Transcripts
1. Combining Lettering and Illustration in Procreate: Hi, everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer, and author of the book Hand Lettering on the iPad with Procreate. Today, I want to show you all of my techniques for combining hand lettering and illustration to create interesting compositions that tell a story. When you watch this class, you'll get all of my lettering brushes, plus a workbook with lots of ideas for letter styles, color palettes, and illustration topics. I'll share with you my library of hundreds of vintage hand lettering images. So you'll have no shortage of inspiration for your letter styles. First, we'll create a letter style menu. We'll even compile all of your favorite letter styles and get some practice with fitting words into various shapes and angles. Once you have your letter style menu, you'll never have to guess what kinds of letters to incorporate into your next composition. Next, we'll create an illustration of a letter and an envelope with a hand lettered message to yourself or someone else. We'll look at easy ways to fit your lettering into specific shapes and ways to make your lettering fit the style of your illustration. Last, we'll use a product as a canvas for a hand lettered message and combine several different letters styles into one composition. We'll look at how to combine multiple letter styles so they work well together and stand out on the canvas. At the end of the class, I'll invite you to join me in a drawing challenge where you can share your hand lettered illustrations with me and everyone else in the challenge. I think a lot of artists and designers get into lettering because they want to be able to tell a story with their work, and that's what I love about this process. It allows you to have fun with creating drawings and illustrations while also telling a story and sharing a message with your audience. You can use the process you'll learn in this class to create a wide range of illustrations that you could use as art prints for print on demand sites, give as gifts, or just share on social media with your friends and followers. I'll be demonstrating all of the processes in this class on my iPad in Procreate with the Apple Pencil. But of course, you can use any digital drawing program, or you could use an analog medium, like paint on canvas or pencil on paper. Let's get started.
2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to the Download section and the Projects tab on Skillshare. You won't see the Projects tab on the Skillshare app though, so make sure you're using Skillshare and web browser to see the Project section. Once you click on that link, you'll see that you need a password to get into the page, and I'll show the password on the screen right now. Once you get into the page, you can scroll down and see all of the class downloads. The first is the brush set, I'll click on that. If you have the Dropbox app, that might open the Dropbox app or it'll download in a web browser. Either way, you'll just need to export or download the file. So I'll click "Export" because I'm using the Dropbox up here. Then, you can find Procreate on the apps list. If it doesn't show up there, just click "More", and then you can find Procreate. Once those brushes download, you can click on the Brush menu and you should see that at the very top of your brush list. You'll do the exact same process for the color palettes, if you want to use the color palettes that I'm sharing with you. Also, you can do the same process for the class workbook. You can either use the Dropbox app like I did before or you can click and hold and open in a new tab. I'll show how to do it in a browser this time. Then, you should get a little Download button. I'm using Chrome as my browser, so if you have any trouble, maybe switch to Chrome. I'll just click "Download", and then, open in and choose Procreate again, as the app. With this workbook, what you'll notice is it doesn't come up automatically, you have to go back to the gallery first. Get out of a stack if you're already in a stack, and then it will show up at the very top of your gallery. That's how you'll get into the class workbook. Once you have all of the downloads and resources on your iPad, let's go ahead and take a look at some inspiration.
3. Inspiration: Next, let's take a look at some inspiration for letter styles and ways to decorate letters. There is so much amazing inspiration out there online and in print. I've compiled a huge list of lettering alphabets, and advertisements, and vintage images that you can use as inspiration. Let's start by taking a look at those so you can build up your letter library of styles that really fit your personal style. Back on the Downloads and Resources page, you'll see several different types of inspiration. The first is the vintage lettering inspiration board. I'll click on that and that'll open Pinterest if you have the Pinterest app, or it'll open Pinterest in a web browser. This board has three different sections: flourishes and decorative elements; ads, signs, and partial alphabets; and whole alphabets. You can click on any of these sections to see a lot of different pens relating to that topic. This is all kinds of different alphabets that you can use as inspiration. These should all be in the Creative Commons. There may be a few that aren't, so it's always good to double-check, and you can do that by clicking on it and seeing what the year is. This one's 1888, so you can use this as inspiration, no problem. You can scan through here and find some styles that work for you, or maybe find just a few words that really inspire you, or some style, or an ampersand that you really like, something like that that just speaks to you. Go ahead and screenshot it. I'll take this one, for example. I love that G and I love this little swash here that connects to the Y. That whole word is really interesting to me, so I'll just screenshot that. That's what I recommend doing first, it's just going through and getting a lot of different styles that speak to you. For example, this isn't really my style, so I would just skip that, whereas this has some really nice script that I love, especially that word "genuine" right there. Go through, get 20, 30, or 50, 60, however many speak to you on this list. Then if you go back to the Downloads and Resources page, you'll see the lettering illustration inspiration board. I'll click on that to open it up. Same idea here we're seeing illustration being combined with hand lettering and some really interesting lettering styles and ways of wrapping text or fitting text into little spaces. Here's an example. I love this playful monoline script, but then they've chopped off the edges to give it a choppy feel. I love that, I'm going to screenshot that. Here's another example. I love this color combination and I love this bold text with the playful script. We're just getting ideas here. We're certainly not going to just copy any of these, but we're getting ideas and getting a feel for personal style when it comes to hand lettering. I also want to show you a few of my favorite hand lettering books that I always go to when I'm just stuck for what kind of style to use or how to finish off a piece. This one is one of my favorites, Junk Type. You can see just on the cover, we're getting so many ideas; a banner that has a little leaf behind it, some script that's outlined. Every single page of this book has incredible ideas that you can pull from. Sometimes it just gets your brain going to peek through something like this and to step away from the computer and just get some ideas from real type in real life. Of course, we can't just go out to thrift stores every single day and find stuff like this, so books like this are really helpful because we can pull from the real world without actually having to go out and find these things ourselves. Here's a beautiful script that I would really like to try, really nice and fluid. I like how they created this circle and just let the text fall off the sides of it, so I might take a picture of that with my phone and add it to my library. That's typically what I do, is I take all these screenshots, a little picture of anything I find in a book, and then I just throw it all in an album in my Photos app. Then you just have all of that available when you need it. This is an awesome book. Here's another great book. If you're really into script lettering, this is a great one to have. I'm going to put links to these on the class Resources page so you don't have to worry about writing down all these titles. Again, you're going to find so many inspiring styles of text. I love this weighted bottoms with the sharp tops. If you're really into calligraphy, you can get inspired in this book, but also lot of modern styles, interesting choppy styles. This is a calligraphy-esque style. If you are a script lover like me, this is a great one to get. Then also Vintage Type and Graphics which has all kinds of borders, shapes. You can see I've already dog-eared pages here because there are things I need to go back to that I really like; borders, intricate details. Between these books and the Pinterest board, you'll never run out of inspiration for lettering. Also, I'm going to plug my own book here. I have a book on Hand Lettering on the iPad with Procreate, and I take you through how to take one of these styles that you find, for example, you find something in one of these books and you really love it, in this book we go through how you will take that inspiration and turn it into lettering piece or turn it into a whole alphabet. So if you're having trouble with anything you see in this class, this could be a support for you. Of course, I'm going to take you through all the steps in the class today, but this will also be a great resource for you if you need it. Now that we have all the inspiration we can possibly use, let's go ahead and get started on our first project.
4. Planning Your Menu: For this first project, we're going to create a letter style menu so you can have all of your favorite letter styles in one place. So you can pull out your letter style images that you saved from the last section and we'll use those as inspiration to create your letter style menu. This is also a great way way practice fitting letters into different spaces, which we'll be doing a lot of as we get into incorporating illustration with hand lettering. Let's start by pulling out your images that you've saved from the inspiration section and creating your letter style menu. The first thing I'll do is create a new document, and I'll just tap the "Plus" symbol, tap the "New Canvas" button here, and I'll be using 3000 by 3000 pixels for all of the projects in this class today. I like to use this size, I find that it works well for my digital and print uses, but of course you can work at any size here. Next, I'll tap "Create", and I want to start pulling from some of the letter styles that I saved as screenshots, as I was looking at my inspiration in the last section. What you can do is use the photos app to slide up and then pull this over to the left here. I've saved all of these screenshots in my photos app so they're really easy to access. I also like to create an album and just save all of my inspiration in one album, that way it's always there whenever I need it. First, I'll just start sketching out some of these styles. Of course, you don't have to copy these styles exactly, you can use them as a starting point. I like to just dive right right. I don't like to spend too much time worrying about which one I choose, so I recommend you do the same. Don't let the hesitation stop you from getting started. I'm going to grab the sketching pencil tapered, and I'm just going to start creating these little sections here, where I can fit some of my text. Let's go with this one first. What I love about this is it's unpredictable. Things aren't going in a straight line. There's this L that juts out below the A. The P is way below the other letters, the C sticks out. So there's a lot of variation going on in here, and that's something I love about this style. I'm just going to write the word varied and just play around with, how can I make this varied, like we're seeing over here without actually copying that style. I like how these letters just dip down. So I'm going to do that, but up here with the V, down and then back up. Let's try something totally different with the R. I'm just going to loop around with the R. I could also do that with the I, but I feel like then we've got two kinds of similar things going on there. So I'm going to skip doing that with the I. You can see, I'm just doing a really rough sketch here. I'm not so worried about fitting this perfectly on the page, I'm just playing around with ideas. So that will be something like what my first style will be. Then I'm just going to create a little box around this and start going with the next word. Of course, you can use any words at all. You don't have to write the word varied or write, exactly describing the text. You can just write any word that inspires you, that helps you practice this style. Also, feel free to add in a style that you already know you like. I like grade school, I call it grades school cursive because this is how we learn to write in school. So I'm going to do one of those over here. I'm not trying to make these perfect. I'm really just playing around, filling things in wherever they'll go. I have a weird space here so I'm going to fit that in with some small text, that will be small and bold. I'm going to do something with this script. So I'm going to leave a little space for the script, and you can see I'm trying to make some interesting spaces here. You don't have to do it like this, you can just do blocks on top of each other, but I think it's a little more interesting if you break it up in a fun way. This will be smooth and then to contrast smooth, I'm going to do something really rough. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to make that happen, but that's okay, you don't have to know everything as you're sketching, you just have to get close. I'm going to keep going through my inspiration images and playing around with ideas for how to fill in the rest of these blocks. If you decide you want to move a section around, you can click the "Selection Tool", make sure freehand is selected and just grab whatever it is you need to move by circling it, and then I can just shift this down, and now I have more space for this text up here. Sometimes I'll start from the end of a word rather than the beginning if I'm having trouble fitting it in, or you can start from the middle and work your way out. When we get into illustrating in objects, that will be really helpful because sometimes you can't just start from the beginning and keep writing, you need to work your way in. Play around with a few different ways to write in the word if you're having trouble fitting in. I'm happy with my basic layout. I'm going to tap the "N" symbol and reduce the opacity of that. Then on a new layer, I'll get a different color and I'm going to start making myself some guidelines. The first thing I'll do is go ahead and draw in my boxes and make those nice and neat. So I'll just draw a line, hold to make it straight, put one finger down to make it perfectly horizontal. I'll repeat that same process on the whole Canvas.
5. Guides and Thickening: Now that I have those lines taken care of, I'm going to create a new layer and start drawing in my guides. Your guides are just the top of your letter, the bottom of your letter, and the middle point of your letter or the place where the bars cross. I'm just going through each one and putting the guides for each letter on a new layer, and I'll show you why in just a second here. This is a new layer, and I will need to make some nice little guides for the word grade. Now that I've created those for the first word, I can go to my Layers panel, swipe left, tap "Duplicate" and move that down for the word school, and then same process for the final word. So that's why I put my guides all on separate layers. I just like to be able to easily duplicate those if I need to. Then you can just pinch to merge all of those guides onto the same layer. I'm just going to repeat the same process throughout my entire composition. When I do slanted guides, I'll just draw the first one, duplicate it, and then move it up, duplicate it again, and move it up again. That way they're all the exact same slant, then when I pinch them together and duplicate, I've got the slant for both of those lines. I'm realizing I don't really like that the slant is different for this box and these guides, so I'm going to delete that. That's just something you can consider. You don't have to do it this way, but I do prefer if my guides match these angles throughout my composition. So I'm just copying what you see down here. One thing you may also like to do is do your guides in a different color so it's a little easier to see. I'm going to grab blue as my color, swipe two fingers right to Alpha lock that layer, tap on the "Layer" and tap "Fill layer". I'll just repeat that with all of my guides, so then it's really easy to differentiate your guides from your boxes. I think that's the one thing that gets a little bit confusing in hand lettering is sometimes your sketches can just be so confusing because you've got so many different layers of sketch and guides and illustration or whatever else you're adding, it can get a little confusing on the page. So I tend to just break everything up into different colors to make it a little bit easier. I also try to give everything a lot of breathing room. I'm not going to let these letters touch the edge of my box. Instead, I'm going to have a quarter inch or more of space around the words, so there's plenty of breathing room. As you can see this process is a really good exercise for fitting text into spaces, which is what we're going to be doing a lot of in this class. We want to create some illustrations and then have our lettering fit nicely into those illustrations. This is just a precursor to that where we're doing the basic steps of fitting words into spaces without having to worry about the illustration side. It's also a great time to start exploring your hand lettering style. Identifying the lettering styles that work for you is the best way to start finding your style in lettering. Otherwise, you're just copying what everyone else is doing out there. So it's better to really dive in and start finding your own styles, getting inspiration from vintage images and texts, and using that to inspire your own personal style. I've got my guides, I've got my boxes, if I make my sketch layer invisible, you can see what's going on here. I've just got a lot of lines that are going to help me stay organized as I work. Let's bring that sketch back and create a new layer. I'm going to go back to that red color or you could choose a totally different color. Then I'm going to grab the rough lettering pen in the brush set. I'm just going to start by choosing a size. This is just going to be a sketch layer. It's not going to be my final layer. So it's okay if this isn't the perfect size that you want to work with, but you want to get pretty close. One thing I like to always do is make sure that the smallest space in the word is going to work well with this thickness. For example, I feel like in this particular letter, the smallest curve or the smallest space will be this R loop. So I'm just going to test my size there. For example, if I had an o here, that would be too big. In that case I would bump this down and do a thinner line. It's just something to think about before you start inking an entire word. Sometimes it's helpful to just double check that the smallest loop works with the size. First thing I like to do is go through and set the bars of a letter. Let's start with the V. I'm going to hold to get a straight line, and then just follow that curve. One thing I want to mention here is that you can do more sketch layers. My sketch layer was really messy. Often I'll do two sketch layers, three sketch layers, sketch three or four times over the same thing, just to get it right. So it takes some time to get a word right. The more you do lettering the less time it'll take you, and the more fun you'll be able to have with the process. I can already see that I don't have enough space for my R here. So I'm going to back it up. I want to make this word "VARIED" a little bit smaller. So I'll make that guide smaller and I'll make that word smaller. Make sure the guide layer's selected, swipe right on the sketch layer, tap the selection tool, and circle that whole word and guides. I messed that up, let's do it again. Tap the move tool, and then we can resize both of those layers at the same time. I think if I just make that word a lot smaller it's going to give me a lot more playing room for that little swash on the bottom of the R. Let's try that again, working just with the R. You can see how the process of lettering is just trial and error. You try something out, it doesn't work. You try it in a different way and [inaudible] and you repeat. I enjoy that part of the process. If that's frustrating to you, you probably need to do a lot more sketch layers. Take your time here and use as many sketch layers as you'd feel like you need. You also maybe just need to space out your letters a little bit more. I was seeing that my letters felt just a little bit cramped, and so I'm just spacing them out a little bit more. I'm happy with how that looks for now. I may go back and work on that a little more. But if you get stuck on where to go next with something, it's time to just move on. I also want to mention that I don't tend to resketch in the same thickness that I did for my original sketch. I prefer to do these layers in a thick pen because it's the only way you can get the spacing right. For example if I did another sketch layer of this, with this really thin pen, and then I come through and I do the actual thickness that I want to use, the spacing's going to be totally off. Even if you're doing multiple sketch layers, it's really a good idea to choose your thickness before you get too deep into sketching. We've got some text here that has a slant to it. So I'm going to go to Canvas, turn on the Drawing Guide, Edit Drawing Guide, and just choose a slant by moving this little green dot. Then you can reduce the grid size here. I'm happy with how that slant looks. I'm just thinking about that slant as I'm working on these letters. For example, my g slants down and it follows these guidelines. So this bar here follows this black guideline until it starts curving in. I also have a lot of script tips in my hand lettering book that I mentioned in the last video. So check that out if you feel like you really need some help with getting started with script.
6. Building Letterforms: As you're working through your different lettering styles, you may want to reference the class workbook. I show my process for creating any letter style. I showed how to download this workbook in the first video of this class, so check that out if you're not sure how I got this workbook. You'll see when you open the workbook that the very first layer is called flare lettering practice, and this is the lettering process that I use for almost any letter. I've got it broken down into steps here. The first step is draw the guides. The second step is sketch, which we've already done on our letter style menu. The third step is thicken, which we're doing now. The fourth step is draw, in this case, flares or some other decoration or Serif that you're adding to the letter. I go through here all my tips for how to add these. Especially, how wide do you make the flares? How wide do you make the letters? The next step I do typically is to draw the outlines of the letters using the thickening layer and the flares as my guide. The next step is to fill it in with color and then add some different types of decoration. If you're really new to lettering, you may want to start with just doing this practice sheet, starting on the drawing guides layer, and just practice drawing somebody's letters so you feel comfortable with the process. Otherwise, you can just jump straight into creating your letter style menu. I'm going to continue with drawing out some of these letters. I'll start next with this cursive dots and lines. You just need to readjust my grid by tapping canvas, add a drawing guide, and moving that little green ball to get it to the angle that I want for my letters. Again, I'm checking the thickness and some of the smaller areas of these letters before I start drawing, so the o. The e is going to be a really tight space, so that's pretty close, but I'm happy with how that looks. I might go down just here, so that e has this little bit more breathing room. I'm making sure I'm doing this on a new layer in case I need to edit later. I also take a lot of tries to draw some letters. Not every letter is so easy to just throw down. An o can be pretty symbol, it's just a circle. But then this d, there are a lot of different ways I could do that, so I'll just take some time to play around with letters like that. I'm being sure to get a style that really works for me. Sometimes you'll forget to do something on a new layer, and that's no problem. These two, for example, I accidentally put on the same layer. I'll just tap the Selection tool, select around that 1970. Drag three fingers down on the canvas, and cut and paste. That moves that to a new layer. Then it can just reduce the opacity of that and do some sketching on a new layer. I'm trying to create a bubbly 1970s feel here, so I'm just loosely drawing in some bubbles, making these bottom parts really thick. I have a whole class on 70s lettering. If you like this style, you can check that out. But for today, I'm just doing this one little piece. I didn't leave room for my s, so I'm going to tap the Move tool and then make sure Uniform is selected rather than Free Form. Uniform is going to help me preserved my proportions. Then I have a little bit more room so I can stick that s in there. One thing I want to mention here is, of course you can keep your reference images of this whole time and really refer to those as you work. That's definitely an option. I like to start with the reference images, keep them in my mind, but not follow them exactly, because then you can end up copying. But I will tell you that when I first started lettering, I relied on my reference images a lot more. I think you just need to go with what feels right to you here. If you're struggling with building these letters, go to your reference images, of course. But if you're doing great and you're enjoying making up your own style, then put those reference images away and try to do your own thing. It's an evolution that you just have to take on your own time and not worry about really how other people do it. Of course, you can also refer to my letter style menu, which I put in the workbook. Go to the workbook and you can see all of the letter styles that I played around with for this project. Feel free to just copy that if you're feeling like you're just not sure where to go to start there, and eventually, you'll get to the point where you wanna go out and find your own letter styles. I ended up having a little extra space at the end of this word. I know I'm going to put some flares on this letter, so I'm just going to widen some of these spaces so I have plenty of room to add in my flares.
7. Inking Your Letters: Now that I've got all of my thickening taken care of, I can make that black layer invisible and you can see how much cleaner this is now. We've got a much better idea of how this is going to be laid out, and it's not perfect yet, but we're getting closer. This is the process of lettering, just working layer by layer until you get things exactly how you want them to be. If anything doesn't look how you want it to at this point, this is the time to go through and fix it. You may want to thicken something, thin something out, change a word, something like that. Take your time here and once you're happy, you can just merge all of those thickening layers onto the same layer by pinching them. We could even be super organized and name that layer thickener. I'm going to make that layer semi-transparent and on a new layer, I'm going to get black as my color. I always ink in black because it's just so much easier to see. Then I'm going to go through each word and ink. There's two options here. Of course you could just redraw. I'm going to open up the drawing guides. Tap this little green dot and tap reset to get perfectly straight up and down guides. I could just go through here and just redraw these exactly as they are. But that line may be a little bit too rough for you. If that's the case, you can get a smaller brush and go through. Then you have just that little bit of texture. Or of course, if you're not a person who likes a lot of texture, grab the fluid ink brush, and go through an ink with the fluid ink brush. This is where you've got to just go with what works for your personal style. Maybe do each word in a different style so you can really play around with versions. I'm going to go with the thicker less textured version here, and I'm going to outline each of these letters. One thing to really triple check as you're doing this is that your letters are going all the way to your guides. If you see this blue line here I'm going right across the blue line, I'm not going under it and I'm not going over it. If you do that, your letters, are going to end up looking pretty wonky. Just double-check as you're drawing each of these lines, that you're going all the way to the blue or whatever color you ended up using. Then pulling down from there. It's always easier to pull towards yourself than it is to push. If you're trying to push like that and having trouble making straight lines, try pulling. I also have a screen protector on my IPad, and I do find it makes it a little bit easier to do hand lettering with a screen protector because it just has a little bit of dry paper grit to it so you can drag your hand across it instead of getting stuck. I'll put a link on the Downloads and Resources page to my review of this screen protector that I have. I'm also squaring off these ends. Originally it was curved and I'm just squaring those off. Then you can just fill with color drop as you draw. You can see that my letters are not perfect. There's definitely some wonkiness to my letters and I could take a lot more time and do more sketch layers and try to make these perfect. But honestly, I think people really like the hand made feel of hand lettering. If you want something sleek and smooth, just use a font. But if you want something playful and rough, hand lettering gives you a great opportunity to do that. I also find this process really relaxing. The inking especially, you don't have to do a lot of thought as you're inking. This is a great time to listen to a podcast or do something else that's just relaxing for you. You can also use these grids to help you space stuff out. If you're having trouble getting things in proportion, these grids can be really helpful. Whenever I erase, I use the same brush that I'm drawing with so that I get the same texture as the pen itself. If you erase with a really smooth brush and you're drawing with a rough brush, the erasing is going to be really apparent. I like to stick with the same brush for erasing and drawing. You can see how off my other side of my I eye but I used that grid. I had one bar in the middle, 1, 2 over here, and one 2 over here. This was almost one whole square off. That's why I like using the grid because it really helps me stay on track. I'm happy with how that looks. The only thing that bothers me is that the V is too close to the A right here, they are almost touching, so I'll just get that freehand selection tool. Really carefully select that V. Step back a little bit and just give it just a tad more breathing room. Also, that's a little tight right there. What I'm actually going to do is slice through right here on this R and shift it down just a little to give it a little more breathing room right there and then I can just fill that in. Nobody will ever know and I have a little bit more breathing room there, so it looks more natural. Also, of course, I want to make sure all the other spacing is even. I don't measure spacing, I just do it optically. I think that's the best way to do it. It's the most natural way to do it. We're looking for space in between letters and trying to make sure they're pretty even. I had to leave more space here because of my little swash, but the other spaces are pretty much even. The best way I think is to step way back and look for spaces that are too close or too far apart. I'm going to continue this same process with the other letters on the canvas, being sure that I'm putting each new word on its own layer. I want to note here there are a few letters that can go just a tiny bit beyond your guides. Those are the rounded letters. So s, o, g, q, anything that has a really rounded endpoint, that meets the guide then that can just peak a little bit over the guide so that it's just balanced with the other letters.
8. Spacing and Adjustments: I'm going to make these exactly as I show in the workbook. Starting with just going through and adding those flares. Then we can either do angled flares like that, or we can do smooth flares like that. I'm going to go with smooth for this piece, but just go with whatever works for your style here. You may also want to flare these little inner crossbars, just so we have that same flared feeling in the center. Also, you can feel free to borrow letters from other sections of a word. For example, I really like this I, and this I ended up being grid off. So I'm going to grab my freehand selection tool, select that I, drag three fingers down, tap "Copy", drag three fingers down again and tap "Paste". Then I can just slide that new pasted I over to here and you could do the same thing with other letters if you want. Let's grab that G. Copy. Paste. It's totally up to you, you can draw each letter one by one. It's great practice. Or you can copy some of your favorites from other parts of your composition. Looks like I spelled smooth wrong, I missed an O. So I'm just going to circle that and resize it so it can leave a little bit more space for that extra letter that I missed. You may want to add some thickening to some of these. You can use the fluid ink or the sketching tapered to just add in some of that fluid line word. You can see if you press down, the sketching tapered gets thicker and if you press slightly it gets thinner. So that's a brush that I like to use to help me make these thick to thin letters. Every time we do a down stroke, we're pressing harder, and then for the upstroke we're pressing very lightly. You can see with some of these, I end up doing three, four, five sketch layers just because I want to get an exact result. So don't feel like you have to get it on the first go, some words just take more sketch layers. I like that S a lot better than when it was just one thin little bar. But it really took doing all those extra layers to get to this place. Now I'm going to do the opposite of smooth down here, which is rough. I'm going to get a really big brush. Let it be super rough, and then I'm probably going to add in even more roughness, so it's really apparent that that's the point of this letter style. This G needs a little bit more space. I'm just going to bump that down and then I can widen that G a little bit. So I want to add a little bit more roughness to this, and also square off some of those bottom edges. So I'm just going to go through with a smaller brush and just artificially add in just a little more variation to that edge. I think that looks sufficiently rough compared to the smooth letters, and I'm just going to continue the same process with my other letters on the menu. Now I've finished all of my inking, so I can drag all my ink layers to the top of my layer stack so I'm staying super organized, and then I can start thinking about color.
9. Color and Decoration: I've made all of my layers invisible except for the plaque inking and the red bars to cordon off these little spaces. I'm going to tap the Actions menu and turn off my drawing guide, just so everything's pretty simple on my canvas. I'm going be using the same four colors for every single project in this class. I've got my four colors here. I created some color palettes for you in case you want to try the same thing. I really believe that working in limited palettes can help you a lot with developing your color sense. What I've done in the workbook is create some color palettes that you can grab. You can create a saved palette by going to Pallets, clicking the plus symbol, tapping and holding on that color, and then tapping on your new palette. You can do that, or you can change some of these palettes if there's something you'd like about them, but you're not crazy about the whole set. Let's say you don't really like that brown. I'm going to select that brown in the Layers menu, go to Adjustments, Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Layer, and then play around with that color and maybe the saturation, maybe change how bright it is. So whatever works for you here, make this color palette exactly how you want it to be. Then you can save it in your pallets. I'm today using a four color palette. You can get even more extreme and use a three color palette. I'm going to use the same palette for all these projects. So I would invite you to do the same thing if you want to try it out. Once you choose a set of colors that you want to work with, you can create a new layer below all of your inking layers. Just start adding in color using these blocks as a reference. I'm going to make this [inaudible] layer semi-transparent. Then I'll just go through and cordon off these little spaces using my few colors that I've chosen to work with. I am also putting each one on a new layer. Then I'll take the text layer that goes with that box and put it just above it. I've got the red box and then varied right above it on the layers panel that this makes it a lot easier to find things as we started layering detail. The next thing I'm going to do is start adding color to these letters. I’ll start with the word varied, and I'll just choose one of those colors. Swipe two fingers right on the layer to alpha lock it or just tap it and tap Alpha Lock and then tap Fill. You can try to fill it with a few different colors to see what looks best. We could do that pink or the cream. I'm going to stick with the cream so I get a lot of contrast. I'm just going to repeat this same process with all of the letters. Now you can start going through and adding all kinds of detail to practice different types of detail work. I'll go above the layer that says varied. Let's get a somewhat small line, a thin line. I'm just going to go through and add this thin line that goes all the way through. It's not going to connect. There's going to be a little bit of an opening there. This is just one style of decoration, but of course, take a look at my letter style menu in the workbook if you want to see a lot of different options for decorating your work. Of course, looking at all of the reference images that we talked about in the first section. There's books, there's online resources, there are endless ways to figure out how to decorate your lettering. Another one I'm going to do is lines halfway down the letter. Then as the text here says, I'm going to add in some dots. The top half will be dots. See you can imagine there are endless variations of how you can decorate your texts. You could play around with a lot of different ways on this menu and create more menus as well, so that you just have a lot of different options to choose from all the time. Another thing we can do, of course, is add a little perspective. Let's work on this word highlights. I’m going to duplicate that layer and then drag the duplicate below the original. Then I can fill it with a color, then just tap the move to and drag that layer down. Now we have this nice bold perspective layer here. Then we just need to turn off alpha log by swiping two fingers and go through and connect all of these perspective layers. I'm not going to do every single word like this because I think you get the idea. But you can go as far as you want with this, play around with as many different ways to decorate as you can think of. Look at all the resources and think of more ways to decorate. Of course, create more of these if you feel like you've only touched the tip of the iceberg, which we definitely have here. You'll be able to take time whenever you're ready and find so many different styles and ways to decorate. I’m going to leave this how it is because I think you get the point with how I create these. I also want to show you the other letter style menus that I created. I followed this exact same process, starting with sketching and then moving on to inking, adding in color and a lot of decoration. Then I just put all four of these together on the same canvas and this is a really nice reference for me whenever I'm creating a lettering piece. I have all of the letter styles and decorations that I really like all in one place. Now that you're starting to get an idea of your own letter style and what types of hand lettering speaks to your style. Let's go ahead and create our first illustration and lettering composition.
10. Thumbanils and Planning: Next, we're going to create an illustration of a letter and an envelope and add some hand lettering to the paper. You can feel free to copy the quote that I'm using, but I can tell you the prompt that I use to come up with this quote. So the concept is a letter that you want to write to yourself or someone else, some kind of message that you need to hear or that you think someone else needs to hear, maybe it's some great advice that you have. So you can distill that into a so much short quote and we'll talk about how to do that in the lesson. So I'm starting out with the same size canvas I used last time, 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. I'll get black as my color and grab the sketching pencil tapered. I always like to start by just doing some really rough sketch ideas of the composition. I know I want to do an envelope as part of this illustration, and then, I want to have a letter that has some writing on it. So this is one idea, it could be like the envelope has just been opened and the letter is just sticking out of it like this, and then we could have our text here. My text is going to be: Saying no to something is saying yes to something else. You can start thinking about how you're going to organize the text, but don't spend a ton of time here because we're definitely going to change this up and this is just one little idea for how this layout could be formed. Also, I want to mention when I come up with these quotes, I sometimes of course, you'll just think of something out of the blue but most of the time you're thinking of a concept. For example, I was thinking of the concept, sometimes it's hard to say no to really interesting opportunities, even when you don't really have the time or you already feel stretched then with the work you're currently doing, and you feel guilty for saying no or you feel like you're missing out on something, or on and on and on. But the point for lettering is to shorten it into something concise that we can fit into a few words. What I normally do is take out a journal, just some regular-lined paper, it doesn't have to be anything fancy, and just write a few pages about this topic. Normally, when you do that, things will start to surface, repeating elements will start to surface, and you'll start getting some ideas for how to shorten the quote. I wrote a few pages about this concept, why this comes up for me a lot, how I deal with it, what's holding me back, and I've shortened it to: Saying no to something is saying yes to something else. You want to try to keep these as short as possible especially if your plan is to show these online because they're going to show up pretty small. So the more words you're trying to fit into a space, the less likely it is that people will actually be able to see it. So feel free to copy my quote, but also, you will get into making your own at some point and do something that is relevant to you, or the people you know, or the field that you're in, whatever it is, something that's meaningful to you for whatever reason. I also cover a lot about creating your own quotes in my book that I mentioned at the beginning. So you can find a link to that in the Downloads and Resources section. I like this layout where you're adding in a pencil, the envelope sitting over to the side like this, that's nice. I might use this idea. Also, we could do the same idea but not have the pencil, so that would just simplify it a little bit. We've got the envelope and I've got the paper over here. You can see how rough the sketches are. I'm really not trying to create a masterpiece, I'm just trying to figure out where things are going to go on the page. Then, another idea that you could certainly do would be to put these on a notebook instead of on a letter and envelope. So we could have our quote going across a notebook. That's another idea. I'm going to save that for a letter and I'm going to stick with this. This is my favorite. I feel like you can really see the envelope well here and you can see the piece of paper well. So I'm going to stick with that. I'll make that layer invisible, create a new layer, and then, I want to start sketching my envelope. I'm going to grab a reference image for this, and if you go back to the Downloads and Resources page, you'll see search envelopes on Unsplash, and Unsplash is a site for photos that are free for personal and commercial use, and you can use these as references. You can scroll through here and find an envelope style that works for you. I love this envelope right here, so just take a screenshot, oops, by pressing the Home button and the Power button. Go to the Photos app, and I've already cropped that image, so I've got that right here. Back in Procreate, I'm going to slide my finger up, put that photos up over on the side here, and then I've got my envelopes right over here just for getting my improved portions looking nice. We could do this using the Symmetry tool, that would probably be the easiest way. The first thing I like to do though anytime I draw anything, it's just a big simple sketch. So I'm just going really rough figuring out how wide I want these things to be. I want a rounded edge here like that, a little rounded here, it cuts up, and then goes across. So I don't spend a ton of time sketching, I like to just do some really loose sketching but I do think it's a really important part of the process. Let's tap the Move tool and make that a little smaller. I can already tell that's way too big on the canvas. Now I can grab the Symmetry tool by going to the Actions menu, Canvas, turn on the Drawing Guide, Edit Drawing Guide, Symmetry, and under options, make sure vertical is selected. Now, on that layer, we can start with a darker color or just holding down your pencil a little harder, drawing over that sketch.
11. Sketching and Inking: I'm happy with that I want to refine it a little bit more. So I'm going to create a new layer, tap on that layer and turn on drawing assess. Now that has the cemetery feature activated, I'll make my original sketch invisible and now I can do a much more refined sketch of this envelope. I'm also just going to take a minute to look at this and make sure the proportions and everything look good before I move on. If they don't, you could tap the move tool, tap free-form, maybe squish it a little bit, make it a little bit wider. If your proportions just don't look right, this is a good time to play around with it before you start doing your fine sketch. I really love how this envelope has so many interesting rounded edges. It's not like your typical mailer envelope that you see, it's a more interesting shape. That's something I always think about when I'm illustrating is, how can I pick something that has this a little bit more of an interesting shape, getting just a little bit different from what you would necessarily expect. I think that really helps your illustration stand out. I'm also going to add in this little, what do we call this? Glue pads, something like that. I'm happy with how my envelope looks. I know I want my piece of paper to appear as though it fits inside my envelope. So I'll create a new layer, make that original sketch layer invisible. Turn on drawing assess for that new layer and let's reduce the opacity of our sketch. This new layer is easier to see, this cure to that envelope. I don't really need that right now. I'm just going to draw my piece of paper, half of it anyway. Then I'll duplicate that. Tap the move tool, flip vertical on snapping, make sure magnetics is on and then just pull that up. Now, we have a piece of paper that figurely fits within our envelope. I'll merge those two paper layers together. If you want to get super organized, you can name your layers paper envelope. Now I can start organizing these on the page. I'm going to take my envelope, turn off snapping magnetics and let's put the envelope over here. The paper can go up here, but I don't want it to cover the envelope too much. I think that everything's a little bit too big right now. I'm going to select both of those. Tap the move tool, make sure that uniform is on and then resize. That looks a little better that way when I pull my paper up here, I'm not missing out on all those nice angled edges and things on the envelope. I'm always thinking about how do lines meet, how do lines interact with each other? For example, I wouldn't want my paper corner to touch this fold on the envelope because that's going to create a confusing situation for the viewer. Whereas if the paper overlapped here is clearly a separate thing and it's not attached to the envelope, it's just sitting on top of it. This is just one way to avoid visual confusion. Let's turn off that drawing guides so we don't have that distracting line in the center. Create a new layer and let's get some guides down for our lettering. First, I'm just going to sketch the lettering in here and figure out the best way to fit this text onto lines. I'm doing this on a new layer, so it's easy to edit and move around and I'm not going to try to get super fancy with the text right here. I'm just sketching it in. I'm happy with how that slayed out. If you're not, you can grab your selection tool, grab a word, put it on different line. We could even tap the move tool, make this all a little bit smaller so it fits on the page more in the center. Just play around here with the spacing and where each word goes until you feel really comfortable with the layout. Then I'm going to reduce the opacity of that, get a new color, new layer, and start dropping in my guides. I want to make sure that my lettering is lining up with the top of that page. So I'm going to draw my first guide on the top of that page and then tap the move tool and then I can start dropping in my guide. I can already see that my text was a little bit off, I'm just duplicating that layer. That can help you just stay on track if you use that top edge as a guide. I'm happy with that as my guides for the whole piece. So I'm going to duplicate that, shift it down, and just try to space these out nicely. Once you're happy with your guides, you can merge those together and then I'll create a new layer, new color, and start doing a more refined version of my lettering. I tend to start with the lettering first when I do these pieces, I'm just reactivating my guide, just like we did in the first project. I like to do the lettering first because for me in a composition like this, lettering is the most important thing and everything else comes after it. So I'm letting the composition be shaped around the lettering. You can see sometimes you just run out of room with a word. Then I'll just grab the freehand selection tool, circle around that line, and shift it over. Also of course, I chose one of the letter styles that I really like for this, but you could work with any style here. I think script is a nice touch with the letter and envelope composition. But of course, go with any letter style from your menu or from some other resource that you find to fill out this letter. Now I can make my sketch layer invisible and I'm going to go ahead and ink my letters. Again, that's the most important part of this composition and I want everything else to fit around that. In this case, I'm going to start with the lettering. I don't always do that, it depends on the composition. But I think in this case, it's pretty straightforward. We just need to fit this into a rectangle. I'm going to grab a rough lettering pen at a medium size and play around with some of these smaller loops before I commit to one of these sizes. I can see that that brush was too small for my e, so I need to find something that's going to fit my e a little bit better. I think that's going to work. I'll go ahead and ink this trying to get everything somewhat even across the page and of course first, I want to make sure my sketch is pretty much lined up. I'll take that freehand selection tool and shift some of these things over. Another thing I like to do is let some of these little tails trail off. I think that adds some nice variation to the piece. That's one thing you can consider if you're using a script, is just get a little bit playful with how you finish off these words. I can really help out a lot of visual interest to your composition. I always take a few tries to finish off these letters. Sometimes the first or second try is just not exactly cohesive with the rest of the composition. So I usually just try a few times and step back until something fits. Also you might consider doing a little bit of variation in how you end these tails. For example, the g just trails off under the word no. But then that same word over here, I did it with the y. Just trying to create a little visual difference between those two words.
12. Color and Options: I'm happy with how this looks. I'm ready to start working on my illustration. I'm going to create a new layer below this layer, and color in my paper. I'm just following this sketch that I created. These illustrations really don't have to be super complex to support your lettering well. It's really just a canvas for your lettering, and the focus is on the lettering, that's what everyone's going to read. You don't have to spend a lot of time making a super complex illustration. I'm going to go ahead and throw a background color down, and then swipe to bring my sketch up above that background layer, and then start filling in my envelope. Again, I'm using my limited color palette. I really like using these limited palettes, not just because of the way they look, but because it just takes some of the guess work out of drawing and illustrating. I know especially in the beginning that can take a lot of your time, just changing colors over, and over, and over. Whereas if you just commit to a set of colors and just play around with that for a few months or longer. You can really focus a lot more time on your illustration skills rather than obsessing over color all the time. I'm just going to grab a slightly darker version of that same color. That's the color I'll use to fill in all of these extra parts of my envelope like this little glue strip. I'll also use that same color for the interior part of my envelope. I want to be able to draw write off the edge here, so since that darker layer is on the layer above my envelope, I can just tap on it and tap clipping mask, and it clips that ink to the shape below it. Another thing I'd like to add in, is some lines on the paper. I'm just going to drag my line sketch back up above my paper, and make it semi-transparent so I can see it but it's not really distracting. Then I'll just grab, black is my color, and follow this line to create some lined paper for my lettering. I'm just going to reduce the opacity of that layer a little bit so that it's not overpowering the lettering, so it just looks like some light lines on a sheet of paper. I'll tap the actions menu in canvas to turn off that guide so that's not in my way, and then I feel like my text is a little bit large on the paper now that I'm seeing this whole composition. I'm going to tap on the text layer, swipe on the lines layer, tap the move tool, make sure uniform is selected, and just make everything a little bit smaller, so that it fits a little bit more snugly here on the paper. I think that looks a little bit better. Next, you could keep going with this. You could add texture. I'm just going to add a little bit of line work in the background to show that there is a texture to this background, maybe a table or a floor wherever this is sitting. I'll just turn on my drawing guide. Tap edit drawing guide, tap that little green dot and reset. Actually let's make that grid size a little bit bigger. Tap done. Then I can just follow these lines to create a really simple background. Of course, you could create any kind of background here. You could do some wind texture. You may have some texture brush that you like. I have a lot of classes where I give away texture brushes, so you could grab some of those, you could make your own. There's endless things you could do with this background. But you might consider, if you're going to do several of these illustrations, just choose a background style and stick with it for a few different compositions, and then you have a nice little set of drawings that work well together. I'm just randomly throwing these down here and doing sort fur wood grain. I'm also going to change the color of my text to that red that we're using in the rest of the composition and turn off the drawing guide. Turn off my sketch layers, and there's my final composition. Of course, you could do the same process and make the composition a little bit more complicated. In this case, I decided that I wanted to have a pen along with the envelope and piece of paper. I did the exact same process that we just did. I just arranged everything a little bit differently and threw in a pencil. I think that really just adds something interesting to the composition. It let's your eye bounce around the page and have a little bit more to look at than you would if it was just the two objects. You could do the same thing and add in a coffee cup or a phone, or whatever else is sitting on your table. Just illustrate that in to support your letter and envelope. Of course, a letter and an envelope is not the only type of illustration we could do this process with. We could use any object here. I just like for the quote to relate somehow to the object. In this case, I thought after the quote you probably have enough on your plate, so I used the plate, and added in some silverware here. It's really the exact same process that we just used. I just added a little bit more lettering to the composition, and I also combined a script and a serif. Both of these are just from my letter menu. You've already seen the process for how I create this lettering, and then I just added in a little bit of perspective coming in from the center of the plate, and played around with a few different options for the text before I landed on a final decision. I had the idea for the quote, what would you do if you believed that was possible? This is one of those types of quotes that it's not easy to think of an object to combine with it. So I started with some thumbnails to brainstorm some ways to write out this quote, and I think a poster taped to the wall is a great catch-all illustration that you could really put any quote on. It doesn't have to be anything specific. Some message that you want to send to yourself or to someone else. I just added a few little pieces of tape at the top. This is a super simple illustration. It's really focusing all on the lettering, and you can see I'm using the same lettering styles that I used in the other composition. I'm just laying them out in a slightly different format, and then adding a little bit of perspective and layering to the letters and that's really it. This is something you could do in an hour or two and have a really nice composition to share. You could also fit your quote around some object. I had an idea for this quote that had the word cut in it, and I thought that would be a nice combination with some scissors. I first sketched in the scissors because I knew that was going to be difficult to fit on the canvas, and then I fit all of my letters around that object. Then I'm just using some of the letter styles from my letter menu, which you can feel free to copy. But as you know, I just copied these from the reference images and got inspiration from those. Then I'm just adding in a little bit of perspective, not doing anything too dramatic with these. You can see I spent a lot of time working and reworking some of the words to get them to fit nicely around the scissors. Then I just added in some fun little texts in the background that just relates to the quote but isn't really part of the quote. I thought it would be funny to just have snip, snip, snip all around the composition, and then just a little bit more detail work on top of each of the letters. Another fine composition type is just to scatter all of your objects around the canvas, and then add the quote in the very center. You don't have to fit your text on or around an object, it certainly can just be scattered around the page. Let's go ahead and move on to our next project where we'll do a little bit more complex illustration and lettering work.
13. Combining Letterforms: For this next project, we're going to use some product like a bottle or a box as a canvas for our hand lettering. You could use any product at all, but the only thing to be careful about is using copyrighted products or shapes. You wouldn't want to do, for example, a Coca-Cola bottle. As you know, illustrators have to be really careful about copying copyrighted shapes and products. So make sure you're using something really generic. I'll be using a matchbox, so you can feel free to copy me or choose a different product. Let's start by looking at some inspiration for those product shapes. Starting here on the resources and downloads page, I'm going to go to the lettering and illustration inspiration board. You'll see if you scroll down on this board I've saved images of a lot of products and bottles. These are all vintage images, so you can use these fun shapes as inspiration. You could do a bottle, you could do a shoe, you could do a can. Maybe just scroll through here and find something that works for your style, the drawing ink one is kind of fun, a wine bottle, could be soap box, a food box. What I'm going to do though is a match box. You can follow along with me, or you can choose a different product. But essentially we're going to try to fit a lot of different types of lettering onto a product. This one's a good example because it has a nice circular area and then a horizontal area that you can use to fill space. You'll also get some great ideas for ways to lay out your lettering. This is a really nice layout here. Or you could do something like this where it cuts across and then has some lettering horizontally. This is a great place to get inspiration for some of your lettering pieces. I'm going to go ahead and start with this one, and I'll just take a screenshot of that. I have that beside me as I work. Let's go to the photos app, tap on that image, tag, edit, and then crop it. But then they can go back to procreate, and I have that exact same size canvas that we've been working with. Let's start by just playing around with some ideas for how to lay this out. I had the idea for the quote: create whatever lights your fire. I thought I would go nice with a match box. We could have the matchbox laying down with it open and have some matches coming out, like you're seeing here, but it's turned. We could have the match box top and then the bottom laying down here with the matches in it. That's one idea. We could have the matchbox sideways, and then maybe have a match out with it. This is what I do with every single composition like this I create. I just start by going through and sketching it out and trying to figure out what is the most interesting composition, what is going to leave me plenty of room for my lettering and still be fun to look at for the viewer. I really like this one where I am showing a lit match beside, and I like this lit match that the cat is holding here so I think I'm going to use that as inspiration for my drawing. I'll create a new layer, and let's just start by sketching this out. I'm going to let my matchbox be, not quite in the center, but over to the right a little bit, or to the left. Then, let's have the match just sticking out here, then we'll have little flame. The sketching process is so important for just making your work easier as you draw. If you don't start out with this sketching and you try to start with the details first, it often leads to things just not fitting on the canvas or things being not quite in proportion with each other. So I always recommend starting with a sketch layer. I'm going to have this be a 3D version of this box, even though that's not what we're seeing on the cat image. I like having this side of the box showing just a little bit. It doesn't have to be extreme. One trick here, the more dramatic you make this angle, the wider your box is going to look. So just think about here how wide a match box would be, and then try to get close to that. Doesn't have to be perfect. I mean, this is a fun, playful illustration and we're going to have matches sticking out of it, so nobody's going to be confused as to whether or not it's a match box. I'm happy with that. I'm also going to have it be open a little bit, so I need to draw in this little area where the matchbox is open, and then where all my matches stick out. Next, I want to make sure I'm leaving plenty of room for my quote. My quote is, "Create whatever lights you fire". On this composition, I invite you to try combining a few different letter styles, maybe two or three. I'm going to do three, but if that sounds too much, go ahead and just do two, whatever two you're comfortable with that work well together. I'm going to do a script here for the word "whatever" and then I'm going to add in something totally different here, a circle that says "lights your." That leaves me a nice space here for my F. It's going to be something like that. You can, of course, take some time to try different composition ideas. If you do this lettering piece on a different layer, I'll just move this to a different layer for an example, then we could try a whole another composition. What if we started with script? It doesn't really leave nice room for that word, but depending on the quote that you do, that might work really well to start with the script and just have it sweeping across. So use inspiration from whatever product you're using or anything else on the inspiration board to make your quote fit here. For me, I can already tell this isn't going to work well just because I don't really like breaking apart words like that, but it's not that bad. We probably could make it work and figure out a way to fit whatever in there a little bit better. That's one reason why it's a good idea to put your lettering sketch on another layer because then you have that flexibility to try out different layouts. So now that we have a sketch going on here, let's merge all those sketch layers together, reduce the opacity and start doing a more refined sketch.
14. Sketching and Inking: I'm just going to use the quick line and putting down one finger to get things perfectly horizontal. I'm starting with a simple box shape, and you can see why here it's so nice to have that sketch because, I can just follow my sketch rather than doing a lot of guesswork as I'm refining. I'm going to create a new layer for this prospective work, because I want to be able to reuse these prospective lines over and over. Here's the first prospective line just coming down from the side of this box. I'm just going to duplicate that, shift it down to here. Duplicate the first one again, shift it down here, and duplicate it again and shift it over here. I'm just keeping it super simple. These prospective lines just help the box with a little bit 3D. You don't have to do this 3D portion if you don't like how it looks, but I like to add just a little bit of extra interests to the piece. I feel like my prospective lines ended up being way too long, so I'm going to read this and make them a little bit shorter. That's a little better. I felt like my match box was just way too thick. This is what you'll always go through as you're doing the sketch layers is things don't quite look right and you just have to take some time to adjust, redo, step back. I try to always step back as I'm working so that I don't get really far along in the process, and then say, "Oh, that is all totally off." I'm going to do a fun wavy flame like this cat is holding here, and I'm probably going to do two layers of color just so it's really easy to see that this is a flame. I think my match is way too big, so I'm just going to circle it, make it a little bit smaller here. Then I'm also going to add in matches here. I think I'll just copy this, drag three fingers down, copy, drag three fingers down, paste, and stick this in here, so that the match that's out matches the match that's in the box. I'm just erasing that flame. I'll just duplicate that shape a few times, and space it across my matchbox. I still think my matches are a little bit big, so I'm going to select all my matches, including the one that's out, make them a little bit smaller, and that way I can fit a couple more in the box. Next, I'm going to add in some guidelines for my text. Of course you could do another sketch layer first if you're not quite sure about how your lettering is going to be laid out. You may want to start with one more sketch layer for your lettering before you take into inking. One thing I'm always thinking about with these quotes is, you want the most important words to stand out the most. These two words, LIGHTS YOUR, they're just supporting words that help the sentence makes sense. But the important words here are CREATE and Fire. Whatever LIGHTS YOUR is just the support, CREATE and Fire, those need to be really big and prominent in my composition. Now I'm going to grab that rough lettering pen and start adding in my thickening weight here. I'll start with the word CREATE, and you can see I ran out of room. So I just need to select that guide layer, select the text layer with the freehand selection tool, then tap the move tool and give myself a little bit more space for that E. I'm also going to circle that guide layer with the freehand selection tool, cut and paste, and then duplicate it to shift it over here, so I have a little bit more guide to work with. I need to turn on my drawing guide because I'm working with some script that has an angle to it. So I'm just turning that on and adjusting it. Little bit of overlap here with this word, so I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller. You can see my most common problem is making things too big and then having to work to fit them in. I think that's pretty common when you're lettering, you want to fit a lot more than you can on the page and then you end up having to spend a lot of time shifting things around. I'm happy with how this looks. I'm going to make my first sketch layer invisible, so I can get that out of my way. Now, as I did with the last piece, I'm going to work on refining my text. I'll get black as my color, get that rough lettering pen, and I'm just going to use this thickening layer as a guide, just like we did in the lettering menu. I'm going to go through and add in my serifs or my decoration, or whatever I'm doing to that particular letter style, and inking that in, in black. I ended up really not liking this E, so I'm just going to cut it onto another layer. Get the freehand selection tool, circle this E, which I do like, copy, and then paste it over here. That other one just got way too chunky for this letter style. As you can see, my word is a little bit too big for that space, so I'm just going to size it down just a tiny bit, and then fill in these letters. I'm just going to repeat the same process with all my different letter styles. The only thing differently that I'm going to do with this one, is I'm going to add in a little bit of weight. So on these lower downstrokes here, I'm just going to add a little bit of filler. I just do that by doing a little curve like that, filling it in, just making this whole thing a little bit more chunky. For example, in this e, let's do an e, and then add in a little bit of weight. I'm trying to do the same weight on each one, of course, it doesn't have to be perfect. This is hand lettering, so it can have a little bit of the human hand in it, which is imperfection, but I do try to get these somewhat even. I also want to note here that I'm putting the inking for each word on its own layer. CREATE is on a layer, and whatever is on a different layer, and I'm going to put LIGHTS YOUR on a different layer. I'm also going to remove that matches image that's going to kill my battery to have that out, so I'm just going to get rid of that. I know that procreate has the reference layer now, but I have to be honest that when I turn that, it just drove me crazy that it was always on my screen and on top of my artwork, and I just zoom around and move around the page way too much to have something else on the screen here. I'm just doing this word with really simple text on my letter menus, I think called small and bold. Because this is more of a supporting text, and this isn't like a essential part of the quote, I'm just going to give it a really simple letter style, whereas the ones I want to be more prominent, those get more flourishes, serifs, more decoration. I'm just trying to draw the viewer's eye into the most important words. I'm happy with how that's laid out, so I'll probably make some little adjustments as I work. But for now, I'm going to get rid of all those grids and all those sketches so I just have my fun little lettering area.
15. Color and Detail: I also want to just fill in the circle here so that I remember that this text was supposed to be within a circle. Now I can start playing around with the color. Again, I'm going to start by dropping in that background layer. Let's find that matches sketch and bring that up. As you can see, I'm using the same color palette, I'm not having any guesswork with the colors. I'm just jumping right in the colors I already have. Now I have the sides of the box, so for the bottom, I'm just getting a slightly darker color, just sliding to the darker area on that color wheel. Then for the side, sure you can guess, I'm just going to get a slightly lighter color. It says if the brightest color is shining on that area. Then maybe for this part of the side, to differentiate that from the other side, I'll just use the original red color. So I'm just going back and forth between colors. There is no right or wrong way to do this, just play around with it, see how it looks. Let's go with this darker color on the inside of the match box. If I make my sketch invisible, it starts making enough of an impact to see the bottom, and the side and everything being really well differentiated. I honestly think this dark red can be a little bit darker. I wish I had put that on another layer. Now you can see why it's so nice to have things on another layer, because then you don't have to go through this, the whole redrawing thing, but we aren't perfect sometimes we forget. I like that a lot better. It really shows that there is the bottom there. I'm going to add that same color to the inside of the match box. I like how that's shaping up, so I'll bring my sketch back and now I can start coloring my matches. I'll just get that same rough lettering pen. You can see I'm pretty much using the same two brushes for this entire composition. You can have a lot more fun with different pressures and play around, but sometimes with lettering, I like to just keep it super simple and just use the same brushes over and over. I'm going to give each of these matches a little ellipse to show the side of the match, and then duplicate that shape, bring it up here, and make sure that's going to work for my match box. I think that looks good. I'm just going to duplicate those little guys over and over to fill in my matchbox area. I've said this probably a million times, but always try to duplicate the original layer, don't duplicate a duplicate because every time you duplicate something in raster based imagery, which is what Procreate uses, it gets a little bit more blurry. We want to always stick with duplicating original images, not duplicating duplicates. I wanted these matches to just spiel a little bit off, not totally right beside each other, just a little bit varied in there, so I like how that looks. I'm going to merge all of these matches together, and then I'll just erase anything that comes below this matchbox opening. I'm going to move my sketch so you can really see what I'm doing here. See, if I'd put this darker color on a different layer, like I always say to do, but then forget to do, I wouldn't have to do this. I could just stick this below the match box layer, but of course, I did this just to demonstrate to you why it is a different layer. Once I've erased that majority here, just to give myself a little opening, I can grab that freehand selection tool, circle the bottom of those matches, drag three fingers down and cut. Next, I'll add in my frame and I'm just going to grab that same red color, keeping it simple here with the limited palette. That's going to be the first part of my frame. I think I'm going to let this be under the match so you can really see it. I'm going to sample this darker color that we used and that will be the second part of my frame. Turn off the sketch so I can see how that looks. I like how that's going so I'll stick with that, and now I'm just going to start adding some color to my lettering. I'm going to use that blue color that's in my palette, but I'm going to make it a little bit darker so I get almost a midnight blue. I'm going to try to use that blue in a few other places because if you use a color in just one one two places, it doesn't really fit well in the composition whereas if you spread it throughout the composition, it seems to fit better in there. So now I'm just adding a little bit of perspective to the word create. We could also go into that word and use that background color to add some decorative area to the lettering. For example, we could fill just a little bit of pink in here and that draws that background color forward too. I'll do the fill and then I'll do some lines like this, using that grid to help me space it out and I'll repeat that on this whole word. If you make these lines half dotted sometimes, they get a vintage feel. So you can just come in and add some little dots and showing where it was faded on the paper, that will give it a nice vintage feel. This is just pulling these from the reference images. I didn't come up with these myself, this is all inspiration from the vintage images. There are so many things we could do to decorate this, but I won't keep going forever and having you watch me decorate this, I'm just going to add one more thing here to give this some visual interests. Let's do a little circle around this. We could do double circles, we could add perspective, so many different things to try here. If I step back, it looks like there is a lot of blank space on this match box, so I'm going to do two things. I'm going to add perspective to my script. First, I'll do the word fire, give that a little perspective, then I'll do the word whatever. Already that's spacing out that cream and blue color to spread it around the matchbox. So you can see if we step back, we're getting this much more even look rather than having really bright areas at the top and then really dark areas at the bottom. What we're trying to avoid is a visual heaviness to one area. Instead, we want the viewer's eye to bounce around the page and have even emphasis in all different areas. I'm also looking out for these little mistakes as I'm filling in the perspective, so sometimes you'll see a little dot where you didn't totally fill in the color and then you can just go back to that layer and dump that on. I think that match is way too close to my matchbox now that I look at it, so I'm just going to pull it over here to even out that composition.
16. Decoration and Challenge: One last thing I want to add in is just a little bit of filler. I don't like these big blank spaces here. What I'll do is come through first and just do some little lines, some gesture lines that are filling these spaces in a way that make sense. I don't want to just randomly add lines. I'm trying to mimic the open spaces here, and then I'll make that layer semi-transparent. Come through here and we can do some teardrop shapes or we could just leave it as lines. There are endless ways that you can decorate these compositions, maybe play around with a few different things, a few different flourishes. You can get ideas for those flourishes on the Pinterest inspiration boards, screenshots, and flourishes that you really like, so that when you're working on a composition you just have those there easy to access. I really like these tear shapes though, they're pretty good, all-purpose fillers that work for a lot of different compositions. What I might try on top of those too is using that same red color of the matchbox, so just go inside and add a fun little filler there. You can see how as we're building up these various layers, we're getting more and more visual interest on the Canvas. We're inviting the viewer to look around, look at every little part, rather than just focusing on one or two areas. Of course you can keep going with this. You can try different perspective layers, different types of decoration, change all the colors. There are so many different things you can do here. We could add a texture layer as well. What I'll do is go ahead and call this finish so I can show you a few more options of what you could do with this composition style. I use this exact same process to design some fun stamp compositions. So this is another good idea that you can do that, pretty much any quote could go inside a stamp. Whatever you can think of here, you could do a whole series of stamps in the same color, in different colors, whatever works for your style. Another thing you might try is doing a bottle or set of bottles. I got an idea to illustrate what creates a creative career or a successful creative. I found some bottles on Pinterest, some bottle shapes, and then just added in my text on top of these. You don't always have to do a quote, you can do a list or just some ingredients or anything that you can think of that you want to represent in visual form. You can figure out how to make this into a hand lettering piece. I'm using the exact same process that we did with all of our lettering, putting in those guides, adding that ink layer, then playing around with color last. With this bottle idea, you could do one bottle, two bottles, three. You can scale this up and down depending on how complex you want to get with your work. You can see I'm using those exact same colors that we used last time, and then also adding some things up on the wall. I feel this was missing a little something, so I just added in some little posters or stickers that are up on the wall. This is a great opportunity to add in some secret message or a hidden message, that the viewer has to work a little bit to figure out. That's a great way to get people looking at your work a little bit longer, and keep them interested in your message as they're looking at your work. I want to invite you to join me in a drawing challenge on Instagram where you can share all of the drawings that you made in this class. There are six challenge topics that I suggest, but of course you can choose your own topics or use some of the topics listed in the Idea section in the workbook. You can use the hashtag, lettering and illustration challenge in your caption on Instagram to share your drawings with me and everyone else in the challenge. You can also tag me and follow along with my drawings for the challenge. I hope you've enjoyed this class, and that you feel inspired to start combining hand lettering and illustration. If you'd liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create ink illustrations and procreate, how to hand letter in the 1970s style, and how to illustrate using layered texture and color. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, we share a lot of free downloads for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more like you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the projects that you create after you watch this class. So please join me in the drawing challenge. You can also share your projects here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, designers, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad, and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work, check out the group in the link on my website. If you have any questions as you work through the processes in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You could reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
