Transcripts
1. Design an Adult Coloring Book Page on Your iPad: Hi, everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator, and teacher. Today I want to show you how to design an adult coloring book page on your iPad. I'll show you every step of my process, from sourcing images to filling in drawings with patterns and shapes. First, we'll look at ways to fill in shapes to make them ideal for coloring. I'll give you a practice sheet that you can use to start playing around with patterns and line styles. Next, we'll create a simple line drawing of an animal, then add patterns and shapes to break up the flat image and create a fun space for coloring. Next, we'll turn a photograph of a bird into a detailed coloring book illustration. I'll show you how to simplify a photograph to make it work as a coloring book illustration. Next, we'll turn a set of photographs into a botanical line drawing with intricate spaces for coloring. You can use the coloring pages you create on your iPad or you can print them onto paper for friends and family to use. You could also sell your coloring book page as downloads, or turn them into a book using a self-publishing site like CreateSpace. 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. I'll provide you with all the images you need and some practice sheets so you don't feel like you're starting from scratch. Let's get started.
2. Downloads Password + Inspiration & Practice: You can find all of the materials that I mentioned in this class in the ''about section'' of the class page and here is the password that you'll need to access that page. The first thing I want to do is take a look at some different ways to get inspired for your coloring book pages. I created a Pinterest board with a lot of different examples of many styles of coloring books and I'll link this Pinterest board in the ''about section'' of this class. You can see here some people will just create a simple outline and then fill in some of the spaces and textures. Other people will use pattern to create the shapes. Just get a silhouette of an animal or some other object and then fill that with some pattern like plant forms. Another thing you can do is just add lines to show the contours of an object and those lines show where all your coloring spaces are. I recommend just taking a look through this board and seeing which pieces catch your eye and which ones stand out to you. Because everyone's going to have a different style with these coloring books, so the key here is to figure out what style you like the most. I'm going to show you today a few different options. We're going to do a botanical themed piece. We're going to do an animal with some patterns, and we're also going to do a simple bird outline. I'll show you three different ways of creating these and you can take whatever stands out to you and recreate it. For the first project, I'm going to create a simple silhouette and then fill that with some pattern. This is a great beginner project if you're just starting out and you just want to try this process, this is a great way to start. Just choose a nice silhouette and fill it up with some pattern and we'll go through all the steps here. One thing I do recommend, if you're not really familiar with drawing and procreate, is taking a little bit of time to practice your line making. When it comes to coloring books, the lines are really important because you really want to have closed lines. For example, I'm going to use my monoline pen here, which comes with procreate from the inking section. I'm going to drag across this pattern here. That creates a totally closed shape on the side. But let's say for example, I draw this line and I don't quite get to the edge, that creates an open shape and that's really hard for the person coloring, because they don't know if they should have the same color and both of these chambers. Especially if you get a situation like this where you're just barely touching and it becomes clear that you used a digital pen because it's just meeting here with a round edge. With all of these lines, you want to really focus on going all the way through the line and into the next one. You may also run into a situation where you go a little bit too far. That's fine. Just grab your eraser tool with the monoline pen and you can just come slowly in and clean up that little tail end that's sticking out. I created a lot of patterns here for you to use as practice. If you want to get a little practice and before you make your actual coloring page, this is a great way to start. You could use the patterns that I have here or you could go ahead and create your own patterns just to practice the mark making process. You'll be able to download the sheet on the ''about page'' of this class, and also all of the images that I use today and all of the coloring pages that I create will be available on that ''download page'' as well. If you want to try out my coloring pages and you want to use the images that I used for my projects, you can pick those up on the ''about page''.
3. Outlines & Patterns: First I'm going to go to my gallery, click the plus sign, create custom size, and I'm going to use 8 by 10 inches. I like to use that size because that's a common book size. If you think you'll ever use these to print your own book, that's a great size to start with. You could also use regular paper size, 8.5 by 11. It just depends on what you think will be your final use. If you're just doing a digital download and you want to just share this with friends, then you could use any size at all. It's really up to you, but I do recommend working at 300 dpi if you're going to consider printing this in the future. I'm going to go ahead and insert my image by clicking the tool symbol, insert a photo, and then find the photo on my iPad. I got this photo from a website called Unsplash. The images on that site are free for personal and commercial use. I used that site a lot, I recommend going on there. If you're just looking for a basic animal silhouette, you can usually find something nice to just trace over. I'm going to go to this layer settings here and reduce the opacity to about 50 percent. That just makes it a lot easier to see my line. I'm also going to swipe left on the image layer and lock it. I never want to draw on that layer because eventually it's going to go away. I'm going to keep that locked just to prevent myself from accidentally writing on it. Now on my new layer, I'm going to make sure I have my monoline pen on the smallest size, and I'm going to double-click down here in the black area to get a pure black. Then I'm just going to go through and trace this dear image. I'm really trying to keep my line wavy because the natural silhouette of this animal is wavy, so I'm trying not to do any straight or hard lines. They're all curved. I'm leaving out a lot of details here. I'm trying to make this coloring book friendly, so I'm skipping a lot of details, simplifying a lot of areas. This is something you have to think about if you want to turn a photo into a coloring book page, you're not going to be able to get all the details that you see in the actual photo. You really have to make some choices about which details are important to you and which details don't really matter. I'll go ahead and speed up my video while I trace this whole image. Now that I have the basic outline of my dear, I can go ahead and remove that picture. I'm going to leave it on the document because I may bring it back in later if I want to look at some details, but for now I can go ahead and remove it. The next thing I want to do is start adding in some pattern. I don't have to cover the whole dear, but I do want to add a little bit of texture and show some of the contours of this piece using pattern. I'm going to leave my outline on a separate layer because all of my patterns are experiments. I may fill an area with a pattern and then decide that I hate that pattern and I want to take it out. I really recommend doing your patterns and your outlines on separate layers. That gives you a lot more flexibility and the ability to step back and fix something that you don't like about your drawing. Let's start here with the antlers. I'm going to just make some little rings on each of these antlers. I'm making sure that I have enough space in between these to be able to color this easily. I wouldn't want to put a line that was that close because that's going to be really hard for the person to color, and it'll just be a little frustrating for them because they can't fill in a color that shows up fairly well on the page. I'm just going to try to make my smallest line the width of my actual line, so I wouldn't have an outline that was any less wide than my actual line itself. I'll speed up my video here while I go through and do this same process to all of the antlers. Now that I have the antlers covered and I have that on a separate layer, so I can look at my piece, turn that layer on and off and decide if I really like how that pattern looks or not. Then when I'm ready to do another pattern, I'm going to create a new layer and put that on its own layer as well. That way every piece of the pattern functions independently, and I'm not fully committing to this whole piece. I'm just looking at this as little parts that I can change as I work. I'll go ahead and do the same process on the rest of the deer filling it in with a lot of different patterns, and I'm trying to keep it really varied. In some places I'll do more intricate patterns, and in other places I'll just do some really simple line work. I try to never let my pattern elements meet another part of my drawing. The end of the foot ends right here, so I don't want this line to meet right there because it creates a little bit of visual confusion there. Whereas if I change that line so that it meets the outline of this foot, then it's a lot more clear that those two objects are overlapping each other. That's just one thing to keep in mind as you add in these patterns. If it forces you to make two lines meet, then you may want to change how you're setting up that pattern a little bit. I'm going to bring back my picture for a minute, because I want to break up this big blank space in the middle from the back to the front of the animal. I'm going to add in just a little bit of texture where this fur is. I'm going to let that texture be my pattern. Sometimes you can actually use these patterns to show the texture of the piece. It doesn't have to just be a random pattern, it can actually be mimicking what's on the animal itself. If you were doing feathers on a bird, you could do a really nice feathering. I'll go ahead and keep adding this pattern in. This back area is a really wide expanse. I think I'm going to fill that with a larger pattern. Again, I'm doing this on a new layer. I'm just going to come in and add some plant forms to the back. I'll put some big leaves in here, and then I'll fill in the pattern with some smaller leaves. I think I'm going to call this piece finished. I could add more pattern, I could add some pattern to the face but I like having a lot of contrast. I like having these really dense areas of pattern and then a really open area in the face, but that's just my style. You could do this in a totally different way if you'd like. Let's go ahead and test this pattern and play around with the color a little bit. I'm going to remove the background layer, and I want to bring this onto a separate document because right now it's all on separate layers, so it's not ideal for coloring in this state. I'm going to use my tool symbol, click "Share", and then I'm going to choose PNG. PNG will save this without a background, it'll save just the black lines. Whereas the other ones are going to be saving a background. I'll click "PNG", "Save Image", go to my gallery, click "Plus", "Create Custom Size". Again, I'm working with 8 by 10 inches. Tool symbol, image, insert a photo and then find that photo, and place that right in the center there. Now, I can start playing around with the color. I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times because I may want to do a few different color versions. For the first one, let's just play around with adding some color here. We have a couple of options. We can drag a color into a space like that. Or if you'd rather do more of a coloring style you can go in on the layer below, your drawing layer. Then you can just use a pen to color in that space. It's really easy to do if you have it on the layer below, because you can be coloring on that black layer and you can't see it. You can see if I reverse these layers, it would look terrible because it's not filling in correctly. But as long as you're coloring layers below, then you can just come in and play around with that style. Another thing you can do, let's say you want to add in some different coloring, like some texture. Let's get a Charcoal pen. We can come in here and do some real coloring with some color blending and shading. There are a lot of different things you can do with these coloring pages. Once you create the outline, you can really play around with this. Or you could send the PNG file to friends who have an iPad and get them to color on it, and maybe give you a little bit of feedback. You may find that your first coloring page is not that great but after you color on it and play around with it, you'll start to understand what makes a good coloring page and what makes a area that's too small? I think I even did some areas that are a little bit risky here. Those tiny little areas can be difficult for the colorist. Those are just some things to consider. This is a good starter piece, but let's go ahead and move on to something slightly more complicated.
4. Outlines with Details: Next, I want to show you a coloring page option that doesn't include patterns. It's more about showing the outlines of the actual objects, and then adding a little bit of detail to the objects that make for some nice coloring areas. I'm going to use the same size again, 8 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. The image that I use is going to be this spurred image that I got from the site Pixabay. Again, I'm going to link all of these images in the About section. I want to make sure when I resize things that I have magnetic set as my move tool, so I select move tool and then I click "Magnetic". If you use free-form, you can actually distort the proportions of your image so, you don't want to do that. You want to use magnetic and that keeps the proportions of your image just as they should be. I'm going to go ahead and position this like we did with the last one. We want to set the size right now. We don't want to have to resize this piece later. I'm going to zoom out and make sure I like how this composition looks. I like that. I'm going to reduce the opacity, create a new layer, double-click on black to get a pure black, and then go to my monoline pen on the smallest size. I'm going to do the same thing I did to start the last one. I'm going to go through and trace this image. But I'm going to leave out a lot of details. This drawing or this photograph has all these tiny little branches that would be a little bit difficult to color. You can see all these little sticks that come off of each berry. I'm not going to draw all those. I'm going to really simplify this branch especially and leave a lot of the details out of the bird as well because I want to make this really easy to color, a little bit challenging, but also fun to color, and not too intricate to the point of becoming frustrating. I'll go ahead and take some time to trace this and I'll speed up my video while I do that. I wanted to make a note here. You can see I totally changed how these feathers were. In the drawing, they all come from this central point here. That was going to make my coloring lines way too close to each other. It suggests that a little bit how these are spaced, then you can feel free to do that. You don't have to stick with exactly what you see in the photograph. In fact, the most important thing is that it's great for coloring. Keep that in mind as you're drawing. Feel free to change things and adjust the drawing so that it not only fits your style, but makes it pleasant for coloring. Now that I have drawn all the wings, I'm going to go through and make sure all of the areas where they meet are really nice and clean. I don't have any little areas where you can see a digital brush mark. Now I have the basic outline of my bird. I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer for the berries because it's going to be a lot easier to erase the sections where they overlap if they're on separate layers. Now I'll go ahead and draw the branch exactly as it is, and then I can go back in and erase the parts of the wings here that overlap with those berries. That's going to make my process a lot faster if I keep these on separate layers. One thing I'm thinking about as I'm drawing these berries is that I want the colorist to be able to color the berries one color and the sticks another color that flow into each other. I'm going to do a line to separate the berry from the branch. But then I'm going to erase this section where the two branches meet. That way, they can keep the branch all one color. That's a nice way to help the colorist with their coloring job. You're making it a lot easier to differentiate between the sections. Now that I have the basic outline ready, I'm going to go ahead and start adding in some details. Like we did on the last piece, I'm going to be adding the details on a new layer. I'm going to start by adding some little reflections on each berry. I'll go into each berry and add a little space. That'll add a little bit more details to these. Now, I'm going to make a new layer because I'm going to put each type of detail on its own layer. I'm going to add in an eyeball here and zoom out to see how that looks. Eyes are really expressive. You want to be sure that your eyes don't look strange because that can really throw off the whole piece. Now, I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to add a little bit of detail to each feather. I'm going to come in and add another little space for the colorist to add some contrasting color too. I'll add some model loops like that on each wing. You can see with these newest loops that I drew, I went ahead and drew over all my details because it's much easier to erase a section than it is to come in and make this line perfectly curved while trying to avoid all these berries too. I'll go ahead and draw it in with a nice curve and then I can go back and erase all of these little details that overlap my branch. Now I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to add some little feathers that are at the base of the larger feathers. Now, I'm going to bring back my bird image so that I can see here exactly where the patterns of his face begin and end. I think I'm going to bring in some little lines here to show some definition in that pattern. I would consider this piece done. This is a nice simple piece. They could choose to color the background a solid color if they wanted, or just leave the background plain. You can see here, if I make these layers invisible, we still have that original outline. If you wanted to do this same bird with some really intricate patterns on every single wing, you could do that. You can use the same outline for a lot of different options just to play around with some different styles and figure out what style works best for you. I'm going to go ahead and save this as a PNG, remove my background, and then I'm going to bring it into a new document at the same size. Now, I can play around with the color. Again, I'm going to duplicate that a few times so I can maybe try coloring it a few different times. I'm going to use the method where I drop color into a section. I'm going to start with the berries here, and I'll speed up my video while I color this so you could see a possible version of coloring this piece. I'm going to leave my coloring length that with a really simple version. But I really recommend this step of testing your coloring because already as I was doing this, I found about five things that I feel like I need to change. There's a few little areas that were a little bit too small, like that one. That's really too small for someone to color. I would shift this line down a little bit to leave a little bit more space for the person to color. I really recommend this step. Give your adult coloring pages a try before you send them out to anyone else or put them on your site. Let's go ahead and call this piece done and move on to a slightly more complex piece.
5. Botanical Collage Part 1: For the last piece, I actually want to combine a lot of different pictures and pull plants and leaves, and flowers from a lot of different pictures that I took on a single day. I'm going to do a collage style with this, then do the line drawings afterwards. The first step I did was, I went through every single one of these pictures that I took and I put these in an album. First I took the pictures, put everything in an album then I went to the album and put a heart on everything that looks like it would be good for a coloring page. This one's good for a coloring page because, I can see the whole outline of the flower. I think I have all of these placed where I want them to be and I've got a little bit of overlapping in mind. I tried to balance the flowers and the leaves. I've got a really big one facing us on the corner, then I have one facing to the left here, and then I have one facing down. I'm thinking about the direction of the stamen. This one's going up, that's going down, and this is going across. Just having that little bit of contrast in the directions can really help with the movement of the piece. Same thing here, I have this stem. I wouldn't want this stem to be facing the same way as this so I turned it a little bit, so it's facing up. Everything's pointing in a different direction so we have a lot of contrast and a lot of variation in terms of the layout. There's a few here that I'm going to do some overlapping with. First I'll do a tracing of the leaves and then I'll do the flowers after that. I think I'm going to add in some of these little baby flowers too. I'm going to do the same process that I did with the other pieces. I'll go ahead and get my black mono-line pen. You may also choose to use your gel pen. It really just depends on your personal preference, but the gel pen is going to be a slightly center line. I do tend to use the gel pen if I'm doing something a little bit more detailed. I think I may actually use the gel pen on this one. First I'm going to go to each layer and bring it down to 50 percent opacity. I'm not ready to merge these layers yet because I'm just not sure if I'm going to want to change the placement or anything like that. I'm going to keep these as separate layers for now, but I can always change that later on. Then I'm making sure I'm on a brand new layer, and I've got my gel pen selected with a medium size and appear black. I'll just go through and start tracing these pieces. You can see here, I'm not really following the veins as they are in the picture, because my main concern here is making something that's fun to color. The veins in this leaf are actually really complicated. I think it would just be a little bit frustrating for someone to have to color. I'm just going to break these up into really simple blocks. That's going to make it easier to make a nice line. I could go ahead and do an additional set of veins to make these a little thicker, but I think I'm going to make my leaves a little bit more dense. The flowers are a little bit more dense and the leaves a little bit more sparse. I'm keeping that in mind as I create each of these lines. I want to always be thinking about the balance of contrast and how the pieces relate to each other. When I do these flower petals, I try to shake my hand a little bit. I don't want these to be perfectly curved. I want to have a lot of shakiness too, because that's how they look in the picture. I'm not trying to perfectly follow this curve. I'm just trying to shake my hand a little bit as I draw. Now that I have the general outline of that plant, I'm going to go ahead and add in some variation in each pedal. That's just to show the direction of the petal, but also to give the color as something to fill in. Because these pedals are such big expanses that it really wouldn't be very fun to just draw a big solid petals. Whereas if they had some nice flowing shapes to color in, that would be a lot more fun. I'm just going to do that on each petal and just keeping in mind that I don't want to meet with any of the leaves veins. I wouldn't want to do that, because then that becomes visually confusing why the vein is meeting with the flower petal. I'm just keeping these things in mind as I work and just trying to keep a lot of contrast and my lines, and keeping this nice and flowing as I work. Now I can remove that flower and just take a look and make sure that looks good. I think that's good for now. I can always go back in and add some detail, but let's start with that for now. On a new layer, I'm going to go ahead and start tracing the other pieces. I think I'm going to change how these leaves look. I want to add in a little bit of detail on these that just makes them a little bit more fun to color. I'm going to add an extra vein, then I'm just going to erase all of those pieces in the middle.
6. Botanical Collage Part 2: Now that I have all of these images traced, I could add in a few more leaves, but I like the big wide open spaces mixed with the high contrast and lots of lines and these more dense areas. So I'm going to leave it as it is. As always, I want to test this before I call it finished, and so I'll click "Share", "PNG", and save the image. Then I'll go to my gallery and create a new image at 8 by 10 inches. Insert a photo and insert that drawing. Now I can play around with adding some colors to this piece, and as I'm doing that, I'm keeping in mind that I want this to be really fun and easy for someone to color. I want it to be a little bit challenging, but I don't want it to be frustrating. If I see anything like this little area that's preventing this from closing here, that tells me I need to go back to my original document and fix that area right there. Add a little black line here. Little things like that can really help make your drawing great for coloring. It takes a little practice and you can try this in a few different ways. But this is a great way to get started. Just trace a few images that you take and then go through and test and see how it looks as a coloring. Let's go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed watching this class and that you feel inspired to start designing your own coloring book page. 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 paint realistic watercolors 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 on my site. If you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my website. I would love to see your finished coloring book page. I know we would all be inspired by seeing each other's work. Please share what you may, you can do that here on Skillshare by uploading your project image. Or you can share it with me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to ask. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching this class and I hope I see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
