Digital Paper Quilling in Procreate

1. Introduction: Paper killing has gone digital. No more need to worry about paper strips, glue, tweezers, or sore fingers. When you want to create beautiful three D artwork in this unique style. Join me in class to learn how to create realistic three D digital killing in procreate. In this class, you're going to learn the basic techniques for creating three D Digital Quill art in procreate. Then we'll work through a full design together. Once you complete the main part of this class, you'll be able to take what you've learned and create your own unique artwork that you can share via e mail or social media. 2. Resources: Let's take a quick look at all the resources I've provided for you in this course and where you can find them. 0. When you get to the resource page for this course, this is what you will see. This button right here will take you out to drop box where you can download the feather template if you want to use that. The guide to the quilling shapes and the procreate color palette that I'm going to use for the sample project. If you want to do a different project or you just want some inspiration later on I've put together a curated Pinter is board for our course. This has a wide variety of projects on here. You never want to directly copy someone. Of course, this will give you a lot of inspiration for the different types of digital quilling pieces that you can create. Everything from typography to food, to animals. Depending on your skill level and what you're comfortable with, you can get more simple designs, or you can do a little bit more detail. You can do more traditional shapes like this or more of the on edge paper quilling we're going to talk about later where you have more open ****** and you're almost painting with the paper free to just go through here, take a look and see what inspires you for your next project. The other thing that's available on this page is the digital quill brush set for procreate that I've put together. In this brush set, we have both sets of brushes that I'm going to be talking about in this course for two different methods for doing digital quill. All you need to do is just fill out your name and e mail address and those will get sent to you automatically as we go through the process. I'm also going to tell you which built in procreate brushes could be used for this as well, but this is a free set that I'm including for our students. In the next, we're going to learn about the course project. 3. Class Project: Quilling is an art form that I fell in love with years ago. And I've done quite a lot of it. But over the years since being a professional designer and using my hands all day, I found that I just couldn't do the fine motor using the tweezers and scissors and all of that stuff for more than about an hour at a time before I started really having a lot of pain. And this was really frustrating and sad for me because I love this art form. I think it's so unique and fun. And I really wanted to find a way that I could do this with less pain and even less mess. And do it really anytime anywhere that I wanted. After a lot of trial and error, I figured out a way to digitally quill in procreate. And that's what we're going to learn this course. The project that we're going to do together is to digitally quill a feather. I chose this project because it's fairly easy, but the results look like you spent a ton of time on it and you can get a simple, or as intricate as you want. So it's suitable for all levels from beginner to more advanced artists. I provided a basic template for you to use as a sketching layer, or you can totally create your own feather design as well. 4. Quilling History: In this video, I'm going to give you a brief overview of traditional paper quilling. We need to know where we've been and what we're trying to replicate. Before we do this digitally, I'll go over some of the basic quilling shapes. You have a resource for that as well in your kit. Then I'll talk about on edge paper quill and another hybrid form of this art, which is called paper graphics. Paper quill, also known as paper fill, is an intricate art form that involves rolling and shaping strips of paper into various designs. Its history dates back to the Renaissance period in Europe, when nuns and monks used gilded edges of books to create decorative designs resembling scroll work. Technique evolved over time, gaining popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries as a leisure activity for affluent women who would use it to create ornate designs for greeting cards, jewelry, and home decor. During the Victorian era, paper quilling gained prominence as a popular craft. The term quill originated from the use of bird feathers or quills to roll the paper strips. Modern paper quilling involves various techniques and tools that make it more accessible to a wide range of enthusiasts. Quillers around the world create intricate designs, including flowers, animals, abstract patterns, and more by manipulating strips of paper, usually from one eighth to a four inch wide, but sometimes wider. Modern tools have replaced actual quills, but many artists use only their hands or find other ways to form shapes from paper. Today's artists continue to push the boundaries of the craft, incorporating it into mixed media projects, sculptures, and even digital art. With its rich history and ongoing innovation, paper Quill remains a captivating expression of creativity and craftsmanship. The most basic shapes and quilling are the tight coil and the loose coil. These are used in creating many of the other by pinching, stretching, or combining them. Some of the most common include the tear drop, petal, marquise, heart triangle, square, and star. There are also several varieties of scrolls that are commonly used in quilling designs on edge paper quilling and the broader term of paper graphics is often associated with artists like Julia Brodskya. This is a distinctive style within the broader realm of paper quill. Often these pieces feature more scrolls and negative space than traditional quillingwever. They can also have other elements and shapes incorporated, such as typography, paper cut elements and layers, and even three D paper sculptures. This new modern style of quilling encourages experimentation, pushes the boundaries of paper quilling and creates visually stunning pieces that capture the imagination. 5. DigiQuill Process: In this video, I'm going to give you an overview of the basic digital quilling technique. There are two main methods that I've found. I'm going to go over both of them with you, the pros and cons, and tell you which one I prefer and why. Traditional quill generally starts with a tight or loose coil and then pinches the paper to form a bunch of other shapes. I've provided this guide to you if you want to do digital quill in a more traditional style. I created all of these with the techniques that we're going to learn in this course. There are two main methods for doing digital quilling in procreate. The first method is actually to use some three D strips and these I've provided for you in the class resources. There's two different kinds here, there's three D strips and the specialty ones, I want to show you the difference. This digi Quill full strip is a two color brush. If we were just to use it as it is right now, you can see there's one color on the top and one on the side. That's definitely not what we want. We need to set both of these to purple and make the second one darker. That's going to be the side of our paper strip just like that. It's nice that it has the paper strip shading built in. But you do need to remember to have dual colors every time you use the brush. These specialty ones actually have a paper texture built in. However, because of the way the brushes are built, they are going to be a little bit see through at the top. They're not going to be solid like this. We took this one and drew a strip. You can see it has this really nice texture to it, but if we put a background color here, you're actually going to see that come through, whereas you're not on this one. Both of these give a pretty nice three D effect. But I feel like they're a little bit more time consuming, a little bit less forgiving than the alternate method that I'm going to show you. I have some examples of some basic coiling shapes that I've made with these brushes. Just to show you the difference, let's take a look at those. These were made with that three D brush. I always start out my quiling process with a sketch, then we would go over that on a new layer with the brush and add highlights and shadows on another layer after that. This is an example of domed brush, which gives you a little bit less offset on your paper shadow. If you want to make something that looks more like this, I feel like this process is a little bit more labor intensive and a little bit less forgiving. Let's take a look at this other set of brushes Gives you definitely a different feel, having this open at the top, if that's something that you like and you're going to have a white background, then this would work fine. You can get some really nice open coils using these brushes. I have three sizes in your kit here. There's thin, medium, and thick, and then there's paper roll right here. That's what these are showing. But the method that we're going to learn for this course that I really like ends up giving us this effect. It's a lot easier to make updates and changes. I feel like this is the most effective way to do this technique. We're going to start with a sketch, we're going to color over that, we're going to add the three D effect, and then add our shadows and highlights. Let's go back to our other canvas and we will walk through this technique for the digital coiling technique that I'm going to recommend and teach in this course. We're going to use some of the brushes from my digital coiling set that you can get in the resources. However, you can do this with built in procreate brushes as well. You can use basic monoline brushes and basic pencil brushes, as well as the air brush from procreate. For all of this, again, I usually start out with a sketch just so I know approximately where my design is going to go for super basic things like this, it's not quite as necessary, but especially if you're doing more intricate designs, you're definitely going to want to have a sketch. Then we're going to put a new layer on top of that drop down the opacity of our sketch by tapping this little n right here. On our new layer, we're going to choose the first color that we want. I've provided a color palette for you for a class that we're going to use for this one, I'm just going to grab something from my grape vine palette. Maybe this dark purple. I'm going to use my digit quill outline brush. It's a basic monoline brush and I've turned up the stream line and stabilization quite a bit. So it gives you nice, really smooth lines. You can see I'm hardly having to try to keep that smooth. And I'm going to make this a perfect circle by holding my pencil at the end and then tapping my finger down. When I'm going to switch to a new color or some other line that's going to cross over, I'm going to add a new layer. It's going to make it really easy to keep this clean. Let's go with a little bit lighter purple here. I'm going to drop this new layer behind. Let's make this big curve here. Two finger tap to undo. I actually want to cross over this so I can get the clean line. Then I'm just going to take my eraser. If I tap and hold the eraser, I'm going to erase with that same brush. And then I can just come right over here and clean that up. Add another new layer underneath right between my sketch and that lighter purple. I'm going to go even a little bit lighter and fill in these last two curves crossing over. Grab my eraser and just clean up these ends you want. You can chop off the ends of your paper so it looks a little bit more like actual paper strips. All right, once you've got your color on there, you can go ahead and turn your sketch layer off. Come over to this checkbox and just tap on that. Then what we're going to do is actually make a copy of all of our colors here, so they're all on one layer. I'd like to hold onto these so I have them as a back up in case I want to make any changes later. Let's turn off our background color for the moment. We're going to take three fingers and swipe down copy all, turn our background back on. We're going to group all of these by swiping to the right tapping group. Then I'm just going to hide that. We're going to make a new layer at the top. Swipe down with three fingers and paste. Now we have all of our lines on one layer. We're going to duplicate this by swiping to the left. I'm going to rename these, this one is going to be Talk, this one is going to be Side. Now all we're going to do is we're going to make a bunch of copies of this side. We're always going to duplicate the bottom one so that we don't degrade our image. Then we're just going to start nudging that over. And that's how we're going to make the side of our paper strips. How many copies of this you make and how far you slide them is going to determine the width of your paper. Let's come up to this first copy. Come over to your transform tool. I like to just use the tap method to nudge these two or three pixels at a time. Let's tap twice, just off of this bottom left corner. Tap, tap. It doesn't look like we've done very much, but we're going to do this for all of these duplicates that we've made. That one we did twice. This one we're going to do four times 1234. This one we're going to do 6123456 and so on. After you've done three or four of them, come on up to this top layer. We're going to come to our Adjustments menu. That's your magic wand, tap hue, saturation, and brightness. You may want to zoom in a little bit so you can see we're going to take the saturation down to about 45% the brightness up to about 55. Now you can see we're starting to get that separation. You can adjust that a little bit more or less, depending on what look you want. I'm going to continue this process right now that's as thick as my paper is. Generally I go about eight to ten copies, sometimes more. It just depends on the look that you want, but this is the general process. Once you are happy with how thick your paper is, you can pinch these all together, everything that says side, and then we're ready to move on to shadows and highlights. We're going to add two layers above the side. You can rename them shadows and highlights. Generally, I keep highlights on the top. When we actually go through our designs, there's going to be a little bit of clean up we'll do before this step, but that's easier to show you in the actual design for shadows. We're going to change this b***d mode by tapping on the N. We're going to change that to Overlay for highlights. We're going to change this to add. Now on the shadow layer, we're going to come to our color palette and tap on either gray, dark gray, or black. I'm going to grab the digital shader brush. You could also use just the air brush from procreate. You're basically going to come in and add shadows on any, depending on where you think your lights coming from, but those shadows would fall. Because we have these layers separated, it's really easy to just add shadows to the side. Nothing is happening on the top layers, Then highlights go up here. We're going to actually go ahead and do a clipping mask as well. So none of these go outside of the lines. For highlights, we're going to switch to white and do those opposite of the shadows, wherever that light's going to hit. That's a really quick run through of the general technique for digital quilling that we're going to use in this course. In the next video, we're going to go through setting up our canvas and some more best practices. 6. Setup and Best Practices: This video will cover some basic set up for your file and the best practices that I have found in creating digital quilling artwork. Let's go ahead and set up our canvas. Come over to the plus icon. Choose new canvas, you can use any size that you'd like. I'm going to go ahead and just use a square for this one. As far as best practices for digital quilling, want to generally distill your ideas down into a more basic version of them. Because you're going to be having thick lines, you want to have more basic shapes. This, of course, depends on how thick of paper you want to use as far as how much detail goes into them. You can see this is a little bit more of a dense piece with some thinner paper, something like the sham rock has a few less pieces of quill paper and some more open space. Some of it depends on the look that you want, but you just need to think about that as you're deciding on your design. Whichever method you're using, whether you're using the monoline brush from my quillingseet or you're actually going to use one of the three D brushes I've included. You want to choose the thickness of it based on the size of the paper you want to end up with at the end. If I choose a really thin size on my brush, that's not going to work very well for my paper. I'm going to want to choose something that's a little bit thicker, so that is the edge of my paper. The same thing goes for if you're going to use the three D brushes as well. The thicker you make them, the thicker that paper is going to appear. In the next video, we're going to talk about how to actually sketch out your designs. 7. Sketching: For digital quilling, I always recommend doing a sketch first so you know how you want to lay out your design before you start putting a lot of time and effort into making it three D. For this course, we're going to be working on a digital quill feather together. I provided a template for you in the class resource kit, but you don't have to use it. You could also just draw out your sketch freehand as well. If you really are not into the feather. You can of course, draw your own design as well if you need some inspiration. I've included a link to a Pinterest inspiration board in the class resource kit. I've included a sketching pencil in the digital cooling set. Or you can also use just a regular pencil from the procreate built in brushes. If you want to follow along with this course project, you can import the feather template from the course resources. Come over to the wrench, that's your actions menu. Insert a file or a photo, depending on where you saved it. That will import into your canvas and you can make adjustments to this size and the direction, anything that you'd like. Then you're going to come over to your layers, tap on this n here, and we're going to drop that opacity down. About 30% is usually pretty good. You could also just draw your feather or whatever else, free hand. You just want to have a rough idea of your strips are going to go and what shapes you want to have. That's an option as well. Once your sketch is done and you're happy with that, drop that opacity down, and we're going to add a new layer right above this. And this is where we're going to start outlining and getting our digital coiling artwork done. In the next video, we're going to start outlining our design and adding some color. 8. Outlines: Now that you've completed your sketch, in this video we're going to move on to actually outlining our digital quilling design. Okay, it's time to start outlining and drawing our digital quilling feather. You can use this color palette that I've provided for you or choose your own. We're going to use the digital quill outlining brush. Or you can also use the monoline brush. From the procreate in the calligraphy set, you can get some nice curves in procreate by just holding your pencil at the end. If you don't like that, you can always two finger tap to undo, then try it again. You can edit that arc by just sliding these little nodes as we're going along. Anytime you change color or you're going to cross over another line, I recommend doing that on another layer so you can keep these edges really nice and clean. I'm going to take my eraser and just chop off these edges so they look more like the edge of a piece of paper. And then I'm going to add a new layer. Generally add the new layers underneath. It's going to give you a better b***ding effect. And then I'm going to continue this color. For things that come to a point, you can either leave them rounded like this or you can add a little bit of extra come in and just touch that up with your eraser on a smaller size, give it a nicer point. The nice thing about having this on its own layer is I can clean this up right here without affecting those lines underneath. I'm going to go through and add everything that I think I want in this color, and then we'll go on to the next one. How you spread out your colors is totally up to you. I like the look of having the colors mixed up a little bit and then having some gradients within them. I'm going to go to a little bit of a lighter color here. Once I'm done with everything on the same color, I can actually pinch those together and rename this. Here's a pro tip. I recommend renaming your layers as you go to stay organized. Dark magenta, I think is something like that, that new layer underneath for this lighter color. Then I can come in here and add a little bit of a lighter shade inside of it. Once you get a few of these going, that gradient starts to look really nice. Color is totally subjective, though It's up to you what color scheme you want to use. You don't have to follow this template or even your own sketch exactly. It's more to give you a layout, to give you the overall shape of what you're doing. If you accidentally undo, you can redo with three fingers. We're going to go through and add a few more colors in here. And then I will stop the video and get it all cleaned up and show you the next step. One thing I like to do in my color palettes is add an accent color. We're going to use this coral here and put this in a few key spots. As you can see, I'm not 100% following my sketch. Some things aren't fitting quite as well, but that's part of the fun of this is just going with the flow and evolving it as you go. And you can make changes and decide what look you like. At this point, I'm going to turn my sketch off so I can get a better feel for how this is looking. I'm going to come over here to my sketch layer and just hit that checkbox. All right. I think this is looking pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and clean up this coral layer. And then in the next video, we're going to work on that three D effect. 9. DigiQuill 3D Effect: If you chose to use one of the three D brushes included in the course resource kit, you can actually skip this lesson. We're going to be doing the other method in this one to create the three D paper strip effect. Everyone else, let's jump right in. Once you've got your coiling design, how you like it with all of the colors, we are going to move on to making this three D. I'm going to just get rid of my sketch because I don't need it anymore. Then we're going to group all of our outlines. Tap on one of them and swipe to the right to select all of them. Choose group. I'm just going to rename this back up because that's what these are for in case I want to make any changes later. We're going to come to our background layer and turn that off temporarily. We want to only be able to see our outlines. Take three fingers and swipe down, choose Copy All. Then we can go ahead and close this group. Turn the background back on and turn this group off. We need to add a new layer. Then we're going to paste what we just copied. Three fingers, swipe down and paste. Now we have all of our outlines grouped together on one layer. We are going to make a copy of this by swiping to the left and choosing duplicate. Then we're going to rename these top and side, just like we did in the technique video. Now we need to make a bunch of copies of the side and start nudging them over until we get the desired thickness of our paper. We always want to make sure that we are duplicating the bottom one so we don't get any image degradation. Let's start with our first copy here. Come over to the transform tool. That's your arrow. You might need to shrink your canvas just a little bit so you can see this edge. And we're just going to tap two times off of this bottom left corner. That's going to nudge it this way, just a couple of pixels. It doesn't look like it did much, but we're going to do that adding to every time to each of these sides. And I like to rename these as I go, so I know that I've done it. That one got four. She might be easier to rename these. How many? I'm moving them. Let's do that. Okay? This one's going to get moved six times. Okay? Once you've done three or four of these, we're going to select our top layer. Zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing. We're going to come up to our magic wand, to our Adjustments menu. Go to Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. And we're going to take our saturation down to about 45 and our brightness up to about 55. Again, you can play with these and see how much contrast you want. Depending on the color palette you use, you may want a little bit more or less. I'm actually going to take this brightness up maybe to 57, 58. Just a little bit more contrast. And this is going to give you the difference between the side of your paper and the top. Then we're just going to continue this process with the rest of these sides. I just want to make sure that you're always tapping in pretty much the same spot in the same direction for all of these. All right, so that was eight copies of this, let me see that is I think that's looking pretty good. You can do more or less depending on how thick you want your paper at this point. I'm just going to pinch all of my sides together until I'm left with just one side. In the next video, we're going to do a little bit of clean up and some final details on our artwork. 10. Final Details: In this video, we're going to do a little bit of clean up work on our art if you need it, and then add some extra details to take it to the next level. If you've used one of the three D brushes, this section will be a little bit different for you because you won't have the same layers that we do. You can still follow along, however, and add your own clipping mask layers to add shadows and highlights to your paper strips. Depending on how thick you made your paper, how many copies of the side you made, we will have a little bit of clean up work to do in order to make this look more realistic. You can see we have some jagged edges here. We have some bleed through some tips of the points that we need to clean up. That's what we're going to do now. We're going to be alternating between this top layer and the side layer. Depending on what we need to fill in for this, I'm going to use this digital touch up brush again. You could use the monoline brush from procreate if you need to. I'm going to start on the side layer because generally where I find most of the clean up needs to happen. But if you're trying to cover something up or change the color and it's not working, it may be because it's actually on the top layer, you may need to switch back and forth. It's pretty simple. You're just going to use your finger and color sample and then just come in, make sure your brush is small enough. Just put a nice clean line there. That's what we're going to do for these edges in spots like this where we have some bleed through, we're going to color sample then just go over that so it's actually the right color right here. You can see I'm trying to go over this but it's not working because this is actually on the top layer. I'm going to switch layers. Now, I can paint over that, make sure I switch back to the side For these ones where the strips are meeting. You just want to use your best judgment on how far over that strip needs to be. That looks pretty good. One other thing you may notice as you're going through and doing clean up is some of these extra colors on the edge from where things have moved. Sometimes easier to see this. If you change the background to a shade of gray, you can see I have a little bit of extra pink here. Then we're just going to take the eraser and clean those up. And you may need to swap between layers to make sure you get it all. I'm just going to go through and get all of this cleanup work done, then we're going to move on to some final details. Now we've got this all cleaned up, we can work on adding some final details to our artwork. Going to start out by adding some shadows to this, we want to think about where your light is coming from. For this, we're going to have our light coming from the top right, which means we're going to cast shadows to the bottom left. Let's come to our layers and add a new layer right on top of this side. Tap on that layer and make it a clipping mask. We're going to change the b***d mode of this layer by tapping on the N and changing it to overlay. Now we want our brush color to be either black or dark gray. For this, we're going to use the Digu shader. You could also use the soft brush from the procreate airbrushing set. For this brush, I have the opacity set at about 60% We're just going to think about where the shadows would be if the paper edges are touching. Where those shadows are going to be cast, if there's any tight corners, things like that. And then you can just come in here and paint those in. Some of these edges are going to be a little bit darker. You can see this brush, it's just darkening the shade of the paper that's already there. It's not adding solid black on it, which is really nice. Some of these areas that are tucked in here like this would have more shadow. And these edges that are touching you can add a really nice effect just with this one brush. It is pressure sensitive. The harder you push, the more shadow you're going to be adding in between here is going to have a lot more shadow because it's narrow. To go through and add a bunch of shadows here. And then we'll come back for the next step. Now we're going to add some highlights to the top layer here. We're going to add a new layer above that, make it a clipping mask. We're going to change this b***d mode to add. Let's make our brush color white or it can be a really pale yellow as well. We're going to choose our dig quill highlighter brush again. You could also use that soft airbrush and we're just going to come in and go where we think the light is going to be hitting the tops of these. I have my opacity way down on this brush because I like to do it really incrementally, but you can adjust that and play with it however you like. This is looking pretty good. Nice And three D. One thing that's missing is if this was actually paper, it would be casting a shadow. We're going to add two effects for that. We're going to come to our layer that's called side. We're going to duplicate this twice. Swipe to the left si the first one we're going to rename shadow. The second one we're going to rename Glow on our shadow layer. We're going to come up to hue saturation. And brightness. We're going to take that brightness all the way down, we're basically turning it black for our glow layer. We're going to come to our adjustments. We're going to go to motion blur. Now we want to drag this in the same way that the paper was going. How much you do is up to you how much of that color shadow we're going to see. Let's start with eight or 9% and see how that does. Click your transform tool. Zoom in a little bit, then we're going to just nudge this down a little bit. It's really strong right now. We're going to adjust this. Just want to get the right direction here. All right. That looks pretty good. We're going to come back to our adjustments. Go to Gaussian blur, slide to the right. To blur that, that color bleed out a little bit as if it's casting a color on the page. If it's too strong, you can adjust the opacity of that layer. Tap on this little n, take it down a little bit, then this is our actual drop shadow. We're just going to nudge this one by tapping like we did before. It doesn't take much. You can see we're already getting a little bit of that black showing through there and we're just going to blur this one ever so slightly. Adjustments gambler, just so we don't have a harsh black line there. Maybe three or 4% is enough. And again, we're going to take the opacity down maybe 60, 65% and now you have a finished digital quillin piece. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how you can export and share your artwork. 11. Sharing Your Art: You did it, you made your own digital quilling art. I am so proud of you. I'm so excited to see what you made and now you can share it with the rest of the world. In this video, we're going to walk through how to export your design and share it, whether that's on e mail, social media, or actually even getting it printed. Now that you have some beautiful digital cooling artwork, you're going to want to share it. To do that, we're going to come up here to the wrench. This is our Actions menu. Come to share. And you're probably going to want to share it as either a J peg or a PNG. Once you've exported your art, you can share it on Social. Make sure you tag me. You can E mail it to someone. You can even get it printed if you want. Make sure that if you know you're going to print something, you do it at a high enough quality from the beginning. 12. Thank You: I hope you found that helpful. I love showing people how to combine creativity and technology. If you enjoyed this class, I would appreciate it if you took just a couple minutes to leave me a teacher review. I cannot wait to see the digital cooling artwork that you're going to make using this technique. So make sure that you share it with us in the project area of this class.