge. I'm going to do the same pink right here. I'm just filling this in. Remember other fill-in option was to grab this guy, bring it over and release. But I don't want to do that because I want to have that same texture within, so minus those two and I'll just fill it in manually. For this guy, I'm going to change the color to yellow and fill him in. I think that's looking really nice. We have a very nice texture on these peels. We're not repeating that texture on these inner areas and that's just a conscientious design decision. It's feeling pretty good. So one more thing I want to do before we wrap this lesson up is add some texture to the backgrounds. So let's go ahead and open up our layers. Cool. We've only used three layers, so we have some room to spare. I'm going to click that plus sign to add a new layer. I'm going to press and hold and bring this all the way down to the bottom so it's just above that background color. This will be the layer that we add some texture to that background. First, let's go ahead and tap our background layer. Then that juicy palette, I'm going to choose this off-white color. So now, I'm going to go into my layers, make sure this layer is selected, change my palette, do that exact same color, that tan color, go to my brushes and select roasted. Roasted is a brush I use all the time for the backgrounds that really adds a lot of depth to that canvas and makes it more interesting. Right now, my brush color is the exact same color as the background. If I were to start drawing, you can't see anything. The reason that's happening is because that brush color again is matching the background entirely. But don't worry, this is completely intentional and I'll show you why. So let's open up our layers. You can see that there's something on this layer, but it's just not showing through because these tones match completely. So what we want to do is change our blending mode. Remember N, that stands for normal, a normal blending mode. Go ahead and tap that N and we have all of our blending mode options here. The blending mode I want to use is up here at the top. It's called multiply. Now you can see that brushstroke. It's been multiplied on top of that background color. Remember what multiply does as a blending mode is it combines those two colors together. Since we're using the exact same color, what it's doing is it's making it a little bit darker. Now when we go to our layers, there's an M here that stands for multiply. It's no longer an N, which stands for normal. I'm just going to get my brush selected, tap out, and start adding some texture back here on that multiply blending mode. Remember this is a texture where you have to continuously pick up your brush and then set it back down on that paper. Cool, that's looking really nice. It's a little too dark for my taste. So I'm going to go back into my layers, click that M, and I'm going to bring that opacity down to about 40 percent. Now you can see it's much more subtle. Here let me show you. This is without that layer and this is with that layer. It's not too overwhelming, but it's enough texture in that background to add some visual intrigue. The last thing I'm going to do is go up to my top layer, change my brush to, let's go to sketching, to peppermint. I think the color for this, I am going to use this dark navy. I'm going to add my signature. Always, always, always sign your work, especially if you're sharing it on social media. You always want to get credit for what you did. So that is our lesson on adding textures to these fruity citrus shapes. I've got one more lesson for you guys, and it's all of the additional resources that I recommend with Procreate, with pursuing art, creativity, entrepreneurship, all that jazz. Let's go ahead and dive right in.
8. More Resources: All right guys, thank you so much for taking my class today. I hope you learned everything you need in order to take your Procreate skills to the next level. I've got a few additional resources that I highly recommend. If you wanted to take some actionable steps towards a career or even side hustle licensing your arts. I recommend checking out my previous class, A Step-by-Step Guide to Art Licensing; Sell your first piece of art work online. In this class, I explain exactly what a career in service design looks like. This class is filled with actionable steps that help you make your first sale with artwork online, as well as boosting sales if you're already selling. If you want to deep dive into a creative skill-based class, check out another one of my previous courses, Modern Patterns; From Sketch to Screen. In that class, I'll show you how to easily create professional quality surface design patterns in Photoshop. This is the perfect class for you if you've ever wanted to turn your hand drawn art into a pattern and it's actually incredibly simple. In that class, you'll learn the basics of transforming your sketch into a digital pattern. By the end, you'll know all the techniques to create gorgeous on trends patterns out of your own artwork. Last but not least, Marketing. If you're an artist, designer, photographer, content creator, or really any visual creative and you went to amp up your Instagram presence, check out my class, Growing Your Creative Business through Instagram. This class will help you build your brand successfully on Instagram and it's tailored specifically to visual creatives. All right guys, don't forget to follow me on Instagram @catcoq to see all of my class updates, new pieces of artwork, and a glimpse of wherever in the world that I'm currently living. If you tag me in your posts or stories, I'd love to see what you've created today in this class. Plus share your stories from my own accounts as well, so all of my followers can see too. You can also follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. Thank you so much for taking my class today. I can't wait to see what you creates and drop in the project gallery and here on social media. See you next time.
Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
