Create Soft Pastel Drawings on Your iPad in Procreate + 12 Free Brushes and Templates

1. Create Soft Pastel Drawings on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator and teacher and today I want to show you how to create soft pastel drawings on your iPad and procreate. When you watch this class, you'll get all of the pastel brushes I created, plus a blending brush, paper texture brushes and some drawing templates. First we'll create a colorful feather drawing on dark charcoal paper. I'll show you how to create textured backgrounds and how to control the amount of texture, vibrancy and color in your background. Then we'll look at how to create wispy feathers using pastel brushes and how to apply blended colors to the shape. I'll show you how to use the feathers as a single image. How to turn them into a pattern, and how to use them to decorate a quote. Next, we'll create a portrait on a roughly textured brown paper. I'll show you some easy ways to work from a photograph, plus some tips for getting a good portrait photo of yourself or someone else. Then we'll use some bold colors to give the portrait personality and visual interest. Next, we'll turn a picture of an animal into a colorful pastel drawing. I'll show you how to use light and color to make the image stand out on the page and how to use blending to bring a real pastel look to your digital drawing. In the class, you'll see how working with digital pastels allows you to turn any sketch or photograph into a beautifully textured and later drawing. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the stylus. I'll be using the Apple pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Downloads & Inspiration: The first thing we'll do is take a look at how you can get all of the downloads that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page in the about section of the class and if you're on the app, you won't see the about section. Switch to a browser and you'll be able to see the link. Once you get to this page, you'll see that you need a password to get in and I'll show the password on the screen right now. Once you enter the password, you'll see the list of downloads in the middle here. The first one is, download the brush set. I'm going to click and hold and then click "Open" in a new tab. Once that new tab opens, you should see Open in Procreate. If you don't click more and scroll over to find the Procreate app on this list, if you have any trouble with that you may need to make the most recent update to your Procreate app. I'll go ahead and click "Open In Procreate" and then it'll open whatever the last document you had open was. When you click your brushes, you should see at the very top the pastel brush set and all of the brushes and templates will be there. The next thing you'll see on the class downloads page is the Pinterest inspiration board. I'm going to click that one time and that'll open it in a browser. You'll see here I collected a ton of pastel drawings in a lot of different styles with a lot of different backgrounds and colors. You may want to start by scrolling through here and just getting an idea of what type of pastels speak to your personal style. You may be a person who likes more pastel light colors or you may be more into the brighter colors like this piece. If you're not sure where to start, this is a great place to get ideas for colors and compositions and just to get a feel for how pastels are blended and how colors combine well together with this particular medium. In this class, we're going to take a look at a few different styles. We're going to start with a little bit more of a line-drawing effect. Then we're going move into a little bit more blending so that you can see how colors blend really nicely together when you use pastels. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project. 3. Paper Texture & Drawing: For this first project, we're going to get to know the brush set and understand the paper textures and how to create multi-color effects with these pastel brushes. We're going to make a feather form and add some various colors to the feather, and then play around with a few different ways to use that feather in a composition. The first thing I'll do is click the plus symbol, click "Create Custom Size". I'll use inches as my measurement and I'm going to use 10 by 10 inches, that tends to work well for my personal uses. But you may have a different use for this, so use whatever size is best for you. I'll click "Create". Next, I'm going to go ahead and lay down the paper texture. On this first layer I'm going to get a dark charcoal color, and then I'm going to grab my brush called paper texture, Drastic. I'll just cover the whole canvas with one swoop of this brush, and it's okay to go over the same area multiple times just to make sure you got every single surface. But once you pick up your brush and start again, you are changing the layout of the paper texture. So try to get it all in one swoop. Next, I'm going to duplicate that layer, so I a have slightly darker look. I'm going to create a new layer. I'll go to my brushes and get my paper texture, Subtle and do the same thing. I'm just going to cover this whole area, and then I'll duplicate that one as well. Now we have two different textures going on here. The next thing I'll do is move my drastic texture layers to the top, and you'll see that makes a slight difference in how they appear on the very top drastic layer. I'm going to go to the Adjustments panel, click "Curves", and then just pull this curves bar over just a little bit. I'll zoom in here so you can really see what this does. This just bumps up the texture a little bit. It creates more of a polarize white and black, and you can do that on one of the texture layers or both. It really just depends on how much texture you want. I would recommend your first few times just play around with having multiple layers of texture, adjusting the curves, adjusting the contrast, adjusting the brightness, maybe even using some different colors to seek and get a feel for the various textures you can create with this brush. The next thing I'm going to do is lock these paper layers. I don't want to accidentally paint only, so I'm just going to keep those locked so I don't make a mistake. Then I'm going click the plus symbol to create a new layer, and that'll be the layer where I do my pastel drawing. Let's go ahead and click on that layer and click "Rename", and I'll call that Pastel. I'm going to create one more layer and rename that to Template. My Template layer is just going to be a drawing guide. I'm going to go as wide as my colors since that'll be easy to see on this dark background. I'm on my Template layer and I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of the pastels brush list. You can choose any of these feathers that you like. I'm just going to go with Feather Template 3, and I'll just tap that one time. You may want to adjust the size of the brush. That's a good size for now. I'm going to click the Move tool and just put this in the place wherever I want it to be. You want to be sure that Magnetic is selected here so you don't accidentally hurt the proportions of this template, and then I'll click the Move tool to set that transformation. This is a nice outline guide for me to use as I'm drawing. I'm also going to swipe left and click "Lock" on that template layer because I also don't want to accidentally draw on that layer. I'll go to my Pastel layer and I'm going to grab the very top brush which is the Small Pastel Super Sharp brush, and I still have white as my color. I'm just going to map out how I want this to look. I know I want to have a strong quill in the middle here. I also want to make sure that I'm following the direction that these feathers would naturally go in. I'm trying to start thick and move out to a thinner line. So I'll keep being aware of that as I make each line. I'm just going through random parts of the feathers and creating some directional lines so that as I start making all these little pieces of the feather, I can really see what direction my lines should go in. I think this just helps because once you start drawing, things can get a little crazy. If you have any little guides to keep you on track it just makes it a lot easier. I'm also going to change this template a little bit, so I'll go back to the Template layer, swipe left Unlock. I'll get my Eraser tool. I'm just going to erase a little area here, and then create a little dip in this little area where the feathering opened up. Feel free to change these templates. This is just a general idea of a feather, but you can make any changes that you'd like. I'll lock my template layer again and go back to my pastel layer. Now I'm going to start making these feathers. I'll start at the base and come out. I want to be sure that I am varying my line a lot. I don't want each line to be the same. I want these to be very loose and varied, and I also want to be sure that the bottom is thicker than the edges. The edges are just going to be like fragile, loose pieces, whereas the bottom is going to be really thick. So I always come back in and thicken the bottom a little bit, like this, and then just loosely do these little marks all the way out to the edge. I'm just going to continue the same process all the way to both sides of this feather. It's really up to you how thick you make this, there are feathers that are really thick and then there are feathers that are really sparse and loose. It really just depends on what you are going for. If you want to do a specific bird, you may want to look up their feathers first and then you'll know exactly what shape and how thick you need it to be as you work. One thing I do often is zoom out and make sure this looks right before you do the entire feather. I've done these before where I have my brush on a little bit too small or a little bit too large and it just looks terrible and you have to start over. So zoom out before you get too far and make sure the thickness of these lines is actually accurate for a feather. That way you don't go too far and waste a lot of work. One more thing I do as I'm going through these little sections is thicken random areas. I'll go through a certain area and make it almost totally opaque with just a tiny bit of texture there, and that just shows the natural variation of the feather. If it's all exactly the same up and down, it doesn't look very realistic, it looks a little forced. Whereas if it has that natural variation that you see in a feather, it's just going to be more pleasing to the eye and look a lot more natural. I also like to create some little loose feathers down at the bottom here. I think that just makes it look a little bit more natural. That's not necessarily included in the feathered template, but you usually see that if you look at an actual feather. I've gotten to the place where this is going to split, and I'm going to keep in mind that the feathers are splitting for a reason. It's probably that something came through here and created that indentation. I'm going to make sure that my feather lines here make that really clear to create some movement in that area. At this point I'm going to zoom out and remove my template so I can really see what the full feather form looks like. Then I'm going to look for some areas that don't have much variation. Like right here, that area all looks really similar. I'm just going to zoom in and add a little bit of variation in that area. You can see that I always turn the feather so that it's coming towards me. When you're making the same mark over and over, it can be helpful to pull towards you rather than push away from you. So I always tend to turn my canvas so that I'm pulling towards me. I'm happy with how that feather turned out, but you can certainly take more time to add more variation. You could do three or four different feathers so that your piece has a lot more variation overall. But I'll go ahead and move forward with this feather. The first thing I want to do before making any changes to this document is go to my gallery and duplicate this document. I want to save this feather. I don't want to lose this nice template that I have. You'll see if you start doing this with your work, you can use these as tools in other projects. Now I have a feather that I can use for any color, any project. I'm just going to save it there and then this will be my actual composition. I tend to do that with all of my projects and I'm almost always happy that I did it because I'll make a mistake or I want to go back to my original feather. I really recommend trying this extra little safety mechanism. 4. Adding Color & Variation: The first thing I'm going to do is duplicate this first layer. Now I have two of these, and I'm going to do that a few times. I'm always duplicating the bottom layer, which is the original layer, not the top layer, which is the duplicate. You'll notice in procreate, if you duplicate something over and over, it gets more and more blurry. Whereas if you duplicate the original, it doesn't. Because each time you duplicate, your losing a little bit of file quality. But if you always work with the original, then you're starting with a higher file quality when you duplicate. I'm going to make all these duplicated feathers invisible and those will just be my various color versions. For this first one, I'm going to swipe right with two fingers to put it in the alpha lock state. Then I'm going to grab my pastel shading brush. This brush makes a really subtle color, you have to go slow, and watch what you're doing. I like to zoom in pretty closely, and you'll see that color will just really lightly start falling into those areas. We put it in that alpha lock state because that makes it. My brush can only paint on the area where I've already added color, which is white. It just makes it a lot easier to go crazy with your color than it would if, for example, you try to do your color as you are creating your feather. I always do it this way, just because I think it makes it a lot easier to get a nice color variation, when you're worrying about making the form in one step and adding the color in a different step. I'm happy with that color. I do want to accent the spine a little bit. I'm going to grab a light gray color, and go back to my small pastel super sharp brush, and just come through and add a little bit of variation on the spine. I'm just doing this on the left side of the spine, because I want to create a shadow effect. I'm letting the right side remain as it was, and the left side is has a little bit of gray on it. Next, I'm going to get my blending tool, and get the pastel smudge stick on a pretty small size, because I only want to affect the spine not the feathers. I'm just going to come through and smudge this gray a little bit. It blends nicely with the white. You can really see that on the bottom stem here. You could also come through here with white if you want your quill to stand out a little bit more. I like the feathers on the side to be the focus and the quill to just be a structure. I just leave that as a light gray, and I just let it fade into the other colors on the top. Now that I have one color version, I'm going to make that piece invisible and just play around with different colors on each piece. For this next piece, I'm going to do the exact same process with the different color palette. You can see I try not to do colors like 1-2-3. I tried to change at each time, the first one its was more sectional, this time it's weaving in and out of each other, so that let each feather looks a little bit different and not so predictable. Now that I have a couple of colors, I could use my original, which is this green, to create other color versions. I don't have to paint on each and every one. Let's say for example, I duplicate the green one, which is my original. Then I can go to hue saturation, brightness in the adjustments panel, or color balance, just play around with getting some different color options here. I like that red pink version. We could do that again, duplicating the green one. Again, we don't want to duplicate a duplicate, so I'm only working with that green one for now. Now we have a lot of different color options, and you've seen two different ways to create these color options. I also want to add in a little bit of text. I'm just going to use a single word for this because I really want my feathers, to be the important part of this. I'm just adjusting the, so I can see all my colors together. I like to do this because it lets me know if I did a little bit of redundancy with my colors. Looking at these two together now, I can see that they're similar. That bottom one, I do want to make a color adjustment. I'll go back to hue saturation brightness, and give that a little bit more blue. That really differentiates it from my first blue-green version. I think I'm going to do the same thing on this one. I wish it was higher in color saturation, maybe a little bit more purple. Just weighing all these out together, and seeing them all at once can really help you create more variation. The last thing I'm going to do is turn these into a composition. You could scatter these across the page to create just a pattern effect. But what I'm going to do, is add a little bit of text. I'm going to make them all invisible. I'm going to go back to my pure white color with the super pastel sharp. I'm on a new layer. I'm just going to add a single word and I need a guide here. I'll just click and hold and then two fingers down to get a straight line. Then on a new layer, I'm just going to write a short word here. I'm also going to add some little flourishes, that will be able to weave in and out of my feathers. I'm going to make my text a little bit smaller. To leave room for those flourishes. I'm going to make this layer semi-transparent by clicking on the layer, and reducing the opacity. Because this is just my template layer and now I'm going to draw the real lettering. I always do this. I'm not a lettering pro, so I need a little bit of guidance as I'm lettering. If you don't feel a 100% confident with your lettering, This is a great way to start. Now I can make my templates invisible, and you can spend a lot more time refining this. I'm going to go ahead and move forward, but you may be a pro at lettering and you can take lot of time to make more intricate flourish whatever you want to do here. This is just something to weave in and out of my feathers because it's all about the feathers in this piece really. The next thing I'm going to do is duplicate each of these. This does break my rule of don't duplicate a duplicate, but I'd just like to have a backup for all of my colors. I'm duplicating each one and then making the duplicate invisible. That's really just the safety mechanism, I have that there mostly because if I click the Move Tool, and I move this feather off the page like that, and then I move on. Now that feather is cut off. If I click the Move tool, I've lost that part of the feather and that's gone forever unless I step back and changed my whole composition. But if I've duplicated it, then I have it hidden up there and I can always go back. I'm just going to tap two fingers to step back a few times. Now I'll just use the move tool to place these around the canvas. Again, I have magnetics on because I don't want to distort the proportions of my feather. Keeping in mind where my letters and flourishes are, I want to have a feather that comes up and goes in and out of these, so I'm going to let that feather be right here. Then as I'm placing these, I'm just keeping in mind which feather I want to weave in and out of my flourish. I'm going to go ahead and use some of these duplicates because I think this could use a few more feathers down here. That's another great reason why it's good to make some duplicates because you just never know when you're going to want to throw that into your composition, or just fill it out a little bit more. Now we have a few feathers overlapping our text and we can decide how we want these to weave in and out of the lettering. I'm going to move this feather right here, above my lettering, so that it's overlapping. Then this feather here, I'd like it to go over, and then under. I want to remove this white area here, and maybe even move the feather up a little bit. I'm not going to cut off my T too much. I want to remove all the white that's on this feather. That means I need to select my feather. I click my feather one time, click select, and then go to my text layer and do some erasing. I've got my super pastel sharp eraser. It's only erasing where the feather is, so you can see the text peeking out from behind. That creates a really nice effect, especially on the edge of the feather. Now you can see this feather comes up, and under the text. I'll do something similar over here as well. I'm selecting that feather, and clicking on my text layer, and clicking my eraser. Then I'm just erasing, and letting that text peak out from behind the feather. Let's do that same thing up here as well. I'm going to go ahead and call this piece finished, but you could certainly keep going with this. You could try some different shapes, like leaves. You could try some different color versions, change the background color, add some more tags, puts more flourishes in. There are so many different directions you could go with the same process, but I'm going to call this piece finished so we can move on to our next pastel project. 5. Preparing Your Reference Image: For this next piece, I'm going to create the paper texture in a slightly different way. For the first layer, I'm going to get a brown cream color and then I'm going to get my paper texture drastic and cover the canvas just like we did last time. Next I'm going to create a new layer. Click on that layer one time and click Fill. This is the same color that I used for the texture and I'm just filling the canvas with that. I'm moving that layer below my paper texture layer and then I'm going to reduce the opacity of that fill layer. You can go as far as you want here. The higher you go, the less apparent the texture will be, so it really just depends on your personal taste here how far you set that opacity. Then on the texture layer, I'm going to go to the adjustments panel, click Curves, and just do a tiny adjustment on that to add a little bit more contrast to the texture. Then I can click the Move Tool to set that change. For this piece, I'm going to do a self portrait. You could certainly do a picture of someone else, or you could use your hands with a sketch book as your picture, you could do a picture of your pet, you could really do anything here. This is just the style that I'm going to show you, but I think a self portrait is a nice thing to do as an artist, you can show a little bit of your style, and this is a great thing to post on your social media, maybe to introduce yourself or set it as your avatar on your side. First, I want to show you a few different tips that you can keep in mind when you take your picture. The first tip is to use even lighting. The lighting that you're seeing on my face right now is even lining. Light is coming from multiple directions so there's no extreme shadows anywhere on my face. This is the perfect type of picture for this specific process that we're going to use today. The second tip is to turn your head slightly. If you look straight on, that works okay for some types of portraits, but for this particular process, we're looking for defined features. If you turn a little bit, you'll see that you get an extra jaw line, you get a little bit more definition on the nose and you can just overall draw your features a little bit more easily than you can if it's straight on. The third tip is to convey a specific mood. Decide what you want your portrait to say and what kind of mood you want it to have before you take your pictures, or maybe try out a few different moods and then look at all the pictures and decide which one really fits you best. I wanted to appear happy and inquisitive, but not overly guilty or excited, so I smiled a little, but I didn't show my teeth, and I raise my eyebrows a little bit just to show a little bit more of my mood. The fourth tip is to wear some accessories. Having something on your body just gives the portrait a little bit more visual interest and personality. I chose to wear my glasses and have on a sweater, but you could use anything that fits your personality like a necklace, earrings, glasses, scarf, or maybe even a hat, or do something crazy with your hair, something that shows your personality in the portrait. The next tip is to take a ton of pictures, take as many as you can stand. This is the secret to getting good at photography, is taking a ton of pictures and then going through them all and figuring out why one is better than the other. The more pictures you take, the better chance you have of getting an amazing picture. This is also a good time to ask someone for help, not just for holding your camera, but just for being around to make you have a genuine smile and laugh when you take your picture. If you are taking your own picture, it can be really difficult to get a realistic emotion, whereas, if you're with another person and they can help draw that out of you, it can be a lot more realistic. Once you've decided on a photo, it's time to turn it into a drawing. If you're really confident with your drawing, go ahead and just use the picture itself as a reference or trace the picture. But if you're just not sure where to start and you really just need a guide to get you going, I recommend this app called Imaengine. If you download this app, it's free, it's really easy to use. When you open the app, you'll see the option to import a photo. I'll click that one time. Then you can find your picture in your photo gallery. Next, you can use these little bars to crop, and you want to crop out anything that's really extreme in the picture. There's a little dark area over here and I want to remove that, so I'm just going to crop that part out, and then if there was too much light over here, I might crop that out as well. Then you just click Go, and you can see it really helps you turn this into a line drawing with a little bit of detail. I like to use the option called Plastic and bump up the stroke and colors and detail all the way to the max. Then you're getting the most amount of lines to help you as a guide. Next, I'm just going to click the home button and the power button at the same time, and that's going to take a screenshot. Now go to Procreate, to my paper, texture document. Click Add, Insert a photo, find that image, and drop that here on the paper. 6. Creating a Pastel Portrait: I'm going to place this keeping in mind that it's nice to have a little bit of negative space on the top. You don't want your head to be touching the top of the paper. Then I'm going to create a new layer, and that's my drawing layer. I'm going to go to this layer and reduce the opacity, so I can just barely see those lines. On this new layer, my pastel layer, I'm going to use a dark brown color. You could use black, you could use anything that goes well with the paper that you chose. I'm going to rename this my drawing layer. Like I always do, I'm going to lock my inserted image and my paper textures because I don't want to accidentally draw on those. On my drawing layer, I'm going to grab my super sharp pastel and just going to choose a medium size here. I like this brush because you can really get small or thin to thick really easily by just putting a little bit of pressure. That can help you make especially some of these wavy lines that go thin to thick, back to thin. I'm not going to follow this exactly. I'm just going to use this as a guide and just use these gestural marks to start mapping out the features of my face. You don't have to include every little line. You can also add some things in. For example, you can't see the bottom of my lip here. If I just make the lines that are existing in this picture and zoom out, it almost looks like I don't have a bottom lip and that's a little odd for the viewer. I'm just going to add a little line here and then another little line to show the gesture there. Adding a little things like that when you feel like something just doesn't look quite right, is totally fine. Take your time. Zoom-out, make sure it actually looks like you or the person that you're drawing and then add and take away wherever needed. Another thing I'm going to do is move my hair. It's really sticking out straight that way and it pulls the image that way. I'm going to make it come down this way, but I still want to keep the same curve that's in the original hair strand. I'm keeping an eye on that as I just create a few little strands. I'll continue this same process covering this whole image. Eyes are probably the most difficult thing to draw. My rule is always less, is more with the eyes. It's better to leave some areas out and let the viewer decide what's there than to try to fill in every little detail and make it look a little strange. Eyes is the easiest thing to mess up because they have so much emotion. One little extra centimeter on the pupil and the person looks totally insane. Just take your time with the eyes, maybe try a few different versions. Of course, if this is your first portrait, don't really worry about it. Just get it done as best as you can and then move on and create a new one. Your first one is not going to be perfect and that's fine. For these glasses, rather than filling it in with the dark fill that it has here, I'm going to leave that space open for color. That's something I'm thinking about as I'm creating this drawing. I want to leave a lot of space open for the colors that I want to add. When something is filled, I'm going to leave it open, so I have a little bit of leeway there when I started my coloring. With the hair, I'm really trying to keep in mind the direction that these waves go. I've got here with the front side. Then I'm going back to show how much hair changes directions right here. That may or may not be important depending on the portrait that you're doing. But hair is a great way to show someone's personality. If you take a little bit of time and add some extra details here into hair that can really add a lot to your portrait. Something that I do often when I'm working on these is remove your picture layer and make sure everything looks okay. If anything starting to look a little strange, this is a great time to address it. I'm going to add in, for example, a little bit of jawbone here. Because without it I felt like I didn't even look like I had a chin. I'm just going to add in a few little marks here just to show where I know the shape of my face is, even though it's not shown in the picture. I'm also going to add a little bit of detail here onto the sweater because I just wanted to stand out a little bit more as it is. It's just kind of a boring shirt. But if I just add even a little collar, it makes a big difference for the detail of the piece. Now I can remove my picture and maybe add in a little bit more detail still, there are few things that I would like to see here. Maybe some little marks that show a little more personality. You can always remove these. If you make a mark and you end up not liking it, you can always erase it. What I do is just add them in and then you can remove later. The next thing I want to do is add in a little bit of color, and I'm going to do that on a new layer. Let's rename that color. I'm going move that color layer below my drawing layer because I want the color to really pop out from behind and not cover up any of my brown. I'm going to use some of these bright neon colors just to add a little bit of personality to this piece. You can see I'm doing this loosely because I wanted to look a little messy, I wanted to look like an actual pastel portrait. I'm not trying to perfectly cover this. I'm letting there be some texture that isn't totally filling the paper. I'm letting there be some directional lines that shows where my brush was working. I'm going to use an orange color here for the sweater. You can see how bright colors really look nice with this pastel effect, especially on this textured paper. You'll see how neon's and really bold colors stand out nicely, especially when you add a darker texture like this one. I'm going to add color to some areas that aren't closed. They don't have an outline because I just want to highlight certain personality features or certain areas to make them stand out a little bit more. Now I'm going to grab a green and just add a little bit of color to the eyes. All of this is optional. You don't have to add all these extra colors or you could color the entire piece. I'm going to leave it with just a little bit of color, but I'm also going to play around with the paper texture a little, it seems a little bit dark right now. I'm going to unlock that and then reduce the opacity of the paper texture a little, and reduce the opacity of the filled layer as well. Unlock that filled layer and reduce the opacity just to brighten that up a little bit. Then one thing you can do is merge those paper layers together, so they're on one layer. Click the adjustments tool, use saturation brightness. You can play around with some different color versions. You may like your portrait a little bit better on a blue background. Or you may want to go remove the saturation so you have a gray and create a darker background or a lighter background. This is a good time to just play around with all of your options. You can see a few different color versions that I created here. I did the blue version that we just looked at. I also did a white pastel on a dark background. That's an option as well. If you'd rather do a piece like this that's a little bit more abstract. You can definitely do that as well. One last thing I'd like to do with this is create a little animation that can add a lot of visual interest for your online postings. If you want to try that out, I have a whole class on doing animations, and that's how I created this one. I will go ahead and call this piece finished, and we'll move on to our next project. 7. Masking Out Lights and Darks: For this next project, I really want to use the beautiful blending and layering that you can get with these pastel brushes. I'm going to do a picture of a zebra. But you could certainly use any animal or you could even do a portrait in this style. Some other animals I would be great to do with this same style would be anything with stripes or spots like a giraffe, a tiger, a leopard. If you go back to the Class Downloads page, you'll see a link to get the zebra image that I'm going to use. You'll also see a link for reference images for iPad art. I have a blog post with tons of images and resources that you can use to get pictures of really anything animals, people, machines, patterns. These are images that are okay for personal and commercial use, so check that out if you need some resources for images. I'll go ahead and click "Get the Zebra Image". Then I'll click "Download free". Rather than taking a screenshot for this, I'm going to save the image. I'm going to click and hold and click "Save image" so I can get a really high resolution picture of just this portion of the image. I'll go back to my image in procreate and click "Insert a Photo" and insert that zebra image. I'm going to let this fill the whole canvas. But I'm going to make it a tiny bit smaller so that the tail and the ears have plenty of breathing room on both sides of the canvas. Next, I'm going to create a new layer for my paper. For this paper, I'm just going to use the subtle paper texture and I'm using a sandy brown. I'm going to run that over the page one time and then duplicate it. That's a little bit darker than I want so I'll go to that top layer and just reduce the opacity a little. Now I've got a tiny bit of paper texture, but it's not really prominent or overwhelming the piece. You may want to do a little more texture on this piece. It's totally up to you. I'm going to move my zebra image on top and reduce the opacity of that image. I'm also going to go to my adjustments panel, click "Hue Saturation Brightness," and take the saturation all the way down. I really want to be able to see the black and white only. I don't want to be distracted by any color in this. I'm also going to go to curves on the adjustments panel and bump that up just a little bit. That's going to really allow me to see the pure black and white shades and just make them a little bit more high contrast. What I'm going to do for this piece is make the white stripes in shades of yellow to red and make the black stripes in shades of blue. You can use the same color palette if you'd like, just take a screenshot of my image and then copy those colors or you could choose a totally different color palette. It's really up to you. I'm going to start with this lightest color. I'm going to be using the super pastel sharp again. I'm going to start with the brightest areas here making sure that I'm on a new layer not my photo layer. Let's go ahead and lock the photo and the paper layers. I'm on my paint layer. I'm just looking for the brightest spots of this image and giving them a little bit of yellow. I'm doing this really roughly. I'm not worrying about perfectly filling in these lines. I'm not worried about perfectly finding the widest spots on the canvas. I'm just letting this be a loose almost abstract piece and if you do that rather than trying to go high detail, it's much easier to get away with mistakes. If you're trying to make a perfect image with high detail, any little mistake you make is really obvious whereas if you go with the abstracted version, it's okay to make little errors here and there, it just becomes part of the abstraction. Especially if you're new to drawing and painting, or you just don't feel confident with doing this particular image, I really recommend sticking with this loose abstract version. As you can see, I'm noticing that the sun is coming from this side, so everything that's being hit by the sun can have a little bit of this brightest yellow on it. 8. Color Gradiation: Now that I've done that first color, I'm ready to move on to my second color and it's a slightly darker shade of yellow. Now I'm going to pick up where that first yellow left off and just do a little bit of blending to get those two to merge together. Then when we get towards the end of this piece, I'm going to blend all of the colors and make sure all of these work nicely together. But for now, I'm really just masking out dark and light. I'm not worrying about it being a perfect representation of color, but I am trying to work from dark to light. If there's a really bright area right here, then right beside it, there's going to be a little bit of a darker light color. You can see this is really loose. I'm not trying to stay perfectly in these lines. I'm just trying to loosely find the general areas that would be this slightly darker shade and filling those in. Now I can move on to the next color which is in-between a yellow and an orange. Now I'm starting to branch out into other areas too. This is kind of a medium shade on this stripe. I'm just going to come through with this orange and start filling that into all of these mediums shades. Now I'm ready to move on to my next color and I'm really keeping an eye on how much white space I have left. So I've only got two more colors, this orange and then a red. I want to be sure when I work with this orange, I'm only leaving room for the darkest color of white so that the red can fill there. For example, with this stripe, I'm going to come through here and I'm looking for the darkest area of this stripe. I'm leaving that for the red. On all of these stripes I'm going through, where's my medium white? Then there's my darkest white. I'm going to stop there and all that's going to be red. It doesn't have to be perfect. Nobody's going to see a picture of the zebra when you put this up so don't worry too much about this being perfect, but just try to get close. Especially if you're new to painting, it's a good time to start looking at light and start focusing on dark and light and seeing where colors transition and how they transition. If you're just starting out, then you may not be comfortable with that process and it's a good time to just start thinking about it as you work. You don't have to do that perfectly on this piece, but just starting to think about it will really start to change how you work. You may find some areas that you missed before, like I'm seeing that this should really be that lighter orange right here. So you can always jump back and forth between colors. There's nothing wrong with adding in colors later. With these pastels, it's really easy to cover up a previous color. If you realize you put the wrong color in the space, you can just draw right over that original color. Even if there is a little bit of overlapping, it doesn't matter because we're going to do all of the blending later on that's going to cover everything up. The next thing I'm going to do is just come through with these little hairs on the top, just like we did with the feathers, I'm just making some light strokes here. Then I'll come through with this other color, this lighter orange, and just give this a little bit of variation. Now I'm just going through all of the white areas, section by section, and making sure I didn't miss anything. Going through each of my colors and just dabbing on a little bit of whatever color I need because I only have room for red now. I want to make sure there's no white exposed except for where my red is going to be. Now I'm going to grab my darkest shade, which is red, and just go through and fill in all the other white spaces that are remaining. Now I'm just going to remove the picture so I can take a look and see how this is going. I can see that, obviously, I need all my black stripes in here. But overall, it's really starting to resemble a zebra. I can see that the light is coming from the left side and that the dark is coming from the right side. Overall, this is going well. I'm going to create a new layer for my next color. I'm going to be doing the same process that I did on the last one, but rather than using all these different colors, I'm just using different shades of blue. The reason I'm not using multiple colors here is because that could create some visual confusion unless you do it really well. I think it's easier if either the black or the white is a single color and then the other one is a multicolor version. But you can try this however you'd like. Maybe you'd like a ton of color and you want to go with both stripes being multicolored. Give it a try and see how it looks. Some of the best discoveries are made that way. I'll go ahead and continue filling in these black stripes, going from light to dark and using all of these shades of blue. I'm going to do the same thing with the tail that I did with the wispy parts on the top. I'm just going to come through each time I use a new shade of blue, I'll do another layer of these. Then it will be kind of a multi-layered tail. Then I've got a little bit of that red wispiness to mix in there. So I'll go over that a little bit as well. I'm going to take a minute here to define the hooves. I can go over these with a different color later on, but I'm just trying to get an idea of where these are in the grass because they're a little bit covered. So you may want to start with a picture that has a little bit more definition if this part is difficult for you. But it really doesn't matter. People are going to be looking at the stripes because they're so bright and colorful and the hooves will just be in the background. You'll see as you start working with this process that these brushes are really forgiving. If you zoom in here, it looks like a total mess but when you zoom out, because of all the texture and variation, it looks pretty nice. It's like an abstract textural piece. Don't worry if you're a total beginner here and you feel like you can't define the light and dark very well. Just go for it and see what happens because I think you'll be surprised with these brushes, how easy they make it to create some nice texture and form. I'm going to go ahead and get my next dark color. I'm keeping in mind here that I only have one more dark color to use after this. So I'm just going to leave space for the absolute darkest place. On the snout here, I'm going to mimic what's happening on the hooves and just do a solid color. Then I'll add a little bit of light and dark variation to that just to give it some texture and a little bit of shadow. I'm moving onto my last color and so at this point I should not see any more black when I'm done with this. I'm trying to go through and cover every black area. If I missed anything, I'm going to go back with that other color and fill it in. For the eyes here, I'm going to do circular shape, but then bring in that oval shape that I can see in the picture. These don't have to be perfect. Just a general outline of the eyes and once you zoom out, it's going to be prominent. Again, I'm going to do the little wispy portions here by layering light and dark. So start with this dark color and move to lighter ones. I've pretty much covered the whole piece, but I'm going to check this by removing my photo. You'll see when you zoom in, there's going to be little areas that aren't totally filled. These don't have to be 100 percent filled. But when we start doing our blending, it's nice if the colors are at least almost touching. So if I see some areas that just aren't quite full enough, I'm just going to click and hold to get that color and then quickly color in that area. I'll take just a few minutes to refine these areas a little bit. 9. Filling & Blending: Now I'm going to merge my color layers together. I have all of my colors on the same layer and I have a couple of options here. One thing that I've seen people do that looks really nice, is to add an under layer color, so that all of these little areas where the pastel isn't touching really shines through. I'm just going to grab a really bright pink color here. To make this easy, I'm going to use my selection tool to just rope all the way around this piece. I'm going to get close but not touching. Then I'm going grab my brush. This is the medium pastel though and I'm just going to go through and fill all behind this piece and it's going a little bit outside of it, but I can just erase that in a minute. So if I zoom in, you can see all these little areas in between that weren't filled are now filled with another color. You can just grab an eraser. Let's get the small pastel sharp and just go through and remove all that excess pink that's only edge and you can leave a little on the outside. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. So I'll take just a few minutes to clean that up.. Then you get that nice shade in the background that's just filling all those extra little spaces and the next thing you can do is start doing some blending. This is really the most fun part I think. I use the pastel smudge stick that comes with the downloads and I'm going to get this on a size that's about the width of whatever stripe I'm working on and I only blend the areas that connect the colors that go with each other. I wouldn't blend a yellow and a blue like that. I would only blend a yellow with an orange or another yellow, but you can certainly play around with this and see what works best for your personal style. You may have a cleaner style, you may have a more messy style. Just go with whatever feels right to you here and maybe try it a few different ways. Duplicate this layer, hide the first one and then you can just play around with that layer without worrying about losing all that work that you've already done. I'm just going to take a few minutes to blend this out and especially remove all of the areas that have really clearly defined border and just get a little bit more looseness to this. It's almost like a painting. On these wispy areas, I'm just going to pull my smudge stick out and select the speed is a little bit more than they were before. I don't blend every area. I think it looks nice to have a combination of blended and non blended areas, but that again, just depends on your personal style. You may want to blend the whole thing or you may just want to go through like I'm doing and selectively blend so that you have that contrast of these blended areas and then the more rough areas like this one. You could keep going with this. You can also change the color of that pink layer. Let's say that's a little bit too intense for you. You could go with a blue or maybe even more of a yellow and if there's a color that you're having trouble achieving, to select it on the color swatch, swipe right on that solid layer. Click one time and click fill. So now I've got a yellow on there. That color looks nice as well. Just go with whatever works for your personal style here. One last thing you may want to add in is a little background. I'm going to go with yellow and I'm going to get the pastel shading brush and on a layer below my zebra and my solid pink layer. I'm just going to add a little bit of shading just to help that stand out. You may even want to add a little bit of an accent on the eyes and I'll do that with the super pastel sharp. It would be amazing if you did this and then add in another animal with it are add in some other background. I did this same piece and added in some grass and some sky. So that's something you can do as well if you are a person who likes to have a little bit of background, a little bit of depth. I just added in some wispy pieces of grass here. One last thing you can do with this process, if you're not really in the mood to draw an animal, would be to do a landscape. You can do the same thing we just did. Lay down some solid color blocks and then just use the blending tool to just smooth those out. You can also do more of a layered landscape where you add in some visual interests like these little birds and different layers of trees, some myths in the background and this is just laying down a little color and then blending in. Let's go ahead and call this pastel drawings finished. We hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own soft pastel drawings. If you'd like to 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 paint realistic watercolors and goulash using the free downloadable brushes I created. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads online blogs. So if you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the project that you create after you watch this class so please share what you make. You can do that here on skillshare in the project section or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad Artists, Illustrators, Letterers and Digital Planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting and digital planning and get inspired by creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and you want to join other people around the world in conversation, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on skill share or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye-bye.