Draw Your Dream Home in Procreate

1. Let's Go!: Hey there, my name is Cat Coquillette and I want to welcome you to my 20th Skillshare class! In today's class, you're going to envision your dream home and make it a reality through illustration. Fun fact about me, I don't actually have a permanent home anywhere. This is an Airbnb. Instead, I travel the world full-time as a nomadic artist, hopping from country to country and creating new artwork as I go. Instead of just one study home, I'm actually living out of a suitcase in a dozen or more places throughout the year. That's one of the reasons why I love dreaming up what my ideal home might look like and then illustrating it to make my vision a reality. In today's class, you're going to learn how to do the exact same thing. I'll show you how you can use reference photos to spark your imagination. You can even pull bits and pieces from one house and fuse them into your sketch to create a custom design that is all yours, and I do this all the time. Then we'll turn our sketch into a polished illustration and pepper and fun details like trees, props, and a pretty cool background. We're going to be doing all of this on our iPads using the drawing app, Procreate. Real quick, if you're watching this and thinking this is way beyond my skill level, I'm here to assure you that it is not. This class is for all levels. Whether you're already familiar with Procreate, or you're opening this app for the very first time, you're going to be able to follow along just fine. My teaching style is pretty straightforward. I break everything down into simple steps and each lesson is a bite-sized chunk that teaches you a very specific skill, like drawing a symmetrical line, or infusing some fun texture into your artwork. By the time you finish this class, you are going to be amazed with what you've been able to create yourself. Plus, you'll be picking up a ton of tips and tricks in Procreate all along the way. You are going to gain a wealth of knowledge that will come in handy for your future illustrations. For the Class Project today, you can either follow along with me to create this Bohemian beach House, or you can whip up your own custom home, whether it's a Queen Anne in the heart of San Francisco, a Balinese style doorway in tropical paradise, or even your own home that you're in right now. If you're looking for a cool gift idea, I've also drawn friends houses and then surprised them with the artwork, and that is a huge hit. Last but not least, I've also teamed up with my fellow Skillshare top teacher, Maja Faber, to provide you with five free Procreate brushes. That way, not only can you follow along with me for literally every brushstroke if you want to, but you can also keep a set of professional Procreate brushes that you can use in today's class and all of your future artwork. Massive thank you to Maja for hooking us up with these freebies. More free stuff, I've also created 10 custom color swatches that you can import directly into Procreate and use for today's artwork, as well as any future artwork that you create, no strings attached. Last thing. If you want to get a notification the next time I launch a class, go ahead and click that follow button up top. Without further ado, let's dive right in so you can start illustrating the home of your dreams. 2. Your Project: For today's class projects, I want you to think about what your dream home looks like. Because we're artists and therefore visual people, I've pulled together a ton of reference photos to help you get started. These are all images from unsplash.com, which is a stock photography website where you can download images to use for free, even commercially, which is awesome. I'll be using this photo as the base for my house. I love the simplicity of the structure, but right now it looks like it belongs at the end of a country lane, but my dream house belongs near an ocean. I'm going to be drawing in some custom elements to make it more unique and give it some beach vibes. You're welcome to follow along with every step to create the same artwork as me. Or you can go your own route. I pulled about 100 reference photos together for you to sift through, literally 100. If one in particular catches your eye, I encourage you to use that as your inspiration instead. You could also snap a photo of your own home if you'd like. If you're doing this, I recommend lining up the camera so what's a perfect straight on shots. We're going to be using the symmetry drawing assist tool a lot in this class so if your image really matches from left to right, it's going to be a lot easier for you. That's what I mean when I say get that straight on shot of your house. More stuff. The class assets. 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. Like I mentioned earlier, I have teamed up with my fellow Skillshare top teacher, Maja Faber to provide you with five of her best Procreate Brushes. I only asked for three, but she is a super generous lady so you're in luck and you get five. She makes and sells her own brushes on her website, and I am a huge fan of them. I've also designed 10 custom color palettes for you to use today. These are all color palettes that I use in my own artwork as well. You can use them in your dream home illustration that you create today, as well as any future artwork that you create. Consider this my gift to you so that you can continue creating beautiful illustrations in Procreate. These pallets are already turned into swatches, specifically for Procreate so I also made a JPEG of the swatches in case you want to use it in Photoshop, Canva, Illustrator or whatever programs you're using for digital illustrations. Last but not least, I am also providing you with a free paper texture. It's cold press watercolor paper that I scanned in myself at a super high resolution. I like adding paper textures in at the very end of my illustration as a finalizing touch, I feel like it just gives it a really subtle glow that elevates the piece as a whole. At the end of the class, I'll be showing you exactly how I do this. Also, just like all of the other class assets, you can keep this watercolor texture and use it on any future projects of yours with no strings attached. Let me show you where you can find the class assets and how you can get them onto your iPad. First, go to catcoq.com/dreamhome, all one word. There's a direct link down below in the class description if you don't feel like typing it out. Anyway, once you're there, go ahead and plug your name and email into the form which will unlock access to all of my class assets. Also, just a heads up. This also grants you access to my email newsletter as well as myers, I sent out about one email a week with brand updates, freebies, class updates, and other cool stuff. But you can unsubscribe it anytime. Anyway once you hit unlock, you'll be redirected to a Dropbox folder that contains all of the class assets for today. You can download them all in one go by selecting everything and hitting Download. Then you can send these assets directly to your iPad. If you're on a Mac, you can AirDrop everything to your iPad by selecting the files, right-clicking and choosing AirDrop, then you just click your device and they should shoot right on over. The brushes and the swatches will load it straight into Procreate and populate right into your brush library and your color palette library. If you can't AirDrop, there are also a ton of other ways to get these files to your iPad. The simplest way is probably by emailing the files to yourself and then opening them up from your mail app on your iPad. If you want to make it even simpler, you can load that class assets page directly from your iPad, complete all the steps, and then download the Dropbox files from your iPad itself and that way there's no transfer necessary and for the reference photos. I recommend that you go through them first and you decide which photo or photos you'd like to use as your reference for the illustration today. Then you can send just one or two photos to your iPad so you don't have to send 100 reference photos into your camera roll. For the paper texture, same thing. Once you send it to your iPad, it'll pop up in your photos, not in Procreates. The brushes and the swatches will go directly into Procreate automatically and then the reference photos and the paper texture will go straight into your photos app. Here's how to find everything on your iPad. Let's start with swatches. They'll appear automatically within your palettes. We'll dive more into this later. But for right now, I want to show you that they live right here and new brushes will appear under imported. Again, we'll get more into detail with where the brushes and where the color palettes are later in this class. But for now, I just want to show you a quick glimpse of where they are. For your reference photos and the paper texture, remember, they're going to be in your photo library. If you can't see them at first, then just look for your photo album called Recents and that's where they should be. Remember, I'm providing about 100 reference photos to go through and choose from so you only need to pick and choose a few to actually send to your iPad. You don't need to send everything there. The file I'm using is called _DreamHome.jpg so it should be the first in the list. You shouldn't have to sift through everything to find it. Now that you've got an understanding of the class project, you know where to find all the class assets and you've imported them into your iPad. Let's dive right into Procreate, starting with setting up our canvas. 3. Canvas Setup: All right. Now that we have all of the class assets imported into our iPads, let's go ahead and open up Procreate. This is what my gallery looks like. It's a collection of all of the artwork that I've been working on lately. What we're going to do is setup our own custom canvas size. To do that, I'm going to go to this plus sign on the top right-hand corner. Tap that once, and we have our canvas options here. Rather than going with the presets over here, I'm actually going to come up with my own canvas size. You'll see this grayed out rectangular box with a plus sign, go ahead and tap that once to come to your Custom Canvas page. The first thing I always do is switch it from pixels to inches. For this canvas size, I want it to be 24 inches by 30 inches. That puts me at 300 DPI with four maximum layers. Real quick. If you just tried to use those same dimensions, 24 by 30, and you ran into some issues, that is because Procreate actually limits maximum canvas sizes depending on your model of iPad. I'm using a 2019 iPad Pro and this is the maximum canvas size I can get. But if you have a different model of iPad, you might find that you need to get a little bit smaller with your dimensions. If 24 by 30 didn't work for you, go ahead and try 20 by 25. It's a little bit smaller, but the dimensions will be really similar. They're both vertical portrait canvas sizes. If 20 by 25 still doesn't work for you and you need to go a little bit smaller, go ahead and try 16 by 20. If you need to go even smaller, try 12 by 15. Last but not least, 8 by 10. All of these numbers I just threw out at you are all different canvas sizes you can try from large to small. If the larger one doesn't work, try one step down. But whether you're working on an 8 by 10 or the 24 by 30, you'll be able to follow along just fine. The dimensions, again, will be the same. They'll all be this vertical orientation. One more interesting thing I want to show you. When I'm working with the largest canvas size, 24 by 30, I only get four maximum layers. But if I were to switch this to 8 by 10, I'm going to get 70 maximum layers. The larger your canvas size, the fewer layers you'll have. But if you use a much smaller canvas, you'll have way more layers at your disposal. But I'm okay with only having four layers. I'm going to switch mine back to 24 by 30. In this class, I'm going to show you how I work with a maximum of four layers, which is a little bit restrictive. There's actually some workarounds for that and I'm going to show you that in this class. The rest of these things over here: color profile, time-lapse settings, canvas properties, I'm actually not going to change anything, but I do want to point something out in color profile, and that's the RGB color mode. Within RGB, I specifically use Display P3. If your settings look a little bit different here, it's again because of your model of iPad, but the important thing is to be working with RGB color mode. If you're already familiar with color modes, you might know that RGB color is for color that's viewed on screen and CMYK color is for color that's viewed printed out. I use RGB color mode for everything, including any products that get printed out. The reason I do that is because the print on-demand partners I work with, Society 6, Red Bubble, they all require RGB color modes for any files that I upload. It sounds counter-intuitive because you would think that a print on-demand website that makes products would want to have CMYK color mode. But for whatever reason, they all require RGB color mode. I use RGB for all artwork that I create, whether it's something that I draw in Procreate, something that I make in Adobe Illustrator or scanned in watercolors, I use RGB for everything. The reason I'm going into so much detail about RGB color mode versus CMYK is because I get a lot of questions from students about why I use RGB and that's why. It's because my licensing partners prefer that file type. Let's go back to dimensions, 24 by 30, 300 DPI, four maximum layers. We are all good to go. Go ahead and tap "Create", the top right-hand corner, and voila, we have our custom-sized canvas ready to be drawn on. Without further ado, let's get to the fun part, which is beginning our sketch. 4. Prepping the Sketch: Now that we have our Canvas setup, it's time for the fun part, which is sketching. You're going to be learning four primary things during this lesson. The first one is learning how to combine really fluid gestural sketching with very precise line work. I'm going to show you how to draw perfectly straight lines in Procreate, which really comes in handy when we're doing something like architectural drawings like today. Two, we're going to be utilizing the symmetry tool for our sketch. What the symmetry tool with Drawing Assist means, is that whatever we draw on one side of our composition gets replicated automatically on the other side of the Canvas, so you're going to be learning that in this lesson as well. Three, if you're taking a look at your reference photo, you might be a little bit overwhelmed right now because there's so much going on in the photo. What I'm going to show you is how to take a very complex motif and then distill it into its most basic, simple shapes. For this example, we don't need to be drawing every single detail in this house, but we just need to get a basic understanding of the shapes so that we can start infusing our own spin into them later. We're not sketching out every single piece of wood or nail, or door handle, but we are going to be getting the basic elements down so that we can add our own unique twist later on. Complex motifs, simple sketch. Last but not least, you're going to learn how to infuse your own unique artistic voice into the composition. We will be using the reference photo for the base of this sketch, but there is ample room for peppering in your own vision into your artwork. You don't have to go exactly step-by-step with what the reference photo looks like, you can add your own details. After all, this is your dream home, so you want to make it truly yours. Let's get started. First things first, we air in those brushes a little bit earlier, let's go ahead and find them. I want to find this paintbrush icon, tap it once, and this opens up the brush library. Now, I have a huge library with a lot of different folders. Yours might look a little bit simpler than mine, but the important thing is to look down here at the very bottom where it says imported, tap that. This is where you should see Mayas' brushes that you've imported into your iPad. What I want to do is go ahead and set up a separate folder to put them all in, just to keep it nice and organized. At the very tip top of my brush library there should be a plus sign. If you don't see it, then just go ahead and pull up until it appears. I'll tap that once, and now I have an untitled set which I'm going to name Faber Co, and then go all the way back down to the bottom under imported, find the five brushes that I imported from Maya and go ahead and select all of them by swiping right. I've got all five of her brushes selected. I'll scroll back up to my folder that says Faber Co, drive the brushes into the folder and then release. Now, all of Mayas brushes are contained within this one folder called Faber Co, so it's easy to find as we're illustrating. For me, I have so many different folders, it's just a way for me to stay organized with my brushes. Now with a Faber Co folder selected, we have all of the free brushes all in one spot. While we're here, I'm going to show you where the color swatches wound up. Up here at the far right, there's a little circle. Go ahead and tap that, and this opens up all of your colors. What I want to do is at the very bottom menu, tap palettes. Here, I can see all of the palettes that I imported in earlier. You can recognize them by their names; ice cream sundae, sandy shore, sail boats. We have a lot of options to choose from here, but we'll get more into that a little bit later. For now, I just want to show you this is where they landed in Procreate. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I'm going to do is turn on my drawing guide, with Drawing Assist. Go ahead and find your wrench on the top left, tap that to open up your actions and we want to go to Canvas and toggle on drawing guide. You can see on my screen that it's created this grid. That's awesome, that's what the drawing guide is, but we're going to be altering it a little bit. I'm going to be selecting Edit Drawing Guide. Right now it's on this 2D grid. I want to change it over here to symmetry, and now it's just one vertical line splitting the center of the Canvas. Because I want you to see what I'm doing on screen, I'm going to bring my opacity up to max and same with my thickness. I'm also going to change the color to something like a bright pink just so that you can see very well what I'm doing. Now over here on the far right, you'll see a button called "Options " Go ahead and tap that, and make sure that your Guide Options settings match mine. It should be vertical, rotational symmetry should be off, and Assisted Drawing should be toggled on. If yours looks the exact same as mine, go ahead and come over here and press "Done." Now that we have our drawing guide established, it's time to bring in our reference photo. Now, there's a few different ways that you can bring photos into Procreate, but I'm going to show you my favorite way to do it. Go over here to your actions, which is the wrench icon, and in the top menu bar, select "Add", and you'll see this option here to insert a photo. Rather than just tapping on that, I'm going to slide it to the left, and then choose this private option which is called insert a private photo. I'm going to go ahead and find that dream home photo right here, tap it once, and it will load right into my Canvas. Real quick, why did I insert a private photo instead of just doing a regular photo? When you're drawing in Procreate, it's recording everything you are doing, so by the time you finish your artwork, if you want to, you can watch a time-lapse replay of your work. Personally, I love this feature. I like being able to see my sketch go from start to absolute finish, plus it's a really cool thing to share on social media since videos do really well on Instagram and Facebook. This is where the private photo comes in handy. Since I inserted this photo privately, what that means is this photo is never going to appear in the time-lapse replay. Even though everything on my screen is being recorded right now by Procreate, this photo is going to be invisible. The reason that's important is because when I share this time-lapse video on Facebook or Instagram later, I don't want it to start with a photo of what I'm drawing, I want it to start with me sketching. This photo over here, I'll show you on the layers. Underneath inserted image, it says private, which means that's going to be invisible in the time-lapse replay. If you don't want people to see your reference photo from which you sketched, then go ahead and make sure that the photo you insert is private. Just a little hack for you for those time-lapse replays at the end. I've got my image in there, and I want to go ahead and resize it to fit better on the art-board. Go ahead and make sure that that layer is selected, and then clicking the arrow on the top menu to get to your transform. Now, we can simply pull it to have it fit a little bit better on that Canvas. What I want to do is make sure that it lines up perfectly with the middle of my symmetry line. Not over here, not over here, but the point of that house should be right in the middle of that pink line. Perfect. When you're ready to set the transformation, go ahead and tap that arrow one more time, and now that house is set, and it is time to begin our sketch. 5. Sketch: Basic Form: Now that we're ready for the actual sketch, let's go ahead and open up our layers panel. It's the two overlapping squares. Go ahead and tap that once. Now we'll see that we have the photo reference at the very top, that layer 1 with the assisted guide right beneath it. So I want to go ahead and do some rearranging. I'm going to grab that layer 1 by tapping and holding and just drag it straight up top so that it's the first layer on that layer's panel. Now whatever we draw on this layer will be on top of that house layer. The house layer will always be its own separate thing, as well as our sketch. That way, when we finish our sketch, we can go ahead and delete and remove that reference photo. But for now, I'm going to keep it in place. Because I want to actually be able to see what I'm doing with this sketch, I'm going to turn the opacity of this photo layer down a little bit so that when we sketch above it, we can actually see what we're doing. On this photo layer, you'll see over here on the right, there's this N, and that N stands for normal, so it's a normal blending mode. If you tap that N, it's going to open up a lot of other blending options. Right now they're not really going to do anything because there's nothing beneath this layer except for a white background. We'll get more into this later. But for now, I want to look up here at this line that says opacity, and bring that scrubber from the far right, which is the max, down to about 50 percent, 47, close enough. The point here is that we want to be able to actually see our sketch without having that photo behind it being so distracting. So if we bring down the opacity, that reference photo, we'll see our sketch much more clearly. I've brought that opacity down. You can go ahead and just click out of that by clicking anywhere, and now I want to select that layer 1. This is going to be my sketch layer. The first thing I'm going to do is go over here to my color palettes. Down at the bottom menu bar, it says "Classic". Go ahead and tap that. I prefer to sketch with like a bright red ink. I like working with bright red because it's much more visible for me than your standard gray sketching pencil. If you want to sketch with gray, go for it, or hot pink go for it as well. I like using this bright red because it shows up a little bit more. Remember, this is a sketch, so whatever color you're using to sketch, it's not going to show up in the final piece. It's just for your own visual reference right now. I like working with the bright red, so I'm going to start there. For my sketching pencil, I'm going to go up here to this top menu under my brush library, and I'm actually going to go with a Procreate default brush. I'll find it here in the sketching group. There's a lot of different pencils you can use to sketch, but my preference is peppermint. Choose whichever sketching pencil you like most. I like peppermint. This is not one of my favorite brushes, this is actually a default Procreate brush. So whether you imported the brushes or not, you should have peppermint in your brush library. Go ahead and make sure peppermint is selected. I have my opacity all the way up and that brush size is all the way up as well. Last thing I want to check is that my layer 1 is selected. I do not want to be sketching on that photo layer itself, I want to be sketching on this blank layer above it. Underneath where it says layer 1, it should say assisted and assisted, is there to remind us that whatever we draw on one side of this line, will automatically appear on the other. You can also tap your layer thumbnail and where it says "Drawing Assist", there should be a little check mark next to it. Now that we have double and triple checked, that we are on the correct layer, let's go ahead and start our sketch. The first thing I'm going to do is sketch out the basic outline of this house. This is where drawing perfectly straight lines really comes in handy. Let me show you. Whatever I draw on this side of the axis is automatically going to appear on the other side as well, and that is the glory of drawing assist. But I don't need two circles there, so I'm going to go ahead and find this backwards arrow to undo. You can redo by clicking the arrow just underneath it or you can do what I do and undo with two fingers. So tap two fingers on the screen and it will undo your last action. You can always redo with three fingers. But I want to undo, so two. Let's start with a basic outline of this house. Real quick, let me show you how I draw a perfectly straight line. I'm going to push my pen down. Draw a line as straight as I can, not release the pen and you'll see here that no matter what, my pen is still touching the screen, by the way, it's a perfectly straight line and it's being repeated on both sides of that axis because we're using drawing assist. If I want this to snap to perfect 15 degree increments, I'll take three fingers, put them on the screen. Now you can see that it's snapping in those 15 degree increments, which is awesome because I want a perfectly horizontal line that goes across the screen. It might take a little bit of getting used to and some trial and error, but just know that that's how you draw a perfectly straight line. I'll do it at the bottom as well. Bottom of the house, straight line, three fingers, hold down, and that will snap to a perfect horizontal or perfect 15 degrees, 30 degrees, 45, et cetera. Then I always release the pencil before I release my three fingers. Again, I'm going to draw my line, not lift my pen tip up from the screen yet, Wait for it to snap into a perfectly straight line, and then use three fingers, hold them on the screen, and then it's going to snap into those perfect increments. I always release my pen before I release my fingers. What I'm going to do is just go through and sketch out the basic outline of this house. Press hold, keep my pen tip touching the screen, and I actually don't need a perfect 15 degree increment here because it's just the roof of the house. So I'm going to go ahead and connect it, then draw the side of the house, keep my pen touching until it snaps into a straight line. Three fingers on screen to make it absolutely perfectly horizontal. We've got the back of the house completed. Let's go ahead and draw the front parts. Straight line, let it snap into place, three fingers, same thing with the roof, let it snap into place. But I don't need the 15 degree increments here because I'm just going to follow the reference photo. Now that we have the basic blocky outline of this house completed, it's time to start peppering in our own unique twist. 6. Sketch: Adding Details: Remember I want this house to be living on a beach, so I want to think about what a beachy house might look like, and then try to form this house into that vision. I'm going to show you how I do that. First I'm going to go ahead and put that check mark back on so that I can see my reference photo in the background, and then make sure that my layer is selected. Remember, we want our sketch to be separate from that photo reference, so you can always toggle the photo reference on and off, and toggle your sketch visibility on and off as well. As long as those are always on two separate layers we'll be good. Whenever you're sketching, make sure you're sketching on your sketch layer, not on that photo reference layer. I have my sketch layer selected, it's time to add in some fun details. This house has some pretty standard rectangular windows with standard panes in there. That's cool and it works for this house, but I think I want mine to be a little bit more interesting, so I think I'm going to go with some curved windows like this. I'll start with a straight line, three fingers so that it snaps at 15 degree increments, and I'm just going to draw a basic window with a dome up top. If you draw your dome and you don't really like it, you can always use two fingers to undo, and then give it another shot. Perfect. Maybe these windows on either side of the door also have that same dome shape. Three fingers with my straight line, and instead of a rectangular window up here, maybe it's also one big dome. Cool. Since this house should be a beach house and lives by the ocean, I think I'd like to have some balcony. Remember, we can totally make this our own. I think I'm going to put a balcony up top here instead of that chimney. My house is somewhere tropical and warm, so I have no need for a chimney but I definitely need a balcony. I'm going to go ahead and just sketch and make up some balcony to live right here in the middle. Maybe it's behind the steeple in the front, and maybe my balcony has a little roof to it. Maybe there's a window right in the middle and some smaller windows on either side. Now that I've drawn this window, I don't actually need this line right in the middle, so I'm going to go ahead and erase it. Your Eraser tool is right here in the center, and if you tap and hold it, you'll see this little notification pop down that says, "Erase with current brush." What that means is my eraser is the same brush as whatever I'm using right now, which is the peppermint sketching tool. If I were to try and erase it, it would be erasing with that peppermint sketch brush, which takes forever and I'm a little bit impatient. So instead of doing that, I'm going to tap my "Eraser", go down to the "Inking" folder, and switch to "Syrup", which is another Procreate default brush, which means you should already have access to Syrup, it's built into your iPad with Procreate. Remember it's under the "Inking" group, go ahead and tap "Syrup," and so now when we erase, we're erasing with the syrup brush, which is just a lot faster to do. You can always adjust the size of your eraser over here on the left to make it bigger or smaller. Cool. I'm working on this balcony up top that is completely make-believe and coming out of my head. One thing I think I want for it is some railing so that I can walk out onto my balcony and maybe lean against the railing and sip my morning coffee. Seriously, this is my dream house. Let's go ahead and put that railing in place. I'm going to go back to my brush, and maybe the walkway comes out to about here. Three fingers to snap it into place, and I'm going to go ahead and erase this bottom line here, it's no longer necessary. I'll tap my "Eraser", go ahead and get rid of that line, go back to my brush. I think I want to have some railing that maybe looks like an X. Three fingers to snap to those 15 degree increments. Sometimes I have to lift my palm off the screen because it gets in the way of my three fingers trying to make that 15 degree increment snap. If it's not snapping the way you want it to, just go ahead and lift your palm because sometimes it interferes. So three fingers for that 15 degrees and so forth. I have my balcony up top, I have this nice little walkway with the railing, and all my windows have this nice curve to them. Now I'm going to add that front door. Same thing, I'm just going to use my photo reference as a guide for the placement of that door, except in this case, I think I want to have an awning over the front door to match the same roof for my terrace up top. We can go ahead and just make it up and draw it in. First is the roof, and then, again, I want it to match that same curve that my balcony does. Maybe it looks like this and then connects, three fingers to snap it, and then I have some beam coming down. I just realized I should probably draw my base of the house. You know what? Speaking of base of the house, I think if this were my dream home and it were next to the ocean, it probably would be on stilts, I would think. I'm going to go ahead and add some stilts to this house because it's on the beach. It's probably on sand, to be honest, because I live super close to the beach in my dream house, so I'm going to come up with some basic structure so it looks like the house is on stilts to make it even more beachy exotic. I'm going to go ahead and create a platform, and maybe some little stilts. It's a pretty heavy house, so I think I need some support beams for my stilts. I like this too because I have this theme of curves that's starting to appear all throughout my composition. I'm going to go back over here to my layers, turn off the visibility of my reference photo, and take a look and see how I like it. This is actually one of my favorite things about being a creative and being an artist and creating illustrations like this. I can make it whatever I want it to be. In this case, we're using this basic reference image to get the skeleton of our concept down, but we're able to infuse all of these other elements. This reference photo is just a starting point for our creativity. In my case, I was able to add these round windows, my own private balcony up top, the whole house is on stilts because it lives in the sand. It's things like this that make it really magical to be an artist and an illustrator in particular, because whatever is in your mind, you can translate that onto paper, or in this case, it's screen. If you have some ideas like this for your own personal dream home, maybe you want to add a beautiful terrace or a swimming pool, but you're having a fuzzy idea of what that looks like in your head and you need a little bit of a boost. I recommend going through those other reference photos, there's 100 to go through, and look for elements within some of those other photos that you like and you might want to incorporate into your dream home. Maybe it's a really cool way of doing windows, or you like the way the staircase is laid out or the door in particular is really nice. You can pick and choose elements you like and infuse them into your own custom sketch. I do this all the time and it's called ''Frankenstein-ing''. It's where you take different bits and pieces from different reference photos, collage them together and create this new unique scene. The cool thing about that is you own that, that is all yours, that is your creation. You've combined a lot of different ideas together to create something absolutely new and unique and true to yourself. That's one of the really magical things about being an illustrator is being able to do that. If you're following along, you can do this too. Take a look at these different reference photos, find little bits and pieces from photos that you like, and then try to find ways to incorporate that into your dream home sketch. For my balcony and my house on stilts, I just made that up from my memory, but if I want to I could go through some of these other reference photos and base it off of a photo as well. If you don't feel confident to just go through and makeup what a balcony looks like, Google images. Find some images to base that vision off of so that you have a nice jumping off point. That's totally fine to do. I'm going to add a few more custom elements into the sketch before I call it a day and we move on to the next step. First of all, I'm going to go up to my layers, toggle off the visibility of my reference photo so that I can get a general idea of what this is looking like. Wait, I need stairs. I have no way to get to my home, so first things first, I'm going to add a ladder. Making sure that I'm on Layer 1, which is my sketch layer, and not sketching on that Private image. I'm going to drag down whatever my ladder might look like. Remember, three fingers will snap to those perfect 15 degree increments as long as my palm is not touching the screen. Perfect. My house is only accessible by ladder. A little bit tricky to get into, but I like the aesthetic. I think for my door I want to have a really cool window on it, something that looks like a Moroccan teardrop shape. That's fun. I'm going to add some interesting paneling into my windows just to flush out a little bit more detail. Maybe this semicircle repeats at the base, and then it has these wedges that come out almost like an orange or citrus slice. We have some nice empty space up top, I think I'm going to go ahead and add in some illustrative elements up here to make it look like rays of sunshine. That's fun. While I'm here, I'm going to go ahead and select my eraser and just erase out this unnecessary line. Cool. Go back to my pencil. I'm going to do the same thing for these windows, I'm going to add some paneling. Remember, you can always select your eraser and erase out the parts that you no longer need. I think I'm going to add a trim to this house as well, just as an opportunity to infuse some color later on. Let's draw some straight lines here, and maybe the trim comes up here as well. Now that I have all of the symmetrical aspects of this house completely configured, everything I've drawn has been reliant on the Drawing Assist right here, but now I want to start infusing a little bit more of a setting, so maybe some palm trees, some sky, ocean, sand, things like that. So let's go ahead and start adding in those setting details in the next video. 7. Sketch: The Setting: Now that we have the book of the sketch finished, let's go ahead and pepper in some of those really fun details to make this custom and unique to being your dream house. I'm going to take an overall look at this composition and the first thing that I need to add is some setting. For me, I like keeping things pretty simple so I'm going to establish my setting by just making a few lines. With my "Brush" selected, make sure that I'm on the correct layer. I'm going to start by deciding where the sky is and again, three fingers to lock that at a complete horizontal. Now everything above the house is going to be the sky and like I mentioned, this is a beach house. Next up, I want to find a place to put the waves. I think one more horizontal line, three fingers down we'll do it. That is all I'm going to do to emphasize where this house actually is. This top section right here will be representative of the sky, this middle section right here will be the ocean and then the foreground right here will be the sand or soil, whatever this house is actually sitting on. Simple as that, it doesn't have to be super-complicated, in my case, it's just a few lines. If your house lives in the rockies, maybe there's some mountains in the background may undo or if it's in the jungle, maybe there's a suggestion of really lush dense forests all around. But for me, I want to keep it very minimal, I want that background's not to command too much attention because I want the house to be the focus of this artwork. Now I'm going to add a few more details but at this point, I don't need the "Symmetry" tool anymore, I can go ahead and turn it off. I'm going to go back to my "Layers" palettes, tap the thumbnail from my sketch, and go ahead and tap "Assisted Drawing", and you'll see that it's turned off. It no longer says "Assisted Drawing" underneath that layer name. You can go ahead and tap that thumbnail again and see that it does not have a checkmark next to it. Now what that means is, whatever I draw on one side of the composition is not repeated on the other side. Let me quickly undo and see where we're at. I think the first thing I want to do is bring this whole composition down a little bit so that the sky covers up about maybe two-thirds of the composition and that way it really plays into the rule of thirds. I'm going to go to my "Layers", make sure that that sketch layer is selected, go to my "Transform" tool, tap, where it says "Snapping" on the bottom left and go ahead and turn snapping on. What that's going to do is make it a lot easier so that when I bring this illustration down, it'll stay locked right on that center grid. Let me bring it down just a smidge, I think right there is perfect and then you can hit that arrow again to set the transformation. Now I have my house at this bottom part of the screen. The sky is taking up about two-thirds of the composition and I think the first thing I'm going to do is add a moon right over here. What I'm going to do is draw my circle, but don't lift my pen up yet. My pen is still touching the screen, I'm going to use those three fingers, tap them on the screen and now I've created a perfect circle. Without the three fingers, it's a wonky mess that I drew first, like an eclipse but with three fingers down, it'll snap to be a perfect circle. I think the sun or moon, whatever this will be, I think that's a pretty good size for it. I've lifted my pen up and then I can lift up my fingers. Remember whenever you're editing shapes like this, trying to draw perfect lines or really snap to a 15 degree increment or draw perfect circles, always lift your pen off the screen before you lift your three fingers off the screen. If you were to lift your fingers before you lift the pen, it wouldn't quite snap to the shape you're looking for. I've got my sun, actually, now that I'm seeing it in the composition, I think I want to raise it a little bit. I'm going to go over here to my "Selection" tool. Right now it's set to freehand, which is perfect, so I'm just going to draw a selection around my moon, go to my "Transform" tool and move it exactly where I'd like it to be. That feels pretty perfect. Hit that arrow again, to set the transformation, and that selection tool is just a pretty easy way to quickly move something around on your artboard. Now that that "Assisted Drawing" is turned off, we're free to draw whatever we want on here without having to worry about it replicating on the other side. The first thing I'm going to do with my "Drawing" tool selected is add a little flag up here, it's a nice beach home and I think a flag adds some nice festivity to it. Plus, that'll be good for me to know what direction the wind is going in case I want to go surfing. This is my dream home after all and I've never gone surfing in my life, but in my dream scenario I'm an avid surfer. Speaking of surfing, the activity that I do not do, but I do do in my dream life, I think I'm going to go ahead and draw a surfboard. I think I'll put it right here leaning against the front of the house. I'm just free forming this right now based off of what I'm pretty sure a surfboard looks like. Now I'll go to my "Eraser" tool and I can erase out all of those unnecessary lines in the middle because that surfboard is in the foreground. I'm pretty sure surfboards have some cool line work design on the back, and then there's a some. Just by adding little props like this, it's really helping to set that setting and show exactly where this house belongs. Before I added the stilts or the flag or the sun or the surfboard, this house can probably belong just about anywhere, but now I'm looking for opportunities to infuse some extra elements so that it really anchors into a specific setting. For me, it's at the beach, maybe yours is in the desert or the mountains or the rainforest. Think about what other props might exist in that location and look for ways to put those into the composition to suggest that setting even further. One thing that will totally cell the tropical vibes of this house will be adding in a few palm trees. Before I start drawing the palm trees, I think I'm going to draw them on a separate layer just in case I want to move them around like I did with the sun. If I were to draw them right now on top of the sketch, I wouldn't be able to move them around separately, they would be on the same layer. But if I go ahead and go to my "Layers" and click this plus sign to add a new layer. I'll be able to draw my tree here on the second layer so that I can move it around later if I want to adjust it slightly. More layers just give you more flexibility and control over your composition. I have my new layer added and I got there by hitting this plus sign up here. Let's go back to my "Brush", still on "Peppermint" and I'm going to draw my first tree. It's a palm tree, so they're at an angle. I don't have to finesse it totally right now I just want to get an idea of that general shape of the palm tree and maybe there's one back here in the background. Maybe it's behind the house to add a little bit more visual intrigue to the composition and give it some more depth. You know what? I'm going to put one right here in front because why not. Perfect. Actually I do want to adjust this last final palm tree and just move it a smidge to the right, that is why I put it on its own layer. Let's go ahead and grab that by hitting the "Selection" tool, making sure that you're on freehand and then drawing around your palm tree, go into the "Transform" tool, actually I want to have more control so I'm going to turn "Snapping" off. Now I can really decide exactly where I want it. Maybe it's a little bit smaller, that's nice. I barely changed anything with that tree, I just made it a little bit smaller and moved it slightly to the left. But by doing so, I wanted to show you that by putting your trees or whatever elements you're working with on a separate layer, you can move those independently without making any destructive edits to the house in the background. As you can see, by turning on and off the visibility of the tree layer, they're all on their own layer and the house itself is also on its own layer. Looking at my dream home, I am really happy with it. I have established my very own beach house, added some unique architectural elements and also peppered in some palm trees, added a surfboard, even though I don't surf and some other elements to make it feel pretty beachy and added a sun over here in the top-right corner because summer is my favorite season. I am really happy with this sketch and how it's turned out. Now it's time to move on to the next step, which is exploring color. 8. Color Exploration: Now, it is time for the fun part. We have finished our sketch, and now it is time for color exploration. Consider color exploration like an intermediate phase between sketching and then working on our final artwork. It's something I like to do to establish what color palettes are working best for this particular artwork, and it also helps me embrace trying a bunch of different color palettes and seeing what's working, what's not working. Because oftentimes, the idea I had in my head doesn't turn out to be the final palette. I definitely want to try it out and get it out there on screen to see what it looks like, but most of the time I do this, I wind up trying out some color palette that was unexpected, and I love it. Color exploration is a really fun intermediate step, and it's about being playful, trying new color combinations, and maybe getting out of your comfort zone a little bit with color and seeing what works best for you. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I'm going to do is, up here at the top left, it says gallery, go ahead and tap that. Now I'm going to hit Select, select my canvas, and hit Duplicate. Go ahead and hit that X. What I've done is just made a copy of this artwork. If you've taken my other Procreate classes, you're probably pretty familiar with this step. Consider each canvas its own Save As. I'm going to start making a bunch of edits to this new canvas and things are going to get reshuffled. Layers are going to get flattened or deleted altogether, but if I ever need to, I can go back to a previous canvas, make some adjustments, and then move forward. Think of duplicating your canvas like a contingency plan. You can always go back to a previous canvas or maybe three previous canvases, if we've gone really far with it, make some adjustments, and then move forward again. This is basically a way of saving your work so not all is lost. What I'm going to do, just to keep this nice and organized, is hit Select again, grab both of my artboards, and then hit Stack, and then hit the X. Think of a stack like a group. It's where you can put several canvases together in one area, and it helps your overall gallery stay nice and organized. Let's go ahead and open up our stack. The first thing I'm going to do is click where it says Untitled Artwork, and I'm going to rename this sketch. Now I'm going to click where it says Untitled Artwork of the second canvas, and I'm going to call it Color Exploration. Renaming canvases like this just helped me stay more organized. Let's open up the color exploration canvas. I'm going to open up my layers, and I'm going to clean up my layers a little bit. I'm going to swipe left on my reference photo and hit Delete. Now I'm going to merge the palm trees with the house. All you do there is you just pinch your layers together to consolidate them onto one layer. To begin our color exploration, I'm going to open up my layers, make sure that layer 1 is selected. At this point, it should be the only layer besides your background color on the entire board. Then I'm going to go to my transform arrow and just drag this to be a lot smaller and tuck it into the top left-hand part of the screen. The reason I'm tucking it in the corner like this is so that I can duplicate my sketch 1, 2, 3 more times so that I have four custom color palettes to choose from and explore. But let's go ahead and zoom into this guy and get started. The first thing I'm going to do is select my brush. Then in the inking group, go ahead and grab syrup again. If you remember before, this is the same brush we used as an eraser earlier when we were sketching. Syrup is selected, and again, this is a Procreate default brush, so everyone should have syrup in their brush library under the inking group name. If you're wondering why we haven't used Maya's brushes yet, it's because I'm saving those for the final illustration. But for right now, it's all sketching and filling in some color blobs. It's things that aren't going to be visible in the final illustration, so right now I'm using Procreate default brushes. Syrup is selected, and now I'm going to go over to my colors. Down at the bottom right menu, select palettes. Here is where all of those color swatches I imported in earlier appear. Ice cream sundae, sandy shore, sailboat, they should all be up here at the top of our palette menu because we imported them into our iPads. Let's see. I'm just going to go ahead and pick one to get started with. I'm really drawn to this tangerine chocolate palette, and I think that could be really interesting in the setting. I'm going to tap where it says Set Defaults, and that way this becomes my default palette. It's just easier to find when I need to. Now I'm going to go to my layers, hit this plus sign to add a new layer, and then click it, drag it underneath the sketch, tap that layer name, hit Rename at the top, and I'm calling this tangerine chocolate, which is the same as my palette name, so it's just easy to remember. It's important to have this color layer underneath our sketch layer so whatever we draw on this layer will still have the sketch visible above it. I'm going to go back to my brushes, double-check that syrup is selected, go to my palettes, and I'm going to start with the largest part of the illustration, which is the background. I'm going to choose this bright pink for that. That is very blobby, but this is the way that I do color exploration in Procreate. It doesn't have to be perfect whatsoever. It's time to fill in that selection, so I'm going to grab my pink circle, drag it to the middle, and I haven't released my pen from the screen yet. It's still touching, which is why I see color drop threshold up here at the top. If I were to drag this all the way to the right, the threshold would fill to 100 percent and fill in my entire canvas. But instead, I just want it to fill in the area I've selected. So it looks like 45 percent, anywhere honestly, besides 100 percent is doing that for me. Once I release the pen, then the color fill has completed. The reason I'm pointing this out is, if you're filling in your blob and the entire screen filled in, then that's a color threshold issue. Just remember, keep your pen touching on the screen until you get the threshold that you're looking for. Once it's filled in exactly the way you'd like it to be filled in, then you can go ahead and release your pen from the screen. We're going to dive more into color threshold later, but for now, I just wanted to point it out that, yes, it does exist. Now I'm going to fill in the second largest part of the screen, which will be the foreground rate here. Let's go back to my palettes, and I like this nice tan sandy color. I'm just going to go through, really blobby shapes, and fill it in. Last but not least, I'm going to fill in the ocean. So I'm going to go back to my palettes, select this dark navy teal, and then fill in that background shape. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect whatsoever. The purpose of this color study is to find a color combination that's working really well for you, and something that you want to move forward with for your final illustration. Plus, it's about having fun with color and trying some different things. Next up, I'm going to select this dark brown, and that's going to be the roof of my house and the roof of my balcony, and can also be the baseboard of my house as well. I think for the main color of the house, I want to try this nice lighter pink. I'm just going to go through, draw a very rough outline, and fill it in. Sometimes I'll use color fill and other times I'll just fill it in manually with my brush. I'm just going to fill in a few more areas. I really like this teal, this really dark blue so that's going to be the base for my palm trees, and then I'm going to go to this light brown to fill in the trunks of the trees and the railing for my balcony. It can be that ladder as well. For the trim of the house, I'm going to go to white, just to break it up a little bit and give it some breathing room, and maybe that front door is white as well, and the flag. I think I'm going to go back to that hot pink that I used for the sky to fill in these windows, and use that same hot pink for my surfboard. Cool. Last but not least, I think I'll fill in the sun with the same light pink that I'm using for the house. As you can see, this is super loose and that's totally fine. It's just to give us an idea of color balance and what colors are working well, making sure that these overlaps have enough contrast, and just getting a general idea for that vibe that we're going for. Color is a really important factor in that. This is looking pretty good. If I go over to my layers, I can go ahead and turn off that sketch layer and turn it back on. If I don't want to see any of those red outlines, I can hide that for now to get an even better understanding of this color. This color palette, tangerine chocolate, is looking pretty interesting, but I've got room to do three more, so I'm going to go ahead and utilize this space and try out three more palettes, and see which one I like best. 9. Color Studies: First of all, I'll turn my layer visibility back on, and with my tangerine chocolate layer selected, I'm going to go ahead and swipe right on layer 1 as well and hit "Group." Now what this means is both of these layers are contained within the same folder. It makes it pretty easy for me just to swipe left on my group, hit "Duplicate", and I have my brand new group that I can now use my transform tool by selecting that arrow, I'm going to turn snapping back on, then just bring it over to the right, we make it a little smaller, hit the arrow to set the transformation, and now I can try out a brand new palette over here. I'm going to open up my layers, toggle on and off the visibility of my new group just to make sure I'm working on the right one, select that tangerine chocolate layer, and now go back into my palettes and choose a new one. Let's see. I like this West Coast one that fits the vibe of this beachy house. So I'm going to make that my defaults, and then start with this very light blue to be the background. Before anything else, I'm going to go to my layers, select where it says tangerine chocolate, hit "Rename" and I'm going to call this West Coast, and that way it matches the palette that I'm about to be using. Now I'm going to click that color, drag it over, and this is where color threshold really comes into play. As you can see, I only filled in the background but the rest of the colors have actually keyed into the same blue. If I were to bring it to 100, it doesn't fill the whole canvas with blue, but what it does is affect all the other colors on this layer. Remember, my pen is still touching the screen, which is why I'm still able to adjust the threshold. Instead of bringing it to the far right, I'm going to bring it as far left as I possibly can, this threshold right now is only at one or two percent, and then release my pen. By making that threshold very restrictive, that means that it only changed that one color, not all the colors on this layer. So by the end of this class, you will be very familiar with color thresholds, but for now, just keep in mind that as long as your pen is touching the screen, no transformations have been set and you can adjust that threshold by moving to the right and moving to the left. Then once you lift your pen from the screen, that color drop fill has been set. But one of the cool things about color threshold, is it remembers the last threshold you used. So when I dropped that blue and it was between one and two percent, so now I can just click release, and I don't have to hold my pen down every time because it's going to stay at that one or two percent, so it just makes it a little bit easier. Let's go into my palettes, I'm on West Coast. I think I'm going to keep the sand, the same sandy color. This might even be the same color. It's a little bit later and now, I'm going to fill in my ocean with this medium range teal. I'm going to select this very bright red for the sun and for all the windows. For the trim of the house, I'll go with this really dark brown, and I'm going to make the house itself bright white. Because some of the colors are a little bit similar from our original over here, I'm going to be manually filling those in instead of using the color drop, so this is what I mean. I want the roof to be this lighter of the two browns, but that's going to go ahead and erase out that railing, which is fine, we'll just draw it back in. Let's fill in this area, and I also want the platform for this house to be a lighter brown, which because it's similar to the brown we used over here, just means that we will be redrawing a few areas, which is totally fine. I'm going to switch back to that dark brown for the trunks of these trees. This one I've got to draw in overhead, and I'm going to draw over that ladder with the darker of the two browns. While I still have this palette, I'm just going to make that balcony a dark brown as well. For this one, and I think I'm going to use that same sky blue to fill in the door. If you ever get sick of always having to go into your palettes, then coming back out, and going into your palettes, changing colors, coming back out, one quick workaround is over here. It's the color dropper, it's this little square with rounded corners. If you click that, you'll see this color dropper pop up and you can drag this anywhere on your art board and you'll see that wherever you leave it, it changes the color over here in your palettes. So if I want to quickly changed to white color, I'll just tap that square, move the color picker over here to the whites, and notice up top that it changed here as well. So I'm going to hit that square, grab that red, make sure it changed up top, and then I can just fill in. That color picker is just a nice little shortcut instead of constantly opening up palates, selecting a new color, closing palettes, drawing with that color. If you just want to be really quick like me, you can just go ahead and use the color picker as a shortcut. Last but not least, I'm going to again use that color picker, grab that red, and change the color of that flag. Cool. I have two very, very distinctly different color palettes and each elicits its own unique vibe. I'm actually really drawn to this one, I thought I was going to be going with the pink and navy because that's my forte with colors, but I'm really liking this retro inspired by this bright orangey red and this muted blue mint background. I think it looks really nice, especially offset with that neutral of the brown and the tan. But let's go ahead and try two more. But before I make copies of these, I got to do one quick thing to my canvas. If you remember, way back when we set up that canvas initially, it gave us a maximum of four layers. If you look over here on our palettes, we're actually at the max right now. We have layer 1, layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4. The background color doesn't count towards our four layers. If I try to add a new layer by clicking this plus sign, I'm going to get a message up here that says maximum limit of four layers reached. The solution for that is we are temporarily going to make this canvas a little bit smaller just to fill in the rest of the colors, so we have more layers, and then when we're ready to move on with the final illustration, we're going to bring that canvas size right back up to where it used to be. I'm going to go over here to my wrench to open up my actions, and on this top menu under Canvas, I want to select "Crop and Resize". Now I'll tap "Settings", toggle on re-sample canvas and change it from 24 to, let's try 10. So now our canvas is only 10 by 12 and 1/2 inches, go ahead and press done and it doesn't really look like there was any visible difference. The canvas still has the exact same dimensions, but in fact it's actually a lot smaller. If we go over to our layers panel now, I'm going to select the group for tangerine and chocolate, swipe left, hit duplicate, and we're able to add more layers now to our canvas because we made the canvas size quite a bit smaller. So because this is not final artwork, we're still exploring color and we're still in our sketch, it's totally fine to work on a pretty low-res canvas. We just want to make sure we have high res when we're working on our final illustration. I have my new group selected, I'm going to hit my transform arrow, bring it down to the bottom, and then hit that arrow again to set the transformation. For this one, I think I want to try this sandy shore palette. I'm going to set that as my defaults and again, start with the largest real estate, which is that sky, I'm going to have be that nice minty color. Go back to my layers, select the layer that shows tangerine chocolate, rename it to my color palettes name, which is Sandy Shore, and now I can do the same thing I did before, click and drag in that color fill. For this one, because the roof and the main body of the house have such similar colors, I think I'm also going to use the same black to add in some more details that I'm not using on the others. If you ever feel like you're not really getting a good idea of color and you need to add even more details within that color, that's totally fine to do as well. I've got three palettes, they're each really holding their own and they each have a completely unique and different vibe from the others. I think I'm going to do one more just to get a very well-informed decision of the color I want to use moving forward. I'm going to go back to my layers, swipe left on that tangerine chocolate group, hit "Duplicate", and then go over to my palettes and I've actually really been dying to use this mid-century modern palette. I'm going to start here with that peachy pink. Now I'll go back to my layers, make sure that entire group is selected, hit the arrow tool, and then move it down to this bottom corner, press the arrow again to set the transformation, and go back to my layers, change the name of tangerine chocolate to mid-century modern so that it matches the color palette name. Same as before, I'm just going to start filling these in. Now that I've created four custom color palettes, I can take a broad look at all of them and look at pros and cons, see which one I am most drawn to that I want to move forward with. To be totally honest, I thought it was going to be this first one, tangerine chocolate, which is why I started with it, but I think I am most drawn over here to the West Coast palette. I really like this retro inspired color palette, especially that orangey red against the desaturated minty teal background. I'm taking a look at all of them, they all stand up very well on their own and have their own merits, but the one that I would ultimately like to move forward with is right here, it's the West Coast palate. So just by doing this color exploration, it helps me get out of my color comfort zone a little bit, try some new unexpected things, see what was working, see what wasn't working, and ultimately net out at a really good place that I want to use as a starting point for my final illustration. For you, I hope you also had the same realization. You were able to try out some different styles of color palettes, Find one that really suits you and your illustration style and something that you're comfortable moving forward with, and without further do, let's go ahead and get started on the first steps of our final illustration. 10. First Layer: Now that our color studies are complete, it is time to begin our final illustration. I'm going to be breaking this down into step-by-step. We're going to start with the very first layer. Let's go ahead and get started. First things first, I'm going to go back to my gallery, hit "Select", select that original sketch, and hit "Duplicate". Now I'll tap the "X" turn, select, grab that sketch, and move it to the end of the stack, and now I'm going to tap where it says sketch and change it to layer 1. This just helps me stay organized. As you can see, they're starting to become a progression of canvases as we move along with our illustration. So we go from Sketch to Color Exploration, and this is going to be the first layer of our final artwork. If you look underneath the layer name, you'll see that it says 24 by 30. That's perfect because that's again and that really large canvas size that we want to be working on for our final illustration. Let's go ahead and tap that canvas to open it up. The first thing I'm going to do is open up my layers and I can go ahead and delete that photo reference, and then merge my two sketch layers together, again just by pinching them together. Remember the name of the game here is to work with as few layers as possible since we're restricted to just four layers with this huge canvas size. Right now, we're only at one layer and that's the sketch, so that's a perfect starting points. Just like with the color exploration, the way I want to start this is by filling in that background with a dominant color. We can go ahead and do that by tapping the background color thumbnail. I'm going to go down here into my palettes, and the palette I want to move forward with is right here, it's West Coast, and that background, remember, is that really light sky blue. So I'll tap that once and the whole background has gone ahead and changed. Now I'm going to go into my palettes by clicking this circle at the top right. My last default was set at Mid-Century Modern, so I'm just going to go ahead and tap set defaults on West Coast because that's the palette I'm moving forward with. Let's go back to our layers, and I'm going to add a new layer by hitting this plus sign up top, and I'm going to drag this new layer right underneath the sketch. You know what? While we're at it, let's just go ahead and stay organized, so I'm going to tap where it says layer 1, hit "Rename", and I'm going to call this Sketch. Again, this just helps me differentiate that sketch layer from the first layer of our illustration, which is right now called layer 2. I'm going to go ahead and tap "Layer 2" and turn on Drawing Assist. Procreate has remembered that the last time we used Drawing Assist, it was along this vertical axis. You can still see that line coming down right now. So when we tap the thumbnail and turn Drawing Assist on, it's going to remember that last setting and then just reproduce it. So if the last time, you used Drawing Assist, it was along say a horizontal axis, or maybe it was a quadrant and you had all four, it's just going to do the exact same thing. But since the last time we used Drawing Assist, it was along this vertical axis, it's going to apply that as well. If for whatever reason you don't have this Drawing Assist option, remember, you can get there by going into your actions and under Canvas, turn on your Drawing Guide, and then select "Edit Drawing Guide", and make sure it's on Symmetry, Vertical, and Assisted Drawing is turned on. With all of these settings selected, you can just press Done. So we have Assisted Drawing enabled for our layer 2, and again, you'd have that reminder because underneath the layer name it says Assisted. Let's go ahead and choose our first brush to get started. I'm going to go to my Brush Library, and remember I started that folder called Faber Co. We've got five brushes to choose from. Three of them are texture brushes, and then these two right in the middle, Smooth Filler and Monoline2, those are drawing brushes. I'm going to use Smooth Filler as my dominant drawing brush for this illustration, because I like having a little bit of rough edges and texture within my brushwork, but if you'd like to have something a lot cleaner and smoother, then you should go ahead and use Monoline2. But for me, I want some texture, so I'm going to use Smooth Filler. Next, let's go into our color palettes, and the way that I'm going to be coloring in this artwork, is by working on the house first, and then doing the extra elements like the palm trees and the surfboard. Then, last but not least, I'm going to do the background which is the water, the sand, and the Sun. Knowing that I'm starting with the house, the color I want to start with is going to be the color that's furthest in the background of the house. Taking a look at my color exploration, it looks like it's going to be this light brown color that covers the roof, the windows, and the platform that the house is on. I'm going to go ahead and select my light brown, go back to my layers, double, triple, quadruple, check that I'm on the correct layer, which is a completely blank layer that has Assisted Drawing enabled, and it is sandwiched between the sketch layer and the background color. With that layer selected, I'm going to go ahead and start my drawing. I'm going to start with the roof of my balcony. Remember I'm going to draw a straight line, hold that with a pen touching the screen so that it creates a perfectly straight line, and then use three fingers to place on the screen so that it snaps at perfect 15 degree increments. Now I'll just bring it out to here, and I'll do the same thing with my upper roof. I'll draw my line, hold it until it turns into a perfectly straight line, three fingers so that it snaps to a perfect horizontal, release my pen, and then release my fingers. One thing I'm noticing is it's a little bit tricky to see my brown line work underneath the sketch, so I'm just going to go back into my layers, and on my sketch layer, I'm going to tap that N that stands for normal, and bring that opacity down to about 50 percent. That way I can see my line work even though that sketch is on top of it. Again, it makes sure that we still have the layer 2 selected, and let's go ahead and continue filling in that roof. Now that I have this entire area perfectly contained, it's time to fill it in with color. I'm going to zoom in quite a bit so that I can see these edges really perfectly, drag from my color, drop, keep my pen touching the screen, and you can see right now that there's this white halo around my brushwork, and that's because the brush I'm using has some texture on the edges. It's not a perfectly smooth brush. So because of that, I want to really take note of that color threshold and drag it as far to the right as I possibly can to fill in that halo without filling in the background. For me it looks like it's going to be something around, there we go, 83.9 percent. Yours is probably going to be slightly different from mine, but I don't mind if there's a little bit of a halo in there, but you can always fill it in with your brush later if you don't like that look. But because I'm going to be adding so much texture to this, I actually don't mind that it gets a little bit rough on the edges. So we have our roof filled in for the terrace. Let's go ahead and get those windows up here while we're at it. So straight line, hold it until it's perfectly straight, three fingers so that it snaps at 15 degree increments, and then I'll draw my window. I went a little bit over the lines down here, so I can just click and hold my eraser, which means it's going to erase with the current brush, which is Smooth Filler, and I can just go through like this and erase any line work that was unnecessary. I'll go back to my brush and fill in the main area of the roof. If your color drop ever just fills in the entire screen like that, remember, you can use two fingers to undo, and it looks like I just didn't connect that area all the way. So if whatever shape you drew isn't perfectly contained, then add that color drop threshold is going to fill the entire canvas. If that ever happens, just go ahead and look for the area which in mine it's right here, and just make sure that you're filling that shape in all the way. Let's try this again. Perfect. At this point, I have filled in all the brown to match my color exploration. But that color exploration remember, is pretty rough, so I'm just going to look for other areas that I think that brown might belong. One area I see is going to be this awning over the doorway, so I'm just going to go ahead and add that in with brown as well. Now I'm just going through and smoothing out some of those rougher areas so that it feels a little bit more consistent. But again, it doesn't have to be completely perfect. Now that we have the first layer of our illustration completely laid out, let's go ahead and add some texture to it. 11. Roof Texture: Now, it is time to add some texture to our roof. To do that, I'm going to start by opening up my layers and unchecking this box just to hide the visibility of my sketch. I don't want to delete the layer altogether because I want to open it up again later, but for now, I just don't want to see it because I don't want it to be distracting from the texture that I'm going to be laying down. I'm going to hit that plus sign to open up a new blank layer and this is going to be my texture layer, so I'm going to tap where it says "Layer 3", hit "Rename" and just call this texture. My texture layer should be directly underneath the sketch and right above that primary brown layer. Let's go ahead and tap the thumbnail for texture and turn Drawing Assist on and we know it's on because it says "Assisted" right under the layer name, which is texture. I'm going to tap that thumbnail one more time and also enable clipping masks, so go ahead and tap "Clipping Mask" and we know that it's enabled because you'll see a teeny, tiny, little arrow that bends and points down to the layer beneath it. What the clipping mask does is whatever I draw on this texture layer will be contained within whatever shapes I have drawn on the layer directly beneath it, so let me show you real quick. You don't have to follow along with this. I'm just going to choose a random color and start drawing in. As I draw this, you can see that that drawing is only appearing in the areas where there's something drawn on the layer beneath it. If there's nothing drawn on this background, then we won't see any of that texture, but if you turn the clipping mask off, you'll be able to see that all of those lines still exist. But for us, we want clipping mask on so that whatever texture we apply is only applied to those brown areas. But that was just an example, so I'm going to undo what I just did, two fingers, two fingers, two fingers, two fingers, there we go. I have my texture layer, clipping mask is enabled, and so is Drawing Assist, so this is where we want to start. So let's go ahead and get our texture brush. I'm going to open up the brush library and I want to first try out this Gouache Soft Grain. Fun fact about this brush, I didn't actually ask Maya for it, but she offered it over to me. She was like, "You have to try this one out," and I did, and it's amazing. I'm now using the Gouache brush on a lot of my other artwork, so massive thank you to Maya for suggesting that we use the Gouache Soft Grain in this class. I think it adds a really nice texture and it completely came out of left field for me so that's the one I'm going to be starting with. Now, I'm going to open up my color palettes, select that same brown that I used for that primary level of the house and then go over here to the bottom menu and tap "Classic", and I'm just going to bring that brown down a little bit so that it gets a little bit deeper and darker. The original was up here somewhere, but I'm bringing it down just to make it slightly darker. Let's double-check that we're on the correct layer. Clipping mask is on, Drawing Assist is on, and I'm going to bring that brush size up to 100 percent and opacity is also at 100 percent. Let's start filling in this brush. As you can see, it's really subtle and that's what I love about this brush. That means that you can slowly build up this texture and it won't be too overwhelming. Let's add a little bit to the roof of this house, the windows, and the harder you push down with your stylus, the more that texture is going to show up. But I like using a nice, gentle, medium pressure with my stylus so that I can really slowly build that texture. Remember, since we have Assisted Drawing turned on, I really only need to texturize 1/2 of this illustration because it will automatically be applied to the second half. I'm really liking how this is looking, except here, I think it's a little bit too harsh of a transition. What I'm going to do is go back to my color palettes and select that original brown, and now I can actually paint that same texture back in to blend the texture we put on top of it. If you want it to be really nice and subtle, you can paint back in the original color with that same texture brush. Now, I'm going to go back to my palettes under classic, bring it back down to that slightly darker color, go to my brushes, and I'm actually going to apply a second texture just to make it more interesting. For my second texture, I want to try Speckle Grain. Let's see how this looks. It's really slight. You can see it here, it adds these splatters on top, but because it's so slight, I think I'm going to go back to my palettes and make it a little bit darker. Now, let's give it another shot. That's nice, so it's adding this really nice splatter finish and I'm just going to pepper in on top of this roof in the darker areas and same thing with these windows. I'm really just adding the Speckle Grain on top of the area where I already added some texture, so I'm not texturizing the entire window. I'm just looking for opportunities to add some depth. I'm adding selective texture so it almost looks like there's a lighter area and then it gets slightly darker as that window recedes. Same thing, I'm just going to pepper in a few speckles and maybe a few more over here, and before we finish texturizing, I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to go back to my colors, select that original brown, and now make it a little bit lighter. Now, I'm going to add some of that speckle texture of the lighter tones in as well, just to break up that flatness and make it a little bit more interesting. I'm just going to add a few little touches of this, not too much, and that way I have a really nice dynamic texture happening. I used two separate texture brushes, the Gouache Soft Grain and the Speckle Grain, and combined over this flat artwork, it's really brought a lot of dimension to this. Let me show you what it looks like before. I'm going to turn off the visibility. It was a very flat piece of artwork, but with that texture layer applied, you see it adds a lot of depth and intrigue in your illustration, which I absolutely love. Now that we have the base of our illustration down, we have that primary color already established and laid out on our page, let's go ahead and work on the second color that we'll be using. 12. House Color: Now that we have our primary color and the texture already laid out and established, let's go ahead and work on the next layer which is going to be the paint's color of the house. I'm going to start by going back to my gallery, hitting "Select, " selecting that house, and hitting "Duplicates". Hit that "X" to unselect, and I'm going to tap where it says Layer 1 and just change this to Layer 2. Again, you're really starting to see this progression. Let's go ahead and open up Layer 2. The first thing I'm going to do is go over here to my layers, turn my sketch back on, and then I want to consolidate the texture layer with that base color. Again, you can do this just by pinching the two of those together. Now we have two layers. We have the sketch layer, and then we have that initial brown coat with the texture applied. The reason that I merged those two layers together is, again, because we only have four maximum layers we can work with. So any opportunity I have to consolidate layers or delete layers that are no longer necessary, I'm definitely going to take it. If I ever want to go back and make some adjustments to that texture, I can always go back to my gallery, open up Layer 1 again, open up my layers, and I still have that texture saved. This is what I mean about having a contingency plan if I ever want to go back a few steps, but I've already flattened that layer, no problem because I can always go back to my gallery, find that previous artwork, make some edits, and then move forward again. This is really just a form of non-destructive editing techniques. I'm continuously building upon this illustration, but I'm doing it in a way that I can always go back if I need to. That's why we're making so many duplicates as we go. Let's go ahead and open up our Layer 2. In my layers now, I should have that sketch layer, and I have that brown layer with the texture applied. Because I like to work from back to front, let's go ahead and tackle the main color of the house, so the house paint. Looking back at my color study, it looks like I used that white creamy color. Let's go ahead and open up our palettes and finds that. I've selected it. I looked up here at my color indicator and seen that it's changed to white. Let's go ahead and go to our layers, hit that "Plus" sign to add a new layer, let's go ahead and tap it, and turn on Drawing Assist. Now whatever we draw on one side of the canvas will automatically be applied to the other. I have my new layer selected, I'm just going to go ahead and drag it underneath that brown. The sketch layer should be at the very tip-top. That initial color we laid down should be under the sketch, and then at the very bottom is going to be the new layer that we're working on. Now let's go to our brushes and I'll change mine back to smooth filler, so that's selected. Quadruple check if I'm on the correct layer. It's always a huge bummer when I've completed 20-30 minutes into an illustration and then I realize I'm on my sketch layer or I'm on the wrong layer. So it's always important to go check your layers and make sure you're on the right one. But this all looks good. What I'm going to do is consider my reference photo and start filling this in. It looks like the bulk of this house is actually going to be that white color. Remember I'm keeping my pen touching the screen so that I get that perfectly straight line, and then three fingers to walk it at a perfect vertical. I'll do the same up here, three fingers. The rest of this I actually want to be filled in. If I were to just grab this color picker, drop it in, it would fill in the entire background. I definitely don't want that. So two fingers to undo. Even though it looks like this white is perfectly contained with this brown layer above it, it's actually open. If we go back to our layers and turn off the visibility of that brown, all we really did was make two lines that then got duplicated on the other axis. Of course when we try to fill it in, the entire canvas is filled in. What we need to do is connect these lines. I'm going to go back to my layers, turn back on the visibility for that brown layer, tap the "N", and bring the opacity down a little bit because I want to actually be able to see what I'm doing on my white layer. With that white layer selected, I'm just going to willy-nilly connect these lines. It doesn't have to be perfect at all. I just want to make sure that this shape is outlined entirely and there's no gaps so that when I fill it in, it only fills in where the shape is, not the rest of the canvas. Now if I go back to my layers, click that "N", and bring the opacity back up, I can see that I've gone ahead and filled in exactly what I need to for the house. That might seem complicated, but I promise that as you become more comfortable with Procreate, it'll become a little bit more intuitive with how you fill in these areas and how you layer the colors as well. But for now, let's go ahead and add some texture. Again, I'm going to open up my layers, unclick that sketch so I'm not distracted by it. Instead of adding a new layer for the texture like we did last time, I'm going to show you a slightly different way to do it. If you tap the thumbnail of your layer and select Alpha Lock, what that's going to do is very similar to your mask. Don't follow along for this part I'm just going to show you. With Alpha Lock turns on, anything I draw is only going to be contained to that same layer. Anything I draw outside of that layer won't be visible. It's really similar to what the clipping mask does, except with Alpha Lock, we can do that on the same layer. We don't need to add a layer above it like we do with a clipping mask. But I'm going to go ahead and undo what I just did because it was just a quick example, and let's go ahead and add some texture. I'm going to open up my brushes and start with that same gouache soft grain, then go to my color palettes. I'm actually going to use this cream color above the white to create the shading within my texture. Let's go back to Layers, double-check that we're on the correct layer and that Alpha Lock is turned on and so is Drawing Assist, and now we can just start filling in that texture. Again, it's pretty subtle, but I actually like that. I think it adds some nice visual intrigue. I don't want to overdo it, so I'm just going to add a little bit more. Now I'm going to switch my brush back up to that speckle grain. Go to my Palettes, under Classic choose something a little bit deeper and darker, and then make just a few really gentle brushstrokes to add a little bit of that speckle grain texture. I always err on the side of underdoing the texture rather than overdoing it. Just like that, we have gone ahead and texturized the second layer of our house. From here on out, it's just going to be continuing to work from back to front and filling in some more of those details. Let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson. 13. House Trim: Let's continue to build up this house from back to front. I'm going to go back to my gallery. Same thing as before. Hit Select, select Layer 2, and duplicate it. Hit that x and now tap where it says Layer 2. I'm going to change this to layer 3. Let's go ahead and open up that duplicate. Following that same set of procedures, let's go ahead and open up the layers. Turn on the visibility of that sketch and merge those first two layers together. Now we have the sketch up top, those first two layers plus their textures combined under one layer, and then the background color layer. I'm going to hit that plus sign to set up a brand new layer, tap the thumbnail to turn on drawing assist. I'm going to leave it right there in the order so it's directly underneath the sketch and it's right above that main house layer so it's kind of sandwiched in between. Whatever we draw on this layer is going to be drawn on top of this existing house that we've done so far. Let's go ahead and go to our color palettes. Because I'm working from back to front, I'm going to add in those dark brown details which are things like the ladder and the house trim. I've switched my palette to that dark brown. Let's go to brushes and go back to the smooth filler. Make sure we're on the correct layer and that assisted is turned on. I'm going to start filling in some of those details, starting with the trim of the house. Again, my pen is still touching the screen so I have these perfectly straight lines and then three fingers will snap to those 15-degree increments. Then I'm going to zoom in to fill it in. I'm going to play with this threshold a little bit. My pen is still touching the screen. I want to see how far I can push it. Looks like I can get to about 94 percent and release the pen. I want to make sure that I've connected that area all the way so that when I fill in the color, it stays contained within that shape. I'm going to go outside of my sketch a little bit to do this railing. If you ever need to draw outside of your sketch because you'd like to adjust the shape of something, that's totally fine to do. Consider the sketch, just guidelines. Again, this is an area where I'm going outside of my sketch, but that's totally fine. Let's go ahead and texturize this brown area. I'm going to open up my Layers, select that brown, and hit Alpha Lock, turn off the visibility of my sketch so I can see what I'm doing, and then go into my colors. Under the Classic menu, drag this down to make it a little bit deeper and darker. Go to my brushes and start with that soft gouache. Now let's see, that's actually really nice. I love seeing that speckle tone come through on that railing. I'll do the same thing for the ceiling of the house and a little bit on the ladder. Now I'm going to go into my brushes and grab that speckle grain. Instead of going even darker, for this one I'm going to go a little bit lighter. You can always go down here to your palette, select that color to see where it started, and then bring it up just a smidge to make it a little bit lighter. See, it's little details like this that are really nice and really add a lot of depth and interest into your illustration. Even though it's so subtle and you can really only see it if you zoom in, it's touches like this that make your illustration feel very professional. I'll add a little bit to this ladder. Cool, I think that looks great. Since we have four maximum layers we can work with and right now we're only utilizing three because that background color doesn't count towards our layers, let's go ahead and add in that blue paneling that's on the bottom of the house from that color study. I'm going to hit that plus sign to add a new layer, click it, and drag it underneath that paneling layer we just did because I want that blue paneling to be underneath the ladder, and then tap that thumbnail and turn drawing assist back on. In my brushes, I want to go back to my smooth filler brush and in my palettes, I want to select that dark blue. Double-check I'm on the correct layer and that assisted is enabled. Let's go ahead and turn that sketch back on and start filling in that blue. You can see here that that blue is behind that dark brown of the ladder and that's because of the layer order. This is the blue layer. If we were to drag it above, then it would hide the ladder. But because it's underneath that dark brown layer, that ladder is still visible, which is perfect. Let's go ahead and add some texture to this dark blue. I'll tap the layer, turn on Alpha Lock, go to my brushes, select the gouache soft grain, and in my palettes down here in the bottom menu, I'll choose classic. Let me make it a little bit deeper and darker. Again, I'm not filling in the entire blue area with this texture, I'm just going to do it in select areas to add a little bit of dimension so I don't have as much texture over here than I do over here on the left-hand area. I'm going to go back to my brushes, switch it to speckle grain, go back to my colors, find that starting blue, make it a little bit lighter, and then pepper ince some areas of that light blue speckle grain. It's nice to add behind the ladder because it really helps that dark brown pop out a little bit more. Now that we've got the base of this illustration established, let's go ahead and work on the next layer which is going to be the windows and the door. 14. Windows & Door: Let's start filling in the windows and doors. I'm going to do the same step as before. Go back to my gallery, hit "Select", select that last layer and hit "Duplicates". Hit that "X" to unselect, tap where it says Layer 3 and change it to Layer 4. We're really starting to see the progression as this house gets built. Let's open up that Layer 4, go into my layers and consolidate everything except the sketch. So I'm going to squeeze all three of those together, so now the sketch is on one isolated layer and the rest of the illustration is all on its own layer. I'm going to hit that plus sign to create a new layer and turn on drawing assist, and I'll go back to my brushes, grab that smooth filler, and according to my color study, it looks like the center of these windows is in that same bright red as the sun. So I'm going to go over here to my colors, under palettes and grab that same orangey red. Back to my layers, make sure that I'm on the correct layer with assisted turned on and make sure that that layer is above the main artwork layer. Let's go ahead and start filling in our windows. This is going to be another case of me going slightly against the sketch where I can start infusing in so that my own artistic sketches that might be slightly different from what the initial sketch had. In this case, I'm going to add two panes to this window that are slightly different sizes. One thing to keep in mind before I fill in the color is, I want to keep an eye on that color thresholds because we are working with a brand new color and our palette. So I grabbed it, my pen is still touching the screen and I've got to find a nice balance, I don't want the entire screen to fill in, but I want enough of this box to fill in. So it looks like 44, that's doing it for me. Let's drag the other color in and start filling in the other panes. Same thing here. My sketch didn't quite have enough data, so this is the point where I'm deciding what these window panes look like. I'm going to zoom in pretty tight just to make sure I'm not drawing over the top of the house. I think I'm going to have this sunshine embellishments be red as well. For this one, I don't really need to use color fill because it's a small enough area, I can just manually fill it in. I'm going to smooth out these ends. May bring my brush size down slightly just to have a little bit more detail and control here. Perfect. Time to fill in the window panes, have my little cut eye window up here. Remember you can always grab your eraser and erase out any unnecessary marks. Last window. I think I'm just going to smooth out this area a little bit with my eraser, so it feels a little bit more consistent and smooth, and now let's add some texture to these window panes. So I'm going to go back to my layers, select the "Thumbnail" and turn on Alpha lock, go to my color palette, select the "Classic", bring that red down to be a little bit deeper. Go to my brushes, grab this squash soft grain, and I'm going to turn my sketch off so that I have no distractions. Now I can just start filling this in with some very, very slight texture. Now for the second texture brush, I'm going to go back to my brushes, grab that speckle grain, go back to my palettes, start with that initial red and maybe make it a little bit lighter. Now I'll put my speckle grain down here at the bottom to contrast the darkness of that gouache texture. It's really, really subtle, but it adds a lot of sophistication. Cool. I think that looks great. Let's go ahead and add in that front door. For this, I'm going to go back to my layers, hit that plus sign to get a new layer, and I'm going to drag it underneath the window pane layer. Let's go to my brushes, grab that smooth filler, color palettes, and it looks like my door is that same light blue as the background. Back to layers, and don't forget to turn on drawing assist. At least that's one of those things where if you forget it and you start drawing, you'll know immediately that you forgot it because whatever you're drawing, it won't be replicated on the other side. So let's turn the visibility of my sketch back on, and this should be pretty quick, it's just a rectangle. Now let's add some quick texture, so I'll go back to my layers, select the "Thumbnail", turn on Alpha lock, go to my brushes, start with that gouache soft grain. Go to my palettes, and under classic, find something a little bit deeper and darker, and I think I want the shading to be up top, and now I'm going to switch to the speckle grain, use something a little bit lighter and add some speckles at the bottom. Perfect. Let's turn off our sketch to see how that looks. Cool. We're really starting to see our dream house bloom into real life. So let's go ahead and continue with these embellishments. 15. Embellishments: Now that we have the main assets of this house already completed and illustrated, let's start adding in some of those fun embellishments that we have in our sketch, like the surfboard and flag or whatever it is that you've drawn in to set the setting for your house. First things first, I'm going to go back to Gallery. Hit "Select", grab that canvas, duplicate it, hit the "X" again. Then I'm going to rename this Layer 5. Let's open it up. Same as before. I'm going to go into my layers, turn that sketch back on, and then smash everything together except for the sketch. We're back down to only having two layers. We have our sketch layer, and then we have that entire house flattened into one layer. Let's go ahead and hit that plus sign to create a new layer. I'm going to start by illustrating the surfboard right here. This is actually the first time that we're not going to turn on Drawing Assist because this is where the asymmetrical part of the illustration starts. I just want to have one surfboard leaning against the left side of the house. I don't also need one replicated on the right side, which means we don't need that drawing assist anymore. We're pretty much done with that for now. In terms of layer placement, this is actually perfect. We have the sketch up top, and then we have our house layer at the very bottom, and then our layer for the surfboard or whatever embellishments that you are going to be putting in there is right in the middle. I'm going to go to my brushes, switch it to Smooth Filler, go to my colors, and grab that bright red for the surfboard. Back to my layers to double, quadruple check that I'm on the right layer and I'm going to start free-handing in the surfboard. For this, I'm actually going to be adding the texture as I go. I'll go back to my layers, hit that thumbnail and select "Alpha Lock". Go to my brushes, grab that Gouache Soft Grain. In my palettes under classic, I'm going to make this red a little bit deeper. Now, I can start gently brushing in that soft grain texture. Now, I'll switch to that Speckle Grain. Go to my colors, find something much deeper and darker and start peppering in that speckle texture. I think for this, I'm also going to choose a lighter speckle just to make it a little more interesting. We'll go back to my colors, go back to my original red. You get a little bit lighter and add in some of that light speckle laptop. Now, it looks like in my sketch, I have this vertical bar that comes down through the middle of the surfboard. I'm going to go ahead and add that in. We'll go back to my layers. Hit this plus sign to make a new layer, go to brushes, back to smooth filler, color palettes. I think for the middle of the surfboard, I want to use this really dark brown. Because I want this dark brown line to be contained within the shape of the surfboard, I'm going to use a clipping mask for that. Go ahead and tap your layer thumbnail and select "Clipping Mask". Now, as I draw this line that splits through the center of the surfboard, I can go way outside of the lines of the surfboard, but it is still contained because I have the clipping mask on. One thing to take note of here, if I were to try to fill it in right now, the entire surfboard is going to fill in with brown. The reason that's happening is because those lines weren't contained. Two fingers to undo. I'll go back to my layers. Tap this layer and turn the clipping mask off. You can see now that these lines aren't actually connected. When we tried to fill in that section, of course, the entire layer filled in, so two fingers to undo. What I'm going to do is just quickly connect to them. That way they fill in in the entirety. Now, I can go back, select that layer thumbnail, and turn that clipping mask back on. Clipping masks are great, they give you a lot of flexibility. Let's go ahead and add some texture to this center stripe. I'm going to tap that thumbnail, turn on Alpha Lock, go to my brushes, grab that gouache, color palettes, think it a little bit darker, and start filling in. The bottom is really nice and dark and then it gets lighter on top. I'm going to switch now to the Speckle Grain. Go back to my starting brown, make it a little bit lighter. Add a few speckles up here at the top to give some dimension to the surfboard. Now, that I finished drawing the surfboard and adding that stripe elements, I can go ahead and squish those two together so they're on their own layer. Now, for the final touch, I want to fill in this rudder right here. I'm going to make a new layer. Go to my color palettes. I'm going to choose this white. Go to my brushes, select Smooth Filler, and I'm just going to freehand draw it in. Perfect, and quickly add some texture. I'll go back to my layers. Select that layer, turn on Alpha Lock, grab that gouache brush, change my colors to that tan-yellow, and just add a little bit of dimension. Because this is such a small, tiny element, this little rudder of this surfboard, it doesn't take up too much space. I'm just going to skip that Speckle Grain because I don't think it's necessary. Going back to my layers, I'm going to pinch those two together. The surfboard now exists entirely on its own layer. We're working with three layers right now. We've got our sketch, the surfboard, and the house itself. One thing I'm noticing is the store needs a door knob, otherwise, how am I going to get into my dream house? Let's go ahead and add that in. I'm going to hit that plus sign to open up a new layer. Go to my brushes, grab Smooth Filler, and I want my door knob to be white. I'm just going to freehand draw it in like this and then add a quick texture to it. Select that layer, hit Alpha Lock. In this case, I'm going to grab my Speckle Grain, change the color back to that tan, and give it a few taps with the Speckle Grain so that it has a little bit of texture associated with it. At this point, I'm going to consolidate my door knob and my surfboard onto one layer just to be conscious of how many layers I'm using, since I only get four. Then last but not least, I'm going to add in the flag. I'll zoom in, add a new layer. Make sure that my Smooth Filler is selected. I'm going to go back to that bright red. I'm just going to freehand in this flag. Then I can quickly throw some texture on it by selecting that layer thumbnail, turning on Alpha Lock, switching to my gouache brush, making a slightly deeper, darker color, and pepper in a little bit of texture. Perfect. Now, I'm going to pinch that together with the surfboard and door knob and do my final layer of embellishments for that teeny, tiny flagpole. I'll switch my brush to the Smooth Filler. Switch my color to white, and draw that ball on the top of the flag. Bring it down to the house. For this again, it's so tiny that I'm not going to bother adding any texture to that little flagpole. At this point, I can go ahead and pinch that together with the other embellishments. Now, all of our embellishments are completed. We have the sketch on its own layer. We have those little embellishments, the door knob, the surfboard, and the flag, all on their own layer, and we have that house also existing on its own layer. We are very close to being finished. Let's go ahead and add in those trees. 16. Trees: Now that we have our dream home illustrated, we've added some extra embellishments. Let's go ahead and start adding in some greenery with some trees. Exact same steps. I'm going go back to gallery. Hit "Select", select that canvas and duplicates. Hit the X, and then tap where it says "Layer 5", and I'm sure you guessed this already, but we're changing it to Layer 6. Let's go ahead and open it up. Same drill as before. I'm going to go ahead and flatten the elements into the house so that I'm back down to two layers. I have my sketch layer and then I have everything else consolidated into one layer, and then, of course we also have our background. I'm going to hit that plus sign to get a new layer and that's the exact placement for it. I want it to be underneath the sketch layer and above the house layer. Now, taking a look at my color exploration, it looks like the trunks of these trees are that same dark brown as the trim of the house. I'll go up to my color palettes and change it to that dark brown. Go to my brushes and make sure that I'm on smooth filler, and let's go ahead and draw in that first tree trunk. Before I fill it in, I just want to zoom in on those corners and make sure that that shape is contained in its entirety so that when I fill it, it only fills in that shape, not my entire canvas. Now that our tree trunks are drawn in, let's go ahead and add some texture. I'm going to open up my layers, temporarily hide the visibility of my sketch layer, select that tree trunk layer, and turn on Alpha Lock. Now, I'll go back to my brushes, select that Gouache Soft Grain, and in my color palettes, and our classic, again, choose something a little bit darker and then start gently brushing in that grain. For me, I'm just going to keep that texture on the bottom of the tree trunks to add some depth. Now, when I switch my brush to the Speckle Grain and change my color palette to something much lighter, I'll add that speckle grain to the tops of the tree trunks. Cool. So our tree trunks are completed. Let's go ahead and add in some leaves. We'll go back to my layers, hit the plus sign to add a new layer above the tree trunks. Go to my brushes, change it back to Smooth Filler, and in my color palettes, I'm using that dark navy blue for the palm tree leaves, and so that I have some guidance, let's go ahead and turn that sketch back on and make sure that we're working on this fresh new layer. For this, I use the sketch as a rough guide for how we want those leaves to be placed. But now that I'm actually illustrating it, I have an opportunity to add in my own stylistic touches, and for me, that's adding a serrated leaves instead of these really smooth flat leaves that were in the sketch. Now, I'm just going to make some minor adjustments and connect those palm leaves to the trunk. Cool. One tree down, two to go. I'll do the same thing here, using my sketch as a really rough guide, but then adding in my own stylistic leaves to this tree. I'm just going to smooth out some of these areas and time for our last tree, and now I can go ahead and open up my layers, turn off the visibility of my sketch, and do a little bit of cleaning up if necessary. Cool. Let's add some texture to our leaves. I'll open up my layers, select the layer thumbnail for the leaves, and turn on Alpha Lock, and I'll go to my color palettes, choose a slightly deeper blue, and change my brush to that Gouache Soft Grain. Now, I can start filling in some texture into these leaves, and then I'm going to go back to my palettes. Start with my original blue. Think of a little bit lighter, and then switch my brush to that Speckle Green. On the opposite side of the leaf from where I added that dark blue texture, I'm going to add the lighter blue texture. So that was actually pretty simple. We have our stylized palm trees, which have really helped set the scene for this tropical beach house. Now, at this point, we have one more step in our illustration, and that is adding in the background. 17. Background: Last but not least for the composition of our illustration, let's go ahead and add in that backgrounds. I'm going to go back to Gallery, Select, grab my canvas, Duplicate it, hit the "X", change this to Layer 7, and go ahead and open it up. Now I'll open my layers and I'm going to consolidate all my layers again so that again I'm down to two layers; the sketch, and then that main house with all of the additional elements and the trees. Let's go ahead and add in that sand and ocean. I will hit that "Plus" sign, and this time I want to click that layer and drag it underneath the house layer because this is the background, so it needs to be the very bottom layer. I will go to my brushes, change it back to smooth filler, and my color palettes, and I'm going to grab this darker mid stone for the color of the ocean. I'm just going to draw a line straight across my canvas, keeping my pen touching the canvas so that it snaps into a straight line. Now with three fingers, I'll snap it to a perfect horizontal. I release the pen, then release my fingers. I'm going to do the same thing with the bottom line. Straight line, pen is still touching the screen, three fingers to snap it to a horizontal, and voila. Let's go ahead and drag in that color. Perfect. Two lines and one fill equals a beautiful ocean. Let's go ahead and add some texture to this. I'll open up my layers, select the layer thumbnail, and hit "Alpha Lock." I go back to my palettes, choose a slightly deeper green. Go to my brushes, change it to gouache, and start filling in a little bit of nice texture to this ocean. Perfect. For this one, I want that water to be really smooth, so I'm actually not going to add the speckle grain, I'm just going to keep that gouache in there. Let's do the sands. Back to my layers, I'm going to add one more layer. Now that layer is above the ocean layer, but it is still beneath the house layer. I'll switch my color to that sandy cream color, which is perfect for sands. Go to my brushes, change it to smooth filler, and the same thing, I'm just going to draw a line across my canvas, keep my pen touching the screen so that it snaps to a perfectly straight line, three fingers to lock it to a horizontal axis, and then I can drag in and fill. This is looking really good. Let's go ahead and add in some texture to that sands. I'll go back to my brushes, select the Gouache Soft Grain, go to my color palettes, choose a slightly darker cream, go to my layers, tap that "Layer" thumbnail, and turn on Alpha Lock. Now I can start adding in that slightly darker gouache texture to the very back of this illustration where the sands meets the ocean. I'm also going to add some underneath the house to create a shadow as well since my house is elevated on stilts. Remember, the harder I press down with my brush, the darker that texture is going to appear. Perfect. I'm going to go back to my brushes, choose that speckle grain, which is perfect for sand actually, and then go back to my palettes. I'm going to have the speckle be white so it looks like that sand is really glimmering in the sun. I'm going to add some white speckle here in the closest part of the foreground. I think it's getting a little bit too washed out here, so I want to smooth this transition between shadow and foreground. I'm just going to change my color back to that original cream, and then add some speckle tone right here to smooth out that transition a little bit more. Again, it's really subtle, but it's those subtle changes that make a big difference in the quality and professionalism of your illustration. Perfect. I'm really happy with this setting now. We have a very clear sky, ocean, and sand in the foregrounds. Now, let's just add that sunshine. I'm going to go back to my layers, pinch together the sun and the sand to merge them into one layer, and then click that "Plus" sign to add a layer above it and this will be the sun. Taking a look at my color reference, it looks like that sun is that same bright orangey-red. I'm going to go to my color palettes, select that same tone, go to my brushes, grab the smooth filler, and draw it in. Just like we can draw these perfectly straight lines in Procreate, we can do the same thing with circles. Here's how. I'm going to draw as best I can a perfect circle, but with my pen still touching the screen, it's gone ahead and smoothed out those lines for me. You can see up here, it's a ellipse created. Now if I use those three fingers, place them on the screen, it's going to lock into a perfect circle. I'm just going to go ahead and make it about the size I want it. Perfect. Then drag in my color fill. plane a little bit with that color threshold so I can get it as close as they possibly can before it fills in the entire screen. Perfect. Let's add some texture to that sun. I go back to my layers, tap the "Layer" thumbnail, hit "Alpha Lock", go to my colors, bring it slightly down to be a deeper red, go to my brushes, change it to Gouache Soft Grain, and now I'm just going to start very gently adding in a little bit of a shadow here following that same curve as the shape of the sun. Perfect. Subtle is best. Let's go change it to that speckle grain. Go back to my colors, start with that original red, make it a little bit lighter, and then add some speckle on the opposite corner. Perfect. Now I'm going to go back to my layers, turn off that sketch, and take a look at my completed illustration. But before everything is said and done, I have one finishing touch that I want to add to my artwork and that's that paper texture. 18. Paper Texture: I'm going to show you how I add that in to round out the overall effect of my illustration and make it feel much more sophisticated. First of all, if you open up our layers, you'll see that we're already at the max amount of layers. We have four up here. If you click this plus sign to add a new layer, you're going to get a notification at the top that says maximum limit of four layers reached. But luckily, we no longer need that sketch since we have a completed illustration. I can go ahead and swipe left on that sketch and tap Delete. Don't worry, that sketch is still saved in those prior examples that we've been duplicating over and over again back in our stack. At this point, you should go ahead and send that paper texture straight to your iPad. Whether it's through AirDrop or iCloud or some other method, it should exist in your camera roll. To access it, let's go up here to the wrench, click "Add", insert a photo, and I have my paper texture right here. I'll tap that once. It is perfectly fit to my canvas because this paper texture is also sized to 24 by 30 which is the same size as my canvas. If this paper texture hasn't totally fit in your canvas the right way, you can go ahead and grab these anchor points and make it larger or smaller to fit your exact canvas dimensions. But I'm going to go ahead and leave it exactly where it was because it's snapped in perfectly. Go ahead and press that arrow to set the transformation. Let's go to our layers. Drag that paper texture above every other layer so now it just looks like we have this completely white paper canvas. Here is when we're going to get into those transparency effects that I talked about way back in those early lessons. Go ahead and tap that N. Instead of playing with the opacity here, we're going to play with the actual transparency effects. Right now it's on normal, just like all of our other layers. But you can actually toggle through these other effects so that the way this texture blends on the layers beneath it can be slightly different. The effect that I use for paper texture like this is Multiply or Linear Burn depending on how dramatic I want it to be. Let me zoom in and show you what this looks like. Linear Burn and Multiply, it's going to have very similar effects. Multiply is going to be a little bit more subtle whereas Linear Burn is a bit more heavy handed. For this illustration, I'm actually really liking Linear Burn. I love seeing how deep that paper texture affects the artwork itself. I'm going to keep mine set to Linear Burn. Let me zoom out to see the overall effect of this illustration. Real quick, I'm going to turn off drawing assist so we can get rid of this line because we no longer need it. Under my wrench, under canvas, I'm just going to toggle off where it says Drawing Guide. Now that line has disappeared. With my layer selected, I'm going to show you what this looks like with and without the texture. Without the texture, it's a very flat piece of artwork. Even though we've done a really good job incorporating a lot of texture and dimension into our illustration, adding that paper texture really just takes it to the next level. Before the texture and with the texture. For me, I'm a big fan of paper texture and I always like to include that in my final artwork. I said paper texture was the last step, but there's actually something that is way more important than that and that is adding your signature. Let's go ahead and add that in. But as you can see, we're still at a maximum of four layers reached. I'm going to go ahead and consolidate the sun with the ocean and the sand by pinching them together like this. Then I'm going to hit that plus sign to make a new layer and drag it just underneath that paper texture. I think I'm going to sign mine in that same dark brown. I'll go to my colors, select dark brown, go to my brushes. I'm traditional, I like signing in pencil. I'm going to go back in my brush library, find the sketching group, make sure I'm on peppermint, I'm going to pass it all the way up, bring the brush size all the way up, and find a nice little place to add in my signature. The reason I like doing my signature on a separate layer is when I take a look at the final illustration like this, my signature seems a little bit dominant, so I'm going to go ahead and make it a little bit smaller by going to my Transform, sizing it down just a tad, maybe rotating it by grabbing this green toggle and hitting the arrow to set the transformation. Now we have our final polished artwork. We have the background completed, the house is in its full form. We've added some fun details like trees, maybe a sunshine, and then we've polished our illustration by adding this rough paper texture and our signature down at the bottom. I hope you're really happy with your dream home. But before we call it a day, I want to show you something that I do to all of my illustrations, which is once they're final, I explore a variety of color palettes. I'm going to show you how. 19. Color Alterations: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create some really cool, unique color alterations out of this original palette. For me, it takes me about 95 percent of my time and effort to get to this point with my illustration, and the other five percent is exploring color. Honestly, when it comes down to it, for me, it's completely worth it to go ahead and take this illustration and turn it into a few additional color palettes. It doesn't take too much time, and it's really fun to see this original artwork bloom into all of this color diversity. Plus, we're probably going to get some really cool surprises and unexpected results. For me, one of the biggest benefits of creating additional color palettes out of my artwork is that by having more color palettes, there's more opportunities for this artwork to get sold. I make a living as an artist and surface designer, so the more artwork I I to bulk up my portfolio, the better I'm going to be doing. A really easy way to bulk up my portfolio with new designs is by creating multiple color palettes out of one design. It doesn't take too much time and it's a great strategy to increase your opportunity for sales. Let me go ahead and show you how I do this. First things first, let's go ahead and go back to our gallery, hit "Select", grab that Layer 7, and hit "Duplicate". Cool. Hit that "X", and let's go ahead and open up this duplicate. The first way I'm going to show you how to change color is the simplest way to possibly do it. Let's go over here to our layers, and I'm going to go ahead and consolidate the house layer with the background. I'll just quickly pinch them together, so now I'm back to three layers. I have the paper texture, my signature, and that artwork. With my artwork layer selected, go ahead and tap that once to make sure, let's go over to our adjustments and select Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, by layer. Like I mentioned, this is the easiest way to try out some different colors, and that's by grabbing this little circle on the hue spectrum and scrubbing it all the way to the right and scrubbing it all the way to the left. We're seeing a lot of variety in the color of our original artwork. When I play with the hue spectrum like this, one of my favorite things to do is to bring it all the way to the right or all the way to the left, it's going to be the exact same thing, and see what the polar opposite colors look like. In this case, I think it's fun. We're seeing a really cool-toned palette of these blues and indigos. Let's see what happens if I bring the saturation way up. Oh, that's cool. Now the ocean itself is pink and we went from having a son to having a moon, so that's fun. Brightness, I usually don't adjust that much because I've already done a really conscious job of making sure that the values in contrast are playing off each other really well, so I usually leave that right where it is at 50 percent. To set the transformation, go ahead and tap that magic wand, and voila, we have our first color palette. Altogether, I'm going to show you three ways that I adjust color, and we've gone ahead and just completed our first one, which is adjusting the hue and saturation. Let's go ahead and try a different technique. I'm going to go back to my gallery and before anything else, I'm going to go ahead and tap where it says Layer 7, and I'm just going to call this one blue. Now go ahead and hit "Select", grab that original final color palette, hit "Duplicate" again, hit the "X", and let's make another one. I'm going to open up that duplicate and let's get started. For this next one, I'm going to show you a technique called keying in color. What that means is I'm going to match all of the hues in these palettes to one dominant hue. Let me show you what I mean by that. First things first, let's go to our layers. Same thing as before, I'm going to consolidate the house layer with the background layer and pinch them into one layer, and I'm going to hit that plus sign to add a brand new layer, and I'm going to drag that layer so that it is directly above our main illustration. Now I'm going to go to my color palette, and I have this orange in my West Coast palette that I actually haven't utilized yet, so let's go ahead and click and select that. This is going to be the color that I'm keying in to the rest of the illustration. I'm just going to click it, drag it, and fill in the entire layer. If you go back here to our layers, you can see that our illustration layer still exists, it's just hidden behind this orange layer. This is where we're going to get into some of those fun transparency effects. Go ahead and tap that N that stands for a normal blending mode, and let's toggle through and see what some other blending modes do. With this really lush orange layer, we're toggling through different transparency modes to see how it changes the color of the artwork directly underneath it. There's some cool stuff happening here. Color dodge is fun. This is really vibrant, but I think I want something a little more, perfect, overlay. This overlay transparency mode has created this effect where this orange really sinks in to the colors behind it and changes the hues of everything to have more of an orange feel to it. This is actually working out really well for my beach home because it's summer, it's hot, it's humid, and having everything be orange in here really emphasizes that kind of vibe. But let's go ahead and make some tweaks to it to make it even more customized. Again, with that orange layer selected, I'm going to go up to my Adjustments, open up that Hue, Saturation, and Brightness again, by layer. If you want to see what different colors look like overlaid, you can again grab that circle and scrub it along the spectrum to see different options of what keying color in looks like. There's some fun stuff happening here with this pinkish red all the way down to keying it in to a very cool blue tone. But I'm actually going to stick with where I was right at 50 percent with that orange. See what happens if I bring that saturation up this image, and now play with the brightness. Oh, this is really cool. I mentioned before that I really don't mess with the brightness too much because I've already established the values and the tonalities, which means the darkness and lightness to see how these colors affect the overlaying colors. But in this case, what I'm doing is I'm changing the brightness of that orange layer itself. In situations like this, it's actually interesting to maybe bring that brightness up and see what happens to that color layer that's overlaid on top of our original artwork. I'm actually really liking the vibe here. If I bring this brightness up too far, I'm going to lose that background, but if I hit it here, let's see, around 77 percent, it's actually creating some really cool effects. A lot of those brown areas within the roof have now keyed in to that orange color and it's even added some orange tones into the navy of those leaves and then trim off the house to create a nice turquoise feel. I think this is super cool. I'm going to go ahead and hit my magic wand to set the transformation. I have just completed my second color alt. I really like this palette. It feels really steamy and humid and hot and summery, which is actually perfect for my dream home since here I am living on the beach. Let's go ahead and create one more color alt using a completely different technique. Same thing as before. I'm going to go back to my gallery. I'm going to tap this layer name and call it orange. Then hit "Select", select that original color palette, duplicate it, hit the "X", and open up the duplicate. Same as before, I'm going to open up my layers and consolidate the house with the background. Then I want to go ahead and select that layer so that any color alts we do will be affecting that layer only. So completely different technique. Let's go ahead and go back up to our adjustments. This time, I'm going to tap "Gradient Map", by layer. Gradient maps are really cool. Basically what they are, are preconfigured gradients so that all you have to do is go through, tap each one, and see what it could look like on top of your artwork. Venice is actually really nice, but let's go through and see what the others look like. I like blaze as well, that's pretty fun. That's just a pretty standard black and white. All right, cool. Out of all of these, I think I'm liking Venice the most. If you tap it, you can make more adjustments to that gradient and really customize it for you. I think I'm going to amp up some of those pink tones and call it a day. I'll press "Done". But before I finish this color palette, I want to make one more customization. For that, I'm going to go back up to my adjustments, tap "Color Balance", by layer. This is where you can really get detailed with that color balance. Before we start moving these scrubbers, go over here to your sunshine, and we have three different areas that we can adjust: shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. I typically like starting with mid-tones first. That way I can grab these scrubbers and see what it looks like if I go full cyan, or full red. That's pretty interesting. Let's try that magenta to green and the yellow to blue. I like seeing that blue come through in the mid-tones with maybe a little bit more cyan. Definitely, some fun stuff happening here. Now I'm going to switch it to shadows and see what happens if I bring more of that red into the shadow versus more of that cyan. Let's try magenta versus green and yellow versus blue. I think I'm just going to make some slight tweaks here. All right, so this is looking pretty interesting. Let's go ahead and tap that magic wand to set the color transformation, and I'm really loving this result. One thing I want to point out is when we made all of these adjustments, it only affected our artwork layer. That background color is the exact same as it was before. If you want to, you can go ahead and tap the thumbnail for background color. Let's go into classic and try out some different colors to see them in real-time. You can grab along the hue spectrum. It's kind of fun with this orange tone in the background. It looks like Miami Vice. Well, you know what? That original mint is going to win out because that looks really cool. That was just to let you know that you can change the background color if you want to, but I'm actually really liking this combination of mint against all these indigo tones. I'm going to call it a day with that. Let's go back to our gallery, tap where it says Layer 7, and I'm going to change this to indigo. While I'm at it, I'm going to tap the layer name of that final artwork and call it Navy Red. At this point, I have my original color palette plus 1, 2, 3 really fun color alts. Each one of these feels vastly different from the other. As a series with four of these, they really stand up on their own. If someone's not really into this Miami Vice vaporwave, pink-indigo color palette, maybe they would like that original West Coast palette we used called Navy Red. In that exact situation, I might earn an art sale that I might otherwise lose just because of the color palette preferences. So the more color palettes you create, the better chances you have of selling your artwork. At this point, our stack is pretty filled out. It's interesting to see this progression go from sketch to color exploration and then see as our house slowly begins to build into its final illustration, and then have these color alt supplementary to that. Really cool to see the full process. But before we finish, I'm going to share some of my best file-saving and exporting tips. 20. Saving: When it comes to saving my artwork, I am really organized with it and I'm a huge stickler for the way that I export these vital files. I'm going to give you a little peek into how I keep this all organized and how I export them to the highest quality settings. The first thing I'm going to start with, is our original color palette. Go ahead and open up that one. The first thing I like to look at when I finish my artwork, is the time-lapse replay. That's the video that gets compiled automatically by Procreate, that shows you from start to finish how your illustration was drawn. To see your time-lapse replay, go to your Wrench, tap "Video", and then tap "Time-lapse Replay". This is going to show you from start to finish, how you created this illustration. Even though these sketches were happening on previous canvases, the fact that we kept duplicating our canvas means that the memory of those drawings that we did continued onwards from canvas to canvas. Even though on this exact canvas the only thing we did was add a signature and then that paper texture, it's still remembering all past canvases that were duplicated to create this final artwork. Pretty cool to see the full story unfold here. I'm going to tap "Done". Go back to My Wrench. What I want to do under Actions, under Video, is export my time-lapse video. You have two options for video length. You can go full length or 30 seconds. We just watched the full-length video and it was a little bit over a minute. What I normally do, is export to the 30-second version. The reason why, is because 30 seconds is perfect for social media. The way that I use these time-lapse replays, is to share primarily on my Instagram page. Thirty seconds is the perfect amount of time for an Instagram video, so what I'm going to do, is select 30 seconds and then airdrop it directly to my phone, so that I can easily share it on Instagram. That was export version 1. It's the time-lapse replay because videos do exceptionally well on social media, especially Instagram. But now, let me show you my second way that I save my file which is arguably the most important. It's saving the master file with all of the layers. For that, I'm going to go back into My Actions, tap "Share". There are two ways that I'm going to export this final layered file. I'm either going to export the Procreate version or the PSD version. PSD stands for Photoshop file. Now for me, I use Photoshop to make some little last-minute tweaks to my artwork and all of my final artwork will always pass through Photoshop before I send it to any of my art licensors or upload it to any print-on-demand sites. For me, I export as a PSD file because I know I'm going to open it in Photoshop. But if you don't use Photoshop, then that's not necessary for you, in which case, I would export it as a Procreate file. If you export it as a Procreate file, it means that you can save it somewhere else like on your laptop or on an external hard drive or on the Cloud. Then you can always bring it back into Procreate, and it'll open with all of these layers intact, and it'll look exactly like this. If you want to save your working file in a way that you can always bring it back into Procreate later and make some edits, then go ahead and share it as a Procreate file. For me, I usually do PSD because I airdrop it to my MacBook, make some final adjustments in Photoshop, and then license it out. The important thing to remember here, is you should have one master file. Whether it's a Procreate file or a Photoshop file, it should be exported in some version where all of these layers are separated and intact, they're not flattened together. Master file just means a file with all of those working layers. If you're wondering why you should export the Procreate file when it's already saved in Procreates, it's for redundancy, it's to protect your artwork against data loss. It's always great to have backups of your artwork saved in different locations. The Cloud is probably the safest bet, but I also save to external hard drives. Regardless of how you're saving your files, always, always, always have a backup or two backups or three backups available just in case you need them. About three years ago when I was living in Bali, the humidity and the heat really got to my external hard drive and it crashed. The worst part about that, was I didn't have any backups. I had stopped backing up to the Cloud because I got lazy. That day in 2018 when my hard drive crashed and I lost five months' worth of artwork, that was the worst day of the entire year for me. To put that into perspective, I also had a breakup that year and I got into a motorbike accident, so that just shows you how important those files are to me. Always backup your artwork, you don't want to have to deal with any sort of data loss because it is the worst. I just went off on this huge tangent, but the important thing to remember is always, always, always back up your artwork in some secondary location. The Cloud is probably the best. That is where exporting as a procreate or PSD, some sorted of layered file comes into handy. That is the second way that I export my artwork. The third way is a flattened JPEG. Down here, you'll have this option that says JPEG. When you export as a JPEG, it's going to match all of the same settings as this working file. The dimensions, the color mode, the resolution, will all be the exact same. In this case, if I save this as a JPEG, it's going to also be 24 by 30 inches. It's also going to be an RGB color mode, and it's also going to be 300 DPI. By exporting as a JPEG. It's basically going to export this exact thing on-screen, except all of these different layers are going to be merged into one layer. You're not going to be able to make little adjustments like turning your signature on and off or moving it around the composition, so you're going to lose a lot of those editing opportunities. If it's final artwork and it's ready to go on your Etsy page or on your Instagram or be uploaded to Society 6, JPEG is the way to go. The fourth and final way that I like to save my artwork, is as a transparent PNG. This comes in handy if I want to have a transparent background for something like Apparel, a T-shirt, maybe a kiss cut sticker or even a transparent phone case. Let me show you how I do that. First, I'm going to go into my Layers, turn off that background and turn off that photo texture, so that everything you see in the background here that has this black grid, that represents transparency. That is nothingness. Then I'm going to go back to my Actions and select PNG. What that PNG is going to do, is flatten all of this artwork again into one layer except the big difference between PNG and JPEG, is with JPEG, it's going to flatten it into one layer with no transparency. But with a PNG, it will preserve that transparency, so that any areas here that are just empty with nothing, that's going to be represented as a cut-out piece from that file, so it's transparent background. Again, this comes in handy for things like printing stickers or t-shirts. Just like a JPEG, the PNG will preserve all of the original file settings. It'll still be 24 by 36, still be 300 DPI and still be an RGB color mode. Once I finish and export it, I'll go back to My Layers, turn that background back on, turn that paper texture back on, and then go back to my gallery and do the same thing with my other color palettes. Let me walk you through it one more time, so you get a quick glimpse of the four ways I save files. I'll open up my indigo color palette, go to My Actions video, export the time-lapse video at 30 seconds, so I can share it on Instagram. Then I'll go to Share, and then I'll save a layered version. Either Procreate or PSD, depending on whether or not I use Photoshop. Either way, this is going to get me a layered version of my artwork, so if I need to make any changes later on, I can always do that. Three, I'm going to save it as a JPEG. That is the flattened version of this. It'll be exactly like this artwork, except in my layers, everything will be consolidated down into one layer. Last but not least, I'll turn off my background, turn off my paper texture, go back to my actions and save it as a PNG, so that I have that transparent background for things like T-shirts or stickers. Then once I finish, I'll go back to my layers, turn back on the backgrounds and the paper texture, go back to my gallery, and then do the same thing for the other color palettes that I've created. By the time all is said and done, I'll have a variety of files saved for each final color palette of artwork. Between those four file types, they'll cover all the bases for everything I need to do, whether it's going back in later and editing those layers, that's the working file, or uploading the flattened version to Society 6, that's the JPEG. May be selling it as a sticker, that's the transparent PNG, or sharing the video on my Instagram page, which is the MP4 time-lapse replay. Between those four, I am good to go. I have a few more tips to share with you in the very last video of today's class. 21. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on illustrating your dream home. I hope you enjoy the process of envisioning a concept, sketching it out, and making it a reality. I cannot wait to see what you created in this class today. Please share your artwork in the student project gallery down below. That way, I can take a pic and comment on your artwork. You can find the gallery under the Projects & Resources tab. On the right, you'll see a green button that says "Create project". Click that, and once you're there, you'll have the option to upload a cover photo, add a title, and write a little description. You can include both text and images here. If you're up for it, I would love to hear a little bit about what made this your dream home. For me, it's being near an ocean, having a balcony up top, and living somewhere lush and tropical. Once your project is uploaded, it'll appear in the student project gallery. You can view other projects here, and I encourage you to check out other student's work and like and comments if you'd like to as well. If you'd like to share your project on Instagram, please tag me @catcoq and Skillshare @skillshare so that we can like and comment as well to boost your engagements. If you share your artwork in your Instagram stories, please don't forget to tag me so that I can re-share your story to my own audience as well. Last but not least, please don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking that Follow button up top. That means that you'll get an email announcement as soon as I launch my next class or have some announcement to share with my students. I usually send out a direct message about once a month. Speaking of other classes, if you enjoyed this one and want to check out some more appropriate classes, I recommend watching "Draw animals in Procreates: Plus Tips for Art Licensing Sales". In that class, I walk you through the steps to create a cute animal in Procreate. Here's a pic of some of the class projects that other students shared. I absolutely love seeing this huge variety in the animals. I also have another Procreate class where you learn how to illustrate seamless patterns. It's called "Drawing Seamless Patterns in Procreate Plus Professional Surface Design Tips". It's exactly what it sounds like. You'll learn from start to finish how to illustrate your elements and arrange them into a perfect repeat pattern. Also, if you enjoy the process of creating those color alts out of your final artwork today, I have an entire class dedicated to just that. It's called "Cultivating Color: Vary Palettes in Original Arts and Grow Your Portfolio". It is packed with examples of how to explore different color combinations in Adobe Photoshop. I do this all the time with the artwork that I make in Procreate. Last but not least, I also have classes that teach you how to market yourself as an artist through social media. Plus, I have an entire class on trends tracking, so you can create artwork with mass appeal. You can find all of these classes by clicking my name up top and scrolling down in my profile. If you enjoyed my class today, please leave a review. I read each and every single one of them, and they give me so much fulfillment as a teacher because you're great. Well, thank you for joining me today, and I cannot wait to see what your dream homes look like. Take care.