Digital Illustration on Procreate: Draw a Bowl of Soup, Food Illustration

1. Trailer: Hey, guys. This is Esther Nariyoshi. I'm surface pattern designer, illustrator, and lettering artist. In this class, we're going to draw a bowl of soup on iPad. I'm going to walk you through step by step on how to create each ingredient. The best part is you don't have to be an artists to learn this. Just like you don't have to be a super master chef to cook yummy dinner for your family. Let's get started. 2. Sourcing Inspiration: Let's talk about inspiration first because we're going to create one simple soup on your iPad. It may be helpful to think through what ingredients that you want to include in your soup. There are multiple places where you can pull your inspiration from. One easy one is to think about what you really like as a child and think about the family meals that you had and what really brings back the sweetness of the family. Or you can go to places like Pinterest that has so many rich recipes that presented visually that you can easily see the ingredients and see if that's something you want to draw with your pen. Similarly, you can also just have a physical copy of a recipe book can to reference that picture as you draw on your iPad, whatever way that is most convenient, an appealing to you, just go with it and keep those sourcing process as simple as possible. Because the ultimate goal is to get you started in iPad drawing and to get, to loosen up and use different functions and experiment with color and texture and to really have fun by drawing this bowl of soup. For our class, I'm going to go with this tie sweet potato, carrot soup. It looks really appetizing and I really like how the color contrast each other. Yes, I think that's enough reason for me to go forward with a concept. One thing I do want to mention before we start a project is that I'm not going to trace on top of this picture, but I won't use this recipe as a visual reference in terms of ingredients. Just out of respect for the original content creator. I'm going to take a screenshot of this picture and click the thumbnail and then adjust border to crop this image to whatever that is irrelevant to my soup and say photos. Then I can go to my procreate to create a new document. 3. Drawing: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to draw our chosen soup step-by-step. Now, we have our Procreate app open and you can come over to the plus sign on the right hand corner to create a new canvas. I'm just going to set it to five inches by five inches and a 150 or 300 DPI. I'm going to resize it using my finger a little bit, so I can see all the sides of the canvas. Then I click setting and insert a photo. I'm going to resize it just a tiny bit so I can see the full image. Eventually, I'm going to resize it and put it on this side instead of tracing it. But right now, I'm going to create a new layer and start simple the colors. It's a lot easier to sample the colors when the pictures are pretty big and clear, so I'm going to click this little icon on the left to sample the soup. Then you can click the color dot and click Palettes and plus sign for a new pallet and just add by clicking the little squares. I'm going to sample the heavy cream color and I want to have the lime peel. Another good thing about zooming in is that you can see the tiny ingredients a lot better, so you can draw better. I also want to sample the line color and the chili pepper and what else? There seems to be some nuts over here and I'm just going to leave it there and some green onions would be [inaudible] I think that's it and I resize it and sample the bowl. You notice that there is quite a difference between the brightest part of the bowl and the darkest part of the bowl. You can just choose whatever you prefer. Actually, I didn't need to create a new layer at the beginning, so I'm going to delete that, so that later when I'm drawing, I'm not confused by so many layers. I'm going to click the picture layer and just resize the picture and put it on this side as a reference. I want it to be big enough so that I can see the general layout of the ingredients. But I also want it to be small enough that it's not in the way while I'm drawing. I'm going to start by creating a new layer on top of the reference photo. In terms of the brush, I used one of the brush that comes with the Procreate app. It's in the Inking folder and this particular one is called dry ink. Whenever you want to test a brush, you can just click on that brush and then test it in the area here. I'm happy with how it looks like, now just close it. I'm going to draw a big circle over here. If you don't lift your pen Procreate will help you to create this perfect round or oval shape. But if you like the imperfection of a hand-drawn illustration, you can double finger tap and it will let you go back to your original shape. I kind of like the wonkiness of this hand drawn shape, so I'm going to keep it that way. Maybe fix the address a little bit, so the original bowl is just a circle and I want to make it more interesting by giving it two handles. It kind of makes it look like a Dutch oven. Somehow it makes the soup feel more warm to me because you can directly cook your soup in the oven. It's just how I think. Right now if you look at it, it kind of feels flat to me. So I'm going to add a little shadow to give it a little depth, so I want to create a new layer and make it a clipping mask. Basically, I can draw on top of this shape without coloring outside of the bounds. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to choose a slightly darker gray to indicate the shadow. I'm going to zoom in here and just start coloring, even though I'm coloring, the tip of my pen is outside of the shape because I'm using the clipping mask, it doesn't really show, so this is really neat. You can make a shadow using that technique. Now I want to have another layer, or the soup, the base of the soup. With the same thing, I'm going to draw a big circle to indicate the soup and then drag and drop to color the whole shape. To make your designs more versatile, I would recommend creating as many layers as possible. So basically, say that if you need to get rid of one ingredient or change color of a certain ingredients, you can just deal with that particular layer instead of redrawing the whole thing. For each individual ingredients, I'm going to have a new layer. I'm going to name this one as lime and go back to choose the color for the lime. Let me zoom in a tiny bit and lower the size of the brush and just draw a simple half-circle. Let's draw two symmetrical ones then we draw another one here. Now when I create another layer beneath it, for the actual line. This is the color that we sampled in the beginning. I'm just going to create this shape over here. If I just hide this lime peel color, you will see I just made a drop. Basically, you need to draw an enclosed shape so that it will drag and drop. If the shape is not closed, you will not be able to use drag and drop for coloring. There we go and let me erase this part a little bit and then we can use white to draw on top of the line to give it more detail. This is the right brush. Since this is kind of a fun project and you don't have to be scientifically accurate, it's more important to draw to communicate the mood of the recipe. As you can see I accidentally actually drew on top of this beige layer, which is okay in this case, but say that if I want to change the color of the white color, I kind of basically have to redraw the whole thing or just leave it as it is, since I'm not going to change the color in this case. We have so many layers. Now is a good time to organize them. We're going to keep all the line slices together by right swipe. Then I group them, see varying one layer. Whenever you want to move them, move their placement of the lime slices. You can have the group selected and use the lasso tool and just circle the portion where you want to move. Fairly simple, if you want to rotate, you can click on them. You can drag the green handle and you will rotate. It's fairly simple. All right, let's move on to the next ingredient, which will be the heavy cream. Going to pick a color that is white. As you can see, the heavy cream very airy and has this natural movement of liquid interacting with another liquid. Unless you are like masterful in drawing. This is a fact that it's pretty hard to create. So I'm going to use some help from procreate. Let's start by drawing a circle or semicircle. You can have it closed or not closed. Basically, you want to draw like a big structure so that you can use the liquify under the adjustment and click liquify. You can either select to your right or to your left doesn't really matter. Basically, it brings in this big departure is too big. It basically brings in this big tornado. That will distort the shape of your heavy cream. Looks pretty natural to me now. Right now I'm going to resize it a little bit. So if you look at the picture, the line is on the very top of the soup, and the heavy cream is beneath that. So I'm going to change my layer order to reflect that as well. I'm going to move on to the chili pepper and maybe choose a different brush. This is a good time to test different brushes and see how it works. Like this Gesinski Ink. Because as you can see, it has this slant, kind of reflect how a chili pepper slice looks like. So I'm going to go with that. So well too big. Nothing fancy. Just go around and sprinkle some chili peppers. Wanted to diversify the orientation of the chili pepper so they don't face the same direction. You have the height, the chili pepper underneath the line. So this is one layer, I'm going to move on to the next to create some green onion. Just like how you cook, just go around and sprinkle them. Remember whenever we want to redo something, you just double finger tap and like cooking. If you put too much salt, there's no going back. But digital illustration is a lot more forgiving. It's why I really like it. You can make mistakes and it's going to be okay. This looks pretty good, all right. Also feel free to add another ingredient. You don't have to be a 100 p[ercent accurate, this is not science. I'm going to add some parmesan cheese just because it's very tasty. You want to keep it in relative scale. You don't want to make the cheese too big, too unbelievable. So I'm just going to make thin grated Parmesan cheese. If you want to make absolutely straight line, you can keep your pen down. Procreate will help you to draw a straight line. That can be very helpful. Okay? That's basically all the ingredients I want to have for the soup. I'm going to turn off my picture here for now. If I look on my soup, it feels like a flat piece of picture floating on this bowl. So I want to add a little bit of depth to my soup as well. So one of the ways to do that is to add a little shadow. I'm going to create a clipping mask on top of my soup and select the original color, the orange. But making just ever so slightly darker. So that you create this shadow you look and go back to my original brush, which is dry Ink. I go the room to just give it a light shadow. Nothing too fancy. So right now you just imagine the light coming through the upper left and then I create a layer so you can see what I'm talking about. Imagine here is the light source, right? It casts a shadow over the soup. It probably will also brighten up some parts over here. So I'm going to add a little reflection over here as well. Actually I already have a clipping mask here, which is great. I'm going to sample the gray color over here and make it a little bit lighter. Perfect gives you this relation in terms of light. Okay. You can also use two fingers to rotate the Canvas so that you can draw comfortable angle. Stop it right there. So there you go. We have a bowl of soup now. If you want to get fancy, we can add some decoration around the bowl. For rather Dutch oven. Maybe starting by creating and tablecloth. Can do that by making where it seems like I already have a new layer selected, and choose a contrasting color. That doesn't really compete, but adds to our motif. We need to bring it all the way down so that we're not blocking the soup like the tranquility of the blue and maybe I want to add some texture on top of that. I want to add it this non-destructively. So I'm going to create a clipping mask and start adding texture on that. One good thing to do is to give it a drop shadow. So we have a sense of dimension. This is a good brush to do that and maybe increase the size a little bit. Remember where our light source come from. You can create a job shadow. Just imagining the light coming through the upper left-hand corner. Shadow right here maybe needs to be softer. It doesn't have to be super accurate. Something that will make sense. Then I'll want to create another clipping mask to add a little more random texture. We're going to select a color that is really light and maybe just give it a little bit of texture over here. So this brush set comes from Jamie Bartlett. If you search her name on creative market, you will find this texture brush. I think it's only $3, but it's really helpful when you want to create a random texture like this. Maybe I don't want this much contrast. I'm bring down the opacity a little bit so that it doesn't look like it has like flower everywhere on the table. So yeah, that's our sweet potato, carrot soup. 4. Finishing Touches: If you want to get fancy, we can add some decoration around the bowl, or rather the Dutch open. Maybe starting by creating a tablecloth and do that by making in layer. Seems like I already have a new layer selected and choose a contrasting color. That doesn't really compete, but adds to our motif. We need to bring it all the way down so that we're not blocking the soup. Like the tranquility of the blue and maybe I want to add some texture on top of that. I want to add this non-destructively, so I'm going to create a clipping mask and start adding texture on that. One good thing to do is to give it a drop shadow, so we have a sense of dimension. We can do that by using good brush and maybe increase the size a little bit and remember where our light source comes from. You can create a job shadow, just imagining the light coming through the upper left-hand corner and then a bit of shadow. Right here maybe needs to be a bit softer, it doesn't have to be super accurate. Something that will make sense and then I will create another clipping mask to add a little more random texture. We're going to select a color that is really light and maybe just give it a little bit of texture over here. This brush set comes from Jamie Bartlett. If you search her name on Creative Market, you'll find this texture brush. I think it's only $3 but it's really helpful when you want to create a random texture like this. Maybe I don't want this much contrast and then bring down the opacity a little bit, so that it doesn't look like it has flower everywhere on the table. That's our sweet potato, carrot soup. 5. Next Steps: Hey guys, congratulations on finishing your first soup illustration. I hope the process has been fun to you and you're inspired to make more. There are many applications where you can use your illustrations for. You can create Instagram posts, or create your recipe illustration for your blog posts, or like me, I printed those illustrations on fabric through [inaudible] and iron them together with a really thick interfacing, and just cut them out. My kids can use them as toys for their pretend play. The possibilities are really endless. I hope you had a lot of fun drawing. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Thanks for taking my class.