Compare Procreate, Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator: A Comprehensive Guide

1. Course Introduction: Hi there. I'm Esther Nariyoshi, a US based illustrator and a digital brush makekr. My work has been featured in magazines and licensed to companies. And most importantly, teaching is one of my favorite things to do. Through my creative work, I've taught over 40 classes to 45,000 students around the world. But I always remember what it was like as a beginner artist. I'd look at different digital programs and think, which one should I actually use for my artwork? That's exactly why I created this course. Today we're going to put three major programs through the same tasks. We will test Procreate, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. Each program will handle four common things that visual artists do all the time. Black ink on white paper, colored ink on colored paper, and drawing natively in the program and working with watercolor paintings. This class works for artists at any level. You might watch it differently depending on how much experience you have. If you're just starting out, use this to help decide which program to spend your time learning. If you have been doing this for a while, you might want to see how different programs and creative workflows stack up. And here's the thing. I'm not trying to get you learn every program at once. My goal is to help you find the best fit for how you like to work and what you want to create. And this will save you time, money, energy, and a lot of frustration. You will have the ability to pick a tool that works with you instead of against you. All of these programs can handle typography and special effects and things like that pretty well. But that's not what we're focusing on today. We're going to look at drawing and working with artwork. I've also put together some really helpful resources that come with this course to fill in any gaps that you might have. And if any of these programs catch your interest and you might want to dive deeper, I have courses on my page that go way more in depth with techniques and workflows for each one. Come along with me on this, and by the end, you will have a much better understanding of which program fits best with how you like to work. I'll see you in class. 2. Make Most Out of the Class: Before we jump in, let me tell you about some cool resources I have made just for this course. I have a five day email series that takes each lesson and breaks it down into bite sized pieces. Plus, you will get free brush packs and actions for each program. This newsletter series really helps fill in the blanks and gives you way more detail on each technique we cover. Here's how this course works. We're going program by program. First, Procreate, and then Adobe Photoshop, and then Adobe Illustrator. Each program gets put through exact same four tasks so that you can see side by side how they handle things. I'm going to move pretty quickly to cover everything we need to. If something feels too fast, just pause or rewind or watch it at a slower speed. Or even better. Grab that newsletter where I slow everything down step by step. First, we're seeing how each program handles the easy stuff black ink on white paper. That's like the perfect scenario for most programs because it gives a really high contrast. And then we're making it harder by working with colored ink on creamy paper, which means dealing with color correction and trickier selections. Third, we're going to draw natively in each program and build up our artwork from scratch. And this shows what each one is really good at creatively. Last but not least, we're tackling watercolor paintings with all their soft edges, multiple colors, and subtle blending. Think of this as getting a preview before you invest serious time and money learning specific tools. I want to show you each program's personality so you can make smart choices about where to focus your energy. Alright, let's start testing. 3. Procreate Workflow: We're starting with Procreate, and I'm excited to show you how this iPad app handles our four challenges. Procreate has gotten really popular and for good reason. You pay once, and you're done. No monthly fees. It's designed beautifully for touch, and it just feels natural from day one. The way you use gestures and the Apple Pencil makes it feel more like the real drawing experience than a lot of desktop programs. But how does it actually do when we put it through the stuff that artists deal with every day? That's what we're about to find out. Let's get started with the peppers. The first one is the ink pepper itself, and the second one is for the texture. Our goal for this exercise is to lift our ink drawing away from the white background. I've seen other artists done changing the blending mode to multiply to kind of fake the effect. The problem with that is that you can't really have the full freedom of changing color. And if something, for example, if this has to live on another drawing, let's see. Let me just show you real quick. So if this pepper has to live on another drawing, you don't have the full opacity because you have used the multiply blend mode. So I want to show you two different ways to truly isolate and digitize our ink drawing away from the white background. So let's restore the blend mode. And I will show you two different method. The first one is common, but with limitations. So you want to come over to select the selection tool and hit automatic, and you just tap on the area that you want to isolate. For example, it does a pretty good reading of the pepper. And if you need, you can change the threshold of your selection by sliding your pencil on screen. However, the limitation comes up when you select something like this. For example, when you tap on the texture, you can see these things are at least in the eyes of the Procrade program is isolated islands. These areas are not really connected, so you really have to go into every little detail to pick them up, and this can get really tedious and very inaccurate. So if I were to just copy and paste this one, copy and paste them on a new layer, you can see the result is not very satisfactory. The texture is broken into discontinuous pieces. That's why I think the second method is a lot easier and better. Although the downside is that it doesn't make much logical sense. You just have to trust me and follow my instruction. So I'm just drawing something really, really general. I'm not even pretending to be precise. As you can see, I just drew a big kind of blob. And from there, I want to make a copy. So make sure you have that selection copied. And create a new layer and a layer mask. So tape on the thumbnail and mask. And from there, you want to have your mask selected and then paste. It doesn't make any logical sense, but you just have to trust me. So tap on the thumbnail again of the mask and invert. So visually, it looks like the white peppers or whatever you're drawing in white is sitting on black background. The magic really happens when you color drop the main layer. So I'm going to pick a color that is pretty close to the actual pepper, which is spicy red, and hide my skin right now. And to make the contrast even better, I'm going to change my background color to white, and from there, have my main layer selected and boom, Walla. So here we are with every little detail from our skin. And then you can pinch to merge these two layers. Now you have your peppers. And then I'm going to select my second portion and cut and paste into a new layer. So from there, I can even change the color independently into something else and then move it over, change the blend modes to truly let the texture shine. I think I'm going to go with this. And then I will use the warp function under the selection to change the contour of my pepper texture. Technically, I can turn this into a clipping mask to make the edges neater, but I do like the overprint effect. So I'm going to leave it that way. And I do want to create a clipping mask as a way to color the top stem. I'm going to do this darker green, and I can even go a little bit warmer. So this almost like brown color. I can go a little bit darker of this dark olive color. Well, here we go. We have our first motif digitized. For the next exercise, we're gonna work on digitizing the green beans. Our job, again, is to lift this off of the creamy background it has. And because the background is creamy, we can't use the exact step from what we have learned from the pepper. Instead, we will have to add one more step. So make sure you have your green beans selected and go to your curves, which is under adjustment. And you will see at the bottom of the screen, you will have a handle. So I'm going to move the curve upward until I see the creamy edge turned white. So you can't really see the background. We manually turn the background white. So this method has its limitation here because when we do that, let me just put a comparison here. When we do that, we lost some vitality of the color. As you can see, at the very top, our pepper is more nuanced and we have a lot more tone variation than the one at the bottom. But this will give us a clean selection, and I will show you a workaround. Again, I am going to select my green bean very roughly and then copy it, create a new layer and add a layer mask, and then just paste on that mask. And from there, we are going to invert the mask, and then we can hide our original skin. And for the green beans, I'm going to choose a dark green color to kind of flood the main layer. Wah. It's pretty faded, as you can see, it's not super vibrant and a lot more transparent. To fix that, we're going to create another duplicate on top, kind of manually bring more color on top and then just merge these two layers. And you can go into hue saturation and brightness to fine tune your color. I think I'm going to leave it that way. Amba, here's our green bean. And from there, you can add more layers to draw on top. Or if you're happy with what you have, you can keep it as it is. For the second exercise, we're going to draw on top of this beat. First, I want to treat this as a faint sketch. So I'm going to lower the opacity and then pick a colored pencil to draw on top. You will probably see a lot of similarity between Procreate and Photoshop in this particular process, especially if you're using a tablet like syntaque to draw with Photoshop because this really feels like you're drawing on paper. Just really depends on what kind of medium that you use. This one that I'm using right now is from my own brush shop. This one is called pencil work. Really mimics the natural look and feel of a real pencil. When you zoom in, you can tell there's a lot of real texture variation, which I really appreciate. For Photoshop and Procreate, I will try to keep the same medium choice so you can tell the difference between the two. To In this exercise, we're going to work on digitizing this watercolor piece. Remember at the beginning, when we were working on the texture of the pepper, the automatic selection didn't really work out all that well, and this is a use case where I would go there first. So first, I'm going to actually change my background to a darker color so I can see my selection better. And from there, you can select your watercolor layer and then choose automatic selection. And you want to tap on anywhere in the middle and then slide it left and right to adjust the threshold of your selection. It will never be super, super perfect in this case, but you're looking for good enough. So from here, I'm going to tap on my screen and hit cut and paste. And from there, I should have my selection digitized. And when we zoom in to our result, you can see our edges are not super, super perfect. Let me fix that. So you want to go to your layer and create a layer mask. Technically, you can go around with eraser and just erase it, but that is destructive editing, which means that you cannot go back. For example, if I accidentally erase a part that I didn't mean to, I can always change it to white to restore that part. As you can see, that's pretty, pretty neat. And you can go around and erase the edges. Sometimes you need a couple of passes. And again, anytime you feel like you have over erased, you can always go to your layer mask and just use white color to reveal it. See? There you go. Now you have a perfectly restored edge to rework on. So what do you think? It was pretty good for me when I digitize the black ink on paper, and drawing inside Procreate feels really natural. And I think that's where Procreate really shines. The watercolor stuff worked pretty well, as well, although I had to do some manual cleanup, and I have to be careful about how I set the threshold. But when I got to the colored ink on creamy paper, it got a little bit tricky. Especially when we had to adjust the color balance and we lost some of the color vibrancy. Here's the deal. Procreate is built for artists who want to focus on making art, not wrestling with technical stuff. Don't forget to check out the newsletter where you can download the free starter pack. Next up, let's see if Photoshops technical tools can handle the stuff that gave Procreate trouble. 4. Photoshop Workflow: Welcome to Round two. Now, we're putting Photoshop through the same four challenges we just tried with Procreate. Photoshop has been the go to for digital image work forever. It's literally named after photo editing. But us illustrators have figured out how to use its powerful tools for our own stuff. What makes Photoshop special is how it can solve problems and let you edit without messing up your original work. I'm doing my demo on a tablet with Wacom Syntaque. But if you're using a mouse, keep that in mind. Drawing in Photoshop with a mouse can feel pretty clunky compared to a stylus. Photoshop is amazing at complex selections, fixing colors, and handling technical image stuff. It's what you reach for when you need to solve a problem. In addition to our four main challenges, I'm also throwing in a few extras, like fixing those annoying gaps in scanned sketchbook pages and pulling artwork out of messy backgrounds. Downside, it's got a steep learning curve, and you will have to pay monthly. Let's see how Photoshop handles our test. So here we are in Photoshop. If you look at the layer structure, we have our four tasks stacked into four different layers, and we're going to tackle that one at a time. Alright, let's work with our pepper. I'm going to use the Lasso tool, which is L on your keyboard to generally select the ink area. And then from there, you want to copy Command C, and then deselect Command D. And from there, I'm going to create a new layer and then hit Q for Quick Mask. As soon as you hit Q, you should be able to see that the brand new layer is highlighted in red. And that's a good sign. And then from there, you hit Command V on your keyboard, and then you can turn off your quick mask by hitting Q again. And this will create these kind of marching ends all around. But if you look at the border of your canvas, it also has marching ends. So basically, this means that everything except the pepper is selected. Now I want to invert the selection. So Command Shift I and from there, you can color this black. I'm just going to hit Option Delete. And from there, if I hide my original layer with the background, you will have these two isolated pepper. And these pepper has all the little details. I know this whole process seems really fast and not super logical. Don't worry. In a newsletter, I have a step by step block post where you can follow. And right now, if you want to change the color of the pepper, there are different ways to do that. I will show you my preferred way. I like to go to layers. And from there, you want to go down and new fill layer and solid color. I'm going to hit any color I like. Right now it's coloring this whole thing. Don't worry. I'm just choosing a color for the pepper. Maybe something like this and hit Okay. And from there, I am going to change this solid layer into a clipping mask. So it's only coloring the pepper. So hit option, and then that will link these two layers. Because I do this so often, I actually created a recolor action. Where I'm going to show you in a minute. And also this is part of giveaway as well for the newsletter. So pull out your newsletter, maybe day two or day three, where you can get all the goodies from the newsletter. And I'll show you how this color action works. I'm going to select my layer and then go to actions. Make sure I have the recolor selected and hit play. Hit Okay. And from there, I can just select whatever and the color is going to match. And this layer is live. So whenever you want to change this, you can just double click and then switch it to a different color. Alright, that's our pepper. And from there, you can actually merge these two layers. And I can select my texture and then command J to separate it into a different layer, and then just delete the original copy. And I want to color my texture into a different color just for fun. Actually, I will also change my background color. The background is not very helpful, so I am going to change the background to white so we will have more contrast. There you go. So I just use the same recolor action to change the background. And from there, we can move our texture on top of our pepper. And you can also do warp. Hold on to Control key and tap and then warp where you can manipulate the direction of the pepper. All right, hit done. And then from there, I will change the blend mode. I'm going to leave it this way. Alright, so that is our pepper. I will make everything into a folder and then hide that folder. Make sure you have your artwork selected, and you can just go to levels. Let me just pull it over here so you can see it clearly. So this is right next to it. In the levels dialog or Pop up window, you can tap on this little eyedropper tool. That's the last one at the bottom. This one basically tells Photoshop, Hey, I want this to be white. So I'm going to just tap on here. And instantaneously, this turned the background into white without losing much information of our green bean. So I think this challenge is easy PZ for Photoshop. Over here, I want to show you one step above. So we have a much complicated background. This one is on acrylic marker. As you can see, there are different values. It's not just uniformly creamy color or some kind of color. So I'm going to use the same method with the levels. So hit levels under adjustment and then pick your eyedropper tool at the bottom. And then tell Photoshop you want this to be the white background. So I'm just going to tap once. As you can see, it's not super clean yet. And then I'm just going to keep tapping on the slightly darker area until this whole background is isolated from there. And from here, you can select this mushroom and do the same separation trick as we did for the black ink. So this is one step above. Let's go back to our Canvas. And for the third test, I'm going to show you how I would draw inside Photoshop natively. So this one is the same sketch that we had. I'm going to tune it down a little bit, so we can faintly see the outline, and I'll just create a new layer from there. And I want to choose the same brush. Actually, I have these brushes at my store as well. I'm going to go with the creamy pencil just to be fair because I also use the creamy pencil for procreate drawing. And you can pick a color that represent whatever subject that you're drawing. And it really depends on what kind of brush that you are using. And also, as I said, I'm using a tablet. So the drawing experience feels really natural. But if you don't anticipate getting a tablet anytime soon, photoshop might not be your go to for drawing because I just can't imagine drawing this or any sort of detail with a mouse. Although I would say using mouse inside Illustrator is not that bad as long as you're not drawing. So I always use mouse for geometric shapes. So I always use mouse for drawing geometric shapes just because that's how I learned and it's not too inconvenient. So that's not too bad. And I guess it's worth mentioning that you can also change the property of your brush. If you go to brush setting, you're able to change how your brush behave. In terms of layer structure, Photoshop functions very similarly to Pcreate. So right now, I have a empty layer where I can just easily turn it into a clipping mask. And from there, I can add texture. So I'm going to sample this color and then make it lighter and then choose a texture brush for the scratchy effect. Let's see. Okay. This is pretty good, but this brush is a little too thick. I'm going to go with this. And you got the idea. If I am going to go ahead and hide my sketch, this is my final result inside Photoshop. Last but not least, we have our little gourd. My muscle memory tells me to use the magic wand tool, which is W on a keyboard, and the icon looks like this. I'm going to just tap on the different areas. It's not a perfect selection. If you look at the edges, it's not even close. So I'm going to hold on to shift to add more areas. And then from there, we have a better selection, not perfect. I'm going to move around, maybe shrink this a little bit, so it's easier to select. It just feels a little bit tedious. Wow, and then here's a rough selection. I'm going to test it out by using Command J and then hide the original layer. It's not great. You can tell the edges are pretty jagged. Instead, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to use the erase background. So I will go to my eraser tool, long hold, and then background eraser tool. So I use the magic want tool for the rough selection, and I use this erase background for finer details. So basically, I just need to go around and erase the the white edges. I might need to tweak the tolerance so that it's not accidentally erasing my artwork. Okay? For edges like here with high contrast, you can use the erase background. It's pretty manual, but I like to use it to make sure my work is up to par to professional level. So it's not like a weird selection that just looks like someone slaps it onto the white canvas. For areas like this, you got to be careful about how you define the edges. It might not be a bad idea if you over erase and then use a watercolor brush or media of your choice to manually draw on top of your work on a new layer to kind of help it to blend in onto a new canvas. So that's the basic process. But before we hop off of Photoshop, I want to show you one more thing. If you draw on sketchbook at any period of time, scenarios like this is bound to happen because you might find your motifs are bigger than one side of the spread, and you're spreading over the whole scene over two pages. And over here, I have listed six different medium, just to show you how you can use Photoshop to soften the gap. So over here, we have a marker and then ink, and then oil pastel, ink, crayon, and then watercolor here. The process is fairly simple. I'm going to just on the layer, draw a wider rectangle over here. As you can see, it just goes slightly over the spine. And from there, I will right click and go to content aware fill. And this will take me over to a new workspace almost, and will also give me a preview of Photoshop solution. The default is pretty good. But if you don't like any of these choices, you can change the selection, color adaptation, rotation adaptation, and just to make sure your motifs connect well from left to the right. And if you're happy about that, you can just hit Okay. And then when you deselect, you can see the spine kind of disappeared. And when you deselect, you can see the spine is smooth again. If you go over to the Layers panel, you can see Photoshop basically just made a patch that connects the left and right. When you hide the patch, you can still see your original work. And this is non destructive, which means that it did not alter your original work. So that's all I have for Photoshop. So what do you think about Photoshop? I think it handled pretty well with our challenges in addition to the couple extras that I threw in there. But is a steep learning curve a problem for you? And how about monthly subscriptions? These are the helpful things to think about when you make a decision. But before you make your final decision, let's move on to Adobe Illustrator to check it out. 5. Adobe Illustrator: Welcome to our final round of testing. We're going through the same tasks, but this is going to be a bit different from what we have seen so far. Adobe Illustrator is part of the Adobe family like Photoshop. So same monthly subscription deal, but it works with vectors, which means that it makes mathematical shapes instead of pixels. This gives it some pretty cool superpowers. Your graphics stay crisp, no matter how big or small you make them. You get perfect geometric precision. Your stuff works at any size from a tiny business card to huge billboards. Before we dive in, let me show you some of my favorite actor artists. The first one comes from Malika, and she makes the bold, beautiful, minimal illustrations with vectors. DKNG Studio also does a pretty good job with their incredible poster art that shows off their clean vector lines and bright colors. O and Dave makes beautiful wildlife illustrations that mix detailed linework with flat colors. These artists show how vector art can be both creative and super precise. I'm also using my tablet for the demo portion. If you are using a mouse, keep that in mind that drawing illustrator with a mouse can be a bit clunky. So this is something that you need to factor in. A lot of illustrators have mixed feelings about Adobe Illustrator because it thinks differently than traditional drawing. But for certain stuff like logos, patterns, crisp graphics, nothing else comes close. The trade off is that it focuses on precision and clean edges instead of organic textures. Let's take a look. All right, here we are in Adobe Illustrator. These are some of the web graphics that I have created for my own website, and these are pretty typical for what Adobe Illustrator produces. It's very geographical, very bold and very graphic designing. Over here is a letter that I built from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. As you can see, not only the structure, which is highly geometrical, is built in here, and these tiny, teeny specs of textures are also built inside the program. So Illustrator definitely has a lot of capacity to handle variety of different tasks. As I scroll down, you will see different texture lines. The first line is just a flat straight line with no texture at all. And the second one technically is also a path, but I have applied a special brush to it. So what it does is that it stretches the middle but keep the ending the same. So even if you are drawing something simple like this, like a path, it can turn it into whatever shape, whatever brush that you define. So I think that's pretty flexible. A lot of vector work is really flat, but that doesn't have to be necessarily true because over here, in addition to this graphic pencil, we also have lines that are highly texturized. This is just one continuous line. And by the way, you can pick up these three texture brushes in the newsletter, and you can just play with it. I can easily go in to change the size of this path. It can be thinner. And for this one, it can be way thicker to create a different effect. So this is pretty cool. And to further demonstrate my point, here is our general impression of what Adobe Illustrator produces. And here on the right, this little carat is what Adobe Illustrator can do. So over here, you can see the texture is still pretty rich. And similarly, over here on this sausage, everything was built in Adobe illustrator. It's pretty cool. And let's keep on moving. And sometimes the textures can be just a pattern. For example, over here, the texture for the leaf of the leak is just stripes, and it's also built in Illustrator. And Illustrator is a pretty popular tool to build patterns. And by the way, this is one of the courses where I teach how to build patterns in different ways inside Illustrator from the beginning to the end. So these are the results. When I double click in one of these patterns from the Swatches panel, you can make live adjustment, and you can see how your live changes affect the overall composition, which I think is really cool. I'm just going to cancel here and keep on moving. I'm just going to cancel here. In another way that I use Illustrator is to use it to build something highly geometrical, and then move it over to Photoshop because I don't think Photoshop is built for making design elements. Things are just really clunky and not very scalable. For example, over here, I have a grid pattern. I can just copy Command C and go over to Photoshop and then paste it, Command V, and paste it as a smart object. And then change this into a clipping mask. And you can see, we will have grid on our paper instantaneously. And when you double click this vector Smart Object, it will take you back to Illustrator on a new file where you can play with the scale and color. Say that we want to make this darker and then hit Okay and save it. And it will automatically update our Photoshop file. See, the grade is darker. And then I also use it to brand my logo onto the page when I need to. Alright, let's hop back over. Earlier, we mentioned that vector graphics can have this ability to infinitely scale without losing its quality. I just want to show you real quick. If we were to zoom in on one point, no matter how close we are to this graphic, you can see the line is still pretty smooth and crisp. I cannot say the same thing for Photoshop. If we zoom in on particular graphic, you will see pixelation pretty soon. Over here, you can already tell things are pixelated until this is a complete pixel level. So keep in mind that if you want your work to be super flexible, super scalable, Adobe Illustrator might be your choice. I'm going to import some of our earlier scans so we can work with Adobe illustrator to see how it handles it. We will start with our black pepper. So you want to go to the Window and then select Image Trace. And from there, you should be able to have some options here. I'm just going to expand everything. And for our black and white, it's perfect for the mode black and white. And then from there, I'm going to use default for the most except I want to ignore the white background color. So make sure you have this check mark checked for Ignore color. And I'm actually going to collapse the advanced so I can see this option called Trace. But if you want to see how your final result looks like, so make sure you have the preview turned on, and from there, it will give you the first reading. It's actually not all that great at all. We lost so much detail and this pepper texture became even unrecognizable. I'm going to turn up the threshold, hoping that Illustrator will pick up more information from there. Okay, it's better, but still there's oversimplification happening right here. For my kind of creative vision, I don't see this work. You can go in and tweak under the event to increase the path. So this will introduce more detail, increase the corners, and decrease the noise. Still, I feel like this is what Illustrator can do. That it's trying its best to interpret this black ink on white paper. I will just expand to commit to this result. Our next test is our green bean. As you can see, it's a creamy paper. And I am going to use the same image trace and then color. And from there, I want to specifically ignore instead of white, I want to ignore this cream color and see how Adobe Illustrator react. As you can see, over here, it has updated to the creamy color. I am going to hit preview to see my first reading. This is real time rendering and my machine is really fast. The fact that it takes this long for it to think, it's not a good sign. It just means that it takes a lot of resources to read, and the result is not super fascinating. There is definitely oversimplification going on. And again, you can change the complexity of your work. But each time when you tweak any parameter, your machine is going to take that long to adjust. I'm going to undo preview so that I can quickly, change my slider options without having to preview every time. Let's see. Okay, so this is Adobe Illustrator doing its best. I'm just going to say, Okay, thanks for trying. I'm going to expand. And that is and that is our final result for the bean. Sometimes if I have to do things in Illustrator, I would color correct in a different program. So I do appreciate this new update that allows me to choose the creamy color to ignore. But still, the point is not the creamy color. The point is loss of my detail in the rendering. Although if you're looking for this kind of look, that's completely fine. And plus on the side, we have some cleanup to do. You can see there's some stray pixels for us to clean up. All right. Before we draw, I'm actually going to change the order of events and come over to this little Guard guy over here just to show you the same process. Go over to mold under image trace and choose color. And I anticipate I want to blow up the path and maybe make more corners and make the noise little. And I do want to ignore the color white, and then I can do a preview. There are so many colors. Um I'm pretty sure it's going to take a while. Oh, actually, it's not that bad. The first reading, it's still pretty sloppy. And if you really, really want to make this work, you can go to palette. And then instead of choosing limited palette, which gives it 30 colors, you can choose full tone or automatic. I'm just going to go with full tone because I want to see Illustrator's best effort. Okay. The simplification has improved a little bit. But still, when we zoom in, you see almost like this heat map, you know, when you see on the weather channel, it's not great, to be honest. There are a lot of great things a W Illustrator can do, but this is not one of them. However, I'm just going to hit Expand so that I can have this selection. And I'm going to group it into one group and show you how easily it is. You can just throw this into a pattern. Say that I want to make a pattern out of this. You can just go to object, pattern make. And from there, you can easily easily make different layouts. Of course, this is a super simplified version, but I just really like the different ideas that Illustrator gives me when I have multiple different motifs to work with. So that's something to keep in mind. Oh, right. Now we can come over to drawing. To draw in Adobe Illustrator, you would want the Blob Brush tool, which is Shift B on your keyboard. And then in the center, let me just lock this so it doesn't move with me. Alright. Blob brush, and then you can choose a different color. Here is the fill color and the border color. I'm going to choose something punchy. And you can just draw. Each time when you draw, things turn into a blob. And it's just really, really flat. And if you are familiar with Bezier curve, you can also use Pen tool to draw. But that is another beast that you have to tame. I do have a free YouTube series where I cover all these little details on drawing in Adobe Illustrator, which I will throw a link in the newsletter. All right. If this is the first time you ever see someone use a pen tool, this can feel really scary, but it's a matter of muscle memory. Right now, to add some texture, just to show you some simple example, I'm going to throw a copy right on top and then change the fill color into a different texture. For example, this guy right here, so it's not that bad. So this is the sausage texture that I showed you earlier on. I just got lazy and used the same texture, and you can use different blend mode to kind of change the effect. Okay, this is better. And then you can change the scale as well. So I'm going to right click Transform Scale and make sure you don't transform the object and make it like 300. Okay. So this is one of the ways to add texture. You can also do the same thing by drawing inside and make sure I have no fill and just a straight color for the selection. Thing like that. Currently, we have the smooth brush selected. I'm going to I'm going to toggle different brushes from my brush selection that I showed you earlier on, which you can also download from the newsletter. I'm happy with this, and I will just go ahead and change the size of the brush. The bigger it is, the exaggerated the texture can be. Maybe I'll change this color to a gentler version. Of pink. Let's see. Alright. If you hop out, this is what we have at the end. And we can use the same brush for the stem as well. So you can use a different color. Make sure it's selected, and then you can use a different color from there. You can totally just increase to crazy amount. This is pretty good. This is a pretty good representation. I'm just gonna keep drawing until I have four. Alright, here's what we got. It's not a typical vector graphic look, but also, it's not a typical photoshop or procreate look or sketchbook look. So it has its own place in my heart. If this is something that you want to do, illustrator is your thing. So what do you think about Adobe Illustrator? It turned black ink into vectors that stay crisp at any size, even though it simplified things instead of preserving every texture detail. And for the color on color test, it did need some help with the color correction before processing in Adobe Illustrator. And drawing an illustrator can feel pretty satisfying, especially if you're looking for crisp edges and perfect geometric shapes. For watercolor work, it prioritizes simplification, which is cool for many artists, especially given that you can assemble a pattern pretty easily inside the program. So the final decision is yours. What do you think about these three programs? Before we move on to the next lesson, check out those Adobe Illustrator texture brushes in the newsletter, and I'll see you in a bit. 6. Congratulations!: Wow. You made it through the whole thing. Honestly, I am so excited that you stuck with me through all three programs. I really hope that watching PRCreate Photoshop and Illustrator tackle the same stuff, give you that aha moment about which one clicks with you, whether you're vibing with Procreate's natural feel, geeking out over Photoshop's problem solving magic or getting inspired by Illustrator's crisp precision. At least now you know what you're signing up for, right? This is just the beginning. I have gotten some fun classes coming up. Be sure to send up to my newsletter where you get the Insight scoop what I'm working on next and my favorite tips and tricks in art making. And whenever you are ready to level up your game, you can find the top of line digital brushes at professional digitalbrushes.com. These are the brushes that I made and literally use every day for my professional work. The whole point of the course was to find tools that work with you instead of against you. Now you've got the inside info. I hope you make that choice confidently. Thanks for hanging out with me, and I can't wait to see what you create.