Digital Illustration: Learn to Use Procreate

1. Introduction: Hey guys, my name is Jarom Vogel. I'm a Freelance Illustrator from Salt Lake City. I actually started out studying dentistry in college and I got really far on that. I was studying illustration at the same time and ended up realizing I'd hate being a dentist. So, here I am as an illustrator instead. My style is flat and graphic. It has a lot of strong shapes. I try to keep interesting compositions and I really try to focus on having interesting colors, contrast, and textures. In this class, I'm going to be using Procreate, which is an advanced painting and illustration app for iPad and iPad pro, and lets you create beautiful illustrations with relatively little effort. In college, I used a lot of paints and I was really interested in getting interesting textures. Something I really like about Procreate is that, it lets me translate it to the way that I was working with paint into digital really easily. When I first found Procreate, I thought it was deceptively simple looking, but I was really impressed by the complexity that's in there when you're dig down and just how well-thought through everything is. I've been using it for about four years and I just think it's fantastic and I love it. So today, I'm just going to be creating a pretty simple illustration of character against the background of some kind. I'm going to get started with some thumbnails and then move on to fleshing out the details by creating a more detailed sketch and then I'm adding and tweaking colors and adding textures and a little bit of background detail. I'm going to show you the basics of Procreate, where everything is, and then some of my favorite shortcuts and tips and tricks to make things easier. I hope as you follow along with this, you'll be able to take your sketches from simple to beautiful illustrations. After you finish this class, I'd really love to see your own dynamic characters that you create. So, just share your work in the project gallery and feel free to ask any questions you have down there and I'll try to answer them as I see them. Thanks so much for joining the class and lets go get started. 2. Getting Started with Procreate: I'm just going to show you how to get started with settings really quick. I'm going to show you a couple of quick things that I like to set up before I get started working. So, before you can change any settings, you're going to need to actually have a Canvas to work on. So, I'm just going to click this little plus in the top-right corner of the screen. So, you'll see I have probably a lot more options here than you do because I've made a lot of custom ones. For this particular thing, when I'm doing thumbnails, I'm just going to click the screen size option at the top. But when we go to create a project, I'll have a better idea of what size of canvas I want or what shape. So, we'll come back and probably create a custom one there. But for now, I'm just going to tap this very top option that says screen size. It will take me right into the canvas. So, after you've created a canvas, it will just take you right into here. You can see there's this top bar along the top of the screen with all of the tools that you're going to want to use. To get into settings and just set things up how you like them, you're going to click on this little wrench icon towards the top left. So, I like having this light interface turned on and then, personally, I like to have the brush cursor, which just means as you draw, you're going to see this shape of the brush as you go. If you have that off, you can see, you don't see that shape. You just see the mark that you're making. I like it on. You can turn off if you want to. Then, down at the very bottom of this menu, there's this advanced gesture controls section. I like to have Gestures Only turned on for touch, which just means that if I slide my finger along the screen, it won't draw, only the Apple Pencil will draw. So, if you don't have an Apple Pencil, obviously, that's not an option. But this just means I can move the canvas with my fingers, I can undo, I can redo all of those things, but I don't have to worry about doing those on accident if I'm not using or I don't have to worry about drawing on accident if I'm only using a pencil. Then down here, I like to just tap on Touch Hold which turns on my quick menu. You can choose how you want to invoke that. I like to do it through Touch Hold. I find that touch, it pops up a lot when I don't want it to. So, the Touch Hold is a nice way of just making sure that it only shows up when I actually want to see it. But I mean, you can do this how you want. There's a couple of different options. This is how I have it set up. Then let me show you what that quick menu is really quickly. You can just tap anywhere outside of those controls to dismiss that and then anywhere outside of that settings menu to dismiss that one. So, when you just tap on the screen and hold your finger, then you'll get this menu that shows up. You can customize this to whatever you want. This is what I have it set up as. I think, by default it's probably something a little different. But basically, how you use that is you tap and hold and then slide up to the option you want to use or over or down, I guess. But if you want to change what those things are, you tap and hold, and then lift your finger, and then tap and hold again on the option you want to change, and you can see there's a whole lot of different options for what you can do there. There's different actions, or you can choose a specific brush that you want it to switch to. So, these can be super helpful. It can help you do a lot of things a lot more quickly. But there are just a couple more things that I'm going to show you in the iPad settings app that you have to go. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom, almost, depending on how many apps you have installed, but there should be a pocreate section in this left bar. So you tap on that, and then it will take you into this procreate settings. The only things I would recommend changing are if you want a higher quality time-lapse video, you can set that to 4K if you have a new enough iPad or you can just set it to a slightly higher quality than what you get by default. So, for this one, I'm going to do 4K, and then I like to make sure Simplified Undos is turned off. I believe that's on by default, but just tap it once to turn that off. That just means some of the more complicated things you do and procreate. If you have that turned on, undoing will undo a lot of steps all at once. I like to have more fine-grained control over that, so I leave it off. That's all I would get set up, and then we're ready to get started drawing. You'll notice you have this top bar, and this is where most of your tools are. So, if you tap gallery, that's going to take you back out to all of your drawings. You just tap on that canvas again to get back in. We'll get into these other ones on the top left more a little later. But for now, they're not too important. Then over here, on the top right are probably your most important tools. You've got your brush menu. You can choose what you're drawing with. So, I'm going to go in and choose. I like to use a slightly bigger pencil for sketching. I have all of my brushes like the ones that I like in a little Favorites menu here. You're going to find the default pencils in this sketching section. The HB pencil is what I'm going to be using. So, you have your smudge menu and your eraser menu. All of these have the same brushes. So, you can smudge with the same brush, you can erase with the same brush if you want to. Yes, I'll show you. As I use those, I think you'll get the feel for it a little bit better. Then, there's this layers menu. Basically, it just lets you draw things on top of other things without ruining what you've already drawn. You click the little plus to create a new layer. We'll get into that more definitely. But for now, I just want to tap on this layer, rename that, and say, this is thumbnails, and press Enter. So, now I have a thumbnails layer that I'm going to be sketching on. Then, just last thing is I'm on this weird peach color. So I want to just sketch in black probably. You can just drag down to the bottom to get a black. Then, tap again to dismiss your colors. I think that's pretty much the basics up there. I guess the other thing I should point out really quickly is that over here, you have your brush size slider, it's the top one. So, you can change how big the brush is. Well, this is how big it starts and then if you put it down, you can make it a lot smaller. Then brush opacity is the other slider down below here. So, it's a little hard to tell. I'm just not, I'm pushing hard, and it's just the less opaque. But again, we'll get into that stuff more. Don't worry about the square for now. I'm sure I'll use it later. Then, you have a little buttons for undo and redo down here. I don't ever use those because you can just tap with two fingers to undo and tap with three fingers to redo, and it's much, much, much faster. 3. Using Brushes to Draw Thumbnails: I like to get started by just drawing some boxes. So for this one, I'm going to start with maybe one portrait, just a rectangle that's the same shape as an iPad screen, maybe one square, and this can help to find some different compositions. So, this little S up here at the top left of the screen. If you tap that, it lets you select things. You can free form draw, you can tap to create straight lines, and you can mix and match those all you want. So, what I'm doing is I have that. So I have the selection tool active. I'm just going to select this whole area, just draw around it and then I'm going to tap the move and transform tool up here which is like a little mouse cursor, and then I'm just going to move this into the middle. So, I just like to keep things kind of clean that way. So, I'm going to rename this layer thumbnails. Thought I had done that, but I guess I lost that somehow. Then, just delete this extra layer down here. Then, because I might end up changing my mind about the frame size or maybe I might want to move things around within the frame a little bit, I like to create another layer underneath that. So I actually might rename this to just templates, and then name this thumbnails underneath. A lot of the time when I'm doing this, because I want a dynamic pose or something, I'm going to draw some character, right? I already know that. But I like to just get started with a with a squiggle of some kind. So, this is looking like a leg shape to me, and you can come in the back and just make that more obvious. A lot of time, I'll probably have a lot of false starts on this as I go. So, I might undo and redo a lot. If I find that I do a sketch that I just think is awful then, I'll just undo it and pretend it never happened. But you can start to put some little feet in there this. Just has to be super basic, super easy, like all I'm trying to do is get the idea across. Drawing the arms, have them looking off to the right and because this is like a weight lifting person, maybe I'll try to make them look a little less scrawny here. What's with this guy and like a tank top or something? Maybe some stripes, but the whole point here is just to get an idea of where am I going with this illustration, right? Yeah. But it can be as simple as that. You don't have to do anything fancy at all. A lot of the time I like to play with the composition by adding some shape in the background or something just to make it feel a little more cohesive. So, maybe I'm going to do just a circled drawing attention to the top half of this, and then I'm going to do another one. So I've got three sketches already to go. So now, I'm just going to look at these and I think I really like the second one best. So, I'm going to show you how I would take that second sketch and just put it on another canvas to get started on working out the details a little bit better for a full sketch. To do that, I'm going to select that, or get that selection tool again. You notice I made this one a square. So I'm going I want a square canvas. Then I'm just going to select this entire thing, just draw around the outside of it, I'll tap again to finish that selection, and then I want to make sure I am on the right layer that has the actual image on it. It looks like I am on that thumbnails layer. So, I'm just going to swipe down really quickly with three fingers and then I'm going to tap copy, and then I'm just going to tap gallery, and then I'm back out to my gallery view. I click plus and this is where I'm going to show you how to make it a custom canvas size. So down at the very bottom of this menu, there's a button that says, ''Create custom size.'' I'm going to tap this, and for something like this, maybe I'll do like 4000 by 4000. That's a pretty big size that should be okay, if I decide I want to print or something like that, and then I'm just going to name this custom square or something like that. Clicked on, and it will create a canvas for you. If you were to go back out to the gallery, it also saves that as a new canvas size. So you can see down at the bottom I have custom square, and I can use that again. But for now, I just want to go back into this canvas I just made, and then again, I'm going to swipe down with three fingers and then just tap paste. You can see that I pasted my tiny little thumbnail from before. I could just drag this out to resize it, but you notice that this is getting kind of distorted in weird ways if I do that. So the way to avoid that, I just did undo a couple of times, is first you're going to tap magnetic down at the bottom of the screen. So the difference is that constrains the aspect ratio, and it makes it so I can only rotate or scale at one time instead of, if it's free form I can do any and all of those things and just do whatever I want with it. But magnetic for this is going to be better. Then there's this little button at the bottom of the screen that's two arrows pointing out from each other. If you tap that, it will bring it up to, it will just automatically size it to the same size as your canvas. Depending on whether you have magnetic or free form selected, that's going to resize it differently. So, if magnetic is selected, it will make sure it fills the entire canvas and it cuts off a little bit of the art potentially, or if you have a free form and tap this, it keeps it like both of these will keep the aspect ratio, but this one will make sure all of the artwork is contained within the screen. So I'm going to free form in this case, but if I was just resizing it manually, magnetic is probably better for that. I think I'm pretty happy with how that's sitting on the screen and from here, I think we're ready to get started on a full sketch. 4. Sketching on a New Layer: In this lesson, I'm going to just go over how I take the thumbnail and add more detail to make it a full sketch before I go on to add shapes, and colors, and things like that. We have our thumbnail all blown up and everything, which we did before, and so I'm going to tap on the layers menu. I'm going to rename this to thumbnail, and then press enter. Then I'm going to create another layer above that, and I'm just going to rename it to sketch. Then I like to just lower the opacity of the thumbnail layer quite a bit, so I'm going to tap on that to make sure that's my selected layer, and then tap with two fingers, just a really quick tap, and you see this slide to adjust in blue bar up here at the top of the screen. Then you can just slide anywhere on the screen to change the opacity. So towards the left, we'll make it lower, towards the right and make it higher. The other way you can do this is, if you just tap on this little end to the side of the layer, you'll get a whole list of layer blend mode options, but it also has this opacity slider at the top that's it's probably easier to remember where that is. Then I'm going to bring the layer opacity down to something like 25 percent maybe, and then you just tap anywhere to kind of finish that opacity change. I'm going to probably make a couple of changes here because that was just a really quick sketch. For instance, I noticed that I have his left arm and his left leg are both out at the same time over here. I'm no running expert, but I don't think that's how people actually run. So, I'm probably going to end up swapping the arms around, and I think I can even keep them in pretty much the same place if I just move. Let's see this. This sketch is just a little bit tricky. But, basically, I'm going to extend that curve, and I might even do like a quick gesture here, and then do another layer to finish up the sketch depending on how this goes. Because you can use any brush with any of these things, a lot of the time. I want to be using the same brush to erase it as I am to draw. So, a quick way to, let's say I'm on soft pastel or something with the eraser and I'm drawing with a pencil. So, I draw a line and then I quickly erase, and it's just totally different eraser. You can just quickly tap and hold on that eraser icon, and it will automatically load it to the same brush that you're using for painting. Same thing goes for any of these other ones. Like, if I have soft pastel and want to use that as a drawing, same thing tap and hold. That's a really quick way to just match what you're doing with the other one. So, I want that HB pencil, looks like I have that selected now. If you're using an Apple pencil, you can just tilt to get a bigger brush on these pencils, specifically. So, I want the arms in the same place that I had them, but basically I'm going to be twisting the body, is the idea here. I'm just going to make sure that this arm that I want on his right side is on the right side by moving the shoulder up here, and then move the jacket forward a little bit. So, that just feels a little better with how he's running. I might go change this, so it doesn't run right into his knee. But basically, just to get these on the right side of the body is the main idea right now. Then just playing with this color. So, I'm doing a pretty rough version of the sketch to start with, I guess. I'm just sort of coming in and formalizing some of the lines I did earlier just to have that arm come back here, get the shoulder in place. Especially for these lines where I have some motion going on, I want to make sure that I get it in one stroke. Because if I'm trying to go in there and just trace over really carefully, you just don't get the same feeling. So, a lot of the time, I might end up doing that several times to make sure I get the sort of fluid motion that I want there. But in this section, I'm trying to be really precise about where my lines are. So, when I'm actually going in and doing color, I don't have to think too hard about the drawing itself. It's more about just the colors and how they overlay with each other better. Then I'll turn off the thumbnail quite a bit to just see how the sketch is working on its own. Sometimes, I'll even work just for a second that way, so I don't have that distracting thumbnail underneath. It gives me a clearer view of what I'm doing. I'll probably toggle this back and forth several times as I'm working. So, there's a couple of things I want to mention here as I'm going through the sketch. One of them is how to draw straight lines better and how to snap them to specific angles, and then just how to draw circles a little more cleanly. I'm going to start with lines. I want to add a shadow underneath him here. You can see I have just a little shadow. I'm drawing really quick on the thumbnail. But to draw a straight line, just draw a line, and then hold that the end of it. Then as you move your pencil, you'll see you can move it around. If you let it go and then tap the move tool up at the top left of the screen, again that's a little mouse arrow looking button. It will give you a little node on either side of that line that you can then adjust where it is. So, you can see actually it's just a little lower than his foot. And I want to go up against his foot, I'm going to drag that up and then if you want to make sure that it is perfectly level with the canvas, while you're moving it, tap and hold another finger on the screen and it will snap too I think 15 degree angles, so I can just make sure that it stays regardless, I can move my pencil pretty far before it will jump to a different angle. I just try to drag it out to right around there maybe, and then just tap on the brush to dismiss that. Then to draw circles, there's not a circle tool in procreated right now, but I'm just going to create another layer, and then tap and hold it to put it underneath this sketch layer. I'm going to delete this in just a second. So, this is just a temporary thing, so I'm not going to bother naming it. But, if you type on your brushes, and then go down to the airbrushing option down here, this should be one of your default brush sets, and then I like to choose this hard brush down at the very bottom. Then I'm just going to choose a light color. We'll get into how you choose colors in here a little more later, but basically you choose a hue with this outside ring, and then you can kind of choose saturation and brightness on the inner ring but I'm just going to do something light it doesn't really matter color it is. I'm going to make this brush as big as I can make it, and then just tap once really quickly where I want my circle to be. Because this brush is just a perfect circle and a really big already, it's pretty easy to get a good circle that way. Then I'm going to, with magnetic selected down here at the bottom left again, so I've tapped my new icon, the mouse arrow, and then I've tapped magnetic, and then I'm just going to resize this to about where I wanted that circle in the sketch. I think I actually did a pretty decent job of putting that in a spot that it's not conflicting with anything too badly. Then I just want to position it, so it's about where I had that circle, and now I'm going to deselect that, and then I'm going to again tap with two fingers on that layer to just bring the opacity down. Then I'm going back to my sketch layer, and now I want to get back to my pencil brush which I think I was using. I don't actually remember which of these I was using. I think it was HB, and then I just want to select black in this color wheel, and then I'm just going to trace around the outside of the circle. So, I actually prefer this to having a completely perfect circle, personally because I like to have just a little bit of the natural variation in the line that I get by drawing it. I'm still trying to match this as closely as I can to the circle, but free handing just gives you more of a hand drawn look which I personally like. If you did want to just keep a circle back there, you can definitely just use that brush and leave it there, and then use that shape later. But I'd prefer to hand draw this and do it myself, then you go and just delete that layer, turn off the thumbnail, and now I have an almost perfect circle behind it. So, I'm just going to do those same things again for a couple other parts of the sketch, but that's the general idea. So, I think this is a pretty good place. I'm happy for now with where the sketches. That doesn't mean it's 100 percent perfect. I'll probably still make a few other minor changes as I go through and do the shapes and colors. But, for now, I think I've done pretty much all I can on the actual sketch itself, and I think we're going to go from here. 5. Using the Selection Tool: In this lesson, we're going to go through. To start blocking in basic shapes, I'm going to get started on a couple of basic color things, and I'm going to show you how to work with layers, how to fill with color, and just a little bit of how I use brushes versus fill and things like that. To start, remember, if you open your layers, I have two layers now; I have my thumbnail and my sketch. I'm just going to go ahead and delete the thumbnail layer since I'm done copying everything I want from there. Then I'm going to do the same thing where I tap with two fingers, and just bring the opacity of the sketch layer down to about 25 percent. Then I'm going to create a new layer, and again I just tap and hold on it, and then pull it down underneath that one. In this case, it actually is a little bit important that you keep the sketch as the top layer because otherwise, you'll start blocking out pieces of your sketch as you create shapes. At this stage, I like to just plan what layers I'll need, and obviously, I'll probably end up adding some after that. I think I can probably just go from there, and I'll add more as I need them. But one thing I did want to show while I have this open, is just how you create a layer group. So, as I go, I'm probably going to end up with enough layers that it would get pretty confusing and it'd have background layers mixed with character layers. So, I'm going to select each layer I want by swiping towards the right on it. So, I have this top layer, the sketch layer selected and you can see that it's highlighted blue. Then as I swipe right, these ones will be highlighted a lighter blue which means that they're not the main layer, but they're also selected. So, if I was to draw at this point, it would draw on the sketch layer. But these other ones if I want to do like a transform or something, so let's say I close that, and I want to move everything at once, all of those layers are moving with this. But while they're selected, this little three lines button at the top right of your layers panel, will just create a layer group really quickly, and then you can collapse that and just keep things a little cleaner that way. So, everything related to my character I've put in this group, and then as I create more I'll probably create a background group as well. Depending on the drawing I might have more than that, but for now, I think that's going to be good. Then I just want to rename this. I don't even know what to call this guy. I'll just call it guy. So, I'm going to go down, and I'm going to show you how I would start drawing the body. The way that I do this and the reason that it's so important to have a detailed sketch to begin with, is that basically I'm doing this drawing again, but just tracing over thing over everything with the selection tool. Again, the selection tool is this little s at the top left. You're going to become very familiar with it because starting here, I use it a lot, so. For the body layer, I think it's what I had selected and actually, I've put these in the wrong order. So, I want that body layer above the back arm and leg because this includes the front leg, the front arm, and the head, I think. So, I'm going to just grab my selection tool, and then start tracing over the outline. You will notice if you turned off the active tool for touch, that doesn't apply to the selection tool, so you could still draw selections with your finger if you want to, even if you've turned that off. You'll notice that I come back and do a little loop sometimes. It's a little bit hard to explain why I do that, but let me just show you. Like so let's say I'm drawing along, and I accidentally went way off over here somehow, and that's not where I want the selection to be. But because I know the whole selection will be in this leg anyway, I found that I can go back and just loop back to where I messed up, and then as I go and then finish it, that whole area will be included in the selection. So, this is something that I think you just need a feel for. The reason I don't just undo is sometimes I've already drawn quite a bit of the line that I am happy with before I get to that point, and I don't want to undo all of the part that did turn out well. So, I'm just going to create part of this, and I'll go back, and you can see all of those places where I did the loops are just included in there, and it's just a way of not stopping the selection that I'm doing, or undoing the parts that I like. So, like let's say I'm trying to draw a circle and I go in, I can just loop around, include it, and finish the election. This doesn't work if you go outside the other way. So, like let's say I'm trying to draw a circle, and I go out, I can't do that same loop back because that part is going to be included in the selection. So, whatever it is, it has to be on the inside of the shape you're drawing. Again, this is just something you'll get a better feel for as you use it. This doesn't have to be perfect the first time round, I'll probably come in and end up cleaning up a couple of these edges anyway. But I do want to make it as close as I can at this stage because this is part of the final drawing. You see I came outside there, so in this case, I have to undo. Then I can loop back, and sometimes even when I haven't messed up, I'll loop back just so I can draw along the same line, rather than try to just pick up where I left off and end up with a weird little jagged spot. Just going to go up and build up that shape, and this will just by default add to the shape that you've already created. Well, let's say I selected a part that I don't want included in there, like this here it was going out just a little bit. This came out just a little farther than I wanted it to, so I can just select that little piece, and then I press the minus. So, if you go down to the bottom of the screen, there's a little two lines of plus or minus the, I think that's invert. There's a couple options here. If you press minus, that's subtract from selection, plus is add to selection. So, that one is what happens by default when you just close the shape, but minus you have to go down and press the minus button at the bottom. I'm just going to clean up a couple of the edges. At this point, I'd also turn off the sketch just so I can see that shape a little more clearly, and that will help me to see the areas that need just a little bit of cleanup. So, like here I've got a little bit of a lump. You will notice I just reloaded my selection. So, if for instance, I went and turned off a layer, let's see, yeah, turning on and off a layer, you'll notice the selection tools went away from the bottom, and I need those back because suddenly I'm not in selection mode anymore. So, to get back into selection mode without losing the selection that you have, you'll notice if I tap it once, the election I have just gets dismissed. But if I tap and hold on that, then it pulls my selection tools up and keeps my active selection, and that is really nice to know. So, because there's nothing worse than losing a selection that you just spent five minutes on. Another cool thing about that is, even if you've already dismissed the selection, and you have done something else, like let's say start drawing something, I can reload that selection still just by tapping and holding. So, that will just always keep the last selection you have active, but I just need to go in and finish up the head. Sometimes I'll just build it up in pieces like this. If there's part of the curve that I've drawn that I'm pretty happy with and I just want to make sure I get it done before I mess it up somehow, I'll just build up the selection bit by bit as I go. So, there's a couple of ways you can fill in this shape, and again, I'm going to turn off the sketch for just a second so we can see what's going on here. But this piece I want to fill in. Let's go just choose a color, I'll refine this a little bit more later. But for now, I'm just going to go with orange or something. There is a couple of ways to fill in the color on this. One of them and I'm going to show you is called ColorDrop, just tap and drag out of that color and you'll see the color comes with you. Then you just drop it where you want. If you tap and hold without letting go in the area that you want to fill, you can actually adjust to the fill threshold. You can just let go, and it will fill in that area. You can dismiss your selection, and that's all filled with color. Then I'm going to turn on something called Alpha lock on this layer, which means that as I draw, I won't be able to draw outside of any area that's already been drawn in. That may not make a lot of sense, but I think as I show it you, you'll see what I'm saying. So, I'm going to swipe to the right with two fingers on that layer, and you'll see a little checkerboard pattern appear in the background of the layer thumbnail. You can also tap on the layer, and tap Alpha lock in this menu that comes up, or I think I have it set up as one of my quick menu shortcuts. But whichever way you prefer to do that I really like this swipe with two fingers method. Basically, you can go in choose another color, so we can see what's going on here. Then, I'm going to choose a brush that's just bigger that I can fill in with, and I'll talk more about these in a second. But as I draw, you'll notice that it doesn't go outside of the layer that I already had there, or if I turn off the lock off and do that same thing it's drawing outside the bounds as well. So, this is really nice for adjusting colors, for adding texture things like that. Then I'll show you how that selection or the ColorDrop threshold works a little bit better here. So now, I have a different color. Let's say I want to drop a color on top of that, but as I had just the threshold, you'll notice that that yellow goes down less and less, but you just have to keep sliding after you've done the draw without lifting your pencil or finger. So, I don't actually want that color there, so I'm going to get rid of it. But basically, I'm just going to do this for each section here that I've outlined. Okay, so I have these the back arm, and back leg all selected out, and I've just turned off my sketch. But when I do this, I like to keep the further back layers a little bit darker. So, I'm actually going to use the eyedropper tool to just select this darker orange from down here. The way that I did that is I tapped and held the little square on the left side of the screen in between the size and opacity sliders. So, I held that down with my thumb, and then as I moved the pencil, it was just a little modifier button. So, I can just choose a color with my pencil as I have that held down. Or I can also just tap it once, and then it will pull up the color picker as well. Then, I'm just going to go in with my pencil and fill these in. So, I do this way of filling in a lot just because I get a little more interesting textures that way. For this particular stage, it probably doesn't matter too much because I'm just using one color and I want it to be filled all the way. But if I'm like doing shape within one of these layers or something, a lot of the time I'll use the brush rather than the fill tool. I'm going to go in and do some of these other things, and again I'm just going to be trying for a second as I do that. I think I'm just about done with the shapes section of this. I haven't worried too much about colors, because I know I'm going to go and change those quite a bit as I start adding the background in later videos. But I'm going to come back in and do the shadows as well when I do that. But for now, I'm really happy with these shapes, and we can use those to start building the color and the texture, and start thinking more about the details. 6. Adding Color, Shadow, & Texture: So, in this lesson we're going to go over more. How to choose a color palette, how to check your contrasts, how to just sort of pick colors that look okay together and then I'm probably going to start adding just a little bit more texture and things like that as well. So, to start on colors, you'll notice that I've been working from a little palette I already had here. We're going to create a new one because these are just colors I had laying around. I just want to get something a little more specific for this drawing and just make more conscious color decisions rather than just picking something I already have. So, to do that, I'm going to tap on this palettes button at the bottom right corner of the color palette, or panel, color panel and then up at the very top of this, I'm going to click the little plus icon and you'll notice that created a Untitled palette partway down my panel here. So, that already has default marked. You can choose which one you want as default by tap and select or set default. Then I'm going to go back to my disk and you'll notice I have completely blank color palette now, and then I'm just going to call that space cadet. Then to start picking colors, a lot of the time I have a general color palette in mind already. So, for this one I don't have a lot in mind but I'm going to try to have sort of a teal ish background and maybe like make some of these background shapes kind of a pink color or something. So, I'm going to start adding a couple of those colors just as I go. So, to start with, I'm going to go because I know I want a teal background I'm just going to drop that in there right now. So, the way I did that is you tap on your layers and then just tap on background color. This is a special layer that you can't do anything with except to choose the color. So, when you tap on it, it will automatically just drop you in this color's palette and you can choose what color you want your background to be. So, I want this teal color. I'm going to turn off the sketch for just a second so I can see what's going on better with my colors and I'm trying to decide if I want the dark or the light. I think I like the dark just a little bit better. Then just start changing some of the colors that I know I want to change. For instance I don't want these gray pants so I'm going to go back and make sure I have awful luck turned on and then I'm going to use this brown that I chose earlier. Actually, I haven't really talked about brushes yet so this is a good place to talk about how I'm going to get some of the textures I want and some of the interesting color combinations I want. So, if you open your brushes and then go down to artistic, both of the brushes that I use most are in here, I actually have slightly modified versions of these that base the opacity a little bit on the speed of the brush as well. All I'll post links to those in the class notes. Basically as I go, because the things that are sort of driving the texture are speed and the amount of pressure, I want kind of bury those as I draw and as I do that, I can get more interesting. So, I'll push a little harder and get kind of a stumped look and then I want some streaks in there so I go faster and lighter or fast and darker just like fill in. For what I'm doing here because I want to change the entire color of the pant leg, I'm not really going to do too much of that but later when we start adding a little bit more texture and stuff, that's going to be more important. So, I'm going to choose this darker color of brown, go over that again and just go over it a couple times. I like rather than filling with completely solid brush, I like to use one of these textured brushes a little bit because like especially if I'm changing the color. Chances are the color I had before was something I kind of liked as well. If I can get just a little bit of that to show through in places, it kind of creates an interesting shimmer sometimes. I'll show you this more in other places hopefully. So, let's say I have kind of a yellow on these pants. I just make it completely yellow which is not what I actually want to do. But then I go back in and do this Brown over the top of that. You kind of get a little bit of the yellow showing through if I use one of these brushes which I do like, it just gives it a little more life than just a flat color. So, I don't want to completely fill it 100 percent because I still want that variation in their. Then I'm going to go do the same thing on the back pant leg if I can find it, there it is. But because same reason I want to make this a little darker. So, rather than creating a new color for my color palette, I'm just going to start with that color and pull down a little bit from the middle to make it darker. But same thing I want that yellow to show through so I'm going to fill it in yellow first, just go over this a couple times and then go choose the darker version of that brown again, and just fill that in. So, then I don't really like this green jacket. I think that was not something that- I don't know, the color I would go for here. Well I'm going to just pull open if I tap on this magic wand and that opens my adjustments panel. Then there's a couple of ways I can do this. For this one because it's easier to understand, I'm going to start out by using the hue saturation brightness adjustment and so you'll tap on that and it will pull up these controls down at the bottom of the screen. Because I just want it to be a little closer to blue, I'm just going to slide that hue slider just a tiny bit to the right. I think I like that quite a bit better already. If you want to just quickly compare what you had before with what you've switched to, there's a little preview button at the bottom left, there's a few buttons, it's the second one down. If you hold that it will switch back to what it looked like before and then if you let go it will be with those adjustments applied. So, I'm pretty happy with that. I might just tweak a couple other things just to see if I like it any better. Then to commit that adjustment and just tap on the magic wand again or I mean I think any other tool will just dismiss it and keep it where it was. But let's say for this moment for instance, unhappy with probably the shade of red and the end and just how bright it is, so I could use hue saturation and brightness but I typically use kerbs for this sort of thing because I'm you know a lot more control but it is more complicated. Basically, when you're when you're using kerbs you have four different. I think these are called channels. Somebody can correct me in the comments if I'm wrong. But you have your composite, red, green, and blue and composite is going to adjust I think all of those together kind of. So, basically that's affecting brightness more than anything. So, I'm going to pull that up just a little bit and then pull it off. Let's just start with that and then I can add more red and basically the right side of this little chart is going to be your lighter colors and the left side is your darker colors. So, if I want the dark parts of whatever I'm adjusting to get darker or I can pull that down, if I want the dark parts to get lighter I can pull that up and vice versa, if I want the light parts dark or I can pull this down if I want them lighter I can pull it up. Because this is pretty light mostly, you can see this little red peak that's where the color is because I only have one color in that helmet. I'm just going to pull that up a little bit. I might want to just tone down how red it is by adding a little bit of blue to it. Then same thing on this back arm I'm just going to go just really quickly. So, here I don't want to adjust that backlog even though it's not showing. Just in case for whatever reason I did decide to show it, going to adjust is this part. So, I'm going to use my selection tool to just select that area of the layer even though that has the back arm and the back leg on it. I only have the arm selected and I'm going to tap the magic wand so I'm going to open kerbs and I'm just going to bring that up a little bit. Then the last thing I wanted to do here was just go make the boots dark. I don't really love the light against that light background so I want them to be darker than the background so I'm just going to come into kerbs and basically just make them black by pulling a composite all the way down. I think I'm going to block in a couple of the shadows really quickly. I know I'm going to have one here on this back leg. I know I'm going to have one on this back arm and then across the chest here, and then one under his chin and on the helmet potentially and then one on this front leg as well. So, I think I'm going to block those ones in. So, I want kind of a bluish shadow where the shadow is darker or deeper shadow and then towards the part where it's more in the light, I want to make it just a little bit red. So, when you dismiss that, you'll see you have a two tone shadow there. I might have gone a little bit overboard on that so I'm going to just undo to bring that selection back up and then I just want to make the whole thing a little more blue than it is in general. So, I'm just going go over with blue, that whole thing. I'm going to go in and block in the shadow on the back sleeve and you can't see the sketch there very well because I've got a dark color underneath it but basically I have sort of a fold shape there, when I turn off the sketch and I just want a really dark blue but not quite black. I try to avoid resorting to black for things like shadows because it's too easy to go all the way to black and then you don't really have anywhere to go from there I guess. If you can have colorful shadows that helps you kind of set the temperature of the drying and it also just more interesting to look at than black, black tends to be a little too heavy generally. So, I think I'm pretty happy with where this is for initial color changes and we're going to start getting into adding some background details, maybe a little bit of texture and some tweaks to the colors in the next lesson. 7. Making the Background: So, now that we have our colors figured out in a general direction on those, I'm going to start adding some background details especially because that will affect some of the contrast in places, I want to get those in pretty early on. So, I'm going to turn my sketch layer back on. Then, I'm going to just collapse this whole guy layer group that I made and go to my background group. Actually, I'm going to move that sketch layer out of that for now and then turn off that guy group. So, I can still see my sketch layer and turn it on and off easily. Then, for this background section, I'm going to just start adding some of these different background shapes and try to figure out where I want to go with those color wise. So, let's start with this big circle. Again, I'm just sort of tracing around it. It doesn't have to be perfect. I actually prefer a little bit that it's not perfect, but you want to get as close as you can without being too crazy about it. So, I've got that shape pretty much in there. I'm going to turn off the sketch layer. I'm not totally sure what color I want to make this. So, I'm going to play with a couple of different things and just see what looks good. What I was thinking originally is that I'd make it kind of a pink color. But, you can see that causes a lot of weird contrast issues. So, I'm not totally sure that I want to do that. But, I might do something like that and then bring down the opacity or something like that just to sort of play with a couple of different options. That's not really working great. So, another thing I can do here is just sort of play with blend modes a little bit, definitely I don't like any of those. But this is a good place to just talk a little bit about these blend modes. These are just different ways that a layer interacts with what's behind it. So, these multiply ones all make things darker in some way, the darkened sections, sorry, multiplies the top of the darkened section. Light in all of these should make things a little bit lighter in some way. Actually, I really like that one, except that it's causing me some color issues, but this might be something that I can play with opacity in combination with that screen in plain mode. Overlay, looks pretty nice sometimes and that one might actually work if I do that and then turn the layer color down quite a bit as well. But, I'm not totally happy with that, especially if that helmet is not working with that at all. So, the other one I liked was screen and maybe if I turn that down a bit to 40 percent or something, I think I like that a little bit better. So, I might just go without for now. That means, I'm going to have to add another layer to create some of these different background pieces. Again, I'm going to put those in a group, just to keep things clean. We'll just call this whole group background. Then, I'll make this layer to large circle or something like that. I'm going to create another layer for shadows. These are going to be just the shadows along the ground. These can be a little more just free-handed looking, I guess. They don't have to be perfect but I'm going to just sort of free-hand to the ends and use this straight line mode for the select tool for the in-betweens, I guess. I'll make sure I clean up the ends a little, and I want to make sure all of these are selected. So, I get some pretty consistent colors across them and then if I do want to make changes. So, the colors of these different shadows are different. I can do that after the fact, but going to start with all the same, I think. We can turn off that sketch and then just start filling in shadows. I'm going to use one kind of a dark blue here. I'll probably end up turning this layer to multiply. So, that will just make it darker. Sort of like combines it with the background color in a way that just opacity doesn't. But I want to have red on the right side. Again, I want sort of a warmer side of the shadow more towards where my light is. I kind of decided the light would be at the top right. So, towards the right, I want all of these to be just a little warmer and make them kind of red on that side. Then, I'm just going to tap that and on the side, and tap multiply. I think that worked pretty well. I might turn down the opacity a little bit. I just want to do that little semicircle kind of setting sun sort of piece as well. Then, I'll go in and do the clouds. Then, I'll try to figure out what I'm doing with colors where they're messed up by the background. So, I think I'm pretty happy with those background colors maybe minus that big circle. The piece that's bothering me the most against that is that helmet, so I turn that off. So, I think I'm going to mess with the color of this background piece a little bit more to just see if I can find something that looks better there. Whether it's a different color, or a different blend mode. I think I'd prefer to avoid changing the color of the face to match that. Maybe I'll just pull in curves and start messing around with things there to see if I can find something else that works well for that large circle. My goal here, I guess, is to have as few collisions with the rest of the piece as I can for this. I'm just moving things around. I don't really have much of a plan here other than make it different than it is. I'm just keeping an eye on the drawing above to see what works. I think this might be a good way to go. It's just sort of be a lighter version of the background color. I think something like that could work pretty well. So, I'm going to go back and turn that helmet on again, and we've definitely got some contrast issues there especially between the back of the helmet and that circle here, you can see they're almost the exact same shade of grey when you return on the saturation mask. This is just more saturated than I would like it to be, just a little bit. So, I'm going to pull up that hue saturation brightness. Just pull it down a little bit. Maybe, pull the brightness down and maybe just mess with the hue a little bit. So, I think I'm happier with that. Let me turn on that saturation layer again. Yeah. I think that's working quite a bit better. One other thing I didn't mention that I should have earlier is that, as I'm drawing a figure like this, I like to have the tips of the fingers and the tips of the nose be a little bit warmer, just because I think people tend to have a little bit more blood in those areas, and basically your hands and your nose are a little redder than the rest of you. So, I'm just going to go and add a little bit of that in there. I'm actually going to use a gouache brush this time. So, that's also in your artistic. I have a slightly modified version of that and basically, the same way as the acrylic one, but this is just a softer brush. It doesn't give you a strong of textures. So, for something like creating a gradient, this one works really well. I think that's pretty much where I want it to be for doing the background and a few more color tweaks. So, I think for now this is a pretty good stopping point for a minute. In the next lesson, we'll go over a little bit of just like fine tuning some colors and some final details. 8. Final Effects & Tweaks: In this lesson, we're going to go over a little bit more how to just push contrast, push highlights, shadows, and texture a little bit more and maybe adjust some colors. There's just a few areas where I specifically want to make a couple of changes already. So, one of those is I don't think I have a lot of texture in my shadows and that's something I usually like to have a little bit more of. So, I'm going to try to push that and then this little plasma, whatever, from the gun. I think the color isn't quite working really well with the rest of it, so I'm going to try to do something really quickly there. So, first of all, I'm going to just select this ray gun group which I never named, by the way. Then I'm going to select that glow within it and tap the layer blend mode and I think this is an area where that overlay is going to work really well, that just makes it a little bit more green. I can play with a couple other things here like add or screen. I think overlay is probably going to look best and you can see how that compares to normal but I think that green fits a little better with the rest of the picture. Then to do my textures a little bit more. So, I'm going to select this front pants layer, open my selection tool and select the area with shadow here again. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect with the original selection especially because the sort of thing I'm doing here is supposed to look just a little bit messy by default. So, I'm going to go back to my favorites and select my wet acrylic brush and then I want to go just a little darker than I have here. I'm going to start by just using the eyedropper tool to select the color that I have in there already. Then I'm going to go just a little bit bluer, more towards blue in this outer ring and a little bit farther down in that color. We also have slightly darker color, you can see if you compare the before and after colors up there, just how that compares it exactly and then I'm going to take this. Like I mentioned before, I just want to, oh, first I need to make my brush full size. I'm just going to push and pull with pressure and speed to try to get a mix of greeny stampy looking things and streaky stuff. I think that actually worked pretty well, if you zoom in, you can see there's an area where there's a lot of texture and then down here it smooths out. I actually like that but I still think there could be a little more going on here but rather than just follow that exact same shadow curve, I'm going to come down here and I like to just create a couple of random extra little shadows that there's not any obvious source for them but just something to break up the shape a little bit and make it more interesting. Then kind of the same thing with highlights. So, I'm going to come on this other side that's in the light and I'm just creating some subtle shapes that I can make a slightly lighter color in there. Let's start with that and see what it looks like. I'm just going to choose kind of a color that is lighter than that but similar to it and then with that same brush, just come in sort of like just try to make some interesting little marks in there. I think that actually worked out. I'm going to do that same thing on the back pant leg. I think that's already a lot more interesting to look at on both of those pant legs and then I do want to push the contrast on those boots just a little bit. I'm going to do that with curves. I'm just going to come in here turn on the composite or go to the composite channel and then pull down over here because they're already pretty dark. The lightest areas of the boots are going to be closer to this dark end and in the darkest areas are also going to be closer to this dark end. I just want to make a little tweak there, you can see it, that just makes it a little clear that there is something going on in there besides just black. The other thing I wanted to show you was if you just feel like some of the things are a little too flat, if you don't want super flat color in places, something that I sometimes do is I'll go and add a layer over the whole thing. You want to fill this with 50 percent gray value, unless you make really precise color changes, if you're familiar with RGB or HSB or even hex colors. So, I'm just going to use RGB here and put each of these at half. So, let's see. It's 256 B divided by two, it's I think 128 by 127 because RGB starts at zero. But basically, you just want to enter numbers for each of those. If you put every single one to 127, then I should have at least pretty close to 50 percent or currently, you can just type 50 percent in this black thing which is maybe a little easier. So, you want this 50 percent gray. I have this blank layer and I'm just going to drag that out and fill the whole layer. Then from there, I'm going to switch the blend mode to overlay and that's in the contrast section of the blend modes. So, if I turn that on and off, you should see no difference and it looks like that is working as expected. Okay. So, I'm going to open up my adjustments menu which is the magic wand up at the top left and I'm going to go down to noise and you can just slide across all the way to the right. If you wanted to, you could add this crazy amount of noise. I don't think that's the right look for this particular picture. So, I'm going to make this a lot more subtle and just by swiping anywhere on the screen towards the left. You can pull this down quite a bit. I think something like there is pretty good for what I want because I just want like a little bit of subtle green added to this. And then if you tap it again that will keep that green there. If you zoom in, you can see this a little bit better and turn that layer on and off you can see what it's doing. Then I'm going to make this just a little bit bigger because I want the green itself to be a little bigger and to do that, I'm going to tap on the move and transform tool up here, just a little mouse arrow. I want to make sure magnetic is selected and then I'm just going to pinch outward and it should snap at 125 percent or 150. So, I'm going to tap on my adjustments again, tap on Gaussian Blur. Just to show you what this does, as you slide across, it just blurs whatever is on the layer. So, this is a little bit hard to see because I already have subtle texture there, but as you go across, it just blurs all the way out. So, I want to add just a tiny bit of this. Maybe something like 2.5 percent is pretty good. Then just one last adjustment I wanted to do to this and this depends on what you're looking for. I don't want this to adjust my colors at all so I'm just going to turn the saturation all the way down in that hue saturation and brightness adjustment and then tap on the adjustments and then you, and yeah. So, if that adds just a little bit more personality to the try. So you can see there's a little bit of variation in the background color and things like that. Let's just see if there's anything else I wanted to do here. I'm going to turn my sketch back on and I think this is actually one of the hardest parts of a drawing for me is just deciding when it's done because I think there's always things I would like to change. But I think this is good enough. So, I'm going to call it done. 9. Exporting & Final Thoughts: Now that you've finished your illustration, in this lesson, we're just going to go over how to export your image in a couple of different formats and how to export your time lapse video. To export this, there's a couple of different ways you can do it as with a lot of things in here. But the way that I usually use is by tapping on the wrench icon to open the actions menu, and then tap on share, and then you can choose what format you want to export it in, whether you want it to procreate to share it with somebody else with the app or you can do a Photoshop document if you want to go do something with it in Photoshop, PDF, JPEG, PNG. I tend to do JPEG or PNG or procreate if I'm backing it up or something. So, I'm going to just choose PNG here. You'll get a little circle that says exporting, and then you can export it to whatever you want. So I'm just going to save it to my camera roll and then it will show up right there. Another way you can do this is if you tap on gallery and go back to the gallery, you can swipe from the right and just tap share and get those same options, so that's also an option. But one of the really cool things about procreate is that now that you've spent all of his time drawing this, you can actually watch a time-lapse replay of the whole thing. It automatically just stores everything that you drew, and if you tap time lapse replay, then you get a cool little thing that just shows you a quick recreation of the whole drawing. So you can watch this actually while you're in this time lapse replay mode. You can sort of scrub back and forth if you want to go faster or slower or go back, it's kind of cool. Or you can, within that same menu, just say export time lapse video, and that will take just a second, and then same thing you can just save it to wherever you want. So I'm going to save that one to files, then it will just let me save it in my files app. So, I'm going to save it right there, and there you go. So, this is the end of the class. I'm really glad that you came and participated and I'm really excited to see the illustrations that you make. Just make sure that you share them in the project gallery and thanks for watching. 10. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: way.