Drawing on Photographs in Procreate: Spark Creativity with Digital Illustration

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Altea, and I'm an artist and graphic designer based in Italy. I'm passionate about everything revolving around art and new techniques in this field that spark my creativity always excites me. I work both with traditional and digital media, creating collections of graphics and illustrations, and designing templates. Being open to new ideas is part of my work and it is how I stay inspired. In this course, you will learn the creative process for illustrating on photographs in Procreate, and how to unleash your imagination to create stunning and eye-catching visuals. Drawing on photographs is a new multimedia technique that allows me to express myself and explore new ways of storytelling. It fascinates me how you can bring your imagination into a photo, turning something based in the real world into fantastical new creation. In this beginner-friendly course, we're going to start with the basics, learning where to source our photos and how to source the right one. We'll then explore ideas, shapes, elements we can use to enhance a photo. I'll share some tips about composition and show you how you can position elements with purpose and balance. I will share my workflow to show you how to plan and sketch for the final work product, and allow you to explore the endless possibilities in style, design, and storytelling when illustrating on a photo. By just drawing a few lines and shapes to create a more complex scene, you can use this technique to share a story, create eye-catching images for your business, surprise a friend with something unexpected, add aesthetics and creativity to your social media photos. For the final project, you'll create an illustrated photo using either stock images or your own photographs. By the end of this course, you'll be able to bring your photos to life, unleash your creativity, and explore a new, fun, and versatile technique. Create anything you can imagine and join me in this Skillshare course. 2. Class Project: If you're here, welcome to the class and thank you for joining me. My hope for this course is to help you unleash your imagination and create a project you'll be proud of. If you've done one of my previous classes before, you know how much I love to experiment with new techniques. I always try to keep my mind open to explore new ways of expressing myself in a creative way. I do believe that by stepping out of my comfort zone, I can grow as an artist, and I can just get the opportunity to find out about new skills that I can learn. I got into illustrative photographs about a year and a half ago when I was creating content for my YouTube channel. I saw these other creators having these amazing thumbnails for their videos. This really caught my attention and I just couldn't resist to trying it out. I then realized that illustrative photographs can be used in a variety of projects. You can basically create anything you want with them. You can make your product stand out, you can share a message, a story, or just make your social media content really aesthetic and creative. To give you a more in-depth look on this course, we'll begin by sourcing the right picture because there are a few things to keep in mind when illustrating on a photo. That will help you find the most suitable pictures. Next, we'll explore ideas, styles, shapes, and elements. This is going to help you understand what you're most comfortable drawing on a photo, recognize, and apply your style. Before moving on to the final project, I will cover a few composition rules to help you create a balanced and pleasant illustrated photo. Once we've covered all the basics, I will share my step-by-step process to plan and create our final project. As mentioned in the introduction, this is a beginner-friendly class, so if you're new to Procreate, I've included a lesson where I'll briefly walk you through the basic features we're going to use. Your project for this class is to apply the tips and techniques to create an illustrated photo. By clicking on the Create Project tab, you'll be able to upload your illustrative photographs and share it with others. I'm sure this class will spark many ideas for each one of you, and I'm already curious to see what you will create. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you where to find the class resources and what materials we'll need. 3. Materials and Resources: For illustrating the photos, I'll be using the app Procreate, my iPad, and my Apple Pencil. A good alternative if you don't own an iPad is using a digital tablet or any other digital drawing tools. Even though you might not have the same exact materials as me, you'll still be able to keep up with the class and utilize the tips and techniques. You can find all the class resources under the Projects & Resources tab below this video. On the right sidebar, you can see the file so you can download. I've attached a doodle template, a sheet we're going to fill in to brainstorm ideas and doodles. I've also attached a couple of photos we're going to use in some of the lessons. In this section, you can also access a Pinterest board with more than a 100 examples with different styles from many artists around the world. This is to help you get inspired and discover your own dancing style. I've also created a Pexels board so that you don't have to sift through thousands of photographs to find the right one. I've already pre-grouped pictures suitable for this illustrated photograph technique. Anytime, you can download the photo you love the most and get started practicing. Of course, don't forget to go through your photo library and use your own ones as well. In the next video, we're going to learn about where to source photos and how to choose the right photo for your product. 4. Sourcing Photos: When looking for a photo that we can use for our project, we have to keep in mind a few things. First of all, we need to consider copyright because not all photos we find online we can use for our projects. For this reason, there are specific websites where you can find and source stock free images. Unsplash, Pixabay and Pexels are just some of the examples where you can source stock images. I can't stress this enough but I love Pexels. If you are curious to know what is the one I use the most is definitely Pexels. The second thing to consider is what are the best photos to illustrate and what photos we should avoid? When selecting a photo, I highly recommend you to make sure that the photo has some negative space. Negative space refers to the area surrounding the main subject in a photo where nothing is really happening. In other words, is the space around the main focus. On the other hand, we have positive space, which refers to the primary subject of the photo. Because we are going to draw an illustration on top of a photo, we want to give ourselves space to draw additional elements and avoid crowding the image. Noisy pictures can be hard to draw because too many elements may look disjointed, confusing, and we may end up overwhelming the person located on our photo, causing them to bounce their eyes back and forth from a near view of the photo to another one. Whereas as you can see here, these pictures are really easy to understand and it's pretty straightforward who's the subject of our photo and what's going on. There's also room to draw, and this will help us achieve a more cohesive result. The third thing I look for when I'm selecting the photo is the opportunity to tell a story. My favorite types of photo to illustrate are objects because I really like to imagine things coming out of those objects, like, for example, something coming out of a book, a mug, a bottle. I also love people in action. These shots are really great for creating stories and enhancing the silhouette of subject. Also, black and white images are really fun to draw because when you're going to illustrate with colors, the whole image is really going to stand out. To wrap things up, we discussed where to find copyright-free images. We also talked about the use of negative space and how it can help us to recognize the main focus of our photo, giving us also plenty of room to draw. Lastly, choose a photo that spark your imagination and that you feel connected, you can tell a story through. Of course, you can always use photographs that you've taken yourself for example, a selfie, a photo of your pet or any photo. If you need inspiration about possible shots, themes, camera angles or poses, you can always refer to the Texas Board I've created. The next class we will be focused on setting up and getting familiar with Procreate. If you haven't worked with this app before, I'm going to show you the basic functions to get started. If you already have experience with this app, you can skip the next lesson and I'll see you for the doodle ideas. 5. Procreate Setup: In this lesson, I want to give you a quick rundown of the basic functions we'll utilize during this class. We'll see how to set up our canvas, how to create a color palette, how to use brushes and so much more. Basically, all you need to get started drawing on a photo. If some of you are just starting out with this up, don't have to worry. I'm here to walk you through it. Procreate is a very intuitive and user-friendly app, and this is where a love about it. Before we get started, you can download the photo I'll be using for this demonstration in the projects and resources section and save it to your photo library. Let's set up our canvas. Once you open the app, just tap the plus sign up here in the corner, and you will have two options. You can select a blank canvas in one of the default canvas sizes that Procreate provides, or you can create your own canvas with custom dimensions. To do this, tap this small dark rectangle here. Once you've selected this option, you'll be able to specify the units of your canvas. It automatically defaults to pixels body. You can also switch to millimeters, inches, and so on. You can also specify the width and the height of your custom canvas. Lastly, we have DPI, which is the resolution. 72 DPI is the web standard resolution. It's good if you plan on posting your work online, but I would recommend you to work on 300 DPI, which is the standard print resolution. You never know if you want to print your artwork in the future so once you've created your canvas, you can go back and change the DPI. It's better to start with a higher resolution in the beginning. Based on the setting we just selected, we can now see how many layers we have to work on. If you increase your canvas size, the number of available layers will decrease whereas if you work in a smaller canvas, and you reduce the height or the width, then you can see the number of layers increasing. Let's upgrade, and here's our canvas. Now, if you want to insert a photo and make it fit our canvas, let's go to the wrench icon and select insert a photo. Select the photo you want to use from your photo library. Once it loads on your canvas, you can scale the image by pooling the corners, and you can adjust it as you want to. Once you're done, just click on the arrow. Let's say you don't want to crop your photo, and you just want to keep its original dimensions. You don't need to create a canvas in Procreate, but you can directly start working on the photo itself. If this is your preferred method, just open Procreate, click on "Photo" and simply select the one you want to illustrate. This is going to create an artboard with your photo in its original dimensions as the base. Now let's talk about possible brushes in Procreate. To open the brush library, just tap the brush icon. As you can see, Procreate already has a ton of brushes ready to use. The brushes are organized by categories such as inking, calligraphy, and so on. Once you select the category, you can see all the variety of brushes that pop up from the assertion. For example, here I'm selecting the monoline brush from the calligraphy brushes set. Once you tap on the brush, you'll be able to play around with its options. I don't like to go too crazy here because it's really easy to get carried away. For this class, I'll be just playing around with the spacing, jitter, and streamline. In the drawing pad on your right, you can see how your brush changes as you are adjusting the settings. The option I love the most is definitely the streamline because it helps smooth out the lines. Just try that one cause it's so nice. Once you have selected your brush, select "Done". Back on the canvas, you can adjust the size in the opacity of your brush by using the sliders on the left side. Procreate has too fine shortcuts that you're going to need. Versa, you can tap two fingers to undo what you did, and you can tap with three fingers to redo the action. Once we have our photo open, it is super, super important to create a new layer. Please remember not to draw on the same layer of the photo because then you won't be able to erase or undo your illustrations without also erasing the photo. You can imagine how many times I did that just because I was distracted, and it's not the best feeling realizing that you have to just throw away your whole work just because you didn't work on separate layers. Please remember that. Working on different layers allows you more control over the different elements you want to add in your image, and it also allows you to focus on each element in isolation without interfering with the elements in the other layer. Now let's see the colors. To select the color of your brush, tap the circle in the top right corner. The colors tab allows you to visualize the specific colors and things that you want for your image in various ways. The classic color view, for example, allows you to choose a color using this lighting menu, and you can have control over hue saturation, and black and white. You can also move your pencil through the bigger square. The discord view will display the color in two circles. In the outer circle, you can select the color and in the inner circle, you can change the saturation. I personally love to use this color picker and also the classic. Another feature that I love to use is to create a color palette. Here you can find already existing palettes ready to use, or you can also create a color palette from a photo. You just have to click this plus sign, select the source image and the color palette based on the image you've just picked will automatically display. Another way to create a color palette is by picking the colors from your canvas. Again, tap the plus icon, create a new palette, and click on the circle between the two sliders. Then now you can pick up the colors you are touching. This circle is the eyedropper, and I'm using it to pick up different colors in the image. I usually pick up three to five colors because I think it's enough. If you want to add the selected color to the palette, you just have to press down with a pencil into the palette box. Lastly, if you want to set a color palette as default, you can just tap the three dots and then press on default. We're all set to start drawing. We have our image, our brush, our colors. Again, we want to make sure we are on a new layer before we start drawing. I just want to show you a couple of more features we'll be using throughout the class. I'm just going to draw an element on top of this photo. I'm drawing a branch with some leaves. I make sure I close all my lines and make sure you don't have any gaps. Now you can just drag and drop the color to fill the shape in. Now I'm adding a detail to the leaf and I picked a darker shade of the green I was using. Now, if you want to select a move or stretch the element we just drew, we can just tap on the arrow on the top left-hand side. Clicking on the green circle extending from the top center of the image allows you to rotate it around. With regards to scaling, when it's an uniform, the element will scale and keep its proportions. Whereas if you change that option, and you click, for example, on freedom, the element will scale freely. In this section, you can also distort, rotate, and flip the element. It can come really handy. I'm placing the branch on the shoulder of the subject. By just swiping left on the layer, we can duplicate our element. Now I can play around with the copied layer, flip it around, and just place it on the other shoulder like two wings. Now let's tap the erase tool and let's get rid of the extra lines. The eraser tool work similar to the brush. You can go through the options and select the type of eraser you want to use. Here I'm choosing one from the airbrushing category to create a more natural transition between the image and the extra lines I'm erasing. Also just feel free to add more details to this photo. This is how I finished it. I really played around with flowers, tried to add more branches, tried different colors, and this is the final result. In the next lesson, we'll see more about Procreate, but this is all you need right now to get started and be able to make an illustrated photo. When you're ready to save, go to the action tab, press share, choose the format, and save the image. You also have more options such as sharing it on Pinterest, Instagram, e-mail, and so on. I hope this lesson was really helpful for those of you new to Procreate. Now, let's gather some inspiration and hue doodle ideas. 6. Inspiration and Doodle Ideas: If you've never tried to illustrate a photo, getting started might feel overwhelming. I do believe that before jumping into a new technique or a new art project, it is always a good idea to take some time to explore and get to know how many different possibilities that technique can offer. Other people's creativity, techniques and interpretations of a photo can be great tools for widening our own imagination. For this reason, I created a Pinterest board with more than 100 samples of illustrated photos to help you find the one that speaks to you. Let's go through some of the different examples I've collected on Pinterest. First of all, as you can see, lots of these photos, for the pattern we talked about in the previous lesson. Most of this picture have one main subject, and a lot of negative space. I also wanted to bring your attention to how some photos include very rich and colorful elements. They embellish the photo through colors that pop or other shapes and textures that other cartoon fill to the photo. On the opposite side, we also have photos with a minimal line work. This method service more to add a flow to the image in a simplistic yet elegant way. In some photos, it's just very basic lines, and shapes that are used to highlight the subject at aliens product or make certain parts pop out. We can also see what types of additions are most common to the photos like lines, dots, abstract strokes of lines, rainbows, and so on. When I first started illustrating my photos, my attention went without a doubt to the photos that were embellished with the white line art. I find them to be very close to my own personal style, and they give me a ton of ideas and inspirations for my own work. I would encourage you to go through this Pinterest board and save Pinterest styles you will love the most, and just let yourself get inspired. For the next part of the lesson, I've created a template sheet for generating additional doodling ideas. Feel free to draw along with me, I will show you what types of doodles we can draw, four different categories. I'll also give you examples on how you can feel this shading. This is also a great chance to experiment with different brushes, colors, and styles. Of course, you can also try to include elements that caught your attention, while going through Pinterest and come up with your own doodles as well. Remember that, this template is here just to get you started and to show you concrete ways of thinking of elements you want to add. When it comes to the doodling on photos, the quickest and easiest things that we can draw are lines, and also shapes. Lines can be used to outline the subject of our photo, to draw attention to a certain area or simply embellish an area of the photo. You can draw straight, loop to curled and many more types of lines. The type of line I use the most is the spiral, especially in photos that feature people, I find it really beautiful. The way this line can really enhance the pose of the person, and later I'll show you how you can draw one. Next, we have characters. Characters are great to tell a story or bring objects alive. As you can already imagine, this is going beyond just adding lines, because with characters, you can really add an extra layer to the story of the photo. When thinking of characters, you can think of animals, imaginary creatures, or even people to add to the photo. But you can also think of turning visible things in the photo into a character and animating objects. For example, just by adding an eye on a mug or a pair of arms on a book, you can really get creative. Generally, I don't draw characters, but when I do, I really enjoy making my own characters. Instead of referring to the real world references, I find much more freedom, in just drawing from my imagination. Here's an example. As you can see, I illustrated this imaginary creature beside bigger, than was reading this book. Another thing we can add to a photo is lettering. I find that Auden birds can really reinforce the message we are sharing or the story we are telling. Since I don't feel super comfortable hand lettering, what I do is to add text and use pre-existing fonts that fit the feel of the photo. But if you're passionate about lettering and calligraphy, absolutely feel free to explore different styles for fighting wars in this section. Other doodle ideas can be shapes, as mentioned before, objects and florals. The shapes section in particular is a great place to experiment with brush settings, and procreate to see what types of textures you can create. Going through this process of researching, exploring different source, and brainstorming doodle that fit my own way of drawing, made me understand how I could translate my own style onto the photo. I hope this lesson gave you idea about possibilities and gave you an idea about the direction you want to take your illustrated photos. Now we're just going to go over a few composition rules and we're going to get started practicing on a few photos. 7. Composition Tips: Before jumping into illustrating a few photos, I just want to share a few tips about composition that will help you position the elements with purpose in your photos. Composition is a very sensitive topic, but I've narrowed down into three approaches you can take to add elements to your photographs in a balanced way. First, you can decide to change or modify an existing element of your photo. In this first example, I choose the mountain element that already existed in the photograph, and I reinterpret it as a desert. In the second example, I chose flower that were present in the original photo and modified them into my own botanical illustrations. In this last example, I picked the scuba diver that was already in the photo again and transformed her into an angel rising from the abyss. In all these cases, I just picked one element that was already contained in my photo and I transformed it into a new idea. The mountain into a desert, the flowers into my own botanical's illustrations, and the scuba diver into an angel. The second thing you can do on a photo is to add new elements to embellish, emphasize, enhance something that already exists in your photo. In this first example, I identified an element that already existed in the photo, the two hands, and chose to bring emphasis to them. I added a new element in the form of twisting botanical lines that really reinforced the bond between the two arms. In this second example, I chose the two girls as already-existing subjects in the photo. I wanted to bring emphasis to their connection with each other. This is why I added some new elements in the shape of botanicals all around them further strengthening that feeling of unity and peace. In this last example, the rocky island in the middle of the sea really stood out to me. It looked like a mystical and mysterious place and I wanted to embellish the rocks by drawing botanical branches flowing up into the sky. Just to review, I've shown you that you can either transform an already existing element in your photo, or you can add elements to something that already exists in your photo. These two methods are for sure the two options that will guarantee you the best results in terms of bonds and composition of the photo, even if you're just starting out. The last method I will go over is adding something new to the photo. This requires some more attention to the composition, making sure the new elements communicate and flow well within the photo. For example, in this photo with the girl sitting on the wall, I noticed that she was looking towards her left side. Her gaze naturally moved me in that direction as well. That's why I chose to add a character there to keep balance within my photo. The character's gaze is one example of leading lines in a photo. Learning how to recognize these leading lines can really help you to insert your illustration in a photo and you will keep the compositions really cohesive and balanced. This is very important. Again, as I've mentioned in the beginning of this lesson, composition is super wide, this is just one composition rule and this is the one that I use the most. Leading lines are elements in your image that usually direct your eyes to a focal point of the photo. Sometimes they can just also move your focus from one area of the photo to the other. Now let's do some examples so you can learn how to find and how to recognize leading lines. I will also be showing you how you can take advantage of leading lines in creative cohesive compositions. In this first example, there is one focal point, and the three lines that make up the road really draw you to that horizon containing the focal point. Once we identify the leading lines, we can really start to play around with adding new elements. One example of adding new elements could be drawing trees that fall along the curve of the road. A second example of how you can take advantage of leading lines is by adding a person walking on the road. The person can be walking in the opposite direction from the leading lines. This creates tension and a stir within the image that portrays a character who goes against the flow or just someone who does not look back. Since the end of the road is a strong area of focus in our photo, we can play with various stories. Of course, our subject can also go in the direction of the leading lines and follow the path as if he had found his way. One last example is about adding a creature coming from behind the mountains and looking at this focal area. As you can notice, these examples work really well because they fit into the composition and flow of the photo. Now, I'm just going to show you more leading lines in a different style of photos so you can develop a better feel for how to recognize them. In this example, the fence along the path is leading us toward an endpoint where we can spot the pink house. In this image, we can follow the leading lines up the skyscrapers as they direct our gaze towards the sky. Here we have leading lines from multiple elements, such as the roof, the escalator, or the floor. We can think about these leading lines as if somebody is pointing a particular spot in an image and telling us to look towards that spot. Now, keeping all these tips in mind, we can start, get practicing and you can use your own photos or you can head over to Pexels and fix some of the photos I've collected. At this point, don't worry too much about coming up with the perfect idea or storytelling mechanism yet, because we'll dive deep into that further into this course. For now, just start with something easy and have fun. You can add the characters, animals, splashes of colors, or just some dots and a few simple shapes and anything you're comfortable drawing. You can refer to the dual ideas we went through and you can also gather inspiration among the beautiful works you can find on Pinterest. 8. Warm Up Practice Examples: Since I love making spiral lines for this practicing lesson, I'm going to make one around this girl. I really like her pose and this type of design is going to emphasize the dynamic and the flow of the photo. At the same time, it will also add a touch of delicacy. Feel free to follow along with me or just pick other photos and experiment with what you've learned so far. I just choose this photo from our pictures board. I downloaded it and open it on portrait. I'm choosing the white color and the type of brush. Since I use two types of spirals, I'm just going to show you how I draw them. The first style resembles a wavy line, while the second style has knotted loops. Just pick a size you like better or just experiment with both. In this lesson, I'm choosing to use the wavy line and I'm drawing it all over the girl. To create the three-dimensional effect that the vines twist around the body of the girl, I'm erasing a portion of the wavy line where it overlaps with the body of the girl. A new layer, I start working my way around the wavy line and drawing leaves along it. You can place the leaves on either side of the line. As a final touch, you can add some detail to the leaves like the lines I'm drawing here on half of the side of the leaf. As you can see, this is a really quick and easy way to embellish photo and make it eye-catching and unique. You can also experiment yourself with different types of colors or brushes styles like here, I found another way to utilize the spiral lines. I chose a brush with uneven edges and I just picked a few colors from our image. I used the eyedropper tool to select my colors and then I just drew a spiral line that extended behind the body of the girl just to add a different kind of pop. Since I wanted to add something a little more complex to this part of the course where we'll still practicing, I thought about showing you one last illustrated photo. Wings are just some element that I really love to draw on top of photographs and a few days ago I stumble across this image of a girl walking in the woods and I could perfectly picture her as a fairy. I did a little research to see how fairy wings look, and I just started to draw them. On a new layer, I sketched one wing because to create the other one we'll just duplicate this one. When I was happy with the sketch, I created a new layer and lower the opacity of the layer containing the wing. I went over this sketch to create my final illustration. Once I finish, I just deleted the sketching layer because I want the wing to look a little more detailed, I lowered the size of my brush and I just started to add many thin lines within each section of my wing. For this section, I started from the bottom of the shape and for the next one, I started from the top and I just kept alternating until I was done filling in each section. This created a nice effect that made the wing a little more three-dimensional. I lowered the outline of the wing because I really liked the details and I just wanted to make them pop out a little more. Since I liked the two little curves, I went over there with the white inking pen. When you're happy with the wing, you can merge down the layers you have. Then duplicate the layer, tap the arrow, and now you can move and adjust this second wing. Now this is optional, but if you want to play a little with the general shape of the wing, and if you want to give it a more symmetrical and natural look, you can tap on "Wrap" and this will allow you to move and modify the shape of your wings. With the airbrushing eraser, I'm creating a soft realization between the wings and the body of the girl. Now let's add a final touch of magic by adding stars. I love using this brush and I'm showing you the settings just in case you want to create the same effect. I'm keeping spacing at 78 percent and jitter in max. To wrap things up guys, in this class, we did a little bit of practice just to warm up and in the next couple of lesson we're going to cover the more in-depth process of finding what to sketch and how to generate ideas. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Planning and Sketching: We went through composition rules, different types of noodles and we tested everything out on a few photos. Now that you have the skills and the tools to illustrate on a photo, it's time to go into a more in-depth process and see how you can plan a sketch, and create a story for the image. When I was looking for a method that would help me come up with ideas, I had the thought of creating a mood board. This is also what I do for my graphic design project, and I thought that a mood board would lend itself well to illustrate a photo. What's a mood board? Basically, it's a collage of ideas and inspiration, and mood board can be made of images, colors, words, everything that creates a clear visual direction for your project. In this lesson, we're going to create a mood board to let ideas flow and to plan for our final illustrative photo. Make sure you have downloaded the photo for this lesson and let's get started. First I'm creating a blank, rectangular canvas because we'll be experimenting with different sketches. Just make sure you have enough room to place elements and draw. Open the photo libraries, select the photo and place it on one side of the canvas. I'm just resizing and centering mind on the left side to make sure that the photo is big enough to see all its elements, but also to ensure that I have enough space for sketching. Now I'm creating a new layer and I'm simply writing down the things that I see in the photo. There's an ice cream cone, we can also see a bunch of flowers, the hand of a girl, the clouds, and the sky. As I go through each of these items, I think about the feelings that they evoke. Each word should make you feel something, for example, for writing down the words sky and clouds made me think about something really delicate, light, and calming. Also seeing the flowers instead of an actual ice cream made me think that something about this image was really playful. Also, the girl's hand reaching for the sky, made me think of hope, passion, energy. The questions that help me go through this first phase are, what do you see in the photo? How do I feel? What emotions does the photo evoke? What do I imagine when I look at the photo? Do I see an element I want to draw attention to? Writing is an effective exercise to understand more in-depth the parts that break up the photos and ways in which they fit together. I believe that by writing, we can better analyze what the photo is about and we can also figure out what we want to communicate with it. Now let's create a color palette. One more thing I love to do here is to pick three colors and create a color palette. I usually only illustrate in white, but in case I decide to go for a colored illustration, I have this color palette that complements the image ready. I'm using the Eyedropper tool and I'm picking the color of the sky, then I'm going through the flowers because there's a lot of variation in the pink color within the flowers. First I'm going for a lighter rosy pink. Lastly, I decided to add a darker version of the previous color. Now we can start brainstorming ways of enhancing our photo, and in our case, you see a lot of negative space all around our main focus. Our subject is the ice cream and we can start thinking about ways of making it pop or we can start working on it. Keep in mind your feelings and associations you brought down to come up with elements and illustrations, and of course, always remember to draw each idea on a different layer so you can have more control over your artboard. Because this photo overall makes me feel happy, I really wanted to do something to reinforce this feeling of energy and playfulness. I sketched the two eyes on top of the cone to turn it into a character. I drew hands that reached into the flowers to appear like the little guy was scratching his hair. Next, I tried to sketch something using the colors I previously picked. Since I love the idea of the flowers laid on top of the cone, I just decided to illustrate them in my own style. First I'm covering the flowers, you can see in the photo with the darker pink shade, I'm creating a big blobby shape on top of it. This creates a nice solid background for me to draw flowers on top of. Next, I made a flower using the lighter shade of the pink, and I'm duplicating it so I can quickly get more flowers to place on top of the cone. I'm resizing and rearranging them in a way that feels balanced. To keep my ideas organized, I'm grouping all the layers with the flowers together. Another idea I tried was to create an actual ice cream. I didn't spend much time exploring this idea because it didn't really make me feel enthusiastic and I wanted to explore more directions. I could take this photo that felt more creative to me. Lastly, I had the wonderful idea of hiding the flowers in the photo. This was inspired by the previous idea of drawing flowers in my own style, but this time I really wanted to use my signature white brush stroke style. I covered the sky with the shade of blue I picked earlier, and I just added some white clouds to try to blend it into the background. I'm also very quickly sketching the plants on top of the cone. This is still a very crude version of how I want the final photo to look. But it just meant to give a little visual sneak peek of how the idea I'm might develop. The more I welcome this the more this idea excited me, and I seem I already know it is the one we'll get to do from scratch in the next lesson. Once I had all the different ideas sketched out, I went through each of them and picked the one I love the most. To complete the mood board, I just put down some keywords for my final project. For example, I wrote down the type of brush I had to use, the types of elements I want to draw, and the side of the illustration I was going for. When we sit down to create a final version of the illustrated photo, we can already have this information ready to use. I really consider this process that we just went through, really important to plan a photo, so take your time if you want to sketch something more. In the meanwhile, I'm leaving you with another example. This is another mood board that I created for a photo with a scuba diver. Hopefully, this can act as another resource to help you get into the idea generation mindset. Get ready for the final illustration and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Illustrating: Let's open the photo in Procreate and duplicate the level. On the new copy, we're going to work on cropping out the flowers because our end goal is to replace them with our botanical illustrations. Tap the Selection tool and make sure free hand is selected and start going over the outline of the flowers. I'm not being super precise here, as long as you just stay close to the outline of the flowers, it should be fine. Close the loop of your selection. Swipe three fingers down and tap Cut & Paste. This option will move the element we've just selected onto another layer. Since we do not need a flower this time, we can just fill in this layer. Now, select the first layer with the original image and move the photo around so that you can feel the area we cut out with parts of the sky. Stretch and skill the image until you've reached a result you are satisfied with. Let's go back to the layer where we lead our selection into theories or tool. This will allow us to smooth the edges of the ice cream cone. Pick one of the airbrushing erasers and start going over the outline of the cut up flowers section with it. When you're done adjusting the ice cream cone, go back to the Layers menu and emerge the two by pinching them together. Duplicate it to create a backup just in case something goes wrong with the layer we'll work on. You can turn it off because it's just there in case we need it. As you can notice, we can still see a harsher line between the sky and our cutout. We want to get rid of that and create a more natural transition. Tap on the magic one tool and then choose Clone. When you choose this tool, a little ring will pop up. When you draw with your pencil the place on the photo where the little ring is centered, will be the part of the photo that you are duplicating with your pencil. As you can see the little ring is moving as I move my pencil, but if you want you can lock it. If you want to clone a constant area of your image just hold your finger down on the ring and it's going to lock. For the cloning, again, I picked a smooth brush so that I can create a good blended effect. As I get closer to the edge of the ice cream cone, I'm adjusting the size of the brush so that I can be more precise. Now I'm creating a new layer. In the previous lesson I had written down that I was going to use the monoline brush but for the final version I just changed my mind at the very last minute and I decided to go with the inking pen instead. I really love the way you can work with its pressure. Since we're going to draw leaves and flowers, this brush can really add some nice details. With a white inking pen, I'm going over the edge of the cone itself. As I'm tracing the outline, I'm creating an effect of melted ice cream drooping over the edge of the cone. For the upcoming illustrations, every time a draw a new type of design, I will create a new layer. As I mentioned in the previous lessons, we'll be able to overlap, move, or adjust the elements very easily. On a new layer, I'm going to start drawing the plants and the flowers that will be on top of the ice cream cone. I'm showing you very quickly just how you can draw some leaves and flowers. But if you want to learn how to draw them, just make sure to check out my secret garden class. There you can find exactly how to draw botanical elements and how you can put them together. Right now I'm just starting out by drawing a few leaves on the left side. On a new layer, I'm creating a big flower and I decided to position it in the center. I'm taking the eraser tool and get rid of any part of the leaf. Don't worry if you draw on top of other elements, because each element is on a different layer. You can raise just any part of the illustration without having to depend on other elements. To complete this group of leaves, I'm adding some lines and nice detailing. Next, I'm creating some small leaves on top of what I just drew. Again, I'm drawing on a new layer and my goal here is to keep on reaching and building this area out. I really want to diversify the smaller elements and create leaves with different shapes. On a new layer, I'm going to draw these other types of the leaves that have a more O shapes. Then I'm drawing another flower here and adding various elements as I go along. I'm just trying what feels right to me. But if you guys want to add different elements, just feel free to sketch and place those elements in your own way. I realized that I wanted to adjust a little the position of the flower so that I can move it and rotate it a little. I'm finishing off this drawing by adding more botanical elements. As I've mentioned before, I recommend working on different layers so that you can modify each type of element without having to erase or mess up with the rest of your illustration. I really hope you're enjoying illustrating this photo so far. But mostly I really hope you're getting a lot out of this course. We're so close to completing our first illustration and I can't really wait to see what you come up with. Make sure to stick around till the very end of this course because after this lesson, I will share more tips and tricks for how to creatively add illustrations to your photos. Once we're happy with the amount of botanical elements we have added onto a cone, we have completed the work. You can now group all the elements together and rename the layer if you want to, so we can keep our workspace more organized. I think this photo already looks amazing, but if you feel like the clouds behind the line art are blending a little too much with the illustration, we can do something to make our illustration pop a little more. First, create a new layer and move it below the layer of the botanical illustrations. Using the eyedropper tool, I'm picking a shade of blue color from the sky and with a soft brush from the airbrushing category, I am just going over the area where our botanical illustrations are placed. This will create a flat monochromatic background that doesn't have the white fluff of clouds and allows us to make our illustration stand out a little more. With the eraser get rid of the paint that goes over the outline of the botanical elements. If you think the blue background creates too much contrast, just lower the opacity of the layer. I kept mine at around 73 percent. To export your work, tap the wrench icon, then share, select the image format and tap Save Image if you want to save it to your image library. This illustrated photo is finished, but I wanted to bring a second example here so that I can show you another Procreate tool and a second way to get rid of the line that you see after cutting out a portion of your photo in this case, the flowers. I'm going to go a little faster now because the steps I'm going to take to complete this image are the same we just took to illustrate the ice cream, but make sure to pause the lesson anytime you need it. If you'd like to draw along with me, you can find this image in the class and resources section, open the photo in Procreate and duplicate the level. Tap the selection tool, select the flowers, swipe three fingers down, ends up on cut. Select the first layer, stretch it and move it to fill the area we cut out. Merge the two layers, and create the backup copy. You can turn this one off. Select the magic one tool and tap on Liquify. This can be a great alternative to make the line between the background and our cut out disappear. You can see that different modes along the bottom, and I will use the first one which is push. With movements starting from the upper corners of the photo, I move the pencil towards the mug and as you can notice the pixels are just been pushed in the directions of the brushstroke. I find the liquefy features super fun to use on photos and also really calming and relaxing. I really encourage you to try it out and you can also experiment with its different modes. The background looks good. Now this comes down to personal preference, but I find that the pink nails really stand out from the rest of the image. I'm creating a new layer and with the eye dropper tool, I'm picking the green color from the background with a monoline brush. I'm going over the nails so that I can uniform the colors of the image. As we did on top of the ice cream photo on a new layer, I'm drawing this shape just to give the idea that something is dripping over the mug, this time it's just the outline, I'm not filling in the shape, but I'm just adding tiny details. Next, we can start drawing the botanical elements as we did before. Remember that each type of design is on a different layer. I decided to draw just a few botanical elements coming out of the mug because now I'm picking one of my favorite brushes to spark some magic. Our magical botanical cup is finished. I love this image is so much that I made a print to keep here in the studio. We're nearing the end of this course and I know we've gone through a lot of techniques and concepts, but I really hope you've still got some energy left for learning about one last trick. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you another method you can apply to spark creativity in your photos. You can follow the steps or watch it as a reference. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. One Last Trick: Thank you for joining me for our final lesson. I'm about to show you how I use the mask feature to replace the girl's sweater in the image with the sky and create an effect of having illustrating the sweater. The mask tool lets you replace part of your photo with the content of another image. It's a really great tool to add yet another layer of creativity to your illustrated photographs. I love using this feature to create an effect of transparency in one of the elements of my photo, and make it look like as if I had drawn that element. You can really get creative here and find your own way of using this feature. Here I've already imported the photo I'll be using and I'm creating a new layer. I pick the monoline brush from the calligraphy brushes set, and I'm just testing the size of the brush to make sure it's right. As first step, I'm just tracing the outline of the girl's sweater. Your outline doesn't have to be super detail and exact, just as long as it captures the concept Once I finish outlining the sweater, I duplicate the layer with the original photo. Okay. Now stretch your original photo and move it around the canvas until the illustrated sweater contains the piece of the sky I want to include. Save the changes, go back to the layer with the copy, from the menu select Mask. This will create a new layer, and from the color wheel select black and use it to fill in the shape that you want to raise. Make sure you've selected black because it's the only color that will act as an eraser. If you ever want to bring back part of the sweater, you can do so by selecting white color instead. I'm using broad brush strokes to cover large areas, and for small details around the edges where I need to make more accurate movements, I'm using a smaller brush. Now I'm simply checking around the edges of the outline for imperfections and making small adjustments, either by bringing back parts of the photo I've accidentally erased or by using a different brush for masking around the girl's hair. We're all done with the masking. Just go ahead and merge the two layers together. Now create a new one and just bring it below. I want to create the gradient of the sky within the sweater and to do that, I'm selecting a lighter shade of blue. I'm just picking it from the photo. I picked a soft brush from the airbrushing category, and then I simply started covering the base of the sweater. I also lower the opacity of the light blue shade. This is optional, but I'm just quickly embellishing the sky by adding some stars. I really hope you enjoyed learning about this masking tool. It's really super creative. It's a powerful method that allows you to really replace part of the original image with another photo. Like for example here, I could select any image from my photo library and place it underneath the mask layer. Here as you can see, I can let the clouds and the sunset colors from the other image shine through the sweater. Thank you again for making it this far. I really enjoyed having you in this journey and I'll be wrapping things up in the next video. 12. Conclusions: If you're here, congrats for making it this far. This video marks the end of the course. Let's sum up what we've learned. First, we went through different ideas, styles, doodles and composition tips to get comfortable with these new techniques and learn the basics. Then I showed you my step-by-step process for planning and illustrating a photo. Beyond this course, you can apply this technique to endless other projects. You can use it as a daily practice to unleash your imagination, use it to create eye-catching images for your business or aesthetics and creativity to your social media photos. Feel free to share any part of your work in the project gallery. It can be the mood board, your doodles, your draft. I always love seeing my students work and seeing all the creative directions and style that arise. Remember that, even the most simple ideas can inspire others and I can't just wait to see what you've created. To grade your project, just click on the Projects and Resources tab below this video and then press Create Project option. If you have enjoyed this during this course, I would encourage you to leave a feedback. Reading your feedback always brings me so much joy and really motivates me to create new classes. Thank you again so much for joining me today and I hope to see you again in one of my classes.