Acrylic Landscapes on the iPad in Procreate

1. Acrylic Landscapes in Procreate + 32 Free Acrylic Brushes and Stamps: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create acrylic paint style landscapes on your iPad and Procreate. When you watch this class you get all of the acrylic brushes I created, including 12 different types of acrylic strokes, textures, and some color changing brushes that will help add realistic variation to your paintings. The set also includes 19 bird and plant stamps. You can quickly add some layering and depth to your composition. First, we'll look at a few ways to create a fluid sky full of variation and acrylic streaks. We cover easy ways to add shadow and highlights to your landscape features. Then look at how to use elements in the foreground to add depth to your paintings. Next, we'll use an impressionist painting style to build up a landscape with small strokes. We'll talk about ways to use light and shadow to create an abstract landscape that's full of color and variation. Last we'll combine all the painting techniques into a varied composition with bold shapes and color. We'll look at how to adjust the colors of your painting. So even if you're working with a plane landscape, you can still create a vibrant painting. I'll show you how to get tons of beautiful acrylic paint strokes and textures so that your paintings have a life-like feeling that's often missing in digital art. By the end of this class, you'll be able to turn any landscape into an acrylic painting and procreate. Landscape painting is a great way to help you loosen up whether digital drawing and painting. It's also may go to style when I get stuck in a creative art. Even when I have no idea what else to draw, I can still be inspired by a beautiful landscape and some simple paint strokes. You could use the paintings you create in this class as gifts for friends and family. Art prints to sell or give away or upload the images to print on demand sites like Society 6 and Red bubble. Painting and procreate is also a great way to prepare for your paintings on real Canvas. If you've tried acrylic painting on Canvas before and you've been disappointed with the results, this is a great opportunity to practice composition and color, so that when you pull out your real paints in Canvas, you feel really confident with your personal style. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find the link to get to the downloads page on the project section on the Skillshare website, not the app. Once you click on that link, you'll see that you need a password to get into the page. I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you can scroll down to see the list of Downloads and Resources, and I'll click on the first one, which is Download the brush set. Once that opens, you should see a download button. Then it downloads you should see open in, and then you can find procreate on that list. If it's not on that list, you can click more and then scroll through to find copy to procreate. That'll automatically put the brush set at the top of your brush list right here. If we head back to the downloads and Resources page, you'll see the next item on the list is See the Inspiration Board. On this Board, I've saved a ton of photographs of landscapes. These are free for personal or commercial use. So you can use these for inspiration for your landscape paintings. Of course, you can use your own photos as well, which is even better. But of course you may not have a tone of beautiful landscape photo, I think this is a great place to start. It also helps you create a few paintings and start getting an idea of what a good landscape photo looks like for a painting. So then when you go out and you see a beautiful landscape, you know how to capture the picture. It will look great in your paintings. Feel free to use these. Obviously the creator appreciates if you credit them when you post your image on social media, but it isn't required. There's mountain scenes, beach scenes, desert scene, you can go with whatever works for your personal style here. Are we using a few different versions throughout the class? You can feel free to copy the photos that I use or use something totally different. A lot of artists will tell you that you should never use someone else's photos. I think that's totally wrong. it's great to use other people's photos, especially if they're offering them for free, personal or commercial use. Partly because when someone uses their own photo, they feel that it's really precious and they don't want to mess it up. If you're looking at your own photo that you took of this perfect scene, you may feel that it's so precious that you're afraid to make mistakes on you're painting. Whereas if you're using someone else's photograph, you might be a little more free to try some new things. So I like to start with other people's photographs and then move on to my own when I get more confident. Feel free to go with whatever feels good to you here use someone else's, or start taking your own. So let's go ahead and get started on our first project. 3. Sketching and Blending: For this first project, we're going to create a wide open sky with some birds, and plants, and some mountains to give the landscape some depth. We're going to play around with all of the brushes and blending options, so don't worry so much about creating a perfect landscape. This is just a good opportunity to get to know the brushes and the blending and how to use them altogether. I'll start out in Procreate by creating a new canvas. I'll tap the plus symbol, tap the symbol here to create a custom canvas. I'll choose inches as my measurement and use 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. You can work at any size here, but it's important to keep in mind the maximum layers. I do work with a lot of layers of these landscape paintings, maybe at least 20 or 30 sometimes. I'd like to keep that number pretty high to preserve the flexibility. But of course, if you have a smaller iPad, you may need to go with a smaller size to keep up your maximum layers number. It's also important to think about how large you might want to use this image digitally or in print. I know that I wouldn't print this larger than 10 by 10 inches, so this is a good size for me. But if you think you're going to do something at maybe 15 by 15 inches as a print, of course you'd want to work at that size here. I'll tap "Create" to open that. I always like to start by just sketching out my layout. I'm going to grab black as my color, and then in the brush set, I'll get the first brush, which is the dry acrylic streaks. Let's set that to a somewhat small size. I'm not going to use a photograph for this, I'm just going to go with some general mountains shapes and some platforms. I'll just start by doing a basic sketch. I'm trying to keep my pencil really loose here. I don't want this to appear stiff or a lumpy, so I'm trying to just keep my pencil moving and think about how mountains have these jagged edges on the top. I'm trying to capture that as I draw these. I also want to have some plants just draping in from the sides here. I'm just sketching that in. Then some plants right here up close to the viewer to create a little bit of depth. You can see with the mountains, I'm trying to keep them very random. I finished two on the edge of the canvas and I finished one in the middle of this little hump here. Then I finished these two really close to each other, and this one down here. I'm trying not to just do like mountain, mountain, mountain three predictable lines. I'm keeping it more varied and chaotic, which is what you see in nature. Next I'm going to create a new layer, and I'll just drag that layer below my sketch. It looks like I accidentally turned that into a group. I'll just tap two fingers to step back. I just want to drag that layer below my sketch layer so I can always see my sketch. I'm going to do a monochromatic landscape here. I'm going to choose one color and use various shades of that color throughout the piece. The first thing I'll do is choose my first color. This is going to be the medium color of my landscapes. I'll have lighter colors and I'll have darker colors, but this will be the medium shade in my color range. You can really go with any color here, but obviously you want to think about what might actually be the color of a landscape. Unless you just want to do something totally unrealistic, which is fine as well. I like that color, I'm going to create a monochromatic palette by clicking "Pallets", tapping the plus symbol to create a new pallet. Then going back to my desk and there's my new palette. The first color is this color I've already selected. I'll just put that in the middle. Then I'm going to decide, do I want to grab my colors diagonally like this? Do I want to grab them straight up and down like that. I'm just putting an imaginary line across the color wheel, and I'm going to stick with that. Shifting up a little across my diagonal line and that's a slightly lighter color, a little more, a lighter color. I'm just trying to get a nice varied range. Then I want to go back to my middle color to get some darker shades. I click on that middle color, shift down and just get a full range of colors here all the way to almost black. This is going to be the gradiention for my sky. I'm going to start with my darkest color, and I'm on that new layer, not my sketch layer. We're going to grab the opaque acrylic brush. Let's get a somewhat large size for that brash. Just have a little line. That's going to be my darkness area of my canvas. Go to the next color, slightly lighter, and I'm just going to repeat this process all the way down to my mountains. I'm going to a little bit past my mountains because I don't want to have any little bits of white peeking out at the bottom of my mountains. I'm just sneaking in that little bit here. Next I want to blend these together so it looks like an acrylic brush just swept across the page with various colors. I'm going tap on the blending tool and then get the dry acrylic streaks brush that we used for sketching. I'll make sure it's on the largest size here. I'm just going to go through and really lightly blend these colors together. Sometimes what I like to do is sweep my brush in a kind of x, pattern. That creates a little bit of that acrylic streak brushing. It looks like a real brush came through there. But you can do this however you'd like. You could create a really smooth transition or you could create a more rough brush transition. Just play around here with different options and see what feels good for your style. I'm just going to keep working on these lines up and down and trying to remove these clear strips and make it look more alike a brush stroked gracefully across the canvas. I actually love when I get some of these unintentional marks because that's what it really looks like with acrylic paint. You get these areas that aren't perfectly even and have the residue of a brushstroke. Don't feel like you have to perfectly blend everything with this process. It's fine to show some of your marks and mistakes. Once you're happy with your gradiention, one thing I like to do is add a little bit more texture to this. I'm going to create a new layer and with this lightest color in my scale, I'm going to get the light streaky acrylic brush, its largest size, and just come through and add in some little highlights. You can see that this brush does a horse hair stroke. You can add those in anywhere here on the sky. It doesn't just have to be on the lighter area. Then I'll probably switch to a darker color and do the exact same thing with a darker color on my palette. I'm doing this on a new layer because I'm not a 100 percent sure if I'm going to like it. Anything that I'm just not sure about I always do on a separate layer because even though you can step back by tapping two fingers with the number of strokes I'm putting down on this page, it would take a really long time for me to step back with two fingers. I like to just put everything on a new layer and not ever have to worry about stepping back like that. I'm just trying to bring all the shades into all the areas. I'm preserving that gradiention but I also just want a little more variations, so it's not just blocks of color. You can keep working this for a long time but the key is to not overwork it, it's really easy to overwork paintings and you want to keep that spontaneity there and not look like you spent hours just brushing over the same area. Don't worry about making it perfect here, just get it close and you can always go back to that layer and work on it more. Let's go ahead and create a new layer for the mountains. I'm just going to choose three shades here. I might do the lightest mountains and then maybe every other color here, the medium mountains and the darkest. You can play around here with how much variation you want. Maybe you want your very front mountain to be super dark, so you'd go with one of these darker colors. You can always change it, do just play around with the various options. I'm going to start with this darker color and just see how it looks. I'm grabbing the acrylic streaks shade changer lighter. What this means is you're getting an acrylic streak texture. It's going to change the shade with the pressure of your Apple Pencil, and it's going to change to a lighter shade as you press harder. I'll show you an example here. Let's get a bigger brush. I'm pressing light, so I set that backwards it gets darker with pressure. If we get a lighter color here, you can see I'm pressing light harder, harder. The harder I press, the darker it is. If I press really light I can get a light color. You can get some nice variation with this. It's probably a good idea to take some time to practice this feeling a little bit. Of course, if you don't have an Apple Pencil, this won't be possible. I'm sorry for anyone who doesn't have an Apple Pencil this part may be a little frustrating, but what you can do is just come through with one color get a lighter color and then come through and add your highlights. Whereas if you have the Apple pencil, we're going to do that all in one step. 4. Shadow, Highlights, and Depth: So go ahead and grab the color that you want to use. And I like to start by outlining the very top of the mountains.You can see, I'm trying to keep this pretty jagged. I don't want these perfect humps like this because that's just not how mountains actually look.They're very jagged and unpredictable in their lines. I'm just trying to capture that here. I'm keeping my brush really loose in my hand and kind of just shaking it around the canvas. One Thing you'll notice with this brush is if you use it straight up and down, you get these little marks here, which can be nice in some cases, but sometimes you need a smoother edge. If you just turn the canvas, you can get the other edge of that brush, which is the smooth edge. That's why you'll notice I turn my canvas sideways a lot. See, you may end up doing that to kind of play around with the edge of the brush. I don't like this jagged part because it looks really predictable. It's almost like a ribbon or something. So if I see something too predictable like that, I'm just going to come through and change it. Now that I have outline, let's get a larger size brush and just sweep through this area. I could get my even larger brush here but I like using a smaller brush just to get all these little different colored brushstrokes. Of course, you can go with whatever works for your style here. But what I love about these brushes is getting that variation. I always take a little bit of time to work each area and try to get some different shades in there. I'm happy with how this looks, I'm ready to add a little bit of shading. I need to decide where my light is coming from. The left, the right, or the top. I'm going to have my sunlight coming from this side, the right side. Actually, let's go with the left side because I like how this dark spots already over here like naturally showing where the light is. Let's just go with that. I'm pressing really light and just barely holding this in my hand and I don't want to just have these little triangles of shading that are really predictable.I wan to do something a little more varied. As I'm creating this variation, I'm trying to keep my pen or pencil really loose and moving around the canvas a little bit and moving down the mountain. This is anywhere where light would hit the side of the mountain. That could be randomly down here. There can be little jagged areas, or it could be just on the peaks so you can decide where the light is on this painting and then I'm going to press down really hard and get some darker areas on the opposite side of those lighter areas. You can just picture the sun's coming through here. It's creating sunlight on this side and some shadow on the side of any little jagged area or peak and of course, you can change brush colors here too. I'm going to go one step lighter. Just to get a tiny bit more variation on these highlights. You can see there's not a real science to this other than just trying to keep a chaotic and not being too predictable. If you're just going one, two, three,four, five like this, people are going to really see that brushstroke and it's going to stand out. Try to keep your brush loose. This is a great practice for someone who tends to always work really tightly and wants to loosen up in their work a little bit. Challenge yourself here to go a little bit more abstract than you're used to going. I'm happy with how that mountain looks. I'll just create another layer for my next mountain and I'm going to drag that below this mountains so that I can freely draw like this and not have to worry about overlapping my other mountain. I'll start by choosing the color and I'm thinking about contrast here.I want the contrast to be enough to really make this mountain stand out. I'm gonna go pretty light with this mountain and then of course I'll add in some darker colors later. But you can see that creates enough contrasts that it's really easy to differentiate these two shapes. I'm just going to repeat the exact same process that I did for this first mountain.I'm also thinking about directional marks in these paintings. For example, if I do all of my shading like this on one mountain and then I do it like this on another mountain, I'm kind of creating some conflict that's going make those areas stand out. I'm trying to keep some kind of consistency between these two mountains so that it appears like one person created this whole painting. When you have multiple versions going on, on different spaces, it almost looks like you let two people work on the painting and they had two different ideas about how it should look. So think about that as you create a view, decide on a directional line. It might be good to repeat that in other parts of the canvas, or just go with chaos all over the canvas. Decide what your style is going to be for the piece and then stick with it. One thing you'll notice with the shade changer brushes is sometimes it's nice to not have the shade change, like you just want to put down a solid color. In that case, you can just use the opaque acrylic brush. I was having a little trouble with this color becoming too dark with the shade changer, so I'm just going to start by laying down this color on the whole mountain. Then I'm going to go back to my shade changer brush and add in all that variation. We'll go ahead and remove my sketch because I don't really need that anymore. This is a good time to start thinking about the contrast between your mountains. Do you have enough contrast? Do you need to bump it up a little bit more? If you do need to do that just tap on the "Layer" that contains whatever mountain you want to change and tap the "Adjustments" tool, [inaudible] and start playing around with that. I just felt like that mountain was a little bit too bright, and maybe a little bit too saturated, like it's almost neon. I'm just going to bump down the saturation, bump down the brightness and I feel like that fits a little bit better in the overall composition. You can do that for any of these that need a little bit of a shift. Next, I want to add some other landscape features. I'm doing that on a new layer and I'll put that above everything else. I've gone ahead and created a bunch of landscape features that you may want to use, but of course you can also make your own. I'm not going to show how to do this here because I already show how to do it in my class on Winter Illustrations. Check that out if you're not sure how to make these brush stamps. It's really simple, you just duplicate the brush and add your own shape in. What I've done is drawn a few different plants, and just turn those into stamps so that you can use these in any of your compositions. But of course eventually you're going to want to use your own shapes. In that case, it's a good idea to make your own brushes. You can make these out of any shapes at all. Maybe start brainstorming some shapes that might work well for your composition. For now, I'm just going to grab some of these birds. There's nine birds stamps. Each one makes a different size. I'm going to set down my pencil for this because I like to use my finger and that's because I created these brushes so that if you tap with the pencil, you can get a different size each time depending on your pressure, which is great in some cases. But in this case, I want to have more control, so if you tap with your finger, you get the exact size that you're setting it to right here. I can just look at my landscape, look at the brush slider and say, that's how big I want this bird, so I'll put that in right there. Next thing I'm going to get my next bird. Same process, get the sizing, and of course you could do these much smaller or much larger. It just depends on how close you want these birds to the viewer. I'm only using each bird once, but if you want more birds, you can certainly go through and use each one twice. I just try to space them out and then if you get any redundancies like this one and this one, you can grab the "Freehand" selection tool, circle it, tap the "Move" tool, and just shift it a little and then those don't look quite so similar. You could do the same thing, tap the "Move' tool, make it a little smaller. Just some way to differentiate those so it doesn't look like you're using the same stamp over and over. You can imagine if you were doing a landscape of a very specific place, you probably would want to do some birds that live in that area. These birds I chose are all hawks, so that works for my mountain scene. But if you were doing some other area that has a specific type of bird, then of course you could do that. I'm just tapping the 'Move" tool and making all of those smaller, I felt like they were just way too big on the canvas. I also want to spread them out a little bit, so I'll get the "Freehand" selection tool, tap the "Move" tool and you can turn off magnetics for this, because magnetics just helps us keep things in alignment and we're just moving things around free form so we don't really need any kind of alignment. I'm just giving these a little bit more breathing room so it doesn't look like one big chunk of birds, it looks like more of a free form shape. I'm happy with how that looks and a lot of people ask me, "why would you make something into a stamp?" Let's say, for example, you want to do a series of ten landscape paintings in your city, or in some place you went on vacation. It's nice to be able to re-use these shapes because if you put them in different paintings, in different colors, people aren't going to recognize that you're using the same shapes over and over, and it gives you a lot more freedom to speed up your process a little bit, so you're not spending so much time doing the same thing over and over. Of course you don't have to turn these into stamps, you could draw everything by hand if you'd like. But I do like to save my drawings as stamps, especially if I spent a little more time putting some detail work into them. I just never know when I'm going to want to use them again, so I like to go ahead and save them as stamps personally. 5. Color and Composition Options: I've done the exact same thing with some plant-forms. I chose eucalyptus. Of course, you could choose whatever plat-forms work for your style and work for your landscape. But I'm going to grab some of these eucalyptus and put them on a somewhat large size. Again, I'm putting my Apple Pencil down, and I'm just going to move this around the canvas to get it to a place that looks nice, that's not covering up any of my birds. With these, I like to do each one on a different layer because I like to be able to move them individually. You can decide here if you need to do these on a different layer or not. Personally I think it's a lot easier. I also like to use the "Move" tool to tilt these a little bit so that they don't look the same in any two paintings. Sometimes you lay it down the first time and it looks great, sometimes it takes a lot of adjusting. Last time I used this one on this side of the canvas, this time I'm going to use it on the opposite side. I'm trying to think about creating variation and movement and not reusing any of the same pieces in a similar way. You can also use overlapping to disguise that you use the same shape multiple times. I've already used the same eucalyptus several times and you really can't tell because I'm shifting these around, I'm overlapping them and it gets kind of confusing once you get all of those leaves and there. So feel free to play around with different versions of this. Even just using one tiny little piece like this can help a lot to remove the redundancies. I'm happy with that for now, I can always add more later. I'll create a new layer for some plants that I want to put on the bottom and I'm going to combine these eucalyptus and palms here. You can see why it's nice to have these as stamps. It helps me break up my process a little bit because sometimes I'll just find some really interesting plants and make some stamps out of them, and I have no idea what I'm going to use them for. I actually made these stamps a few months ago when I went to Florida and I didn't know what they were going to be for, but then I started creating landscapes and realized that's perfect for this. One thing to think about with your processes, why not just create stamps now and then, or save some images that you'd like. They don't have to be for something specific because you never know what you'll use them for in the end. I'm happy with how this composition looks, but it's lacking a little bit of texture. The first thing I'll do is just pinch all of my plant-forms together. I'm going to keep my birds separate. Lets have the plant-forms on one layer and the birds on another. We want to give this just a little bit of texture. I'm going to grab my eraser and get the brush called even canvas fade and put it on the larger size. With this brush, I like to actually tap far away from whatever I'm trying to effect, and then we get just a tiny bit of that canvas texture in there. This is, of course, optional but it is a nice way to just add a little bit more of an acrylic feel. I'm going to do the same thing with the birds. The last thing I'd like to do is add some canvas texture. I'll create a new layer, get the brush with the even canvas texture, brush that over the whole composition. Obviously that's way too dark. I'll go to my Layers panel and reduce the opacity. I just tapped on the "N" symbol, bringing the opacity down. You can also play around with blend modes here. Some of these will change the colors in different ways. I'm using black as my color here, but you could use a totally different color and it would have a different effect on the composition. I'm just going to use normal as my blend mode. I'm happy with this just being a transparent layer over the whole composition. At this point, I usually start playing with color a little bit. You may find that having the sky the same color is a little bit distracting, so I'm going to merge the sky with the sky details that I added. But before I merge anything, I'm going to create a duplicate of this. I'll go back to my gallery, tap "Select", tap on the painting and tap "Duplicate". Let's just do that a couple of times. These are going to be my color versions. I can do whatever I want with these. I can merge layers, I can move stuff around and it doesn't affect my original. Let's merge the two sky layers. So the skies all on one layer. Let's merge all the mountains so they're on one layer, and let's merge the details, the birds and the plants. Then we just have the canvas and I can delete this sketch layer. We've got four simple layers here. I'm going to tap on the sky layer, go to my adjustments panel, "Hue, saturation, brightness," and just play around with some other options for the sky. You don't have to stick with this monochromatic look, you can certainly play around with some other options here. I am adjusting the hue, I'm adjusting the brightness. We can bring down the saturation or bring up the saturation. Of course, you may also see that you could add some more coloring here. What if I got some orange, got the light streaky acrylic and just added some really subtle orange highlights here. You can see how that's bringing in a nice varied shade to the whole composition. I'm also going to tap the "Move" tool on that layer and see what would happen if I moved this down a little bit. I feel like there's just too much white. But if I bring it down link that, it has a little bit more variation to the sky and it's a tiny bit of white. You may also want to play with the color of the mountains. But let's say for example, I'm happy with that, I don't want to mess with that anymore, I'm going to go back to my gallery tap "Select" and duplicate it. Now I'm saving that first color version and now I'm going to create a third color version because I want to keep that orange and play around with the hue on the mountains. I kind of like that color combinations like the Blue Ridge Mountains. This is a great time to just play around with color, play around with texture, move things around, and take some time to critique your work and think about how you could do something differently next time. I want to show you a couple more options that you can do with the same composition style. You can see with this piece, I did the same thing. I started with a sketch, but I just added a fog layer so it's not just three mountains. I've got one extra layer in there. Rather than putting plants on the top, I just put them on the bottom and then I added some birds in the background. You can really play around with this composition style. You don't have to do it exactly as I did, and you'll probably discover a lot more options as you play around with this. Here's another example. I used a lot of color in this composition, and I use a lot more layers of mountains. You can pick up these tree brushes in my winter illustration class, and you can see it's the exact same process that we used before. Same brushes, same style, just a little bit of difference in color and the plant-forms. So you can see how changing the plant-forms really changes the mood of the composition. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the scene looks a lot like where I grew up. There's pine trees everywhere. There's hawks flying all over the mountains and the sunsets are beautiful. You can try to capture real location once you get confident with this process. Let's go ahead and move on to our next composition style. 6. Strokes and Underlayers: For this next project, we're going to use an impressionist painting style which uses tiny little strokes to build up color and light on the canvas. I'll be working from a photograph that I took and you can download that photo from the resources page if you'd like. You could also use your own photo or you could find one on the Pinterest board that I showed you at the beginning. This is the photo that I'll be using and I took this picture in China. What I love about this picture is there's trees really close to the viewer, and then some water in the middle and some mountains in the background, so we have multiple layers of visual interest. So for this painting, I recommend that you choose something that has some trees because we're going to use the contrast between the trees and whatever is in the background to create our color and light contrast. So I'm starting by opening this photo in the app "Photos", and then I'm going to open "Procreate". This document is the exact same size as the last one. 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I want to see my photo over on this side. So I'm just going to slide my finger up here to get this menu, and this is showing up here because I just had the Photos app open, so if you didn't just open the Photos app, you won't see that. So just go open it up and then come back to Procreate. Then I can just grab that and drag it and put it over on the left side here. I'm going to make that window a little bit smaller so I can see more of my canvas. And just like we did with the last one, I'm going to start by sketching out this composition. Obviously, this is a rectangle and this is a square. So I'm going to have to play around a little bit with the composition. I'm not worried too much about perfectly depicting what's in the photo. It's fine for there to be a little bit of difference between the photo and what you see on the canvas. No one's actually ever going to see this photo with the painting, so it's fine for your photo to just be inspiration for your painting and not an exact replica. So I start by just laying out the basic shapes and I'm not so worried about getting the thickness perfect, I'm just trying to get a general feel of the composition. I'm going to bring these trees way closer to each other because since I'm working with a square canvas, I'm going to need a lot less space to be filled on the canvas. And I'm also changing the mountains because I moved the tree, so I have to change how those mountains interact with the skyline as well. So now that I have my basic shapes down, I'm just going to go through and do a little bit of refining, and I'm going to do that on a new layer. So I'll tap the N symbol on this first layer and reduce the opacity so I can just barely see it and then create a new sketch layer and that's where my final sketch will be. So I'm taking a lot more time with this one because I want to be sure that even though I'm not trying to perfectly follow my photo, I am trying to make sure it looks like a tree. One important thing with trees is that it gets smaller as it goes up, so if you have a tree that's like this, even if it's just a tiny bit smaller at the bottom, people aren't going to read it as a tree. So just double-check and make sure you're thickening towards the bottom and thinning towards the top. And also, trees aren't fluid. They look fluid from far away, but when you get up close, they're a little bit jagged because they change directions every time the sun changes or every time their growth changes. So while trees look like they're kind of smooth like this, they're actually made up of angular movements like this. So as I'm creating my tree, I'm kind of working in straight lines. I'm not working in fluid lines at all. So I'm happy with my sketch, so I can create a new layer and drag that layer below my sketch layer. I can make that first sketch invisible or just delete it. So now I just have my sketch layer and a new layer. That new layer, I'm going to start thinking about color. So I'm going to go with some blue shades for the sky and some green for the water like you see here. Because this was a lake that had a lot of algae in it. So I'm going to go close to these colors, but I'm going to make it a little more stylized because the style of impressionism is naturally stylized. So I'm going to choose this really bright blue over here and just like we did with the last composition, I'm going to work around the color palette here and get different shades. I'm not going to make a palette for this because I'm going to do it kind of randomly, so I just like to choose a color on the wheel and then play around within that shade. I'm going to grab the Dry Streaks Shade Changer Lighter, and just like the other shade changer, this is going to change with your pressure. So you can play around with that brush a little bit and then when you're ready, you can decide what size strokes you want to use for this composition. So once you set your strokes, it's good to stick to that size. So I'm going to go with this kind of medium size. If you want to be really ambitious, you could go with something really small, make your brush smaller and that will take a really long time, so you may want to start with a medium size just to get used to the process. But if you look at Impressionist paintings, they use all different sizes of marks. So we're really just building up color with marks. So as you're doing this, you can think, "What's my mid-range color, What's my lightest color, my darkest color", and just fill those onto the canvas. Once we get this more filled in and we're going to start doing a lot of overlapping of color, but in the beginning, it kind of just looks like raindrops. I'm ready to change colors, so I'm just going to move my color circle here. Let's go a little bit darker than that. So it doesn't have to be totally different from what you were using before, it can just be slight little shifts in color. I am trying to overlap the trees because I want it to look like these are coming out from behind the trees. Whereas if everything's right on the edge of the tree, it's going to look like I made an outline, so I'm going right over the edge of the tree, just like that, and then we'll draw the trees on top so you won't be able to see that overlap, once our trees are on the canvas. Same thing with the skyline. I'm being sure to sometimes overlap the skyline because I don't want to end up with a bunch of streaks that are right along the edge of the skyline, it's going to look like a weird outline. I'm going to switch to a much lighter color and I'm happy here to overlap some of these. I'm not worrying about the brushstrokes touching each other. In fact, I want them to touch each other a little bit. Now, one thing you can choose to do with this process is a gradient. So we could start with a light color, go darker, darker, darker, and end up with the darkest color. That's an option as well. If you want to show the change in the sky's color, that would be a great way to do this rather than just spreading it randomly like I'm doing here. You can see here how the Shade Changer brush gives some nice variation. If you change your pressure as you brush, so you may like the single color or you may like that it has a different shade from top to bottom. So just play around with both options and see what works better for your style. One thing that you see a lot in impressionist painting is an underlayer. An underlayer is just a bright layer of color that's peeking out from behind all the colors above it. You may or may not like the look of an under-layer, so maybe just try it, see what you think, and go from there. I am going to add my under-layer right now, so I'll create a new layer, put it below everything, and then choose a really bright color. So I'm going to go with a really bright orange and you can see if you zoom in, it gives this nice effect where you can see little bits of orange through your color. I'm going to keep adding blue here so you can't see quite so much orange, but you can get a really nice effect here, just flooding some of the orange peek out. Now I'm going to continue adding blue. You can see I'm trying to close some of those orange gaps with this color and make sure that there's not too much orange poking through and there's not too much space between the trees and the sky. We can always come back and add more and blue later. So this isn't your final take, just get as close as you can to being finished. So I'm happy with that for now. I'll probably come back in later and do some adjusting. But at this point, I don't really need this picture anymore. I'm just going to go from memory and play around with light here. I know I'm going to add some shading to the trees, but these trees are pretty much black in the picture. So that's not really going to help me. So to preserve the battery of my iPad, I'm just going to slide that over to get rid of the picture. Of course, you can keep the picture there the whole time if you want, but for me, I hate watching my battery go down. It kind of stresses me out. Like I need to quickly finish my painting, so I like to just get rid of that as soon as I can. 7. Layering and Adjusting: So now I'm going to choose a color for the water and I'm going with kind of a green shade, and I'm going to do what we talked about before, which is creating a little bit of radiation. So the water is lighter up here where it's closer to the light source, which is the sun. So we're going to start by just adding some wider streets. You can see I'm using a different kind of mark than I did up here because I want to really differentiate the top from the bottom and make it clear that this is a horizontal wave-like pattern and this is just an overall sky. So you might think about some ways to kind of differentiate the different parts of your composition. You can see I'm just layering color here. I'm just trying to keep that ingredient in mind, but I'm not obsessing over it. I'm letting there kind of be some overlap between the two, between the multiple shades here. So I'm bringing in a little dark up on the top and I'm bringing in a little light up on the bottom so that we have a lot of variation we're not just going straight from light to dark. I'm being careful not to do any sideways marks like that, those will be really visible. So I'm trying to just go straight back and forth here to keep that same pattern going. So I'm happy with that for now. I want to add in my trees and then reassess the water and sky. So let's go with a deep brown for these trees. I'm using that same brush dry streak shape changer. I'm going to start by just laying down these shapes and double-checking that I want a new layer that's above everything else. I'm going to go quite a bit darker with this color that just feels way too bright. So you can take some time here to just play around with whatever works for the colors in your composition, whatever works for your style and of course, you can always change this later. You can see I'm using my strokes to show the movement of the tree. So those angular marks that we talked about where the tree is made of angles, I'm trying to capture those in my brush strokes. One thing to think about too, is you could make a really beautiful unified composition by using the same marks over and over throughout the whole composition. So these little marks that I used to make the sky, what if you use that to also make the water and the trees? So you see that a lot in Impressionist paintings, some painters would take one brush stroke and use that for the entire composition. So that's one option that you can try and if you're piece feels a little bit disjointed, that would be a great option. Just try unifying a little bit by adding in some similar strokes throughout the whole piece. Again, we needed the side where light is coming from, and so we made the side a little bit lighter than this side. So I think I'm going to let there be just a tiny bit of light on the left side of these trees. So I'm going to get a slightly little brown, and just go through here, pressing down a little bit harder to get that bits of light show. You don't have to do even strokes here, you can really just keep it rough and show the movement of the tree. So sometimes I'm just doing one or two strokes in some areas and other times I'm going over it multiple times. So I'm happy with the variation on those. I'm going switch back to my mountains because that's the one last thing I haven't filled in. So these are gong to go in-between my tree layer and my water layer. I'm just going to use one of these darker greens, I'm just tapping in holding on that to capture that green color. Let's keep these mountains really simple on the skyline. Now I can go ahead and remove my sketch layer so I can really see how this is going to look in the final result. So one thing I'm noticing is there's a lot of orange peeking out around the trees, and I really don't want that. So I'm going to back to my sky layer and just do a little bit of work here to make the sky seamlessly transition behind trees and I'll have to use multiple colors for that, so I'll take just a minute to play around with filling all this in. I'm happy with how this looks. But one thing I wish I had was a little bit more contrast between the trees in the background. So I'll do two things to make that happen. On my tree layer, I'll tap adjustments, hue saturation, brightness, and let's bump down the brightness and saturation a little bit. So that gives me some nice contrast. I also wish that I had some of this underlayer behind the trees. The trees aren't really getting any of that underlayer. So to make that happen, I'm going to duplicate my tree layer and move it below the original tree layer. So now I've just got two tree layers and the original is on top. And on the bottom layer, I'm going to swipe two fingers right, to put that in the Alpha Lock state where we can just tap on it and tap Alpha Lock. Then I want to get that orange color. So I'll just zoom in and tap and hold the sample that color, tap on the bottom tree layer and tap Fill. So now I just have an orange tree layer and then a regular tree layer. So what I can do now is erase part of my tree layer and I'm going to use a dry acrylic streaks brush. That's going to give me a nice little outline of the underlayer. So I'm not going to do much. It's a tiny little bit just to show kind of a hint of orange and it just helps the tree stand out a little bit more. If I zoom out, you can see that tree contrasts really nicely with the water, whereas these almost blend in a little bit. Just that tiny bit of underlayer makes a big difference. I also feel like my water needs a little bit more attention. So I'm just going to go back and sample some of those greens and fill those in to just hide some of that orange. So it's just little bit more filled in. Also, I think the more layers you do with this, the more interesting contrasts and overlapping that you'll get.So you know of course there's a point where you go too far and then just looks crazy, but you almost have to get to that point to know when you've gotten there and how to avoid it next time, so just keep going. If you're just sitting and watching TV while you do this, just keep doing lines and see what happens, or if you're doing a sky, just see how tiny can you make the marks and how many different shades of blue can you use in the sky. So you know people can tell when they look at your work how long you took to make it and if you've spent hours making these tiny little marks, it's going to create a really impressive composition. Of course I could keep going with this. I could add more trees. I could add some leafs. I could go deeper on the sky and add some more colors, but I'll stop there for now. Of course start looking at some options for color versions. So again, I'll go to my Gallery, tap Select, tap on it, and duplicate a few times. Then let's open one of those and play around with maybe we could do a blue sky or blue water and a pink sky. So that blue actually has a really nice contrast with the purple. I almost always do color versions. I don't know if I've ever finished a composition with the color that I originally chose. So, I definitely recommend taking some time to play around with color, play around with brightness and saturation. Like I think this could all be a lot brighter and be more of a pastel composition. So this has a totally different feel. This is more of a pastel look. Let's add our canvas texture to this and see how it looks. I've got black is my color. I'm on a new layer above everything else and I've got the even canvas texture, swipe over everything and then reduce the opacity. Honestly, I like this pastel version better. So you can see how playing around with this, after you create your composition, playing with different colors, you can really discover some interesting things. We could also play around with the color of our underlayer. So I'm on my underlayer and I'm just playing around with various color options. I think that this turquoise looks really nice with that pink. So obviously, if I do that to the underlayer, I need to also do that to the tree mask layer that I used behind the tree. So it's already in Alpha lock, so I can just click on it and click Fill and that turns that green. There's another option, honestly, I'd like the orange better, so I would go back to that. Take your time here and play around with a lot of different color options. Once you put all this work into creating these beautiful strokes, it's a great time to just sit and play with color for awhile. I want to show you one more composition that I created using the same process and I didn't use a picture for this. I just did some trees going straight up and down and I knew I wanted the sky to be behind the trees. So, I made a lot of different trees with tons of branches, and I went ahead and put that turquoise underlayer in there. Rather than using the dry streaks with this one, I used the regular acrylic color changer. Then I started going through with three different colors. You can see I marked my colors down the page first. I've got a yellow on the top, green in the middle, and blue on the bottom. I've just got those making a nice gradient down the page and making sure to blend those nicely by just scattering the colors at the transition points. You can see it takes a long time to build one of these compositions. This is a lot of strokes, but it makes a really beautiful piece with a lot of movement in it. I did the same process to reveal the underlayer on the trees where I created another tree layer and fill that with turquoise. Then just went through and erased over all of the branches. You can imagine there are so many different options that you could do. The same process could be used for things other than landscapes. You could do flowers, you could do people, anything that you're interested in painting. You can use this impressionists stroke painting style. So let's go ahead and move on to our next composition. 8. Designing a Layered Landscape: For this last project, we're going to create a multi-layered landscape. If you could find a picture that starts with maybe some trees and then some mountains or a city or some other kind of landscape feature, then maybe some clouds in the sky. We're looking for something that has multiple layers. So we have that depth built into the composition. I'll show you the photo that I'm working with but you can scan through the Pinterest page and find a photo that works for you or of course take your own picture. So I'm starting out here on the Pinterest inspiration board that you can find on the resources page. I'll just click on this photo that I want to use and what I love about this photo is the layers. We've got sky, mountains, city, trees. This is naturally creating a lot of depth for me. So I'll click on that to open a web-page and just take a screenshot. I'll open that in photos and you can see that it's got all of that white around it, so I'm just going to have edit, crop, and then crop that out. Then I'll tap done. Now that I have that ready in photos, I can open procreate, swipe up, and move that photo over to the left, make it a little bit smaller. Just like we did for the other compositions, I'm going to start by just sketching my layout. Again, I'm just trying to keep it really varied. I've got some trees down here, my city, and I'm not making any smooth or long strokes. I'm making these tiny little rough marks to just kind of get the overall outline. I'm not even really following the photo for these trees, I'm really just getting in general outline. I've also decided to add another layer of trees so this will just be a slightly darker layer of trees here. Feel free to add stuff into your photo that you think is missing. Not that the composition is engraved. This photographer did a beautiful job obviously. But for painting, I just want a little bit more visual interest here. It's less about the quality of the painting or the composition, and it's more just about my personal style, so you may or may not feel the need to add stuff in. I've got that composition laid out. I really would like to have a little bit more sky, so I’m going to get the selection tool and circle these three layers, tap the move tool and just move this down. That gives me a little less city, but a lot more sky, so I'm happy with that. I'll create a new layer below my sketch and then I'm going to grab some light blue color here that's similar to that sky. I'll get the acrylics streaks shade changer, huge brush. What's nice about that brush is you can cover really large areas at a time. I'm just trying to create that little bit of shade variation here. I'm going to get a slightly lighter color and I'll let some of that dark peek through, but I'm mostly covering it up. Just getting a kind of varied sky here. You can see there are few different shades going on here. There's a kind of a gray blue, lighter blue, medium blue. So I like getting all those different colors in there really creates the feeling of an acrylic paint look. I'll create a new layer and start working on my mountains just like we did in the other composition. You can see that I often work sideways and when I painted on real canvas, I did the same thing. I think it's easier to pull a brush or a pen down the page than it is to try to make it go across, so you can do this however you'd like, of course. But I do find that sometimes turning it sideways not only gives you a different perspective on the composition, but it also just makes it a little bit easier to pull your brush down in an even motion. I have a really big area to cover here, so I'm going to get the huge brush down on the medium size and come through here and I'm still getting that nice variation. I'm just getting it in larger swaths. You can see that I'm not perfectly matching the colors of the photograph. That really doesn't matter. The important thing here is that you're following your personal style and making it look exactly as you want it to be, not that you're perfectly depicting what's on the photograph. I want to choose a color for the city, so I'm kind of trying to take an average of all the colors in this area, and it's almost a sort of peachy bright color. So I'm just going to use that to lay down the basic shape of the city. Then later on I'll come through and add some building shapes. Your landscapes could certainly include some cities or maybe a little house or whatever you wanted to include. There's no rules here about what you can and can't put it in your landscape. I'll do the same process for the trees. I really like this little limy color that's peeking out here, so I'm going to try to find something like that for my trees. Always making sure that I'm on a new layer for every single thing I do. I constantly check my layers panel because as I'm sure you know it's so easy to forget to create a new layer and then you want to change something later and you can't. So it's always worth double checking every time you make a new layer. You can see with this huge brush, I'm not able to get a lot of detail on the edge. So I'm just going to fill in these bigger areas and then I'll get my shade changer and come in with that smaller brush and start just adding in this little bit of chaotic leaves. 9. Details and Variation: I'm going to go ahead and remove my sketch layer so I can really see what this is going to look like. Just like we did in the first composition, I want to start by adding in some shading and highlights on these mountains. One thing I like to do is get a little wild with these brushstrokes. I like to move my brush around a lot like this and I don't like to worry about messing up the skyline or the edge of my mountain. I'm just going to Alpha lock that layer by taking two fingers and swiping right on the layer. What that does is it allows me to stay within the lines here. Even if I get really crazy, I can't paint outside of this mountain. I just like doing that because I don't want to have to worry about painting over the edge. I just want to focus on doing my highlights and choosing the right color. The more you can help yourself remove parts of your worry or parts of your process, I always recommend doing that. Alpha lock is one good example. You just don't have to worry about going outside the lines anymore. You can do these interesting strokes. If you're being really careful like this, you're making a different line than you would if you just really quickly move through an area. I like getting these quick strokes that really show the movement of the pencil. Same thing on my larger mountain, I'm going to Alpha lock it, and then I can start adding in my highlights and shadows. Because I got this really big open space on this mountain, I'm just going to go through and add another highlighted area down here in the middle and that just shows the jaggedness of the mountain. I'm going to repeat this same process with my trees. I'm just adding a slightly different mark with these trees, rather than those side-to-side marks. I'm just going to do random thinking about how the leaves would be angled on the tree, and just going in and out, light and dark strokes. Maybe these are little leaves or little bunches of leaves around the tree. I'm going to create my city above this page layer because I want to have the flexibility to move around and maybe change the color of that later. We're using that same brush that I've been using all along. Like we did with the impression of style painting, I'm just going to make my city out of these little marks. I'm trying to use some of those colors that are in the picture here, but I'm not too worried about it. In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and remove that photo because I get the general idea here and I'm just not going to stick to the photo much more than that. Again, it really reduces your battery to have both of those apps open. If you're just not using the photo, there's no need to keep it open. You can always reopen it if you need it later. Now that I've got most of these areas filled in, I want to start thinking about overlapping. I wouldn't want to overlap like this, because then I've got a building sitting on top of a building. I find it easier to just create a new layer and put it below that layer and then when I overlap, it automatically goes behind. That's a little bit easier than trying to just make stuff go behind each other. I'm happy with this city. You could keep going with this, of course, and do way more buildings or way less, whatever works for your photo and your personal style. I want a little bit more highlight on these mountains because I feel like they're just not standing out right now. At this point, I'm really just going to go through the painting and think about variation in contrast. I want there to be a lot of contrast between the various parts. For example, I don't think these mountains are differentiated enough from the front mountains. Let's go to hue saturation brightness and brighten those up a little bit. That's a little better. That gives us some nice contrast. Then let's add a little bit more highlight to these mountains. I'm going to make this front set of trees much darker and then the other set of trees a little bit darker. I'm just making little adjustments trying to figure out what needs to be adjusted and what looks good. I'm also going to add in my Canvas texture using the same process that we used before and lighten up my sky a little bit. If everything looks the same and dull, that's a great time to just start brightening things up, darkening other things, adding in more texture and movement. Let's finish up with some color versions. I'm going to do the mountains and sky all in one color change, because I feel like if these were more pink, would be a little more interesting. There we've got an interesting combination between these three shades. You can play around with this, get whatever colors work for your personal style. I want to show you a couple more versions of this same process. This is the painting you see on the cover for this class and as you can see, I just started with that simple sketch, blocked in all of the colors and then just started adding shadow. You can see I block in the shadow first, and then later I start going in and adding more highlights and shadows. Don't feel like you have to do it all in one shot. You can really go back and forth between the sky and the ground and just add some variation as you work. Here's another example where rather than a big bunch of trees, I did a lot of different small trees and multiple colors. So I worked on getting each one a little bit different than the others and putting some highlights on each tree and having just a lot of different shades in there to help differentiate the different trees. Then I blocked in some mountains and as usual, added in some highlights and shading on each one. Then the sky is just that acrylic huge brush, just swept around with a light gray color. You can see with these mountains, I did some tiny little strokes. You can really play around with how you want to show shading and light in these paintings. Some people like big fat strokes, some people like tiny little strokes. You can really play around with what works best for your personal style. Of course, not every composition has to be super-complicated. You can just have a really simple sky, some really simple ground, and then some landscape feature in the background. So with this, I spent a lot of time making the sky really vibrant, and then added in some colorful mountains. I actually went really far with the ground and then decided that I didn't like that and I removed it. I really like just the simple look of these huge brushstrokes. You may find that your style has more of a simple feel and just go with that, go with whatever works for your style. You may even find that you are more into abstract painting. You can go through and just build up color with whatever colors you want to use. It doesn't have to be realistic. Here, I'm using the even Canvas Brush to erase the clouds and just give them a little bit of Canvas texture. Just making the hills out of colorful lines, it doesn't have to realistically depict anything. I hope you enjoy this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own acrylic landscapes in procreate. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create folk art style illustrations, how to use metallic textures to create bold compositions,and how to draw colorful botanical illustrations. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads on my website, so if you'd like to get more or like you've got for this class, check out my site. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letters writers and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group through the link on my website. I would absolutely love to see your finished landscape paintings, so please share what you make. You can do that here on the Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.