Drawing Easy Characters in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hey everybody, My name is Travis A. Thompson, and today I'm going to be showing you how you can draw simple and easy characters using procreate. Now this is a lesson that you probably can use using just regular pencil and paper. But there are going to be some parts of this lesson that are going to be very specific to procreate. It's an IOS app and I'm going to be using my ipad Pro, which is a 12.9 inch screen, and the second generation Apple pencil. This lesson is for all skill levels and let's get started. 2. Setting Up the Canvas: All right, so this process is going to be very easy and very straightforward. I'm going to try to keep things as simple as possible because drawing a cartoon shouldn't be that difficult. Of course, we're going to be using the procreate app. I'm going to be using it on my ipad Pro 12.9 inch screen, and I'm going to be using the Apple pencil two. So the first thing that you want to do once you've opened up procreate, is you want to create a new canvas to draw our picture in. You're going to create a canvas by tapping on the plus sign up here in the top right corner. Now I have created all kinds of different canvases because there's all different projects that I do. But we're just going to choose a simple square shaped canvas. Now you have two options. There's already a pre loaded square option of a canvas right here. It's going to say square S, RGB, and it's going to be 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels. That one is all we need for this. Of course, if you wanted to create a customized canvas, you would tap up here in this corner right here. And then you'd be able to set those dimensions that you want. But for today, we're just going to go with the basic square shape. 3. Defining the Pose: I'm going to choose a color to sketch in, so you're going to tap the little color circle in the top right. I'm going to stick, I'm going to do an orange. I'm going to pick an orange. And this is just going to be the color that I do the initial sketch in. I'll go and do details in a darker color later. The type of pencil that I'm going to be using is a pencil that is pre loaded in procreate, which is a six pencil. To locate it, you would, you would tap that icon right there for your brush library. And then these are your categories over here. Always remember that you can find brushes, you can buy brushes out on the Internet and import them into your procreate. So that's why I have some additional brushes up here. Brush categories, the six pencil can be found under sketching. And then of course, six B, that is the pencil that I'm going to be using. You see that's what it looks like if I'm drawing on the screen for now. I'm going to use my brush size at the highest size, which is 100% And I'm going to do 100% opacity as well. The first thing that I always start off doing when I'm drawing a simple cartoon is I'm just doing the basic shape for the head and the body for the head. I'm just going to start off with a circle. I like to do a bunch of sketches as far as a bunch of marks to just flesh out what I want the shape of the characters head and body to look like. That's going to be the head, then the body, we're just going to do just a smaller oval. Now, of course, you can do whatever size, whatever shape you want, and then these will also be altered later on. But I'm just going to use this as my starting point. I have my head and I have my body. One thing that I want to start off doing is we're going to use symmetry to help make this process go a lot easier. The way we're going to do that is we're going to go over here to the tool panel. It's right beside gallery is this one. We're going to tap on it and we're going to come all the way down to drawing guide and we're going to turn drawing guide on. Now when drawing guide initially comes on, you're going to get the grid. But we don't want the grid today, want symmetry. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to tap on Edit Drawing guide. Down here at the bottom, you have different drawing guides that you can use currently. Right now, this is the grid you can play with, the settings over here. This is the opacity, the thickness of the lines, the grid size like that. But like I said, we're not using the grid. We're going to use symmetry. So I'm going to come and tap on symmetry. I'm going to move my opacity all the way up to 100. And I'm going to move my thickness all the way up to max as well. Just to make it easier for me to see what I'm doing up here at the top. You can change the color of the line. So for example, if you don't want to line that's black, you can pick another color. So I'm going to pick something in the warm color family. And then I'm just going to click done. Now, drawing a cyst is going to automatically be turned on. And what that means is anything I draw on the left side is automatically going to show up on the right side. For example, you see that right there, I draw it on the right side, it shows up on the left side. This really helps when it comes to cartoons, because most cartoons, when we're drawing them, just straightforward, they're symmetrical because that's the kind of cartoon we're going to be drawing today. Right now, the layer that the body is on is drawing a cyst is turned on. That's fine for right now. What I want to first start off by doing is I'm going to tap this icon right here. Because I want to center what I've drawn so far. We already know the center of the canvas is where that line is. Now that I've turned this on, I can see the eight points rather for my drawing. No, it's not eight points. Yeah, eight points. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to line up that middle dot and that middle dot with the middle line. That means now my drawing is centered. Now I can see how off it is. So now I can make adjustments. And keep in mind, like I said, whatever you draw on one side automatically gets drawn on the other side. So I'm just going to correct the head a little bit. You see how the body is more space on this side than it is on that side. I'm just going to try to even this out a little bit. Now, we could have started off doing this, but I'd like to just start off without all of this stuff. First, of course, if you have the apple pencil two, if you tap it two times, it's going to automatically switch to the eraser. Otherwise, you can get tap on the eraser. The eraser that I'm probably going to be using is under the airbrushing category, and it's the soft brush. So I'm going to make it a little small, probably about like three to five. And I'm just going to clean up the shape that we have right now for the head and the shape that we have for the body. All these little marks that I don't really need. We're just going to get rid of those and we're good right now. So now we have the head in the body, so now we can start adding on everything else. One thing that I think it's important to do is to add marks to be your guide when it comes to how your character's body is. I'm adding one at the top is going to be for the shoulders and then one at the bottom for where the legs are going to come out. Now keep in mind everything we draw on one side is going to appear on the other side, so we don't have to draw up two separate arms and two legs and all of that. We just draw once and it automatically goes over. I want the character just be standing straight out of the circle for where the legs are, just a straight line. And we're just going to do some cartoonish feet. And then you have a character that is standing. Now if we wanted to have a character whose arms are by their side, we come out of that shoulder circle. And we can do something like that. And this is your basis for drawing a cartoon character. You have the body shape, you have the head. And then it's just about drawing all of the different tools, the different attributes for the character. But I'm going to erase these arms. I don't want my character's arms to be right on the side today. I'm going to draw them with their arms initially on their hip area. That's why I love drawing. Says what I do on one side, it automatically does on the other side. All right, so now we have our character stance. We have our characters posed. I'm going to change this side. I don't want my character to stand with both hands on the hips. I'm going to draw one that's waving at us. What I'm going to do is I'm now going to come back to this layer that I'm working on. I'm going to tap on it and I'm going to turn off drawing is now when I draw something on one side, it's not mirrored on the other side. And always remember, I don't know if I said this in the last videos. If you want an easy way to erase something or to undo, just tap the two fingers. And I'm coming up to my, my eraser and I'm going to erase this arm in hand. And then we're going to draw him, waving him or her, whatever it's going to be. So we're going to come out a little bit. Go up, there we go. That is going to be the stands for the character that we are going to be drawing today. We're going to now take this and we're going to refine it. And then you have an opportunity to make it your own. 4. Refining the Pose: All right, now we're going to take this and move to the next level to keep things organized. We are currently on layer one, we're going to go ahead and rename layer one. And we can just rename layer one. Well, I'm going to call it stance just so I can keep up with it. So this is going to be my stance layer. And I'm going to go ahead and add a layer on top of stance, because now we're going to refine how the character actually looks. What we're going to do is I'm going to drop down the opacity of the stance layer because it makes it easier for me to see. I'm going to drop it down to about 50% You see the percentages changing right here. As you slide this over, you'll see the percentage change and you'll see the opacity of what you've drawn begin to change as well. All right, I'm stance layer opacity is now 50% We're going to come up to what is now layer two and we're going to draw on layer two. But I'm going to change the color. I don't want to draw with the same orange on top of a faded orange. I'm going to go to a red. And I'm just going to drop it down a little bit. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and turn back on drawing a cyst on layer two. I'm going to tap layer two. Tap drawing a cyst. Now on layer two, when I draw something it mirrors what I'm going to do with this area. Is I'm going to refine how the legs and the feet look. Excuse me, so we have the legs, like the shape of the legs or whatever. So now I'm just going to kind of work on this. So now what I'm pretty much doing is creating the shape of the body of the character. Create the neck. And then I'm going to stop here. So we have the feet, legs, and body. Our arms are different, so we need to go in and make sure we turn off drawing assist, unless you kept yours with the same stance on both sides. Turn off drawings and now I'm going to go over a, I'm going to go ahead and start drawing the hand It to be really simple, so as you can see, I didn't stick exactly with what I did on that stance layer. But that's the purpose of the stance layers, just to help you kind of flesh out how you want everything to look. All right, now we have the stance for the character. Now I'm going to open this hand. This character is going to be waving, so we know that this is going to be an open hand. I'm going to come down to the stance layer just so I can show you Pretty much you can decide whether you want your character to have four fingers or five, or three. You know, it's up to you, but the thumb is always going to be right here. Then the rest of your fingers, they're going to be in this area right here. Many different ways to draw hands. Some people like to take and draw the circles here, so you can envision how the hand is going to be. It's really up to you, but the simple way for me to do it is right on the stance layer. I'm going to go ahead and draw how I think the hand is going to look. There's the thumb, then the fingers back into frame, and then the fingers will be in there. Now I can come up to layer two again and I can create the exact details for the fingers. And I'm going to do how many fingers don't want to do, I'll go ahead and do five. Middle finger is always longer than the index finger, ring finger and index finger. About the same. Then I think I'm moving tab a little bit then pinking. Of course, this is all still a rough sketch. We can do a little line here to show the character is waving. Now when I look at this, I'm starting to think that the hand is actually too big for the character in comparison to everything else. What I can do is I can take this lasso to right here, tap on it, make sure free hand is chosen and should be on a. And I'm just going to draw a circle around the hand. I want the hand. I don't want the arm or anything else. Just the hand. Then I'm going to tap on here. And then I can now change the size of the hand to fit and be more proportional. And see if you use two fingers. You can zoom out of the paper, zoom out of the canvas. Look her at how everything is looking. I can turn the hand to the side like that, but you can clearly see that's probably a better size for the hand. All right. 5. Drawing The Face: All right, now it's time to work on the characters space. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and drop the opacity down to about 35. Then I'm going to add another layer above stance. We have stance and we have layer two with stance selected. I'm then going to tap the plus sine. That's going to open up layer three above the stance layer. And we're going to go ahead and zoom in. And we're going to use this layer to map out the face. And we're going to turn on Drawing Assist. We're going to go back to that orange I was using face. I'm going to put a line there. We don't need a line down the middle because the symmetry line is already there for us. The ears are probably going to be about here. Of course, as drawing assist is turned on, the ears are being put on both sides. And then you can make, you know, whatever adjustments you want to. The nose is going to be right up under, right up under this line. But then if we're going to do a smile, we can do that there. And then the kind of eyes that you want, you can draw those in. So I can have eyes like that or I can draw eyes that are actual ovals or something like that. You see how easy it makes actually drawing the character. So the ears look a little too big. I'm want to make those ears a little bit smaller, so I'm just going to erase them off and redo them. There we go. That's better. All right, so now is your opportunity just to kind of give your character some personality. Whatever kind of eyes, that's really what's going to give your character, the personality, the kind of eyes you do, some eyebrows, something simple. And this is all I really need for now. Now my character has a face. And then I can go from here to the next step. Let me add line in for the ear. And if we want to, we can go ahead and refine the head actually, so I can come through here and even here. All right, so now I'm going to go ahead and completely turn off the stance layer. All right, so now we have our character. We know what our characters space is, the stance and everything. Character looks friendly. And now we're going to start to refine everything. This is where you're going to decide what your character will look like, whether your character is a boy or a girl. If you're adding eyelashes, what kind of hair you want to add. All of those fun things. And you can essentially take this, I'm going to erase some of this ear off, make sure dranger sys is turned off. I'm going to erase the ear here because it's behind the hand, you wouldn't see it. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this line that was going across the middle line here. Don't need that. I'm just cleaning it up. And then I'm going to come down to the come up to layer two. I'll just get rid of that part right there. And now I'm going to take these two layers and I'm going to combine them. So I'm going to combine layer two with layer three by tapping on layer two and choose merge down. Now these are on the same layer. And then I'm going to do is going to come up to the wand hue saturation and brightness. I'm going to go ahead and drop the brightness all the way down. Now it's all black and it's all the same color. What I like to do when I'm creating characters is I may feel like I don't want to mess this character up. So let me create a duplicate. What you're going to do is come up to your layers tab, swipe on there, choose duplicate. That way let's say we continue moving forward the character and we're like, I really don't like how I was looking. I want to go back to the beginning. We'll have an extra character here. You'll see layer three and layer three, we have two choices, because we have two of the same character. And we'll just leave the other one in there turned off so it doesn't get messed up. I'm going to turn off this layer three now. I'm going to change the name of this top layer three. I got to name a character one. 6. Drawing the Shoes and Clothes: All right, we have our character ready to go. And now it's just a matter of making the character our own. So what I'm going to do is for character one, I'm going to drop down the opacity to 50% We actually do 40% because it's black, jumping down to 40% Then we're going to add a layer on top of character one that should be called layer four. I like to draw a color I'm going to draw and probably like this, but go back to the Warn family. I'll stick with pink. Now I can go in and I can make the character my own. So I'm going to start up with the character's clothes. Let's start with his shoes. Let's turn on drawing Assist, because we don't want to sit here and draw the same thing twice using the shape of the character as my guide. I'm now going to make these into some tennis shoes. It's really just tracing the shape. Then I can add a little line here, you can give the character whatever kind of clothes you want it to have. Going to have a shirt on. You know, easy drawing the system makes things shorts. And I'll fix that. When we turn off drawing the system, we'll add the lines for the legs because we can see those. We can add some more to these shoes. Something simple. And now we need to turn drawing assist off so we can do the shirt turn off drawing assist. And I'm going to do this side to be short sleeves, some of this, this side short sleeves here as well. And then I can trace the arms still drawing assist is off because what I'm drawing is not symmetrical. And I can add an extra line there for the closed up fingers. And we'll draw on this side, just following with what we have. All right, so now we have our character, shoes, shorts, shirt. I'm just going to draw a line right there. Close that up, and now we can move on to the face. Now if we were to turn off character one, you would see what you have left. Then this also allows you to see what you may have missed. So for example, I haven't done that line in the hand, so I need to make sure I go in at that. And I might keep that line right there. Okay, I can add a design to the shirt. You know, whatever kind of design you may want to add. Remember today, it's just about a simple, easy, straightforward character. You can make it fancy later. 7. Drawing the Final Face and Hair: I'm just going to keep my character as a boy, so I'm not going to add any eyelashes or anything like that. I'm going to turn back on drawing assist because for the most part he'll be symmetrical. So I'm going to go ahead and do drawing assist is not on drawing assist. I ain't going to do the neck, just going to pull my side down just a little bit. Smile the nose under the nose up or the nose down. I'll do the nose down this time. A little line like that. The ear just little line in the ear. The chin and then the eyes, the eye lid. Shave that in. Give him some eyebrows with some weight to them. I can shave that in. I'm going to add some glares in his eyes. I'm going to turn off drawing assist for a moment and just that way you know, he mouth'll be looking a little pointed. I don't like the way that looks. I'm going to come back and fix that turn drawing the sis back on. I went down just a little bit too much with the mouth. All right. So for his hair, I think I'm going to give him something that's not symmetrical. So I'm going to I need to make sure I erase the inside of the ear out of here. So drawing the sis is already off. I'll go ahead and erase this part out. All right? So I'm just making this app to go. 9. Changing Into a New Character pt. 2: Now as I come to the face, it's essentially the same thing. Turn back on drawing a cyst. Draw the face as I want to, but let's say maybe we don't want the character to have the exact same eyes. I'm just going to create this on a brand new layer. It's going to be layer six. And I'm going to turn drawing a cyst on same steps, trace what's there. Make whatever modifications you want. As you're drawing. Let's say maybe we would see lips for this particular character. I can draw it like that. Maybe this character of the nose will be up as opposed to down. Maybe she's going to have slightly bigger ears. We use the character we initially drew as our base, as our guide. And then we just make whatever modifications are necessary. Maybe she'll have a little bit of earrings, so let's say maybe she's going to have maybe whiter eyes. Can use character one as my guide. Maybe skin in your pupils. Still drawing with drawing the system and then my brows. Okay, course going to draw. Turn drawing the system off. I'm going to use my eraser and just add in some glares to the eyes. Erase a part of the ear away. Now, a lot of times with cartoon girls, their hair might be a lot different than a boy. I'm going to do the hair on its own layer as well. Right now we have layer five which is girl. Layer six is just the face and then layer seven will be the hair. I like to do my layers in different colors just so I can see where everything is. I'm going to go ahead and drop down character one's opacity even more, dropping it down to about a 15 because I can still see it. But now I'm about to focus on the hair only. So let's say what, This character is going to have a head band. I'm going to make sure drawing assist is on and then I'll draw the head band. Head band of course, Go to the ears. And then there I'm going to add just some waviness. We're here. Maybe I'll flare it out right there. All right? And then back here. And of course I'm drawing all these places but I'm going to erase what I don't need. Of course you all of that will get erased. Wants this time. All right? I'm going to turn off drawing the cyst. Going to erase away the hair out of the hand and out of the arm, because all of that is behind the character. I'm going to erase it out of the hand here. Then the last thing I'll add are some eyelashes. Turn drawing the sys back on. 123. Boom. All right, so now we're going to turn off character one altogether. And now we see the design for our girl character. So we have 56.7 I'm just going to pinch all three together to combine them. Come up to the hue saturation and brightness. Move her all the way down to black. Turn her off. Let's turn the boy on. The same thing. Come up to hue saturation and brightness, turn him all the way down there. Now we have just completed two simple drawings of a boy character and a girl character using the same stance and using very simple techniques. We started off with our stance, we develop what the character will look like, and then we turn the character into a boy and into a girl. I can then put these two characters right by each other. I can also go ahead and turn layer five and rename it to girl. That's it. 10. Final Thoughts: All right, and that's all it is. Thank y'all so much for joining me for this lesson on drawing easy characters and procreate. Be sure to go watch my next class, which is going to go over how we're going to add color to it. Thank y'all so much. Be sure to post your projects down below in whatever the second is called. I don't know what it's called but poster projects, so I can see what they look like. Thank y'all so much and I'll talk to you all soon, piece.