Coloring Easy Characters in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hey everybody, Welcome to my new skill share class, which we're going to go over how to add color to simple characters that we drew in Procreate. My name is Travis, Say Thompson. If you missed the first lesson, you can find it linked below or you can go grab the picture that we drew down in the description. It's a PNG file, so all you have to do is just save it to your ipad, save it, and open it up in procreate. And then you can follow along with the steps, or like I said, you can go watch that first lesson to learn exactly how we drew those simple characters. All I'm using today is my ipad Pro 12.98 screen and my second generation Apple pencil. Let's stop talking. Let's start drawing a. Let's go. 2. Preparing our Canvas: All right, so today we're going to be practicing and learning how to add color to a character. This is a continuation of a lesson that I did in another class. If you missed that lesson, be sure to go check it out. But I'm also going to include the PNG version, this character, and the PNG version of this character. So that you can easily follow along with how to add color my way and procreate. If you are starting from nothing at all. You're going to go ahead and open up the PNG that is linked in the class, otherwise you're just going to use the picture that you already drawn. Or if you have a black and white character that you'd like to follow along with, you can do that as well. But I'm just going to do the boy character to make things a whole lot easier. So let me open up another canvas. I'm just going to duplicate this canvas really quickly so I can close out all the other layers. All right. Now I have this listed as boy, as you can see, I still have my drawing assist turned on. If you are new, you're going to make sure you go into canvas under the settings icon. Go to canvas, go to Drawing Guide. Turn it on. Edit, Drawing Guide. Make sure you have symmetry chosen. Opacity is at max, thickness is at max. And I just chose like a pink color for the line. We're going to be toggling this on and off, but we're going to use this to make it a whole lot easier when we're adding on our different layers. There are many different ways to actually add color to your drawings. So this is just the way that I do it, This is what works for me. And I'm going to only use brushes that come standard with procreate. So right now I have my boy layer. It is listed as being assisted because we just went through the whole drawing guide thing. I'm going to drop down the opacity of my boy layer to about 25. And then I'm going to add a layer and I'm going to hold onto this layer and I'm going to drop it below boy. All layers that I add are all going to be underneath the boy layer. So I'm just going to start off on layer two. We're going to go back and rename these later. 3. Adding Colors in Layers: The first thing you want to think about when you're adding color is when I add my colors and layers. You always want to think about what's the furthest thing back then we just add stuff in front of that. When I look at this, the legs are behind a lot of stuff. This arm is behind some stuff. We can even consider the hair to be behind some stuff as well. Sometimes you can put the hair in front, sometimes you can put it back. But today we're going to put the hair in the back. On this layer that we have layer to, we're going to tap on it. We're going to rename it hair. All right, The brush that I'm going to use, we're going to come over to our brush library. I'm going to go to inking, and I'm going to go with studio pen. I've modified some of mine to make a more streamlined, but for now I'm just going to use it just as it is and procreate that way. What I'm creating looks exactly like what you have available to you with the standard studio pen brush. That's what it's going to look something like. I always remember tap with two fingers to undo. Tap with three fingers to redo. Of course, you can choose whatever colors you want. So I'm just going to choose a dark brown color. Come to my color, Will brown is always in the orange family going to come down to a dark brown. I may alter these later and this is going to be very flat colors. Right now, like I said, we're on hair and all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to trace the hair. One thing you have to always be careful, be careful with procreate is accidentally tapping the screen. While I was just talking. I tapped the screen, I made that mark, and I've made the mistake of not catching these, having a product printed, and then finding little dots from where I guess I accidentally touch the screen. So just be mindful of that, I'm going to do is I'm going to start off tracing the hair. This is going to be the same process for every layer now, because the hair is going to be behind everything. I don't need to sit here and do all of this. I can actually go from here and go all the way across. Go here, because the hand is going to cover up here, and then we're going to put the face on top of this. Now your choice is you can sit and you can color the whole thing in. But that might take some time. Or you can grab the circle, pull it over, and drop it. Now, depending on the brush you use, you may have to change the threshold so that it fills in more. Let's say for example, I did threshold zero. When you zoom in, you're going to see this little line right here. And it may make you feel like you need to go in and edit it like that. But no, that just comes from when you're dropping in the character. I mean dropping in the color, you need to move your brush over until the entire area is filled. Also, keep in mind when you're drawing areas to fill in, if it is not an enclosed space, when you go to try to fill in that area, the color is going to leak out through whatever it is that you drew. So just keep that in mind. All right, so we have our hair down here. I'm going to turn hair off and I'm going to add a layer above here. Hair is going to be back here, face is going to be in front of the hair, but the neck is behind the face and all this other stuff. I think the best thing to add next is going to be for the skin. We're going to do this arm and we're going to do the legs because they're behind other things. You want to think about it. We're stacking up the layers. So we want to keep in mind what's in front of what. So we're just going to call this one skin one. Whatever skin tone you decide to add, grab that. I'm going to do this arm, I'm going to come up in here because this shirt is going to be in front of this hand and arm, and the shorts are going to be in front of it as well, so I don't have to worry about these parts over here being a little messy. Drag and drop My color in the same thing with the legs doesn't have to be perfect because of how it looks. Dragon drop. All right, so now I'm going to think what's in front of the legs and the next thing I can do is either the shoes or the shorts. I'm going to go ahead and add on the shorts. I did not do this hand, excuse me, because this hand is in front of the face and it's in front of the hair. Add another layer. This is going to be renamed, two shorts, going to choose some random colors. I'm going to turn off skin one, so I'll move that back into the camera. And there's always, these don't have to be perfect. So if we turn on everything we've done so far, that's what our colors are looking like. All right, now I'm going to, what do I want to do next? I think I'm going to add on the shirt. Next. At the shoes, I'm going to rename this layer to shoes. And let's make his colors complimentary to each other. So I'm going to go back, this green color that I use for the shorts. I'm going to come up to my color wheel. Going to come over here to harmony. Right now, I have analogous chosen, analogous means beside each other on the color wheel. If we tap on analogous, we have some other options, whether it's complimentary split, complimentary analysis, analysis, analogous, triadic or tetradic. If we do that, we get three color choices that are compliment each other. This one gives us four. I'm going to stick with this one for now. And I'm going to pull from these four colors for how I'm going to color his shirt just for today. I'm going to make the color opposite on the color wheel, the color of his shirt. I mean, I'll color your shoes. Excuse me. All right. Now the shoes are symmetrical. So instead of sitting here and drawing each shoe and all of that kind of stuff, I can just turn on drawing the cyst. And now anything I draw on this side is automatically on the other side. I need to get something to keep the tablet from sliding when I draw. All right, drop the color in. Now I'm going to go above shoes. I'm going to add another layer. And I'm going to make this a clipping mask, which means I'm going to tap on this. I'm going to choose clipping mask With the clipping mask, that means anything I draw on here is only going to show up where the shoes are. Because I'm clipping this layer to this one. The only places where it's going to show up, what I'm drawing is on the shoes. Now if I were to draw, turn clipping mask off. You see everywhere. I just scribble for what? Clipping mask on. It's only going to show up on the shoes. I'm going to clear that off. I'm going to do the bottom of the shoes. And I may go in and change these colors later. This is just for now. You can be as creative as you want to. Now you see I did not have drawing assist turned on and I should, so I'm going to stop turn drawing assist so that it's on both. Then of course, drop in that color just like that. I'm going to make the top part of the shoes right there the same color just for now and go back later and decide if I'm going to make a change. And I'm going to use the same brush for my eraser so I can go to recent choose studio pen. And then that allows me to clean up any places where I might have messed up a little bit. All right, now above this layer, I'm going to go ahead and add another layer. And we're going to go ahead and make this the shirt layer. I'm going to rename this to shirt. And I'm going to make the shirt the same color that I just used for the highlighted part on the shoes. I'm not going to have drawing Acis turned on because the sleeves are not exactly symmetrical. And see the reason why we have that top layer turned down so low is makes it easier for us to see where we're drawing it sleeve. Okay. And this side I'm just going to take it straight across. All right. Now I feel that in just like that, I'm probably going to definitely change his color later because I'm not necessarily a fan of what that's looking like right now. But we're going to keep going for the sake of time. All right, above this layer, we're going to add another layer. This layer is going to be for neck. Actually, just neck. This will just be the neck layer. To get the color for the neck, I'm going to hold my finger on the color for the arm, then drop that in for the neck. All right. Same thing for the face. I'm going to add a layer above neck. Rename it face. Now this one we can turn on drawing desist because it's going to be symmetrical. At least this part then there. Now, when we drew this, the hair was not even so we're going to turn drawing the cyst off and I'm going to draw the line for the hair. All right. Now I can drop that color in. Keep in mind, hair has been back here the whole time and now it actually makes a difference with the way that it looks because we had the hair behind everything else. The hand is in front of the face and the hair, but the arm comes out of the shirt. So you can either draw all of this on its own layer and just be mindful of how this looks here. Or you can draw the arm behind the shirt and then the hand in front of here. It's really up to you how you choose to do it. I'm just going to draw mine on a brand new layer above the face. I'm going to add another layer, name this one. I'm going to turn off the face to make sure I'm drawing it correctly. Now keep in mind this is in front of the shirt. What I'll need to do is once I fill it in, I'm going to turn off the drawing and come in and just erase so that it looks correctly. All right, so now that works. I'm going to zoom back out. Turn the face and turn the hair on. All right, for the shirt design, we're going to choose shirt. We're going to add a design above shirt, and we're going to name this one design. And then we're going to turn this one to a clipping mask so that it's only clipped to the shirt. Let's choose the color of the shirt. Let's go back and look at these color choices that we have. I'm going to change and make the shirt this blue color. I'm going to do that first and then I'll make the design the lime green color. All right. This dogs outside, they are really going crazy. All right? And we're going to go up to the eyes. We're going to add this layer above arm. And we're going to turn on drawing desist. We're going to choose white. I'm going to draw the whites for the eyes. Add another layer above drawing desist. Again, this is going to be the colorful part of the eyes. Iris. And then I'm going to do the eyebrows. I'm, I can do the eyebrows on the same layer. All right? And so our character is almost dumb with just basic color at the very top. Then I add a layer and call it outline. 4. Adding Outlines: All right, on this outline layer, that is where I'm going to draw all the lines that help to define certain parts of this picture. And to make it easier for me to know where everything is, I'm going to take the boy layer and I'm going to drop that opacity even down, even further down. Because if I turn it completely off and you look at my character, you can't tell where his nose is. You can't tell where his mouth is, You can't tell where his fingers are or anything like that. So we're going to use the outline layer to draw that stuff in. I'm going to turn boy back on for the color. I'm going to grab the skin color and I'm just going to drop the color down a little bit. Not too much further for now. Since I'm still in the face. I'm going to turn on drawing desist, be the eyelid there, the nose, Everything that can be done symmetrically. I'm going to go ahead and do it now. I'm going to do the ear, even though I have to erase it on the other side. So I'm going to erase that side. All right, and then I'm going to use black for right above the eyes. That's what I always do for my characters. Just like that. And I can turn drawing assist off, I can grab white, I can do the pupils, I'm going to erase the parts of the ear over here. I'm going to get the color back that I was using. Go ahead and do all of this over here. You can experiment with how thick you want your lines to be. How thin you want them to be is totally your preference. I'm going to add this line right here. I'm going to take see all those little dots and get this green, drop it down a little bit right there. I can get this green, drop it down and do shoe strings or something. I'm going to turn on drawn assistances on both sides. Essentially, that is all I need for the character. The character is done, the character has been drawn, color has been added to the character. And you can actually stop here. But I like to take mine a little bit further by adding a little bit of highlighting, a little bit of shading to make the character pop even more. So that's what we're going to explore next, adding highlights and details. 5. Adding Highlights and Shadows pt. 1: All right, so now we're going to go in and I'm going to add some texture to our picture. The pin that I'm going to use the most is going to be under charcoal. It is one that comes standard with procreate. I'll probably stick with the vine charcoal brush for the hair, maybe even the skin that'll give it some texture. So we're going to use the vine charcoal brush for now. I'm going to start just like I deal with the color with the back. So we're going to go all the way down to hair. What we want to make sure that we do is we want to Alpha lock all our layers. The Alpha lock tackle on the hair layer, Alpha lock it. The reason why I want to Alpha lock it is because same thing with clipping mask anywhere I draw. Only going to show up where I have Alpha Loctaly, which is on the hair. I'm going to grab the hair color and I'm going to take the color down just a little bit and then I'm just going to add some swirling motion towards the bottom. I can then go down a little bit more in color, closer to black, and do just down here at the bottom. Then I can grab the color here at the top and I can go up for highlights, but you're just right up here at the top of his hair. I can take him around the side. Very simple way to add depth to your character, to just make things pop off the page even more. All right, next thing up is going to be the skin, which is the arm and the legs alpha like them as well. Start over here and grab the skin color and I'm going to go diagonal down. Now, you may not want to do this directly on the skin. If you don't want to do that, what you should do is add a layer above and do a clipping mask. That way if you ever look at it later and you're like, I really don't like it, you can always go back and turn off that layer or make adjustments. What I'm doing now, I'm just adding a couple of places. There will be a natural shadow appear on the side and you see the difference, that little bit of the difference that, that makes with the legs right appear at the top. Maybe down in the middle just a little bit. Not too much. Just a little bit. While I have this color, I'm going to go ahead and knock out the other places of skin. It's going to come up here to net. I'll lock it. I'm still using that vine charcoal brush face. I'll flock it again, if I don't want to color directly on the face. Add a layer above. Clip it a little bit in the ear area. Same thing on this side. I'm going to add some to the nose. Right here at the bottom right here. It's really personal choice where you add all these little areas of highlighting it. Highlighting in shadows that I'm just doing shadows, I'm going to add. Oops, now I'm right to the bottom of the face. You can use any brush you choose. If you don't want to brush with so much texture, you can use the airbrushing brush and then it'll be very smooth. All right. Now I need to do this hand locket here, just a little bit between the fingers. I'm always going to adjust my brush size to match what I'm actually doing. You don't want to use a brush that's too big for the area you're working on, and you want to think about where the light is coming from. Right now, I'm shading this as if the light is coming straight down. Shadows are always opposite of light. If the light is coming straight down, the shadow is going to be on the other side of it. As you practice more, you get a better understanding of where shadows should fall. You can also study some things. Now the same way I added a dark area to the hair and a lighter area, I'm going to do the same thing with the skin. I've gone in and added all of these different places to have a little bit of the shadow. Now I'm going to grab the skin tone again and this time I'm going to go towards White. And now I'm going to go and do the same thing, pretty much opposite of where I did it the first time. To add some highlights to the skin. Go back down to the face, the nose. I can do a little bit on the cheek area to lighten it up. And I'll do something else adding a little bit, just a little bit to the face. This just keeps the picture from looking completely flat. And the eyelids here, just a little bit more to the cheek area. All right, let's go down to, We don't need any at the neck carry over here. And I don't need any there on the legs. I'm going to add a little bit of pink to the cheeks to give them a more rosy look. So I'm going to grab the skin tone again and this time I'm going to move the slider towards red. Then down just a little bit, I'm going to go back to the che, still using the same brush. I'm just going to add a little bit of rosiness to the cheeks. That's all. All right. So now the skin and the hair is all good. Start tackling some other areas like the eyes and the eyebrows. Make sure we alpha lock it. Same concept, grab the brown, make it a little bit darker. Do the bottom of the eyes. And I can also go and do the eyebrows as well. This one I could have did like drawing guide is still on. This one go a little bit further for this layer, my drawing, the system is still on, so that's why I was doing it on both sides. Grab the eye color, go up to turn it off for this one, because we don't want it to be symmetrical for the eyes because the glare, it is not in the same place on both eyes. All right, These little moments help to make a huge difference in making your character really pop and have some life. All right, now we have the clothes left to do. Come down. I'll do the shorts first. I'll f lock them. Grab the color. Now, when you're doing shadows, you can go straight down. But here's a tip to add a little bit more of some interestingness to your picture. Go on the color will and change the color you're working in and then go down. Instead of me adding shadows with a darker mint green, I'm adding shadows with the darker blue that's near it on the color wheel on here, in between there. And then I can grab that green. And instead of just going straight up, I may go over with this color and then go up and then add that color. See it makes it look a whole lot better. Now let's go to the shirt. Shirt Alpha, lock it. Same thing, instead of just being a dark blue, going to make it a dark purple. So I'm going to go over the purple a little bit and go down, and I'm going to use that for my shadow. And then if you need to go down a little bit more and go down a little bit more, make my brush a little bit smaller, I can get those areas just like that. His head is going to cast somewhat of a shadow on the shoulder. So we're going to do just a little bit of a shadow right there under the head. It's the same process. Grab the color of the shirt. Go to the left, this time, go up. Then we can add this over here on the side. We can even come across as well. Let's do the design, same steps, alpha, lock it. Instead of just going straight down, I'm going to go over the green a little bit, come down slightly. I'm not going to do too much shading on the design. It mostly be just on the sides. Grab the color from the middle. It's going to go over towards yellow, just right there in the middle. Just like that. 6. Adding Highlights and Shadows pt. 2: All right, so now we're going to the shoes layer drawing assist is still chosen, so we're going to leave that, we're going to alphalock it. We're going to grab the pink color. We're going to go more to the right and down. Of course, it's a habit for me to go back and forth, but they're both selected. Do this over here a little bit more darkness. All right? I'm going to grab the pink color. I'm going to go over just a little bit that really makes a difference when you go to the left and to the right for the colors. All right, same thing we did for the design of the shirt. We're going to do the same thing for the green part on the shoes. So let's select that. Assist to still selected. Let's go to an Alpha, lock it, grab that green color. We're going to go towards green and come down. And now we're going to do some shading here and there, right along the bottom. And I think I can go down a little bit more and then I can do a little bit of shading in here. I'm going to grab the green color and go up towards the yellow, just so I can kind of hit the top of the shoe right there. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and turn off the drawing guide because I know one more thing, We have the character done. I can go ahead and play around with everything looking to see if there's any minor adjustments that need to be made. But for the most part, the character is done. Now where the hair layer is, I'm going to add another layer above hair. Then I'm going to drag this layer under here. We're just going to create the shadow for where our character is standing. First, let's pick a nice background color for this. Since we have a lot of blue hues, let's choose something on the warm side. I didn't use orange in the picture at all. Let's see what the orange background looks like A I don't really like it too much, but you want to pick you a color background that you think will work with the character. Help to pop it out a little bit. All right? And that's going to be what the layer is under hair. I'm going to add one above it. I'm going to grab this orange color. Go down and I'm going to go to the left this time instead of to the right using that same vine charcoal brush. I'm going to color what would be like the shadow being cast by my character. May go a little bit darker. Right up under his shoes and now it is making my character like it actually exists in the real world. Turn off the drawing guide, you sign it, and you're complete. And there you have a very simple cartoon character that you have drawn and colored in procreate. I'm really happy that you joined me for this two video for this two series in drawing simple cartoon characters, I can't wait to see what you come up with. The only thing that I sometimes do to make this composition look a little bit better when I come back down to this background color, instead of my background just being like a flat color, I'll grab that orange and maybe get some yellow. You can still use the same vine charcoal. And I may just add a color like that that really makes a difference. Or you can use white like on a separate layer and draw it around the character. Sometimes that'll help make the character pop out a little bit more thor gaution blur on it. Now's your chance just to experiment with different ways to make your character pop out. But always be sure that you sign your work before you post it online so that no one gets the credit but you. I'm just going to sign mine right here. And that is drawing a simple cartoon character and coloring it in procreate. 7. Final Thoughts: All right, and that's all it is. We drew a simple character and procreate in that first lesson. And in today's lesson, we added color using very simple steps that are easy for anybody at any skill level. I can't wait to see the pictures that you drew. I can't wait to see maybe the original characters that you came up with. Please make sure that you post them down in the description. And stay tuned for more lessons Again, I'm Travis Thompson. Thank you so much for watching this class. Bye y'all