Develop Your Signature Drawing Style for Surface Pattern Design

1. Introduction: Developing consistency in your artwork can feel a little vague and frustrating at times. A lot of the advice you'll hear when you're first starting out is just to continue to draw and to practice a lot and that your style will eventually emerge. And although that is true to an extent, for me personally, I found more consistency once I was able to develop a process that I could repeat time and time again. Hi, I'm Kelly. I'm a surface pattern designer and illustrator based out of Washington State. In my own work, consistency came less out of just sheer practice and more out of intentional decisions regarding my process. Process usually starts in my sketchbook, where I draw rough draft, and then I'll take a picture of that and bring it into Procreate. Using my Procreate brushes, I draw my linework and color. And once I get my motifs looking and feeling like I want, I'll take that file into Illustrator. Using Illustrator, I vectorize the motifs, and I will build my final pattern. This class, I'm going to use my process as an example, but the goal isn't for you to necessarily copy it. I want you to develop your own process that works for you best, and I want you to choose brushes that feel the most natural for you. This class is designed for beginning surface pattern designers and people who are looking for more consistency in their artwork. Specifically, artists who use Procreate as their main source of creation. You'll need an iPad and an Apple pencil, as well as the Procreate software. And if you'd like, you can have a sketchbook if you want to include that as part of your process. Also going to include a section about vectorizing in Illustrator. So if you have Illustrator, you're welcome to do that. But that is an optional part of the course, and you don't need Illustrator to do the first part of it. For the class project, you should have a final test sheet of your brushes, a toolkit that you've created of your selected brushes, as well as three final motifs that you can submit to the by the end of the class, you won't be locked into a permanent style, but rather you will hopefully develop a process that feels natural to you with a select number of brushes that you can then continue to take forward, redefine, and evolve with as an artist. So let's start building a drawing process that you can return to time and time again. I'll see you in the class. 2. Class Project: For the class project, you're going to use a simple motif sheet and experiment with different brushes to find the ones that you like the most. And this will help you start to build your repeatable drawing process. When you're all done, you'll share your completed test sheet along with three motifs that you've drawn using your chosen brushes. Included some motif sheets that I've drawn in the class resources. You're welcome to download one of those or draw your own motifs. It's completely up to you. Choose whatever option allows you to focus on the brush testing process and not necessarily focusing on creating perfect motifs. First, you'll choose your test motifs, and then we'll go through a couple experiments using different linework brushes and fill brushes. You're also welcome to experiment with texture brushes as well. And then once you find brushes that you enjoy using the most, you'll go ahead and recreate your motifs using your selected brushes. I chose this project because I felt like it was an easy process to help build consistency in your artwork. And I hope that you'll be able to come back to it time and time again and continue to evolve your style as you grow as an artist. The first step is creating your motif sheet. Or downloading one of the ones I have available in the class resources, it's up to you. If you are creating your own motif sheet, remember to keep it simple and feel free to move on to the next lesson. Welcome to draw Along while I talk. When you're finished, make sure to upload your test sheet, your final brushes that you selected, as well as your three motifs that you drew to the project gallery. I'm really excited to see the work that you also love to hear what you noticed during your experimenting and if your brush choices surprise you. By the end of this course, you're not going to be locked into a permanent style, which I've already said to you. But rather, you're going to have a practical process that you can return to time and time again. You'll also have a tool kit that you can continue to refine as you grow as an artist. So let's go ahead and move on, and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 3. Selecting Motifs: For this exercise, you're going to need a sheet of simple motifs that are easy to draw over and over again. And as you can see, I have the one that I've put together right here in front of me. I chose to do a woodland theme for my motif sheet, and as you can see, I chose some, like, mushrooms and twigs and flowers and just kind of some random woodland themed items that I thought might work well. Goal is not to have the perfect motifs. It's to have a variety of motifs because you want to be able to test the brushes on different things. I spent some time making sure that I had different shapes included in my motif sheet, so there's some circles. The leaves have some fine points on them. And I included some larger elements, as well as smaller elements. So I have some of these little dots and the stars on here as well, along with the larger motifs, like the flour, the mushrooms and the frog in the middle. And you want a variety is because you want to be able to test how the brushes will work on both large and small scale motifs. So I do have a variety of those included. Our main goal is simple and easy to repeat, so just keep that in mind while you're drawing yours. I understand that in some situations, creativity can feel like it's non existent. If you find yourself currently in one of those spots, I don't want you to feel discouraged and you can't participate in this. So please feel free to download one of the class resource motif sheets that I've provided, and go ahead and walk through this experiment. I found that playing around with brushes and experimenting is a great way to start to spark your creativity. Don't give up if that's where you find yourself currently. Please go ahead and keep jumping in. So either create your own or download mine, and then we can go ahead and move on to testing some brushes. Not quite ready, feel free to move on to the next lesson anyways. I'm going to talk a little bit about repeating processes and creating consistency, and then we'll move on to experimenting with brushes. 4. Consistency Through Repetition: Before we jump into testing brushes, I wanted to talk a little bit about why having this kind of a process helps you build consistency in your artwork. Style isn't just about what you draw. It's about the decisions you make while drawing, what tools you're going to use, how you're going to do the lines, how you're gonna fill them with color, and any final touches that you make to your artwork. As artists, we all love to experiment with different mediums and brushes and all of that stuff. Every time we make a new decision when we're drawing a new piece of art, we risk it looking a little bit different than what we've made before. Sometimes those differences are fine, and it still falls within our style. Other decisions we make can throw us off into a completely different direction. So we just want to be mindful of the decisions we're making and the tools we're incorporating into our style for the long run. At a point where you feel like your work isn't consistent, it doesn't necessarily mean you're drawing the wrong things. It might just mean you're using the wrong tools or too many tools. So we're going to explore how to pair those down and choose the right ones for you. As I mentioned earlier, my process usually goes sketchbook, photo, procreate, then Illustrator. Your process may end up looking different than mine, and that's okay. But when we're starting out, you can follow along with mine, and then if you feel like something I do doesn't fit what you do, feel free to change it at any point. My process works for me, but I would never claim that it's the perfect process. Recognize that everybody's process is personal to them and the art that they want to make. So this course is just aimed at helping you find one that works for you that allows you to create art on a regular, consistent basis. As we're using different tools, try and notice which ones work best for you. You want to pay attention to which brushes feel the most comfortable and work naturally with your drawing style. Also keep in mind which brushes you feel you could use for a large amount of motifs if you're having to draw a large amount of flowers. Which brushes do you realistically think you could use Toolkit should be considered a starting point, not the end of your style. This is simply where you can begin, and as you go, you can adjust as your skills and your interests and your artwork develops. Now that we know what we're looking for, let's go ahead and move on and make sure our motifs are ready to work with. 5. Motif Preparation: So for this exercise, the Canvas size in Procreate isn't a huge deal. So I have just a screen size document open up here. And so I'm going to open that first, and then up here in the upper left corner, we're going to click on the wrench. I've already taken a picture of my sketchbook, so we're going to go ahead and go through the process of adding that picture onto our first layer here. So I clicked the wrench in the upper left corner. Now I'm going to click Add. I'm going to click Insert Photo because I took the picture on my iPad. I had taken the picture on my phone or any other device and maybe sent it to either a Dropbox or a Google Drive, you would click Insert File, and then you would have access to that. But I'm going to go ahead and click Insert Photo. And I'm going to click this first one here. And there's our image of my motifs that you saw me drawing earlier. I'm going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit. I want to be able to see my whole canvas so I can make sure this fits well. One of the things I like to do Procreate will crop anything that you release that's off the canvas. So one of the things I like to do is I will use that function to crop images that have a little extra space. So I'm gonna bring this one up to the top. Drop that there. I'm gonna pick it up again. Now I've cropped that image a little bit, just a little bit cleaner. I'm going to size this up. I'm gonna fit that as much as possible. There you go. That looks good. Once I have my photo placed, I can go ahead and come up into my layers panel and click on the N, and I'm going to go ahead and drop down the opacity to about with about 60%. I think that'll be good. Doesn't need to be perfect, just in that ballpark. Now I have that set. I'm gonna go ahead and lock this layer. I am one of those artists that is prone to drawing on reference layers or layers in general that you don't want to draw on. I'm gonna draw on them. So to avoid that, I'm gonna go ahead and lock this layer. So that way, if I do start to draw on this image, it will notify me. And I'm going to go ahead and add in a new layer. I'm gonna find a pretty neutral brush to use for this exercise. And I'm actually You know what? I'm gonna actually use this one. This is a brush pack that I bought from Jazza studios on YouTube. They made a giant brush pack. It has a ton of different brushes and textures and all sorts of really fun things that I enjoy using. One of the ones I enjoy the most is this construction pencil. It's basically like one of those blue pencils that you would get for sketching your rough drafts. So I'm going to go and use that. All right. So now I have my brush selected, and I have my canvas here. Going to go and bring the brush size down just a little bit. I'm going to start with these three lines in the corner. I made these three lines with the intention of testing brush width. So I'm going to bring this down fairly low so I can see what the smallest one is like. And that is I'm not even sure you can see that. You can. But it's basically invisible. That is a very, very fine line. So we're going to drag that up. Just a smidge. Also these are for my references, so they don't need to be the exact sizes of my actual brush experiments will be. I just want them to be some variation in them. All right. I got those three done. I'm also not going to save sizes right now with brushes. As we get into experimenting with linework and stuff, if you find a specific size of brush that you like to use, you should feel free to save that size or bookmark. And if you don't know how to do that, I will show you how to do that in later lessons when we get there. Alright, I'm going to come in here. I'm going to draw some of these smaller elements that I drew. And then some of these bigger ones, I have some of these little they're like cattail shapes. And again, I'm not trying to add any more style than what my rough drafts have down currently. Right now, I'm just I'm getting my rough drafts basically transferred onto Procreate. You're welcome, too. If you don't want to do this process and you want to just basically do your test draw your test sheets directly from the image of your sketchbook, you can do that for each brush that we experiment, and you can skip this part if you've already got your image added. I'm doing this because when I drew in my sketchbook, I had some images that ended up kind of cramped together, and I would like to take the opportunity to adjust those maybe and give them just a little bit more breathing room on my page. So now I got these cat tails. I don't want to forget to draw the stems for each one. I almost thought I was done and then didn't have the stems drawn. I go go and come in, and we'll do some wine. I'm gonna keep the shapes simple. I am gonna clean these up a little bit. These ones I got a little wild with when I was drawing them with my pencil. So as I go through, I'm gonna kind of make sure each one is close. I'm making them a little bit more uniform than they were. And I'm also making sure that they're directly across from each other because that was one of the elements I wanted. And then we'll get them all on there. And I hope you're working along with me in tracing your motifs and getting them all transferred down. And if at any point you decide, you know what? Like, you don't want to transfer all your motifs. Maybe you've already decided which three are going to be your final three. You can just transfer those ones into Procreate and move on to the next lesson. It's completely up to you. I'm gonna go ahead and continue tracing my images and getting them laid down here in my Procreate document so they're ready for our brush tests. And you're welcome to just keep working alongside me. No M. Alright, now I have all my motifs drawn. I'm going to go ahead and come back up here and turn off the layer with my image on it. And I'm going to go ahead and do just some minor minor tweaks and moving some motifs around just to make sure they have enough room. So when I'm tracing them, I'm not accidentally tracing on top of each other. The one that I'm trying to make some room for is this little one down here 'cause there's a lot of it's kind of cramped, so I'm gonna bring this up. Move that there. I think I'm gonna move this flower. Just center that a little bit. I'm grab a leaf and move that. Perfect. Okay. I'm gonna grab that one and move it down just to smh. I'm gonna bump these ones. Once I have them all moved around. So everybody has its own little kind of breathing room. I think that looks good. Alright, now that I have this guide built and I have my motifs laid out in a way that I want them, I'm going to go ahead and actually export this as a JPEG so that I always have my original guide sheet. So if something happens down the road, I need my original guide sheet, something happens and it gets messed up. I can come back here and I can bring this actually, I'm going to do a PNG. That way I can bring the PNG back in if I need it. So we'll go and click on the wrench or go to share. I'm going to do a PNG. And then I'm just going to click Saved Image. Or save image. Sorry. Alright. I got it in there now, and we're ready to go ahead and move forward. If you would prefer to save a version that doesn't have a background, you can go and turn off the background and then export your PNG, and it will just be your guides. But that's up to you. You can do whichever one you prefer. Alright, now that we got those all ready to go, it's up to you whether or not you keep your original image in here. I'm going to choose to delete mine just because I prefer to keep my layers as clean as possible, and I am done with the original image. So I'm gonna go ahead and swipe it I can't delete it because it's locked right now, so I'm going to go ahead and swipe it again, unlock, and then I can swipe and delete, and now it's gone. Before I lock my guide, I'm going to go ahead and come in here and click on the N and then we'll go and drop down the opacity. I like that. I think that looks good. And then we'll go ahead and lock our guide layer. We can go ahead and click the add new layer button so that we have our first layer for our first line work brush. The first brush I'm going to use is called syrup. It's actually from the old Procreate library, it's an inking pen. So I have that selected here, and I'm going to go ahead and come into my layers. I'm going to rename my layer to syrup so that I know what brush I'm using on that layer. So click on layer, click Rename. So. Alright, so that layer is ready for us to start testing the surrep brush on. I'll also be using a black ink for the test, and I'm going to keep that color the same. I plan on vectorizing at the end of this, and I find that black vectorizes the best when it has, like, a black and white contrast. So that's my preferred color. You're welcome to use other colors because, again, this is about finding your process. So if you have a set of colors that you already work within, feel free to use those colors as you go forward. If you don't, you can use black or you can use another color experiment and find what you enjoy using the most. Have our guide layer all set up and our first brush picked out. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson and get into experimenting. 6. Linework Brush Test #1: Alright. We have our page all set up, so I'm going to go ahead and move on to using our first brush. The first one I chose to test out is the syrup brush. This is one that I have used before, so I have a little experience with it, but it is a very clean brush. It's pretty controlled. I did want to show something that a setting that I tend to adjust with pretty much any brush I use because I have shakier hands when I'm drying, so I will adjust the stabilization for each brush that I use. So the stabilization currently on this one is about 30%. I might pull that up just a little bit. I'm going to bump it up to 40 and see what that does. Sometimes, if it's a little bit too much, I can back it off, but that's where we're going to start first. This brush should be a good baseline for us as we move into brushes that have more texture and variation in them. So I'm going to go ahead and start with these three line widths at the bottom. I have it set relatively small, so we'll go and test that out. So I like that for my first test line. So I'm going to go ahead and save this width so that I can reference it later. So over here on the little size adjuster, I'm going to click on it. I'm going to hit Add. And now that little bar appears, that will mark on there where this size is so I can return to it. So let's go and pick a midpoint. Feel like that's a great midpoint? This brush gets relatively large. I don't want to work huge because I don't usually work on very large canvases, so I don't need a giant brush, but for the largest setting, we will bump it up a little bit and see what that gives us. And I like how this kind of shows the variation of how it starts out thin and then gets fatter as you draw with it. So I'll go ahead and save that size as well. If at any point you decide you don't want one of these sizes or you want to change it and remark it, you can just click on it again, and there's a minus sign. Once you cook the minus sign and it'll disappear. Alright, we'll go and move on to some of these other motifs here. I'm going to come from the small motifs. I'm going to go ahead and bump my brush back down to the small one. We'll see how that works. I like the stabilization of the brush that I bumped up. I don't really think I need to change that at all. We'll do this one down here. This one has some round elements on it, which are nice. I can test it round tear drops. As I'm drawing with it, I'm just going to think about how easy is it to draw with? Is it creating the shapes I need it to create without me having to manually adjust it or constantly redraw, for me, that stabilization setting, bumping that up usually helps me not have to redraw things as many times as I generally do. That's a little tip I want to pass on to anyone who's watching the class. I think I'm going to move up to this little cattail one because it's kind of a a wonky little shape, and I want to play around with this. One of the things I'm noticing about this brush is that it is very pressure sensitive. So as you can see, like, when I first start out, it's very small cause I'm not pushing down as much as I push down. I will give me some variation. So that is nice. I do like that in a brush because you can start to get some line weight variation without having to, like, go back in. Trace. The only downside I find, especially for me personally, is that I tend to be a heavy handed drawer, and so even brushes that have pressure sensitivity tend to come out pretty thick when I'm using them because I have a hard time drawing lately, so it's something I'm working on. It's something I try and remind myself of as I'm drawing and to remember to let my line weight vary and let my pen do some of that work for me. But I don't always remember. All right. That one came out a little bit little wonkier than I like. I like this, like, kind of thinner at the top look that I'm getting for these stems. So I'm gonna go and keep doing that. I come through all of these. And you should be also just experimenting with the brush that you chose and your motifs and just kind of thinking about how is it feeling in your hand? Is it easy to draw with? Do you like the lines that you're getting? I really like this. One of the thoughts I'm already having is that this is my thinnest setting that I save, and I already feel like, personally, this is more of a medium line weight for me. So in that case, I think what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to get rid of the biggest line weight that I save. And I'm gonna come down here. I'm gonna actually come down to the bottom and see what that gives me real quick. You know, it's a little bit lighter than I want to. So here, I'm gonna get rid of this one. Yeah, 'cause that's coming out just a hair. It's just coming out a little bit too heavy for me, so I'm gonna ahead and get rid of the lightest one that I have too. I'm just gonna drop it just a tiny, tiny bit. It was a very small adjustment, but I do feel like it makes a noticeable difference in the line weight. So I'm gonna go ahead and say this is my smallest I think I might save that as my biggest. And I might just skip a medium. Yeah, we're going to add that medium back in. That's roughly where I was before. Alright, so now I have my three new line weights for this brush that I think I prefer. So I'm gonna go to the smallest one now and experiment with that. That's much better. This is going to give me a lot more control on smaller motifs like these leaves and stuff like that. So don't be afraid to adjust your size after you've already maybe picked it. Remember, you're not locked into anything. This is all experimental. With the same small line weight, I'm going to go ahead and come into some of these smaller details I have over here. I'll work on those. I'm going to go ahead and go into this branch that I have here. I'm going to play a little bit around with both the pressure and size of this brush because this brush does have some good variation with the pressure. If I start out really light, I get nice thin, push down. That works really good for these branches that I need to be a little bit thicker. At the base, but I want them to be pretty thin at the tip. So this brush is working well for that. So that's something to know if branches are a common thing that I find myself drawing a lot. Then having a brush with good dynamic pressure is something to keep in mind. I'm just going to go ahead and keep on drawing, and you should keep working on yours. And when we're all finished up, we'll meet up at the end to discuss what we found. No. So as I review my finished sheet, I'm going to just kind of think about how that brush worked for me. Personally, I really enjoyed the brush that I chose. I thought that it wrote very smoothly, especially with the stabilization increase that I made. I also really liked the dynamic pressure that it had. So I was able to get thinner and thicker parts of the lines without having to switch the actual size of the brush, which I liked a lot. I also feel like it had a good range of sizes. I felt like it could get pretty small, but then it could also get pretty big. I don't think I actually used the largest size that it could get to. So I appreciate that in a brush. Having a lot of variation in size is nice. I'm going to go ahead and keep those things in mind as I move forward and I choose my second brush. For the second brush, we're going to go with something a little bit looser or rougher and see what kind of a result we get then. And so I will see you guys in the next lesson. 7. Linework Brush Test #2: Alright, so for my second brush, I went ahead and I chose a brush that has a little bit of a looser texture to it just to see what kind of variation we get. Since our motifs are going to stay the same, this will give us a chance to really focus on what changes the brush makes to our art as we create it. Alright, so let's go ahead and go into Procreate and add another layer for our new brush. I have my existing layers in there, the one with the motifs on it, and then the first brush that I tested. I went ahead and locked that layer. I did that just to be safe so that I don't accidentally delete it or draw on it. It's just personally, I prefer to do that because I am prone to moving really fast and not always realizing that I deleted a layer. Just to be safe, I got it locked. For this brush, I chose one from the new library. Procreate did a recent update, and they added new libraries. And so this is from the new one, and it's under paints, and it's called Make Peace. So I'm going to go ahead and use that one. And I'm going to do the same thing that I did to the syrup brush. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to go I'm going to up the stabilization just to see. I have done some test drawings with it just to see before I started filming, so I do kind of know how this brush is going to perform, but I'm going to bump up the stabilization just to see what it does differently. So we got our brush picked out. Let's go ahead and rename our layer to the brush name, which is Make piece. Perfect. Make sure we're selecting our layer. Now we're going to go ahead and get started on drawing. I'm going to start with the three lines in the lower left hand corner just to get a feel for the variation and what it looks like. And so, right now, it's already set to a pretty small one, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it there. And we'll see what it gives me. Now we'll go about middle. That is huge, obviously. So let's see how big this one goes. So this is a very large brush at its largest form. I'm not gonna be using it there. So we're probably going to stay in the bottom half, I'm actually thinking. So let's try that one for our thickest. That's about good. I'm going to go ahead and save this one so that I have a visual for where my largest brush size is at. I don't know that I'll save all three, but we'll see. Let's see. See, that ends up actually being about that size. Let's go and get rid of this one. We'll go even smaller for that one. It's like little speckles. I'm gonna actually do two a few goes at the line. There you go. That looks pretty good. I like that. Alright, so we can go ahead and move into the motifs. I am going to bump it up just a tiny bit. Let's see how this works with the smaller motifs. It's actually working better than I thought it would. It is also a square brush, and I don't usually use a lot of square brushes. I tend to use the brushes that are tapered at each end, but that's okay. This is still working. It's very, very patchy, which again, I'm not I'm not making a ruling for or against it. I'm going to work all the way through all the motifs, and then I will kind of review it. Let's see. The other thing to keep in mind, if you are an Illustrator user and you do vectorize your work, vectorizing things will change it as well. So what you get in Procreate is kind of your first draft. And then when you vectorize it, that's your final draft. So that's something else to keep in mind that don't fall too in love with a brush in Procreate, if you're planning on vectorizing it because ultimately it probably won't maintain a lot of what you're seeing in Procreate. It'll maintain the vibe for the most part, but the exactness isn't always translated. I like to just kind of buffer my hopes in that I'm like, oh, I'm excited to see how this is going to turn out, but I'm not, like, really banking on it looking exactly like it did in Procreate. Especially for more textured brushes like this, it can get a little I can get a little crazy when you vectorize these ones, but that's okay. I'm just going to see what this looks like without the blue underneath it. I do like the direction this is going. I'm gonna go ahead and keep going. I know it seems it's a little odd to have such patchy lining, I think, but I'm gonna go ahead and keep moving forward with it. Next up, I'm gonna come up here and do some round elements and see how it functions on a round shape. I also functions pretty well with the like auto snapping shapes that Procreate does. Sometimes that will change, like, the width or the look of a brush when it snaps it into a circle or whatever. And for this one, for the most part, I feel like it's doing a pretty good job of maintaining it, even when I let it snap it into the line or whatever. Alright, let's see how small a circles I can get in here. Is kind of cute. Alright, let's get in here with the branch. I will say this one does not have very much pressure variation. Those are settings, of course, that you can mess with if you like to do that. I'm not a big fan of messing with settings beyond the stabilization setting. So I just kind of put up with how it is. Alright. Getting these leaves all filled in. So as I'm drawing this, I am noticing that it is working a little bit different than the syrup brush from the first go around. It's a little bit harder to work with, but not impossible, so I'm not against it. It's just different. Yes. And these are the kind of things you want to make note of while you're working. Is it easier to work with, more difficult to work with? Are you enjoying yourself while drawing with it? Are you getting frustrated? Because if you're getting frustrated and you're finding yourself like, I don't even want to finish this exercise, then I would go ahead and move on to a different brush, pick something different, it should not frustrate you. It should be more of an exercise of curiosity. And if it isn't drying any excitement out of you while you're using it, then I would say it's probably a good sign that it's not the brush for you. So just go ahead and move on to a different one. Got a flower done there. Let's go ahead and move into. I want to try these little these little motifs. I might have to space them out just a little bit the brush is a little bit thicker. I'm going to make some smaller ones over here. I think I have to go around a couple of times with this one. When it's really small, it's really, really patchy. And I do plan on vectorizing these at some point, so I need them to be somewhat filled in. So I'm going to kind of go through a couple times. Let's try this branch. Just keep tracing like that. Looks pretty good. Got a little crazy here. I'm gonna clean that up. All right. Let's go ahead and see what we got left. We have this big mushroom. Let's go and bump it up. I'm gonna do a slightly bigger outline on this one. Bring it down just a little bit for the stem, but not much. And I'm gonna leave it. I'm gonna leave it kind of big 'cause it's already kind of patchy and this top of this is already kind of like a patchy look, so I'll leave it like that. I'm gonna start coloring these in. I'm not going exactly with the lines this brush is kind of large, and there's a lot of lines. So I'm not sure it'll work, but I am just go to kind of go randomly and fill it in. Alright. Got that mushroom done. Gonna do the frog. Got his eyes done. Let's see if I can get the body done. I have to have to drop this down pretty small. I feel like to be able to do the body. Okay. Okay. This is a trickier brush to work with. I will say that. I can already tell, which is why I tend to gravitate towards smooth brushes like syrup. All right. I just got a few more elements here. I'm going to finish up, and you can go ahead and keep working on your motif sheet as well. If yours is a bigger motif sheet or you're maybe just taking your time. That's totally fine. Keep doing that. And then I will meet you at the end of this lesson when we're all done. Alright, so here's my final sheet with brush number two, and the result is very interesting. It's much different than our first brush that I used. I used to like the look that I got. It is a patchier look than I'm used to. I generally draw with pretty strong line work. So this is a little bit patchier than I'm used to. I'm actually really interested to see what this is going to do in the vectorizing part of this lesson that I'm going to do because I do vectorize my work, and I know it has the potential to change it quite a bit. And so I'm interested to see what this brush looks like when I vectorize so, I'm going to go ahead and move on to a third brush, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we go ahead and pick that out. 8. Linework Brush Test #3: Alright, so I've picked out a third brush. I am I did a bold line first, and then we did a paintbrush last. So I'm going to go with a pencil this go around. I think it'll still give us a rough look, but I think it might be more filled in than what that paint brush did on the last go around. So I went ahead, I added my layer, and I'm going to go ahead and name it. Huntsman is the name of the pencil that I'm going to be using. Again, it's in the new library under pencils Huntsman. Got my layer named, I locked the other layers just to be safe. I got my pencil ready. I got my motifs on the sheet, and now we're ready to go ahead and start drawing. I'm going to go ahead and start in the lower left with our lines. I'm going to bump this up as big as it will go and see how big that is. It's not that big. It doesn't even fill in my test line all the way, so we'll go and drop it to about medium width. Alright and then we'll go as small as it can. That's a very, very, very fine line. So now we're going to bump somewhere between halfway and the lowest one, and we'll go ahead and draw these stars first. Like they're a good test. They're one of the smaller ones, but not the smallest detail I have on the page. And then we'll come up to the cats tails and start filling those in. Again, just making note of how the brush is drying, how the pressure works. Does it have dynamic pressure? The last brush I used, it didn't one does, I believe. That was said with a question mark because I'm not 100% sure. But it does I'm pretty sure it does have a little bit of dynamic pressure going on. I didn't change any settings with this one. I'm just going to see how it works from the get go. I didn't test this brush ahead of time, like I did the other one, so we are seeing its results in real time together. Also, just a reminder, if at any point you decide you picked a brush that just is not working with you and won't work for you. There really is no point in testing it on the whole sheet. If you know that one or two motifs in, go ahead and switch to a different brush. It's okay. If you need to pause the video and start your sheet again, that's fine. I want you to be successful with the brushes that you're choosing, and I don't want you to just, like, force it just to finish the exercise. This is about This is really about you finding tools that will work for you in the long run. And if you're just rushing it and just doing it to get it done, it's not really serving the purpose, so take your time. We'll come up to our most round mushroom up here. I'm going to bump up my width just a little bit. Let's see if I can get. Okay, it does have. There is some dynamic pressure stuff with this one. All right. It's all built in. We'll move over to the bran Oops, move over to the branch. So I can tell you, from the get go. I like this brush much better than our last one. It has a good mix of the pressure dynamic that the first brush had, as well as, like, I feel like I like the roughness of the brush, as well. It's not as smooth as that first brush, but it's not as patchy as the second brush, which is nice, so it's just some of the things I'm noticing as I'm using it. Little mental notes I'm making before we move into our review process. Actually see how these all came out. You can go ahead and keep working on yours. I'm going to keep drawing my motif sheet. Again, take your time. Don't rush yourself. You can pause the video here or you can just keep it running, and then I will see you at the end when we have all of our motifs all drawn. No. No. Yeah. Alright, so here's my final sheet with the pencil brush. This brush, I feel like gave the motifs a rougher quality without being as patchy as the paint brush that we used in the previous round. So that was a nice surprise. Overall, I did like how this one worked. I didn't make any changes to any of the settings. I used it as it was. And I enjoyed it a lot. So now that we have our three line work brushes done, we're going to go ahead and move on to trying out some fill brushes, and then we'll play around a little bit with texture before we compare them all and make our final decision. So I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 9. Fill Test #1: Color Drop: Alright, so we're back here in Procrit, and it's time to start testing some fill brushes to go along with our line work brushes. So I decided to go ahead and work with the syrup line work brush that I worked with earlier. So I have that motif sheet pulled up currently, and I want to show a couple of different ways because I understand that for some of you, maybe coloring in and filling in, painting, all of that isn't really what you're looking for, and you're kind of looking for quick fill ideas. In that case, what I would recommend doing is creating a new layer. You'll bring that down. Below your line work layer. So I'm using my syrup layer, so it's going to go underneath syrup. And then I'm going to click on syrup. And then over here in the list of things third from the bottom, it says reference. I'm going to go ahead and click reference. Let's go to rename this new layer to fill. I'm going to do all my fills on the same layer because I'm not really I'm not going to do the whole thing, so I'm just going to add one layer and I'll just add colors to that layer. So now with that setup, what that's going to allow us to do is that's going to allow us to actually pick some colors and start to drop them into our fill lines. I have a color palette here. You can actually download this color palette in the class resources. So if you don't want to choose your own, you can do that. And I have this one and a few other options for you if you'd like to download them. But I'm going to go ahead and start with this yellow. I'm actually going to lighten up just a little bit. And I'm going to grab it. And just like you would with any other time when you're filling an object, you grab your color from the corner, drag to where you want to fill and drop. I'm going to show you what this looks like in the layer now that we added some color. So as you can see, the color was only added to the new layer that we just added, but it used the syrup line work as a guideline. So we can go ahead and add some other colors. Let's go with this light pink. For this one, I'm going to continue filling at the top, which will then allow me to click each petal, and now we have the flower filled in. I'm going to go with this green color here. We're gonna go and drop it into the leaves. Click continue fill. Let's see if we can fill in all these leaves. Zoom a little bit. Once we're done filling, click the little check box. Let's try these guys too. Make them light blue. But now we've done a few motifs with that style. We can look in our layers, and we can see we can actually look at just the fill. So we have our fills just from the color dropping. If this is a style of color fill that you want to do, totally fine. It's a great way to do it. It's very fast. So you can do that moving forward. And then if you are someone who also does Illustrator, you can go ahead and take that into Illustrator. So if you want to keep going forward with this method, you can actually feel free to fill in your whole sheet or a couple warm motifs, whatever you want to do. And when you're ready, you can move on to the next lesson. If you are a painter or someone who prefers to color in your work, then let's go ahead and move on to choosing another brush. 10. Fill Test #2: Paint Brush: So for the first brush that I'm gonna use to fill in some of the motifs, I'm gonna actually use one that I used for the line work brush, and it was the paint brush that was called, what was it? Let's see. Make piece. That was the one I used on the linework. I'm gonna use that again for paint. If I'm being honest, I didn't really like how it worked for the linework. However, I think I might enjoy it more for filling in and painting like I think it's intended to be used. So that's gonna be the first one I'm gonna use. And I'm gonna go ahead and start with Let's see. Let's go with this green. I'm not coloring this frog. I'm trying to remember the brush width of this one. It's a little bit big. That's okay. I'm not too worried about going outside the lines. I am This is just an exercise after all. Not the end of the world. I can also clean it up. Maybe you decide that coloring outside the lines is part of your style, and you like that. So I might go through and clean up just a little bit. Link in the eyes and right around here around the face. Maybe some of these bigger aerials I'll get as well. Let me get this one here. All right, so I got that filled in. Let's go to go with a lighter color and a smaller brush. Men see. Ah, yes. This one is really patchy when it's small. I forgot about that. So, in that case, let's see if I can bump it up a little bit. I'm not really seeing shows up a little bit. Not really. Let's see here. I'm gonna bump the brightness up. Let's see what this looks like. This is not showing up at all. Alright, so I'm gonna switch. I'm gonna go with this Ghost hawk brush. I'm just gonna go through with this brush and just do some highlights and shadows with it. I'm not gonna actually switch brushes. I'm just gonna keep using the same pen brush. M Take your time while you're filling in and drawing. There's no rush. Play around with it. See what you like. So I think for this mushroom, I'm going to do a mix of the first technique with the dropping of the color along with painting. So I'm gonna start off with the make piece brush. I'm gonna go ahead and fill in the cap here. I'm gonna bump it up a little bit. Gosh, this brush is huge. A lot bigger than I met. Okay, we'll just do that. That works. We'll just clean it up a little bit here with my eraser. I'm going to go ahead and go with this dark purple for underneath using the same brush. But in a smaller size, 'cause that is way too big. So we'll just fill this in. And again, when I make this brush small, it does get patchy, but I do like the texture that's coming with it, so I guess I'm putting up with it a little bit. All right. I am going to clean up right here on the stem I think I want the stem color to come all the way up. Alright. And what should the stem color be? I think I'm gonna go with this kind of Biji mushroom color. Once I get that filled in, I'm going to actually switch what I'm doing. I need to pick this lighter pink color. And now we're gonna drop that into the circles. Okay. Not too bad. Leave that one. 11. Fill Test #3: Oil Pastel: Let's go ahead and go into, let's see. Maybe paints. Another paint. Or a marker. Let's go with a marker. I'm gonna go with what was that? I'm gonna go with this flin marker. Let's try that one out and see what it does. Ooh, that's big. Interesting. I think this color is too dark, so I'm gonna actually lighting this green just a minute. Just try that. This marker kind of gives me like it reminds me of when your marker is kind of dying. It's kind of the look I'm getting from it. I don't think I like it. I'm going to abandon this brush, and we're gonna pick a different one. Let's try this one. I'm not a fan of markers. Okay. Not a big fan of markers, so I'm gonna go ahead and move on. I'm gonna choose. Let's try one of these pastels. Oh, I kind of like that. Let's go back to that green that we had. It kind of gives a gives a very interesting texture, but it fills in really, really easily. It actually feels it kind of feels very buttery, like an oil pastel. Is kind of what it's reminding me of. Almost like if you push really hard with oil pastel, how it lays down really heavily. That's kind of what this is doing. But if you're light, it lays down a lot lighter. Okay. So here, let's play with this. I kind of like this brush. So I'm gonna fill these in solid first with this dark green color. I'm actually gonna bump up my size also. All right. I'm going to leave the roughness on the outside of the line work. I'm okay with that, again, we're playing with styles, we're seeing what we like. So not everything has to be perfectly in the line or outside of it. So this one I'm gonna be a little rough and let the color fall outside. And now I have a lighter green. I'm gonna come in here with the same brush. I'm gonna drop it down. I go really, really lightly with this along. I'm gonna go along these stem lines with the light green. And I'm making sure not to push too hard because as I mentioned, this one is sensitive to pressure. And if I push hard, it's gonna fill in a really, really strong line, and I'll lose all of that texture. And I like the texture, so I do like this pastel. I enjoy how it's working. As I mentioned, it is very, like, buttery. I feel like I can almost feel how it would work if it was on real paper. And I feel like it's very similar to my experiences with oil pastel, so I kind of like that. I always like a brush that could kind of mimic the real the real thing, especially if you're, like, a traditional medium artist where you're maybe you make oil pastel work normally. Sometimes I feel like the brushes you can use, it's like watercolor brushes aren't always like this isn't really giving the same effect that watercolor does. But I like this one a lot. Alright. I think I'm gonna go ahead and stop with those there. I think I will do one of these mushrooms. I'm gonna go with this mushroom here. And we're going to go ahead and stay with the same brush. I still have that same pastel brush, and I'm going to color in the stem first. And then I think I'm going to add some details here. I think I'm gonna go with the really dark brown for the cap, but I'm gonna lighten it just a little bit. And then I'm gonna actually go, let's see. I'm gonna bump this pastel brush up, and then I'm gonna go really, really light because I'm trying to maintain as much of this texture as I can. So we're gonna do that, let's go ahead and switch to round one, let's switch to a different lighter brown. I'm gonna do the same thing. This is our stem brown. Just kind of coming back in with that. And I'm still staying very, very, like, Oops to maintain that texture. Alright. And then let's I think I, I have a good medium brown here, which I'm gonna actually darken just a smidge. We'll come in with that one. And I'm just kind of layering these browns to see what I can get. Go back to the darker brown. I'm actually going to fill in this large mushroom in the corner, too, but I'm going to do the same drop method as I did earlier. I'm gonna do that because I think I'm going to play around with some texture brushes on this mushroom specifically, 'cause I'm gonna take it into Illustrator and vectorize it in a little bit, and I kind of want to see what some texture brushes might look like. 12. Fill Test #4: Texture Brush: For this one, I dropped some color in there. I'm gonna pick some I have been using I want to clarify when I say texture brushes because I have been using brushes that have a lot of texture in them. But I mean when I say a texture brush, I mean something that makes, like, a spray, a splatter. I have a cloud brush that I've used as a texture brush before, like, not in a cloud context, but I vectorized a cloud and used it for other things. So for my texture brushes, I'm going to use this, what is it? Raglan speckled one first. Have my mushroom that I drew, and I'm going to go ahead and come in here. Let's go with this dark brown. I'm also going to clip to my fill layer to make it a little bit easier to draw on here. I'm gonna go ahead and just draw along the stem here. Put some texture down, and then we'll switch to a lighter color. Oh, that's the same color. That. Perfect. I'm gonna take this blue, and then I'm just gonna darken it a little bit. I pull a bit along the bottom here. Also gonna go along the top here. And then we'll go with the teal. We'll do the same thing. We're gonna darken the teal up a little bit. And then we'll come glow and fill in with the same speckled brash. I'm going to add some of this texture up here to this one also. This mushroom, we'll go with the same dark color along one side. And then we'll go with the really light white on the other side. So I think that's enough. I have some texture brushes and fill brushes and line brushes that I've tried out, and I'm enjoying the result I'm getting. I'm going to go ahead and move on to my next lesson, where we're going to kind of compare all the brushes and make some decisions to build our toolkit. I'll see you guys there. 13. Review Linework Brushes: So I have my linework brushes done, my fill brushes, and I experimented a little bit with texture. It's time to start reviewing and deciding which brushes I want to use going forward. I'm gonna go ahead and start by looking at my line work brushes first without the fill, so I went ahead and turned off my fill layer. I think what I'm gonna do is I want to be able to see all of my lineworks together at once. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go through, and I'm going to go ahead and turn them all on and unlock them. I'm gonna select one of them, and I'm going to go ahead and swipe to the right on each one, and I'm going to group them. I'm going to duplicate my group. And then we'll go and turn off one of the groups. I'm doing this so that I can preserve my original sketches. I want to be able to shrink these down and put them all on one page so I can compare them easily. But in order to do that, I have to change the size. And in Procreate, if you change the size of it, especially shrinking down, you will affect it permanently. If you shrink it down, make it big, shrink it down, make it big, it will start to affect the quality of your image. So I just try and be very careful when I'm doing that type of stuff, and I usually duplicate the layer that I plan on shrinking. I've duplicated the group, turned one off. Let's go ahead and select the groups that are on, and we'll go and shrink them down. That seems good enough. I think I'll be able to fit all three of them there. Let's go ahead and move them. This is the huntsman. This is the pencil that I used. Here's Make piece, the paint brush. And the one over there is the syrup. Brush, which was the first one we did, and also the one we had the layer we used for our fill experiment. So now I can kind of look at it. It's very interesting. It actually kind of looks like they are almost like copies of the syrup one. They get a little bit duller on each one. While I'm looking at these, some of the things I want to consider are what line brush felt the most natural in my hand while I was using it? Which ones were the easiest to use? Which ones gave me a result I was looking for? Did any of them provide any stumbling blocks that made it difficult to draw or made me give up on them completely? For me, personally, when I look at these, the ones that worked the most naturally for me are the syrup brush and the huntsman brush. I really enjoyed those too. I thought they wrote really well. They had some good pressure dynamics, and overall, I like the result that I got from both of them. Huntsman, I really like the pencil look. I enjoy that really rough line. I do like strong bold lines in certain contexts. And in a lot of cases for my own personal style, I will do a mix of these two. I will do a mix of rough pencil lines and smoother bold graphic lines. So just right off the bat, those are the two that I'm drawn to. Far as Make Peace goes, a little bit of an ironic name. I am not at peace with this brush. I found it very difficult to work with. It is very patchy when it's small, so you kind of have to work with it on really large scales. Which it is a paint brush, so I think it's intended to be painted with. I will get into how it performed as a paint brush on the fill layers. But for now, as far as a line work brush, I'm not a fan. I will say that I'm just going to put it out there right now that this is this is not one that I will use going forward. So I can go ahead and cut this one out, and I'm going to go ahead and turn it off because I don't need it. I'm not going to use it. So I'm going to go ahead and look at these two now on the page. So, again, like I mentioned, I do tend to use a mix of really bold lines and rough lines. I like how rough lines vectorize when you take them into Illustrator, which is why I tend to prefer to work with this type of brush. You can touch to see, sorry. I don't know if you can tell that. It's a little bit starting to blur already because I shrunk it down and made it bigger. I don't know if you can actually see that on camera or not. So for me personally, I am going to actually choose to keep both of these line brushes because as part of my style, I like to mix rough and smooth. I am going to keep both of these as potential line work brushes in my tool kit. So I'm going to go ahead and leave them on the page as they are, and we're going to go ahead and go back to the larger versions of them so we can look at what they look like with 14. Review Fill Brushes: Now I have just the syrup layer on. I'm going to go ahead and turn on our fill layers so we can see what it looks like with color, which we've already seen, this is the layer that I used while I was filling it. I do like how these turned out. I would like to see how these fills and textures work with the Huntsman linework, which I also saved. I would like to just point out that I did sketch these two separately, obviously, so the sketches may not line up perfectly. Therefore, the color may not line up perfectly. But we'll go ahead and turn off syrup and turn on Huntsman, which is our pencil. Then I can start to look and see what kind of result I got in this. You can see as I mentioned, the flour isn't quite isn't quite perfect, but that's okay. I can still get the gist of it all. I'm going to duplicate the fill within this group, and then I'm going to put one under each layer. So I have one under Huntsman, one under syrup. And now we can go. I have this fill selected, so I'm going to go ahead and swipe to the right to select the huntsman on top. Shrink it down. Then we're going to take the syrup layer, turn it on, swipe right on the fill below it. I shrink it down to this corner. Alright, so now I have my fill layers turned on, and this allows me to see what they look like with both of the linework. Again, as I mentioned, the lips are a little bit different on the frog, so the lines aren't matching up perfectly. But as I'm looking through at the fill colors and the texture and all of that, I want to kind of ask myself, which combinations look the most natural? Which ones are I drawing to the most? And which ones do I think I could repeat on motifs over and over again? And as I look at this, I do again, I'm drawn to a few different things. I like the I like the ease of the reference drop in fill. That's a very, very easy way to get color down, especially if you're going to take it in to vectorize it in Illustrator. I mean, there are I just want to throw this out there. If you are an Illustrator user, there are ways to add your color in Illustrator. So there are times I only do linework in Procreate. Then I take that linework into Illustrator and I use the I believe it's paint. I can't quite remember. I think it's paint bucket. I know the keyboard shortcut is K, but I'll use that to add color. So that's also an option. Again, this is all part of your process and what you like to do. If you like to add color in Illustrator, that's great. Go ahead and do that. If you want to add your color in Procreate and then take it into Illustrator, this is how you do that as well. So Again, coming back to this, I really liked the fill and drop reference option. That was really great. I'm also really drawn to this mushroom over here. I really like this texture of the oil pastel that I got. I really enjoyed that. I like the highlight that it did. I also like the general blending that all of this blending I was able to get without using the smudge brush at all, which I really like. I do like this mushroom with the speckled texture that I added. It's kind of hard to see on that one. I think it's easier to see on this one, the speckled texture here. I do like this So I do think the texture is something that I probably will take into my toolkit, as well. So as far as building a toolkit with the brushes I use, I would probably stick with the two linework brushes that I talked about. I would keep both of those and put them into the toolkit. That way, I have the option to kind of switch between a rough line or a smooth line depending on the project that I'm working on. Or the fill techniques, personally, the ones that I enjoyed doing were the dropping of the color. I liked using my linework as a reference and then dropping color in to get a nice solid base. And then I really like how this stem turned out. I like the pastel, the oil pastel brush and how it works. So I think I would move forward using that as well to add highlights and shadows to, like, the flower over here or something like that. Things I've already added solid color too. Similarly, the texture brush, I would continue to use that going forward. So I think I will also add it to my tool kit in Procreate, so that way I have them built and ready to go. 15. Build Your Toolkit: As far as building the tool kit in Procreate so that you don't have to hunt for the brushes every time you want to use them, we're going to go up to our brush here and we're going to click on it. In the upper right hand corner, there's a plus sign. You're going to go and click that. It gives you a few options. You can create a new brush or create a new set, or you can import brushes if you've got maybe free brushes from somewhere or bought brushes. We're gonna go and click Create New set. Now we're going to name it. I'm gonna name it my brushes. That way, I know these are the brushes that I curated and put in here. As far as putting the brushes in here, we're going to start with this pastel that I used here. This is the one that I used for adding the shadows and highlights. So I'm just going to go ahead and long click on this brush. One of the options is duplicate. Click that. Now I have two of them. I'm going to go ahead and click on it again. Now I can drag it up to my brushes. And drop it in my brushes. And now I have my oil pastel in there. You can if you want to move your brushes, you can. So I could drag the original brush and I could put it in here. That is an option. I choose not to do that because sometimes when I'm following along with someone else and they reference a brush, I want to be able to go find that brush. And if I've moved it or renamed it, then I don't know what brush they're talking about anymore. So, I like to always duplicate and then move them into my set. So let's go ahead and go into pencils. And we'll get Huntsman. Here it is. Long tap, duplicate. Grab the one with number two. Bring it up, drop in my brushes. Double check. It's in there. It is. All right. I'm gonna go ahead and get the speckle brush as well. This is the texture brush that I use. So we'll go ahead and long tap and duplicate. Going to get back up into my brushes. Alright, so now have my rough linework brush, my texture brush, and one of my fill brushes. Technically, my other fill brush isn't a brush. It's more of a technique, but that's okay. I have my main fill brush that I'm going to use in here. All right, so I need to add my syrup brush. And my syrup brush comes from the old Procreate library. So I'm going to actually have to duplicate it over there and then bring it into the new library because that's where I set up We'll go ahead and click on the arrow up here. Back to libraries. We'll go to the classic library. You can see this is a set that I've already created called My go tos, and it has a lot of different brushes that I've collected throughout the year. Syrup is one of those ones that lives in here. It is from the old library, but it lives in here. I'm going to go ahead and click on here. We're going to duplicate it. I'm going to grab the syrup too. Make sure I can drag it. Drop down the arrow, click back to libraries, click on the new library, and drop it in our new brushes. I went ahead and reorganize them, so I have them buy my smooth line brush, my rougher line brush, my fill brush, and then my texture brush. Now that I have my kit picked out and built in Procreate, I also want to make just some notes about my process. Personally, the way my process is starting to look is that I will sketch things out in my sketchbook first. Take a picture of that and bring it into Procreate. I will trace my sketches in Procreate to get my linework using one of my line work brushes. Then I will use the reference and drop fill method to add color to my linework. Using my other fill brush and texture brush, I can then add shadows, highlights, and texture. And then from there, I'm ready to actually export into Illustrator, where I will then vectorize. Rising will ultimately have the final say of what my art looks like in Illustrator. But these are the tools that I have chosen to set me up for what I think will give me the best result. With all of our decisions made, we can go ahead and move on to our last step in this exercise where we're going to go ahead and redraw three of these motifs. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Create Final Motifs: Fill: The brush test helped us make some decisions, and now we're going to test those decisions out with our motif sheet. I have more motifs on here than you need. I think originally I said three. That's totally fine. You can pick three of yours. I have a few more because I'm going to take these into Illustrator for the next lesson, and I wanted a few more options to demonstrate within there. But you're welcome to just do three, so that way you have your project to submit to the gallery, but it's completely simplified my motif sheet to just the ones that I'm going to use, but I am still in my original documents. So I have all of the original layers that I created. So I think what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go to the gallery and duplicate this document, so that way I can just have the layers that have the motifs I'm going to work with. So to do that, we're going to go ahead and click on Gallery in the upper left. Then from here and the upper right, you're going to click Select. We'll click on the document that we want to duplicate and I'm going to hit Duplicate. Now we have two of those. I'm going to go ahead and click the checkbox. So I'm going to go ahead and open this one up, and from there, I can go ahead and delete all the layers we're not going to use. Oh, that one's locked. So I got to slide it, unlock it, and then I can delete it. You'll notice I have two layers still. This one, the bottom one has smaller motifs on it. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to take these in to vectorize them in Illustrator, so I wanted some larger and smaller motifs to use for that. I am going to keep them on two separate layers. And I do that as part of my process because I want to be able to vectorize things that are small on a different level than bigger items if so larger items I generally want heavier line weight, and so I can just go with the 128 threshold. But with smaller details, I may want lighter line weight. And so I want to pull that threshold down. I like to keep some things separated. And so when I'm drawing my linework, that is something I keep in mind is what threshold do I want to vectorize this? If it's going to be a higher, lower or standard, and then I draw those linework on that layer accordingly. So I have two in here. I have one that's going to be vectorized probably at the default 128, and then my lower one, which I'll probably drop down. Again, that's going to be in the next lesson if you are an Illustrator user. If you're not, you can just disregard what I just said. Let's go ahead and get into filling these. So I'm going to add two layers since I have two linework layers. I'm going to go ahead and add those. One is going to go underneath my top layer. The other one is going to go underneath my small motifs layer. So now that I got my fill layers added, I'm going to go ahead and change this top one to a reference. I can only do this with one of the layers at a time, so I'm going to go ahead and just do the larger motif layer first and keep the smaller motif layer turned off. You click on our layer for fill and then our brush. And I'm going to start dragging some colors in here and dropping them into the frog. I want to have a lot of brown variations in this pattern or in this palate. So I'm going to add a couple of browns, I think. I'm going to give myself, like, a nice midtone. Add that one. All right, this one's going to be a little intense to fill. So let's get in here and get all these hops. Did not mean to click the line. I'm going to go and switch to a brush and select my fill layer here and fill in some little gaps that I see of white. The paint drop color didn't quite get everything, so Alright. That's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and drop some colour in this mushroom down here. And for the cap, I'm gonna go with this wren. I'm gonna put the yellow here. Perfect. What do we have left? This mushroom. I'm gonna go with the I think I'm gonna go with this rust color for this mushroom, and we'll go with a lighter one for the dots. It looks good. I'll go with this one. Go this one here. Actually I'm gonna take this darker tan, and then I'm just gonna trace over. This one. You can just stick with an outline. For now. Alright, let's go ahead and bring in our small motifs. We're gonna add another layer underneath the small motif layer. And now we're gonna change the reference layer to the small motifs. Here go, select fill. I want a blue. I think I need a good blue. Let me find one. I like this one here. I can do some little blue details. I like that for these dots. Alright, that one's not filling in. So turn that off, go to our brush. Perfect. All right. Got those filled in. Now let's go and switch to this yellow. Perfect. For this one, I think I'm going to go back to that same blue. So it's going turn to the previous blue. Let you zoom in here. All right, we're going to start dropping that into these little leaves. So I have my base layer of color laid down now. I can go ahead and move into adding some texture with my pastel brush that I saved. 17. Create Final Motifs: Texture: Just like my linework, I like to keep my texture layer separate from my base color layer. I'm going to go ahead and add in two more layers, one above this fill layer, and one above this fill layer, and we're going to go ahead and start with this top one because I'm going to work on this frog here. Then we're just going to go and start adding in some texture and color. And you can feel free to start doing the same thing on yours. With your motifs, welcome to do as much or as little detail as you want. Again, this is an exercise. This is intended to be fun and relaxing and a way for you to be able to experiment and find things that work for you and hopefully start on a path towards discovering your long term style. Got that added. We'll come on down here. I'm leave that mushroom as it is, but I'm gonna come and do this one here. Just add a little bit. Almost like a little shadow highlight situation. I'm going to do the same thing here. This one I'm actually going with the darker brown on this side to match the top of it, and up in the top, I'm going to come back to this tan this up. Oops. I'm going to do something real quick. I'm gonna clip this to my fill layer. All right. All right, so that looks good. I have another texture brush that I'm actually going to use the little speckled one that I saved. I'm gonna use that for this flour. And for the color, I'm going to take that same yellow color, but I'm gonna actually darken it. So then I go kind of small. Too small. Too big. There you go. Perfect. There you go. And we'll go back to our pastel brush and add some texture to the flour. Petals. This mushroom cap here. Let's see. I'm gonna use the darker one, I think. Then on these little spots, I'm going to put some textured. All right. I think for these leaves also, I'm going to do just for the really light brushing of this pastel trying not to go too hard because this pastel is prone to laying a lot down if I push too hard. So I'm okay with on on these smaller leaves. I am intentially making them more heavy. But the bigger leaves I'm trying to go a little bit light around. So at this point, the question is whether or not our motifs are working together and whether or not they could work in a collection. I feel like personally, what I got as a result does work together, and I feel like I could use that going forward in a collection. If that's also the case for you, if you got a motif sheet that you're very satisfied with, congratulations. I'm excited for you. Just remember it's not a permanent toolkit and always spend time experimenting and trying new things. It's important as an artist for your style and also just for your creativity and inspiration. If you are someone who created a motif sheet that you are not satisfied with and you didn't like the results from tool kit, please don't be frustrated. I understand the frustration, and I want to encourage you to not give up and to take a step back and just evaluate what it was that wasn't working. Was it a linework brush? Was it a fill brush? Was it too much texture, not enough texture, maybe the wrong kind of texture? Just take some time to think about those things and kind of ask yourself those questions. And maybe you need to cut one of the tools out of your tool kit. Maybe there's one that you tried out that you were kind of on the fence about and you ended up cutting it at first. Maybe you want to add that back in and try experimenting with it again. Don't give up, keep experimenting, keep trying new things. You will find something that works for you. And eventually, your style will start to emerge. So don't give up, keep at it. And I promise you'll there. Completed motifs, you can go ahead and submit those to the project gallery. I'm really excited to see the work that you guys created, and I would love to hear any feedback that you have about your experiments, what worked, what didn't work, any roadblocks you ran into or anything that surprised you that you really enjoyed. I would love to hear all of that from you guys. I'm going to move on to the next lesson, which is an Illustrator extension. If you're an Illustrator user, I would love to see you in there. We're going to talk a little bit about vectorizing our motifs, how that will change them and also the best ways to try and maintain some of what you've created and Procreate when you vectorize an Illustrator. So I'll see you guys there. 18. Optional: Illustrator Extension: Alright, so to move this into Illustrator, we're going to have to get it into a file format that Illustrator can open. So we're going to go ahead and come up here and click on the wrench in the upper left hand corner. Make sure you're on share, and then we're going to choose PSD. That's a photoshop format. And so Illustrator's able to open that. You can save it in your Dropbox or locally on your iPad or wherever you prefer to save it. I use Google Drive. I'm going to go ahead and save it in there, and then we will go ahead and move into Illustrator and vectorize our motifs and see what we get. So we'll go ahead and start by opening up our Photoshop document you open a Photoshop document, it's going to pop up this window import options here. You'll want to click on Convert layers to objects and click Okay. Alright, so now we have our document open here. Now I have my Motif document open. I'm going to go ahead and start vectorizing layer by layer. So if I go into my layers panel here, I'm going to see I have a background layer. This is my large motif linework, my large motif fill my small motif linework and my small Motif fill. Background image I actually don't need, so I'm going to go ahead and delete that layer right now because need it. And then I'm going to go through. I'm going to turn off the small and I'm going to turn off the fill layers for the large. I'm going to start with the linework of my large motifs. And now I can go ahead and click on the motif layer. And then click I'm going to come over to my side panel here and open up Image Trace. If you don't have image trace in your side panel here, you can get it through your Windows option up here. Just click Window, scroll down to Image Trace and click it. Mine has a check next to it because it's already visible. If yours doesn't have a check next to it, go ahead and click on it. It should pop up a window. If it's a loose window, if it comes up and it looks like this, and you're like, but I want it in my side panel. Drag it over to your side panel, and you can just drop it in there where you want. So Alright, we got image trace selected. Right now it's not giving me an option to trace because I don't have my motif layer selected, so let's go ahead and click on the motif layer. Now it'll give me an option to trace. This is my boldest line. It's also my largest motif. So I'm going to go ahead and go with the logo preset option that they have in Illustrator. The logo always defaults to color. I do like to change it to black and white, even if it's still worked fine. I always change it to black and white. And I mentioned earlier that I will likely keep this threshold at 1:28. That is the default when you're image tracing. And in general, it's a decent default for me. I don't mind it. As you can see, nothing really changed a whole lot from this brush, which is my goal. I want to have predictable artwork from Procreate to Illustrator. If my artwork is changing drastically from its original form to what Illustrator is putting out, I personally don't want that unless the final result is something crazy good. I'm like, This is everything I wanted to. And maybe that is the case that you're in, and that's totally fine. For me, personally, I like to try and preserve as much of my artwork from Procreate in Illustrator. So using a nice bold graphic liner does that really well. I do use another rough liner, similar to the pencil huntsman brush that we were using in this exercise. And in that case, it does give me a rougher line vectorized, but still pretty clean, very similar to what I'm getting right now. So, this looks pretty good. I'm not going to make any changes to it. I'm not going to change the threshold at all. I think the only thing I'm going to do is I'm going to ignore white. Since I do have my own fill colors, I'm going to go ahead and ignore that. And now we can go ahead and expand. It's going to turn on our fill layer for our large motifs and make sure we have it selected. And then we'll go in here to Image Trace. Right now, my image trace panel is grade out, even though my motifs are selected. And if you've ever run into this and you're like, why does this happen? You have two options. You can click Image Trace up here and it will just kind of do a default image trace for you, and then you can adjust the settings. Or you can click off of the layer and then click back onto the layer. Now, it's giving me the option to do image trace, and I can actually change the setting. So we're going to stick with Logo. Again, and it's going to default to color like it did the first time. And in that case, I'm okay with that. The colors look relatively the same. Right now, the colors are set to 30 colors, which is not how many colors I used in this. So let's see, I have one, two, y four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I have roughly nine colors that I used. So I'm going to drop this color down to ten and see what happens. So it changed a little bit of the leaf pattern work. Interesting. It got some green over here in this mushroom, which that's fine. Not a big deal. We can fix that later. I'm gonna see what happens. What happens if I drop it down to nine? Which I think is the actual number that is in the documents. Let's see. Alright, well, I like that. I'm gonna go ahead and leave it at nine. We're gonna ignore white again, and then we'll go ahead and expand that once it's done. Okay, that gives us our large motifs. I'm going to go ahead and now that I have a group of linework and a group of fill, I'm actually going to move them both onto the same layer in Illustrator. One of the things I like to do while working is I like to work as clean as possible in my layers, and that goes from starting in Procreate to coming in to Illustrator. As I mentioned in Procreate, I am usually thoughtful of how I want to vectorize the things that I'm drawing. And then I draw them on layers according to how I plan to vectorize them, if that makes sense. So if I'm planning to use logo at 1:28 on everything, then I will draw all on the same layer, assuming it's linework and then fill on its own. If I plan to adjust the threshold of the image trace, or if I plan to use a different style of image trace, there's a few different options in here that I use maybe when I'm using, like, a rough or brush or something like that to maintain some of that texture. If I do plan to image trace with a different setting, then I'll also put that on its own layer. So always consider that while you're working. And then when you move into Illustrator, maintain those layers while you work. So right now, I'm going to keep them in the groups that they're in. I will eventually go and group each motif with its linework and fill, but I'm not quite to that point yet. So I'm going to go ahead and group just large motif linework large motif fill work all on the same layer. And now I can go ahead and delete this layer. And what we're left with is our small motif, so let's go ahead and fill those. I'm going to turn off our large ones. We'll start with the linework, turn off the fill. I'm going to click Image Trace. I already have my linework selected, so it's already popping up ready for the settings. I'm going to do logo again. This is a bold liner, which is why I'm using the logo for it. If I had a rougher brush, I tend to use the sketched art preset because I like how that works for a rougher textured brush. But for a nice clean brush, I always go with logo. I'm going to ahead and change the color to black and white. We're gonna ignore white. And before I finalize it, I do want to play with these, as I mentioned, these are my smaller motifs. I would like their line weight to be a little bit lighter than my larger motifs. So let's go ahead and drop this down. So it doesn't really it doesn't really affect the line weight until I get pretty low. Whoop, that was too low. Okay, so about eight is about as low as or nine is about as low as I can take it. And nine kind of gets patchy with some of the circles. So I'm gonna pull them up to about 15. And now I have to decide if I'm okay with the breaks in the circles or if I want them to be full circles, 'cause they technically are, but okay. I think I like that. I'm going to leave threshold around 25, and I'm going to ignore white. Perfect. We're going to go ahead and expand those. Let's go into our fill and turn that back on, we'll select our fill layer and go into Image Trace. Again, it's not showing, so let's click off and then click back onto our fill layer. Now we're ready to Image trace. We'll do logo again, and it's going to default to color. And let's see I only have two colors on here. We'll see how many it defaults to. Alright, so it defaulted to 30, so let's go ahead and reduce that down to two. And let's actually see if it keeps both colors. Occasionally. Oh, it did it. Yeah. Occasionally it if you do two colors for whatever reason, it will change it to one color. Alright, let's bump it up to three and see if that yellow comes back. There it is. Alright. Let's go ahead and expand that. Now I can come in here. Turn all the layers back on, and we'll group our small motifs with our large motifs. Oh, sorry. We'll group our small motifs with each other and our large motifs with each other. I'm gonna delete that extra layer 'cause I don't need it anymore. And now I can rename these large motifs. And small motifs. So I know which is which. Personally, the last step that I do in my process before I move on to pattern making is I'm going to group all of these together individually by their motif. So we'll select. We're going to ungroup. And then we're also going to ungroup the color. You can also do Control Shift G. We'll ungroup them, and now you can see our layers panel is insane. But that's okay. I'm I'm going to hit Q for the Lasso. And we're gonna select select. All right. We're gonna select this frog. Control G. I'm gonna turn off our small motif, so I stopped trying to select them. Okay, here, let's go like this. We're gonna select this flour. We'll group that. Group this mushroom. Just hitting Control G after I lasso. Oops. Sorry, I want to make sure I wasn't getting any of that leaf down there. So I Lasso motif, and then group it. Perfect. All right. Now we can do the same thing, turn our small motifs on. Control Shift G on that one. Control Shift G on that one to ungroup them. Now we're gonna circle them, group, group. Control G. Control G. Control G. Alright. Now I have my small motifs and my large motifs all grouped with their fill colors. There is more cleanup work that I go into before I start pattern making an illustrator, but I'm not going to get into that today because that's not what this video is about. This video is about experimenting and helping you start on a path of finding your style. And if you're an illustrator artist, vectorizing your art is a very important part of that process. So I never want you to discount what vectorizing will do to your art when you get into Illustrator because it does change it. And if you want to maintain the way your art looks in its original form, it's important to know how vectorizing is going to impact. So you should just spend some time kind of looking at what you got in Illustrator and asking yourself, do you still like the final look from Procreate to Illustrator? Are there things you would have changed or maybe brushes that you would have included had you known it was going to vectorize a specific way? Consider all those things. It's okay to go back and edit and change your toolkit as needed, again, not permanent. So just keep experimenting, trying things out. If you got a good clean, final look, I'm very satisfied with what I got. It carried over pretty much exactly as I expected it to from Procreate, which is always nice in Illustrator. So I'm happy with this. I hope you like what you created, and I'm really excited to see it in the project gallery, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll share some final thoughts. 19. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking this class and congratulations on completing this style exploration experiment. You selected and created a test motif sheet and experimented with different fill brushes, line brushes, texture brushes, and considered all of the results you got and made decisions to build your toolkit. You have your toolkit now in Procreate, so you can continue to revisit it and use it. Feel free to refine it at any point, add or take away or even do this experiment again to try out new brushes that you may come across. Remember to upload your final motifs to the project gallery with a little note about what your tool kit ended up looking like. I'm really excited to see your work, and I would love to hear any feedback that you have. You can also follow me here on Skillshare and leave a review so other students know if this class would be helpful to them. You can also find me on social media at Maloney Design. And my website is maloney.com, and I have a blog. I have a newsletter, and I have all sorts of things, so I'm excited to connect with you guys wherever you can find me. And thank you again for taking this class, and I wish you all of the best going forward. May your pencils always be sharp? Your erasers never smudge, and your iPad always be charged. I'll see you guys next time.