Cosy Christmas Wreaths in Procreate

1. Trailer: If you're looking for something festive, cozy and fun to draw in Procreate, the perfect little project to keep your hands busy while you binge watch Christmas movies this season or something that looks impressive but is actually really simple to make, then you're in the right place. In this class, we're creating a set of bright and colorful floral Christmas wreaths in Procreate. I'm Rebecca Flatti. I'm a patent artist and content creator, and I love creating digital artwork in Procreate. In the past, I've licensed my designs for things like cosmetics, dog harnesses, and wallets, you name it. But these days, I'm all about creating happy and helpful content and cheering on others as they start their creative journey. I love taking techniques that look complicated and breaking them down into clever beginner friendly steps. In this class, you'll learn how to create and use custom rotation guides, symmetry, layering, quick texture tricks, and even a bit of animation to create beautiful wreath illustrations in Procreate. Learning these skills is really useful because once you master the process, you can create wreaths for any occasion, sunflowers for summer, pumpkins for autumn, or pastel florals for spring. I put this class together because making Christmas art is one of my favorite ways to wind down after a busy rush towards the end of the year. There's something so cozy about sitting on the sofa with your iPad and a Christmas movie. And when you've got a few simple, reasonable techniques to lean on, you can make some cute and satisfying art without having to think too much about it. By the end of the class, you'll have a collection of festive floor wreaths you can use in text messages, social media graphics or simply as something creative and cozy to enjoy making during your next Christmas movie marathon. So grab your iPad and let's play this together. Okay. 2. Class Project: Let's have a look at what you'll be making. Your project for this class is to create your very own set of three festive floral wreaths in Procreate. Each mini project builds on the last, starting simple and gradually adding more detail on creativity. Project one is a clean, minimal line art and dot wreath using seven rotations. This will help you get comfortable with the setup and techniques. Project two is a symmetrical floral wreath using six rotations with offset motifs and a little more detail for a playful polished look. Project three is a flowing trailing branch wreath using five rotations. You overlap lines and combine repeated and free form motifs to create a more natural hand drawn feel. As a fun bonus, I'll show you how to add twinkling Christmas lights and turn one of your wreaths into a flashing gift or short video, perfect for sharing on social media or in the Project Gallery. I'd absolutely love to see what you create, so please share your wreaths in the Project Gallery. You can post a single design or three, or even your own seasonal twist, maybe spring flowers, autumn leaves or pastel wreaths. I can't wait to see your festive creations. 3. Project 1 | Key Concepts: Let's start with some basics. You can use any size of canvas you want for these projects. I recommend that you use a square just because of the wave that we're going to be rotating stuff. That's much easier on a square canvas. I'm going to use the canvas that is 12 " square or 3,600 pixels. So let's put that in here, 3600 for the width and height. DPI, I'm going to leave at 300 because then I do have the option of printing them if I want. And if you do want to print your artwork, then you should work at the actual size you want to print out and ideally, even a little bigger. So for example, if you were designing something for a five by seven greeting card, then your canvas should be at the very least five by seven at 300 DPI. The reason I say ideally a little bigger is we're going to be rotating things here, which will mean that your rotated sections will get a tiny bit fuzzy on the edges. So by going bigger, that's automatically going to be less noticeable. I will show you some workarounds for this, though, if you don't like the idea of any pixel manipulation in Procreate. As we work through, I'll be giving you a print ready pixel perfect option, which will take a little longer, but it will give perfect results. And then we'll also do making art for fun option, which is speedier looks just as good as long as you're not putting it under a magnifying glass and is perfect for sharing online or just having some fun. So let's go ahead and create this canvas. I'm going to change the color profile to P three. Normally, I work in SRGB, but just because I want this to look nice and bright and colorful on screen, I'm going to go with P three. So 3,600 pixels for the width and height, DPI 300, and we can create this now. When I'm drawing wreaths, I find it helpful to make some guides to work with him. So let's set those up first. I'm going to grab a brush here. I'm just using the Yaga brush, and this is from Procreate the new Procreate library. You can use any brush you like for this, and let's just grab color, and I'm just going to draw a circle kind of about the size that I want my wreath to be. So I'm just going to draw around here. And then I'm going to hold, tap, and then lift up, and that is a perfect circle. What I want to do now is center this on the canvas. So tap up here, come down to snapping, and you want magnetics and snapping both on and turned all the way up. And then we're going to center this on the canvas. And you should see orange lines crossing there, and that's to tell you that it's in the middle. Now we're going to duplicate this circle. So we've swipe left on it and tap duplicate. Then tap transform. And we're going to make this a little bit smaller. So we're kind of going for a big doughnut shape or, like, I don't know, more of a polo mint sort of shape. So something like that, or if you want to have, like, a big thicker, chunkier wreath, you can make it something a bit more like that. But I think I'm going to go with that and center this on the canvas like that. Then we can pinch those two together, and then we're going to fill in this area, like So that is going to be the guide for our wreath. So as we're making it, we kind of stick within this as the margin. I'll turn the opacity down on this. It doesn't need to be quite so in our face. So then this can sit at the bottom, and we'll use this as our margin while we're drawing. Now, I know you all know how to use the symmetry tool with rotation on to make wreaths where you have eight separate perfect sections, and you just draw your one branch, and it gets repeated evenly around the circle. But if not, I'm going to show you that now because it will give you a really quick feel for how we're going to build these wreaths. So let's tap on actions up here. Go to Canvas and turn the drawing guide on. Then we're going to edit the drawing guide, and down here you'll see symmetry. So tap on that, go to options, and let's make it radial and turn on rotational symmetry and make sure you've got assisted drawing on. Then you can tap on the tick. Tap on that. And then if we add a layer and make this one drawing assist as well, you can see down there because we were on this layer when we set drawing assist. That one is assisted drawing. We need to turn it on for any following layers that we add. So turn it on there. And then when we start drawing in this, it's going to rotate it and be repeated. Actually, maybe if I draw down here, you can see a bit better. It's going to rotate it around the canvas, so you can draw a wreath like this. And it gets rotated perfectly around the canvas, and you can very quickly sketch out a simple wreath. One thing to point out is that this updates in real time. So as I start drawing here, by the time I get to this section, I can see where this one starts, so I have the option of lining this one up with it. I'm not kind of drawing blind. As I start to get here, I've got this one in place already, and this is a thing to remember for later because we're going to have to kind of mimic a way of being able to do this. So here we've got this little branch rotated eight times evenly around the canvas. And it all fits together nicely to make a wreath. And that's what we're going to be doing with all of the wreaths in our class, except I'm going to show you how to go beyond the options that the symmetry tool will give you. You'll see here we've got radial, if I put the drawing guide back on again. We've got radio, which will give us eight sections, and we've got quadrant that will give us four sections. So those are the only options you have for making wreaths like this in Procreate. You've got either four or eight sections. And I'm going to show you how to go beyond the options that the symmetry tool will give you. And why exactly might you ask? Well, first up, it's super satisfying to learn a workaround for doing something differently, but the real reason is that it's a well known rule that in design, objects look better, more dynamic and interesting when they're grouped in odd numbers, whereas even groupings can look a little static and uniform. And that applies to these wreath illustrations, too. I find that using four or eight sections in a wreath just makes it look a little bit too uniform when everything is repeated at 90 degrees. So you've got kind of the same thing there and there. So I like to mix it up using five, six or seven repeats. I know six is an even number, but we still lose that kind of 90 degree repeat. In the next lesson, we'll draw a proper version of this wreath using seven sections instead of eight for a more dynamic and interesting design. 4. Project 1 | 7 Section Simple Wreath | Setup: So we'll carry on with what we've started here. And the first thing we want to do is to turn off the drawing guide and get rid of these eight sections. So we'll turn that off, and I've already turned off drawing assist on that layer. So we'll start by adding a new layer here and zoom out a bit. And what I want to do is draw a rough line from kind of just off the edge to somewhere near the middle, like that. I'm going to hold, so it snaps to a straight line, then tap, so it snaps to a vertical line. And now I've got this line that is going perfectly straight up the canvas. I'm going to tap transform on this. And what I want to do is center it on the canvas now. So let's zoom in and find the middle. So I found the middle line there. We've got orange line, that's the middle of the canvas. So now I can bring this along here and let me invert the color on this so you can see a bit more contrast with the orange. That's what you want to go for. The orange line going down whoops through the middle of this line there, and then it's kind of sat on the center line there. Can be a little bit fiddly. If I turn this layer off, you might find that it snaps a bit easier. There we go. So that is what you want to be looking for orange line going down through the middle and then sat on this horizontal line there. So we've got this line like a clock hand going from the middle straight up to 12. What we want to do now is rotate this one seventh of the way around the canvas. Procreate rotates things around the middle of the selection. So if I tap on this layer here and rotate it, it's going to rotate it around the middle of this selection. What I want to do is rotate it around here, though. This is called changing the anchor point. And this isn't a feature that procreator has, but it is very easy to set up a workaround. All we need to do is fill an entire new layer with color. So if we add a layer, tap and fill it with color, I'll bring it underneath so that you can see both of them. And then I just zoom out a bit. If we swipe on this one and that one, so I've got them both selected and then tap transform, you can then rotate this around the middle like that, which is kind of handy. You don't have to have this layer turned on. You can turn it off. Just rotate this again. You can still grab all of that layer, even with the thing turned off. And you'll notice it's going to get cut off at the edges, but it will always be even as long as you're only rotating it and not moving it in the other direction, which we won't be. You'll eventually end up with almost circle the more times you rotate this and it gets cut off. So you can just keep using this one layer. You can leave it turned off and at the bottom of your document here, and just grab this one plus whatever you're rotating and you don't have to keep filling it every time. I'm going to undo this now to get that back. Horizontally at the top, where we started. And let's do our first proper rotation now. So we're going to duplicate this line, swipe to grab this layer, tap transform, and then tap the green node. So in this box, we get to tell it exactly how much we want to rotate it by. So there's 360 degrees in a circle, and we want seven sections. 360/7 is well, it's not a nice even number, but rounding it to 51.4 is close enough. So let's do 51.4. Then we can tap off that. And then that is one of our seven rotations. That's kind of the area that we have to work in. So now you can pinch these together, and then you can group those together and just leave that at the bottom of your wreath as you're working, and that's your guide. So let's add a layer here, and now we can sketch out a branch. I'm going to go for simple straight lines for this, and I'm going to keep everything within this section. I might just invert the color on that so that I can seems see the difference between the green color that I'm using. So I'm just going to sketch out a rough design for this, and I'm going to use simple straight lines because I want to keep this one nice and simple. I'll probably just put a few berries on here. So it can just be something really simple like that to start with. And once you have it sketched out, you can then add a layer above, reduce the opacity on this, and I'm going to trace over it on a new layer, and I'm going to use separate layers for each color. So I'm going to do the stems first, and these can be on their own layer. And because I want to use straight lines, I'm just holding to get this to snap to a straight line every time. As you work on your designs, if you're a complete beginner, you can copy what I do exactly, as copying is a great stress free way to learn new techniques. But if you're already at home in Procreate, you can do any sort of design you like here and make it as detailed as you like. If you're doing this at a different time of year, then you definitely don't have to draw Christmas wreaths, either. Then I'm going to add a layer above this. And to do the dots, what I've done is I've duplicated this Yaga brush. I tap on this one. On the stroke path, I've brought the spacing all the way up to the top so that we can do stamps and dots like that. And the reason I like this one is because the shape is slightly wonky, it's not a perfect circle. The other thing I've done is on the color dynamics, under stamp color jitter, I've turned the secondary color all the way up. And what that will do if I go to colors, it will give us a mix of something between these two colors here. So you can tap on this one, and you can change that one and then tap on this one and change it. And if I were on the right layer, you can see if I tap on these and add dots, it's giving like a mix of something that will fall in between this and this. So it's a nice way of adding a bit of color variation. So I'm just going to put some berries on the end of all of these. Then I'm going to change the color again to pink and then this lighter pink and do some slightly smaller dots just to fill those spaces in there. Then I'm going to make it smaller again. I'm going to change it to pink and this cream color and do some much smaller dots in there as well. I can't see all of these because some of them are the same color as this guide that I've got in place. Maybe if I invert the color on this and turn it down because you can see there I've done too many in the same place, so let's just erase those. 5. Project 1 | 7 Section Simple Wreath | Rotation: Now I've got this finished section of illustration for my wreath. What I can do is group these two together and we can hide this guide now. Let's set the background color. Wreath is going to be made of seven repeats of this evenly spaced around the canvas. And this is where we have two options depending on the level of pixel perfect accuracy you want. I'm going to show you the drawing for fun option first, and then afterwards, I'll show you how you would do this if you want everything pixel perfect. So first of all, we're going to duplicate our group. Don't flatten it because we're going to do some stuff with the different layers later. So we've got this group selected, and we want to swipe right on this one here. Tap transform, tap on the green node like we did earlier, and it's 51.4 degrees is the first rotation that we're going to. So we can tap off that. And then you can see this has now been rotated around just like the rotational symmetry was doing earlier, except this time, we can choose exactly how many degrees we move it by. If I zoom in here, you can see what I mean about this having, like, a tiny bit of pixelation. I mean, it's not much difference. There's not a whole bunch of difference between how sharp that looks compared to that. But there is that slight bit of difference there. Brush I'm using is not hugely noticeable, but it might look a bit fuzzier if you've used a texture brush. Most of the time, you won't notice it unless you zoom right in, like I did just there. And it's certainly not a problem if you're making art for fun, or if you're just making images for sharing on socials or digital cards or text messages. If you want pixel perfect print ready art, though, there is another option for you, two options, actually. You could do the rotating in different software like Affinity or Photoshop, which are much better at image interpolation, and you don't get this softening there. Or you can use this rotation method we're using here to put this in place to rotate your sketch, which isn't showing cars. It's in the same color as the background. Let's make this multiply. So what you could do is rotate this seven times around the canvas and then just trace over the whole of it in one go so that each motif is drawn in place. So you duplicate your sketch. Grab the rotation layer, at the same time, tap transform. Rotate this 51.4. And then you could grab this one again. Rotate it another 51.4. And you could keep doing that all the way around the canvas, so then you've got a nicely, evenly spaced out sketch to work on, and then you can trace over all of this bit by bit, remembering to use separate layers for the leaves and dots. It takes a little longer, but it's the best method if you need pixel perfect artwork. The nice thing about doing it this way is that if you want to, you can get a bit of unique variation into each section. I'm going to carry on rotating this one around, though, and go with the making art for fun option today. And all of the images I used for this class will also be made with this method too, so you'll be able to see that it really does look good enough to share. So let's duplicate this bottom one again. It is really important that we always duplicate this original one that we drew, because if you duplicate and then rotate one that you've already rotated, so this one, that softness and pixelation will start to show a lot. It's like photocopying a photocopy. So always work off your original one at the bottom here. To make things a bit easier for you, I've made this layer here, which has got all the measurements worked out for the different sections. If I put this change the blend mode to normal as we're working on this. You can see I've put the measurements in the number of degrees you need to move it to fit into each of these sections. So if we grab this one here, so this is the one we've just duplicated. We can open this, grab our rotation layer, tap transform, tap on the green node, and to make it appear down here, we need to rotate it by this much. So one oh 2.9 whoops, one oh 2.9 degrees. You got to be quick. All of these are kind of rounded to the nearest whole number. They don't add up perfectly because like I said, dividing 360 min seven gives you a horrible long number, but I've just rounded them to the nearest sorry, not the nearest hole number, the nearest decimal place. And when I made another Skillshare class that used rotation with decimal places, I did have some people in the comments in the discussions saying they didn't have a decimal point on the rotation box here. So if for some reason you don't have decimal point on your rotation box, just raun this up or down to the nearest hole number so that you could make that 501-10-3154, and it's going to look close enough. Those point whatever it is of a degree isn't going to be the end of the world. So that's that one in place, and we can now go back to working off this one again, the bottom one, duplicate, grab your rotation layer, tap transform, and we'll go for down here now. So that's 154.3. There we go. And then when you get to there, we can start working back the other way and just using minus numbers instead. So duplicate this bottom one. Grab your rotation layer, tap transform, tap on the green node, and it's 51.4, but we want minus, so you tap that there. And that will bring that round to there for us. Go back to your bottom one again. Tap transform. Whoops. I did not have that grabbed at the same time. Tap transform 102.9, but minus duplicate one last time. Grab the rotation layer, transform, green node, and it's 154.3 minus. There we go. Then we can hide this. And that's our cute little wreath built out there. So once you're at this stage, and that's whether you have it rotated in groups like me, or if you have all of your stems on one layer where you've drawn each one and then have all of the dots on another layer, we are ready to then move on and add a drop shadow as a final detail. What I'm going to do is merge all of these onto one layer. So this one here, which is the original one that I drew, go to duplicate that and just hide a backup copy of that, and I'll put that along with those guides in my group at the bottom there. Then I can open up all of these groups, and I'm going to swipe right on all of the berries, first of all, the dots. And drag all of those up to the top there. Then I'm going to pinch those all down onto one layer, and then we can do the same with all of these branches there. Now we've got all our branches on one layer and all our berries on the other. What we're going to do is duplicate each of these layers. So we've got two of each, and then the ones at the bottom, I'm going to alpha lock them, so swipe right with two fingers. And I'm going to fill them with a 50% gray, and you can get that by double tapping there. And we're going to fill this one. So that one's gray underneath and then fill this one. Then we're going to take alpha lock off both of those because what we're gonna do, we're going to soften those with the blur. So if I hide the colored layers, and see that's what we've got. I'll zoom in on this so you can see what's happening as we do it. Come up here to your adjustments so this magic wand, and we're going to go for a bit of gaussian blur. And you'll see up there, it tells you how much, and we're just going to swipe or drag to the right slightly. And you only need to go for something about 3%. You can see if I zoom in there, you can see that's blurred it a little bit. So we can tap off that up there and then go to the one that's on the berries, go to Gasienblu again, and again, just put 3% on there. And then what we're going to do is change the blend mode on these, so it looks a bit more like a shadow. So tap on this N, which stands for normal blend mode, and we're going to change it to linear burn. You'll see that looks like a proper shadow now. G to do the same on this one. To make it more like a drop shadow, it's going to look more realistic if it's slightly sort of shifted to the side. So we're going to tap on one of these, swipe bright on the other. So it's the two gray layers I've got selected. Tap transform. And if we zoom in down here, what you need to do is just tap down here a few times, and that's just going to nudge this selection down slightly. So we'll try one, two, three, four. It's probably about enough. So you can see that looks more like a drop shadow with the distance on it now. And this drop shadow is a thing you would always do after getting your motifs in place. Because if you added the drop shadow in one of these groups here, like if you added it on there, every time you rotated it, the shadow angle would be different in each one, which would look a bit weird. But by doing it all in one go with everything all on one layer, you get all of the shadows going this way. Whereas, like, if we'd rotated it, the shadow angle would be different on all of them. That is wreath number one complete, and you have learned the basics of how to create your own wreath with evenly spaced sections in any multiple that you choose. The next lesson, we'll make a six section wreath and learn how to use and adjust the symmetry tool to add interest and variation to our designs. 6. Project 2 | 6 Section Symmetry Wreath | Setup: So I'm in the same canvas before, and I've got the rotation guide and the kind of doughnut guide area pasted into this one as well. Let's set up some guidelines because we're working with six sections and an even number, when we draw our guidelines for this one, we can just draw straight from top to bottom of the canvas. So let's do that now. Grab black and draw a line going straight from top to bottom of the canvas like that, snap it. So it's a straight line and then tap, so it's vertical. Then we're going to tap to transform, and you want to center this on the canvas like that so that you can see those orange lines crossing there. When we rotate this because it's already touching the edges of the canvas here and centered, we don't need to grab this at the same time. So we're going to duplicate this, tap transform, tap on the green node. And with this one, we want six sections. So 360/6 is 60 degrees. So there we go. That's rotated around 60 degrees now, and it's done it around the middle because this was already going off the edges. And if you just wanted to do something similar to the last wreath we made, but with six sections instead of seven, you could leave it there and start illustrating in this part. But I want to do something a little bit extra with this one, which is going to require us knowing where the halfway point is there. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this bottom straight one again, the vertical one. Tap transform and I'm going to rotate this 130 degrees, so it's going to go halfway between the two, and if I invert the color on that, so we can see what's what. I can pinch those three together and just reduce the opacity on that, and I'm going to pop that in the group with the guides there. Then we can add a layer above, and we can start doing our sketch in this layer. I'm going to turn the drawing guide on. So go to actions, Canvas, turn the drawing guide on, edit the drawing guide, and you want to have symmetry, and you want quadrant symmetry and assisted drawing on, but not rotational symmetry for this one. Tap done on that. And right on the right layer here. So what I want to draw is a sprig of leaves here. I'm going to draw some holly leaves there, and then some other bits and pieces coming out of there. And you'll see also repeated at the bottom there. And I can use the symmetry tool for that. No problem. But what I also want to do is draw something here at the halfway point and have that be symmetrical, too. I want to draw a bow there. Bows are nice symmetrical designs. And I know I can draw it here, and it will be symmetrical in terms of it's repeated over there, but I want it to be symmetrical either side of the bow. So what I'm going to do is use adjust the symmetry tool, and once I have this in place, draw that in there. So let's work on drawing this holly leaf in first. And holly leaves can sometimes be a bit tricky to draw if you don't quite know where you're going to start and finish. So when I'm drawing holly leaves, what I like to do is draw a leaf shape in first. And then I know where I'm kind of working within and then match the holly leaf to that shape. Just a bit of an easy way of drawing them. Then I'm going to just put some spriggy things up there. And then I want to draw the bow in here. So what I can do is adjust the symmetry. If I tap on actions, edit drawing guide. If I grab this green node, I can move it to anywhere around the canvas. So I'm just going to plop it roughly in the middle there, zoom in, and then just kind of put it as close as you can to what looks like the middle of that line. It's not going to matter if it's a couple of degrees off, everything will still be even. So once you have it roughly in the middle of that line, tap done, and then we can draw a bow in here, and that's going to be placed symmetrically here as well. If you were drawing other things, this could be a flower, a heart or anything else that you wanted to be symmetrical. And then we could adjust the holly leaf shape to fit a little bit better, as well. There we go. Don't worry about the fact that that's over there. We can work off this while we're drawing. So that's all the planning we need to do for this, and we can do our drawing now. A 7. Project 2 | 6 Section Symmetry Wreath | Illustration: You need to start with the bow because if you reset the symmetry and put it back here, you wouldn't be able to get it in exactly the right place for this. So let's draw the bow first while we have the symmetry over here. So I'm going to add a layer. Let's turn down the opacity on this. Anytime you add a new layer, just remember to put drawing assist on. And if you want to be able to add shading, then I recommend drawing each color on a separate layer as well. When I'm illustrating, I like to keep things interesting and combine symmetry with a bit of asymmetry. The symmetry tool is great, but for some things, it's better to turn it off. And shading and texture is one of the things that I prefer to do freehand. It just kind of looks weird if your texture is, like, 100% symmetrical. So I'm going to add some shading and texture to this now, and I'm going to do it with drawing assist off. You can add your texture, however you prefer if you've got a go to way of doing it that works for you, but I'm going to show you how I do mine. So I'm going to add a layer above this and make it a clipping mask. Then I'm going to grab a texture brush. There's loads in the new Procreate library that would work well for this like some of the charcoal brushes, for example. I'm going to use a 50% gray, so get that by double tapping here. And I'm going to change the blend mode on this, tap the N. That stands for normal blend mode, and I'm going to change the blend mode to color burn. And just use that to add some texture over the top of here. If I show you what I mean about the symmetry thing, let's just clear this layer and turn assisted drawing on. It just kind of looks a bit too uniform if everything is exactly the same there. Like the pattern repeated either side, and it looks a lot more natural if you do it without drawing a system. So it's a nice way to, like, mix things up and combine some symmetrical things with a bit of unexpected asymmetry. So let's clear this layer and just add a little bit of texture on there. I'm going to reduce the opacity on this to about 40 to 50%. Then you get a nice Sato effect. And the reason I like using this method is that we need to do is use this gray color, and you can change the color underneath. Just invert this to something else, and you can see the color will always match whatever you have underneath. If you want to add some lighter texture, you can do that by adding another layer above this one. It's automatically going to get clipped and you can use color dodge for this and again, reduce the opacity to 40 something, and then you can add a bit of lighter texture with that. If you've turned drawing a cyst off to do this, don't forget that you need to go and do it on this one, as well. Then I'll just do the same to add a bit of texture over that dot there. So add a layer there, make it clipping mask, color burn, 40 something, add a bit of texture on there. The lighter the color you use, kind of the less of an obvious difference is. Make this one color dodge. There we go. So that all has that nice kind of soft fuzzy texture, and we need to remember to do it on this one, as well. There we go. Once your bow is in place, you can then reset the symmetry and draw these motifs up there. So tap on your canvas actions, edit the drawing guide, and tap on this.in the middle and reset, and that's going to snap it back up to the top there. Then we can add a layer and do our holly leaves. Don't forget to put drawing assist back on for this, though. I think I'm gonna switch to using a darker green for this. Then I'll add another layer, tone drawing a cyst for this one, and I'll draw these sprigs in here. I'm going to draw the leaf veins on this layer, but I'm going to mix things up and do these freehand. So I'm gonna turn drawing assist off for this and just draw these in their free hand so that each one can be slightly different. And you'll need to remember to go to the ones at the bottom and do those as well. And although we made these symmetrical, the color on these doesn't have to be. So what we can do is Alpha lock this layer and then just recolor these so we can have the opposite ones be different color. So I'm going to make these opposite ones the darker green and then do the same at the bottom, as well. That's another way you can combine the symmetry and asymmetry to mix it up and keep it visually interesting. And then one last layer on top, and I'm going to do this one completely freehand, and that's the berries. And we've got that nice little non symmetrical detail in there. And then I'm going to go and put a bit of texture on these things. So let's go back down to the leaves at the bottom. So we'll make a clipping mask, color burn 40 and grab our 50% gray and something with a bit of texture in it. Just add a bit of that to the center of the leaves, not forgetting these ones down there. Add a layer underneath, make this one color dodge 40. And then we can do the same over this layer with these on them. And I need to go and put the berries in down on this bottom layer as well. So now this is ready to be rotated. Because we've got quite a lot of layers here, what I'm going to do is work with a flattened copy of this so things don't get too out of hand. If you want to go the pixel perfect route, then you would need to rotate your sketch around the canvas the way I'm about to show you tracing over it each time in the new positions. If you're in art for fun mode like me, then you can copy exactly what I'm doing here. So I'm going to group all of these illustration layers together. By swiping right on all of them, not the sketch layer, and then we can group those together. Let's move the sketch out of the way down there and we can hide this. Can also turn the drawing guide off now. So this here, we're going to duplicate and flatten it. If you don't have enough spare layers, you can hide the background color, swipe down with three fingers, copy all, put your background back on. You can hide that flatten group because we'll keep that as a backup. Swipe down with three fingers and paste. Let's find our rotation guide. So let's duplicate this because we'll use that for the first one, grab our rotation guide at the same time, tap transform, and if you remember, it was 60 degrees. Is the rotation on this one? That's our first one in place there. We then just need to duplicate this one more time. Swipe on this one, as well. Tap transform and rotate this 160, but you can go -60 for this one. And there you go. That's how quick it is to build that wreath out. And if we compare the image quality on these two, you can see there's not a whole bunch of difference between the softness of that and that. So, you know, even though we're rotating it, you still get a pretty good crisp effect there, which is perfect for sharing online or if you want to send it in an e card or something like that. I really love the cute bows and vibrant colors in this one. So now you know how to use the symmetry tool, how to make it work for you, and how to mix up multiple lines of symmetry when you're designing your own wreaths. In the next lesson, we're going to be working with five sections and a seamless trailing design. I 8. Project 3 | 5 Section Trailing Wreath | Setup: Okay, so let's make one more layer template, this one with five sections. And back in a 3,600 pixel Canvas, and I've pasted in the margin guide here. I've got my rotation layer, and I've also pasted in this one, which you can get in the resource section as a reference image for how many degrees you need to rotate each one. So let's add our first guideline in. We've already got these in here, but I want to show you how to make it. I'm going to add a layer. And we can draw a line going, What brush do I have here? Use this one going from around halfway to the top. Hold it so it snaps to a line, tap, so you've got vertical there. Then we're going to center this the same as we've been doing. So tap transform might be easier if we hide everything else. Put snapping and magnetics back on and snap this to the middle of the canvas there and also horizontally. Then you can duplicate this, grab your rotation layer, tap transform, tap on the node, and we're going to rotate this 72 degrees. 360/5 is 72. So each one of these sections is 72 degrees. Pinch those together, reduce the opacity on that and put that down in your reference group. So here's how this trailing wreath is going to work. Each line is going to start and finish at the same point, so we have this kind of trailing line that goes like that, and then we can have, you know, some branches like that coming off it. And that's pretty easy to draw like this using drawing assist and rotational symmetry when you're using four or eight sections. I want to use five, though, which means we have to do a little bit of extra triangle error to get it to line up. Going to be working out the layout first with a sketch to make sure things line up and then drawing the finished piece once we have the layout sorted. Very similar to the way I make patterns in Procreate. So let's turn off this drawing guide, clear this layer and take off drawing assist. And we can put our guide back on for this. Before you draw your first branch in, what you want to kind of do is visualize hitting this line at the same place you went in. If you want to put a marker in to help you, that's the thing you can do. So let's kind of put a marker halfway there, and a marker halfway there just to help us kind of know where we're aiming for when we get up there. So we want to kind of do something a bit like that. It doesn't matter if it's not perfectly lined up because we're going to go and fix that in a second. I also want to put some branches coming off this, so we'll kind of do one going down there and one going just up there. So now I've got a first rough sketching. Let's duplicate this and move it to either side so we can see how it's lining up. So duplicate, grab this here. I'm going to bring this guide up so you know how much to rotate it each way. Tap transform. Find our green node, and let's rotate it 72 degrees. As you can see, it doesn't line up at the moment, but that's fine because I want to show you how to make it line up when yours doesn't anyway. So let's invert the color on this one. So this is the duplicated one and the black one is the one we want to fix. So we can erase some of that and then go back over this, redrawing it to match up a bit better. So now, when we duplicate this again, and then we grab this, tap transform, and let's rotate it the other way now. So 72 but minus. You can see now we've got this lining up a lot better. So we've got this nice solid line that we can trace over in our sketch. Let's invert this rotated one. Go back down to this one. If you ever made trailing floral patterns with me, this trial and fix it process should feel a little familiar. So now we've got a fixed layout for the stems we can draw some leaves in. We'll start at this end and go as far as we can go and then move this over and see how it's lining up. So we'll kind of start over here and draw some leaves in. With this one, I'm not worrying too much about going outside the lines a little bit. So I think we'll go as far as there, and then we need to know where these ones are going to be up there. So let's duplicate this layer, grab our rotation guide, tap transform, and we're going to bring it -72 degrees. So that's going to put it up there. Let's invert the colors on this so that we can keep track of what's what. And then we can go back down to our black layer and just put these final leaves in there. Okay, so that's how we're gonna make sure this lines up smoothly, and the last thing we could do is just put a few berries on this. And when we come to draw these in, we're gonna have to make sure that this stem in this section ends up being tucked in underneath those berries. But we'll come to that later. I 9. Project 3 | 5 Section Trailing Wreath | Illustration: So that's the sketch as done as it needs to be for this wreath, and now we can start drawing. If you want to do this the pixel perfect way and draw the whole thing, then you would need to duplicate this wreath section into each of these, rotating it by this amount of degrees each time, so you have a full circle and then you can trace over the whole thing in one go. You'll have the benefit of a nice, evenly spaced out layout, plus the opportunity to work in a bit of variation if you want to. If you want to go the quicker making art for fun direction, then you can follow along with what I'm doing here. So let's group those, move them out the way, reduce the opacity on that. I can just pinch those onto one layer. And let's add a new layer. So I'm going to start here to draw my first stem, and I'm going to carry it on into this section here. A nice amount of, like, extra weight into this section, so there's plenty of overlap with this white one. Try and stick as closely to the line as possible, and that will make it much easier to line up. Once you have that, we're going to duplicate this down here so we can redraw this to merge it in properly. Duplicate this layer here, grab your rotation guide, tap transform, find your green node, and rotate this 72 degrees. That's going to take it down there. Let's go back down to this one here. And what we can do is just draw that in there, so it merges in nicely with that one. If you had it where it was already overlapping and it wasn't quite lined up, what you would do is erase the end of this line and then redraw it to merge in with that one. You can use any brush you like for doing this. But if you're feeling a little wobbly and it's hard to get them to line up, here's a couple of things you can do to make it easier on yourself. First up, you can try turning the streamlining or the stabilization up much more to get a lot more of a smooth stroke like that. If you're only just turning it up at this point to draw this, then I would go back and redraw the whole of this stem with the streamlining on so that you don't have a wobbly first half and then a streamlined second half of your line. Other thing you can do is use a brush with a bit of texture in it like this one. It's very hard to get a smooth line to match up, but this stroke already has a bit of jitter in it, so it's more forgiving. And if you want good brushes to use for this one, the ones I recommend using are the inking set, the ink bleed or the dry ink brushes are good for this kind of textured line. So once you've got your stems flowing nicely into each other like that, you can then duplicate this one over there so we know how it's going to line up on that part. So this one here, duplicate tap transform. Make sure you've got this at the same time and then tap transform. And it's -72 degrees we're going to use to put it into this section there. You can see that lines up nicely as well. Let's invert the color on these so that we're not getting confused. Make sure we're working on this one. And then you can just work through tracing over your sketch, making sure that you're drawing on the black ones and not repeating kind of ones that you've drawn in the same place. So that's much easier to do if you've inverted the colors as we've been going along. So work your way through and just trace over all of these motifs. I'm going to keep all of my stems on one layer, and then the leaves on a separate layer, and then the berries on a separate layer as well. So I'm just going to whiz through that now. I'm going to use the color burn and color dodge technique to add some gradients to the leaves, but I'll leave the shading on the berries and the stems and do that in one whole layer later, as that's going to be more related to the light direction, so I don't want that shading rotated. And it'll also help keep these stems seamless if we do the shading on one layer two. I'm using the stucco brush from the Procreate classic library here. Once you have your little section of wreath all finished, you can group it together. So I'm going to grab the leaves, the texture layers, the stem, and the berries, and group those together. And that can come up to the top there. I want to do some separate things with the different layers, so I'm not going to flatten this. And I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this around the wreath now. I've got this here so you can see how many degrees I'm rotating it by, but I'm going to whiz through this as it's the same as we've been doing before. There we go. And it all looks great flowing around seamlessly like that. As I mentioned before, we need to sort out the layering on here, though, so that we've got the berries on top. I'm going to go ahead and open up all of these groups here and I'm going to put them onto the same layer. So I've got all of the berries on the same layer first. So we'll swipe right on all of these. If you want to duplicate your first group to keep that as a backup, then you could do that. Just go to live dangerously and merge this all onto one layer, though. There we go. So that's all of my berries on one layer. Come pinch to merge those, and you can see, now, those are all set on top. I'm going to grab all of the stems now. Those can all go on one layer. And then all that's left is this shading and the leaves, and I'm just going to squig all of that down onto one layer there. So now you should have your leaves on one layer, stems on another, and berries on the top. So let's add a bit of shading onto the berries first. Let's add a layer above. Make this one color buurn 40. I'm going to imagine my light is coming from the top left. So I'm going to go for colour burn in the bottom right and then colour dodge on the top left. Need to make sure it's on a clipping mask. And I'm just going to add a little bit of that on the bottoms there. And you can add another layer and make the next one color dodge. And I'll be the first to admit this doesn't make a huge amount of difference because I've used such a light color for the leaves for the berries. But if you were using, say, red, you can see there it does make more of a difference if you're using a darker color. But I'm going to stick with white because I like that contrast. So I'm just going to add a bit of texture to all these berries. And like I said, on mine, it's such a subtle difference. I kind of doesn't really make much of a difference. But if I was using red, then I would go for the different angles on this. So I've just got a bit of texture on there instead. Then we can put some texture on the stems so that it all kind of, like, matches these look a bit flat compared to that. A then I'm just going to put a bit of lighter texture on these as well. You can see it kind of all starts to match and look a bit more unified now. And then last of all, I want to add a bit of vintage sparkle to this and draw some little crosses around the wreath. And again, this is a step that needs to be done at the end rather than rotated if you want them all to be crosses and not rotated xs. So let's add a layer right at the top here, and I'm just going to draw a few little sparkly crosses around like this. And then I'm going to add a few little dots around this as well. But you could use the Yaga brush that we edited earlier if you wanted a similar brush for this. And then that is our finished wreath. In the very last lesson, we're going to have a bit of fun with the animation in Procreate and use this wreath, reuse it and learn a simple way to animate some color chasing fairy lights on this to make a simple gift or looping video. 10. Project 4 | Adding Animation: Okay, time for some fun. Let's start by grabbing a copy of this wreath to use as the base for our animation. I want to stick to just flat colors for this one and no shading. Two reasons. One, it's a lot quicker, but also, I want to keep the file size to a minimum for a gift. For example, my email list provider has a ten megabyte limit on gifts. But really, for fast loading times in emails and on websites, you ideally want to keep gifts below 1 megabyte. And one of the easiest ways to keep the file size low is to limit the number of colors. Shaded leaf like this probably has like hundreds if not thousands of different shades of green in it. So by taking off the shading, we're going to reduce that to just one color, which you'll keep our file size down. I mean, technically, it's not really going to be one color because, you know, we've used a textured brush, so there's bits of semi transparency on here, but at least it's a lot less than it was. So I'm going to go out into the gallery. I'm going to duplicate this. So we've got a proper one and then this one that we can mess with. So let's delete all the shading layers. I am also gonna alpha lock the leaf layer and just fill it with the plain green. So we've got that flat green, and you can see what I mean about, you know, there's still different shades of green, but at least this is just wall shade. And I'm going to hide the berries, hide the dots, and hide the background. I just want to take a snapshot of this. So I'm going to swipe down with three fingers and copy all. And this is what we'll use for the basis of our animation. So let's come out into the gallery, and we're going to create a new document. So tap up here, and we're going to create a new canvas, and 1,000 pixels square is plenty big enough for this. Then you can tap done. And then we're going to swipe down with three fingers and paste. You'll see that's a lot more simplified now because it's on a much smaller canvas. Let's change the background color to something else as we're working. It can be this pink color again. So let's turn on our animation tools now. Tap up here on your actions and turn on animation assist. You'll see this little bar will appear at the bottom, and that's where all of your animation frames will appear as we start to add them. At the moment, there's only one frame here because we only have one layer up there. Each layer becomes a frame, and if you group several layers together, that group becomes one whole frame instead of the individual layers. So I can add another layer here. It becomes a frame. But if I group them, that then just becomes one whole frame. So the animation I plan to do is have this wreath be static and then have some animated light chasing round over the top, and then maybe some wobbling sparkles around the outside, too. Because the wreath itself doesn't need to move, we can set it as the background, meaning it will be there visible in every frame, the same static layer on repeat. We don't have to duplicate it or redraw it. So tap on this down here and set it as the background. And then that will be on view for the whole of the animation. So now let's add some fairy lights on top. We're going to add a layer, and let's draw them all on this layer, and I'll do my first one in pink. I'm going to pick three colors for these just to keep it simple, and I'm going to go for three repeats around the wreath. So I'll draw three pink ones. One, two, three, and then I'll add in the other colors. So do yellow one as the next color. And then red for this one. It's some nice bright, clashing Christmas colors. There we go. So we've got three repeats of three colors in sequence around the wreath. And I'm going for mimicking the Christmas tree light function that's called Chase, and it's where the colors flow along the string of lights. So where I have this yellow for one frame in the next frame, it would be up there, and in the next frame, it would be up there and so on. The sequence of colors would shift along one spot each time. Now you might be thinking we need to animate this pink light, for example, in every position around the wreath until it gets back to the beginning. But we only need to animate three frames because we've got three colors for our lights. By the time we get to the fourth frame, we've already got a pink light here. We can just loop back to the beginning because this other pink light would already be there. So let's add another layer on top now. You can see frames are being added along the bottom here, and you'll also notice that the previous one is still on show but with a reduced opacity. That's called onion skinning, and it allows you to see what the previous frame was so you know what you're working off. You can change how many frames are on view by going to settings and you can change the amount of onion skin frames here. And I think it's just on Max as default. We're going to leave it on that because this is a very simple animation, and we don't need to get bogged down by too much of that. So on this new layer, go and grab your pink and then just draw one frame on with your pink color. So I'm going to draw over here, trying to draw mostly the same sort of shape and size as what's already there. They don't have to line up perfectly. We do want a bit of wobble, but don't stray too far from what you can see on the layer below. Then we can grab the yellow and go one spot on for the yellow. And then the last ones will be red. There we go. And those are our first two frames that we've drawn. So we just need to do one more, and I'm going to hide the one underneath so I can keep track of what's what. So we need to move the pink one on one last spot onto this one. And then the next color on clockwise is our yellow, and then last of all the red again. That one back on again. And now what we can do is press play and see how this is looking. Kind of crazy. That is way too fast. What we can do is go to our settings and reduce the frames per second. So you can change the speed. You can make it really super fast, or you can make it really slow. I find something about six frames per second looks quite good for this, something 6-9 depending on how flash you want it. I'm going to leave mine on six, another thing that helps keep gift file size down is frames per second. So I'm going to go for the minimum that I feel like I can get away with. So we'll go for six. Pause that now. Now we've got this cute little Christmas wreath animation. I want to show you how to take this a little further, though, and animate some smaller white dots around the outside. They're going to stay in the same position and stay the same color, but we're just going to redraw them in the same spot each time so that they wobble about. And in animation, this is called a boil. I'm going to add a new layer for it because we could draw this on the same layer, but if we want to change things or do any editing, it might be easier if it's on separate layers. So I'm going to add a layer here. And what I need to do is group it with this one so that it's on show at the same time. So you can see this one here is a frame all of its own because I've grouped it together. So I'm going to grab white and just draw some little dots around here. And again, you could use the Yaga brush dot for this. Or you could just free hand your dots. We go. I think that looks kind of random enough. And then I'm going to go to this next frame on, add a layer, group them. And then what I need to do is trace over them in the same position in this group. And you don't want them in exactly the same position. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a boil, but you don't want to have them launching off all over the place, either. So try and make them mostly in the same place. Basically, the natural variation that you'll get despite trying to make them the same will be just the right amount. There we go. And then, same with this one, we add a layer, group them. Then on this one, we're going to go over them again. When I'm animating the boil, I like to work off the original bottom layer the whole time so that my dots or whatever it is, I'm boiling doesn't start to drift. Say you're always working off the last thing you drew, and it's ended up shifting over to the left or right a little more each time you've drawn it. By the time you loop back to the beginning, you're going to have a big shift back to where it originally was. So it's best practice to work off the same original bottom layer when you're animating a boil. We're only using three frames here, so it's not a huge deal, but if you are animating something with a longer you would start to notice. So it's better to learn how to do it correctly from the beginning. So I'm going to hide this middle one that I've just drawn. And when I go back up to this one, the onion skin layer that's showing is these ones at the bottom. So I'll just then go over these as well. There we go. Now we can put this layer back in and press play and see how this is looking. There we go. So you can see we've got those lights chasing around there, flashing and changing color. And then we've got these little snowy sparkly dots there bobbling around. Let's have a look at how to export this now. In your Canvas actions, you can go to share, and you can see you've got the option there for an animated gift. So let's tap on that. You can either share it as a square with a solid colored background or you can export it with a transparent background. To use as a sticker. You might need to adjust the Alpha threshold to adjust how much of your dots are showing. If it's quite high, you can see it cuts quite a lot of this off. But if you bring it down to somewhere like 50 or less, it will add more pixels in, but it's kind of a balancing act because it adds gray in. So just kind of try and find the sweet spot where you've got just enough showing, but hopefully not too much. Gray or black in there. But the thing to remember is that this is a gift. They are meant to be ow Rs, and it is just a thing we share for fun. Think of all the gifts you've ever seen. Have you honestly ever thought, Oh, my goodness me, that is so low res. How dare they send me that? I know I never have. And the other thing is that this is huge on screen right now in terms of how much space it's taking up on the screen. Once you send this in a text or use it as a sticker, it's going to be so small on screen, it'll look just fine. So don't panic too much about the image quality on this. It is meant to be just a thing we share for fun. So check your image size up here. This is almost 1 megabyte. So what you could do if you want to speed it up and reduce the file size even more by speed up, I mean, loading time, not the rate of the animation. You can check web ready, and it's going to crunch it down even smaller again. And now this is only 208 kilobytes, so that would load super quick in an email or on website graphics. So I'm going to share it like this, and I'm going to tick done and save it to my camera roll, so I'll save image. You can also save it as an animated video, animated MP four, and then you can save that the same way if you wanted to share it on Instagram or something. I'm going to show you how that gift would look in a text now. If I send that to myself, it looks perfect there in the chat and not all pixelated like it did a moment ago. Okay, so that is it. We are done drawing for this class now. In the last lesson, we'll have a quick recap of what we've learned today and how you could use these techniques outside of the festive season. 11. Wrapping Up!: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you've had a lovely creative time making your festive floral wreath with me. Let's do a quick little recap of everything we've covered. You've learned how to set up your canvas for different rotation guides, how to build both simple or more complex motifs within each section, and how to use those rotations to create balancing, satisfying wreath designs. We've explored the symmetry tool. We've added texture and easy recoloring tricks, and you've even created your own animated twinkly wreath using Procreate animation tools. That is a whole lot of skills packed into a short ish class. It's so well done. Now, what you do with your wreaths is completely up to you. You can turn them into Christmas e cards or texts for family and friends, use them as website graphics, or share them on social media as a fun festive post. But remember, you don't always need a purpose for your artwork. It's totally okay to make something simply because it feels fun, cozy, and creative. These wreaths are perfect for keeping your hands busy while you marathon Christmas movies on Netflix. These techniques are for life and not just for Christmas. You can use the exact same rotation setups to make wreaths for any time of year, Sunflowers for summer, pumpkins and leaves for autumn, past or florals for Mother's Day, whatever you fancy creating next. And I would absolutely love to see what you make. So please share your artwork in the project gallery, whether you've completed one wreath or three or made your own seasonal twist if you're watching this at a different time of year. I can't wait to see them. Don't forget you can download the rotation guides and the resources section if you want to keep experimenting after the class. And if you've got any questions at all, just pop them into the discussions tab. I'm always happy to help. If you've enjoyed this class, make sure to follow me here on Skillshare so you don't miss any new classes when they come out, and I would love it if you could leave me a quick review. And if you'd like even more tutorials, plus plenty of pattern making chaos and creativity, come and find me over on YouTube and join the Pattern Makers Talkit. Thank you again for spending your creative time with me. I hope you have a wonderful, cozy and restful season ahead, and I can't wait to see your beautiful wreaths. Have fun. Stay creative, and I will see you soon. And