Digital Illustration on the Procreate iPad: A Can Of Worms

1. Class Trailer: Drawing faces is hard. You worry about proportion, perspective, shading, and angle. The pressure is on as soon as you start drawing, if not before. It's basically like opening a can of worms. Well, maybe that could be a great starting point. Hi, my name is Esther. I'm a surface designer and illustrator and also top teacher here on Skillshare. In this class, I'll walk you through tiny fun exercises of drawing simple faces on a bunch of wormies. There are many reasons why this class is great for someone who just got started. For one, mistake is pretty low because worms don't have faces. It's really hard to go wrong from here. You're free to use your own imagination. You won't fall into the comparison trap. Because as far as I know, not a whole lot of people have drawn faces on worms yet. So the pressure is virtually none. I'll be using iPad Procreate app throughout the class, but you're free to follow along with the media of your own choice. To kick it up a notch, I also partnered with my personal favorite professional mock-ups studio, creatsy, to bring your wormy illustrations to life on the can. All right, I hope you're excited. Let's get to it. 2. Class Project: As far as class projects, you can do a few different directions. The first one is to follow along the class and just post your progress, and show us what you have. The second one is to do a family portrait. Think about your family members and their classic expressions, the accessories that they like to use, and the style, and their fashion senses, and just have fun with it. Maybe at the end of the day, you can even have a little fun piece for your Christmas cards this year. Along the same line, you can also do office group picture. If you do not have an office, you can even draw characters from The Office Show along that line. You can also draw the simplified version of a movie character or something like that. I've also partnered up with a professional mock-up making studio called Create Z, and they have offered as a tin can, mock-up for free, which is really on point.. Hopefully that will give you some extra motivation to draw a bunch of forms and put them on a can to just drive the point home. Don't worry, like always, I'll walk you through every single step. I really enjoy seeing students' projects. Sometimes when you have an online class where you do not meet students face to face, seeing their projects is a really rewarding experience. So if you do end up drawing something, please share. I would love to see them. 3. Importing Brushes: So this is the Canvas that I set up. It's 4,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels, and it's 300 DPI. In terms of the layer structure, I have my two background textures. The first one is this, really faint stroke, paint really stroke, and the second one is the grid. I just feel like it's helpful to have some background to get started with, even though you can delete them anytime. I feel like having something on the Canvas will help me get started. So if you find this type of texture, it can help you to get started. You can grab it from the resource area. I have loaded our resource area with tons of goodies,. One of them being our brushes. I've made four brushes from scratch, and I will be alternating among those. In a second, I will show you how to download them and import it into Procreate, but before that, I would like to show you how to use them first. The first one is called Wormies. This one is pretty flat in terms of shape. So basically, you use it to lay down the foundation of our wormies. This will give you a general compositional idea where your wormies are going to be. The second one is called liner. It's called wormy liner. This one is for us to draw very detailed expressions. For example, let me just select a color. Let's go with this. So for example later when we move on to drawing little faces, having this little textured brush can be really helpful. As you can see, it's not completely flat, it has some jagged edges. So I think that will be really helpful, and now we'll give our wormies more character. The third and fourth brush are both texture brushes. The difference is, as you can see from their name, the first one is pretty light. I'm just going to select "Black" so you can see it better. So the first one is basically like a sandy texture. We use that to add shading and highlight. If this is too light, you can do multiple passes, or you can also use the second shader, which is called wormy texture. So the first pass is pretty clear already, and the second one produces a much more solid look. So that's the four brushes that I'm going to use. So next thing I'm going to show you how to import them into your appropriate. So the first thing we want to do, is of course to download them to your files or your iCloud. Then you want to come over to your brushes panel on the left side where other folders are, you just lightly scroll down, until you see the plus sign over here. Tap on it and give it a different name. Since I already have my brushes organized, I'm just going to name this test. You just tap anywhere else to exit out. Once you have that, you double-click your home button. As you can see, I have my file icon already stacked over here at the bottom. So you just drag it and hover over your appropriate, before releasing coming to the side, so that you can have a split screen, and you click on "Select". That will let you select a multiple brushes all at once. So you don't have to do it four times. Once you have the folder selected, you can just drag and drop. Now, you have all your brushes imported. To get rid of this second half, you can just drag the divider all the way to the end, and have your appropriate full screen again. Whenever you want to delete a folder, just tap on it, and they will let you either rename, delete, share, or duplicate. I'm just going to delete it, because it already happened. So now you know how to import the brushes, let's get started. 4. Foundation: Basic Shapes: The first thing I want do is to create a new layer, I've already done that over here, and I do want to zoom out a little bit so I can see all my address. I don't want my wormies to be cutoff. I'm just going to select the first smooth brush for the foundation of the wormies. You can choose how wide or skinny you want your wormies to be. Just keep in mind that if it's a little bit wider, you do have more playground for the facial expressions. I'm just going to do this and it doesn't have to be super calculated. Basically, if you want to do something similar to what I did for the cover, which has text in the middle, then you want to have your wormies poking from the sides to the middle, or you just want to try it out, you can just have a couple of them. It's really up to you. I do want to mention that if at some point you want to have your worms sitting on top of each other, then you do want to create a separate layer. The reason behind is that when you do textures, for example over here, you can treat them individually. Of course, you can always come back and manually erase all the extra stuff, but it just makes your life much easier if they are on separate layers. I'm just going to delete that one and keep everybody on one layer for the sake of demonstration. Looking at what I have now, it's pretty dreadful. We don't need dreadful worms, so let's give them some colors. Basically you just grab your color dropper, hover, and drop them off here. There is no specific rules that you have to color your worms, just whatever you feel like, basically. I tend to gravitate towards this reddish pink and pinkish red. I think I'm doing that too much here. I'm just going to try to do something different, maybe green. I'm happy with what I have over here. Just a real quick trick, if you want to fit your Canvas back to the full screen, you can just quickly pinch. Just do this and it will fit everybody back. Now I have a good sense of where compositional-wise everybody is. I'm going to add another part of the worm, which I will call scarf. Don't worry, because in this class I would never ever show you a picture of a worm. I've done the research for you already. I don't recommend anyone googling any images, don't ask me why. Basically, what I'm going to do over here is to add a little scarf to each worm. I'm going to come over to peg my Liner brushes, just because the texture looks tastier. It's awkward to say tastier on worms. Don't overthink it, just do it. I'm going to hold this color and then come over to the value panel under My Color. Then I do want to increase the brightness ever so slightly. It's still under the same cue, but darker. Basically, you're giving your wormies a little nice scarves. Apparently, this part helps forms to move, so I feel like it might be a helpful decorative part of our illustration. Again, I hold to sample the pink color and make it darker by moving the brightness to the left. If you want the little scarves to take on a different color, feel free to. Just the consistency of the same cue. The distance between the head and the scarf can vary. Maybe some worms have super long necks, others are super cold and the scarf is right up to the head. Add your imagination there. There's a lot of space for stories. Important part of drawing faces is having fun. Just go around and add a darker color as the scarf. The color is already really dark. I'm actually going to give it a lighter scarf, or because you are the author of this illustration, you can do what you want. Enjoy your artistic freedom. There we go. I'm going to pinch it back. Now everybody has a scarf.Let's revisit our layer structure here. We have our wormy bodies here and we have our scarves on top. The next thing we want to do is to add some textures. 5. Adding Texture: You may think, "Wait a minute, I thought this class is about drawing faces?" You're right. I'm being sneaky here because I want to create a bunch of fun exercises to basically help your hands to move into a warm up. Adding texture is one of those sneaky exercises. Let's go back to our warming bodies here and create a layer on top, and turn that thing into a Clipping Mask. You tap on the thumbnail lightly and turn it into a Clipping Mask. If you have never heard of the word clipping masks before, don't worry. Basically, it will just allow you to draw in a much messier manner. Still yields pretty good result. For example, I have my Clipping Mask here selected and I'm going to draw on top of that. Even if I'm drawing across the board like this, it only shows the overlapped area. This can be super helpful if you are detailing and adding the texture. For example, if we only want the lower half of the warming to bear this texture, we don't have to draw a super carefully and you erase it later. We can just do a rather careless stroke. As you can see, the definition is still pretty crisp. That's what we want. If you uncheck the Clipping Mask right here, it will show you your actual drawing, which is all over the place. But whenever you turn a layer into clipping mask, it only shows the overlapped area. Which is pretty awesome because this is non-destructive, which means that say later, you change your mind, you don't want this texture anymore, you can just turn it off. It's still there, it just won't show. Or you want to change your color of your texture, say this bright orange, you can just do a Alpha Lock and fill that layer with orange. It's pretty quick and it's non-destructive, which means that the parent layers still stays what it is. I would use non-destructive methods as much as possible. If you are really interested in knowing more about techniques like this, you can go ahead and grab my class that's called alpha lock, clipping mask, and layer mask, where I explain these things in detail. Now, with that squared away, let me just delete this so you're not confused and let's add textures. The next thing I want to do is to use Clipping Mask. I want to create one layer above my warming bodies and turn that into a clipping mask. There are a few different ways of approaching this. If you want to pick your individual colors for your texture, you can go ahead and select a different color each time you do your texture. But I'm just going to do a quick overall, which is I'm going to select my color as black, and turn my blending mode to Multiply and turn Opacity down maybe to 20 percent. I do want to zoom out for the same reason because I want my brush to go all the way to the address. I want to select a light texture first to see how it does. When you do texture or shading, it might be helpful to consider where does your light come from. For this piece sake, I'm just going to say my light source comes from this way, it's this direction. So the bottom of my warmies are going to be very shaded and the top is going to have a light highlight. I'm going to show you in a second. Basically, you just come to each warmy and do a light brush. This looks really dark. I wonder what happened. I want to turn Opacity down to 20 something percent and then just keep on going. As you can see, even though my select color is black, because it's semi-transparent and it's only like 20 percent, it still gives me the illusion of a darker blue right here. Might be harder to see over here because this color is pretty dark already. I'm going to go around and shade the lower part of the warmies. If the lighter texture brush is too light, feel free to give it a second pass. I also want to shade the scarves as well. New layer above, turn it into Clipping Mask, turn Opacity down and change the blending mode to Multiply. Now, I have my layers set up. I'm just going to draw on top of my scarfs. I feel like this time the other shader might be better, this heavier guy. Let's see. Already liking the result. There's a little distinction between the two shades. I like that. The next thing I want to do is to create some highlight using the same technique but on a separate layer, of course. If you have taken my previous classes, you know that I love layers. They are awesome, non-destructive and very flexible. Basically, you want to select your warmy bodies layer and click on "Plus". Anything that is created between the parent layer and the clipping mask will automatically be turned into a clipping mask. As you can see, it comes with this elbow icon. That's a good sign. This time I want to add highlight. I'm going to go with white and again, I do not want the opacity to be too bright. I'm going to test it out first. This time I want to select my heavier texture brush and do a pass on top of the warmy. Seems a little bit too heavy handed, so I'm going to reduce the size and try it another time. Much better. Basically, you're just going around and adding highlight. If you want the highlight to be a little bit more obvious, you can increase the opacity or change the blending mode. Screen is usually a pretty good option. Just keep on going to see how it looks like once everything is done. This contrast seems to be a little bit too strong for my taste. I'm just going to undo and decrease my opacity of my brush manually, just for this particular stroke, so it doesn't look too bright out there and turn it back up for the rest. This is pretty fun to play with before you know it, your hands are warmed up. This is pretty nice. Again, I want to select my scarf parent layer and create a layer above it. It's going to be lower in the opacity. This time I'm going to use a lighter texture brush. It maybe nice to alternate between the lighter texture brush and the heavier one, so that your eyes find it interesting to look at. I think we're basically done with shading and texture over here. If you are feeling ultra fancy, you can add a background texture. Maybe I will just leave it this way for now and come back later. I hope your hands are warmed up by now. Let's do a bit of organization here. I'm going to just right-swipe all my warmies layers including their textures and group them into one group. You can even rename them, just make sure you don't flatten them. You want to keep them in layers. If you want to feel extra secure, you can even just left-swipe and lock it. In that way, nobody yourself included, can do any changes or damages to those group of layers. I want to create one layer above for the faces, so that'll be what we're going to do for the next lesson. 6. Drawing Faces Part 1: Finally we got to draw faces. In our resource area I have included a reference sheet for you to refer to if you want to just have some idea to jump start your drawing. You can also follow along what I'm doing here and come up with your own expressions as well. The point is to have fun, and let's get started. Let's start with this blue guy here. I'm just using two finger to rotate and pinch and zoom to position my guy here. You can choose whatever color and I'm going to do yellow. Let me just test it real quick. I do want to grab my liner brush which is better for drawing details. I'm going to get started. Let me just test it to see how this contrasts with the warming colors and textures. Seems to me that this one is not the great choice because the contrast is very low. It's hard to tell it apart. I'm going to do a bit of fine tuning here, much better color. What you do want to see is a stark contrast between all different intersections. I'm going to start with hair. When I stay about drawing faces over wormies versus people is that wormies don't really have a face. You can give them whatever face that is in your imagination and there's really no wrong way to do it. I'm going to do a hair and then maybe a couple a few strand of stray hair so the hair doesn't look too rigid. This gives it a little movement and this guy seems to be pretty nerdy to me. I'm going to give him a big glasses. I just love how the texture of this pen comes out. There's a lot of room to play with the position of the eye. For example, if you put it like on the lower part of the rim of the glass, it looks like he noticed something down below, or if you, for example, put it on this side, that really brings viewers attention to the other direction. I'm going leave it this way it's pretty fun. You can try just a normal mouth and/or a big smile. If you do like a circle, it will look like he's very surprised somehow. You can also do that face, I don't care or whoa I can't believe that happened face. I'm going to go with the nerdy look with the teeth like that. Since we have so much space between the head and the little scarf, I think we can give him some fancy decoration. This little nerdy guy can be going to work on Monday let's give him some tie. I want to give him some safe colors. Before that I want to zoom out to see the position the neighbors around it. I want to make sure all other worms have enough space. Maybe I want to give him a flying tie situation. Something like this. It looks not very flattering so let me just do it again. Much better. I'm just going to smooth out the details so it looks a little bit more realistic. Great. This guy is done. You can go ahead and create another layer for it, but I'm just going to keep everybody on the same layer since they won't be touching each other. This is a pretty dark color and it's calling for something bright. Let me do a color check. You see this orange contrasted really well with the purple and the background. I'm going to stick with that. I'm going to give this girl maybe a bomb. Like that. Let's end up looking like a helmet. Well, I'm going to make some changes to alter that. You can color that solid, but I really like the texture of individual hair overlapping each other. I'm going to just do that at the pretty big bang. I'll give her glasses as well. Maybe something like that. She can have a big smile like that. You can choose a second color to add a bit of texture for it. Something like that. Let's move on to this green guy here. Let's do a color check first. This is a good color but I don't like how close this value is to here. I'm going to maybe turn up the brightness, turned down the brightness a little bit, much better. We're going to do a little crazy flying hair from here. If you need some inspirations on hairstyle, Google and Pinterest are good places to go. This guy seems to be like, I don't know, I wouldn't say on trend but, pretty unique. Somehow I really like glasses. Let's see. Maybe he's staring at this guy. Let's position his eyes over here. This seems to be fine. I like this. You can add some fun buttons on his scarf. Let's go with this pink. It's pretty edgy. I like that. If you have any elements repeating like this, I would encourage you to at least do it three times so that people know there is a pattern to it. If there are only two spots look awkward that way. We have three phases already. Let's move on to this red person here or warmy. I'm going to go and select a color that I haven't used much. Again, I want to brighter contrast let's see, this is a better option. I'm going to do a simplified pussy hair, but very simplified. We have just a few lines to indicate the direction of the hair maybe some in the back. Zoom in. Maybe it's more like a dreads, have a lot of volume but clear definition. Not everything has to start from the very root. As long as you can understand its hair, that's fine. I like this volume of the hair, and then I will put just simple eyes and eyelashes and surprised face. Now, it seems to mean this yellow doesn't contrast the background as much as I would like. Maybe I'm actually going to turn these yellow lines who touches the background a different color. Let's do this light orange. Let's see. Let me just test it, okay, better. what I'm going to do is to do awful lock. Basically this will lock all the transparent pixels and let me only paint on the painted pixels already so let me just increase the size, and I'll show you what I mean. I'm drawing clearly with a giant brush on top of the hair. But as you can see, only the painted pixels get repainted with a different color. You can even do a ombre. Maybe that's a good idea. Let me do a different shade of the same orange, slightly pink. Let's see. Better. That's how you add personality to different warmy. Maybe with the purple highlight because why not? Let's try purple. This guy here. This is a pretty good place for this guy. I'm going to turn around and keep on drawing for this great warmy. Let's do color check. Before that I want to unlock my alpha lock so that I will be able to draw on the transparency again, do a color check. It's a little bit too close to the background color, so maybe I'll just increase the saturation a bit. This Grey seems to be serious, so let's add a serious color to it. It may be really helpful when you are drawing to give your characters some narrative, to imagine a story behind it. For example, for this person, I'm thinking this is like a really serious CPA in tax season, and it just looks super responsible. Let's see, I'm just going to color it in and no stray hair. Everything's super groomed. She's like super well-groomed and with pretty serious glasses, and her eyes are actually not at the glasses level because she's looking up at to saying, "Hey pay your taxes" and say, "Hey I find some discrepancy in your taxes." If we add a little tongue sticking out like that, I will make her less serious. But I'm going to keep the vibe going like that and maybe give her some pearl necklace. That adds a bit more character to her. If you want to break-off the seriousness a little bit, you can add a bit of fun. Geometric earrings, even asymmetrical. That will make her look slightly more fun. Yes. All right. Let's move on to the next. Who's our next guy? This blue person right here, and let's do a contrast check. This seems to be pretty good. It's contrasting really well with the warmy color and the background. I like how that turns out. May not be a bad idea if you want to zoom out for a second to see our neighbors. These two guys seems to be pretty close to each other, so maybe this guy feels like, "Oh, my personal bubble." Let's see how we can express that, so make this person feel little squished. Let's put his eye up at the very top, and trying to think how you feel on you are squished or feeling squished. Eyes goes closed, and the eyebrows it's increased to size.The eyebrows need to be a little stronger. Maybe sticking his tongue out like this, because he's feeling super squished. I think it will be more consistent if I color the eyes and eyebrows with the same color. Again, I'm going to alpha lock my layer, and then just use a brush to paint over this. 7. Drawing Faces Part 2: If you want to change the position of a certain portion, you can just click on the lasso tool right here and use freehand. Just lasso around this and click on the arrow icon. Just to reposition with two fingers, we can exaggerate it and make it bigger. This is even better. He feels like his eyes are squished out of his face. We want to move this up a little bit to to add that drama. Maybe moved to turn a little bit down. This is a better spot. This little wormy feel like, I need more space. Let's move on to this guy here. Let's pick a color. I'm going with this and do check. It doesn't show anything because I still have my alpha lock on and want to unlock it. This looks a little bit too close to the neighboring color. I'm going to select something different. Maybe not blue, but go with this darker green. Seems to work. Maybe I'll just make it a tet darker so the contrast works better. This is a much better spot. This guy, maybe I want to give him like a little hat. He's like reading his morning paper. Like a little grandpa who retired,and he's trying to take a nap. Let's do this. This is Grandpa taking nap. He's happy, pretty content with his retired life. He is a Grandpa with style. Let's give him some bow ties. Because his neck is so long. I'm going to do a multiple one's,and just to adapt to the warmi fashion. You can add a bit of a highlight for the creases. For example, just doing simple lines like that. We're really highlight his little bow. Okay, great. You can even give him a nice suit. Maybe start out with a nice color. Increase my size of my brush. Nice color, like that. You don't have to draw the whole thing because for one, wormies don't have arms. I'm just going to simplify it and draw three buttons here. You can infer this is a suit. Even though you don't have to draw arms, which is pretty nice. If you're feeling fancy, you can change the color to something different. I'm just going to leave it as it is. It seems like this little grandpa person is very color coordinated. We only have one more wormy to decorate. The sky is pink. Maybe it is like a 20-something girl. We can pick a color that works well with her. This pink, this bright pink. I like how this one highlights everybody. This is a really good color. So far we have our heads turned sideways and facing up. I figured it may be nice to have a person who is actually facing down. We will emphasize a lot on her hair like that. Maybe even give her a hair band. Although it's hard to see from the back. I'll just do a quick one. Yellow one like this just to indicate that there is some kind of decoration here. Technically, if you hold your eraser, it will let you erase with the current brush. I discovered sometimes it doesn't work, but I think it's probably a bug. In general, I think it's safe to assume it does that. I'm going to erase parts of the hair to add a little bit of movement to it. Her hair is not this one giant piece. I'm using a Matte screen protector. I want between retrieving Matte and reflective and I end up liking matte ultimately because it gives me a paper like texture. You can even add some highlight, using you mean like a darker version of this pink? Yes, highlight doesn't always have to be lighter. Happy with this, you just add more texture to her hair. So now we have everybody. Let's go back to see if we can add or subtract anything. This tie looks a little bit too quiet to me. I'm going to do a color change for this tie. Maybe I'll do this dark blue and let's see, maybe this olive color to keep the green tone. Seems fine and you can even add some stripes to it. This time I do want to lock my alpha lock, so I'm not painting over the edges. Just some really quick stripy thing. It seems to be good. You can add few stripes this way. This guy's hair look a little bit flat to me. I'm going to add some texture to it. First, I want to sample this color and then just treat from there. In general something lighter with last saturation. I'm going to give this guy some curls. Just to add more fun to it. I do want to unlock my alpha lock so that I can paint outside of my edge. All right, great. I'm happy with this. Just looks like instant noodles. I like that. I think that's it for our drawing exercises. I'll make sure to leave this final layered file to the resource area so you can download and import it and check out all the layers and blending techniques and all that. 8. Mockup Your Illustrations: In this video, I will quickly walk you through steps of making a professional grade mock-up using the artwork you just created from this class. In the resource area, you will find PSD file called can Mockup from Creatsy. There are a professional mock-ups studio where they produce all kinds of surfaces and substrates to put your workout. For example, home decor and fabrics are too big thing. They also do clothing, cups, key chains, ribbons, anything you can think of. They have literally more than a thousand choices. For our class, they have graciously offered one free Mockup of a can so that you can bring your final illustrations and wrap it around the can, which I think is a pretty on point you because we're talking about a can of worms. They have several stores on Creative Market. I think the easiest way to find them is to go to creativemarket.com and just search "Creatsy" spelled as C-R-E-A-T-S-Y. I'm just going to show you a few quick steps on how to create a mock-up for your own. Over here I have the file open already and it will look something like this. I also have my second file open. This is a piece of art work that I have created over the summer. I'm going to take this illustration onto the mock-up. basically there are three big folders. One is Lighting and then Object and Background. Most of the changes are going to happen under the Object and Background. You will see some folders just say "Don't add it". I would listen to that. If you go down the green highlights and you will see Texture, and under Texture, you will see base color and image based light. What do you need to do is to double-click this layer that says "3D". Just double-click, it will take you to another window. Depending on how you set up your Photoshop, yours may look something like this. All we need to do is to turn off the UV Overlays. You can also see the instruction right at the top. All we need to do is to come over to your artwork and drag it and hover over the tab and drop it. You do want to delete the layer called Sample Design. This is just a place holder. As you're dragging your design, this gives you an idea of your placement. Let me just zoom out for a second. I want to press "Command T" to go to Free Transform. Basically, I want my art work to cover all the blue area. You can move it around so that the faces show better. This is a good spot. You can click the "Check" or press "Command S". When you jump back to your Mockup file, this is the updated look. If you want to get rid of all the grids and stuff, the extra stuff, you can just click on a different folder. You will see your mock-up. It's pretty neat. If the placement is not ideal, you can always just go back to your file and then move it around and save it. It will update the original file. You can also change the background as well. It's in this purple folder that is called Background. Basically, all you need to do is to double-click "Okay", and put your design or solid color right here. I'm going to create a layer above it. I will select "Color". That is slightly huge then click on "Okay". I'm going to press option "Delete" to cover my canvas with the foreground color. Press "Command S" to save it and jump back to my original file. As you can see, the entire background is colored this way. From here you can save your file to JPEG or Pang, or PSD, whatever format you want. Big shout out to our friends at Creatsy. Thank you so much for supporting this class. I hope you will have a lot of fun making your own Mockups. Again, if you have any questions, please reach out to me over a Skillshare or Instagram. I'll be more than happy to take a look. 9. Thank You: You did it. Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope I have helped you in your artistic journey in some way, and it's truly a privilege of mine to be part of it. Please do let me know if there's any questions that I can help you with, until next time. Bye. 10. BONUS: About Colors: In this video, I'm going to show you how I normally approach colors. One of the easiest way that I do is to grab a photo that I think convey a mood that I want to achieve for. You can source the photo from your own library or online and bring them to iPad. You can click on the "wrench" icon and "add" and "insert a photo" to bring in your reference image. It's very tempting to just press "hold" and sample color that way. However, I find it really inaccurate because sometimes your photo is really low resolution so depending on where exactly are you some point in the color or it could be just ever so slightly off and your color palette will end up looking darker or brighter than you wanted. I have a little hack for you, that is using smudge tool. You see this little smudging icon over here at the upper right-hand corner, it functions like brush of some sort. You can even select a shape, make the brush tip or smudge tip a little bit larger and come to my target area. For example, if I want to sample some color from the red dates, if I just press and hold and go around, you will see the color shifts dramatically as my finger moves around. That's because there are so many creases on this tiny little area, it's really hard to get an accurate read. What I prefer to do is to grab the smudge tool, and just lightly smudging the area over here. Make sure you're on the image layer so that you're smudging on your photo. It will mess up the photo, but that's okay. This is just a reference. Basically this will present you an average color of this tiny area. It's much easier to sample an accurate color from the smudged area. Another really cool tool that I like to use is called Coolors. That's spelled as C-O-O-L-O-R-S.CO. You can go to their website or you can use iOS apps to sample the colors. One of the reason why I really like this app, it's because the color combinations are really well curated in a way. I can tell it's not straight up randomized computer ideas. Sometimes the color can look really off, but this one, I can tell there is a human touch to it. Upon opening the app, you will already have a combination. If you want to switch things up, you can press "generate," and each time you will have a brand new color palette. For example, if you really like this color in the middle but not so hot about other colors around it, you can lock the middle color by pressing the "lock" icon. After that, whenever you click on the "generate," the middle color will stay the same. Only surrounding color will change, and then you can keep on locking different colors that you think work well with the middle color until you have a cohesive palette of five colors.