Transcripts
1. Introduction: There's so much botanical inspiration out there. But what type of flowers should I create today? Why do my flowers not have character? Why does my composition look unbalanced? If you can relate to any of these concerns, then this class is designed for you. I'm Vinitha Mammen, a fashion designer and pattern maker by profession, and self-taught illustrator, and lettering artist. Besides teaching on Skillshare, I do freelance commercial lettering and illustration projects, and license my artwork through print-on-demand websites like Society6 and Art&Found. This class is a deep dive on Procreate floral illustration. Whether I'm creating commercially or just to unwind, florals have always been a favorite. They make amazing standalone pieces of art but also beautifully complement other types of art and design. Botanical illustrations can be used to bring lettering compositions to life, to add a touch of whimsy to portrait illustrations, or to create fun surface pattern designs. Combined with the power of a phenomenon tool like Procreate, the possibilities are endless. The fact that you can create stunning botanical illustrations right on your iPad from literally anywhere still blows my mind. By the end of this class, you'll learn an organized approach to effectively take inspiration from the natural world and transform it to your very own stylized floral composition, right from putting together inspiration boards and building a reference library of botanical elements to creating an eye-catching floral composition bursting with personality. While this class is not intended to be an introduction to Procreate, you do not require any previous Procreate knowledge to take it. Whether you're a total newbie or a seasoned user of Procreate, you'll find all the guidance that you require to complete every step of your botanical illustration process as we progress through the class. I am beyond excited to embark on this botanical journey with you. Let's get started.
2. Class Project: Your project for this class is to illustrate a modern botanical composition on Procreate. Based on our workflow to get here, I've divided the class project into three phases: one inspiration boards; two, botanical reference libraries; and three, botanical composition. In Phase 1, we assemble inspiration boards and Procreate. After identifying some reference images to use as inspiration, we put together three inspiration boards, one each for each category of botanical elements that goes into our composition. Phase 2 is all about building your reference libraries of botanical sketches. We'll use the inspiration boards we created to sketch out some simple and stylized botanical sketches, and these sketches will go into your very own growing libraries of botanical reference sketches that you can turn to for ideas anytime you want to illustrate florals. In the third and final phase of our class project, we create a botanical composition, which will be an illustration of a floral arrangement inside a cup. We pick out a few elements from our botanical reference libraries and develop a sketch for our composition using these elements. Finally, we'll bring our composition sketch to life by illustrating everything in color. To make the coloring process more efficient and flexible for future edits, we'll be applying my non-destructive workflow techniques that I explain and demonstrate in a dedicated lesson. I've also included detailed lessons on illustrating every element that we sketch out so that you get multiple ideas to go about bringing any botanical element to life with color. In the end, you'll end up having created a bunch of images from the three phases of your class project and I would love to see them all. Please export them as images, JPEG or PNG files, and upload them to the Project Gallery of this class so that your classmates and I can see all the fabulous work that you created on this class. I'll also give you my honest feedback on these and answer any questions you may have. All you need to take this class and complete your projects are the Procreate app, an iPad that supports it, and a stylus like the Apple Pencil. I've included links to purchase all of these in the Resource section. Finally, brushes. Procreate comes with several sets of default brushes already installed and we'll mostly be using these for our sketches and illustrations, except for a spot stamp brush that I custom created that massively speeds up my process. I've included this brush as a free download for you in the Resource section. Please download it into Procreate before moving onto the rest of the class. Are you all set to kick-start this adventure? Let's dive right in and start off by drawing inspiration from incredible Mother Nature.
3. Nature's Wealth Of Inspiration: Nature is the ultimate source of inspiration for botanical art of any kind. Whether you are creating realistic floral paintings or completely stylized botanical illustrations, the ideas always originate from what we see in nature at some point. There is so much to be inspired by in nature when it comes to botanicals. There are countless varieties of flora across the globe and countless number of ways in which these can be interpreted. There really is an infinite amount of inspiration out there. Now how do you access all of the wealth of inspiration that nature has to offer? My favorite is when I get to use images from firsthand photography. Besides eliminating copyright issues, there's just something uniquely satisfying about a photo that you clicked, because it's not just an image of a plant. It represents a specific experience that you've had and how you choose to portray it on camera, and that is special. Whether it's photographs of nature around you or from a place you travel to, these may be great sources of inspiration. But we may not always have the luxury of experiencing everything firsthand. Fortunately for us, we have enough and more secondary sources of inspiration at our fingertips, like nature documentaries. I find myself wanting to pause and sketch every few seconds when I watch a documentary about nature. Besides the visuals, even the information you get from these can give you ideas on specific keywords to look for during your visual research on the Internet. Then of course, you have other sources of images on the Internet like Unsplash and Pinterest. These are great for you both to browse through random images and find specific ones using the search function. Instagram is another endless source of inspiration, particularly if you follow nature photography and travel accounts. A few important things to note while you look for botanical inspiration on the Internet. Firstly, stay away from images of artwork. While it can be great to be inspired by other artists and their work, this class is about taking inspiration directly from nature and putting your own spin on it. A botanical artwork is already somebody else's interpretation of nature, which does not serve our purpose very well. So look for photographs of real botanicals in nature. Secondly, even photographs can be copyrighted. Watch out and make sure that you're not violating any copyright laws. We'll be using these images purely as sources of inspiration, and in the end, our illustrations are going to be significantly transformed in comparison to the original inspiration image. However, especially if you want to use your illustrations commercially, it's safest to use royalty-free images. Unsplash is a great place to find these. This class is designed to teach you how to use reference images as inspiration and develop a stylized botanical illustration from them. We're going to be using Pinterest as our platform for visual research. You are however, free to use whatever images that you prefer, including your own firsthand photography. Also, if you prefer to just create from imagination without using a reference image at all, you're more than welcome to do that in which case you might want to skip the sections on gathering inspiration and creating inspiration board. In the next lesson, we will break down botanical compositions into the elements that they are composed of, so we know exactly what to look for during our hunt for inspiration.
4. Elements Of A Botanical Composition: Botanical elements are the building blocks of any botanical composition. In my observation, most effective botanical compositions are a strategic combination of three categories of elements: flowers, foliage, and fillers. Flowers are usually the highlight of a floral illustration, so they are the hero elements that draw the viewer's eye. But a botanical composition with just flowers falls flat. They need other elements to give them context. Foliage, which is basically the leaves and stems, not only beautifully complement the flowers but also build a relationship between them. Fillers are exactly what they sound like, little elements that fill up empty spaces to bring everything together. But in my opinion, they are also responsible for that touch of magic in your botanical compositions and hence should not be neglected. Now, of course, not all botanical compositions have to have all three elements. You can even do combinations of any two of these categories of elements. For example, you can create a beautiful botanical piece that doesn't even have flowers, and it's not like a rule that you have to follow. Breaking them down into elements just helps us to approach botanical compositions in a more organized fashion and even develop our own formulas for successful compositions by experimenting with including the different elements in different proportions. Also, this breakdown encourages us to mix and match elements. We're not stuck with using one kind of leaf with a particular type of flower, for example. After all, we are not trying to create scientific diagrams, so why not? Yet another advantage of dissecting compositions this way is that you know what to look for during visual research to make the inspiration from nature a little less overwhelming. As we move on to our first phase of our class projects, which is gathering inspiration, we'll specifically be looking out for these three elements: flowers, foliage, and fillers.
5. Gathering Inspiration: In this lesson, we will dive into Pinterest and start gathering some inspiration for our botanical illustrations. Like I said, you are more than welcome to use your go-to source for images or even your own photographs of botanicals. Irrespective of where you're getting your images from, you can follow the general thought process and ideas I'm demonstrating here using Pinterest. So I hope you are ready with your iPads to follow along with me as I get started with gathering inspiration from the previous lesson, you already know what we're looking for in terms of the different elements of a botanical composition. These three are what we'll be looking for specifically as we do our search on Pinterest. All right, I'm just opening my Pinterest app on the iPad. Now, have clearly been looking at lots of flowers here. So Pinterest is suggesting some floral images. But we'll pretend we don't care and head straight to the search bar where we type in a keyword. Let's start off with flowers. Click Search. And we get a gazillion cloud images for our Perusall. So just scroll through and look for anything that catches your eye when you find something you like, save it by clicking Save. So we need to add it to a board. Now I already have a board called botanicals for inspiration. You probably want to click here on Create board. Then you have all these options. You can give it a name, keep it a secret if you like. And once you're happy with all these settings, just click Create. Once you have a name for the board, the Create button will open up and you can take it. Since I've already created a board, I'm just going to select that. Now you can either go back and look at more pictures or you can scroll down and you'll find more images related to the one you just looked at. The related images are a good way to streamline your search. But you can go any which way that you like. This really is an endless source of images, right? It can be overwhelming sometimes. So it helps us to just look out for specific things like interesting shapes, Details, angles. For instance, I tend to mostly gravitate towards images of flowers from a side angle as opposed to straight from the top. But I do keep an eye out for both. You could impose your own set of constraints as you search for flowers if you feel like there's just too much going on. Okay, So similarly, look for your other elements too. Here are some keywords, suggestions that you could use if you like, to find images in each of our categories. So even if you just go through some of these, you'll end up with enough and more images to be inspired by. Cool. So once we have saved some images, you can head on over to your board to take a look at everything you've saved. So like I said, I already have a board for this year. This is my boat that I've been building over time. It's called botanicals for inspiration. You'll see a whole mix of interesting images right here. So feel free to go through these for inspiration. If you want to save any of these to your own boards, That's totally fine. Although I highly recommend that you develop your own research skills by identifying suitable images. If any reason you cannot or do not want to create your own Pinterest board. You can straight up, use mine. Now it's time for us to just focus and look for one thing at a time. We want a shot list, six images in each category. And once you've decided on a particular image, download it. First, we start with flowers. Let's try to find flowers that we want to illustrate. Just scroll through all the pens you've saved and identify your favorite ones. So these are the six flower images that I decided to go with. If you observe my selection, you can see that I've tried to mix things up by including closed flowers, open flowers, hanging flowers, different angles and shapes. So try to find flowers that are a bit different from each other so that we have a good bit IT of shapes and angles to work with. I pick this particular, I mentioned just because I fell in love with the idea of this flower, but couldn't find a better image. So even if the picture is not aesthetically stunning, looking for flasks with that added interest factor. Also remember that we are trying to find those big hero elements that will stand out and draw the viewer's attention. Now let's move onto foliage. Go through your book again and this time, find the leaves and other foliage elements that seem the most exciting to you and download them to your gallery. Again, I have a wide variety of shapes and mix of simple and complex leaves. And it's always good to have some simple leaves instead of your entire composition being filled with statement leaf shapes. It's sort of like choosing a wardrobe. You do not want to neglect your basic pieces, right? Moving on, we now look for our little filler elements. Fillers can we have so many different types? Mix things up by including a good variety of botanical fillers. Here are my choices for fillers. I've included buds, little Betty's, and even little flowers because tiny simple flowers make great for L2 and add a nice element of hierarchy in your compositions. And that's it. We have all our images saved in this folder here. So we have six each of flowers, foliage, and fillers. We're all set to put these together to create our inspiration boards, which is what we'll be doing in the next lesson. Before moving on, if you haven't been doing this with me, you can take some time out now to create your own Pinterest board and pigs. Images of flowers, foliage, and filler elements. Tried to keep things simple, while also including an interesting variety of options in each category. Download these shortlisted images and make sure you have them together in a folder. In the next lesson, we will move on to procreate and create an inspiration for us to get started on our botanical industry.
6. Project Phase 1: Inspiration Boards: So we've collected a whole bunch of inspiration images and we also shortlisted and downloaded the images of botanical elements that we want to illustrate. Now we need to put them into inspiration boards so that they're in a concise form and easy for us to reference from. We will make separate inspiration boards for flowers and foliage and fillers. And we'll do this on procreate. Putting together not one but three inspiration boards can sound intimidating, but in this case they're essentially just basic collage of images put next to each other. There's nothing complicated about this. This is also a great opportunity for us to go over some basic procreate essentials in case you are new to the app. So shall we. I'm assuming you have the app already installed. So just go ahead and open it up. So for Procreate beginners, this year is the gallery where all the fabulous pieces you create are going to be displayed out like mine right now. What we need to do first is open a new canvas. To open a new canvas, just tap on this plus sign right here. Now you need to choose a size for your canvas. You'll see a list of preset sizes available for you to choose. Or you can also create a canvas in a custom size. I use a lot of different canvas sizes depending on the application. And as you can see, I'm not very organized about naming them and stuff. I'm just always in a dash to start creating. So I'll give you a quick overview of what you need to keep in mind when choosing a size for your canvas. Let's go ahead and tap this plus sign here as if we were to create a new canvas size. As you can see, you have all these options here. You can enter your dimensions in millimeters, centimeters, inches, or pixels. Let's say I go with inches for now. And I'll start off with something like six by four inch canvas. And the resolution here is at 300 DPI, which is plenty for most digital applications. So we'll keep it at 300. Now this is what I want to mainly talk about layers. You have a maximum of 244 layers here. And this maximum number of layers changes depending on the size of your canvas. For instance, if I decide to go bigger, see ten by eight inches. C, the maximum layers has decreased to 70. Now, if I go with the higher DPI value as well, it will decrease even further. So it's a balance right? On the one hand, a bigger Canvas and higher DPI is good for you in terms of scalability of the artwork. If you go with two small canvas size, you can't scale it up beyond the point without your artwork and enough pixelated. And on the other hand, we can use as many layers as we can get because there's dual advantages to working in layers, especially when we're illustrating busy pieces like Charles. There's a whole in-depth lesson on the books of working in labs coming up. So I will not get into that right now. In short, more number of layers is good for us. So the basic idea is that it's a balance. We need to find the sweet spot for each project by finding a comfortable size for us to work with. That also gives us a reasonable number of lives. But right now we don't need to worry about this since the size doesn't really matter. In the case of our inspiration boards, since we're not trying to print it off in large-scale and we don't need a huge number of layers IDO. So let's now go through the hassle of creating a custom size. We have a bunch of ready-made options here, and most of them will do the job. For now. We'll just go with the effect size here that comes pre-loaded with the app. To keep that extra guesswork out of it. It's going to work just fine for us. So just go ahead and tap that and your IPO sized canvas opens up right away. I think it shows up in portrait mode by default in this case, but I want to do this in landscapes, so I'll just rotate it. All you need to do for that is pinch and twist using two fingers. In fact, you can pinch with two fingers and move it around to zoom in and out and rotate at the same time. I personally love this feature and as you'll see, I use this all the time probably much more than I need to. In fact, we're not going to draw anything like now. We're just going to create a collage using the images. So first we need to get these images in here into procreate. So let's do that. So to insert an image, tap here on this wrench icon. And then you want to tap on this Add Tab and then tap on, Insert a photo. The photo gallery pops up instantly with the most recent photos right on top. So just select one of the flower images and it shows up in your Canvas. Now as you can see, there is a bounding box around the image. By default, I can drag on these nodes to transform the image. So I can scale it up or down. If you don't want to alter the proportions of the image, you want to make sure uniform is selected. A free form is selected. Instead, the image is not going to retain its proportions. And in this case, that's definitely not what we want. We want to preserve the original proportions. So let's undo this. So to undo, use two fingers and tap anywhere on the screen. And to redo something, same thing, but using three fingers. So that's 32 now and just undo the changes till we get to the original state of the image. And then I'm going to move this over to the side and click on this arrow to de-select it. Okay, Now the next image, wrench icon, Insert a photo and select the next one. It shows up. Then just move it out of the way. This year is the layers panel. If we open it up, we can see that these photos are on separate layers. So procreate automatically add each image into a separate layer when we go here and insert photo, which is good, we want to keep them in separate layers so that they're easy to move around. So let's do the exact same thing to add the other images. We're going to add only the images of flowers right now. We'll do foliage and fillers in just a bit. Okay, So we have all six of the flowers and now we just need to arrange these on our canvas. You just need to open the layers panel, the leg responding to the image. You want to adjust and tap this arrow here to bring up the bounding box. It can then move it around as you like. If it's not selected, then your last tool we'll just be active, which in this case is the brush tool. So you'll just end up scribbling. But if it is selected, you can move it by touching just about anywhere on the screen. You don't even need to be right on top of the image. Now, I want to just put this picture on this extreme corner. And I'm going to go over here and turn on snapping just so that it snaps in place. So if you tap here and turn on snapping, it snaps perfectly to the corners. And I'm just going to pull this node to make it bigger. Somewhere around here. Looks good for now, okay, and de-selected. Now I go over to the last panel again and select the next image. I think I'll just put this here in the bottom. I wanted to snap to this corner and I'll make it about the same width as the first image. But I don't want this to cover the previous image. So I'll go back into the Layers panel and drag this one below the previous one, and it goes underneath in the Canvas. Okay, now I want to move this to somewhere around here, make it about that big move it up and looking for it. Okay, whatever it goes outside the canvas just gets cut off automatically, which in this case is fine. Next, I'm going to go ahead and put this one on this extreme end and blew it up. Then I'll go with this one and move it to this corner. And in, yeah, I'm most interested in this particular flower, if you recall. So I'll just zoom in like that and make it bigger, move it around until it looks good enough and the flour I need is clearly visible. Then I'm gonna take this and move it right over here and bring this to there. Now in this case, this is the flower that I'm most interested in. So I can move this around to focus on that and get rid of the rest. And I want to move this downwards so that some more of that flower on top as visible. Perfect, now I have everything I want and we onset. So that was me showing you how I go through with something like this. You can literally do it however you want. You don't have to follow a particular layout or anything. So long as all the flowers you want to focus on, I didn't view your good, cool. So now these images at all in separate layers. In the end, the point is that I want to save all of this as a single image. So just to keep things a little organized before we proceed, let's go ahead and group them. We want to put the six images into a single group. So for that, we're going to select all of these layers. Now, how do we select multiple layers? Just do this swipe right? On each layer that you want to select. This one's already selected. If you do this again, you'll end up de-selecting it, which is fine. You can just Google that it yet again and it will be added to the selection. Now once all of them are selected, tap Group, now all of them are in a single group. You can collapse this if you want. Now if you tap the selection arrow, the whole thing moves as a group. But you can go within the group and still select them individually. You can also go back in here and tap on the group. You'll get an option here to rename it, tap on it and type in whatever name you want to give it. That's two flowers. So that's outflow group. We can toggle this checkbox on and off to control the visibility of this entire group. So let's turn it off while we work on our next inspiration board. So next we'll do the exact same thing that we did right now, but with the foliage images. Now the first one is in here. If I open up the nails, I can see that this new image is in its own layer, which is also outside of the flowers group. Again. So that works specifically for us. Now in the same week, bring in all six of your foliage images into your canvas. So we have all of them. Now, I picked this image only because I want this particular leaf. I think it's best to cut that out a loan from here and get rid of the rest. So let me show you how I would do that. Tap on the S-like icon. This is the selection tool which we can use to isolate certain parts of a layer. You can either select Freehand and go ahead and just draw around the leaf to select it. Or you can tap on rectangle and drag over the area like this. So now you've isolated that area within the dotted line. Now swipe down with three fingers. This brings up the copy and paste menu. Tap on Duplicate. Now it doesn't look like anything has happened. But if you open the Layers panel, you can see that just the isolated area of that layer is now in a separate layer of its own. We don't need this original layer anymore, so we can select that, which you see is the full image and go ahead and delete that layer. So swipe left, swipe right was to select, let's say. This time we swipe left. You have lock, duplicate and delete. You can just tap Delete and then you'll be left with just this, which is what we want. Okay? So now I'll move this over again at 10, snapping on so that it snaps to the corner. And then scale it up. So go ahead and move all of them around, scale them as you require, and spread them around nicely in the page one by one. There may be some extra space and some bots, but that's totally fine. It doesn't matter. My OCD is kicking and tell me I need to create a perfect layout. But clearly there's absolutely no benefit to wasting time on that in this case. So now, like we did with the flowers will just group the six lists together, select each layer, group them, tap on a group, Rename and rename the group as foliage. Cool. Again, we turn off the visibility of the foliage group and proceed to fill those. So don't worry, I won't take you through all of these step-by-step. Again. I'll just speed this up while you do your own thing with the filler images, just like we did with the other two. Once all the images are in your canvas, resize, rearrange, and reposition them to lay them out on the page. Group the layers and rename the group as fillers. So now our three inspiration boards are ready. On last step is to just save each of these as a separate image. Let's go back to the flowers group, make it visible. Now we need to export this as an image. For that. Tap on the wrench icon, go to the Share tab. You have all these different file formats to choose from, whether you want to export as an image or even a video. And this case, you can save it as a JPEG or a PNG. Either one is just fine. So I'll tap on JPEG and then image. When you do that, it will get saved in your gallery. Here it is. So back in Procreate, unchecked the flower group and turn visibility on for the foliage group. Go ahead and save this as well. Let me clarify something here. The idea is that when you export something as an image, it will include everything that is currently visible on your canvas. So it has nothing to do with what layers are. Groups of layers are selected exactly. It's about what's visible on the Canvas when you're exporting. Okay, so now, same thing for fillers. So that's all three of our inspiration boards. Ready? One each for flowers, foliage, and fellows. Cool. So it's your turn now to create your inspiration boards. If you haven't been following along, I'll summarize the steps for you. Create a new, a full-size Canvas on Procreate. Import the sixth shortlisted flower images into your canvas. Resize, reposition, and rearrange them to spread them out in your Canvas. Group all six image layers together. This is your inspiration board for flowers. Repeat the same steps with foliage images, and then once again with the fillers. Finally, export each group as a separate JPEG or PNG file into your gallery. You now have all three inspiration boards. Reading. These inspiration boards will serve as our starting point to create a reference library of botanical sketches. In the next lesson, we will talk about how this comes in handy for easy reference. And I'll also show you my own ever-growing deafness. Every time.
7. Project Phase 2: Botanical Reference Libraries: We've created inspiration boards for our three categories of botanical elements. We're going to use these to develop some botanical sketches. As we create these sketches, they're going to go into a growing collection of botanical libraries that we can refer to for ideas anytime we want to create a floral illustration. Why exactly are we doing this? When I want to create a botanical illustration, I often want to get right to it. But with a blank canvas in front of me and a head full of botanical inspiration, images competing against each other, the chaos eventually just takes over and ends up throwing me off my game completely. I noticed that this was causing me to create much less botanical art than I wanted to. That's when the whole idea of building a reference library of botanical sketches came about. This was born much before I was actively illustrating digitally. My first version of this library was in a sketchbook. When I came across an interesting botanical element, I would pencil down a simplified interpretation of it and sometimes go in and ink it later on if I felt like. I even ended up putting down the flowers and leaves separate from each other. Eventually, as I got into creating more florals on Procreate, I found it easier to have a growing collection within my iPad and so I transferred these sketches over to Procreate. Now I keep adding more as I get new ideas. Once I started building a botanical deference library, not just of inspirational photographs, but of actual sketches that I created, it gave me a definite set of ideas that I can easily skim through and tap into. Sometimes when you're not feeling like doing a lot of research right before creating something, these come in so handy because you've already done the research and you have a set of sketches right in front of you that you can instantly use to get more creative. Also, this gives you an efficient system to reuse elements from your previous creations. Because the struggle of creating from memory is very good and it's not very efficient to go back to every single floral illustration you've created to find that one flower that you want to reuse. This way you have everything in one place in an easy to go to format. A visual library is always more effective than a mental library. Another thing I love about these is that you can mix and match your different elements. You can experiment with different combinations of flowers foliage and fillers to get unique results each time. This makes your botanical illustration process a new adventure every time. This whole thing was like an epiphany and it has hence evolved into a system that works very comfortably for me today. My library today is a growing collection of three individual libraries. A library each for flowers, foliage, and fillers. This separation is particularly effective, not just because it makes it easier to search for what you want, but also because it automatically aligns you to think along the lines of mixing and matching your elements. I really hope this class inspires you to start your own ever-growing botanical library of sketches because it's going to be a phenomenally useful asset to your botanical art process which is why this is the next case of our class project. I'm going to show you exactly how I built my library of reference sketches in the next couple of lessons.
8. Library Of Flowers: We've seen a sneak peek of what a library of botanical sketches can look like. And we've established that it's an awesome asset to have anyone incorporating flurry illustration in the work. Now let's start creating our own library, starting with flowers. Let's open a new canvas on procreate. We're going to go with the A4 size. Again. A four works just fine. Just rotating the canvas here and then a quick pinch and released, bring the canvas to full-screen. Now, I usually sketch with a bright blue color, just a habit I picked up. And here in the brush panel, I'm going to go to sketching and select the 6 B pencil. So it gives me a nice range to work with for my initial sketches. Now the first thing we need to do is bring in our inspiration board. But we're not going to import it into the Canvas because we're not going to trace off of those images. We're going to keep it on the side and use it as a reference image. Procreates newest update, Procreate 5 x has this feature and it's actually pretty useful. To do this. Go over to the wrench icon Canvas tab. See this reference. That's what we want to toggle on. Now this reference window opens up and there are these options, Canvas, image and face, and never used the face options. So I'm not sure what that does. Canvas, I'll show you. I'll just move this window over to the side. So with Canvas, this is what it does. Basically, whatever you draw on the canvas here shows up here in the reference window. Now, if you're wondering what's the point of that, let me show you where it really comes in handy is when you zoom in to your Canvas to do some detail work, you see how the reference doesn't zoom in along with it. So basically, you can still see the bigger picture while you're zoomed in on a specific area. Which can actually be quite useful. But that's not what we're using this for right now. What we want is image tap here on input image. And we're going to import our inspiration board with all the flower images put together. So just tap on it and it shows up here. Now we can just use this image as a deference and go over these flowers one by one. I'm just going to keep the reference image on the side of a hill and do my sketching over hill. So let's start. You can pick whichever flower you like to start with. I think I'll start with the simplest one, this one. And I'm going to focus on this little flower here actually, because I like how the petals just Cup in on themselves. And I think that would be a really interesting and easy way to show dimension in the petals. So first of all, we can draw the center just like the hat, a simple circuit. Now if you want to make it a perfect circle, just press and hold at the end of that stroke, tap Edit Shape and tap circle. And then it becomes a nice circuit. It doesn't have to be. But you know, if you want to do it, That's how you do it. Now we have 12345 petals. So let's roughly divide the circle into five sections. I kind of get an even distribution of the petals. You can just eyeball it. So now if you were to divide the circle into four sections, we would do 1, 2, 3, 4, something like this, right? So this is the approximate size of each section. If there are four sections, but we need five sections. So we can go with maybe somewhere around that much. Okay? So just keep a rough idea of that size in your mind and that's what we'll try to do. It doesn't have to be perfect. 345. There you go. Now we make some petal shapes within these sections, just like that. Okay? Super simple. Child, keep the lines a little irregular to keep it looking more natural and more fun. Now to get that coupling effect, we're just going to add some very simple lines to the petals. Just like that. This is a very simple and yet effective way to make up petals look more 3D. So that's done. Actually, I don't like this one that much, so let me erase that. I'll pick the same six B brush for the eraser tool. It is that now redraw it? Yes, that's better. I think this one also is a bit too pointy, so I'll just fix that. Okay, good. So now we have just these anthers to add. I'll just draw some random little dots for that. I'll make the brush slightly larger. We're not trying to match the positions at all. Just drop them around this central area. So that's it. So what we sketched so far is all in just a single layer. So I'm just going to select it and move it over to this side. Then I'm going to open a new layer. Now, this one. Like one of my go-to flowers. Now this specific one, but this kind of flower. So I think I'll just be focusing on this particular one here. We're going to try and clean this ship first. Now one way to look at it is as three inner petals and three outer petals. Or you can look at it as three petals at the back and 3 in the front. Okay. It's completely up to you. Now, in my opinion, it's better not to try to bring in all of the different perspectives and nuances into our sketches. Just because we're trying to do this in a boiled yet minimalist style, taking a very stylized approach, we're not going to be doing any shading. It's just going to be color blocked straight up. So it's best to keep things as simple as possible. In this case, I'm going to break this flower down as back and front petals and then something fun in the middle. So let's go ahead and start off with a little U-shape. Just like that. Make it a little bit more pointy. Make that okay. And then for the petals, you can go 123 if you feel like or you can keep it a bit more wiggly like 123. I do both variations quite often. And then similarly for the front petals. Just make sure you add a nice dip around here and then go back up. So something like that. You can keep doing this till you are satisfied with the shape. I tend to do this a few times, usually before. I'm happy with how it looks. But it helps to sort of just take it from there and then draw a curvy line and then take it back into this. Makes it look more like a cup. Now the stem, you can make it a straight line if you like, like that. If you want a perfectly straight line, just draw a line and press and hold, then you'll get a nice straight line and you can move it down to decide exactly where you want to place it. And if you please one finger anywhere on the screen while you do this, then it constraints the line to specific angles, like a perfect vertical, horizontally and a few other angles in between. Okay, so just something to note. And then there's a little bit of a green part here. I think it's called a pedestal. All my biology lessons through high school law coming back to me right now. So maybe something like that. A little wider. Maybe a wider stem to OK. And you can go ahead and erase these extra lines to clean it up a bit. And finally, there's the middle stuff. You can have fun with this. Do whatever shape you want. You can do a little thing like that, or you can do a squiggly thing more similar to the actual reference image, but simplified. I like to keep the center's kind of simple and I end up doing this style for most of my flowers. Just a simple curve like that and a second Gulf pattern to that. So that's the flower. Again. I'm going to select that layer and just take it over to the side and leave it there. And I'll open up a new layer for our next block. I think this entire thing looks extremely beautiful, but it'll be easier to incorporate into floral compositions if you just go with smaller elements. So in this case, I think I'll just do this part alone. Right? I'm going to just zoom into that and tilt it a bit because I want to sketch it at this angle. Now again, I see this as some petals in the front, some in the back, and some fleshy bits at the bottom. The overall shape of this flower is sort of like a picture, isn't it? So let's start off there. I'm going to go ahead and free hand something like a picture. And you can just go ahead and go over the lines and readjusted as much as you need to. You don't have to get it perfect in just one stroke. No judgment at all. By all means. Take your time and go ahead and adjust the shapes to your happy with what you have. Okay, that looks good enough, I think. And then let's complete the picture with a mouth like that. And we can use this as a guide lead sketching flower over. So I'll just tap here and reduce the opacity of this layer and add a new lead to sketch on. So I'm going to just go over this shape again. And then instead of doing these pointy petals, I want to keep it a little more rounded like that. And then like that in the middle. And then I'm gonna do the same thing here on top 23. And then just for fun, we could do a little thing in this sentence. Well, down here, we can do 1234. Good. And all of these can come nicely to the middle. And let's do a little bump here. Just think of the reference as a starting point to get you going. You don't have to draw the exact shapes and details. Just have fun with it as you go. Okay, So the stock is also done. And there you go. You can go ahead and delete the guide layer if you want, and then pick this up. I'm going to put this here. Again, start a new layer. And let's do this one. I love doing hanging flies. Hanging flies are really pretty and bring so much interests to a composition. I'm going to focus mainly on this particular one. Let's start off with a stock in this case. So just a vertical line. And let's add a little bend at the top, just for fun. Now, I think this is a good flower to introduce the symmetry tool to you, and that is hiding here and the drawing guide. So let's turn that on. These grid guides are what comes by default. So to change it, just tap on Edit Drawing Guide and you'll get a bunch of options. Let's select symmetry and you have even more options here. Vertical, horizontal, Quadrant, and Radial. Vertical means you have a vertical symmetry axis and it helps you achieve drawing status symmetric on the left and right sides. Horizontal gives you a horizontal symmetry axis. So now the top and bottom will be symmetric to each other. Quadrant, as the name suggests, divides the page into four quadrants of symmetry. And finally, radial gives you eight radial sections of symmetry about the center point of the canvas. Actually, it doesn't have to be about the center of the canvas. You can move this center point around to other positions on the canvas to depending on what you want. And this is the case with all of the other options to not just read it and then just tap with two fingers to undo if you want to bring it back to the original center position. Now for this vertical is what we want. So we'll stick to that and tap Done. So now if you look at the last panel, you will see that the active layer has assisted written under it. That basically means that drawing assist is on for this lab, which means the symmetry guide you just activated will assist you in drawing on this slide. And that's exactly what we want. So make sure it's checked. Now what we'll do is we'll move this stock over to coincide with us symmetry axis here. And I think I'll just nudge this out of my way. Actually, I'll move it over to this side. Go back here. So what is symmetric guide with Drawing Assist does is this. Now when you draw, you get the same exact thing on either side of the symmetry axis. So now you'll get a perfectly symmetric sketch just by drawing 1.5. Pretty awesome, great. Now we can start off here with this little bulb and close it off. Just like that. Next, I'll pick up this sort of battleship from you. Enjoy that in just like that. You can add this lining as well if you want. Okay, now the petals, now this image has these flowers at a slight angle. But I'm going to imagine I'm seeing this from Hill, from the symmetric center of this flower. Just to simplify things. So I'll just go ahead and draw a circle like that. Press and hold to get a smooth curve and then do a second one like that. And while pressing and holding it can actually move it around before deciding where to place it. If you want the petals to overlap, you can do this. I'm just going to keep it right here at the center. Okay, so that's the front petals. Now, the back petals like this. And like this, place it right at the center again. Next is a center, but maybe just like this. Yeah. You can erase these extra lines to see the shapes more clearly. And then I'll add another one of these curves here. So does it look like this? Not really. But did it serve as an inspiring starting point to a fun illustration? Absolutely. Date. Oh, there's also these long Saman thing is, I've kinda found them to distract from the clean look of my compositions. So I think it looks more simple and stylized if I leave out the lines altogether and instead 0 at any point, if you want to turn off the symmetry, just go back to the layer options and uncheck Drawing Assist. So yes, we leave out the lines and just draw a few tiny circles floating around for the amperes. Just vary the sizes and place them randomly. This one is too far out, so I'll just select around it and move it over here. You can go ahead and move things around like that till you're happy with how it looks. So this is done and then go head and move it over to this side. Then a new layer for our next flower. This one. So here I want to do just this particular flower here. Actually I think I want to use the symmetry tool for this as well. So I'll just move this out to the side. And it's okay if they overlap here, they are on separate layers, so that won't be a problem. Okay, I'm going to turn on the Drawing Assist for this new layer. Now for this flower, again, we have this picture shape going on. So I'll just start with that. See how much easier it is with symmetry on. So then we'll close this off with a code like that, similar to the reference image. Now the petals, we'll just draw them as simple shapes just like that. Okay, we're going to start off with some front petals. And then less and more petals behind them will try to recreate the overall shape of the flower. But we don't need to be counting the petals and stuff. Let's start with the middle one. Make that. Then on the side, you can start right here, press and hold and place it like that. And then another one just like that. And then we're going to draw a petal is in between these. So like this. Okay, check if your liking the overall shape of it. I think it works. So now I'll add one more layer of petals in between these. I like these little curvy sepals here. So I'll add those two just like that. And finally, the stem. They go, just move it over to this side. All right, so now let's do our last one, the cone flower. I'm going to focus on this particular one here. Now here again, I think it'll be useful for us to create a guide sketch with basic shapes. Let's tilt the reference image to position the flower like that. And let's use Drawing Assist here to just draw the guide shape. So if you see it sort of like a triangular shape, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and draw a triangle and the bottom. They can actually take it all the way here to get it to match correctly. Okay? Now this is actually a triangle, but with curved edges, right? So let's add some curves here. And a bigger curve down hill. Okay, so we have our basic shape down. Now I'll open up a new lab. Maybe even reduce the opacity of this guide lead. Now I'm not using drawing assist in the new layer. You can if you want to. Now, if you look here in this triangular shape, division is slightly above the middle of the triangle. So in this case, the middle is somewhere here. So I'll just draw a curve around here. Then I'll complete this conical shape and curve out this corner, this corner. And finally called this out too, and then join it. I'll just erase these extra bits here. Cool. Now we just need to draw some petals. See the tips of these petals here. They have this sort of split at the very tip. I'd like to incorporate those. So they're going to be similar to these petals. But with that split detail happening, I'll just do the curves like that. And then add a tiny little w at the tip. Okay, So just keep creating similar shapes to draw some more petals. Some of them on the sides, cobalt more to one side like this one. You try to vary the shapes to bring in that movement that you see in the reference photo. You don't have to create the exact shapes, just the directions and dynamics in a simplified form like this twist over hill. Now again, that looks good enough. Now, a simple line for this stem. Actually, let's make the stem a little wider, just like that. And that's it. So now we've gone through with all of the flowers in our inspiration board. We can remove the drawing guide and then we can just rearrange the flowers to spread them out in the Canvas. Just so it's nice to look at. You can actually just kind of follow the positions in our inspiration board itself for no reason other than to just compare them side-by-side. And when you're done, you can get rid of this reference image. And you can go back to the gallery view. And let's rename this canvas as library of flowers. And there you have it. This here is your library of flowers. Good. You can keep building on this library as you find more interesting flower images to sketch from. And if it gets clouded you, you can always scale them down to fit them in the page. We wouldn't be using these sketches directly in final illustrations. This is just a reference library, right? So it's not really important to preserve the resolution of these lines. And you can very well resize them as a client, right? So look at these two side-by-side. We've arrived at some really fun sketches from my inspiration images, don't you think? And as I kept seeing through this lesson, we use the inspiration goods just as starting points to create some simple stylized florals sketches. That's why we call these inspiration boards and not reference images right? Now, if you've just been watching me, you can go ahead and create your own liability of flowers using the flower images you've picked for inspiration. Just follow the basic steps and put your own spin on them. Start off by creating a new IPO size canvas. Turn on the reference option and import your inspiration board of flowers into the reference window. Zoom in on the flowers in the reference image one-by-one, and sketch out your own simple stylized versions of each of them on separate layers. You symmetry and Drawing Assist to your advantage whenever possible. Finally, rearrange all your sketches to spread them around in your canvas. This is your library of flowers. I hope this was a fun exploration for you. Take this as an ongoing project and keep making more flooding sketches as you come across interesting flower images student cleared. For now, let's move on to doing this for our foliage elements in the next lesson.
9. Library Of Foliage: To draw some fantastic Boolean sketches. Let's get right to it. Let's open another new canvas. If all sides again. And let's rotate it to landscape. We have to open up our reference window, again, import image, and this time bringing our inspiration board of foliage images. Okay, I'll put it on the side. And let's start off with the very first one. This is our most basically if you're so it'll be a good one to start with. I'll just rotate this like this, and then pick my trusted blue colored sketch with starting off with the central stem here, just a simple line and then some super-simple leaves. You can press and hold to get some perfect codes if you like. Or you can even go fully irregular like that. Totally up to you. For now, let's add more branches and leaves. You can offset the branches like that or have them start at the same point on either side. I'm gonna do them at an offset for this one. I don't really prefer either one over the other. I do both depending on what I feel like doing. In this case with the leaves looking super perfect. I think it'll be nice to bring in a little irregularity with the offset branches. I think we probably didn't even need a reference image for this one. This almost always is the leaf shape that I would randomly come up with in most cases anyway. If you look here, you'll see that the leaves are getting slightly bigger as you move down. So you can try and do that if you like. And I like to take these lines all the way up to the tip. I'll just do that with all the leaves. That's about it. I'm just gonna make this a little bit smaller and put it over here. Let's add a new layer. Now, as I said, using the same image as a starting point, I'm going to do a slightly different version. So this time I'll make the leaves more irregular shaped and draw them in super quickly, just like that. You can also go on and get them to overlap in some, but if you'd like, so just have fun with it. Leaves are always so fun because you can pretty much do whatever you want with them, right? And there you go. That's another one that started at the exact same place, but ended up looking so different from the first. There are still many directions that you can take these in, right? So let's add a new layer. Now we'll do this one. I'm just going to start with a simple curve like that for the stem, we're not doing the twisty shape and stuff, just keeping it simple. And then for the leaf, just do that. So simply just little loops forming our rounded leaf shapes. Keep adding them at roughly regular intervals. And then on the other side as well, we can start them at slightly offset points on the stem and making them slightly smaller as I move down the stem. Okay, so super simplified. And then we'll just go ahead and cut this also right in the middle. I like to do this so that I can add a different color to half of each leaf. I find that that's a really easy way to add inches. So there you go. That's another one. New layer. Let's look at this one. I'm going to create a guide layer with the overall shape of the leaf drawn out. Let's start off with a line down the middle again. And then we'll draw a curve to create one side. Make that the sheep that the entire thing is forming here is what we're interested in right now. So let's draw that shape. Doing this extra step now will give us the freedom to go nuts with the smaller leaflet shapes later on without worrying about what overall shape their farming. You can actually even use this symmetry tool here if you'd like to. It'll definitely speed things up a little bit. But I'm pretty much done with the shape layers now. Okay? And then let's also add in some lines to map out a skeleton to place the leaves. Maybe these are a bit too close to each other, so let's do this again. A little more distance between them would be good. Yeah. And on the other side, there are almost starting on the same point, so I'll keep it that way. Then on a new layer, Let's start adding this skinny leaves. And here you can either do simple little curves, make that all you can go ahead and do more wriggly lines. Thank you. So something like that, which is definitely more fun for me. So this is what I'm going to be doing. Keep it nice and squiggly. Just totally random, you know. And it helps me to do these kind of fast. And if you don't like how a particular one looks, you can always just redo it. So just know particular distinctions besides just trying to stay within the guide shape underneath. Okay, this looks a bit too bulgy to me, so let's do that again. And then I'll finish it off with one. And then we do the same thing on the other side too. So fun. This is what I enjoy the most about drawing leaves. It gets almost meditative up to the point. So we're done with that. And just add in the central vein as well. And that's it. I'll select it, make it a little smaller. Make sure uniform is selected always okay to preserve the proportions and then move it out of the way. And now this guide layer, in this particular case, this can also be a leaf in itself. So instead of deleting it, I'm just going to keep it. Okay, awesome. So again, new layer. And we're going to go with this one. Let's start with an angled middle vein and usually tend to start with middle vein. Let's tilt this also to a similar angle. So now if you observe this leaf, you'll see that the shapes out of goes out and then comes in around the veins. So wherever there's the space in between the veins is where the shape takes hip inwards. So to sort of just guide that, I'm going to start off with the beams in this case. So just draw some curves like that. Just pull one out from the central vein, starting small, then it gets a bit bigger and then small again. And then on the other side as well, offsetting them ever-so-slightly. Okay, and now for the leaf shape, we start off from around here. And then from Hill we go out and in. We don't have to follow the exact shapes as a reference at all, which is going to go like that, like that. And then at the tip just like that and like that. Okay. So again, same thing on the other side. Then just come in like this and close it off. I'll just round that off like that and then just darken the beans a little bit as well. Good. So I'll just make it a little smaller and move it aside. Again, new layer. Now, here comes the mushroom. I've been looking forward to this one. I'll start this one off with a guide layer to just to get the shapes down. I'm going to maybe start off with a little circle. Another way to get a perfect circle is to just hold it with one finger anywhere on the screen while pressing and holding this true. Then another so-called some way Hill. Just as a guide for this vital. And then from there we're going to just start the stock at downhill and make the brush a little bigger for this. And then just sketch out a nice and long stem similar to the image, but it doesn't have to be exactly like that. Now from here, I'm just going to try and get this spiral going. So just like that. So this gives us an idea of how we want this vital to farm. Okay? So I'm going to just reduce the opacity on this layer and open a new layer. And I'm going to be a little bit more intentional with our strokes this time. Just carefully drawing around the sheep. Come in like this. I like to keep turning my canvas around as I do shapes like this. And this is what I love about using Procreate. It's so intuitive to just get lost in your work with minimum acid. So here this ends somewhere around there. So let's bring this to about there and stop. Okay. Now we just taken the stock a little bit just like that and bring that about there. And now we want to connect this and this, but a fun squiggly line. So just go like this. And like this and finish off like that. Now we have most of the shape right there. We can go in and add a final little detail in just a little bit of a spiral in here, just a fun little addition. Now we can turn off this guide layer. We can also use the selection tool to select around the spider leg back and nudge it over here a little bit. Actually, I think I'll also just rotate it. So somewhere around there. And also maybe make it a tad longer test like that. They go I like the look of that, so I'm going to hold on to that. Now I'll just pick it up and move it a little bit. Delete the guide layer. Go ahead and add another new layer. Now we have our last one, this being collect layered one. So pretty, I love this one. We'll start off again with a guide shape. It'll be something like COVID triangular shapes. So I'm just looking at my reference and trying to capture the dynamics in the shapes as I'm sketching. So it almost looks like two triangles just ready to fly out from that central point. And then the little stem just as a continuation of this curve. Just like that. I'll just make this a little bigger. Okay? And then we have 1, 2, 3, sort of concentric layers happening here. So let's lay some guides for those. Okay? That's 123. So this is going to be my guide layer and just reduce the opacity new layer. And then draw over that and start off with the smallest gluteal shapes in the front here. Just some soft, subtly irregularities. Then again here, like this. And like this. And then connect them using a wiggly curve. You can also add some little notches in between to keep it looking a bit more interesting like that. Then again on this side. So just keep doing that. Bringing some nice variation in the shapes as you go. Just oblique, any monotony. And finally the last layer, in this case, this one's going a little bit inside on this side. So I'll do this and take the leg that and create some similar wiggly shapes. And then finish it off with a stem. And that's it. Done, right? So I'll just delete the guide layer. And there you go. So we have a bunch of leaves sketches inspired by a foliage images. So fine. I'll just get rid of the reference window. Now. Let's go back to the gallery and rename this Canvas as our library of foliage. So that's it. Here's my library of foliage. Now let's create yours, follow the exact same sequence of operations and you're all set. Start off by creating a new A4 size canvas. Turn on the reference option and import your inspiration board of foliage into the reference window. Zoom in on the foliage images one by one, and sketch out your own simple, stylized versions of each of them on separate layers. Finally, rearrange all your sketches to spread them around in your canvas. This is your library of foliage. And now all we have left at this phase of our project is a library of filler elements. So let's do that.
10. Library Of Fillers: Now we have our last botanical reference library to create the library of fillers. Let's go ahead and do it. In case of the fillers, we're going to keep things even more simple and so we'll be keeping the details to the bare minimum as we sketch. I've opened another A4-sized Canvas and I'm importing my inspiration board of filler elements into the reference window. Then we can just move it over to the side and get started. We'll do this one by one, starting with the first image. For this, I'll start off with a line just like that and then add a little circle on top, then some more circles just randomly placed around this line. I wouldn't bother trying to make them perfect circles, I'm just trying to vary the sizes and keep that overall tree-like shape going. Then we'll do little connections like these from my main stem to these circles. Then we'll finish it off with some more tiny floating circles, I like to keep some loose elements like that to add a touch of flimsy. That's it. We can move it aside and we can try another simpler version based on the same type of filler. We'll draw some smaller, more wispy ones like these. We can have just two or three little branches on each of them. I use these fillers a lot in my work, they are simple but are great to fill up any bald spots. Whoops, I ended up putting it in the same layer as the previous one. See, it's okay though. If you end up doing this by mistake and chances are you will at some point, there is an easy fix. Just tap on the selection tool here, make sure your free hand is selected. Then draw around it to select it. Then swipe down with three fingers and cut and paste. Now it's in its own layer. See, they are now in two separate layers. Now I can just pick this up and put it here. Next, let's do this one. If you take a closer look at this, you'll see that there's a central point from where these teardrop-shaped bulbs come out. On each branch, you'll find a few such clusters. That's what we're aiming at recreating here. Let's start off with the stem again and then from the tips, let's pull out a few small lines and draw these teardrop shapes on each of them. Just like that, and then you can make more such branches. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Vary the length a bit and then add the teardrops at the ends. Let's do another one here. Then we can do some more branching out the same ones. We'll do just three here, and another one here with just two. That should be enough, let's not overcrowd this, and that's that. Next one, the bud. There're some green sepals here which is not really there on this one, so I'm going to do this stage of the bud. A slightly curved stem like that and then we want to do a teardrop-like shape again over here, but this time since we need a bigger teardrop, we can start with a circle here to guide the shape. Just like that. Then you can just go ahead and start pointing out from around here and here. You can just get rid of the circle when you're done with the shape. Then we'll do these green sepals. We'll just do that, that, and that. Let's also go in and add a little line here to mark a petal forming. To keep it simple, we'll just stick to one such line. Now this one, and this is like the easiest thing ever, literally just lollipops. Let's draw a circle, holding a finger down, then just add a curvy stem, something like that. Let's do an overlapping one here and another one here. It is these extra lines if you want to and that's it. Like I said, we're trying to keep the details on these very minimal. Like, I wouldn't bother trying to bring in any of this texture. Next is this. This is technically a flower, but I use these tiny flowers often as fillers in my compositions. Our last two images are actually flowers, but I like to use them as fillers too. We'll start off with a U-shape here for the bottom bit. Instead of pulling this out like this, we can just do this and like that and another in the middle and then a stem. That's one way to do it. Now we can try a more direct interpretation of the shape. Again, starting with a U-shape and then just pull it out like that on both sides and the rest is the same, just three-pointy petals. I don't try to include the layering of the petals here, like I would in the case of bigger flower elements, it's just not required. We move on to the last image, it's super simple. What I do with these is just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, dot. Again, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then a dot in the center. There's no need to try and make all the petals the exact same size and shape. Just keep that overall circular shape, that way just approximately will do. Another way to do these is like little daisies with the petals coming in and meeting in the middle, just like this. Cool. So that's it. Finally, I'll also just quickly show you some other fillers that I use in my floral work often. I like to do these little stalks with slim BD things, just really quick little shapes branching out from the stem. I think they look really pretty next to bigger flowers. Then there are these little elongated bulbs like this. These can be used to add a lot of movement and direction in your pieces or even like larger berries with little stems holding them together, so the possibilities are endless. Now, I'll just pick these up one by one and rearrange them a little bit more neatly on the Canvas. Cool. So that looks good. Now we can go back and rename this Canvas as our library of fillers. You know the drill by now. Time to make your own version, if you haven't already. Create a new A4 size Canvas. Turn on the reference option and import your inspiration board of filler images into the reference window. Zoom in on the images one by one and sketch out your own simple, stylized versions of each of them on separate layers. Finally, rearrange all your sketches to spread them around in your canvas. This is your library of fillers. That brings us to the end of our project's phase 2. We now have three separate reference libraries of botanical sketches ready to help us with our floral illustrations. Like I said, use these as a growing collection of botanical references by adding more and more sketches as you find inspiring images from nature. I guarantee that doing this will make your life as a floral illustrator much easier and more organized. In the next lesson, I'll demonstrate a little bit of the workflow that I use when illustrating on Procreate, taking full advantage of working in layers to create artwork in the most non-destructive ways. I'll see you there.
11. Non-Destructive Illustration Techniques: Before moving on to adding colors to illustrate our botanical elements, I want to just take a moment to talk to you about non-destructive illustration techniques. There's a lot of pros and cons to working digitally versus working traditionally. I would not be able to pick a definite went out between the two methods of creating art. But one of the most valuable throes of working digitally for me is the ability to work non-destructively. And by that, I simply mean that if we take advantage of some of the wonderful features that an app like Procreate has to offer. Digital illustration gives us the freedom to make mistakes and correct them. And the most efficient and flexible waste possible. It can be as simple as the powder can undo. We all know how much that helps us in our process state. But that are much more powerful features that we can take advantage of. And that's what I want to highlight in this lesson. So first of all, what do I mean by non-destructive? I mean, what am I destroying? I'm just creating art. I'll explain it. Imagine you're making a cup of coffee and you end up adding a spoonful of salt into it when you actually meant to add sugar. Wouldn't it be awesome, right after you realize this, you could just take that salt and change it to sugar. Unfortunately, you can't. You have no option but to trash that cup of coffee and start again. And hence, that was sadly a destructive process. But fortunately for us as digital artists and specifically procreate artists, we have ways to make quick changes to our artwork if we just plan and work with that goal in mind, or in other words, we have the power to work non-destructively. So in our context, non-destructive illustration basically means working in a way that allows yourself to go back to the original or the previous state of your artwork at anytime, if you need to. And not by doing a 1000 undoes along the way, by planning and efficiently optimizing your workflow so that things are as flexible as possible at all times. So how do you optimize your workflow to allow for maximum non-destructive editing. The short version is by taking advantage of the power of layers and masks. And before we get to the long version, I want to start off by demonstrating what not to do. So basically using externalities and no loss. So then you'll get an idea of where this might not be the best approach. I've gone ahead and created a very basic sketch of a smiling, simpler. I'm going to illustrate this in color now, and I'll keep the sketch as separately, but I'll be doing the entire coloring process in a single layer. So I'm just adding color to the different elements in this illustration one-by-one. But all in a single layer. Cool. Now I'll just turn off the sketch layer, and this is what we have. So let's see what problems we may face. Firstly, trimming and rearranging elements. If you look here, the stem ends oddly over the petals here, the only thing I can do about that now is to paint over this. There's nothing else that can be done. Similarly, the leaves, some of these beans here are sticking out oddly. Also here. When we added the petals over the circle, we change the shape and it's not a circle anymore. All we can do now to make it a circle is to draw over it again. The elements are not editable individually. Another major problem will face is changing colors. For instance, here, if instead of the Brown, I'm gonna go with purple, I'll just drop the purple color here. But you see how the entire thing changes color. Now, there is a color overlay over the entire thing. Now there are ways in which you can select just specific areas to recolor even within a layer. One way is to free hand select the area like that, and then drop the new color. But you need to do the selection very precisely, or this is what you'll end up with. Another option is to select Automatic here and then drag over the area you want to recolor as you go outwards. Now you'll be selecting the yellows also. So just stick to that. And then you can drop the color there. But again, if you look up close, It's not a clean result. Similarly, if I want to make the veins in the leaf yellow, I can go ahead and drop the colors right on top of the veins. But all of this now turns yellow, which is not what I was looking for. A date. Again here, if you want to change the mouth to a different color, then the whole face changes color C. So changing colors of individual elements becomes a nightmare. Third problem. Transforming elements, re-sizing, rotating, repositioning, all of that. See I want to make the leap smaller. It's not impossible. It's just not very convenient. This is how I would do it at this point. I would have to make a selection around that element and adjust the size. But there is no way to transform, just the veins are just the leaf. It has to be both. Now if I feel like the features in the face are too big, I can't do the same thing because then I have to cut the brown part. Also. My only option is to paint over everything with brown. Enjoyed all over again. To be honest, I would say this is more info. This situation don't totally know. That was actually extremely suffocating for me, even though it was just for demonstration purposes. I'm so glad that's over. Fortunately for us, we have much better ways to go about this. So let's see how we can avoid these problems and work much more efficiently. So let me show you how I should have done this coloring in the first place. And start off the same way with the Brown Center. And then I'll open a new layer to do the yellow petals. Now, again, a new layer for the darker yellow. So every color will be in its own layer. And sometimes I even do more than one layer for the color if there are elements that are touching, overlapping each other. Okay, So I'll just lay down all of the different colors like that, using as many separate layers as I need to. All right, I'll send out the sketch layer, and here we go. Now we can see the true magic of layers. Are you ready to solve our problems one by one? Our first problem with trimming and rearranging elements. We have the same issue here with the petals that we did earlier, but in this case, it's such an easy fix. I can just drag this layer over the petal layers and our problem instantly disappears. I can also move the darker petals below the lighter ones if I want to. Just like that. It's so much more flexible this way. And the stem is against taking out over the flower. But I can just take it and put it below the flower and that's it. So is this a problem anymore? No, sir. Next problem, changing colors. Say I want to change the color of the mouth from white to red. I'll just go to this layer, pick up the red color. Now, even though the eyes are also in the same layer as the mouth, it's not going to be a problem since they are not touching each other. So all I need to do is drop the new color right on top of the mouth. Similarly, if I want to make the blush, see Popper, I can just drop it here and then Hill and nothing else gets affected. So changing colors is no motor problem. And finally, transforming elements. Again, I want to make the facial features smaller hill. All I need to do is select the three layers in which these facial features are to swiping right on each of them to select them. Now all three are selected. Tab the selection arrow. And now all the facial features are selected almost as if they are a single group. I can move them. If I want to plot, I can scale them down to whatever size I prefer. And just like that, transforming elements is also now a breeze. So we have discovered that just using lists to our advantage, salts all three of our problems beautifully. However, we can go one step further and make our lives even better by using mass. I'm going to be talking mainly about two types of mass in this lesson, clipping mask and Alpha Lock. There's one more type of mask in Procreate, the layer mask, which is also a great feature, but I haven't had the need to use landmass as part of my workflow for floral illustration. So I'm just going to stick to the other two more relevant options. Let me start by showing you what the clipping mask does. Now, did you notice I didn't take any effort to keep these lines within the shapes whatsoever. That's because I know I can rely on clipping mask to come to my rescue. Now, all we need to trim off the lines is drag that lead down and put it here right on top of the leaf layer. The layer that we want to confine the winds within. Then just tap on the layer and select clipping mask. See clipping mask off, clipping mask on. So everything outside the shape underneath it just gets clipped off. And since they are in two separate lists, you can change the color of the veins independently without changing the leaf color as well. Also, you can even move the beans around to reposition them if you want, and they will still get clipped off. And that same exact shape. Same thing here. We can use clipping mask to trim these stripes and keep them within the shape of the pot. Again, I can move it around if I want to say I want these lines to only come halfway down the pot, I can just do this. And the great thing is that the remaining lines are not gone. All of the information in this layer is still there. Later on, if I feel like I want to move it back down, I totally can. If that's not non-destructive than I don't know what is. By using these features, you are holding onto as much information as possible so that you can make changes efficiently at any later stage. Now, let's look at Alpha Lock. Now to demonstrate the Alpha Lock, I'm going to be making some changes to this layer. But in the spirit of working non-destructively, I want to keep this version of the lab result. So I'll just swipe right and duplicate this layer and make one of them invisible. And I'm going to work on the other one. Now. I'm going to tap on this layer and turn on Alpha lock. So what does alpha log does is it locks the rest of that particular layer. So everything on this layer is now locked or an editable, except for the area that was already on that layer when you activate it, the alpha lock, this plant pot was already in this lab before we turn Alpha lock on. So that is the only area on this layer that is currently active or editable. The rest of this layer is completely out of bounds. See if I draw here, nothing happens. But if I come over this area, it shows up. Again. Nothing to like draw over the pot. So the end result is similar to clipping mass, but it works differently. If I want to do the stripes again using Alpha Lock and stay in the same layer and just draw them in and they automatically get clipped on the fly. So this is also another way to do it. But since you are still making changes to that same layer, you can't select the stripes alone anymore. If you selected, is selecting the whole thing. Now, that doesn't mean that alpha locks are not as useful or that clipping mask is a superior feature. It just means that they are used for different things, different applications. I use both of them a lot in my process just for different reasons altogether. So for this kind of application, I would not be going the Alpha Lock way. I would stick to using the clipping mask so that these layers are individually editable at any later stage. And because the information on the clipped layer is not lost in his clipping mask. Now, where I would use Alpha Lock is to recolor multiple elements in a single layer in one go. That's where alpha lock comes in the most handy for me in my floral illustrations. For example, if I want to change the color of the petals, I want to make these light yellow petals blue. So I'll pick the blue color. Now since I'm gonna make changes to this layer, I'll just duplicate it to be on the safe side. Now, without alpha lock, I would just be dropping color on each better like this, one by one. In this case, that's not a big deal because it's just five petals and they're fairly large elements. So dragging and dropping color into them one by one is not that difficult a task. But if the layer was full of very small shapes that are detached from each other, it would be very cumbersome to drag and drop color into each and every one of those elements individually. So what I do instead is I'll go to the Layer and alpha lock it. Now with alpha lock on in this particular layer, only these petals are active. Only the pixels within these petals are acted on this layer. The rest of the layer is locked. Then all I need to do is tap on the layer again and tap fill layer and it fills the blue color and all the petals in one go. So if the alpha lock is off, and then I do fill layer the whole leg, it's filled with blue. Everything underneath that leg, it's covered up and everything above that is still visible. So basically the entire layer is filled with the blue. But when the layer is Alpha locked and then filled, it will fill only those areas. This comes in extremely handy, especially when you're trying out different colorways. All it takes is two tabs rate. So similarly, I'll recolor the darker petals too. Just duplicating it because I want to still keep these two as an option. So tap Alpha Lock, pick the new color and fill it. You can use that for the blushed to, instead of dragging and dropping into each side separately, you can do alpha lock. So just select whatever color you want and then just do fill there. Easy-peasy. So we've learned so many cool tips in this lesson. We now know that in order to keep our workflow as non-destructive as possible, we need to use multiple layers. The more the merrier. Ideally, each color gets its own dedicated layer. And sometimes even more. It's also very useful to duplicate a layer to preserve an original version effect before directly making changes to delay. Then we can also use the magic of clipping mask to confine the detail elements within a shape without losing any information on the clipped layer. And finally, we can use Alpha Lock to easily recolor layers that have multiple elements which are still in detail. In the next lesson, we will start putting all of these new learnings to use as we bring our time to life, using color, starting with flowers.
12. Illustrating Flowers: Now that we know in advance how to plan and approach coloring our illustrations to ensure that they're open to edit. Let's get started with illustrating our flowers for our final compositions will be picking a few elements from our Bhutan collections libraries. And so I may not get a chance to show you how I would finish off investigating all of the botanical sketches that we created. Which is why I'm dedicating a few lessons to demonstrate how I would go about adding colored each of them. Although this lesson is not directly a part of your final class projects, I would still recommend that you follow along with me and do this coloring process because it's going to reinforce the techniques and give you some practice before you move onto your final compositions. You do not have to use the same colors that I do. You can give your illustrations that one was 90 by picking colors that you like to see together. Such that we, now, since our intention for these reference libraries is that they become a growing collection of sketches. Let's just make a duplicate version of our library of flowers to practice this coloring process in. Okay, So for that, just swipe left on the Canvas and tap Duplicate. Now we have two of the same canvas. You can open up any of these Andrew seed. The other one will remain as is cool. So we'll start by adding a new layer and dragging it down all the way below the sketch layers. Let's do the cone flower first. First of all, the brush I use most for this process is found under the calligraphy tab monoline. This is one that I modified from the original version, but this is what you need. It comes by default, preloaded in the app. So you can just use it. It is, you can change the size as per your requirement. You can test them out anywhere on the canvas whenever you need. And I'm going to zoom in on the sketch layer and just reduce the opacity of this sketch layer to about 50 percent. So we can see what we're coloring more clearly. So I'm going to start with the petals here. I selected a yellow color to get started. So we can start with drawing an outline for each shape. But now see with this brush size, I'm not able to get a betty distinct cove there. For that reason, I'm going to reduce the brush size a bit. And then just draw over it again. It doesn't have to exactly follow the lines in the sketch. We're just using the sketch as an approximate guide. I'm doing only alternate petals now because I want the petals in between to be a different color. Okay? Then I just drag and drop the color into each of these spectacles. Good. Now we'll open up a new layer for the petals behind. And I move it under this, and then I'm going to pick a darker yellow for this. Now, if we just draw the visible outline like this and drop color the entire leg, it's filled because it's not a closed shape, right? If you turn off visibility on this lab, actually let's reduce the opacity of our sketch layers and more. I think about 20 percent will be better. So you can see what's happening a bit better. Now see this is not a closed shape yet. So we'll have to close the shape like that and then fill it in. Now if you want, you can reduce the opacity of the previous layer so that you can see what's happening below it more clearly. That's one way to do it. Or you can do what I do, keep the opacity cranked all the way up, and then draw based on some guesswork. I can't see what's happening under the first layer, but I don't need to see what's happening so long as I'm getting closed shapes. That's all that matters, right? Okay. Now I want a conical thing here to be on top of both of these petri less. So I'll add a new layer on top of these. And I'm going to make it, let's say light purple. And then same thing. Just draw the outlines first. Again, don't bother trying to keep the shape exactly like the sketch. Just go for it and then fill it. Then we need a layer for this stem. So underneath all of this, pick a green or whatever color doesn't even have to be a green, make the brush bigger. And then just like that, you can actually take it all the way here. If you want a little bit of the green peaking from under the petals. Now we're going to add some dimension to this by adding some highlight and shadow areas. Let's pick a darker purple. Make new layer above this and turn on clipping mask. And let's draw some shadows here. And just imagine the light is coming in from this side. So the shadows will fall on the opposite side. Okay, This is too big. I'll reduce the brush size. And I'm just going to draw a shape like that. Now again, if I do this and drop color, the whole thing will get filled. Basically the whole layer will get filled. But because clipping mask is on, that entire shape will get filled. That's not what I want. So we need to close this shape out. We'll go from here. Take it all the way around like this, and take it here. Make sure it closes in on itself. I can't see the whole thing, but I know I've drawn a closed shape. Now I can go ahead and drop color and it will come just in that area. If you remove the clipping mask, you can see the shape. It's all over the place, but it doesn't matter. Innate ones you clip it, it looks fine. And that works for us. Okay. Now I'm gonna do it for the petals. I'm going to add some highlights on them and open a new layer, do clipping mask, and I'll pick white to do the highlights. So again, the light is coming from this side, right? So we'll do the highlights to the left of each petal. Now if we do this with white brush, it just looks like I erase that much. What I want is a lighter shade of yellow. So what I'll do is I'll reduce the opacity of the white to about 50 percent. So it looks like a lighter shade of yellow. Now to get rid of this line, I can click on this layer and just duke field. So everything on that layer just goes away. But our transparency settings to lumens as it is. And then just do that. Again. We'll close the shapes as we go and drop color into the shape. Okay? So just go like this. That fill it. Just do that for all the petals. Okay, So now we'll do exactly that again for the darker petals. New layer, clipping mask. Reduce the opacity to 50 percent. And then go for it. You can get rid of your sketch layer to see what's happening more clearly. Just step back to get a feel of what's happening with everything. I feel like the colors are a little bit dull now, after adding the highlights, the lightening seems to have gone a bit too far. So I'll just reduce the opacity a little bit. Play around with it. Maybe somewhere there. And especially on this lab. So I bring it down here to to about 20 percent. Looks better I think. But maybe this one can be bumped up a little bit more. Okay. That looks good to me. I think this is also a bit too dark, so I'll reduce the opacity of that too. Now I think I'll add one more layer to add some dots over here to bring in some highlights, but in a more sparkly way. So for this, we need to pick up our spot brush. In my case, it's here under my brushes. In yours. It probably ended up here under imported. So find it and pick it up. I'll keep it small. And then sprinkle in some dots. Vary the pressure on your Apple pencil a bit so that you'll get varying sizes of dots just on the top left side. And that's it. Now as a final step to keep things a bit organized and select all of these layers and group them. You can also rename it if you want. I'll call it if you know the name of the flower with that, otherwise, just go with whatever comes to mind. Shall we do this one next? That's this layer. I'll reduce the opacity. New layer. It can be added outside of this group, which is good. Okay, Let's dive in. Go back to our monoline brush. I pick this pink color. Now we can start drawing in the petals. Now in this case, instead of going like this, actually let me show you, Let's see, I draw like this. Now see after I drop the color, I can't see much of a distinction between the petals. They're fusing together into a pretty large blob in the middle. So instead, even though I've sketched it like this, when I actually block out the shapes in color, I like to keep a little bit of space between the petals. Just like that. We're just drawing slightly around the lines in between the petals. Basically. It's just a personal preference because I think it makes it look more stylized, can swim. And I don't care that much about the specific shape of the petals. Just using the sketch as a rough estimate and drawing over it. Make sure it's a nice and closed shape again. Then drop color. Cool, easy. Now, new lab. In this lab we're going to do this bit. The bots that are falling over from underneath. So I'm going with a darker shade of pink for these. Now if I try to draw the whole thing like this, it'll be a bit sloppy to match the outlines to the previous layer. It's doable but not ideal. We can save so much time and get a cleaner look with clipping masks, right? So that's what we'll do. So we'll start a little bit away from the better. Take it back. Again, this is not a closed shape. This is just an open line right now. We need to close the shape. So just close it like this, even though you can't see it. And then jot the color. So I'll just do the same thing for all the other petals too. Good. Easy right? Next would be our central part. I want to go with yellow Hill. I want the circle to cover all of these intersections. So you can either draw it in like this, press and hold to get a nice ellipse. If you want a perfect circle, you can do that. And then job Kinda. Or you can pick up the spot, brush and go with the bigger size and just tap. Okay. So that's that It's in its own separate layer. You can change the color or adjust the size anytime if you need to. Now I'll make another layer for all these little spots and pick a white color. My spot brush is already selected. Adjust the size. And remember, different pressure will give us different sized spots. So just try and apply varying pressure to keep things more interesting. You don't have to follow the exact positions as in the sketch. It's there in the sketch mainly to remind yourself to do these spots and not miss them out entirely. Now you can go ahead and remove this sketch layer. I feel like we have enough going on. Yeah, I don't think we need to add any more shadows or highlights on this one. So I'm happy with how that looks. Okay. So just select everything and group them and rename it if you like to. Now this 1, first off, again, reducing the opacity of the sketch layer. Open a new one. I'm going to go with an audience for this one. Go back to our monoline brush. We already have the new layer. I'll set. Now for this, you can do this in two ways. I'll show you both. So first is start off like this with the front. Okay, drop in the column, then open a new layer. This is for the back petals that has to be behind this layer. So I'm going to move that underneath. I'm going to select a different color, let's say red and do that. That and that. Then I'm going to just close it off like that. And then drop color. Okay. Then I want the middle stuff to be in-between these two layers. So I'm going to create a layer in between. Let's do a dark blue center for this. Then I'm going to just do that, kills it up and fill it. So that is one way to do it. Another way to do it is where we start off with the battery. So this time with red, we saw the same. We then instead of drawing this one, will draw the back petals and fill it in. Then we will do the orange front part as a clipping mask over it. So then just do this, this and this. And then go around this and close it off. And then drop color. Again, we need a layer in between these two. Now when you add a layer underneath a layer with clipping mask on, it's automatically going to be a clip, clip. And this case it doesn't make a difference really whether it's clipped or not. Okay? So again to speak, the same dark blue and add in our central bond. Okay? Both ways are perfectly valid ways to go about it. The first doesn't use any clipping masks at all. The second one does. But in this case, both workout just as well for us. Now in this case, I want to be on top of the flower, not underneath it. So I open a new layer over it. And I'll pick this green color. And then we'll just do that. And that. Make sure each one is appeals cheap, then fill them in. And then we'll just do that and fill that too. Now if you remove the sketch, it just looks like some weird shape without much definition. I want to try and define those shapes a little bit. He'll add a new layer, clipping mask on and add some blue parts over this. Any color works other than the same green as the base. And then just go in like that and fill it in. Just split it like that right through the middle, close it off and drop color. Super-simple, but also does the job really well. And then I'll just add in another shape at the bottom, just like this. So it just looks like a shadow happening. Looks much better day. We can see the distinct shapes now. Then let's add a new layer for the stem. I'm going to make the stem also blue. So you can just do it like that on top of everything if you like. Or you can drag it to the bottom. So it got added to the clipping mass below it. Just turn that off. Actually like the look of how it sits here on top. So I'm going to leave it like that. And I think I'll finish this off with a few spots around here too. I just liked the look of these floating dots in my florals. I tend to incorporate these dots in my designs quite a bit if you noticed. So I'm just adding a new layer. Again. Let's say we go with this pink and pick our spot stamp. Brush again. Maybe a bit bigger, just a few random spots. Okay, good. Now I'll just group all of this. I'm including even the invisible list and then group them, rename the group if you want to. Next would be this one. Reduce the opacity on the sketch layer, add a new layer. And I'm going to go with that blue. And we go back to our monoline brush. Let's start off. Then you can go like this and press and hold. You can also adjust the position and the shape a little bit before you release it. Then you just go in here and draw our outer curve like this and close it off and then fill it. Now in this case, it happens to be the exact same color as our sketch. So I'm not able to see the lines anymore and just change the color to red just so that we can still see the sketch. Okay, then new layer clipping mask. We're going to do the front face. I'm changing the color to a lighter blue. Now, instead of starting right hill, just to get more of a continuous look and start a little bit outside. And then just follow a line like this and bring it till about Hill. I want it to look like this in timeout is one continuous shape. Okay? Then you can go like this. Come in here. Philip. Simple enough. Now we need a land between these two for the central bit. So I'll just create one. And I want that to be yellow. I'll go ahead and add a code like that. Press and hold and place it where it looks good to me. Release it and then do that and fill it up. Then I want to do one more layer over that with a dark clave, trying to keep it concentric to the previous curve. And again, same thing. Ok. Now I don't need the lines on the flower to be visible anymore. So I can now go ahead and switch back to the color I wanted originally, which is this blue. Now we just have green stuff left that open a new layer and do this green again. And then just go for it. Smaller brush and just cooling and drop color. I'm going to leave this as it is without any other details coming in. And I'm going to do the stem in a darker green and then just a straight line like that. And I want it to go underneath this. Again, it gets up into the clipping mask below. You can turn it off and it will be visible. Now we're done. So we can select all the layers and group them. I'm going to call this the cup flour. Hello, I'm pretty positive that's not what it's actually called. But when, say here we go. Next, this one. For this one, now we have three petals in the front, these two petals in the middle, and these four petals all the way in the back. So for this, I'm going to do the flower in a single color tone, but just using light medium and dark shades of it in their respective lives. Okay. I have a light medium and dark purple here. So that would work well for us. If we start with the ones in the back, we can actually see what we're doing better. So let's pick the darkest purple hill. Actually, since the colors are quite close to the sketch color, why don't we go on and change the color of our sketch to black. So just turn on Alpha Lock selects black filled in. So now it's black. We can reduce the opacity again. So now it will be much more visible. Then we do these petals one-by-one. So just this much will do. It doesn't need to come all the way down at this point, just enough to cover the visible parts and make it a closed shape. So the darkest layer is done. Next would be these two middle petals. So new layer on top. Next shade of purple. Now in this case, if you do this, make it end up being a bald spot here without any column. So I'm going to do this instead. Same thing on this side too. Actually, I feel like this is not light enough for it to stand out against the back littles. So let me try going in with the lighter purple. Do alpha lock, fill layer. Yeah, That definitely looks better. Okay. Now, next sleep. So we've already used up that color that was intended for this layered, right? So let's just select the same one anyway. Go to this disk mode here and drag the selection over to a lighter range, somewhere around there. Looks good, I think. Then we'll just do our last layer of petals as well. Okay? Then add another layer. Now the petals are done. Next, we need to do this. I'll go for our bright green color. So just outline it and drop color. Okay, now I'm gonna do these two on a separate layer. I'll make the brush smaller since these are smaller details. Okay, So same hill. Then we'll do this step. Actually we can do the stem on this layer itself. When the elements are not touching each other, you can go ahead and safely keep them on the same layer. I mean, you can very well do it on a separate layer if you have enough layers. But if you're short on layers and you don't have the luxury to dedicate a separate late every element. This is one way to be more economical about your lens. Now I want to add another color here just to break the monotony of this large shape. So I'm going to add a new layer here, Clipping Mask, pick a different color, let's say this blue. And then I'll draw something like this. And then come back like that to close it and fill it in just for an added interest. Okay. Now these two are next to each other and they bought the same color. So I want to just break that up a bit by doing a clipping mask over this. And just draw around this whole shape like that and drop in the blue column. This one I leave green because it's next to the blue part. Now I'll just go on and remove the sketch layer to see what it looks like. And I feel like the difference in brightness between the darkest and the medium shade is too much now in comparison to this difference. So either this difference is not enough ADH, this difference is too much to look like a nice gradient. I want to just play around with that and see what I can do. So I think this is a good opportunity to show you another way to change colors besides doing the Alpha Lock and fill layer. If you want to just tweak the colors a little bit, or just be able to play around with the colors on the fly. You need to go here to this magic wand icon, tap, hue, saturation and brightness. There's a layer option and a pencil option. In case of pencil, you'll be making the changes only to specific areas, like a spot correction option. But I don't use that much is what we want because we want to change the color of everything in that layer. Right? Now we've selected this darkest purple layer. So now we have these three sliders for hue, saturation and brightness. So in this particular case, I want to make it a little lighter. In other words, increase the brightness. So this slider is what I would move. You can just play around with it and see what works. I think something like that looks good to me as opposed to that, which is how it was originally, right? So I leave it somewhere around there. You can also change other things if you want to, like huge changes the color altogether, but that's not what I want in this case, so I leave that right where it was. And this slider changes the saturation. So you can desaturated by moving this to the left and vice versa. So basically this is good if you want to make slight adjustments to the colors on the fly. Finally, I'll just select all the layers and group them together. And we move on to our last flower. Find the sketch layer, reduce opacity. Open a new layer. I'll be good red in this case. They're already on a monoline brush. And I'll just go in for the petals. By now. You know the drill rate. I would recommend going a bit bust this line so that there are no little gaps anywhere. Okay, so that's your front petals. Next we'll do the petals behind. So I've moved this laid down. I'll pick a darker red and then go like that. You can use the symmetry tool again for this, if you'd like to, then close it like this and do the same thing on this site too. And then we'll add a layer in between these two. To do this central part. I pick a blue color and draw that and kills it up, bringing it all the way around like that. So it's nice and blue all the way here. Another layer just above that. And I'm going to do some very light doodling in here instead of doing a color fill. So instead of doing this, I'm going to try and do some concentric line workshop. Now the one thing that should do next, we want this little battleship to go over the petals. So I'm going to make a new layer over this. And then I'll just do this. Okay? Now I want this to be in a separate layer so that I can work on the details separately. Maybe even make it a different color later on if I feel like close it and drop column. Okay, Now I want to do different colors for this bit and this bit just for fun. So new layer over this clipping mask. Let's say we go with a darker green. And I'll just do that job. I want to also do over this top part. So again, a new layer with clipping mask on and I'll just draw some lines like that. Then the stem, I'll go with the lighter green, again, slightly bigger brush, goes straight like that. Release it. And then a curve on top. And I want this to be behind all of this, so I'll move it there. And it's also slightly off-center. So I'll just pick it up and nudge it over just a tad. And finally we have our dots. Of course. Let's go with pink. Pick the spot brush again. Go for it. Does remove the sketch layer. And voila, we are done. Did you have fun bringing this to life? The process was essentially very simply within it. Some simple shapes, blocks of color, some highlights, some shadows, and sprinklers. But the end result is so fun. I love how everything looks so clean and minimal and so stylized. In the next lesson, we will use the same workflow to add color to our foliage sketches.
13. Illustrating Foliage: Just like we brought florence to life, we are going to go over each of our foliage elements and illustrate them using some colors. So once again, I've duplicated our foliage Canvas. Everything is in place and we're ready to start coloring these. I'll add a new layer under all the sketch layers. We'll go back to our mono line brush will mostly be using just this brush throughout this lesson. And we'll start with this green. Let's zoom in on the first leaf here. Adjust the brush size to something that will work for our middle. And then just draw that middle beam. And I'll make the brush slightly smaller for the other branches and just go through all of them one by one. So this is one way to go about it, but you just do all the branches in one layer and then we make a separate layer for the leaves under this stem lab. Let's pick a different color for the leaves. And then just draw the outline of the leaf. And just adjust the shape a bit. And then fill it in. And just go through all the leaves in the same way. Now, I'll add a new layer over that and do clipping mask. I'm going to use this layer to just doodle on 1.5 of each leaf. So reduce the brush size and just create some stripes like that. You can do basically any design that you want yet. Okay. So now since I've done this side on this, instead of doing this and go with this site. And similarly, I'll just go through with all of them in an alternating pattern of solids and stripes. I'll just select the three layers and group them together. Now let's try another way to do the same leaf. So I'll open another new layer. This is actually the one that I find myself doing most of the time. Again, I'm starting off with the middle vein, reduce the brush size a bit. And once again do all the branches. And in this case, you don't have to bring them all the way to the tip. You can just stop anywhere in between because the leaves are going to cover them up anyway. Then in the same leg, we're going to draw the outlines of all our leaves. Okay, then just fill them in. Now, the next thing I do is new layer, clipping mask. Pick up a different color and just draw a line through the center of the leaf, close it up like this on one side and fill it in. So again, since I did this, I'm not going to do this. I'll do this one instead to stick to that alternating style. Try to take it right from here all the way to the tip. And just keep doing that. Now this side. And since I did the bottom half CO, and do the top half sum this site. Finally, just go in here and group these layers together. So that's two different approaches to doing our first leaf. Next one is this. Reduce the opacity of the sketch layer. Add a new layer, and then start with the middle vein again. This time I'm going with a more wavy line. This whole thing is a little bit irregular rate, so we'll try to keep it that way. Now.
14. Illustrating Fillers: By now, especially if you've been following along and illustrating alongside me, I'm pretty sure you know how to go about adding color to your sketches. And when it comes to fillers, it's going to be even more from Greece because we keeping them super simple with minimal details. So shall we dive into this? Once again, I've duplicated my library of Fellows. Let's start with our first sketch. Add a new layer below all the sketch layers and reduce the opacity of your sketch. I'm going to start off with my bright green color. Make sure the monoline brush is selected. Yes, it is. Adjust the brush size and just go over the lines. Super simple. Just wherever you see a branch Joe over it. I like to keep my fill is very minimal, very detailed. Okay, now open a new layer. Let's maybe go with Oded, switchover to trusted spot stamp brush and find a nice size that could work for this. Then just place the spots, vary the pressure on your stylist to get varying sizes. Do some over the branches and do some loose ones just like in the sketch. Then turn off the sketch layer. And that's it. One down. Next one. I'll start with a stem again in this green, going back to my monoline brush and just draw over the lines. Right, new layer. Let's make these blue picking up this spot stamp brush again and spotting away. Remove the sketch layer. And if you want, you can add one little detail here is add a new layer and pick up white. Go smaller with the brush and do a little highlight spot in each of these. And done. Next is this one. We'll start with the stem again. Green color, monoline brush. I'll go a bit bigger for the main stem. Okay? Slightly thinner for this next set of branches. And then even thinner for the smallest branches. It's just an option. You can by all means do everything using this same line width as well. Just go through all of them like that. Now get new layer. Let's go with a dark pink and then just do a little teardrops like that. Now it helps to move the whole thing closer to the color picker like this. When you have a lot of little shapes to fill in, it just shortens the distance. You have to drag back and forth. And there you go. That's it. Next, let's do a little flower bud. I'll start off with the blood itself. So just outlining the shape like that. Filling it in new layer, clipping mask. Then with a darker pink just cut into the shape just like that. Close the shape and fill it to indicate a separate petal. Again, another clipping mask. The clipping mask helps us avoid having to draw this outline again. We can just do this, kills it very roughly and fill it in. Then yet another layer for the stem, increase the brush size and draw the stem. And done. Now we have our lollipops. Let's start with a darker green for a change. And then just like that, and like that. Now since this one is overlapping, let's do it in a separate layer using a different color just for fun. Then let's pick this yellow for the tops and back to our spot brush. Make it nice and big. And tap. I just keep tapping until I find a size. I'm happy with. I like how unpredictable disease for these kind of things. It gives me more exciting results than if I were to manually vary the size. But if that annoys you, you can always just draw a so-called manually in whatever size you like instead. Now I want to do one more layer to add some highlights. Pick a white. We'll use the same spot brush, but much smaller. And then just sprinkle some dots like that to give it some smoker. I'm sticking to mostly just the top left side of all of them. But otherwise, I'm just going pretty random with these. And they, you go. Next. Let's do this one. Just a basic line for the stem. New layer. Let's do a red color. Starting with a code like this. You can press and hold to get it smooth and perfect. Then one. 34, drop color. Now if you want, you can take it a bit further. Clipping mask, select a different red, darker or lighter than the original, and just block out some petals just like that. I'm intentionally trying to leave a tiny sliver of space in the center so that they look like two distinct petals. So you can do this if you want to give it more of a tool, or you can very well just leave it like that too. Good. Now this also very similar. Start with the stem again. New layer. Let's go with this blue. Do the bottom curve. Then like that, like that. And that color drop. Again, you can add petals in the same way if you want. I'll just leave this one as it is. Next, we have our daisies going in with this light pink setting right at the center, 12345, and then fill them in. If we were to do these like this, the petals just end up merging into each other when you fill color. So we'll take a little bit of effort to maintain a tiny little gap in between the petals just so that they look a little more defined. That's basically the difference between this flower and this flower rate. So it'll just look like these if you don't specifically do this. Alright, let's pick a yellow spot brush again. And just do the centers like that. Demo, the sketch layer. Done. Now, these little flowers, let me go with a blue hill monoline brush again. And just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So pretty much exactly like how we sketch these. And it's totally fine if the petals are all different sizes and shapes. I think it adds to their personalities. In fact, I'll do orange for the middle. Switch to our spot brush, a little bit bigger and tap, tap, tap. So that's done as well. This is our next one and these remind me of 11 does pick a light purple. And I'll just go in like that. That just little skinny elongated ellipses. Then we drop color into each of them. Okay? And then new layer. Let's put it under this one. Let's do this gleaned for the stem. Those smaller. And just draw over this stem and branches. Now, just to add a touch of whimsy to these and other new layer, I'll pick a lighter. Let's go back to our spot brush. We go Nice and small with these and just sprinkle over all of these blobs. And we're gonna get rid of the sketch so we can see this better. And then continue sprinkling some on and some just outside the shapes. I'm keeping this totally loose and random. They go, it looks quite cute, I think. Now we have these Betty's. Why don't we go in with a darker pink for these. Let's go nice and big with a spot brush and just tap. And let's do another layer with some lighter pink Scott's for highlights. And then another layer for the little stems. Monoline brush like that. And like that. In this case, I like how the stem is over the berries because it looks like the center of the base around here. And that's done as well. Then we have our last one. These could be little leaves, a little petals are basically whatever you want. So just pick any color, outline them and fill color. Remove the sketch layer. And that's literally it with this one. And we've gone through all of our fellows. Can you believe how easy and quick that was? And yet these little filler elements are what add that final such a fabulous in a floral composition and bring everything together. In the next lesson, we kick off the final phase of our project, which is the botanical composition itself. Take a little break per-click stretto too.
15. Project Phase 3: Botanical Composition: I hope you've taken a little break and you're all pumped up to get into the third and final phase of our class project. In the previous few lessons, we took a pretty comprehensive dive into illustrating our flowers, foliage, and filler elements so I trust that this has equipped you with a good sense of how to go about bringing your elements to life. Even if you started off with completely different reference images or your sketches look completely different from mine, I believe you can approach developing them into colored illustrations with confidence now. Our next step is to bring everything together in a stunning botanical composition. In this lesson, we're going to set ourselves up to kick off our final compositions. I'll also show you exactly how we use our botanical reference libraries to our advantage as we plan our compositions. Let's look at some actual floral arrangements. There are so many different ways in which florals can be put together. There are bouquets, wreaths, arches, flower vase arrangements, patterns, you name it. Irrespective of which kind, in my opinion, the essence of building a floral composition lies in achieving a good balance between the different botanical elements. For our class project, we'll be creating a simple arrangement of florals inside a cup. The rest is completely open to your interpretation. First, you need a cup, right? You can either come up with the shape of the cup completely from your imagination or you can use a reference image. This can be something off of the Internet or just a photo of a cup or mug from your kitchen. Either way, just decide on a nice cup that you think looks interesting and fun. As for me, I have this super cool mug that Skillshare recently gifted me, and I'm in love with the shape of it so I'll be using this as my reference. Next thing we need to do is choose our botanical elements. This is where we actually put our botanical reference libraries to use. As I mentioned earlier, we'll not be using all of our elements to create our compositions. That'll just be too chaotic and all over the place. We want to create a nice cohesive composition with just a few different elements. Let's see how we go about this process. Firstly, come back to Procreate and open a new A4-size canvas, and just keep it there. Now, let's start with flowers. These are our hero elements of the composition so I would pick about 2-3 different flowers to include in my final piece. I would usually not go more than that. I have my library of flowers open here. Let's take a good look at everything and decide which three flowers we'll use in the composition. I want to include this one. If you've seen my floral work, you know this is one of my favorites so I definitely want to do this with you. Then I'll pick this one because I like the idea of having some fully open flowers as part of the arrangement so I'll choose this one. Then I want to mix things up by doing a hanging flower too. It'll be nice to have some flowers just hanging off of the cup wanted. Yes, I want to do that. Now, go to the Layers panel, find the ones that you selected, tap on one of them, tap "Copy". Go back to the Gallery, open the new canvas you just created. Go here under the "Add" tab, tap "Paste" so the flower you selected shows up here. Just place it wherever you want on the canvas. Then we will go back and do the same steps with the other two sketches. Tap on the layer, copy, go to the new canvas, and instead of going in here and doing paste, we can also swipe down with three fingers and tap "Paste". Then again, the last one, copy, go here, swipe down with three fingers, paste. I'll just move this over here and reduce the size a bit too. We have the three flowers that we're going to do. Next, foliage elements. Now I stick to about one or two different foliage elements usually. If you want foliage to be a more prominent part of your composition, you can go with up to three. But my recommendation is to stick to just one or two in most cases. We're in our library of foliage, just taking a look at everything we have. This is pretty much a standard leaf that is simple to create, complements most flowers very well, and easy to fit into different kinds of spaces. I'm going to go with this one. With the second one, I'll be a bit more adventurous. I really love this one. It's nice and fun and whimsical. I've never used this one before. I just found this reference image and sketched it with you so I've been super excited to use it. It's going to be this one and this one. Copy, go back to the same file, and paste it. Then I'll take this one and bring it over too, the exact same way. Finally, we need to pick our fillers. In case of fillers too, I stick to just one or two kinds. I'll be doing a lot of loose spots and sprinkles besides these, so 1-2 will be plenty. Over here in our library of fillers, I'll pick these ones first. They're simple, and they can be added to pretty much any stem. Then I think I want to do these tiny flowers as loose elements just hanging around in the composition. I've brought these over to our new canvas too. These are going to be the foundational elements in our botanical composition. Now, our final step is to just export this canvas as an image, either JPEG or PNG, and it should show up in your photo gallery. We can then use it as a reference image while we sketch our composition. We found a cup to inspire the shape of our vessel and we have all our botanical elements in one place. This means we have everything we need to get started with creating our botanical composition. In the next lesson, we'll start sketching it.
16. Sketching Your Composition: In this lesson, we will develop the sketch for a botanical composition. I will walk you through my process as I build a composition using the different botanical elements we selected in the previous lesson. One thing you can expect throughout this lesson is that things are constantly changing. Sketching a composition is a process of evolution. We will put down the thoughts in our mind out onto the canvas, and we'll keep refining what we create till we're something we're happy with. What I'm trying to say is, don't be scared to let things evolve. Let's do this. First, we need a brand new canvas. You can go with whatever size you want to, just keep in mind that we need a considerable number of layers because we're going to do not just the sketch, but the entire illustration on this canvas. Each element would need an average of at least 3-5 layers, depending on the number of colors and level of detail. Ideally, we should find the biggest canvas size that gives us at least about 50 less to work with. I create a custom size, switch to inches, and I'll do 10 by eight inch. Leave the DPI at 300, and we get 70 layers which should give us enough less for apiece, and then some cool. Let's start with a cup. I have my cup right in front of me, so I'm just going to look at it and sketch it out. If you're using an image, you can open the Reference window and put it there. Now, I'll first go here and turn on the Drawing guide. Edit drawing guide, and then I'll choose symmetry because my cup is symmetric on both sides except for the handle. So symmetry will help me. I'm going to go in here and make sure that for this layer, the Drawing Assist is turned on. Then the brush, I'll go with 6B pencil for sketching. We'll start off with some very basic lines and curves to guide the shape of the mug. You can go over them and adjust them as much as you like to. That gives me an idea of the shape I want to create. Then we'll reduce the opacity of this layer, and add a new layer on top to do a more refined version with Drawing Assist on. This time, I'll draw only the lines that I need, but again, you don't need to be super precious about it, it's still only a sketch. I'll round off some of these corners to get a softer shape. You can then go on and turn the guide layer off, then I'll remove the Drawing Assist to draw the handle, because I didn't want it to show up on both sides. Then I'll just sketch out a handle for my mug. I'm happy with the shape, so I don't need our guide layer anymore. I'm going to make this smaller, so I'll just reduce the size, because we need enough space on the canvas for our stars of the day, the botanicals. I'll bring it down to about there, so my florals can all go up here. I'll add one more layer, also Drawing Assist, to make a surface here for my mug to sit on. I'll go ahead and get rid of this line too, just to avoid any confusion. Now, we can move on to our actual botanical composition. Open a new layer, we don't want Drawing Assist anymore, we don't even need the drawing guide in fact. I like to start off my compositions by first blocking out some areas where I would like my flowers, the hero elements to go. Let's do that. The first thing that strikes me is this. If I put all my florals just here on top, the whole thing will look slightly off balance because I have the handle over here. I want to do something on this side to balance that out. To get that balance, it does not necessarily have to be right here. If I imagine that my canvas is divided into four quadrants like that, the handle is on the lower right quadrant. To balance it out, I want to put something similar sized in the upper left quadrant, diagonally opposite to the handle. Somewhere around here. I'll just roughly mark out a circular blob over here. That looks good for the start. We can always change it later on if we need to. I can go on and play some more blobs for my other flowers wherever I want to. I'd like to have one of the flowers to be spilling out of the cup just to be at the edge, but slightly coming out over the mouth. Maybe something like that around that size. You can select around them and move them around to find a better spot if you need to, or even adjust the sizes. Now we definitely need something on this side, but not as big as this. Something like that. We can also do something around there. Actually, I'll take it from there and put it more towards this side, maybe make it a bit bigger. I think this can go a little bit more to this side. I'll move this also a tad more off-center. Remember we picked a hanging flower. It'll be nice to put that somewhere here, I think. Maybe around here with the stem sort of like that. Then we have this space here in the center. We can even have a couple of things overlapping. Maybe this one can be a tad smaller, and go a bit to this side, so we have room for more stuff around here. Let's block out a couple more circles here. The flowers themselves need not even big circles [inaudible] , we're just blocking out some blobs for each of them. I'm quite happy with that. I like my compositions to be balanced but not symmetric exactly. We have some bald spots here and there, but we still have leaves and fellows to do. These adjusts for a bigger floss. Now, let's do another new layer to start drawing our flask. At this point, I'll go ahead and bring in our reference image, the canvas with all our chosen elements that are going to go into this composition. I put it here on this side. Now, I have all my elements right here to easily make decisions as I sketch. I think I'm going to do this over here. I'll just sketch that out. Oh, I missed to reduce the opacity of this layer. We just need to barely see it. We already went through sketching all these elements in detail, so I won't be walking you through that step-by-step this time. Feel free to change up any details you want to. You don't have to do everything exactly as it is in our reference sketches. Now, I know this one's going to be a hanging flower, so let's get that down. Since this is a hanging flower, and you know gravity, I want the stem to be perfectly vertical, and then I'll draw the rest of the stem from there. This, the flower itself, is slightly tilted with reference to the stem, so I'll just fix that. I think I'll make this one also, the hanging one. The stem can be like that, curving out and coming down like this. Just to save time, I'm going to select this, swipe down with three fingers, duplicate. We have a second one, which we can move over to this spot, where it meets its stem. We can do another one of these cup flowers here. Over here, I feel this one would be the best fit. I'll sketch that in here, starting with the center. Let's do another one of these open flowers up here. Now I'm thinking, if we fill these with flowers too, then we won't have enough space to do these swirly ones. These are circular elements too that take up a significant amount of space. I don't really want to tuck them away behind other stuff, because they fun and we like fun. So yes, let's do one of these, starting from around here. With these sketches, we don't need to go super detailed or precise. In fact, I think it's best to keep these loose and simple. Let's do another one of these over here. If you do these in separate layers, you can easily move them around and adjust them at this stage. Lit it on once the sketch is done, we can always just merge the layers if they are short on layers. Now, we can get rid of a layer of blobs. I'll delete it, then we can go on to adding our basic leaves. I'll look out for the biggest ball spots, and draw some leaves there. I'm just doing individual leaves wherever I need them because I don't want to overcrowd this with the entire complex leaf being everywhere. Especially since our other foliage element is already taking up a considerable amount of real estate on the canvas. I prefer to not have them overlap with the flowers much. I don't mind the stems overlapping with the leaves, or the leaves overlapping over each other, but I try to keep the flowers a little bit away from all of that. Another leaf falling over here would be nice. Let's extend this stem down to figure out placement for one more leaf. We can do one here, just the tip peeking out of the cup, and then we can get rid of all this. We have some more bald spots in between, where we'll add our little filler elements. I think we have enough foliage happening here. Let's go on and add some fillers in a new layer. Let me start off with this spot here, put one of these in here, just like that. Another one here, then we can do some of that tiny flowers here, just floating around. You can even have some of them overlapping among themselves. Let's do some over here, just at the edge. When it comes to these fillers, you don't have to think so much about whether they make sense. Do the laws of physics apply? The main job of the fillers is to just add a touch of whimsy to our composition, and to fill up empty spaces. So, if they don't have stems holding them up and stuff, that's fine. In fact, in my opinion, they look better, just hanging around aimlessly. It will be cool to have some falling ones around here maybe, so I'll just do a couple right here, and maybe one more up here. That looks pretty good to me. This here is our sketch. Now, I cannot wait to bring this to live with some color, and that's exactly what we'll do in our next lesson.
17. Illustrating Your Composition: Ready to dive into our final step of illustrating our botanical composition and color. This is going to be super fun since we've already gone in depth with illustrating our individual elements. This lesson will be a walk-through of how I apply those techniques in a larger context. Thanks to a non-destructive workflow, we don't need to worry about committing to a color choices as we do this. So we will first focus on getting all the shapes and details down. And in the end, play around with the colors. Good. So I have my sketch here. They're on the same canvas as before. Before beginning the coloring process, I'm going to merge all the layers in our sketch into a single layer. To do this, a simple pinch across all the less will do the job. Now we can start adding layers for our colors underneath the sketch layer. I'm starting with my mug first. So let me go with this light purple maybe. I'll pick a monoline brush again. And then start by outlining the front face of the mug. I don't usually use symmetry when I'm doing the final illustration because I like the subtle differences that come up with manually doing both sides and then fill it in. Now a different layer for the inside of the cup. And I'll pick a darker purple. So pretty much every single thing is going to be done this way. Outlines first D to closed shape and then drop color. Another new layer for the handle. I can just hold down hill to pick the same color as this. Naturally I once again, Mr. Reduce the opacity of the sketch. So let's do that. And we'll outline the handle. Now if you try to fill it in, the whole layer will fill up because we haven't closed the shape right? So close it up and then fill it. Okay. The mug is pretty much ready. I don't want to try and make it look realistic or detailed. The focus is on the botanicals. So let's move on to that now. Open a new layer. I'm gonna do this 1 first, starting with the back petals. Then on the same layer, I'll do the back petals of the second one too. So basically all parts of the same kind of flower that are the same color go into this same way unless there are any overlapping elements. Okay? We have only two of this kind, so we can proceed to the front petals now separately, turning on clipping mask, the lighter yellow. And same here. Then in between these two layers, another new layer for the pink middle spot on both of them. And another one for the dark gray. But now the stems, another layer of course. Make sure the stem goes past the NGO related jacket inside the mug. And then seeing hip. We want the stems to be in front of the dark purple, but behind the light papillae. That's when it'll look like they're coming from inside the mug. Right? So I'm going to move it, my tip. Now we can do the leaves. I'm doing these on the same layer as the stems. Okay, my intention for this leaf was for it to be over the handle. So I'll pick it up and move it. And the stems are still fine because it's still between the two probabilities. We can add the little stems for the fillers to at this point. Now the second color over the leaves on another layer. So this kinda flat is done to keep things a little bit organized. I'll go on and group these uphill and downhill and then open a new layer. Next, let's do these floss. I go through all these layers in both these flags one-by-one. For now, I'm using pretty much the same colors that I did during our previous demos. Switch over to this spot brush to do the big yellow circle. And all the little enters in the center vary the pressure to get a nice mediation in the sizes of these spots. Then back to a monoline brush for the stem and leaves on this plot. And these are done now, hanging floss. Now on the pedestal to go above the flat lays in this case. The rest of it though, the stem, we wanted to, again come from inside the cup. So again between the front and back legs of the cup and then go for it. I'll do these also in the same net. I just realized I missed this leaf, so I'll add this to the first clip let that we did. Okay, so that's all our plants and leaves. Now I slowly foliage. Again. We want these to stick out from inside the cup. So I'll add a layer right over this and go for it. Then the second color, the colors on these are clashing with the leaves. So I'm going to try some other color options, but we'll look into that later. Once we finished putting all our elements down, we'll review the colors of everything and see what needs to be adjusted. Good. I'm going to add some stripes on these. So it makes this POC look a bit darker, kind of like a shadow. But in a more interestingly, Yeah, looks good so far. Now I'm going to do my little filler flowers. I want some of them to be in a darker shade and some lighter. So I'm doing just the lighter ones now in one layer. And then the darker ones in a separate layer. And the blue dots on the dark and light ones can all go in one day. Then. Yes, that's all of them. Next we have other filler elements. Maybe this pink, a bit bigger, and go in. Now I want to add some spots in these glass, make some floating anthers, few outside the flower, and few insight. And then let's add some more loose dots. Look for areas that look a little blank and add some spots there. And remember, each color of dots goes on a separate layer. So you can change the colors easily at a later stage if you need to. I wanna do some floating anthers for these ones to maybe yellow. Now, I think the cup could use some shadows to add a little bit of dimension. So I use a docket open to just block out some shadow areas like this bottom section here. Reduce the opacity on that a little bit. We don't want it to be too harsh. And again, some shadows for the handle tube. This will help to handle stand out against the body once the sketch lines Gobi. And again, lower the opacity, then we have the table or the surface. We do this all the way here below everything else. I think this can also be the dark gray that we used inside the class at London. Nice contrast. Just draw a straight line. Hold down to make sure it's horizontal. Fill it. We can actually move it up a tad just like that and fill up the rest of the space too. Cool. So now we can get the sketch layer out of the way so we can properly look at everything and see what changes we need to make. The more I look at this, the more unsure damn about the broken mug. I might want to do some background color instead of leaving it white. But I do want some white in the picture. So I'm thinking maybe I'll meet the Maglite and maybe the background can be open. So let's do a light purple for the background and go white for the monk. Of course, the shadows have to now be green. And the inside of the mug too. Yeah, I like that much better. I like the color of this flower and like the pink hue. In fact, I like how all the flowers and leaves are looking. But the pink is not standing out against this background. So maybe the backbone being poeple is not the best idea. I just go on and try some other colors for the background. Some blues pastels, bright and deep colors, more neutral shades. Maybe audience. And I land back at a blue, but more towards a deep teal this time. Interesting. You know what? I'm going to keep it like this and I'm going to play it out with these first. This needs to be sorted before I can fully come into the background. And I'm thinking, I don't want them to be green or any typical leaf color, only just be more adventurous with them. So, how about this blue? Now? Maybe with a lighter purple hill. Interesting. What if we make this read? Because I'm loving how the rest of the red blocks and there isn't enough of it. Yes, I love it. You always know it when you find the one, really, it's just a sudden they'll look at that. Isn't it? Gorgeous. Okay, now time to figure out the background. Again. I feel like a dark background is making the white COP stand out more than anything else. So maybe you want to stick to something softer and maybe more neutral. Actually, we have a hue saturation brightness settings that we can do it. So we can easily get a feel of how different colors look using the sliders. I keep getting down to the blues Dante, is that assign? I think that's a sign. Looks like it's going to be blue after all. Now it's just about doing some minor tweaks till I find the one which seems to be somewhere around here. Yeah, I'm going to hold onto this. Okay. My last step is to go nuts with some more blue spots. After all, what is a botanical composition without a bunch of sprinkles? When I say go nuts. So I don't really mean GoodNotes. Do not overdo this. It's best to just use them sparingly announced spots that you think look a little bit bold. And one last thing, I want to add a little shadow for the entire cup over here. I've picked a jet lag and block out a simple shape like that, close it off and fill it in. Maybe a slight angle here to mimic the curb on the month Done. And that's it. Here is our complete illustrated botanical composition. So as you saw, I rely on my instincts quite a bit as I go about creating these illustrations, especially when it comes to color. While what's happening around us matters, I think in the end, urine Logger Pro to create. There's no fun in. And I think your most authentic work is always a brainchild of your instincts. Train yourself to use your instincts. Now, if you've been just sitting back and watching this illustration come to life, it's time to create your own. And once you do, give yourself a pat on the back on my behalf because I'm proud of you.
18. Sharing Your Class Project: Having completed all three phases of our project for this class, it's time to upload them to our class project section. To make this a total breeze, I'll give you a checklist of things to upload. From our first phase, we have our three Inspiration boards, one each for flowers, foliage, and fillers. In phase 2, we built our Botanical Reference Library, so we have our library of flowers, library of foliage, and library of fillers. Lastly from the third phase, we have our composition sketch and the final illustrated botanical composition. Besides this, you are more than welcome to share any of your in-between pieces, including the individual illustrative elements that we created. Because who doesn't love looking at some work in progress pictures? In each of these cases, all you need to do is export them as an image, a JPEG or PNG file, and upload it to your class project in the project gallery. I've uploaded some of the work that I created with you on this class as a separate class project. Please feel free to visit my project if you'd like to have a closer look at everything. I'm absolutely thrilled to see what you've created with me and I know your classmates will enjoy seeing your creations too. So don't forget to take out a little time to do this one last step. I promised to give you my honest feedback and answer any questions you may have. In addition, if you post your botanical creations on Instagram, do tag me so we can stay connected and I can feature your work in my stories. Let's catch up in the next lesson for some final thoughts before we wrap up this class.
19. Final Thoughts: Just like that, you've made it to the end of the class. Congrats on taking the time and effort to invest in your skills. I trust that you've had a fun journey with me and gained a lot of new knowledge and ideas through this class. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this class, it is the confidence to take any inspiration from the natural world of botanicals and put your own spin on it to create floral illustrations bursting with personality. I cannot wait to see all the creative ways you've arrived at to apply the new skills you've learned with me. Do follow me on Instagram and don't forget to tag me when you share your floral illustrations. I would be thrilled to reshare student projects through my stories. If you enjoyed this class and if you have the time, I would truly appreciate a review here and a shoutout on social media so that other creatives like you can find this class and learn from it. I'm already working on my next class and all I can tell you right now is that it's going to be the perfect class for you to apply what you learned here and take it to the next level. Do follow me on Skillshare so that you will be notified right away as soon as I publish it. In the meantime, if the idea of mixing watercolors with negative space lettering, tickles your curiosity, then do check out my first two Skillshare classes that are already out there. Thank you for staying with me, and until next time. Bye.
Vinitha Mammen, Illustrator | Lettering Artist
