Create a Unique House Illustration: Find Your True Colors in Procreate

1. Welcome Home: Are you ready to learn how to go from this to this in five lessons. First, we'll dive deep into an inspiration lesson where we'll revisit memories from our childhood and trips that have left a lasting impression on us. But becoming aware that we may already have more than we know all around us to get inspired. I want to teach you how to see the beauty in the ordinary and how the essential ingredients to make your illustration unique is simply paying attention to the things that you resonate with and basically learning more about who you are will lay our foundation one step at a time and learn them. Making a complex illustration isn't necessarily as hard as we thought. I'll be sharing with you my entire grid if process to walk you through all my tools, both conceptual and technical, so that you'll have the freedom to pick and choose however many you want to use and decide how simple or elaborate you want it a little house to be. You'll see that layers will unlock a whole new world of possibilities. And you'll learn how we can use them to bring depth and detail to our composition, even if I think we can draw. I'll also show you the magic of color palettes and the way that I seek inspiration to create my own. Additionally, you learn, you can play around before committing to a final color scheme. And thanks to layers, will make sure your illustrations are always ready to be easily recolored in the future if you need to use a different color palettes. Next, I'll teach you how to add the final touches to your digital illustration. You'll see that even small stylistic choices can be very impactful on the end result. Plus, I'll say this special secret twist for the end to wrap up the unique aspect showing you how this can transform your illustration into a heartfelt gift for someone you love, will be using an iPad. But even if you don't have one, I believe you'll still get a lot from this class. And in case you don't know how to use Procreate, I've included a few tricks to make your workflow smoother with their house freshly painted. You'll see the best part is that this class will give you skills that you'll be able to apply in the future for any illustrations to decide to make. Not just houses. Although I wouldn't blame you if after this class you want to create more than just one house illustration. I shouldn't say. Oh, and one last thing in case you are wondering, I'm floating format. I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Argentina, living in New York. So are you ready to create your unique little houses Thracian with me. I'll see you in class 2. Your Unique Project: Oftentimes people ask me, why do you always create a little houses? And I started wondering why I feel so drawn to creating them in all shapes and forms. And that was what inspired me to start crafting this class for you. What's your project? Your project is to create your unique house illustration. How to make a unique. We're gonna go through a series of lessons where we'll learn how to do just that. In the first lesson, I'm going to be sharing my inspiration process and how I pick all these little attributes that your illustration, you can have to be your own to look unique. Then we're going to move on to sketching. It doesn't have to be a super technical detailed sketch or anything like that. We're gonna go from a simple house shape to a more complex digital house illustration. I'll guide you through each and every step of my thought process as I'm sketching both fast and slow, showing you how to put all those attributes and ideas from lesson one into art work. In the third lesson, we're going to create our final illustration on the iPad. We'll import our sketches into procreate, and I'll show you how to assemble your house in your way. What makes tracing over it feel effortless? And if you don't know how to draw, no need to worry, this class will give you the clarity you need to understand that creating a composition is something that anyone can learn. Plus we'll also talk a lot about layers and how this will simplify our sketching process. You'll see how taking one small step at a time can lead you to great results. Then we're going to move on to pick in our color palette. And that's my favorite lessons. So I cannot wait to share all of my secrets with you when we get there. And finally, we're going to learn how to paint our house, will explore a few brokerage tricks to make it this process a bit easier. And if you don't have an iPad, but you want to finish your illustration by hand or digitizing and a different way that you already know. You're also going to get a lot from this class. I want to show you all the tools that I use, but you'll have the freedom to choose as many or as few as you'd like to use your own illustration. So please don't worry about complexity. The best takeaway from this class is that you'll be able to use the same techniques you'll learn for this and any illustrations you make in the future. I would love for you to share what you create in this class. You can share your final illustration in the project gallery. And you can also consider sharing stuff along the way. You'd like your sketch and the color palette that you choose. If you have any doubts at any point, be sure to ask a question in the discussion sections so that I can help you out. And so now I think who are more than ready to begin, right? Let's just go to class, Let's get started. 3. Inspiration: Your House Plan: For this lesson, we'll need to grab a notebook and a pen, and maybe something cozy to drink. I love tea no matter what the season is. And now let me teach you how to gather inspiration to make your illustration unique. Let's begin this exercise by going back to our childhood. Do you have any favorite fairy tales that had cute houses that you remember? The most memorable to me was Hansel and Gretel, who didn't love that house. It had everything that every kid wants, every sweet, every candy, chocolate. Did you have any favorite toys as a kid and maybe a doll house. I had some wooden blocks that I would use to build the front of a house with. They were really cute. And I also had a small porcelain tea set that I remember the teapot had little houses painted on it. My grandma escaped me both gifts. And speaking of them, I'll never forget my grandparents house. When I was a kid, I was in love with that house. There, tile roof there, brig citing everything was beautiful to me. Do you have any real house you can think of was your favorite, maybe your own house or maybe a house that belong to a relative. Now let's talk about trips. The first time that I traveled abroad on my own, I went to this small city in Poland called Poznan, and I got introduced the concept of an old town for the very first time in my life, needless to say, I became obsessed. They had cobblestones everywhere. So many adorable stores, dreaming restaurants in, during a phase. And most importantly, all these little houses one next to the other. I mean, how can one not get inspired, right? And when I went to Prague, I became even more fascinated overseeing all of these adorable houses from up above. A couple of years later, I went to the city in Italy that has my name. I always tell this story that the thing that captivated me the most about this city was the fact that I was walking than everything around me felt like a fairy tale. And then all of a sudden we turned around the corner and I saw this massive cathedral and I was in absolute, I couldn't believe my eyes because I wasn't expecting to see this enormous thing. After all these like really narrow streets and cute stores. That's what I love about traveling with no expectations. So you get surprised all the time. And the best part was that as I got closer to it, I kept seeing more and more details. It was like a graphic design lecture in practice, the concept of visual hierarchy was incredible. The far the medium and the short distance, and everything in-between had different things to offer. It was sort of like zooming into an illustration that would never end. Let me give you another tip. When you go to new places, always look up indoors or outdoors, actually, especially places that you're familiar with. You'll be surprised to see how many details we missed simply by not looking from a different perspective. But you don't need to travel far away in order to get ideas. Take a look at this. This is something that looks so similar to the columns from the cathedral, doesn't it? But it's just a string that came with a gift back. So try to look for more interesting shapes and textures that could give you something interesting to add to your illustration. On that note, it's time to pay attention to what's immediately around us. If you're anything like me, you already have cute little houses everywhere. They can be magnets. Think of magnets. You got during trips or the people gave us a gift. This one also happens to remind me of a cuckoo clock that my grandparents had on their wall in that house that I loved. But you can also think of cookie tins. They always had really gorgeous illustrations on them. And I don't know about you, but I don't remember ever eating those cookies. But I do remember having a lot of those tents at home. Another thing that always has houses on them is plates and any dishes. I bet there's one somewhere in your house that you may not even use too often. That has to house on it. Maybe also a mug you have around. Sometimes. Another thing that helps is to try to visualize the interior of the house. Who could this house belongs to? Who lives in it? I'm thinking of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. There was always afraid of being late. If you went into his house, he had clubs everywhere, thinking of who lives in the house and give you the theme for it. So try to think of a favorite character of yours, or maybe even your pets. Finally, house plants. Plants can add such acute touched the porch of the house. For example, some plants have really cool patterns on their leaves. They kinda look like they were made to be illustrated, don't they? I promised I'd show you how to make unique illustrations in this class and gathering inspiration from all these different sources. The first step to achieve that no one can interpret life or experience the real world the same way that you do. So taking the time to pay attention to these things we've been talking about and making these more intentional choices, it's going to be key for this. Take a moment to look for pictures or videos of the things that you have on your list. And if you don't have any, we can always go from memory. So now we're definitely ready to start sketching. See you in the next lesson where I'll teach you exactly how to put these ideas on paper. 4. Sketch: Laying Down Your Foundation: We have all of our notes from the inspiration lesson. Let's see which ones we can instill in our sketch. You can think of this as a recipe. You're adding little touches of your personality, injecting into your design what resonates with you? What do you feel drawn to the shapes you like? What you feel kinship with your identity. I'll never forget the moment when I learned that in order to make a complex illustration, I didn't have to make it all in one go. That's when the concept of layers came into my life. Layers open the door to a whole new world of possibilities for me. I could finally just sit down with my ideas onto paper and worry about details later. So let's put your illustration together one step at a time. We're going to start by making the simplest house shape first. And let's add a very basic roof to. Now we're going to split the house a bit because there's always helps to start imagining different areas. Because we're having a front view and I really want to add the tile roof from my grandparents house. I'm going to pick this section over here to be my visible roof. We're not going for a realistic drawing, but rather one that depicts ideas. So you see this and you think of a roof, even when it technically doesn't belong there. After adding some columns, I'm thinking I don't want my house to be completely symmetrical. So I'm going to offset the front door to the left a bit. And since the door is up here now, we can add some front steps that we'll reach the ground. As you can see, even though this drawing is not realistic, we just need to keep finding excuses to add additional elements to our illustration. These front steps, for instance, remind me of brown stones in New York. So if I draw inspiration from those, I can also add a couple of lower windows to complement that style. And since we're already adding windows, the next area that's calling my attention to add some balances over here, I'm feeling this window needs to be circular. Now I want to add another one to the top of the house, but I don't think it full circle would work here. Perhaps an arch would be better. And let's set a similar one around the front door. I think I want to add a couple of doors inside the window up here. So that gives me an excuse to have a little balcony. In this way, I can add a railing to it too. You see, here's another example of artistic license, where I don't care too much about the balcony having a floor or the true perspective. But rather, I use the railing as a symbol to the big, the idea of a balcony. And by adding these curves, I also make the illustration feel a bit more organic, dynamic, and not super flat. Okay, The next step is to add our beautiful plant choices. Why don't we start with the easy decision of framing the front steps, right? I'm gonna go with one soft looking pine tree on each side. And here I'm seeing a new opportunity to break off the symmetry. So I will add one more tree to the right since there's some space over here. The asymmetry now becomes a decision that can be seen as part of a system and not a stand alone. When you start setting some rules for yourself to follow, your design will look more cohesive. As you can tell, I keep adding elements where there are spots that need my attention. We call this negative space. My eye identifies empty spaces to fill, allowing me to give the composition more balanced. As you're adding elements to your own illustration, bear in mind that negative space is just as important as active elements. In other words, our artwork needs to be able to breathe and not feel super cluttered. Let's add one small plant here. A couple of potted ones over here, since this dividing line could serve as a ledge. Let's add one more to the left over here. Most of the things that I'm adding now our generic looking because I know I'll spend more time polishing them later on. Let me see what's missing. The final spot that's calling me is at the top of the house. I want to add some plants all around the balcony window, I think. But these are not going to be real plants. I'm picturing them like the ones that I saw in those old townhouses in Boston, they were painted. I wish I had a picture to show you, but this whole top part kinda looks like those wooden blocks I mentioned in the first lesson. There's one final detail that I want to add to break up the symmetry one more time, a chimney. Now we're going to number all the elements that we want to spend a bend more time refining on separate pages. I found this method allows me to work with more freedom and doesn't make me feel constricted. Otherwise, I'm always worried about erasing or modifying things that I already have. Remember to keep the notes and pictures from lesson one within reach for reference. I love working this way because drawing becomes so much easier. You know, I can make my elements big and spread out a bit. It can feel so limiting to work on details when you have to make them so tiny. This is my approach, but you can always decide to do the same thing and polished or shapes directly on the iPad. In the next lesson. When I started working on my chimney, I asked myself, how can I make this my own? And all these images from trips popped into my mind. So I saw an opportunity and I turned it into a dome. So this is my second tip to make your illustration unique. This dome and sub B, my own version of a chimney because of the place where I'm going to put it, where a chimney belongs in a house. But it's not an actual 2x10. You see what I'm saying? This is a simple example of rhetorical substitution. Consider applying the same techniques to your own illustration. Try to find an opportunity to replace one of the elements in your sketch with a similar looking one from your inspiration list, or maybe a new one that comes to mind. It should be similar enough to make sense, but unexpected enough to add your unique touch. So to recap a bit, as I was sketching, I always had in mind the visual hierarchy concept we learned in lesson one. We went from larger to smaller elements, making sure to strategically positioned different points of interests throughout the whole composition. As I described when talking about the financing cathedral, ideally, your illustration should have different levels of interpretation. The first one should be from afar, the thing that draws you in. The first thing that you see. As you get closer, just like with the Cathedral, although not as complex, you start seeing more elements that provide more levels of complexity. Within some of those shapes, we can spend a bit more time crafting smaller details. They can only be seen upon closer inspection. Now we're ready to move on to the next lesson. But first, let's take a few pictures of both the rough sketch and all the separate more detailed sketches that we'll use to make our final illustration on the iPad. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Final Design: Building Your House: In this lesson, you'll understand my alternative approach to traditional drawing and you'll learn how to assemble your final illustration before we start. This is not required, but you can consider touching up your photos to get cleaner and sharper lines. I'm going to turn mine to black and white and up the contrast as much as possible. When is the way to do this is with their phones photo editor. You can play around with the brightness and contrast features until it looks something like this. Once you're done, Let's start by creating a new canvas in Procreate, I'm going to make mine 5,000 by 5,000 pixels, 300 DPI. And I'm going to work with RGB because it's a digital illustration. But if you're planning on printing it, you should consider using CMYK as a general rule when we're working with pixels, it's always important to make your design in a larger scale. This allows for flexibility in case of future changes. You can always make your designs smaller outside of Baroque rate without compromising its quality, but you can never make it bigger. It will always lose to finish and become increasingly blurry if you do. Alright, now we're going to follow it simple steps to lay the groundwork and prepare our creative space. The first step is to import all of our sketches into Procreate. Let's import our rough sketch first by going to Actions. Add, insert a photo. And let's do the same with all of our refined sketches, importing them into different layers. Brokerage does this by default. You add a picture and it creates a new layer. We will use our rough sketch as the reference layer, and therefore, it will have to be the last thing that we see. So you'll want to position it at the very bottom of your layer list. If it's not already there, you can use your Apple pencil to press and drag the layer where it belongs. Then you can name it base layer and lock it. The second step is to change the Blending Mode of our layers. It'll be important to be able to see through all of our sketches. And if we were to lower the opacity of each layer, we wouldn't be able to see clear lines. So instead, what we have to do is change the blending mode to multiply. This way we can see all of our layers, no problem. Step three is to assemble your final sketch. As a kid, I always thought it was so hard to draw. But when I changed my mindset from drawing to create an, a composition, everything changed for me. I realized anyone can do this, whether you have drawing skills are not. You're designing your creating a composition and you're using layers to your advantage, you can consider lowering the opacity of your base layer a bit now so that you can easily tell apart your reference layer from your refined sketches. This step is fun, sort of like putting pieces of a puzzle where they belong. Just makes sure you're on the correct layer and tap on the transform tool every time you want to move something. As you're adjusting size, don't forget to tap on uniform so that your shapes won't get distorted. If anything is bothering me, my assembly process and I can't see through, I'm going to turn off those layers until I need them. This is the perfect time to play with things and move them around as much as you want. Remember, we're putting together now is an enhanced version of your sketch. Our aim is to get this to look as close as possible to the final version so that in the next and final step we can easily trace over it. It is important to note that procreate will lower the quality of your shapes when you move or resize them. So it's better for that to happen now and not when we're working with our final shapes. If one of your images goes overboard like this by accident, it's going to be cut off. So make sure to always keep your shapes within the Canvas edges. If this happens to you though, you can always get it back by tapping the Undo button or tapping on your screen with two fingers. Once all my refined sketches are in the right spot, I'm going to unlock the base layer and erase the rough parts that I don't need anymore. By the way, if your eraser isn't working, check the opacity slider and bring it all the way up. Now that I have my final sketch fully assembled, I'm going to merge all the layers by doing this with my fingers. If you have too many layers, you can do the same gesture a few times in a row until you're left with one. Or you can combine them into a group by tapping on each layer and hidden combined down. Then you'll be able to do flatten the whole group. Just a quick warning. If one of your layers happened to be set to a blending mode that wasn't multiply, your layer may disappear when you merge them off. For instance, this is what would happen if one of my layers was set to dark. We have finally reached the last stage of this list. Tracing over our house. This step should be pretty seamless because we took our time with all the previous steps as the starting point will lower the opacity of our reference layer just a bit so that we can comfortably see where we're tracing. And this is important. I'm going to lock this layer so I don't accidentally start tracing on it. Then I'll have to start all over again. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. Let's create a new layer on top of this one and start tracing our shapes. I'm going to use my favorite brush that comes with procreate called dry ink. But feel free to use whichever one you want. A very important thing to keep in mind throughout this whole process is to always close your shapes and never leave any gaps. Your future self will thank you for this. When you're coloring your house. Typically, I would use as many layers as I want, but we're going to have a limited number of layers in Procreate because we're working with a big file. So we'll have to keep some shapes together. The safest bet is to do this, especially with shapes that do not overlap each other. You see I was saved by the locked layer. I want to show you a trick that you can use when you're working with lines or any geometric shapes, you can draw your shape and when you're done hold, you'll seal becomes smoother. Now I'm not a huge fan of this because if our goal is for our illustration to look unique, perfect shapes won't get us there right? But sometimes this trick can be very helpful. Like for instance, when I'm working on my columns or on the roof, I can just make a line and hold until it becomes straight. Plus if you want your line a perfect angle, you should also tap on the screen with their finger as you're holding your line with their Apple pencil. As you're working on your illustration, it's gonna be important to think of your elements and their potential background. We're gonna go over this in more detail in lesson five when we paint our house. But this cigarette example that helps you understand why insist so much on the importance of layers. If I were to trace the lines of both my balcony and my tile roof on the same layer, I would go insane, right? The things two layers, this becomes trivial. I only have to ensure that I trace the shapes on separate layers. Will go through a few more examples in a moment. If you have any elements that look the same like my lower windows here, you can just duplicate the layer and move the element to where you need it instead of tracing over it twice. I'm not really liking how blame my balcony looks. So I'm going to revisit my reference pictures to get some ideas. Sometimes we may neglect certain elements during the initial sketch stage, but fortunately, it's not too late to finish polishing them directly on the iPad. I'll show you one quick final tip in case you're planning to use some geometric patterns like this one to decorate your windows. For example, I have these lines and instead of making them again, I'll just duplicate the layer, tap on the transform tool, flip it horizontally, and then I would have saved some time. After merging them. You can also get rid of this overlapping area by selecting it with a rectangle selection tool and cutting it out. As promised. Let's go through a few examples of how I grew up my shapes together. As we saw before, the front door of shape is in one layer, the towels in a different one, in the balcony, in a third one. The same thing happens with a chimney and it's tiles. I need them in separate layers because they're all overlapping elements. But as you can see, I can group the front roof with the top part of the house. And all of the tiles and decorative window textures together. The plants and flowers or another, the group. As long as I keep this overlapping tree in a different layer. I hope that my example help you find what's more convenient for you. But the way that I did it is just one possibility among the countless variations that may exist. After some last minute tweaks and ensuring there are no gaps to my shapes are black and white. Illustration is ready. It kind of looks like a coloring page, right? I really want to add some color to it. I'll see you in the next lesson, which is my favorite by the way, where we'll talk all about color palettes 6. Palette: Hues for Your House: We finally got to my favorite lesson. Color is an essential tool that we cannot overlook. It's what will set your design apart from the rest. So I'm going to show you how you can create your own unique color palettes. Spring brought all of these ideas to meet. Seeing cherry blossoms, magnolias, all the flowering trees. Gotten me really inspired. If you feel like the pictures from the inspiration lesson don't have enough interesting colors. This is a great time to go gather more. When we're all set, we're going to import our pictures into procreate and pick some colors. As we learned before, you can do this by going to Actions. Add, insert a photo. This looks a bit messy. Let me fix it. There we go. To fake my colors. I simply tap and hold on the color that I liked. And then I slide my finger until I find the right shade. Then I draw a little circle. I tap and hold on the color shade in the top right corner and I drag it so I can fill my shape. This way. I can select a few colors and play around a bit before I commit to final color palette. There are times when I can't find the right shade that I'm looking for. So I'll select one that's close and gently make it lighter in order to have more options. I'm trying to find a shade of green that's brighter than this one and sort of mixed with this other blue. But I can't spot it in my pictures. So I'm going to try to create something between these two shapes. I tend to use these colors a lot as you can see. After we're happy with our color choices from all of these, we're going to try to just keep a few. Let's select eight to ten. Oftentimes working with a limited color palette is more impactful. And it can also be replicated into different pieces. If you were to create a series of illustrations, for instance, it holds more meaning and it's more appealing to the eye. If there's a picture whose colours you particularly love, you can create your palate directly from the picture. To do this, go to the colored circle, tap the plus sign, and then new from photos. Perhaps you won't like the full palette, but some colors might end up surprising you. So these are my final colors. I'm gonna go with a warm color scheme for my little house illustration. Now let me show you how to properly create a color palette in Procreate. Let's tap and hold on the first color. And when it comes up on the circle, tap on the plus sign and create a new palette. Then tap on the first gray square. Let's now go to our second color. Tap and hold and tap on the second gray square, and do this with all of your colors. As I said before, my color scheme is warm, but I also chose another color for highlights. I'm going to use it very specifically on small elements are sections. If you feel a bit lost with color, I created two options for you. Feel free to use them for this project. You can also find this in the class resources section. Now it's time to have some fun. We're gonna relax and do a quick test, playing around with our colors before we paint the final house. We're gonna use our black outlines for this, but we don't want to get confused and mess up our layer Canvas. So let's export this as a PNG and then imported into new campus. Next we're going to resize it and duplicate it a couple of times so that we have different options to play with. We're going to create a new layer on top and change the blending mode to multiply so that we can see the outlines below. While we're painting. You shouldn't spend too much time on this step. It's supposed to be a very rough tests so that you can get an idea of color percentages and where you want each color to go. Just as a friendly reminder because I often forget this myself. You can drag your color palette out, making any way more convenient for you to select color. Here, I feel like I'm missing a yellow. I didn't bring it into my color palette. But this is why it's nice to have a reference canvas with initial color choices to go back till. I'm really happy with this version. So let's move on to the next lesson where we'll finally paint our house. I'll see you there. 7. Color: Painting Your House: Okay, Here we are. This is the final lesson and we're ready to paint our house. So let's start by getting our color test from the previous lesson. We will merge these layers and using the selection tool, draw a rectangle shape around our favorite option, then slide these three fingers as usual and copy it. Next, we'll open our final black and white illustration and paste it. We're going to make it small and keep it for reference on the top-left corner of the canvas. Now we're going to start adding color to the very first layer of our house, which should be the last one on the list. And then we're going to build up from there. We have to start visualizing what's behind everything else. If you want, we can turn off all the layers above to see better. One thing that has always helped me visualize my illustrations in layers is to try to imagine them from the side. Throughout this lesson, you'll learn that some elements may have more layers than you think. Because there are this window, for example, the obvious things that we see are the frame and these dots, right? But one thing that we're missing is the glass. This is an easy example, but you can do this same exercise with other shapes that are more complex. To start adding color to our illustration, we're going to select a color from our palette and drag it into the shape that we want. To remove the outlines. We're gonna do this. We're going to swipe right on the layer that we're painting, then tap on it and then Fill Layer. Now, everything is the same color. Frankly, I really enjoy working by coloring the outlines first because then using the recoloring tool becomes even more satisfying. Let me walk you through this process. First, we'll pick the color that we want to use, paying attention to our little house reference. And then we'll turn the layer we want to color into alpha lock by swiping right on it as we did before. Then tap on it and tap on Fill layer. Now your outlines should be the color that you want. In case it needs a color, elements with the same layer separately. Here's a useful trick. You can use the selection tool to target the specific shape or the outline. So you want to color and use this same method as before. After turning your layer into alpha lock by selected and filling the layer only the selected outlines are gonna get colored. It's got like an alpha log. Within an alpha log, if you think about it. Once we're done coloring our first outlines, we're going to remove the alpha lock so that I can explain to you the magic of the recoloring tool. If we drag and drop our color into our shape like we did earlier, a little message is going to pop up that says continue filling with three color. So if you tap on that, this will allow you to continue coloring every shape that you have in the same layer. I have to say oftentimes as I'm starting to use the recoloring tool, I experienced a little mishap where the background gets flooded with color. To avoid this, it's important to position the crosshair within the area that you want to call her next. And if you want to use a different color from the one you have selected, you simply have to go to your color palette and tap on the desired color. Following that, it becomes really satisfying. You can just tap away, select the color you want first, and then tap on the area that you want to color next. Bear in mind the things they are tapping need to be in the same layer, otherwise they will not get colored. And by the way, another reason for the flooding mishap could be they are shape isn't fully clothed, unlike with your future self requested in less than three. Remember, when you activate the recoloring tool, you can fix this sometimes by adjusting the flood slider that comes up on the bottom. Now when it comes to smaller elements, it will be much more practical to simply paint them by hand. A very long time ago, I made this stylistic choice to remove outlines for my illustrations. I believe this enhances my artwork by giving it a soft and gentle look that I will not be able to achieve otherwise, this will be entirely up to you, of course. But if you decide to choose the same approach, I want to teach you how I go about this process and show you the way I translate some lines that are not as straightforward to say the outlines of a simple square or a circle. Consider these flowers. If I were to simply fill in the shapes with color, I would be losing so much information and so many lines they give character to my flowers. We obviously cannot afford to do something like that when we're creating a unique illustration by spending a little more time on them, what I do is erase the areas where the outlines would be. And when I positioned the flowers on top of a contrasting color, the former outline sort of come back to life, but in a much more subtle way now, keeping their essence intact. Same goes for the leaves. I raised their main line this way, or all the way out up to where the stem begins. And then it becomes Decide to leave open, if you will. This way you get to represent both the main line and the stem without needing outlines. See this right here. This is another thing that can happen when you're using the flooding method. You may end up with streaks. If you don't want this problem, it's a good idea to use a different type of brush, maybe something that's smooth instead of texture. I don't really worry too much about these minor issues because personally, I find that painting process to be incredibly therapeutic. So I really don't mind fixing some of these things by hand, but I'm just letting you know in case you want to save some time during the coloring stage. Now is a good time to add some more details and highlights to my shapes. Keeping in mind the concept of visual hierarchy we touched on in the previous lessons. This is why I didn't add any lines to my columns before. It's way easier to do this as you're coloring your shapes. Once you have applied the base color to your shape, you have the simplest switch your layer to alpha lock. And you can draw these lines without really worrying where they start or where they end. Since alpha lock is the mask, whatever you paint or draw will appear on the shape and nowhere else. The reason why I've been very adamant about having our shapes in different layers is in case you want to change the color of your illustration. So for instance, going back to our window example, since it's not super complex, we can just use the recoloring tool, but the perfect example to understand the importance of layers, as you're very aware by now, is my tile roof. If we weren't going to have the roof background color and the towels in the same layer it would take for ever to color this. We would practically need to retrace the whole thing. So in this case, we won't be able to use the recoloring tool. I don't think it works great without lengths anyway, to be honest. But with layers, you don't have to worry about that. We simply transform our outlines into alpha lock and color them. As we approach the end of this lesson, let me show you how I add some final touches to my plants that are not very complicated, but can go a long way given more character and depth to your illustration. To do this, don't forget to switch the alpha lock like I did there. We're going to pick a texture brush. I love using this one called bonobo chalk. It's my favorite. Want to make it big so the texture looks sharp, increase in its size to maybe 30%. Then you seen a shade that's slightly darker than the base color. I add a subtle shadow with a shape that's a tad lighter. I add a bit of a highlight to the other side, as if the Sun were glowing on the tree from an angle. Given tiny imperfections to some elements like this window can be yet another way of making your illustration unique. Any final details you want to add to help balance negative space. Polka dots are always a good filler. And this is a cute twist that I was saving for the end. To wrap up aspect of theory illustration, I wanted to add a little secret to it that would most likely go unnoticed if I didn't point it out. Let me take you on a little trip to expand on this concept. To admittedly, it won't hurt to get away from our illustration for a little while. In fact, it'll be really helpful. It's always good practice to briefly step away in an attempt to get fresh eyes. And when you come back and take a look again, you start seeing opportunities in different spots. And you can create these simple little details that didn't add a lot of meaning to your final projects. If I were going to give this illustration to my dad, for instance, I would analyze it and try to find it something like a code that we share my data and I love watching movies together. So by adding a few details here and there, I can make references that convey that. Or if I gave this to my mom on a greeting card, I would add the infinite symbol that represents a deep special connection between us. Or maybe a butterfly that only she and I know the emotional value of. And finally, if I were going to give this to my husband, I would add these details. And maybe these that evoked the city where we first lived together. And use the house numbers as the way to include the date when we first met. You can make special additions is subtle or as prominent as you like. And when borrowing attributes from real-life elements to enhance your symbols, always remember to add your personal touch. I hope the examples I showed you throughout this class helped. But as a safe rule, remember this nature consistently proves to be the most reliable source when it comes to borrowing attributes. To use senior design. Makes sense. Alright, enough examples. Let's wrap this up by adding the background color, creating a layer at the very bottom of our list. And then we'll fill it in with one of our colors and use the recoloring tool to play around and see which color fits best. A great time to add your signature to your little house. I love hide in it and my illustrations. This seems to be a great spot for it. And we're finally done. Now you can keep your houses the digital guard, or posted on social media if you do, don't forget to tag me so I won't miss it. And please consider sharing it in the project gallery so that we can all see your amazing creation. Congratulations, and I'll see you in the next video for a brief moment of unique introspection 8. Unique Introspection Interlude: Before you go, can I share this final reflection with you? It's interesting that cathedral I mentioned so many times throughout this class impedance. It is called Mary of the flower. And do you know them? My full name is very long. Part of it is Maria Florencia and my nickname is Florida. Now I know that anyone who looks at the cathedral would be impressed and feelings fired regardless of their name, right? But there's just something about the things that we identify with. In essence, these are the things that fascinate us. You know, those things that you look at and you feel a little tickling their heart, never lose sight of them. Are emotional connection to these things may not necessarily be so obvious, and it's a matter of fact, they won't always be the things that every single person finds captivating. But you know what? These are the very things that move us to create. Consider them your diamonds in the rough. So I want to leave you with this final suggestion. Always pay attention to the things that you resonate with because that's the key to finding your own visual identity. Seeking to be genuinely who you are and understanding what makes you unique. It's going to be the most fulfilling path you can follow both as an artist. Now it's time to see what's in store for your little house. I'll see you in the next video to talk about possible next steps and the takeaways from this class 9. Bye So Soon?: So this is it, you made it. Congratulations on finishing this class. You'll learn how to make your own house illustration. But you also have all these other tools now in your creative mind after exploring multiple sources of inspiration and grasping the concept and valley of rhetorical substitution. You learn that drawing a complex illustration doesn't have to be as hard as we originally imagined and that we can create a detailed piece one layer at a time. You learned how to get inspired to create your unique color palettes. And thanks to layers, we made sure your files are always ready to be recolored in the future. If you need to use a different color palette. And the best takeaway, you'll learn how to make any illustration your grades from now on unique by injecting it with your very own personality and identity, the end result will always look like it belongs steel. Now let me give you a few ideas on how you can use your finished project. You can use your little houses, have digital greeting card or you can also print it. But remember to watch out for the difference in color between RGB and CMYK. If you're printing it, you can also frame it and use it in your own home or give it, give to someone you love. Adding those personal touches we learned about in the final lesson. One more thing you can do with it is use your black and white illustration from lesson three as a coloring page. Before you go, let me say, thank you for taking the time to join my class. And if you have any doubts or you want any feedback, please let me know in the discussion section and I'll answer as soon as I can. I'd love to see your finished project and what you think of this class. So please don't forget to review it if you find it valuable and feel free to share the class with any friends that you have that you think would love to create little houses. If you'd like to stay in touch and know of my upcoming classes, you can follow me here on Skillshare or on social media. And you can also consider becoming a part of my newsletter community if you want to keep igniting your creativity with little moments of unique introspection. I hope you'll be filled with creative ideas after this class for your future projects. I'll see you very soon.