Captivating Designs: Symmetrical Illustration in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to captivating designs, symmetrical illustration in Procreate. I'm Kiley Bennett, an artist and online educator based in Lexington, Kentucky. I'm so excited to be teaching another Skillshare class on one of my favorite topics, Procreate. Every single day, I create digital artwork in Procreate and every day it feels like I learned something new about this incredible program. When I discovered the power of the symmetry tool, a whole new world of creativity opened up and I have been obsessed with symmetrical illustration ever since. In this class, I'm going to show you how to use the symmetry tool in Procreate to create captivating unique designs ranging from simple to complex. Throughout our time together, you'll learn tips and tricks and shortcuts for creating truly unique artwork faster and with more confidence. I'm also excited to share a custom color palette and three all new Procreate brushes with you so that you can follow along and we can create something beautiful together. Once you discover the power of the symmetry tool, I know you'll feel empowered and excited to explore your own unique creativity and all this tool can do. So let's get started. 2. Class Overview + Bonuses: As we dive into this class, you'll find that the content is best suited for someone who is familiar and comfortable in Procreate. If you are completely new to the program, I invite you to take one of my other classes here on Skillshare, the Procreate class. That class is a full and complete introduction to Procreate in a perfect primer for this class. As I mentioned earlier, I'm also giving you free access to a custom color palette and a three brush set that I created just for this class. The brush set includes some of my very favorite brushes I've ever created, a dynamic detail brush that ranges from super fine to super thick, an inky glaze brush, which is great for providing more organic feel, and an extra fine mono line, which is excellent for creating those detailed, fine lines. To access those bonuses, click the link in the About section of this class just below this video. Once you sign up for those bonuses you'll be taken to a Dropbox folder where you can instantly access the bonuses and also see instructions for how to download and install your bonuses. 3. Class Project: Throughout this class, we'll create three illustrations ranging from simple to more complex. For your class project, you're invited to share your version of one or all three illustrations, and as always, so welcome to put your own unique spin on the designs. Share your class project image in the Projects tab below this video. 4. Overview: The Symmetry Tool: In this lesson, we're going to dive into exploring what all the Symmetry tool can do before we create our first project. We first need to create our art board here in Procreate. I'm going to click on this plus sign and click on "New canvas". You can set your Canvas size to whatever size, ratio that you'd like to. I like to create in a square size. If you'd like to create in a rectangle, that's perfectly fine too. I prefer to work in 3000 by 3000 pixel art boards. That's going to give us 70 layers maximum. We could even create a larger art board and still have enough layers because nothing that we create in this class is going to take 70 layers, so that's plenty for us. I'm going to press "Create". How you access the Symmetry tool is by clicking on this wrench in the top left-hand corner of your top toolbar and you're going to check on the Drawing Guide. When you do that, this grid is going to appear, and you want to click on "Edit Drawing Guide". This is where you could actually change your grid. The grid function in Procreate is amazing as well and I use that often so you could, move this up and down if you wanted to explore. That changed the thickness, change the opacity, even change the color of your grid up here in this slider. But we want to turn symmetry on. Down here in the bottom right corner, you're going to see symmetry. Now, I just upgraded to the larger iPad and I noticed that on my smaller iPad, symmetry was in a different spot. Wherever yours is, turn it on, and then it defaults to this vertical symmetry option. When you turn on symmetry, you'll see this vertical line going down the middle. That's just what it defaults to. You can click on "Options" here and you can see some of the other options that they have available. We're going to explore those in just a minute. But for now I want to show you how the Symmetry tool works. But I'm just going to up my thickness of this line and make sure it's really dark so that you can see it on camera. I'm going to click "Done". What's so cool about the Symmetry tool is that depending on what your settings are, it's going to perfectly mirror everything that you are drawing on one side of the board, on the opposite side. I'm going to grab my Extra Fine Modelline from my brush set and I'm just going to start drawing something. You can see that it is perfectly mirroring it simultaneously on the left side of the art board. If I wanted to draw something on the left side of the art board, it is perfectly mirroring that at the same time on the right side. That's really cool. It means you can switch out whichever side of the board you want to draw on. It's going to create that exact same stroke on the other side. Not only does drawing work in the Symmetry tool, but erasing works as well. I'm going to grab my eraser and start erasing and you can see that my squiggly line is disappearing from the left side as well. Then I can also create a quick shape. I'm just going to draw a circle, hold it down until quick shapes fills in. It also did that on the left side and then I can even drop color into it to fill it and it works. Pretty much any tool that you want to use in Procreate is going to be compatible with the Symmetry tool. There's just a very few exceptions and really it's not very often that you come across those exceptions, so that's not something that we need to worry about right now. What's also really great about the Symmetry tool is that it works with your layers and you can easily turn it on or off without having to go into your drawing guide and make edits there. If you click into our Layers panel, you'll see that underneath this Layer 1 which is our current layer we're working in, there's this little Assisted. If I click on this, you'll see that, that stands for Drawing Assist and that has a little check mark beside it to show us that it is turned on. Whenever you set up your symmetry settings, it's going to automatically turn on Drawing Assist in the current layer you're working on. If for some reason you wanted to turn off Drawing Assist, you could just click in this layer. You could turn it off and now I can draw something on the right side and it's not reflected on the left side. If I want to turn it back on, it's the same process. Just click into that Layer, turn on Drawing Assist and now it is perfectly mirroring that again. There are instances in which you want to turn on and off symmetry and we're going to encounter those even in our first simple drawing design that we're going to do in this class. Another thing to watch out for is whenever you create a new layer by clicking this plus sign, Drawing Assist does not default to turning on with every new layer. You have to be conscious about turning on drawing assist in that new layer otherwise, you can start drawing something. You're really zoomed in, you think that it's being reflected on the other side and then it turns out it's not. Learn from my mistakes. I'm going to clear off these layers. Let's go back into our drawing guide and just take a look at what some of those other options do. I'm just going to Edit Drawing Guide. I'm going to open up my options. Let me show you what a horizontal does. Just like a vertical, horizontal is just dividing your art board into two halves and so this is the top and bottom half. Everything that you do in the top half or the bottom half will be mirrored. If I turn on Quadrant, it's now going to divide my art board into four sections and it's going to mirror everything horizontally and vertically, which is really cool as well. Then lastly, if we turn on radial symmetry, it's dividing our art board into eight pieces. Anything that you do in one section is going to be perfectly mirrored in all directions on your art board. Then the last thing that we can do with our Symmetry tool, is we can turn on rotational symmetry. If you go into Options and you check on Rotational Symmetry. Now, what happens is when you draw something in one section, it's going to repeat what you just did in each section, but it's going to rotate it around your art board perfectly. Let's change our Symmetry to Quadrant, so you can see that a little bit better. I'm just going to draw a leaf and show you what that looks like. I've got Rotational Symmetry turned on, and it's perfectly rotating that leaf across my art board. There's a lot of really cool creative things that you can do with Rotational Symmetry turned on. Now you've seen everything that this Symmetry tool can do and now we're ready to get in there, start designing and actually get comfortable with using this tool to create something really cute. 5. Practice Making Shapes: Whenever learning something new, the best way to learn is to dive in and start practicing. For those of you that haven't yet experimented with the symmetry tool before, it's probably going to feel a little bit strange when you first try it. Let's take just a minute to practice making some basic shapes. I've got my vertical symmetry guide on and I'm also using the extra fine monoline brush from my brush set. We're just going to make some shapes together so you can get a feel for how this works. First let's draw a heart. That's one of the easiest things to draw with the symmetry tool. Pick any point in your center. Then you're basically just going to draw half a heart like that. We make that a little bit thicker so you can see it better. Let's try drawing a circle now, which means that we only need to create one half of our circle. Just pick a point in the center and draw a half-moon and then hold down until quick shapes takes effect. It's reading that as an arc. Sometimes you have the option for an ellipse or a circle, but that looks pretty good to me. There's just one little area here that needs to get filled in. Let's do that. As you'll see in the first illustration that we do together, actually think it's trickier to create a perfect circle using the symmetry tool. Oftentimes I just turned it off when I need to create something that's really perfect. Then I'll show you my trick for doing that when we get into that illustration. Let's try drawing something that's a little bit more complex. Let's do a flower together. The main thing to remember when drawing something that's a little more complicated than a circle or a heart is that you only need to draw half the object when you're working from the center point. If I want to draw a flower, the first thing I'm probably going to do is my stem. I'm going to actually try to trace down the center line to get it perfect. I'm just going to hold down on that center line and then I'm going to hold down until quick shapes takes effect. Then that's going to be my stem. I'm only going to need to draw one leaf because it's going to mirror that perfectly on the other side. I can even add in a little detail line here. Then I need to add my bloom on top. Usually I start by drawing the center of my flower first. I'm just going to draw a little half-moon. Now I want to draw in my petals. If you want your petals to be long and skinny like this, then you can try drawing a couple in. Usually I just start drawing them in and then if I need to fill in spaces, I will go in and do that and then try to draw half of a petal here and then fill in the other areas. It definitely takes a little bit of practice to get this right. I'm always getting better and better. Another style of flower that I like to do is more of a retro-looking flower like this. That can be pretty difficult to get perfect on the top and bottom as well. That's why I like to sketch everything out to make sure that all of my spacing looks good and I'll just play around with that until it looks right. Try making a couple of flowers like this and I really think that's going to help you get the hang of this faster as well. Let's turn on the horizontal symmetry tool and I'll show you what that looks like. I really rely more on the vertical symmetry guide to create artwork because that's what feel really good to me. But you can create some really cool things with the horizontal symmetry turned on as well. Something that immediately comes to mind for me is a fish. Let's try drawing a fish shape with horizontal symmetry and see how that would work. Once again, we are only going to have to draw the top or bottom half of the fish and symmetry is going to take care of the rest of it. I'm going to start by going to draw the body of my fish. I'm going to just draw this arch shape there. Then I'm going to fill in the fins over here, so I only have to do half of my fins. Then we can do like that. We'll fill in his body here and give him some scales. The scales are pretty hard to get even when you're thinking about meeting in the middle but it's really good practice to do it. I would fill in the rest of the scales. Then if I wanted to give him an eye, if I have symmetry turned on, I'm giving him two eyes which does not look right. I would go into this layer and uncheck drawing assist in order to give him an eye and maybe give him a smile. I don't know how much that actually looks like a fish, but it's great practice to experiment with the different guides that symmetry tool offers. You can play around with different illustrations that you can make using the different guides. When it comes to using the symmetry tool to illustrate, really the only time that you're doing something unique and different to your normal illustration routine wouldn't be when you're working in that center point. Otherwise, once you fill in everything that's on the center axis, for the rest of your work you're going to be creating on one-half of the artboard and drawing as normally, and the symmetry tool just makes your illustration come together twice as fast. I think if you are ready to move on to working on our first illustration together, you're going to get even a better idea of how this tool works. But if you need a little bit more practice on your own, take a minute to do that and then jump in when you're ready. 6. Simple Design: A Smiling Sun: For our first project, we're going to create a smiling sun together using both the vertical and the quadrant holes, as well as using some other really fun tricks in Procreate. To get started, I'm just picking up where we left off with that 3,000-by-3,000 pixel art board and my drawing assist is turned on and I want to make sure that rotational symmetry is unchecked. I'm going to go into our options and it is unchecked, that's perfect because we won't need it to draw our sun. I've got my quadrant symmetry option turned on, which is great as well. The first thing we want to do to draw our sun is draw a circle, that's usually the first step in drawing a sun. But we actually don't need to use symmetry to draw a perfect circle, and in fact, I think it's a little bit harder to draw a circle with symmetry turned on. I'm going to click into our layer and uncheck Drawing Assist. I'm going to grab a pencil as well. I'm going to go into my sketching pencils and just grab the peppermint pencil, it's the one I like to use. To draw a circle, we want to just draw something that's, I would say a medium-sized circle in the center of the art board. We can scale it up or down later if it's too small, by just eyeball it and see what feels good to you. Then also make sure you hold down on your circle until quick shapes is activated. Then you want to edit the shape and choose circle so that we know we have a perfect circle. We have a perfect circle, but it needs to be perfectly centered on our art board in order for symmetry to work. In order to do that, we want to grab our selection tool, which is the arrow at the top left of your toolbar. We want to make sure that uniform is on because that means you can grab any of these handles and it will scale your artwork uniformly. I'm just going to scale it down back to where it was. You want to make sure that snapping is on, so turn that on as well as magnetics. This will just make it that much easier for you to find the perfect center of your art board. I'm going to zoom in, hopefully so you can see how this snapping works. I'm going to select my circle and I'm going to move it slowly to the right until I see this yellow line appear down the vertical axis. That tells me that my circle is vertically centered perfectly. I'm going to move it down until I see that yellow line appear on the horizontal axis. Now that my circle is aligned both horizontally and vertically, I know that it's perfectly centered and I can proceed with the symmetry tool. I'm going to start a new layer to create our sun rays. As you can see from the reference photo, I like for my sun rays to be skinny. I like for them to be different lengths and different colors. I think this makes it a little more interesting and stylized. You're welcome to put your own twist on them, but I'm just going to start up here at the top and I'm going to start by creating a V-shape outward. I want it to be pretty thin. I'm just going to connect it at the bottom and at the top. If you wanted it to be a perfect copy of the ones that you just created, you can duplicate that layer by swiping to the right on that layer, clicking Duplicate. Then you can grab that layer, and then with snapping and magnetics on, you can just rotate that around until it is perfectly centered on that horizontal axis. Now, I'm going to pinch those two layers together so that they become one because we don't need a bunch of sun ray layers being separated from one another. I'm going to rotate my art board just a little bit and then I'm going to create a longer ray here in the center. That's a good base for our sun rays. We're actually going to leave this where it is now and we'll fill in the rest of our rays a little bit later using a really cool trick. But now we need to sketch in her face. Since faces are only symmetrical on the vertical axis, we are going to edit our Drawing Guide to be the vertical symmetry tool and now I'm ready to sketch in her face. I'm going to create some eyes. Really simple eye-shape, nothing fancy here. Also, this is just a sketch, so you can be a little bit messy. A mouth. Just going to create just really simple shapes. You might notice she doesn't have a nose yet, and that's because the type of nose that I like to do is not symmetrical, so I'm going to click into our sketch layer and then unselect Drawing Assist so that I can quickly sketch in her nose. To create her nose, I'm going to continue from her eyebrow, draw the bridge of her nose and then a little rounded edge at the bottom. I'm going to make her face a little bit smaller and move it down in the circle a little. I'm going to grab the selection tool, and I'm going to select everything and move that down. I've still got snapping and magnetics on, so it's snapping it to the center of the circle, which is fine with me. Now we've got our sun sketch done. We're ready to start laying down our base color for our sun. I'm going to start a brand new layer above, make sure that Drawing Assist is turned on. I'm going to grab this yellow color from the color palette that I created for this class. I'm going to grab also the extra fine monoline from the brush set that I shared with you all, and I'm just going to start inking in just our circle here. It's really easy to ink when you have the symmetry tool turned on because it's just choices fast. I'm going to move that up just a little bit so we can cover more ground. I'm going to create a new layer to start filling in our rays, and I'm going to fill in color for the rays that we have currently. Now that we've got our rays colored in now is a really great time to use that trick that I was telling you about to fill in the rest of the rays around the sun. I'm going to grab this ray layer, I'm going to swipe to the left, and I'm going to duplicate it. We're going to grab it with the selection tool, but we want to check free form instead of uniform and also turn magnetics and snapping off. This is going to allow us to grab onto this green handlebar up here, which is the rotation tool, and we're just going to slide this until it looks about even. I think I'm going to size all of it down just a little bit because the rays are coming close to the edge. I'm going to select all those layers and then grab my selection tool, turn uniform on so that I can scale everything down. If you use this center blue handle, it will keep it centered for you. Let's just move that back up, turn snapping and magnetics on really quick to make sure that everything is nice and centered. There we go. I'm going to hide my sketch layer because we don't need it right now. Then let's see just what a third layer of rays would look like. We might not like it. We can delete it if so. Looking nice and even. Let's see what one more will do about it. There we go. We had to turn it around quite a bit until it was perfect, but we got exactly what we wanted. Now we have a ton of rays evenly distributed around our sun, and it looks really cool and it's in this really great pattern. Now I've got four separate layers of rays, and I don't need that many layers. I'm going to grab all four layers and I'm going to pinch together. Now all of my sun rays are on the same layer. You could leave everything just like this, all one color, or you could add in a deeper, richer gold from the palette, which is what I would like to do. I want to fill in some of these rays with this darker gold to add just a little bit of interest. A really easy way to do that is by using the selection tool. We are going to make sure we're on a proper layer. We want to click on our Selection Tool. Then down here in this menu, I want to click Color Fill, and I'm going to change over to automatic. Whenever I tap into one of the rays on this layer, it is going to automatically fill it with that gold, which is pretty cool, so just tap. I'm going to alternate one by one. So easy, so quick. We've got everything colored in, in no time. When you're done, just click out of that, and now we are ready to start coloring in our face. I'm going to move that face sketch up above so that I can see it again. Remember that we had sized everything down, so I need to size my face sketched down as well. Make sure uniform is on, make sure snapping and magnetics is on, so that symmetry tool will work. Perfect. I'm going to create a new layer to ink my face and make sure that drawing assist is turned on. Now I'm going to grab my monoline brush and that white color for the eyes. Something else that I think I'd like to do while we're working on our face is to give her some cheek. I'm going to grab this pink color and I'm just going to give her some little rosy cheeks here by making a circle and then filling that in as well. We'll work on her brows while we're here. For her brows, I'm going to switch over to my dynamic detail brush because that's going to give me a great brow shape since it is pressure sensitive. Move my sizing up just a little bit. That's going to allow me to easily start thick by pressing a little bit harder at the beginning and then I can slowly ease up pressure and that line will get thinner in that mimics an eyebrow that you'd see in real life. Then to fill in her nose, we are going to click off drawing assist because her nose is not symmetrical. I'm just going to continue that line. I'm going to make it just a little bit thinner. I want to create yet another layer to fill in her pupils and then this line through her smile, so we'll just make sure Drawing Assist is turned on, and then move your sketch up above so that you can see it. I'm actually going to lower the opacity on that sketch so that it doesn't distract me. Now I can uncheck my sketch layers because we no longer need them. All that we have left to do is give her a little bit of a background color. I'm going to click into background color and then select this really pretty soft blue-green, and there you have it. That is our smiling sun using the symmetry tool. In the next lesson, we're going to create a butterfly which has a little bit more detail. But honestly it might even be easier than the sun. You're going to love it. I'll see you there. 7. Simple Design: Butterfly: Now that we created that sun design together, I'm hoping that you have a tighter grasp on this symmetry tool and how it works, and you're ready to move on to something that's slightly more detailed and requires a little bit more illustration skill. That's why we're going to create a butterfly for our next illustration. Because when I think about detailed symmetry, I immediately think of a butterfly. It's a perfectly symmetrical masterpiece that's found in nature. There are endless creative possibilities when it comes to the designs of a butterfly. I'm going to be drawing this butterfly from my mind. I'm not going to use any reference photos but you're welcome to grab a reference photo from online or you can follow along with me as we complete this design together. You could also choose another symmetrical insect, like a moth, a bee, or even a beetle. You can feel free to get creative with the designs also inside any of these insects or the butterfly wings and do something unique. Going to create my artboard and get started with that 3,000 by 3,000-pixel artboard. I'm going to turn on my vertical symmetry tool using my drawing guide and then grab my sketching pencil. Like I said, I'm going to be working from memory on this butterfly. I like to find my own style of drawing. Usually, that happens with me just drawing something from my mind and not using any reference photos. We're going to start with the body, which is the center of the butterfly. I'm going to start with a little circle up here. Then we're going to create a long, rounded rectangular shape. Then we're going to repeat that again, but it's going to be longer and we're going to come to a point at the end, going to size that down uniformly, keeping it centered, keeping the snapping and magnetics on. Then I'm going to do the antenna as well. Let's center that again. For the wings, you could turn on your quadrant symmetry, that way you would have an exact mirror of your wings both vertically and horizontally. But the style of butterfly that I like to draw has a different shape laying on top and bottom but you can experiment with having the same shape of wings on both top and bottom. That would be totally fine. To start with my wings though, I'm going to start in the middle of the body right there and then come out, it's a sweeping motion and then do a little curve. I want to meet close to where I started. I'm just going to have my line join there. That's the top wing. Then my bottom wing is going to be somewhat smaller and I'm going to start in the middle of this top wing, go down. This one's going to be more of a rounded square shape and come up to about the center of the bottom portion of their body. That's going to be my butterfly. Now is the really fun part. You can get so creative with the design on the inside of a butterfly. What I always like to do is create that really unique veining pattern that you see in monarch butterflies. Where you just create these lines that weave and really are unpredictable and really beautiful and interesting. It's almost like no two butterflies are alike. That's the pattern that I like to do on the inside of my butterfly. I'm going to add maybe just a circle shape that fits in up here. Maybe another one right here. Really, I'm just thinking of pictures of butterflies that I've seen online, butterflies that I see in my backyard, and what they look like, it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm going to add some detailing to the edges. Something that I see on butterflies. They have these little dots of color on the very edge of their wings. Then I might connect these veins as well to some of those. Now for the bottom of my butterfly, I'm going to do the same thing without these circles. It's going to start with that vein pattern. I think that's it. I think we are ready to add some color to our butterfly. I'm going to start a new layer for the body of my butterfly by clicking on the plus sign, then I grab this darkest color from the color palette. I believe I'm going to grab my inky glaze brush from my brush collection. I'm going to start inking that butterfly. Got to make sure Drawing Assist is turned on always, always forget. I'm inking this all as one object, even though I drew it in three separate pieces. That's just a way for me to get the shape drawn out easily and color that in. Then I'm going to switch to the monoline brush to do the antenna. Get in there and clean that line up with my eraser. On a new layer, I am going to start on my top set of wings. I think I want my wings to be this dark green color. I really like playing with butterfly colors that you don't necessarily find in nature. I just think that's a lot more fun. I'm going to once again make sure Drawing Assist is turned on. I'm going to start inking that. Don't worry about your lines coming on top of your butterfly body. We can move a layer down in just a moment, going to fill that up. Then I am going to move that layer down below our body so that our little wing edges are tucked underneath the body. Then I'm going to create a new layer and I'll just go ahead and move that one below our top wings. Since our bottom wings are underneath that top wing layer and I'm going to make those, I think I want to make them white, but we won't be able to see them. So let's make our background color, I think we should make it this gray color. I'm going to grab that white now that we should be able to see it a little bit better. Start inking out our wings. Here we go. I'm going to move my sketch layer up above everything so I can see what I'm working on. I'm also going to lower the opacity on that sketch layer so it's not distracting. Create a new layer on top and turn Drawing Assist on. For my veining, I want that to be black. That's pretty typical to what you see on a butterfly. Going to use my Dynamic Detail brush to do that painting on there. I'm going to really let the pressure sensitivity of this brush do its thing because I want this veining to have some personality to not be so stiff, not be so perfect. I'll go ahead and I don't think I'm going to do the bottom in that color, but I think I'm going to do these circles that I drew in the black. We'll go ahead and put those on the same layer since they can be touching each other. On this bottom wing, I'm going to do a gold, and just because I'm using a new color, I'm going to start a new layer and turn on Drawing Assist. Now that that veining is done, I'm ready to add these little details around the edges. I think I'm going to start a new layer because I want to use this softer yellow color here. To make sure that you get your color perfectly on these wings, I'm going to move this layer down just above our top wing here. I'm going to create a clipping mask. That way I can draw outside the lines and it's not going to color outside my lines. Really easy way to go quickly without having to make sure you are perfectly inside the lines. My sketch layer is still above my yellow layer now, but that's okay because we can still see what we're working on. I want the bottom detail edges to be that yellow as well, but I need to create a clipping mask above this bottom wing layer. We're just going to create a layer right above that one and click on "Clipping Mask". We are so close to being done, but I want to add something that I didn't plan for onto the body of this butterfly. Want to add some interesting pattern onto his body. I don't know if that's typical for butterflies, but that's what I'm seeing in my head. That's what I'm going to do, so I'm going to create a new layer on top of everything, I'm going to turn on Drawing Assist, I'm going to grab this darker gold color, and we're just going to create some dots. Then some lines here at the bottom. Once again, I'm sure that's not exactly typical for a butterfly, but I like the way it looks. We're pretty much done. I'm going to turn my sketch layer off and that will complete our butterfly. Let's see it without the drawing guide, it is done. That completes our beautiful butterfly that we made in the snap of a finger using the symmetry tool. 8. Complex Design: Sketch a Floral Motif: For our final design, we're going to create a symmetrical floral motif that includes lettering or topography in the center. To get started, let's set up that art board. I'm still going to be using that 3,000 by 3,000 pixels square shape art board. Once again, you can use whatever size or ratio or board you prefer. The first thing that we need to do right off the board before we do anything else is map out where our lettering or topography is going to go. If you've never used typography in Procreate before, you can check out the Procreate class, which is another class I have here on Skillshare about Procreate, where I explain how to insert font of your choosing or one of the fonts that Procreate has built into it to insert a quote or a phrase or something else using typography. I want to use lettering. I'm going to use the quote, Never Stop Growing, because I love it. It's short, it's sweet, and it also fits in with our floral theme. I know that I want my quote to be in my cursive script lettering style. I've got a couple of options. I could do two lines like that and I'm just really sketching this out. This isn't meant to be my final piece. Or I could do three words on top of one another. I think I like just the two lines there. We're going to go with that. I don't even need to do anymore work because as long as I know that I want it to be two lines, I can just snap this to the center points. I'm going to lower the opacity on this, start a new layer right above, and I'm going to turn on symmetry to the vertical symmetry. Let's turn our drawing guide on. Now, I'm going to draw asymmetrical bounding box around this lettering. I might even get a little bit more creative with it. I might do maybe a little bit of a curve to make it just slightly more interesting. I think I like that better. That way I've got room for my G's on either side, but it's still all going to fit in there really nicely. Maybe I want the sides to be a little bit more straight. Then now from here, I'm going to just hide my lettering sketch because I really don't need it anymore. I'm going to start filling in my floral motif around this symmetrical space where my lettering is going to go in the end. It can be incredibly challenging to come up with enough variety and different types of greenery in florals to fit into this blank space. What I like to do is prep a little element library for myself in another document and procreate. In my gallery I have this little document that's just got some different sketches of botanical elements that I can use in my illustration style. As long as everything's in the same theme, I can use each of these in different scales, different shapes. I can put curves into some of them. I can play with how many leaves I have and how big my flower is. I can mix and match these elements together depending on where I need them to fit in my motif. You can go also so far as to determine what color everything needs to be in this step, but I like to save color for later. Feel free to pause and create an element library of your own that contains as many elements as you'd like in your unique style or you can follow along with me as I go. Let's go back to our art board. I'm ready to start filling in my floral motif elements. I just like to start in the middle and then work outward, make sure that I've got a lot of movement and I want to fit as much on this page as possible. My motifs are going to be on the smaller size compared to the size of this art board. I'm just going to start drawing and I'll talk to you about my decision process here at the beginning, then I'll speed it up and be able to pause whenever I have any tips or shortcuts to share with you. First, I always like to start with a show piece or a hero motif here at the top. I'm going to just start with a stem. I'm going to be referencing back to this flower right here that I dreamed up for this piece. I'm going to start with my stem down the middle, and when you've got the symmetry tool in place, drawing a straight line even is interesting. But as long as Crick shapes take effects, you can get your straight line as good as can be. It's not going to be perfect, but done is better than perfect. I'm going to just draw these little flowy leaves. I like for these pieces in the middle, oftentimes to be bigger. Showstopper hero motifs. As I go I'm going to be drawing in some detail lines as well. If I draw a really big floral, I might balance it out immediately with some smaller ones out to the side. I might add a little stem there to fill in some space. I don't want every single inch of the board to be covered, but I want it to feel like there is no a lot of dead space in this piece. A great way to fill up space with a floral motif is to include some branches that have some greenery and some leaves coming out. Now, I also like to do some small scattered florals out to the sides. I'm going to do what I would consider a daisy, maybe, a bunch of daisies. I'm just going to quickly inorganically draw out the stems. Just like that. It doesn't have to be anything perfect. Then I'm going to go in and just draw out a really funky flower shape, just the easiest flower shape you can think of. That's going to be a good space filler as well. I'm going to go ahead and speed this video up and I'll pause whenever I have a tip or a shortcut to share with you. My sketch is looking pretty good. I'm going to start on a new layer and I'm going to begin inking this in, and then I'll see you when we're ready to do our lettering. 9. Complex Design: Inking in Layers: Our floral motif is all sketched out, it's looking good, and we're ready to start inking. Since we have so much going on here, we are going to need to be careful with the layers that we use for our inking. A rule of thumb that I like to do when creating these floral motifs specifically, is I like to do any of the greenery on one layer and then I'll do all of the blooms on one layer, and then on top of that, I'll do all the centers of my flowers on one layer and then the fourth layer will be my details. You'll see that that's how I do that throughout this sketch. That's just going to keep everything really nice and separated. I'm going to create a new layer and make sure drawing assist is on, that's going to make inking so much faster, then I will lower the opacity on my sketch layer so that it's not as distracting. I'm going to start on my greenery first and I'll see you when we're ready to start that next layer. I've gone in and inked everything that was a greenery element, including some things that I wanted to be a different color just to add some interest. I also made sure to experiment with using the different brushes and the brush set to add some varieties. These gold branches up here, I used my dynamic brush pen because I was able to get some different thicknesses in the lines and the branches, and I think that makes it look a little bit more unique and a little bit more like my specific style of illustration. If I hide my sketch layer, this is what we are working with. It looks super clean and polished and it's going to continue to look better and better as we add in more inking. I'm going to create a new layer and move that just below my greenery layer. This is going to be my floral layer, because most of the flower elements that I have, they are going to be underneath our greenery and I will see you again when we are ready to add our next layer of detail. The blooms layer went really quickly and I'm ready to start adding in my final layer of detail. I'm going to move that sketch up to the top, and then create a new layer on top of my sketch so that I can fill in all of the extra little details that are left. For me, that is to fill in things like the stamens that are coming out of this flower as well as the centers of all of my flowers. I'm going to also add in some detail lines into my leaves to make it a little bit more interesting and unique. I'm going to get going on that and then after we finish up the inking for this, we'll be ready to finish up our lettering layer and then our floral motif will be complete. Instead of being really careful to stay inside the lines with each of these detail lines that I'm adding, you can see some of them are going off to the side. It's easier sometimes to just get them done and then take your eraser and go around the edge of your leaf to erase any of the fall off. That's what I do to save a little bit of time because it is just easier and quicker in the end to erase what falls off the edge rather than to be really careful as you're creating your detail lines. 10. Complex Design: Add the Lettering: I am finally done with all the details and all of the floral elements in my motif. All that's left to do is add that lettering in. But I was looking at that initial script sketch that I did. I'm not really thrilled with the idea of doing a script lettering on this piece after all, because as it's come together, I think that it needs something that's a little more uniform to match the uniformness of the floral motif. I think I want to go for a block lettering style, and I'm just going to make sure that my block lettering follows the curves here of this space that I left open. The quote is still going to work because we mapped it out and I know that I can do never stop and growing and fit it in here. I'm just going to change the style that we're doing. On a brand new layer, I'm going to grab the Pencil Tool and start sketching out never stop growing in more of a block lettering style. I'm going to just sketch out just print letters right now. Then when we ink it that's when we'll turn it into block letters. I'm going to show you my process for doing that quickly and easily. That's looking pretty good, but we need to make a few tweaks. I'm going to lower the opacity on this sketch layer, create a new layer. Then with this sketch, I'm going to perfect it a little bit more before we start inking. That's looking a little bit better. Might want to bring this G down just a little bit. I think this is what I want to go off of and I promise it's going to look even better when we ink it, this is just my process. If you need to do a couple more sketches, feel free to do that. To ink, I'm going to delete the sketch layer that we don't need and lower the opacity on this one that we were happy with, then create another new layer on top of that to be our inking layer. I'm going to show you my trick for creating block letters that are really easy and they take way less time than having to draw each one of these out. I'm going to grab the extra fine monoline brush. I'm going to take that up to 70 percent probably. I'm going to trace over these and let the quick shape feature do its thing to help me get those straight lines. I'm just going to try to get everything pretty even on top of these letters. It's okay if we overextend a little bit because we're going to go back in with the eraser and clean up and square off these edges so that it looks a little bit more like lettering at the end. I've got that all inked up and now I want to take my eraser. I'm also going to set the eraser to the extra fine monoline brush. I'm going to lower the size on that one just a little bit. Then I want to go in and square off the edges of these letters so that it looks a little bit more like lettering. I'm literally just taking this eraser and erasing until that roundness is gone. This doesn't have to be perfect either, so not all of these letters are going to be the exact same height or width or anything like that and we're not creating a font, so don't stress about getting it perfect. Just do your best. Oftentimes, I find that things being a little bit imperfect makes it look more handmade and hand-drawn. Sometimes that's what you're going for. For instance, this V isn't going to be as tall as either E around it, but that's okay, still looks good. Everything is squared off. Looks pretty good. I might take the time to go in here and just make a few changes. Let me go back to that monoline pen and straighten this out just a little bit. I'm going to extend this T or this P just a little bit. These are things that you might want to do at the very end to perfect everything and make it look as good as possible. But one thing that I'm really good at is not stressing about it being perfect. I'm actually really not a perfectionist at all, which serves me well in times like this. I will hide my sketch layer here and take a look at everything. One thing I might do is grab this lettering layer with the Selection Tool. I'm going to turn it on free form so that I can grab the rotation handle and freely move it around until it looks like it's just slightly more centered. I think the only thing left to do is to finalize our background color and then also to add some color to this lettering so that it isn't black. I think what I want to do is make it this gold color that I've used. I'm going to select that. Then an easy way to color everything on the layer at one time is to go into that layer, click on it and click the Select in the menu. You're going to see on your screen you're going to have all these gray and white lines appear. That just means that your artwork on that layer is selected. You want to click on your "Layers" panel again, click again into that "Artwork Layer", and then click "Fill Layer". That's going to color everything on that layer at the same time. Now it's all gold. Then let's click into our Layers and go to our Background layer and play around with what color we might want to make our background. There's just a few colors that I didn't use throughout the motif. I currently have it set to this off-white color, which looks really good. It's very subtle. You probably can't even see it on the screen. I'm thinking anything else for my background is going to be just a little too. That looks pretty good, but we'd have to make some changes to some colors within our motif. The blue looks okay. Looks better on screen than it does in real life actually. That's looks pretty good too. I think just that off white is going to be what I settle on because it allows everything in my motif to pop. That is our floral motif all done. I'm so happy with how it looks and I can't wait to see how [inaudible]. 11. Thank you for joining me!: Thank you so much for joining me for captivating designs, symmetrical illustration in Procreate. I am so looking forward to seeing what you created during our time together and I hope you'll share your final designs with us in the projects tab below this video. If you want to, I would love to see your designs on Instagram or Facebook. You can find me @kileybennetco and use the hashtag captivating designs to share your work and see what your classmates are up to as well. See you in my next class.