Botanical Illustration: Draw a Flower Flat Lay with iPad Procreate

1. Class Trailer: Hi there. This is Esther. I'm a Surface designer and illustrator based in Michigan. Many of you have taken my botanical illustration class. Thank you so much for your feedback. I've gotten quite a few reviews asking for more examples. So that's how this class was born. In this class, we're going to draw together again, not four, not six, but 12 different plants. There were these little exercises. We're going to talk about some of the basic essential and events techniques of digital illustration. I will walk you through my entire creative workflow. Hopefully, you can observe, and pick and choose what works best for you. So grab your iPad or your art supplies. Let's get started. 2. Finding Inspiration: In terms of inspiration, there are many different sources. One easiest way is to Google and use Pinterest and organize images that way, and you can also go to your local botanical garden to take your own pictures. When you do have the luxury to do that, you want to make sure that you capture your images from different angles. For example, if there is this one lovely flower that you really want to draw, make sure you capture it from up front, and also from the sideways, and even from the bottom up so you can use your source photo even to assemble a bouquet, so your drawing will look fuller that way. You can also go to your local library to borrow some books. In this case, I have a book called IN Bloom, and it's written by Claire Nolan. When I flipped through the pages, I pay attention to a few things. One is their composition. I look at how different types of flowers can compliment each other and play as a team and a bouquet, and also pay attention to colors and textures, these can oftentimes be an inspiration in my work. I may not want to draw all the flowers verbatim, meaning tracing after our photo. That is not my own because of copyrighting issues and just out of respect for another artist, which is photographer in this case. Another thing to pay attention to is to look at how flowers look like in different life stages. For example, how do they look like when they're just budding, and how about after 10 days? Things like that will really add depth to your work. When you are drawing, it's really helpful to incorporate flowers from different angles. It's tempting to just draw a front-facing flowers, but adding different viewpoints will really bring your work to life. There are a few ways of taking this class, and it really depends on how you like it the best. You can just binge-watch every video and then start doing your own project, or you can follow along and pause and practice at the same time, and we're going to do our drawing from start to finish on iPad using Procreate App. But by no means that you have to have an iPad to learn all the techniques. If you have any questions throughout the course, please feel free to let me know, I will be more than happy to clarify and explain if you need it. Without further ado, let's get started. 3. Warming Up: Over here is my canvas that is 4,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels. In terms of my layer structure, I have a group of layers for the background and an a color palette that I have imported. If you want to use the same palette, you can grab it from our class resource area. I will also make the background texture available for you to download. Sometimes it's just very intimidating to draw on the blank canvas, I totally get it. If you want to grab them and insert it in your canvas, you're good to go. From an organizational standpoint, I think it would be helpful to use one document per motif. It would just be easier when you do the final composition that you don't have to juggle between all kinds of layers. Once you have a basic file setup with the background texture, color palette and all that, you can just simply duplicate in that file 11 times. So you have 12 exact copy and just open a new file every time you draw a new element. Now I've recorded both my hand motion as well as the screen cast, I'll be alternating these two throughout the class. I'll be using whichever that I think that is most helpful for you as a student, but if you have any suggestions for future recording please do let me know. Let's grab a brush to work with. It really comes down to your personal artistic preference. If you're really into water color, you might want to use a brush that mimic that look and feel. By default, the Procreate brush library has a really rich collection where you can choose from. I really encourage you to pause the video and spend some time to test out different brushes. For this class, I'm going to use a group of dry marker brushes. I got those from Creative Market, which I can leave a link in the resource area. I really like them because the edges of my strokes are still really textured, but it's very solid in the middle. A solid middle can give me a really good foundation to add any additional texture. If you want to tweak your brush, just go ahead and click on whatever brush you have chosen, and it will take you to the brush setting area. If this is the first time you have ever seen the interface, it's probably very overwhelming. There are so many options. As far as our class is concerned I'll just call your attention to stroke path and the second option under that, that is called streamline. If I have to choose, I think this will be the one single important parameter under brush setting. Basically, if you turn a streamline level all the way up, you will discover your lines are more smooth and it seems like the brushes are more elastic and forgiving. If you have a shaky hands like me sometimes, you will find it very helpful. On the flip side, if the streamline level is all the way down, you will find your lines are more true to your pencil movements. It really depends on what look and feel you're aiming for, and you can play with the streamline. But if you are new to Procreate, you have no idea what I've just said, "Don't worry, just pick a number and draw for a while and change the streamline level to something completely different." It's very likely that your hand will be able to tell the difference. In this case for this particular brush, I'm going to leave it around 70 percent. Now that you have your brush chosen, let's go back to our canvas. Just a fun fact, if you use your three finger to scrub your canvas, you would delete anything that is on the canvas. It's a really nice and quick way to erase. Let's draw some leaves. This exercise is mostly for you to warm up your hand. We'll do some very simple motion just to slowly get our mind and our hands to get into art-making. First, I want to lay down some very basic branches to build my leafs upon. There's nothing too special about it, I just want to vary my direction and size. Later if I do decide to use them on a pattern, I have a good variety to choose from. Because we have 12 different types of florals, I'm going to do three at the most for each kind. Now I want to create a separate layer for my leaves. The reason why I want my leaves to be on separate layer is because later if I do apply some texture or effect, it will not affect the branches. I'm going to go ahead and lay down some simple visual guides so that I know how far apart my leaves are going to be. If you want to be super neat about your layering, you can go ahead and even set this visual guides on a separate layer so everything is so clean and it's very non-destructive, which means that if you change the property of one layer it will not affect any other layers. It's always a good practice to have as many layers as possible if you can afford. Sometimes if your canvas is too big, you can only have very limited small amount of layers. So that's a trade-off that you have to choose. Let's have a new layer to draw our leaves. Let me just zoom in so you can see better. There's nothing super special about it, just make sure that you close your shape. I'd like to start from the very top so that I can see the connection points better. Think of any shape that you draw as a container. If the container has holes, it's going to leak. Later, if you color everything, you drag and drop. You don't want to color the whole canvas and you want to target that specific shape. Making sure all the shapes are closed is important, which I'm sure we'll make mistakes later, but that's the ideal. I'm not looking at any specific reference for this shape so I just want to wiggle my lines and go around and draw leaves, so my hands are warmed up. I'm going to time lapse from here so you don't have to see me draw 100 of them. Throughout the class if you see things happen super fast, that's probably for the same reason. In reality, I'm not fast at all. This class took me days to plan and design, and to get ready. What you see is only a very small percentage of edited work. I want to make sure my teaching is concise and to the point, so you can follow along without all the gibberish. But I also want you to know the truth so that you're not discouraged about it. When it's 10 times as fast it's easier to tell but sometimes when it's two times or four times as fast, you can't really tell if someone is just being very fast or it's been time-lapsed. If you ever have any thoughts about it on my class, it's probably because its time-lapsed. I do want to let you know one small trick that I did over here that's been time-lapsed. I'm going to bring it back and show you. Basically, this will let you separate your strokes and your fill. You set your stroke layer as a reference. Just tap on your thumbnail and then click on "Reference" and then create a new layer, and drag and drop the color. The fill will be on the new layer that you created above, but it won't look to the outline layer below, which is the reference layer for the boundary of the drag-and-drop. This is great when you try to decide between, do I want the outline only or do I want it with fill together? At any point, if you want to see what exactly is on one single layer, you can just long press the visibility toggle. It will only show you that one layer. In this case, we can see we have all the leaves fill on that layer and the strokes are on the layer below. You do want to uncheck the reference layer once you're done coloring so that the future layers are not confused. 4. Understanding the Basics: So now looking at our leaves, we have a pretty good foundation, at least for the shapes. I'll teach you a few ways of adding texture to it. I'm going to bring out my color palette layer just to check the visibility, and if I want to only see that layer only I can long press the visibility toggle to temporarily hide everybody else. I can choose a color that works well with the blue, which is this lighter blue, which I think will be a little fun accent color on top of our leaves. So I'm just going to create a new layer and hide my color palette and draw on top of the leaves that I have. I do have a shortcut in terms of color choosing, that is using blending mode. Let me just three fingers scrub to clear my layer. I will sample the same royal blue color. Instead of selecting a highlight color, I'm just going to toggle between different blending mode to see what kind of effect I can get out of the same blue. Just to test it, I'm going to select multiply as my blending mode and start drawing on my new layer. This is really great, especially if you want a color that works well in harmony with your existing color. I already really like this blue color but this is not committing because I can just go back to my blending mode drop-down menu to see what else I can get without actually changing the color and you can instantly preview the effect as I toggle between different choices. So screening is really nice because it usually gives you a pretty harmonious highlight. Color dodger is really awesome too. Just go through the list and see what you like the best. I think I'm going to stay with this multiply. I just went ahead and did the same thing for the rest of the leaves. In this example, all my leaves are facing upward, which is not necessarily true in nature, but I don't want you to overthink too much on our first floral or greenery element, and just go ahead and do whatever wiggly lines your hands want to do and see where life takes you. Say that later you have changed your mind or your client has and they want this angry red to be in the middle instead of blue and here's how you can do it. First, I want to make sure my blending mode is normal. Now I have the exact red that I want to use, I want to do [inaudible]. Basically this means that you're going to lock the transparent pixels and only change the colors of the painted pixels. You can also do that by using two fingers to do a right swipe on the layer and you will see this checkerboard background on that particular thumbnail. You can also tab on the thumbnail and just make sure you track the [inaudible]. As soon as you see the checkerboard pattern appear, you can tap home, the thumbnail again and do fill layer. This will color all the painted pixels to whatever active color you have. I'm just going to undo a few times to go back to my original multiply blending mode. With our highlight color actually being darker, I'm going to choose a brighter color to add additional accent as a texture and I also want to choose a brush that is very creamy and buttery. What I mean by that is that a brush that is very sensitive to pressure. As I'm drawing, I really try to vary the pressure of my hand so that I can bring out the thick and thin of this brush. Just like how real brush works when you press it really hard, the line's going to be thicker, and when you lift your hand the lines are thinner. If you would like to customize how your pens reacts to pressure, you can go ahead and click on the wrench icon and under preference, you will see pressure curve. Go ahead and click it and you should be able to adjust from there. If you are heavy handed like me, you would probably enjoy having your curve bending down and if you're light-handed, you might like having your curves bending up. Either way I feel like it's better than having a straight line to factory default. Any changes you've made here are going to affect all the brushes that you have. That's a lot of information. So I'm going to be quiet for awhile and to give you some space and time to draw, before we move on to the next. I'm pretty happy with what we have over here, but I still want to go over some blending options so that you can see what other possibilities that we have starting from multiply, which is really nice. The first a few options are usually darker as you go down, it gets lighter and the very last options are the darkest that I would say. I like this lighten and gives this little pink highlight and you can choose scroll like I did over here and you should be able to view everything on the fly. I think I'm going to stick to linear burn because I like the intersection, how the intersection is like really dramatically darkened. I'm pretty happy about where we are. So let's move on to the next one. If you have any questions, if there's any gap that I didn't cover, please feel free to reach out to me via social media or on Skillshare. 5. Adding Volume: Let me just pick a different color. Let's go with this dark green, in terms of our layer structure is the same. We have our color palettes layer hidden at the bottom and on top we have a new layer to draw whatever motif we want. In this exercise, we're going to draw a palm branch. If you're thinking about how one palm branch is shaped, is like a boat. Let's get started by drawing the boat shaped structure first. Procreate has a function called quick shape. Basically, when you draw a line without lifting up your pen, it will give you some help making your line more smooth. You can also click on the "Edit Shape" and it will give you a few anchor points that you can adjust. This is very helpful if you want to have a polished look. Now we're drawing the sides of our boat. Doesn't have to be super accurate. This is just going to be a visual guideline for us to roughly follow. Our actual drawing is going to be on a new layer on top of this one. In order to use this but not have it in a way, we're going to dim the opacity to maybe around 20 percent. Then we're going to do our actual drawing at the very top, since our brush is pressure sensitive. I'm just going to bear down heavily and draw the stem. If you want, you can, like I said, click on "Edit Shape" to adjust your anchor points you're liking. You can also of course, rotate your Canvas so that you are working at a right angle that your wrist doesn't feel like it cramped, after a while, I'm going to have my leaves drawn on a separate layer because later I'm going to add more texture or just specifically to the leafs, not to the stems. It'll be helpful to have them separate. Now I have to create a new layer and I want to start drawing the individual leaves. I want to make sure the tips of my leaves ends where those sides of the boat are. You can draw roughly straight lines and you can also wiggle a little bit like I do over here. It's really up to you. Basically you want to have roughly even spacing between the leaves and have them drawn all the way from the bottom to the tip. Also like before, you want to make sure each one of your leaf is in closed shape. You will have an easier time coloring them just with drag and drop, because of the sheer number of the leaves that we have in this particular motif. This can be a really good warm up exercise as well. I'm going to speed up my video from here. Now we're done with the basic outline of our palm tree or a palm branch. I'm going to delete our visual guide because we don't need it anymore. We're going to work on the texture for our leaves. You know where the leaves and the stem connects, there's opportunity to add more shadow. Again, we're going to use a clipping mask to achieve that. I really love using clipping masks, because they are non-destructive, which means that whatever changes that you have done to your layers is not permanent. Which is really helpful because at the end, when you put all the motifs together, you might need to adjust certain color or texture to make all the elements work better together. If you do have a separate layer, that makes it really easy to make changes. To turn a regular layer into a clipping mask, you just need to click on the thumbnail and check the clipping mask. Your mask layer is a tiny bit indented. You can also see the elbow shaped icon to indicate that you have made a clipping mask. Now I'm going to choose a color that is in high contrast with our darker green. You can see the magic of our clipping mask. I'm going to go with this little dark orange. I have my clipping mask layer selected and I'm going to just draw. Actually I'm going to turn up the brush size so you can see better. As I'm drawing one continuous line, you will see that only the parts that overlaps with the leafs shows up and all the gaps are not colored. That's really convenient when we just want to apply specific texture on top of our leafs instead of everywhere. Now you understand how a clipping mask works. Let's get started with our texture. I'm just going to select my clipping mask and use my three finger to scribble to clear that layer. I want to long press to sample the same green color that we have for our leaves. Then I want to go to my blending mode and change it to multiply. Now I'm going to start drawing. Although, we're drawing with the same color, because of the blending mode, it will appear darker. I'm going to select this squash shader that gives us a little bit of sandy look. Let's test it out. Well, this seems a little bit too big, so let's make it smaller, and just to add a little bit of shadow there. This look pretty nice to me. If it's too dark for you, you can always just reduce the opacity. It seems like we're painting on top of the stem a little bit. This can be fixed just by bringing the stem layer up all the way to the top automatically, because we've brought it on top of a clipping mask. Procreate will think, we want another clipping mask on top, which is not the case. Just click on the thumbnail and uncheck the clipping mask. Now we're just going to go around and to do the same thing for each piece of leaf. If you do want to change color, I would suggest to you to play with the blending mode, first to see if anything catches your attention before you select a different color. Usually blending mode will give us some really nice options in terms of color harmony. I would go there first. I'm pretty happy with the little depths we're able to have, so I'm just going to turn it on and off so you can see. If this is too dark to your tastes, you can always change the opacity. Next step, we're going to make some additional lines to bring volumes to our leafs. I didn't study illustration in my college, so I have to do a little hacks here and there to make it look better. This is the technique that I figured out, which I covered briefly in my bonus video in my vertical garden class. But in here, I'm going to cover it in depth. To make it a little bit more easier to understand, I'm going to draw a somewhat exaggerated leaf over here, by exaggerated, I mean, this leaf is actual wiggly. We can see the ups and downs and find opportunities to add volume lines to our leaf. Let's give it a solid color first. If we're looking at the app and downs of the waves, we're definitely focusing on the valleys instead of the peaks. I'm going to use a really obnoxious color to highlight those areas. Basically whenever the curves come in to the center of the leaves, that's where we're going to draw. Basically, we want to grab a white marker or whatever highlight color you choose, and to just draw a line that goes and curves in a little bit more, like a gentle hug, if that makes any sense. You can just pick one side of the leaves to do the little hacks or you can do two sides as well. It depends on how much volume you want to emphasize for your leaves, because our palm branches pretty dense shape already, so we don't want to overemphasize it. I'm going to do it only on one side. The next thing I'm going to do is just to go around the leafs and to give it a gentle hug for each one. Just to review what we have covered, you want to grab a leaf and find out where the shape dibs, where the valleys are and then start drawing your lines. You can also do a clipping mask or a layer mask. For this, it will basically give you a more clean and polished look. But also you can just do the white marker, create a new layer on top of that. It's really up to you. If all the masking actions are confusing for you, you can grab my class. I think one of my class called a clipping mask overlook and layer mask. Over there, I cover everything that I know about masking, so hopefully that will give you a creative boost in your creative workflow. I feel like this part could be the most time-consuming section of the entire class. But I feel like at the end, it's totally worth it because, you know, maybe 20 million other artists are drawing the same palm tree. It's really the details that tell one art is apart from another. I think it's worthy to at least explore what is your creative voice through and in the little details. 6. Beyond Realism: We have so far covered a lot of really complicated wave shapes, although it's warm up, but so like I installed a lot of new concepts to your mind. So hopefully you have that part foundation setup. In this section, we're going to make a really quick fun leaf that doesn't exist in nature, but it just looks really fun. I like to always start with my stems, so that I know what direction my leaves are going to go. I've selected earthy green color for my leaves. In terms of shapes, I just wiggle my way around and then try to align to the stem not perfectly on my way back. Before I move on, I want to show you a little trick. If you hold onto your long hold, your eraser icon, now will change your eraser tip to the same shape as your brush. That makes it very consistent when you erase certain edges. You might not see super clearly here, but if you have a very textured brush, the result is awesome. So I'm going to draw the same leaf shape for the number 2 and 3. This is one the streamline setting that we did at the beginning comes in handy. If you have the slider slide all the way to the right, your lines will be smooth beyond your imagination, which is what I really need. Next step, I'm going to choose a relatively contrasty color to work with. So I'm going to do the same thing for my leaves on a separate layer. Just make sure I want to alternate the peaks and valleys of the leaf so that they can play off of each other really well instead of blocking each other, if that makes any sense. I just want to go ahead and do the same thing for the rest of the leaves here. I'm not really aiming for accuracy here, as you can see, all three layers don't perfectly align at the spine, which is fine. This motif is meant to be the playful voice in my whole composition. So having some misalignment is completely okay. Looking at my leaves, it seems like my spines are disappearing a little bit and so I'm bring them to the top. You can leave it as it is as a simple motif. But as you might have guessed, I'm going to play with the blending mode to see how the colors can interact with each other and maybe bringing a third color as a result of that. The new procreate version that makes it really easy to toggle between different blending mode. So just play with it and have fun and see if there's any fun surprises that you have as a result of this. The pink that I chose initially is a little bit quiet. So I'm going to actually change the color to this bright orange to see if the interaction will be any different. My goal for this imaginary leaf is to be fun and creative and dancing, and just when it's in the composition, it will be a fun voice. I'm going to do some color adjustment based on this vision. To change the color quickly instead of drag and drop three times, I'm going to alpha lock it. You can do that by two-finger right swipe on your layer and tap on the thumbnail and choose Fill layer, and that will fill all three parts all at once. After playing with the different options, I eventually decided to make my stems boulder. So I've increased my brush size and have chosen more happier color and just redraw my stamps. I like how the colors interact with one another, but the texture looks a little bit plain to me. It looks plastic. So I'm going to add a bit of accent on top of my leafs. It's going to mimic the real life leaves, the veins on top of it. It's pretty light. Like before I'm going to experiment with different blending mode before I move on to draw the rest of the veins. Overall, I want this to be a bit of a highlight, but doesn't really compete too much of attention. Color Dodge seems to be doing a great job for this function. I'm going to stick with that and just rearrange my layer a little bit so my stem covers the highlight. Then I'm just going to go ahead and finish up the rest of the highlight. 7. The Non-Flower Flower: We have done quite a bit of leaves. Let's jump in to do a little flower here. Again, it's not really a real flower. If you want to work against a reference, go ahead and pull in your reference. But for here I'm just going to do some random shapes. Feels like a seashell, like a half of this seashell. I'm going to choose a color that I haven't used quite a lot, which is yellow. Let me just zoom in tiny bit and work on some of the details. This one looks a little bit flat to me. I'm going to add a little bit of volume to it by giving it a back color. If you're thinking about a wavy mushrooms or like a quirrell or something like that, they are soft and if you look at it, you usually see the front color and whatever volume that is in the back will take on a darker version of that color. That's what I'm doing over here. I'm just creating a bunch of enclosed shapes. My flower looks a little bit three dimensional instead of flat. On the inside, I'm doing a bit of a highlight over here. Basically wherever the edges curves in, I draw a line from top to bottom to give it a little bit of structure, like a real flower. I'm also going to draw a couple of filament here from the stem, indicates it's a flower. Sometime, if things are too imaginative, people will have hard time to know what it is. I want to borrow at least a couple of real life elements to give people a visual cue of what it is. Now I'm going to do a little bit of organization. I'm going to right swipe the top four layers to group them together. At this point, if you want to make some color changes, the easiest way is to go over to adjustment, which is the second icon. Then select Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. You can play with the sliders until you're happy with the color. The hue won't change the tone of the color, so alternating between all the colors of the rainbow, and the saturation will tell you how bright and how vibrant your color is. Eventually the brightness will decide how muted your color is, really depending on what your preference. You can have a lot of fun here. I do like the yellow, the bright yellow we had before, so I'm going to revert back to that. Just a quick refresher for our flower shapes. We start out with the front face of our flower if you will, it's like a quirrell shape. Makes sure it's enclosed and we want to color it. Then we make it three dimensional by adding another darker version of the color in the back. After that, we use a highlight color to draw a couple lines. In this case, maybe three lines to give our flower a little bit of structure. Last but not least, we add a couple of filaments to make our flower look a little bit realistic. I went ahead and created a new layer under our flower group, so we can have some leaves and stems to support our flowers. This is our element number 4. In the next element, I'm going to teach you some of my shading techniques, so that we can bring more dimension to our greeneries or florals. 8. Shading Techniques: In this section of the class, we're going to focus on adding some really crazy textures and some shading to our simple shapes. Hopefully you'll enjoy it. Again, we started out with just two simple branches, and we're going to go around and add some really midi leaves. Like I did before, our stands and leaves are on separate layers, so when we do apply textures they're not interfering with one another. Right now, I'm just doing very simple outline and coloring using my drive marker brush. Later, I'm going to use a more sandy gouache texture for my shading. If you're not familiar with your brush library, this is a good time to test out your brush. You can do that by creating a blank canvas, and just scribble on it, and leave the brushes that you do like to gather what their name and you raise those that you do not like. You can also just do that by creating one layer in your existing document, or whatever your working document is. If you want to refer back to your inventory, you can just look at it and make a decision quickly. Back to our drawing. I just created a new layer for overlapping leaf. The reason behind is that when I apply textures, they're not interfering each other. It may not make perfect sense at the moment, but when I do apply texture, it will be clear. Long story short, this is what we end up with. At the very top is our overlapping leaves, then the main group of leaves are on the second layer, and the third layer is our stem. I do want to create a new layer under the first one so that we can start doing our textures. I am going to make the textural layer a clipping mask for the main leaf group so that I don't accidentally draw outside of the bounce. Before I start drawing, I want to change the texture layers, blending mode into multiply. I would like some sandy textually rich brush to use. In this case, I'm going to go with, something like this. Probably like gouache, closer to gouache as the medium. I'm going to zoom into one layer and just draw on 1.5 of the leaf. I do want my strokes to overlap with the midline so that later I can use eraser to create a sharper edge. Now on the same layer, I want to pick up my eraser and use a pretty sharp shape as my eraser, so that I can erase along the midline. As you can see if we zoom out, it looks like a shadow. I want to go around to do the same thing for every leaf. As you're drawing, you might also want to consider where the light source come from. If the shadows appear at the lower part of one leaf and you want that to be consistent for the rest of the leaf as well. Otherwise, the optical inconsistency will really throw people off. Remember the overlapping leaves are on separate layer. In that case, I want to create one separate, the clipping mask, just for that layer to do the same job. It may sound a little bit complicated, but it will really save you a lot of time because things are not like all muddled together. You want to repeat the previous steps to setup a clipping mask, and to change the blending mode to multiply, and use the same color to draw, and then erase. Also you want to consider where the light source come from, so everything is consistent. I did turn off the texture we just worked on so that I can focus on the new texture for the overlapping leaves here. Once we're done with the shading, we can get started with highlighting. The logic is really similar. Basically you create another clipping mask layer on top of your shading layer and change our blending mode to maybe like screen or something that's lighter. You can use even the same brushes to draw on the opposite side of the leaf to add highlights. If using blending mode is a little counter-intuitive for you, you can just go ahead and go to the color picker tool to select whatever color you want to work on directly. 9. Bringing in Fun: So far the things that we worked on in this class are soft and whimsical. I wonder if we can use some geometric shapes to break it up a little bit. I started here with some high contrast, very straight lines here, and it's also shorter in comparison to others, because when we eventually put a composition together, we want our motifs to be flexible enough to fill the smaller and the big holes, if that makes any sense. We want to create a new layer for whatever geometric flowers that we end up with. In terms of colors, we have used a lot of warm tones. In this case, I'm going to use a little bit of a cooler color just to balance the composition. In terms of brushes, I'm going to go with a default brush in the brush library. If you go to painting brush folder and you will see Nikko rull, that's the one that we're going to use. Basically it creates this chunky line and it feels like you have done it with a roller. I like that contrast in comparison to our software lines before. I'm just going to go around my branches to create, I don't know, I think I'm going to call it marshmallow flower. Basically feel like a marshmallow on a stick, when you go camping, you make that into some more. I'm going to use that as part of my composition. I have a feeling that this may be the quickest flower that we're going to draw in our class. 10. Breaking the Rules: Looking at the shapes that we have accomplished or elongated. They are rectangle in shape in general. It'll be nice to have something that is shorter, maybe like a circle. The shape itself doesn't have to be exactly a circle, but it'll be nice to have a round shape to fill the holes that maybe it's harder to do with longer branches. I'm not really going off of any reference. But if you'd like to look at any particular flowers, even just to sample their colors, you might be good to add your reference photo to the canvas. Thinking color wise, I have been using earthy, moody colors before. In this case, I went with something much folder and brighter and more contrast. In my opinion, having a little bit of a different ways, whether it's in color or in shape. I feel like it adds a lot of interest, visual interest to your composition. For the actual paddles, I'm going to use the same shape, but a different color with a different wandering mode, and also won't keep it as solid. But instead, I will maybe draw some structural lines just to support it so it doesn't look hollow. As you might have noticed, my videos are getting quicker and quicker. That's because at the very beginning, I wanted to slow down to explain to you why I use certain techniques and how to use it. Once you are familiar with those techniques, I feel like it's more helpful for you just to skim through and to see the speedup version. That being said, if I accidentally skipped through one important step and that makes it harder for you to follow, please let me know by leaving discussion question or reach out to me via social media. I would love to walk you through it more slowly. 11. Centerpiece: So hopefully your hands are warmed up and you're ready to draw a center piece with me. This moment, I'm thinking about maybe peonies or English roses that has many layers of petals really tightly packed on top of each other, and this used to be something that really scares me when I draw, because I want to draw them because they're so pretty. But also there's so many layers, it's just purely intimidating. I have a hack for you. So basically, you draw a tiny planet and one orbit around it. That'll be your visual guide for your paddles to grow out of it. You also want to dot the little dots that I have on the screen, so that you know, that's the root, not the root of the plant, but the root where all the petals come from. With that in mind, let's dim this layer to reduce the opacity. So it'll be like a guide quietly in the background. We're going to start drawing. Starting from the dot, we're going to draw our first petal. This one is likely to be in the back. Then right next to it, we want to draw its neighbor. It will be helpful, if you have some, maybe a few reference picture together at this angle. But it's not required. If you want to just draw what I draw here [inaudible] , go ahead. I'm just going to keep stacking over here. As the petal gets closer to you, the angle may change. For example, the petal over here, you can only see the tip of it. It looks and really elongated. Honestly, this is the hardest part. Once you are done with the first group, the rest is easy peasy. Once you have the first group of petals done, you can start building the second layer. It's a lot easier. Basically it, you find the gap between two petals and just draw half a petal behind it. Notice that, I'm not really doing any coloring right now. I'm just focusing on the direction of my lines and I'm just purely doing outlines right here. I'm also not doing many layers all at once. I'm just building my first group of petals based on the little planet guide and builds my second group of petals based on the orbit around it. It's definitely more simplified and abstract side of things. But I feel like it does equally present the flower in a beautiful way. So that was my first round-off drawing. Actually, I'm going to turn it into visual guide and to create another layer to trace on top of that. The reason why I want to do that is because when I did the first layer, I was paying so much attention on where the outline is going to go. The line just doesn't look all that smooth. So I'm going to try again, by varying the pressure of my hand, so that I can maximize the thick and thin of my brush and really bring this flower to life. Much better. So I'm going to delete my first draft and just use the second outline as the official one. I want to create a layer that is underneath so I can start coloring. In this case, I'm going to choose a different shade of blue and just roughly draw underneath it. I'm not worried about accuracy. So you will see that the edges don't exactly align, which is the point. This flower is more loose in comparison to previous ones. So I'm just happy with very rough outline. Just looking at the two colors, I feel like I want to change the Blending Mode of the outline, so that the contrast shows better. In-between the two layers, I want to create a clipping mask to add another layer of shading. I'm looking at the inner group and trying to think how the shadow will cast on the second group. I'm not going for a scientific, so this looks good enough for me. I'm just going to keep rotating and draw the shadows at different angle. Basically, I want a softer shadow layer in-between the two group of petals. With the same logic, you want to add one more shading layer so that your shadows don't look too flat. This time, the layer is a lot smaller and the color is a little bit darker. This step is highly optional. I actually end up not using this layer, but I still feel like it might be helpful to show you how I did it the first time. Last, but not least, we're adding some dots on top of our flower. If you're feeling fancy, you can do a bit of a highlight, like what I'm doing over here. That is our centerpiece flower. 12. Adding Breathing Room: Looking at the flowers that we have worked on so far, there are solid and dance. To break things up a little bit, we're going to work on something that is really airy and light This one will be playing more of a supporting role for the rest of the composition. As you have noticed, we have longer, and shorter, and strayed, and bent stems, so that in case we have awkward space that these guys are ready to jump in. This is also a really helpful consideration if you want to assemble all your elements together for a repeating pattern. Having a more of a diverse group of motifs, even if you're just drawing one type of florals, having it in different ways and different sizes and directions can be really helpful. Because you don't want to repeat your motifs so much that people can tell where is the repeating block. Having that diverse motif will really help you to bring a composition together. What I'm doing over here is just to draw some normal looking leaves and to add a few, maybe three to five lines in between. This motif is really light. I think it will be really helpful to break up the heavy, dense color blocks that we have worked on before.. 13. Adding Texture: The leaves that we have drawn previously make me think of the water lilies. I'm going to draw something chunky to mimic the lily pads, not exactly, but in a different way. I started out with the front facing side of the leaf. It looks a little bit flat. I added another layer underneath to add a little bit of volume. It's very similar to the yellow flower that we have drawn before. Basically we use two colors to convey this three-dimensional viewpoint. I'm trying to draw a enclosed shape underneath so we can use the drag and drop to color it. But if you really like to use texture, you can also just hand paint the second layer instead of using a solid color block. The second layer looks a little bit blend to me. I pull out my adjustment panel to play with a color. I like using that because I can preview the result on the fly. Next step, we want to add a bit of texture for our leaves. First I'm going to select a green color to add the center line. I don't know what's the technical term for that. As you have noticed, I'm not drawing a straight line here. I intentionally wiggles my line a little bit so that we add more movement to our leaves. As usual, I want to play with the blending mode to see what fun colors that it can come up with. This screen looks a little bit literal for me because I'm aiming for dreamy gardenish, moody vibe. I'm going to go to adjustment, hue, saturation and brightness to change the color. Last but not least, I will add another layer of texture by just simply dotting. This looks really good. Let's add one more magic touch, which is using liquefy. If you go to your adjustment panel, you will see the liquefy option. Just click on it and in this case, I think we're going to go with twirl, either right or left, it doesn't matter. Just play with the size and dimension and the pressure and just lightly glaze over your dots. Make sure the dot layer is selected so that will gently distort the dots so they don't look too round and regular. 14. Adding Movements: The next floral is more like a review session for us because we have worked on the basic concepts and techniques before. Basically we want to draw some really bendy stems on our canvas, and starting from there we build our leaves around it and then we add another layer for dimension. A lot of our flowers and leaves are really stationary. They look like they're really still. The purpose of this is to add a little more movement to our composition. To exaggerate the movement, my lines are actual wiggly, so the waves are deeper. It goes up and down. It's just looks visually more rhythmic. You pick up something soft and bended certain parts tends to wrinkle and it's completely the same way here. The easiest way to learn how to draw this type of leaves is to pick up some fresh leaves, but wait for a couple of days, when they get dry, they tend to get really wrinkly. That's a really good time to do subjects study. If this is the wrong season in your area to pick up fresh leaves, you can always go to places like Pinterest, just to search dry leaves and you will get some really nice composition. [MUSIC] 15. Finishing Up: All right, last but not least, we're down to our last element. We have done most of the heavy lifting in previous sessions, so in this one we're going to create something really light and airy and fits a narrow space easily. The idea behind it is that when we put a composition together, when we have awkward space, this one we can easily fill in. This one is definitely a supporting kind of flower. It's going to be small in scale. I also encourage you to use more of a neutral tone, so it's not competing with our centerpieces. This has concluded our individual drawings of our elements. In the next lesson, we're going to bring all the elements together in one composition. 16. Bringing it together: Right now we have 12 elements in our folder. We're going to do a little bit of preparation so we can get all the files ready to assemble in one composition. The first thing you want to do is to select whatever file you have and turn off the background. It's the last layer of your layers panel. I happen to like darker interface. This is what I'm seeing when I have the background color turned off. If you are using the lighter interface, you will see something like this. Once you have the background turned off, you can go back to your folder. Just click on gallery, and then select the files that you have by left swiping, and you will see three options. One of them is share, and you will be able to select different formats. I would really recommend doing PNG because that will preserve transparency. If you do it in JPEG, even if you have the background color turned off, you will still see the white color. This is really inconvenient if you're planning on using a darker background and you can save the PNG file locally to your iPad and do the same thing for the rest of the motifs. You can also export all your files in batch. Just select all of them and click on share at the top and share them as a PNG file. Once you're done with that, you can create a new file for the final composition. You can tap the wrench icon and add, insert a photo to bring in all the 12 motifs that you have drawn. So once you're done with that, your screen should look something like this. I did not rescale or rearrange while I'm importing so my layers are just sitting on top of each other. They look a little bit bigger than I wanted. I am going to rescale them in batch. To make this process simpler, you can just write swipe every layer you want to group together and put them under one group. You can go ahead and use the selection tool to resize them. One thing you do want to pay attention is not to accidentally stretch any of them. You want to turn on the magnetic. Once they're in a pretty reasonable scale, and you can work on the layers one by one. I want to do the centerpiece first, and turn off the rest of the layers and then rearrange them accordingly. This is my process. I turned on the center piece first, and activate one layer at a time. In my work, I don't really overlap my motifs on top of each other. I'm really trying to fit the space with the shape of the motif. Eventually it will look something like flatly. I did need to adjust the colors for some motifs. All I did was to pull out my adjustment panel for hue saturation and brightness, and just fine tune from there. At the end, I dotted some blank space with circles and I used the liquefy tool to make those circles look a little bit irregular, and I also played with the darker background. As you can see in our cover photo for this class, I ended up really liking that version. This concludes our flower flatly class. It has been really fun to come up with the class and designing a plan and record and edit. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you following along. If you have any questions, please let me know on Skillshare or through Instagram or YouTube channel. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Until next time, happy drawing. 17. Bonus: How to Watch While You Draw: In this video, I'll quickly show you how to use the multitask function on your iPad to watch sculpture class on one side and follow along on the other. Over here I have my procreate open. Also on my home screen, I have the Skillshare icon stacked at the bottom. That's important. One of the first thing you want to do is to pick a class already on Skillshare. The reason why you want to do that is because sometimes the UI doesn't scale super well. It's good to have a class selected already. Now we jump back to procreate and double-click on your home button. You might be tempted to just click on this icon and try to stack over. It doesn't work like that. You have to select the Icon from the very bottom. Sometimes it's tricky. Try again and then hover over, procreate without releasing. You just put it on the side. Now you have a half, half split screen and you can also drag it to change the proportion. If you're okay just watching with this much on your screen and that's fine. You can follow along drawing. You'll have full function, procreate as well. You can just click on "Play" button to watch your process. Whenever you're done with it, you can just drag it to the side. Again to burn it over, you just grab it from the bottom and hover it over. If you want your window to be floating, instead of stacking to this side, you can just let go. You do have the option of dragging it around. Resizing is a little bit tricky. I guess you have to have this skinny tall thing around. I would probably just put it on the side. Something like this. I hope this is helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions.