10 Procreate Quick Tips for Artists & Illustrators

1. Class Intro: Procreate is an amazing app for artists and illustrators who are new to digital art. It's intuitive and so user-friendly. You can install the app, grab your Apple pencil, and be halfway drawn line and just a few minutes. But are you missing out on some tips and tricks that can improve your workflow and just make your art-making more fun. Hi, I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman, a children's book Illustrator and bird artist. I've been using Procreate as part of my illustration workflow for a few years now. In this class, I'm going to share some of the things that I've learned along the way. How to set up a CMYK document and why you need to do that. What the reference window is in three ways you can use it. How to copy layers to a new canvas and organize your brushes. How you can use color dynamics to create beautiful painterly illustrations. How to use quick shapes to build illustrations without wobbly edges and wonky lines. How to use adjustments, gradient maps, and clipping masks. You'll also learn a trick to check your values and your illustration. For the bonus lesson, I'll show you how to set up quick menus to save yourself so much time. By the end of this class, you'll have a deeper understanding of Procreate and you'll have even more tools to grow your digital art skills. Are you ready to get started? Grab your iPad, Apple pencil, head over to the first video, and let's get started with 10 Procreate quick tips for artists and illustrators. 2. Working in CMYK: You may be thinking, why should I even use CMYK? This could be a class on its own, and we'll do the short version of it right now. Basically, you can create digital art in either the RGB or CMYK color space. The important thing for you to know is that RGB is for work that will be viewed on a device like a phone, an iPad, a computer monitor, or a TV. CMYK is for work that will be printed. Like books, magazines, greeting cards, wallpaper, fabric, clothing, puzzles, literally anything that you can think of that can be printed. If you are creating work for print clients, you'll be asked to deliver it in CMYK about 99 percent of the time. Now in older versions of Procreate, work could only be created in RGB, so then you needed Photoshop or another app to convert it to CMYK, but now, we can set up our documents in Procreate and CMYK, which makes our lives a lot easier. Now, one big exception to the use CMYK for anything that will be printed rule, is if you or your customer is printing your art on a home printer. If you're printing on a home printer, you can and should still use RGB because that's what's going to give you the best results if you are printing at home. Let's talk about how we can set up our CMYK document in Procreate. It's actually super simple. The first thing you want to do is you just want to tap the plus icon in the upper right-hand corner, and then tap on this other little plus icon right next to New canvas. This is going to bring you into a brand new canvas and choose whatever size you want. I'm actually just going to make this canvas eight by 10 inches and I've swapped it ever to inches because that's what makes the most sense for me. Can set it to whichever one you want, and then I want to make sure also that my minimum DPI is at 300. If you're creating work for print, your canvas has to be at least 300 DPI to ensure good print quality. If it is lower than this, it's not going to print out very well at all. Next up, let's tap on "Color profile". This is going to take us to our two options. We have RGB, which is what it usually defaults to, and then we have CMYK, which is going to give us all of these CMYK color palette options. Generally, you are fine to just go with this generic CMYK profile unless you've got a specific request from a client to use one of these other options and then you would want to go with that. I've got all my settings done. I'm just going to tap on "Create", and it is going to make my brand new CMYK canvas, that is eight by 10 inches. Now, if you made a canvas and you can't remember if it is in CMYK or not, or you're halfway through a project and you're panicking because you think it may not be in CMYK, you can actually check that. If you tap on the "Wrench" icon and then just go to canvas, tap on "Canvas information" and then tap on "Color profile" and you'll see now that I can see that this is a CMYK document and I know that I am good to go. Now when you start working in CMYK, you might find yourself thinking, there are fewer colors now and they're not as bright. That is actually true and it is correct for prints. Like we said earlier, RGB is for things that are going to appear on screen, so you're going to have a wider range of colors available in RGB and some of those can't be replicated in CMYK, especially sort neon colors and some other colors get a little wonky too. If you are working in a CMYK pallet in Procreate, you don't have to worry that your work isn't going to reproduce correctly when it's printed on paper. It should look fairly close, although obviously the screen is really beautiful and putting ink on paper is never going to look as gorgeous as the screen does, so that's something to keep in mind. But, by working in CMYK, you are seeing the most accurate representation of what your art will look like when it's printed out. Head on over to the next lesson and we're going to be talking about using the reference window in your work. 3. Using the Reference Window: In this video, let's take a look at how we can use the reference window in a couple of different ways. The reference window is actually a handy pop-up window that you can use for a variety of things. One of the first things that you can do is you can just use it as a navigation window. If you've used Photoshop or Illustrator in the past, this will look a little bit familiar. With an open document, you open the reference window by tapping on the handy wrench icon, tapping on canvas, and then toggling on this little thing here that says reference, and when you do that, you're greeted with this handy-dandy little pop up right here. The default setting for this window is just to display the art that you have on your Canvas. This is super helpful if you are zoomed way far. Say you're zoomed in this far on your illustration, you still have this nice little thumbnail size over here so you can make sure that everything is looking nice, thumbnail size, and you don't have to constantly be zooming in and out to check on what your illustration is looking like. You can also zoom in on this window over here. If you need to get a closer look at whenever you're zoomed in really far on, you can take a nice close look at that as well. That is the first way that we can use our reference window. Now, the next thing that you can do is you can actually just tap on Image and you can import an image here. This is really fantastic. If you have a reference photo that you need to look at or if you have another old piece of artwork that you need to be referencing for this piece, you can upload it directly into this window, it's going to make your life a lot easier. Now, let's also take a look at a third way that you can use the reference window. The third way is if you want to add a color palette right here. Now, I know you have color palettes over here that you can choose from, but sometimes if you're working on a more complex piece, like if you're working on book illustrations or a graphic novel or something like that, you might actually need to have a bigger color palette document that has everything labeled so you know what piece of the illustration needs to be what color. We can actually import that into the reference window. The first thing that you need to do is you actually need a document created that has a color palette on it. I just scribbled down some colors and wrote down some random words on this as my color ballot reference, yours would probably be more complex than just six colors if you were going to be using this, I would assume that you would have a lot more colors. Once you've created this document, you just want to swipe left, hit "Share", and just go ahead and save it as a JPEG and you're just going to save image, that's just going to save it to your camera roll or you can save it to Dropbox or wherever you want to save it to. I'm going to go back into my image now. Now I do need to tap to bring my reference guide back up and you'll see it right here. Now I'm just going to go to Image, import an image, tap on my color palette that I saved, and now whenever I'm drawing, I can just use my fingertip to pick colors directly from this and I've got everything labeled, so it's super easy to use. A few other couple of quick things before we move on to the next video. Let's just note how we can move this around. If you grab this tiny bar right here, you can actually move this anywhere around on your Canvas, and if you grab this corner, you've actually got the ability to make it bigger or smaller as you need to. Of course, we already talked about how you can zoom in and zoom out on your Canvas as well. If you want to get rid of this, you can actually tap on it and exit out right here or you could also just go back up to your wrench area under Canvas and you can toggle reference off and then it would disappear. Then if you go back and you turn it on again, it's going to have your previous reference material. As long as I've got this image open that I'm working on, It's going to pull up my color palette. If I need to get rid of this for a minute and then I need to come back to it at a later point, I can just pop this up here again and we're good to go. If I decide I don't need this anymore, all I have to do is just tap on "Clear" up in the upper left-hand corner and now we're back to the default, and we can go back to either upload another image if we need to or we can just go back to seeing the Canvas option here. I hope that's really helpful. Head on over to the next video and we're going to talk about copying layers to a new Canvas. 4. Copying Layers to a New Canvas: Copying layers to a new canvas. Being able to copy layers to a new canvas is extremely useful if you have multiple elements that you want to use in another art piece. Let's take a quick look at how you might do that. Now the first thing that you want to do is you want to create a new canvas. I've already created a new canvas here that is the same size as my original canvas. It is 11 by 8.5, so it's going to be easy for me to copy everything over. Now, this particular piece is just a little fun sketch piece and it's actually only got two layers. It's got the line art layer and then it's got just the color layer on the bottom. Let's pretend, for the sake of this lesson, that this is a much more complex image, and there are some specific areas that we want to copy and use again. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go ahead and swipe left on my layers. They're both highlighted in blue and I'm just going to tap and hold and drag them out of my layers, and you can see here that they are free-floating around here now. Now I'm just going to tap on Gallery and that's going to take me back to my new documents, and now I'm going to go ahead and just tap my new document, release my layers in the new document, and you can see that they imported. Now, the one thing that I've noticed about importing layers in Procreate is that they don't always necessarily import in the correct order. In this case, my color shape is actually over my line art layer now. I would need to drag this into place under here and now I've got them in the correct order, and now that looks right and that blue doesn't look so much like it's got an overlay on it. The other thing that I've noticed is that if I have got layer like blending modes on my original document, like say I have this one sad as like multiply or darken or whatever, it wouldn't copy over to this new document, so I would need to go in and set my blending modes once I get my layers copied over. Again, this is super useful if you are working on multiple art pieces and you just want to copy pieces of an illustration from one canvas to another. Now, another really easy way that you can do that is just by duplicating your existing canvas and deleting any layers that you don't actually need. This is my original canvas. I'm going to swipe left, tap on duplicates, now I have two identical canvases and I can go into my new canvas and say, I don't want this color layer anymore, I can just go ahead and swipe left and delete that and now I'm left with the one layer that I do want to work with. Basically, you just want to try out both of these methods and see what makes the most sense for you and feels the easiest to manage. Personally, I tend to just duplicate my entire document and then delete anything that I don't need. I'll head on over to the next video and we're going to talk about organizing all of your brushes. 5. Organizing Your Brushes: When you first start using Procreate, you find yourself buying all the brushes in the universe until you end up having a situation that looks something like this where you just have tons of brushes, and it's hard to remember what you use for what project. So instead of scrolling through all these brush sets, you can actually organize everything into folders. So you could create a folder of your favorite brushes in Procreate, or if you're working on a project and you want to make sure that all the brushes you've used are in one easy to find place, you can make a new folder for that. So the first thing that you should make note of is that when you are duplicating your brushes, when you're adding brushes to a new folder, it is sometimes helpful, and this is totally up to you, but it's helpful to duplicate the brush, so you can still go back to the original brushes if you want to keep those files here. So you can just go back to the original, and it'll still be there. So to duplicate your brush, you're just going to swipe left, tap on duplicate, and then it's going to pop up the same brush with a little number 1 or 2 or whatever after it. Now the next thing you want to do is you want to create a new folder by pulling down the existing brush set list. Just pull down on this, and then tap on that plus icon right there, not icon button, and then you can name this whatever you want to. You can name it by project, you can name it whatever you want. I have already got a favorites listed here so let's go ahead and delete that extra one that we just created, and we'll just move brushes into this favorites folder. So if I want to move my brushes, it's pretty easy. You can either do it one at a time or you can move your brushes in a group. So to move them one at a time, just going to start with my duplicated super dry flat brush here. I'm just going to tap on it until it pops loose from its home, and it's got this little plus icon, and then I'm just going to hover over my new group until it opens, and then I'm just going to drop my new brush into this group, and I'm done. So you can also do this for multiple brushes at once. So if we go back here, and then let's just say I want to move these top three brushes, so I just swipe left to turn them all blue, and then again I'm just going to tap and hold. It'll tell me how many brushes I've got right here in this little icon, and then I can just hold it over my new folder until it pops open, and drop my new brushes here, and I'm ready to go. Now, another way to move multiple brushes is just by grabbing one, and then as you drag it around it's got this handy plus icon. I can just tap that as I'm holding over other brushes, and it's going to add those back in, and then again, I'm just going to go back to my original folder this time. I'm just going to hover over that, and it is going to open up. If it doesn't open, just tap the new brush or the brush library that you want to drop these into, and they will get added to your list, and you are ready to go. Again, this is a really great way to just keep your brushes organized, so you don't have to worry about what brush you're using and when. Let's cover one last quick thing about brushes that's going to help you keep everything really organized. Let's talk about how you would rename these brushes. I'm just going to tap on this brush, this is new at the top. It's going to open up Brush Studio, and in Brush Studio I'm going to tap on about this brush, and at the very top you're going to see the name of the brush. This one's called New, so not very fancy. If I tap on that, then I can actually just go in and rename this. We'll just call this one watercolor 1, hit Done, and now my brush is named, and when I go back in here, I can easily reference this. So you could name these based on what you're using them for in an illustration or something that helps you easily remember which brush is which, whatever is convenient for you. Head on over to the next video, and we're going to talk about some more fun brush stuff, we're going to be talking about color dynamics. 6. Using Brush Color Dynamics: Color dynamics is a really cool thing that helps your digital art not look as digital. It's going to give you this really nice color variation. You can see in this petal, the end of it is an orangey color, and that it picks up some other lighter yellow colors throughout. It gives that feeling like you are painting and you're picking out more colors or you're losing colors as you're painting. It gives you that really nice variation that again, doesn't make your digital art look quite as digital. Let's talk about how to activate our color dynamics. Again, you're going to want to go into Brush Studio and I am just going to pick a brush out of here real quick, just a random one. I'm going to pick the acrylic flat unloaded brush to work with, and I'm going to tap on this and go into Brush Studio. Once I'm in Brush Studio, I'm going to tap on "Color Dynamics", and this is going to help me set up my color dynamics for this brush. Now, you'll have two options for color dynamics. You can do this as a stamp color jitter, and that's great if you're using a shape stamp brush or a texture stamp brush. But we're actually going to focus on the stroke color jitter, which alters the color on each individual brushstroke that you apply. First, you have got your hue jitter, which changes the color with each new stroke, so let me tap on drawing pad here, and let's go ahead and pick this pink color, and let's go ahead and slide this pretty far over to about 60 percent so you'll really be able to see the variation. You see here, the color that I picked on my drawing pad is pink, but because I have this hue slider way up here, it's just creating some really crazy color variation, which is awesome if that is what you want. Let's clear our drawing pad. Now, I usually like to keep those around somewhere between 5 and 8 percent seems to be a good amount of variation for me. So this is on six percent, and you can see there's not a ton of variation. Let's pop it up to 10, so you can see, there you go. Now you can see there's a little bit more color variation in there. So you really have to play around with this and see what works best for you. Let's clear the drawing pad again, I'm going to take my hue jitter back down to zero, and then let's take a look at our saturation jitter. If we take this all the way up to max and we start drawing, you're going to see that we're going to have a variety of saturations of our color, all the way from our darkest color to white that is completely desaturated, and then, of course, we can adjust this back down. As you adjust, you'll see that Brush Studio will show you the changes with the strokes that you've already made, so you get a sense of how it's going to look. Next up, we have lightness and darkness, which do pretty much exactly what you think they do. You can fiddle around with those on your own time, get a feel for them. But the next one that I want to take a look at is, I want to take a look at secondary color. Let's go ahead and just clear our settings. Let's go ahead and bump up our secondary color. Now, you can't really see this very well in Brush Studio, so we're going to leave this up at about 60 percent again, and then let's go over to our Canvas and take a look at it. If I look at my colors here, let's pick our bright pink color, and then we'll just leave this secondary color right here. Let's leave it a darker color and let's see what happens. We have our brush selected, we're on a new layer, and as we paint, you can see that it's basically blending the two colors together. So we've got our bright pink and our dark purplish brown, and as we paint on this canvas, every time we pick up our pen and put it back down, we're getting a new version of those two colors blended together. So if you're looking for a really nice painterly effect, this can be a beautiful way to test that out. Let's undo that mess real quick. Let's take a look at this in action so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about. I'm just going to hop back into Brush Studio, and I'm just going to turn the hue jitter up to eight percent. It is my sweet spot. Then let's just add another leaf here. Let me grab this green color right here, and then I'm just going to use the Lasso tool for this because I love it. I've got it set to free hand, and I'm just going to circle another leaf shape right here, and then let's just select our brush. As I paint this green leaf in, you can see I'm getting this really awesome color variation. It's not just painting a solid green, it's painting a variety of colors. Again, I can bump up the settings on this if it doesn't feel like it's enough, but I feel like it does actually feel pretty good at this point. That's it's looking pretty cohesive with the other ones. I hope you can see how using those color dynamics just really add a lot of variation, and that just really helps to add some extra interest to your illustrations and it makes sure that they don't look too digital. Head on over to the next video and we're going to be talking about quick shapes and quick lines. 7. Using Quick Shapes: Quick shapes and quick lines are really great if you struggle with creating shapes and lines that have a nice clean edge. If you're new to digital arts and you're not happy with how your lines are looking or shapes or looking, or if you have a vector art background and you really want those nice crisp shapes and lines, this is going to work well for you. For quick shapes, I like to use a brush that isn't super textured. I'm actually just going to go to the Procreate native brushes and choose a dry ink brush. This just has a little texture on the edge, but not anything too crazy. You'll see why in a minute why I don't like to use super texture brushes. To make a quick shape, you actually just draw a shape like a circle or a triangle or a square or rectangle, and you hold your pen down until it clicks into place. You'll see at the top here it'll say ellipse created. Now while you're still holding it down, you can resize your shape until you get the shape that you want. Then when you let go, you'll still have an option to tap to edit your shape. Now with this, I've drawn an ellipse. I can actually tap on circle, it'll turn it into a perfect circle. I can tap back to ellipse if I'd rather have that, and then I can grab these nodes on either of the four sides and I can use it to create whatever shape I need. Then when I'm done, I can just tap over to my brush or whatever and it'll have this nice shape. Now, I'm sure you're thinking like, what am I supposed to do with those? What you can do is you can actually drag your colors in. So you're going to grab your green from over here, you're going to drag it in. Now, you may find the first time that you try this that you get this weird white halo on the edge. That is a result of having a brush that is a little bit textured. That's why I don't like to use brushes that have a ton of texture. Let me tell you how to fix that. When you're doing your color drop, drop your color in, and then you slide over, and up here at the top, you see you've got your collar drop threshold. As you slide that further over, it's going to give you a better fill. Let me just try that again and side it a little further over. Now, if you go too far, it fills up your entire canvas. You have got to get right there on the edge. So that's looking pretty good. Now, the same thing happens if you just want to draw a line. You just draw a line, hold your pen down, clicks into place, and then you can drag it around however you want it. You can edit the shape, grabbing these nodes and moving them around and you're ready to go. You can do the same thing if you wanted to just do an arc. You'll see it says arc created at the top. Again, I can just swing this around, I can edit my shape. This one has three nodes, so I can really pull it around any way that I want to. You can get a sense, already how this is going to be super handy if you want to create an illustration, just blocking in shapes like this. This is super fun. Let's take a look at how we can add together some of the arcs and shapes and create some more complicated shapes. I'm just going to do a half-moon shape, I think. So let's just do an arc. I'm just going to draw in my arc, hold down until it creates my arc. I just pull it to the size that I want. Now I'm going to create another arc within this. Let's just pull it through here. Now what I want to make sure is I want to edit the shape because I want to make sure that all of my ends are closed. If I have an open end, when I do my color drop, it's going to fill the entire canvas and there's nothing I can do about that. But as long as my ends are closed, I'm good to go. Now I can just grab my green and drop it into my shape; and now I've created a simple half-moon shape. Can you see how this could be used to create more complex pieces? Just to really block in the flat colors of your illustrations. I think this is going to be super helpful for any illustrator, whether you're a beginner or an experienced illustrator who's just not getting the quality of shape and line they want in their digital art yet. Head on over to the next video and we're going to talk about three ways to apply adjustments. 8. Applying Adjustments: You can use the adjustments in Procreate in a few different ways. You can actually apply these to the entire layer that you're working on. You can use the Selection tool to select an area that the adjustments will be applied to, or you can color in an area with a brush by choosing the Pencil option. Let's take a look at all three of those options real quick. We're going to start with this just flower and foliage illustration and take a look at all the different things that we can do. This first one is just going to be applying this to the entire layer. This illustration just has one layer, so we're keeping it simple. We're going to tap on the Adjustments menu, we're going to tap on Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, and then we'll tap on Layer. That's because we want this to apply to the entire layer and we don't want to specify an area. Tap on Layer. Now we're given our hue, saturation, and brightness sliders down at the bottom, and we can use those to change the color of our illustration if we want to. We can change the saturation on it, and we can also adjust the brightness if we want to. If we want to commit to this, we can go ahead and just tap anywhere else on our screen and we can commit to this, or we just tap on our window over here to the side, we have the option to commit to it, and we have the option to cancel, reset, undo, or apply. The most important thing here is actually the Preview button. If we tap on Preview and hold it down. This is what the piece originally looked like, and now this is what it looks like with our adjustments. I can tap Reset if I don't like that, and it'll take me back to what my original illustration looked like. Then I can drag my sliders around more. If I feel like I'm done with that, I can hit out of the Canvas, I'm ready to go. I'll just undo that and take it back to its original state. Then next, we're going to take a look at how we can just use the Selection tool to change our colors as well. I'm going to do the Selection tool. Normally, I would go for freehand, but in this case, I'm going to try automatic instead. Let's see what happens when we select a specific area of our illustration. Again, just like with our color drop, you can really move the selection threshold over. You can actually go through and pick some different colors if you want to, to add to your selection. You can really zoom in if you need to get super specific with the areas that you're selecting. It's just coloring in the areas that have been selected. Let's just select a little bit more of this color. Undo do that one. We're just going to grab just a little bit more of these flowers right here. We can really zoom in if you need to get to a specific area of your illustration. Let's see if we can get this little bit right here. No, that one's not going to work, but that's okay. Now we're going to go into our Adjustments menu. We're going to go Hue, Saturation, Brightness again, choose Layer again because we're just going to be applying it to this single layer, we're not going to be painting anything. Then, if I move my hue, saturation, and brightness sliders, you'll see that what's happening is it's only doing the adjustment on the areas of the illustration that I have selected. I can go ahead and do the same thing where I can tap my illustration. Now I can get a preview of what it was like before what it was like now. If I want to apply that, I can tap Apply, but in this case, I'm going to hit "Cancel" and we're just going to go back to our original illustration. The third way that you can apply adjustments is just by applying them with a brush. Let's go ahead and choose a brush real quick. I'm going to pick a brush from [inaudible] set. This is just going to be the bristle brush, and it's got a nice texture on it so I think that it's going to work really well to select my adjustment. Again, I'm just going to go to Adjustments, Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, and this time, I'm going to pick Pencil. Tap on Pencil. What's going to happen now is, let's just say that I want to focus on this leaf right here and make my brush a little bigger. You'll see that what's happening is as I'm coloring this area, my adjustment is being applied, my previous adjustment. I can go in and slide this over. Let's make this a little brighter. Then I can just keep coloring with this. If I want to change all the leaves, I can just use the same brush, and I can just go in and make my adjustments to just the areas that I want to change instead of changing the entire layer. Again, I just tap to get my menu, so I can get my preview. I can undo step-by-step if I need to, or you can just tap to reset the entire image and it's going to go all the way back to the beginning. Let's head over to the next video and we're going to talk about one more adjustment layer. We're going to talk about gradient maps. 9. Using Gradient Maps: Gradient maps are an easy way to adjust your colors without fiddling with every single layer. A gradient map adjustment basically applies a gradient over your existing values. That means that it'll change the entire illustration at once, which is going to save you a ton of time. Just like with your other adjustments, you can either apply this to your entire layer or you can use the pencil and pick a brush and decide where you're going to add it. For this example, we're just going to stick with the layer option. Again, we're just going to be working with this floral illustration. You'll see right away you've got some options down here at the bottom that are prebuilt from Procreate. You can just scroll through these options to see what they look like. You might notice that even though this original illustration was monochromatic, this gradient map option allows you to add some more color, so you've got a lot more variation of color than you would get if you were just doing a hue saturation brightness adjustment. You can also add in your own gradient. You can tap on the plus icon and you're going to be given a gradient map. You can add extra nodes through here if you want to or you can tap on those to just delete them, if you need to get rid of them, just do little tap and hold. Then you can also tap on the individual nodes and you can pick a color. We'll say we want to go with like a red here. Then on this end, let's just pick purple, maybe. That's pretty tacky, but let's go for it. You can actually just slide around here to get your various colors. Let's go with a little bit of a yellow color. Get a little bit of a fall vibe here. Now I can see what this gradient map looks like and it gets added in to my library from Procreate. I can really play around with it until I find something that works for my illustration. When you want to get rid of that, if you want to get rid of any gradients that you created, you just hold down on it, tap on delete, and it'll remove any gradients that you have added that you don't want any longer and you're pretty much done. Then of course, just like your other adjustments, you've got your sub-menu here. You can do your preview, you can look at what you are previous image looked like and then see what it looks like with your gradient map, and then you are ready to go. Super easy, fun way to adjust your illustrations. Head on over to the next video, and next up we are going to talk about clipping masks. 10. Using Clipping Masks: Clipping masks are non-destructive and that's why they are my favorite way to add extra texture and details. I can experiment with a bunch of different options without worrying that I've ruined my artwork. Let's again use this floral piece and let's say that you want to add some contrast in color texture to this. The main piece is blue, let's go ahead and just pick orange. I've still got a gouache brush selected, so let's just stick with that. I'm going make a new layer above my existing floral layer. Tap on that create a clipping mask, and now anything that I add to this flower and foliage layer is just going to be on that layer, it's not going to show on the white at all. Let's take a quick look at that. Let's say I just want to add a little bit of variation to these flowers. I'm just going to go in and just add that and really roughly. This is just another way that you can make adjustments to your illustration. But this is really great because it's non-destructive, so you don't have to worry that you are making the changes that are going to irreparably damage your artwork. That looks pretty simple now. Let's take a look at what it looks like if we turn the clipping mask off because that's really going to help you understand what's going on here. If I tap on my layer again, tap on clipping mask to turn it off. Now you'll see that it's just all over the place that's gone outside of the lines, and it's quite a mess. If I go back into my layers, tap it. Add my Clipping Mask back, you'll see that it's just adding the color to the specific area that was originally underneath it. So it's just adding the color to this watercolor illustration part right here. The fun thing about a clipping mask is that you can make adjustments to it once you've drawn something. If I want to, I can grab the Move Tool, and I can move this around if I need to. I can erase it and do whatever I want to. I can also make my adjustments on it. So if I go to my Adjustments layer if I don't like this color that I've selected, I can just use my Hue saturation and brightness slider on it, and I can adjust it to a color that does work for me. I think you can see how this is going to be a really powerful way that you can try things out on your illustrations. I love using a clipping mask for adding textures, or adding details, or little patterns, and anything that I want to try out but don't necessarily want to commit to on my a painting, I will use a clipping mask for. I hope you can see that these are super powerful, and I hope that you'll be able to add them into your [inaudible] as well. Head on over to the next video, and let's talk about a fun trick to check your values in Procreate. 11. Checking Your Values: If your illustration is looking muddy or you're feeling like something is just a little off, it's probably that your values are too close to one another. Here is a quick way to check it out and make some adjustments. The first thing you want to do is just make a brand new layer. You want to grab black as your color and just drag that onto your new layer. Go back to your layer, tap on your Blending Modes, and you're actually going to change this one to saturation. That's going to convert everything to grayscale. Now that it's converted to grayscale, I can easily see what my values are and if there are any areas of my illustration where the values are too close and things may not be reading as clearly as I would like them to. In this bird illustration, I think that you can see pretty easily that the top of the head really blends in with the background right here. Then the same thing with this little bird down here. The top of the head is really blending with the background. I just don't think that that is going to let this illustration speak as loudly as it would. Let's go into our hue, saturation, brightness. Just going to select the pencil brush, and I've got my bristle brush selected. I'm just going to start coloring in the top of this bird's head right here. I know it's a wacky color right now, but we're going to fix it in just a second. This is just so we can see where our problem is. I can use my hue saturation and brightness slider to just make some adjustments here just so we can make sure that that stands out a little bit more. I think that looks pretty good. Let's go back and check our values again. I've still got my saturation layer here. I'm going to turn that back on. You'll see now, there's a much better variation in color between the top of this bird's head and the background color. Honestly, I could probably push it a little bit further. There's a couple other spots where the values are a tiny bit close that I could edit if I wanted to, but we're going to leave it alone for now because I think that this will work. That is just a really quick way to check your illustrations. Like I said, if anything looks muddy or it just isn't reading right, very often it's that you've got values that are very close to one another, that are sitting right next to each other. It's just making your illustration not as visually clear as it could be. That's it for our 10 and quick Procreate tips, but head on over to the next video, and I'm actually going to show you a bonus quick tip. 12. Bonus: Quick Menu: Your bonus quick tip for Procreate is setting up quick menus, which is going to give you quick access to everything that you use often. To set up your quick menu, the first thing you need to do is figure out what the gesture is going to be for that. I'm going to gesture controls, go down to quick menu. These are all of the options that you have to access your quick menu. I've just got mine set to a forefinger tap. You can set it to any of these that you want to. I'm going to go ahead and tap on Done, and go back to our canvas. Now, when I tap with four fingers, it brings up my quick menu. I've got six different options that I can set now. If I want to adjust these, I can just hold down on it. It's going to pop up a little sub menu that says Set action. I can choose whatever action I want it to be. Let's say I want to make this one copy. Then let's go into this one and let's make this one paste super easy. I've got all these set up now so I can just tap out when I'm done and when I want that menu to come back up, I'll do my forefinger tap. Well, it helps if I actually tap with all four fingers to my forefinger tap. Now I've got quick access to anything that I use on a regular basis. This is going to be something that is really going to help you a lot. Now you can also have multiple quick menus. If you need to have more than six shortcuts setup, you can set up a new quick menu and have another six shortcuts setup there. I hope that's really helpful and this is going to be your last quick tip for this class. Head on over to the next video and let's talk about your class project. 13. Your Project + Next Steps: Your project for this class is pretty simple. Create a piece of art using one or more of the tips and tricks you learned today. Share that piece in the projects and resources section. Be sure to leave a note about which quick tips you used in your creation. If you enjoyed this class, and want more digital art tutorials, plus info on building an illustration career, subscribe to my newsletter, The Illustrator's Greenhouse. Thanks for watching.