Drawing Houses in Procreate: Illustrate a Unique, Imaginative Home

1. Intro: Homes and buildings can be a lot of fun to illustrate. From designing interesting shapes and layouts to adding quirky details and textures, there's loads of room to play around with narrative and personality in order to design a setting that is totally unique and full of character. Hi, I'm Sarah Holliday and I'm an illustrator and top teacher here on Skillshare. The work I like to make is very story-driven and imaginative. That's why I really enjoy illustrating houses because you can get totally stuck into your imagination and dream up something completely new with its own sense of wonder and atmosphere. In this class, we're going to be designing and illustrating houses in Procreate, as well as introducing you to some of my favourite Procreate tools, such as the Symmetry tool, QuickShape tool, Clipping Masks, and much more, I'll show you how we can design unique, eye-catching homes by playing with shape, colour, texture, and detail. We'll start off by writing a short brief for ourselves and finding inspiration before making quick studies and moving on to explore rendering textures and designing with shapes. I'll then walk you step-by-step through my process for illustrating an interesting characterful home, so that you'll be able to follow along and create your own unique design. While this class is beginner-friendly, it's also suitable for any artist who wants to improve their illustration skills and gain more practice in Procreate. I'll be explaining how to get started in Procreate and showing you how to use my favourite tools as we go along. So even if you've never used the app before, you'll be able to join in. To take this class, you'll need an iPad with Procreate installed and an Apple Pencil. So if all that sounds like fun and you're ready to draw some imaginative homes with me, then let's get started. 2. Class Overview: [MUSIC] So I'll let you in on a little secret. I used to find drawing houses and architecture kind of boring. I'm someone who's most at home drawing more organic, curving forms like characters and natural scenes. So I used to think that buildings with all their straight lines and angular shapes were just not that exciting to draw. So what changed I hear you ask? Well, I basically realised that what was lacking in my illustrations of buildings wasn't necessarily technical ability or architectural knowledge, but rather a focus on imagination, character, and personality. So after I switched my focus from just drawing something that looks technically sound to setting a scene and telling a story, not only did my drawings improve but the whole process became much more fun and freeing. I was able to change my mindset from one of constantly worrying about what the final product was going to look like and instead just enjoy the process of getting lost in my imagination and exploring a narrative. So this is what I want us to mainly focus on in this class. How do we get from drawing a big block of bricks and doors and windows to creating a unique home full of charm and personality? Obviously, we need to hone that technical ability to be able to portray what we want to portray. But we also want to balance that with our more imaginative and playful side as well. So I've tried to layout this class with that balance in mind. I am going to be showing you a lot of technical tips and tricks to help you use Procreate and learn to draw better. But then I also want to encourage you to tap into your imagination and try and express some kind of narrative or atmosphere through this piece. So we'll begin by writing out a short brief for ourselves just as a starting point. We'll then go and find lots of relevant reference photos to inspire us. After we've gathered a handful of these reference images, we'll start off by sketching small parts of these buildings that we find unique and interesting. We'll then move on to play around with rendering textures and designing using shapes. Then once we've explored and played around with some different techniques there, we'll be ready to begin our final piece. We'll start by creating some small thumbnail sketches to explore several ideas before taking our favourite onto final by refining the sketch and adding colour, texture, and detail. I'll also be showing you how to get started using Procreate as well as introducing you to lots of my favourite tools and tricks that I use all the time within the app. This is not a fully comprehensive guide on everything that Procreate can do because we only have so much time here. But I'll be explaining all the tools that I use within the class. Something that I am not going to cover in this class is perspective. I'll be demonstrating this project in a mainly flat style so that we can focus more on the overall design and feeling of our house rather than worrying too much about creating a realistic looking image. However, if you are comfortable working with perspective, then you're more than welcome to add a bit more of a three-dimensional look to your houses. That's completely dependent on your skill level and what direction you want to take your project in. I can't wait to see what you create in this class, so do feel free to upload your work in progress in the project section of the class as you go along. If you have any questions or need a bit of help with anything at all, then please leave a post in the discussion section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If you're ready to begin, then I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Finding Inspiration: To begin with, we're going to go straight in and write up a short brief for ourselves and then go find some inspiration. I've made up a little worksheet to help us create a brief which you can find in the resources section of this class. You can think about the kind of characters that might live in the house, where it's located, whether that's a specific geographic region or just a general idea of the kind of landscape it's situated in. You can also think about the materials that the house is made of and if there are any specific features and details that you want to include, and if you are really stuck for your own ideas, then I've also made up a few extra sample briefs that you're more than welcome to use for your own project. For my own project, I want to draw the house of a potion maker who lives in the countryside. I'm thinking the house is probably going to be made primarily of stone, wood, and straw. I want to include a big chimney somewhere, and maybe as a thatched roof, as well as lots of plants and herbs growing in pots around the place. So your brief doesn't need to be totally fleshed out and you can, of course, leave yourself some room to play with different ideas. But once you have a starting point, then we can go and start searching for inspiration and make a moodboard relating to this topic, featuring photos of houses or parts of homes or objects with the kind of vibe that you want to bring together in your piece. For this mood board, you can use photos found online from websites like Unsplash or Pinterest, or you might want to go straight to the source and take some photos of buildings around your own area, or maybe you have lots of pictures from a holiday destination that you really enjoyed that you can use as inspiration as well. I recommend choosing images that you're really drawn towards, that have maybe some particular charm to them. Often you'll find they have that charm because there's something a little unique and different about them that intrigues you, and that's the kind of feeling that we want to infuse later on in our own illustration. Whether that's through all the unique little details that we add, or perhaps it's the shape and layout of the building. So those are all things to think about when you're gathering your reference images and making a moodboard. I like to bring my images together all in one place, so that I have an easy reference point and I don't have to switch between different photos all the time. You can do this on whatever program suits you, or if you use Pinterest, then I really recommend that as an easy way to gather reference images all in one place. So here I've pre-made this fairy tale cottage moodboard, which I'm going to use as inspiration for my piece today. So as you can see, I've gathered images of houses that I think fit this theme I'm going for, as well as collecting references of different houses. I've also collected images for the extra little details that I might want to include to help add to the story and character of the house. I've gathered images of potion bottles and different kinds of floral arrangements and different styles of ornate doors and windows. Just go ahead and collect images of houses and objects with different features which interest you, and that you think that your chosen theme. Then once you've gathered a good amount of photo reference and you're feeling inspired to begin the project, then let's move on and start drawing. 4. Getting Started in Procreate: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to quickly go over how to create a custom Canvas in Procreate and get started sketching for anyone that's totally new to the app. If you're already familiar with Procreate or you're using a different medium, then feel free to just skip this lesson and go straight to the next one. But if you are new to Procreate or you want to refresh it, then I'll just quickly show you how to set up your Canvas and begin sketching within the app. Let's begin by opening up the Procreate app. Let's create a new Canvas by pressing this plus button in the top right hand corner of the interface and selecting that little rectangle with a plus in it to create a custom canvas. [NOISE] I'm going to make my Canvas 4,000 times 4,000 pixels at 300 DPI. You'll see that the larger you make your canvas, the less layers you'll be allowed to work with. If you do want more layers, you will have to make your Canvas a little bit smaller in terms of its pixel size. Just bear that in mind and you don't have to use the same dimensions I'm using here. If you want to use different canvas measurements and settings, that's totally up to you. But I would always recommend keeping your DPI at 300 or above to retain a good quality of resolution in case you want to print your artwork. Once you're happy with those settings, we can then set our color profile. I'm going to work in RGB for now with this sRGB setting underneath Display P3. Then you can also say wherever time lapse settings you want, and the background color, etc. I'm going to leave those as they are for now. Once you're happy with your Canvas dimensions and other settings, we can just tap Create and that'll bring you straight into the Canvas. Here in the canvas we've got our drawing tools up in the right hand corner. We have our brush, smudge, eraser, layers and color. We've got this sidebar where we can increase the size of our brushstrokes and the opacity. Up here in the left we've got our adjustment tools which do a lot of useful and interesting things which we'll touch upon later on. If you tap on that Brush symbol to start with, you'll see this brush library open up, and this is where we can choose from loads of different brushes. If you're new to Procreate and you don't have any downloaded brushes, then you will probably just see these Procreate native brushes from the sketching folder downwards. Let's tap on the sketching folder to open it. I'm going to be using the Derwent pencil from the sketching folder. But feel free to use whatever brush you feel most comfortable drawing with, or you can try out different brushes to see what feels best for you. To change the brush color, we can tap on that colored circle in the right hand corner. I'm going to change my color to black just by sliding that circle down to the bottom of the classic color picker. Then to close that window, I'll just tap the circle again. That means that our brush color will appear black when we sketch on the Canvas. If you want to undo quickly, you can either press this little Undo button at the bottom of the sidebar there, or you can tap on the Canvas with two fingers to undo your last stroke. If you want to read your stroke you can tap with three fingers to bring those back, one stroke at a time. That is a quick way to easily undo or redo without disrupting your flow too much. If we want to lower or raise the size of our brush, then we can just use this top slider here on the sidebar, and you'll see that changes the thickness of our strokes. If you want to lower the opacity to make your brush more transparent, then you can play around with that bottom slider there. This is really just scratching the surface of what that can do. But hopefully that's given you a basic overview of where everything is that you need to get started sketching within Procreate. Have a play around with that if you want and get familiar with the interface. When you're ready, you can meet me in the next lesson where we can start making some rough studies of our reference images. 5. Making Studies: [MUSIC] Now that I have my Procreate canvas setup and ready to draw, I'm going to bring up my Moodboard alongside that. So however you want to set up your Moodboard is fine, just as long as you can see your reference images at the same time as you're drawing. To do this, I'm just swiping upwards with my finger from the bottom of my iPad to bring up the dark bar and then I'm going to tap and hold on the Pinterest app and then keep my fingers held down on the app and I'll drag it to the side of the screen so that I can use both apps at the same time. If you want, you can drag this little center button to change the layer and space that each app takes up and you can also move the app to the other side of the screen using those three dots at the top. This makes it really easy for us to see our inspiration board and reference photos alongside our Procreate canvas so that we can start to make some studies of these photos. Let's just start sketching from these images now and I'm just starting off with that potion bottle and roughly building up the basic shapes here starting with a circle and then adding on some little rectangles to make up that bottle shape. You might also want to start off by drawing the simpler objects from your Moodboard first to ease yourself in and just break down those forms by identifying the main shapes first and then adding on and flushing out the extra details. I'm basically just looking at my references and identifying the parts of these houses and objects that I find most interesting. I really like the style of that door from the blue house and I'm just going to draw that by itself, again, sketching out the main shape first, so in this case it's quite an arch shape. Then I'm roughly sketching the pattern on the door by splitting up the bigger sections first and then drawing in those lines as they appear on the reference photo. I'm just drawing really quick and simple line sketches here, so not worrying at all about shading or adding any really detailed effects. I also quite like the look of those exposed breaks around that door that I'm drawing. I'll just roughly sketch those in as well just following along the arch shape of the door and roughly outlining that feature. Now I'm going to look for another door to draw and again, it's the same idea of sketching out that main shape first. So in this case, I'm drawing a rectangle with a slightly curved top and then once I have that main shape sketched out, I'm going in with all the little details like this square window and these brackets at the side of the door and then some lines for the wood panels. I've gone over the lines a bit there, so I'm just going to navigate to the eraser tool and I can select any brush that's in our brush library to raise with. Actually, I'm going to select a more solid brush to erase with. But in general, I'd encourage you to try and avoid using the eraser as much as possible in this exercise. Just let yourself be messy and loose and make a few scribbles. I'll just speed through the rest of these drawings now, but it's pretty much the same idea each time. I'm just roughly blocking out the main shape of what I'm drawing and then adding in any relevant details after I've drawn out that main shape. I'm also not worrying about drawing in perspective here. You can see I'm drawing everything flat because we don't want to worry too much about perspective at the moment. It's just about identifying design features and shapes. The aim of this exercise is not to complete a page of perfect, beautiful drawings. It's so that we can collect a rough idea of how to draw a variety of these structures and objects in our head so that when it comes to designing our own unique house, we'll have more of an idea of what we want to include and we'll be more confident at drawing all of these separate elements. As you can see, I'm keeping my sketches really quick and rough and loose. They don't need to be super detailed and accurate at all. This should just be a really low pressure exercise to get us warmed up and into the groove and also to kick-start our imagination ready for designing our own house. At this stage I'm just drawing separate elements such as different styles of doors and windows, as well as ornamental objects such as plant parts and lamps and then we'll move on to sketch out more complex house shapes very shortly. So once we've drawn a variety of different windows and doors and objects, we can start drawing some of these houses as a whole and looking at the different kinds of shapes that they're made up off. I'm going to use the transform tool by pressing this arrow symbol and make sure I'm on uniform and then I can scale down those sketches by dragging this blue node at the corner and that gives me more space in the Canvas to keep drawing more studies. Once we're finished scaling, we can just press the arrow again to exit and then you can see we have this empty space where we can start sketching some house shapes. This time I'm looking at the whole house instead of just one part of it and again, trying to identify and break down the main shapes that make up the overall form. You can see here that I started off by drawing that main shape of the front of the house, just simplifying it down to a wonky rectangle with an asymmetrical sloped roof and then I added on this bigger shape behind it and just kept adding on these simple shapes to build up that more complex form. It makes the process a lot easier if you can break things down block-by-block, instead of trying to draw the whole thing at once. Once you have the big shapes blocked in, then it's much easier to go in and add the little ornamental shapes and details afterwards. Then it doesn't matter too much if these measurements are not absolutely spot on because we're just getting a rough idea of the general shape. It doesn't need to be mathematically accurate at all. Once you've sketched out a rough idea of the general form, then let's just move on to the next study and don't worry about adding textures or details or anything at this stage, we're just focusing on the form right now. So for my next study, I'm starting off by sketching out that triangular roof shape on the left and then I'm adding on this rectangle to the side of that to complete the bulk of that roof and then just sketching out the rest of the house shape, which is pretty rectangular as well. Then again, I'm just going in and further breaking down the shapes within those main shapes to flush out the rest of this form, so just loosely blocking out the extra structural details like windows and chimneys. I'm also going to draw that pattern on this thatched roof there because I really like the look of that. That line is made up of these smooth curves and then a more pointed shape. I'm just capturing that not totally accurately, but just the general flow of it. I'll speed through the next few studies again, but again, each time I'm just breaking down and identifying the different shapes that make up the whole house and trying to study from a variety of different styles of houses within my theme. If I come across any more individual objects that I find really interesting and want to study, then I'll just draw them out as well. [MUSIC] By the end of this exercise, hopefully you've filled up a page of these list studies and you've practiced drawing different kinds of windows and doors and a variety of different house shapes and you've got a feel for all the little details that you can use to add story and character to your illustration. Don't worry if your drawings don't look perfect. It's not about how they look, it's about what we've learned from making these studies. We learned so much by just looking at our references with intention and picking out the details that we like and trying to replicate their structure. So hopefully you're feeling warmed up and inspired to move on with your project and once you're ready, you can meet me in the next lesson where we'll practice rendering materials and textures. 6. Materials & Textures: In this lesson, we're going to explore illustrating materials and textures in Procreate. We'll be talking more about using layers within Procreate as well as working with clipping masks and Alpha Lock and other fun techniques. I'll show you my process for adding texture and rendering materials in a stylized way. Let us begin by heading to our layers panel, which you'll find by tapping on that overlapping square symbol in the top right-hand corner of the Canvas. Then we want to add a new layer by pressing up that 'Plus' button. Let's just rename our layers to keep everything tidy. To rename a layer, we can just tap on it and you'll see that selected layer highlighted in blue. Then if we tap on the layer again, you should see this list up here to the side of it. Then we can just tap on rename and our keyboard will pop up. I'm going to rename this layer studies. We can then just tap out of that and let's do the same on our new layer by selecting it, tap on it, rename, and we'll name this materials. Tap out of that to exit. To hide a layer, you can see we've got these little visibility checkboxes at the side here. If we uncheck that box on the studies layer, then it hides it so that we can't see it on the Canvas anymore. But it is still there and we can bring it back anytime using that visibility checkbox. But for this next stage we want to keep that hidden, so I'll uncheck the box. Make sure you have your new layer highlighted, the one called materials. Then let's tap out of the layer panel and go to our brush tool by selecting that brush symbol. Once you're in the brush library, we can just navigate to the airbrushing folder and select this hard brush. Then we can tap the brush symbol again to exit and we'll use this top slider in the sidebar to change our brush size to something like 14 percent. Then if we tap down very firmly on the Canvas, we can create four little black blobs. If it comes out a bit gray like this, just give that couple more taps until it becomes black. Now we have four evenly sized blobs that we can practice rendering materials over. What we can do now is make sure you're still on the materials layer and then go to this little magic wand symbol to open up the adjustments panel. Let's head to the first tab on this list, which is hue, saturation, and brightness and just tap on that. You'll see all these sliders appear, which we can use to edit the colors of our selected layer. Using the brightness slider we can just raise that up to maybe about 85 percent just so we have something a bit lighter than the black. Actually I'll bring that up to 90 percent to make it even lighter. Then I'll just tap on the magic wand symbol again to exit. I'm now heading back to my layers panel and I'm going to create a new layer by selecting that plus symbol and we're going to clip this layer onto the one below. I'll just tap to bring up that list again and this time I want to select clipping mask. What a clipping mask layer does is it sits on top of a specific layer, whichever layer we set it to. I'll just change my brush quickly back to that Derwent pencil here to demonstrate. Whatever we draw within that clipping mask layer will only appear within the pixel boundaries of the layer it's clipped to. If I just start making a few scribbles on this clipping mask layer, you can see that these scribbles only appear within the pixels of those blobs on the layer this is clipped to, which is that materials layer. Let's just rename this clipping mask layer by tapping on it, selecting rename, and I'll call this texture lines. Then make sure you have this clipping mask layer selected and what we're going to do next is start sketching out some materials. Let's tap out of that layer panel. Now let us go back to our reference images again and look for a few different materials to draw from. So depending on the theme you've chosen, you might have different types of materials and textures in your reference photos. But generally in my mood board I'm seeing a lot of stone and thatched roofs and wood, so I think those are the materials I'm going to try and render here. So just have a look through and see what catches your eye and note if there are any particular textures you want to try and render and stylize. I'll walk you through this process. I'm going to start off with this stone texture here. So once you've chosen your first texture reference, then we can start just sketching out the rough shapes and patterns using lines. I don't want to copy the texture exactly, but I'm trying to know what the main features are of this texture. Noticing how these stones are all pretty varied in their shapes and sizes and I want to capture that as well as an impression of how they're laid out together, sorting in with each other like puzzle pieces but with little gaps in-between. I also don't want to draw every single stone. I just wanted to capture an impression of this texture rather than creating a realistic rendition. So as you can see here, I'm just drawing some of these stones out in various shapes and sizes, in little clusters together. I'm just aiming to capture the general pattern and flow of the smaller stones amongst the bigger stones of various shapes and sizes. If you want to create a more realistic rendition of the material, that's totally up to you. This is just what I like to do in my style. I don't like to overwhelm the piece with too much detail. I just like to add enough detail that's necessary to give an impression of the material that I want to portray. Then I'm just adding some smaller stones to these little clusters to add a bit more variety and interest to this material. So once we've sketched out the rough shapes or lines of our first material, let's just move on to the next. Up next, I'm going to draw this thatched roof texture. As there are no clearly defined shapes here, I'm just going to sketch some lines following the same direction as that thatching to give a subtle impression of the texture. Again, not going into too much detail, just drawing lots of clusters of a couple of short lines and keeping it simple. That just gives you an idea of the flow of the texture without having to add too much detail. Next, I want to draw this wooden pattern. I'm going to first of all break this shape down into thick vertical planks and then within the grain of the wood there are all these lovely carving lines, so I want to simplify those and replicate the pattern and flow of those contours. Again, I'm keeping it simple, not copying every detail and just trying to capture the essence of this wood texture. I'm trying to maintain a sense of flow and curve to these lines. Then I'm just going over those vertical lines again to help make these wood planks stand out from the green lines. Then for this last texture, I'm going to go for these bricks. You can see how these bricks are very uniformly placed and even in size compared to the stones from our first texture. I'm just drawing in rough rectangular shapes of more or less the same shape and size here. Again, not bothering to drawing every brick, but just enough to give the impression of this texture. Those two in the middle are looking a bit too wonky for my liking, so I'll just erase those and draw them in again. Whatever textures I'm drawing, I'm thinking about simplifying the shapes or lines and trying to figure out a way that I can create the impression of this material without over-rendering. Then to fill in the gaps, I sometimes like to use a few dots here and there just to add a little bit more roughness and suggestion of texture so that it doesn't feel like there's as much empty space but still doesn't overwhelm the piece with detail. Now that we've roughly drawn out those textures, we're going to start a new layer, so tap the 'Plus' button. Then we can just drag this new layer in-between our clipping mask layer and materials layer. Then if we just release that, you can see this new layer is also added to this clipping mask group. That's an easy way to create another clipping mask layer on top of the same layer without having to go through too many steps. Let's just rename this new layer texture shapes. Make sure you still have that layer selected. Then let's go to our brushes and open up the inking folder. Change your brush to something from this folder. You can choose whichever brush you prefer, but I'm going to use this tinderbox brush here. It's got quite a nice flow to it. I love brushes which have a slightly textured edge. I would encourage you at this stage, especially if you're new to Procreate, to just play around with different brushes here and see how they look and feel. Going back to our layers now, let's select that texture lines layer again. We're going to lower the opacity of this layer now. If we tap on the end symbol to bring up the opacity slider, then we can just drag that down to around 30 percent. That way we can use these lines as a guide for our shapes without them interfering too much. Then make sure you have your texture shapes layer selected now, and then we can just go to our colors panel by tapping that blob in the top right corner and we can either use this classic color picker to choose whatever color you want by using these three sliders below. Or you can choose the color from within the panel itself. Or you can switch to the desk, which I personally use more often. Then you can just play around by adjusting the hue on the outside wheel and then picking the preferred tool and within the inside circle. I'm looking for a beige color here to match those bricks. Then once I'm happy, I'll just tap that blob again to close the color panel. Then I'll just lower the size of this brush and start going in and blocking out the shapes of these bricks using those lines above as a guide. What you can do with your shapes to speed things up a bit, is to just draw the outlines of a few of them and make sure that the line is completely closed without any gaps. Then you can drop the color inside of these outlines by dragging that colored blob from the top right corner to the inside of these closed outlines. Let's just finish off coloring those and I'm not worrying too much about keeping these shapes super neat. Then again, I'm just using that color drop to fill in these last few shapes and then adding in these little dots in-between. Then if we hide these little textures lines above, we can see that brick texture starting to take shape. Now I'm going to color the gray circle underneath. Select your materials layer, which all this is sitting on top of, and then tap on it again to bring up the layer options. Then we're going to select Alpha Lock. This means that any transformations we make to that material's layer will be confined to the contents of that layer and will not affect the transparent areas. It's very similar to a clipping mask, except that you don't need an extra layer. The benefit of the clipping mask is that you can turn it on and off and you don't have to commit to a certain transformation, while Alpha Lock saves you time and layers for making simple edits. I'm going to choose a lighter color now to use as a base for this brick texture, make sure I'm still on the materials there, raise my brush size. Then you can see that with that Alpha Lock turned on, I can draw directly in the layer while staying within the boundaries of those locked pixels. Another option here to make this step a bit quicker is to just drop that color directly within the shape to fill it. This way, we can try out several options for colored backgrounds here and see what works best. Let's turn those texture lines back on. I'm going to choose a base color for each of these gray blobs now. Again, just dragging and dropping that color in to fill each of them. I'm just choosing the color depending on the material that I'm rendering, but not worrying about being a 100 percent realistic. It doesn't really matter what colors you use here. Just have a play around and experiment. Then going back to my texture shapes layer, I'll show you how you can edit these colors using yet another method. If you tap on the magic one symbol, that takes you to adjustments, and you can use any of these top four options to adjust the colors. But we're going to just use hue, saturation and brightness for now. Let's tap on that. Then you'll see these three sliders appear at the bottom of the screen. Saturation adjusts the vibrancy of the color, hue adjusts the color itself, and brightness adjusts how light or dark the color is. Feel free to have a play around with that if you ever need to adjust your colors and make small tweaks. Now I'm just going to continue drawing out the shapes for each of these remaining materials. I'm making a new layer for each of these shapes and naming them accordingly, just so that it's easier to edit the colors individually later on if I want to. Another trick for picking colors is to hold your finger down on that middle button in-between the two sliders on the sidebar. Then you can drag and hover your pencil over whichever color you want to select. Then if you just let go of your pencil and the middle button, you'll see that color is loaded onto our brush now. You'll be able to draw with the exact same color you just picked. This can save us a lot of time and frustration if you want to match a specific color. Then I can use the color disk to adjust that color if I want, and in this case I'll make it a little darker. Again, I'm just going to go in and define the lines and shapes for each of these materials now, using my line work above as a guide. Defining the lines for the wood grain, some short directional lines for the thatching, and then blocking out different size and shapes for the stonework and adding some variety in color with these stones as well. If I turn that texture lines layer off now, you can see how those materials are really starting to take shape, even with only a few lines and shapes to suggest the texture here. I'm just going to add a little bit of variation to the color of these bricks by using the Alpha Lock method again. Turning that Alpha Lock on, on the bricks there, and then color picking the current color of those bricks, adjusting that color to something a little more saturated within the color wheel, and then just drawing over a few of those bricks with this new color to add a bit more variation to this material. With those shapes and lines blocked out, these materials are looking quite recognizable, but what will really bring them to life is adding various brush textures. Let's add a new layer again. I'll rename this brush textures. This is where we can just have some fun playing with all the different brushes within Procreate. If you have purchased brushes that you want to use for this exercise, then you're more than welcome to use those. But for this lesson, I'm going to just use the native Procreate brushes because there's so much you can do with just these. If you're new to Procreate, you might not have any custom brushes downloaded. I want to show you that you can still create beautiful textures with just these default brushes. We can go ahead and look for different brushes that maybe reflect the texture that you want to create. For example, for the thatched roof, I want to indicate the individual pieces of straw. This thylacine brush seems quite a good fit for that. If I go back to the Canvas now and just choose a bit of a darker color and play around with my brush size, then I can just draw on a few of these brushstrokes in that downwards direction, which helps add some lovely texture. Then I can just play around with lowering the opacity to decrease the intensity of that texture so that we can still see those lines that we drew previously. We can also scroll through this list of blend modes underneath that opacity slider and you'll notice each of these options creates a slightly different effect. Some of them make the texture appear brighter upon that background and some make that texture seem much darker or more vibrant. You can play around with those and see what effect looks best depending on what you're rendering. I'm going to make a new texture layer for each of these three remaining materials now within this clipping mask group, so that I can play around with different blend modes and opacity settings for each layer. I'll just rename my layers accordingly. I'm just doing the same thing as before, playing around with adding different brush textures that I think suit the material, and then playing with blend modes and opacity on that textured layer. There is no set rule here. Just experiment and play around with what you think works and looks good and practice using these different blend modes and different brush textures and get used to working with clipping masks and Alpha Lock and color adjustments. Once you're done rendering those textures, and you've had a good practice with all these different tools and techniques, we're going to actually get rid of those texture lines by deleting that first layer. If we select that layer and we slide it to the left, then we can press that red button that says Delete to just get rid of that layer. Because we only have a limited number of layers to use and we want to conserve as many as possible for our final piece, we're actually going to merge all of these layers from this exercise together. Just make sure you're happy with everything before you merge. But remember, this is just a practice exercise, so it doesn't need to be perfect. But once you're finished practicing, then we can just simply merge everything by pinching all those layers together between your thumb and index finger. Make sure you're not pinching your studies layer because we don't want to merge that. Everything from this top layer down to the first materials there. Then if we just pinch our thumb and index finger together, that merges all those different layers into the one layer. You should just be left with two layers now, from our first two exercises. Then once you're ready, let's move on to the next lesson where I'll show you some handy Procreate tools for creating shapes. 7. Shapes: [MUSIC] Now we're going to explore playing with shapes, and I'll show you a couple of tools we can use within procreate to make those really fun and easy. Let's open up our layers panel and top on the plus button to add a new layer and just rename this layer shapes. Then I'm going to hide my materials there and go to my brush and select that Darwin pencil from the sketching folder and quickly change my color to black. I'm going to get rid of that mood board as well just by sliding that tab all the way to the left so that procreate takes up the whole screen here. We'll start off by showing you how to use the quick shape tool. If you draw a line, just freehand and then keep your pencil held down on the canvas for a moment afterwards, you can see that it creates this perfectly straight line. If we keep that pencil held down and just move it around then you can freely rotate this line to whatever angle you like. Then if we hold our finger down as well anywhere on that canvas and move the pencil around again that line will stop to 15 degree increments. This can be a great way to achieve a perfectly horizontal or vertical line, or if you want to draw a specific angle within those 15 degree increments. You can just release your pencil to create that line, and if you tap Edit Shape at the top of the canvas, you'll see these blue nodes appear at either side of that line. You can then play around with these nodes to stretch or move the line to wherever you want it. You can also move the line by dragging your finger around anywhere on the canvas. If we want to commit to this placement, you can just tap anywhere on the canvas and that exits the quick shape tool. I'll just tap with two fingers to undo this line. Then we can practice using that same method to help us draw many different shapes such as squares, polylines, triangles, ellipses, and quadrilateral shapes. For example, I can draw a rough circular shape and by keeping my pencil held down, it creates this perfect ellipse which I can scale up or down and rotate just as before. If I also hold my finger down, you can see that ellipse becomes a perfect circle. I can then release my pencil to create that shape, and again, that Edit Shape tab appears above where we can further edit the shape using these blue nodes, just as we did with our line before. Because we've squashed a bit, this circle has become an ellipse again. If we want to turn it back into a circle, we can just tap that button at the top that says circle, and you can see that it snaps back to a perfect circular shape. Then just tap anywhere on the canvas to confirm that shape, I'll just undo that by tapping with two fingers again, and we can do the same thing with lots of different shapes. I can try a triangle this time, and then we can play with these options above to easily edit this form. If I tap on quadrilateral, you can see that allows us to change this into a four-sided shape, and then polyline break this up into a line with several angles that we can then move around. This tool allows us to easily create lots of interesting shapes, which can be really handy when it comes to designing unique structures for our houses later on in the class, and arcs can be really fun to play with as well. Feel free to play around with this quick shape tool and just see what it can do, and all the variety of shapes that it can help you make. I'll just undo that by tapping with two fingers on the canvas again. Next, I'll show you how to use the symmetry tool. Let's head to this little spanner icon up in the top left next to gallery and just tap on that to bring up the Actions panel. Then tap on Canvas and head down to drawing guide and just switch on that toggle there. You might see this grid appear on your Canvas. Then we'll go to Edit Drawing Guide and tap on that to bring up this window. You'll see we have a few options of drawing guides to choose between. We have 2D grid, isometric, perspective, or symmetry. We're just going to focus on symmetry today, and I won't bother going through the others, but you can always have a play around with them in your own time if you want. Then there's the option to change the opacity and the thickness of that guideline so that it's more visible if you like, by using these sliders at the bottom. You can also change the color of the line using the slider at the top. But let's just keep it black for now. We can also change whether we want the guide to be horizontal, quadrant, radial, or if we want rotational symmetry. But for this demonstration, we're just going to keep the default settings with rotational symmetry switched off and vertical selected. Make sure assisted drawing is switched on, and then we can just select Done at the top left here. You should see that this line has appeared in the middle of your canvas. If we head back to our layer panel, you'll notice that because we turned the drawing guide on while we were in that shapes layer, a little assisted label has appeared underneath it, which means that we can use the drawing guide with this layer or with whatever layer shows this assisted label. That means that while we're drawing within that assisted layer and the symmetry drawing guide is turned on, whatever we draw on one side of that symmetry guideline will be mirrored on the other side to create a symmetrical drawing. This can be a really fun way to have your drawing time and create very aesthetically pleasing, appealing houses using symmetry. Just undo that by tapping two fingers. Then if you want to turn off the symmetry drawing guide on that layer, you can just tap on the layer and look for drawing assist, tap on it, and then you'll be able to draw on that layer again without any symmetry occurring. The same thing if you want to turn it back on, just select Drawing Assist again from that list. If you want to edit the drawing guide at anytime, you can just go back to the spanner and then to Canvas, edit drawing guide, and using this blue node, you can move the drawing guide around the canvas to change the placement of that symmetry. You can also use this green node above to rotate the guideline in case you want to create some symmetry at a particular angle. I'll tap with two fingers until that guideline has returned to where it was, and so if I move this over to the right side and click Done, you'll see that it's changed the placement of that symmetry. For example, if I turn the drawing assist off again, I can then draw an asymmetrically shaped house, and then maybe I then want to turn the drawing assist on, and draw one part of my piece with symmetry. Rough example, but you can see that this can be such a helpful and effective tool to play with in your drawings and designs. You might not even need to use it at all for this project, but it's good to have the option and know how to use it if you want to. Just quickly undo that drawing by tapping with two fingers again, and then to turn off the drawing guide so that it's not visible anymore, you can just go to Actions, Canvas, Drawing Guide, and just toggle that switch off. Then we'll tap out of that. Let's go back to our layers and make sure we still have that shapes there selected. Now we're going to practice using these tools I've just shown you, and your task is to just draw as many random shapes as you can think of to fill up this page. Try using the quick shape tool, the symmetry tool, and drawing some freehand shapes as well. The purpose of this is to help us get warmed up by drawing lots of individual shapes before we come to bring these all together to build up our host designs in the next lesson. I'm going to speed this part up because I've just shown you all the techniques that I'm using to draw these shapes. Basically, I'm just playing around and thinking about maybe different shapes that I might want to use to build up my host design. Thinking of shapes that might look good as a roof or one section of the building, or even the whole silhouette of the house. Just use your imagination here and see what funky shapes you can come up with, and just have fun with this exercise. Try using that symmetry tool and that quick shape tool and see how you get on with them. You can also try drawing more asymmetrical shapes and really curvy ones, really angular ones, and obviously it also depends on the theme you're going for if you want to go for something that's really modern and minimalists looking, you might want to use more angular and really simplified shapes. Whereas if your theme is a bit more decorative, then you might want to create more intricate looking shapes. Don't be afraid to just go wild and experiment here. You'll probably find that once you get all the basic obvious shapes out of the way, you'll start to become a bit more inventive with the different shapes you create. Once you've had a go at using the quick shape tool and experimented with symmetry and creating a variety of different shapes, then we're ready to move on and start drafting ideas for our final piece. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll be building up several thumbnail ideas for our illustration. 8. Thumbnail Sketches: [MUSIC] Now that we've practiced making studies, rendering materials, and drawing out different shapes, it's time to build upon these skills and start sketching out several ideas for our final piece. Let's begin a new layer by pressing that plus button, and we'll rename this layer Thumbnail Sketches. Just tap out of that, and then we can turn off the visibility of the other layers. What we're going to do here is start sketching out lots of different ideas for our final host design. If you want to go back and reference any of your development work up till now, such as your studies and your shapes, or your mood board to give you more ideas, then you're more than welcome to use those and refer to them at anytime for extra inspiration. For example, I want to make a bit of a feature out of the chimney in my piece. I'm seeing a couple of shapes from our previous exercise that might work well for that with the wonkiness to them which I like. I also quite like this bottle shape which I might try to incorporate somewhere to just suggest more of the character of the host and what it's used for. I also like the look of these rounded semicircle shapes placed together, which I think might work really nicely as a roof with different shapes overlapping each other. We can also go back to our studies and take inspiration from all the different shapes that we studied from there and how those houses are put together. But ultimately we want to create something that's unique and imaginative. This is your chance to really play and be creative, and see what combinations of shapes you can come up with to create really interesting silhouettes for these houses. Let's hide those shapes for now and we can refer back to them again at anytime. If you want to bring up your mood board again at any point for extra inspiration, then you're more than welcome to do that. I think I'm just going to hide mine right now because I want to create something that is unique. I don't want to be too influenced by my reference images. If you're not as confident and you want those reference images to hand, that is totally fine. But just makes sure you don't only take inspiration from one source. Instead, try to mix it up with lots of different references to create something new. Let's finally start sketching these out. You can start off anywhere maybe with one main shape, and then start adding on more shapes around it. You'll see I'm keeping my thumbnail drawings quite small because we don't want to get too much into the details right now. Here I've just started with a very basic wonky rectangle to build the base of the house, and then I'm going to add a semicircular roof shape on top. Then I'll just keep flashing out the overall form with more shapes to add interest and character. You might want to use the same kind of shape or a couple of shapes over and over again in your design to create some uniformity in flow, or you might want to use loads of different shapes for a more chaotic look. You can see here that I'm reusing that same semicircular shape on top of rectangles, which helps to tie everything together. But then I'm going to add this triangular shape to break up the pattern a bit and adds a little extra interest. Then to help tie that shape in further, I'm going to give a bit of a bulky rounded roof. Then I'll use the eraser tool to rub out some of these overlapping lines so that I can see these shapes more clearly. I'm using the mercury brush to erase with. Remember you can change your eraser brush at any point as well by choosing any brush from this brush library. I don't really have a plan here. I'm just trying things out and seeing what works in terms of throwing shapes together and seeing where it takes us. Then I'm adding in a big chimney as well at the back of the house here. I'm going to finish that off with some smaller shapes at the top so that it reads better as a chimney. Then I'm just exaggerating this roof shape here so that it sticks out more from the main shape of the house and adds extra interest to the overall silhouette. I'm just keeping on adding shapes and thinking of how I can make this design look even more interesting. I'm adding even more of those little rounded roofs at different heights. Then if you want to block out some rough shape for the doors, and windows, and any other structural features you want to include. Then go ahead, but don't bother going into any of the finer details right now. This stage is all about just quickly blocking out those main shapes. Once you're quite happy with that, just move on to the next one. We don't want to be spending too long on each drawing here, so try to limit yourself to just a few minutes on each thumbnail. This time I'm starting off with a roof shape and then I'm building up a similar base to my first drawing without wonky rectangular shape. But I'm being a bit more playful and using more angular shapes this time and just trying out different things here. Again, using the eraser tool to get rid of some of these overlapping lines. Then just building up the form by adding more shapes and structural features. Blocking out where the windows and doors might go to make this look more like a building. Then playing around with adding a few more chimneys. Then here I'm not too happy with our main roof shape anymore. I'm just using the eraser tool to rub out some parts and then drawing on a new shape in place of that. Which I think it goes much better with the overall look of the house and creates more of an interesting feature out of it. Then taking inspiration from the thatched roof I studied earlier, I'm adding on that curvy pattern shape to the bumps in this roof, which I think helps to add even more character. Then lastly, just tidying up some of these shapes and making sure the overall form of the house is nicely balanced before moving on quickly to the next thumbnail. The process is pretty much the same for the rest of these drawings here, is just building up shapes and using your own eye and imagination to come up with something that you think looks unique and has some character to it. I find the best way to tap into that imagination is to picture the story of the person who lives there or the history of the house and imagine it within its setting. You don't have to draw these things, but if you can create an emotional connection around some kind of story or character related to this house, then it becomes much easier to dream up something that looks really intriguing and tells its own story. If you need to revisit your mood board or one of our previous drawing exercises while you're working on these thumbnails, I would encourage you to do so just to keep yourself inspired, and don't be afraid to try out some really weird and unconventional structures here. This is a time to just experiment and let your imagination flow. Your mood board is just there to kick-start your imagination, so don't be afraid to use it if you're ever feeling a bit stuck. Now that my page is filling up more, I want to create a bit of space to draw a few more of these thumbnails. I'm just tapping that arrow icon and moving these into the corner more, and then using the S icon to draw around and individual hosts, and then tapping the arrow again to move it closer to the corner as well. I'm just repeating this a few times, moving these houses closer together to maximize the space available on the page. Now I have a decent amount of space left. I'm going to continue drawing these thumbnail designs, trying to really vary my structures and come up with something totally different to what I've drawn so far. Hopefully after you draw the first few designs, you'll build-up a bit of confidence and feel more comfortable working with more complex structures and shapes. Just challenge yourself a bit here and also have fun experimenting. If one of your drawings turns out a bit rubbish and you don't like it. That's totally fine. That's the whole point of experimenting and you'll learn so much from that as well. Don't be afraid of making bad drawings. That's all part of the process here. You wouldn't be experimenting if some of those experiments didn't go wrong once in awhile. You'll see me here doing a lot of editing of these shapes using the selection tool to squash and enlarged certain features and using the eraser to rub stuff and redraw it in a different way. I'm just trying different layouts and moving stuff around. I encourage you to do the same. If you don't like the look of something or you think it could be improved upon, just go for it and make those changes. But also try not to be too perfectionistic here. There's a fine balance to be struck. You don't want to be spending forever on a design if it's just not working for you. If that happens, just leave it, move on, and start afresh. That is me finish drawing these designs and I'm going to use the selection tool again to space these drawings are evenly and just get rid of that mood board. Again, just drawing a circle around each house with the selection tool, and using the arrow to move it on the page and maybe resizing the designs a little so that I can view them all at the same size. This is a totally optional step, but it's just so that I can more easily compare my designs to decide which one I like best. Something else we can do to help us view these designs with a fresh eye is to first of all make sure we still have the Thumbnail Sketches layer selected. Then we can just go to actions at that spanner icon, Canvas, and then Flip horizontal. As you can see, that just flips our Canvas and helps us to view these from a fresh perspective and guess better sense of the balance of them. As we've been looking at these sketches for quite a while now, so looking at your designs now with a fresh eye, we're going to choose the one that we want to develop further into our final piece. I'm actually really drawn to this central house here because I like how the roof is in an awkward shape and I like that layout of the multiple chimneys as well. I think overall it's quite interesting as a design and it looks quite unique. One last check that you can do, especially if you're struggling to choose between your designs, is to color them in black. If we just create a new layer above our thumbnail sketches, then go to our brush and change it to something from the inking folder like Tinderbox, and then what we can do is really roughly and quickly color in the whole shape of each thumbnail. I'll just raise my brush size so that it doesn't take me as long because I just want to be quick here, and I'm just really roughly filling that shape in. This is totally optional of course, but I find that the more interesting and recognizable your silhouettes are within whatever you're drawing, then the more interesting your overall illustration will be. By coloring in our drawings this way, it allows us to view the overall forum without being distracted by any of the details or smaller shapes within that design. You can see that these silhouettes are all quite distinctive from each other, and all these chimneys and bits of added shapes coming out of the sides, all add interest and character to the silhouette. If we just turn off and on that silhouettes layer, you'll notice how that step really helps us view these shapes much more clearly. Doing that has just confirmed to me that I like this middle thumbnail the best, as I think it has the strongest, most distinctive silhouette. I'll just quickly rename that layer to Silhouettes. When you're ready, we'll move on to refine our chosen thumbnail sketch in the next lesson. 9. Refined Sketch: [MUSIC] Once you've chosen the thumbnail that you want to develop into your final piece, just make sure you have that thumbnail sketches layer selected. Then let's go to the Selection tool by tapping the little "S" symbol to the left of the arrow icon. Then making sure you have freehand selected, we're just going to draw a circle around our chosen thumbnail and then tap that "Gray blob" to complete the selection. Now that the house is selected, we can just go down to where it says copy and paste and tap on that. Then if we go to our Layers, you can see that a new layer has been created called from selection. If we hide our thumbnail sketches now, you'll see the our selected house has been copied and pasted onto this new layer. I'm just going to rename that layer sketch. Then I'll go to the arrow symbol, make sure I'm on the uniform selection. Just drag the corners of this box to scale up the drawing until it takes up a good amount of space on the page, but still leaving a bit of breathing room around it. Then I'll tap that "Arrow" again to confirm those changes and head back to my Layers. I'm just going to drag this new sketch layer above all the others. Then I'm going to make a layer group with the remaining layers just to keep them all in one place. Just select any one of these and then we can add the other layers to the selection by sliding to the right on each layer until everything is highlighted in blue, apart from this sketch there at the top. Then I'll just press "Group" at the top of the layer panel here. You can see this organize these layers into a group which you can then open and close. We can just rename that group something like development sketches. That just helps us to keep this layer panel organized, especially if we're going to be adding lots of layers later on. If we want to reference any of these developments sketches at any point, we can easily find them. Now that we have our chosen thumbnail sketch setup, we're going to flesh this out a bit more by refining these shapes and adding more details. Let's head back to our layers again. I'm making sure you have your sketch layer selected. Let's just tap on the "N" at the left, which brings up the opacity slider. We can just bring that opacity down to about 30 percent. Then let's add a new layer using the Plus button and I'll rename this refined sketch. I'm going to use the direct pencil again and just raise my brush size. Then I'm going to bring up my mood board yet again and keep that other side while I'm refining this design. Just to give me some extra inspiration while I'm drawing all the details of my house. I'm just going to start by drawing over and defining the lines that I want to keep. I'm being a little bit neater than I was before when sketching my thumbnails. I'm just taking my time here to define those shapes a little more and drawing in lots of extra details that are going to add character and story to my house. Just taking more inspiration for these shapes and details from my references, but trying to put my own spin on them to create something unique and imaginative. This stage, if you want to change anything about your design, if you want to add any more details or change the shapes, then you can just use your under sketch as a base. But you don't need to trace over exactly. You can still let this piece evolve and change wherever you like from the original sketch. You can use that quick shape tool again if you want to create very precise looking shapes. Or likewise, you can use the Symmetry tool for any symmetrical elements in your design. I'll just speed through this next bit of the process and let you watch this sketch evolve as I add more details and refine these shapes. [MUSIC] I think that is me done with this sketch. We can just get rid of the mood board for now. I really like how this is looking. I think it's got a lot of character and there's a lot of scope to play with adding color and texture as well. Once you have your finalized sketch and you're happy with it, then meet me in the next lesson where we'll talk about choosing a color scheme for your illustration. 10. Choosing Colours: Now we're going to experiment with a few different color schemes before we decide on the final colors we want to work with. Let's go ahead and open up our layers and make sure you have your refined sketch selected. Then we can just duplicate this layer by sliding to the left until these three options appear and then press 'Duplicate' in the middle. You'll see that that duplicates the layer there. Then let's turn off that lower layer by unchecking the visibility box. Now with this top layer selected, we can just go to the arrow button and make sure you have this uniform option selected so that we can scale this down in proportion. Then using one of these blue nodes in the corner, just drag this to scale the image down until it takes off about less than a quarter of the page. Then I'll just reposition this into the top-left corner by dragging outside of that box. We're going to do the same thing again by duplicating this layer, so sliding to the left to bring up those three options, press 'Duplicate', use the transform tool and just move that over to the side there. I'll do the same thing twice more until I have four little thumbnail versions of my refined sketch laid out neatly on the canvas. Then we can just merge these four thumbnails into one layer by pinching our thumb and forefinger together with those four duplicated layers in-between. Make sure you still have that original full-sized refined sketch there below because we're going to need that for the next lesson. Then I'll quickly rename this layer Refined Sketch X4, to make sure that I don't get confused between the two. Then we can create a new layer underneath those four sketches so that we can start to add some color. I'll just rename this layer, Colors. Then let's open up our colors panel by tapping on the circle in the top right-hand corner. You may have some specific color palettes or colors in mind that you want to work with in your illustration. In which case you're more than welcome to do what works for you in terms of choosing a color scheme. But if you don't quite know where to start with colors, then I'll show you just one method that we can use here, which I find works well. To start with, we're going to just use three colors for each house that we think go together well, and then add on both the light and dark tone for each of those three colors to complete a palette. I'm using this disk in the color panel to select my colors by adjusting the hue around the outside and then choosing the specific tool that I want from this inner circle. I'm going to change my brush to something hard from the inking folder, so maybe something like syrup or mercury. Then I can just draw on these blobs of color next to the corresponding house, and then go back to that color panel to choose another color to go with that. I really like the combination of a lime green with a turquoise. Then I'll go ahead and choose a third color to complement those. Maybe something a lot warmer and contrasting like this deep orange. I'll just continue on by picking three main colors for each little thumbnail here and drawing them besides their designated house within this same layer. You may already have some particular colors in mind that you think will fit your theme, but I also encourage you to play around with some colors that you don't usually use here and see if you can come up with something fresh and unique. You can also think about what kind of season you want this to be set in. For example, if you're portraying an autumnal scene, you might want to choose lots of oranges and warm colors, and if it's set during the daytime, you might want to show bright, vibrant colors compared to nighttime scenes, which will be less saturated and maybe on the cooler side. Or if you want to create a really calm and tranquil scene, then maybe light pastel colors are the way to go. Try to use your intuition here and just let yourself play and experiment with different combinations of colors. Then once you have four sets of these three base colors, we can expand the palette by selecting a dark and light tone for each of these. Let's zoom in a bit and pick these colors from our canvas now. To do this, we can just hold our finger down on that middle button on the sidebar and place our pencil over the color that we want to select. If you drag the pencil around, it will select whatever color you hover over last. Then if we release the pencil and go to our color panel, it'll show the exact color within the color wheel. Then we can easily choose a darker version of that same hue by just dragging the selector. Then I'll draw a rough blob of that darker color to expand this palette. Then I'll go back and select a much lighter version of that here and draw it on my palette as well. I'm going to repeat this with the rest of my chosen colors now, firstly picking the color and then choosing a dark tone of that hue, as well as a light version of the same color. This gives us a good range of light and dark tones to create contrast with, along with our chosen range of hues. As you can see, I'm just repeating these steps until I have four sets of color palettes, each containing nine different swatches. You can see that already by using this simple method, we've got some nice varied color palettes here to work with. I'm going to try applying these to my houses now and see how they're going to look in action. I'm just quickly going to move these color palettes to the right a little so that they're not overlapping with the drawing. Then I'm going to start a new layer and call this Color Roughs. Then starting with whatever thumbnail you like, just zoom in on it and we can easily pick colors from our palette at the site here by holding our finger on that sidebar button and holding our pencil over the color we want to select at the same time. Then you can just very roughly start coloring this sketch in whatever way makes sense to you. I just want to fill these out really quickly and get a rough idea of how these colors might work together within this piece. I'm not worrying about being neat or staying within the lines here. I'm just making quick decisions and staying loose. I also don't like to use even amounts of my colors, so often I'll use a much higher ratio of one color, like these orange tones. Then maybe I'll use a little less of the other colors, like this turquoise, which will make those few turquoise areas stand out. Another stage, you might want to decide whether to include a background, so I think I'm just going to include a very simple background with a little bit of grass for this house to sit on and then add a bit of sky behind. Just something very simple to give this house a little more context and place it within a setting. You'll also want to consider creating contrast by placing different values of these colors next to each other. For example, I'm using a darker tone of that turquoise to further highlight those windows and doors, which makes them more easily recognizable. If you use too many similar tones next to each other. For example; two very light tones or two dark tones, there's the potential for them to get lost within the scene. Just be aware of that and try not to place too many similar tones next to each other. If while you're coloring in this rough, you realize that you want to add another color to the palette or use a different tone of whatever hues are in your palate, then that's absolutely fine. Just make this work for you and try it out. Then if you want to add extra definition to any of these shapes, then I recommend using a darker tone of that specific color to help out form and definition. You don't have to stick to realistic colors here. Just feel free to be a bit experimental with these. If you want to use colors which focus more on the mood you wish to convey rather than using life-like colors, then that can work really well. I absolutely encourage you to just experiment and play around at this stage and see what you feel works and what doesn't. When I'm coloring in the window panes in a daytime scene, I usually use a lighter color that matches whatever color of the sky I've chosen as if that's being reflected within the glass. That's just my personal preference over using dark colors. But of course, you're welcome to play around and see what works for you. Notice, in this rough, I've used different amounts of these colors, using that yellow and purple quite predominantly. Then the red and pink tones have been scattered around more sparsely as an accent color. Then once I'm fairly happy with those colors, just moving on quickly to the next one. Again, blocking in those rough colors from the corresponding palette, starting with those big shapes first and then adding on from there. I'm trying out that lighter pink color as a background to contrast the teal house, maybe adding some pink grass and violet window frames. I'm actually not sure about this teal-colored roof anymore. I want to see how it looks in a darker blue color. What I can do is just pick that dark blue from my color palette, and then I can use the color drop tool by dragging that selected color from the top right-hand corner on top of that teal roof to replace the color. Ideally, this new color should stay within the boundaries of the color you've just replaced. But if it's affecting the surrounding colors, you may need to adjust the color threshold, which you'll see at the top of your screen here. To adjust this, just keep your pencil held down after you make that color drop. You can either drag the pencil to the right to increase the threshold, which if it's set too high, it may disrupt the other colors around it. Whereas if you drag the pencil to the left, it lowers the threshold so that it only affects that one color. Then just release your pencil to confirm the change. I'm going to use that color drop tool again to change some more of these colors and just try out different combinations until I find something that I like. Sometimes you'll have to try a few different combinations before you find something that works. That's one reason for keeping these really rough so that we can make very quick changes and experiment in a low pressure setting. With all these cool tones working together now, this color rough is starting to look a lot like a nighttime scene to me. I'm going to lean into that and stay away from too many contrasting colors here. Then moving on to the last palette, I'm again blocking out these big shapes with the colors that I feel make the most sense. This palette is a little bit more of a challenge for me as there isn't that much contrast between any of these hues, as they're all quite warm, neutral colors. But I'll try to make it work by focusing on the contrast between the light and dark values instead. I've now finished roughing out all these color options and notice how each of these color schemes gives the whole house a completely different look and feeling. This one feels to me very spring-like. It looks quite natural and bright and happy. In the second draft, I've used a bit more of an unusual color palette for this subject with this purple glass and pink foliage, which gives off a mysterious and intriguing appearance. This next one is more of a twilight scene. The colors are very harmonious and I've used predominantly blues and cool colors, which gives off a very calming feeling to me. If I take this one onto final, I probably would brighten the windows further and try to create a glowing effect, which always looks really nice. If you compare the colors I actually used here to my starting color palette, we can say I ended up not using any of those teal tones. Don't feel like you absolutely have to use every color from your palette. This last rough actually turned out better than I expected it to while I was working on it. It reminds me a bit of an old sepia colored photograph due to these warm, neutral tones. It has a charming historical look, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite of the bunch. We can make some further adjustments to these color schemes now, just to push these even more. Let's go back to our layers panel and I'm going to hide that colors layer containing our original color palettes by unchecking the visibility box. Then I'm going to add a new layer by pressing the plus button and I'm going to fill this layer in with a completely gray color. Opening up the color panel and sliding the selector to the very left side to pick a completely gray tone. Then I'll just drag that gray blob into this layer so that it fills the whole Canvas. Then pressing the N on that gray layer and scrolling down through this list until I land on the color settings second from the bottom. As you can see, this drains all of these color roughs of their hues and their saturation so that we can only see the values. That's the difference between our light and dark tones. If I hide those sketches above, you can see that without those lines, we really rely so much on the contrast of these values as it's what helps our composition or are subject to be readable and recognizable. I want my host to stand out well from the background here and in some of these roughs, it isn't standing out as well as I'd like. In this case, I think it would help to either darken the house or lighten the background a little. I'll hide that gray layer for now to bring back these colors and then selecting my color roughs, I'm going to duplicate this layer by sliding to the left and pressing duplicate. Now on this duplicated layer, I'm going to lighten these backgrounds a little to create a bit more contrast here. I'm picking the color of that sky background by holding down the sidebar button and my pencil and then opening up the color panel to select a lighter version of that background color and drawing it on near the horizon. Then if I turn that gray layer back on, you can see that makes the house stand out a little more. Turning that gray layer off again and choosing a slightly darker tone of that color, I'm going to darken the top part of the sky background to mimic a gradient effect, which always looks quite nice within a sky. If I check my values again, I quite like the look of that now. I'm going to try the same thing on some of these other roughs by lightening the bottom part of the sky and slightly darkening the top part, which has a double benefit of increasing the contrast between colors, while also providing more of a natural look by creating a gradient in the sky. We can also make small adjustments to each of these individual color roughs by going to the selection tool at that little s-shaped symbol. Then using the free hand option, we can just draw around any of these individual roughs with our pencil to create a closed loop. Then we need to make sure that we close that loop by pressing the gray blob at the origin of the selection to confirm the region that we want to select. This allows us to edit whatever is inside that selection without affecting the other roughs. Then we can go to the magic wand tool to bring up our adjustments and we can play around with these top four options to tweak the colors a little bit here. Let's try a hue saturation and brightness to start with and then I can play around with these sliders just to try things out and see if I can push these colors further in any way. While you're in this window if you tap outside of the canvas with one finger, you'll bring up this panel here, which allows you to preview your changes. If you hold down that preview button in the middle and then release it, it'll show you what your colors look like before and after these edits and then you can either select apply, undo, reset or cancel. I think I quite like these subtle changes. I'm going to select apply to commit to these adjustments. Then I'm going to go back to my adjustments panel at that magic wand and play around with the color balance now. In this color balance window, you can change the balance of your highlights, mid tones, and shadows independently of each other. These sliders will only affect whichever range of tone you've selected. I have highlight selected just now. Moving these sliders will change only the balance of my lightest tones within this selection. We can decide between giving those lighter tones more of a blue or yellow tint or green versus magenta. Just play around with these sliders and see if you think there are any improvements to be made. Then we can also try adjusting the mid tones in the same way by just playing with these sliders and seeing what you think works and the same again with the shadows. Then if we go back to adjustments, we can also play around with these curves. Gamma affects the overall colors and you can just play around with bending this curve in different ways to see how that affects the brightness and contrast in your image. We can also edit the individual curves for the red, green, and blue color channels, which allows for further control and editing your colors this way. Again, you can tap outside of the canvas with your finger to bring up that little preview panel and view these changes. The fourth color adjustment we can try as gradient map. If you open up, you'll find all these presets at the bottom and this works by mapping preset colors to the different tonal values of your image. I tend not to use this feature as I like to have more control over my colors but it can be an easy way to totally transform your color scheme. If you open up any of these preset gradient maps by tapping on one, you can easily edit the colors of this gradient to suit your needs. The right side of that gradient map will affect the lighter tones in your image and the colors to the left will adjust the darker tones. You can see how that very quickly transforms the whole look and feeling of that color scheme. But I don't like this too much, so I'll bring up that panel again and select cancel to bring me out of that window. Then I'll tap on the S button to tap out of that selection. I'll repeat this process with my other color roughs now by selecting each one individually. I'm playing around with these color adjustments to see if I can make any final improvements. Then once that's done, if we go back to our layer panel and turn that top color roughs layer on and off, you can see the difference those little tweaks and adjustments have made to these colors overall. It's just lifted them and made them look a little more alive and vibrant. Then if you want, you can turn those refined sketches back on to help visualize what these roughs will look like with more details. We can also check our values again by turning on that gray layer. I'm quite happy with these for now and I'll probably try to push the values a little farther when it comes to adding details and texture later on, but for now these look fine to work with. Then I'll just hide that gray layer again and at this stage you can go ahead and decide on which color scheme you want to take on to your final piece. These two in the right here are definitely my joint favorites at the moment. But if I have to choose one, I'm going to go with this more fresh, spring-like scene. Let's export this as an image now by opening up the actions panel at this panel icon and then selecting Share and you'll see all these different options of file types appear. I'll just select jpeg and then save Image and that will save the image to our photos gallery on the iPad so that we can export it back into Procreate in the next lesson. Now we can just tidy up our layers a little to keep things organized. I'll delete that original color roughs layer because I don't need it anymore. I'll just slide that layer to the left until these three options appear and press Delete. I can also delete those original color pallets in the same way. Just slide to the left and then delete. I'll delete those four refined sketches as well just to keep everything tidy and organized. When you're ready I'll meet you in the next lesson where we can start to block out our layers using our chosen color scheme. 11. Colour Blocking: [MUSIC] Now it's time to block our shapes and layers using our chosen color scheme. We've exported this image to our photo gallery in the last lesson and now we're going to bring it in again as a reference by going to Actions at that spanner symbol, then Canvas and down to Reference. Then turn on that little reference button. You should see this panel pop-up in the middle of the screen. If you just select Image down below and then import image, this will open up our photos gallery. We can just select the image that we've just exported. Then let's zoom in on the specific color scheme that we want to work with within that panel. I'm going to work with this top bright color palette, and I'm just positioning it within that panel and then using the little bar at the top, you can just reposition this to the corner of your Canvas and resize that panel so that it's not in the way as much. If you just hold down the pencil over any part of this reference image, you'll be able to pick colors from the image directly just by dragging the pencil around within the reference panel. You don't need to bother about holding down that button on the sidebar at the same time. Let's add this color roughs layer to our development sketches folder just by dragging it over that folder until you see the folder highlighted, and then just release the pencil. Then within the folder you can reposition that to the top if you want. I'm also going to drag in my sketch into that folder as well. I'm going to keep my refined sketch out because we'll be needing this for the next step. I'll just rename this gray layer as well and I'm going to keep that at the top there so that I can turn it on and off whenever I want to check my values. I'm also going to turn the visibility of those color roughs off now, just close that folder, then turn my refined sketch layer back on and select it. Then I'll tap on the N on that layer and lower the opacity to maybe around 30 percent. Then I'm going to start a new layer, so pressing that plus button and then just drag that new layer underneath my refined sketch but above the development sketches folder. What we can do now is just start to block out the different shapes of our house using these colors that we've roughed out. We're just going to focus on getting all of our shapes blocked out so that we can then attach textures to them later on. Let's open up our brush and choose a somewhat hard brush for this, maybe from the inking folder and any of these top few brushes will work, so maybe that syrup brush or tinderbox or mercury. I'm going to use this mercury brush and I have actually edited this brush very slightly in the past and I can't remember the exact settings I changed. Your default brush might look a tiny bit different to mine but I do really recommend this mercury brush. But feel free to use whatever brush you prefer here. Now that we've got that all set up, we can just pick a color from our reference panel just by holding the pencil down on whatever color we want to work with first and you'll see that that color gets loaded onto our brush, then zooming into the Canvas so that I have more control, I'm just going to start to draw the outline of my first shape. I'm going to draw this roof as one whole shape with this orange color. I'm just moving my hand quite slowly and steadily and rotating the Canvas so that I can draw these curves by pivoting my hand, which gives me more control over drawing a smooth carving lane. I want to make sure that there are no gaps in this outline as I'll be filling it in afterwards with the color drop tool. You can see that I'm just tracing over those lanes from my refined sketch until I have a closed loop here, which I can then fill in to block out this first shape. Once you've drawn the outline for your shape and made sure that you've created a closed loop here. We can just drag that color into this outline to fill that shape. If you want to increase the color drop threshold, remember you can keep your pencil held down after you make that color drop and just drag towards the left or the right to decrease or increase the threshold, but in this case it doesn't matter too much. Then moving on to the next one, I'll just start a new layer for each shape and I'll try to keep my layers named and in some logical order. I'll drag that new layer below this roof because I'm blocking out the main house shape now. Again, just picking the corresponding color from that reference image and then neatly drawing the outlines of my shape, making sure any outlines of the areas I'm blocking out are completely closed before I fill them in with that color drop. I'll just speed through this next part because it's all the same idea. This time I'm drawing out multiple shapes on the one layer instead of just one big shape. Just do whatever makes sense to you here depending on the layer of your house and your different shapes and layers. You can also use the eraser tool if you want to cut some smaller shapes out of any of those big shapes. I'm always starting with the biggest shapes first and then moving on to block out the smaller shapes in details afterwards. I'm starting a new layer for each color and sometimes that layer will only contain one shape such as the grass area or sometimes it will contain a few shapes of the same color and material. This just keeps everything organized and ready to add individual textures too in the next stage. If you feel you need to make any slight changes or adjustments to any of these shapes or colors at this stage, then go ahead. Your refine sketch on your color rough should just be there as a guide to help you but if you feel at any stage that these are being more restrictive than useful, then don't be afraid to mix things up a bit. You can occasionally turn your refined sketch on and off and turn on that gray layer just to check how well these values and shapes are working together and make any adjustments as needed. [MUSIC] You can also create clipping masks above certain objects if you want to add a block of color within any particular shapes such as I'm doing with these windows and doors here. [MUSIC] Once you've finished blocking out all these shapes, let's go to our layers panel and turn off that refined sketch to see how this is all looking without that gate. Once you're happy with all these shapes and you have your layers organized in a logical way, we can now move on to adding textures and final details to bring this illustration to life. 12. Texture & Detail: Now that we've blocked everything out and we have the basis of our illustration down, we're going to bring this to life by adding details and texture. I'm going to be using a lot of clipping masks at this stage to add details and textures to all these shapes. Then I might add a few layers for any extra details that I want to include, such as flowers and clothes in the background and maybe some smoke and stuff like that. Just to take this from being a plain illustration of a house to something that can really spark the imagination and tell a story. Again, let's start off with the big shapes such as this roof. You can see that I've already created a clipping mask over the roof layer for that shadow. I'll just add another clipping mask by making sure my new layer is on top of whatever shape I want to clip to or above another clipping mask on that same shape. Then tap on that new layer again and select clipping mask. That just gets added to that previously created clipping mask. Then we can just go in with any of these brush textures that we want to hear and start playing around. Feel free to take some time to explore these different brushes and textures and try them out. I'm going to try using this copper head brush from the drawing folder to add texture to this roof shape. Just making several downward strokes and leaving some little gaps for the color to shine through underneath. Then I can tap the N on that layer and play about with this list of blend modes. Some of these will change the color slightly and some will darken the colors and some will lighten them. I'm just scrolling through to see if there are any effects that I like. I can also lower the opacity of this layer to just decrease the intensity of this texture. I think I prefer the multiply blend mode the most here. If I turn that layer visibility on and off, I can check what effect this is having on the piece. You can see that this texture is not too overpowering, but it just helps to add a bit more interest to this shape. You can layer over as many clipping masks with different textures as you like. But be mindful that we only have a certain amount of layers to work with here. If you want to merge down your layers with two fingers at any point, just make sure you're only emerging one main shape at a time, so that we can still edit these shapes independently from each other. I'm just going to undo that merge action by tapping two fingers in the canvas to bring back those clipping mask layers, because I still want to edit these. But if you're starting to run out of layers, then you want to keep merging and being decisive about your textures to conserve your layer count. I'm going to go ahead now and do the same thing with all of these different flat layers. Selecting the layer I want to add texture to, adding a new layer on top, turning that layer into a clipping mask, and then adding texture with different brushes here. Feel free to play about with any of these brushes. You don't have to use the ones that I'm using at all. Just play around and experiment with these. I'm probably going to use a mixture of the default Procreate brushes as well as some custom brushes that I've purchased. Then you can try out different blend modes and opacity settings with these textures. You can also try adjusting the colors if you want to. Then once you're happy with how the texture is looking, you can just merge those layers together. As well as adding texture here, you can also use these clipping masks to add extra details by drawing on lines or patterns, such as I'm doing here with these little roof details. I'm just using my refined sketch again as a guide here. But if you want to add in any new details that you haven't already mapped out in your refined sketch, then that's also fine. Feel free to turn your refined sketch layer on at any stage if you need it to help map out your details. But if not, you can just keep it turned off. With these roof details, I can also try our different opacity settings and blend modes, and see what effect that creates. Remember, if you want to check your values at any point throughout this process, you can just turn on that gray layer. Something else you can do to give yourself a fresh perspective now and then is to go to Actions, Canvas, and then Flip horizontal. That just gives us a fresh view of this piece, so that we can more easily recognize if there's anything that looks a bit off and needs adjusting. Now I'm just going to go ahead and keep adding texture and maybe adding in a few more shapes in the background, as well as creating a nice gradient there and adding lots of little details to enhance the interest and storytelling of this illustration. Take your time here. Just try and really have fun and get lost in your imagination. Don't worry too much about making things look perfect. Just think about the kind of story and the atmosphere you want to convey and let the rest follow. I'm basically just repeating those same steps over and over here. I'm going to just speed through this next bit of my process, so that you can see this piece gradually evolving as I add lots of extra texture and little details and make small adjustments to the colors. [MUSIC] Once you're happy with all these textures and details and you've checked your values are looking alright by turning on that gray layer, we can then go and make sure all of these layers are all organized and just merge down any stray clipping masks onto their corresponding shapes. Then if you feel like any of these colors need a little tweaking, we can adjust the colors at these layers individually by selecting the layer you want to edit. Going to Adjustments at that magic wand tool and then down too Curves. Then we can just play around with those curves may be trying to push the contrast a little more if you think it needs it, or editing any of these individual color channels. It might just be a very subtle change that you make, because ideally our piece is already pretty finished at this point. This is just us making those very final touches. Then once I'm done, I can tap outside the canvas to bring up that preview panel, and view the changes I've made to decide whether they're an improvement or not. I think they are. So I'll just select "Apply" on that panel and tap off the Adjustments window. I'll go ahead now and do the same for any of these layers that I think could do with pushing the contrast a little bit more. Going to Adjustments, Curves, and just playing around with these until I'm happy with the final result. [MUSIC] Then once I'm happy with my colors and how everything's working together, I like to add one last layer, and this will be for our final details. I'll just rename that layer, final details. Then using that mercury brush, I'm just going to pick colors directly from the image and draw in any last details that I want to include all on the same layer. Drawing an outline here and there on objects which I feel need a little more definition, and also adding a small bit of detailing on certain objects. But trying to be careful not to overdo it. I'm still keeping these details fairly simple by just using lines and dots, especially between adjacent objects of similar values, which may just need that extra outline to define the shape. Then I'm also adding in little dots to suggest texture and a few extra blades of grass. Then drawing in some symbol details to these flowers, to help enhance the charm and appeal of the image and bring everything together. I think I'm pretty much done with this piece. I'll just do one final check by scaling this canvas right down really small to see if it's still recognizable. Then flipping the canvas horizontally, and turning that gray layer back on to check the values. I'll just flip that background again. I'm very happy with how this has turned out. I think it's got just enough details to give it that nice sense of charm. I like how these colors and textures have come together. Once you're happy with your final artwork, we can export this image by heading to Actions at the spanner icon, selecting "Share," and then choose either JPEG or PNG. I'm going to select "JPEG" and then select "Save Image" to save this piece to your photo gallery on the iPad. Then once you're done, you can upload your project and your development sketches into the class gallery below and show off your work on social media as well. 13. Thank You!: Thank you so much for joining me to learn about illustrating houses in Procreate. I hope you've had fun with this project and I can't wait to see your creations so make sure to share them in the project section below. If you share your work on Instagram then please tag me @sarahholliday so I can like and share your work there too. If you have any questions at all, you can ask me in the discussion section below, and I'll make sure to get back to you as soon as possible. If you'd like to leave a review and let me know what you liked about the class that would be amazing. If you want to learn more from me, then you can check out my other classes on my Skillshare profile. At the moment I have classes about character design and environment illustration. I have a lot more planned, so you can follow me here on Skillshare and over on Instagram @sarahholliday to stay updated with new classes. Thanks again for joining me and I hope to see you soon in the next class.