Transcripts
1. Art Nouveau Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer and teacher. Today, I want to show you how to create three different kinds of art nouveau style illustration on your iPad and Procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of the brushes and stamps I used to make my art nouveau illustrations, including 10 composition templates, 12 backgrounds and illustration elements, 11 texture brushes, and a few drawing and shading brushes. We'll start the class by using a drawing book published in 1904 to learn the techniques and forms that artists and designers and the art nouveau era I used. I'll show you how to get the book as a free download, so you can use the exercises to practice drawing flowers, leaves and decorative elements in an art nouveau style. We'll start by creating a line drawing using the technique in the book. Then we'll use watercolor texture to give the drawing some variation and contrast. We'll look at some alternative ways to finish off your line work. Like how to build up color and texture, to turn your line drawing into a vibrant frame around a quote. I created an art nouveau font that I want to share with you as a free download, so you can add some text to your work that matches the art nouveau style. Next, we'll use a reductive drawing process to create a flowing border made of fruit and leaves. Will look at options for creating overlapping elements and talk about ways to give your work the fluid feel that you see in art nouveau illustrations. We'll also look at how to create a pattern brush, so you can add a layer of subtle pattern behind your compositions. Last will combine plants, animals and patterns and an overlapping composition with texture and playful movement. You can use the work you create in this class for print on demand projects, gifts, or display them on your website. Once you finish this class, you'll be able to turn any object or concept into an art nouveau illustration. 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 Inspiration: 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 in 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 in and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see if you scroll down beneath the image, there is a list of downloads and resources. The first one is the brush set, so this is all the brushes and stamps that I'll be using in the class today. When you're ready to download that, you can click and hold and click "Open in a New Tab." Once that new tab opens, you should see the option Open in Procreate. If you don't, click "More" and then find Procreate on the list. I'll click "Open in Procreate" and it'll just open whatever document you had opened last and then we can click on the brushes and you'll see it at the very top of your brush list. The other thing that I'll be using in the class today is the color palette. I'll click and hold, Open in a New Tab. Again, Open in Procreate and then if you go to your color palettes, you should see it on your list of palettes here. You can set it as your default palette by clicking "Set Default." The next item on the list is the Art Nouveau inspiration board. I'll just click and that'll open the Pinterest app if you have it. If not, it should just open this page in a web browser. I pulled together this list of Art Nouveau decoration and flowers and plants and composition ideas. You can just scan through here and see what you're drawn to. Maybe you like these more solid, blocky, decorative elements or maybe you want to go with something a little bit more layered that has a lot of different textures incorporated into it. You can also get great ideas for color palettes here. I really like this vibrant color palette. You could take a screenshot of this and just pull the colors. Obviously, we wouldn't want to copy the elements here and the colors. But if you just see a few colors you like, this is a great opportunity to find some Art Nouveau-inspired colors on this board. You can also get composition ideas. You see this three panel layout often in Art Nouveau and you could do three different illustration types in each panel. You'll also see some beautiful overlapping techniques. If you look at this, you can see the ways that this artist decided to overlap vines and leaves and how they cut each plant in order to show that overlapping. You can just get some ideas from the artists and designers on this board. Here's another beautiful color palette and an example of how to weave very different plants into each other. We've got these really pointy leaves and then we have these long thin leaves. You can start thinking about contrasting multiple elements that are different colors and also different shapes or you could go with a single color. You can also get some beautiful effects with just one solid color. As we go through this class, you'll be able to pull up any of the images on this list and figure out how you could do something similar in Procreate. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project.
3. Free Resources from Online Libraries: Next I want to take a look at some inspiration. I found a couple of books that you can pick up as free downloads online, and these are books that were made in the Art Nouveau period. They have all of the traditional styles and colors that you'll see in Art Nouveau work. There are a few different things that you'll notice about art and designs made in this period. First, you'll notice a lot of fluidity in the design elements. There aren't a lot of sharp points in the Art Nouveau style. You'll see that artists and designers create rounded edges on plants and decorative elements. You'll also see that almost everything is stylized. This is one thing I love about Art Nouveau, you won't see a lot of realistic depictions in this style. You can really use your own personal style to bring a stylized look to your work. There are also lot of overlapping elements. In this class we'll look at a few different ways to create seamlessly overlapping elements. You'll see a lot of stretching or elongating of elements in Art Nouveau. Plants that would normally be short, are stretched across the page and other elongated elements will weave around them. You'll also notice muted colors, there aren't a lot of bright colors in Art Nouveau. You'll see a lot of muted pallets, but that certainly doesn't mean you can't use vibrant tones in your Art Nouveau work. I've shared my color palette with you, which does contain mostly muted tones, but I definitely recommend you use whatever color speak to your style. You'll also see a lot of beautiful texture in Art Nouveau work, especially in the backgrounds, but often on the illustrated elements as well. Let's go ahead and take a look at a few books that you can download and use to get color palette ideas. You can also learn to draw some of the common shapes that are found in Art Nouveau illustrations using these books. To get the first book, you can click on this link that says see the Art Nouveau illustration book. I'll click and hold and click open in a new tab. You can see that this book was created in 1896. It's in the Creative Commons. The Smithsonian Library has released this for free download. You can flip through this book here on the website and look at the platforms here, or if you use a planner app like GoodNotes or Notability. You can just download the PDF into that app. That's what I've done, I clicked download the PDF and then select PDF. Then once that page opens, you can click the Share button here and then choose your planner app from that list. If you're using Chrome, it may be a little different. I think you have to just click on the page and then there'll a little button to open it in a different app. Once you've sent the book to your app or you're viewing it on the website, you can use it to get some ideas for color pallets. What I like to do is go to the thumbnail option and find the page that I like. I really like the color palettes and shapes on this page. This is an example of a page I would take a screenshot, just to save it in my photos, so that if I need to pull it into Procreate to get some color or shape or ideas, I can do that. I'll click the home button and the power button at the same time to take a screenshot. If you scan through the pages in this book, you'll see that every page contains several color palettes and many different ideas for shapes. If you're having trouble coming up with shape ideas, this is a great place to start looking. Just on this single page alone, we've got several different flowers and leaves and ideas for breaking up the shapes. Here they used a geometric shape for the interior, whereas over here it's just more of a shading effect on the interior. Then here they did the same flower with some line work. You can also get some ideas for background textures. In the class today will be making some background textures, and this would be a great example of what you could do, some large circles and small circles and turn that into a brush. You can also get some ideas for stamps. Here are some little starburst shapes that are all over the background of this piece, and you could use that to fill up the back of your canvas or just add as a little filler in between plant elements. Because this book is in the Creative Commons, you can feel free to copy the elements in this book. One great practice if you're not sure where to start, would be to look at something here that you love and try to recreate it in Procreate. Obviously, add a little bit of your own personal style into it, but it's a great practice sometimes to just copy work that's in the Creative Commons, to get a feel for how the artists created that piece. If we head back to the downloads page, you'll see that the next item on the book is the Nature Drawing practice book. Open in a new tab again. What I love about this book is they include some examples on how to draw the shapes. Not just showing finished pieces, but actually showing you how you can create the shapes from start to finish. I've done the same process of downloading this book and putting it in GoodNotes. What's so interesting about this book is that it was created in the Art Nouveau era, to teach artists how to draw a plant and flower forms. You'll see exactly how Art Nouveau artists were trained to create the shapes. Let's take a look at the beginning here. The book says in the first place, nature drawings may be considered as free hand examples to be copied and finished in pencil outline or sketched in pencil and finished with a brush pen. They really encourage you to start here by just sketching, and then finish it off with some line work later on. When finishing with a pen, the student can modify the breadth of the line by increasing the pressure or by using different pens, for example, a quill or around ballpointed pen. This will give a fairly uniform line. While an ordinary writing pen used in the same manner as a pencil by holding it at right angles to the line, the finest touches and strokes can be produced, or broad ones may be obtained by allowing the pen to follow the direction of the line. They're really encouraging you here to vary your lines, so going thick to thin because that fluidity was so important in the Art Nouveau era. After these drawings have been carefully copied, attempts should be made at memory drawing. For this purpose, it's best to begin with the simplest subject, such as a single flower only. The complete plant and its parts should be led up to by gradual stages. They're really encouraging you to start with some of these simple shapes, and then later develop this into your own composition. Which is exactly what we'll do in the exercise today. What I recommend doing is starting by finding a flower that you'd like. You can see with this flower for example, it's a snow drop flower, and if we go to the previous page, you can read a little bit about it if you're interested. I would start by just taking a look and seeing if this is a shape that really speaks to you. If it is, we can go ahead and start practicing that shape. Again, I'll just take a screenshot so I can pull that into Procreate. Here's another flower that I really like, and I really like these composition ideas as well, so I'll take a screenshot of that one. One thing you can do to make these a little bit easier to pull into Procreate is go to your photos app, click on the screenshot that you just took, click edit, crop, and then we can just crop that photo so it's easy to bring into Procreate. Now that we have all the practice pages ready to go, we can go ahead and get started.
4. Mastering a Plant Form: You can see I've already been playing around with one of these practice pages, and I just wanted to show you an example of how I work with these pages. The first step would be to just copy exactly what they're doing here. We've got a triangle shape, and then they're taking that triangle and breaking it into little orbs. That was my first step here, is to draw that triangle and then break it into those little orbs. Next, we can start adding the actual flower shape on top of that, using the pictures to the left. Then my final step is to add the inking. Let's go ahead and do that with the other flower shape that I saved. I'll click the plus symbol, create custom size, I'll choose inches as my measurement and use 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I'll click the tool symbol, add, insert a photo, and then find the page that I saved, and I'm going to do each of these steps on a new layer. Every single sketch layer I do, I'll create a new layer for that sketch. The first thing I'll do is choose a bright color. I like to sketch in different colors because it makes it easier to see each layer individually. I've got a bright pink. I'm going to go to my art nouveau set and choose the sketching pencil smooth as my brush, and set a brush size, and then if I zoom in here, I can take a look at how they're creating these flowers. Number one, we have a circle, then we have an inner circle and another, and then we have five spokes. That's the beginning construction of every single one of these flowers. I can click the move tool and move it over here so we can really see what we're doing. Next, they're using those spokes to just create these little lumps around to create the petal shape. What I'll do is go to a new layer, get black as my color, and with that same pencil, I'll just go around and create those little lumps. The next thing you can see is there's an interior circle and then there's a lot of little spokes around the middle. That's the basic construction of the flower straight on. But there's also a flower from the side that I want to capture in my composition. I want to figure out how are they're creating that flower from the side. Again, I'll get pink is my color and go back to my pink layer, and if you see here, they create these lines that serve as guides, and then they just swoop down here, and there's our flower shape. When we're inking this we'll smooth these shapes out quite a bit, so if I get black as my color and go to my black layer, I can go over these and just use those little blocky shapes as guides. Then they've got these little petals, so now that I understand the basic construction of those flowers, I'm going to go to a new layer, and with that same pink color, I'm going to start my own flower over here in a larger size. Just as they said in the front of this book, it's good to start with a small size and work your way up. I'm starting this by getting the basic understanding of the construction, and then I'm going to come through and do a larger flower. Exact same process that we did before, creating those circles, creating the spokes, and at this point if the spokes aren't perfect grab your eraser. There I've got my five spokes and I also need a stem. You can see they have stems that are sometimes sloping down, sometimes wiggling around and meeting in the center. I want to create something like that. I made a brush that is a dual pencil, so this is really great for making stems. You can use the dual pencil parallel if you just want a single solid parallel line. One thing I've noticed is sometimes you have to turn the canvas for this brush to work. If you're having trouble getting that parallel line, then just turn your canvas. I'm just adjusting the width of the line here in order to get the stem size that I want. I'm also going to add in some of these leaves that they've created here. One thing you can do when you're first drawing one of these shapes is just trace it. They have a central vein and they have two side veins, and then there's also these other little spokes that come out, and then they go around and just create this very loose, rounded outline. That's a great way to get started with a shape if you're just not sure where to start. I might do the same thing for this shape. We've just got two little simple leaves that come off of this stem. Now I can go to a new layer, get black as my color, and again, just use that shape to create my little petals. Now I'll do one of those leaf shapes that we just looked at, so we've got that inner vein. You can see here I'm really just playing around with the shapes on this page, and you can go as far as you want with this. You could ink these as well, you could add some color and really get an idea before you start your composition, exactly what flower you want to use, how you want to create it, and which parts of this page you want to use. You don't have to use everything on the page, just use the ones that really speak to you. If you'd like to go ahead and share this part of your image as a project, you can do that, I would just take a screenshot. Go to the photos app, click edit, crop, and then crop this so you can show whatever part of your sketch you want to show, and click done. Then you can go to the class on skill share and click projects and resources, create project, upload image from photo library, and then choose that image that we just created, and because we cropped that horizontally, it fits nicely as the project cover, so I'll click submit. Then you can add in a title, and here where it says start typing, you could add a little bit about what this is, and then you can click Image, photo library and then choose that image. If you'd like to share your sketch, you can just click publish, and then later on you can go back to the project and click edit to add your additional projects in. Now that we know what platforms we're going to use and how to construct them, let's go ahead and create our first composition.
5. Borders and Layouts: Next, we'll look at how to use the shapes that you learned to create from the nature drawing book to create a finished composition. For this piece, you could choose something simple like a single flower motif. Or if you want to do something a little more complex, you could do a three panel illustration. I'll be doing a piece with different compartments and both aside and straight view of the plant I chose. But you could certainly do one of these more simplified versions. I would just recommend going with whatever makes you inspired to get started. If the more complex piece intimidates you and makes you worried that you can't finish it, then just start with one of the smaller ones. Just start with a single flower or a little bouquet in the center, and just keep it simple in the beginning and build up from there. So back in Procreate, I've got all of my sketches ready. I'm just going to make these invisible. You can delete things that you know you don't really need anymore, like these initial sketches. I don't really need that anymore. I've really moved on to the larger pieces. So I'm just going to make all of that invisible and create a new layer. I've got black as my color, and I'm going to go down in the Brush Set to these borders. So there are 10 different borders that you can choose from, but you could certainly create your own borders too. These are just the few that I thought would be nice to start with. If there's something else you want to make, of course, you could draw it in Procreate, or what I've done here is create these shapes in Affinity Designer. Affinity makes it really easy to align things properly and make perfect shapes like circles and squares. So if you want to make a different shape and you want to use Affinity Designer to make some perfect geometric shapes, then you may want to use the process in my class on Affinity. I cover how to make geometric shapes from start to finish in terms of calculating the border and all of that, so just so you know how I created these borders. You can start by just choosing a border you like and adjusting the size over here. You'll notice if you click with your finger, the size will be consistent. So I typically lay these borders down with my finger and just tap once in the very center. What you want to do is get it as large as possible without going off the Canvas. So I'm just doing tiny little adjustments here to make this larger. Once it's pretty close to the edge, it doesn't have to be perfect, I'll click the Move tool and then I'll click ''Fit to Canvas''. So what that's doing is, it's stretching it perfectly to the edge of the Canvas so that it's centered across this page. If you don't do that Fit to Canvas process, then, it'll be just a little bit off kilter. So once you've fit that to the Canvas, you may want to bring in the border a little bit. If you want to do that, click the Move tool, make sure magnetics is on, and then we'll just pinch a tiny bit. You want to make sure you're pinching directly in and not turning your fingers at all because you don't want to shift this square. So you can take a look at each of these borders, just being sure you click ''Fit to Canvas''. I'm going to use number 7. Again, I'm just adjusting this until it's large, almost to the edge of the Canvas, but it doesn't have to be perfect. I'll click the Move tool and click ''Rotate'' to make sure that's in the right space, and then click ''Fit to Canvas''. I want this to be a little bit further. So I'll click the Move tool, make sure magnetics is selected, and just give that a tiny little pinch. If you have any trouble with that, one easy way to make sure this is aligned is to create a grid on here. So I'll click ''Canvas'', turn on the drawing guide, click ''Edit Drawing Guide'', and then down here under 2D Grid, I'll adjust this grid size. I'm just looking for where I want this border to be and adjusting the grid size until I see a size that works well for me. So I'm happy with that. So I click ''Done'', and then I'll click the Move tool. I want to zoom in here, so I'll hold down on the Move tool and zoom in really closely. Then making sure magnetics is selected, I'm just going to bring this up to meet my grid. Now I'll go over to the other corner and do the exact same thing. So now the edge of my border is perfectly aligned with that grid in Procreate. Then I can just turn my grid off because I don't really need that anymore. So I'll click the Tool symbol and turn off the Drawing Guide. I'm going to use this border as a guide, but it doesn't have to be perfectly solid like it is now, it's distracting. So I'm going to click the End symbol and reduce the opacity. So it's there as a guide, but it's not in my way. Next, I'll create a new layer. Again, I'll get the sketching pencil smooth. I want to start creating my composition and figuring out where I want my main flower forms to be. I know I want this to be a symmetrical composition, so I'll go to the Tool symbol, turn on the Drawing Guide, click, ''Edit Drawing Guide'', click ''Symmetry'', and make sure the horizontal symmetry's selected and click ''Done''. Then I always test my symmetry. That looks good. So on the sketch layer, I'm just going to start thinking about where I want my main flowers to be. I typically start with the vines, because those tend to be the elements that really dictate how the composition is laid out. One thing to think about with Art Nouveau composition is that things are always flowing, things are always moving. You never see lines like that in Art Nouveau, just straight lines. Everything has an S shape to it. So as I'm drawing in these vines, I'm thinking about that with every single line I create. Next, I'm just marking the general location of these flowers. I don't want too many vines to meet all at the bottom here because it's going to get a little bit chaotic. So I'm just going to make some adjustments here so that only two vines are meeting in the center. I'm also making sure everything has enough space. I don't want any of these elements to appear smooshed or forced. Everything needs to have a fluidity to it. So it needs to appear very purposeful. So all my straight-on flowers will be here, and then all of my profile flowers will be here. So if you remember, when we created that form, it was a cup. I'm just drawing this little cup rather than the circle that I drew over here. So this is the stage where I'll take a ton of time to think about my composition. So I really want to make sure this is exactly how I want it laid out before I get started because the deeper you get into this process, the more difficult it is to change everything. So I'm happy with how this is laid out. I'm going to make this layer semi-transparent, create a new layer, and get pink as my color this time, so it's easy to see and differentiate from my previous sketch layer. So on that new layer, I'm going to start with my Dual Pencil-Parallel with the pink, and I'm just going to go really close here and start playing around with some different widths. So I'll zoom out and make sure that width looks good for that size flower. If not, you can adjust it over here on the left. But I'm happy with that width. I want to also consider how these vines branch off from each other. We want the stem to meet in the center of the flower. You wouldn't want a stem to come up over here on the left side. So that's something to consider as you're making these stems. Also, before I get started with those, I need to make sure that this new sketch layer is on symmetry. So what we can do is click it one time and click ''Drawing Assist''. So wherever symmetry you set previously is the one that will come when you click "Drawing Assist". So I'm just going to go through all my stems, and making sure I'm doing this S shape, this curving on every single line. So I'm happy with how the stems work. So I'm going to get my sketching pencil smooth. Now I'll go through and create the second layer of sketching for these flowers. So we've got that circle. We have the inner circle, the outer circle, and the five spokes. Then on these, we have this basic shape that we start with, and then we have the interior shape. One thing I'm also thinking about is I don't want any two elements to be too close. So I'm keeping that little buffer zone in between. So I'll continue the same process, getting all the flowers ready for my final sketching. One other thing I think about is I don't like petals to meet right on the stem. The problem with that, if we have a petal right here, it interacts with the stem in a strange way and can cause some visual confusion. So what I do is make sure a petal is draping right across the stem. I can see that this flower isn't turned correctly. So I just want to turn it. I'm going to get my Selection tool with Freehand selected. I want to select just the flower, not the stem. So I'm just circling around that. Click the Move tool and just turn that a little bit. I think that looks a lot better the way that it interacts with that stem.
6. Refining Your Sketch: I'm happy with how that turned out, so I can go ahead and make my first sketch layer invisible, just to make things a little more clear on this pink layer. I'm going to grab my sketching pencil smooth. On this same layer, I'm going to start thinking about where I want my leaves to be. I have some larger spaces here, that'll be great for those larger leaves, that have multiple parts to them. I'm just going to start bringing in some leaf shapes, just like the ones we created on that sketching page. You really just have to take some time here to figure out what will fit. Originally, I had two different leaves. At this point, I think one is going to fit a lot better. Take some time to just get to know these negative spaces, and figure out what's going to be best in that specific space. Now, I'm bringing in this second type of leaf that was on the original drawing and just marking out some spaces where those will fit. I also want to create a little more space here, so I can fill this up. I'm going to grab this flower, shift it up a little bit, and then I have some space to bring in a leaf over here. As you can see, I really work largest to smallest. I think that's the easiest way to fill a space. We've got the biggest elements, which are the stems, which take up huge swaths of space. Then we've got the medium elements, which is the flowers. Then, we've got the small elements, which is the large leaves and then, even smaller, the tiny leaves. We're just working large to small. One thing I love about this type of leaf is that it's really flexible. You can do two prongs, you can do four, I can even move it up and do six. It just can be used to fill whatever space you need to fill, really. You can decide here, do you want to do another layer of sketching, and do some serious refining at that stage? Or, are you ready to just go for it? I'm going to just go for it. But, if you're at this stage feeling like things just don't look how you want them to, things are just a little bit off, that means you need another layer of sketching. It takes as many layers as it takes. There's no magic number of how many sketching layers you should do. But, it's always true that each layer you do makes the drawing a little bit better. Before you start inking, just make sure you feel really comfortable with your drawing. Here's something I don't like. My stem is meeting where these petals separate, so I'm going to do a free-hand selection on that flower, and just turn that flower a little bit. Little things like that really help the composition. They make it appear more natural, more purposeful. I really recommend taking a ton of time here, before you move on to your inking.
7. Inking and Variation: I'm going to go ahead and make this layer semi-transparent and create a new layer. I want to make sure that's a symmetry layer so I'm going to click at one time, and click "Drawing Assist" to make sure that's on symmetry. I'll get black as my color and I'm going to get the line work smooth. There's two line work brushes, one is smooth and one is regular. With the smooth, I've turned on the setting that artificially smooth is out your line work. I like using that for Art Nouveau because it's a very fluid style. If that doesn't really work with your personal style, then use the regular. You can see with the regular, we get a little bit more of a wavy line and with the smooth, it's artificially smoothed out. It's slight difference, but it really just depends on your personal style here. Go with whatever works for you. I'm just going to go through and ink every part of this composition, including this border. Because I want my border and my elements to all be the same width. Right now, my border is quite a bit thicker than everything else, but I want it to be the same. I'm stepping back here and thinking about how thick do I want this line work? I might do one flower just as a sketch, and then zoom out to whatever size this will probably be viewed. That's Instagram, or maybe that's an art print like this. I'm going to think about, does that line work for whatever zoomed in or zoomed out version of this design people will be seeing? I'm happy with that thickness, but you could certainly go with something thicker or thinner depending on your personal style. One thing to think about as you do this line work is going all the way through a line. You don't want to go almost to the line and leave that tiny bit of white space, you want to keep going through the previous line. I'm thinking about that every time I finish a line, I'm also thinking about variation. This is a pressure sensitive pen, and so if I push it a little bit harder, I get a slightly thicker line. If I push lighter, I can get a thinner line. I'm thinking about that adding in that fluidity and variation that you see in Art Nouveau as I create each of these lines. You also have to decide here, do you want to have this open? Or do you want this line to cut through your stem? Maybe try it both ways and step back and take a look. I like it detached like this, so what I'll do is to draw my leaves and then go back through and erase any of that extra stem that's in the way. Now that I have all of the curved spaces taken care of, I'm just going to finish up with these straight lines by drawing a line, putting down two fingers to make it straight 90 degrees. When I do these borders, I always zoom in and work on the corners because they're very rarely perfect. Because you really have to zoom out to create designs and then you can't really see what you're doing very well. I always double-check those at the end. I'm happy with how that turned out, so I'm going to remove my sketch. One last thing I'd like to do here is just add in a little bit of variation. We can put some little marks on each petal, we can add a little vein to the leaves, we can do the same thing for these leaves here. It's certainly up to you here how far you want to go with the detail, but I'm just going to do those few marks on each of these.
8. Watercolor Texture: Now that I have all of my line work taken care of, I've made everything invisible except for this layer of line work. I'm going to create a new layer and put that below the line work, so I can start adding in a little bit of color and texture. What I'm going to do with this piece is just add a little bit of watercolor texture, but you could add of course, solid color, any texture, background. What I'll do is grab the watercolor huge brush, and I'm going to get this light green here on the color palette, and you'll see with this brush, it lays down color in a way that's somewhat uneven. I'm just swiping that over the whole entire piece. Then I'm going to grab the cloud eraser, and with the actual eraser here. Then I'll just go through and remove a little bit of this watercolor, just to add in that tiny bit of variation. If that's not dark enough for you, duplicate that layer, may be duplicate it again. You can merge those three layers together by pinching them and even duplicate again. You can go as dark as you want with this. Then again, bringing in the eraser and just getting a little bit of variation going. I'm not pressing very hard. I'm just really lightly letting this just collide across the page. I want to add some watercolor to these flower petals, but I don't want to have to individually paint each one. What I'll do is go to that inking layer, this black and white ink layer here, get this selection tool, click ''Automatic'', and then I'm just going to click one of these flowers. You'll see that it selects that petal. What I want to do is select as much of this petal as I can, without having any white space. If you put your pencil down and drag it across the screen, you're getting this threshold. I want to go really high with this threshold. I don't want to go so far, I don't want a 100 percent, because that would be the entire Canvas. Obviously, that's too much. I went to 98 percent with my threshold. That way I'm selecting almost outside these lines. You can see that it actually captures a little bit of that black line. That's perfect. We want to really cover that interior area. I'm just going through and getting each of these petals selected. If you make a mistake, you can tap two fingers to step back if you select the wrong area. The symmetry tool doesn't work with selections, so you will have to go through and select both sides. I've got all of my flower selected. I'm going to click the Layers panel, create a new layer, and drag that below my inking layer. I'm going to grab a bright red as my color. Get my watercolor huge brush, making sure I'm on that new layer, not the inking layer. Then I'm just going to swipe all the way across this and make sure I get every square inch of these petals. Then I can click the selection tool to get rid of that selection. I want this red to be way more intense and have some variation. I'm going to duplicate it a couple of times, and then merge all three of those together. I'll grab the cloud eraser again on a slightly smaller size, and just go through and start erasing random areas on both sides of this illustration. Some areas I'm almost totally erasing, and other areas I'm letting them be dark. I might duplicate this again to just get a little bit more intensity, and then again merge those layers together and go back to erasing. The more time you take on this step, the more of a watercolor texture it's going to have. I would recommend really taking your time here, going slow and trying to make every single flower different. If you erase the center of one, erase the left side of another. If you totally erased one, the one beside that, let it be a little bit darker, so that you're getting a natural variation that occurs in watercolors. Once you're happy with that, you can go to Hue, Saturation, Brightness. I'm going to bump up the saturation because I want a bright red here. You can also adjust the color if you'd like. I'm just going to bump up the saturation. I'm happy with that color. Now I'm going to do the same process with the leaves. I want the leaves to be a darker green. So Selection, Automatic, and then go through and select all of my leaves and stems. I'm also going to select this outer border. I think it's nice to bring some colors from the platforms into your border. I'm just going to select that as well. Again, creating a new layer, dragging that below my inking layer. Get a nice dark green as my color, and then the watercolor huge brush, and just making sure I'm covering every square inch of that selected area before clicking the selection tool to remove that selection. Now I'm going to do the same process that I did with the red. Duplicate, merge those two layers together, get my cloud brush and come through and give this a ton of variation. I'm happy with how this turned out, but obviously you could keep going here. You could add in some more elements, you could adjust the colors. What I'll do is go back to my gallery, click ''Select'', click on that item and click ''Duplicate''. I'll do that again, just click ''Duplicate'', so I have a couple of those. I'm going to try a few color version. I'll go into that duplicated document, merge everything, so I have one single layer, click ''Adjustments'', ''Hue, Saturation, Brightness'', and just find a different color here. I really like this blue, but I'm going to bump down the saturation to give it that Art Nouveau muted color. That'll be one of my color versions. I'll do the same process with the third duplicated image. I really like this pink and green. I'm going to play around with saturation here, and that will be my third color version. I'm happy with how this turned out. Let's go ahead and look out one other way to finish off these compositions.
9. Layering Texture and Color: Next, I want to show you an alternative way to finish off your line work. The watercolor effect is beautiful, but it's not right for everyone. I want to show you a method that involves more layering of texture and color. You'll notice that I'm starting out with some line work that I've already created. You could create some more line work or you could just use what you already created in the last project. As you can see here, I've done the same process that we did in the last project. Rather than using the regular line works smooth, I've used the sketching pencil to do my line work. I like this varied rough sketch look. Rather than doing a solid line this time, I just did a sketched line. What you'll see here is I have that layer, and then I've also created another layer which is just leaves. That leaf layer will be overlapping my flower layer and it'll allow me to do a little bit of intertwining with the plants. The first thing I want to do is add a background layer here. I'll create a new layer and pull it all the way below everything else. I'm just going to get this light color here, and click on that layer and click "Fill Layer." Now, I've got a nice beige background to start with. I'll click the plus symbol to create a new layer and get a slightly lighter shade. It's almost this darker color, but it's just a tiny bit lighter in some of the second row here. What I want to do is add some texture to this background. You'll see there are a lot of different texture brushes in this set. You could do a woven fabric texture. You can do a printed ink texture. You could just do this wallpaper texture, which just adds a little bit of grittiness to it. What I'm going to do is add some dots. I created this brush and I'll show you how I did this later on to just have these little varied dots in the background. If you don't like the size of the dots, click on the "Brush", click on "Grain", and bump up the grain and you can see the size changing here. Make those dots whatever size you want them to be. Then you can drop that on the canvas. I'm going to add some color to these flowers. We're going to use the same automatic selection process. I'll click "Select", click "Automatic". You'll notice if I click this, it selects the whole page. I have to make sure I'm on this flower layer. If I click again, it still selects too much. The reason for that is I still have my threshold very high. I need and click and hold to bring my threshold down. One thing you'll notice is if you have a sketched varied line, you need a really low threshold. Whereas if you have a solid line, you can do a much higher threshold. Because the threshold just decide how far does a selection go. What I need to do is find a threshold that selects the area within these flowers without getting everything else. You can see at about 17 or 18 percent, it starts selecting the actual background. I don't want to do that obviously. I've got this at about 19 percent. Sometimes you'll find a space where it goes too far. You can just leave that space open and come back to it later with a lower threshold. It looks like I didn't fully close that flower, so I'll just come in and manually paint that color. I'll create a new layer, drag it below my ink layer, choose the color I want to use and click "Fill." Now I've got this nice pink behind my ink. If you notice a little bit of haziness around your inking lines, you can duplicate that layer a couple of times and it'll create a fuzziness that fills in that extra space. We also weren't able to fill in that area so I'll just get my brush, line work smooth, and fill that in. Another thing you can do if that selection wasn't perfect and there's a little bit of haziness there, you can go to Gaussian blur in the adjustments panel and just bump up that blur a tiny bit. You don't want to go too far here. You just want to do a tiny, tiny blur because you don't want to go beyond these lines. I 'm just going to do a tiny blur just to clean up that space. Another thing I'm going to do here is give this a dark color. I want to have a nice gritty dark texture here. I'll create a new layer and put that below this layer. I'm going to go to my color palette and get a slightly darker color. Click on this petal pink layer and click "Alpha Lock." Alpha Lock means I can only paint on that pink. I'm going to grab my scuff texture brush, and I've got that darker pink color. I'm just going to go through and add some scuffs like that. The reason I do that is you always notice this texturing in Art Nouveau. You very rarely see something that doesn't have at least a little bit of texture. I'll take just a minute to add a little bit of texture and making sure it's the right thickness. Maybe I want to do 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm going to think about how far I want to go with this texture. I'm happy with that texture. Now I want to add a little bit of decoration to this layer. I'm going to pull this new layer above the pink layer. I'm going to get a lighter pink as my color and grab this irregular dot chain brush. This brush just makes little irregular dots to look hand-drawn. I'm going to go through, and for each flower I'm going to give a little bit of variation. I want to be sure first that I have this layer in symmetry. I'll click on that layer and click drawing assist and make sure that symmetry is working correctly. Then I can go ahead and give each of these flowers a little bit of variation. I'm going to repeat the same coloring process with the stems, and I'm going to fill them with this darker brown color. Select Automatic, and then I'll go through and select every single part of these stems. Again I've got a little bit of haziness in between the line and the fill. I'm going to go to Gaussian Blur and just do tiny bit of blur. Then duplicate that a couple of times and that'll really help that white area get filled in. I had a little area here that I couldn't select, so I'm just going to fill that in. Now, I'm going to make my leaf layer visible. I'm going to do the exact same process to add some color to that layer. I'm going to use this light green color here. Then there were a couple of leaves that I couldn't select, so I'll go ahead and make my flower elements invisible while I work on these leaves. I've got the line works smooth brush and I'm just going to fill in all these little extra spaces. I'm going to have the same texture that I did to the flowers. I've put that layer in the alpha state and I'm just going through the GFS texture brush and giving that a little bit of texture. Then I'm going to grab a lighter color and get the irregular dot chain again, and just give these veins a little bit of decoration. I've added one more layer to this piece as well that I wanted to show you. This is a layer that contains some really simple leaves with the veins erased with the irregular dot brush. I just got white as my color. I got my line work smooth brush, drew a simple vein, and then just these little loop leaves. I filled each of those with color. Then I got my irregular dot chain and erased. That's how I made all of these little leaves that go around the canvas. You'll see now I have a few different layers. I've got the white leaves that poke through here. I've got these pink flowers and their leaves, and then I've got the third layer of leaves. If you want to do something a little more complex, you can do this layered piece. Then this would be a great place to add a quote in the middle. I created a file that I want to just share with you, so if you'd like to download that, it's an Art Nouveau Font. You can find that on the downloads page. Click get my Art Nouveau Font, click and hold and open in a new tab. Then you should see Open in Procreate, if you don't click More and then find Procreate. Now that font is installed in Procreate. I'll click the tool symbol, add, add text, find that font, that's selected and then I can start typing my quote. I'll click Edit Style to reduce the size of this quote, I can bring the bars in and out to adjust the sizing. I'm happy with this sizing, but this white color is very difficult to see. I'm going to click on the colors and choose a slightly darker color. To change the text color, I'll click one time, click edit text, and then click on the color I want. I'm happy with that brown color, but I do want this text to stand out just a little bit more. I'm going to duplicate that text layer. On the layer that's on the bottom, I'll click edit text. I'm going to turn on the outline so that you can see makes it a little bit thicker. Then I'm going to choose white as my color. What that does for me is it creates a white outline around my text. That just makes it stand out a little bit more so it's a little easier to see. Of course, just like we did with the watercolor piece, you could take some time to do some color versions. You could change the color of the entire piece or you can play around with changing the color of individual layers. Let's go ahead and move on to our next project.
10. Designing Overlapping Elements: Next, we'll use a process that I'll be calling productive drawing. This is a process that makes it really easy to create overlapping elements that weave in and out of each other in a way that's really common in art nouveau work. So I'll be using peaches and reuse as my design elements. You could do the same, or you could choose some other berry like blueberries or strawberries to depict here. So I got the idea for this project from this book. It's a pattern book of William Morris is Prince. William Morris was a British designer who is famous for his art nouveau patterns. I got this book because it has a huge selection of his patterns. It also comes with a CD so you can print out some of the images and hang them on your wall. So I'm just really inspired by his work. So I decided to go ahead and get this book and I put a link to the sunlight Class Resources page. What I love about his style, especially the reductive pieces, is that it makes some beautiful overlapping elements. So what I mean by reductive is that he's creating a shape, and then erasing to reveal the shape. So he makes the solid looking shape, and then erase that vein and across these veins. So we're going to do this process and procreate and use these lines and these open areas to create some beautiful overlapping. So you can see that you could include some animals, leaf forms, and different plants. So there are a lot of different options here for what you can include in your reductive drawing. So I would start by just thinking about a few different things that you'd like to include, or you can just feel free to copy mine. Do your own concept for the next project. I really love on this piece how he erased the tops of the acorns. You can see you can use just simple lines, two arrays, or you can add in some dots, some other shapes, whatever it is you're erasing the shape that you originally drew. So let's go ahead and start our own project. I'll be working at the same size I did last time, 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I'm going to start by adding in my background. So I'll be using the color palette here on the bottom left, and I'll start with this light cream, and then get this slightly darker gray, and grab the scoffs texture and just dirty up the background a little bit. If that's too intense for you, you can click on the end symbol and reduce the opacity, and really adjust how intense that texture is. I'll create a new layer, and on that layer I'm going to do my sketching so I'll set that layer to symmetry. Rather than doing the vertical symmetry, this time I'm going to do the quadrant symmetry. So I need to go adjust that in the settings. I'll click the tool symbol, Canvas, turn on the drawing guide, edit, drawing guide, symmetry and quadrant. Click done. I'll get black as my color, and the sketching pencil as my drawing tool. I want to start by just figuring out how I want this composition to be placed. So I want to have a circular area here for this quote to fit in, and I'm going to choose a quote. So border number 8 is going to work perfectly for this. So I'll go on a new layer, and set that border to the largest size possible, Click the Move tool. Click Fit to canvas. Then I'll reduce the opacity of that layer. So I'm not going to be using this border exactly. I'm just using it to create these quadrants. So I can go ahead and grab my sketching tool, go back to my assisted layer. Just sketch out where I want this to be. I really don't need all these extra border lines. I just need to know this quadrant area, and everything else is not really necessary. So go ahead and delete that border layer. I just have my sketch. I'll create a new layer, and I'm ready to go ahead and add in my text. I typically always add my text first because I want my design elements to fit perfectly around my text. So I'll click the tool symbol, add text. We've already downloaded the art nouveau [inaudible]. For now I'll just choose a color, Click on that layer, and click edit text, and then type my quote. So I'm setting that outline like I did last time. I'm choosing a dark color so I can really see that text. I'll click on that layer again, and click edit text, and then play around with the sizing and spacing of this text. I can also use the dots on the top, and left if I just click the Move tool to make sure this is centered right in the very middle of the canvas. Then I want to add a little bit of a fill to that color. So I'll duplicate the text layer, and on the top layer, I'll click edit text, turn off that outline, and then choose my interior color. So now I've got the outline texts layer and the inside texts layer. So I can really just work up in this top corner because I've got the quadrant symmetry on. So I'll zoom in here so I can see just this corner. I need an assisted layer, so I'll create a new layer, click one time, and click drawing assist. Get black is my color, and the sketching pencil is my drawing tool, and I just want to take a minute to think about a nice flow that the central vein could have. So again, I'm thinking about that art nouveau theme of fluidity, and trying to avoid having anything sharp or flat. I also don't want my vine to get too close to the edge, because if I go too close to the edge, I'm not going to have room for a leaf, I'm trying to think about leaves and how they'll fit in all of these little spaces. After I do that main central vine, I'm going to add in my fruit, as usual, I'm working large to small. First, I did my big vine, that's my most important central element, now I'm adding in the fruit, which is the second largest element. Now that I know where my fruit will be placed, I need to add additional vines to fill in this area, I have to decide where is that vine going to come from in a way that's natural, I'm just adding on some modal additional vines, this isn't just a pure straight line, it has more of an interesting curve and a lot of different offshoots. At this point, I always step back and make sure that it looks balanced, I wouldn't want to have a ton of fruit right here and then nothing over here, that would just be a little forced, I'm trying to spread things out, but also not make things too predictable. I don't want to have every other peach be so the same as the other, I've got one on the right, one on the left, one on the right, but they're in different directions, so it's not just 1,1,1,1,1, all the same. Those are some things I'm thinking about as I'm drawing these. The next thing I'm going to do is decide what size I want my leaves to be, I could go with something medium like that, I could go with something large like that one, I can do some small leaves. At this point, I always just take a second and draw a few leaves in throughout the piece, and step back. We want to be sure that the comparison between the peaches, or whatever element you're using here and the leaves is correct, you wouldn't necessarily want a huge leaf that's bigger than the peaches, unless these are blueberries, then you could have a huge leaf, just something to consider as you're sizing your leaves. I'm happy with that size, what I'd like to do at this point, is go through and put down what I would call sizing leaves. One thing you'll notice if you zoom in really close and just keep drawing without zooming out, is your elements will change size, you may start really large and then gets smaller and smaller. When you're zoomed in like that, it's really hard to keep things even, what I always do is set down some sizing leaves and that helps me stay consistent throughout the piece. I'm zooming out and just laying down these big leaves, and those are going to be the precedent that's set for the rest of the piece. Of course not every leaf has to be the same size, I can certainly have some leaves that are different, but I do like to start out with a little bit of consistency. Once I'm happy with that, I'm ready to go through and start adding in some more leaves. What I like to do is think about how these are going to overlap, I like to have a lot of overlapping with this process, so I will get really loose with overlapping these pieces. Some will overlap with others, and some will overlap with anything, that's fine. You just have to decide what is the precedent you want to set for this whole piece, and then keep up that consistency throughout the piece, if you are overlapping every other leaf, then try to keep that up as you work, but you wouldn't want to overlap everything here and then nothing over here is overlapped, then you have that inconsistency showing through. I do put some leaves behind the peaches as well, I was going to draw those in and later on, we'll sort out how those will overlap with each other. I love cutting across another leaf, and especially if I can get one leaf to cut across two, that's going to create some really beautiful negative spaces. Sometimes I'll enlarge a leaf, so it'll overlap even more. You can see there's really no rules with this process, you just have to do what works best for your personal style, figure out how big you want these leaves to be, what kind of sizing and overlapping you want to work with. Then as we're doing the inking portion, we can certainly change things around, but this is just setting our original stage. Sometimes I'll go through and add in an extra leaf, I don't like this blank space here, so I think I can actually fit two leaves in that space, I'll do that. I don't have to do all of my leaves right now, I can always come back and add more later. I'm just setting the basics at this point and then we can feel free to make changes later on. Again, I'm going to zoom out and make sure everything looks consistent and normal, if I noticed that my leaves are getting way smaller as they get down to the left, then I'm going to erase those and start over. I do like to have a little variation, so I'll have a tiny flower here, maybe another tiny leaf right here, so that it's consistent throughout the piece, and not just one little area for of tiny leaves.
11. Overlapping Effects: I'm happy with how that looks. I'm going to go ahead and reduce the opacity of that layer and the border layer. Now, I'll create a new layer and get the color that I want to use, which is this dark green color here on the bottom middle.Then I'll set a size for my brush. I'm thinking about what size I want this vine to be and I want it to be proportional to my leaves. I don't want it to be way too thick for that size leaf. I'm just going to go through and I'm always thinking about that curved S shape as I'm drawing these pieces and keeping it really fluid. Then one thing you'll notice with art nouveau is they don't do terminations that are sharp. You can see these sharp lines that are created. What I always do with those is, come through and smooth, smooth and now it looks more like an art nouveau line. I'm going to dive in here creating these leaves. Again, I'm trying to create that S shape everywhere I go. I don't want this blocky start or finish. I want to swish around and get that S-shaped going everywhere I go. If this is difficult to do, then you can go back through and sketch these shapes in and then start a new sketching layer. You don't have to go from scratch like I'm going here. Feel free to do as many sketch layers as you need. I'm going to go ahead and get my peaches in order. Again with my terminations, I'm smoothing just a little bit. I'll go ahead and do that with all of my peaches. I'm going to go ahead and color my peaches just so those are really prominent. What I'll do is set this layer that I'm working on as my reference layer. So click on the layer and click "Reference." What that means is that future color drop layers below it are going to reference it. If I create a new layer and put it below the screen inking reference layer, I can choose another color and then just drop it into those circles. Even though I'm on a new layer, I'm referencing my green layer. Back on my green layer, I'm going to go ahead and work on these leaves. I'm not worrying too much about the overlapping spaces right now, I'm just trying to get a leaf-shaped down on the page. You'll notice, I'm not worrying about the termination points at the bottom of these leaves because I'm actually going to erase those anyway. I'm just going to leave those as they are and we'll worry about that later. Now that I have most of my overlapping leaves taken care of, I can go ahead and start working on the overlapping. I'm just going to remove my sketch layer and you'll notice here that I failed to turn on the symmetry for this layer. That's not a big deal. We can easily copy that to all the other quadrants. I'll just duplicate that layer and that layer selected plus I'm going to swipe right on the background layer, click the "Move tool" and click "Flip horizontal." Same process. I'm going to duplicate that original bottom layer right here. Duplicate, swipe right on the back ground, flip vertical. Same process, duplicate, flip horizontal and vertical. So I'll do the same process with the peaches. Sometimes you just forget to do step and that's not a big deal. That's easy to fix and procreate. Now that I've got all of those duplicated, I'm going to merge all of the green quadrants and all of the peach quadrants, so I've got green on one layer and peach on another. Then I'll click on each of those layers and turn on the assisted drawing. Now I'll go to my green layer and get my eraser with the vine work smooth brush and play around with the brush size. I'm going to set the brush size and do a few lines. Then zoom out and make sure that's the size I want. It looks a little thin from here, so I'm going to go a little bit thicker. I'm happy with that. Now I have to decide what is overlapping what. Let's say this leaf is on the very top. We've got that leaf isolated. I'm also going to draw its vein and try to make it follow this curve of the leaves peak and then I'm also going to erase all the space around the stem. I'm separating this stem from the leave and I'm separating it from the leaves around it. I'll do the same thing with this leaf. Some of these you'll realize you need to make some changes. I want to beef up this leaf a little bit and then I can do my erasing. After I do my erasing, I always go in and just make those terminations a little bit more dull. I don't want a super sharp area. Continue this same process through the entire piece. I'm separating the outline of the peach from this leaf. You can see every time we make these little separations, we are telling the viewer what is overlapping what. Which leaves are on top of the peaches, which ones are behind. You can really take your time here and really think about varying your overlapping. You don't necessarily want to just work your way down. It's good to skip around and maybe have this leaf on top of all the others. I tend to skip around when I do this process to avoid having my overlapping being really a stair step down the page. I'm happy with how this turned out but I do feel like it can be a little more full. I'm going to go through with my brush and my eraser and just add in some thickness in some areas, I think I could just bump up this leaf a little bit. I'll just do that same process all over the page. Some cases I'll add another leaf and in some cases I will just beef up an existing leaf. I'm also going to add just a few little features to these peaches. So the first will just be a little bump on the opposite side of the stem and the other will be a little bit of texture on the peaches themselves. I'll go to the peach layer, swipe two fingers right to Alpha bracket, get a slightly darker peach color and then I'm going to grab that scarf texture. Let's get an even darker peach color. Then I'm going to reduce the grain of the scarves. I'm going to click on the "Brush", click "Grain." I'm just going to play around with the darkness and the grain to get whatever scarves that are going to work well on this piece. I like those really dark scarves right there, so I'm going to stick with that. Then I'll just continue working on these leaves. I'm happy with how that turned out. I can go ahead and make my border invisible. Then of course, I could play around with color. I could go to each layer and play with the saturation brightness. I can save this image in my gallery and change the color of the entire piece or maybe just the leaves or maybe just the text. So you can imagine here there's so much you can do to adjust this piece and make little tiny changes. But I will go ahead and call this piece finished.
12. Creating a Vine Brush: I wanted to show you one other option for doing this reductive process. On this piece I've done the exact same thing that we did on the last piece, the only differences is, I did the vertical symmetry rather than the quadrant symmetry, and for the flowers, I just created an orange circle and then I erased these little pieces out of it. Then the leaves are really the same as they were in the last piece and then I've added my quote in the center. One thing I wanted to note here is that on the Class Resources page, you'll see the short quotes group board. That's a board that I created and I'm inviting you and anyone else to join and add their own quotes. You'll see that there, I think 50 or so people on this board who add quotes that are great for lettering. Short quotes, all kinds of different topics. Check that out if you're just not sure what quote to use, but I've chosen a couple William Morris quotes. I want to add a little more depth to this background, this blue background, that solid is just a little bit boring and I didn't want to use the dots on this piece. What I've done is I created a brush that is vines. What you'll see with this brush, like all of them, you can adjust the grain and it's a seamless repeat. I'll create a layer above my background layer and just draw that in a little space to see how that looks. You can see the sizing there and you can adjust the scale if you want something a little smaller. I like this medium size so I'm just going to run that all over the background. If you'd like to create one of these brushes, the process is really simple and I'll show you quickly here an easy way to do that. See you can have any flower, plant, dots, anything you can turn into a seamless repeat texture brush. I'll click create custom size, 10 by 10 inches and this does have to be a square. I recommend ten by ten inches because that's a nice large size so your brush won't be pixelated. I'll get black as my color and I'll get the line work smooth brush. I'm going to use that same smooth flowing line work that we've been doing and when you think about a seamless repeat, you have to think where these pieces match up. We've got squares that fit beside each other, so this side will match up with this side, and this side will match up with this side. You can imagine if you repeated this block down here, this vine would repeat up this way, this vine would repeat down that way. You wouldn't want to do this, for example. Because then when these two blocks meet, you're going to have two lines that are right beside each other and they may even cross each other in a weird way, so we don't want to do that. What I like to do is start with a sketch in another color and so I'm thinking about these repeat blocks and I'm realizing if I put something on the edge here, then this area is a no go zone. I'm just going to put a little x right there to remind myself. Same thing here. Going straight across any area where a line meets, I can't draw anything in that area. Let's let those four be plenty and then I'm just going to create some little swirls around the canvas. I'll start with that. I'll get black as my color. The line work smooth brush and make my sketch semi-transparent and then I'll just go through and copy those lines. Once you have all of your vines exactly as you want them to be, we can start playing around with the leaf shapes. I'm just going to do a really simple, variable flowing leaf shape and of course you can make these overlap or not. I'll go ahead and make my sketch layer invisible, I'm just going to continue the same process, adding leaves over this entire document.
13. Finishing Your Vine Brush: Now that I've filled in all of my leaf shapes, I can go ahead and turn this into a seamless repeat for my brush. I will create a new layer, and drag that below this black ink layer and get white as my color. Then I'll go on that new layer, click One time and click fill. We just have a solid white layer. I'm going to merge my black and my white, so now I just have a pure black and white layer. I'm going to swipe left to duplicate that three times. I have four total pieces. This is a way to make a seamless repeat and procreate that I use only for brushes or for digital work. For example, if I was doing something for a seamless repeat for print on demand like society 6 or spoon flower, I would do that using my process in Affinity designer because that is a pixel perfect process. It's going to be very exact and it's going to work well for print. This process is great for doing digital work, like making brushes, because it's not pixel perfect, but it's close enough for digital work. It's as close as the eye can see. But when it comes to printed work, you really need to use a pixel-perfect method. That's why I'm using this process today. The first thing I want to do is move my blocks into my repeat corners. I'll get them really close to the edge, but not perfect, and you can turn off magnetic here because sometimes that can get in the way when you're trying to get things in place. So I'm going really close to the edge, but not completely to the edge. You can see here I'm leaving that tiny little bit of space between the grid lines and the border of this image. Now I've moved those four pieces into the four corners. I'm going to zoom in really closely here, and get these perfect. I'm getting even closer, but not exactly on the grid line, just really close. So you can see I'm doing this progressively. I get really close, and then I zoom in. Then I get even closer, and I zoom in more. You'll see that every time you zoom in, you get a little closer. Now I've zoomed in as far as I can. This is the pixel level. So when I go to the pixel level, I can see exactly where this needs to go. You don't want go too far. You want go right on that little edge. You can see it's not quite perfect, but it's good enough for making brushes. I don't worry too much about it not being exactly on the line. The key is not to go too far. You also want make sure you're not grabbing those little blue dots. You want to move the entire piece. You don't want to resize, so you don't want to touch those little blue dots accidentally. So I've gotten as close as possible, then when I zoom out, I can see that there are some areas that need to be worked on. Some areas that have spaces like this wave, for example, which is cut off right on the border. So I'm just going to turn that into a leaf. Let's do all of our inking on a layer above all of these layers. So now I've got a nice little leaf, and I want to make sure that's totally closed before I do my color drop. I can do something like that. I can add these leaves to go over the border, and I also want to start adding in some vines that meet all of these borders. So I'm just going right across the repeat lines, and then I'm just going to start adding leaves, and until I fill up the entire interior of the space. Now that I've created this block, I can save this by clicking the tool symbol, clicking share, JPEG, save image, and then you can go to any of the seamless repeat brushes like these vines. I'll swipe left, click, Duplicate, click on that brush, click Source, insert a photo, and shoes that vines brush. So now we can choose a different color, for example. There is a seamless repeat over vines that we just created. So you can imagine you can do that same process with any shape. It could be dots, flowers, words, letters, whatever it is you want to repeat on the Canvas, you just need that seamless repeat block for this brush. So now that we've made that nice seamless repeat background, something I might add to the leaves is some dots. I made this dot brush using the exact same process that I just showed you. But rather than doing leaves, I did dots. So you can see how you can easily make some really nice texture brushes using that process. I want to just give a little bit more variation to those flowers. So I'm going get that color by clicking and holding, then I'm going to get a slightly lighter color on the color wheel, and I'm just going to grab the shading soft brush and give these just a little bit of shading, and I think what I'll do is reduce the size of this brush, but bump up the grain, so we get that little bit of gritty texture. I'm just going really gently tap on these and give them a tiny bit of shading. So we could do it all on the same plane. I do want make sure that set to drawing assist with vertical symmetry. I'm going to go on Canvas, edit drawing guide, make sure vertical cemetery is on and just double-check that, it looks good. Then I'll just go through, and I like to do this from a zoomed out perspective. So you can really see how the looks. I'm just adding a little bit of light, and same thing with darker color, I will decide a little bit of dark to the opposite side. Let's go a little bit more orange with that dark color. So that just gives my flowers a little bit more variation. I may not have noted here, I have this layer in alpha lock. So you can double-check that if you click on the layer, and make sure alpha lock is checked, that means when I draw my splutters, it doesn't get on the background as well. That's just one more option that you can do for this type of reductive drawing. Let's go ahead and move on to our last project.
14. Drawing the Acanthus: Next we'll create a line drawing of an Acanthus leaf. This is a common leaf shape that you'll see in a lot of art nouveau designs and art. So it's an essential leaf type to learn how to draw. It's also very flexible, you can change the width and then the height easily so it can fit whatever composition you're working on. This is a set of prints from the William Morris book that I showed you, and you'll notice from his work that he frequently uses this leaf shape. The great thing about this leaf is truly flexible you can fit it into any area. It just has the central spine and then it has these little curves spokes that come out from the edge. Sometimes it has just single spokes like that, whereas other times you'll see these multiple pieces that come out. Sometimes you'll see many layers and other times you'll see just a couple of layers. These leaves are really flexible and it's a great plant to know if you really like this art nouveau style, this is an essential plant to know how to draw. What we're going to do is create one of these leaves and then turn it into a stamp so we can use it in a composition. I'll start by getting black as my color and I'm working at the same size, 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I'll grab my sketching pencil and I like to just start with that swooping S-shape. That's always my very first move in an art nouveau piece, then I like to add in these little markers to show me where to go. Typically, these leaves have a fatter part and then they get thinner. I'm just going to map that out here so I can try to keep that shape going. Then we've got these little S-shaped vines that come out from the side. I'll try to mirror that on the other side, but it's fine for the leaf to not be symmetrical too. Next, I want to decide how many spines this will have on each level and I think these top ones will have four, and maybe the very top one just has two. I'd like to put these somewhat close because then I can do some interesting overlapping. I'm thinking about this leaf interacting with this one. Depending on how large you draw this, you may need an additional layer. You can just play around here with the sizing and you may draw three or four of these before you get one that you really like. I probably did this five or six times before I was happy with this one. Once you're happy with your shape you can go ahead and start mapping out the leaf portions. Again, I'm thinking about that S-shape. I'm trying to always keep that in everything I do and these are nouveau pieces. I usually start with these peaks and then I'll let the previous peak just overlap that one, and I'll come in with these little islands. So these plants overlap often and then they have this little rounded space here where one leaf is laying over another. You don't have to incorporate that on every single part. There's some parts where it just won't really work well. Just try to work that in if you can as you work on this. I think on this piece I'm actually going to add another layer. You may find as you work on these that it's necessary to add another layer and that's fine. I'll do the same process again, starting with the eyelids, again, starting with the peaks, and then working on that little islands. I'm really letting these overlap, I'm not worrying so much about what's going to overlap with what at this point, I just know that I like these really crowded. So feel free to make these pagan chunky and let things get crowded as you work. Once you get the basic sketch down you can, like we talked about in the last piece, do another sketch if you feel like this really messy and you don't like how it turned out. Go ahead and do another layer. I'm going to go ahead and start my inking so I'll reduce the opacity of that layer, get my line with a smooth brush and just start inking starting with my vein. I'm happy with this leaf, so I've made my sketch invisible. You can see that I have chosen here in some places to have the bottom leaf on top and other places to have the top leaf above the bottom leaves. You can just decide as you go how you want these to overlap with each other. Once you're happy with your leaf, you can click the tool symbol, click Share and choose JPEG, save image. Then I can go to any of these stamp brushes. I'll just go to one of these leaves, swipe left. Click Duplicate, click Source, insert a photo, and then insert that leaf that we just created. Once you've done that, you have that stamp and you can use that in a ton of different compositions, so you may want to make a few different ones in a few different orientations. What I did was I created one that points this way and another that points the other way. You may just want to try a few different angles.
15. Layering and Overlapping: To start this composition, I'm going to use my drawing as a stamp and then fill that stamp with the color. The first thing I'll do is stamp my leaf and you may need to make it a little bit larger. I want to make it as large as possible to fit on this Canvas, because I really want to have a high resolution version of this leaf. I want to get a selection of the interior of this leaf. Click the Selection tool, Automatic, click one time. Then I want to make sure my threshold is high, not too high, I don't want to go all the way outside of it. I can zoom in here to see how far this is going. That looks good, that's far enough. I'll create a new layer, get the color I want to use, which is a cream, click on that layer and click "Fill". Then I can make my leaf invisible. Now I have this nice cut out of my leaf. You'll notice it's not perfectly smooth, there's a little bit of jaggedness to it. What you can do is duplicate the layer and that'll help a little bit or if it's really bad, you can redraw. Just grab your eraser and go through and just smooth out these lines. For my purposes, I'm going to make this leaf a lot smaller. These jagged areas aren't actually going to be visible at this size. I'll go ahead and leave that as it is, and I'm going to create a new layer and put it below that layer. I will get a dark-blue and click "Fill Layer". I'll create a new layer and get a lighter blue, and I'm going to use this Printed Ink texture on the background, so we've got just a little bit of texture to this piece. Now I'm going to duplicate my leaf a few times. I've got five total. I'm always duplicating the bottom leaf because that's the original, you never want to duplicate a duplicate, so keep duplicating your original rather than the ones you've already duplicated. I will make them all invisible except for one and I'm going to start placing them around the Canvas. Use the Rotate tool and I'll just resize and spin it around. I'm just trying to get a lot of different angles. I'm happy with this placement, I want to add some more elements into this and rather than having you watch me make each of these elements, I turn them into stamps so we can just go ahead and stamp them. But I think you can imagine how I created these, for example, with this bird I traced a bird image and then I added all of this pattern on the wings. I do go into depth about this process in my class on FOLK ART. If you're not sure how I got to this point, then you can check that class out and it'll be easy for you after that. I'll click the "Move" tool and I want to put this little bird into place so that he's mostly on the background, but overlapping the leaves a little bit. I will really want to create that overlapping effect with these pieces. I'm going to merge my leaves all onto the same layer and then reduce the Opacity because I really want to be able to differentiate between the leaves and the bird. Once I'm happy with the placement of that bird, I'm going to go to my Leaf Layer, get my line work smooth eraser, and just erase one tiny little strip to separate my bird from these leaves. Just like we did in the reductive drawing piece, we're just using this little lines to mark our overlapping areas. You can see there are some areas where the leaves are peeking through the pattern and so I'm just going to erase that so my pattern is visible. Now, I can return my leaves to full Opacity and just double-check and make sure I didn't miss any erasing areas. Now you can see we have this nice filination between my bird and the leaves. I'm going to repeat this same process with a lot of different design elements and you'll find all of these in the stamp section. I'm going to grab the lotus flower, for example, and drop this on the top of the Canvas, and then I'll have to come through and do a little bit of erasing wherever it overlaps with the leaves. I'm going to add another bird, just like the previous bird on the top left. You can imagine this would make a really beautiful repeat pattern because you can really nicely fit these elements together, like a 12 pattern where you have a lot of different elements, but they weave together on the Canvas.
16. Fillers and Textures: Now that I have all of these elements that are weaving together, I want to add a little something so that these aren't quite so spaced out something as a filler. What I like to do for that is some little smooth plant form. I'm thinking about those Art Nouveau forms, I'm thinking about the fluidity and the smoothness of Art Nouveau. I'm just going to do these little loop flowers or loop leaves, and I'll continue these throughout the whole piece, just using them to fill in these little spaces. As easy with these little offshoots, say you have a lot of variation. So I'll just play with filling in all these little intricate spaces in between the leaves and buds. So one last thing I'd like to add into these is just some dots. This is a great way to fill in all the little empty spaces that you don't know how to fill. So it does take time to go around and look for big blank spaces that are drawing the viewers high end and just clear those up. One last thing I'll do is merge all of my drawing layers onto a single layer. So I've got my dots, my leaves, my buds, everything's on the same layer, then I'll swipe two fingers right, and get a slightly darker color. So this is in the alpha box state, and I'll grab one of these dot brushes and just go over that so we get that tiny bit of texture in there, of course, you don't have to use the dot brush here. You could use any of the texture brushes or create your own and play around with a lot of different options for the dots, and of course, our last step could be to try some various color versions. I might just go to the background layer and play around with different colors there. Maybe bump up the saturation and brightness and see what this would look like with some different backgrounds. I really like this turquoise color. You can play around here, see what works best for your personal style, I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. So I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own Art Nouveau style illustrations. 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 illustration, how to use metallic and procreate? How to set up your society six shop and create mockups of your digital art? So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more or like you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the finished project that you create after you watch this class. So please share what you make. You can do that here on skill share in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, 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. So 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 to the link on my website. 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 skill share, or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
