Design a Risograph Inspired Poster in Procreate using texture brushes

1. Course Intro: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Jen, a full time freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and educator based out of the Midwest, and I run Bella and Sophia Creative Studio. Today, I'm coming back with another procreate tutorial. As a creator, I often work in both digital and traditional mediums, but I often opt for digital just because of the ease of access. I don't have to deal with all the mess, and sometimes it's just easier to have my iPad and my Apple pencil and work on the go. Yet I still love adding textures and grid to give my digital work a more traditional feel. So whether it's grid or half tones, digital textures can give your work that more traditional feel and a little something extra. One style that I really, really like is the Risograph print style. This is a very 80s kind of inspired 80s based style, and I see it having really huge comeback and I love the imperfect feel of it. And that's what we're going to be working with today, so let's get started. 2. The Background on Riso: Before we jump into the project, let's learn a little bit about Risograph. Risograph is a brand of digital duplicators that were manufactured by the Rizo Kugaku Corporation, and they were designed mainly for high volume photocopying and printing. It was released in Japan in 1980, and the digital duplicator is essentially a modern day stencil printer. So what happens is the so internally creates a stencil that is laid onto a drum filled with ink which then spins at a really, really high speed, forcing the ink through the stencil and onto the paper. This process creates a really unique textured print. Reso printing can be very inaccurate and unpredictable at times in terms of its overall print process. But personally, I think that is what makes it so special and so unique and so interesting to look at. The machines were designed basically to make office copies. They weren't really made for high precision printing. Imperfect registration, smudging and uneven coverage are just a few of the many quirks that come with this print process. We're going to factor that in as we're creating this artwork. 3. Tips for Working in Layers: So when it comes to creating traditionally with this specific print process and digitally in general, at least in my opinion, when you're working with things like Photoshop and Affinity Photo, you often will have to work with layers in mind. Each ink color used is printed layer by layer, very similar to what you would see in screen printing. Your files will need to be created with this in mind. That's the process that we'll be going through and how to set up your file as we move throughout creating this piece of working. It seems like a lot of work upfront, but I promise the payoff is totally going to be worth it because it's really pretty once you finalize and you see the final print, so to speak. Now that we know more about Rizo, let's get started with our design. I've personally already mapped out my undersketching just to make life easier, but I'm going to drop in my whole sketch process video here. I was basically inspired by the ideas of tools of the trade and obviously with the trade being designed and illustration. I incorporated the different tools that I work with on a daily as a freelance designer and illustrator. I have my iPad, I have pencils, I have paint brushes, I have a paint palette, a sketchbook. A pencil sharpener, things like that. If you don't already have a sketch in mind or something that you're working with or you want to just do what I'm doing, that's fine. But take a moment, then pause the video, get your under sketch finalized. Then when you have your sketch and you have your basic shapes ready to go, you can come back to this video, press start, and then we can jump into setting up our layers and getting everything prepared to color. 4. Setting up the File and the Sketch: You'll want to do first though is set up a basic 8.5 by 11 Canvas at 300 DPI. That's what I'm working with because I just wanted it to be easy to print out just on a basic printer. Let's get started. What we'll want to do first is launch our Procreate app. If you don't already have a sketch, what we can do is go to the upper right hand corner, hit that plus, and then in that little rectangle here, there's another plus, hit that and it's going to allow you to create a custom canvas. I would suggest changing your measurements to inches. You can do anything like 8.5 by 11, 11 by 14. 11 by 17 or 13 by 19 depending on what your printer can print. For my Canvas, I just did a basic 8.5 by 11 inch Canvas at 300 DPI. Once you've updated your width and your height, making sure that DPI is at least 300 because we want to make sure that it prints nicely, then you can hit Create. What I did though, as I said in the intro, I already did an under sketch. I basically I had a concept already that I wanted to work with, which is this tools of the trade poster idea. Now that you have your sketch, what we'll want to do is go into our layers panel on the right hand side and we're going to set up our layers. Just like I said in the intro, the whole process within this Risograph print style, each color is printed on its own layer. So we're going to keep that in mind as we're setting up this file. You don't want things to be to too detailed. I'm going to actually simplify some of these down as we work, but I'm going to keep the outline sketch on its own because I think it'll be a nice fun addition to have these lines on top of the risograph, color once we're done. What we want to do is if you already have your sketch layer, we're going to add some additional layers underneath this sketch layer. You probably will want to add a layer for each element or each element that will have a different color for each of your items. But the most basic thing to keep in mind is just for each element that you have, Make sure it'll be a different color and it'll have a different layer for each one. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten elements. At minimum, I'll have ten layers plus an overlay layer up top and then a multiply layer at the bottom to give me this paper texture effect that I'm trying to go for. I'm going to do 12 layers total right from underneath my original sketch layer. To keep things organized too, you can rename your layer. I'm going to click on this layer. I'm going to select rename and then I'm just going to rename it sketch just to keep my layers organized. You can do that for each of the elements as well. I'm just getting in the habit of keeping your files and your layers organized. Or you can choose not to and just have them named whatever layer number it pops up. Whatever works for you. I'm going to add my layers by clicking on this little plus icon and I'm going to add them underneath my sketch layer. 5. Adding a Paper Texture: All right, of these 12 layers, what I want to do is go to this first layer, and I'm actually going to turn off my sketch layer for now just so that we can see what we're doing. I'm going to go to this first layer, and I want to add a paper texture to this. I'm going to select that first layer. I'm going to go to my brush tools and I've already installed the Risograph brushes that I downloaded. I'm going to go and I'm going to go all the way up to their paper overlay options. They have some really fantastic paper overlays. What we want to do first is just go into our color palette here, make sure that the first color option here is black, and then the second one is white. Then we'll go back to our brushes and we can test a couple of these out before we actually work with this. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller just so that you can see what we're doing. You'll see it gives us this really beautiful textured paper effect. And we're going to utilize the overlay and multiply options so that the color still shows up, but the paper effect bleeds through. That's the first one. This is the AN basic papery. This is the AN favorite. I like this one a lot. I like the little platters and speckles and things like that. Then there's also the A and subtle. This is a little bit more of a subtle paper effect. If you are new to procreate, you could always just tap with two fingers to undo. And then I'm going to go into this last one, which is the instant cheats so overlay. Basically, it gives you that so effect immediately. But we're not going to do it this way. I'm going to show you a different way to go about than just adding the effect with the brush. What I want to do is go back to that favorite paper overlay because I really like the speckles in this. I'm going to increase the size of my brush all the way to max on the left hand side, and then I'm just going to fill my paper here, and then I'm going to go to my last layer and I'm going to do the same thing with that same brush and fill another on top. Then what I want to do is go into that last layer and I'm going to change it from normal to multiply. Then I'm going to go to that first layer and I'm going to change it from normal to overlay. Then we're going to go back down to our last layer that we change to multiply, and we're going to bring the opacity down to anywhere 10-20%. What you'll see is that it takes away that carbon paper effect, but we still will have a nice grainy texture. I'm going to actually just go into a new layer so we can test it out and you can see the effect with a color. I'm just going to still working in the so brush library because they have tons of different options. They have obviously the paper and then the riso effects brushes. Then they also have some really fun shaded brushes and ink brushes. I'm going to go with the Squid ink. I'm going to increase the size just so that you can see what we're working with. I'm going to lay down some color and then when we zoom in, you'll see that you could still see all of those speckles in there. It just doesn't affect the color anymore because we've multiplied it and we brought the opacity down. Now that we've done that, I am going to go through and it'll be important to change all of these center layers here between our overlay and our multiply layer, and we're going to change them all to multiply, just so that we can see what we're working with as we're working with the undersketch. So to change all these, just click where the little N is and then you scroll through to find your layer effects, and then you just select multiply. 6. Coloring your Artwork: All of your layers have been updated and are multiplied, then you can go to your sketch layer and we can turn it back on by clicking on that little checkmark. Now what we'll want to do is just begin to fill. What we'll want to have is a color story. I already have one set up here. I like this blue, yellow, red and pink effect. Then I have some additional ones like a green for a darker element, a gray, and then a light yellow. But for now, I really like the idea of utilizing this simplified color palette. You can do as you please. But this is just the the style that I'm going for just I want to simplify it down. That's also what you'll want to keep in mind as you're working on something within the style. The simpler, the better usually. I'm going to start adding color to each of my elements, and I'm going to go to that first layer that I'm going to be working with, making sure that it is multiplied. I'm on that layer, and then I'll start outlining the first item that I want to add to that layer. I'm going to go into my so brushes. Again, my Risograph brushes. I'm going to use this squid inking pen. And I'm going to adjust the size of this and then I'm going to adjust my colors and start doing my pencil here. Just like you would normally do with all your other artworks that you are creating in Procreate, I'm just going to start outlining and filling in with color. You could utilize the reference option. If you select reference. If you select your sketch layer, you tap on the image and you select reference. You can reference the shapes in your sketch. You just want to make sure all of your lines are closed, and then you can go into the layer that you're working with and you can just drag color in and it will fill the shape. You just want to make sure though that you have all of your lines closed so that it doesn't flood fill your entire campus. This is a really fast way to go about it, or you can just outline and then drag and drop your fill color. I'm going to finish filling out this section here. Like I said, you probably want to keep in mind that any colors that are different should be on a separate layer. In this case, I'm going to create a new layer for the pink eraser and for the metal section here. I'm just going to continue this process to fill out each of my elements. Now that I've done the pencil, I'm going to go to a new layer and I'm going to fill the rest of these items. As you see with this one because I have a line that isn't completely closed, it filled the outside part of this paint tube. What I'm going to do is undo that by tapping twice and then I'm going to go back to my sketch layer. I'm going to turn off reference for now, go back to my paint brush here and then I'm just going to outline this shape in its own layer and I'm going to fill it that way. Once I've outlined it and I have a nice clean outline as you see here, then I can just go to my color picker, drag and drop it and it'll fill that section for me. As I'm creating the color sections for each of these layers, I like to also group them. I'm going to go to this pencil layer. I'm going to select the first yellow part of it, and then I'm going to drag across right to select the eraser and that blue section. Then I'm going to select group here. And I'm just going to rename that group by clicking on it and I'm going to change it to pencil, so that I have everything together, all the different elements together. It just makes things more organized and easier to manage. But like I said, you could choose to have each color on its own layer or you can just have each element on its layer with multiple colors. But you'll see in a moment why it'll be easier just to keep everything separated but still group together. And this is also why you may want to add more layers. I say, for example, you're already running out of layers, what we can just do is go into your layers options here, swipe left and then just select duplicate and you can just duplicate that layer and it has all the settings that you already need. The cool thing with Risograph and what you'll notice as you're coloring probably is that it creates additional colors when you overlay the colors together. That's the beauty of how it works. That's also why it gives you a nice variety of different colors because you're essentially color mixing with the print. If you don't know how that works and you're interested, I'm going to link above. I have a fun simple basic color theory video here on YouTube that I use from my most recent one of my most recent Skillshare classes, I think color theory is a really fun and important subject to understand and start to grasp as you work with art, just so that your colors and your artwork and the color stories that you create are striking and beautiful. The other thing I like to do too is that if there are different elements on your shape, but they're the same color, I keep them on the same layer. I'm going to fill in this little area here in blue, but I'm going to keep it on the same layer as this bigger section of the paint tube. I'm going to just continue this process and fill in the rest of the layer colors for each of my shapes that I've created, and then we'll get into the next part of this tutorial. 7. Adding a Background: So now what I want to do now that we've got all of our colors laid down is quickly add a kind of like rectangle shape in the background to give us this nice a border, and it doesn't have to be perfect. I want it to be a little imperfect in terms of placement, and then we'll be able to also start the process of knocking some of those colors out and then adding the so effects. I'm going to go to this one of the last two layers that I have here, and then I'm going to go into my color options here and I'm going to select I think I'm going to select this blue color because I don't have it used very often, so things should stand apart from it. While we're on this layer, we're just going to use the paint brush to create a really simple shape. Keeping in mind that we want it to be more of a rectangle than a square. If you draw a line and just keep your pen down, it'll allow you to create a straight, perfect line. That's what I'm doing. I'm just connecting all of my edges here to make sure everything looks like it's supposed to be in place. Once I've done that, then I'm just going to fill that shape with color by clicking on my color pica tool dragging and dropping. And just make sure though that your reference is turned off that your sketch is no longer a reference, and then you can go back to the layer where you created the rectangle and then just drag and drop your color in. Now what I'm going to do is resize it, and I'm going to distort or I'm going to have free form on and I'm just going to resize it so that it fits the background a little bit better. I'm going to click Distort as well just so that it's easier to make sure everything is lining up properly. So even though this is at the bottom, it is having an impact on all of the elements within it. The idea is that basically all of these shapes need to be knocked out from this background. So what we're going to do is create some reference shapes so that we can eliminate the different elements behind them. Since we were already grouping all of our elements, part of the work is done because we're going to use those grouped elements as the reference shapes by flattening them. To make this a little bit speedier though, what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of my shapes as one entire group. I'm going to group them all together. I'm going to close that group and I'm going to duplicate that group. Then I'm going to actually flatten this group and this is going to be our reference group. Now I'm going to select that reference group layer and I'm going to click on the little image here, and then I'm going to select select, then I'm going to go back into my layers. I'm going to go into my background layer that I've created. And then I'm going to select the little icon again with my background layer, and then I'm going to scroll down to hit clear and it'll knock all of the background with that shape in it out so that we can now see our images. Now that I'm looking at this, this blue seems a little too much. I'm going to go in and I think I'm going to select a lighter color here. I think I'm going to go with a lighter yellow. What's nice is all we have to do is select the color and then we can go into that blue layer here and then we can just drag and drop, and then we can just fill in anything that might be missing within this layer. For example, these little blue dots here, I'll fill them and change the color and then I'll just go in and double check any other areas. 8. Creating the Risograph Effects: Now what we want to do is create that offset. That's the beauty of Risograph is that it's imperfect. I like when the offset shows a little bit of the white background. What we're going to do is select that layer with the background and then I'm going to use my arrow tool here and I'm just going to nudge it over to the right just a bit. You'll start to see the little offset white effects show through. You can see it here really nicely. Then you start to see also the colors overlapping to create that darker color. If you don't like that, you can always just go in and erase those, but I think this is what gives this effect its charm. Now what I'm going to do is just add this background to my group with all of the colors within the shapes. I'm just going to take this background layer. I'm going to rename it, change it to background. I'm actually going to lock it so that it doesn't move, so I'm going to swipe to the left and I'm going to lock it, and then I'm just going to drag it into this group here. I'm just going to rename this group colored icons just so that I know what I'm working with. Now we can begin the process of basically creating the so effect. Like I said, if you notice anything in your background that you do not like or any colors that seem off, you can just go in and clean those up either with the eraser or with your paintbrush tool. Basically, I'm just going through and double checking for any lines that don't belong within this background. We've knocked out the shapes, but there still might be some residual line work that didn't get removed. You can just erase that. It's not going to impact your background because there's no background anymore where this is. There's just some outlines that are still showing up on my sketch here. I'm just going to go through and clean those up. Once you're done cleaning up any residual lines that may have been left over, then now we can jump into creating the so effect. You could leave your art just like this. This is a really fun textured effect that you get from this. It's create the so effect for every layer that we have that makes up an item, we need to have that many layers to create the so effect on top of it. We'll start with this pencil. This pencil has three layers, the yellow portion, the pink eraser, and then that blue section that connects the eraser to the pencil wood. What we'll need then is three layers to create the fact that we're going for this pencil because we'll have those three colored layers that will apply on top. And they all have to be set to multiply. What I could do is just go to the layer that I have currently and just duplicate that last layer that I have of all the layers that I had created. I have one layer left, so I can just duplicate that. I'm going to duplicate it three more times so that I have the one still, and then I'm going to take those three layers and I'm going to apply color to each of those layers in relation to the color for the layer that's going to make up this shape. I'm going to go to my background layer. We can see it happening on a wider color so it's easier to see. I'm going to click on that layer. I'm going to select, select and it'll give you'll see this gray effect going over that will highlight the outside part of your selection. Then what we want to do is go into that new layer, one of those new layers that we've created, and then I'm going to go into my brush options. I'm going to go into those sograph brushes and then I'm going to select sograph style that I want to go for. Since this is a background, I want it to not overwhelm the rest of the drawings. I'm going to select a light so and I'm going to go with this super light so here. Then I'm just going to increase the size of this brush here and then what I can do is begin to fill in wherever that color is and you already start to see the dots popping up. To make things a little easier as well, you can turn off some of these other elements and only work on the element that you're currently on just to make it less confusing. You can go into your group layers and just uncheck mark whatever it is that you don't want to see. And just checkmark whatever it is that you're working on. We've got this background and you can see, actually it looks really neat, even with just the black and white imagery with that layer. I know it's hard to see because this is such a light color. But as you zoom in, you can see this effect in place. There's the background. Now I'm going to turn on the tube here and I'm going to select each element and then I'm going to go to this next layer because that's going to be the layer for the color, the paint tube. I'm going to go to this blue layer first. I'm going to tap on it. I'm going to tap on the little icon and then I'm going to hit Select. Once I've hit Select and I get this gray background again, I'm going to go to my next layer and then I'm going to go into my color picker. I'm going to select the blue, and then I'm just going to go into my brush tools again and then I'm going to select a new so brush. I did that really light one for the background. I'm going to use a denser one for all of the colors on top. I'm going to select this AN dense so then making sure I'm on that new layer, select that paint brush and then I'm just going to fill it in. I can decrease the size if I need to Remember, part of the idea is that it's not supposed to be perfect. You can build up color. It doesn't have to be fully even. You can build up and create your own shadows and things like that, and this is the effect you'll see. You could also just increase the size of your brush to fill it in one go. Now I'm going to do the same process for the yellow parts of this as well. I'm going to go back into that layer group. I'm going to select my arrow button just to deselect it, go into the yellow layer, hit select. Go into my new layer, select my so brush, go into my color wheel, select that yellow, and then add the yellow to the darker areas and then select that lighter yellow and add the yellow to this lighter section. Then we can hit that little arrow key again and you're starting to see these elements playing together. Right now, we have a color background still, but once we turn that background off, this is the effect we're starting to get here. We're going to repeat this process for each of the additional elements. I'll go through one more with you and then I'll speed things up. We are going to now go into our sketchbook here and eraser. We're going to select that layer, click on the icon, hit Select, go back into our layers and then scroll down to the new layer that we've created, go into our color picker and select that pink, then go into our brush tool, make sure our so brush is selected, and then you can either keep using the same one or if you want to select some of the other ones just to see what they look like, you can do that as well. I would opt for the same one just to create a consistent look. Then just making sure you're on that new layer, you can begin to fill this in. And then again, you can turn off that background of color if you want, just to see what it looks like without it. And this is what it'll look like without it. Overall, I think it's showing out really nicely. Now select your error tool to deselect. I like the effect that it gives with the color underlay. It just feels like it's a bit bolder and I like that. But you could also opt to not have the color background and get more of this softer effect as well. That is the whole process for adding this riso effect style to some of your illustrations. Um, now that I've walked you through this step, you can finish the rest on your own. I'm going to speed through finishing up the rest of the coloring on this image here. 9. Project Reveal and Final Thoughts: All right, and this is the final effect. So you could choose to not have any of the undercolor and just kind of give it this really simple, really sketchly feel. Or you can turn on all of the undercolor options here and have a much more vibrant effect. There we go. I'm going to darken things up a bit just so you can see this is the overall effect that we will get when it comes to this look. I think it's really fun. I really like it a lot. I'll include some visuals up on screen right now just to see things a little bit better. This is the final project. Like I said, I'll include some close up visuals on screen so you can get a better feel for it. What I like is that once you print this out, you're going to get this really beautiful grainy texture. It's going to make it look and feel as if you went about this in a more traditional way versus your regular old digital art that you would create here on Procreate. It just gives it something extra, something special. That's it for this tutorial. I hope you found it helpful 10. Course Outro: Thank you so much for creating with me this month. I hope you found this class on how to design a Risograph inspired poster in Procreate helpful and that it inspires you to experiment more with your creation. If you enjoy this class, definitely leave a class review. It's so helpful in terms of helping with search, as well as giving feedback to us teachers. And if you feel called to, I would love to have you share your project in the class project gallery. I'd be happy to give you feedback or offer any additional tips or tricks or answer any questions you may have you so much for joining me this month, and I will see you in the next one. Bye.