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Digital Illustration Workflow Hacks

teacher avatar The Artmother, Professional Art Teacher and Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      4:22

    • 2.

      Downloads and Setup

      6:34

    • 3.

      Find Inspiration + One Minute Character Design

      8:27

    • 4.

      The First Hack - Composition Thumbnailing

      7:18

    • 5.

      The First Hack - Color Thumbnailing

      2:59

    • 6.

      The Second Hack - The Horizontal Flip

      6:33

    • 7.

      The Third Hack - The Painter's Palette

      3:33

    • 8.

      The Fourth Hack - The Value Check

      1:31

    • 9.

      Illustration Part 1.

      13:00

    • 10.

      Illustration Part 2.

      6:37

    • 11.

      Illustration Part 3.

      7:53

    • 12.

      Final Thoughts

      2:05

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About This Class

Welcome to the Digital Illustration Workflow Hacks!

Do you know the situation when you have your head full of ideas and you just sit down to illustrate, but you are just too excited about the end result? Then you just end up with a bad design, messed up ideas and really really frustrated?

I've got you! In this class I will teach you 4 hacks that will help you stay on track and if implemented to your illustration workflow will get you from your initial ideas to real finished illustrations!

Throughout this class we are going to illustrate a cute birdie together - I will guide you through the whole process from start to finish and I will show the four hacks in action, so that you see them already implemented to an illustration workflow.

I will provide you the brushes, the color palette, the sketches and the original file for reference, but of course you will have your artistic freedom as well.

So the 4 hacks are: Color and Composition Thumbnailing, The Horizontal Flip, The Painter’s Palette, and The Value Check.

In this class we are going to use and iPad and Procreate, BUT, the hacks apply to any digital illustration workflow, so if you will use a different program, for example Photoshop, you are free to do it, you will just need to adjust the technical steps for your environment.

This class is for beginners, who just started out their illustration journey. It is recommended to be familiar with the program you are working in, in my case Procreate. However, I comment on every step in detail and have notes on the screen so that you can easily follow along.

 

The skills in this class will help creatives, illustrators and even hobbyists to create better illustrations, with better compositions and color combinations, with harmonious designs and values.

By the end of this class you will have a full illustration of a cute birdie, but so much more than that – you will already experience the magic of these hacks, and you will be packed with skills that will skyrocket your confidence while illustrating.

So are you ready to illustrate with me?

Let's get right into it!

Other Useful Classes: 

Classes on Procreate

Classes on Illustration

Classes on Digital Illustration

Meet Your Teacher

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The Artmother

Professional Art Teacher and Artist

Top Teacher


Welcome! My name is Alexandra Finta - a passionate artist, a happy mother and an enthusiastic teacher - in short The Artmother. I am a professional art teacher with a Masters Degree in Art Education with years of experience in teaching in person and online. As an artist, I am creating in all different kinds of mediums from acrylics, watercolors, graphite and digital. I have years of experience in graphic design and photography.

For more info check out my website here: www.theartmotherart.com

Follow me on Instagram and Facebook:)

I am very passionate about helping very beginners to explore their artistic abilities and to build their confidence in creating art, so I have built an open comm... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] You love to illustrate. This class is a solution for those who usually get too excited about creating. I'm sure you know the situation when you have your head full of ideas and visuals and you just stay down to create and illustrate and paint, but you expect to have a masterpiece after five minutes. At the end, you want to just throw your iPad out of the window and you procrastinate over your ideas for another week. [LAUGHTER] Don't do that. Throughout this class I will teach you four hacks that will help you to stay on track. Will be stable points in your workflow, and you'll make your ideas a reality without any technical damage. [LAUGHTER] Hello and welcome to the digital illustration workflow hacks. My name is Alexandra Gabor and I'm a professional art teacher with a Master's Degree in Art Education. I'm an artist and an illustrator as well, and I'm on my own journey of perfecting my illustration style and workflow. I'm constantly analyzing the art works of my favorite illustrators, the processes and the speed painting videos I'm watching instead of Netflix, and I read a ton of books on art and art workflows. I selected four hacks that I implemented into my own illustration workflow. That helped me to get from an initial idea to a full illustration, and give me confidence, then my designs will be harmonious and a static. Throughout this class we are going to illustrate this cute birdie together. I will guide you through the whole process from start to finish. Then will show you the four hacks in action so that you can see them already implemented into a workflow. I will provide you the brushes, the sketches, the color palette, and the original file for reference. But of course, you will have your artistic freedom as well. These are the four hacks, the color and composition, thumbnailing, the horizontal flip, the painter's palette and the value check. If you don't know these tricks, keep watching, but if you know them already, keep watching as well and illustrate this cutie with me. In this class we're going to use an iPad and Procreate. But the hacks apply to any digital painting and illustrating process, so if you will use a different program, for example Photoshop, you are free to do it. You will just need to adjust the technical steps for yourself. Obviously, this class is for beginners who just started their illustration journey. It is recommended to be familiar with the program you are working in because the class itself focuses on the hacks not the technicalities. But if you have been with me in my previous digital illustration classes, you already know that I comment on everything and every step in detail and I leave notes here and there so that you can easily follow along. The skills in this class will help creatives, illustrators, even hobbies to create better illustrations with better compositions, color combination with harmonious designs and values. By the end of this class, you will have a full illustration of this cute birdie. But so much more than that, you will already experienced the magic of this hacks and you will be packed with skills that will skyrocket your confidence while illustrating. If you have any questions for the class don't hesitate to contact me or ask them in the discussion tab below. Follow me on Skillshare so that you get notified when the other classes will be up there and follow me on social media as well on Instagram and Facebook to see what I'm up to, my latest works and projects, my philosophical thoughts on some music recommendation. Are you ready? Let's dive in it. 2. Downloads and Setup: [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to the Digital Illustration Workflow Hacks. In this video, we are going to talk about the downloads and set up, but let me just first, thank you for taking this class. I'm really happy to have you here. Let's talk about the resources, open Skillshare and find the area below the videos. You have the about reviews community under project and resources section down here. This is the place where you can create your project, and here are the resources. I would love to tell you that there are two ways to do this class. The first is that you download all the resources and you follow the tutorial step-by-step with me. The second way is you can download their resources, but you create your own illustration, and you just take my advices and staffs and you build your own artwork. I encourage you to do your own illustration, but if you don't feel that safe, you can just download this and follow me. Let's take a look on this one individually. The first one is the birdie's catch png, that is my sketch and that you can use freely. To have this sketch in your procreate, you just tap on, holds down, hit save image, and it will just save the image to your camera roll. If you open procreate, go to gallery, create a new canvas because we are going to use a screen sized canvas. Choose that, hit orange button, add, insert a photo, choose this catch, and you will have it right here on a new layer. You can continue from there. Let's go back and let's see the second one, which is the birdie color palette. I'm providing you the exact color palette, I'm going to use for the illustration. We are going to build a new one in the next video for those who want their own colors. But you will have this as well. Just hit on it, opening files and it will automatically import to procreate. If you go to the colors and to the palette, you will have the birdie color palette at the bottom of your palettes. Don't be afraid when you open your palettes, go to the button and you will have it there. If you want to use it, you need to hit start default. When you go to for e.g. classic, you will have this birdie color palette for yourself. Let's go back, and now we have the birdie procreate file, which is the original file of my illustration. It is really good for reference, so just hit it, it will take a little time to load because it is a big file. Yeah, and it is opening, and it's here. Hit open in procreate, it is importing, and if you go to gallery, you will have it here. Open it up and in the layers you will see every layer that we're going to create. We have the value check layer, the sketch layer, the flattened image, the layered illustration, painter's palette and a thumbnail as well. Let's go back again. We have two brushes here, these are the exact same brushes that I'm providing you in the other digital illustration classes. These are my personal illustration brushes. To import them, just hit opening files and it is important to your brushes. You will find it down here at the imported brushes. If you have done any other my classes, you already have this. But if you didn't, I just want to show you how to download them. Hit this shader brush again, opening files and it'll show up right here. These are the resources you can find in Skillshare. I would love to show you some recommendations for brush packs that I'm using. Let's go to my website, which is theartmother.com. Yes, you can sign up for my newsletter, and here you have the procreate brushes. You can find a liner and a shader as well, so you can download them from here as well. Down here, they're my favorite brushes on Creative Market. I will use some brushes from the forest tales and I guess something from the gouache brushes. These are some amazing brush packs, so they don't cost a lot. You can see like $8, $14, etc, but they include like 60 brushes and all of them are amazing. I really recommend you to get them if you want. I will just show you how to download the brushes from my website. You need to hold down these download buttons, and hit open a new tab and go to that tab. It will open a Google Drive page and you'll have to download button here. If you hit that and then you will have the opening procreate option, and it will just import that shader brush as well. Let's go back to Skillshare, I want to invite you to create a project. You can post work in progress photos to your project as well. I really love to see how you build your illustration. There is another place on Facebook that is called the arbiters online art room. I would love to invite you there. It is an exclusive Facebook group for my students. You need to answer the questions to get in, and you can just share your work in progress photos or any other R2 create. I just love to see them and to give feedback, Just come and join us. I think that was all that I wanted to say to you in this video. See you in the next one where we are going to get some inspiration and do a one-minute character design. 3. Find Inspiration + One Minute Character Design: [MUSIC] Welcome. In this video, we are going to talk about what we are going to do in this class. Our topic is a cute birdie. What I want you to do is to go to Google and write colorful bird, hit "Images" and you will find some amazing creatures. I will love you to go through these images and find birds that you really love and in a minute I will just show you how to build a color palette from these images. What I have chosen for my project, where is my cute birdie, is a dissolute a cutie and the way I'm going to build a color palette from her is that I hit these two buttons and create a screenshot. Now, I will go to procreate and create a new canvas. Hit the pause button and create a screen-size canvas. This is what we are going to work on. The reason is because it is big enough to be a quality illustration, but not too big to have a limited number of layers. Hit the Range button, insert the photo, and do the same process. Insert this birdie here and now you now have this birdie color palette I have created here. You can create a new one from the image you just imported. I will create a new color palette in the color palette. Hit the Plus sign here. You can name it new birdie. Just so that I can differentiate and set it as a default. Every time you create a new palette, it is going to be the default palette. You can put colors into it. Go back to the classic, and just hit the Color Picker and go through the birdie and just add those that you like. This is a quick way to build a color palette that you like and you see that is harmonious. I'm not going to do this again. I just wanted to show you the process of it. This is the inspiration of colors but now let's do a one-minute character design, and I will just show you an exercise that will help you to create some fun and goofy characters. Character design is a really deep topic. I could talk about it for hours and I will in Skillshare class in the future but right now, let's just create a new layer. Choose black color and the 6B pencil in the sketching brushes, and do some exercises. Scribbling always frees up the tension in your hands. Let's just first do some really scribbles around the whole canvas. To free the tension in our hands you can just clean it. Let's just do some small ones. Just these ones. Let's do six of them. This looks like nothing to you, but they can be actually animals or birds, even so, let us place some eyes. Mirrors the beak. Let's say here is one leg two leg. You can have these wings here. Can you see the bird in it? I will just erase from it. You can play with these shapes and just create some fun things from these scribbles. I can see a bird here. I will erase this part. You can erase from it. You can add lines to it as you wish. Here's the wing here's some tummy. I love to do these googly eyes. I love this one. This is fun. Let's move on. This will be a big birdie. I don't like this line here, so I will delete it. I will make some big eyes like this. Again, your task is to do these scribbles and do some fun with them, and choose one birdie to be your character. We will play with that in the next video, which is going to be the first hack but okay. This is an interesting shape. Let's make him longer legs. This is going to be the wing. This is going to be a very serious bird. I will put in some. Let's do another one here. This is going to be a mama birdie with a small cute birdie. These scribbles can really turn your creativity on. This doesn't look good. Why not? I have some scribbles here. I choose something like this, but with a different shape. I already have it sketched, so I will keep with that one and do this exercise to have some idea of your birdie or you can just use my sketch. In the next video, I'm going to do thumb-nailing. This is again optional if you are going with my sketch, but just keep watching because it will be good to see what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Your task now, if you do your own illustration, is to first build a color palette from a colorful bird image. Then warm up with some scribbling, then create six small scribbles and use your creativity to make birds from them. After that, choose one to be your character. If you are not going to do your own illustration, you can still do these exercises for practice. Now see you in the next video. Let's start with the first hack. 4. The First Hack - Composition Thumbnailing: Hello and welcome to the first hack which is thumb-nailing. Actually it is composition and color thumb-nailing, which are two different processes. But they're so closely related that I wanted to include them in the same hack, but we're going to deal with them in different videos. What is thumb-nailing? Thumb-nailing is the stage before sketching. It is basically laying down rough ideas on a very basic level. This will prevent you from jumping right into the sketching and just messing up your design idea. In this stage, we are going to do two different things; composition and color thumb-nailing. These two answer different questions. The composition thumb-nailing answers that what are we going to draw and where are we going to draw it? Obviously the color thumb-nailing answers what color the elements will be. Now, what do we know? We know that we want to draw a cute birdie, and we already have this wonderful character design. But we don't really want this birdie to be alone. But also, I don't really want to over-complicate the whole illustration as our class is focusing on the hacks, so I decided to add a decorational element, which is this floral that I include in most of my illustrations. What I'm going to do is to combine these two together in an illustration. Now your task is to decide what do you want to add to your bird. It can be a floral, it can be an object or a different decorative element. Don't over-complicate it. Just make sure that the two fit together. We already know the colors, what colors we will use. We already have the color palette built. You already built your own color palette in the previous video. Now, let's just talk about the where. The composition of thumb-nailing actually answers more this where question. Where we are going to place our elements, what is going to be dominant? What is going to be in proportion, bigger or smaller, etc. What I love to do is to place my elements into a shape. I'm going to use a circular shape to guide my design. Let's just go back where we left off and create our composition thumbnails. Create a new layer above everything. I will keep my black color and a sketching 6B pencil. The point of having thumbnails is to see the canvas with my illustration and character. It is a kind of visualization of the whole idea. I will just lay down free of this landscape oriented canvases. This is one canvas. You can use the quick shape function in Procreate to have like straight lines. You can lay down more to see what works. In the composition thumb-nailing which is the first one, you place your birdie into the canvas you have in front of you. My idea for this illustration was, and what I love to do in my illustrations is to place my characters and elements into a shape. I love circles. I will just draw a circle into the middle of every canvas. You can edit the shape to make it a circle. If you cannot draw proper circle, or if you are actually doing that, you don't need to do this. You can do something else which you like. You really have the artistic freedom because this class is about the hacks, not actually the illustrating part. So let's see the first one. My question is, where I'm going to place my character in this setting. It is also about dominance. I don't want to do a too complicated illustration. I want to have my birdie. I will just catch him here. I want my birdie, and I want some florals because I really love my florals if you know my style. This composition thumb-nailing is about dominance as well. Should I place my birdie into the middle of this circle? This is a really rough sketch. The florals should be around him like this for example. Or my birdie should be small. The florals should be dominant around him and I can add more. Or should I make it more actionable? The birdie should do something, or should I draw him somewhere here? I love spirals as well. I will do something like this. Now, your task is to do thumbnails like this and try out some placements and compositions. Will the birdie be big or small in a center, inside? wood elements will you have in a really rough, on a really basic level? You can do more of these. I'm doing just three because I already noted, I will choose this setting. When I decide on that, I will select my thumbnail. Put my three fingers on the screen, slide up and hit "Cut and Paste." What this does is that it will place my thumbnail on a new layer. I will just delete the layer below, and I have this layer. Now I can continue to the color thumb-nailing, which is the second part of the first hack, and we're going to do it in the next video. See you there. 5. The First Hack - Color Thumbnailing: [MUSIC] Welcome to the second part of the first hack, the Color Thumbnailing. Color thumbnailing is basically laying down rough colors in more versions from the color palette we have built in order to choose the best possible combination. The color thumbnailing answers the question, what color the elements will be. So now we have our little beautiful thumbnail and the color palette that we have already built, so what we're going to do now is we're going to create more colored versions of this thumbnail. So let's go back to procreate, duplicate this thumbnail several times on our Canvas, and we are going to place it around the Canvas. Then create a new layer below all of the layers you have, and start trying out color combinations, so paint on this layer below the thumbnails. Choose the liner brush or any opaque brush to lay down the colors. You really don't need to go into details, values are shadows, the point is to know what color the main elements will be. In this case, the background, the birdie, and fluoro. You don't need to restrict yourself to the color palette you have built, you can add and remove colors as you wish. So at the end of this process, you need to select the version that you like the most. For some reason, I love this one. What I'm going to do before I start catching, is that I will select all these layers, group them. When you have the group hit "Flatten", and it will make one layer from all of the layers. Now, hit "Select", select all those that you didn't like. Free fingers slide up and hit, "Cut", and you will remain with the little thumbnail with the composition, and then with the colors, and now you can start working. [MUSIC] In the next video, I'm going to sketch and show you the second hack, which is the horizonal flip. [MUSIC] Don't forget to give yourself time for this process, and also share your colored thumbnails in your Skillshare project and/or in the Facebook group. [MUSIC] 6. The Second Hack - The Horizontal Flip: Welcome. In this video, we're going to sketch the whole illustration. I have the thumbnail layer and I will create a new layer for the sketch. I can rename these layers. I will just Thumbnail and Rename. What do I need for my sketch? I need black color, I need sketching 6-bit pencil, and I need a circle. Thank God, Procreate has the quick shape, so I will draw the circle, hold down, hit "Edit Shape" and "Circle", and I have circle. Now I can go deeper into character design. I'm not sure if the bird is going to have the same shape. I'm not sure although it should be a triangle. You know what? I'm going to be like, spontaneous, and I'm just going to draw this shape like this. This is going to be my bird and I'm not going to work on it more, this bird will have his legs around this somehow. It will have three things up here. One bigger eye, I just love to do that. It will just look a little goofy. This is beak, and he will have a big tummy, with some textures on, one wing, other wing, and I don't know. But I just want it to be so simple, I don't want to overdo this. I will have some bubbles around, and that's my thing, and I think that's okay. The second hack is the horizonal flip. What that means that you select it and flip horizontal and you see what is wrong with your illustration. Now I can see that is absolutely not balanced. Maybe it would look better if it would be like this. I'm missing something here, from here. I will add one more little, this leaf. I will just turn it back a little bit like this. I can see that these legs are a little bit imbalanced, makes like we're feeling. I'll play with the legs and maybe I can just turn these body a little bit. I will just hit the "Select," and cut around him, and position this maybe just a little bit. Feels better. Just the millimeter, but still amazing. Cool. Now I also see that this spiral is not as long so I will just turn this. I don't want this one either. This is really cleaning up this catch and making it better. Amazing. Now let's flip it back, and it looks great. But I think this is too big, so I will just delete it. Again while I have my sketch and it is balanced and I know my colors and everything's just fine, and this will add into your illustrating this experience because you will have everything a little bit better. I might get smaller, I will add a little bit here like that. Something then just can't stop doing stuff like this. [MUSIC] Now, let's move on to illustrating parts and we are going to talk about the third hack, which is the painter's palette. Now you'll have seen how my sketch was boring. But if you are doing your own sketch, again, give it time, to work on your sketch flip it back and forth as many times as you need to reach a balanced design. If you're doing your sketch, your task now is to finish it off. 7. The Third Hack - The Painter's Palette: [MUSIC] Welcome to the third hack where we are going to do the painter's palette. The point of this hack is to make your illustration workflow easier. I just hate that when I have these colors chosen, I always need to click and go back mainly when I'm really into painting. It is like a flow. You have the flow and you are actually interrupting the flow with clicking and stuff like that. What I love to do is to create a painter's palette because I'm a traditional painter and I just loved to have everything in front of me in a massive way, and I really miss that from digital. What I'd love to do is to hit the plus sign, put this layer behind the sketch. I will choose brush. Actually, it can be any opaque brush. I'm going to use my liner again and what I'm going to do is to go through these colors and just lay them down. It is a lighter version here. I think I want a lighter version here as well. Maybe I'm not going to use all these colors. I would squeeze them out from the tubes if you know what I mean. I will just rather maybe manage all this vibrant red. I will just add it back here. I will go with the magenta. I'm squeezing out the paint to my palette so that I can just grab them. What I love to do is to choose a darker and a lighter version from same color. Because when it comes to shading, I just grabbed a darker one and I'm ready to use those. Actually, I'm missing a little bit of this mint green. I'm not sure if I'm going to use that. I know I have the color thumbnail, but maybe I will need that for details. I just love these colors. I will just add down here. I don't need a darker version of it. I love them navy. It is dark navy. So this is my color palette that I'm going to just add the color picker and start painting. It will just make your painting and illustrating workflow a lot easier. Now, let's continue to the next video where we're going to apply the four tag, the value check and then we will start illustrating and finish this illustration up together. Let's see you in the next video. Your task now is to squeeze out your colors to a painter's palette to see how they work together and improve this palette by adding lighter and darker versions and different colors that you are missing. 8. The Fourth Hack - The Value Check: [MUSIC] Before I start illustrating, I love to do the Value Check layer. Hit the layers and create a new layer above everything. Now choose gray, hit that layer and hit "Fill Layer" and now you have a full gray layer. But what we're going to do now is to hit this N, go to Color and go to Color. Now you will see everything in gray scale. To have a harmonious design, you cannot have everything disk dark. Now I see, even in my color's thumbnail, that the color that I've chosen here needs to be lighter. I see my color palette, which are the values of my colors. You will need to turn this layer on and off while you are illustrating so that you can see that everything's all right. This is what pros do because your designs need to work in gray scale as well. See you in the next video and let's start illustrating. 9. Illustration Part 1.: [MUSIC] I'll just check what we have here. So we have a layer for the value check. You know what, I'm going to rename that. Value check. Amazing. Then we have the sketch. Then we have the painter's palette and we have this thumbnail. That's what we have. Now let's create a new layer below the sketch. What I love to do with the sketch layer is to hit "N", lower the opacity, and hit "Multiply". By this, I will be able to see through the sketch. Choose this layer, and let's choose a color for our birdie. I will just choose this one. Another thing else that I always think in layers. I mean, what's behind, what's in the middle, what's in the front. In the middle is the body of this birdie. Just draw and fill in the shape of his body with a color we've chosen. Now, what I love to do is to add a little shading to my illustrations. If you don't know how to shade, I recommend you to take my digital shading class. What I'm going to do is to Alpha lock this layer, choose a darker version of the color. Choose the shader brush again. Make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to choose a darker one actually. Oh, that's too much. I will lower opacity. Now, I will add a little shadow below these eyes. It'll look fun. This is all a little bit shading with color, texture, and transparency, as it is already a transparent layer. Hit a new layer above, choose white color because we're going to do the eyes. I choose the liner brush. I will again, Alpha lock it, I will add a little bit of gray and a shader brush. Actually this is simple process I'm following. Great. Now choose black and add the liner and that, and this, cuties to make it goofy. That looks great. As you can see, I lowered the size of the brush. I will just add back a little light to the eyes. Cool. Now, add a new layer, and it is going to be the beak. So now I choose this very vibrant red and again, choose the liner brush. I'll make it bigger. Looks great. I will turn off the sketch so that I can see it better. I might add some more shadows. I will Alpha lock the beak and choose a darker red, add a little bit of shadow here. I will go back to the eyes and I will adjust that a little bit with an eraser. I'm sorry I didn't comment on this process a little bit, but I had to make up my mistakes so it looks better. I need to repair the shape of the bird as well. I just repaired it and I will turn on the sketching layer again. So let's create a new layer and make this thing about what we said. Let's say, I think it should be a light blue. I will just take this. I will take the liner brush again and put this layer behind the birdie so that it's not distracting. Wow, looks great. Oh, it's shaded as well. I have this navy here. Choose the shader brush, Alpha lock it, and put some shadows here and there to the sides so that it looks great. Let's put these pinks and it will be magenta. Again, it can be in the same layer only you need to un-Alpha lock it or unlock it. Now choose the liner brush. This is exactly the same process that I'm doing over and over in my other illustrations classes. So it is not like anything surprising. Just to have this little birdie fun. Amazing. Now I will choose this darker violet maybe and shade with that. I'll Alpha lock the layer again. Amazing. Cool. It looks great. I just love it. Let's do a value check. It's fine. Maybe the beak could be darker. Let's just do it. Choose the layer of the beak. Hit the adjustments, hue saturation, and brightness, darkness, and just put a little bit darker. Let's do value check. Looks better. Great. Turn off the value check and let's continue. What about the legs? I will create a new layer for the legs and I think they could be red. Again, liner brush. It will be something like this. Looks weird. It can stay. What I'm going to do is to paint the background. The reason for that is so that I have something to put this floral on. Choose the color picker and this dark violet and create a new layer below everything, I mean, of the birdie and just do the circle. Looks great. Let's do value check. Still okay, but these wings are a little bit lost. So I need to think about something. I will turn off this. Yeah, I know why. I will repaint this. I will choose the layer of the wings and choose the magenta. Again, with the shader brush I will just repaint it. Everyone does mistakes. I will choose this light pink and I will not shade but lighten now. Do value check, and it's fine already. Maybe this still is lost somewhere and the legs as well. So I will need to find something. What color is this? Value check. White, yellow. I actually need to do something with the background. I will just show you a texture that I really love. It is the forest tales brush set and this water brush texture. I will maybe choose this dark navy and just darken where the bird is. Let's do value check, actually it looks fine. I just don't like the legs now. I will choose the legs. Hit "Adjustments", hue saturation, choose a different color, darker ones. Maybe this blue, a darker red. I will Alpha lock it, choose the yellow, choose the shader brush and I'll just do something like this. Looks better. Great. I wanted to put some stomach to this birdie. It was this orange. So I will just choose the orange, choose the body of the birdie hit "Select" and hit "New layer". So now I'm on a new layer, but still in the shape that I had selected and turn on the sketching layer and choose the liner brush and I will just paint there. Nice. What I will do to include this shape within the shading of the birdie is to create a layer above these two shapes, choose black, and you can keep the shader brush, just lower the opacity, make it a little bit bigger. This transparent layer of black about this color will affect the color so that it blends into this shading that we have here. Now, let's do a value check. It will be fine because I want to add some details around it's stomach so that it will be a little bit separative. Let's continue in the next video. Go for break. 10. Illustration Part 2.: [MUSIC] Welcome back. I hope you took a little break as I did. I'm back to this illustration. It is always a good thing to step aside and have a break. Now, we are going to continue with the illustration. What my problem is that I'm not sure what color I want this to be. I wanted to have it like this magenta, but I think it will blend too much into the background and it will be too purplish, I don't know. I will just see what I'm layering on. I created a new layer above everything. What I wanted to do is to select all the layers my birdie has and group them and just rename it like Birdy. I have a birdie. I have a background and these layers, and I have a new layer 13, lucky number. In this layer, I will go back to my thumbnail and just try to figure out. I don't like this red. Let's try something yellow. It will be too yellow. But you know what? The birdie has this teal stuff on his head, and I guess it would look great to have this teal laurel around. You can be flexible with this thumbnailing as well. But you have a little thumbnail to try things on, so you don't need to go right away into the illustration. I have this 13th layer. I have my liner brush. I have the teal color I have here. Let's start illustrating. I have the liner brush again and I will try to increase pressure to have this nice gradation from the thin line to the thicker line. I'll try to follow the line for the outline of this background. If you have problems with a brush that is not really following the movements you want to make, just tilt on it and add streamline and it will just fix this problem. My hands are a little bit shaky now, so I need more streamline. You can always adjust this and adjust back. Don't be afraid to do what you need to do. Great. It looks quite cute. Let's do Value Check. It really blends into the background. What I need to do is to lighten up this part of the background or darken it. Lighten this up and darken this maybe. You check, turn off. I will Alpha Lock this laurel and choose the shader brush again and pick this mint color like white blue or mint. I'm not sure what color it is. I will just try to add a little dimension again to this laurel. I will add on the top of these leaves as if it was a highlight. It looks great. It adds a little variation to it and I will add a little navy to make it darker. Here and there. Make it smaller. Brush. I will add back this leaf. I love this. Put back the navy. [NOISE] This is when the color picker is really useful in that we have this painter's color palette here so that we can just go back and forth. I don't like this bigger shader brush. Go back to the navy. I am doing simple shading. I didn't go a bit of a three-dimensional feeling to the whole illustration. Fine, let's do Value Check. It looks great. I will need to darken the background a little bit. Turn this on. Go back to the background and choose whatever brush texture. If you don't have this, you can use maybe the artistic. The gouache brush will work fine as well. Maybe I will stay with this gouache brush for a sec. Maybe darken it a little bit. I will choose this light. Blend this well and go back with it. [NOISE] While you check, I will add this light purple where these shadowy things are, and I will darken it with a little navy where [inaudible] just like this lighter. I will do it like that. It will be the trick. Fine. It looks great. I will just darken it a little bit. Just play with this. In the next video, I will add some details. 11. Illustration Part 3.: [MUSIC] Let's add some details. The first detail layer, so create a new layer above everything. These illustrations is the birdie and on her stomach, I want to see something a little bit reddish. I will go to this darker red and choose, I don't know, soft pastel. I will just make it smaller and just add a little bit of this soft pastel to this tummy. I can choose this vibrant yellow. What I love to do is to choose the 6B, or is it sketching a 6B pencil? Just add some little things like that to the stomach. Soft pastel. Let's add to it a little bit of orange. I will place this layer to the birdie and below the eyes and the beak so that I can continue. With this dark red, I will go back to the 6B pencil and just some some. I will choose this light pink and add some lines to the wings and the dark pink as well, this dark magenta. Cool. It looks great to me. Let's add something up here. Let's choose these vibrant blue and we can just add these lines. I will go to this floral. I will create a new layer above the floral and I will add maybe some dots here and there. I love this. I love so much when the illustration just comes together. When I'm not illustrating for a long time, I get too excited about the result and I tend to overdo things. I'm going to just add these dots. It looks so interesting and I just love this. Let's do a value check and it looks fine to me. I think it really looks good on a grayscale as well. Turn off the value check. What I wanted to add as my personal thing did I love to do are these little black bubbles. I will just turn on this. As you can see, I added some here and there. You can all do this as well, or do just your own decoration of things. What I love to do is to choose black, choose my liner brush, and do black bubbles because that's my thing. Signature element. You can add it if you want, but don't use it as your signature element, please. [LAUGHTER] What I do is I Alpha lock it, choose the white, choose the shader to make it small, go inside and just add this feeling, these little black bubbles. Cool. I'm going to turn off the sketch. Here is my cool illustration. Now that we're done with the details, I will add one more layer of shadows. If you have taken the digital shading class for me, you know what will happen. I will create one more layer above everything. Below the sketch, choose black as my color and choose from painting the round brush. I will lower the opacity and the size of it and I will add these inclusion shadows. There will be just a little sharp and I try to make it fit the illustration. What it does that is, it adjusts the colors right away. I will add maybe below her eyes, smaller one, maybe on the beak. Just a really small transparent line to make it a little bit here, just so that it looks fine to me. I will add a little bit here, add a little bit here. You know that these are just fine details that you can add. You don't need to, but I just love to. I will add here and here, you know where things touch. Now we're down. What do you say to this illustration? I just love it. It is so fun and colorful and it is harmonious in composition and in colors and values and everything is just amazing. I hope you enjoy this class. I'll see you in the next video where we're going to summarize what happened in this class and you will be able to upload your project. I just can't wait to see what you create. See you guys in the next video. 12. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations, you have gone through the whole process. Now you have a crispy illustration that I bet you're proud of. I hope these hacks will help you to level up your art and that this class was really beneficial for you. It would mean so much to me if you would leave me a review so that I know what you think about the class. I am super excited to see what you create so don't miss out on posting your projects into the project gallery and share it with your friends and family and other students to get feedback. Please join the art butters online on Facebook graph where you can post your results and work-in-progress photos and other artworks. We're really happy to see what you're up to. I'm so glad that you have finished this class and that you have chosen me to be your instructor. I'm really, really thankful. Stay tuned for the next class. See you. Let's just summarize what you have learned in this class. Now you know that to have a great design, you need to plan ahead to get inspiration for a color palette from real creatures that you can design a cute character from scribbles. The thumbnailing will help you to place your elements. That color thumbnailing will help you make better color choices, that looking at your design from a different angle will help you correct mistakes. That a squeezed-out color palette will help you pay more smoothly and that value check will be your best friend when illustrating. I hope you're happy with your drawing. Happy creating everyone.