Cityscapes Made Easy: How to Digitally Illustrate Your Favorite City in Procreate

1. Course and Teacher Introduction: Hi. My name is Nick. I've spent my career at agencies, startups and big tech working as an illustrator, animator, and art director. But I've always been active sharing personal work on social media. I was surprised when the cityscape saw they just draw for fun, bloop overnight. I love drawing in the style and my goal with this course is to share that ability no matter your skill level. If you bought an iPad last year and downloaded Procreate with the best of intentions but got stuck because you didn't know what to draw or had a hard time finding inspiration I think this is the perfect class for you. If you're wondering how I know what buildings looked like from above or doubting your ability to draw with perspective I'll give away my biggest secret right now. Google Earth. Lots of major cities have been mapped in 3D so I explore the world on my iPad, screenshot interesting compositions and trace. Of course, there's so much more than tracing. We'll cover composition, line work, color thumbnails, blending modes, and every tip and trick to go from something like this to this. I'll be working in Procreate, but feel free to use whatever drawing application you are comfortable with. I've got my process down to a science by now. As long as you have stylists and some time on your hands, you should be good to go. You can follow along with the same cityscape I'm making or choose your own, the approach will basically be the same. Finally, this course is illustration only. I'm saving animation for my next class. However, we'll cover considerations for the drawing that would affect animation in the future. I really appreciate you being here. Let's go exploring. 2. Choosing a Composition: In this video, I'll show you how I find my compositions. You can open up Google Earth on your tablet, phone or computer and get to looking around. I love drawing New York City, so that's where I'm headed. You should feel free to follow me to New York or choose your own location as the method I'm teaching will work wherever. But there are some things that are important to keep in mind. First, Google has three map a lot of cities in the world, but not every last one. There's a chance that place you're looking at appears flat like this instead of this. Next, because we're tracing on top of our reference photo, I always make sure I'm not setting myself up for more than I can choose, so I avoid shallow angles that show building's going off forever and the distance. I keep the angle steep to limit what I'll have to draw, and I recommend you do the same. Lastly, I illustrate all my cityscapes at a four by five ratio so that I can sell them as prints for common sizes like eight by 10 inches. But I also create animated videos to share on social media, which are nine by 16. If you think you'll want to take the animation course I'm making after this, keep that in mind and give yourself enough space to account for both sizes. Back to New York. I'm liking this composition for those wanting to draw this same scene, it's the Essex House just off Central Park. The buildings aren't too complicated but not too boring. I've got streets that are simple straight lines and trees along the bottom. I'll take a few screenshots from various angles until I find just the right one. I've attached the screenshot I'm working from in the class materials along with other reference photos I've used in previous cityscapes. Find your composition and in the next video, we'll set up our canvas. 3. Setting Up the Canvas: In this video, we're going to set up our Canvas and get our brushes sorted out. Let's open up your drawing application and set up the Canvas. I'd like to illustrate a two times the size of what I think the final size will be. Because I want to sell these at eight by 10 inches, I'm going to choose inches as my measurement and set the width to 16 inches and height to 20 inches. I also like to set my DPI at 300, this basically ensures that the image will look good no matter how much you scale it up or down. I can also see that at this size, I'll be able to have 61 layers at most. If you're on Procreate and your number is different, it just means we have different iPad models, but no worries we're going to try to keep our best to keep layers tidy and as few as possible. If you want to get into color profiles, I set mine to RGB instead of CMYK. With our Canvas setup, let's talk about brushes. In the class materials I've included.ABR file, which is for brush types. There are tons of tutorials out there for importing brushes and since we all might be using different programs, I'll let you figure it out. We're only going to be using two brushes for the whole drawing. The first is a rough brush for line work and filling in color, the other is a grainy brush for adding texture. You likely already have brushes available similar to these, so choose your own or install mine. In the next video, we'll import our reference photo and start drawing. 4. Outlining the Scene: In this video, we're going to outline the scene. Let's import our photo to the Canvas and get it positioned just how we want it. If you want to draw less, Zoom in. Remember to keep in mind the 4 by 5 the 9 by 16 considerations. We'll drop the opacity of the images so our lines are easy to see, create a new layer for the outline, and get started. At this stage, we want to capture the outline of the road, trees and buildings. We're not adding details or windows, we're just want to map for where we're going. Let's first define the sidewalk. In procreate, you can draw a line, hold the stylus in place at the end and they'll automatically straighten out. I use this all the time to get fast, clean lines. As we move into the buildings, the biggest thing to keep in mind here is that we're simplifying. You can draw as much or as little as you want, but try not to get caught up in the details. A trick I use all the time to tell what's important and what isn't, is to squint. Things look a little blurry and the shapes become more general. These are the shapes we want to capture. Here's a good example where I'm disregarding all the complexity of that roof and putting a flat box around it. Feel free to make things up as well. Now that the buildings are done, let's go back down to work more on the ground and the trees. As you can see, our view of the sidewalk is blocked. Sometimes I'll go into Google Earth and look around to get an idea of what's going on underneath the trees, and sometimes I'll just make it up. Let's finally add our trees. This isn't something I attempt to trace, I just look at where the trees are generally and start drawing circles of various shapes and sizes. I don't like to make big clusters, so give them some space. Hide the background image to get a feel for what you've got. It should look something like this. It's okay if yours is a little different. One One I've noticed is that in all these areas where we have a bunch of vertical lines, without the background image, it's hard to tell what's going on. I'm going to make a few lines that inform me of the shape of the building. I'm just looking at the windows and drawing lines that follow that same perspective. Our lines good to go. In the next video, we'll move on the color. 5. Creating a Color Palette: In this video, we'll determine our color palette. First, I have to decide what season or feeling I'm aiming for. I think I'd like late spring, so warm and bright colors. I'm going to go to Google and start looking for photos that when I squint at carry that feeling. Now, I know that we'll have buildings and trees in this drawing. So while the image doesn't have to be a cityscape, I do want to make sure it's got some greens to cover the foliage. Buildings can really be any color, but I just want a cohesive variety to choose from. I think I felt when I like, I'll import the immature Canvas, but we don't want to just color pick from this image as is. Here's why. If you zoom way in, you'll see that this tree is made up of pixels of so many colors, we want a simplified palette. Here's a trick on Procreate and Photoshop respectively to turn this into this. In Procreate with the color reference photo layer selected, press the cursor button. Along the bottom, you should see an icon that says Nearest. This setting handles re-sampling as you scale your image up and down. You have nearest neighbor, bilinear, and by cubic. This will only work if set to nearest neighbor. Make sure that transform type is set to uniform and scale the image down until it's only 20 or 30 pixels wide. Place it by tapping the cursor so that the transform handles disappear. Then tap the cursor again to highlight. When you scale this image backup in place it, it becomes a pixel grid. This takes the average color of that given area. In Photoshop with your image selected, go to filter along the top, pixelated, and mosaic. You can set yourself size and you'll see your palate simplify. Back to procreate. Now that I have my palette, I'm going to play with the colors a bit, increasing the saturation and brightness until it feels just right. Now we want to create five groupings of colors. In a new layer called palette, the first color is for the sidewalk. I like to use cool grays and tans. Second is for the grass, two to four shades of green will do just fine. Third is for the trees. I'm aiming for mid spring, so I'm adding a couple of greens and pops of yellow and orange. Fourth is for the buildings. I want them to be more colorful than real life, but I don't want any one building standing out over the other. They're all pretty similar and saturation. Lastly is for the people in cars. Because these are the smallest elements in the scene, I like to choose a rainbow with more saturated colors. Let's take those colors and put them off to the side. In the next video, we'll make our color thumbnails. 6. Creating Color Thumbnails: In this video, we'll create color thumbnails. Color thumbnails are an important part of the process. It allows you to quickly play with colors and get an idea for the end product before committing to a given palette. We're going to create a new layer underneath the line reference layer and call it thumbnail. Let's grab a random fat brush so we can lay color on quickly. The point here is to be super loose. Don't worry about coloring in the lines. First I'm going to lay down the sidewalk color than the grass for the buildings I start in the back and work my way forwards. I don't have a real science to coloring, I'm just picking them from my building palette at random and making sure they're spread out. I color in the trees last, I'm taking another quick pass, adjusting or changing colors. I'm just making sure that there isn't one building that stands out above the others. Now I'm playing more with the colors, changing the brightness, contrast, and hue. Sometimes I'll use a yellow fill and change the blending mode to see what happens. We want to end up with a few options alongside one another. This is the same thing you do for a client, presenting a range of options. Once we've chosen the color thumbnail, the last step is figuring out where the shadows are going. I want to quickly create four shading options is if the Sun were coming from four different directions to help us finalize our color thumbnails. Depending on what the color of the underlying material is, shadows can be all sorts of different colors. I like to simplify this process using blending modes. First, you're going to create a new layer on top of everything else and change the blending mode to multiply. I like to use purple for my shadows, but any cool color will work. It's just a matter of what you want the mood to be. As you can see when I paint on top of my thumbnail, it's going to darken the area beneath imitating these shadows. I think I like the bottom-left option. I'm going to grab my final thumbnail, scale it down and placed in the quarter for referencing. In the next video, we'll lay down the base color for a final piece. 7. Painting the Base Layer: In this video, we'll lay down the base color. Now that we have the outline and the color thumbnail, we have all the information we need to get started on the final illustration. Let's start with the sidewalk. I'm creating a new layer, naming it concrete, picking from my reference, and filling it in like a coloring book. Next, I'll color in the grass in a new layer called, can you guess? Grass. Then comes the buildings. We can make each building its own layer, but then we'll have a ton of layers, and I think that's more trouble than it's worth. But I am going to separate the buildings into two groups; the background and the foreground buildings, to have a little break. Let's keep coloring. One thing to note is that when using a color fill feature on really any painting program, you see a faint line where your shape wasn't completely filled in, I always go back around and clean this up. Also, when your color picking from your reference, make sure not to pick the areas in the shadow. We want to use the unshaded colors. For the foreground buildings, I'm going to show you a slightly different approach to coloring using a clipping mask. I'm going to create a new layer and call it building front. I'm using a random color to fill in the silhouette of the entire group of the buildings in the front. Now if I create a new layer directly above it, lay on the blue pane of this particular building, I can go back to my layers, tap it, and make it a clipping mask. It clips the color to the shape beneath, while I'm coloring, I don't have to worry about the outer edges. Next come the trees. This will be a new layer and I'm taking my rough line brush and simply scaling it up to create the tree so it's got that leafy rough edge. I'm turning off my outline layer and let's see what we've got. It never hurts to go back and clean up some of those lines. In the next video, we'll make the cityscape pop off of the screen with shading 8. Shading the Cityscape: In this video, we'll go over shading. For me, the shading is the glue that holds the illustration together and makes it pop off the screen. We'll split up the shadows into a few layers to make things more organized. First, we'll create a new layer for the ground shadows above the ground layer, but below the building layer. I like to use a cool shade of purple because when this layer is set to the multiply blending mode, it darkens the colors beneath it. I'll first paint in the shadow being cast from this building. Once you establish the angle of the shadow, make sure the rest of your ground shadows are close to the same angle. Next, I work in the trees, which is just a angled oval shape. It's far from perfect, but that's what we want. When I set the blending mode to multiply, I lower the opacity to 50 percent or so and we can already start to see how the buildings and trees are lifting off the screen. Next, I'll add the shadows with the foreground buildings by creating an additional clipping mask layer. With the outline layer turned on, I'm going to shade all of the sides that aren't facing the sun. Here on this red building, we have a circumstance where part of the roof would be shaded. Here's a quick way to figure out where the shadows fall. I'm creating a new layer for reference called shadow line and tracing the angle of the cast shadow on the ground from that building. The cast shadow should all be roughly the same angle. If I line up where the corner of the roof meets the building, that shows me where the shadow should fall. Soon it'll become second nature and I strongly encourage you to work loosely. There's going to be so much going on in this illustration that no one will notice a shadow that's slightly off angle, if anything, mistakes just give it a character. Once all the buildings are done, we'll move on to the trees. They'll all have a similar shape to their shading being a crescent moon. I've dropped the opacity of the brush a bit so I can create a gradual shadows since the trees are shaped like an orb and therefore won't have hard shadow edges. Now you could go through and paint these one-by-one and be meticulous about where the trees overlap, but here's a shortcut. If you press the selection tool to change the type to automatic, you can tap on a color and it'll select all the shapes within that color on that layer. Now the specific tree color selected, I'll move over the shadow layer and we can quickly shade and move on to the next color set. Once we're done, again, we set the blending mode to multiply and drop the opacity. In the next video, we'll add texture to the scene to give it some more character. 9. Adding Texture: In this video, we're going to be adding texture. Texture is illustration character. It makes it feel lived in and it's an essential part of my process. Grass and concrete layers always get a texture treatment and they're done the same exact way. Let's start with the grass. I'll create a new layer above it, make it a clipping mask, and name it grass texture. With my grain brush set to about 50% opacity, I'm going to feather in a darker green color around the edges of the grass. This gives it some nice contrast. Feel free to use multiple shades of green, but keep them all relatively subtle. I'm doing the same thing with the concrete layer. I have one more optional layer of texture. I like to think of it as my signature that probably no one recognizes, but I use triangles. You can see them in all of these illustrations. I think it helps to sell the perspective. All I'm going to do is create a new clipping mask on top of the grass layer and call it grass triangle texture. Using the Lasso tool, I simply create flattened triangles. It's a bit hard to tell, so give them a temporary red feel for you to see. Let me undo that and now I'll go back in with my grain brush and a darker green and color and the edges, keep it loose. I'm going to set the blending mode to multiply and lower the opacity until it's just barely visible. Again, texture is all about subtle touches. See the difference between texture and no texture? In the next video, we'll be adding line work back into the illustration. 10. Finalizing Linework: In this video, we'll add parts of the original line work back in the illustration, and I'll show you shortcuts for adding details like windows. Let's unhide the outline layer and drop the opacity. We're going to use this as a guide. The rule I go by is pretty simple. Whatever edges aren't defined by a difference of color will be defined by a black line. You see this roof edge, the shadow is defining this edge so we don't need a black line. You see this building where the roof edge goes from shadow to light, I'm only going to define the edge completely in shadow. Next, I always add little stems to the bottom of each tree to give them some grounding. Now for my favorite part, the windows, if you look around the original reference image, we have so many different shapes of windows, you should feel free to take as many creative liberties as you want with this, you can make it true to life or simplify them. We're going to be doing a bit of both. The problem with free handing windows is that windows are meant to be the same size and spaced perfectly. It's really easy to spot mistakes when you're expecting consistency. To make it harder, the windows on the bottom of the building will be differently shaped and what's on top due to a change in perspective. But I've got a shortcut for all this. Let's disregard the windows below and on a new layer, draw a simple rectangle with all right angles, no perspective. Then I duplicate it and shift it over. I merge these two window layers together to form one and duplicate that and shift it over. I'm going to keep merging and duplicating until I've got one layer that's a big grid of uniform windows. To apply the new building, I'm going to make a duplicate so that I can preserve the original for other buildings and use the free form distort tool to warp the group until it matches the angle of the buildings. Once one side is set, I'll duplicate it, mirror it, and warp it to fit the other side. You can unhide the reference image and drop the opacity until it's just barely visible to indicate how to warp the windows. As you warp and scale, you might notice the lines become irregular in their thickness. I like to have mine is close to uniforms possible. So in this case, I'll just duplicate this side and slightly offset it to increase the thickness, then merge the layers together. As I work my way throughout the city, I'll create a few more variations of windows using this method. Also add details like doors or lines to the rooftop. I take inspiration from the reference image and find simple ways to suggest similar shapes. Here's some examples. We're in the homestretch now. The final video is going to be adding cars and people. 11. Drawing Cars and Crowds: You made it. In this final video, I'll show you my shortcuts to creating cars and people. I create a new layer called cars. I'm going to use my line brush and a random color to draw the individual lanes of traffic. If you want three lines on the street, draw three lines. I like to use the draw and hold method to create perfectly straight lines. I'm going to be erasing sections of the line to create the cars. On a new layer, I'm drawing some reference lines perpendicular to the angle of the street to help me understand how the car should be shaped and now, start erasing. Create as many or as few as you like. I just tried to ensure that there's plenty of variation in space. To color them, I'm going to unhide our palette layer and color pick from it. In a new clipping mask above the car layer, I'll start coloring them in. If your cars are appearing above the ground shadow layer, you could either move that layer underneath the ground shadow layer or just set the car layer blending mode to multiply and they'll mix in with the shadows. To create the people, I could do them one by one, but this takes way too long. I create a new layer called people and draw a small group of 10 to 20. Use as many colors as you want taken from the palette. Now I'm going to duplicate the group a bunch of times and start to space them out. I go through and clean up the people I don't want and erasing those appearing on top of the tree. As of right now, the people who are appearing above the shadows, but unlike the cars, we can't set them to multiply because we don't want them to be translucent. I'll create a clipping mask on top of the people and use the same shadow purple to fill in the people falling the shadows. When I change this layer to multiply and drop the opacity like we've done a thousand times before we have people in shafts. The final step is adding cast shadows to people. I don't have a shortcut for this. I just go through and on a new layer underneath the people, I draw in the shadows one-by-one. Set your blending mode to multiply and drop the opacity. That should be it. You're all done. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking interest in this course. I hope it makes illustration feel a bit more accessible and I love to see what you create, so please share it with me. If you're interested in animation, keep a lookout for my next course on animating these cityscapes. See you around.