Transcripts
1. Let's Go!: Hey there, my name is Cat Coquillette, and I am back for my 17th Skillshare class! Today, you are going to learn my absolute best techniques for creating professional quality artwork on your iPad with the intention of getting it licensed and sold. My level of expertise is creating art that sells well. I license my designs through companies like Target, Urban Outfitters, HomeGoods, and more. But I also sell my designs through print on-demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. These are platforms that anyone can join to start selling their artwork. In fact, Society6 is how I got started earning an income through art way back in 2014. Now, thanks to art licensing, I make a living as an artist, so this class is a two for one. You're going to learn all of my best tips for illustrating professional artwork on your iPad using the drawing app, Procreate. I am a big believer in learning by doing, so you're going to be creating your own gorgeous illustration right alongside me, from sketch to final piece. The kicker, not only are you going to learn professional illustration techniques, but you'll also be gaining insider knowledge into the art licensing industry so you can create your own best-selling artwork. Creating artwork that will sell is more than just a whim. All of my creative and technical decisions that I make when illustrating are steeped in strategy. From choosing what I'm going to draw, establishing the color palettes, illustration style, canvas size and dimensions, export settings, all that jazz, you are going to learn all of this. When I create artwork to license, I want to do everything I can to optimize this illustration for success. Consider this class a peek into my brain as I strategize, sketch, finalize, and publish my artwork. You are going to be following along for the entire journey. By the end of this class, you'll not only have the insider scoop into the art licensing industry, but you'll also have a super cool illustration that you drew yourself. I'm also providing you with a ton of freebies for this class including 10 illustration prompts. These are collections of reference photos that I use when I'm drawing from scratch. I'm also providing you with eight custom color palettes that you can use to create your class project, plus any future artwork that you create. Here's the best part, I have teamed up with True Grit Texture Supply to give away four of their best brushes, totally free of charge. With all of these freebies combined, plus the skills you'll learn in this class, you are going to have one powerful toolkit for your artist journey. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking that follow button up top. Without further ado, let's dive right in.
2. Your Project: All right, so first
things first. These freebies are totally
optional in this class. Think of them like
an extra perk. You're welcome to download these freebie assets
to use today, or you can follow up and complete your class
project using your own favorite Procreate
brushes and color palettes. It's entirely up to you. Either way, you're
going to wind up with a gorgeous class project. Let's go over where to find all of these
awesome freebies. Go to catcoq.com/bonus. I'm also providing a link down below in the class description. Once you're there, you can
submit your email to unlock the Dropbox folder that contains all of the
bonus freebies. The True Grit Texture
Supply brushes, the custom color palettes, and the reference photo collages that we'll be using
in today's class. Heads up submitting your email also unlocks access to
my email newsletter, as well as True Grit
Texture Supplies. You can unsubscribe at anytime. So once you're in
the Dropbox folder, you can download everything. You don't need a
Dropbox account. Because I have a Mac computer I just Airdrop all
the color swatches, brushes, and reference
images straight to my iPad. The brushes and the pallets will automatically load
to Procreates. I also want to give
one more shout out to True Grit Texture Supply for providing all of these
amazing freebie brushes. If you want to see more
of their brush selection, just check out their websites. Little hints, I am all about hooking my students
up with freebies. So if you enter your
email on their website, you get a bunch more of
free brushes as well. I am tossing that
link down below in the class description
too. Another little tip. Once my brushes are
imported into Procreate, I like to duplicate
them and put them into their own little folder that's specific to the artwork
that I'm creating. In this case, I made
a new brush folder called Leopard with
a cute little emoji on there just because, and that is what contains all of my brushes that I'll be
using for this illustration. I actually do this for most of my Procreate
illustrations. It is really great
for two big reasons. One, easy access. I don't have to hunt around
in my library to find a specific brush every
time I change brushes. Two, it helps me remember what brushes I used for a
specific illustration. For example, I wanted to create a new illustration
that matched the same style that I used in
my retro road trip drawing. I created that artwork
five months ago and I have no idea exactly what
brushes I used at the time. So all I had to do was look for the brush
folder that I had already created for
that illustration when I drew it in
the first place. Once I was there, I saw
that I used two brushes, Lisa's pencil and Peppermint. Once I have that info, I was able to make
my new illustration using the exact same brushes, which helps these both
hold together pretty well and feel cohesive
as a collection. All right, last housekeeping
tip before we dive in. I want this class
to work for you, so for the class project, I'll be drawing this jaguar surrounded by some
tropical leaves. You are more than welcome to
follow my lead and create the same artwork color palette
everything step by step. Or, you can embark on
your entirely own path. This is the reason
that I'm providing 10 full pages of
reference photos. That way you can
choose exactly what you want to draw for
your class project. While I'm drawing this jaguar, you can follow the
exact same steps, but be illustrating
a sloth, or a zebra, or a unicorn on
your iPad instead. Trust me, you'll be able
to follow along just fine, even if you're not drawing
the exact same animal as me. I love seeing a diversified
project gallery. Please feel free to go
along your own path here. Actually, after I
launched my last class on surface design
patterns in Procreate, I was absolutely floored with the quality
and creativity of the patterns that
you guys shared in the project gallery
and on Instagram. In that class, I was
demonstrating how to turn flowers into
repeat patterns, but you guys took it to
the absolute next level. I saw student projects
of fruit patterns, Halloween icons,
butterflies, houses, autumn leaves, bunnies, parrots, elephants, topography,
so many cool projects. So yes, you are more than welcome to follow
along with my leopard, but I also encourage you to forge your own path
and surprise me. Also, here is a little tip, if you feel brave
enough to share your class project on Instagram, please tag me @catcoq and
Skillshare @skillshare, so I can like and comment
to boost your engagements. I am all about community
over competition, so I'd love to support
you as best I can. Also, if you share your project to your Instagram
story and you tag me @catcoq I'll be able to re-share it pretty easily
on my end as well, so that you'll have even
more eyes on your artwork. I also like to include
student projects in my email newsletter because I love bragging about you guys. I shared on Instagram as well. If I can find your
handle then I usually include it so that you can
get even more followers. We really do rise by
lifting each other up. To recap, you have found
the Dropbox folder, downloaded all of
the Class Assets, and sent them to your iPad. Now, let's decide what
we're going to illustrate.
3. Brainstorming: This is one of my favorite parts of designing new artwork, choosing what it is I'm actually going to draw. Like I mentioned, this class is all about creating artwork with the intention of having it become a wild commercial success, which means choosing a motif that people want to buy. With trend forecasting, I always start with fashion. Fashion is the forefront of trends and nearly every other visual industry follows suit. Fashion gives me inspiration for motifs, patterns, colors, textures, compositions, pretty much everything is visual. Let me show you how I track that. When I'm brainstorming what to draw, I typically look at two fashion brands in particular, Anthropologie and ModCloth. I zeroed in on these two for a couple of different reasons. One, their audience aligns really well with my audience. We both attract primarily women who are interested in stylish designs and have some disposable income to spend on Walmart or Home Decor. Chances are whatever Anthro or ModCloth is selling is going to appeal to my audience as well and this is a super easy win for me. I also look at these two brands because they give me a bit of variety, Anthro sells higher-end products with a higher price tag. In addition to fashion, they also sell home decor items and beautiful furniture. ModCloth is cheaper, cockier, and more of a fast fashion brand like H&M or Forever 21. Fast fashion simply means that they sell products that are super trendy right now at the moment, but will probably lose relevance much faster. This means they move their inventory quickly and they adapt rapidly. Between the two of these brands, Anthro and ModCloth, I get a really well-rounded idea of what's on trend right now and what's likely to continue being on trend for the foreseeable future. Plus what is appealing directly to my audience. The first thing I look for is patterns. I don't mean the surface design kinds. I mean noticing similarities between products across the board. If you're seeing a lot of teal green throughout the catalog, this means that teal is probably a really popular color trend. Take a mental note there. It might be something to incorporate into your artwork. I'm also seeing a lot of animals, which is great news because this absolutely fits my personal style. I illustrate a lot of cute animals and they're always big earners with art licensing. Honestly, if you're looking for strong sales, animals are going to be a really solid choice for you because they always have high purchasing power. Simply put, people find the animals cute, and there will always be a demand for them in surface design and art licensing, it is an easy, easy win for us. Both Anthropologie and ModCloth have dedicated sections just for animals, which tells you that their audience is also very interested in animal motifs. For me, I'm going to stick with what I know will work and is reinforced by what I'm seeing here on their websites. I am going to choose an animal theme for my illustration today. Now let's fine-tune it a little bit. Animal print has been wildly popular for the past few years. The trend hasn't really died out yet, and it still appears to be going strong based off of what I'm seeing here on these pages. I have a lot of animal print themed artwork in my portfolio and it does really well for me in terms of sales. I could stick to my tried and true and do another animal print theme. But let's take a peek at ModCloth real quick. They have a little bit more variety within their animals here. Scrolling through Anthropologie's animal collection, it seemed like a lookbook with a highly curated aesthetic of jungle animals and animal print. But taking a look at ModCloth, they have a little bit more variety. I'm seeing animals that are on trend for the upcoming holidays, which I'm really not interested in doing today. Sure, I can always illustrate a bat and I'm sure would sell really well in October before Halloween and that would be great, but what I want to focus on right now and show you is a more evergreen motif. Evergreen just means something that will be relevant year-round, not just for a specific time of year. What else? ModCloth, they seem to be loving their raccoons right now. But I'm also seeing some bunnies, kitty cats, sloths, bumblebees, unicorns, butterflies, basically all animals that are typically on trend and sell pretty well. No big surprises here. You've actually probably been seen all of these animals printed on various products when you walk through the aisles at Target. In fact, I've actually already illustrated each and every single one of these animals and they do very well in my licensing portfolio. But I'm also seeing jungle cats here on ModCloth too, which aligns with what I noticed on Anthropologie. I already have a lot of jungle cats and animal prints in my portfolio, but they all have really high sales. I'm thinking I'll just stick with that same theme, but create something that feels different from what's already up in my portfolio. Internal monologue continuing. Now that I've nailed down the motif, it's time to think about color. With a lot of my work, I create multiple color palettes out of the exact same illustration and I do this for a few different reasons. One, it's really simple and fast to do. Planning and illustrating my design takes about 95 percent of my time and effort. Re-coloring takes about five percent. It is a low commitment, high-value and too after I've put in all of that hard work of creating a brand new design, I absolutely want to maximize its potential success and get the most bang for my buck. The easiest way to do this is through adding more color options. If someone likes my orange blooms, but that blush background isn't really working for them in their home, I also have several other background colors that they could choose from. The blush might not work for them, but charcoal might just do the trick. I earned a sale that I otherwise might have lost. Creating multiple color options is super simple, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that a bit later in this class. But for now, I want to determine the colors I use for my original drawing. Let's take another quick peek at Anthropologie for some inspiration here. It looks like traditional neutral palettes for animal print is their preference. Maybe paired with a jewel tone like emeralds or teal. Good to know. Let's take a peek at ModCloth. They have the same neutral traditional palettes, but they also have a more modern approach with unexpected colors that you don't generally associate with leopard prints, like mint and light pink. Honestly, that modern approach feels more in line with my brand as well. I like using pops of bright color, especially if it's unexpected for that particular theme, like my peak crocodiles and these minty cheetahs I painted in the past. I think I'm going to go along that route. Unexpected modern bright pops of color. Teal and blush work really well together and I use this color combo in a lot of my artwork. Plus I see a lot of these colors repeated as I scroll through these websites, which means they're on trend, and will probably get a better customer response. If I'm using a really bright palette, I like to pepper in a few neutral tones to make it feel more sophisticated. When you go with all rainbow colors, it can tend to look a little bit childish, which is absolutely great if that's your audience, but I want to appeal to stylish women, so I'm keeping that in mind when I choose my color palettes. If you enjoyed this thought process and internal monologue and strategy to learn more about what I look for when I track trends, check out my previous class, how to discover profitable design trends before anyone else, and create artwork with mass appeal. That class has a ton of good nuggets, so you can learn how to identify trends and incorporate them into your artwork. Popular designs mean more success in licensing. Now that I've got that idea in my mind, both in terms of what I want to draw, jungle cats, and the colors I want to use, let's get our ideas out of our brains and sketched out on screen in Procreate.
4. Prepping the Canvas: First thing's first, I've opened up Procreate, and this is what my homepage is looking like. The first thing I want to do is start a new canvas. Go to the plus sign at the top right of the screen and then select, "New Canvas" here on the top right. I'm going to change it to inches and make it 8 by 10. It's at 300 DPI and this gives me 70 maximum layers. That is awesome. Go ahead and tap, "Create" and here is our canvas. If you're following along and you're thinking 8 by 10, that is way too small of a canvas size if I want to be selling this on print-on-demand sites or licensing it out. You are absolutely correct. That is why we are going to be working with several different canvas sizes throughout this class. But I always start with 8 by 10 for my initial sketch because I have so many layers to work with. If I were going to go immediately to the maximum canvas size, I'd be limited to four layers. But since I'm starting here with a small 8 by 10 board, I get 70 layers and I'm not even going to come anywhere close to using all of those. Just for this initial stage when we're sketching out our ideas or adding these reference photos to the art board, or maybe testing out color palettes, it's nice to have a lot of layers. I start with 8 by 10, but by the time we're doing our final illustration, we'll move up to a much larger canvas size. But anyway, 8 by 10 is a great place to start. The first thing I'm going to do is import my inspiration board. I'm going to go up here to the wrench at the top-left. Under, "Add" I want to do, "Insert a Photo". I've already air all of those inspiration boards to my iPad, so they're here in my camera roll, plus some photos. I went to an animal sanctuary a few days ago, so those are those flamingos and otters. Anyway, like I mentioned, I want to be doing a jungle catch for this. Of those inspiration boards, I created ones for jungle cats, flowers, flamingos, parrots or other tropical birds, sloths, nice range of tropical foliage, giraffes, unicorns, which by the way, there's no unicorn photo since unicorns aren't real, so they're horses, and then I pulled in a picture of this gazelle or antelope, I'm not sure what it is, but you can use it's horn as the reference for the unicorn horn and zebras. I encourage you to follow along with whichever one of these animals is resonating with you, or if you want to do something that's not included here, totally go for it, It's up to you. I'd love to see a really diverse project gallery. But anyway, I'm going to go ahead and start with the jungle cats. So I just tap that once and it will appear in my canvas. Let's go ahead and increase that a little bit and I know I talk about in my other Procreate classes, you should never scale up like this because you lose resolution and that's totally true. But for this, again, it's just our practice sketches, so I don't really care if things get blurry. Scale up or down to your heart's content, including with the sketches.10 It's fine. This is just the sketch phase, but when we get to final, we will not be doing that. Taking a look at these jungle cats, I really like the look of this central leopard because I've already [inaudible] or designed to jungle cats that look like these three in the top left. So I want to try something different. Well, a cheetah made it in here, but just pretend that's a leopard. I really like the look of this one, that's sitting, but I love this one's face over here. What I'm going to do is just collage and Frankenstein these together. If you're working on the Flamingo Board or the sloths or something else, feel free to follow along. You can pick aspects of each photo you like and piece them together and I'll show you how. First of all, I'm going to hit the up arrow key to set that transformation, and what I want to do, is isolate out this guy's head and put it on this guy's body. I'm going to go to my selection tool, which is the S. My freehand is already selected. If you're on rectangle, or ellipse, or automatic, just go ahead and switch it to freehand. Now I'm just going to trace around his head, it can be really loose, and then use three fingers to swipe down and hit, "Cut" and, "Paste". What that's done, and I'll show you, is put that leopard head on its own layer. If we hide the other layer, you'll see that it's isolated out. What I want to do is making sure that this jungle head is selected. Go to my arrow tool and bring it back down and size it down and just place it somewhere on this leopard's body. Perfect. Hit that arrow again to set the transformation and there is my Frankenstein leopard. Feel free to do this, Find the parts of the animals you like, piece them together into your own composition, and this is another great way of really making it your own. Now it is time to do our sketch. First thing's first, I'm going to go to my layers and pinch these together to merge them onto one layer. Now that jaguar head is flattened onto that jaguar body. I'm going to go back to my arrow tool and resize this so that it fits pretty comfortably in that composition. For my final, I want to have these tropical leaves coming out, so I'm going to give some room to that. It doesn't have to be perfect, just something like this where it's in the middle of that page and we've got some breathing room on the edges. Let's go ahead and start our sketch.
5. Sketching: Let's go ahead and start our sketch. Let's go back to our Layers, and hit this plus sign to start a new layer. Before we start sketching, I want to go ahead and bring the opacity down on this big jaguar layer so that I can actually see what I'm doing on the sketch. To do that, on that jaguar layer, go ahead and tap this N, and N stands for normal. It's a normal blending mode. As you see here, there's a bunch of different blending modes to choose from, but we'll get into that a little bit later. But for now, just keep it on normal, and I want to look up here at the opacity bar, grab that scrubber, bring it back down so that I can still see that illustration, but I also want to see my brush strokes that I do on top of it for the sketch. Thirty four percent, sure, that looks great, doesn't have to be perfect, and now with Layer 2 selected, which is our sketch layer, I want to go up here to my color palettes, and I generally like working with a really bright red, when I'm sketching. The reason for this is because a bright red pencil will show up a lot better, especially when I'm sketching on something that has a lot of desaturated tones. Some people like sketching with black, I like red, choose a color that works for you. But again, it won't really matter. The sketching won't appear in your final illustration, this is just a reference for us to start building this up. All right, so I've got my color as a bright red and when I double-check my layers, double, triple, quadruple check. I always go back to my layers because when I'm drawing on the wrong layer, I have to go back so many steps, so I always double check my layers to make sure I'm on the right one. All right, in my brushes, my preferred sketching brush is called Peppermint. It's over here in the Sketching folder, and it's actually a Procreate default brush, so you should all have it on Procreate. If you don't have it or you want to use a different brush, really, any of these sketching brushes will do, anything that says pencil, but I prefer Peppermint. Looking at my layers again, I'm definitely on the right one. Let's go ahead and start our sketch. All right, so my sketches are always really loose, and it doesn't have to be perfect at all. It's just helping me get an idea of the form of these animals. Again, doesn't have to be perfect and in fact, it shouldn't be, if you want to take it off in your own direction, and just use these reference photos as a really loose guide, that's totally fine. For me, I just use it as a guide to make sure that I'm getting those forms correct, so that this animal will actually be recognizable, and to make sure that I'm getting the proportions and something that feels realistic. All right. For my sketches, I prefer to keep it really minimal like this. You don't need to add a ton of details, but for this, I am going to draw some of those spots, and the reason for that is because I want to get an idea for how these spots are lain out in the body. Right here on its side, they're really big and circular, but over here towards this chest, they get squished in words and roll with the form of this body. I'm just going to draw a few of these in as a reference for me, so that I know when I'm working on this final illustration, that kind of general direction that these spots go, and what sizes I want to make it. These face one's are really tiny and slope along with his head. All right, cool. Yeah, the only thing I want to do now is add a tail. The photo doesn't have one but again, that's the great thing about drawing, is you can make it your own. So I'm going to have a tail coming out like this, perfect, and a few spots that probably come off the side of the tail a little bit, perfect. All right, I'm going to go back to my layers, and go ahead and toggle off visibility for that photo layer, so I can get a good idea of the sketch. As you can see, it's pretty loose, but it's great. This is exactly where I want it to be. It's not unnecessarily detailed, and it's a really great starting point for when I'm working on that final illustration. Like I mentioned, I want to have some leaves coming out from behind my jungle cat, so I'm going to go back to my wrench under Add, hit, "Insert a photo", and I'm going to bring in this leaf inspiration board. If you're following along, feel free to do the same with leaves. I also have a flower board. Again, feel free to make this illustration entirely your own. All right, I'm looking at my leaves, I'm going to scale them up so I can really get an eye for them. That arrow is to set the transformation and in terms of the forms of these leaves, I'm really drawn to this one right here. I think I'm going to start with that one, make absolute sure that this is the selected layer. With my selection tool, I'm going to make sure I'm on free hands, and I'm just going to trace around this leaf, maybe get both of these here. Then, with three fingers swipe down, hit "Cut" and "Paste." Go back to my layers, go ahead and turn off the visibility, for our Inspire board. It's still there, it's just hidden from sight right now. Now with that main layer selected, I'm going to go back to my arrow and pull it up a little bit, resize it, look for a nice little place to tuck these leaves within this jaguar illustration, something a little bigger. Yeah, that feels pretty good. I'll go ahead and tap that arrow to hit the transformation. We'll sketch these in a sec, but first I want to add the other leaves that I'll be referencing the sketch. Back into my layers, I'm going to turn back on that Inspire board, I go ahead and tap it once to select it, and I'm looking at other leaves that I like. These two are actually resonating with me. They match these and it gives me another angle to pull from. I'm going to go to my selection tool, make sure I am on Freehands, and now do the same thing. Just trace around, maybe pull a few of these, three fingers, swipe down, "Cut" and "Paste", go to my layers, toggle off the visibility for Inspire board, and now with that new layer selected, I'm going to go to my transform and look for a nice place to tuck it into the composition. Cool, that's filling pretty good. I'm going to hit the "Arrow" to set the transformation, and now it's time to do some tracing. I'll go back to my layers, pinch those two together to merge them, hit this "N" for normal, bring that opacity down, so that I can actually see what I'm doing, and I'm going to add a new layer by hitting this plus sign. My color should still be red, and my pencil should still be that Peppermint. Now, it's time to just draw in using this loosely as an inspiration, for what that form and direction looks like. This one is nice, do a few leaf strokes, so to remember what the direction of that vein should look like. Now, this one and as you can see, I'm not tracing it on exactly what that photo looks like, and that's totally fine. I'm making this my own and just using this photo as a really rough reference. All right, cool. Let's go back to my layers, I'm going to turn off the visibility and now I can see the sketch isolated to see how it's looking. I'm really liking the direction. To balance out this composition, I think I'm going to add a leaf down here, and maybe one up here. I don't know if I really need to use these reference photos that heavily anymore. For me, leaves are pretty simple to draw, so I think I'm just going to wing it and free-form it. Let's turn off that reference photo. I'm staying on that same leaf layer, and what if I have one kind of coming down like this, sort of some fan poem illustration, and maybe something up here, that does the same thing and just mirrors it, awesome. I'll do some little free-form leaves as well, to remind myself to fill those in as we're doing our final illustration. Awesome, I love it. Our sketch is pretty finalized. Again, it's super rough, but that is totally okay because we're not at the final illustration yet. We'll be able to work out some of these kinks, when we're doing our final illustration. So before we move on to the next lesson, I'm going to do some housekeeping and some organization. I'm going to go into my layers, I can go ahead and swipe left on all these photo references. I don't really need them anymore, so we can delete those, and now I'm going to select both my layers by swiping right. I'll hit "New group" and I'm going to select that group, hit "Rename" and I'm going to be calling this group sketch, S-K-E-T-C-H. Perfect. Again, this just helps me stay organized. Let me zoom out a bit. One thing I am going to do with this whole sketch group selected, is go to my "Transform" and bring it down a little bit, to center it on the page to get a better balance within that composition. Hit the arrow again to set the transformation, perfect. All right, hard part over, our sketch is finalized, we've taken composites of all of those photos and blended them together, to make this composition truly our own. Whether you were following along with the zebra or the unicorn or the sloth, I hope you feel like you have a nice unique composition, using those photo references, but then also adding your own details and touches. Without further ado, let's go ahead and start playing and exploring with color.
6. Color Exploration: Now that we have finished up our sketch, it is time to start playing with some color exploration. When I'm doing color, I like to see a few different variations before I find one that I'm really jiving with and want to move forward with. Let's go ahead and dive in, and I'm going to show you exactly how I explore color in this way. The first step is going to be duplicating this Canvas. When I work, I make these series of duplications as I go, and that's just a way to save all the progress of this step before moving onto the next step and so forth. That way, if I ever need to go back a few steps, I'll have those files to save there. It's just a contingency plan for me. To duplicate this Canvas, I'm going to go up into gallery, hit "Select", select my Canvas and just duplicate. Cool, hit that "X", and then we're going to do Select again. I'm going to take both of these and stack them, hit that "X" again. What that stack has done is it's put them into this group. The first thing I'm going to do because I like being very organized, is to tap where it says Untitled Artwork, and I'm just going to rename this Sketch. For this one, I'm going to hit "Untitled Artwork", and call this one Color. Again, this just helps me stay organized. I'm going to leave Sketch exactly where it is, not going to touch it for now, but I am going to open up the new Color, and this will be the Canvas where I have those color explorations. The first thing I'm going to do is open up my layers, hit that carrot on Sketch and consolidate everything into one layer. You do that just by pinching them together. Now that sketch is entirely flattened on one layer, and that'll just help us keep a nice and tidy layers panel. When I'm exploring colors, I always like to start with the background. Go ahead and add a new layer by hitting that plus sign, and I'm going to go into my palettes, and I've already imported all the palettes that are available for this class, so I just airdrop them straight to my iPad and they'll automatically open and procreate like this. If you try to open them on your computer, they won't open. These are iPad files only that will only work in Procreate. I put together a lot of premade color palettes for you guys, and they're all up here at the top for me. You'll be able to find them by their filenames, Lush Autumn, Copper Shoreline, Pastel Summer. But I think I want to start with this one called Jungle Modern. I'm going to go ahead and tap "Set Defaults". Like I mentioned, I like starting with a background color first and then building on top of that. For this Jungle Modern, I think I want it to have this blush background. I tapped the blush, you'll see on the color indicator up at the top right, it changes as well, and then I'm going to open up my layers. If already added that new layer, I'm just going to click it and drag it underneath the sketch, grab from my color indicator and drop right in. If your entire screen just turned one color, just make sure that that layer is underneath the sketch, not on top of it. Now that I've got that background layer established, it's time to start building up the rest of the colors of this composition. I'm going to hit that plus sign to start a new layer and this layer should also be beneath the sketch layer, and that way we can still see that sketch coming through as we're filling in our colors. To fill in those colors, I'm going to go over to my brushes. The brush I'm going to use for this is the True Grit Texture Supply brush called Crispy Inker. If you're not using the imported brushes, one I would recommend for you is over here in inking. It's a default brush and it is called Syrup. If you're not using the imported brushes, Syrup is a great one to use for this because it draws a very solid line and it's easy to fill in. But because we already have these True Grit brushes, I want to be using those, so I'm going to start with that Crispy Inker, and then with my pallets, so again, I'm using jungle modern. I guess I'll just start by filling in that leopard. For that, I think I'm going to use this light brown color. Now is the fun part. You just make these really blobby shapes. If you're looking at this in horror, thinking like, "My God, this isn't how you illustrate." That's okay. This is just the color exploration practice. The only thing I'm trying to get here is an idea for what colors to move forward with, and to do that, it doesn't have to be perfect. I just draw blobby shapes so that I get an idea of color balance. It's actually fun because you can be really messy with it. Now I'm going to start filling in those leaves, I'm going to start with that bright turquoise, and same thing, just fill in these blobby shapes. You can drag from that color picker and drop them right in. Let's make this one. It's fun and loose to do. It's like a very therapeutic exercise to just make these blobby shapes that don't have to be perfect at all. Let's switch it up a little bit, and I'm going to use that other minty color to contrast that bright turquoise we've got going for us. Again, I'm just filling these in to get an idea for how that color will be balanced across the composition. We got to use some of these darker blacks, we got fill in spots of it. Lets get a little sample size spots, and I'll use that darker color to do the middle part. Cool. Now at this point, I usually toggle off the visibility on that sketch layer, so I can of see how that color is balancing across the composition. Again, I know it looks like a kindergartener drew this, but the test here is seeing how that color is balancing and playing off of each other. I think this is looking pretty good. It feels nice and modern, even though I'm using a traditional palette for that leopard itself, with those neutrals and traditional, greens for the leaves, and having that blush background is helping it feel a little bit more modern. But I think what I want to try next to something that feels ultramodern with a lot of unexpected colors. Let's go ahead and try a totally different palates. The way that I organize this, is I go ahead and swipe right on all those layers and hit "Group" to group them together. Then with that group selected, make sure you're selecting new group and not an individual layer within that group. With new group selected, I'm going to go over here to my Arrow tool and size it down a lots. Then I'm actually going to rotate it by hitting 45 degrees twice, so it fits nicely over there, and then I'm going to flip my whole Canvas and set the transformation. That's really cool in Procreate. All you have to do is rotate your Canvas around, and it's automatically flipped to a new orientation. Just a fun cool thing you can do in Procreate. But now, I'm going to go back to my layers, swipe left on new group and hit "Duplicate". Now with that new one selected, I'm going to go back over here to my arrow and just drag it to the right. Press that arrow to set the transformation. Now with these two side-by-side, I'll be able to see a direct comparison when I do the new color pallets on this guy over here. Let's go ahead and get started. I always start with the background, and if you ever want to make sure which group you're working with, just toggle that visibility on and off, so you can make sure you're on the right one. Let's go over here to my palettes, and I'm going to browse through all of those pallets I put together. Man, there are a lot of choices. I'm really liking this Lush Autumn because it has these really nice bubble gum pop colors. Like I said, I wanted to try something a little bit more modern, so I'm going to go ahead and set defaults. I think it would the background of this one to be this cream, really light yellow. I'm going to go back to my layers, double-check that I'm on that background layer, and just click it and drag it in. That's cool to see this existing color palette with that different background colors, so just a mental note, something to maybe look at a little bit more thoroughly later. But let's go ahead and fill in the rest of those colors. I'm going to open up my layers, make sure that those color blob layers are selected. Again, you can double-check by toggling that visibility on and off. With that layer selected, I'm going to go back to my palettes, and under Lush Autumn, I'm just going to choose new colors and just start dragging them in. What if it's a bright orange leopard with maybe these pink leaves? If for whatever reason, a lot of colors are changing as you drag this over, that is a threshold issue. Let me show you what I mean. If I drag this over and I don't release the pen from the screen, you can bring it all the way to the right and look at this color dropped thresholds up here at the top. All the way to the left, means it's barely filling in that color and all the way to the right means it's going to fill in a 100 percent, all those similar colors. Just keep an eye on that. Again, this is happening because my pen hasn't left the screen. It's just an interesting thing to explore and play around with. But it looks like for me that 20 percent range is doing pretty well. That means it's only filling in that color that's right there, not the adjoining colors. Let's see what other colors you've got in this palates. That's a really nice gold, maybe that fills in for these other leaves and maybe that gold is also the spots on this leopard. There's a black in here too, which I want to use. Maybe that's the middle of the spots. Yeah, this is interesting. Maybe that white comes in and replaces some of these smaller leaves. Some cool stuff is happening here and it's definitely feeling a lot more modern than this more traditional palette over here. But I think I'm going to go ahead and try one more with a different color palette and just see how it's looking. As you can see, I'm running out of room over here. I'm going to go back to my layers, select both groups by swiping right on the group name. Go into my pointer tool and just dragging it down a little bit so that I can fit another color palette over here. Hit that pointer tool again to set the transformation. Go back to my layers and I'm going to swipe left, hit duplicate on that group name and using my arrow tool, I'm just going to pull it over and I'm going to try one more over here on the right. I'm going to open up my layers. Make sure that's the actual group that I want to be working with and I'm going to start with my background. I have that layer selected. I'm going to go up to my palettes. Think for this one, I want to try this retro drama palette. I'll hit that for set defaults. Let's take a look at what I've been doing so far. I've been doing these lights backgrounds. Let's try something with a really dark background. I'm going to use this dark black charcoal color and just drag it straight in, that's fun. Back to my layers. I'm going to select that color blobby layer and again, turn on and off that check mark to make sure I'm on the right layer. As you notice, I double-check and triple check things all the time in Procreate, especially with layers. It's really easy to get lost in your artwork and then realize you've been working off the wrong layer the whole time. Don't be afraid to double-check and triple check layers all the time, I definitely do that. That is the correct layer, I'm going to go into my color palettes and let's see. I've got all these colors with retro drama. I think I want to try this tannish red color for the leopard itself. That's fun. For the leaves, I think I'm going to use this mint color over here to replace that pink. What else have we got here? We have this like brighter blush pink. Let's replace them with these top leaves. I want to show you what happened there. Let me backup by hitting two fingers will always undo a step. Then if you want to redo it, three fingers will redo, two fingers will undo. As you can see, when I pulled this color over, the leopard itself has changed colors and the reason that's happening is a threshold issue. I'm going to show you how to fix that. Two fingers will back up. If I bring this color over and don't release my pen, it's still touching the screen, then I can bring down this color threshold to a much lower number. If I have it all the way up here to a 100 percent, everything is going to key into this color and change. But if I bring it all the way down, it looks like 11 percent is really doing it for me so I can release the pen at that point. That way, only this color has changed. If you're ever dragging colors over and doing stuff like this, especially if they're touching a similar color, you might run into that problem. Just keep your pen touching the screen and move it right and left to adjust that color thresholds, so that should. Cool. Once you set the threshold, it will set that way for the rest of the times you're dropping color in. It's pretty common when I'm illustrating that I have to readjust that color threshold as I'm going. That's just part of the process. What do I want to fill those inner spots with? I like this brick red, it's that lighter red of the two options and we'll just fill in the spots. You can either drag and drop or draw over. For smaller areas like this, I usually just redraw it over. It's a little bit simpler and faster. For the middle of the spots, let's try that much darker, maroon red. Just the center spots there. I'm going to see what it looks like if I bring some of that mint out of the composition a bit to help it balance. You know what? I think it needs more pink too. That one's feeling pretty fun and modern, it's a nice balance between these neutral tones and these unexpected bright colors. That's just a really quick way that I test out color and I find out what kind of color composition I want to be proceeding with. I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this, but if you guys want to, you can go back up to your layers and just keep repeating this process and maybe even fill an entire board and with more color options. The possibilities are endless here. I sent over a lot of different palettes. If you're having fun with this color exploration phase and you want to keep going and trying out new palettes and testing out different options, totally go for it. But I think you've gotten the gist of how I explore these colors and how I duplicate these layers to see new options. That's really nice to see everything together like this, because I can really get an idea of each individual palette as well as see them altogether and see things that are working and not working. The end of this lesson is just looking at all these color options that we've put together. Maybe you have three on your page, maybe you have six, and deciding which color palette that you want to move forward with. For me, I'm really gravitating back to this original one I did. I think this is going to be the winner and this is what I'm going to proceed with into the final illustration. But I can also, once I'm finished with that final illustration, play with more color, once I've finished. I'm still going to keep these as back-burner in case once I finished my final illustration, I also want to try out this palette or this one. I'll show you how to do that as well towards the end of this class. Let's go ahead and move on to our next lesson, which is beginning our main motif.
7. Main Motif: This is where we left off. Now that we're finished with the color exploration and we know which one we're wanting to move forward with, let's go ahead and get started on the final illustration. I'm breaking this up into a few different parts. The first part of the final illustration will be just illustrating that mean motif. For me it'll be that leopard, but maybe you're following along with a flamingo or a zebra, or an animal of your own choice, or maybe not even an animal at all. But this next step, we'll be illustrating that main part of our illustration. I'm going to go back to gallery, hit select, hit sketch, and we are going to duplicate that. Like I mentioned, there's a lot of duplicating happening, hit that X to end the selection, and I'm just going to drag it over. This again, I'm a sucker for staying organized, so I like seeing things in succession as we complete them. Sketch, color, and then this will be the beginning part of our final illustration. I'm just going to tap where it says sketch, and I'm going to rename this main motif. Cool. Go ahead and tap it to open. The first thing we're going to do, will be resizing that Canvas. Like I mentioned earlier, I start on these smaller or boards 8 by 10 because it gives me a lot of flexibility with layers. But when it comes time for that final illustration, I wanted to be as high as possible, so that I have more options when I'm turning this into products like maybe bed sheets or tapestries, something that I want it to be printed very large. I'll show you how I do that in Procreates. Go up here, tap that wrench, and I'm going to hit crop and resize, and settings. I am going to change this from 8 by 10 to 24 by 30. Everything else I'm leaving unchecked, not messing with rotation or DPI. I'm going to go ahead and click Done. I want to pause here for a second because I know some of you aren't going to be able to do that same Canvas size on your iPads. I am using a 2019 iPad Pro 12.9 inch. Because it's that specific model, especially iPad Pro, it lets me get to this large Canvas size, 24 by 30. But for some of you, you're going to find if you're working with an older iPad or maybe it's not a Pro, that Canvas size will be limited in Procreate. You won't be able to go so large, you'll have to go smaller. It all depends on the model of your iPad. If this isn't working for you, I would first see if each 18 by 24 works, test that out. If it still won't let you go that big, try 16 by 20, if it's still not working, just troubleshoot and get it to the maximum size you can based of the limitations of your iPad. I know it's a huge pain and I really hope Procreate comes out with an update at some point, they'll let you get larger Canvas sizes. But for now, you just have to be flexible with it and work under the restraints that you might have. The first thing I'm going to do is open up my layers, toggle down that carry on sketch again, and pinch everything together to consolidate and flatten it into one layer. Now that we're working with this larger Canvas size, we have to be really aware of how many layers we're using. For this one, I'm limited to only four layers so I have to be really careful and creative about how I use those layers. I have flattened my sketch. I'm going to go to my arrow tool and drag it up to fill in this space. I know how I always talk about how you should never scale up and I brought it up in a previous lesson. But for this, that's the sketch, it will be deleted before its final. If it gets all pixelated and blurry, it really doesn't matter to me because it will be deleted later. If it was a final illustration and I scaled up like that, that is a big no. But since it's just the sketch, it doesn't bother me. It can get all pixelated and blurry as long as I can see the general gist of it, I'm happy. Now before I get started filling in these layers, I like to do a couple of things. The first one is to go over to my layers, and under that sketch layer tap that N, it stands for normal, and bring that opacity down somewhere, maybe 30, 40 percent. I still want to be able to see what this looks like, but I don't want it to be too overpowering when I start filling in the actual illustration. Just a little bit less opaque on screen so that it doesn't stand out as much. Next, I go over here to my wrench, and under Canvas, there's an option here for reference. This is new with the Procreate update that came out recently, so I'll toggle that on. What it's done is builds up this little box that I can move around. I can actually import an image into this. That's not part of the main layers over here, it just lives over here. It still counts as a layer, so that's annoying. But what it does here I'll show you. Go ahead and select image. We're going to import an image. I'm going to use those same leopards. You can still zoom in like this, just like you can on your art board. Now, as I'm working on filling in this main motif, I have this leopard over here that I can use as a reference. As I'm working on the body, I can look at this part, when I switch to the head, I can reference this area. It's really cool and it just helps you stay on track as you're illustrating. But like I mentioned, it does count as one of my layers, so we may have to get rid of this reference later depending on how things are going. Let's go ahead and get going. I always start with the background color, so let's go ahead and fill that in first. Over here are my layers. If you just tap the thumbnail for backgrounds, you can now go through and select your background color. Remember I was using jungle modern as my preferred palette and I had that blush background. You can go ahead and tap to fill that in. Next up, I'm going to go back to my layers, and I'm going to add a new layer. I definitely don't want to be drawing on this sketch layer, otherwise I won't be able to remove it later. I'm going to add a new layer, tap it and drag it underneath sketch, so I can still see that sketch above and then go over here to my palettes. I'm going to start with this beige brown, the lighter of those browns, because I already tested it out in my color exploration and I know that that's what I want that main body to look like. Last but not least, let's go to our brushes and True Grit Texture Supply actually provided for really great brushes for us. It's two main inking brushes, crispy inker and super smooth, and then there's also two really wonderful texture brushes. We're going to start with the inking brushes. For mine, I'm going to do all of mine in crispy inker. But if you feel like you want to try different brush from me, feel free to follow along with smooth inker instead. I just wanted to throw that in there as an option, but I won't be using it for this lesson. I'm going to stick with crispy inker for all of these. If you want to get an idea for what those brushes look like, this is the crispy inker that I'll be moving forward with, and this is the super smooth inker. Within that super smooth you get some really nice texture coming through. Whereas with the crispy inker, it is a completely solid line. Little differences but just something to be aware of as you choose which brush you'd like to use. Remember two fingers will always undo. I'm going to make sure that my brush is selected, crispy inker and double-check that I'm on that correct layer, it's underneath the main sketch layer, nothing else on that layer. Now it's time to start outlining that leopard. I'm going to go through this. I'm outlining based off of what my sketch was, but I 'm also looking over here at this leopard to make sure that that body is curving and forming in a way that looks realistic to that animal. I'm not worried about all these inner lines yet, I'll be addressing those later. The first thing I want to do is really just get that solid shape filled in. Now to fill it in, I'm just going to grab my color circle. But before I release, I just want to look at that color threshold and make sure it's filling in all the way without leaving any weird halo effects behind these lines. That's looking pretty good. Remember you can get to that color threshold, make sure you again, I'm going to undo, by leaving your pen touching the screen. I'm not raising my pen, it's still touching the screen, but once I release it from the screen, that will such. Can you hear those stray dogs barking outside? I'm actually recording this in Mexico right now, a lot of stray dogs and cats on the streets. They're super cute and I pet them whenever they don't run away from me. Before I forget, I want to go ahead and add his tail in as well. Almost forgot that, sorry little guy, and fill it all in. Perfect. As you can see with the tiger, there's these areas in here that I've lined out on the sketch. Those are areas where maybe the arm is creasing against the skin or like here that arm is in front of his belly area. I like to indicate that with whitespace, and I'll show you exactly what I mean. For this, I'm going to use my eraser. But before I tap my eraser, I want to show you a cool trick. If you tap and hold on your eraser, that means that the eraser brush will be the same as the brush that you're using to draw. Two fingers back up. To make sure that it's that exact same brush, I'm going to tap and hold. Did you see that indicator up here? It says erase with current brush. Here I'll show you again, you tap and hold, there it is. Again, what that means is now when I erase, it's also erasing with crispy inker, that same brush I'm using for the outline. That's perfect, that's exactly what I'm looking for. To get those whitespace areas, what I'm really doing is starting with a really light pressure and then getting heavier pressure towards the edges. It has this nice tapered effect. That's the nice thing with these brushes, is light strokes are really thin and then heavy strokes are really thick. Two fingers. Now I'm going to do the same, so light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure, heavy pressure. I'm just going through these areas to make him look a little bit more 3D in dynamics so that you can see a little bit more of what's going on. I'm going to start with heavy pressure, maybe get light around the mouth and then go back to heavy. Cool. I think I'll do the same thing for the tail, so light pressure and then heavy. Awesome. When I want to check and see how this is looking without that sketch, I go back into my layers and I toggle off the visibility for the sketch. Then I get a pretty good idea of where those whitespace areas are coming in without all those distractions in the background. I do see some areas that I want to smooth out a little bit more. Let's see, maybe this little toe I can round that out. Other than that, I think it's looking pretty good. Right now it's super flat. Now let's go ahead and add some texture.
8. Main Texture: Now let's go ahead and add some texture. True Grit Texture Supply, it makes some amazing texture brushes. I'm going to show you the ones that I like to use and then how I like to use them. First up, I'm going to go into my layers, tap my layer once. I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock just by tapping it. What Alpha Lock does is it means that whatever I draw now will be contained to the shape that's already in that layer. Basically what that means, here I'll show you a quick example, is if I draw it outside of that layer, nothing will show up, but it will show up when I'm on that shape that's already there. Undo. That's going to come in handy right now as we start adding some texture. The texture I add, I just want it to be on this leopard, I don't want it to be on the background. Since we have Alpha Lock turned on, that's exactly what's going to happen. Whatever I draw will only be on this leopard. First things first. I'm going to go to my brushes and I'm going to start with Dead Subtle 17, Worn 4. It's a long title name, but it's a great brush. With that brush selected, I'm going to go to my palette, select that main color that I used to paint this leopard, and then go down here to Classic, and drag this to make it a little bit darker. It's that same hue, it's just a slightly darker value. Now, with my brush, I'm going to bring it up to full opacity and it's also at 100 percent size. I'm just going to do some really gentle tapping in the areas where I want it to be a little bit darker. It's going to be the tip of this tail, then maybe the top. This is where I'm really using this reference photo. In this photo, it looks like it's a little bit darker up top, whereas coat is the most intense. Then down here at the bottom where you see his belly and his chest, it gets a little bit wider. I'm getting ahead to use that as my inspiration, so you can see what these gentle taps are doing. It's nice and getting a little bit darker and filled in at the top, but I'm not tapping as much at the bottom, so it's a lot less intense. This is a really slow build, that's just a lot of gentle tapping to slowly build up that dimension within this jaguar. Let's go ahead and switch up the color to something lighter. I'm just going to bring it up. See what this does. That might be way too light. No, that's nice. I'm going to bring down the brush size so that I can really concentrate on this area. It's hard to see because it's a really slow build up. Like I'm not doing anything too intense, I'm just really gently bringing up a lot of the values in the coloring. You are getting some nice, lighter areas along with some darker areas as well. Then belly is a little bit wider, so I'm just going to focus there. Be focused on the chest. I think I got a little bit too intense over here on the chest, so I'll show you how to balance it out. I'm going to go back to my colors, and under my palettes and going to select that original color, and then those areas where I think it just got a little bit too much, a little too bright. I'm just going to do the same thing. I'm just going to drag that texture in to smoothen out a little bit more and integrate it with that original color. The thing with texture, it's a lot of like slow building up. Really, it's a very gentle process. Now you're really starting to see how it's darker at the top here, lighter at the bottom, and it just helps it feel a little bit more dynamic. I'm liking how this is looking. I think I want to do one more where I'm going to go down to my classic, make it pretty dark. Bring up to 100 percent for brush size, and then just do a few taps. I'm way outside of my jaguar as you can see him tapping up here. So it's really just the edge of the brush down here that's even making a difference. I'm going to do a few taps because I'm pretty sure this brush right now is probably around this size. It's a pretty big one. When I tap up here, just the edge of the brush is heading down here, and maybe the bottom of his tail, and his paws. Cool. Yeah, that's looking pretty nice. A lot of nice gradients are now popping up in here. I want to do one more texture brush. I'm going to go back to my brushes, and this time I want to try Grainy 3, which is the light medium green. Go ahead and select that. This one's a lot more intense. The one we were just using was very subtle. It's these really gentle light strokes. But this new one, as you can see it adds these big splatters. It's nice to have a combination of both. I'm going to be tapping, the outside part of my jaguar to just focus these splatters up top. Then I think I'm going to switch the color back to the original maybe, and do some splatters down below. That looks really nice on his tail right here. Last but not least, I'm going to go back to my color wheel and bring it a little bit lighter, and do the same thing. Maybe just two taps, I don't want to overdo it. It's really easy to overdo texture. I always error on the side of keeping it less intense rather than overdoing it too much. I think that's looking pretty good. The base coat of that animal, I'm pretty happy with it. I think it's time to move on to some more of the details, especially in those spots and the nose and the eye.
9. Adding Details: Time to move on to some more of the details. For that, I'm going to go up to my layers, hit the plus sign to add a new layer, change my color in the palettes to that slightly darker brown or whichever color palette you're using. What I'm filling in now are the spots, so a little bit more detail. Let's go back to our brushes and I'm going to change it back to Crispy Inker one, and just again, double check on a new layer, that's super important. Cool. I'm on that completely blank layer and just take note of the way that this is stacked so that base coat we just did, that main base area of our illustration is on the very bottom, the spots and details will be right above it, and then the sketches at the very top. I'm going to go ahead and turn the visibility for that back on, since I'm now working on the spots. But the layer that's selected right now is this completely blank layer that we're going to add the details do. For this I've got my sketch in here that helps me figure out the direction and sizing of those spots. But I'm also going to be looking over here at my reference to make sure that I'm fitting them in the way I'd like to. Again, just filling in. I'm going to do something real quick. You see what happened where I drew this spot that it went over the jaguar, I'm going to show you how to fix that. So in the layers, if you tap your "Layer'' you can turn on "Clipping Mask" just by tapping it once. Now, you can see there's a little arrow over here. Now, whatever I draw will be constrained to whatever that immediate layer beneath it is. It's similar to Alpha Lock but instead of affecting only what's on that existing layer, it affects the layer immediately beneath it. I'm going to keep clipping mask on so that when I fill in these spots, I don't have to worry about being really careful on those edges. I can have a lot more wiggle room there because I know it's automatically going to be clipped off. I don't like my illustrations to look too photo realistic I like adding an illustrative spin to them. After all that's why I'm an artist, I'm not a photographer. I like adding things in that don't have to be exact, so for these spots, they're not looking exactly photo realistic they look like their own thing. Then referencing the general idea but still going with my own intuition here and my own artistic preferences. But note that the one thing I am paying attention to is the direction of these spots. As you can see, you know, when his arm bends the spots are warping with that. I think it's details like that that make for really quality illustration. Then we've got the tail, then last but not least the face. Let me do the eyes first, so I'm going to start with a really light pressure and then have it get heavier as I go. Not only am I getting the eye, but I'm getting this divid before his nose begins, and his nose and a cute little mouth. Cool. I'm going to go ahead and go into my layers and turn off the sketch, so I can get a better idea what's going on here. That's looking really nice, I'm loving this. Especially seeing that subtle gradient behind in that fur where it's darker up top and lighter at the bottom, I think it's looking really nice. Before I start adding texture to this, I'm going to go ahead and finish out the detail areas of this, which will be those darker spots. As you can see those spots have two colors. I'm going to go ahead, and add that darker color in, and then do the texture so that it's all in one go. Normally when I'm illustrating like this, I add texture every time I finish a new color, and that way the texture is specifically applied to that one color. But since the detail on these spots is really similar to this brown I just put down, I think I can get away with just applying the texture to the black and brown together. Two fingers to undo, double check them on the cracked layer, and now I'm just going to add some detail spots. It looks like on this they have these extra spots that go around that main spot, so I'm going to do something like that. Again, it doesn't have to be photo realistic this is just over here helping me figure out how to look somewhat realistic without having to be too intense with it. I still want this to feel like an illustration not a photo. There's something nice about doing these repetitive tasks like this, you know once you get that general pattern established, it's just rinsing and repeating throughout the rest of the illustration. It's like folding laundry, I love it and find it really relaxing. Now, that I'm looking at this, I think I actually want to change the eyes and the nose to this black. So I'm just going to drag from my color picker, and release down and fill in some of those areas that I missed. Cool. Now, I can zoom out and get a bigger picture view of this and see how it's looking. Yeah, I love it. I think it's coming together really well. I like seeing this variation in larger spots over here on his flank, and then the more detailed tighter spots when you get into his chest and his face. Let's go ahead and add some texture. I'll go up to my layers, tap this layer once turn on "Alpha Lock". Now, not only is it clipping masked to the layer beneath it, but now Alpha Lock is turned on, so whatever I draw will be only on those spots not on this layer beneath it, which is exactly what I want. I'm going to go over to my brushes, start with this Dead Subtle 17. What color am I on? I'm on the black, great. I'm just going to do some taps especially up here at the top. Let me zoom in so you can actually see. You can really see that texture coming through on these spots where I'm focusing on the top, then letting these bottom ones get a little bit lighter. I'm just going to do some taps around on the top. I can't see it that closely, but I'm just trusting that it's filling in well. Then I'm going to go to my colors go down to Classic choose something a lot brighter, and do the same thing down here. That's way too bright, I don't like that at all, so I'm going to undo and I'm going to instead go back to my palettes, click our original color, go back to Classic, and go for something just slightly lighter not too extreme. As you're doing this, that feels much better, much more subtle. Yeah, you'll find out this, maybe you're trying to get a little bit too extreme or too drastic and it's not looking so good. You can always undo and then repeat and start over again. Awesome. I think I'm going go back to my palettes and use some of this original caramel layer and just to do a few taps to build it in there. Cool. Let's go ahead and switch it to the other texture, we're going to use Grainy. I'm going to have the color be that dark black, and just a few taps up here, that looks nice. Then on the bottom I'm going to switch it. Let's try that pink and just see what it looks like. Yeah, I like that. As you can see that pink is only on the spots. It's not on that fur layer underneath. Sometimes adding unexpected textures like this can be a breath of fresh air and it feels nice. You might even do one up there. Yeah, I like that. Cool. The good news is we are totally maxed out of our layers, and we've got three over here and one over here with the sky. If I tried to add a new layer, I get this notification up here it says, maximum limit of four layers reached. But that's actually perfect timing, because I am finished with this main motif, and next step is going to be adding some of those detailed plans around it. To do that, we're going to solve our layer problem all in one go. So let's go ahead and jump on into that.
10. Secondary Motif: This is where we had left off. Now that we have that main motif of our illustration completed, it's time to add in some of those background elements, those leaves and foliage, or on your end, maybe whatever it is that you've done on the outside. First things first, I'm going to go back to my gallery, and you guessed it, we are going to make a duplicate of this main motif layer. I'll go to Select, Main motif, Duplicate and that X to close the selection, and I'm going to rename this, "Full Motif". Perfect. That's interesting, by the time we're finished, you'll just see this progression of sketch, color explorations in bit by bit as we work our way to this final illustration. Go ahead and tap to open it up, and the first thing I'm going to do is go over here to my Layers and the first thing I'm going to do is flatten everything together that's not the sketch. For me, it's just these two layers. It's the spots in the background. I'm just going to flatten them together by pinching them like this, and I'll go ahead and toggle on that sketch layer. Remember, you can get to the opacity by hitting that N. My opacities at about 30 percent right now. If you're all the way up to 100, go ahead and bring that back down so that you'll be able to see whatever we're drawing on top of it. Like I mentioned earlier, with an artboard this size, we're only limited to four layers. Look what happens if I try to add two more layers. It won't let me add that fourth layer. It says maximum limit of four layers reached. You're wondering why is that the case? Because over here, there's only three layers plus the background. The reason that's happening is because of our reference photo. Remember earlier, we were using this reference here, let me turn it on, pull it in over here. Our reference counts as a layer. It's super annoying, but it's just the way it is with Procreate. The way that you do that is by opening up your reference and then hitting Clear, and now there's no image there. Then I'm going to go back to Actions and go ahead and toggle this off so that box disappears, and I want to go to my Layers. I can add that fourth layer. If you're getting roadblocks there, just make sure that you clear your reference and then close the panel and then you'll be able to get your last layer back. But I, actually, don't need that layer right now, so let's just delete it. I've already added that new layer by hitting the plus sign. I just want to drag it and sandwich it so that it's underneath the sketch and above the leopard, and that just helps me stay organized and so that I can still see this sketch over whatever it is that I'm drawing. I'm going to start with the leaves. If you remember over in our color exploration, I've already determined what colors I want those leaves to be, and if you ever forgot what colors you were using and you want a quick visual guide, you can always go back to your gallery and then take a look over here at your color. I can see in my color area, I was using that minty green and then that turquoise as well. Just getting a visual picture over here so I remember these are the colors I wanted to move forward with, and then I can go back to my gallery and go back to my full motif. I'm going to start with that turquoise. It's over here in Jungle Modern. I'm going to go to my brushes, and remember I was using crispy anchor to do the outlines for this big cat. I want to keep it pretty consistent and use the exact same brush so that this piece feels like it was all done with a similar brush, and last but not least, go back to my Layers and quadruple check that I am on the correct layer. Always, check always checked this. You can't be too paranoid. It's a great thing to check because when you're on the wrong layer, it's a huge pain. I'm just going to go ahead and start outlining these leaves, just like we did with the jaguar. Let's see, I'll do the stem first, and I think I wanted to taper at that bottom edge like that. I could use the color dropper to fill it in. But when it's really small shapes like that, I just go ahead and fill it in with a brush. With the jaguar, I was using that photo reference to look at the jaguar as I filled in the shape. But for this, I know what a leaf looks like. I don't need that additional reference, so I'm just going to go ahead and skip it. Got this guy over here, and I'm not actually going to have any of these leaves touched the jaguar. I really like what's happening with this white negative space over here, so I want to keep that theme going. Just drawing these leaves, and as you can see, I'm not following the sketch exactly. It's more of just a rough guide for me. Remember to keep an eye on this threshold over here. For whatever reason, it's filling in the whole canvas or you're getting this awful halo, that's the thing that drives me crazy in Procreate. It's this halo that can sometimes happen when the threshold isn't set to accurately. Two fingers, remember, will undo. If you are getting that halo, just remember, keep your pen touching the screen, and then you can drag it all the way to the right to increase the color thresholds. It looks like my threshold sweet spot is hanging out at around 97, 98 percent. It's that little area there. I'm just filling in those details as we go. I think this leaf results in some kind of that darker green, and again, you can see I'm not following that sketch exactly. This is the time to fine tune and find out what's working best for you and for that composition. I think the last thing that was turquoise was this leaf down here, and I can just drag on over from my color picker to fill in those areas. Now that I've got those turquoise areas filled in, I'm going to fill in those extra two leaves with that mint from the palette. I'll go back to my color palettes, choose the mint and do the same thing. I want to point this out. This leaf looks like it's going over the jaguar's ear. I'm actually not a big fan of that. I went that jaguar to be in the foreground, so I'm going to go back to my Layers, select my jaguar layer and bring it up so that it's over that leaf layer, and now his ear is in front of the leaf. It's nice having layers like that because you'll have that flexibility as you go. You can make these game time decisions as you're illustrating and seeing what's working best in the composition. Last big leaf, and this one I clearly should have drawn first because it's in the way of this other leaf but I can just use careful brushstrokes to go around those edges instead. I actually started connecting this leaf to that end but then I remembered I didn't do it over here, so I'm just going to go ahead and erase this out. Remember, if you tap and hold on your eraser, it will erase with the current brush you're using. Now, I can just be careful over here and go around. Cool. I'm going to turn my sketch off so that I can get an idea of what things are looking like in that composition. This is looking really nice. I think I'm going to clean up this edge right here. I could go back to my palettes and select this turquoise again, but there's another technique you can use as well. It's over here on the far left. It's this little rounded corner square. If you tap that, you'll get that color picker option where you can drag around and choose a specific color, and if I let it land right here on this turquoise, notice up here at the top, the color changed. That's just a quick way if you don't want to keep going between palettes and back to your artboard. You can just use this picker option where you click it, you take it to the color you want, and then you see up here on the top right, that color has changed. I do this all the time. It's just a quick way of saving time. Cool. I have fixed that little edge. This is looking nice. I'm going to go ahead and fill in those detail leaves now so that we get all of those leaf backgrounds done before we add the texture.
11. Composition Balance: I'm going to go ahead and fill in those detail leaves now. So I'll turn my sketch back on just to get a good idea of where I had established the placement. Maybe over here we need a little bit more of that mint to balance out the heavy turquoise in this area. So I'm going to switch it back to mint and then do these extra leaves using the mint. I don't know if you can hear it on your end, but it is raining outside right now. Hurricane Eta just passed through here in Playa del Carmen about a week ago and luckily the damage wasn't too bad. This month has been my first ever hurricane season of my entire life since I moved down to Mexico during hurricane season. The day after I moved down here, I was hit by Hurricane Delta and Hurricane Eta hit a few week later. I grew up in Kansas, I grew up with tornadoes, but hurricanes are a brand new thing for me. Luckily, nobody was hurt and the damage was pretty minimal. One other benefit here of adding these stand-alone leaves like this is if I decide to turn this into a pattern later, I can pull these leaves out and isolate them to help arrange it into a new pattern. So it just gives me more flexibility depending on what I decided to do with this illustration. But for now, it's just nice to have these aesthetic of these kinds of floating leaves around my main motif. If I'm not doing leaves like this, I'm usually doing flowers. I really like having something natural working around whatever it is that I've decided to illustrate in the middle, flowers, leaves, stars, all sorts of shapes. You know what, at this point, I'm looking around, I'm completely finished with that sketch. I don't really think I need it anymore. Wait no, I think I'm going to use it real quick to get my whitespace areas established. But after that, we're going to get rid of our sketch. I'm going to go to my eraser, tap and hold. I am going to do the veining of these leaves in the same style that I did for the whitespace of this jaguar. That just helps us stay more visually consistence. I'm going to start with a really light stroke and then get heavier as I get to the top. In that way, I get a nice, fine tapered edge over here where it starts out thin and then goes thick. I'm going to do the same thing for the veining of these leaves. I don't want to make these veins too tight or too detailed because I want it to match the same style of what's going on in this jaguar. There's not too much detail happening here and these lines that I've added in are nice and spread apart from each other. I want to keep that same style going for the veining that I add to the leaves. It would be really easy to make a bunch of really detailed veins like these all close together. But having that amount of detail detracts from what's happening here. Instead, remember two fingers will undo. Instead I just want to keep it more minimal. I'm going to do the same thing here. Sometimes it helps to rotate that canvas around so that you get a more natural brushstroke. Anymore? Yeah, let's do this guys. I think I need to do something slightly different because it's awkward what's happening over here. I'm going to do one that doesn't connect to the bottom all the way. Remember, these don't have to be perfect. What's nice is having these naive strokes and makes it feel more hand done and not like a digital illustration. I didn't like how close that one was getting to this area here, I like it more when it's balanced out between that leaf. Maybe just a few more. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of my sketch layer. I could just turn it off, but since I'm totally finished with that sketch and I have it saved in these previous canvases, I'm just going to go ahead and delete this layer altogether by swiping left on the layer and tapping delete. In that way I have two more layers at my disposal. As I'm always building illustrations, one of my main strategies is preserving layers and making sure that whenever I need a layer it's always there and I'm not restricted. Cool. Taking a look at this composition, seeing how these leaves are looking, I'm really liking the detail of the veining that are in these leaves. I think I want to try a little bit of that out with these extra peppered in leaves, maybe even these fronds as well. Let's just see what happens if I add a little bit of detail into these guys. I'm going to do one and then I'm going to backup, see the whole canvas and see if I like it or not. Yeah, actually, I think that's pretty cool. I like it a lot. So I'm going to do the same thing over here. I think it balances out that composition in a really nice way and adds just enough detail without being overpowering. Cool. Maybe I'll do that for just a few of these extra leaves, but not all of them. I have some that are just full-bleed and then I have some that have that little detail in there. It's a nice balance. Before we add texture, I want to use some of the colors from this jaguar to add a few more supplemental leave. I'm going to go back to my palettes and I'm going to use this medium brown. It's not the black and it's not that light tan, but it's that one right in the middle. I'm just looking for opportunities to add that in where it feels like a really nice balance and fits in and makes that composition feel really, really complete. Let's take a look. Nice. Wow, I actually really like seeing those colors from the jaguar pulled out to the edge. I wasn't planning on doing this, but now that I'm looking at it as a whole, I think I'm going to add a couple more leaves that are that tan color. This is the nice thing about staying fluid with your illustration. Having a sketch to start out your composition is great, but it's always nice to have wiggle room just in case you see opportunities like this to make your illustration even stronger, where you weren't really expecting that, it just became an opportunity as you were drawing. I'm going to add a few more of these tan leaves. I want one down here, but there's already a lot going on so I think what I'm going to do is just change the color of this leaf to tan. Maybe one more right here and let's see how it looks. If you're wondering what I'm doing with that pinch, if you ever really zoomed in on a part of your canvas and you want to go snap it back to see the full canvas at once, just a quick pinch will bring it right back to center. If I'm ever in a detail area, and I want to go back to full screen and see the whole image, quick pinch will bring me there. Taking a look at this illustration, I really like where this is at right now and how that balance is feeling. It feels really nice. Because I am a detail freak, one more leaf. Now I'm done, I promise. Now that I'm seeing this as a whole, I'm noticing that it's feeling really nice and balanced in all three corners, but not so much over here. I think what I'm going to do, is add a little bit more of a frond, something similar to this one or this one in this space as well using this mint color. This is the importance of really being flexible as you're drawing and you look for opportunities and you can see if things are working out or not working out. For me right now, this composition is just a little bit unbalanced down here. I'm going to get rid of this leaf with my eraser selected. I'm just going to erase that guy out and I am going to go back to my palettes, chose that mint and instead, I'm going to draw a frond down here. I'm just going to freehand it. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. Make that stem a little bit thicker and fill in those leaves. Cool. Then I'm also going to use my eraser by tapping and holding and do that same thing I did before, where I add that whitespace veining within these leaves. Because I'm a perfectionist with compositions, I want to move this leaf a little bit over so that it's not so close to these guys. I'm going to go to my selection tool, it's this S up here at the top. Make sure I'm on free hand, and then I'm just going to very carefully lasso around this guy. Then go to my selection tool and move it to a place that it feels a little bit nicer, right there. Cool. I'm going to add one more tan leaf right here. I'm going to use this trick again where I can use that color picker, get the tan and then draw it in nice and tiny on that edge. Perfect. Now I am much happier with the balance of this composition. It feels really nice. These leaves are supporting this main motif and exploding out from inwards which draws your eye right here at the jaguar exactly where I want it to be. Now it's time to add some of that texture in and we're going to do that the same way that we added texture to this jaguar to begin with.
12. Secondary Texture: Now it's time to add some of that texture in and we're going to do this in a really similar way to how we filled in the Jaguar, but with a very minor tweak and I'll show you what I mean. Let's go over into our layers and I'm going to hit that plus sign to add a new layer. It should be right above this greenery layer. Tap it once and turn on Clipping Mask. Now whatever I draw on that layer will only show up on the elements of that layer itself. As I'm drawing these lines, they're not on the background, they're only on that layer. Remember two fingers to undo. Now with that mask in place, I can start adding in this texture and it will only appear on leafy green layer. I am going to go to my brushes and start with this Dead Subtle 17 Worn 4 brush. Change my color. I'm going to go back to my palettes and let's start with this turquoise green. I'm going to tap it, make sure it changes up here at the top and then go to my classic and bring it down a little bit to make it a tiny bit darker. Now I can start filling that in. Right now it's at full opacity and it's at the full brush size. I'm going to do a few sample taps and see how that's looking. Yeah, it's really subtle but you can really see it coming through over here. It's also coming through in these minty blue leaves as well. I'm actually going to make it a little bit smaller, let's try like 27, that feels better. I'm just going to do some taps around the beginning of these leaves, maybe just on the left side to give it some dimension. Maybe a tiny bit more on these edges, cool. Now, I'll do the same thing over here. I'll do more taps in the center so it feels like it's maybe folding inwards, it's darker in the middle, and then lighter, as you go out to the tips. Over here I'll do it down here at the bottom. Again, it's a very slow build. I don't even know if you can see it that well on camera, but as you can see, it's getting much darker here on the bottom of this leaf and then lighter on top. It doesn't make a huge difference. Honestly, in my opinion, when you add these really subtle traits to illustrations like this, that's what elevates it from an average illustration to something that feels a lot more quality and well thought out. Adding a few more over here may be the ends here have a little bit more darkness. Now I want to show you why I put this on a separate layer instead of just doing that alpha lock technique that I showed you earlier. The reason I did that is because right now all of our leaves are on one layer. When I'm adding the texture to this leaf, it's also getting applied up here to the brown leaf and also over here on our mint leaf. Now, if that's the look you're going for, it's totally okay, but for me, I prefer to not have that green bleeding over so heavily into this blue, exactly like that. What I'm going to do, since this is on its own layer, I can actually erase parts of that texture. I'm going to go over here to my selection and just grab, loosely selecting around that leaf. I'm grabbing the texture here. Then with three fingers swiping down, I can cut. What that's done is it's cut that texture out of the leaf right here. In areas where I didn't really like how heavy the texture was getting, I can go ahead and just remove it entirely, thanks to this technique. I'm just going to go through and check and see if there's any other areas that I didn't like where the texture was happening. Don't really like it here, so I'm going to do the same thing. Select around, three fingers drag, cut. That texture bled through on this leaf, but I actually like it, it gives it some nice dimension on the edge, so I'll leave it there. Let's go ahead and add the texture to these lighter mint leaves as well. I'll go back to my palettes, select my mint, go down to classic, make it a tiny bit darker, and then do the same thing. Just a lot of taps around where I went that leaf to be darker and then leaving the areas alone where I want it to be lighter. For this, I like having it darker in the center and maybe on those top edges and then a lighter on these edges. Same thing here. I'm going to add a little bit more shadow down here, at the bottom so it looks like it's hidden behind this leaf. Lots and lots of tapping. [inaudible] do the same thing. I'll make that stem in the center area a little bit darker, maybe where those leaves are starting to sprout out from the stem can be a little bit darker as well. Now I'm just going to tap selectively for those small detail leaves, perfect. I think, I might add some of that blue detail into the green as well. It's really subtle, but again, I like having those subtle touches. I'm going to do the same thing with these brown leaves, so I'll change the color down here on my palettes. Let's do this medium brown. Now I'm just going to carefully brush that into the tips of some of these leaves. Some of them I might just do the whole leaf. Now, for the darker leaves, I'm going to go back to my palettes. I'm actually going to use this light brown palette to add the texture to these dark leaves to brighten them up a little bit. That was the first of two passes that I'm going to do with texture. The next one is over here in my brushes. It's that grainy three brush, light medium grain. Here I'm going to be really careful because remember this brush splatters a lot. For example, if I were to do it right here on this leaf. That thing splatters all the way over here. That's a nice effect as long as I do it intentionally. For that, I'm going to switch my color palettes to this turquoise, go to my classic wheel, make it a little bit darker. Now I'm just going to very carefully splatter this texture on the leaves. It's going to go across the brown leaves, the mint leaves, the turquoise leaves and it'll be a nice way to key in that texture and make it feel integrated. Let me zoom in, so you can see what that's done. It's added this very subtle texture, these splatters across all of those leaves, which is nice because now the splatter texture has matched that same splatter that's happening within our main motif. Before I say, it's all said and done, I'm going to go back to my color picker, bring it all the way up to white, and then do the same thing. Look for a few select areas that I can splatter with white. Again, not too overpowering to kind of tie in the white splatter happening here with the white splatter that's happening on the Jaguar. A quick pinch to bring it back up to the full screen composition. Taking a look, I'm really liking how this is looking. It's feeling more like a fleshed out full illustration. We've got some really nice textures coming through that are integrated with the main motif and these stems and foliage that are blooming outwards. It's a really nice balance of color. I love working with limited palettes and this one's really accomplishing that. It's really just three main colors. It's green, brown, and then this blush background. Art work does seem to feel more sophisticated and more modern when you use a very limited palette like this. Limited palette simply means using a very small number of colors. Before we move on to the next step, I want to do one more thing. I'm going to go over here to my layers, add a new layer, change the color to this dark brown, black. Change my brush back down here to that procreate default brush, it's under sketching. Where is it? Here we go. Sketching, peppermint. I am going to find a nice place to tuck in my signature. Perfect. Always sign your work. That is one of the best ways to reinforce your brand and let people know exactly who created this beautiful illustration. I like to find places to tuck in my signature, usually on the bottom right. I don't sign my full name, Coquillette because my brand name is CatCoq. I've just shortened the end of my last name because no one can pronounce or spell Coquillette, so I just made it a lot easier for my branding. We are finished with our main illustration, so go ahead and give yourselves a round of applause. Let's go ahead and move on to our next lesson.
13. Paper Texture: The very last thing I do is add in that paper texture. The reason I save it till the very end is I like to get a look over here at my layers and see how I'm doing. If I'm already at four layers and I really don't want to consolidate, then I'll go ahead and duplicate this canvas into a new one, merge everything, and then add that paper texture in, so it just gives me a little bit more flexibility. But for this one, I can go ahead and say that I don't mind merging this texture on top of those leaves with the backgrounds of those leaves. Remember that texture is all on its own layer, which just gives us a lot more flexibility when we were erasing certain parts out. But at this point, I know that I am 100 percent certain that I really like this texture and I don't really care about seeing options without that texture. Because I'm certain, I can go ahead and pinch the texture with those leaves together to merge them onto one layer. Once that's done, if I want to erase part of that texture, that means that leaf will be erased as well. But because I'm certain, that's a good thing for me to move forward with. Now that I'm down with just three layers, I can go ahead and add that paper texture. I'm going to go over here to my wrench, hit "Add", insert a photo, and I've already imported my paper texture to my iPad, so it's right there. Cool, so here we are. I'm just going to pull it slightly over to the edges to make it fit those dimensions. Awesome. Hit that arrow to set the transformation. If you're wondering why this paper texture is now behind the jaguar, it's just because of the order of the layers. Let's go back over to our layers. I'm going to click this paper texture, drag it all the way up to the top, which now of course has obscured everything else, but I'll show you why. Then I'm going to click that "N" stands for normal and change the Blending Mode appear to multiply. Let's take a quick peek, I'll show you what that's done. You can really see that paper texture coming through on the background. Right now because I've used the multiply effect, that texture image has now covered everything that we've drawn. You even see that paper texture here within the leaves. You see it really subtly here over the cat. Here I'll show you what it looks like turned off and turned on. Again, it's very subtle. But what it really does is it makes this illustration feel hands done like this was maybe actually done on this textured paper. Plus by having this texture layer over everything else, it really just keys this illustration together with a very consistent texture, which is the texture of this rough paper. One more zoom in so you can really see the difference. This is without and this is with. I really like this effect. Now we are actually finished with our main motif illustration. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson.
14. Spot Adjusting Color: Cool. Now that we have completed our final illustration, I'm going to show you a few different ways that you can manually and automatically adjust color. When I create artwork like this, as you know, because you just did it alongside me, we spent a lot of time and effort creating our beautiful masterpiece. Once I get to the point where I'm ready to start selling this, through maybe print on demand websites like Society6, or Redbubble, or license it out to my partners like Target or Urban Outfitters, what I want to do is maximize my chances of people purchasing this artwork. The easiest way for me to do that is to create a variety of color palettes using this exact same artwork. All of that hard work is already done. We've created our final beautiful illustration. At this point, it's just a few easy steps to start adjusting colors and exploring a variety of pallets. I'm going to walk you through exactly how I do that. First things first, let's go back to gallery. I'm going to hit "Select" to tap that full motif, final illustration, and hit "Duplicate". Cool. Hit that x to end the selection. Now I've made a duplicate file of that full motif. Now whatever I do on this one, I can explore to my heart's content, but I know that I have original, saved, and preserved over here. Let's go ahead and open up the new one. I'm going to show you a few different ways that you can adjust color. The first way is manually. If you want to have the most control over color, this is going to be the step for you. My goal here is to reference that retro drama palette that we already explored back in that earlier lesson, and use those colors for this final illustration. I'll show you how I do that. First things first, let's go into our layers and tap where it says background-color. For that retro drama color palette exploration, it had this black charcoal background. I'm going to go with that. Cool. Actually, it's nice just seeing that existing palette on a charcoal background. I'm going to make a mental note that this might be something I want to explore later and maybe publish this as a separate color palette. But let's go ahead and adjust the rest of the colors so that I can show you how I do that. Going back to my Layers, I am going to start by selecting the layer that holds my main motif, which is my leopard, and then going into my color palettes, I want to go ahead and set defaults to retro drama. This just helps me find it easily when I'm opening and reopening my color pallets. I remember in that color exploration that the main color of this leopard was that peachy color. It's this one right here. I'll tap it, make sure it changes on my color indicator. Again, double-checking that this leopard layer is selected, I'm going to drag from the color picker right onto that tan release, but I've kept my pen on the screen. You can see this color thresholds up here. My pen has not released from the screen. See see what happens if I bring this all the way up to a 100 percent. Cool. Now, everything on this layer has now been keyed into this peach color, including the spots. Now it is time to start filling in these spots. For that, I'm going to go up to my palettes and choose this dark maroon pallet up here. Now what I want to do is go ahead and grab it from up here at the top. Let it hover over, my pen is still touching the screen over this eye, and then just watch this color thresholds up here and find something that's really resonating and feels right. It looks like hovering around 25 percent for me is really doing the trick. Now, what that's done is it hasn't keyed in the entire layer to this maroon, it's only changed the color for this one segment because nothing else is touching it. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing. I'll fill in this eye. Let's go ahead and drag this into the darkest spots on our leopard. I'm not releasing it here for those lighter moth spots, but I'm going to drop it on the darker ones. What that's done is it's keyed in the rest of those moth spots. If you only want it to be on the darkest areas. You can drag your color threshold down. But I like having a key in to the lighter areas and the darker areas. Yeah. Simple as that, I'm just going to go through and start filling in and dropping the color into the darkest area of these spots. You can see here that when I dropped that color in, a lot up here has changed. Clearly I need to adjust the color threshold for that spot. Two fingers will undo, and let's go ahead and pull that back in. Instead of releasing, I'm going to keep my pen touching the screen. It looks like for this, I need a threshold of around 18 percent to make it only fill in that spot and nothing else around it. One thing I want to point out again is that I'm dropping the color in the darker spots, not the lighter spots. If I were to drop the color in the lighter spots, it would be a completely different outcome. You back up, and continue filling it in. Again, I'm just constantly taking a look at this color threshold up top and seeing how it's filling in that area. As you start filling in the spots on your illustration, you might notice that you're adjusting the color thresholds constantly as you go. That one got to the entire rest of the jaguar. I'm going to back up, go back in and try it again. I think I went ahead and got all the areas that needed to be changed specifically. One thing I'm doing as I'm looking at this illustration though, is I think it looked really nice for the eyes, and nose, and inner ears to have that same charcoal background. I'm going to go back to my color picker, select that black, and fill it in. What's nice about this is by doing these one by one, you have the opportunity to really customize them. If you want certain areas to be a very specific color, you're definitely able to do that. Cool. This is matching really well with that original color exploration I did back at the beginning. Let's go ahead and do the same thing to the leaves. I'll go back to my Layers, select the "Leaf Layer", go back to my Palettes, and I'm going to start by filling in that bright pink area for the leaves. It looks like all of these really light minty leaves, I'm going to change to this blush pink. Again, I haven't released my pen and I'm getting an idea of the color thresholds here. Looks like 41 percent is really doing it for me. Now I can just start filling in the others. For this one, because it's touching this darker turquoise leave, I'm going to have to be really careful with this color thresholds. It looks like for this, just about 24 percent is that Goldilocks zone. But for these, I can bring it back up to the 40s because they're not touching anything else. Cool. I've just changed all of those minty leaves to this bright pink. Now I'm going to change all these turquoise leaves to that mint color in the pallet. I'll select the mint to the very end, and do the same thing. Just start filling it in on those turquoise areas to selectively change the color. That looks really nice. Last but not least, I'm going to go ahead and change these brown and neutral leaves to something within this maroon or pitch of the jaguar to really tie in that pallet. Let's do this maroon color. I'll just start filling these in. Awesome. This is that final illustration, it matches pretty well with that color exploration we did earlier. That was a really good example for, if you want to have a lot of control with how you change color, you can go segment by segment like this. Before I forget, it looks like we lost our signature down at the bottom since we changed that background to charcoal. I'll show you how to make your signature white. Open up your Layers, select your "Signature layer", and then up here at the top, this magic one, it stands for adjustments. Go ahead and choose hue, saturation, and brightness, by Layer. Now you can bring the brightness all the way up and you can see how that signature all of a sudden pops back up from that charcoal. Now that we've learned how to adjust color step-by-step and just little segments by little segments, this is if you want to have a lot of control over the color that you're changing. Now that we've accomplished this and shown you how it works, I'm going to show you how you can change color on a much more broad spectrum. The second part is the one I do most often. Let's go ahead and learn how.
15. Layer Adjusting Color: This is where we left off with adjusting color. I'm going to show you one more way that I adjust color in a much more fluid manner. Let's go back to gallery. Before I forget, I'm just going to tap where it says Full Motif and change the name to Color: Retro Drama. Now I'll hit "Select", go back to that Full Motif, that original color palette that we came up with and go ahead and hit "Duplicate." Hit the "X" to close and let's open up the copy of that original color palette. For this, I'm going to show you how to adjust color by entire layer at a time, not by dragging in individual color picker sections. First things first, let's go to our layers and when I'm exploring color like this in a more intuitive fashion, I like to start with a completely blank slate. I'm going to go to that background color, tap it and then change it to white. Having that white background, it just helps me better visualize all of the color adjustments that I'll be doing to the mane motif and those leaves. I can always go back at the end and adjust that background color. But for now, I want to start with a blank slates so white is perfect. The first thing I want to do is adjust the color of this leopard itself. Again, I want no distractions, so I'm going to go ahead and toggle off the visibility of that leaf layer so that I'm only seeing the leopard. Now we'll go ahead and select that leopard layer. Go up to my Adjustments and I'm going to go to Hue, Saturation and Brightness, and I will adjust by layer. Now this is the simplest and fastest way to see what different colors look like scrubbing across this hue spectrum here. I can see the full gamete of rainbow options for this leopard. We have this really nice blue coming to this purple, magenta, orange. Right in the middle, if you go to 50 percent, it'll be exactly where you started. Let's drag all the way to the right. I like what's going on here with this nice turquoise. Let's see what happens if I bring up the saturation. Not a ton of difference, but it's nice. But I think I'll leave that at about 50. Then brightness for this part, I leave it alone because I usually prefer to adjust my brightness in curves rather than here where it's the whole thing changing at once. I'm going to leave that brightness at 50 percent and I'll show you how I adjust the levels and brightness instead. Let's go back to our Adjustments and I'm going to select Curves by layer. Now what curves does is it'll give me a lot more flexibility in the light and dark tones. Mine right now is on gamma, which is that full spectrum, which is perfect. I want to start there and I'm just going to grab this line from the middle and move it up. If I move it to the very top, it gets very, very bright, I move it to the very bottom, the whole thing gets dark. What I want to do is take this far right area of that spectrum, bring it to the left a little bit, grab that far left version from the bottom and bring it to the right. Now, when I adjust the middle, those dark tones are staying really dark and those lighter tones are continuing to stay light. It's just a way to manually control that contrast. This is interesting. We still have those really dark tones up here with the blacks, but then we get this really nice, vibrant blue. Let's go ahead and explore, see what some of these other options are doing. I've switched it to red, then bring this all the way up versus all the way down. We're getting some really cool unique things happening there. I think I'm going to bring this slightly up and that's desaturating a little bit of that middle part, which is interesting. Let's see what happens with the green. All the way down versus all the way up. I think I just want to leave that right there in the middle where it was, and blue. Let's see what happens all the way up and all the way down. Same thing. I want to leave this one write in the middle. Now that I've got the jaguar in a really interesting place with color, let's go ahead and adjust the leaves as well. I'll go back to my layers, turn on the visibility from my leaf layer, select it so that any changes we make will happen to this layer only. Then go back to my Adjustments, and I'm going to go to this option here called Gradient Map, and I'll show you what that does. We'll do it by layer. With gradient map selected, you can go through and see what these different gradients will look like on your layer. It's cool because if you want to get a quick glimpse of what different colors are looking like, this gives you that pretty instantaneously. You can also make your own gradient over here with this top plus sign. But out of all of these, I really liked how blaze was looking. It's nice to have that contrast of this bright turquoise against these maroons and magentas and peaches. I'm going to select blaze and make a few more tweaks to that color to get it to the absolutely perfect place. I'm going to go back up here to my Adjustments, go back to my Curves, by layer, go back here up to gamma and what I want to do is really brighten those backgrounds, so it feels like a really nice, airy peach and pink. I really like the saturation here of that hot pink and that peach. This is where I started at 50 percent, right in the middle, but if I bring it up a little bit, everything just gets a lot lighter and it just feels like this nice bubblegum pop color. Let's see what happens if I bring that contrast and make it a little bit darker. What I'm doing is I'm dragging from this bottom corner and bringing it to the right. When you move this from the bottom, you're going to get those darker levels coming back in. As you can see when I drag that, this is where it started. There's not a lot of contrast here in these leaves but when I drag this over from the right, it starts getting a lot more deeper and darker, which I really like. All right, cool, that's a pretty fun pallet. Let's go back to my layers and now is the time to analyze. Do I need to make more adjustments to this leopard or is it balancing really well with those leaves. At this point I really like it. I don't think I need to go back into my leopard layer and make adjustments. I think it looks excellent as is. That way of adjusting color when you do it by entire layer at a time, not by dragging over individual spot colors, this way of using it is it lets you be a little bit more intuitive and it also paves the way for you to explore a color that you may not have considered before. This is usually my go to approach when I'm adjusting color, rather than trying to control every little bit by dropping the colors in. But I wanted to show you both so that you know you have both options there. You can be much more loose and fluid with it or if you know exactly what you're looking for, you can get there too by dragging those spot colors in. All right, so last but not least, now that we have created all of this beautiful artwork, I'm going to show you how to export it at the highest settings so that it's going to look absolutely beautiful when you upload it to print on demand sites or Etsy or Instagram, whatever you're looking for. Let's go ahead and dive right in.
16. Saving: Now that we have these beautiful illustrations created, I'll show you how to save it based off of what your desired output is. I'm going to go back to gallery and before I change anything else, I'm going to tap that layer name and change it to color: pink turquoise. Perfect. So let's go ahead and start by exporting our first color palette that we came up with, that original. I'll tap this guy and I'm going to show you a few different export settings. First things first, let's go over here to our wrench and under video, let's take a look at what that time-lapse replay looks like. I'll tap that. Now it's showing me how I got to this jaguar every step of the way. It's just basically sped up all of my brush strokes the entire way. As you'll notice, it's not just doing it for this one duplicated art board, it's starting from the very beginning because we kept duplicating those art boards, so it's going to show us everything, even though we kept setting up different canvases as we went. That's always pretty cool. That's a definite perk of duplicating the canvas rather than starting a new one. So time-lapse replay, that's always pretty cool. If you want to share that, video does really great on social media. If you go back to your wrench under video, there is an option here for export time-lapse video, and here's something pretty cool. You can choose between full length and 30 seconds. The reason that 30 second option is there is because 30 seconds is a great amount of time for social media. If I'm going to go ahead and share a time-lapse replay on my social media account, I usually go with the 30 second option, not the full option. Then when I send it to myself, I usually just wind up air dropping it to my MacBook Pro, but you can also save the video directly to your iPad. That's how you export the time-lapse video. Again, videos do really well on social media, so sharing those time-lapse replays is a really great way to boost your engagement. Next step. Let's say that you want to save this full high res version to upload to your Society6 shop or print out at home to make Etsy art prints, whatever it is, you want the most high res version imaginable. Let's go back into our wrench and under share, you have a lot of different sharing options. The ones that I most frequently use is first PSD, and what PSD stands for is a Photoshop file. What I typically do is I export these all to my MacBook Pro as a Photoshop file, which means all of these layers will be intact and that way if I ever want to make a few more edits and Photoshop, I can do that and that's a way for me to have this whole layered version saved in a different place. If you're ever afraid of completely losing all of your work on your iPad, which has personally happened to me several times, it's always great if you're not backing up to the cloud to go ahead and export to the layered version. If you have Photoshop, export it as a Photoshop file, you can also export it as a procreate file and save it somewhere else. If you want to export the procreate file, which means it'll be able to open up and procreate, you can do that and then save it on your computer or if you have an external hard drive, you can save it there. But it's nice to have a layered version saved somewhere else. Whether you're saving it as a procreate layered version or a Photoshop layered version, it's really great just for added security to go ahead and export one or both of those and then save it on an additional device. But I just remembered, that's not what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about exporting for the most high res version possible that's flattened that you can directly upload to Society6, and for that, it is the JPEG. What a JPEG does is it'll completely flatten all of this artwork into one layer, so when you export a JPEG and you open that up later, say in Photoshop or again in procreate, none of these layers will be here, it'll all be flattened into one image. When you're completely done, ready for it to say, "Okay, it's the final", you can go ahead and export that JPEG and then upload it directly to Society6 or Redbubble or send it off to your licensors or partners. JPEG is a great place for that, and because our canvas size is already the largest it can possibly be in procreate, when you save as this JPEG, it's going to save in that exact same image size, resolution, DPI, everything. That's going to get you a very high res file, but you will not be able to edit it. Last but not least, when I want to have this available as, say a T-shirt, or maybe on a transparent phone case or a kiss cut sticker, I don't want this background here. What I do in that situation is I go to my layers, toggle off the visibility for background color and turn off that paper texture so that it's just this grid back here that indicates it's a transparent background, and now I can go back to my actions under share, I can share it as a PNG. What PNG does is again, it will flatten everything, all of these leaves will flatten with the jaguar, will flatten with the signature, but it will retain that transparency. When you save it as a PNG and you've already toggled off that background layer, then you're going to have this perfectly cut out transparent version of this artwork, so it'll look great on a t-shirt or a sticker, anything where you really need that transparent background. After I've gone ahead and exported everything, usually by air dropping it to my computer, I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for our other color versions. Let's turn that background back on, go back to gallery, open up that pink turquoise version and then do the same thing. Just to walk you through it one more time in that order, I'll go to my wrench, under video, I'll export the time-lapse video of 30 seconds and that way I can use it on social media. Next up under share, I'm going to export the PSD version so I can open it in Photoshop on my computer. If I don't use Photoshop then I would export to the procreate version so that I can save it in a different location just in case my iPad crashes, I don't want to lose all that artwork. Next up, I want to save the most high res version imaginable to upload to my Society6 shop to sell on art prints, and for that, I'm going to export the JPEG exactly how it is. That is again, the flattened version of everything, so it's going to stay this high res, but it'll just be flat. Last but not least, I'm going to go to my layers, turn off the background and turn off that paper texture, then go back to my actions and then under share, I'm going to export as a PNG, which is going to get me that transparency so this artwork will look good on things where it requires a transparent background, like apparel. Then once I finish that, I'll go back to my layers, turn that background color back on, turn that texture back on, go back to my gallery and then do the exact same thing for the last one, that retro drama color palette. That way I'll have three distinct color palettes, all exported and ready to be uploaded to Society6 or whatever else I'm using. One more thing I do, and this is if you want to have even more products available to you, is to save it in a square format. I'll show you how I set up that square canvas. I'm going to go to select, take that full motif and duplicate it again. Hit that X to cancel this selection, and then open up that new one. Now I'm going to go into my layers, swipe right on the main artwork. I don't really need the paper texture selected or the background. Then I'll go to my arrow, drag this down to resize it a little bit to give it some breathing room over here on the right, and I always drag it down from that top right corner, because when you crop things in and out in procreate, it starts from that bottom left corner. So whenever you're going to be resizing your canvas, drag it to the lower left part of the canvas. Okay, cool. Now I'll go back to my wrench, under canvas I'm going to select crop and resize, settings and change this to 27 inches by 27 inches, which that is the largest possible canvas size that I can get in procreate with the model of iPad I have. Again, I use a 2019 iPad Pro 12.9 inch, which means that I can get all the way up to 27 by 27. If your iPad isn't letting you do this, maybe try 20 by 20, or 15 by 15, and play around to get to the absolute maximum size square that you can. DPI 300, that's a great place, let's just keep it there and then go ahead and press "Done". Cool, now this whole canvas has now cropped to a square. Now I want to go back to my layers. All of these layers are still selected. I can go to my arrow tool and just drag them over to center them. I have some handy little snapping guides that are helping me figure out the exact center, if you're not seeing that on your screen and you want to have those aiding you in the right direction, just go over here to snapping and make sure magnetics and snapping are turned on. If you don't want to have those guides here, go back to snapping and turn them both off and then you won't have that and you can really position it however you see fit to be perfectly centered. But I like using snapping as a good visual guide so I'm going to keep them in place. Now what I would do here is do the exact same thing, go back to my wrench, under share, export this as a JPEG, either to my iPad and then upload it directly from here or I would send it to my computer first, and then upload it to Society6 from Safari or whatever my browser is. But the reason square is important again, is because that's going to enable a few more product categories for you, both on Society6 and Redbubble, plus, it's great to have this breathing room around the edges so that you have more flexibility as you adjust this onto products. I know that was incredibly thorough, so I hope that answered a lot of the questions you had about how to export. Let's go ahead and move on to some final tips.
17. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking my class and learning with me today. I hope you picked up a lot of useful knowledge, and I cannot wait to see what you create. Please share in the Project Gallery so we can all take a peek, heart it, and to leave comments on one another's work. Like I mentioned earlier, I also encourage you to share on Instagram and tag me @catcoq and Skillshare @skillshare. That's the social media platform I'm most active on and I am all about helping boost engagement. If you tag me in your Instagram stories, I can simply hit "reshare" on my end, so all of my followers consider designs as well. If you want to learn more about monetizing your artwork through art licensing or print on demand, I recommend checking out my previous class, "A Step-by-Step Guide to Art Licensing: Sell Your First Piece of Artwork Online". That class is exactly what it sounds like. I share my tips for getting more traction and sales to your online shop. If you want to learn more about surface design, especially in Procreate, check out my last class, "Drawing Seamless Patterns in Procreate plus Professional Surface Design Tips". Spoiler alert: that class is also optimized for succeeding with licensing and print on demand sites. I spend about a solid 10-minute chunk of time in that class, just dishing out the insider scoop of the surface design industry. It is a goldmine of knowledge. If you want to get involved with surface design, you should check it out. If you enjoyed my class, please leave a review. These reviews mean so much to me and I read every single one of them. From time to time, I'll even screenshot one and send it to my mom because it makes her day as well. If you have any questions or comments about the class, please feel free to post in the Class Discussion down below. Consider this like the community chat for everything related to this class. Last but not least, please follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. This means that as soon as I launch my next class or I want to share something with you, you'll be the first to know. You can also follow me on Instagram @catcoq to see all my latest works in progress, read my advice for artists and designers out there, and see a snapshot of where in the world I'm living at this very moment. Like I mentioned earlier, with the dogs barking outside my window, I'm currently in Mexico and I actually just experienced my first two hurricanes of my entire life, so that was fun. I travel the world 24/7, thanks to art licensing and my portable lifestyle. I create artwork all around the world as I go. It's a pretty adventurous and fulfilling experience, and it's the reason I love illustrating on my iPad. I can create artwork from anywhere. Thanks again for taking the time to learn with me today. I will see you guys for my next class.
Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
