Transcripts
1. Hello! Let's Draw Together : Hey, creative friend. If
you are craving a quick, creative win, a little
dopamine hit in your day, then this class is for you. We're gonna keep it super
simple and fun today by drawing a sweet little
rock stack in Procreate. Just one brush, one layer, and if you want to
go full minimalist mode, just one color. There's no pressure, no fuss, just a relaxing art
moment on your iPad. This is one of my go
to drawings for When I Just Need a few
moments of art therapy. You can leave your rock
stack drawing as is, or you can personalize it
by adding your word of the, a symbol that speaks to you, or anything that makes
it feel more you. Real quick, if we haven't
met yet, I'm Melanie. I'm a full time
artist and a teacher, and I want to be your
creative cheerleader today. I love making colorful
whimsical art, and it's usually for cozy
products and coloring books. And really, I'm
all about keeping things approachable and joyful. If you'd like more
happy art in your life, you can also find
me over on YouTube. And don't forget to hit that green follow button
here on Skillshare, as well, so you never
miss a new class from me. Alright, grab your iPad and
your Apple pencil and let's start drawing something
simple and fun together.
2. Your Project: By the end of this draw
with me style class, you will have a simple and
joyful little drawing of a rock stack created right on
your iPad using Procreate. Feel free to get playful
and make it your own. You can add different textures, color, shading, or you can
keep it super minimal. And don't forget you can
personalize your rocks by adding your word of the year or a symbol that's
meaningful to you. It's a lovely way to make
this piece even more special. Once you've finished it, or even if you're
still in progress, I'd love to see what
you've created. So please share your drawing in the projects and resources
tab below because it's always so inspiring to see how everyone puts their
own spin on things. You could even
upload just a sketch in progress if you'd
like a little feedback. And if your piece has a
special word or symbol on it, consider printing it out and setting it as your
phone or tablet background to keep
that energy front and center throughout your day. Alright, let's talk
supplies really quick.
3. Supplies: The supplies for this
class are very simple. You're going to need your iPad, the Procreate app, and
your Apple pencil. You'll also need to download one file from the resources tab. That download is just a Procreate Canvas file
that's going to help you get started right away because it's already
set to the right size, DPI and has a fun paper
texture ready to roll. You'll see in the
layers that it has paper textures at the top and a draw here
layer right there, and it's a five by seven. I highly recommend downloading your files from a
computer, if possible, and saving to your
Dropbox folder or online storage
system of your choice. Once you have your
Canvas downloaded, we will be ready to draw.
4. Let's Draw Some Rocks: Alright, let's get started. If you haven't
already, go ahead and download and import your
Procreate Canvas file. It should be all set
to the right size DPI and has the paper
textures all set. So you'll see in the
layers right here. Neath the paper textures, you should see a layer
that says draw here. That's the layer that the
majority of our artwork will be on to keep this
artwork sweet and simple. Alright, like I said before, feel free to use completely
different brushes and colors than I am using. But if for this first one, you just want to follow along to decrease the stress of
making any decisions, then just follow me, my friend. For today, I'm going to be
using the color purple. So I'm going to
start by choosing one of my favorite purples. And then I'm going to put
my color palette mode into the classic mode, which is this little
square down here, and it should look
like this up above. And then throughout
this drawing session, I will only be sliding my selection circle
around in this space, and I won't really be
touching anything else. So I'll just be selecting
different light, more saturated or darker
purples from this box. Next, I'm going to set
my background color to a very light purple, but feel free to choose
any color you'd like. So I'm going to open
up my layers panel, and I'm going to
hit the background thumbnail to choose a color. And I'm going to choose
a very light purple, something very, very light
way up here, almost white. In that way, it's not going
to compete with my drawing. Okay, next, let's go back
to our drawing layer, and that's where we're
actually going to create our artwork. I'm going to make sure I'm
on my drawing layer here. Draw here. And then let's select a brush. I'm going to be using
the Guash brush, and you can find that in the painting section
of your brushes. It's a native brush, so you did not need to
download anything. So come to your brush library, go to painting, and then I'm going to come
to the Guash brush. This brush is fun because it layers up to create
a deeper color, and it's going to
allow us to get some variation in our rocks, even though it's just one brush. So feel free to play
with that for a minute. Try it out, try out
different sizes, just to look at the
texture and see how the edges have
this really nice, rough shape to them. You can always play
with the opacity and size at any point
throughout the class today. Now, if you want
to blend anything, all we'll need to
do is hold down on the smudge tool to blend with
the gouache brush, as well. So since I have it selected as my brush here, if I hold down, you'll see a little
notification popped up at the top that says smudge
with current brush, so I can smudge with
my gouache brush. Then we can blend any areas
we'd like really easily. Alright, next,
let's go ahead and choose a nice midton
of our color. So again, I'm gonna be
working with purple. So I'm gonna stay up in this
area and to choose a midton. I'm gonna go somewhere
right about here. That way, I've got
plenty of lights, plenty of more saturated and plenty of darks to
add to it later. And then we're just
going to go ahead and draw our first rock. I always like to start with
my bottom rock and build up. But if your heart
tells you to start at the top and move
down, you do it. Let's double check our layers. Okay, I'm on my draw here. Good. And I'm just going to start by drawing
a really smooth, organic shape, and
then I'll color it in. You can't mess this up, so don't be afraid to just let loose and let your shapes flow. With this gouache brush, if you do not pick
up your pencil, it will create just one kind
of smooth, even toned layer. And if you pick up
and color again, it's going to create another
layer of color over the top, and you'll see overlaps, and that's totally okay. If you go back over
the top and you see those overlapping lines, that's where your smudge
tool comes in handy, and you can blend those away if they're bothering you and
you don't like the texture. I'm going to make my brush
a little bit larger now and just fill this
in a little bit more towards the bottom. I usually like to
keep the top edges a little lighter and then make it a little darker at the bottom. So I'm just gonna keep filling this up with a
little bit of color. And then in a minute,
we can choose different variations
of our one color, either a lighter or
darker or more saturated and start painting those in and blending them in, as well. So just gonna get a nice
solid basic color going. Now I'll choose a lighter color. I'm going to paint
that in up here. Again, don't be
afraid to play with your brush size and opacity. Now I'm going to go a little
darker and more saturated, and I'm going to tilt
my canvas a little bit, so it's easier for my hand
to draw at the bottom here. Just go to paint this in, and I really love
some of this texture. Some of it's going
to get blended away, but some of it I'm
going to keep. And now I'm just going
to start selecting different purples and
painting it in here. I'm going to change
my brush size so I can get a little bit more
control here at the top. And now I'm gonna go ahead
and blend a little bit. Holding down on my smudge tool. I'm going to lower
the opacity so I don't blend it perfectly smooth. Let's see about the size here. Maybe a little bit bigger. Yeah, I like that. All right. And just like that, our
first rock is done. So let's draw our next rock. We're staying on one layer. Don't worry about
making a new layer. And I'll usually layer this
second rock over the bottom of this bottom rock
just a little bit, and then I'll blend
away the overlap area. I also like to vary the shapes and sizes
of the rocks as I go. So definitely feel free to play with shape and make some thinner or longer and just give it
a bit more visual interest. Coming back to my brush, I'm going to go back to
another mid tone purple here. And I think for this
one, I'll make it kind of thin and skinny here. And again, it's going to
overlap a little bit over that bottom rock,
and I'll fill it in. And you can see where it's
overlapped here where you can see that second layer of
paint. That's not a problem. We can blend it right now or we can wait
because we know that we're gonna keep
putting more layers of paint on here and we're going
to blend in a little bit. I'm gonna leave it for now. I'm gonna choose a
slightly darker purple. It also kind of looks painterly and cool to
leave it like that. She's going to brush
in a little bit of a darker purple here. And once all of our
rocks are done, we'll come back and we'll do a little bit more light
and shadow work. For now, I'm just
keeping it a little more simple to get these
rock shapes in here. I'm pretty happy
with that. I'm just going to do a tiny bit of blending. And that
looks really good. Now you're just going to
repeat these steps for however many rocks you'd
like to have in your stack. And if after these first two, you're a little bit unhappy
with the placement, go ahead and move this around now before you add in
the rest of your rocks. So to do that, select
this arrow tool up here and then just kind of change the
placement if you need to. I might move mine up just
a little bit, just like. Alright, I'm going
to go ahead and make the rest of my rocks here. Again, you can make as many
or as few as you'd like. Maybe there's a certain
number that would have a particular meaning to you that you'd like to do, and
that's up to you. So I'm going to go ahead and
make the rest of my rocks. And then when we're
done with the shapes, the main shapes will come back in with some
shadows and highlights. And we're always keeping in mind if we do something
that we don't like, we can always take
two fingers and tap and undo and redo it. Another thing to
keep in mind is we can always erase, as well. If you need to refine
your shape a little bit, hold down on the eraser, and then you can erase
with the same tool, so that way you keep the
same texture to the edge. Because we are using one
brush with a lot of texture, and we have a really textured
background back here, we can move this around
and resize it and even warp it a little bit without losing too much quality to it. It's gonna be totally fine. If you need to resize things, make it larger, make it smaller. Okay, so now that I have a
rock stack that I really like, I'm going to go ahead and
add a little bit more light and shadow to the whole drawing. So to do that, I'm going to grab a very dark version of my color, and I'm going to make
some thin shadow lines at the bottom of each rock. I'm still going to use
the gouache brush, kind of like more
of a pencil now. With a nice dark color, and I'll make my
brush really small. I may have to play with
the size here a bit. That seems to be a
good size at 1%. So I'm just going
to kind of draw in some soft lines
at the bottom. And this brush will change depending on how hard you push. So I like to make kind of thin and thick areas
as I'm drawing. Zooming out just to kind
of see how things look. I think I'm gonna paint in
just a little bit of darkness underneath some of these rocks to look a little
bit more shadowy. So I'm gonna go with a
slightly larger brush, and I'm actually going
to lower the opacity. And I'm gonna go with a
slightly more saturated purple and just kind of brush in
a little bit of shadow. Remembering I can blend this Alright. Now I'm going to grab
my smudge tool and just help this blend in
a little bit better. Normally, if I were making a
more complicated painting, I'd be doing blending modes. But I think there's
something just super fun about keeping this really simple all on one layer and treating it more like
a traditional painting, where if we were actually painting this on a piece
of paper with paint, we would have to be putting
in our shadows with more paint or more
saturated or darker paint and not be utilizing
blending modes. So it's just kind of fun to simplify your digital art
process once in a while. Alright. Now let's
do the opposite and choose a lighter color and
make some soft highlights. I'm gonna choose something right around this range up here. And a slightly larger brush. And I'm gonna paint this, I guess that was a little too big. I'm gonna paint this
around the tops and edges. Alright. I'm gonna go
a little bit brighter. Add a little bit more drama. And now I'm just gonna blend
some of this in a bit. Not too much, though, 'cause
I really like the textures. Alright, lastly,
if you'd like to, you can now add in any
other rocky details like lines or circles or
speckles on your rock. I always love adding
these rings around my rock like you might see
in some of my rocks up here, because if you find a rock with a white line all
the way around it, supposedly, that's good luck. So back to my gouache brush, a nice light color, full opacity, small size. And I'm just going
to draw in some of those rings on some
of my rocks for fun. And then maybe some fun
little kind of, like, speckly spots on the rocks
can look kind of fun. Again, can't mess it up, do whatever feels
fun and good to you. You can also go back
to a darker color. Sometimes I think
it's fun to make a slightly darker color
underneath those lines. Kind of like that. And then to make some darker speckles
and spots on some of them. Alright, so I'm gonna leave
that like this for now. Feel free to keep playing with yours until
you're happy with it. In the next video,
I'm going to show you how I would personalize
this rock stack even further and tuck in some meaningful symbols.
So I'll see you there.
5. Add Special Details: Alright, if you're up for taking this drawing just
one step further, then let's start by
making a new layer. And I know I know I know that I said one layer
at the beginning, but we're going to play it safe and keep these embellishments on their own layer just in case
we change our mind later. So tap the layers panel
and hit the plus sign, and let's keep it above
our drawing layer. And then we are going to play with a color blend mode for fun, and we're going to use
linear burn to start with. So tap where it says N and
come up to linear burn. I'm going to keep
the same kind of purplish color I've
already been using. But I am going to change my brush to the dry
ink brush just because this brush will feel a
little bit more like I'm writing or carving
into the rock. So come up to the
inking section, and there's the dry
ink brush right there. Then I'm gonna make this size probably a little bit
smaller. Let's see. Yep, that's pretty good. And I'm gonna very simply
write in my word of the year on the bottom rock as if to set that word as my grounding
place for the year. But you could add a
run, a fun symbol, your name, your star sign, like, literally
anything you wanted. Alright, I'm going to move
this just a little bit. So because it's on its own
layer, that's not a problem. I'm going to tap my
arrow tool here. And I'm just going to kind of
re work that a little bit, maybe make it a
little bit bigger. I think that looks a
little bit better. And then I'm going to turn down the opacity just a little
bit on this layer. So tap the LB, where it stands for linear burn and just lower this bar here. I like that a little bit better. The other thing you can do is
play with the blend modes. Another fun one that
I think tends to look pretty magical is overlay mode, which is down lower. And I used not quite
the right purple to make that work this time. If I had used a lighter purple, it would look even better. So changing your
color just a little bit can affect how
these blend modes work. So I'm going to come
back up to a darker one since that seemed to
work best for this one, and I'll lower the
opacity again. But feel free to play with that. Again, you're not gonna
mess anything up. It's on its own layer, and
it's fun to play with. But just like that, I have now personalized this rock stack. The other thing you could
do is you could make a layer beneath
your drawing layer. So make a new layer and
then drag it beneath. Sometimes this gets a little
bit fist. There we go. And a fun thing to do could be to put some
splatters back there. So if you came to the
spray paint brush, you could choose
the splatters and some sort of color that
went well behind your work, and you could splatter things in or do some drips back there. Those are just some
fun ideas for you. I'm going to keep mine super simple just like this, though. And in the next video,
I'm going to show you how I sign my
work really quick.
6. Sign Your Artwork: Alright, now that you have finished your sweet
little drawing, let's sign our artwork. I'm going to use my
signature stamp brush, and if you would like
to learn how to make a quick and easy
stamp signature, like mine, I have another
quick Skillshare class that teaches you how to make
one in about 20 minutes. It's super easy,
and it's going to instantly level up your artwork. So I'm going to make a new layer above both of my drawing layers. And you could also put this into any kind of color blending
mode that you would like. I'm going to choose my
stamp brush here with my name on it and
a purple color. I'm going to stamp
this into place. And then I can
always adjust this, make it a little smaller
so it doesn't overwhelm. Straighten it out a little bit. And then I think I will lower the opacity on that
just a little bit. And Tara, a cute and
easy signature all done. Looks good, right? If you'd like to learn
how to make one, go check out that other class.
7. Thank You! Whats Next?: Thank you so much
for joining me for this sweet and simple drawing. I hope you enjoyed this
quick, creative win, and I really hope to see your drawing in the
shared projects below. If you liked this class
and you haven't already, don't forget to hit
that follow button, so you'll get notified
about my next class. And please consider leaving a little review in
the review tab below. Your review will help
me and other students know that this class was
fun and hopefully helpful. Let me know which part of
the class was your favorite. Okay, so here is where I
will leave you for now. I really hope to see you in my other classes,
though. Happy creating.
Melanie Bess, Painting By The Light Of The Moon
