Draw with me in Procreate: Mid-Century Cookbook Illustration

1. Intro: You love drawing on your iPad and are a big fan of mid-century or just like me, then this is the right place for you. In this class, we're going to discover a typical odd style from the middle of last century, the cookbook illustration style. Because one thing is granted, mid-century art never gets old or boring. Hi, my name is Jutta Schneider. I'm an illustrator, designer, and teacher based in Germany. In this class, I am going to introduce you to one of the most typical art styles from the middle of last century, the cookbook illustration style on your iPad in Procreate. I will show you my process of how to tackle such an illustration from planning to the actual drawing. I will teach you not only the rules and characteristics of this illustration style, but I will also show you how to achieve it in Procreate. As always, I've created carefully a whole bunch of resources for you to download, which you might find useful when creating your own mid-century piece of art. There's a font, a color palette, a gorgeous brush set with every brush you need, and a Pinterest mood board full of inspirations I've got that for you. What you need to take this class is your iPad and Apple Pencil and the app Procreate. A basic understanding of the app is beneficial, but I will make sure to explain step-by-step what I do so you will be able to follow along even if you're new to Procreate. Are you're you ready now to create a quirky and fun mid-century illustration with maybe a modern twist? Then let's jump right into it. See you in the first lesson, I am pretty sure we're going to have a lot of fun together. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Since the topic of this class is cookbook illustration, we're going to create a cooking or a kitchen related artwork. I walk you through the entire process from planning to the finished piece, and all you need to do is follow along, have fun, and upload your finished artwork here by hitting the "Create Project" button in the project and resources tab. You can draw exactly what I do or you go with a motif that suits you better. It's up to you. You are the artist and all the decisions you make are going to be right. By uploading your project, I guarantee you several positive outcomes. You are going to be super proud of your accomplishment and rights you are. You will earn a lot of positive feedback from your peers and you might help future students to decide whether or not this class is interesting for them. Last but not least, you make this teacher here very happy. I can't wait to see your whimsical art here in the project gallery. Let's get into it. [MUSIC] 3. Style Characteristics: [MUSIC] In this video, we are going to find out why this art style is so appealing, what elements the illustrator included, and how we are going to adapt that into our own workflow in Procreate. We're here in my cookbook illustration, mood board. The link, again, you find in the Resources tab. By scrolling through it, we notice one thing right away, it's the colors or better the like of the colors. We can see here this artist just used one color. The rest is just black or negative space, which means the white background of the paper. To depict the shapes, there's just a lot of line work. That's one of our basic rules. We use the negative space, which is the paper background. We are going to include one color and a dark or black tone for our line work. We see right away this is a big limitation. In this piece, we see the artist included dashed or dotted lines to create some variations in his line work, and that, of course, at a lot of interest right away. Here we see even though the artist only used two colors, the yellow and the black, by using halftones, which is unfortunately not able, we cannot see it here in the picture. Here, the chimney, the roof, and all the darker yellow areas, there's this other layer on top where the artist included halftones, the series of dot put on top to just create a darker shade of the yellow that's been used. Here he used the halftones only at the staircase, here two, at the chimney and on the grass. He added two more colors to his palette. This is also something we're going to use later on in our illustration. Let's look further. Here we see the artist don't really pay too much attention to perspective or body proportions. Let's see this head here of this baby is way too big for the rest of the body, but that doesn't really matter, it makes it more interesting, it makes it more whimsical and that's exactly the style we want to achieve. Let me show you also the piano here. The perspective of the piano is absolutely wrong. However, it makes the picture interesting, it makes it whimsical and quirky. This is how we want to draw our illustration as well. Then there's this last thing. What I noticed about this illustration style, who's the one that cooks? Of course, it's the woman [LAUGHTER] Who was the one that cleans up? Of course, it's the woman. Who is the one that raises the child and so on and so forth, and there we have room to make some changes, to break up a little bit with those old stereotypes. You don't have to though, I leave it completely up to you. You do whatever you feel comfortable with. I just want to make clear those old-fashioned family models and roles at home have changed, and I want to show that in my illustration. You can do that, you can follow along, or you do whatever you like better. Please always feel free to go with your own gut, that's absolutely fine. Let's recap one more time. The rules or characteristics of our illustration style. We wanted include in our illustration are first the colors. We are going to include black and another color and use the white background as a third color. We create interesting line work by using liners that are maybe not crisp in their edges or have dots or dashes, we are going to include halftones to increase our color palette. We draw simple illustrations, even breaking up with the typical perspective or proportional rules. If you want to, I leave that completely up to you, we can break up with those old-fashioned stereotypes. In our next video, we're going to talk about what exactly halftones are and how we are going to include them into our illustration. See you in the next video. 4. What is a 'Halftone'?: [MUSIC] What exactly is a halftone? Well, we already talked about the high printing costs publishers were and still are confronted with. How to mass print large editions like a daily newspaper for a reasonable price. This is how the halftones came into place. Wikipedia tells us with halftone printing, you can simulate continuous tone imagery through the use of dots varying in either size or spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect. Basically, we are talking about a series of dots put together. Small black dots with an increased spacing would appear as a light gray tone. Whereas big dots put closely together or even overlapping, they seem dark gray or even black. If you look at a newspaper through magnifying glass, you can see those little dots clearly. This was and still is a great way to save on ink and thus money while mass printing something like a daily newspaper. Halftones are nowadays also used for color printing. You probably already heard about the CMYK color model. The semi opaque dots in the four colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, are combined differently to create full color imagery. In our cookbook illustration style, we're going to use the halftones for two major reasons. Number 1 is to increase our color palette, because the rules of this style tell us to only use black and one additional color, and together with the white background, also called the negative space, we would only have three colors available. To increase this palette, we include halftones like this. By using one of my halftone brushes only, we create either a gray tone or a lighter hue of our chosen color. By using the halftone brush on top of a solid color with maybe the multiply blend mode, we can create a darker shade of the same color. Using a halftone brush in black on top of a color creates even darker shades. In general, and that is a reason number two to include halftones, we create a lot of visual interest in our illustration. We are also not bound to the usage of dots only, why not use hatching or cross-hatching? I included several halftone brushes to achieve the desired effect. That's a good transition to our next video, where I'll introduce you to all the resources that come with the class. See you there. [MUSIC] 5. Resources: [MUSIC] This class comes with a lot of cool resources I carefully created for you and they help you to achieve the same style as I did. You can find all the resources on the Projects and Resources tab on the skillshare.com website on the right-hand side. There's four different files that you can download and there's another link for my Pinterest mood board on mid-century cookbook illustration. There's my Jitterbug font, there's my color palette, there's my cookbook brush set, and there's an inspiration collection sheet. Downloading those files is super simple. You just tap it. You're going to be asked if you want to download it, you say, yes. Then you wait until this little arrow here has bounced. You just tap it, tap the file, and it's going to be imported in Procreate right away. It works a little bit differently with the brush set because it's a bigger file. When you tap the "Brush Set", it's going to ask you again. You say, yes, we wait until the arrow's bounced. We tap that arrow, and then we tap this file here. My iPad is taking me to my Downloads folder in my files app. This is where I find all the downloaded resources. I will tap the brush set file and now it's also imported into Procreate. I just wanted to show you that brush sets are always going to be added at the very top of your brush library, whereas color palettes are always going to be added at the very bottom of your palettes library. The last file here is my inspiration collection sheet. This is a very useful tool. We can also download it by just tapping, download it. It's also going to be transported into our Downloads folder. This is from where we can import it into Procreate. Let me show you quickly. We're in Procreate in the gallery now, and I want to import this worksheet, and I tap the "Import" button and I can find the file here. Now it's imported into Procreate. Super simple. I can work on it now and I'm going to show you how exactly you can use it in my next video about finding inspiration. Just a few notes. We always will add a layer on which we can write just with a pencil, write down some ideas and also sketch out some style examples. Now we have a closer look at the other resources. If you downloaded the font the same way, you are going to find it here under the wrench, add text. When you then tap the little As here, you find the font here in your font library. There it is, Jitterbug. Here's what you get, my font Jitterbug as I just showed you. Next, the color palette you find in my resources, I divided them into medium hues, light hues, and dark hues, as well as gray hues. The medium and light hues, you can choose by preference whatever you like better. The dark hues though, I just added for line work. Sometimes a black is too harsh in contrast for my taste, that's why I would rather use a very dark hue of one of those colors, and sometimes black is just fine. It depends on your taste and maybe also on your mood. Down here, you see a few gray shades as well as kind of black. It's not real black, but it's very dark. This here, in this last little corner here, there is the yellowish-white color I would always use as paper background. I don't really like to draw on white canvas, so I always use a little off-white. It also looks a bit like old yellowed paper. You'll find all these colors in the palette. Next, of course, is my mid-century cookbook brush set, which is separated in four big parts. First, we have this sketcher, which are obviously like pencils. You can use them for sketching, but also later for your line work. One of them is a little bit smoother. One of them is a little bit more rough. Next category are the liners and fillers. We have a nice liner mono, a nice liner rough, which creates really nice, interesting line work. A nice liner tapered, which has tapered ends that are pressure sensitive. We have a softy which has really soft edges. I basically don't use it in that style for drawing, but more for erasing. Then there's the filler irregular. This is a very nice textured brush where you can fill shapes but still have a little bit of a texture. Then we have a dotted and a dashed liner, which are really nice to create interesting line work. Next up are the halftone brushes, where I added seven different ones. You choose just by preference or depending on the result you want to achieve. Let's start with this one. It's a light halftone brush. The next one appears a little bit darker due to the bigger dots. The next one is even darker. The last one very dark. You see the effect when you zoom out. Very interesting. Then we have an irregular filler, a cross-hatching, and a hatching brush. They just bring our illustration to life and add a lot of interest. Then next category are my stain brushes. You can see these stains here and also the crease, those are brushes. You can add them to your illustration. Because if you ask me, if you look at my cookbooks, especially the old ones I used really often, they all have stains. I seem to be a very messy cook, I spilled everything everywhere. If you like these real-looking stains and creases, you can add them to your illustration. Lastly, we have the paper textures. Usually, I'm adding some staples, which you'll find under this brush here, staples. Then on top, I would put a paper texture. We have four different paper textures here. I'm going to be showing you the texture rough, how I usually use them. I set the layers to multiply. I would add a layer, turning it into a clipping mask, and then turn it into multiply blend mode. I would duplicate it because I would add two different layers with the paper texture. On the first layer, I would choose a light color, maybe a yellow because it makes all the colors underneath very vivid and then I would just maybe with a smaller brush size and then I would just draw over. On the next layer, I would add a dark color, like let's say this blackish tone here. Of course, this is way too dark, but if you turn down the opacity, make it barely visible, then you really create this paper texture effect, which I absolutely adore. The last resource can be found again on the skillshare.com website under the Project and Resources tab. It's the link to my mid-century cookbook illustration mood board on Pinterest. You just tap the link and you're going to be transported to Pinterest to the right mood board right away. Here you can scroll and seek for inspiration as much as you want. This is what we're going to do in the next video. We find inspiration for our illustration. See you there. [MUSIC] 6. Finding Inspiration Part 1: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to seek out for inspiration. I can tell you right away no illustrator comes up with every single artwork from out of his mind only, so everybody needs to find inspiration and inspiration can be everywhere. Recently, I was sitting in front of my television with my iPhone and just took some photos from a documentary. It was a documentary about the middle of last century, and I saw so many cool features, so I just sat in front of my television and took photos of it. Very strange, however, it brought me a lot of ideas, what to include in my illustrations. This is the purpose, and that's what we're also going to do right now. Just a few words before. First of all, we're not going to take as much time as I would usually do for the purpose that we have a reasonable length in this class, but you can go above and beyond with finding and sketching down ideas. I just want to go a little bit quicker than I usually do just to make sure the class is not getting too long. For the same reason, we won't create a super complicated and super big illustration. We'll create a fun and whimsical piece and you can go as complex as you want. Let me explain now what my workflow is. I discovered off myself that when I look too much at pictures or use reference photos, I tend to copy things which I don't want. I also feel like my creativity is blocked because I'm always focused on what I see only, and not to think about how I want things to look like. That's why I came up with this worksheet, and this works really well for me. You see here three different columns. Item. I would write down maybe eyes, and then I would write down what attributes I see with eyes in that typical style, and then later on, I would sketch out some ideas. For the first process, I will start my Google app and we'll just bring it into split-screen mode, make a little bit more space for my Canvas. We only need those two columns right now, since we're going to draw a cookbook illustration, and also one to break up a little bit with the stereotypes. I want to have a male person cooking, that's for sure. I'm going to type down man cooking, and then it will give me some images. I will go to Google Images, and then we scroll through. I envisioned something like a man in the center of my illustration with a background and a foreground, so he's doing something on a worktop, whatever table thing. That's my envision. I want to find out now what else I want to include, and how I want this person to look like. First of all, we think about the overall composition. For that, we're going to scroll through those Google images and make sure we add another layer on top of our worksheet. Get the darker color, which we want to write with, and choose just a brush to write with, maybe it's a sketcher here. [MUSIC] That's fine. Now, I'm going to write down only. Let's go with the character. I want him to be central and male, that's for sure. He's supposed to do something. This guy here, he has a pan, he's cutting. I also noticed I don't want him in the side view, I want him to be in a front view so he's front view. I think this is a pose I really like, so he's drizzling something into something. Let's say he's drizzling. It doesn't really matter how this looks, it's just you make your nodes. They can be as messy as whatever, it's just that you need to be able to read them later on. I see something in the background which I also like, he has a window background. There's a window with those bars in, I like that. Also, there's parts on top of a cupboard. Cool. There's a pepper mill that's in the foreground, so I guess this is definitely something I want in my foreground. Somehow, I am obsessed with pepper mills. So in the foregrounds, maybe it's a table, that makes it simple. In the '50s, they didn't have those super fancy cooking glass anyway. There's a table in the foreground, and on the table, there's supposed to be pepper mill. What else do we see? Maybe we can scroll through this here. A bottle. I guess a bottle is great onto the table, maybe some veggies and lemons. Don't mind me when I write some typos. Oh, he's wearing an apron, I want him to have an apron as well. Could be a very simple one, but it also could have some raffles all around, a woman-like print, that would also be cool. He's cutting some things, so I want a cutting board, that's a typical item. Cutting board and also a knife for sure. What else can we think of? What could be in the background? Let's check. Maybe he has a plant. Maybe there's a plant or something in the background. There's the fridge. Yes, a fridge is a great idea. A fridge or maybe such a cool shelf, maybe a board with things on it. But, we need to see how much space we have in the background, we don't want it to get the illustration too complex, that's not the style. You wouldn't find a very complex illustration in a cookbook anyway, because usually the illustration, we're just in a vignette style. That means the tiny little area of the whole page having this little fun illustration, so we don't want to get it too complicated. That's already quite a lot. Next [MUSIC] thing I want to do is look out for features my character has, how I want him to look like in mid-century style before we get into the character. What you also could do is seek out for mid-century. I'm going to show you that too. Our '50s kitchen images, and then you see some really cool ideas of how the kitchen back then looked like. This is what I meant, a board with things on it. Super cool. But again, we need to check if we have the space. There's a pink fridge. Oh, yeah, I would love to have a pink fridge in my home. What else can we see? This is a cool fridge, so I'm pretty sure I want my fridge to look like that somehow. Oh, there's a clock in all those typical sun rays clock. I wanted to clock in my background as well. I like those curtains here. They're just on the top of the window and super simple, so why not add in some curtains here on the window? This is also a super cool and typical kitchen clock, I guess even my mom had one of those. The clock would also look like this. But again, we already found a lot of attributes and a lot of items we want to include. Let's move on now to the Pinterest new board, and this is where we find some typical illustration features. [MUSIC] 7. Finding Inspiration Part 2: [MUSIC] I show you what I mean by that. Let's open the Pinterest. In split screen, we're still in our cookbook illustration mood board. Now we're going to do the same. We add another layer. Turn this one off by just tapping this little check mark here. It's still there, just the visibility has turned off. What we are going to do now is having a closer look how characters were drawn back then in that era and we're going to write down things we like. We need eyes, we need hair, we need a pose, we need noses, we need mouth ideas. That's super important because I know how intimidating it can be drawing a human character. I hope I can show you the technique that encourages you to try it out more often. Because the mid-century cookbook illustration style is very simple to practice with because they don't pay too much attention to perspective and proportion. It doesn't really matter if the head is too big in comparison to his body or if the arms are too skinny, it's the opposite. It makes the whole style super whimsical and fun and that's why I love drawing human character in this particular style. I can just go and exaggerate whatever I want and not paying too much attention if the head is too big, the eyes are on the right height, and whatsoever. Now, I want to look out for typical character features and I'm just going to swipe through my images. The eyes are often closed. The noses, I also noticed are pointy, angled line. Again, don't mind me writing typos. The line can also be connected to the mouth. Again, closed eyes, the mouth though can be open or just a line. This is a super cool hand, which I'm definitely going to implement in my illustration. This is, by the way, the typical mid-century style hand. Let's write down another item, hand. Typical style, thumb and pointer finger make a circle. That's a typical pose. But back to our mouth, I see an oval mouth. Let's go back to the layer with the mouse. I don't know how this shape is called. Let's say it's two lines forming the mouth. There's a cool knife and a typical cutting board. This is a board with a handle. I want to write that down too. Let's open even another layer. Turn this visibility off again. Here we go. A board is going to have a handle with a hole. The board might have a little bit of a wood grain but we need to check if we like it later on. There's a cool window and there's again this cutting board. See. There's a salt shaker. I like that too. I might include that too. Let's go on with the next illustration. Here we see she is winking. Where's our write layer? Here we go. Closed, she is winking. One eye is a dot. Here's a typical cutting board again. I like the tubes and I also like those pots that are super interesting and also the typical shape. It's just a round opening and then two straight lines. Roll and see. He has an oval nose and he has a pointy nose. What I really like is that the nose comes into the head right away, into the forehead. This is something I also need to write down. Let's see where do we have space. I think here. The head shape. I think we can notice that the head of a male character is usually quite boxy and looking like a rectangle with a huge nose. At least that's what I like the best. You can see that here, a very remarkable chin. Often you see that the nose just goes into the forehead right away. Usually, they do have short hair. Hair is also important. These guys here just have lines as hair and they also have squinted eyes and a rectangular nose. Let's go back to our other layer. Here we go. Nose can also be a rectangle and the eyes can be squinted. The mouth here is a bend line with dots at the end. The ear is just a little swirl. Do we have some space for ears? Let's move on to this layer here. Just are spiral basically. Also, they just have something like two lines in the ear. Open eyes, they are almond-shaped. I guess that's enough to show you how this process is working with me. In our next video, we're going to lay down some ideas. We're going to sketch down some ideas. See you there. [MUSIC] 8. Style Experiments: [MUSIC] Here we are. Now it's time to sketch down some style ideas that come to our minds. But first of all, what I need to do is I need to close any photos because that really blocks my own creativity. I want to go with my memory or even something completely new. Let's start with our first layer, turn this visibility off here. Let's see if we want to lay down some ideas for that here. I saw a window and I like my window to have those bars in them and maybe it could also be vice-versa. That could also be a window. Then I also want my window to have curtains, which is basically two lines to the side, some fringes here, some fringes here. That's the curtain, super simple and a plant which could look maybe just a circle here, another circle underneath, and then some ****** and just some spiralish lines. That's right. That's enough. That's already cool for a plant. Maybe we could have a board with something like plates maybe, placed on top of each other and marks maybe for a pot. Super simple. Let's see if we have the space, a clock. We could either have a clock like this or we just have super simple rectangle with the face like this. That's enough, so we found some ideas. You can get even more examples as much as you like. First of all, it gives you practice in sketching, but also it just gets your creativity flowing. But for the purpose of a reasonable length for the class, I'm going to stop here now. The table is basically whatever wonky shape, rectangle with some legs. But maybe we can have some features on the legs. I know that kind of this shape, I guess that looks super fun. A paper mill, what could a paper mill look like? I guess we have this shape here and then this huge round thing on top, and a salt shaker I saw before. It was just something like this. Maybe with some lines and a typical top maybe, some holes in it. What else? A bottle. My bottles usually look like this. Super simple and they do have a cork here maybe a label, there are some veggies. What about having an onion or what did I write down a lemon? Lemon is super cool. There's just this thing in the middle, a cutting board. We want to have the cutting board. But at least I do like this and again, that's so wonderful about this style, we don't need to pay too much attention with perspective, we just draw a second line here, however, wonky. Knives, my knife should look like this. What else could we have? Maybe a bell pepper or an apple. Just super simple like this. It doesn't really matter if it's super messy, but sometimes we just discover a certain style we really like and we're going to take this over into our illustration. I think that's enough. Let's go to the next layer. Turn this off so the eyes, a lot of them are closed, it means this way. But I also saw them this way that means they're squinted due to laughing. Some of them are winking, some of them are just dots like this. Some of them are squinted with lines like this. Some of them are oval, I also saw long ovals. I also saw something like an almond shape, but I also saw lines with eyes under knees. I also saw something like this. You can go above and beyond again to find as much eye shapes as you like. I think I might go with this pie-shape because I want him to be super happy when cooking. The noses. We have those noses to the side facing to the rest of the head. In the face, we have just something like this line here connected to the mouth maybe like this or just to know sometimes it's a little bit of an open triangle. Some have oval nose, sometimes it's even this pointy shape. I also saw this nose shape here this, and sometimes you just see a line like this as a nose and that's already enough. I'm pretty sure I either want this style or this nose which is attached to the forehead right away and then mouth. We have something like an open mouth here in the face, something like this. We have a line, could be like this, can be like that, can be really bend like this with dots at the end, can be open like this, can be like that and even have teeth. Can be a little bit to the side. Maybe can have a tongue sticking out like this with a dot. When I get really into the process, it's like a rabbit hole for me I can really start and just come up with new ideas and ideas and ideas and that's super cool because you discover the best shape in this process. Let's move on to the next layer. We have the hand, yes. I want my hands to have a skinny wrist and some other, this is too long, a thumb like this and the pointer like this, and the other fingers like that. Super messy right now, don't worry, we're going to clean that up later on in a real sketch. Also, my hands usually only have four fingers for whatever reason, I find that easier. But I also saw hands like this, they're basically just rectangle with lines in them to just indicate hands from the side maybe holding something. I also saw just basically hands like this. I saw like this hands. In general, hands are kept super simple in this style maybe like this. That's enough for this purpose. The head shape could be boxy, like this, really rectangular. Sometimes it's awesome more trapezoidish, narrower here and wider there, or the other way around. Sometimes it's a bit oval. In general, it has a huge chin like this, when this is the neck from the side view, a huge chin. This is something I really like and also a huge nose maybe like this. But I also like when the head shape just is the same width as the rest of the body like this. This is his shoulders and here's his arms. This is something I really like and hairdo. One hairdo, can I imagine, we saw lines, his hair like this. We saw crescents maybe like this or high enough Elvis like with hair in front of ears and behind ears, something like this. We saw just crescents on either side. We saw bald guys as well. They only had hair here. A few days later. We also saw hair here, hair here, and maybe some hair peeking out from the back, so he has a little bit longer hair. And we also saw just lines like this, super messy and that's already a lot. Let's move on to the next layer. The board was just the rectangle like this with this handle with the hole, maybe a second line here to indicate three-dimensionality and they had wood grain. The ears, oh, yes, some ears. Ears we have usually crescents here, like half circles, some have two lines. Once it was just a spiral, ones it was a little bit oval. How else I think ears could also have just a dark dot in the middle or just a second line ear and then there's something like a crescent in the ear or just a naked oval or just a longer one picking out like more the top of it, and the bottom is more attached to the head like this and maybe just a light in there. Great. So I guess what are we going to do now is just decide for whatever features we want to include. I think I like this ear style. Just a little bit more out on the top, but more touched on the bottom. This is definitely something I want to keep, so let's see this hand and also this hand maybe. I guess I like this head style, but also this one. I like this hairdo and also this hairdo. I guess I want to go with these two items. As a mouth, I think when I go with this shape, I guess the mouth is going to be like this, just a line. I think we have one more layer. Here we sketched out already. I guess I want to go with this window, with the curtain, with this clock, maybe the plant, maybe the board. Definitely with this and the rest of the item, there's enough space for those. Now we gathered a lot of ideas and even came up with style examples. Let's move on to the next video where we start with our first rough sketch. See you there [MUSIC] 9. Rough Sketch: [MUSIC] We're ready now to start with our rough sketch. I'm just going to stay in this canvas because it has the right dimensions I want to use any way. It's 3,000 by 4,000 pixels. Let's just go check out the canvas. Let's go to the wrench tool. Let's check the canvas and go to canvas information. We see the dimension is 4,000 by 3,000 pixels with 300 DPI. That's the measurement I usually use. It gives me 51 layers. That's a point which you have to keep in mind. If you have a smaller iPad like I do, you might have much less layers. Then it might be better to go with a different size. I'm going to show you how you can make another canvas. We just go back to the gallery and hit the "Plus" button. Then there's here on top, hit the other "Plus" button. Here you can type in whatever measurements you want, and it will tell you right away how many layers you're going to get. Let's see if I would go with 2,000 by 1,500, it would give me 219 layers. Just keep that in mind. We don't need so many layers for this illustration style, but 20-30 we probably will need. Again, I'm going to stay in my canvas with the worksheet because here is where I have all my notes and I can just refer back if I need to remember what else I wanted to include. What we can do now is group all those layers together. We swipe it to the right, and then we hit "Group". We call this group, inspiration. Then we just turn off the visibility. That means we need to add a new layer now and start over. I'm going to put this layer below my group here I just made. In case I want to refer back to it, then I can just turn it on and it's not covered by the rest of my layers. In the beginning I will always start with turning my white canvas into this yellowish [MUSIC] of white tone. I just don't like to draw on a white canvas. I think this yellowish tone is way more soothing for the eyes, and then I start with another layer. Grab my sketcher. This time I'm going to take the sketcher rough and choose a dark color. Let's go. We said we want to have a male character in the center of our illustration. Let's see, I guess I wanted standing here a little bit like this. You see me laying down a curve, and that's for the purpose of the character not seeming to be too stiff. I want him to be like a little bit in motion. A curve indicates that quite well. Then we have his head maybe here like this, very pointy nose sticking out here. Here is his body. Here's one leg, and here's the other leg, something like this. He has one arm like this, drizzling something, and one arm like that, holding something like a bowl. Right now you'll only see me doing messy lines, but that's enough. We'll refine our sketch later on. Let's erase what we don't need so far. I guess I want him, not closed eyes. I think I want him laughing. Maybe like this, and maybe the lower lip sticks out a little bit more. I want him to wear an apron, something like this. He also has hair and an ear. That's what we said, hair in front of ear and hair in the back, maybe like this. Now here's a fancy guy. This is already a very energetic pose. We're going to indicate that later on with those moving lines, like here and maybe here. That indicates that he's really moving right now, almost dancing in front of him, let's add another layer. In front of him there's this table work top. It's just whatever wonky shaped rectangle. Then we say we want legs like this, like woodturned legs. Then we want to have some items on the table. Maybe there's a bottle with a cork, and maybe there's the cutting board is here. Let's erase some parts from our character that we have more space on the table. Like this. It's not visible through the table anyway. Maybe the cutting board is right in front of him. That's super simple. By the way, if you go to the selection tool, you'll just draw around an item, then you tap that arrow here, and then you can move it just around. Maybe the cutting board is in front of him, as well as the knife. On the cutting board, what if there's an onion, maybe with those rings and some onion pieces. We have a peppermill. I guess I want it to be here. Big one. Also maybe a salt shaker like this, and maybe a tube. Maybe one of those cool tubes here. And what if here's a lemon? And maybe also two eggs. One egg, and another egg here. The wine bottle, or the vinegar bottle or whatever it is, has a label and there's a pot. That's what we said. We want to have a pot. No, I don't like this. But with a spoon in it. Let's clean up the lines a little bit. Something like this. And here his bowl also has an opening. It's not just closed. I did that on the wrong layer. Let's go back to him, and draw it here. So, it's a round opening that we can see what's in the bowl. I guess he's preparing some sort of salad or something. So there's just whatever in it. Just super simple. And I'm not very happy with the place of, let's see, let's go back to the table. I'm not happy with the salt shaker here. So I guess I want to erase it. Because I also want to put down something like a colander, where the lettuce leaves are in. Could be looking like this. Like this super simple handles and then there's those hole in there and there's also something in it and I like those spiral lines here. Super cool. So maybe we can place the miles somewhere here now and by having it peeking over the table a little bit, we create some depth but that's also very cool. It looks like it almost falls off the table, but that already also creates some interest. Do we still want the salt shaker? Maybe yeah. Maybe he has a little bit more space. And I guess, that's plenty of stuff already. Maybe we come up with something here. But so far, we don't want it to be too overcrowded. That makes it too complex for our purpose here. Now we need the background. The background is behind my person. So let's add another layer below. We could also just add layer wherever and then just move it around, by just tapping it until it releases here from the menu. So we have a layer below our character. I guess I want the window to be here. I don't want him to be right in front of the window because that doesn't fit the composition there. It would be too much here, too big of a blob here and then there's nothing on this side. So I want to spread it out a little bit. Here's the curtain, like this. Then we have those bars in the window and maybe, as we said, the flower pot. Having some sprigs coming out and just some, whatever weird lines. That's parsley, you know what? That's parsley. And I guess you need some parsley for his salad too. So let's put it on his table. I want some parsley on his table. Maybe that's what he's drizzling in this bowl here anyway. Some sprigs are here with just some, whatever messy lines. We can clean that up later on a little bit and replace the things when we think it's too crowded in the center. But this is what I really like. Cool. Then there's another thing missing here in this corner. So, why don't we add the clock here. Just make sure it's not at the same exact high-flying, as the curtain, to just create some more interest. When everything is on the same level, it looks quite boring. So let's have this rectangular clock here. We need to think about what time it is. When is he cooking? I guess he's preparing dinner, so it's 5:20. Something like that. And then the fridge. That's going to be a kind of wonky rectangle with rounded corners, and two feet on the ground. Here is this line because on the bottom, there's a drawer, here's the handle, and here's the name of the company. And then, he maybe keeps his pots on the fridge, he doesn't have any other space. Something like this. Maybe also the pan here. Super simple. Awesome. Maybe I want to make it a bit smaller. I'm going to go to my selection tool, draw all around it again. Tap the arrow, and now I can make it smaller a little bit. I still want it to be covered at least by a corner of the table, that will create this depth again. Awesome. Although I think, maybe the background has to move over a little bit. I want to shift it to the left a little bit because it's too close to this edge here, and there's too much free space. So let's see on the right layer and I'm just going to move it, just a little bit. We're going to make sure that we find a better spot for the pepper mill later on. And this is our messy sketch. It looks great all ready. We could even include some writing here. Something like maybe he wants to say, splendid, or something like that, which is a typical expression from the middle of last century. You're also going to include some sparkles later on. To just show some happiness. Yeah, just some positive energy in this kitchen here. Okeydokey. And in our next video, we're going to refine our sketch, make sure we place the things where we like them to be. And so we'll see you there. 10. Refined Sketch: [MUSIC] We're ready to refine our sketch now. First of all, we can merge our three layers from the messy sketch by just pinching them together and turn down the opacity a little bit. It's going to distract otherwise. Then we're going to add another layer on top. Now we try to make more refined lines that start with a window. We want to have a curtain. Maybe also some lines in here to just show those fringes. We have the window underneath. I guess I want to tint it dark. Let's see if that works. Yes it works. Erase the bars like this. Then we also want a little flower pot in here. We erase what's black. We can indicate everything else with lines we add later on, like this. These bricks are here, and here's the flower part lines, and then right away, it's going to be visible. We also have our clock here. Just a rectangle plus a circle on one side. The time we said it's going to be shortly past five or something, he prepares dinner. Here we have our fridge like this. I think I want it to be just whatever color with some line work in it. Here is the brand name. The feed are super simple. On top there's the pot and a pan. That's the background we don't need anything else. Now we have him here. This is his hair this's also hair. Here we have this ear. I guess I want to have those two lines in his ear and hair I think I want the hair like this. Here's his nose and his eyes. Then I like his eyebrows to be maybe kicking in the hair, maybe like this, maybe a bit smaller core. Then here we have his neck line little bit diagonal, maybe. His apron. I guess what we see is the upper part is wearing a bow tie. He's a very fancy cook. He wears a suit while cooking. Here's his body. The apron. Goes in this direction. Very cool. Here's his one arm. That means I need to erase part of the window. Here's one arm and here is his hand like this. Here is other arm like this. Has this hand and a bowl, this hand needs to be the bigger. Here we have the bowl. Let's move it over a little bit. In the bowl there's, whatever. He drizzles something down. That means we also need to erase here in the window a little bit. There we see his arm not like this. Now, we have, let's wait with a table. Why don't we exchange the colander and the pepper mill so the colander can be here? The handles and here, we have the pepper mill and here we can have it a little bit smaller. Then the knob on top. Then we can have maybe the tube, the mayo tube maybe, or is it mustard? I don't know. You decide. Can have that here maybe facing this direction. Having a little label on it. I will probably replaced the knife more here like this. The cutting board can stay where it is. But the possly, maybe is here. Just those messy lines. That's enough. Here we have our cutting board with the whole wall. There's this, maybe this onion is a bit too big, like this maybe and some rings inside and some pieces like this. Here we have a part with whatever and the spoon. There's also a neighbor, maybe something like this. I guess this is too crowded here. I guess I just wanted to go with two eggs maybe and the bottle. Maybe the eggs cover a little bit of the bottle will see. I guess that's plenty of stuff on the table. Let's go and add another layer underneath. Just get a nice rectangle where we can erase the lines if we want to. Like this. I'm going to make sure that I will erase or add another line here to just mark the height of the work top. You can erase some of the parts we don't need here. My pepper mill has lost his numb. Let's go back to the other layer. Let's add the numb. Sometimes with my palm erase parts I just drew. That's a problem because I had to turn off the palm rejection in Procreate itself. Because the palm rejection of Procreate would collide with the palm rejection of the Apple pencil. I had a lot of crashes in my Procreate app. Once I turn that off, you can do that in your general settings in your iPad. Once I turn that off, it's gotten way better. But now that also means I sometimes the palm rejection doesn't work properly ever since, but it's better than having it crashing all the time. Here we have the next of our table. Don't pay too much attention, let it look messy. Let it look lose. Because that's adding to the whimsical look of our illustration. Here, we're going to have one leg. This is the way I draw shoes all the time. They have a heel. This foot is a little bit in the air and they're very pointy. The other leg is maybe curved this way. The shoes facing this direction here, maybe like this. We can decide if you want to have some writing here or not but this looks gorgeous. In our next video, we're going to start laying down the colors. See you in the next video. [MUSIC] 11. Color Rough: We're ready now for our color decisions? Let's add another layer and we best add it below our sketch. Let's pinch those layers together. Let's recap our rules. We said we want to use a dark color. We want to use the negative space as a second color and we want to add a real color. We can decide which color we want to go. It doesn't have to be the natural color at all because it would make it super boring. We just add a color we like. Let's see what colors do we have? We could go with a purple or red. I think I want to try red this time. Let's go with a red and choose a brush just to lay down whatever color. Let's see how that looks. Let's make it a bit bigger. Let's make a blob here. Can I imagine this color with this kind of style? No. What about green? No. I think I might go with my turquoise shade. I think that's great. I think I'm going to go with turquoise and then I want to decide on do I want to include dots or dashes? I guess dashes are my favorite. Yes, I guess I want to go with dashes. What Halftone brush do I want to use? That's a cross hatching. This is already very nice. Or what about hatching maybe that's also cool. What I cannot recommend is that you mix halftone brushes and also that you don't mix dots and dashed lines. That makes it too chaotic. We want our illustration to look cohesive, like as a unit. If you mix up with too much of the brushes, then that doesn't look nice. Or do I want to go with maybe the irregular halftones? I guess what I like best was I guess the crosshatching. Just note that if you turn up the size of the brush, you will also turn up the pattern. That doesn't really matter, but it's just a useful information for you. I guess I want to go with this. Also a note. If you fill an area and you lift up, it's a pencil and draw over it again you will shift the pattern. It's not going to start at the same spot where you stopped. They might be some overlapping. It can be super cool because it creates an even darker half tone shade. Well, we can also do is, I don't think I want to go with black this time. I think I want to go with dark blue. We can also play with the opacity. So let's see, we draw this dark blue shade and then we turn down the opacity. Right away it looks gray. It's just maybe a more diluted color from the printing process. Because when we depict here is the screen printing process. If you want to hear more about that, you can check out my other class on mid-century screen printing style. I can only recommend this class it's super fun either. I think that's the colors I want to go with. Black. No, not black. We said dark blue, turquoise, play with opacity, enters the crosshatching brush. I guess I want to, right away make the [MUSIC] shade on the floor in gray. I also want the table to be in crosshatching, maybe a little bit smaller. Like this. Most of the items can be white I guess. We're getting a little splash of turquoise. I guess I want the curtain. Also with half tones like this and maybe also the clock. Just the face is white. I think let's move on to another brush. Nice line or rough. I guess I want the fridge to be turquoise. Also his army and his suit. Probably what's in the dish and the coal lender and maybe the foreshore, the parsley. That means here to maybe also the cutting board is maybe a little color and maybe the wine bottle. Then the pant is going to be dark blue. That's also for sure, as well as the shoes. Then the next is the table and the rest we'd gone to depict with line work. You guys, this looks fantastic. I'm really pleased with how this sketch turned out. We are also now done with laying down our colors. In the next video, we're going to start blocking out the colors for our final result. See you in the next video. 12. Color Blocking: [MUSIC] We are ready to lay down our colors now. It's a super fun and also super simple. I can show you a great trick here in Procreate. First of all, let's turn off the color rough. We're going to start by adding a new layer. This is the one for the shade below our little guy here and the table. As I already mentioned, if we lift up the halftone brush and put it down again to further draw, we might have some weird overlapping which we don't like. I show you a cool trick. What we do is we choose again our selection tool, freehand mode. Then we just draw basically some dot here underneath the table. Then we just choose our halftone brush. I guess we wanted to have the cross-hatching. Here we go. We just start to color. What that does is it only colors the selected area, which is super handy. Let's turn off the selection. Then we can turn down the opacity of this layer to have it in that gray tone we like, that is great. Since we turn down the opacity of this layer, we don't want to use it for any other color. Now, we are going to add another layer, because my aim is to have all the colors, if possible, on the same layer. That saves us a ton of layers, actually. The next layer is going to be my tabletop here, the workspace. For that, I also want to use dark blue and the cross-hatching. We are going to use the selection tool again. I pick it to get some straight lines, whatever wonky, but straight. We just tap in the corners. That creates a straight line, and we close the shape. We see everything else is stripy, just not the tabletop area, so we go back to our cross-hatching brush there, and then we fill this space as well. That also means we need to clean up a little bit here where our items are. We choose a brush to erase. That's the nice liner rough. That's a good decision. Let me just de-select and then start erasing. You don't need to make sure that you meet the line perfectly, due to the screen printing process, it happened that colored areas were shifted. Usually, for each color, there was a separate printing process. If they put the paper not on the absolute correct space below the mesh, that would cost just a little bit of shifting. We would have some areas without ink and some areas where ink would overlap. But that's super cool effect, if you ask me. It also helps to define our shape because it creates an extra outline once more. That helps a bit to define the shape. Here we have the parsley. [MUSIC] The only thing we need to make sure is that we have our shifted white areas always at the same side. Here we go. Next in this layer, let's turn down the opacity a little bit. Next in this layer is going to be the window and the legs of the table and the legs of our cute little guy here. For that, I'm showing you another trick. The window. Let's go to the window first. We do the same as we did with the table. We just tap down in the corners. But now we're not going to fill this area with the halftone brush, but we use our irregular filler here. It creates a colored area, but it still adds texture. I'll show you what I mean. If we draw this here, there's always going to be some areas with less ink. This is exactly the effect we want to achieve because it just creates more interest. It's not just dark color, it's more interesting. That's the window. I think we're going to erase something on the top of the curtain, and, of course, those lines here. We also want to make sure that we sometimes have some perfect lines, but sometimes not. If you can't see your sketch any longer right now, useful tool is to turn it into multiply the sketch layer that makes it more visible in your layer here. Next, and then we need to put our dark color, is the legs here, and we want to make sure that we have a little gap between the legs and the table. For those smaller areas, I'm going to choose my nice liner rough. I could also go with a sketcher rough that just creates some more interest in the outlines. They're not super sharp, but a little bit edgy, I show you. This is too edgy it's because my sider is too big. Here we go. It doesn't matter when those lines are a little bit wonky or not straight, that just adds to the overall wonky atmosphere. Here we go. It looks like he's tapping with his foot. By having the tip of the shoot pointing in a different direction, we create again a little bit of a three dimensionality. [MUSIC] I think I want to turn off one of my sketchers to just have it a little bit more clean to be able to see the edges better. [MUSIC] Awesome. Let's move on to our next color, which is going to be turquoise. We do the same trick. You start with the curtain here, and also our clock. Maybe I want to add another layer just on the corners. Now, we're going to move on with the fridge. I want to fill the fridge with the irregular filler again. That's why I also need my selection tool. I'm going to draw all around the table, but I don't have to erase anymore. Now I want to fill that with the irregular filler again. But I have a turquoise color but with still a little bit of a texture. Then our guy here needs to be turquoise as well. I'm going to go back to my nice liner rough. [MUSIC] For those smaller areas, I really don't mind when it's just filled with a color drop. There, we don't need so much interest. It wouldn't be visible anyway. But the neckline, I guess I want turquoise either. To define the outline a little bit better, I want to erase a little bit in the window. This is the shifted color problem we just mentioned. I want the whole here to be turquoise as well. Let's turn off our sketch and see how it looks like and if the colors are spread evenly. I really like it. It's only the line work that is missing. I guess I'm really pleased with what I see so far. I just want to erase just a little bit left of those table. Halftone colors here. But the rest looks amazing. That's what we're going to do in our next video. We're going to put down all the lines and make sure we switch between straight lines and dashed lines. See you there. [MUSIC] 13. Linework: [MUSIC] Here we go with our line work, so we need to make our sketch visible again, a straight line. I would go with a nice liner rough also would also looks nice, is the sketch rough or the sketcher itself. But what I would not recommend using is the nice line or mono and the nice liner or taper. Their edges are just too crisp. That doesn't really add to the whimsical illness of our picture, [MUSIC] so I guess I want to go with a nice liner rough. So far now I'm going to pick my dark blue color again and we'll add another layer. Here we go. I want to make sure I see the streaks here of my parsley and I want to indicate him here then we have this shirt peeking out here. Maybe we need to make a center line here to indicate the color of the suit and here's some things falling. Let's turn off the sketch and see how it looks. Oh so cool. I love it. I really like it. Let's go on. I'm pretty sure I want to do the outline with the dashes here, the outline of the face. But that's too sick. Let's go with this one here. Awesome. I also wanted to indicate here the flower pot lines. Now I see we forgot the turquoise color of our parsley in the window. Let's go back to that. Let's pick the nice liner and just indicate some clouds here and then we can indicate the lines within the parsley with our back to our line layer, with our dark blue dashes liner. Here we go. Just some spirals, messy, whatever. That's enough. The same as what we can do in here. Maybe the lines in his hair. I will indicate with dashes and I guess that's fantastic. Cool. Let's move on with our lines. We need to go back to our nice liner rough and draw more lines here. Here I see, I want to erase the turquoise below our onion pieces here and I also see I have some dark blue dots from the table top, so I also want to erase that. Let's go back to our linework layer. I think we're pretty good with our lines. Let's turn off the sketch though to see we need something. I guess I want to add some more lines, maybe dashes here, and maybe another line within the clock, but it's in one. Yes, I want to add another layer with white lines, especially dashes because I want to indicate those spiral thing is here in the bowl like this. Just to create a little bit more interests. Awesome. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. In our next video, we're going to add the last finishing touches, so we might add some, some writing, we might add some texture and maybe even [inaudible]. See you in the next video. [MUSIC] 14. Finishing Touches: [MUSIC] We're ready now to add the final touches. First I want to go and add another layer for our sparkles. I want to pick my nice liner again. Of course, we're going to use our dark blue again. I'm going to draw a cross like this and add those lines here to create this typical mid-century sparkle. I guess no mid-century illustration is proper without those sparkles. Here we go. Maybe circle here. Here we're going to add another one, [MUSIC] and maybe as well in the window this time with white. That's fantastic. That's already enough. We don't want to have it too overcrowded. I think I want to add some text in our dark blue. So we go to the wrench. We say add text. I'm going to pick my jitterbug font. I'm going to tap the keyboard symbol here and write, splendid. So he's super happy. You can decide though. I just wanted to show you all the options. You can decide if you want to keep it or not. I want to go with it for now. Next feature is super cool as well. We already talked about the stain brushes I have. I want to add another stain, like a greasy stain because in all of my cookbooks you will find those stains. I'm going to pick this one here. I always add the stains and the paper texture on separate layers. I will always turn those layers into multiply mode because it creates more depth and I will always add two different colors. I show you what I mean. Let's add another layer, turn it into multiply, and then we just duplicate it four more times. First of all, I want to start with a greasy spot thingy. First, I will always choose a light color like this yellow tone here. I guess I want to have it here in this corner and then on the next layer, I would choose a dark color like the black. I try to get it in the same spot. Now, I will play with the opacity because it's way too dark, obviously. Move it over here. I just want it to be there, but very subtle. For now you see there's a stain, maybe a little less. There is something, but it doesn't really jump into your eyes, but it's still there and it just adds to the overall composition. It just creates more interest. The next layer I would lay down the stipples, here we have this stipple brush. We can go and just draw over the whole Canvas, and of course it's too visible right now. Again, we play with opacity so that it's there a little bit to see. But it just creates some subtle interest. The last thing we want to do is adding the paper texture. I'm going to choose the next layer. Choose a yellowish color, and then go for paper texture brush. Let's say we want to choose smooth, and then I will just draw over the whole Canvas. Of course, it looks super awkward now because it's way too yellow, but we going to play with opacity in a second. On the last layer I just added, we're going to use a dark color again. Draw over it. Now we play with opacity. Turn it down, quite far down, and here as well so that we have a subtle texture here. It looks like actual paper. The reason why I always use yellow together with black, because if you keep out the yellow, the colors look a little bit dull. If you have the yellow in there, they make the colors way more vivid. I also see, I think I want to add some text here on my bottle and on my tube. The bottle is probably going to be oil so here in black. Yes, I think I want to add the black text, and let's write down oil. Let's see if it fits like this. Wonky, that's already enough. We just have to erase some of the oil here. For that we need to rasterize our text level, otherwise we can't erase. We tap the layer and we tap rasterize. Then I'm going to go to my eraser and just erase this. I think I also want to add some thin lines here. Is that the right layer? Yes, that's the right layer. Let's pick my nice liner, rough again. Yes, I want add another line here. Cool. Now, we want to add some mayo here in that corner. Let's add another text. Let's write mayo and make it smaller, way smaller like this, maybe. Then we can pull it in here. To have it a little bit more visible, we just duplicate this layer and this bottom layer we turn into the white color. Then we can just shift it a little bit and have this extra outline created what makes it much more readable. I think we are done. This is our final piece. You could go back and forth and check even more if there's something you see that you don't like or if you want to improve on another corner. But I'm super happy, I'm super pleased with how our illustration turned out and I hope so are you. Let's see us in the last video for our final thoughts. [MUSIC] 15. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Here it is, our final piece. I think we did really well. We followed all the style rules, we just used black, one color, and the negative space. We created an interesting linework using halftones as well. We created a whimsical character, breaking quite a few proportional and perspective rules. We created a happy and fun atmosphere and broke the stereotype of always having a woman preparing dinner. You might notice though, that I changed a few details after I was finished recording the class. That is also part of the process. Sometimes when you stare at one piece for a very long time, you might not be able anymore to decide what you like or if there's something bothering you, what needs to be changed. When we then take a break and come back to our work later, we have a fresh eye and mind again. Now it is time to upload your project to show off your work. If you want me to leave a constructive feedback in the comments, just let me know. But if you only want a pat on the back, that's also perfectly fine for me. Why don't you leave a comment below your peers work? I think everyone is super happy to receive some praise. If you enjoyed my class and you'd like the resources I've prepared for you, please leave a review it means a lot to me. You might also want to follow me here on Skillshare to get a notification whenever I upload a new class. I also share tutorials on YouTube. It might be worth it to subscribe to my channel there too. If you post your art on social media, please always tag me so I can see your creations. It is super encouraging and exciting to see what my students make out of the content they've learned in my classes. Thank you once more for staying with me. Happy creating, and we'll see each other in the next class.