3D Lettering in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Lisa Long, a teacher for ten years, and I own my own business painting portraits and doing some hand lettering. In this premium Skillshare class, you will learn how to create 3D letters on your iPad Pro, using your Apple Pencil on the app Procreate. You should take this class if you're beginning on the iPad or if you've been on the iPad for a while and you need to learn some new techniques or something that you haven't actually tried before, this would be a great class for you to take. I'm really excited to share this with you so that you guys can start creating some awesome 3D letters. I will take you step-by-step through the process. It'll be super easy. Join me in making these awesome 3D letters. I'll see you in the project section. I will shower you with praises, praises. Yes, lots of praises. I can't wait to see what you guys can do. Let's get started. 2. Lettering Your Word: Welcome to the first video. I'm going to show you how to make your letters look three-dimensional and pop off the page. Let me take you through the steps. First step, right now, would be getting your word written. We'll go to our "Gallery." I like to use a Square for this because I use my images directly to Instagram. Starting off with a square makes everything a lot easier, so I don't have to crop and then I know how to fit it in. You can always make the lettering bigger or smaller. First item we need to get taken care of is writing our word. I have this cool brush pen that I downloaded from ipadlettering.com. Karen, she has some really awesome stuff. I really like this Perfect Drills Brush to create calligraphy with. I also have this Fine Point Marker that is a nice hard line that I can make bigger or smaller, and I like to use that for monoline stuff. What I like to do is sometimes just fool around with the monoline first, and I write out my word. Let's write. Let's start with black. It looks terrible because I don't have the streamlining on. If you want to have it more streamlined and not so shaky, turn the streamlining way up. Let's delete that and start over. I am not really worried where I placed it because I can select and resize and move it around if I need to. What I do after starting with a monoline is then I go in and turn the "Opacity" down and change my pen, changing it to this "Perfect Drills Brush." I'm going to go right in on top of this with a new layer. I like it all the way up, so I can make nice thick lines. It's very pressure sensitive, so when you press hard, it makes those thick lines. I'm going to write my word and let's redo that. I'm going to move this over. There's my word, united. I'm going to shrink it down a little bit. 3. Creating the 3D Letters: That looks good. We got some thick lines and some thin lines, and let's show you how to drag this out and make it 3D. So the first step I need to do for that is duplicate this layer just by swiping to the left and pushing "Duplicate". On the bottom layer, I'm going to make these opposite colors so they can stand out from each other. So I'm going to choose like green, maybe a dark green, and then I'm going to go in here, and this is a cool trick. You just use two fingers to swipe to the right and then you can tap "Fill", and it just fills in the word or whatever you've written on that, and leaves the background transparent. Then I can come in with this one. Let's do like a red. It's opposite colors, and I got to swipe, and then fill. If I don't swipe and I try to fill, it'll just fill the whole thing. So you're going to swipe and then tap, and then fill. I also want to create a group with this, keep this all in a group so I can move them all around at the same time. I want to come in here and I'm going to use the bottom layer, going to press the" Select" arrow, and then what I can do with my finger or my Apple Pencil is just tap where I want this to move, and it will move very slightly. If I wanted to move straight down, I can tap here. If I tap a few in a row. Notice how it moves and it stays straight. If I press down and try to move it around, it's hard to get it lined up. Let's start back at the beginning by pressing the X and I'm just going to tap at the diagonal. I'm going to tap here. Since we have a very thin line, I don't want to create too many jagged edges. I'm just going to tap two times. Let's go back here to my layers and then I'm going to duplicate this, and on the new layer I'm going to press the "Select" button, and then tap two more times. "Duplicate", "Select", tap. "Duplicate", "Select", tap. When I go in, it's going to be a little bit rough on the thin edges, but it's not super noticeable when you're zoomed out. I'm going to just check some of these, looks good. Then what I want to do is merge all these together and I can do that two ways. I can tap and press "Merge Down" four times, or I can use my fingers, and just squeeze them all together. Sometimes I have trouble getting them to come together and if that's not working, you can just create more layers, and it's easier to squeeze. Now that we have this layer, is little bit thicker, we can go ahead and duplicate this one, and then when we select it, we can tap four times or eight times. Just go in and check and make sure your edges are smooth. I'm going to do this a couple times. "Duplicate" tap, "Duplicate" tap. Then I can merge all those together and I have this nice shadow forming. Now, I want to make this a little bit closer to this color of united. I'm going to hold down my button here and then select to color, and I can go in here and choose a darker tone, to that orange and "Fill". I can also play with the hue and saturation here. 4. Extending and Highlighting: I want to add some highlights to my shadow. I'm going to do that first before I make it any thicker than it already is. I really want to cut down on my time spent shading. I'm just going to shade it while it's thin. I'm going to take this and add just a little bit lighter tone to the shading. I'm going to do that by creating a new layer above this. On this layer, I'm going to press on my layer and push "Select". That will, let me work in all the areas here that's not shaded with the moving lines. I'm going to my new layer and I'm going to get my airbrush, soft brush to add some shading, actually some highlights. I'm going to zoom way in. Then I'm just going to start coloring. I have my opacity down pretty low and my size is down pretty low, so I don't overlap too many areas. Then I'm just going to start pressing and shading right here at the bottom to give it a little highlight. It doesn't matter if it's perfectly blended because I'll show you how to do that real quick. I'm just going to go round and shade. It's a tedious process. I'll probably speed the rest of this up. Okay, now that we've gotten all the highlights done, I'm going to go in and go up here to this magic wand and go to the Gaussian Blur. Then I'm just going to drag to the right. I'm going trying to blur this into, that just makes it look nice and blended. Yes, blending is fun. I don't want to blend too much because I might lose my hard lines there. I want to back off to instead. Okay, I like that. You can click on the "Select" to deselect. I'm going to go into my layers. As you can see this layer here now, we can go merge that down or we can wait. Sometimes it's good to wait in case you need to make corrections. Now I'm going to make this, actually no, I'm going to merge it down. Now that I have all the shading, the highlights, I'm going to come in and duplicate that layer. Then the top layer I'm going to take and tap 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 times. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate it again and to have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8 times. If you move it too much though, you'll start to see a line form. I just want to tap it a few times. 5. Highlights and Shadow: Right now that I have duplicated that layer a few times, I am going to merge them together and do a little Gaussian Blur to get rid of any harsh edges that may have formed. That's optional. You can do the highlights after too. If I wanted to, I can go in here and Select and go to my new layer. With my soft brush, I can come in and add a little bit more highlighting. If I need to fix any of that that I just did. Highlights again. Merge Down. You have this nice Gaussian Blur. Lovely, got this nice little highlight going through here. I did duplicate this layer. This is like a fail-safe in case I mess anything up here. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer and go to the bottom one, get my gray, go ahead and Fill it with gray. Go to my Select tool and tap until I'm happy with it. Sometimes I like to move it a little to the side. Make sure that's lined up everywhere. I think I might want to tap it just a little bit down. 6. Top Highlights: So far so good, it's looking great. Now, what we need to do is add some highlights to the top to make it really pop. I'm going go up to my united layer here and I'm going go ahead and just create a new layer right on top of that. Go to my pen tool, go to inking. I like to use this Gracie pen that I have. I go into the whites. This, you don't really have to be too precise with, just gets some lines going. Since the shadows are on the right side, I'm going to choose the left side to draw in these little highlights. You don't have to be perfect. Maybe like one down here, mine is all too thin to get one on there. Then all I'm going to do is add a Gaussian Blur. I'm going to blur this one pretty good. About 18.4 percent. That looks good. I'm going to go ahead and do another new layer and do some more dots there, just start adding these. Look a little bit more three-dimensional with these. Go to the T. Similar little highlights and one down here. Then and I'm going to Gaussian blur that one just a tiny bit. Just like five percent, and maybe 10 percent. That looks great. Yeah, think it looks so shiny. So I can go ahead and merge that one down. And I'm going to keep that separate for now and go in and create a new layer here. Select this layer and push, "Select", go into my new layer. With my airbrushing pen, I'm going to choose complementary dark color to that one. So let's choose this color and find darker version. Then do some shading. So have my opacity down to about 50 percent and my brush size is about 1.5-2 percent, somewhere in there. Then there's going kind of press along the edge here to create some shading. Not too hard, just shaded in a little bit. Then if you want to make it look like this is going under here, just shade right like that, we are going to come and erase that. So add some shading around. Actually don't do that yet. Go ahead and do this one first and then this one. Just the very subtle shade is all it takes honestly. This one I want to shade there and on the T right there like It's going behind it. Then I can come in with my eraser. I like to choose something that's going to give me a nice clean line. But I'm going to put the streamline down for that. I'm in this layer and just going to erase where it overlaps. That's why I didn't shade this side yet. Now if I erase too far in, it's a little far I can just backspace, undo with two taps. No, not two taps, undo with tap of two fingers. It's a little tedious process. So I might speed this up too. Now that I have all the edges done, I'm going to go in with my soft brush tool. So with my dark color and then finish off shading around the edges. They're starting to look pretty three-dimensional. I'm not happy with the color, so I'm going to come in. Let me merge these down with that layer there and I can come in and change these colors. You may delete that one. So we have these three layers to work with. We have the top one, we have the width of our lettering and then the shadow in the background. So there's few more options after this. 7. Color and Shadow: Now, I'm going to play around with the color. I have my lettering layer selected with all the shading. I can go into hue, saturation, and brightness and play around with how bright I want it. I want it a little brighter. How's saturated? I could even change the color right here. How cool is that? Let's say I want to unite it. What can we do? Like red, white, and blue. Like the United States? That's too cheesy. I don't know, I like turquoise. That looks cool. Then I can make it less saturated or go in a little brighter. Let's try to change this color. Let's see what we can do. That looks nice. Maybe a little less saturated. Maybe over here. Make it look more three-dimensional that way. Like they're cohesive. You could stop here and post your work. It's beautiful. It's done. There's one more step I'd like to show you. Now, I'm going to swipe with two fingers here, and I'm going to duplicate this layer. I'm going to actually swipe this one again, turn this layer black. I'm going to fill that one in black. I'm going to move this black layer up right underneath my word. Turn off the transparent background and Gaussian Blur it just a tiny bit. It's fuzzy around the edges. I'm going to move it just a little bit more underneath my word. Yeah. Then this one, I'm going to also give it some Gaussian Blur. In fact, I want to move this one down just a little bit, because I don't like what it's doing over the n. Here we go. Look at that. Makes it look like it's floating above the paper. More Gaussian Blur on this one. Yeah. I'm going to change the opacity on the black layer, just a tiny bit, so it's not so dark and overbearing. Here we go. Now, that makes that 3D effect really happen. Awesome. I really enjoyed showing you how I make my 3D letters. I hope you learned a lot and got something out of it. I can't wait to see where you take this and what you guys do with it. I cannot wait to see what you guys make in the project section. I'm sure you'll blow me away. 8. Creating a Background: Now if you want to change your background, here is what you should do. I'm going to go in and create a new layer actually, and put it at the bottom. It doesn't have to be in the group. We can close that. This is going to be my background and I can fill with whatever color I want. Let's see, maybe something a little similar. Of course, I can always change it. Now, when you do that, the shadow starts looking weird. You have to adjust the color of the shadow to match the background color. What I'm going to do is right swipe with two fingers, both of those. I'm going to go ahead and fill that in. It's going to disappear, but I'm going to create a darker tone for that. How cool is that? Now I've adjusted and it matches the background color. It's just a darker version like it's the shadow right on the background. It's so cool. Now you can also play around with your background. Sometimes I like to go in. I'm going to create a new layer, use my Soft Brush, and my Airbrushing. I'm going to make this all darker, make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to come around and play with some shading here around the edges. I can zoom out a little bit so I can see the edges. Add some color. My Opacity is still down to 50 percent so I can still layer. Then I'm going to do a Gaussian Blur to blend that. Actually, I'm going to merge it down and then Gaussian Blur it. Such blends it altogether. Add some Noise, which gives it this cool effect. I'm going to click on my Wand, click on "Noise", and then see what happens. When I add some noise, it makes the background look a little rough. That gives it some more dimension. It's cool. Another thing you can do for the background, you have these cool texture brushes. You can come in and use a wood grain. Turn that layer off. I'm going to use the same color because I have that shadow. Then add this wood grain. You don't want to pick your pencil up because it'll move the wood grain. Just keep your pencil down and just shade that in. It has a nice little wood grain to your background, so it looks like it's on a fence or something. If you want to make it bigger, you can always expand it. Just by hitting the Select tool and pinching out. I'm going to add some shading to that and go in and choose my "Airbrushing", "Soft Brush". Maybe I'll add some Noise to that. Maybe not the arch. If I want to, I can go In with a darker color and draw that. That Wood texture with a black. We get it really stand out. Cool. See how it doubles it if I pick up my pencil. I don't want to do that. Then my shadow here probably needs to be a little bit darker. There's some cool tips and tricks for you to make your own three-dimensional lettering. Let me know if you've liked this and if you'd like to see more. I really would like to make some more for you and I need some ideas of what you guys want to see. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you in the project section.