Create an Illustration Series: From Inspiration to Print

1. Create an Illustration Series: : From Inspiration to Print: Hi everyone, I'm Louise Colet Brown. I'm an artist, designer and teacher and today I want to show you how to plan and create an illustration series. Creating a series is the perfect way to develop a cohesive body of work that shows your unique style to the world in a professional format. In this class, I'll be creating my series on my iPad and Procreate, but you could use any medium like paints, paper, drawing pencils, or whatever you like to use. If you want to create a series, but you aren't sure where to start or you get stuck on the planning phases, this is the perfect class for you. I'll show you how to scale your series to fit your skill level and personal time constraints so you can spend anywhere from 20 minutes to 20 hours on each illustration. I'll show you my whole process for creating this series, from planning and inspiration, to the creation process to printing it out, and evaluating color options. When you watch this class, you'll get all of the Procreate brushes I use to create my illustrations, including four drawing and painting brushes and 10 texture brushes to add some grid and depth to your work. You can use the textures to add high contrast grid to your background or you could use them to add subtle color textures or erase texture from the solid shape. I'll share with you some free resources for creating color palette so that your illustration series has a cohesive palette. I'll give you a huge list of content ideas so if you don't know what to draw, you can just pull from the list and get started. First, we'll look at how to plan a series from start to finish. I'll show you how I organize my colors, concepts, and style guide to take all the guesswork out of my design process. When you work from a series plan, you can be sure to create a cohesive and professional set of illustrations that could be the beginning of a collection or a portfolio of work. Next, we'll look at how to turn a simple line drawing into a textured illustration and talk about how to develop the concept into a cohesive set of illustrations that work well as a set or individually. Then we'll look at some advanced drawing techniques that will help you cut down on drawing time and create plentiful yet accurately proportioned illustrations. We will cover a few different ways to use the line drawings and finished illustrations so you can find a set of colors and textures that work for your personal style? If you feel like your style is all over the place or that you don't have a cohesive body of work to present online, then creating a series is exactly what you need to start focusing your work. In the class, I'll show you every part of my process so you don't have to do any guessing and you can jump right in and start creating your own series. Let's get started. 2. Creating a Series: When and Why: The first thing I want to do is take a look at where creating a series fits on the path of becoming a professional artist and designer. Of course, everyone takes a different path and there are many paths that you can create. But I just want to take a look at some of the common steps that people take and where a series fits within that path. The first thing we typically do when we want to create illustrations or any type of art is we learn the tools or technology needed, we find out what the best tools are, then we try to understand how they work and get comfortable with the process. Next, we learn how to make original work. We learn how to find inspiration and sketch and choose colors, and learn about the elements of design like contrast and balance. At this point, the work isn't anywhere close to where we want it to be, but we're creating original illustrations or drawings, and our designs and skills are slowly improving. Next, we learn how to refine our work with detail and subtle changes that make the work look more professional. We learn how to use the elements of design to create work that's well balanced in terms of color, contrast, and cohesive style elements. The next step is usually to start to learn how to make cohesive work so that we can start presenting our work to the world as one single unit rather than a series of unrelated drawings or illustrations. I think this step is also intertwined with finding your style, making work that's cohesive or has some element that ties each of your drawings to the others is what makes your work recognizable to the world. This is where a series comes into play. You can use a series to start making more cohesive work by choosing certain elements that you like and repeating them in a set of illustrations. This is also when you start finding your style, you'll notice that the elements you choose, like your colors and line style, start to become more repetitive and predictable. So you can focus more on content and less on things like color and style. As you can see, creating a series is commonly the step that people take after learning some tools or techniques and also getting a feel for your original style or color choices. If you're just starting out or if you've been drawing and designing for a while, starting a series is a great place to move your work to the next level. Let's take a look at why you would create a series. First of all, creating a series gives you a cohesive body of work to present to your clients or fans. This makes your work look more professional on social media or your website. It also helps you develop new ways to draw and paint. As you're creating these series, you'll find that you discover things that you never would have discovered if you hadn't forced yourself to focus on one central theme. It also helps you develop your style. You'll see that as you have to choose colors and line styles that you'll do for three, six, or nine drawings, you have to make more careful choices because you're making a bigger commitment when you're committing to a series than you are when you commit to a single individual piece. Creating a series also prevents idea generation overwhelm. I'm sure you've felt this. If you try to create unique drawings one after another, you get tired of always thinking of new content. Sometimes it's nice to just choose a theme and just focus on building your skills and not worry so much about finding new content, new colors, and new line styles. This is a great way to especially improve your drawing. If you feel like you're drawing skills aren't quite where you want them to be, you can really use a series to help boost you to the next level. One of my favorite parts about creating a series is that it's easy to scale. So whether you have 20 minutes a day or whether you have two hours a day, whatever amount of time you have to create. You can make a series that fits within that time constraint, you can really decide how complex you want to get with each drawing and scale your pieces based on what time constraints you have. You also never know where a series will lead you. This lettering piece I made started as a series and then I decided to use the individual parts in a single illustration. But starting them as a series helped me wrap my head around where to get started with this concept of building art supplies and combining them together in a single illustration. You can see there are so many benefits to creating a series, it's great for an artist or designer at any level and I want to talk a little bit about what you can do with your series after you create it. I think it's helpful to think about the final use before you start creating it. Obviously you can use these on social media. You can post them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, it's a great way to market your work and get people interested in your work. For maybe client work or maybe you do print on demand, whatever it is, it's a great way to bring attention to your accounts and your portfolio. You can also display your series on a website. If you're looking to build a cohesive portfolio for your website, this is a great place to start. This could be the first of many series that you can host on your website to show the world that you can create cohesive work. You can also use these drawings for print on demand projects, you could put them on a site like Society6 or Redbubble and they could be printed on anything from art prints and pillows to stationary. Lastly, you could add these to an online or a printed portfolio. Every professional artist and designer needs a portfolio and you really don't want every piece in the portfolio to be totally different. It's great to have some focused, cohesive set that people can scan through and really see the range of your skills. So now that we've talked all about why you would create a series and what you can do with your series after you create it, let's start digging into the planning process. 3. Downloads and Resources: First I want to show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to the downloads and resources page on the project section on the Skillshare website, not the app. Once you click on the link, you'll find that you need a password to get into that page. I'll show you the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you will see that there is a list of downloads on the right. We'll start with the brush set. This is the Procreate set. I'm going to click and hold and click "Open in a new tab". I'm using Safari for this. If anything is a little different for you, just switch to Safari and it should work the same. Next, I'll click "Open in Procreate", and that'll just import the brushes in the Procreate. Then when I open any document and click on the Brush tool, it'll be the brush set at the top, and everything will be using today is in that set. The next item on the downloads list is the Pinterest inspiration board. I've pulled together a ton of resources for ideas for starting a series. I'll just do the same thing. Click and hold. You can open in Pinterest if you have the Pinterest app or you can open a new tab. I'm going to click the Pinterest app. You'll see on this board that series can really mean a lot of different things. This, for example, is a series with simple shapes and line drawings. This wouldn't take as long as something like this, for example, which contains a lot of different lines and illustration elements. As you're looking at this, you can think about the time commitment that you want to make for this project. Some of these are going to be very time intensive and others can be quick illustrations. This would be something great to do if you wanted to do something quick. Just some simple shapes and patterns, depicting some kind of object. You can also do a similar shape over and over and just add a different pattern or illustration to it. This is by Nic Squirrell, one of our favorite Skillshare teachers. You can also do a simple line drawing. You don't have to add color. There can just be some pattern elements with some simple shapes outlined. This would be something great to do. If you wanted to do something kitchen themed. You could look at everything in your kitchen and then create a jar and try to put that thing in the jar. This person has put asparagus, carrots, herbs, okra, all kinds of different things within jars. Then you could add some color to this using the brushes that we're using today or some other brush that you like. Here's another great example of someone who chose to do the same object over and over and depicted it in a lot of different ways. This is a great idea if you really want to explore a single shape and just see how many different things you can do with that shape. If you're not sure where to start with their series, I really recommend starting out here. Just scan through and take a look at what stands out to you, what kind of themes interests to you, what kind of colors you're drawn to. Then you can start planning out your own series. Of course, we don't want to copy anyone on here. This is just a starting point. This may just get you to the place where you say, "You know what? I want to do plants or I want to do pastels." You wouldn't want to take the same idea from the same piece. I wouldn't do a neon plant themed piece with these colors in these kind of shapes because that's really just copying that person. What I would rather do is say, "I'm going to do some cats. I like these bold colors. I like these patterns, and I like these textures." We're just pulling from these pieces to find out what interests us, what speaks to our personal style, and then combining it and making it our own. Now that you have all of the tools and inspiration that you need to get started, let's go ahead and start planning our series. 4. Elements of a Series: Next let's talk about the elements of a series. When you start planning your series, there are a lot of different elements to think about, and while we are going to plan these out in advance, of course they can flex as you create your drawings. You'll find that as you go through the process, you need to alter colors or textures. But I do think it's helpful to start with some framework, so that you're working from a base rather than trying to build everything from scratch as you're thinking about your drawings. I think the most important part of a series is the content. What are you going to be drawing? What is the theme? What is the overall concept that you're trying to achieve? Next, I like to think about the color scheme. I want my color scheme to reference the objects. If I'm doing vintage vans, then I want to go with a vintage feel for my color scheme. Next, I like to think about line style. Do you want to do something solid and thick or maybe you want to do something that's more like a brushstroke that's rough and has some texture to it? I'd like to think about the line style, and also the background style and textures. What is each illustration going to have in common in terms of the background area, the colors, the buildup of texture? Those are all the things that we'll think about as we go through this planning process. Let's start by taking a look at some ideas for the content of your illustration series. As you start thinking about content, of course, you can go to the Pinterest inspiration board, and look for ideas there. I've also created a workbook with some ideas in it. We'll do the same thing. Click and hold, open in a new tab. It may take just a minute for that tab to open because this is a file with layers, so it's somewhat larger than the other files we're working with today. Once that page opens, you should see the option to open in some program or you can click "More." I'm going to click "More" because I want to open this in Procreate. I'll click "Add to Procreate." Then I'm going to head to the Procreate app, and I'll give it just a second here to import the file. Now, I can go to my Gallery. It'll send that document to your main gallery, not into any Stack. So you have to go back if you're already inside a Stack. I'm just going to click and drag that into my illustration stack, and it should be blank before you open it. Then once you open it, you'll be able to see the images. The first page is just the title page. As you can see, the pages are separated on two layers. You can just make that first layer invisible, and then you can see the next page. The next page is the illustration series themes ideas. I've made a huge list of ideas that you can feel free to pull from. You could go with something really specific, like moths. You can find types of moths. I'll put a list on the downloads page of some image resources if you need some resources for that, but you can also just Google a picture of a moth. You could do something a little more broad like insects. You could do a lot of different insects, including moths. You can scroll through this list, and see if anything stands out to you. Probably as you read through this list, you'll start getting some ideas. You can go ahead, and write some of your ideas right here on the list. Next time you want to start a series, you have this huge list with some of your own ideas on it. I'm just going to create a new layer. Choose a pen color. I'll just grab the dole sketching pencil. If you ever want to write in Procreate, you may want to click on the "Brush," and make sure the streamline isn't up. It's really hard to write by hand if the streamline is up, so I'm just going to bring the stream line all the way down on that brush, and now it'll be really easy for me to write on this list. I got the idea to use the theme of summer fun. I thought I could do some sunglasses, flip flops, an umbrella, some bathing suits, and I can probably come up with a bigger list, but that's just a start. You may want to start with just brainstorming a few different categories or a few different specific ideas like these, to say you have a lot to pull from, and then grab the one that speaks to you most. I always start like this. I make a huge list of ideas, and then I pull out the one that speaks to me most. I find that works a lot better than just trying to come up with one great idea. Usually the more you work through the problem, you'll get better and better with your idea generation. So once you've gone through this process, and you've chosen your topic, it's time to start pulling together some inspiration images to help get the illustration process started. 5. Creating an Inspiration Board: I've chosen the theme of recreational vehicles. I'm going to do vans, RVs, campers, anything I can find that looks like a summer recreational vehicle. These air streams that you see that are beautifully renovated school buses. I'm going to pull all of those images. I don't know which one I'm going to use. I'm just going to get as many as I can. This is of course, a really simple process. I'm just going to Google and type, vintage camper and click "Go". Then I'll click images. I'll just scroll through here, and look for shapes that I like. I like these really rounded shapes. I'm going to look for one that has that nice rounded shape. This is a great one. When you find the one you like, just click and hold, and click "Save Image". Again, I'm using Safari, so if you're using a different browser and that doesn't work, just switch to Safari. I'll just repeat this same process with a ton of different vans. If I'm going to do nine illustrations, I would probably get at least 18 pictures because I want to be able to pull multiple elements from each van. I don't want to look at this picture and copy this exactly. I want to take this shape and maybe a couple of these windows. Then say, what if it had another window like this van? What if the wheels were more covered like they are in this camper? I'm not copying these images directly, I'm pulling shapes and ideas from each one. Once you continue that process and get all of the images that you want, you'll have those saved in your photos. I'll just go to my photos, and you can see here, I've pulled together a ton of beautiful pictures of vans, and some RVs, and some campers, and so I tried to get a wide range of shapes. I'm thinking about what shapes have I not covered yet, and then I'm going to go back to Safari and try to find that shape. I feel like at this point I have all of the shapes that I need, so I'm going to create an inspiration document and pull all of these onto the page. To create that document, I'll open, procreate, go back to my gallery, create a new canvas, and I'm just going to choose screen size. It really doesn't matter what size this inspiration document is, but if I use screen size, then I can really maximize the amount of screen I have here, so I'm just going to choose that. I want to show you a really easy way to drop all of these images onto this canvas at once. The first important thing about this process is to go to photos, and make sure you can see all of those photos that you want to use. You want to make sure that App is open, and that the photos that you're going to use are displayed. Then go back to procreate and just use one finger to slide up to get that arrow, and then slide up again. If you slide it too fast, it will close the program, so you just have to do that gently. Then you're going to grab that Photos app, and put it over on the left here. Now I can see all my photos and my inspiration board. On the photo side, I'll click "Select," and just select each of these photos. Then I'll just tap and hold, and then drag over to procreate and release. You can see that it's importing each of the photos onto that Canvas. This is a big time-saver. If you want to get a ton of images on a canvas, this is definitely the easiest method. I'm done with that, so I can just pull this little bar and now I just have procreate open. Now I can go to my layers panel and resize all of these at once by clicking on the first one and then swiping on all the others. I want to make sure everything that I want to resize is blue. Now I can click the move tool, and just resize these. These don't all have to be the exact same size. This is just an inspiration document. What I'm thinking about is I have about 25 images, so I'd like to do five-by-five. So I'm trying to leave space so that I could have five this way, and five this way. That looks pretty good. Now I can just start clicking on each image. Click the Move tool, and scoot it over, and I have magnetics on just because I like these to be lined up. You can choose if you want to do that or not. It really doesn't matter. These can be totally scattered. It looks like one of these was too small. I'm just going to manually make it bigger. I normally wouldn't do that if I was working on an illustration, but when it comes to the inspiration board, it just doesn't really matter. These don't have to be perfect. They just need to be there in front of you so you can look at them all together and get some ideas about color and illustration style. I'll continue the same process to move all of these into place. This is the point where I typically will just take a minute to look at what I have and decide if I'm missing anything. I do have quite a bit of vans, and not many RVs, so I might go back and get a couple more RVs and delete some of these vans so that I have more of a balance. But this is really going to depend on your personal style and your version for the illustrations series. One thing I'm thinking about with this document is, I want to have some space over here for my colors, and some space down here for testing out some of the styles that I might use. I'm just going to make sure everything is scooted over nicely so that I have plenty of space for my colors. Of course, if you do these too large, and you just want to make everything smaller, we can just select everything and resize making sure that magnetics is on so we don't distort the proportions of the vans. Now I'm ready to start thinking about color. 6. Color Palette Options: Next, let's take a look at how to choose colors for your series. So one thing I always think about when I choose colors is the mood. Do you want your drawing to be playful? Do you want it to be moody? Do you want it to be dark and mysterious? So as you're thinking about that, we'll go through some options for building color palettes and also give you a few color palettes that I created so that you're not starting from scratch. So I want to show you a couple of different ways to start thinking about color. So if choosing colors is a difficult point for you, and you tend to struggle, or you don't like the colors that you choose, I'm going to show you a few different ways to get some nice combinations and just a few tricks that will help make your color process much easier. So I'm going to go back to the workbook. If you make the themes page invisible, so that all that's visible is the color palette section, you can make this color palette section pop down by clicking that little arrow and you'll see that each of these sections is all split up into layers. So you can click the arrow to expand that section. So I'm looking here at the first color section called vibrant floral. Each of these dots is on a different layer. So let's say you like one of these color palettes and you like everything except for that purple. You can click the adjustments tool making sure that purple layer selected, click hue saturation/brightness, and then just drag until that becomes a color that you like and it works well with the other colors that you're using. All of these color palettes, you can feel free to just grab one of these and use it for your illustration series. But I put these on separate layers because, you may want to make this your own and adjust some of these so that it's a little bit closer to your personal style. These are, of course, because I made this. These are all made in my personal style. You may like this and feel free to just use it as it is or you may want to make some adjustments because maybe you don't like that tone and you wish that it was a different color, or maybe you don't think that pink is dark enough, so, feel free to make changes to these, and then once you're happy with one you can turn it into your own color pallete by just clicking Palettes. So I'm in the color section here, I clicked palletes, I'm clicking the plus symbol, and now I have a new palette, and I can just click and hold on the color, and then click on my palette. So that's one way to create your palette for this series. I've already selected colors that contrast nicely with each other. I've pulled together sets that have a wide range of colors, but are all in the same color family. So you may just want to use one of these, but I also wanted to show you a resource that I created. I have a blog post with three different online color resources. So these are three wonderful sights that make it super easy to find your colors. The first one is Color Hunt. So I'm going to open Color Hunt, and there are ton of colors here already. So let's say, Find When You Like. You can click on it. You could take a screenshot by clicking the home button and the power button at the same time, but this site also has a nice feature where you can just click image and it opens the image in a new tab, so, you can click and hold, and click Save Image. What I like about this site is, it's all created by users, so, users come in and create color palettes, and then people vote on them. You can look here and see, so, 268 people like that color palette. Four hundred and sixty five people like this color palette. So what you could do is choose one that's really popular if you feel like you just don't understand color yet and you just want to go with what's popular, feel free to just grab one from this site. This is what they are for, it says here, it's free and open platform for color inspiration with thousands of hand-picked color palletes. So you can use one that's already created, you can also click "New" if you want to change the sorting option, so, we could choose a trendy palette, we could choose a popular palette, or just choose random. I'm going to choose popular because I want to see which one has the most votes. This row here has the most votes. I really like this palette, that's beautiful. Another thing you can do on this site, if you click the three dot menu over here, is click "Create", click on each box, and then choose a color to go in that box. Okay. So there's a color palette, I'll click "Done", and now that's saved on the site and people can vote on it. So this is is just a really interesting concept. There are a couple other resources on here, Colors.co, I'll click on that one, and this is the same idea, you can choose palettes that are already created, you can create your own palette. The nice thing about this, is it allows five colors, whereas the other side only allows four, so, you may want to consider how many colors you want in your series. Then the last option is Adobe color. So I'll click and hold on Adobe color, and you can see here on the left you can choose a color relationship. So I'll choose complimentary colors. These will be colors that complement each other, and then I can just slide around on this wheel to get different color options down here. Once you find one that you like again, we can just click the Home button and the Power button to save that as a screenshot. So let's go back to our inspiration document. Now you can take whatever colors you've chosen, whatever set you want to go with, and put that on the site of the image here. The first thing I'll do, is just get that section right in the middle of the Canvas. I'm going to put my colors right down this row, as my brush I'm going to choose the circle brush. one thing you'll notice about this brush if you tap with your finger, it'll make the same size circle every time, whereas if you tap with your Apple Pencil, it'll be a different size every time. So when I make color palettes like this, I always just use my finger. I've chosen eight colors, so, I'm just going to go down the list, and each one I want to do on a new layer. So I'll click plus to create a new layer, tap one time to add that color, plus to create another layer, tap one time. I'm just doing that so that I can click the Move tool and move these individually rather than having to move them all as a unit. You may want to turn off magnetics at this point, sometimes if you want to do some free form moving, the magnetics really just gets in your way. So I'm going to continue the same process with all of colors. You can probably see by looking at this color palettes that I tried to go with muted colors, because my theme is like vintage recreational vehicles. So I went with a vintage muted tones, summary feel with some pinks and reds, and then my line work is going to be done with this dark gray. So if you'd like to use the exact same colors that I'm using here. You can feel free to do that, and you can pick up this color palette on the class resources and downloads page right here, download the palette, same as usual, click and hold, open on an new tab, and then open and procreate. I've already done this, so, I'm not going to do it again, but that's the simple process to do it. 7. Planning a Series Style: Now that I have my color and my shapes all together, I want to start thinking about my illustration style. I've used a lot of layers here. I'm going to hit my layer limits soon. I'm just going to go ahead and merge all of my color dots together and all of my vans together. I'm just pinching to merge all of those under the same layer. I've got the vans on one layer and the color on another. Now I can create a new layer and start working on some ideas for the layout of this illustration. I'm just going to grab this sharp sketching pencil here. I'll just look at one of these vans as an idea, but I'm not going to copy it directly. I'm just getting a shape. I'll repeat this same process a couple of times. These are just some simple sketches to help get me started with thinking about a style. I like the idea of doing some line work like this and then adding some bold color behind it. I'll start by grabbing one of my colors. I'm just going to grab this pink. I'm creating a new layer below my sketch layer. I'll just get this fluid ink brush, circle around the sketch, and drag and drop that color. Now I have just an idea of what that gray would look like on the pink. I'll create a new layer and let's get this turquoise as a color. Let's get this sharp sketching pencil as the brush so we get a little bit of grit. I'm going to repeat the same process with these other tampers just so you're getting an idea of what color combinations are going to look nice here. You can see, I'm really just playing around. I'm not thinking so much about does this look perfect? Do my lines look perfect? Does this look exactly like the drawing or the photograph? I'm just thinking about color and placement. What I like about this is we've got a contrasting background, so this pink and turquoise, those really pop right against each other. Same thing with the blue and mustard. With this illustration series, I want to do a bold background like this and then add a contrasting color on the stripes. Then every illustration will have this dark line as the line work and then this white as the unifying theme. I'm thinking about, number 1, ways to differentiate each of these illustrations from each other, and number 2, how to bring them together and make them cohesive. I need a few elements that are the same and a few elements that are different. You could keep going with this. I've played around with these illustrations a lot, so I went straight to what I wanted to do. But you could really take some time here to think about how do you want to play around with this shape? How do you want to choose your background and your main colors? What unifying elements do you want to use? We'll talk about this a little more in the next project too. For this first one, you may just want to dive in and choose a theme or just copy the style that I'm using here, that's fine as well. The last thing I'm going to think about is how am I going to add texture to these to make them a little bit more interesting. Let me grab the gray color as my color. Then in the brush set I'm going to grab the barely there grit. I'm just going to play around with how this texture looks over this color. If you don't like it, just delete that layer, create a new one. Maybe white would be a better texture. Now I have white as my color. That gives a totally different feel going from the black to the white. Another thing we could do is use the textures to erase. On this blue and white layer, I'm going to get my eraser, in the illustration series set, I'll get the same brush, barely there grit, and I'm just going to erase part of my drawing. You can see it's revealing the background. I like to start thinking about this whole process before I create my series so that I know what to do with each piece. I like how this looks, I like how this contrast is going, and I'm imagining all the other colors that I'm going to pull in to this illustration. I feel ready to go ahead and get started. But of course, if you're not, just keep working on your plan. This planning stage is what's going to keep your theme unified and bring all of your parts together. This is a really important part of the process. One thing that you can do at this point is share this as a project on Skillshare. If you'd like to do that, you can click the Actions, Share, JPEG, Save Image, and then head to Skillshare. Next you can go to the class on the Skillshare browser and click "Create Project", "Upload Image". This will be your cover photo. We can choose that inspiration image and that can be our cover photo. Click "Submit". Next we can type a title. I'm going to call mine Vintage RV Series. Then in this next section here where it says start typing, I can click "Add Content" "Photo Library", and then select that image again. The first image you see up here is just the cover, and then you can put your actual project down here. Then when you're ready to add the other parts of your project, you can just add that below this part. I typically will post the first part and then go back and click "Edit Project" later on and add the additional images. Once you're happy with that, you can just click "Publish". 8. Creating a Rough Sketch: Now that we've planned out all of the parts of the series, let's create the first illustration. We'll start with a simple sketch, then add in our line work color and textures, that we talked about in our planning portion. I'll create a new document, create custom size. I'll choose inches as the size and choose 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. You could work in any size here, but it is good to think about what size you might print this file out. So I know that I'll probably print each individual piece at 10 by 10 inches, so this works for me. If you were going to print it larger, of course you'd want to make the file larger. The one downside of going larger is that you lose the amount of layers you can do. So with 10 by 10 inches, I can do 55 layers. With 20 by 20 inches, I can only do 10 layers. So its just something just to think about. What size will be your final use and how many layers do you think you'll need? I like to work at 10 by 10 inches. So I'll click create and I'm just going to start by sketching one of my RVs. I'd like to have one of my inspiration images handy when I do this. So, again I'm going to scroll up like we did last time and make sure the Photos app is over here on the left. Then I've got that RV right beside me to help me proportion this correctly. I'm going to choose the sharp sketching pencil and I'm just thinking about basic shapes. I typically start with a geometric shape, so I'm just looking at the basic shape of this. What geometric shape will this fit into? So we've got that sloping roof that slopes all the way up and then we've got this little downturn here and then we've got the front of the canvas, and then a perfect straight line across the bottom and the back angles out. You can see this is really rough. I'm just thinking about general shapes. I'm not so worried about getting this perfect. I'm just trying to make a nice proportion for myself. I'm also going to place the basic shapes, which would be the door and the wheel and also maybe add some windows in. I wish this camper had another window, so I'm just going to add it in. Just adding some of these basic shapes that I see here. There's this nice little vent, so I'll just add the marks of that in. You can see this is a really loose drawing, I'm not worrying about this being perfect. I think that's the number one mistake that beginners make with drawing, is they think when they first start drawing, it needs to look perfect and it's actually the opposite. Professional illustrators always start with something rough and it always looks ugly in the beginning, and then it gets better and better as they work. Don't try to start with something perfect because it's just not the easy way to draw. I never erase when I sketch. I don't worry about erasing at all. If something looks wrong, I just go back over that area with a darker mark to make it right. I think erasing is a waste of time. It is just one extra thing you have to do, one extra brush you have to choose. You should spend your time thinking about shapes and thinking how the shapes work with each other. Rather than thinking, oh did I make that one little line wrong? That's just a waste. This little point here is unnecessary, just make a mark to tell yourself I don't need that. That isn't part of this illustration. I realized I didn't leave enough space for my front part here. So I'm going to click the move tool. Just scoot that in a little bit. Then I have plenty of space for whatever this thing is called. 9. Refining Your Sketch: I'm happy with how my rough sketch looks. I'm going to go to that layer, reduce the opacity so I can see it, but just barely. Now I'm going to create a new layer. This layer is going to be my more refined sketch. If you're a super beginner, you may want to do a few more layers of this. If this just really doesn't look right to you, you may want to go over this and just refine things, just add in details, make sure everything looks just as you want it to. What I'm going to do on this stage is do my final details here. There is little strips on this window. Since I added in this other window, I'm just going to add those same strips. I added in these little window shades. I don't think these are perfectly proportioned, but it really doesn't matter, they just need to read as window shades. One thing you can do, if you want to get the same angle and everything that you've got going on on this side, just click the Selection tool. Make sure Free Hand is selected, circle around this shape. Drag down three fingers and click, Copy and Paste. I'm copying that layer and pasting it onto a new layer. Then I can just scoot that over, and now I have two of the exact same. You can also just sketch it by hand. But if you're having some trouble with a particular angle, that's a great way to get around it. I'm also now going to start thinking about the actual shape of this RV. I'm going to look at this curve, come down here, follow this curve as I'm drawing, and it may take you a few tries. Just try to look at the curve, try not to look so much at your pencil and think about what you think the curve looks like, just look at the actual curve. That's another beginner drawing mistake, is thinking about what something looks like, rather than just looking at it. I'm going to do a line across here and I really want this line to be straight. I'm going to use the quick line by just holding and that makes a straight line and then put two fingers down to make a perfectly straight line. I feel like using the quick line all the time does make for a forced feel, but using it just to give yourself some guidance for the most important parts, I think is sometimes necessary. I'm adding in this extra little hump over the tire, and that makes me realize that might tire isn't quite big enough, so I'm going to increase that a little bit. This isn't my final drawing, this is another sketch, but it's just a refined version of my sketch where I'm really deciding where do I want all of these details to be? Where do I want each of these boxes to fall? How many vents do I want here? I'm deciding all these tiny little details that the first sketch layer was really just getting in basic shape, and this one is getting a little bit more detail. I also decided to add a little rim around all of these windows. Even though that doesn't exist on the real windows, I just want to have a highlight to really show the shape of these. You can see this is just a slightly more refined version of my original. At this point, I don't really need this sketch anymore and honestly, using the split screen uses up your battery quite a bit so as soon as I'm done with that, I'll just close it out. I can work on the other details here, I don't really need that picture for the rest. One thing I want to add in here is those lines across the paneling, I want to make sure those are straight. I'm going to use a grid here, so I'll click the Actions menu, Canvas, turn on the drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and then just reduce the grid size a little bit. I'm making the grid exactly the width of my panels. It may be hard for you to see the grid lines here, but they're cutting straight across, so I'm just going to use those to make the lines on my RV. I'm also using the quick line for this, but I'm not putting down my two fingers to make sure it's perfectly straight, I'm just using it as a guide, but I'm not so worried about it being perfect. Again, the quick line is just when you hold down your pencil in order to make a straight line. We have to think about the perspective a little bit here. This is the front of my camper, so all of these lines need to tilt up a little bit and you can use something like your window as a guide. As you're doing these illustrations, you'll probably have to think about perspective a little bit. Just use your reference image, take your cues from there, and remember that the perspective doesn't have to be perfect. This is a handmade illustration and some of the quirkiness that you'll see will actually make it more beautiful. Another thing I like about using these quick lines is that it helps me orient everything else. I can see that my windows are a little bit crooked, and so when I draw the final windows, I'm just going to be sure that I amend that crookedness there. Now that I'm done with my grid lines, I'm just going to turn off my drawing guide by clicking the Actions menu and turning that off. I can also make my original sketch invisible, I just don't need that anymore. Then I'm going to make sure all of the sketch layers are on the same layer. Again, I'll make that semi-transparent and then this will be my final inking or drawing lines. One thing I've noticed is that this is a little bit low on the page. I'm going to click the Move tool and just shift it up a little bit so it's right in the center. Now I want a new layer, and I want to think about the line size here. What is the thickest line I want to have. I felt like the sketch lines are a little bit too thick, so I'm going to go a little bit thinner and just see how that might look. I like that line better, I think it's a little bit more consistent and less chunky than what we were working with before. Now I'll just take a couple of minutes to trace over the sketch, and of course doing more refined careful movements. Here you can see some of my sketch lines went past my drawing like that, so that's something I'm keeping an eye on. If I have a line meeting another line, I want to make sure they go straight to each other and not right before or not right after. That's something I'm thinking about as I'm working on this sketch. One thing you can use here when you're doing geometric shapes like circles is the Quick Shape tool. To do that, I'm just going to draw a big circle that's about the size that I want, and then hold. Then I can just move around here and get the shape that I want. I'm doing this on a new layer. I can click the Move tool and move this around to get it in the right place. Another reason I'm doing this on a new layer is because I want to be able to get my eraser and just easily erase this extra part of the wheel without erasing any of the RV. One thing I might do before I erase that is duplicate it. Click the Move tool, and then just pinch in to get a guide for that interior circle. Now I just have a nice circle within a circle. Now I can go back to my bigger part of my tire and erase that. The only problem with making something smaller is then the line is too thin. I'm actually just going to use that inner circle as a guide and just trace over it. I might even use the quick shape because it's going to be hard to make a perfect circle. I'm just going to hold, then I've got a quick shape, then I have a nice circle. I can delete that guide that I was using, and I can merge all the aspects of the tire with the rest of my drawing, and I'll just continue finishing up this drawing. I'm using a quick line here to make my door straight up and down because I feel like this is a really important aspect of the illustration, so I didn't want it to be just a little bit off. I'm happy with my sketch, so I can make my original sketch invisible. I'm just going to double check that I didn't miss anything. I've realized I've missed a few lines here. You can just turn your sketch on and off and see if there's anything else you need to take care of before moving on. I'm just going to add these extra lines in. 10. Adding Color and Texture: I'm happy with how that looks. I'll create a new layer and drag that below my drawing, and now I can start playing around with color. I'll choose my first color. I'm going to go with a mustard. Click on that new layer and click Fill. I feel like this layer could use a little bit of texture, it's just totally flat. I'm going to get a slightly darker shade of that color by just dragging down on the color wheel, and I'm going to get my brush called Grit. You can also play around with these other textures. You may want to go with a number of other textures. One thing to note about these textures here is, they tend to work better if you tap, rather than if you just run your brush around on them. For example, I'll grab the Old Desk brush and if I zoom in here, you can see all these little scratches that it creates. That just gives your background a little bit more life. I always do my textures on a new layer, so that I can turn them on and off, change the colors, do whatever I want with the texture, so I'm not committing to anything. With that slightly darker mustard, I'm going to grab my brush called Grit. One swipe, I think just wasn't quite enough, so I'm going to do another one. You can just feel play around with how intense you want to get out with the color. On that texture layer, I can click the hue saturation brightness. I could go darker on the brightness, I could go lighter. This is a great time to just play around with what kind of texture in your background you'd like to see. I'll create a new layer and I want to start adding in some various colors. I'll start with my turquoise, and I'm just going to choose a spot on the RV. I'll just choose right here, and I'm going to grab my sketching pencil, on a similar or the large size and just start filling in this area. I like to fill this in by hand rather than doing a solid layer with a color drob, because I like to get all of that gritty texture that you get from this brush. But based on your illustration series, you may be going for something totally different. Of course in that case you would choose some other style of brush or some other way to fill in this color. One note while I color this in, I have a lot of other classes where I share other types of brushes. If you're not crazy about this style, you may want to try one of my other classes, like the watercolor classes or pastels or guash, so that you can get a feel for some different styles. This particular style may not speak to you and that's fine. The goal here is to find your own personal style by choosing the mediums that work best for you. I'm going to go to a new layer for each color because I want to have the freedom to change things, alter colors, try different color combinations. I really don't want to combine multiple colors on the same layer because that really limits the freedom that I'll have later on. Now I'm just going to add this white to the top of my RV, and I'm remembering to keep an eye on where my windows are so I don't cover those. I'll sometimes go past the line, and I like how it looks if you just intentionally make it messy. That's my personal style, that's something that I want to incorporate into my illustrations. But you may be doing something that's much more clean, much more refined and in that case, you would do really careful drawing, really careful coloring. I feel like this needs one more color to tie it all together. I'm going to grab that dark gray and again, create a new layer, and I'm going to use that for all of the metal and rubber thing,so this step, this tire. This color will be one of the unifying colors throughout this illustration series. Just a gray metallic color that ties all of these pieces together, even though the backgrounds and the colorings are all going to be different on each illustration, this gray and this black line work, is going to tie it all together. I like how this is going, but I feel like it needs some more grit, so I'll create a new layer and get black as my color. I'm going to grab this Barely There Grit brush, and let's put that on a large size, just go around and add some flex. I think the black was a little bit much, so I'm actually going to get the gray instead. I think that adds a much more sutble color, and then we just get those nice flex all across here to give a little bit of texture. Another thing I might do is erase some of this color with some texture. It's a little flat and I think if we could see some of the background coming through, it will all stand out a little bit more. I'll grab my eraser, get the Barely There Grit brush again, and I'm making sure I'm on my gray layer. Just lightly tapping, moving around, and I'm revealing just some of that background, that just gives it a nice little peek through to the background. You can go as far as you want with this. You can make this as textured or as non textured as you want it to be, and you may create three or four of these and then discover a whole new style and you want to change them all. That's why it's a really good idea to keep all of these things on separate layers, because let's say you discover a whole other style that you want to use. You can just make everything invisible except for your line drawing, and then try a whole new style with this. I really recommend keeping everything separate and keeping this document preserved, don't merge any of these layers. Then go ahead and move on to the next illustration. 11. Combining Your Series Parts: I have repeated the same process with all of my vans. You can see I've tried to choose a variety of backgrounds and color combinations so that they all work together, but they all have their own unique style. You can see how that gray is really helping tie these pieces together. Then the bold colors are what make them unique. Once you're ready to combine these all to a single document, you can click the "Actions' menu, click "Share" "JPEG," and "Save." Then just repeat that process with all of the drawings in your series. Of course, you could do a series of four drawings. You could do a series of six or nine or however many you want to do. You just have to decide as you're working. I usually start with four and then I typically bump it up to nine. Sometimes I even go higher than that. Really just depends on how far you want to go with this theme. I'll click the plus symbol to create a new document. I'll click "Create Custom Size" and choose inches as my measurement. Now I'll choose 20 by 20 inches at 300 DPI. The reason I'm doing that is because my maximum amount of layers is 10 and I only have nine drawings, so 10 layers is enough. I want to make this really big so I have the flexibility to print it out at a large size or use it for print on demand sites like Society6. I'll click "Create." Now I need some help with guides here so that I know where my nine blocks are. I'll click the "Actions" menu, click "Canvas," turn on the drawing guide, click "Edit Drawing Guide." Then I wanted to be perfectly three across and three down. I have to think about how many pixels this canvas is. This canvas is 20 by 20 at 300 dpi. So 20 times 300 is 6,000. That means this canvas is 6,000 by 6,000 pixels. If I want to split it, I need to think about my grid size as being one-third of that. One-third of 6,000 is 2,000. I'll click on the grid size and enter 2,000. Click "Done." Now my squares are perfectly 2,000 by 2,000. I could just take this little circle here and drag in into the very bottom corner, and then it's perfectly space. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 squares. I'll click "Done." One note about this process, this process is imperfect. It's not going to be pixel perfect when you do it in procreate. If I was going to use this for print on demand, I would probably use Affinity Designer. I show how to do that in my class on Society6. If you want a more exact way of doing this, then I would recommend that method. But this works for posting on your website, posting on social media, it's totally fine. When it comes to print, especially print on demand where you're selling to customers, I would want this to be pixel perfect and use the Affinity Designer method. Again, I'm going to use my little trick here to plop all of these images onto the canvas. I'm going to this area where I have all of my vans saved in photos. I'll click "Select" and select all of them. Drag and drop. Now I can get rid of that photos app. I'm just going to swipe right to select everything. Then click the "Move Tool" and move this close to the corner, but not perfect. Then I'm just trying to get close, but I'm not trying to perfectly make this fit the square yet. This may be easier to do right in the center here so you don't accidentally clip off the edge of your piece. I want to zoom in, but I don't want to distort the proportions by moving my fingers. Hold down the Move tool and just zoom in here, and first, I release the Move tool, and just get this right on the edge here. Back to holding down the move tool, while I scoot over to this other corner. I'm double-checking that magnetics is on before I resize anything because I don't want to distort the proportions of my illustrations. Then I'm just scooting this up, so it's almost perfectly on that line. Personally, I like to leave a little bit of extra, like one pixel extra, because I'd rather have some overhang than a white line. I'm just double-checking, this side looks good and the other side looks good. We're good to go. Now I can start deciding which pieces go in which areas. I'll just start throwing these into place. Again, being careful not to touch the edge because that's going to clip off part of my illustration. I will just play around with the placement for these. I'm trying to balance my warm and cool colors, so I'm keeping that in mind as I place these. Once I get that basically into place, I'm going to zoom in really closely so I can easily see my grid lines, and then I'll just take a second to carefully place this into the corner. I'll repeat that same process with all of my illustrations. One trick that you can do in Procreate is with the Move tool selected. You can tap outside of the image and that move that one pixel. If you feel like there's just a tiny bit of white shelling and you want to clear that up, like right here, that blue, I'll select that blue layer, click the Move tool tap, tap, tap, and then we have that white line disappearing. But as you can see, like I said, the Procreate method with moving things like this is not exact, it's not going to be perfect. If you want this to be pixel perfect, then use my method that I show in Affinity Designer. This works. I mean, for Instagram, nobody is going to be able to tell the difference. But when it comes to print, you definitely want to go with the Pixel Perfect method. Once you get these altogether, you may realize that you need to adjust some colors. Maybe you did too many pinks or too many yellows. Then you can go back to your original documents, change that color, and then put this into place. Let's say, for example, I don't like the color of that mustard piece. I can go back to this layer, go to my background layer, and maybe choose one of the other colors that's on my palette. How about that light yellow, click "One time" click "Fill." Then I have changed the whole background. I could also change maybe just this turquoise. One thing I like to do with that is use the recolor tool. I'll select that turquoise layer, click the "Adjustments Tool," click "Recolor," and then move my finger so it's right on where that turquoise is. Now, every time you click a color, it'll change this piece. That's a really quick way to be able to just see some different options with the same piece. Of course, you could also adjust the textures. You could adjust the shapes. You could try adding in a palm tree and some sunglasses as some of your illustration. You can really play around at this point once you get these parts, it's really just a matter of moving them and adjusting them to get them exactly how you want them to be. Next, let's move on to a slightly more complex series. 12. Drawing and Using Guides: So, in this next series, we're going to use a similar process, but we're going to end up with a totally different result. So, I want to show you a slightly different method for drawing and I also want to show you a few different options for combining the sketches under a single document and coming up with a few different color options. So for this series, I'm using the theme of teapots. I love looking at various shapes and patterns on teapots. So I've pulled together a ton of images just like we did for the first project. I've chosen a set of colors and I've played around with a little bit of line, style and color combination options. So the first thing I'll do is create a new document just like we did for the last project. Again, I'll be using ten by ten inches at 300 dpi and I'll click create. I'll pull up the split screen just like I did last time by dragging the photos app over on the left, and I've gone ahead and pulled up the teapot that I'll be using. So I wanted to choose a theme of teapots because in the last project we did a more rectangular shape for the drawing and this one is more rounded and curved shapes. So curved shapes, I think, are a little bit more tricky. They require a little bit more measuring and careful drawing. Whereas the geometric shapes you can be a little bit more loose. What I'll do is get black as my color and grab my sketching pencil again. Just like I did with the last one, I'm going to start with a geometric shape and I'm encapsulating this whole piece into one shape. So I am going from the spout to the top, from the top to the handle, from the handle down to the bottom and the spout and then down to the bottom. So just getting a basic overall geometric shape that makes up this teapot. So once I have that, I can get a little more specific about my geometric shapes. So if we look at the top of the teapot, comes down like this and then shoots out like this and then back in again at the bottom. Our handle comes up, down and across and the top shoots down and up. So you can see I'm just making points with my eye from here to here, from here to here, from there to there, to just start getting an overall shape. It's a lot easier to draw something. If you start with some overall shape. Whereas if you're just trying to draw from scratch, it does get a little tricky. I think the more that you do with this part of the process, the easier the drawing process is every time. So, I'm happy with that. I'm going to reduce the opacity, create a new layer, and then do the same thing with some slightly more curved lines. These are my final lines. These are just getting a basic idea of what this piece looks like. You'll notice when you draw rounded shapes that it can be hard to get things even on both sides, especially if it's a symmetrical shape. So one thing I like to do is just reduce the opacity on that layer, create a new layer and turn on my grid. So go to actions, canvas, turn on the drawing guide, edit drawing guide. You can make this grid size whatever you want it to be, smaller would give you more points and bigger would give you less. So it doesn't really matter. I only do a few points here. What I'm going to use this for is creating a guide for myself. So I want to know where should the very top of my teapot be? I want that to be in the exact same spot on the opposite side. So I'm just using this grid and I'm putting this dot halfway in between on the side of the grid and again halfway between on the other side. So then I can decide where I want this part to lie. I'm counting over 1.5 dots from here. So when I go on this side, 1.5 dots and that's where this side should fall. So I may even bring that out one more dot. So let's bring it out one more dot on both sides. So I'm doing this just to give myself some points to meet when I'm creating my sketch. I'm going to do the same thing for this interior part where my teapot jets in. So let's go right here. So that's 1.5 and 1.5, right here. So as you start making these marks, you'll see how your piece was a little bit off. So this is a great time to practice your drawing skills. Think about how you can make things more even and of course, this doesn't have to be perfect. This is hand drawn, so you can certainly have a little bit of waviness to this. But I do like for my overall shape to be somewhat even. Now that I've created all those points, I can just go through and create this nice smooth line, knowing that it'll be even on both sides. Just like I did with the last piece, I'm trying not to look at my drawing as much as I look at the actual object. So beginners often draw what they think the shape should look like rather than what the shape actually looks like. So make sure you're taking time to look at the picture a lot. Look at the shapes in the picture and think of them as geometric shapes, not so much as an actual teapot itself. I'm also going to make some marks here. 13. Background and Finishing Options: Once you are happy with your sketch, you can go ahead and remove the background layer. I just want to export my line work, I don't want to export my background, so I'm going to save this as a PNG. I'll click actions share PNG and save. I've gone ahead and repeated the same process with all of the tea pots that I wanted to draw. I did nine total, and each one is a little bit different and has a slightly different pattern. Together they make an interesting set. I'll go back to procreate, and just like we did when we pulled all of our veins onto a single image, or create a new canvas at 20 by 20 inches at 300 DPI, click create, and I want to do that quick import using photos. I've got all my tea pots here on the left, and these are all save as PNG files without the background. I'll select each one, drag and drop then of course, it looks like you're crazy mass in the beginning, but we'll organize those now. Back to turning my grid on, I'll go to Canvas, turn on drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and again, I need a grid that's 2000 by 2000 pixels. I'll just drag that little guy down, so I have nine squares here. Now I can take each teapot and put it into place wherever I want it to be. I want to make sure magnetics is on so you I distort my proportions, and I'll just use my fingers to pinch, to re-size as I move those into each square. Now that I have all the drawings together, I can see that some stand out a little more than others. This one has some more darker spaces so this one and this one. There are a couple of these that I want to bump up a little bit. I want them to have a little bit more presence on the page. What I'll do is go to that layer, this one for example, duplicate it, and as you can see, as soon as I do that it gets darker. Here it is with one layer and here it is with two. I could duplicate it again to get three. I am going to hit my layer limit here so I can only do one of those at a time. You can just step back making sure everything I want to look at is in the frame. Just take a minute to see, does anything need to be bumped up?Does anything need a little bit more power? This one does right here. I'm duplicating that a couple times and then merging the duplicated layers together. I think I'll do the same thing with this, and I think I'll do that with this one as well. You can see that gives the line work just a little bit of a boost. If you are happy with all of your line work, you can merge all of these together, or what I usually do is keep this as my master document. I'll go back to my gallery, click select, click on the document, click duplicate. Now that's my master document. I'm not going to touch that, I'm going to use that to maybe try different color versions, try different background options, and then that duplicated version, I can just go crazy with merging layers, trying different colors, and I don't have to worry about messing up my original. I'm going to merge all of those together so they're on one layer, I'll create a new layer beneath it. First let's choose our background color. I'll click on the background layer. Let's start with a bold color. I like this bold color, but then these disappear on the page so they need something to boost them up a little bit. Let's grab this cream. I'm just going to get the fluid ink brush, and I'll go around and just outline really loosely. I'm not worried about perfectly getting in the lines here. I'm letting this be really loose illustrated style. Then I can drag and drop once I make a solid shape. Looks like I missed a section here so I can just get my fluid ink eraser, and just clean that up a little bit. I'll repeat this same process with all of the other tea pots. I'm happy with how this looks, but I feel like it needs a little bit of texture to it. I'm going to get a dark gray color and grab that barely their grid brush, and just add grid all over this piece. You can see how that looks If I zoom in a little bit, just adds a little bit more depth. I'm happy with this, but now that my textures is gray, I'm thinking maybe my line work, should be gray instead of black, so we have that really unified theme. On my sketch layer, I'm going to swipe two fingers right to put it in the alpha lock state, make sure that gray color is selected and click fill. You can see how that made it just a slightly lighter gray. It works a little bit better with that texture. Now we can play around with some background options. I can click on that background layer and start playing around with different solid background options. I like this yellow color, but I also like the deep red and the green. I might try one of each. I'll leave this document how it is, go back to my gallery, click select and click on that layer and click duplicate. Now I'm saving that color version, and I can go to this new duplicated document and do whatever I want that without losing anything that I've done on this previous two documents. Click on that newest version. I want to try something totally different. I want to get cream as my background color, and then for all of these backgrounds that I created these cream outlines of my tea pots, I want to change the color of those. I'm going to take green and just color drop on to that first one. Let's do a couple of greens. Let's do an orange down here. I'm just trying to spread out these bold colors that I'm using, and get an even vibrant coloring across the page. Now I'll bring back that background so that creates a nice contrast to have all of those various colors, but I feel like it needs to solidify a bit more to stand out. One thing I'm going to do is go back to black with my line work. I'll get black as my color, go to my line work layer, make sure that's on alpha lock and click fill, and then I'm also going to do that with my texture layer. I'll Swipe two fingers right on my texture layer and then click fill. Now I've got black texture, black line work that adds a little bit more detail and chunkiness to this piece. Next I'm going to create a new layer between this color layer and this line work layer, and come through and add some interesting color pops so that orange that I used on the bottom would look really nice on these circles. You can see I'm keeping this really loose. I'm going outside the lines. I'm not trying to make this perfect. It makes it look more hand made and more interesting when you first glance at the page. I'm going to continue the same process of picking a color and then highlighting some of these patterns that I created using that color. As you can imagine, there are so many other directions you could go with this. You could try a lot of different ways of illustrating these tea pots, or you could also go a totally different direction with your illustration style if you'd like. You can see this piece that I have started here. I want to do a series of herbs. I'm just going to create solid shapes and then erase the veins of the leaves out of this. That's another option, create a solid block and array shapes out of it for your series. I also have a class on botanical illustration where we create images like this. You could do a series of bouquets or specific flowers or botanical elements, or maybe your hand holding different flowers. I'm sure you can see at this point there are so many different directions you can go with creating an illustration series, and so many benefits to doing it. The number one benefit I think is being able to present a cohesive body of work to the world. In the next section, we'll take a look at some options for sharing your illustration series with the world. 14. Getting Creative with Sharing: The last thing you can do after you create your series is share it with the world. There are a lot of different ways to do that, so I just want to take a couple of minutes to cover some of the options for sharing your series. I've really liked to print my illustrations out onto paper, and I just did this at a local print shop. It was about $0.50 per print, so it's not expensive. You can get somewhat thick paper for a really good price and I always print them out as a single piece so I can see how they work together, and then I'll also print them out individually. I really like to hang them up on the wall and give myself some time to think about the line style, the textures, and then maybe go into procreate and make some changes if necessary. I also like to print out multiple versions of the same piece. Sometimes seeing something on paper can make it so much more clear what the best piece is, and especially if you're going to be using these for print on demand, it's really important to see for yourself what these look like on paper. You might be surprised when you print them out. The colors are going to be a little different. It's not quite as vibrant as it was in Procreate because screen to print is always going to be a little bit different. Another thing I noticed when I printed this out is right here this little spout of the tea pot went off the edge. Little stuff like that needs to be cleared up before you make this for sale to the public, before you put it in your professional portfolio online as well. After I take some time to decide which pieces I like, I also will take a ton of photographs of these. You can take photographs in different settings, like behind a green background. It's really best to use natural light, so if you can find a bright window in your house or go outside somewhere and find an interesting background like a brick wall. That's another great way to share your series online. It's great to see the digital images, but it does get a little boring if every single thing on your social feed or your website is a digital image. Break it up a little bit, show people your hands holding the images. Show people the backgrounds that you think this would work well with, what kind of wall it would look good on and I think this is really the final step of creating an illustration is seeing what it looks like in the real world. If everything we do is on the screen and it never gets translated onto paper, you can really be missing some subtleties. One thing I think after seeing this on paper is these colors could be brightened up a little bit, the black line with these colors, there's not quite enough contrast for my taste. What I will do is go into Procreate, brighten up all of these colors just a tiny bit, and then I'd be a little bit more happy with how this turned out. Another nice thing about creating a series is, you can share the individual images or you can share the final series. What you could do, for example, on Instagram is every day share one illustration, and that might be a good way to encourage you to finish your illustration series too. If people are expecting to see the final result of your series, then you feel that motivation to keep going. Maybe create your first one, post it on Instagram, post it as a skill share project, and give yourself a challenge. Maybe you want to finish one a day, maybe you want to finish one a week. Whatever it is, set your goal, and then you can use social media or your Skillshare projects section to keep you motivated. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own illustration series. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create folk art style illustrations, how to draw and an Art Nouveau Style, and how to set up your Society6 shop and create mock ups of your digital art. Check these out of my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my site, so if you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my website. I would absolutely love to see your finished illustration series, so please share what you made. You could do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook, and like we talked about in the last section, you could share your digital images by just saving them in Procreate or you can print them out and put them outside or take them into some kind of interesting environment and take a picture. You can also share your series in the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, designers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad, drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversation, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.