A Beginner Guide to Affinity Designer | Textured Florals on the iPad V1 | Tracey Capone | Skillshare
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A Beginner Guide to Affinity Designer | Textured Florals on the iPad V1

teacher avatar Tracey Capone, Illustrator, Photographer & Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome | Class Project

      2:10

    • 2.

      Downloads & Resources

      3:03

    • 3.

      Gallery | Creating a New Document

      6:29

    • 4.

      The Designer Persona

      11:26

    • 5.

      The Color Studio

      8:16

    • 6.

      The Pixel Persona

      2:48

    • 7.

      The Shape Tools

      6:48

    • 8.

      The Pen & Pencil Tools

      10:48

    • 9.

      Saving and Exporting Documents

      1:52

    • 10.

      Preparing Your Canvas

      2:38

    • 11.

      Creating Leaves with the Shape Tool

      13:16

    • 12.

      Creating Leaves with Pen and Pencil Tools

      11:11

    • 13.

      Adding Texture to Single Layers

      8:12

    • 14.

      Adding Texture to Groups of Layers

      5:29

    • 15.

      Simple Flowers from Shapes

      12:10

    • 16.

      Complex Flowers From Shapes

      13:16

    • 17.

      Flowers with the Pen & Pencil Tools

      10:55

    • 18.

      Adding Texture to Flowers

      13:41

    • 19.

      The Assets Studio

      6:11

    • 20.

      Putting it All Together

      9:38

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About This Class

In this class, you will learn how to use Affinity Designer V1 to create beautiful, textured florals and leaves right on your iPad.  Designer is a vector based program, with raster elements built in to it, making it perfect to create complex flower and leaf shapes and give them a wonderfully organic feel using pixel based texture.

I will provide you with all of the guidance you need to create your very own botanicals that can be used in illustration, surface pattern design, for print on demand sites, client work and much more.

PLEASE NOTE

If you are using V2 of the app, you can still follow along, as long as you know where tools are located. The process itself hasn't changed, however the interface is much different. Thank you!

You will also receive, as a free download, a set of assets, and a vector brush pack that I have created specifically for this class. Throughout the class, I will show you how to use them to create your own colorful, textured florals. I have also included, in the Resource Guide, a complete list of all of my favorite Affinity Designer brush makers and texture designers so you can further build your own go to collection of tools for creating your own textured flower illustrations. 

Downloads can be found at this link, and the password will be shared in the Downloads & Resources section of the class.

Please note, while I don't provide texture files for this class, there are a number of resources for either free or paid textures out there. I have put together this blog post covering a few of those sources, which also includes a quick video about how you can use Designer's built in stock studio to pull texture images right from Unsplash, Pixabay and Pexels.  Find the post here on my blog.  The class itself isn't about the specific textures or brushes I use but, rather, the process to add them so feel free to use whatever you have on hand.

In this class, you will learn:

- All about the User Interface in Affinity Designer for iPad, including the vector and pixel personas and how they can work both together and separately all in the same app.

- How to create your own custom color palettes using reference photos or your own illustrations. 

- Use the built in shape tools in Affinity Designer to create the vector base for your leaves and flowers.

- Use the Pen and Pencil tool to create freehand shapes that you can turn in to beautifully textured, colorful flowers.

- The three methods I use to add texture and dimension to my flat illustrations.

- How to create, save your completed objects to the Assets Studio and use assets in the Nature Elements Asset Pack to build your leaves and flowers and use them in future illustrations or seamless patterns. 

- Learn how to save and export your documents from Affinity Designer for iPad using the Documents Menu

Already familiar with the ins and out of Designer for iPad and just want to get started creating? Please feel free to jump ahead as I created this class with all levels in mind so, so you can easily do so.

The methods you learn in this class will give you the building blocks you need to create more complex illustrations in Affinity Designer for iPad. The class will be taught on an iPad Pro, using a second generation Apple Pencil, but you can also use your finger or another brand of stylus.

Do you love textural digital illustrations as much as I do? Join my Textural Illustrations for Digital Artists Facebook Group. In this group, you can share your creations, learn tips and tricks for adding texture in the various digital apps, and ask questions of other artists who love texture as much as you do. Check out there group here.

Please note: Affinity Designer is compatible with specific iPads. Click the link to find out more information on Serif's website.

INTRO SONG CREDIT: "Acoustic Breeze" Bensound http://www.bensound.com

Meet Your Teacher

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Tracey Capone

Illustrator, Photographer & Designer

Top Teacher

Hello and welcome to my Skillshare channel! I'm so happy you're here!

My name is Tracey. I'm an illustrator, photographer, teacher and self-proclaimed digital art nerd who loves all the apps, and sharing everything I know. Being able to help students understand more complex applications, like Affinity Designer, and hearing about that moment of clarity when everything came together for them is truly satisfying.

not just the how, but also the why... I believe understanding why I take certain approaches, or use particular tools, will help you absorb what you learn and better prepare you to work on your own later. to embrace the perfectly imperfect... in my mind, it's the best way to develop that sometimes elusive creative voice!

and finally... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Welcome | Class Project: [MUSIC] I am Tracey Capone. I'm an illustrator, photographer, and designer, and welcome to my class all about creating beautiful textures and florals right on your iPad using Affinity Designer. In this class, you'll learn how to use designers powerful vector and raster tools to create beautiful texture flowers and leaves like these. What you'll learn in this class will provide you the building blocks you'll need to go on to create even more complex illustrations. First, I'll take you on a comprehensive tour through designers user interface, show you the difference between each of the workspaces, as well as explain the tools and studios within each one. After that we'll take a look at the built-in shapes and the rectangle tool, as well as the pen and pencil tools, and I'll show you how to use all of these to create organic-looking flower and leaf shapes. Next, I'll show you how to add additional dimension to your flat illustrations by using a combination of vector and raster-based tools to add beautiful texture to your designs. We'll also explore the asset studio, where I'll show you how you can easily save complete objects for use in future illustrations or surface patterns. I'll show you how you can use the nature elements assets pack that I'm providing as a free download for this class. Now, if you're already familiar with designers interface and want to jump right into creating, feel free to. I'll set the class up for everyone from beginner to intermediate so you can easily skip ahead if you'd like. The project for this class will be to create two sets of flowers and leaves using the tools that you'll learn about in the class. The shapes in the rectangle tool, as well as the pen and pencil tool. You'll complete these flower shapes by adding texture and whatever format you'd like to add it using texture image files, vector or raster brushes. Finally, you will create a full textural bouquet illustration using a combination of all the methods that you've learned in the class. For the class, you're going to need a compatible iPad, an Apple Pencil, or other stylists, or if you prefer, you can even draw with your finger. I can't wait to see what you create using the methods you learn in this class, so let's get started. 2. Downloads & Resources: Before we get started, I want to show you how to download the resource guide, brush and assets pack that I've included with the class. I want to know you're going to need to access the download link through the projects and resources section on the Skillshare website and not through the app. You'll find a link at the top of that section. When you click on it, you're going to need a password to access the downloads, and I'll put that up on the screen now. Once you've entered the password and access the three downloads, you'll find three files, the resource guide, the nature elements assets pack, and the textural florals brush pack. Go ahead and download these either to your iPad or to an accessible Cloud file as you'll need to open these on your iPad to import them. The resource guide includes information about Affinity Designer as well as links to Serif's website, in case you haven't already downloaded the app. It also includes a comprehensive breakdown of the difference between vectors and rasters, so that you have a better understanding of how they work and can best decide what's right for your design. Now, while Designer comes with a large number of really great vector and raster brushes which I'm going to use in this class, I've also included a list of my go-to brush makers, in case you want to further build your collection. Designer does not come with built-in textures to use for the texture image files, so I've included this list of my go-to texture makers, because when it comes to adding elements like these, they can really make or break your design. You need to make sure that you're using high-quality, high resolution images to include, otherwise, you could run into quality issues. Included with the download is a set of nature elements assets, as well as a brush pack to help you further enhance the middle sections of your flowers. I'm going to be using all of these in the class, but first, let's go ahead and import them. Once you've downloaded the two files, either onto your iPad or to a Cloud file, you're ready to import them into Designer. Let's go ahead and start with the assets pack. Select your Assets Studio, which looks like nine squares in a block formation, and my screen is set up for left-handed person, so yours may be on the other side. Select the hamburger menu at the top of the studio and tap on import category. This is going to take you to your files. Locate the file that you saved, tap on it, and it's going to add it into your Assets Studio. Finally, let's go ahead and import the brush pack. This time you're going to want to make sure that you're in the designer persona, which is this first icon right here. You'll select the brush studio, which is just under the color dot here, it looks like a brush with a little swoosh formation under it. Once you're in the studio again, go to the hamburger menu at the top, select Import Brushes, locate the file that you saved and tap, and it will import the brushes into your brush studio. We're all set to get started. If you have any issues with downloading the files or importing them, please let me know. In the next section, we're going to begin taking a look at designer's gallery, and user interface, so let's get started. 3. Gallery | Creating a New Document: In this section we're going to take a look at designers gallery screen, as well as get started with creating a new document. Now the gallery is the homepage. This is where you will create a new document access help, change your preference settings as well as organize existing documents. The very first time you open this, it's going to be relatively empty with the exception of a link to some video tutorials as well as sample illustration. But at the top right you'll see a plus sign, question mark, and a cog. I'm going to skip the plus sign for right now that's where you'll access the new document menu. The question mark takes you to the help area. On the left you'll see written help which is broken down into sections, so you can more easily find everything. On the right you can access a collection of video tutorials as well as the user support forums for on Sarah's website. There's a number of ways of accessing help directly inside the app. A cog takes you to System Preferences and it's broken down in two traditional preference categories at the top. I haven't changed very many of my settings, I'm going to show you the ones that I have changed, as well as some additional ones you can decide for yourself if there's any additional changes you want to make. In the general preferences, I make sure that my Undo limit is relatively low. Designer takes a snapshot of every movement you make within a document for undo and redo purposes. The larger this number, the more taxing it is on the application and the slower everything is going to move. I keep mine anywhere between 110 and 130 and haven't found a need to change that. In the interface preferences, you can change your background gray level here with this slider. The further you go to the left, the darker your screening, the further right, the lighter. Now I am left-handed, while this is off by default, I have made sure that left-handed mode is on. All this does is flip your screen opposite of one another, the tools are exactly the same. If you prefer to tap a button rather than use two-finger, three- finger tap, you can turn on Show undo and redo buttons here, but by default it is off. I haven't made any changes to my color preferences. If you have particular needs, you can take a look at the menu here and see if there's anything that you need to change. In the Tools Preferences I make sure that allow canvas rotation in all tools, as well as touch for gestures only is on. Canvas rotation allows you to use two fingers to rotate your canvas rather than rotating the entire iPad. I keep this on overall for the application, but on a document basis, there is a way of locking it and I'll show you how to do that when we get into the workspace. Touch for gestures only, because I don't draw with my finger. What I was finding is when I was using my finger rather as a modifier, I was accidentally moving objects. I make sure that this is on so that doesn't happen. Again if you are someone who draws with your finger, you're going to want to make sure that this is on. If you're using an Apple pencil, in the pencil preferences, you can change your pressure settings as well as make some basic changes to how the pencil interacts with the application. Your font preferences will show you fonts that you've imported into the application. Then finally, the shortcut preferences will provide you with a list of keyboard shortcuts if you use either a bluetooth or a smart keyboard. Let's go ahead and create a new document. Now I'm going to go ahead and hit the plus sign here and it's going to give me a number of options. I'm going to skip the first option here for one moment. You can create new from a clipboard. You can create from a template that you've saved. You can also Open or Import from the Cloud, as well as import photos from your iPad. This final option allows you to create what's called a project and it's basically a folder. I'm going to take you back to my gallery screen. These top four documents are out on their own, but in the bottom here I have projects set up which again are just folders and I use those to organize my documents. For example, I have one set up for my Skillshare class documents. Now within the folder, I can reorder my documents, I can tap on this hamburger menu and get a number of options such as renaming it, saving it, moving out of the project. Then the projects themselves also have a menu. Now, there's something inside it, but the only thing that you can do is rename it. If this were empty, it would also give me the option to close it. Lets go ahead back in here and go to New Document. Now this is where you can manually key in the information for your document. I prefer the most part, ignore the left side. The only time I use this is if I've created presets and you can do that by tapping on this hamburger menu and then you'll find the presets under this drop-down. But for the most part, you can key your information in on the right side here. Now, the one thing that you do want to keep in mind when you're creating your document is if you plan to print it, because while this is a vector program and has raster elements to it, you need to create your original document and the largest size you plan to print. That's to avoid any pixelation or muddy textures. When you're creating that, just keep in mind what your plans are for, what you're creating. Let's say I want to create a 16 by 20 inch document. In pixels I'm going to go ahead and type that in as 4,800 by 6,000. Then I'm going to choose my DPI here. There's a list of preset ones as well as way of keying in your own if you have a particular need. I'm going to tap 300.Now, you can change your orientation and it will automatically change the numbers at the top here. But let's just stick with a portrait orientation. If you prefer to work with the transparent background, you can remove the background by tapping on this. I personally prefer to work with a background, but that's really up to you. Then finally, if you want to work with art boards, you can create that here, then there's ways that you can adjust the art board and add additional ones once you get into the workspace. I'm not going to use one here, I'm just going to tap, "Okay". It's going to create my new document and take me into the user interface. In the next few sections, I'm going to take you on a tour of Designer's interface and take you into each of the persona's that provide you with the tools that you need to create your own illustration. I'll see you there. 4. The Designer Persona: In this section, we're going to take a closer look at the tools under the designer persona. I mentioned in the last section the designer persona is the default persona we'll find the vector-based tools. Now, if you're coming from another vector program, you're likely familiar with the tools in this one. What's probably less familiar is the layout. In designer for iPad, there are tools on one side and what are called studios on the other. Again, my screen is flipped for a left-handed person. The tools allow you to create, move, resize, and reshape objects, as well as perform edits to those objects, and the studio side gives you advanced functionality to perform additional appearance edits to those objects. The two don't necessarily work in conjunction with one another with a few notable exceptions. For example, if I select the ''Vector Brush Tool'' I'll go to the brush studio to select what type of brush I want to use. Similarly, there's a text tool that also has a corresponding tech studio, but for the most part they work independently of one another. Let's take a look at the individual tools themselves, starting with the arrow which is the move tool. The move tool allows you to select, move, re-size, as well as rotate your objects. We're going to use the rotate function, especially when it comes to creating flowers in an upcoming section. I'll turn the labels on here. The node tool, point transform tool, and corner tool allow you to make edits to the line, shapes, curves, and paths that make up your objects. The pencil tool, vector brush tool, and pen tool are used to free-form create those objects as well as perform additional edits to them. The fill tool and transparency tool are used to add gradients to the objects, whether it's a transparent gradient, color gradient, or you can even add texture to a group of layers and I'll show you how to do that in an upcoming section. The rectangle tool, which I'll tap and tap again will provide you with a list of built-in shapes, and when we get into creating leaves and flowers, I'm going to show you how to do that two ways. One of those ways will be using these built-in shapes. I mentioned the text tool already. We're actually not going to use any texts in this class, but this is how you would add it to your design. Then finally, there's an eyedropper tool. This allows you to sample color to use in your existing document or save for future documents. There's actually two ways to use the eyedropper, the one down here and the one in the color studio, we'll get to in a little bit. I typically use this one over in the studio rather than this, but it's really up to you, whatever is more comfortable. Let's take a look at the bottom of the screen. This is the contextual menu, and if I tap through the tools, you'll see that menu change. This just provides you with additional options specific to the selected tool. Just keep an eye out, some of them actually have carrots here where there's additional options that are hidden. This primarily works with the tool side and not as much the studio side, but there are some exceptions that I'll show you when we get there. Moving to the studio side, starting with the color studio, I'm not going to focus a lot of attention on this studio in this class as I have created a specific class dedicated to the color studio where I'll show you how to sample color, as well as create your own palettes. But this is where you'll select the color for the fill and strokes for your objects, and you can do that using the eyedropper tool, a color wheel, sliders, as well as swatches. Again, we'll go into greater detail on that in a bit. The stroke studio allows you to make changes to the appearance of an existing strokes. So if I add a black stroke to this pink box, I can use the stroke studio to change the width of that stroke, I can change it to dashes, and change the pattern of that dash. I can change the handles here to change the pressure settings on the stroke to give it a bit of a warp. Then there's additional settings under this carrot that you can make changes to as well. The brush studio, again, is where you're going to select the type of brush you use with the brush studio. But additionally, you can make changes to the appearance of a selected stroke simply by selecting and tapping on the brush. I have that same stroke selected here. I'm going to tap this acrylic stroke brush, and you can see that it changed the appearance of that stroke to match that of the brush. The layer studio is where layers are house and organized, so you can group layers and ungroup them. You can reorder layers by tapping and dragging. You can also clip layers rather and we'll be using that a lot when we add texture to our objects. You can delete layers, add blank layer or mask, and you can also go into the layer options of a selected layer simply by tapping these three dots. Here you can make a change to the name of the layer, the opacity, as well as the blend mode. The appearance studio provides you with detailed information about the stroke and fill that make up a selected object. In this case I have this orange box selected and it's telling me there's no stroke and an orange fill. If I tap the pink box, it's telling me I have a 30 point black stroke and a pink fill. We're not going to use this studio at all in this class, but there's some really interesting design elements that you can add using the higher functionality of the studio, so I recommend checking out serifs website for additional information. The asset studio is by far my favorite thing about designer. This allows you to save objects, whether they're single layer objects or a multiple layer objects that you can use in your existing document as well as future ones. I use this a lot for surface pattern design as well as when I'm creating an illustration that I just need a little bit of fill for and I don't want to have to start from scratch. All you do is tap and insert and it will insert your object exactly as you saved it. In this case, since I save this as a group, I can go into these individual elements and make changes to them if I want. Now, I mentioned in the resource section that I provided you with a link to a set of nature element assets and this is where you'll find them. In an upcoming section, I'm going to show you not only how to use them to add color and texture and create your own designs, but I'll also show you how to save your own assets as well as organize them. The stock studio allows you to directly access Unsplash, Pixabay, and other sites to find reference photos. Now, if you are used to having to leave an app to go to Pinterest or a web browser, you no longer have to do that. All you have to do is type in a search. I'm going to go ahead and do car again here, and it'll pull up the stock images for that particular search. If I select this VW bug here and tap and then release, it pulls it in as a separate layer in my document. I can re-size this and have it off to the side, I can sample colors from it, I can use it as a reference image. You can also add it to an art board if you're using artboards instead of a single Canvas. Now, because this is a separate layer when I'm done with it, I can either turn it off or delete it completely. We're not going to use the symbols studio in this class. I use this a lot for surface pattern design. What this allows you to do is add an element known as a symbol and duplicate it across your design. When you make changes to one of those symbols, it'll make the exact same change to the rest of the symbols that you've placed. Again, this is really handy for something like surface pattern design, where you're adding a duplicate of the same thing and don't want to have to go into each one to make a particular edit. The layer effects studio allows you to add non-destructive layer effects to your objects. For example, if I select the orange box, I'm not going to go through all of these. We'll select Gaussian Blur. I can drag across the Canvas and add a blur and change the level of blur. I can also do that down here at the contextual menu. If you remember, I mentioned earlier that this menu typically works mainly with the tools. This is one of those exceptions. These are non-destructive layer elements, which means I can go into them at anytime, I can turn it off, I can change the amount, I can even add additional layer effects if I want. Similarly, the adjustment studio adds non-destructive adjustment layers to your design. This primarily works with the raster elements under the pixel persona, where you can add a black and white layer, you can add a curves layer to make changes and contrast, there's a whole list here of things that you can do to make appearance changes to an existing design. Again, they are non-destructive so they can be changed or removed at any time. Again, the tech studio works in conjunction with the text tool. This allows you to make additional edits to any texts that you put in your Canvas. Then the transform studio, we're going to be using a great deal in this class. This allows you to reorder your layers instead of going to the layer panel. You can flip and rotate using any of these buttons, you can change the dimensions of an object either by scrubbing or tapping on the number and keying in a specific number, you can change the position by doing the same thing, either scrubbing or tapping and keying in a number, you can also change the rotation of an object and simply either scrub or tap and change the number back to zero to get it back to right. You can also align objects if you have two or more on your Canvas that you want to align horizontally or vertically, you can do that here. The navigator studio allows you to zoom in and out on your Canvas. You can also lock your Canvas here. If you remember when we discussed the settings, I talked about keeping the Canvas rotation for all documents on so that you can go ahead and rotate your Canvas rather than having to rotate the entire iPad. There are times where I find that inconvenient and I need to turn it off, so you would lock it here and now I can still zoom in and out, but I can no longer rotate it. Now, if you do have this unlocked and you rotate your Canvas and you want to get it back to zero, just tap on this number, type in zero, and it's going to write your Canvas. Then finally, there's the history studio. There's a number of ways that you can access the snapshots in the history. You can either scrub up and down using the slider, you can tap and hold on the clock and again, scrub up and down with your pencil, or you can tap into a particular snapshot. This is driven by the number that you select in settings, which if you recall, we mentioned keeping that number rather low will help your application run much more smoothly. This is the designer persona. In the next section, I'm going to take you into the color studio, where again, I'll show you how to sample colors from reference images, as well as create your own color palettes to use in your documents. I'll see you there. 5. The Color Studio: In this section, we're going to take a closer look at the Color Studio and designer. I mentioned in the last section that you can use the Color Studio to sample colors from reference images, as well as create and save your own swatch pallets for use in the existing document or save for future documents. Before we get into that though, let's take a closer look at the studio itself. Every vector object that you create consists of a stroke and a fill, whether they're visible or not. For example, this rectangle currently has an orange fill and a white stroke. The stroke and the fill represented by the two icons at the top left of the Color Studio. The fill is on the left and the stroke is on the right and you can select between the two simply by tapping. Whichever one is on top is the one that you're going to change. Now there are a number of ways that you can select colors for your stroke and the fill. But before we get to that, let's take a look at what you can do with the icons themselves. If I were to select this blue circle and wanted to swap colors between the stroke and the fill. I would simply swipe across the two icons and I can swap the colors back and forth. Let's say I wanted to remove the blue fill completely, so that I'm left just with the white stroke. I would select my blue fill because again, whichever ones on top is the one that you're going to change and I'll just swipe up. I can do the same thing with a stroke by selecting the stroke and swiping up, and that same change can be made to either simply by using this quick swatch at the bottom. As far as selecting color for your stroke and the fill, there are a number of ways that you can do that, starting with the color wheel. If I wanted this blue fill to be purple, I would select my fill and I would tap into the purple area of the color wheel and just start dragging my sliders around until I find the color that I want. Now if you have exact values you want to can, you can also use the sliders, which can be accessed by using these arrows or by tapping in the middle until you have the full list. Additionally, you can use swatches. Now, on this main screen you're going to see a set of quick colors, including the null that applies to every single document across the application. Below that you'll see a list of recent colors, swatches for the document they're currently in. There's also a list of preset palettes that are already in designer which you can access by tapping on swatches. Again, you can use the arrows to go back and forth. You can change it to the exact values rather than just the dots, or you can tap in the middle and it will give you the full list. Now in addition to the built-in pallets you can create and use your own palettes. There are two ways to do that. If you tap the hamburger menu at the top, it's going to give you two options. One is to add an application palette, the other is to add document palette. If you add an application palette, you can use that color palette no matter what document you're in. For example, I add a list of go-to colors. Every time I create a color that I find myself using a lot and I want to save it, I will save it to this go-to colors palette, which is set as an application palate, which means I can use it in any document. Let's go ahead and create a document palette just for this one though. I'm going to go to my hamburger menu and it's going to ask me whether I want an application palette or a document palette. I'll go ahead and tap document palette and it'll set up an unnamed palette. Now to change the name, I'm going to go to the hamburger menu again, tap rename and let's call this Color Studio. Now I can begin adding my colors. I'm going to use my eyedropper tool to do that. I'll sample the colors throughout this document and they'll start getting added here. Let's use the eyedropper and drag. I want to sample this gray first. When I released my pencil, the icon next to the eye dropper is going to change to the color I just sampled. To add a color to your palate, you need to change the fill to whatever color is here. To do that, you simply tap and it will change the fill to that color. Now I'm going to my hamburger menu again, and select, add current fill to palette and it will show up there. Again, let's go ahead and drag down until I select this orange. It's going to change the orange to that selection. I'll tap until my fill is orange. Go to my hamburger menu and hit add current fill to palette and you can keep doing this for all of the colors in your document. Finally, let's take a look at how you can sample colors from a reference image, either for use in your existing document or to save as a swatch palette for future documents. The first thing I'm going to do is find a stock photograph to use for the reference photo. I'm going to go to my stock studio. Let's say, I'm going to create an illustration of a watermelon. I'm going to type in watermelon. Then select my photograph. I like this particular one because of the variety of colors I'm going to tap and hold and release and it's going to add it to my document as a separate layer. Now I'm not worried about the exact size of this. I just want it large enough that I can get a wide variety of color from it. I'm going to drag out and then de-select. I also want to make sure I lock that layer, so I don't accidentally move it around. I'm just going to go into the layer studio and tap on the lock next to the watermelon image. Now we're ready to start sampling. We'll go to our Color Studio and swatches. Now you need to determine, do you want to use this just for this document or do you want to make it available for future documents as well? In this particular case, let's just select a document specific palette. I'll go to the hamburger menu, tab on add document palette and now I can go ahead and rename it if I'd like, by tapping on the hamburger menu again, selecting rename palette, and we'll type in watermelon. Now when you're selecting colors from a raster image, you're going to see a lot of variation in the various pixels. What I'll typically try and do a select from highlights, mid tones and darks, and I'll try to select two from each one if it's available. Let's start with the darks. I'm going to go ahead and drag over here to this really dark red. I'm going to release and it's going to change that dot to that color. Now remember the swatches and the pallets are based on the fill, so I need to make sure the fill is selected. I'm going to tap the dot and it will change the fill to that color. Now I can go back to my hamburger menu. Select, add current, fill to palette, and now it's in my palette. Let's go ahead and find another dark that's just slightly lighter. I'm going to tap, go to my hamburger menu and select, add current fill to palette. I'll just keep doing this until I feel like I have enough are a variety of colors that I can work with. Again, I typically select from the darks, mid tones and highlights and in this case I'm going to make sure I'm selecting from the rind as well, so let's just keep on selecting here. In this case, the range is so thin that to get the greens, I just need to zoom in. You can always do that if it's helpful. I'm just going to go ahead and get this final lighter green here. I think that gives me enough to work with to create my watermelon illustration. That's how you sample colors from a reference image to create swatch pallets. In the next section, I'm going to take you through the pixel persona and show you the tools that you can use to add some really interesting texture to your designs. I'll see you there. 6. The Pixel Persona: In this section, we're going to take a closer look at the Pixel Persona. Now I'm not going to focus any attention on these studios because while there are some studios in the Designer Persona that aren't found on the pixel side, those that do remain are exactly the same. We're just going to focus on the tools themselves. I mentioned previously that the Pixel Persona is where the raster-based tools are housed. You'll use those tools to add raster texture to your vector objects. You can also access a number of selection tools that allow you to select specific sections of your designs for edits. Now something I haven't previously mentioned is that the two personas work independently of one another. While you can go into your Designer Persona and create flat vector art and not use the Pixel Persona to add any raster texture, conversely, you can use the Pixel Persona exclusively to create raster-based paintings from scratch. It's totally up to you. If you're coming from a raster-based illustration program, you're likely very familiar with the tools in this one. Let's go ahead and take a look at those tools. The arrow is the move tool, just like in the Designer Persona and it works exactly the same. You can select, move, resize, and rotate your objects. You're going to use the Paintbrush Tool to apply the raster texture to your objects and select the type of brush that you want to use in the brush studio. Just like on the designer side, there are a number of baked in brushes that come with the application. I've also included a list of my go-to brush designers in the resources guide. I'll use a number of these brushes throughout the class so you can see how they work. There's also an Erase Brush Tool that allows you to erase away portions of an object. A Pixel Tool that allows you to create those fun 1980s type illustrations. We're not going to use that in this class, but it's actually fun to use. There's a Smudge Brush Tool, a Flood Fill Tool that allows you to flood a selection with color, with a tap. Then finally, there's a number of selection tools as well as a refined selection tool that allows you to modify your selections. Just like in the Designer Persona, there's also an Eyedropper Tool that allows you to sample color so that you can add it to a swatch or use it in your design. Now one thing that the Pixel Persona does have that the designer doesn't, is that when you go to your Paintbrush Tool, if you tap to the right here, you're going to see that there's a symmetry and mirror tool. You can use that to create Radio or Mandala type designs. That's the pixel persona. In the next section, we're going to start creating some designs and I'm going to show you how to create leaves using the built-in shape tools. I'll see you there. 7. The Shape Tools: In this class, I'm going to show you how to create leaves and flowers; two ways. One, we'll be using the built-in shapes in the rectangle tool. The other we'll be using the free form pen and pencil tool, all of which can be found in the designer persona. In this section, we're going to focus our attention on the rectangle tool. So I'm going to tap to select it and tap a second time to pull up the list of shapes. I'm now going to run line by line through the shapes. I'm going to focus on a few of the shapes we're going to use in this class. But what I'm showing you in this section applies to all the shapes. I'm going to go ahead and drag out a rectangle and a crescent, both of these we're going to end up using stems. Then finally I'm going to go ahead and drag out an ellipse. When you use the rectangle tool to create a shape, that's exactly what you're getting. It's a shape, not a curve. What that means is that I can't use my node tools to make any further edits to these shapes. In fact, if I select my node tool and tap on the ellipse, there are no nodes because they don't exist. It's actually giving me the bounding box for the move tool so I can make it bigger and smaller, wider and more narrow. Depending on the shape that I select, I may also get these red dots that I can use to make some minor edits. But for the most part, I'm limited as to what I can do. We're now looking for realism with these illustrations, but we do want that organic quality that you see in nature. I need to be able to add some texture and dimension and a little bit of work to these shapes because right now as they are, they're not really cutting it. To be able to use my node pools, I need to convert these shapes to curves. Let's go ahead and select this crescent tool and start with that line. There's two ways that you convert this to a curve with it selected in the contextual menu, I can tap to curves. If you don't see it there, you can also go to your Edit menu and tap Convert to curves. Now, it'll take me to my node tool and give me four nodes to work with. That means I can drag these out, I can move these, I can use these handles to make further changes. I can also drag on the parts themselves between the two nodes to make additional changes. I can do all sorts of edits to that original crescent shape to get it to where I want. Let's take a look at the individual nodes themselves. The top and the bottom of this pointed crescent are made up of sharp nodes. You can tell they're sharp because they're square. The middle, because there's a slight bend for this crescent, has two smooth nodes on them. You can tell they're smooth because they're circles. Now, if I wanted to use those two nodes to pull a little bit more of a bend the way you would see in some stems, I could do that by selecting my node tool and dragging across the two middle nodes until they're both selected. I know they're selected because they are blue. Now, because these are already smooth nodes, when I start to drag, I already get that nice bend and I can move it up and down and I can go back and forth to place it where I want; put it about there. Now, as is this looks a little bit like a pink green bean instead of a stem, but that's okay because we can make additional changes. If I were to go up to this node at the top, I could drag in to make it a little bit more narrow. I like the bottom, the width that it's at, but I'm going to tap on this right node and just drag in and down a little bit just to make the middle a little bit more narrow. I've gone from a basic crescent shape to a shape that I could see using as a stem. Let's go ahead and get rid of this and take a look at the rectangle tool. Again, this is a shape, it's not a curve. The first thing I need to do is convert it. I'm going to go ahead and with it selected tap to curves and now it takes me into my node tool and gives me four sharp nodes to work with. But because there's no bend in this the way there was with the crescent, I don't have any nodes in the middle but I can add them. I'm going to go ahead and with my node tool selected, tap on one side and tap on the path on the other. They don't have to be exactly lined up but they should be in proximity to one another. Now I can go ahead and select these two nodes but before I bend them. Because if I were to bend them right now because they're sharp nodes, it would be very angular and I want that nice curve the way we had with the crescent. First, I need to convert these from sharp nodes to smooth. They're still selected. I'm going to go to head to my contextual menu at the bottom and tap Smooth. Now they've converted from square sharp nodes to round smooth nodes, which means when I start to bend, it's a nice curve. I'm going to go right about there. Now, if I wanted to perhaps bevel the bottom, I could select one of the nodes and just drag out and down. Let's say at the top. I wanted it to be more pointed. I can either take this node and drag it over, or I could select that node, go to my contextual menu at the bottom, and tap Delete. It makes it a really sharp point. Again, we've taken that from a basic rectangle to another shape that we could use as a stem. Finally, let's take a look at the ellipse. I'm going to convert it to curves. It gives me four smooth nodes because this is a perfectly rounded object. Let's say I wanted this to be a pointed petal. I wanted it pointed to the top and the bottom. With my node tool selected, I could drag across the two nodes until they're both selected and go to my Contextual menu at the bottom and tap Sharp. Now I have a nice point at the top and the bottom, but it's still a basic shape and doesn't look so much like a petal. But I can use these two smooth nodes on the side to make some further changes. If I tap on this one and start dragging up and out with that handle, and then select this one and perhaps drag in and down or move this in a little bit, I could go ahead and make that nice bell shape. That now, if I were to rotate this around the circle would make a really nice flower. That's the basics of the Rectangle tool that we'll be using when we're creating our leaves and flowers later. In the next section, I'm going to show you how to use the pen and pencil tool to free-form create objects similar to these. I'll see you there. 8. The Pen & Pencil Tools: In this section, we're going to do a closer look at the pencil and pen tools in the designer persona. Now these two tools will allow you to create shapes that have a more organic feel than the built-in shapes coming out as the rectangle tool. Let's start with the Pen tool. I'm going to go ahead and select a stroke. I'm going to leave my fill empty for right now. I'll go ahead to the contextual menu at the bottom here. I'm going to key in 15 points for my width just to get myself a nice thick line to work with. Now, when I start tapping around on the screen, it begins to lay down a number of nodes and paths wherever I tap to begin forming a shape. If I tap the original node that I created, that closes my shape out. Now, if I wanted to make further edits to this, the benefit of working with vectors is that I can use my node tools to further manipulate the nodes and the path that I've already laid down to do that. I'm going to ahead and select my Node tool. I'm going to start dragging these around where I want them. I can also delete nodes that I don't need. I can get a different shape than I started with. Now additionally, if I wanted to, I could create bends in these paths, either by dragging the line itself or by dragging the handles that create them. I could also change the type of node that's in place. Right now the selected node is a sharp node. If I tap smooth in a contextual menu, I get a completely different fill. I could add a fill if I wanted to. I could use the Stroke Studio to change the width and the pressure settings. I could also use my Corner tool to select the corner in a corner type at the bottom. When I drag down, it helps me create another shape. That's a few things that you can do straight out of the box with the Pen tool. Let's take a look at a couple of others. I'm going to delete this shape. Again, we're going to start with a stroke, I'm going to leave my fill empty. Select my Pen tool, and I'll tap and tap again. Now before I release am I'm going to drag down, and it's going to create a nice curve. It also gives me these two handles that help direct the curve. Now, if I wanted to get close this shape out with a straight line, I can do that. But in order to do that, I need to let the handle that's currently under my pencil know which direction I want to go. If I will simply release and tap, it's going to close that shape out with a curve rather than a straight line. Let's start that again. I'm going to tap, tap, and I'm going to drag. Now, I'm going to use my finger as a modifier key and hold it down. I'm going to drag my handle up and release so that the handle is facing the direction I want to go and when I tap, it completes the shape with a nice straight line. Now it's actually not perfectly straight. If I zoom in here and select the node tool, you can see that the handle is slightly up from the main line. That's not a problem. With me snapping on, I can simply drag the handle down, and it will snap into place and form a perfectly straight line. Additionally, with the Node tool select, I could use this handle at the top here to change the position or the depth of the original curve. I could also drag down with my path or with these handles to create a curve in the bottom if I wanted to. I could add a fill just like I did previously. I could also change the width and the pressure settings. There's a number of ways that you can use the Pen tool to create and edit shapes. I give you a little bit of an advantage, in my opinion, overusing a raster where you're relying on shape tools, erasers, undo and redo. I'm going to go ahead and delete this and show you one more thing before we get into the Pencil tool. Again, I have a stroke selected. I'll select my Pen tool, and I'm going to change my mode to smart mode. If you're coming from illustration program that has a separate curvature pen, this program does not have that, but the smart mode in the Pen tool works very similarly. I just want to make sure that my pressure settings look okay here, so you can easily see this. When I start tapping around on the screen, it's going to pay attention to where I'm placing my nodes and give me the best curve for that placement. If I were to go ahead and tap and finish this, the program is determining that this is the best type of curve for where I place my nodes. That's fine. I can still go into my Node tool and I can move things around. I can use the handles to drag up or in. I could also change the type of node. This one is currently a smart node. I can change it to sharp, and here you can start seeing that we can form something like a puddle. We're going to end up using this later when we start creating some of our free-form flowers we'll use the smart mode and the pen tool to do that. I want to delete that and show you one more thing before we move on to the Pencil tool. Once again in the pen tool, if you select line, and you started tapping around, let me just make sure I have a stroke selected here. There we go. You can create lines on your Canvas that are perfectly straight, but they're not contiguous. If you have a need for a perfectly straight line, you could easily form those. You can also use your Node tool to then join nodes by dragging up and tapping Join. Now I have two lines that have formed one. That's your Pen tool and the basics on how to use it. Let's move on to the Pencil tool, and I'll show you how to use that to create some really great free form leaf shapes. The Pencil tool is one of my go-to tools for free form creating leaves and flowers, and we'll use it a great deal in the upcoming sections. But for now, let's take a look at the basics of the tool. I'm going to select my Pencil tool, and we can use either just a stroke or a fill only or both. I'm going to show you both ways. Let's start with a stroke. I selected that. I've selected a 15-point width here. You can do that either here in the stroke studio or down in the contextual menu. Now, I'm going to I start drawing, you can see it works just like a pencil. Now this is a vector, so it's made up of nodes and paths, which means I can go into my Node tool and I can start moving these around if I want. I can use my handles to further drag things. I can delete nodes that I no longer need. I can also convert my nodes from smooth to sharp rather. Just like with the Pen tool, I could add a fill to this or change the pressure or width settings and the Stroke Studio. Let's go ahead and get rid of that. Now, if you're like me, and you have a difficult time in drawing a nice smooth line, one of the benefits of using the Pencil tool is there are built-in stabilizers which you can access in the contextual menu by tapping on that carrot. There's three options, No stabilizer, Rope stabilizer, and Window stabilizer. The Rope stabilizer and Window stabilizer work pretty much the same. The difference is just the tool itself. Let me go ahead and start with No stabilizer first. If I turn that off, and I just start drawing, you can see that I have a rather imperfect curve here, and it keeps it even though I remove my pencil. There's little imperfections throughout. Now, let's go ahead and get rid of that and go back in, and I'm going to turn on Rope stabilizer. Let me zoom in here, so you can see how this works. As I'm dragging across. Let me go ahead and make this a little bit bigger, so you can see it. There's a rope pulling my stroke, which is helping to stabilize that stroke as I move along. I'll zoom back out. Now, if I do this, and I create that same loop, I get a much smoother line and curve here. Again, the Window stabilizer works very much the same. The only difference is how that rope that I showed you actually works. I definitely recommend just playing around with the settings on this, whether it's the length of the rope or the type of stabilizer you use because they do work slightly differently depending on the size of the rope that you use. Let's go ahead and take a look at the fill option. I'm going to swap that just by swiping across. I'm going to tap on use fill. Now when I start drawing out, you can see I can create this leaf. Now, it looks like it's completed. If you just look at the shape, it looks like it's a full shape. But if I zoom in, you can see that the initial node and the final node don't have a connection. There's no blue line connecting them. There's two ways that I can crack this. I can select my node tool and I can drag one node to the other, but that also adjust my shape. If you want your shape to remain as is, you could also with the Node tool select or simply tap Close, and it will automatically bridge it with whatever line works best. Now my shape is remained exactly as I drew it, but I have a complete shape to work with. Now one final thing I want to show you with this is the Sculpt Tool. I'm going to turn that on. If you want to either cut away or add to this shape, and I'm not talking about adding another object on top and then combining the two, I can actually add to this shape. I'm going to show you the takeaway first. Let's say I'm creating a Monstera leaf and I want those little cutouts. I could just simply start with the blue line drawing down and then draw my pencil up, and you can make these little cutouts. Now this can be an extremely frustrating tool. I definitely recommend practicing with this and the more you practice the easier it gets. But I can guarantee you that I use the undo and redo buttons a lot with this one. You can also add, I can just draw out and then broke the line between these two nodes and bumped everything out, and I can just keep going with that. I just keep adding to the initial shape. That is the pencil tool in a nutshell. In the next section, we're going to be just start creating our leaf shapes. I'm going to show you how to do that using the built-in shape tool, so I'll see you there. 9. Saving and Exporting Documents: Well, we haven't touched on the Export Persona in this class. I do want to show you how you can easily save and export your documents using a documents menu. There's two options in here, save a copy and export. Save a copy is going to allow you to save a designer formatted copy of your original illustration to whatever file or folder you select. Now it's important that you toggle on "Save History" to make sure that you save all of the layers and history of your document, otherwise it's a flat file. You also want to make sure that you do this before you fully close out your document and the gallery otherwise you're going to lose it completely. I'll go ahead and I'm going to change the name. Then I'll just tap "Save" and it's going to take me to my folders so that I can select where I want it to save to. The next option is using the Export. This is going to allow me to export a file in any of these formats to a folder or if I want I can also use the "Share" button down here to save it to my camera roll, share it to Instagram, text it to somebody or email it, whatever I want to do. I'm not going to focus any attention on those. Let's just go ahead and focus on how you can save it as a file. I don't change anything here, I want the quality to be 100 percent and this is going to be set up the original size that I set the document up. Now, typically I'll save as a TIFF file. In this case I'm going to keep it as a JPEG. I'll just go ahead and change the name. I'll go ahead and hit "Okay" once it gives me this size here. Again, it's going to take me to my folders. I'll hit "Save". Now I have a JPEG formatted file saved to my folders. 10. Preparing Your Canvas: It's the moment of truth. Over the next few sections, we're going to be creating leaves and flowers with beautiful organic textures. I'm going to show you how to do that two ways. The first will be using the built-in shapes and the shape tool. The other will be using the freeform pen and pencil tools, all of which can be found in the designer persona. Now first things first, let's go ahead and set up a Canvas. I'm going to tap on the plus sign and then select "New Document". Now, remember whenever you're introducing raster elements, you need to size accordingly. In this case, because we're adding texture, we are going to be using raster elements. So think ahead to your final output and create your original document at the largest size that you plan to print. Otherwise, you're potentially going to run into muddy textures and pixelation. I'm going to go ahead with an 11 by 14 Canvas at 300 DPI and that should suit my needs perfectly. I'm going to go ahead and key in 3300 pixels by 4200 pixels at 300 DPI. I'm going to keep my orientation, portrait orientation. I don't need a transparent background and I don't need artboard. I'm going to click "Okay" and it's going to create my new document. Now before I move forward, I always add a background layer. I do this for two reasons. One, the white. It's a little taxing on the eyes, but the bigger reason is that I always use my background as part of my overall design. In fact, a lot of the times, I actually add texture to it. Now sometimes I'll go dark and sometimes I go light. I definitely recommend playing around with it because you should start adding textures and changing the colors of your leaves and flowers, as well as the blend modes that you're using. You're going to see a wide variety of end results. So play around with it until you find something you really like. In this case, I'm just going to go ahead and choose an off-white color. So I've changed my fill to an off-white color. I don't need a stroke, so I'm going to select that and turn it off. I'm going to make sure that my snapping is on at the bottom so you can see the blue circle around the magnet. I'm going to select my rectangle tool. May drag up from the bottom corner to the opposite top corner, and because my snapping is on, it's going to snap that rectangle into all four corners. So now I have my background layer. Now before I move forward, I want to make sure this is locked so that as I start adding elements, I don't accidentally move it around. So I'll go into my layer studio, and on that layer, just tap the lock and now it's in place. In the next section, I'm going to show you how to create leaves using the shape tools. So I will see you there. 11. Creating Leaves with the Shape Tool: Now that I have my Canvas in place, it's time to start creating some leaves using the built-in shapes and the rectangle tool. I'm going to start with my stem, but before I do that, I want to select my color. I'll go to my color studio, and I have some greens down here that I typically use for my leaves in my recent color swatches. You can select your color however you would like using the eyedropper tool, the color wheel or sliders, or if you have a swatch palette, you can set that up as well. I'm going to go ahead and select this green color here. I typically only use a fill and not both a fill and a stroke there are some exceptions to that, and I will point those exceptions out throughout the rest of the class. Unlike the green color itself, but I find it a little too light so I could go back into my color studio and use the sliders to change that. Or I can simply tap and hold on the icon for the color studio and just drag down. That's another way that you can easily change the light and dark value of the color that you've selected simply using your pencil or stylus. Now that I have my color selected, I'm going to go ahead and create the stem. Let's take a look at the shapes so available. We'll select the rectangle tool and then tap again to pull up the full list. Now in the section about the rectangle tool, I used a crescent and a rectangle, I think this time I'm going to use a trapezoid, let's just drag out a trapezoid. Now as is, again, this is a pretty plain shape, it could be used as a stem depending on the aesthetic you're going for, but what we're looking to do is pull in more of that organic shape that you see in nature, and this just wouldn't work for us. We need curves to work with, in other words, we need nodes and pads to manipulate but we can't do that right now because this isn't a curve, it's a shape. Remember the first thing you want to do is convert it to a curve, by either tapping two curves down here at the bottom, or selecting it in the, edit menu. Now when we go to the node tool, we have nodes that we can work with. I could drag these paths out to create the bend that I want for the stem, but I want it to be more uniform than that. What I'm going to do is with my node tool selected, I'm going to tap and add nodes on either side of my shape here then I'm going to drag across and select both of them. Now remember if you start out dragging too sharp nodes, you're going to get an angular bend. What I want is that smooth curve, so I'm going to tap, smooth at the bottom here to convert those nodes and now when I bend, it gives me that nice smooth curve. I'm going to leave it about there. I also wanted to go ahead and make my top a little more narrow, so I'll just drag this over. I'm going to bevel my bottom by selecting this left node and just dragging down. Now what started out as a basic trapezoid has a much more organic feel that could work very well for our stem, but now we need the leaves. Let's go ahead and take a look at a few of the shapes that we can use in the rectangle tool to create our leaves. There are a couple of options here in the rectangle tool, the most obvious would be the tear. If I drag that out, it could be a leaf but to me that's pretty boring, and two on the nose it looks just like I went in and drag the shape out and I can manipulate it with my node tool. I think it would take a little bit too much time to get it exactly where I want this particular shape, so I'm going to delete that. My go-to actually tends to be the ellipse which looking at it, yes, is a very boring shape. Again, I can go ahead and use my node tools to make changes to this, to make it much more like a leaf. The first thing I wanted to do is tap two curves, and now when I select my, node tool, I get these four rounded, smooth nodes to work with. I want my top and bottom to be pointed, and you can do whatever you would like with your leaf. I'm going to make the top and bottom of mine pointed, so I'm going to drag across with my node tool selected to select these two nodes and you know they're selected because they're blue. I'm going to go to the bottom here and I'm going to tap sharp. Now I have a sharp top and a sharp bottom but again, it's still a little too on-point until obvious for a leaf shape, I want to warp this a little bit more. I'm going to use these two smooth nodes on the side to make further changes. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drag this handle up, I want to drag this node in a little bit, and then the handle out some. Now I have a nice wavy shape that gives it a little bit more of a leaf feel. Now, don't get to hung up on the exact shape because this is a curve, which means I can always go back in and make a change to it using my node tool once I have it in place, so if I see it's not working just so I can go ahead and added it easily. I'm going to work with this here right now. I'm going to go ahead and use my move tool and select it. With about center on, I'm actually going to make this a little bit smaller. I'm going to rotate it a little bit, and I'm going to add it to my stem here. Now we have the beginning of our leaf shape, but we need to add leaves all the way around, and there are a couple of ways that we can do that, so let's take a look at those. Now that we have our first leaf and our stem in place, there are a couple of ways that we can add additional leaves all the way around the stem. The first is that when you go into the rectangle tool and continue to drag out shapes such as the ellipse or others, and use our move and node tools to then make individual changes to those leaves and place them where we want. The other option is to duplicate the original leaf all the way around, and when we're done, go back in and again using the move and the node tools, make individual edits to each of the leaves. Time-wise both are the same, I'm going to show you the second option though, so that I can show you easy ways of duplicating an object. The first thing we want to do is with our move tool, select that initial leaf. The easiest way to duplicate this is to go to the, edit menu and tap, duplicate. Now, in our layers to you will see we have two of the same exact curve, one is sitting on top of the other. I can just drag this down, I can rotate it and tuck it against the stem here. I'm not going to focus any attention on the size or shape at this point, my focus is first going to be getting the leaves around the entire stem. The other way that you can duplicate is using your two fingers as a modifier and your pencil with the objects selected tap and drag at the same time. Again, tap and drag at the same time. Now with this last duplicates still selected, don't de-select it, the third option is I could go into my edit menu and I can tap, duplicate. Not only does it duplicate it, but it moves it the exact distance that I move the other one. I can continue that all the way down until I have the amount of leaves in place that I want. The easiest way to get these six leaves now to the other side is to go ahead and drag and select them. As long as I have all of the leaves in this blue bounding box, it's going to slap them. Because part of this leaf and part of the stem are outside of it when I released, they don't get selected and that's fine we don't want them selected. I'm going to go ahead into my edit menu and I'm going to tap, duplicate. Now I have the same six leaves duplicated and sitting on top of the original. I'll go to my transform menu and I want to mirror them. I'll flip to a horizontal flip, and then I'm just going to drag those duplicates over. Now this is a jumbled mess, but that's okay we're going to use our move tool now to move the leaves roughly into place so that we can start making individual edits. Before I begin making any edits to my leaves, I like to just get an idea of the amount of space that I'm working with on a stem, and I roughly place my leaf shapes using my move tool. I don't aim for perfection for two reasons nature is not perfect, she's perfectly imperfect. I'm not looking to have leaves lined up with one another, actually try and stagger them. The other reason I don't aim for perfection is because inevitably I'm going to end up moving them a little bit more as I'm changing the shape of them. Again, I'm just trying to get an idea of how much room I'm working with here, and it just makes it easier when I start making those changes to the shapes to have them organized better. We'll just go ahead and keep dragging these out. Now that those are in place, I'm going to use a combination of my move and node tools to make changes to my individual leaves so that they look unique from one another. Typically start at the top with this and I actually like how these two leaves are playing off of one another, but I want this one to be a little bit bigger. I have my move tool selected and about center selected, this just makes it so that everything is evenly distributed when I drag. I'm just going to make it longer and maybe a little bit wider. I'm just going to start following this down, I can go ahead and flip shapes so that the wave pattern is a little bit different, I make this a little wider, maybe a little longer. I could also use my node tool to drag the handles to get a different shape. I just follow this process all the way around until I'm happy with where things are placed and then I'll take a look at it overall. Let me just go ahead and work my way around this and finish this up. Once I'm done, I'll just typically take a step back and take a look at my overall shape and see if there's any individual ones that I wanted to change. For example, this one here was actually a little bit too close to the stem, so I'm just going to rotate it a little bit so it's not quite so blended with the stem. I might rotate this one a little bit more and maybe make it a little longer. I like that overall shape at this point we are good to go as far as adding texture, but we need to group them first to make it a little bit easier to do so. Let's take a look at the two ways that you can group these layers to prepare them for the texture. Now that our leaves are in place and we have shaped them the way we want them, we're at the point where we can begin adding texture. Before we do that, we want to organize our layers to make that an easier process. There's a couple of approaches that you can take here, and the approach that you decide on will ultimately determine how the texture is added. I've dedicated an entire section just to adding texture, so we're just going to focus on grouping here. The first approach is that I can take all of these layers that make up my leaf and I can group them together in a folder. One of the ways that I can select all of this is with my move tool, I'm going to drag across my entire leaf, and now all of these layers are selected. I can go ahead and tap on my group icon, I can tap again to un-group it. You can also simply pinch to create a group as well. That's the first approach. The second approach is to take all of these individual curve layers and combine them to create one curve. When you're adding your texture, you're adding it to one piece rather than multiple. Let me show you a different way that you can select your entire leaf here. When you're in your layers studio, you can tap on the first layer that you want to select and two-finger tap on the last one and it will select all the layers in-between. Now what we want to do is add these together to create that one shape and we're going to do that by using a boolean operation. If you recall when we went through the user interface, I mentioned that you can find these under the edit menu. These are geometric operations that you can perform on a shape that you've created to create another object. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to tap, add because again, we're adding all of our layers together. Now if you look at your layer studio, you'll see you have one curve layer rather than multiple. I can move this around, I can use the node tool and I can make minor changes. Now the only thing that I can't do with this at this point is use my move tool to tap into new digital leaves and move them around. If you take the time upfront to place your leaves where you want them, that shouldn't be an issue. These are the two approaches to grouping your layers to get them ready for the texture. In the next section, we're going to take a look at the free form pen and pencil tool and use them to create leaf shapes similar to these. I'll see you there. 12. Creating Leaves with Pen and Pencil Tools: In the last section, we used the shape tools to create our leaves. In this section, we're going to focus our attention on a combination of the pen and pencil tools to freeform create our leaf shapes. Now I am going to start with my stem just like I did in the last one. But instead of using a fill, I am going to use a stroke. I have my green color selected here. I am going to select My Pen tool to make my stem and I'm going to tap in about 16 points. Now that's just a starting point so that I can see where I am laying my stroke down on the canvas. I'll likely change it because we're going to add some imperfections to the stem to give it an organic feel and to see them, it needs to be a lot wider. I'll just go ahead and I'm going to tap and tap again and drag. Now, I am not loving exactly how this is bending, but that's okay because this is a vector which means I can go into my node tool and I can drag things around until it's where I want it. So I can use this handle to change the depth of the band. I can move my nodes around where I want them. I like that just about there. But right now, this is too thin. Again to see the imperfections we want to create to make it less static and more organic, we need to make it a little bit thicker. I am going to go to my Stroke Studio and I am going to make the width about 60. Now we have a nice line to work with here. But again, it's boring just like the shaped tools were right out of the rectangle tool. I want to give this some waviness and imperfection. I am going to use my handles here in the Stroke Studio to change the pressure settings of this stroke exactly how I want them. The two points on either end represent the two points on either end of the stroke. If I drag this down, you can see the top of my stem, they're getting more narrow. I am going to leave the bottom, the thickness that it's at. But I actually want to tap and add a handle here and just drag in, so that it start thinning out about there. Now I can go ahead. I am going to add some more handles and I am going to drag up and down. If I go ahead and deselect this, you can see that it has that nice waviness that you might see in a real stem. I am going to stop with that. At this point, we're ready to go ahead and start adding our leaf shapes. Just like with the shape tools, there's a number of ways that I can add leaves to this shape. Now one of the things I don't do is create one leaf and then duplicate around because when you're freeform drawing a leaf, it's a lot quicker to do that, than duplicate one leaf and make the changes with the node tool. I am going to select my pencil tool and I want to use a fill instead of a stroke. I already have my fill selected, I just swap them out. I am going to make sure that my use fill is on here in the bottom in the contextual menu. Then I'll just go ahead and start drawing my leaf shapes. You can see that I can get nice waviness that I want without having to use my node poles to get it. I'm just going to go ahead and I am going to keep drawing my shapes out here. I am going to try and vary the length and width and the waviness as I go around. We have our leaf shapes. I sped this video up, but hopefully, you saw that I actually use the "Undo" and "Redo" and "Restarted". I thought about editing that out and beginning again, but I wanted to leave that in for a reason. The beautiful thing about using these digital tools is that you have things like "Undo" and "Redo" available to you and digital erasers and masks and things like that because everybody has to use them. Nobody creates a perfect shape right out of the gate. I look at it the way I look at my photography. I can go out and take a thousand shots and only like 20 of them, and it's the same way here, I can draw a thousand leaves and have to "Undo" and "Redo" 900 of them. Don't get so frustrated when you can't create this, especially if you're new to the tool. Just keep practicing and keep progressing. You're going to find it becomes a lot more second nature as you do that. Our leaves are in place and we're ready to go ahead and turn this into one large curve. Before I do that though, I want to make sure that my stroke in the middle that's making up the stem is actually a fill. That's not only going to prepare it for the add function, but also for texture. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select that curve. I'll go to my "Edit" menu and tap "Expand Stroke". Now when I tap on it and use the node tool, it's no longer a single line stroke, it's actually a fill and my nodes are surrounding it. Now we're all set to go ahead and do the add function on this. I'll go ahead and select all of my layers, go to "Edit", tap "Add", and we're all set. I like how my leaf shape is looking here. I am actually going to call this done. I've already combined it into one large curve by selecting all of the individual curve layers and then doing an add function under the geometry and the "Edit" menu. I am going to go ahead and top this off to the side for right now and turn it off. Before we move to the next section, I want to show you one additional way that you can use a pen and pencil tools to create a different type of shape. This is going to have more stems in it. You can use the building blocks from this to create things like branches on trees. Because really they're created the same way. They're just a larger, wider size. I've gone ahead and I've selected my "Brown Stroke". My pressure is back to normal and I did that by tapping and hitting "Reset Pressure". I'll go ahead and start with a nice thick stroke. I don't have to worry about it being thin, so I'll tap. Sorry, first electric pen tool, tap, tap again and I'm going to drag out. Now I am actually going to raise this up a little bit more. I'm going to set my pressure settings now because I want all of the offshoots from this stemmed have the same feel. So I am going to make the top or narrow. I am going to narrow at the bottom just slightly. I am just going to do the same thing I did with the last stem. I'm going to just add some handles and drag up and down to give it some of that waviness. Now we have a nice start as far as our branch, but I actually want to make this a little bit thicker. So just drag up the slider here. Now, I am going to make sure I de-select this because if I keep going with my pen tool, it's going to complete a shape and I don't want that. I actually want to do offshoots of this. So I am going to close my studio here to zoom in. Now with my pen tool and with this de-selected, I'm just going to start tapping and dragging out branches. I want these to be a little bit smaller, so I will go ahead and just reduce the size of that. You can just make sure you de-select each time. I'm going to create these little offshoots. You can change the size and you can do this on the backend or you can do it as you go. I tend to like to do it as I go just so that I can see where I might need something else. Again just make sure you de-select and drag out and make that a little bit larger. Now that I have my stem pieces in place, I am just going to take a look and make sure I don't have any overhang. For example, I don't have anything hanging past this. Or if there's anything I want to change the size like these to look a little bit too similar to one another so I am going to select this one and maybe change the pressure settings slightly just to have it be a little bit more unique than the other one. Now you can see because I did that and I made the bottom a little wider, it actually extended it beyond the stem here. I'll just take my node tool and I'm just going to drag that up. Before I go ahead and create one large piece out of this, I just want to make sure everything is where I want it. I am liking how this looks, so I am just going to go ahead and the first thing that you want to do before you create one large curve out of this is to expand the strokes. The way we did with the last time where we had to go up to "Edit menu", you can actually go ahead and select all of these way to tap on the first one and two-finger tap on the last, go to your "Edit menu" and tap "Expand Stroke". Now that's created fills rather than strokes. I had the benefit of being able to use the Stroke Studio to create the field that I wanted. Now I am going to convert it to a fill so that I can add the texture and I can combine them. Again, I am going to go ahead and select all of these. I'll go to my edit menu and tap "Add". Now I have one large curve piece to work with. Because this is a fill, I can also add texture to this down the road. Let's go ahead and start creating our leaf shapes. I'm going to go ahead and do that with this. Let's see. I think we're going to use this nice light green color here. I am going to make this a fill because I actually want to use my pencil tool on fill. I've selected use fill here. I'm just going to start drawing out leaf shapes. They don't have to be perfect because they're leaves, you're not going to get perfection from leaves. Just you can always go in and you can make changes if you want. Or again, you can go ahead and delete them and start again. They went the wrong direction with that one so I'm going to go here. I'm just going to go ahead and draw all the way around until I have all the leaf shapes that I want on this stem. I like how these are looking and you can see that you can use your pen and pencil tools not just to create straight lines or curves, but you can also go ahead and creating type of leaf shape that you want. One of the reasons that I lean more heavily on these free hand tools and the shape tools, is because I can get it where I want a little bit quicker than I can use in my node tools on the shape. But I wanted to show you both ways because really it's up to you, whichever works best for you. Now, before I move on to the next section where we're going to start adding texture. I want to do something with these multiple curve layers with these leaves. I'm going to just go ahead and do a Boolean add operation on this so that I have one curve layer to work with. I could have just as easily grouped it, but I actually want to be able to add my texture uniformly across one layer rather than multiple. Again, in the next section, we're going to start adding texture to the leaves that we've been creating so I'll see you there. 13. Adding Texture to Single Layers: One of the benefits of using designer is that you have the best of both worlds in one app. I could create this flat illustration using the vector tools and designer persona. If I wanted to add additional depth and dimension, I can do that by using the raster tools and the pixel persona. Now the way that you add the texture depends on how you group the elements in your object. I broken the texture sections into two sections. The first is going to focus on how you can add texture to a single curve. In other words, we've taken a number of individual curves and combine them into one. The next section is going to show you how you can add texture to individual curve layers that are simply grouped together. Now before we get started, I'm actually adding the texture. I want to remind you that anytime you pull in raster elements, you need to make sure that you size your original document accordingly and size up to the largest size you plan to print, so you don't run to any inequality issues. But beyond that, you also want to make sure that any of the tools that you use, whether it's texture files or brushes, are also high-quality and higher resolution, whether it's ones that you create or purchase. I've included a list of my go-to brush makers and texture makers in the resource guide in case you want to take a look at those. Now the first step I usually take to add texture to a single curve is to add a texture image file. I'm going to go to my document menu and tap "Place Image". It's going to give me the option of either importing from the Cloud or importing from my iPad. But since my texture files are rather large, I keep them on the Cloud. I'm just going to go ahead and select one of these textures from this collection that I have here. I like this one in particular. It's going to go ahead and tell me that you can drag to place your image. You want to make sure that you drag large. If you need to size down, that's okay. But you don't want to place your image small and size up because once again, you could run into quality issues. I am going to drag this down, now that I've placed it, I'm going to drag it down slightly just to make it a little bit more manageable. But right now, this texture file is sitting on top of the leaf and I can't see where it falls within the shape itself. I need to clip this and I'm going to do that by dragging the layer until the blue line shows up in the middle of the layer that I'm clipping to. Make sure that you keep your pencil to the right because moving it to the left is a completely different function. I'm going to go ahead and move it there and I'm going to release. Now my texture is within the leaf itself and I can better see where I'm placing it. When it comes to these texture files I find the earlier the better. The reason for that is when you start using blend mode and working with particular colors, these little imperfections come through in such a way that it really turns to look very much like the imperfect imperfection that you see on an actual leaf or a flower. Like this grittiness and I like this light and dark and these little spots. I tend to use those over the softer textures. This is a little too much, so I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode and since this is on layer still, I can go ahead into the layer options. I can either drop the opacity or if I want, I can start flipping through the blend modes. You can tap through or if you happen to use a texture a lot and you know what blend mode works best. You can also tap and just select. For this one, I know that either soft light or hard light works best, possibly even overlay. I'm going to go with hard light, but this is a little too much, so I'm going to go ahead and drop the opacity. Now I have added the first layer of texture using a texture image file. The next step will typically take is using my vector brush to add a little bit more detail. When it comes to adding texture to your illustrations, you don't have to rely solely on raster tools, whether it's brushes or image files. You can also use your vector brushes. The benefit of doing that is that you don't have to worry about size and quality because they are vectors. I'm going to go ahead and select my vector brush. I have this off-white color selected and I'm going to go into my brushes here. I actually liked this set by Frankentoon. I'm going to select this mud speckles. I want to make sure that my brush is rather large in this case. I'm just going to swipe. Now, this looks a little chaotic. We have a lot of stuff on the outside of the leaf. But just like with the texture file, we're going to clip this. I'm going to group these two and clip them as a group. I'm selecting both layers, not just to stop here for one second, whenever you use a vector brush, the beauty is just like when you're creating shapes, you get a separate layer, which means you can go in and you can use your node tool to move things around. You can use your move tool to size and move things. You have a nice separate layer to work with. Again, I'm going to group these two together. I'm going to go ahead and clip this by dragging down. Once I release everything is within the leaf. Now, this is a little too intense. Again, I'm going to go ahead and change my blend mode. I'm going to change it for the overall group. Because these are separate layers. You can go into each individual one if you want. But in the interest of time, I'm going to do this as a group. Go to the layer options. Now again, you can click through until you find one that you like. I like this color one, but I think I want some of that creamy color to come through. I happen to know that soft light works really nicely for this one, so I've just tapped and I'm going to go ahead and just drag down the opacity a little bit. It's now added some of that nice little spottiness that the brush head in it. But it's a little bit more subtle. That's the second method that you can use to add texture to your illustration. Then next is employing raster elements by pulling in your paintbrush tool from your pixel persona. One of the final ways that I add texture is using the paintbrush tool and the pixel persona. I've gone ahead and selected my pixel persona and the paintbrush tool. I actually want to add a little bit of color with this one. I've selected this teal color. Now, just like with the vectors, there's a number of built-in brushes. I'm actually going to use one of my favorite texture brushes by Frankentoon here though. I have gone ahead and I've selected my brush, I'm going to drag up a little bit to make this a little bit bigger. I'm going to select the curve that I'm adding too because when I do that, it automatically clips the layer to that curve. I don't have to drag it down. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to add some color here and there. I'm going to be using a blend mode. Even though it looks a little bit too much right now, we're going to be blending it in a little bit. I like that. Now let's go ahead and change the blend mode here. The difference between working with a vector brush and working with a paintbrush tool is it unlike with the vector brush where you get a different layer with each stroke, no matter how many times you pick up your pencil and lay it back down, you're using the paintbrush tool, it's all on one layer. If you do want to use different blend modes for each of your strokes, make sure you're adding a new pixel layer each time. In this case, I'm using the same blend mode and opacity, so I just kept it on one layer. I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to change this I think to color because I actually know that works really well with this. You could also just flip through until you find one that you like. I'm just going to drop the opacity a little bit. Now we've gone ahead and added texture, three different ways to this illustration. We used an image file. We've used the vector brush tool, and we've also used the paintbrush tool and the pixel persona. You can use one or all of these. It's totally up to you and the look you're trying to achieve. In the next section, we're going to take a look at how we can add texture to a group of individual layers using these same methods. I'll see you there. 14. Adding Texture to Groups of Layers: In this section, we're going to take a look at how we can add texture to a group of individual layers rather than one large curve. This is the leaf shape that we created in the shape tool section. I just changed the color so that you can more easily see the texture. This is the one where we left the individual leaf layers separate so that we can access them at a future date and we just group them together. That means we have to approach the texture definitely. With the last leaf the first step that we took was pulling in a texture image file using the place image function. But we can't do that here because you can't clip showing overall group. Instead we're going to go ahead and use the fill tool to add an image file. Now, I want to keep the color of the leaf and just add the texture on top. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate the group and I'm going to add my fill to this group layer rather than the bottom one. I'll go ahead and select my fill tool and I'll drag up. You'll see in gradient form, but this isn't the type of gradient we want. We're actually going to go to the contextual menu and we'll select "Bitmap." That will allow me to pull an image file in as the fill. I'm going to go ahead and select this one right here. Now, you can get some really interesting results right out of the gate with the fill tool, but this isn't the look we're going for. We actually want it to have that nice, subtle, organic texture that we had with the other ones. I'm going to use these handles to drag this around until it's placed where I want it. Again, I like how it has that nice, gritty texture and there's some dark and light areas here. I'm going to go head back to the group and I'm going to change the blend mode of the group overall. I'll select the "Layer Options" and I'm going to just go ahead and select "Soft Light" because I know that that works best with this particular texture. You could scroll back and forth until you find one that you really like. I actually think I like hard light better. We'll go with that and we'll drop the opacity a little bit. Now, we have that nice texture here and we have some dark and light values, and we were able to add the texture to the leaf overall. Now, what about adding texture using the vector brush tool or the Paintbrush tool on the Pixel persona? We can do that. Let's go ahead and take a look at how. If you want to add additional texture to a group of individual layers using either the Paintbrush tool in the Pixel persona or the Vector Brush tool you can do that. But again you can't clip to the overall group, which means we need to focus our attention on the individual leaf layers. In other words, if I go ahead and I select my Vector Brush tool and I select that same brush that I used previously, I'm going to make this a little bit larger, and I swipe down it looks just like it did with that last leaf. But if I go ahead and group these and try and clip them it doesn't do anything. It just adds it to the overall group and I still have this mess on the outside. I need to focus my attention on each individual leaf. I'll go ahead and select a leaf and I'll swipe. I can go ahead and clip it that leaf and now change the blend mode. I'll just drop that down a little bit and I would just work my way around. Now, this is why it becomes time-consuming and you also have to give it a little bit more thought because you don't want to have anything look like it's placed. You want it to look organic, which means you really need to think ahead as to where you're putting your texture because you can't simply swipe across the entire shape. The same goes for the Pixel persona and using the Paintbrush tool. I'll go ahead and select that same blue color and that other one that we used before, and I'm going to select this top leaf again. If you select an individual layer and you start using the pixel brush it's going to automatically clip that pixel layer to that one. Now, let me go ahead and zoom in here. I'm going to start painting in the blue. You can see it's already clipped here and I could go in and I can change the blend mode. Let's try something like color and I'll drop the opacity. But again, I need to work my way around this leaf. I'm going to go ahead and do that now. I'm going to work my way around the leaf using a combination of both the Vector Brush tool and the Paintbrush tool. I'm going to stop there. I added some texture using both the Paintbrush tool in the Pixel persona and the Vector Brush and I like how this looks, but it took a lot of work to get it to this point where I could have achieved very similar results simply by using one color. Now, it's really up to you how you want to approach it. You may find that you have a need to use a group of layers rather than an individual curve. Like I mentioned previously, when it comes to the flowers I do tend to use grouping a lot rather than combining everything. It's just a matter of your needs and how you want to approach it. But just keep in mind that when you use this particular method it's going to take more time and a little bit more thought up front. In the next section we're going to take a look at how we can begin creating floral shapes using the built-in shapes in the rectangle tool. I'll see you there. 15. Simple Flowers from Shapes: Over the next two sections, I'm going to show you how to create a range of flowers from simple to more complex, using the built-in shapes in the rectangle tool. What you'll learn in these two sections will provide you with the building blocks to go on to create even more complex florals as well as other illustrations. Let's get started. Let's take a look at how we can use the Ellipse tool to create simple floral shapes like this. I'm going to go ahead and select my fill. Again, I typically don't work with a stroke just to fill. Select this peach color and I'll make sure that my ellipse shape is selected in my rectangle tool. I'll just drag out a nice long, narrow ellipse. This is my starting point for my petals. Again, it's a shape not a curve so I need to convert it so that I can use my node tools. Now when I select the node tool, I have these nice smooth nodes to work with. I want the top and the bottom to be pointed though, so I'm going to go ahead and drag across and select them and tap "Sharp" in the contextual menu. Now this is a good starting point, but it's rather generic. I'm going to make some additional edits to the appearance. But first, I want to create my entire flower shape first. I'll select this petal with my move tool. I want to make sure that my transform origin point is on. It's the little bulls-eye in the contextual menu. And what that does is tell designer what you want, where you want to rotate from. Right now that little bull's eye is in the middle of the shape, so if I start rotating it, it rotates around the center of itself. I actually want it to rotate around the bottom of the petal. With my snapping on, I'm going to drag that down and the snapping is going to guide it as well as snap it into place. Now when I rotate it, it's rotating around the bottom of the petal. I'm ready to start duplicating this. So with it selected, I'll go into my "Edit" menu and tap "Duplicate". I want to begin rotating my petals at 45-degree angles. I can guide that by starting to drag and then tapping my finger down, holding it, and it's going to snap in 15 degree angles. Now I'm at 45. If I continue to hit "Duplicate" with this selected, not only will it duplicate it, but it's going to continue to rotate it at 45-degree angles. Let's go ahead and do that. I have my entire flower shape here. Again, I don't need to work with the individual layer, so I'm just going to go ahead and select them and I'm going to create one large curve by tapping "Add". Now I have one piece to work with. It's looking a little one-dimensional though. I actually want there to be multiple levels of petals. I'm going to duplicate this in place again and just rotate this out just slightly. Now in order for there to be some depth between the two, I'm going to go ahead into the bottom curve and just drag down from the icon for the color studio just to change the dark and light value of that. I'm not going to change it a lot. I just want it to be enough that you can see the difference between the two layers. Now this is looking a little bit perfect, and I don't want that. You want to play into nature's perfect imperfections. So I'll go ahead and select my "Node" tool and I'm just going to start dragging out in various areas with my node tool. We have some nice differences between the petals. There's a nice depth and dimension between the two layers. I think I'm going to call this done and now move on to the middle of the flower. I'll just go ahead and select my "Ellipse" shape again. This is one of those instances where I use both a fill and a stroke. I'm going to select this yellow for my fill and I think white for my stroke. Now when I start dragging out a circle and if I hold my finger down, we'll get a perfect one. You can see that this stroke is rather large and that's okay. In this case, we're going to change it in one moment, drop it into the middle of the flower. Now I want to change the appearance of this stroke to match one of my brushes. In particular, I want to select the brush that's the stamen brush that I provided in the downloads. When I tap that, it's going to change the appearance to the dot formation that's in the brush itself. Now I can go into my stroke studio. I can make this larger. I can also change my alignment to get some different looks. I actually liked this particular one because I like when it's a little bit on the inside and a little on the outside, but it's totally up to you. I think I'm going to make the middle just a little bit smaller. I think that's done. So that's how we can create a nice simple flower shape using a combination of the ellipse shape in the rectangle tool, as well as a specialty brush. I'm going to move on and show you how to use a combination of a triangle and a crescent shape to create another flower formation. I created this flower shape that can be used two directions with a combination of the triangle shape and the crescent shape. Let's go ahead and select our fill. I think I'm going to go ahead and just keep that yellow that we used and I'll turn my stroke off. I want to select my triangle shape and I'll just drag out a triangle. Now again, I want to convert this to a curve and then I want to flip it. So I'll go into my Transform studio and do a vertical flip. Select my Move tool. I make sure that my transplant origin point is at the bottom of my petals so I'll just drag that down. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller just to give ourselves some room to work. I always make sure that my About Center is on so that when I do size up and down, it does it evenly. Now we're ready to start duplicating this. Now, I don't actually want to duplicate this in perfect angles, I'm going to start by duplicating that shape and I'm just going to drag out to where I want it. Now because I don't want it to continue in that same width I'm going to de-select and I'll select again, hit "Duplicate", and I'll just drag this out to where I want it. Again. I'll de-select and select again and hit "Duplicate". I'll drag that to about there. Let's make this a little bit smaller. I also want to make it one large curve. So again, I'll select all the layers and do an add. I'll just make this a little bit smaller. Now I want to duplicate this shape in place so that we have that same depth we had with the last flower. So I'll duplicate it in place. Now, I'm going to drag my transform point down to the tip of the triangle just to keep them aligned. I'll just rotate out, make it a little bit smaller. I don't want this perfect, I don't want it right there. I want it a little bit overlapping and I'm going to go ahead and deselect. Now when I do that again, it doesn't have any depth and I want that. So I'm going to change the light value of the bottom curve and drag down from my color studio. I think I'll make the top one a little bit lighter. Now I have a nice contrast between the two. But again, these piles are a little too perfect, so I'm going to go into my Node tool and I just want to make some changes. I think that looks good like that. You can make whatever changes you want. I have a tendency of always going back in and making additional changes, but in the interest of time, I'm going to call this done. I'm just going to make it a little bit more narrow though. Now I want to select my crescent shape and select a nice green for my fill. So I'll drag out a crescent. This is where I'm going to use one of those red transform nodes here. This is still a shape, but I just want to drag this up, then I'll go ahead and convert it. Because once you convert it, those little red dots are gone, you can't use them anymore. I'm just going to start rotating this and dragging it in with my Move tool. I just try and size it to about where I want it. Sometimes you can't get it perfectly aligned and that's okay. If you want to leave it like that or you can select your Node tool and just drag in to where you want. I might also make this a little bit imperfect. I'll just back out and see how I like it. That's how you can use a combination of the triangle tool, triangle shape rather, and the crescent shape to create a flower that can be used in two directions. Facing up, it can look like a flower that's almost closed and facing down it can look like a flower that's fully open and facing the sun. One of the things that I like about doing these illustrations with the flowers is that I can give a node to my favorite flowers without them being exact. You can go for realism if you want. These tools will get you there. But in this case, I like to have a little bit of whimsy and fun with my flowers. I've created this chamomile flower using a combination of the trapezoid and ellipse shape, as well as my specialty brush. Let's go ahead and take a look at how we can create this. I'll start by creating the petals with the trapezoid. I'm going to select this nice off-white color for my fill and select my trapezoid. Just going to drag down. Again, I need to convert this to curves that I can use in Node tool. I've tapped "Curves", I'll select my Node tool and I want the path between these two nodes to be bent in a little bit. I'm just going to drag up, I'm going to drag these two nodes in towards each other and if you hold your finger down while you do it, it'll keep it straight. I might bend the paths out here as well. I have a nice start to my chamomile flower. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller so we have room to work. I'm going to make sure that my transform origin point is at the top here, so that we rotate around the middle and drag this down. Now I can start duplicating. I'm going to duplicate at 30 degree angles, so I'll duplicate it, and start dragging and hold my finger down and snap to 30 degrees. Now I'll just continue this around to create the full flower. I have my entire flower shape there. Again, I don't need to work with the individual curves, so I'm going to create one large shape out of this. The easiest way to do this because it's so large, is to go into my "Layers" studio, select the first curve and then two-finger tap on the last. I'll go ahead and do an add operation. Now I have one large curve to work with and I'm ready to add the middle. I'll go ahead and select my "Ellipse". I think I'll select this orange color. Make sure that you de-select your shape before you change the color. I'm going to select this red for my stroke. Will start dragging out. Again hold your finger down to get a perfect circle if you want to place this in the middle of the flower. I'm going to change my stroke again to the stamen brush, and I'll drag it out to the largest width. But in this case, I actually want that on the inside. I'll go to my "Advanced Settings" and I'm going to tap this middle one so that the dot formation is on the inside. Now if you wanted to, you could go back in with your node tool and just change some of these petals just to make them look not quite so perfect. I think I'm going to stop there, so I like how this looks. Again, it's a very simple flower shape, but we created it using multiple shapes as well as a specialty brush. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to start creating some more complex flower shapes, again using the shape tool so I'll see you there. 16. Complex Flowers From Shapes: In this second look at how you can use the built-in shapes and the Rectangle tool to create your florals, I'm going to approach the more complex floral shapes like these, and show you how you can use a combination of shapes as well as some specialty brushes to create these flowers. Let's get started. Let's start by creating this dahlia-type shape. We're going to use a combination of the ellipse shape and the duplicate and rotate function to create this more complex flower. I'll select my ellipse and drag out an ellipse. Let me get it a little bit wider here. I'm going to convert this to a curve, but I'm not going to change the nodes at all when I drag my transform-origin point down. I want my initial set of petals to be very dense because the dahlia flower is very dense in its arrangement. I'll go ahead and do a duplicate and I'm just going to rotate 15 degrees. I'm going to continue this all the way around. I have my full set of petals here and I've gone ahead and I have dragged up, selected it, and did an Add function to create one large curve. Now I'm going to start duplicating this, rotating it, and sizing in as I go. Because the duplicate function remembers all the steps that I took, it will continue that for me as I go along. Now, one thing I want to note, I changed the darkness and lightness values of the various levels as I'm going through this. Because there's so many layers and it's so dense, I find it easier to change it as I go along than waiting until the very end. I'll go ahead and select this and hit "Duplicate". Now, I want to rotate this to the middle here. It's about seven and a half, and I'm going to go ahead and hit "Duplicate". I'm keeping that the same size right now, the back two petal sets, and keeping it large. I'm going to rotate this again, but I'm not going to do it quite so perfectly and I'm just going to size in. Now, I want to change the level here and I'll go ahead and keep hitting Duplicate with that selected. I'm going to grab my ellipse again and I'm going to choose that yellow color for my fill and I'm going to choose off-white for my stroke. Now, I'll drag out my circle, and I'm going to move it into place. Let me get a little bit smaller. I want to change the stroke to my brush again, so I'll choose my stamen brush. Now, in this case, I actually like that it's in the middle again, like it was with one of the last flowers we've created. That's how you can create a dahlia-type flower using a combination of the ellipse shape as well as the duplicate function in the Edit menu. Let's go ahead and take a look at another one. We're going to create this gerbera daisy flower with a process similar to what we use for the dahlia, but we're going to shift it a little bit so that we can get this more ragged feel that the daisy typically has. I'm going to go ahead and I'm also going to select not only a fill but a slight stroke just to give a little bit more definition between my petals. I select my ellipse and drag out a nice narrow oval and convert it to curves and I want to make sure that my transform-origin point is at the bottom here. We're going to start duplicating this around, but we're going to do it in a much more randomly than we did with the dahlia. I'll go ahead and duplicate this. I'm going to rotate it. I'll let it do its thing again, but I'm going to drag it out. I'm just going to continue to repeat that around and move it randomly until I work my way all the way around. Now, I don't want to create one large curve out of this because if I do, it's going to convert the entire thing to this off-white color and I'm going to lose my stroke. I'm going to go ahead and going to select the whole thing, go to my layer studio and I'm going to group that. Now I'm going to duplicate the group. But unlike with the dahlia where we rotated and kept going inwards, we're going to randomly size down and up as we duplicate inward. Now, I kept this middle section a little bit empty for a reason. Most gerbera daisies have another set of smaller petals around the middle shapes. Let's go ahead and grab our ellipse. I'm going to create my middle section with a mix of this weed color for my fill and this brown for my stroke. I'll drag out my circle. I don't need it to be too big because again, I want those petals around the middle. I'm going to put this in place. I want to make my stroke much larger and I want to select the stamen brush. We're all set with our middle. Now, I want to create that small petal. Now, I'll select my ellipse again and drag out a small oval here. I'll go ahead and drag my transform point to the bottom. We'll move it into place over the middle section. I want to actually center it. Now, I'm going to size down a little bit. Eventually, this is going to be behind the center. But for right now I want it on top just so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. I'm going to go in and I'm going to start taking some of these out. I really just wanted to get this shape in place just to see where I wanted it. I'll just take some of these out, and now I'm going to go through and I'm going to change the size of some of them. I think that's actually good enough. I'm going to group these. I'll select the first one, two-finger tap on the last one in the layer studio because this is sitting on so much other stuff. It's a lot easier to use my layer studio instead, and I'm going to drag this below the ellipse. I might just shift it slightly. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. I'm going to rotate it and I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. That just gives it another group of petals that I'm going to make a different color. There's our gerbera daisy. Again, once we start adding texture to this, there's going to be a lot more definition to it. But this was created using a series of ellipses, as well as our specialty brush, and a process of using the duplicate function while randomly spacing both the actual pedal and incising up and down as we move our way inward. Finally, let's take a look at how we can create these abstract-type poppy flowers using a combination of the Crescent tool, Ellipse tool, as well as the Pencil tool to do these little cutouts to give it that rugged feel. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use these various shades of blue as my fill. Again, I like to have fun with the colors of these flowers. They don't have to be perfect, they don't have to be realistic. You can make them whatever color you want, especially when you get into the realm of abstract like we are here. I'm going to start with this lighter blue and I'll select my crescent shape and just drag out a crescent. I'm going to rotate it and convert it to curves. Now, I want to use my Node tool to just give it a little bit of that wave that you might see in a poppy flower. I'll just drag this node out a little bit. Now, I'm going to select my Pencil tool and make sure that sculpt is on. Now just a disclaimer about this process. I mentioned it when we went through the Pen and Pencil tools. It can be very frustrating and it takes some practice to get used to doing it. I recommend doing it slowly and carefully. You're going to start from the top and just draw down and up and release carefully. Inevitably, you will have to undo and redo at least once, and I guarantee I'll have to do it here. But again, just practice and it becomes really handy to do cutouts in different floral shapes. I'll just start drawing down and just carefully draw up. You can see that it's breaking the path and creating these little cutout shapes. I'm going to vary the size as well as the distance until I make my way all the way around. If you do have to undo and redo, honestly, it was a miracle I didn't have to there. Sometimes it helps just to go to a different spot and try again because there's just particular spots, especially where there's some curves or we might have some trouble. But again, just keep practicing. I'm going to go ahead and create another crescent. I'll move this out of the way. I'm going to use this darker color now. I'm not going to create the wave on this one. I actually want it to be very much like a crescent. We're going to use these to build up both an open flower shape as well as a closed one. Once again, I'll go ahead and select my Pencil tool and make sure it's on sculpt, and I'll just work my way across the flower. As you saw, I had to do undo and redo a few times on that one. I'm going to drop the lightness of this a little bit more and I'll move this one out of the way and we'll go ahead and create one more. I'm going to choose this mid-range color here. Now, we're going to actually duplicate two of these so that we can create our one large open shape. I'm just going to start rotating these around and just changing the size and just building up on one another till we get a nice open shape. Let's go ahead and add our center. I'm going to select yellow and black for my stroke. Let's drag out a circle. Once again, I want to go ahead and choose my stamen brush, and I want it on both the inside and outside, but I'm going to drag it up so it's its largest size. There we have our first completed piece. Let's go ahead and use a few of these same layers to create the closed piece. I'm going to select some of these and just drag out some duplicates. I think I want that really small piece. Let's go ahead and drag across this large piece and group it so we can move it easily. Now I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to rotate these pieces together, and I want them to have a layer with one another just to give them that closed flower type of feel. I actually like how that one looks. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select my ellipse tool with the same colors, but I'm not going to drag a full circle. I actually want it to be a little bit more narrow because I don't really want anything hanging out. I'm actually going to change the color to white because I do want to show you what you can do if you do need to place it where some pieces are hanging out. Let's go ahead and change that to the stamen brush, make it as large as possible, and then drop it behind. I'm just going to go ahead and drag this in where I want it. Now, you can see some of this hanging out and I don't want that. I just want it to be in this space here. What you can do is go into your Pixel persona and grab your Eraser tool, select the layer and just start erasing away the spots that you don't want. It's going to add a mask to that particular shape and just mask away the extra there. In the next section, we're going to start adding texture to some of our floral creations so that you can see how we can build up and create even more depth and dimension in our florals. I'll see you there. 17. Flowers with the Pen & Pencil Tools: In this section I'm going to show you how to create flowers like these using the freehand pen and pencil tool and a designer persona. Let's get started. Let's go ahead and create this flower shape using a combination of the pencil tool and the ellipse shape. I'm going to go into my color studio and select this lighter color for my fill. Again, no stroke. I'll select my pencil tool and I want to make sure you use photos on. I'll just start drawing out my petal shape. Again, when you use the pencil tool, even if it looks close the shape isn't yet but I'm going to close this once I create both petals. Once again I'll select my pencil tool and I'm going to draw it from the bottom here and do my second petal. Now I want to go ahead and close both of these. With my move tool I'll select both, change to my node tool and just tap Close. While I have them both selected I'm going to create one large piece, so I'll go into my Edit and do an add. I just want to take a look at the bottom because sometimes they will meet up or you'll get this whole jagging marks. I'm going to select this with my node tool. In this case I'm going to drag the handle so it's straight. I'm going to delete these nodes that are causing this problem. I'm going to make sure this one is smooth and delete the other. Now we have a nice pointed bottom, it's aligned and we have our first front petals to work with. Let's go ahead and create our back petal. I'm going to select my pencil tool and I want to select this darker salmon color. I'm just going to start drawing out and it doesn't have to line up, in fact it probably shouldn't. I actually want to start that again because I want it to dip down a little bit more than I did. I get almost like a heart shape. I'm going to go ahead and close it and then drag it below the other curve. Let's take a step back. Now, I want these to meet up a little bit more. I'm going to drag this node over and with snapping on it it's going to line up there. But I have a little bit of spot here just peeking out. I'm going to hold my finger down as I drag this handle so it only drags on handle and then I can just tuck it in. I don't necessarily need all of it meeting up, I just want to move it over just a little bit. Okay, I like how that looks. I might pull this up just slightly, maybe add a node. Now, let's go ahead and create our middle. I'm going to select the ellipse tool. I'll select this brown color for the fill and black for the stroke and I'll just draw out my shape. I'll tap to curves and I'm going to change this stroke to that stamen brush. I think I'm going to lighten up the middle a little bit. I'll rotate this into place and tuck it between the two curve layers so that it's in the middle there. Now, because of the size of this there shouldn't be any issues with any stroke hanging out. But just to be on the safe side I'm going to change this to white just to be sure. I don't see anything there. The only thing I might do is just select the whole thing and I'm going to make it a little bit more narrow and maybe a little shorter. I like how that's looking. Let's move on to creating a chrysanthemum using the pen tool. Here we're going to use the pen tool to create a series of strokes that we're going to then group and turn into this nice shaggy chrysanthemum. I'll go ahead and select my primary color. I think I'm going to start with this off-white color as my fill. Again, I don't need a stroke. I'm going to select my pen tool on pen mode. I'm just going to start tapping and dragging so I get a slight curve. But I want to de-select and start from the same point and just start tapping and dragging in various sizes and various distances. I want to change course and I'll make sure you do the select because I didn't there, it actually completed the circle. I'm just going to ahead and de-select. I'm going to change course here and go the other direction. I'll just keep doing this until the whole thing is completed. I like how it's looking. I'm going to go ahead and select the whole thing. I want to make sure that the bottom is completely in alignment because I did move some of them. I'm going to select my transform studio and go into the alignment and just do a line vertically at the bottom and it didn't move so it looks like it actually was okay. If you start from that point each time there shouldn't be an issue. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to select the whole thing and make it a little bit more narrow and rotate it slightly. I'm going to change the bounds so that the handle moves with that shift that I did. Now we're going to create an entire round shape out of this. I'll go ahead and I'll duplicate it. When you move my transform node down to the bottom here and just start rotating out. Again, I'm going to let it do its thing and duplicate all the way around. We have our first shape here. I'm now going to make one large curve out of this. I actually want to just create a group out of it. I've selected all the curve layers and I'll tap Group. Now we're going to start duplicating this group. Let me just make it a little bit smaller first. Duplicate the group. Rotate it slightly and no random, I'm going to do relatively randomly so that it doesn't look fake, It looks a little bit more like nature. I'm going to change my fill as I go. I have the group selected which means I can go ahead and tap and change my fill. I'm trying to drop the lightness a little bit. I'm going to let it duplicate itself again. I'm going to increase the lightness. I'm going to rotate and I'm going to drag it in just slightly. I'm going to let it do it again and again, just drag down. Now I'll do it one more time. I'm going to decrease it a lot more this time and change the lightness value. We have our main flower shape, I'm just going to go ahead and just drag it in this slightly. I'm going to group the whole thing. Now I want to create my center shapes. I'll select my ellipse tool. I'll go in and get a fill. I'm going to pick this nice, I will use green color and a black stroke and I'll just drag out a circle. Change my stroke to the stamen brush and I think I'll make this a little bit smaller. Now what we'll end up doing when we add texture is just adding texture to each of the group layers so that we have a little bit more dimension. But the reason I was changing my light and dark values was to give it a good start with that. There's our chrysanthemum I'm using the pen for. Let's go ahead and create one more shape using the pencil tool. Let's go ahead and create this final shape using our pencil tool. The first thing I want to do is turn on my guide. Sometimes when I'm creating flowers like that I find the guides very helpful. I'm going to go into my document menu, tap Guides and turn them on. Now I had already created one for another piece so it's already out there. If you don't see one when you tap Show Guides you can just add horizontal and add vertically. You can use your move tool to drag them where you want them. This is all set, I'll go ahead and select my pencil tool and I want to select a color. I'm going to start with this yellow fill and no stroke and I'm just going to start drawing up some petals and I want four all the way around. I have my four shapes and I'm going to turn my guides off just so they don't get in the way. Now I want these to be close so I'm going to go ahead and select all four, go to my node tool and tap Close. Now my shapes are all set. I'm going to start dragging these together a little bit more and rotating them because I'm going to create one large piece but I want it to be a little less like a cross and more like say an iris or something like that. We'll also make some of these a little bit more narrow and just rotate them a little bit so it's not quite so perfect. I like how that's looking. Sometimes you just need to turn your snapping off. I'm going to go ahead and select this and I'm going to create one large curve by doing an add operation. Now I want to duplicate this again and I'm going to drag out but I'm going to drag away so that my petals aren't all the same next to one another and I'm not going to be perfect about this. I don't want it so perfect that it looks evenly spaced. I actually want it off like this and go to my bottom layer and drop the lightness value just slightly to give it a little bit more dimension. If you wanted to you could also make an additional shape and make a smaller piece but I think we're fine with this. I'll go ahead and choose my ellipse tool and select this chestnut color for the fill. I think probably black for the stroke. I'll go ahead and drag out my shape, change my stroke and I think I might shift some of these petals just slightly. In the next section we're going to start adding texture to some of the flowers that we've created so that you can see how you can very easily add additional dimension to your floral creations the same way that we did with the leaves, adding some raster and vector elements. I'll see you there. 18. Adding Texture to Flowers: In this section, we're going to begin adding texture to the flowers we created in the last two. Just like with the leaves, the way that you add texture to these flowers is determined by whether you've grouped a number of individual layers, or you've combined the layers to create one large curve. Let's get started. I'm going to start with this simple flower and while it's grouped for convenience so that I can easily move it around or turn off layers, ultimately, it is three separate individual curves that I can easily add texture to individually. I'm going to start with this light petal at the top. I'm going to start the same way I did with my leaves. I'm going to place a texture image file. I'm going to choose a lighter texture because I want to play into the dark and light value differences between the two layers. Again, I'll just drag large. You can always size down, but you want to size up first. I'm going to drag this in a little bit and move it over. Now I'm going to clip it to that first curve. I'll drag down and clip. I'm going to change the blend mode of this to soft light. I'm not looking for anything obvious. I want it to be rather subtle. In fact, I think I'm going to go ahead and change the opacity just slightly. Now, I'm going to go ahead and choose something for my back one, and I'm going to choose a little bit darker texture to pull out some of that difference there. I'll go ahead and choose this one here. I'm going to drag down and clip it. Then I can go ahead and drag in so I can see where I'm going. I like how that is splay. How there's this subtle organic messiness here. I'll go ahead and change the blend mode of this. I'm going to try overlay and softly just to see how both look. I think I like overlay and I'm going to drop the opacity just slightly. Now I have my first set of texture on both of my petals. I want to play into the difference between the two a little bit more by adding some more texture to the top. I'm going to stick to my vector brushes and we're going to use some of the built-in brushes here. I'll select my vector brush tool. I'm going to go ahead and use a nice off white color for my brush. I'm going to use one of the built-in gouache brushes, specifically this gouache for, when you do short strokes, you can really see the variation in how the brush lays down. Just draw it up a little bit larger. I'm going to start drawing in, in various directions just like we did with the leaves. It's going to look chaotic at first. But we're going to clip this and change the blend mode. I'll go back into my layer studio and again, when you're working with a vector brush, you get separate layers each time you lay down a stroke. I'm going to select the first one and two-finger tap on the last so that I can group them. I'll go ahead and clip them to that top curve. This is a little too bright. I'm going to go ahead and knock back the brightness just by changing the blend mode. I'm again going to go with soft light. I like how that's looking, but I want to drop the opacity just slightly, I like how that looks. We have some nice variation and texture between the top and bottom level as well as a difference in the dark and light values. I'm going to add a little bit more subtle texture to this using my vector brush. I'll go ahead and select my inking brushes, specifically my fountain pen ink. I am going to make the brush a little bit smaller. I have this off-white color selected and I'll just start drawing lines up. I have my lines in place. The first thing I want to do is write my Canvas. I'll go to my navigator studio and under canvas rotation, I'm going to tap and type in zero. That's going to bring my Canvas upgrade again, it's important to make sure that you do that throughout. I need to clip these curves to this top layer of leaves. I'll select my top curve and then two-finger tap to select the bottom. Group them. Now I can clip the whole group to this curve. It's a little too obvious again, I want it to be more subtle, so I'm going to go ahead in and I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light and just drop the opacity a bit. I really just want subtle lines here. I don't want them to stand out too much. Now I could take this a step further and I could go into my pixel persona, grab my paintbrush tool and perhaps add some subtle shading throughout or some variation of color. I like how this is looking. It's a relatively simple flower, so I want to keep the texture symbol overall, but it's really up to you. Let's go ahead and take a look at another flower. In this exercise, we're going to add texture to a flower that's made up of a number of groups of individual layers. When we created the chrysanthemum flower, we use the pen tool to create all of these individuals curves, to go into each individual one and add texture to it would be very time-consuming. Instead we're going to focus on adding texture to the groups that make up the whole flower. Now the first thing I want to do is make sure that these curves are no longer just strokes, but they're fills because you can't add texture to a stroke. I'll just go ahead and I'll select the four groups. Go into my Edit menu and tap Expand Stroke. The appearance doesn't change, but the type of curve you're working with does. They've now been expanded. We're working with fills rather than strokes, which means we're ready to add our texture. I'm not going to add texture to every layer. I find that sometimes when I leave certain elements flat, it adds an additional layer of dimension. I'm going to start and add texture to the bottom, but I want to keep the color the same. I just want to add texture on top so I'll duplicate it first and with it selected, I'll grab my fill tool and just drag up. Now I have the gradient, but it's not the type of fill that I want. I want to select Bitmap. I want you to choose a lighter texture file. I like how this looks, but it's not quite the look we're going for. I'm going to just drag it out a little bit to give myself a little bit more than graininess. I'm going to change the blend mode of the overall group. I'll go ahead and I'm going to tap through. I already know I'm going to like soft light, so I'm just going to go ahead up to that. You could try different ones if you want to tap through. Hard light is nice, but it's a little bit too much. Just going to knock it back a little bit with some soft light, so we still have that color, but there's some nice texture in there as well. I'm done with that one and I'm going to go ahead and de-select it. Let's move on to the next group. I'm going to leave this one flat and I'm going to go up to the next one in the lineup. Again, I'll go ahead and duplicate it. I'm going to grab my fill tool and swipe across it, add the gradient, and I'm going to change this to Bitmap. I want to choose a little bit darker one this time, but not too dark. I'll go ahead with this. Again not quite the look I'm going for. I do like it and you can get some really interesting results just leaving it as is, but we're going to go ahead and change the blend mode. You could also get some interesting results just using the blend modes themselves and add a little bit of color or something like that. I think we're probably going to end up somewhere in linear burn or darker color. I like darker color. I'm just going to knock it back a little bit. Let me try linear burn here. We're going to do that one instead. I like how we have the texture, but it's a little bit darker. Again, we're giving it a little bit more dimension. Now I want to choose this last group and again duplicate it. With it selected, I'll just drag it across. I'm going to select Bitmap. I want to go even darker with the texture because I really want that middle section to stand out. I'll just go ahead and drag up and then just change the blend mode until I get something I like. I actually like that brown. I like how it plays into the neutral zone of the rest of it. I like how the overall flowers look. The only thing I might do at the end here is add some texture and I'm going to go into my pixel [inaudible] and grab my paintbrush tool. I'm going to grab a nice grainy brush and off-white color, I think. I'm just going to start adding some texture around the edges here. Again, it's not clipped, so it's ending up on the outside as well. But that's okay. I want to leave the center a little bit darker. I'll go back in and I'll grab that pixel and I'll clip it to the ellipse. I might just change the blend mode just to see some of the options. Will probably end up again in the soft light or hard light area. I think I like hard way but I'll just drop it down a little bit. There's our overall chrysanthemum flower where we've added texture to individual groups rather than individual layers. Let's take a look at one more flower. Finally, let's add some texture to this simple flower we created using the pencil tool. Because it is so simple, I don't want to add too much texture, but I do want to focus on the difference between light and dark of these two layers, as well as the fact that it's a curved flower. I'm going to play into that. The first thing I'm going to do is place a texture image file on that top layer. I want to pick something light. I'll go ahead and drag this up. I want this dark part here to be at the bottom of the flower. I'll go ahead and clip it. Then I'll change the blend mode. I'm going to choose the soft white because I know that works best with this particular texture. The next thing I want to do here is to add a little bit more texture using a vector brush. Specifically, I want to use one of the acrylic brushes. In the acrylics section, I've added two designer. I'm going to go ahead and choose this glazing brush. When I add texture with this really large, it just adds a nice cottony feel, so I'll go ahead and swipe up. I'll swipe up this direction, and I'll go ahead and group them together and clip it. Then once you start changing the blend mode of this, it blends in really nicely and adds a nice textural quality. I actually like overlay here, but I'm going to drop the opacity. I like how that pulled in a little bit of that yellowish feel from the off-white color I used, but kept that peachy pink. I'll go ahead and add a texture image file now to the back. I want to pick a little bit of darker one. Again, I'll go ahead and drag up, now clip itself to the wrong layer, but that's okay. We're just going to grab it and drag it down. I'll go ahead and once again change the blend mode. I like soft light in this case. Now the difference is subtle, but it's still there. You still have the impression that it's a closed flower. I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of texture to the middle section here again, using the place image. I want something in the Brown family with some grittiness because it's dull and flat. I'm going to go ahead and pick this one. I'll just go ahead and swipe up. I like this section here in particular. I'm just going to change the blend mode again to either overlay or soft light. I think I like overlay the best. One final thing that I want to do is just add a little bit of light to the side here, I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool again. I have my off-white color selected and then going to go and grab this things, gritty brush. I want to go ahead and start adding some light texture to the very side here and a little bit at the top. Now, it's already clipped itself because I selected this layer to begin with. But I do want to change the blend mode to screen and that'll allow not only the texture come through but the lightness will stay as well. I just want to add a little bit of dark to here. I'm going to choose this dark pink color. Now because this was a screen blend mode and I actually wanted to use a different blend mode here I need to add a pixel layer, so I'll go ahead and hit this plus sign. It added the pixel layer. Now I can just start adding my texture here. Again, I don't want to do too much, just a little bit. I'll change the blend mode to multiply and drop the opacity. I like how this flower is looking. In the next section, we're going to go ahead and take a look at the assets section. I'll show you not only how you can save your own objects to use in the existing document you're in but for the future, but also introduce you to this nature elements download that I provided you with and show you how to use the elements to create your own floral arrangements. I'll see you there. 19. The Assets Studio : One of my favorite things about designer is the Asset Studio. It allows me to save objects I create, whether they're single layer objects or made up of multiple layers, for use in future documents. I use this a lot when I'm creating surface patterns or I'm creating an illustration where I just need a little bit of fill and don't want to start from scratch creating a whole new flower. If I see single layer objects, I can stack multiple assets on top of one another to create a new design. If I save multiple layer objects like this one, it will insert it exactly how I saved it, layers and all, so I can go in and make edits if I want. Let's take a look at the Asset Studio. It's broken down into categories and subcategories, and you will always need at least one subcategory to begin adding assets. In this case, I have a category setup for my flower shapes, and it's broken down into multiple sub-categories. I have this flower that I created and I love it and how it looks, so I want to keep it for future use. The first thing I want to do is make sure that all of the elements that make up this flower are grouped together. You can save as individual layers, but it's going to save it as individual elements in your Assets Studio. If you want to save it as it is, make sure that you group those layers first. Now I've made sure this is grouped together and I'm going to go ahead and select it. I'll go into my Asset Studio and I'm going to select which subcategory I want it in. I'm going to place it in this flower heads, and I'll tap on the menu for this subcategory and then select "Add Asset from Selection". Now, it's added to my group here, and if I want to add it back in, I can simply tap, hit "Insert", and it's placed it in my document again. Again, it's broken down into the original layers that I created it with. Let's take a look at how you create your own Asset categories to save to. The first thing you want to do is go to the Hamburger menu at the top of the Asset Studio and select "Add Category". You can rename this by going back into that same menu, selecting "Rename Category", and I'll go ahead and name this skillshare class. Again, you're always going to need at least one subcategory before you can begin adding to this particular category. I'll go back into that same menu tap "Add Subcategory", and I'll go into the menu for that subcategory to rename it. I'll just change this to florals. I'm all set to start adding. Once again, I would go ahead and I would select my object. I'll go into the menu for the subcategory I want to add to and then tap "Add Asset to Subcategory". If you need to delete a category, you can go into that top menu, and again, you can go ahead and delete it. You also can import from here as well as export from here. As part of the downloads for this class, I provided a nature elements assets pack, which is a group of single layer floral and leaf shapes that you can use to create your own designs. Let's take a look at how these work. I'm going to recreate the flower shape that we started with. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select the flower shape and tap "Insert." Let me first go ahead and turn this one off. I will head into my Asset Studio, I want to select this is a shape here. I'll tap on it, hit "Insert," and now it's in my document. Again starts out as a single layer with no color, but you can go ahead and add color to it. I'm going to select this darker fill since I know this is going to be my bottom petal, and I'm going to go back to my Asset Studio and add a second of that same one. You could also just duplicate the first one in place, it's really up to you. I'm going go ahead and add a lighter color to this second layer, and I'm going to make it smaller and rotate it slightly. I'll just go ahead and center these, and I'm ready to add my texture. I'll go ahead and grab a texture image file. I'm going to pick some nice light ones. I'll drag across, and I'm going to clip this to the first layer, change my blend mode to soft light, and I'll just drop the opacity slightly. Now I'm going to go back in and selecting another one from my bottom layer, I'm going to choose a slightly darker one. Remember to drag large, you can always size down, but you want to make sure that you start out at a larger size. I'll go ahead and clip this to my bottom and change that to soft light. I'm all set with my texture on the two petals. If you wanted to, you could go further and add lines to the petals, it's up to you. I'm going to go ahead and add my middle section. There's three flower metals here, I'm going to start with this solid one. It's created using one of the brushes from the texture flower brush pack that I provided as a download. You can change it to whichever one you want in the pack. First, I'm going to go ahead and change the color of my fill and my stroke, but I'll go ahead and make that black. I think I'm going to choose this coffee beans stamen. I'll make this a little bit smaller and move it to the middle, and I'll just increase the stroke size just to make the stamen a little bit larger. Now I can go in and I can add texture to this. I think what I'm going to do is I'll add another one of these flower middle just to add to the middle section here. I'm going to select this one and hit "Insert." I'm going to keep the brush that's selected for this particular stroke, but I'm going to go ahead and change the colors again. I'm just going to make this a little bit smaller. I'm also going to change the alignment of the stroke so that it's in the center. That's how you can take single layers from an Asset Studio and build them up, add texture and color to them to create a whole new design. In the next section, we're going to put everything together and create a beautiful textured bouquet using everything that we learned in the class. I'll see you there. 20. Putting it All Together: In this final section, we're going to take some of the flowers and leaves that we've created and put them together in a texture floral bouquet. Now, it's up to you how do you want to place them together. You can make a traditional bouquet that's just tied together or you can place them in a bowl or cup or if you want, you can even make a flat light bouquet. It's totally up to you. I think I'm going to make a nice little cup to put them in. So I'll start with my pencil tool and I'll go ahead and select this red color, I think. I'll make sure my fill is on and my stroke is off. I'm just going to go ahead and draw out a little bowl and I like to make it slightly imperfect as if it's pottery. Let me go ahead and add some texture to this first. I'll clip that and change the blend mode. I'll stick with overlay there. I want to add a little bit more to this so I'm going to go back to my pencil tool, I'm going to turn off both my fill and my stroke, and I'm going to go ahead and just draw a little circle, swirl formation here. I'm going to go into my brushes and specifically into the engraving brushes that are built into Designer and I'm going to select one of my engraving brushes and make it rather large. I like how it gives it that nice little engraved pottery feel. I'll just go back in and I want to make sure that this is clipped to this curve so nothing's on the outside, I'll change the blend mode to soft light and let's drop the opacity slightly. This is something where you can play around with the color and the different blend modes and you'll get different feels, but I like how this one looks so I'll go ahead and call that done. I'm going to go ahead and start adding my flowers now. Actually, the first thing I'm going to do is add some leaves to the pot, so I'm going to go ahead and insert one of the leaves that I saved. I want this behind the pot and I actually want two of them, so I'll go ahead and flip this. I may add more later, but I'm going to just start with two for now. I'll go ahead and group these and drop them below the pot and I accidentally clipped it there, which is fine. I'm going to do this two finger tap to undo and I'll re-drag. Now everything is behind the pot. I'm going to go ahead and just start placing flower heads. I usually do my stems after the flat once I've placed the flowers where I want them. I'm going to go in and I'm going to grab those two poppy flowers that we had, made a drag this up to the top though. I'm just going to make them smaller. This one up here and this one, I'm going to make a little bit smaller and rotate it and place it over here. I don't try and be perfect about this because it looks more natural when you just place things and you can always move them around. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at my Asset Studio and add a couple of flowers from there. I liked this little salmon flower that we created. I'm going to go ahead and dry it smaller though, and I actually want a couple of them in various spots and I want them to have different orientations. I think I'll drag one over here too. I think we need some white flowers, so I'll go ahead and add this one as well. You can vary the sizes, maybe even vary the shapes if you want to drag in a little bit because not all flowers are perfectly round and I just like to give it a little variety. Maybe we'll just go ahead and add one more here, I'm going to add this yellow flower and just drop the size a little bit and put this one up here. I want to lay it on top of the poppy. If you wanted to talk things behind other things, you can just drag the layer. If I wanted this behind the poppy, you can do that. I actually want that above and I think I'm going to move the poppy flower over just slightly. I think I'm going to stick with this for now. I'm going to start adding some stems just to fill this in. I'll go into my pen tool and I'm going to make sure I de-select so that when I change the color, I don't accidentally change the color of the flower, and I'm going to make that green my stroke. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to tap down and drag. Now this is much larger than we need, so I'll just go ahead and change the size. I'm also going to tuck it behind the head of the flower and I also want to make sure it's behind the bowl. I'm going to use the stroke studio to make some changes to it so it's not so perfect. I might even make this a different color just to make it a little bit different from the leaf formations there, just make it a little bit lighter. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to keep adding stems to this, I can also use the ones that are in my nature elements assets pack, but I just wanted to go ahead and add this, change the color, and I can add texture to that if I want. So I'll just go ahead and fill this in and then we'll start moving things around just to get them in the perfect spot. I like how my flowers are placed, I'm actually not going to add any more. I added some additional leaves and I left some flat. Sometimes I like to have a little pop of color without texture and something that you wouldn't necessarily expect just to add as a filler. The last thing I'm going to do is add a texture to my background and then add a unifying texture across the entire thing. I'm going to go ahead in and I'll select a image file from my black background. When it comes to the black ones, they like to use a black and white type texture. I accidentally hit one there while I was talking. Let's start that again. I like it to be screenish and ghost-like when it comes to black and you'll see why in a second. I'm going to go ahead and drag that up and I'll place it, and I want to drag that down so that it's on top of my black rectangle there. I like how this gives it a little bit of light almost, coming from the one side and I'll just tap through until I find the blend mode I like. I typically end up towards glow because it just gives a little bit of subtle light there so that's good for my background. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to lay a unifying texture on the top now. I'll go back and, in this case, I don't want one of my black and white ones. I'm going to choose a lighter color to the one that I have, this Antique White, and I'll just go ahead and rotate this. It doesn't really matter if it's perfect, I really just want the texture. Again, I want to place a large first and then size down. I'll just place it so that it's got that nice amount right there. Now I want to change the blend mode. That is, I don't want to move it down, I want it on top of everything because I want it to add a little bit of texture to everything. I'll go ahead and change my blend mode again. I wanted to ultimately be subtle, so I'll end up dropping the opacity, but I want to start high and then work my way down. You can usually add a lighter color, it's a nice one. I'm just going to drop the opacity there. It gives us a little bit of subtle texture here, as well as what's coming up from the bottom and it's over the entire thing so it unifies everything. It's up to you whether you want to add that, that tends to be one of my finishing touches, but I'm going to go ahead and call this done. Thank you so much for being a part of this class. I hope you're going to use the methods you learned here to go on to create many beautiful illustrations. My biggest piece of advice when creating these botanicals is to have fun with them. The flowers are all yours to create so you can use abstract shapes, fun colors or go for complete realism. It's totally up to you. If you have any questions about the class or about Designer in general, please feel free to reach out to me either on the class discussion board or with the contact info in the resource guide. Please feel free to share your creations on the class project board as I'd love to see what you've created.