Colouring Line Art and Using Masks in Procreate - Creating on The iPad

1. Colouring Line Art and Using Masks in Procreate b: Hey everyone. My name is Jane and I'm an illustrator and designer who has a passion for creating on the iPad. I love the portability of this form of design. I'm finding that the apps that are coming out now are more advanced and more fun than they've ever been. Creating beautiful digital art is now becoming accessible to everyone. You no longer need to buy a super expensive software packages with steep learning curves in order to create some really beautiful digital eye popping art. So this class is the first in a three-part series where I'm going to show you my techniques on how I take you from hand-drawn design, take it into the app and create some really cool digital designs. This series we're going to work in the Procreate app. In this first class, I'm going to show you how to get your art work into the app. Then I'm going to show you how to separate out the line work from the art itself so that you can use it to do some coloring and painting, and then going to show you how to recolor the line art and to add in more detail if you want to. Next, I'll show you the ins and outs of using different methods for selection and fill to get color into your artwork. Once we have our flats laid in, I'm going to show you how we use them to create masks so that we can do some painting, we can add in texture and we can add in multiple colored blends. Then we'll finish up with a taste of blend mode so that you can get an idea of what's coming in the next class. In class two and three, we're going to delve more into the blend modes and more into textures, we'll do texture brushes. I'm also going to show you how to use the transform tool and get some more dimension using shading into your artwork. But for now, let's dive into the first steps on how to prepare our artwork for some coloring and some painting. 2. Supplies and Brush Imports: Before we begin, let's go over the supplies that you're going to need. You're going to need an iPad. I use an iPad Pro in the demo, but you don't need to have the iPad Pro. Any iPad with a 10.0 iOS update will work. That's what the procreate app requires and you will require the procreate app as well. You can get that in the App Store or at iTunes. There is a small cost to it, but it's well worth it. I've attached the drawing that I use in this particular class. It happens to be one of the hand drawn Mandala's from one of my previous hand drawn Mandala courses and I've attached that in the your project section, you'll find it up to the right under the attached files. You can follow along with that one, or you can use one of your own. If you're using the iPad Pro as I am in this class, you may want to consider the Apple pencil. It only works on the iPad Pro however, so you certainly don't need the Apple pencil, however, it does offer great control over your detail work and it's a great tool to have. Your finger will work just as well as will any stylus on the market. I've used procreate for years with my finger and I still do at times. You'll be able to do everything I'm going to show you with your finger if that works for you. Now, I'm going to show you how to find some of the stuff using your browser on the iPad. You're going to go into Safari. That's what I use. Up here on the top bar, you're going to type in skill share.com and it'll take you to the site where you'll sign in. Once you sign in, you can go to the class. I'm just going to use a previous class of mine that was already up and running at this time. You'll go into your project section and write on the right-hand side, here you'll find the attached files. These are the downloads, and in this case, it was a flower image. You touch the flower image, you choose Save image, and it puts it right into your camera roll where we can use it for the class. In the project description, I'll also give you this link to my Dropbox with the brushes I use in it. This has all the brushes on my iPad courses and I'll often add new ones, so that's a little bonus that you have access to that. You click on the link and it'll pop up into Dropbox. You don't have to have an account in Dropbox, you don't even have to sign in. All you have to do is click on one of the brushes, and it'll pop up with the screen. Choose download, then choose direct download, and it'll pop up with the brush. Let's give it a minute there, and there it is. It recognize it as a procreate file, so you'll open it in procreate, and then the procreate apple open and your brush will already be in there. You can check that by going to the brushes, look under the imported brush folder, and there it is, right at the top. Now, you can move this out of your imported brush folder into any other folder you want or one that you've created. You hold it and slide it up to the folder. It has to be above you somewhere and it pops right into the folder. When you go to the top brush, there it is right there. We'll do one more brush, we go back into Safari, your browser, we go backwards to return to the folder, and then we're going to go back again to get to the whole folder. There we are. I'm going to choose the next brush. It pops up. I choose download, direct download, and there's my brush, the dotted line brush. I open in procreate, the app opens and the brush is sitting there in my imported folder. Again, I can put it into any folder I choose to put it in. I just have to touch it and drag it into the folder. When I open the folder, I go up to the top and there it is sitting right there. You can go back and do that with all the brushes and we're ready to get started on importing our artwork. 3. Importing Your Art Work: To start with we're going to open the Procreate app, and we're going to choose a Canvas. We hit this plus sign and you can choose from one of their presets that they have or you can create your own and down here I have some that I've created, it saves the ones that you create. Also you go into New Canvas to create one. I like to use a 300 DPI that gives you a nice clean line and lots of detail. I like to use an eight inch size on Canvas. So 8 times 300 is 2400 pixels, and then I can title it because then I can use it going forward down at the bottom and I know what it'll be, so I title it in eight inch 300 dpi and I can use it in future. Then I hit ''Done'', and it opens up my Canvas. Now I want to import my artwork into this Canvas. I go up here to the wrench tool and I choose ''Insert flat image'', I go to my Photos where I will have the photo or scanned image of the artwork that I want to bring in. I'm going to use a piece from one of my previous hand-drawn classes on Mandela's and I'm going to bring this piece in. This was something that I hand drew and then I scanned. It comes in on its own layer. It's best to have it as a black and white scanned image, because if you use grayer color it's going to cause a little bit of trouble when we go through this process. So preferably get a black and white scan of your hand-drawn image. When I select it, it selects both the drawing and the background. So if I were to select and then go into a new layer and fill, it fills the entire image. It can't tell the difference between the line work and the background. It considers them all one, so if I were to turn off the background you wouldn't be able to see any difference because the image covers the entire Canvas. I'm going to show you what we're aiming for here. I'm going to turn that one off, we're going to keep it. I'm going to go back into the wrench tool, I'm going to insert, and this time I'm going to go to my camera roll and look for a PNG image. This black one right here is a PNG. It's a Mandela that I have removed the background from, it comes in on its own layer and the background is transparent. So when I turn off my background, it goes transparent because all that I'm importing is the line work, so this is what a PNG is. I can change the background, the colors of the background will change, but they won't affect the line art because it's on its own layer and that's what I want to do with this image. When I select the line art, you can barely see it here but it's very fine line showing you the only thing selected is the line art. If I go to a new layer and I select ''Fill'', only the line art gets filled this time. That's what we're looking for with our image. So I'll get rid of that one and I'll show you another example. If I go back into my gallery and I pick another project I was working on. So this Mandela I drew in Procreate. Again, I can go into the layer and copy that layer because I know that's only line art on that layer there is no background on that layer. So I go into the wrench tool here into the project I am working on, paste from clipboard and I can bring it right into this project, and that's a handy little way also to bring anything into another project. Again here I can turn off my background and you can see that all I have left his line art, it's a transparent background, I can select on that layer, create a new layer and Fill and it only fills the line art. Again, that's another way that I have the line art separate from the background. What we're aiming for today, is to take the image we brought in that has a background and separate the line art out from the background before we do the color. That's our goal for the next lesson. 4. Separating Out The Line Art: Now we're ready to separate out our line work. Even though this image is considered one image background in line work, it still does recognize that there are different colors on this page. If I go into my "Layers" and I click on the layer, off to the left here I pick reference. Now it's going to use this layer as the reference for everything else. So any other layer will refer back to this one. Now I can pick my selection tool. I make sure that it's set on automatic at the bottom, and then I pick something black. It's going to select everything that it recognizes as black that's connected to each other. I can change my threshold by sliding my pencil the other side. Now, I just moved it up to 100 percent. You don't want that because it selects the entire image. So I move it back around the 50 percent mark and see it's selected everything in blue it considers the same. Now this is separate. There's no joining there, so I have to select it separate and select this one separate. There's a lot in here it didn't select. So I go into my separate layer and I choose a different color. I'm going to fill and see everything that it selected it now fills. So I have some of the line work on a separate layer. Now we have to go through and make sure we get the rest of the line work. I picked a pink, so it's very easy to see against the black. I can see what I have, already got, and what I need to still get. You can go around and just make sure that you select the black part, and for the most part it should select everything. You can play around with your threshold as you go. Now we're just going to add in the rest of the lines that didn't get taken out. See here, this one actually didn't get because it's not connected. This piece I don't want. You can just keep going back to your layer, filling in what you've selected, and making sure you get all the pieces. Now, another option is to draw in some of the lines. This piece I don't want. So I'm going to use my eraser and I'm going to erase it back out of my layer. It'll just go black, which means that it's no longer part of my new drawing. I'm going to go back and find that peace that wasn't connected because it's important that your lines are connected. Here it is. I'm going to lower that down and draw that back in all your lines. Any gaps are going to cause problems for you. Now I'm going to use this draw method to draw in the rest of these pieces. You could just select them if you wanted to. But when you draw, see how nice and smooth at line is compared to the other ones. That might be a problem. It might not be, but I do prefer to draw some of my lines back in. Sometimes it's even just faster than selecting everything. This way I can also make any alterations to the drawing that I want to as I go. So I'm just going to quickly draw the center parts back into the flower. You can change your pen size depending on what lines you're drawing in. You can even change your type of pen if you want to, if you want more of a tapered look to your line, you can do that as well. I find, especially these little pieces are easier to draw in than they are to try to select. You can spend a lot of time trying to select them and you end up selecting the opposite to what you wanted. This is a really good alternative to getting in some of the finer line work and some of the smaller line work. By drawing these lines in, it also gives you the opportunity to draw in anything that was missed. Sometimes the selection tool gets most of aligned, but not the complete line, so you can just finish and connect that line. Because for the white spaces they have to be completely enclosed by the pink or they won't work right in the next section that we're going to do where we select our objects so we can do some coloring. This is a really great place to fine tune your work. Once we have everything selected, we can go back and turn off our original image, and we can see we have all of our line work now on its own layer, separate from the background. Now you might say, "I don't want the pink for my line work," but that's okay. You go into the layers, select it, create new layers, choose black as your ink, and fill it. Now we have a layer that's completely black. So turn off that pink layer. You can even delete it if you want to, and you have a new layer of line work separate from the background. 5. Fills & Flats : Now, we're ready for our next steps so we can go in and if you haven't already, you can delete that pink layer if you'd like to. We also need to go into original image and remove the reference. We just click that and it goes off. From now on we'll always be using our new layer as the reference, whenever we have reference on. We're going to create a new layer and we can stay on this layer because we've chosen reference. We don't have to be on the liner layer anymore. Now, we're going to use our selection tool and we're going to start to select these white areas because we're going to want to color them in. This is the first method I'm showing you, you just make sure it's on automatic and you're going to go round and select one section of the Mandela. That's the same all the way around. This time we're picking the pedals and notice how when you select something it changes color. It's usually a contrast opposite color to what the color is. So in this case, everything I'm selecting is turning blue, so you know you have it all. Now, once I have everything selected, if I click on the layer and l zoom in, you can tell that everything else is greater with lines. The only thing that I'm working with is the pure white sections. If you go into your settings, I lost my selection. Let's just select. Now, you can do the back arrow if it's selects more than you want. Now, I'm going to go in and just select this first section and I'm going to show you how to change the mask look. Here's how the white part is what I've selected, if I go into the settings and the preferences, down here we have selection mask visibility. It's set at 25. If you move it all the way up to a 100. Now, I have to go back in and select again. I'll select the same thing. If I click on a layer, see how much darker the mask is now. If you're having trouble seeing the mask, you can change that. I like to keep it around at 25 percent. That's visible for me, but not so dark that it annoys me. There now, see it's a lot lighter. Let's pick a color and I'm going to on this new layer fill, and it will only fill my selection. Then if I turn off the liner, there you have a colored section of my Mandela. Now, we'll do the rest of them as I have them selected before. I'm just going to speed through this section while I select them one more time. Again, you can use the backspace every time you end up selecting something that you don't want, it helps if you zoom in. Now that I have them selected, I go back up to my layer and I hit fill, and it fills only the parts that I selected. Now, I have all of that one piece on its own layer and now I'll be able to work with it separately going forward. I want to do each of these sections on their own layer. I've gone ahead and created a new layer because I want to do my next section on a separate layer again, just like I said, I wanted them all to be on their own layer. I'm going to go round and select this area that lies behind these flowers within my automatic selection tool. Now, you'll see it missed certain areas sometimes if they don't join well enough, then it just skips some, it doesn't see them. You just go back through and you get them yourself. You can use an automatic or you can switch over to freehand while the selection is still active and just draw around the piece that you want to add back in. Then you go down and hit this plus button and it adds that to your selection. It's handy and go back and forth between the free hand and the automatic. Helps if you want little sections. Now, say I want this center which I don't really, but I'm just going to show you, for example. If I wanted the center to be included, I would go around the center. I'd hit the plus button and it would be added. But let's say I don't want it now, so I draw around that center again and I hit the minus button. That's how you get rid of things that get selected that you don't want in your selection. I'm just going to go back there and I'm just going to make sure that I have everything. If I go back to automatic, it shows me the blue again and I can just automatically select those little pieces. See this little wee piece up here, let's say I do want that. That's where I use my free hand because the automatic just didn't pick it up. I just added in that way. Back to automatic and I just make sure that I have everything I want selected. Now that I'm happy with my selection, I'm going to zoom back out and I'm going to go into, make sure I have that separate layer already and pick a different color. I'm going to stick to the neutrals here and I'm going to fill and see how it fill that one. So if I remove my liner, now I've got two sections filled and they're each on their own layer. Now, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to do another section. I think here I'm going to do these center flowers. I make sure I've got my automatic selection and I go round and I choose the petals of the center flower. When I miss, I just would reverse there until I'm back to what I was. The blue tells you how much you have selected. See, you can tell that the widest part is the petals. I'm going to go in and do it this dark gray that I have selected here. We'll go in and I fill, so now that flowers. Now, I'm going to show you how to get the center in a different method. You could use the automatic selection, but I go to the petals and I select that layer and then I hold down my select, and it brings up my menu at the bottom here. Make sure I have automatic. I'm going to pick the outer line work here, and I'm also going to pick the center. So what I'm trying to do is mask it with the things I don't want to paint on. Now, when I choose my layers, see how the only thing not selected is those centers. I hold down my select, I hit the inverse button and now everything, but those centers is selected. Now, I can paint on them and not affect any other area of the design. I go in and I create a new layer for these centers and I choose a color that's going to be different than the petals. I go into my color picker and I'm going to pick a lighter color, I guess is what I'll go with. Lighter. Now, I'm going to go into my brush tool and I'm just going to use that plain tech and I can start drawing and see how the only place that's going to let me draw is right in those centers because everything else is blocked out, basically with the mask. This is how you use the mask to block everything out, but maybe these small sections that you want to paint in. I could change it and paint each one of them differently. That's kind of the fun part of it. I could do them all different shades of gray. I could pick different areas of them to paint over. It gives you a little bit of control as to what you want to do. In this situation, I'm just doing them all one color and I can remove my selection and they are now on their own layer as well. Again, I removed the liner, see the centers are there and the flower is there. This shows you one method. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you another method of getting all of these areas colored in. 6. Alternative Method For Flats: Now I'm going to show you a different method for separating on all the pieces. You can choose the one that works best for you. You can go into my layers and create a new layer. I'm going to pick a color, my colors that I want to work with. I'm just going to choose this blue, can be any color. Back into my layers I'm going to fill this new layer completely. Just click Fill and it's going to fill the entire layer. Now I'm going to go back to my line art and select it. See how it's all selected. Back to the field layer and then clear. What it's done is it's cut the line art out of the solid layer and therefore separated all the pieces from each other automatically. Now you have all the pieces colored in which is great, but they're all one color and they're all on one layer. It's another way to have them all filled in. But now I'm going to show you how I separate them out like before on to separate layers and in different colors. I choose Select and I start selecting the pieces that I'm going to want on one layer. Again I'm going to start with these petals. You can tell what I've selected because this time it goes red. Now I use three fingers and I swipe down and I hit Cut. Then I hit Paste. When I go into the layers it's pasted it onto a separate layer. When you select something and you cut it, and then you paste it back in, it paste it back into new layer which is what I want I'm going to back and pick my selection tool on automatic. Then I'm going to go around and pick these backgrounds of the flowers again. I'm going to try to make sure I get all the pieces picked this time. I swipe with three fingers, I cut and I paste, and they all come back in. Now with this one I'm going to turn it off and make sure. You'll see I missed some pieces here. I'm going to show you, I go back into the layer that has all the pieces on it and you can see where they are left behind. I use my selection tool, use automatic. I'm going to zoom in here to make sure I get them and just pick those two pieces. Then I'm going to swipe with my three fingers again. You need to use cut and paste. Now they're pasting in on their own layer and I actually want them to be with that other layer. I'm just going to put it above the layer. I'm going to merge it into the other layer, but they have to both be on and click Merge Down and now they're back onto the right layer that they should have been in the first place. As I work my way through this, I keep turning the layers off that I've already separated out. That shows me what I have left to still separate out. What I'm aiming for is to have this layer completely blank and everything cut and pasted onto its own layer. The next one I'm going to go for are these flowers. So you'll find as you go that you leave little specks behind. That's okay. You're just aiming to get the color in sections and we're going to delete the layer when it's empty. So all the little specs that are left we'll go with it. We go all the way round. We've selected all our flowers. Again, we swipe with three fingers, we cut and we paste. The flowers come in on their own layer. Then I go back into the layers and I turn the layers off that I've done, because I want to know what I have left to do. Next I'm going to work on these little circles. If I use the selection tool make sure I'm on the right layer. I always have to go back to the layer that everything's on. If I use the selection tool see how difficult it is to get all those little lines. Here we're going to use the free hand tool instead. I'm going to go to select in free hand, and then I'm just going to draw around the little centers and use the plus sign to add them to my selection. I make sure that I do this for every one of the centers and I have to hit that plus sign after I'm finished drawing round each one so that it gets added into my selection. Then when I have them all selected, you'll be able to see where the white shows up is only on those centers. Because there's no background, it's only going to pick the blue parts. Again, I swipe with three fingers, cut and paste and it's on it's own layer. You can tell when you turn it off that it's on its own layer. I have to make sure you always go back to the layer that I'm working all of the pieces off of. I'm going to work off this background now. I'm going to take this background edit, so I hit Select and I have to make sure I'm on automatic, sometimes I forget. You can tell I've selected it. Another method is to hit these double lines and that duplicates what you selected onto its own layer. That's another method you can use. The only thing is it doesn't cut it off of my original which is what I want to do. I'm going to go back in and select that off my original. This time I'm just going to cut it and that'll just get rid of it. So now if I turn off that duplicate layer I made it's gone. Now I see how much I have left still two separate onto its own layers. The next item that I want to take out is this outer ring. Again, making sure I'm on the right layer and I go back to the selection tool. Now I could select every one of these separate again. Could be a lot of work to select all those. So I'm going to show you yet another method that we did learn in the other ones. We're going to use our paintbrush again. I'm going to choose this nice bright blue. I got my pen tool and I'm going to make sure I'm on a brand new layer that's separate from everything. Make sure you've picked a color that's different than the color that you have in your layer so you can tell the difference. I'm going to make that brush a little bigger in fact I'm going to go up to a bigger brush, because I actually want a big brush for this, and I'm going to start painting. Make sure that you were on that new layer. You're not affecting anything else. Paint over the part that you want to cut out. Now if you want to see better, just go to that layer and lower the opacity. Now I can see the items underneath so that I make sure I'm not missing anything. But don't lower the opacity of the pen itself or it's only going to cut at that opacity. You don't want that. Only lower the opacity of the layer. So we're going to paint all the way around, so that we make sure we get everything selected underneath that blue. We have all the pieces picked and they're all covered with this blue. So then we go into our layers. We go to our bright blue and we hit Select. See how it has everything under that blue selected. This is important you have to go to the layer that you are trying to cut it off of. Then you use your three fingers, close down those layers. Three fingers, cut, and it will only cut what's under that blue, then paste it back in. It doesn't affect the bright blue you just drew, but it does remove everything behind it. Now you can delete the layer of that painted blue, turn off that outer layer and you have another piece extracted. So now I'm just going to speed this up a little to finish off these last few sections. Again I'm going to select each of the pieces that I want on their own layer and go through, and cut and paste them, so that everything ends up on its own layer. Now, you'll notice that there's a lot of specs left behind. That's okay. Don't worry about those because we're ultimately just going to delete this layer when we're done with everything and all those specs will get deleted along with it, and you won't really miss them. Now I have everything on its own layer. I can delete that original layer. I don't need it anymore. There's nothing left on it. So I can go through and I can turn all these back on and make sure that I have everything. I should actually do that before I delete that layer. But I knew it was all there, because it was all off of the layer. Now I want to color the pieces differently, because I don't want them all the same color. I'm going to go through in the layer, I select the layer. I choose a color that I want to do it. Then I go back to layer and fill. So essentially what we've done here is we've laid in our flats. That means that we've taken all the areas that we're going to want to work with and every one of them is colored in a solid color. We have put them on separate layers, so that we can work with them going forward. You can choose any color that you want to, to do these. I'm sticking with the neutrals and the grays, and I'm going to show you why I do that in the next lesson. 7. Recolouring the Flats: So I'm just going to speed through this section where I'm going to show you how I recolor each of the sections. I'm staying with the gray neutral tones. It's kind of along the concept of an underdrawing, or a [inaudible] as they call it, where I'm just really going to create values in the different sections. Because when we get into part two, which is the next class that'll be offering on this, I'm going to show you how to use blend modes to work with underdrawings that are neutral. But for now, I'm just going to use different shades of gray. So you could use all different colors, you could use different shades of a different color. It's all up to you how you want to paint this and what you're going to use it for. So I have my little gray palette here. It has about five or six shades of gray. I try to stay away from the black because I use black for my outlining, and I also use white for the outlining. So I want to stay in-between those two shades. So once I have everything colored, and you can tell when you have all the layers here, everything has color, and I'm happy with that, I'm going to go in and make a group out of all these sections. So again, the way that I group these is I make sure I select every one of the layers I want in the group by lightly flicking to the right. And then in this top corner, there's three lines. I'm going to click on those three lines, and it turns it into a group. And then I can turn the group off and on and close down the group. And then I want to duplicate that group because what I want to do is have them all on one layer. So I didn't want to give up the fact that they were separate, so I'll turn my group off. And the other group, I'm going to merge every one of these layers together. Now before I do my final merge, I actually want to change one more thing in here. See how this outer ring, it's all one color? I actually want to divide that into two different layers as well. So go to that. This is where it's good to have them all labeled, so you know which one you're on. It's selecting everything at the moment. See this little area right here is joined? So I'll just use my eraser and make sure that's separate. Now they should select okay. So going to Select in Automatic mode, and I'm just going to select every second one. So I'm just going to go all the way around selecting the same one in every area. And once I've done that, I'm going to change the color. So I have to create a new layer, and fill. And there, I have another set on top that changes the color. So when I merge those all together, that top layer is just going to merge into the next one. So I merge by squeezing them all together, make sure I get them all, and they're all on one layer now. There are my outlines, and I can pull them out of the group and delete that group, because I don't need a group for one layer. Then I pull my outline to the top, and there we have my design. I have my outline turned off at the moment. Now, let's say I don't see my background. See, they're all separated out from the background. Let's say that I don't want a black outline. Let's say I want a white one. So I go in, I select it, I create a new layer, pick white, and I fill it, and now I have a white outline as well. So I can choose between the black and white. 8. Refining Your Piece: Now that we have everything on one layer, I want to show you how I add in a few more details. This layer here is the white line art that we did and I can go in and choose my pen. It lies on top of the rest of the work. I can go in with a white pen and add to this line art. I can just put some veins into the leaves and it will go in on top. It doesn't do anything to the sections themselves because it's lying on top of everything. I'm just going to put a couple of these in and then I'm going to show you what I mean here. Once I have them in, I'm going to go back to the layers and on this layer, if I turn it off, they get turned off as well. Really they're just lying on top. The only thing that affects is your line art. That's a nice way to add in some detail. Another method of doing this is using the eraser. You have to be on the layer that you did all the painting on. Because when you use the eraser tool, you're taking off color that you've already added to your painting. It's the same idea except that these ones aren't on a separate layer so you can't turn them on and off. When you erase something out, it's gone. Here if I turn the background off, you can see that there's nothing underneath the sections that I erased out. If that's a different method, if you want pieces of your drawing to have the background showing through instead of having something lie on top of it. I'm just going to turn to my background back to white. You've got an idea of the different colors behind them and how the eraser has made it so you can see any of the background through. Working back with my eraser, I think I'm going to continue on with the eraser. I have to make sure that I'm on a layer with all of my painted items because I'm going to take out color when I add in the detail. Now I've picked a dotted line and I'm adding a different vein into this section of the design. Another thing that I'm able to do because I'm using the eraser, is I can actually divide out some of these sections even more. I'm going to go up here and choose my plane tech pen, give me a nice hard edge. I'm going to go into these petals and I'm just going to cut off the top of them. Basically, I'm erasing out anything that joins the main part of the petal to this top part of the petal. Then I'll be able to do different things and even put them on their own layer. Once I have these separated out with my eraser, I'm going to go into my selection tool and with the set at automatic, I'm going to pick those sections, go into my layers and create a new layer. On this layer I'm going to do a fill of a new color. I'm just going to choose a darker color. Then I'm going to go back here and I'm going to choose, "Fill" and see how now I've added more color and more detail into the design after the fact. You can keep on doing this. Sometimes it's hard to stop just continuing to add more color, dividing sections out and adding in more detail. Really when it comes to your designs you never done until you just finally stop because you could go on forever. I'm just going to go ahead and using, sorry, I'm on the wrong layer here. It wasn't working because I have to be on the layer that my flats are on. I'm just going to speed this up and I'm going to continue to use my eraser tool. I'm going to take out these veins. Now when you decide to do this, you have to decide what your purpose is, because you're either going to remove color from your flats or you're going to draw into the line or at layer on top. You can do a mix of it if you want. But just keep in mind the effects that it has. When your separating out sections like I'm doing in these leaves, it's usually easier to use the eraser tool and separate them out on the flat layer. It often makes it easier to work with them if you've created them as separate objects, rather than just creating a line that divides them. Because if you decide to turn your liner off, then all of this detail will disappear. I'm just quickly finishing up dividing all of these as well. Then I need to use my selection tool and select all of them. Then I'm going to go back onto the layer that I already made. I'm going to fill them with the same color. Now, I have on that layer, I just have those sections filled. Now that I have this layer, before I emerge it down, I want to create a duplicate of it because I want to keep it in the group with the rest of the individual pieces, so that I can use it separately if I want to. Again, down to the drew group now, I can't just drop it into that group. I need to open the group and then I can drop it into the group. It's in there with all the other pieces. Close down the group. I'll take the one that I didn't do. I'll merge it into the main piece and now everything is on the same layer and it's become part of my artwork. We're ready to do some painting. 9. Using Masks to Paint: Now we can have some painting fun. We're going to use the sections that we already colored in as masks for our painting. You're going to go into your group that has everything separated out. You're going to pick the first layer here, turn it off and on just to see which one it is. I'm going to select the layer. Then when I double-click there, I get the select option. Then I go back above the group and create another layer. This is the one I'm going to paint on. Now that I have that one selected, I go in and pick the color that I want to paint with. Now I'm going to go into my paintbrush and I'm going to go into the painting folder and procreate comes with a really nice watercolor brush, that is modifies a little bit. But that's the one I'm going to use. Then I can just start to paint. I'm on my new layer and because I've selected this particular petal section, it's the only place that will take the paint. The rest of the design is mask out on the page. I'm free to paint as much as I want and it will only go in that one section. To get an idea of what I've done here, I turn off my selection tool and then I turn off the group. All that's left is the area that I painted. It gives it a nice watercolor look without any line work. Now I'll turn my group back on and I'll choose another layer in here. As you go, you turn off the layers and then you know what you've already painted on. I'm going to choose this one and I use Select, I go up, I choose a different color to paint with, and I go back to my paint layer and I paint. Again, everything else is mask out so I can paint anywhere I want on the screen and it will only take to the area that I had selected. This is really handy for giving a stencil lee type watercolor look because you're masking out the rest of the design. Now I'm going to pick another one. The layer doesn't have to be on. Because when you select it, everything else gets grayed out. So you can actually see where you've selected with the layer off. Make sure you go back to your paint layer. I've picked another color here and I sticking with the blues and the greens. I go ahead and I just paint some more in. You can do multiple colors in one area to give yourself that nice watercolor blend look. Now I've selected these flowers and I'm going to start them with a light green. Then I'm going to switch over to blue and I'm going to go over top. Just washing in another color so there's your blend on the flowers. Then I'm just going to add a little more blue in there. I'm just going to speed up this part of the process because basically I'm selecting the layers and they are masking out the rest of the design and then I go to my paint layer and I paint them in. For me, I put all my painting onto one layer. If you want to, you could do each of the painted as sections on their own layer. But it creates a lot of layers and I don't need it to be like that. I just want my painting to be all on one layer. You can keep going back in and fine tuning what you've already done. Add some more colors in whatever works for you until you're happy with it. I go back in and I'm making sure that I didn't miss anything and then I seeing what the colors look like with the grays underneath. Going forward, I'm going to give you a little taste of where we're going to go on the next class with this. But I'll bring this painted layer up and you can start to use your blend modes. You can use them in combination with that gray toned drawing that you already did. Then you can work through the blend modes and get quite different looks. This can be a lot of fun just by using the value painting he did underneath and the watercolor painting he did on the top using the different blend modes. If you go in and look at this painting, we are going to see how I didn't get any of those eraser details in this section. I think it's because I didn't use the sections that I had erased out of, that's okay. We'll work on that in a minute. I'm going to do my background, I think next. I'm going to select off of my gray layer. I'm going to select the background. I don't want to paint behind the painted Mandala at all because the watercolor brush that I use has a lower opacity, so it's a little translucent and if I were to paint behind the mandala itself, it would show through and change the look of the drawing. I have this on its own layer, in case I want to turn it off and just use it as a PNG. Now I'm going to go into the painted layer with my eraser brush, and I've chosen a tapered brush. I think I chose the technical pen. I'm just going to put some of these detail back into my pedal. So basically I'm erasing it out of the painted layer. This is why I say when you do erasing out color or adding in line work, you have to make sure of what your final purposes and you have to make sure you're on the right layer because I did erase it out of these gray ones but see there not there. So I obviously didn't put it into the duplicate. I must have done it on the one that I merged, but I didn't do it on the one that I kept separate. It's important when you go back and change something that you make sure that you take a copy of the newest version because this is what will happen. I took out all that paint and then I didn't duplicate the one that I did the work on. Now the other option that you can do here, if I go back and put all that paint back in that I just erased out, I can go up to this liner and use my pen tool, go into and pick an inking pen that I want the same pen I used for the eraser. I use the white ink that the liner is on. I draw them in and that way they're there. If I want to, I can turn them off or I can turn them back on. Again, it's your choice whether you draw the lines in on the line art or erase them out of the paint. Just make sure you know what layer you're working on. 10. Where We Go Next: So that gives you a lot to work with. You now know how to separate out your line out art, you know how to lay in some flat colors, and you also know how to use them as masks. Now I'm going to give you a little taste of what's going to come in the next class and we're going to start working with blend modes. We are also going to show you how to play around with some of the textures. There's a lot of beautiful texture brushes in Procreate and you can even create your own. With these textures and the blend modes, you can do a lot of really fun stuff with your designs. So here I'm just going to show you that I'm just doing a solid layer of watercolor. I'm mixing up my colors a little, I'm using some blues and some greens as those seemed to be my favorite. I really like these watercolor brushes, but there are quite a few watercolor brushes you can get on the internet, as well as creating your own. But we're going to use this in our design just to give you a little idea of how we work with the blend modes. Now a little trick that I do is when I finish my layer, if I want a little more intensity, I duplicate it and then I merge them down together and it just intensifies the colors that I've used in my background. Now once I have this filled background, I can use it with the layers that I already have, or I can just use it with the gray toned layer. So if I move it down underneath my line art, it basically looks like I've erased the line art of it, but I haven't affected that painted background, I've merely just turned on the white line art over top of it. Now making sure that my gray tone layer is above it, on the gray toned layer, I can start to play with different blend modes. So I just go into the blend mode, I tap on the letter, and it opens up all my blend mode options. So this blend mode is screen and it gives it a beautiful soft look. So once you get into blend modes, there's really a lot of stuff to look at. It really depends on what order you have the layers in and which layer you do the blend modes on, or a combination of the layers doing blend modes. A lot of it is trial and error, but I will explain in the next class what each blend mode does and you'll have a better idea of what you're trying to accomplish. I really enjoy working with the blend modes because there are so many combinations that you can work with. Depending on what capacity level and the values that you're working with, you can get some really stunning looks. So you can play around with those blend modes for now and just see what you come up with and I'll get into more detail in the next class to help you understand what they're doing. The other thing we're going to do is work with more texture and I'll show you how to create a brush of your own with your own texture and you can add this into your design as well. I'm going to show you one more thing here. I had shown you a background that was colored with the different blues and the greens, but you can also do a grayscale background that gives you the values. Then once you have the grayscales, now use the eraser to pull some of that out and it gives it a lot more texture and a lot more value. You can work this and blend it into your design as well and then you can add any color with that and you'll get more combinations. So just like you've added the values to the flats, you can also add values into your texture as well. Again, we'll get a lot more into that in the next class too. Until then, work with the tools that I've given you and try the techniques that I've shown you, and you can explore the brushes that Procreate offers you. They have some really nice texture brushes in here, play around with those and see what you come up with. Thanks so much for joining me in this class. I am so glad that you came to learn some new techniques and have some fun with your designs. Hopefully, we'll see you in the next class where we deal with the blend modes and the textures. For now, have fun and go create.