Illustrate Your Personal Food Pyramid in Procreate: Introduction to Editorial Illustration

1. Intro Trailer: Welcome to illustrate your personal food pyramid and procreate. My name is Ray and I am a business owner and an artist. Making art as a way of getting better acquainted with yourself. If you are what you eat, then when we draw those foods, they become a self portrait. I haven't sung my merchandize directly to brick-and-mortar businesses over the last five years. And one of the keys to my success has been continuing to challenge myself, continuing to try new things and learn new things online and classes like Skillshare. Then incorporating those new things I've learned into my designs. In this class, we're going to illustrate our own personal food pyramids with the foods we actually love. This class is great for familiarizing yourself with editorial illustration. You're going to learn how to source original inspiration. Understand when and how to incorporate hand lettering into your designed to strengthen your concepts and make it your own. In the end, we're going to have drawn all of these different food pyramids that are as diverse as our appetites that reflect the different styles that we bring to the table and are also reflective of our individual tastes. This class is open to all levels and everyone who wants to explore editorial illustration and draw some of their favorite foods. All you need is a pen and paper at minimum. But you're welcome to work in whatever medium suits you. I myself, I'm gonna be working on my iPad and the program procreate with my Apple Pencil. But that's not necessary to participate in this class at all. Alright, so if you're ready to get started, go over to the next module. I'll see you there. 2. Project Overview: You might have already guessed it, but today's class project is to illustrate your own personal food pyramid. The food pyramid was designed in the 1970s in Sweden by a woman named Anna Brett and Seder, Home Economics Educator and a cookbook author. It was then adopted by the US Department of Agriculture later on to represent the ideal diet. However, what's an ideal diet varies both culturally, individually and it changes over time. The reason that I chose this project is because the food pyramid lends itself to editorial illustration. Because editorial illustration is illustration that helps convey concept, message or idea in a way that words that are written cannot do alone. That's why you see it in magazines, newspapers, and on book covers. And it usually accompanies texts or incorporates hand lettering into design. Before we dive in, we're going to get loose by sketching our next grocery list. So this is a really nice way of bringing art and artistic practice into the mundane. At this point, I want you to make sure that you can access the downloads. So you're gonna go to the browser version of Skillshare and under resources, the downloads are available there. I have both of the pyramid template for you to use, as well as individual stamp brushes that I made called food stamps. And those are for you to use in any capacity that you like. I made them specifically for this class for you to enjoy. Alright, well, I'm feeling ready to get inspired. So I'll see you in the next module. 3. Sourcing Inspiration: In this module, we're going to talk about two ways that you can source inspiration. The first is on the web, on sites like Pinterest and Instagram. I was able to build this Pinterest board for class. And you can access the link in the resources tab if you want to check it out. Pinterest is a great way to see a variety of art and multiple styles and get ideas for inspiration. It is inspiring and it's a great reminder that there's a variety of ways to get your ideas out there. A quick reminder, never copy and other artists work without express permission and citing credit. The second way I recommend is to take yourself out a gift you can give yourself as an artist and a person is to treat life with curiosity. Imagine you're on a scavenger hunt and you're going throughout the every day in your mission is to experience life, take a walk, go somewhere. Even your next trip to the grocery store can be a source of inspiration. What color combinations, texts, lettering, layouts, and labels stand out to you? What are you drawn to when you are drawn to those things? Why is that? When I take photos, I take a photo of something, even if I only plan on using one aspect of it. That way, I'm able to have original source images for my art work. Okay, so, so far we've talked about two ways of sourcing inspiration. One being online through social media on Pinterest and Instagram and other things on the web. And then the other one's living life, paying attention, looking around, taking your own source images. I do want to talk about a third, and that is by taking classes and continuing to challenge yourself and following prompts. I love the challenges on Instagram where it says 30 days of drawing or faces Friday or whatever they are. And you engage in these challenges and you're able to draw things you might not normally and just get drawing in general. So in this next module, we're going to illustrate our own grocery list. And that prompt is hopefully going to get you drawing, incorporating hand lettering. And also maybe just doing something you haven't before. Alright, so in the next module we're going to dive right into it. But I also want to mention some of the things are gonna be procreate specific. If you're working in another medium, just go ahead, Carry on illustrating. Alright, I'll see you there. 4. Grocery List Mini Project: Okay, so we're gonna start with the plus button and go to paper size of 11 by 8.5 ". I think that's a really good page to start on for reference because a lot of us can visualize what an eight-and-a-half by 11 inch paper, it looks like that's about 300 DPI. So if I want to go back and change it, go to crop and re-size, I click their settings and it's at the 11 inch and eight-and-a-half, and I can change the DPI right there as well. Alright, so for today we're gonna get started on our shopping list. And I'm going to go ahead and get started right here in the brush library. I'm gonna go with calligraphy and a monoline brush. I'm gonna go ahead and use this pen and I get, get started on my shopping list. Alright, so now that we have our shopping list, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to illustrate these elements. I'm going to start by illustrating the chicken. So I'm gonna go ahead and zoom. And this is how I zoom. I take my two fingers, I squeeze in and out. Now helped me zoom in and out. Alright, so I'm illustrating my chicken, doing a nice little plastic bag around it. I'm going to do two little chicken breasts, kinda like little wobbly triangles. Maybe a few little marks there. So it looks like there's some cellophane wrap or something on top of it. Alright, zooming back out. Alright, so I like my little chicken. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and illustrate maybe some sitar ******. So when I want to undo something, I can use two fingers to undo and three fingers to redo. All right, so I'm back there, I'm drawing my lid, my little container. It looks a little bit like a pill bottle. Maybe I'll draw a little ******. Still kinda looks like pills. That's okay, I'm fine with that. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and draw lemon over here. And lemons, they're kinda like wobbly circle is also not really sure how I like that, but it's more of an oval and then you can add two little points onto it. There you go. Then I can use the happy little eraser tool. And I can just erase the edges there. So I have my oval and then those two little humps on both ends that kinda make it look a little more like a lemon. Then I can use the brush size editing bar over here on the left. And that helps me edit the brush sizes. We can do that for both eraser and brush size tools to edit your shapes. Add some freckles. My Greek yogurt. This is from a Mediterranean dish that I'm having tonight. And I can edit that to make a perfect ellipse. I can kinda move things around if I want to. Alright, so I have it zoomed in here and go work on this lid. And my apple nib kind of came off my pen there. Sometimes that happens, I'll notice I lose traction. Easy fix you just tied on all tighter. Alright, so I'm speeding up through this process here. Again, I'm using the Edit Shape tool to make that perfect ellipse for my little egg. And then I'm actually going to introduce a new tool or the Lasso tool. Circle around there, three fingers down, Drag, duplicate. Now I have two perfect eggs. Alright, so I can use that Lasso tool again. Circle that leg three fingers down and go to Duplicate. Alright, so I've done that process again and said I'm having another edit and my third egg. Alright, well, if I want to keep duplicating, I can. However, I think I want to zoom in and maybe just draw my own imperfect egg. Not all eggs have to be perfect. I'm going go ahead and draw the six of those. Then I got draw a row behind them here in a moment there could be the eggs and the egg carton. So just drawing this little wavy line underneath here for my egg carton. I want to erase over here. First I'm gonna go to Layers, make sure I'm on the same layer, consolidate layers. Now I can go ahead and make sure again, I'm on the same layer. They're all consolidated. I'm gonna do a race the bottom of the egg because I don't think they really show through in the carton. Use that last layer and I'm gonna move it down just a little bit. So that's sitting a little lower and that carton. Alright, so I'm speeding ahead here. You can see I'm drawing on my egg carton. I like it moving onto Hamas. And here when I'm drawing my, cuz, cuz I'm drawing just like a little box, simple shape drawing window so that you can kinda look out at the cuz, cuz, cuz, cuz can look at it, you using the Lasso tool to kinda make it bigger. Alright? And then cucumber, Cucumber can be kinda hard to tell what it is. So sometimes you do a little cross-section there and maybe like little cucumber rounds, they're like, I'm a cucumber. And one more obvious now, then for Adele, I can put it in an ice pack. It's unfortunately in plastic packaging as well, sorry, environment But that's just a lot of the stuff we have in the store. I mean, it's great when you can grow your own supplies. Alright, and I go draw Bananas. Bananas are a huge staple for me, not for dinner, but I just always have them. We're going to draw a bunch of bananas and bagels is definitely like a guilty pleasure kind of thing. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw my bagel. It looks like a flying saucer and that's okay. Alright, so I have my grocery list here, and now we're gonna go ahead and make it a little nicer. All right, so I can click on the layers panel. Currently I have two layers. There's this one which has food, and this one which has the written text. Alright, so I can go ahead and I can change the opacity on these, or it can even turn them off completely. They're still there. Alright, So right now and go work on the written text. So I got the other one out of the way just so it's not distracting me. And I'm gonna go ahead and make some guidelines for myself. I'm tapping and holding down on the screen. Yep. So when I tapped down it makes a straight line all the way across. Alright, so on this new layer and just swipe left duplicate and clicking right there on the duplicate. Now I have an exact replica and drag it down. And then I'm going to go ahead and do that quite a few more times. Another guideline. So everything's on the same vertical and horizontal plane. Alright, and then I can go ahead and click there. And Alpha Lock, choose a color. And I'm gonna go ahead and choose another color, just something that's not the same color as black. So maybe blue, then I get a lower opacity down. So you can kind of vaguely see that guideline there and that's going to help keep my writing straight. So clicking on layers. And I can use the layers panel to switch between layers. I'm gonna circle this with my Lasso Tool, three fingers down, and click, Cut and Paste. That puts it on a new layer here for me. So you can see that can turn it on and off. On this layer, I have all of my list of written things and I can use the lasso tool if I want. So click on that Lassa tool. I circled lemon and I can move that word around however I like. Alright. And so I can change the opacity down lower. That's to increase the transparency here again. Alright? And I'm just gonna kinda play around with this a little bit. I'm really liking how that's looking. I'm going to go ahead and now work on this grocery list. Alright, though, actual word grocery list. So we're gonna go into add texts. Alright? And I'm just going to go ahead and type in the word grocery list. I'm gonna go ahead to the font library and dislikes just a random font. They go back up to layers. Good, click on opacity and I'm going to lower that down. So I have that there. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to click on my brush and maybe going into the painting library, paint. Let's go painting. And she's the flat brush. I'm using this as a guideline. I'm zooming in nugget kinda speed through this really quickly. I'm not, I'm not following these letters shapes exactly. I'm just using them as a guideline. I want you to compare what we have written here from the text we added from the texts library to what we've created here. So I'm going to drag that down and you'll see it looks quite different. I would say that we use as a guideline, but not really the inspiration for this piece. Alright, so now we have a nice grocery list here. I'm going to clean up my layers over here. And just layers, I'm not using maybe those guidelines, I don't need them anymore. Alright, so I should have these three layers here, my list, my title, my illustrations. I'm going to go ahead and turn down the opacity on my sketch layer of food items. And I'm gonna go ahead and take off and start sketching. I'm just tracing over what I already have. I'm finishing it up, making it a little nicer, a little smoother. I wanted to mention color. So I created a whole another layer here with just a little check boxes. And we're just going to drag and drop color in right-hand corner. That's color. We have a few options for looking at color here, for selecting color. I really encourage you guys to explore these. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and I'm going to make sure my correct layer is selected. So clicking on and off, Yep, that's right layer dragging and dropping color into those boxes. Now, see what happens when there's a little space there. Right from here, you can't tell, but we know there's a spot missing. Alright, when I drag that color and boom, it goes everywhere. Now undo. And we're gonna zoom back in and we're going to undo that again. So now it's a nice closed box. And when I drag that in, it's going to fill that box again. Alright. So here we have our grocery list. We've used tips and tricks that are used in Procreate. We've illustrated things in a way that might be personal to us. I, for example, put a little heart on kombucha because I love kombucha. We've incorporated hand lettering. And with all this, I feel ready to move on to our main project. 5. Illustrate Your Pyramid: I have my eight-and-a-half inch by 11 inch canvas. Go to brush, that's food pyramid. And I'm gonna go ahead and pop that down right there. Alright, then I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to use the selection tool right there. And I'm gonna go ahead and we have Freeform, Uniform, Distort and warp. We're going to use free form. You can see how that moves more freely. It's not fixed. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that. Now. What uniform? I can move things in a proportional manner. You can see that middle line that's keeping it centered there on the page. I added another layer. Now I'm gonna go ahead and I get choose a brush. I'm going to use this pencil, but you can use whatever you want you want. I'm holding down to draw the lines straight across. And then in my own handwriting, I'm writing my food pyramid. Then with the selection tool, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab that and move that to center. There we go. Now I'm adding another layer. And I'm gonna go ahead and start dropping down some of my stamp brushes. You don't have to use these, but I made them. I like them. I'm going to use them. So you don't have to keep them all on the same layer. You can put them on different layers so you can kinda move and edit them separately. The workaround would be using the Lasso tool. That way you can keep them on the same layer. I'm using the Lasso tool. You are able to select what you want and move it around, scale it how you want, rotate it, all that. So right here, I'm using the pyramid kind of as a skeleton and just fill it in with shapes, a lot of them and go use for my food stamps. I'm also going to draw some new icons and motifs. Drop them down in there to fill in this space. Take some liberties to explore whatever style you want and put whatever foods you want. This is your food pyramid, make it your own. One cool tool here is you can just flip horizontal, flip vertical if you want to. I'm just gonna drag it down here, shrink at ease a little green bar rotate to the right, and that helps me pivot things. I have to take a moment to mention color. So I'm dragging and dropping color somewhat haphazardly. A lot of artists like to work from a predesignated color palette. I like to make my color palettes on the go. And right now I'm just dragging and dropping and seeing what I like and what I don't like. And I am going to reuse colors. So you're gonna see the same color as being repeated. I feel compelled to mention one of my favorite tools. So if I open the Layers panel and I click on what layer I want. And now another menu shows up and it has Alpha Lock. I select Alpha Lock. Now you can see this whole thing behind here is not selected. It's only the items that exist right now are selected. And if I draw, it's only going to draw on that layer. So pretty neat and you can probably imagine some of the benefits to this. I'm going to go ahead and undo that because I don't really want that. But imagine I want to do some shading so I can go ahead and maybe choose, like the airbrushing brush and size things up a little bit and maybe choose a slightly darker color than what already have. And I can create some shading. Another cool thing I can do with alpha lock is I go back over here, fill layer, and it fills it with the act of color. Now, I don't really like that, even though it looks pretty cool, I'm gonna go ahead and undo that. There are instances where I might not want alpha lock active. For example, if I zoom in here, I don't have those eggs filled in. So if I try to draw, it's not going to happen. If I select like maybe like a nice, Let's see, I'm going to bring it in to a nice soft pink. Nope, can't draw on there because there's nothing there. It's a clear layer. I mean, it's the same color as the background, so maybe you can't see that, but we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna go alpha lock off. And now I can drag and drop color there. If when you drop color you notice it just happens to go everywhere. Look at your color threshold bar at the top, and you can slide it left to right to fill less or more. If you're more organized, the mean, you do want a color palette go up here and you can click the little plus sign. Create new palette. I already did that and I titled it food pyramid, that has the colors represented over here. Now if I want to add, I can use the little color picker tool. Drag over a color and you're going to see that there. It goes to the right corner. And I drop it down into that color palette. So I'm gonna do the same thing again with the darker blue. So grabbing that blue, dropping it in there. Now I have those colors saved for future use. If I forget, I can always just go to the color picker tool. I'm going to change my focus to my food pyramid, the text. So I'm going to layer is adding another layer going, choosing a flat brush. I'm zooming in. And now I'm going to just use my existing texts that I wrote with my handwriting as a skeleton and I get trace over that. But just going to make the letter forms just a little, little nicer. And I'm going to just keep going and it doesn't have to be perfect. And then changing the opacity back lower. And then I'm going to trace these letter forms once more. I just have another layer that I can work off of. And that's the really cool thing about Procreate. So now, based off my own handwriting, I'm creating this text That is fairly unique and I think pretty fun and playful as well. I'm just finishing out my letters by smoothing them out and filling them in, which gives them a nice textured feel. I'm liking that title. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go see what I got here. So I have three layers right now. You can toggle on and off alpha lock. And I'm going to go ahead and choose a color, maybe pink. Me go back to the Alpha Lock and go fill layer. So it fills that color on the outline. Turning Alpha Lock off. Now I'm dragging, boom, that color drops in there. It's a little distracting that bold. I'm gonna go back to layers. I go lower the opacity so it's a little less distracting. So I changed my mind on the color. No big deal. I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go here and I'm Google alpha lock fill layer and I'm going to do purple instead. I'm feeling like a purple girl today. So that's what I'm doing. Up here. I did a drop shadow. So I'm just good. It's just two layers staggered but same thing. So alpha lock fill layer and I'm filling out that purple. I like that a lot better. I'm feeling ready to add some of my own handwriting. So I'm using the Narendra pencil and I'm gonna go ahead and select that. Now, zoom in and I'm going to start writing. Okay, I'm on that alpha locked layer. Let me add a layer. Okay, So on a new layer, writing chips and salsa, occasional glass of wine, heirloom tomatoes. I like how it looks. Next I'm gonna go up here to adjustments, magic wand. And it is magic. So you have hue, saturation, brightness, color, balanced curves and gradient map all here. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm actually just going to go down to Gradient Map. That's what we're going to use right now. So I'm going to click there. And now it gives me the gradient library. And I'm going to move that. Alright, so you can kinda see a bunch of different options and it shows you immediate other color palettes. And then you can change the strength of those color gradient maps at the very top of the page and slide that over. And then kind of like a filter. You can choose how prevalent it is in that map. Alright, I'm really liking how that's coloring. It looks good. I'm going to add a little bit more texts into things. So I'm gonna create a grid for myself, change the opacity. And I'm going to quote myself so that if we are what we eat and when we draw those things, they become a self portrait. I kind of self portrait. So I can quote myself because we all can feel free to call yourself anytime. I'm now cleaning up layers a little bit and just a little editing. And I'm liking how that's looking. Now that I'm happy with what I have going on for my food pyramid. I think last step would be to go toolbar and share image as JPEG. And it's exporting. Now I get to choose where I send it, but I'm just gonna go ahead and go Save Image. And that is going to send it to my photo gallery. If I exit out of the program, I can go ahead and click on my gallery. It appears right there. And boom, there is my JPEG, That's my image. Go ahead and upload your JPEG to the project gallery so we can check them out. Alright, well in the next module, we'll do a quick recap. I'll see you there. 6. Conclusion: At this point, we have a pretty good idea of what is editorial illustration. And now that you know what it is, you're going to see it everywhere. We also learned a little bit about the food pyramid as we made our own and how it's a representational model. And that's a lot of what Editorial Illustration is. And I'm hoping that you are able to incorporate some of your hand lettering because that really does help elevate a piece. And it also helps make it feel more organic and personal to you. So if you're feeling nervous about that, throwing the guidelines, but you do not have to be a professional hand letterer to start incorporating lettering into your work. Leaving this class, my hope for you is that you feel more capable of finding inspiration in the everyday. So for example, your next trip to the grocery store, your nice walk when you write your grocery list, when you write list at all, what can you illustrate? How can you symbolize this? Leaving this cost, you should have two unique pieces that you'll be able to add your portfolio. And with that, I just want to ask one more time, please upload your project to the project gallery. I really want to see them. And thank you so much for taking this class of me. I know Your time is valuable and I'm really honored that you chose to share it with me. So thank you. Take care.