Digital Plein Air Painting with Procreate

1. 00 Quick IntroPromo: It's nice to get out and paint nature. But the supplies are often a hassle to carry, and cleanup is a mess. I found a much easier way. I just use my iPad Pro tablet. Using the Procreate app, I can do digital plan air painting, which is a lot quicker, at easier, and a lot more fun. Join me as I show you my digital paintings from Central Park and other parks and spots in the city. Also, I'll take you inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. To draw rare sculptures and artifacts. Sign up for this fun course today to learn digital plan air painting with Procreate. Sign up now. I need a ion. 2. 01 How to Create Your Own Brush in ProCreate: For a lot of the drawings that I do, I use this brush here that was created by the sky Minero brushes. So I just used this because I don't know, I just wasn't in the habit of creating my own brushes, but it's very easy and procreate to create your own brush. And the most common brush that I use, and sometimes I do use it for detail is the studio pen brush. So I use this a lot, I use it for my comic book illustrations. But like I said, for fine detail, I use this. So if you want to create your own brush, you duplicate it, like you duplicate the brush that you like best or the starting point, basically. I could actually go with the sy brush up here, but anyway, I'm going to go with the studio brush and then in the corner, There you go. In the corner, there was a little brush icon and you click on that. And here you have all the options to change. So if I change the jitter here, you see, I make it more fuzzy. So I'm trying to recall the effect of that brush that I like, and I had a little bit of a jitter. This is a fall off, that means like it fades. I could have a little bit a touch. Why not? I don't know. Okay Stabilization. I'm not sure quite what that means. Pressure pressure. I usually don't want to change the pressure too much if I like the current pressure of the brush, but here. So now we could test the pressure. So I know the pressure is fine. High pressure. Low pressure. I don't know. There's not much difference in this pressure thing. I think that's all right. Let's go like that. Stabilization. What's this? That's like the control. It stabilizes the curves and stuff. I I would rather more control and a little shaky than not. But let's go a bit like that. And I think like I don't know, I don't like as much jitter. Ale stabilization, motion filtering. I'll see, yeah, that's, like, it just, like it filters the curves and stuff, and it kind of straightens things out expression. I'm not sure what quite what that means. All right. We'll keep it there, taper. You know, a lot of these little differences are not that noticeable. To me, like the touch thing. So I usually, I mean, the brushes are so good that, you know, it's tempting not to change much. But anyway, you can make your own brush however you want it. It doesn't really start with such a fine tip. Oh, there we go, tip. T less tip, more tip. I don't know, man. Pressure. Yeah. So pressure is good because you see, like I was doing less pressure shape. Okay grain. Could add grain. There seems to be a grain. Rendering flow, whatever. Okay. Anyway, so there's a lot of options and you could really match the pencil or the brush that you want if you want to create your own, and this is how you do it. You start with a brush as a starting point, and then you go from there. So let's go I mean, there's all these options to your properties, dynamics, jitter size. Opacity, let's see, I think this changes the opacity. Let's go done and see what we created here. The only trouble is it's not like that big, and that's one thing that was great about the other brush. I was nice and big. But the good thing is, this is solid. And, and this is solid. But let's say let's say I started with the syrup duplicate went in there, Jitter added a little bit of jitter. Fall off, a little fall off, taper sizes maximum with some opacity. L et's try that. Let's see what that looks like. This is I feel like it's closer. But let's let's do that. You could also adjust the opacity here like that. Merge. So I got the opacity down on the actual brush. And then yeah, that's essentially what the way that's set up. It's like the opacity on the brush itself is adjusted. So it was in one of those settings that the brush with like when you create the brush, you can set the opacity that it's like below like that. So, that's how you create your own brush. But you can download that one for free if you want from this guy Monero, you see it's on Gum Road, or you can make your own or you could use one of the many that are available from Procreate. All right. B 3. 02 Greyshot Arch, Central Park NYC Digital Plein Air: This is the gray shot arch in Central Park. And this is one of the first plan air studies that I did. I'm using a variety of brushes here like the tamer, the painting brushes and that flat hard edge brush. Also, actually, for these fine details, I'm using the Niko rule, which is kind of like a roller brush, I imagine, like when you're painting your house. So I use that in a really fine way to create the grids that you see here. Rough it out. I want to get the texture, basically. I also put down depth and then I'm going back and forth on the detail. So a lot of the analysis that goes on in my mind is like what's in the background, what's in the mid ground and what's in the foreground. So I know that the background is generally what I put at the beginning is going to stay. And the midground is pretty much going to stay whatever is visible, but then the foreground is what I'm going to cover. So whatever I put in the background, I have to make sure that it's got enough detail that I don't have to touch it later because it becomes complicated, and I typically keep everything in one or two layers. This on the right is one of my favorite parts is the rocks. I thought the rocks turned out well. So I'm using this you know, brush, and I'm just going on on the detail now underneath the bridge, there was light coming in. It's kind of like a grayish day with, like, breaks in the light. So when I'm observing this, I constantly am looking for the best moments. And I grasp those with my mind visually, and I try to recreate them. And this scene Although I didn't take a picture at the time, but I can tell you already that it's like it's a more Disney esque sort of scene. It's, you know, fairy tale like the way I depicted it, and that was on purpose. I always consciously tried to sell the work, you know, to make it unique. And this is, I guess, like kind of a baroque baroque style of painting, but I'm very conscious of this style of trying to you know, make whatever scene I'm drawing a brighter and more colorful than it naturally appears. Also, the digital medium tends to do that. So like a lot of the brushes, tend to be brighter. But again, it's a choice because you could really go on the spectrum, the color wheel and pick any color you want. So there's a lot of foliage there in the trees, and you see, I haven't added the leaves yet. On the trees. But I added the branches and I'm building up to that slowly, but surely because again, I don't want to add those too early because what if I have to add, like, branches later and then I've done, you know, the overlay, the overlay being the leaves. So okay, then there's like overhanging things. Also, I sometimes compose trees, you know, in a certain light. Oh, this is interesting. This I use like this flare and then the motion blur to create a light kind of streaming in from the top left. And then I used the blur as well. There a combination of the flare on the blur and then motion blur to highlight that light coming in. I think here I removed the light just so I could work on the detail and I had it on a separate layer. Now, it's the final touches, just the leaves remaining, and, you know, whatever little detail that I see. There was a fence Here, like in the foreground, there was a really light fence, but I left that out because, you know, it takes away from the ambiance that this is a scene, not in Central Park, but maybe somewhere magical. 4. 03 Battery Park with the Statue of Liberty, NYC Digital Plein Air: For this battery park illustration, I use the flat brush mostly, the Nico rule and the blur. Airbrush. But what's most important about this is that I used photo reference for the composition. This is one of the only ones where I needed to use the photo reference to compose everything to the sizes that I wanted. You see? Here, the statue of liberty is larger. I've got this tree in the foreground. This mid size guy is in the foreground on a bench. There's the boat, the right sizes, you know, everything is like a medium size for the most part, except for the over overlaid tree and the foliage in the foreground. But I wanted something with everything sized properly because originally, well, the statue of liberty was too far away and it was a different angle. So that's the beauty of procreate. You can copy, you could trace. Now, I use this only as a compositional guide in resizing the photos, and then from here, I improvise and observe. So I look at the picture from here. I just needed everything like size to a certain point. And I don't go back to, you know, that photo reference. I used it only for sizing. Here I add the water and all that. There may be some opacities that I play around with, and I use about two layers, maybe three, but most everything is all on the same layer. And when you see, like the statue of liberty illustrated there, I do zoom in on that. So feel free to zoom in. That's the beauty of it, you pinch and zoom, and you get a close up view of the detail that you're working on. Composition wise, you see I've included, like a speedboat, the buoy that I'm working on there, you know, the lamp post, the sailboats, you know, the big cargo ship, you know, the person looking off, ship, which these are, you know, photo reference. I mean, she moved. But I used that location of her in this drawing. And in terms of time that I had, I had to work pretty fast like I usually do in most of these pictures. In one way, that's the beauty of it, because if you were working with traditional paints, it could take quite a long time. But I naturally we quick. Uh, even with traditional paints. So but with these digital paints, I did this maybe 40 minutes at the most that I had, and that's a long stint. So most of the pictures are around anywhere 20-45 minutes. Never longer. It's maybe an hour, once or twice, but rarely. Most of these are quick So yeah, so I have to work quickly to capture everything, and now here I'm moving towards the foliage. Again, I keep certain things in mind, like highlights. I leave to the end, and now I'm blocking in things. I'm conscious now that it's towards the end of that like 40 minute stint. And a lot of it a lot of the time was taken up early on with the planning, with the composition. So now, I'm very conscious that, whatever I put in the foreground has to be a little bit more detailed than everything else. Because that ship, whatever detail you see on the ship, for example, has to look like it's a bit blurry. You know, like, everything is, like, less detailed than the foreground, because I want to give the impression of focus. So that's one thing. And then I switched back there for a second to just kind of gauge the detail. And that's all that there was time for. I hope you enjoyed it. This was a really fun one. 5. 04 Construction Worker Cartoon: This was another quick sketch, and I used only one brush for this. There must have been some sort of time limit. I forget exactly why this was a shortened sketch. I knew I just had limited time to cover all the things that I wanted to cover. Now, I started to draw this guy and he moved. He was looking on his cell phone, and this is a picture I took afterward. You know, I just kind of started to fill things in. And as you could tell by the picture, by the photo, it was going to be very busy and cluttered. So I left out the other people, and also the background I felt was going to be very cluttered as well, and a lot of the detail might be lost in the background. So what I chose to do was something a little bit that I think in the end turned out a little cartoony. Because also I used the pen. And this is the first time I used this pen as well. So it's kind of like an inking pen, and I treated everything like like a drawing in a way, but blocking in colors. So it's like it's almost like color blocking or flats, as they call it in the comic book business. I try to again compose everything in a nice way, where like the character is isolated. Here I'm adding some facial detail. And then to the right of him is the rest of the park, and he's outlined with the white. It's just a simple, fun sketch, and that's about it for this one. 6. 05 The Vessel: This is one of my favorite pieces, and I use just about three brushes. You see, this is the reference. It's the vessel in New York City, which people could climb up onto. And they restrict that now. But this is interesting because usually I do nature, but now I'm incorporating in the foreground a steel structure. And you see, just to be cautious, I split it into three or four layers. There's a highlight too. But I separated this from the background layer. In case I needed to adjust it like the size or something. I put this on a separate layer. So I started with this. For me, it's like random in terms of, which item I start with. Because really I'm trying to capture something. But also, I was aware of the composition. I knew I wanted something overlapping in the foreground, a mid ground and hopefully a background and some obstruction, obviously. This is exactly what I was seeing. I was like sitting on the ground. There's like a pavement area there and buildings and a shopping mall nearby. And, you know, I was applying these textures. And you see There is kind of like the gray and the white area and it just kind of looks raw. Now, I blocked the background, the mid ground, basically. And this is a bit of a somewhat tedious process. And there were periods where I wasn't sure if I was going to get it right because you see it's complex. Like, there's multiple levels. There's like the depth that you see in between, and then later on, I'll have to go in and separate the light parts that you could see through the thing there you go, like the blue there. So you see through the vessel here at those spots. Then there's a little bush in the foreground. So the metal and the shine, the metallic feel. I try to copy that as closely as possible. In terms of quick sketching. Also, you know, the group that I usually draw with, most of these sessions take about 45 minutes. So that's not a lot of time. And I knew I had to rush to get everything right. Now I'm putting the background, and I already know that this background I'm going to have to blur a bit. So I kind of keep that in mind, but You know, before I get caught up in that, I decide to add detail probably because of a time crunch, you know, which is constantly on my mind. I'm not really rushing, and I'm not too nervous, but I'm conscious of it. And it still kind of looks rough in some areas. But then now with the bold lines. You see, those are railings there. With the bold lines, it's coming to life. And slowly around this point, I'm starting to have confidence that I'm going to pull it through because for a while, in between, I wasn't quite sure. So I jumped between, like back the mid ground and the foreground because I uh I wanted to set that in stone because I knew the edges here on the right. I knew I had to go over the background. So now there's the depth that I'm adding there. There's some shadows, highlights with white, and I'm using that pen brush, and then this is on a separate layer of that shine. The blur on the right was done right after. Now I'm adding some foliage on the right here. These are the final touches, basically. So it's funny because, like, during the process, it felt kind of rough, you know, the whole vessel and the sketch. And but now, like, it's really one of my favorite pieces. Part of the fun was drawing and painting an object, like a city object, a design like this, instead of just backgrounds. So it was really fun. 7. 06 Whole Foods: This was an interesting in between area. There was a whole foods on the left and some construction on the right here. So I used the air brush at the beginning. Then I use this roll brush like the roller brush as if you're painting a house. I blocked in a lot of shapes here. I mostly used this roller brush. For most everything, really. Later on, I use my traditional pen brush for the detail, but I block in as much as I can. And you know, at the beginning here, here I'm adding the benches, in everything. Maybe I'm doing some compressing, like in terms of what's on the right, and that far building that I'm working on here. I'm trying to create the right distance. Then here with the orange in the far distance, there's going to be some trees in between, but I'm very consciously putting in all those building details which likely like this section here, I'm going to probably blur a little bit, and then trees will cover it. But I have to add that detail before I do the trees because this one is generally done all in one layer. So not all of these plan air pictures are layered. In most cases, I'll just go to town and do everything all in one layer. This is nice on the bench. You see, I did some cracks. It was kind of like a marble bench. Perhaps it was foam marble. It's hard to tell, but there were some cracks in it, like that were on purpose. I was part of I also gave it the shape. And then yeah, now I start with that detail brush, but I only do a little bit for the grass. And then later on, I'm going to do more for the trees. And you saw I started to lay out a bit of the construction area. That's actually now that I'm looking at it again. Now I can see that the construction area on the right with the planks and so forth. That's a little bit more compressed than it seemed initially in the photo. But I'm squeezing everything in and making it work with perspective. And I'm adding detail now to the side of the building. It's tricky to know exactly what to withhold, what's going to turn out good in the end because it's like, not only am I copying things, but I'm layering things with digital art. You do that with oil painting or acrylic as well. But here there's a specific consciousness. The beauty of it is that it's more permanent. With oil, you might have to blend in these trees, for example, earlier, and then just to kind of work on things simultaneously. But here, it's like they're flat layers, and there's a solidity to each layer of art that you put on. So it's more fixed, and you can be more stern with your decision making, but you have to plan more. That's the catch. You have to plan more ahead of what not to put in and what to leave until these last moments. So you see behind these trees, now that middle section, I did blur a little bit. So it gives some depth. And now I'm adding different highlights to the trees to vary things. There's like two different types of green on the trees alone and then some yellow highlights. I'm fixing the bench now. And then finally, these pylons, that were shown earlier. Now, I wanted to be true to this. I could have removed them altogether. But I thought this tells a story, and I thought that was important. Sometimes in plan air, we leave out the people and that activity. And yeah, I left out the people, but I kept the presence and the knowledge of people through the pylons. Yeah. So there was very fun again. 8. 07 Brooklyn Bridge: This is the famous Brooklyn Bridge from Dumbo. And I used just a few brushes here. I tried to experiment a little bit and tried some different textures. It was just one of those days. So you see, there was a lot of foliage and a lot of overlapping trees and bushes. So I wanted to roughly get those in. I didn't know where to quite start to be honest. So you know, I thought like, maybe if I wasn't you know, in a rush and let's say, I had several hours to do a painting, then I might plan it more thoroughly, like I would only do the buildings in the back on one layer, then do the bridge, then do the foreground. You know, so here I did everything all together. And it's all, you know, in one layer. So you know I'm putting the buildings. I know there's some wiring that will go, from the top of the bridge down. And so I'm not adding those yet. I'm holding out on those. We've got the Freedom Tower on the far right. And that looks fairly good. There it is touched up. So I like the way that looks a lot. I feel like it's recognizable, and that's important to me. And even when I took the photograph I made sure to compose the Freedom Tower, so it's visible there, and I did that, and I may have enlarged a little bit from the photograph, which is a tendency of mine to on purpose for the effect of, you know, the artwork as a whole, to enlarge or play around with the sizing and decomposition a little bit. But the bushes in the foreground, I rough them in first, but now I'm putting that branch layer, and then now again, on top of the branches, I'm adding some extra texture to it. But in a little while I realize that some of this texture is going to take too long, all those little leaves. So I will end up kind of blocking in more kind of you know, playing around with that. And on the top right there, you see the texture that I'm trying to cloak all that, you know, detail because it's like, it would take too long. And, you know, the way I was doing it with the fine detail, it just wasn't doing the job, so I really needed some extra shadow there. And in fact, there is a deep dark shadow among the overhanging tree branches and the places that I've put it along the bottom there. That helps, that those shadows help. Okay. Now there is a flag on top of the bridge there, so I add that. I actually zoom in on that. And now I'm doing those big wires. Now, typically procreate, you could hold down if it's like a big curve and it'll smooth it out. I couldn't do that because the curves weren't wide enough. So I just had the eyeball it, but it's a nice loose painting. And then now, you know, all the details, there's a little in between cracks with the light of the bridge, and those are nice. That's a nice touch. And then there was like a helicopter in the sky, and I add that as well. And that's the beautiful finale. 9. 08 Peter Park NYC Painting #1: This is Peter Park in New York, and I used just a couple of brushes mostly. I'll show you layers later on. Basically, I had the background layer. Then I went in blocking in what I saw. I don't have a photograph of this, but it's essentially this, and I mostly use, like the pen brush that has a bit of a transparency, as you can see by the varying green and, uh you know, other areas like the tree. You know, the darker parts are the areas that I went over twice because of the transparency of the pen. So this one took a while. It was actually like scheduled as a 45 minute drawing. And I definitely used all the time. And I was rushing because there's so much foliage in everything and I tried to, you know, I resize the pen a few times to block in areas. And there were some background elements like this building on the right hand side. I also grabbed it and did a soft focus on it later. And then the foreground here. Well, actually, this is the mid ground. There's kind of a little hangout area made of stone and a couple of steps on the bottom right left hand side there. So I'm putting that in. I'm trying to change up the texture a little bit. So I did use that roller type brush, and you know, the lamppost and the tree on the far left are foreground. The veranda made of stone is kind of midground. The foliage there that I'm highlighting now is background, but then there's like a deep background that I'm going to add in a few minutes, and that's like a city scape beyond there. So it's quite interesting. This is one of my most complex ones, I feel. And At start, it almost felt a little cluttered. There was a lot going on. But at the time, I had a lot of compliments on it from the group that I was drawing with. So they really liked it. Maybe partially because I was one of the few that was using a tablet to draw with some. Yeah, there's like foliage along the lamppost. I like this highlight on the lamppost, the gray, and there was a fence. So that gray along the bottom right is a fence. There's a little fountain. I'm adding contrast and shadows. And this is fun. I really like this one a lot. It keeps growing on me because it's like complex and there's so much going on. There's all these little details like that branch that just overhangs right there on the right. So, I'm doing my best with changing bruh sizes to to fill in all that detail to kind of just kind of get the illusion of detail by putting in those textures. Then finally, on a separate layer, you see on the left in the deep left there, there's buildings, there's skyscrapers and then the water, and I believe that's the East River. So I put those in. I know in my mind already that I'm going to blur them a bit and I did blur them I think slightly, but not too much, and I played around with the opacity. That's why I faded them. Give the illusion that what's in the foreground is really in focus, and then they're super deep in the background and out of focus. I did the same blur to the building on the far right. Top right there, where you can see that it's blurred as well because I want the focus to be clear the foreground. Behind the land post, the trees and the buildings there. I did some soft focus there, too. So you know, you got to go with the elements. Oh, yeah, and then there's like the sun that I added a glow there in the top left hand corner, and then I'm going to bring it back at the very end. But that glow is very, very subtle. 10. 09 Peter Park NYC Painting #2: This is another angle of Peter Park. What's interesting about this is the perspective is very, very evident in this. And I used a couple of layers for this. I was conscious of the sign that's going to appear on the left, so I made a point later on to separate that. But, for the perspective, what's tricky is that you see the ground kind of opens up on the sides here, it kind of curves, and then on the left, there's going to be some benches. So I'm it's not like straight ahead, you know, it's not like straight lines with a ruler. It's curved, it's like organic. So that was kind of tricky to make that look good. And I don't know if I've totally succeeded with this one. It's one of the pictures that I feel like appears rushed, although it took me the same time as the others around 45 minutes. But it just kind of I think it's like it was hard to compose it. And I feel like with plain air, one point perspective that's so evident like this with like structures involved. I don't know. They don't look like plan err, you know, because plan air is supposed to be mostly nature. And there are also some examples in my work here where I do incorporate structures like design structures. But I don't know if this was like the best one in that term, because it's like, maybe too subtle, it's like, I don't know. It's just a feeling I have. But anyway, as I'm adding the foliage in, you know, it's looking okay. I mean, you can be the judge of it. You know, it's always easy to be self critical as an artist. So the depth I feel like is okay. There was, like, this light that was coming through the trees onto the ground, and I try to capture that in the foreground. I feel like the branches top look really good with the foliage and the hanging branches into that empty space on the top left. I feel like that, looks good. I feel like some of the highlights that I'm adding here are pretty good. You know, there's like this dark green, you know, mid ground and light leaves that add some color to the whole scene. And the sun spots on the ground definitely help. I love this part. This is probably my favorite part. The leaves atop the tree on the right there in the bush. Now, I think, I'm feeling a little bit better as I add highlights to the tree there, the brush to a smaller one and the highlights to the leaves there, that helps, again, the light coming in. Basically, I was using the same brush for most everything. The sketch brush. This was like a tricky one where when I added the bench and there's a table here, I had to leave it to the end because I knew this was going to be darker and in the foreground, and I wanted to make sure that, I had a good grasp of the background in the back before I tackled this. So I feel like the bench looks okay, you know? Okay. And then now the sign, the sign I did on a separate layer, as you can see here, And, you know, that helped just in case I had to maybe enlarge it or in case I screwed something up, I had things in the foreground, so I wanted to make sure that that was going to work. Lastly, the background was actually super bright. So there is a tone to it, basically. It's not totally white that you see there. And that's about it. So right now in the end. 11. 10 79th St Boat Basin One Way Concrete: For this, I used the Niko rule brush airbrush and a pen tool. So basically, those were the three brushes, I start out with the layer for the background. This is an interesting one. It was near the Hudson overlooking the Hudson and it's an abandoned restaurant in this park around 79th Street. And this is interesting because also I had some artist friends with me, and one of them rode their bike and they left their bike there. I tried to find this perfect composition. I thought that told a bit of a story. So what was interesting about this was like the texture. You know, there's a lot of texture and the angles were kind of a difficulty because in procreate, you could hold down your pencil tool and it'll lock either a curve or a straight line. But these curves were kind of unusual. So I had to do those a few times to get the right curves. And here there's like you know, some shadows that I'm adding in. And it was a bit complicated. Oh, yeah, this line here is interesting because I drew it on a separate layer, and then I go in and erase it, you say. These are things you kind of have to plan, because it's like for me to get the line across, that white line, highlight across, I really had to go on a separate layer. Otherwise, you could risk, not, you know, drawing it too high or too low in continuing parts between the poles. So the background there was tricky, actually. I did that on a flat layer. It was an afterthought. The details of what is actually on the other side between those posts, the green and everything that's across the Hudson, that's New Jersey. So those were an afterthought that I had to do flatly. Foreground was interesting. I like the bottom. And really, there's a lot of bricks. At the beginning, I had some worries because it was so much detail. I still only had about, like, 40 minutes for this, and I had to rush. Also, I like the the time pressure because it forces me to finish it. So here's the bike. Now, initially, I didn't really draw it right. And then I just backtracked. I clicked on D to redo it from the beginning. And you see, now with the bike, you know, in the Rle of thirds. Basically, it's on the left hand side of the composition. Now it has I feel like a story. It's like, who owns this bike? Why is it abandoned there. It has this mystery to it. Now, above here with the sign, you know, there's this detail and there's like a one way sign there. So I zoomed in on that. So what you're seeing here is actually me having done that on the screen to get that sign and the detail, and I shrunk down my pen nibs. So, yeah, that's about it. And I feel this is one of my strongest pieces, in my opinion, The concrete jungle in the park kind of gives it a different feel. So I like that. Hope you do too. 12. 11 79th St Boat Basin Park: This was an interesting illustration for a lot of reasons. One of them being that the composition was in such a way that I had to make it interesting in finding this place because it was like a wide area of the park and there was only really benches on one side moly. So I wanted to get kind of an angle because I feel like if it's too flat. I mean, the whole picture looks flat. So I try to kind of look down down to the left. Of the field. So so that was one conscious decision I made. And you saw to start how I started with one layer for the background. And then I built on top of that. This one had maybe the most amount of layers out of the illustrations that I've done. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, and I think when I'm unsure, I try to separate the layers just in case I make mistakes and I have to like hide a layer or redo it. I was like, kind of worried about, you know, locking those in on a flat layer. So, you know, in the end, I feel like this is still one of my most interesting ones. But anyway, I love the tree trunk underneath here, and now I'm putting in the leaves. But the tree trunk that's like the centerpiece, I feel like that's pretty strong. You know, and also there was like people passing through here a lot. So I took those out and a lot of these scenes, I don't include the people. Because I want to make it more nature. Also, you see between the trees, I paint blue like the background sky. I forget if those are erased or or dabbed in. But at a certain point it doesn't really matter. You could add those blue. This is kind of interesting. Again, I'm observing the colors. And here, I realized that the railing I should have added after. So then I redid it. Like I put the bricks and then I added the railing again. And next, the ampost. These looked pretty good. I was happy with these. Here's another layer. These branches that are in the foreground, which are actually on my side of the pathway, the street there. I put these on a separate layer too. You can see all the layers here. Then lastly, I used the luminous brush to add that highlight. And then I'm Well, it's the sun. It's really the sun beaming through that sun ray. So then I make some decisions towards the end here, which layer I want to have that sun ray on whether I wanted the branches in front or behind that. So yeah, that's pretty much it. In the end, I feel like it turned out pretty solid. Hopefully, everyone else agrees. 13. 12 Bow Bridge in Central Park, NYC: This is Bow Bridge in Central Park, and it was a beautiful fall day. I worked in multiple layers in this, maybe like the most layers like five or six. I started with a blurry airbrush background to fill, you know, these trees because I didn't want to do those only by pen, as you see here. If I add that extra back layer from a distance as I'm building it up, those trees will look fuller. And that's what I was doing. And I noticed that my brush was too small, so I try to use a bigger brush right now. So I'm just really filling it as quickly as I can. Since this was again, about a 45 minute painting. I wanted to get to the bridge, and here we are finally. This wonderful, beautiful bridge, very famous in many films. I used the lock feature in those curves, so you hold the i pencil down and lock the curve. So that helped. There were some other examples where I couldn't lock it in, and it would just create a straight line. Next is a special effect. I duplicated the bottom part of those trees, and I added a motion blur. This is what created that reflection in the water. Once that photo shop like trick, which can also be done in procreate was created for the reflection. Now I can focus on the fun stuff, like adding more color to the trees and finishing the bridge and everything. But, you know, there's so many fun details in this, and you see, I had a little couple there, and even the branches, they kind of lead the eye to the couple on Bot bridge, and they're just kissing there. It's a nice romantic scene in the fall. There were a lot more people, of course, but I chose to just do this couple. Here's a tree in the foreground. Now, I purposely chose this composition and I knew this big bush was coming on the left hand side. I knew that was coming in and framing the bridge, you know, the tree on the right, and the branches on the left. And now there was like, fun little overlay light green tones over the darker green among the bushes there. And I noticed too, there were, like, little white dots of flowers. And those were wonderful. And it's amazing how nature just creates its own beauty. You know, cause if it wasn't for that and there was a purple, too. If it wasn't for those, like, they could look a little plain and, you know, run down. But, man, you know, nature's like staying alive in the fall, you know? It's still blooming. It's quite amazing. This was one of my favorite ones, for sure. 14. 13 Quick Roman bust drawn at the Met: I came late to the met, and I only had 10 minutes. So I started quick with the Niko rule brush, then the real incher. And I mostly use that. That was for the background I blocked it in, and I try to match the foreground color, like a creamy color with, like, a muted indigo that's in the background. I just start blocking in details and I switch brush sizes throughout. And now I move into the highlights. There was a beam of light above the sculpture. So I try to capture that contrast. But I use into it slowly with a creamy colors variance. And now I just pick up the nuances quick, because I only have about five, 10 minutes in this. And here I use this brush, the airbrush. But just to kind of mute that area around the neck, the shadows. But then I go in with the pen again to finish it off. And then the background, I add this nebula texture, which is this brush here, and this is what it looks like, and then I play around with the opacities to get just the right texture. 15. 14 Slave girl sculpture drawn at the Met: This is a sculpture at the Mt that I drew in my sketchbook as well. And I use mostly the pen, the blur tool, a couple of other textures just for the back. And this one, I was going for a more painterly look than the illustration in the sketchbook. So in the sketchbook, I was doing line art, and now I'm kind of feeling it out between kind of the pen tool as a rough, which I love using because it's like really kind of sharp. And then here, like, the airbrush tool. And then I'm using the eraser now for, you know, the edges. To highlight the contours of the profile. The profile is kind of like a big highlight of this sculpture. Now, I think, like, there's some questions in my mind about whether I got the angles of that arm the way it's supposed to be. So I don't know. I it's not totally perfect because it's like it's a one off painting. So what I like is the cheekbones. Like the cheek bones there, those are really solid. The hair was a bit of a pain on the butt. So I try to be as vague as possible here. This kind of detail requires an artist to take more time and more concentration and slow down the process a lot more than I could afford in the limited time of 30, 40 minutes. Also, the forearm, I should mention, now, I'm working on the forearm. That left arm is so nicely done. I really love it. I think I really nailed that in the shoulder. You know, the feeling of three D is nice there. You know, the necklace, it's turned out our right here. At the Zoom in for this one. You know, that helped a little bit. Mostly from this point on using airbrush. I feel like that's the realistic way to go is to airbrush. I want to mention here that the background and even the sculpture itself is not quite white. The sculpture was kind of like ivory, really nice marble, and It was a lot brighter in real life it felt like, but it's important to create some sort of realistic feel. And so I chose a darker background for the back. And I purposely not super white colors. The purpose being to make a standalone picture that looks great. 16. 15 Quick African bust drawn at the American Natural History Museum NYC: This picture, it's just a simple, simple subject, and therefore, it was a very quick sketch. I think the whole thing was maybe 5 minutes at the most, and then it's sped up here to about 50 seconds. What's cool about it is that it's a lot of shadows on the face, and I do try to capture some nuance, as you see, I leave a little white line for the jaw line. And here, right on the shoulder, I erase some cross hatching just to try different effects. And this is mostly it. I erase there for the dots along that hat. And that's about it. Simple little quick fun sketch. 17. 16 Mongolian Shaman American Natural History Museum NYC 1: This was done at the Natural History Museum and its of Mongolian kind of tribes person. And again, it's using the Betty Betty Edwards method of drawing on the right side of the brain, essentially, where I just I just kind of, like, follow the cons. I gauge I jumped to the arm here on the stick because I gauge the distance between, let's say the chin to the stick and then I try to connect everything. And a big focus of this drawing was essentially making a nice little art piece of it because once I had the colors, that's where it becomes artistic. So I was using one simple pen and then I just like quickly add some highlights. And a greenish background that compliments this foreground colors, and I put, like, a big breast stroke through out there for fun. 18. 17 African Shaman @ American Natural History Museum NYC: I was done at the museum of natural history, the American Museum here in New York, what was tricky about this was that I wanted to fit in the feathers in a nice composition that the feathers he's got coming from his nose. I used the rule of thirds generally. I put him in a little bit to the right of the center, so you see his mouth. I'm gauging like the mouth is kind of like the center because we're mostly going to look at his expression. When there's people in the subject, we tend to focus on the people. So I fit them in and it's just generally an illustration approach that I'm using. I'm not really looking for realism in a painterly way. I'm mostly treating it like a comic book illustration where I'm focusing on the outlines, and then ultimately a nice, colorful design, which will be seen once I add colors. So it's like composition, illustrative technique, engaging the shadows and such that I'm focusing on and the proportions of the hands and things like that. And now the fun, colorful aspect of it. I am following the colors that I see, mind you, but I'm changing the background, and I'm adding that big brush stroke to make it like a fun, you know, colorful and stylish illustration as well. 19. 18 The Thinker by Rodin drawn at the Met: This is one of my favorite sculptures and I even did it in my sketchbook on that same day. I had a pencil version and I also did a different angle for it. You know, for this purpose to show the process because it's very hard to film the other way. What's interesting about this bronze sculpture is that sculpting, it's often unless you're shading realistically, it's very difficult to show the metal, you know, without showing some sort of sort of texture. So I'm essentially doing a quick study. Of the pose of the sculpture. I'm not trying to emulate the actual texture, the actual feel, the metal and so forth. I'm simply treating it like as if it's a life drawing model, and I'm illustrating it. So a lot of these quick museum studies often are more illustrations than they are paintings. And, you know, I'm really just having fun with with the figure and, you know, and all of the figures that are available on these museums. And you saw, you know, at the end here, I do add some shading and some highlights to give a little bit of the impression that it's a bronze or that it's not just a figure because without the shading, and actually, it could look like I'm studying a figure. So adding that shading, that dark shading gives the indication to the viewer, even though it's not realistic, it still gives the indication to the viewer that This is a sculpture. It's not an actual person. Yeah, it's a quick study. I think this was maybe like ten, 15 minutes. So very quick and sculptures are perfect for this. 20. 19 T Rex drawn at American Museum of Natural History: Well, at the Natural History Museum, I had to paint the T rex. And here it is. I don't know if you'll be able to hear some of the noise there, but it was a lot of people, and usually it always is, especially on weekends. So I chose to go on a Saturday, a lot of families and kids. So, you know, that's how the museum is and it's actually a lot busier than the met, typically, because, you know, while, maybe the movies helped, like night at the Museum and all that, you know, for kids, because parents can show the films to the kids and then get them excited. And look, we're going to go to the museum where all these things are happening. So that's a possible explanation to the popularity. But, you know, there's so many cool attractions here. You know, the dinosaurs on the top floor is just one of them. And I'm definitely very thrilled to be able to you know, to embark on these, to have a privilege to, you know, get ahold of such an amazing collection of artifacts. So right. So as you saw here at the beginning, I put in, like, a rough background foundation. I felt like that would I'll make the piece look good to have a nice colorful background, not just a plain white. It's a little tricky because everything else on the skeleton is fairly light. I have to make sure that it stood out. Towards the end, I'm going to add highlights and those are tricky because they almost blend. So I have to make sure that it's like a solid 100% white. So I started with the face pretty much in the center. The intent was, like, maybe the hole for the eye socket would be in the center of the composition. And that's for a reason. It's kind of using rule of thirds. I took some liberties a little bit with the spine here. I tried to follow the vertebrae as closely as I could, and and then, you know, I tried to make my sketch painting as quick as possible because there was so many people there. And, you know, people were complimenting me and so there was, like, some distraction going on. And but if you have time on a quiet day on a weekday, when you go to the museum or any museum, to spend a long time and maybe even come back to the piece and spend a few hours. Then you can really get a nice rendering going. So here, at the end, I'm just adding the highlights. Basically, also, I should mention, I'm mostly just using one pen. On clear pen. I'm not using any other highlights. So this is a quick fun piece, and you know, it's a big T rex and you know, definitely at the museum, try to go for the big stuff. You know, even if there's a crowd around. 21. 20 Torso drawn at the Met: This was a mishmash of the Pen tool with airbrush tool in an effort to make this study of a bust at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to make it more realistic. So I silhouetted the image with the pen, and then I'm going in with two different values like a mid brown tone and a darker tone now. And I'm adding some hatching as well, which makes it look illustrative. But here at this point, I decide to try to make it more realistic looking. So I take the airbrush tool in an effort to make everything more realistic. I try to blur different areas of the sculpture. Then I'm going around the sculpture, the edges to try to refine those edges and add highlights, reflections, and I'm observing closely the actual subject, trying to add different highlights. Now, those yellow marks, there were reflections that I actually saw on the sculpture. I don't know if they translate well in the final piece, but this is really what I'm trying to capture. 22. 21 Figurative sculpture drawn at the Met: This was a very fun sculpture to study. It's a famous sculpture at the Mt. And the figures are really wonderful. And they're interesting to study from a life drawing perspective, and that's why this one has less of an attempt to be realistic and moly studying it as if there were models, real life models. So I'm studying the bend of the forms and the muscles like in hips, the legs, the knees, the hands. There were some you know, complex things done with the hand expressions. Including this one at the bottom, was a very interesting one. There were these three figures and they're all grappling with each other. Interesting note here, I was trying to fit in the head. And in that attempt, I couldn't get it right. You see? I try to shrink the sculpture down, and then in the end I decide, you know what? Just keep it as original because sometimes, you start a picture somewhere and it doesn't quite fit, just go with it. Don't try to force the proportions. Just accept it and do it as you see it from that angle. 23. 22 Native Bronze Sculpture drawn at the Met: This is a beautiful, and I believe pretty famous little sculpture by James Earl Fraser, it was so fun to draw. Basically just used the pencil tool. And then at the end, I added some shading. Again, it's tricky like the bronze sculpture. It's tricky to shade bronze, especially this approach, because again, I am studying it like a life drawing. So I'm using a lot of illustrative line work. As you can see by the arm muscle here, I'm trying to figure it out the best way. And I think that's the arm muscles where I kind of tried to switch. I realized I was using too much line work and I was trying to make it a little bit more filled in and less chicken scratchy. It's enjoyable to draw in those muscles in an illustrative way because This kind of subject also comes from that history, that illustrative history of Cowboy art and everything. This was interesting, too, because I started in actually closer, and then I shrink it. But this was a well, definitely more successful than one of the other sculptures that I did at the MT where when I tried to shrink it and redo the face, it became difficult because resizing it in my head became a challenge. This one was a little bit easier. And you know, the challenges were like, let's say the neck, you see the mouth there in relation to the spear and then the negative space in the neck, between the neck and the spear between the spear and the tip of the foot. Those distances were crucial in my observation. Same with the legs, the empty space between the two legs and the tail and the stomach and everything. These are life drawing techniques that can be covered in other tutorials, but very important when observing anything from life. Here, finally, at the end, I added some shading and I nudged it to the center for a better composition. 24. 23 Conclusion: Congratulations. You did it. You completed my digital plane air painting with Procreate course. I hope I answered most of your questions about the process. The key thing to remember is to use layers whenever you can. T four layers, just in case you make a mistake. And if you do make a mistake, you can always clear the layer. Although I have a few brushes that I like to use that come with procrate, if you do feel adventurous, feel free to create your own brush. Digital painting with procrate is a lot easier than traditional paints often because you can, for one, mix different mediums and techniques, and they blend more easily than they would react if they were traditional paints. Basically, it's just a fun opportunity to try different techniques within Procreate. It's also a great way to travel light with your tablet. You can take your tablet to museums, to the parks, wherever you like, depending on rain or shine. If I can answer any other questions, please feel free to message me. And please don't forget to leave a review so others can find my fun course. Thank you, and I'll see you in my next classes. 25. 24 BONUS 01 Hercules sculpture drawn at the Louvre, Paris: This is another famous sculpture at the Louvre of Hercules. And the first thing that I did was, like, I try to picture in my head the proportions of the whole thing. So this is kind of just an indicator of what's going on in my mind when I'm looking at a sculpture like this. And then based on the distance that I have from the work, then I decide, like, how large to make it. So I don't like force my perspective. And at the beginning there, I'm trying to figure out where to start. So then it ends up centered enough. Once I start, I look for the negative space in that spot of the arm and the elbow there. Then I go in and I'm only using the six B pencil, the digital pencil. It looks like a pencil drawing. The only thing that makes it look digital at this stage is the very bright white background. I'm using the side of the eye pencil, and when you use the side, you could actually get it more gray. So that's kind of a fun little feature. I'm observing the proportions as well as I can. And I'm following the contours. It's fun to observe the muscular ture on a subject like this because yeah, I'm treating it like a life drawing bottle in a way because it's so precise and so figurative. I'm following contours, but I'm trying to imagine the shapes underneath those muscles as well. And here in the face, I'm basically trying to get the proportions while not really defining a grid for the face. So I'm considering, like the eyes, for example, we were at a slant. So I wanted to make sure that those were lined up properly that way. And so is the mouth that's on that same slant. And here I adjusted it so that I ded that it would be more centered. In the page. And the arm his left arm here was a little tricky because it hangs in such an awkward way. But I try to follow it basically the way I saw it. 26. 25 BONUS 02 Various studies drawn at Orsay, Paris: Series of studies were from rsi in Paris. I started with some sculptures. This is a fun, easy one, where I'm mostly focused on the contours. This next one is a painting, and I tried some different tools including the oil brush tool. It was just an interesting one. I was trying to do something flat as a subject. This is back to sculptures. I feel the sculptures are a funner study. I'm just using the six B pencil for this study. This is a great silhouette. It reads really well. It's a nice figure. Good, the upper forum. This one was a complicated study, and it was hard to make sense of it, and I kept looking at it over and over and going, Okay, this is actually what it looks like, like the face, the ways the cheek bone is, and the nose and everything. That's what it was to the best of my ability. Because of the odd angle, I feel the hand as the highlight here. This last one struggled with this, but what a lovely pose this was, and it drew it too big initially and then shrank it down, made it fit within the composition. Some shading was added at the end with the side of the pencil. 27. 26 BONUS 03 Sculpture drawn at Philadelphia Museum of Art: It has a lot of great museums. And I didn't have too much time left by the time I got back to their main museum here, the Rocky one. So, you know, I just kind of saddled up. It was like the last hour before it closed. I found this great sculpture, and I decided to just do like an ink study. The whole thing was maybe less than 10 minutes. I'm showing you here first the top and now like the bottom, like the mid section. It was interesting to study folds and these sculptures, these classical sculptures. They do such a phenomenal job of the cloth, everything, including hands. So it's fun to study the hands. Just a beautiful piece here. Just a quick study. Lots of fun. One ink brush used for the whole thing.