Abstract Painting in Procreate: Playing with Paint, Texture, and Mark-Making!

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Jennifer Nichols of Layla and Po studio. I'm an artist at teacher and a fabric designer. And I absolutely loved the Procreate app and teaching everything. I know. If you're familiar with my work, you might know that I love realism, but I actually prefer more stylized illustrations lately and for years I've had to actually actively practice not doing realism. Part of that journey has led me to practicing abstract painting in procreate. And I love it. In this class, I'm actually going to do an entire painting you can follow along with, or you can watch it, learn some skills, and then do your own thing. I have made 42 new brushes for this class. I went a little crazy because I did a lot of research and watched a lot of traditional abstract painting lessons. And I wanted to get a lot of the different looks that you can get with traditional painting. I made a lot of brushes. I'm also giving you several pallets is to work from and showing you how to create a wonderful canvas texture before you get started, a lot of this class actually is playing with brushes and getting to know everything that you can do with these brushes. Of course, you're not restricted to the brushes I provide. But I've provided some really great charts for you to keep track of the brushes as well as practicing your mark-making. Be sure to head to my Skillshare profile where you can find all the links to where you can find me online, join my Facebook group, follow me on Instagram and head to my website for lots more freebies. Let's get started. I'll see you in class. 2. Why Abstract Painting?: I thought it was going to try to answer the question, why do abstract art? But I realized that I can't actually answer that question. I found a couple of articles. They're linked in the projects and resources in the project description. And this is one of the articles and I think it gets some great information. And I wanted to just give those to you so that you can decide why you are doing abstract painting for yourself. I know I'm doing it because I like to practice being a little bit more loose and free with my art. When you post your class project, let me know what you think of these articles and why you chose to do some abstract painting. All right, let's get started. 3. Reorganizing Brushes & Making Palettes: In this lesson, we're going to talk about downloading resources and a quick overview of posting a class project on Skillshare. Go to the class, go to the Projects and Resources tab, and make sure you're in a browser in landscape mode. In order to be able to see this column over here. I don't believe it works in the Skillshare app. If you have troubles, make sure you try different browsers. I do get a lot of people who have troubles that end up switching into Safari and then they're fine. So be sure to check on that type of stuff. If things don't seem to be downloading properly, there's usually a See More option which will expose more of the list. I think this is the last one on our list though. Yeah. I do have besides our downloads, I have a couple of links here. I have a Pinterest board and then I have two articles that I thought were interesting and I wanted to make sure that you see those. And a little description of the class project, but we'll talk about that in class as well. The Pinterest board mostly has Laura horn and Luis Fletcher, Alice Sheridan. And some Laura horn does do some more botanicals. And she does a lot that are not botanicals as well. But this is a nice little inspiration board for you to check out and definitely look around for more inspiration. We're not going to be doing abstract florals and things like that in this class, this is more about a color shape and mark-making, but you can definitely add things like that on your own. Over here at the downloads, all we need to do is tap on things and tap download. You'll be able to see them downloading right there. Then just keep tapping. I had to split my brush set into two because it was too big of a file for Skillshare. I'm just going through and tapping on every single thing and tapping download. It had tap on this arrow and you can see that your list is ready to go by tapping on one of those. It'll pop over to your files app, and it'll be here in the download section. You can organize your files differently. So minor alphabetized. If you don't remember the name of the thing that you're downloading it, you can just go to recent. There'll be right up here at the top. Let's go ahead and well, anything that's zipped, once you tap it to unzip bit, you're going to end up popping back down to the Downloads here. You need to remember the name of it. Let's remember texture picks and tap that. Now we're down here at downloads and we're in alphabetical order. And what you see is you still see the zipped folder, but then you see a blue folder next to it. Sometimes if in this case I had a folder that was zipped, if I just had a brush set that was zipped or something like that, you would just see the brush set itself. Whatever is in that zipped folder is going to pop up nearby. Unfortunately, sometimes it pops up of certain things pop up on that side and certain things pop up on that side. So it seems a little weird to me. But there it is right there, blue folder. And these are just some images. You'll use these images potentially in your work later. So you might want to save them to your camera roll. You can tap on this little up arrow and tap Save Image. Then it'll be in your camera roll. You can do that for all three of those. Now let's go back to recent and tap pallets. Now we have palettes. I've done this twice, so there's two here. There's a couple more here, but I'm just going to tap on this first blue folder. And now you can see I have those three pallets. I'm gonna split screen with Procreate loops. If I go into a canvas, I'm just going to go into, let's do this one. I can then just tap on these palettes. They're Dots, Swatches, those are palettes. And they just import right over to there. And then I'm going to keep that open and I'm going to keep going over to get the rest of my downloads. I'm going to go up to recent again. And now I have those palettes that I just did have that zipped palette, that zip texture, I'm done with those. Here is a procreate canvas. I'm just going to tap on that and it's going to import. Here is the one of the brush sets Jens to abstract brush sets a tap on that and it imports. Here's a, another procreate file. So tap on that. Then the geons, one abstract brush set tap on that. And then you've got it all. I know that was a lot. So just make sure you got each thing. Now let me show you where you can find them all that to procreate files are gonna be in the top of your gallery. Let's go ahead and go into when the brush sets are gonna be at the top of your list of brushes here. And the palettes for some reason, if you go to Palettes right here, they are at the very, very, very, very, very, very, very bottom. These three pallets right here, blue abstract, bright abstract, muted abstract. You can drag these around and reorder them how you wish. Another fun way to create palettes is to find beautiful things that you love. The things that you find beautiful, you're attracted to those colors, maybe those shapes, there's something about those things that are beautiful. I just used unsplash.com, which is of course a free use website. So you can use these photos and create palettes from them if you want. I was thinking about things to search. You could really search anything at all. I searched tourism because I know that there's so many beautiful photos of beautiful places and the colors do not disappoint. You can definitely look at this one. Definitely save a photo that you love and bring it into procreate. So let's do that. So I'm just going to tap and hold add to photo. Let's go ahead and just start a quick ten by ten Canvas. You have to be in a canvas in order to do this part. And I'm going to tap the wrench tool and insert photo. That photo. There we go, has to be de-selected in order to create a palette. And I know there is a way to drag and drop photos into the pallets. It's not working for me today, so I'm not sure what's going on with that. But I can just tap the plus sign, create new pallet, and then I have a nice blank one right here. Now, I can come through tap and hold, and grab colors and add them right over here. That beautiful magenta, this deep purple, this kind of mixture between pink and purple here. Some of these oranges. And you can come through and add any of the colors that are inspiring to you. Make sure you grab some really dark colors all the way up to some really light colors and you don't need a million. Maybe just grab fate, your favorite 567, something like that. And then know that you can also do tints and shades of those colors as well. So that's a super fun way to create your own palette really quickly. Let's go ahead and combine our two brush sets. Let's tap on Jen's two abstracts and then just make sure at the top of the list and swipe right on every single one. Then we're going to hold and drag, get them right out of their tap on Jen's one abstracts. And let's drag it and let's try to get them to go underneath. We do it. Yes, we did it. So I will drag them to the very bottom. If it doesn't work, it might just be an alignment thing. You might end up dragging them right above this paint flicks brush and you can just reorder things anyway, you wish. Now I have the Jens to the I no longer need so I can delete that. I can change the name of the Jens one so that it just says Jens abstracts. Now you have them all in one folder. We'll take a look at these two files in a different lesson. To create a class project, go to the Projects and Resources tab and just tap class product or Create Project. This Upload button is for the cover image only, and it needs to be eight megabytes or smaller. If you save your work as a JPEG, then when you upload an image, you'll have an option to change the size of it so you can tap on it if you're doing it from your IPad. This one as an example. This says it's 7.6 megabytes, so it's technically small enough to use it as the cover image. But because I saved it as a JPEG, I can tap that little bar down here and I have these smaller sizes to choose from. So pick one of those and then tap, use. The cover photo will crop to a rectangle. If you have something that's not a rectangle and just don't worry about that. Then fill out your project. But then this image button here adds images to your main body of your project. So that's the more important one. And it really, they don't seem to care about the size of that image. And you don't need to worry about that as much. And then tap Publish. That's a great way for us all to be able to see your work for your class project, all you need to do is follow along with me in class or create one entirely of your own and post it to the class projects. Then please go to the review section and leave me a review so I can read it. Unfortunately, I can't reply to those reviews that I love to read reviews and see what you think of class. All right, so now you have all your downloads and you're ready to go. 4. Get To Know Your Brushes: Alright, I'm gonna show you about this abstract brushes chart. I set it up with page assist. That just means that as you toggle through these different groups, you're gonna see each section change. You can also change pages down here. They're in groups because there is one layer that has the names of brushes and then a paint here layer. You're going to go ahead and it's really important in this class to really get to know your brushes. And of course, you're not limited to the brushes that I provided. But for this chart, let's go ahead and play around with the brushes from our group. We're gonna do it on the paint layer here. And then this will be a nice little reference chart to look back on when you're done. I'm not sure you'll need it once you really experiment with brushes and get to know them, you'll remember or you can just experiment right on the canvas that you're working on as well. But just get to know them by doing this. And then that will help you when you're kind of have an idea in your mind of white, look you want to have on your art. You'll pick, oh, that one brush. I can go get that big paintbrush and that should give me the look that I went. Alright, so I'm going to just pick a middle blue here and start with gouache, old brush. What I like to do, some of these, there'll be too big to do this. I like to see what it looks like. Big versus small versus tiny. I like to over lap some strokes. You can see the overlapping on these is a really cool look. I went to also experiment with some smudging. I'm going to put another dark stroke and tap and hold the smudge brush so that that same brush is now selected and do some smudging. I'm not sure I like this merging with this brush. That's good to know. Messy wet, old brush. I'm gonna go back to my blue. This one gets way too big. So let's just do I like that stroke. I have some color changing in several of these brushes. I just spotted it there. This brush. This brush is really fun for blending even just on the brush mode. It's not giving a whole lot of color. Every time. I really like the blob of paint it initially puts down. That's nice. Maybe add some white on top so that one can be a lot of fun. I know I'm acting like I've never seen these brushes before. I've probably seen them away too much because I play with them so much before I put them out. Big heavy paintbrush. This is important for me to show you a problem with Procreate right now. This is a great brush with a problem. And that is if you tap on it and you see the shape source, that shape source is getting put down on the page just like that. At the very start of every stroke. You can see it right here. I believe that's a glitch in Procreate right now. It's never been a perfect situation in Procreate, but you used to be able to get around it by doing kind of moving your hand before the pencil stroke, taps the page. But now you can't, it's always there. So hopefully that will get fixed. But in the meantime, I think it's okay too. You know, just covered up workaround. It started off the page of an enter the page like that. This is a super fun brush for blending with it. Tap and hold. You can get some really cool blending. It's kind of like a dry, big paintbrush. And it's called heavy because it has more color than the next one, which is the same brush but lighter. Let's see, I never checked the size for small. It looks good. I like that a lot. Alright. Then the light is similar. Just not quite as much color. Smooth paint transparent. This one is a very well smooth brush and just like it says, it's pressure sensitive. Let's see how it blends. It's so smooth and yummy. All right, so I'm not going to go through every single brush with you, but I do really encourage you to do this. For every single brush. I'm gonna show you the super wet paint brush really quick. When of my favorites, this one is pressure sensitive and just this yummy, yummy texture. You can see the two hues of blue are slightly different. If you have color changing in any brush that you're not happy with, just tap on the brush, go to Color dynamics and then find whatever isn't set to 0 and turn it to 0. And then tap Done. This brush picks up the colors that are underneath it. Smears together. Very nice. Damp brush is an older brush of mine. And it is a nice blending brush. You can see if I blend some of this over here. You can also get some good color down on it, some nice texture. All right, so then once you're done with one, you can go ahead and reduce that group again. I know I didn't do that one. And then go to the next one. Once you tap on the paint here, it's going to open up the next group here and have all the new names of the next set of brushes. So definitely go through fill this out, play with smudging, play with size. I am going to have another lesson that we're going to really play with brushes on a bigger section. These little tiny sections don't really work for that, but definitely spend some time doing this before you move on. I do want to show you the Canvas texture layer. The canvas texture layer has the masking tape brush, which I'll show you in class. I'm just giving them masking tape look around your canvas. But it also has the four texture brushes for Canvas textures that we're going to use in class. We do I. The way I do it is on a multiply layer and a Color Burn layer. And then we paint underneath those layers. So you can go ahead and pick a gray straight across. Sometimes it's a little lighter, sometimes it's a little darker. You'll need to experiment. I think the watercolor brush is better if it's a tiny bit darker. But I'm just gonna go straight across and pick our rough wall, adjust our size and put a blob there. I think my opacity is already way down. I was experimenting earlier. We're going to change the opacity later. Put a blob there on the multiply layer and on the Color Burn layer. Go to the watercolor paper. Put one on the Color Burn layer and then multiply layer, whoops, I just tap twice. You're going to want to fill the whole canvas without lifting your pencil. But I talked about that layer later. Canvas when multiply layer, Color Burn layer. This to Multiply layer or I guess it's Color Burn layer and multiply layer. And then the paint here layer, just pick some colors and a brush that has a lot of color. Maybe the thick paint brush, and get some colors down in each of these sections that are very different from each other. Like maybe a bright yellow color changing brush. So this yellows did not turn out the same. Maybe a bright red. And then we're just going to play with the opacity of those two layers. Multiply is what's giving you more of the gray look. But it's also what's giving the texture on the lighter colors like the white, this super light tan. Let's go to the Color Burn layer. It's really just a matter of preference and how dark you want your textures to look. If I zoom in on one of these, I can see the texture on all of the colors, and it's not super-duper gray on the white. That works. Here's the directions right here, and we'll talk about it later in class as well. Alright, finished playing with all of these layers and then you'll, all you'll have to do is toggle through the pages down here to find your brushes and what they look like very quickly. Next, we'll look at mark-making. 5. More Good Brush Info: After playing around with the brushes on the grid and getting to know what they can do. I recommend practicing with just getting some really cool blend looks. So on a bigger canvas, I'm just going to show you a couple of things and then I'm also going to show you how to make some changes to brushes for your specific needs. And you probably won't know what those needs are until you start playing around and experimenting even more. Let's go to this blotchy paintbrush. This is just a really fun brush to give a really cool painting look. Definitely have lots of fun figuring out all the different things that the brushes can do on a bigger area. Changing the size, playing with pressure, even erasing with them, and getting some blackness with erasing, smudging. Experimenting with these brushes is a great way for you to be able to get ideas and then you can roll with them. This grunge, major grunge. It is, it is a really grungy brush. It's got a little bit of texture of the canvas texture as well. And it's just so much fun to play with mixing colors with it. Tap and hold this smudge brush. It's fun to not only just use directly, but also to blend with. And if you press harder, it does fill in all of those little gaps, which is maybe not ideal in some situations. If you just want to do a little bit at a time, you can keep picking up your pencil and putting it back down again. So these are the types of little experiments that you really should spend some time doing. One of my favorite brushes is the widest streak brush. You can easily get started. This isn't how we're gonna start our project today, but you can really easily get started on Canvas by just picking a palette and getting some colors on. Swirl them around. This one seems really dark mixture, you have some contrast. So maybe go back to that purple and brighten it a little. Back to that teal and brighten it a little, get some contrast and then smudge with the same brush. Then it's just like you're taking a flat scraper and scraping paint around. I did try to get some really good traditional looks with the brushes. This is beautiful. This is a really great start. And I would just keep adding layers and layers and layers and they would just get more and more depth. While I did try to make these brushes resemble a lot of the looks that you get out there with traditional paint. And procreate doesn't do certain types of traditional looks very well. So there's limitations, but but I get pretty close with this paint brush. You can it fades out like the paint is running off the brush. Even when you're smudging with it. It runs out of steam. See that? That can give, give some really cool looks as well. And you can see right under it. And it's not smudging the layer under because we can pretend that that's dry paint by going to a new layer and only smudging the stuff that's on this layer, I would focus on contrast. So you have a lot of dark, not a lot, but he has some dark, some really light. And then of course I'll in-between. The other thing I want to show you is some changes that you can make to some of these brushes. The dip pen, start with heavy pressure and then lighten it up. It gets really, really thin. The painting circle brush has a little bit of color variation as well as transparency variation. I don't know if you can tell that some of these are a little more transparent and there's a teeny tiny size variation. So you can see this one is pretty big compared to this one right here. If you don't like those things, you can tap on the circle, tap on the brush and go to dynamics. The opacity and the size changes are adjusted right here. If you want smaller to bigger circles, you can raise the size. Then Color dynamics is where you would adjust that and just put them down to 0 if you want them all to be identical in color. And the color dynamics goes for all of the brushes that you find have some color changing ability and you don't want that just go in and turn all the color dynamics to 0. The other thing I wanted to show you is with the pattern brushes. We're going to do a whole lesson on using these as stencils. But I want to show you how you can make them bigger. On the very biggest size, this pattern brush is like that. If you want a bigger stencil, think of a piece of plastic. They has the shape on it and you're laying it down so you can paint. Then you can tap on the brush. There's two ways you can make it bigger. You can go into Properties and make it bigger right here. If that's still not big enough for you, I'm changing that also changed the previous size because it's all about percentages. If that's still not big enough, you can go to grain and you can bump up the scale. I'll just bump it up to about 50 to show you the difference cells. Slide this one over here and try another one right here. You can see the difference there, pretty significant. You could go even bigger. I wouldn't go too crazy though. Once you get a brush set to how you like it, if you want it to stay that way, you can create a new reset point. If you end up not liking what you've changed, you can go back to the way I had it by tapping reset brush. Once you create a new reset point, then you won't be able to go back to the way I said it. Let's go to Properties and you can go to preview right here and bump that up. Preview is this right here. And that will get changed depending on the sizes that you have here at all. So if you change this previous heights right here, that also changes this right here. All right, so that's what you can do to those pattern brushes. And then I just wanted to talk about the watercolor stamps really quick. I don't do a lot of watercolor in procreate, but I did make these real watercolor blushes and turn them into brushes so that you have the ability at least to do some stamping with these shapes. You can duplicate it if you want a more saturated spot there. And then the two watercolor brushes are just like super-duper, watery paint brushes. This one has gotten more color. It does fade. And then this one fades really fast. That kinda gives a cool, watery, faded look there. Another one of my favorites is the gouache old brush where you can just really get some nice panty streaks. This one, you have to be a little careful to press. Pressing too hard gives a bit of a jagged edge. And then have fun smudgy and you can smudge in so many ways. So how about the damp brush? You can choose to leave some of that paint texture there and only smudge a certain amount. I'm barely pressing on here at all. Ended up smudging all of the texture right off of there. Get some lighter color on there and see if that There's so much you can do the classes already, almost two hours long. I can't go into all the different things that you can do with these brushes. I just really, really, really encourage you to spend quite a bit of time smudging and plane. There's a couple of things you can do. You can just follow along and do maybe different colors, but do a similar look to what I do in class to learn some more techniques. Or you can spend a whole bunch of time playing around before you start and then do your own entire look as we go along. And the choice is yours. Just have lots of fun. This is so much fun. Just smudging brushes around and picking your favorite colors and not really having a plan. See you in the next lesson. 6. Mark-Making Practice: All right, let's tap our mark-making Canvas there. This is just an example layer. You can keep it or delete it, but I wanted to show you what I did. I just added a little note about what brush I used in the section so that I could come back and go, Oh, okay, that's that brush and that's the look that I'll get with that brush. And making that mark. Obviously the possibilities are endless here. You can turn on this layer down here to see what the marks look like on dark compared to light. Then you can just toggle one off and go to a new layer to make your own Marx and your own notes and have this wonderful reference to come back to when you're out of ideas or just to keep on hand. I went to Pinterest and I searched abstract mark-making. There's a lot of ways you can search. And this is just showing some really great ideas that you could test out up. That's a video. There's concentric circles. We have a pen that does that actually we have the STP inky and the when writing nearby that one, I can't remember the name of it. All these different marks. She's using a micron marker, a micron pen, which we have a micron pen, and then there's a Posca pen there. You can see all those different marks that she's doing there just as examples. This ones can offend. Having all these kind of wavy half circles. They're looking like a scallop. All of this, we have a sponge brush that could give this look. Posca marker would give this look. This one's also really fun with some lines that end up forming really cool shapes that still very abstract. I don't see anything botanical about it. Sometimes they might end up looking like waves or leaves or flowers. But this one looks pretty abstract. Still. Definitely go through and get some inspiration. Take some photos. When you come across to something in real life that you are inspired by. So that you can then come back to your iPad and make notes in your market-making practice sheet. Here's another big set. I wouldn't make sure these are just for inspiration. You're not copying anything. Very thin. There's lots of these. I could look at this for a long time. You can use any color you want, of course, and have fun practicing lots of marks in this class we're gonna be doing painting, smudging, and mark-making. If that mark-making chart is a little bit too rigid for you and you want something a little more organic. I'm just get some color down on the page, gets some blobs. I used the watercolor stamps here and the old gouache brush here. And then on another layer on top of that, start playing around with the different ways you can make marks that way and then make notes. I can show you what I did. I made the notes on a separate layer entirely to show which markers I used, which brushes I used. And then I made the marks on a separate layer as well. But I also used a layer mask for these scribbles here. I was testing sort of that wax resist look. Instead of erasing, I used a layer mask. If you're not familiar with a Layer Mask, you just tap on the layer and tap mask. Let's see. I'll do a new layer here. Tap on the layer and tap mask right there. And a layer mask attaches to it. When you use black on that layer mask, it's sort of makes it look like you're erasing from what's on that layer underneath. If you use white, It's like you're filling back in. Then I can give that erased look without actually erasing that color itself. I could have also probably just drawn on that with white, but play around with different techniques. This was another fun way to make some marks. And then you can just keep these groups, turn it off and start another layer and do a whole nother group. And then you'll have all sorts of things to come back to, to take a look at just exactly how things look dark with light on top, light with dark on top, and so on. Practice, practice, practice gets some favorite marks going and you'll need them later, you'll need some ideas. So definitely practice lots of different marks. 7. Prepping Your Canvas: All right, are we ready to start painting? Let's go ahead and tap the plus sign and the plus sign again. Now, dimensions and DPI, I would always do 300 DPI or hire 300 is high-res, that's great. Then I choose inches. If you're used to other dimensions, you choose what's comfortable for you. Pick a size that's a common print size where your friend, I like to go with bigger sizes so that I can print them big or small. If you make a small canvas, then you can't print it on a big print. I'm going to do width, 14 inches, height, 11 inches. That's a pretty common print size here. But I have an iPad that has a lot of RAM and that does give me a lot of layers. These three things go into creating the number of layers that you're going to be allowed. So if you need to go to a smaller size ticket, I don't know, maybe about 20 layers then do that and then color profile. I always stick with this very first sRGB. It's a pretty good print profile, even though it's not CMYK. I don't want to go into those details because I'm not a professional. And that P3 Display, P3 is really bright, really saturated, and really only for viewing online. And I've heard it's mostly for viewing on Apple products, but I'm not quite sure about that. You can go through other settings, but I'm just going to tap Create. Here we have it. So the first thing we want to do is use our Canvas textures and fill our whole canvas with them. Here's a little chart that I made just to kind of see what using R for Canvas textures when overlapping two different textures, what they might look like. So this one's kind of interesting during the two Canvas wins. This isn't the greatest chart because it can't show these two overlapping or these two overlapping. But you get the idea. Play around whatever you do. If you do more than when a texture brush, you need to do a multiply layer and a Color Burn layer for each brush. We're just going to stick with when. Pick your favorite. Let's see, I'm going to put muted abstract as my palette. I might change that later. I like to keep with this disk view though, so I'm going to pick a gray that straight across just like we did before and go to our Canvas textures. I've been really enjoying this canvas when I think I'm going to do that, I'm going to play around with grain size a little bit and whatever you do for green size, what you need to do is make sure you've covered the whole canvas in one stroke. If you have to pick up your pencil and put it back down again, you can see it leaves a darker area. So make sure you get it all covered. Then you can just duplicate it. Then we're going to turn one it to multiply and tap on the end and turn the other one to color burn. Play around. Again, this is all experimenting. These are the blend modes that I have found and the color that I have found that works best for me. I like the colors that I choose to be fairly accurate in certain blend modes will make colors very different from what you expect. This is just what works for me. So I encourage everyone to experiment. I'm gonna go ahead and turn the opacity of the multiply layer down. But I'm looking and I have this white canvas and I can see that I'm not seeing a ton of gray. I'm at 43%. I must have chosen a slightly lighter gray than we did in the previous lesson. So let's see, then let's the camp, the color burn is probably okay. I can tell based on the white background and the fact that I'm not seeing a ton of gray, that we might be okay. I'm gonna go ahead and add a layer and drag it beneath. We always draw underneath these two layers. So I'm going to, I'm gonna go ahead. I don't name my layers, but if you want to name your layers, name your layers. And I'm going to group them though. I've selected my two texture layers and I'm just going to group them. And maybe I'll name that group. Can this one I think was it? Yes, Canvas one. Then I'm just going to make a few layers down here underneath. If you want, you can test out some colors before you get started. I'm going to choose thickened painting again. That's really nice. So you can see here, the texture shows up really well on all three of these colors. How about bright red? Shows up on bright red. How about dark gray? Now, obviously if you go to black, it's going to not show the texture, but that's to be expected. Dark gray still shows the texture. How about a super light pink? I was pretty confident that the pink was still going to show the texture because the white is showing the texture. I think we're good to go. Now I'm going to clear that. Now if you want to have a nice, pretty time-lapse video in the end, go into the wrench tool and go to video and tap this time-lapse recording to toggle it off, purge, and then toggle it back on. And your video, we'll start fresh right now. And it won't have all that experimenting in the video. So if you noticed we have this brush down here, the masking tape brush, that is to give a photo masking tape look around your image. And we'll do that later. For now, we're just going to fill the whole canvas and now we're ready to paint. 8. Let's Paint! Getting Started: All right, I've switched over to the bright abstract palette. I'm going to clear my history and I need to think about which one I want to do. I think I'm going to use this very first palette right here. If you're having a bit of fear about this big blank canvas that is very understandable. And let's just get some marks down and go from there. Let's, let's see, let's choose something. How about the Posca marker? And I'm going to choose a nice dark color here. So some techniques would just simply be, let's see, I'm on a middle layer, doesn't really matter. You can move things around later. Simply be just making some marks like that. Just get started. And something that I've found is going to more paint brush like maybe this squash brush, gouache, old brush. And marking off some quadrants doesn't have to be straight up and down, but just get something down. It's going to be covered up. So it's okay. Gosh, it's so pretty I'm not sure I've used this palette yet. All right, so get a couple of marks on the page and then you should have experimented with your brushes by now. You can decide if you want to have a starting color. For example, if you prep your canvas by painting the whole thing, a certain color, now would be a good time to start with a starting color, maybe a dark color. But I can tell you that the wet I'm about to show you is going to fill a lot of it's going to block that background color anyways. So you might not need to worry too much about it. I do like to know if I'm starting light or starting dark. So you might want to pick at least dark or light. Now I'm going to switch. I particularly love this wide streak brush. I'm gonna switch to a lighter color. And I'm on a pretty big size. I'm on the same layer. I have not planned this out. I've practiced a lot, but I've not planned this out for this lesson right now. So this is all going to be new to me as well. So I'm going to get that color in a couple of places on the canvas. I'm leaving some of this little piece here, but it's probably going to get covered up. And how about this dark teal? Maybe a pop of orange here and there. I don't need orange and all of those quadrants. One thing that is also fun with this brush tap and hold the smudge brush is a lightly smudging with it. This is probably my favorite part. And you might cover up one color completely. I've almost completely covered the pink over here. I'm not going to overwork this layer, but I am going to go to a new layer and just keep layering. I'm going to go to that teal, but go nice and dark. I'm going to stick with this brush that I'm on already. Just get some of this. This is such a forgiving way to do art. I'm not trying to make it sound like it's easy. I know that the true abstract artists pour their hearts and souls into this work. And it's Scott, major challenges. Major challenges, challenges mostly with conveying an emotion using proper colors so that it's pretty in the end. I'll all sorts of things. So my main goal with this class is to show you some techniques for doing some abstract art in procreate. I'm not a professional abstract artist. If you're familiar with me, you know that I actually come from a realism background. So this was actually really, really, really challenging for me and I have had so much fun and I hope you do too. I'm going to keep layering because this is really all about layering. If you think of the layers as letting the paint dry before you paint on top of it some more. That's a good way to think about. Moving up to the next layer, when you want to stay on the same layer, you can then smudge those colors together where you can't if you're separating your layers. And so those are things to think about as you're deciding on whether or not to switch to new layers, I'm gonna go back down to this brick, really dark brick color. I'm on this thick paint. I think I might go up to the old gouache brush. I'm going to kind of reinforce my, my lines here. Just a little. I don't know if I want to keep them super obvious and then it go a little darker. Now, I'm going to press a little instructor. I mean, lighter. Get a little bit more streakiness there. I have a lot of dark, I have a couple of bright spots, but I went to get some contrast. So I'm gonna get some very light colors. I can choose a color and then bump it up to light as well. I think I'm going to go to this big heavy paint brush. I'm on a super light pink. Gets some paint strokes down here. I can tap and hold that brush to smudge with it to that kind of smudged those paint strokes right out. So I'm going to undo that. We can take advantage of that ability that we have in Procreate. Nothing wrong with that. You don't get some brightness at here. You might find it surprising where each brush can end up looking like once you smudged some with it, it won't look anything like the original brush strokes that you are getting. This is another reason to do different layers is I can now go to the erase brush. And one of the reasons I made this toothpick scraper so that I can, I can do some scraping of layers because that pink is on its own layer above the other two layers that we did. I can scrape, it's erasing, of course, in Procreate, I can tap and hold this smudge brush and show you what smudging looks like with that brush. You can do smudging and erasing. The comb, the fan brush and the comb brush also smudging. Here's the rough comb brush. When you smudge, if you want to smudge to expose some of the color that's underneath, start from an area that doesn't have that pink color on it. And you're dragging kind of no color into that pink color, if that makes sense, You can do it. I think you can do it from the outside now, the outside kinda just brings the pink smudges the pink around. If you came out from over here and go in, then you're going to get that smudge through the paint more. I was pressing harder though. If you press lighter, it's nice and pale. You can have the dark lines here. I can smudge Ds over. Hopefully you can see that wherever the brush starts, that's the color that's going to drag. Whereas with the eraser, it doesn't matter whatever you're doing, it's erasing. That's pressing lightly and then more firmly. I'm really enjoying this so far. I'm not too concerned with how my pink is here and how smudgy and messy I'm gonna make it look because I'm pretty sure I'm gonna cover most of it anyways. I think I'm gonna keep going into a new layer. Bring in some that teal again. Actually let's get some pops of red in there. One of my favorite brushes is this super wet paint brush. Switch to maybe this light pink that we just did. You can see it smears together. Maybe all the way white. Beautiful brush. Love it. I'm not sure I loved this stroke suggest made, but just to show you how that brush can look, just wanted to show that to you. Now, I might do some light streaks alone. This Let's try this blotchy paintbrush. I'm going to stay on this layer. That's going to make it seem like my paint is still wet. And my new paint is going to affect that layer, that those same everything that's on that layer, right now only the white is on that layer. I might merge those two layers so that the pink and the dark maroon here and the white are now all one layer. I'm gonna stay on that layer now with my blotchy brush on a bright orange. And it's going to affect that layer will get a totally different look than if we were on a new layer. I can tap two fingers to undo. If I'm not happy with that. I'm changing my pressure. As I paint with this. It's a really fantastic brush for making some really cool looks. It does pull up color. One thing I've been attempting to do is kind of do things in at least three areas to tie things together. I think it's time to check out one of our pattern brushes. I think I'm gonna choose this super messy abstract splatter brush. But I'm tempted actually to use this square Warp brush as well. Got this kind of grid look here. Let's do that. I'm going to do this square and I'm going to go to a new layer, but I might rearrange the order of that layer later. I think I want it to be dark. So I'm going to go to that teal and maybe go even darker. Let's see what size. Well, if that's really small, bigger size, that's a good size like that. This pain some here and there. Then I think I'm actually going to warp this. Let's do it with the Liquify tool. So if you go to the little magic one adjustments menu and go to liquefy, I'm on push, momentum and distortion or low pressures, high. Then size is this kind of medium. And then I can distort this grid brush even more. The other thing I want to do is erase some of it. I'm gonna go to the eraser and I'm gonna look at some of my grungy or brushes. Definitely play with the smudging and the erasing with this grunge Canvas smear. This is very pressure sensitive as well. If you can see here what it did was it erased some texture that's like a Canvas texture. I might go over a lot of that actually and start removing some of that very solid line grid. My major grunge brush is pretty major. It might erase a little bit too much. Definitely make sure you've tested out these brushes so that you know that crazy messy bold is, is actually not super bold. It's more bold than a different brush that's similar to this from a different class. So it kind of gave it a similar name. I'm going to tap and erase some of that grid. Maybe my waxy crumble brush, just make sure my edges of that grid brush are where I want them to be. Some kind of making sure I don't have any hard edges. Basically. I don't care if it goes off the edge in a very solidly. But like these ends, I might want to fade them out a little bit more like that. Totally up to you. This one coming over my white, I think I might just erase a little bit of that. This is intended to look like it's blending in, maybe in the background, maybe you used a stencil. All of these pattern brushes, you can pretend you're using them as stencils as well. So I'm going to stop here and pick this back up in the next video. And I'll show you exactly what I mean by using these pattern brushes as stencils. But first I want to rearrange the layer of this and see if I like it better. That one hid under the pink over here. I think I like it better up here on top. And then of course, you can play with blend modes as well. Which will be super fan depending on the color choices. That add blend mode. Lightened it. Very cold. Look. Definitely experiment. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. A Closer Look at "Stencil" Patterns: I'm gonna go ahead and group all views, layers like this. I can turn them off really quick and I'm just going to go to a new layer and I'm going to show you what I mean by using the pattern brushes as stencils. So if you're not familiar with using stencils for an abstract painting, I'm just going to show you with this very circular line bubble brush. Right now. You might have a piece of plastic that has shapes on it. And he would lay it down on your work and he would paint on top of it. And then he would peel that plastic up. And all the areas of paint would be around where the plastic lists. You can use the brush just like this and use the brush itself. Or you can use it in a way that gives that stencil look. Paint your brush down just like this, and then turn it off. Then tap the layer and tap Select. You can't see it very well because the lines for my mask visibility or low, you can go to the wrench tool and go to prefs. And down here, selection mask visibility. You raise it up. You can see now that all the areas around this mask is able to be blocked off. Now I can paint right on. So here's there's two things I can do. I can paint right on where my, my brush strokes are already laid down on the paper. But on a new layer. For example, pick a paintbrush. Let's see you are a spongy brush. How about this sponge paintbrush? And just expunge paint. You can switch colors and you can spend paint, de-select. And there you have your sponge painted stencil pattern. Or you can tap, select, Invert. And now your selection is the shape itself. And you can paint around it. That would be more like using it as a stencil. So this is my stencil. I've laid it down on my canvas. Now I'm going to a new layer and I'm using my spongy paint again. And I'm sponge painting. So much fun. I actually had a hard time recording this class because I had too much fun playing and making brushes. Now de-select. And then it's like you've peeled up your stencil. And the sponge painting that you just did is the only thing that's showing. Now if you had something like this and it was on top of other painting, it would give a much more dramatic look. Love it, love, love, love. Alright, so that's what I mean by using those pattern brushes like stencils. We have two different looks here we can do when we're, we've used the pattern itself. But instead of just making a solid pattern and then removing parts of it like we did with this grid pattern. We've made the solid pattern, turned it off and just added however much color and blackness and opacity and everything that we want. You could fill the whole page and then turn the layer off. And I mean, really the endless possibilities with these pattern brushes. If you, if you're used to taking my classes, you'll know that I gave away a lot of brushes. I have a lot of pattern brushes out there. So if these particular brushes aren't speaking to you, definitely go find some pattern brushes that you love and use this technique. All right, let's keep going in the next lesson. 10. Finishing The Base Layers: I was going to erase what I did in the stencil lesson before this, but I really like it. So I'm going to go ahead and just move this around a little bit because we can do whenever we want, since it's on its own layer, we could rotate it even. Let's see, do I want to move? Let's go ahead and open our group and we can move it into her group, maybe move it down a layer. No, I like it up the layer. Whoops. I think I like it over here. No, I like it over here. This class is gonna be so long. So many decisions to make. Try not to get bogged down with all these decisions. Alright, let's see what about this other one that we made? I also like that one. I might just use a little bit of that one. Yes, I like that. I like that a lot. All right. I'm gonna go ahead and merge those two layers. So I'm going to drag that into our group. Whoops, I just made another little subgroup out of it. Drag that in her group and merge those two layers. And now I can do some erasing just all at once here. I'm on. Sometimes I'm not too fussy about what brush I use to erase them on this waxy crumble brush. And I'm just gonna get some edges he raised, make sure it's placed where I want it to be placed. I'm okay with it overlapping this dark line and the white lines a little bit, but not a ton. I still don't know if these are going to end up showing up at the very end. But I really like where it is right now, even this grid in the background, I know it changed the color blend mode here and it made it lighter. I like it later. So you can either change it by changing a blend mode or you can just go to normal and alpha locket either by tapping and tapping Alpha lock or you can two fingers swipe to the right to Alpha lock and reality lock something. Then once you do that, you can fill the layer so you can, Let's see if I want a light color. I'm just going to go to white. I can tap Fill. Or let's go to, let's undo that so you can see what other, what other thing you can do once it's alpha locked. I can go to here, I'm on my sponge brush. I can sponge on some color, and the color is only going to go where the pixels are already on the layer because it's alpha locked. This is a nice way to just get a bit more variety here. So instead of just making the whole thing white, now I still have some of the dark, but now I have some white as well. That's just went option. Actually think I like this part over here to be darker. Actually, I think I'm going to erase that part. It gets a little too busy over here with the circles. Everything else I like. I'm feeling like these two areas are looking good and this is a little bit plane. This is a small area, so I'm okay with it being like a little bit plane. But I want to keep going. And I just keep going until I feel like I'm ready to stop. You don't need to go back and erase layers if you decide, well, there's way too much orange. You can just add more on top. So don't be afraid to just keep layering and layering and layering. By this point, I can probably safely merge if you're looking at not having enough layers, you can merge some of the earlier layers. I can delete this stencil layer that we used. That one's alpha locked, but I don't need to keep it alpha locked. I can still paint on that layer. There's a lot of ways to manage your layers, but I'm gonna go to a fresh layer on top of this. I'm just going to keep playing. I don't know what I'm gonna do yet. Let's see. I think I want some more of this grunge Canvas. Go to a light color because our, our canvas texture that we added on our Canvas layers is the dark. If I go with a light color, I can get some cool. Oops, I might need to go with white. I can get some cool grungy canvas texture on there in light, a light color. Maybe in my darker areas. This, I definitely made this brush so it's subtle. So you have to press, you have to press and smudge, and then you can blend it even. Awesome, I love it. The color does not spread very far. So you can have DAB and smear. Dab and smear. I'm not sure you can see that very well. A video, so I'm not gonna keep going with that. This grunge major grunge texture. I'm just gonna go ahead and stay on this layer even though I probably shouldn't. And I'm going to show you something really fun with this brush which is smudging. I'm just going to add a bunch of light down here and then maybe some dark to move that's too dark. How about this pink? Then I'm going to tap and hold the smudge brush and smudge with that as well. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a texture Hound. I love this so much. Alright, so start looking at contrast. Do you have some dark areas? Some light areas? Is it sort of all, kind of even? One way to test that is to add a black layer. We can add a layer away on top, tap down here on black and fill it. Then go to the blend mode and go down to Color. When you add it. The blend mode on color, what you're going to see is your entire piece in black and white. So you can really see if you have very much contrast and I really don't. I mean, yes, my dark center lines that we started out with this so dark or dark? Yes. The light is very light in there. But all of our quadrants are just kind of gray. That's good to know. We can keep that layer there and just turn it off and start thinking about some more contrast. I'm going to come back down to the layer where we just did all of this. I think I might just go back to this dark brick red, but I think I might even do some black. Let's get some contrast. I'm going to get some up here to some black and some smudging with that same brush. And don't forget, we still have mark-making to-do. I'm going to get this part a little darker as well. And maybe some darkness may bring my size down. Smudge that around a little. That's looking really cool with this stencil. Look here. I'm going to bring that darkness up, who I like that smudge look going up there. I'm not sure. I like the orange and black here. It's a little too Halloween, Amy. I might come over with some dark teal over here. Okay. I'm getting a lot of texture. I have a lot of design elements in the background. I need to have more marks. So it's time to think about some mark-making. We can check our There's quite a bit more contrast here. We have darkness here and here that made a big difference. There's a lot of light here, but I can add some mark-making to change that and get some more contrast here. You want to have areas where your eye can rest, so don't have the whole thing be too busy. This is unlike any that I've done so far. So just experimenting along the way has been super helpful. I'm not enjoying this paint, blackness on top of my streaks here. And I know they're on the same layer. I'm gonna go to that layer and I might add more streaks. I'm not sure I want to keep them white though. Maybe. Let's do white and then that was the super wet paint brush. You can definitely do a different brush. You don't have to stick with that brush. Oops, I don't want to turn with that brush. I have this texture over here is on a different layer and it's on top of that. So I don't want that there. I can go find that layer. I can just smudge it similar and do something with that until I'm happy with it. Alright, in the next lesson, I think we'll move on to mark-making, but we might come back and play with the base colors some more as well. 11. Start Making Your Marks: Let's go ahead and add a layer to the top for mark-making lead. Say that we have some oil pastels and some acrylic paints and posca pens and things that we're adding to a dry Canvas. If you haven't played with the posca pens before, they're pretty fun to play with. So hopefully you've done some mark-making practice and played around with all these brushes so that you get an idea of what they can do. And of course, we have to splatter paint everywhere as well. We'll do that as well. I did order these brushes sort of in a bit of a sequential order, thinking about more painting things going down first, going down to some more mark-making brushes, and then also sort of crumbly dry wax resist looking brushes as well. So the wax crumble is a great one. If you want to get a wax resist lick, you can simply erase some of a layer with it. So let's see if I go to this layer that has all this dark on it. I can tap and hold so that that wax crumble is on that eraser. And then I can do some erasing. Go to a smaller size here. You can erase. And if you don't know what rack wax resist is, it's when you draw with wax paint, like a more of a watercolor paint on top, then it doesn't absorb into the paper in the places where your wax is on the paper. So the color is added all around it, but not on the wax itself. And it's usually pretty textured looking. Here's a great example of what a wax resist crayon might look like. Part of abstract painting is adding paint. Preventing paint like with the rack wax resist, and also removing paint. And it's a perk of Procreate to easily be able to remove paint by having paint on different layers. And so you can think of this as not only wax resist, but also of taking some sort of tool. Tools can be anything around your house to scratch paint off, whether it's wet paint or dry paint. You can use the all these brushes as erasers in so many ways to pretend that you're using tools. That's why I have the comb brush. You can just pretend your scratch and paint with a comb, things like that. And of course, the toothpick scraper. Alright, so let's go back to the layer on top of all the others and do some mark making. I know I want to do some posca at the very end, but I really like this fan brush. It's pretty bold though, so I'm going to press lightly. I'm varying the pressure. I am intentionally not making it super straight and smooth. If you were holding your paintbrush really loosely. That would be one way to get nice organic strokes. Another thing that this brush is fun for is making short little strokes. Showed you an example of this without showing you how to do it. This just is not planning this. I've just having fun taking this across the page does have fun. If you think it looks good, if it's drawing your eye where you want it to dry. Just have fun. I loved that. I'm going to finish this. I think I dropped my size here from this stroke here. So that brushes just, I don't know, I could use that brush all day. It's similar to Procreate native brush. Let's see which one is it a painting inking this thylacine brush. So it's similar to this brush. Let's check our black layer. You can see with contrast, I don't know, It's just way more exciting to look at than it was when we first initially added our black layer. Awesome. All right, I'm gonna add a new layer for more marks just in case I need to smudge or erase. And I don't want to mess with the ones that I just did. I think I'm going to switch to a dark color. I want to get some pops of red on there too, but I think I'm not ready for that. I think I'm going to switch to teal and maybe go down pretty dark and get the oil pastel. The oil pastel is, it's good for a very typical mark-making. Where you take the whole kind of blunt end of the pastel and make marks like little dots and things have been a fill in this circle right here. That's fun. Maybe a smaller size for this other circle. That can address our eye to that. Those circles little bit more. They were a little kind of hiding over here. I don't know if I like that one. There we go. Another thing this particular brush is good for is on a smaller size. Think about an oil pastel pencil and think about wedding to have it as a pointy, sharper look and then also a wider look. Play around with your pencil making marks that kind of do that. Pressure, harder pressure, lighter pressure to wobbly lines, wider lines with the higher pressure. Not paying a lot of attention to how the lines looking exactly. Because if you do, you might actually make it look too planned. By moving your pencil around a lot. You're getting a much more organic look that way. I might do that same thing up here. I'm gonna go to a new layer and I think I want white paint for my splatter. My paint flat flicks. I made these so that there aren't a lot of flicks each time you tap. And I did that so that you have more control over where you want heavy amounts of flicks versus not. If you just went a couple of little flicks of paint over here, you can just tap a few times. If you want a lot. You can really just go crazy adding a lot, a lot, a lot. You can drag the brush around to have lines of paint. This is where I start to wonder if I'm going a little overboard. This one might be going a little overboard. I'm not sure. I think something needs to happen right here. I'm gonna go back down to the dark layer and see if I can get some pops of red with oil pastel. Let's see. Not sure how well it's going to show up. It doesn't show up too well there. She does a pretty good there. Do some circles. I'm pressing really lightly. I tend to be drawn two circles. I have, I don't know if you've noticed. I know I did an example of some really abstract scratchy lines earlier. But I really, I tend to have a hard time knowing what makes a good abstract mark when it's, I don't want to say the word scribbly. But when it's not shape, like not a circle shape or a wavy line shape. And what I mean by that is if I turn this off and go to a new layer, one of the dip pen, that's a good example here. If I use black on the dip pen. This one, if you start with a lot of pressure and then lighten up, it gets really thin, which is kind of what a dependence. So there's a lot of mark-making in abstract paint. Painting. That's a lot of not shape shapes. I can't even make them. I feel like that's something that I don't know how to do. I love the look of it. I mean, they go back to the Pinterest board and show you what I'm talking about. I mean, there's a million examples. Here's one, here's a fairly simple example which is just this over here. I'm not very good at figuring out how to do that. How to just make marks like this that aren't shapes. I don't know if I'm explaining that well. I'm not a very good person to try to teach that. I encourage you to experiment with mark-making in that way as well, not just circles and dots and lines and things like that. Hopefully, you'll be posting some class projects that will maybe some comments in your class projects that tell me how you figured it out. How did you figure out how to make those types of marks look awesome like this looks awesome. I can definitely do these longer drawn out marks. But these smaller marks in here, scratching paint off. These sort of just seemingly random even though I know they're not random. Marks. I can't help you there. Have fun, have fun. Got some red circles. Let's check our black here. That red did not, it did not help with our contrast. Can you see that it just blend in, right? And you can see that it doesn't, it stands out because it's red, but it really doesn't pop. Interesting. But our dark lines and our dark dots and our white splatters, that really added a lot of contrast. As you can see, you can really just go on and on and on. I'm gonna go ahead and show you some more examples in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 12. Adding a Masking Tape Look: Ticket the masking tape. Look, if you have enough layers, I would well, actually it doesn't matter if you have enough layers. If you do have enough layers, you can duplicate this whole group. I ended up grouping everything here. You can duplicate the whole group and keep your original and just turn it off. And then we can play with this set. If you don't have enough layers to do that, you can just duplicate the whole canvas right here. Then keep one as your full-page original and do what we're about to do with your duplicate. And what we're about to do is shrink everything in a little bit. I have my group that was our originals. You can name it if you want. And I have R group, that is our duplicate. And I'm going to select the whole group. And I'm just going to bring it in and bring it in. Think about how big you want your border to be. The only reason I'm doing this first, even though my paint this isn't, this isn't how we create that edge because this edge is a super crisp, super crisp edge and that's not the type of edge you would get if you used masking tape. But starting like this. So that I'm not painting right over the top of my painting of my image with the masking tape brush. Instead, I'm just going to have my masking tape brush overlap the edge a little bit. Then I'm just painting over a little bit. Let's go in and go to a layer on top of everything. I can't quite tell if there's something on that layer. So I'm just going to go to a new layer and I'm going to go to white. If you had a colorful canvas and you want that color to be your border too. Because it technically it would be if you've painted your whole canvas and then if you started with a colored paper or whatever, black or dark gray, and then he taped it down than when you peel the tape off, it would be the black or dark gray showing right here. So for me it's white. So I'm just going to stick with white. And I'm going to go down to the masking tape brush. We did this in the negative painting class. So you might be familiar with this, although I'm gonna do one more thing to make it even easier. Go to the wrench tool, go to Canvas, tap the Drawing Guide to toggle that on. And then it automatically goes to the 2D grid, which is what we want. Then we can tap the layer and turn drawing assist on. And now we can only paint straight lines. That's awesome. Alright, what size? I'm gonna make it approximately the size that I need. And I can see I'm overlapping quite a bit there. I'm going to undo and just try to overlap a little bit. So what you can see right away is we no longer have that super crisp straight edge, which was basically a duplicate of this outer edge here. I'm just going to rotate my canvas. I don't really need to, but I kind of did a little blurb bright there. That border wasn't quite as wide as this border over here. Make it a little lighter. I am pressing little firmly with this brush. This brush is a little bit see-through. If you don't press firmly. In turn the grid off. There we go. So you can see it's like the masking tape had been there. Little bit of pink bled under the edge of it. And then when you peel it off, It's nice, rough edge. And that's it. Now you have some flexibility with that because it's on its own layer. Your indefinitely making sure that layer is under your Canvas textures so that the canvas texture is still showing up here. I went to kind of bring this out a little bit, even an EPA little something like that. I just need to make sure I still haven't exposed that crisp edge. Alright, good. You definitely want to sign your work. For me. I like to use my stamp brush, not at that size, on a new layer so I could turn it on and off whenever I went to. And that's it. 13. Minor Adjustments that Matter!: All right, here is a very quick video to show you about some changes that I can make. And I also forgot to use the Posca pen. I actually forgot to use quite a few of my favorite brushes like the streaky inky. But I added some black Posca here, here and here. I wanted to show you that if there's certain colors, certain layers that you're just not quite happy with the color. You can go to the layer and change it with hue, saturation, brightness, and have better luck possibly. So I'm going to show you how to do that with our layer that has the stencil lean on it. As I was looking at it, I decided I'm gonna see how that looks darker and lighter. Let's go to that layer and then just go to the adjustments little Magic Wand, Hue, Saturation, Brightness. I'm going to zoom in so you can see. And I'm going to turn down the brightness instantly like this side, much better. When it's darker, I'm not sure I like it when it's lighter. That's about 38%. Like that a lot. I don't think I want it more saturated or less saturated. That went, I'll keep at 50%. Then that's good. I can commit to that just by exiting. All right? If you're in hue saturation brightness and you make a change and you decide you don't like it. You can tap on the screen and tap reset. If you make a change and you're trying to decide between the two, tap on the screen. And you can tap this preview. And it toggles back and forth between what it was and what the current setting is. And you can decide which one you like best. Alright, so there's hue, saturation, brightness, some Posca markers. And then I decided I wanted these super dark blue patches to be a lighter color. I'm going to find those, that layer is right there. I'm just going to alpha lock that layer. I'm on a different palette. I may just tap, double-tap there for white. And you could use multiple brushes. I'm just going to go ahead and use the oil pastel brush that we use to for those. And because it's on Alpha lock, you can just color right on top of it. And it will only color what's currently on the page, which is also these little red marks. So be careful not to accidentally color something else. So I decided this needed less brachii red colors in it. And I changed a lot of it to this bright teal. Just to give it a little pop. Dismiss fiduciary you that real quick. I'm not sure which I prefer. I did like those dark, but I really like the bright colors as well. The possibilities are endless. Those are some of the changes that I just wanted to show you really quickly. 14. Examining Some Example Paintings: This is one of my favorites. I don't remember what palette I started out with. I don't think it was this palette, even though it looks like it. I started out with these purples and this dark maroon being brown and weird purple. And I ended up really not liking it. I like Brown in a lot of things. I have a hard time using brown. So I tried to use brown and I ended up just go into hue saturation, brightness and changing things so that they were not brown anymore. And then I really started to enjoy this painting. You can see I used the pattern brush. This is a brush we didn't use in the last lesson, which is just the circle stamp brush. These are done. Oh, we didn't use these brushes, these wet ink, transparent and streaky inky. They're amazing. They're similar to brushes I've given in the past, but also very different. So they're very pressure sensitive. So this is just very light pressure, but you can press harder to get a thicker look. I believe this blotch of paint here was the messy, wet old brush. Here I used oh my goodness. I can't remember what texture brush I used. I used a texture brush and doesn't made a full circle. I erased with the fan brush. I added some grunge with that grungy canvas brush and just went crazy on that. I love how you can see-through. I think I erased with the canvas brush so it wouldn't smear. Then it erased. You can see some of this red through here because of the erasing. Here's that seem painting but with the masking tape look around it. Here's the land. I intentionally just made too busy for me. You know, it's experimenting with brushes, trying to be more playful. I knew right away it wasn't going anywhere in my type of abstract preferences. That's a good way to phrase it. I just bailed on it and I kept it to show you that, you know, you're not gonna be happy with everything you do. Here's one where I just got started and I haven't continued with it and I did it mostly with these big, heavy and big light paint brushes. I really like the Paint Texture, paintbrush texture. It's kind of like a dry brush, not super saturated with paint. Here is an example of starting out. The white streaky brush. The one we use, wide street brush, starting out with colors that I will I thought it was going okay. Got Maddie over here. I went ahead and added another layer that was exciting, uh, basically covered at the entire first layer, but not quite. Just keep going sometimes, sometimes, you know, okay, that's not working. I need to start over. Added a third layer. And I really, really like this right now. I did this without dividing anything into quadrants. So I know that's how we did our lesson, but it's not necessarily how you have to start. That's just one way of just getting started. Getting some lines on the page. This is one I really love. It is one that I started with. The quadrants. I enter that kind of covering up a lot of that instead of keeping it in the forefront. I just loved this one. I'm not super happy with this upper corner. I might come back to it. This is some of the painting brushes up here. Thick paint or super wet painting. Again, I mean, there's so much with these brushes that I can't show you everything that they can do. That's why I encourage you to experiment and play and get to know what your brushes can do. This one's definitely the super wet paint brush handy. I can see I did some mark-making done here. I did some of the DIP. What's it called? What I call it the dip pen brush. Streaky lines in here. Oh, we didn't use much of the old gouache brush, but the blue back here is that old gouache brush. The very first brush, gouache, old brush. A nice painterly look. This one was super fun. This is the old gouache brush squash, old brush and some of the stencil look here, send that they're super wet painting. This is posca right here. The fan brush, of course. This is another one of the pattern brushes. This splatter a look back here. This was one of my first ones. I loved dragging the toothpick scraper through here and just smearing that blue right out. This is all posca pen. These are the stream streaky, inky, more posca pen. You can see all this texture in the background similar to what we did on our lesson. In this one, I broke up this big dark blue patch with the light blue dots. I broke up this big orange area with my circle stamp. I dragged a comb through here. Here's some more backgrounds that I played with, with some of the palettes that I provided. Just getting started with those. This is when I was playing with more recently. I feel like this one might be too busy for me, but also surprisingly, I'm not super happy with this palette. Maybe it's just really busy with this flattery stencil brush. I'm not sure. 15. Thank You!: Thank you so much for taking my class. I can't wait to see what everybody makes. Feel free to head to my website, Layla and Poe Dot studio. You'll find some more lessons, links to my YouTube, free brushes, my newsletter, sign-up newsletters. A great way to keep in touch and keep up to date. I have some exciting stuff that I'm announcing soon. And I also give away lots of really awesome freebies. I promise I won't fill your inbox only one or two e-mails per month and I keep them short and sweet. See you next time.