Easy Digital Illustration: Paint an Acrylic Sunflower in Procreate

1. Intro & Welcome: Have you ever wanted to create digital art that looks like a real acrylic painting? Hi there creative. My name is Shannon Lane. I'm an artist and a hand letterer, and I love using digital tools to create art that has a traditional feel. In this class, I'll show you how to sketch out a sunflower, paint it with custom brushes, and then a texture to give it that acrylic look so that by the end, you'll have a beautiful sunflower illustration to share for your class project, along with some new painting skills to use when you create future artwork. This class is perfect for anyone with a basic understanding of Procreate who wants a fun low pressure project to practice digital painting. To follow along, you'll need an iPad with Procreate, Apple Pencil, and the free resources in the project section. Grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Class Resources: For this class, I've created a few acrylic brushes to help create that acrylic style effect. The first brush is the acrylic painter brush, which is going to be used for added color as well as for blending them. This brush is pressure sensitive and it has a little bit of smudginess to it. So when you apply later pressure, you will get a lighter value of color and you will be able to blend it in a lot easier. When you apply full pressure, you're going to get a darker value of your color and it's still going to allow you to blend. As you use this brush, it works like a flat brush. You're going to try to keep your strokes going in one direction just so that it creates the effect of painting with a flat brush. The final brush that you're going to use is the dry brush. So it's just going to add a little bit of texture when you paint, and I'm mostly going to be using this at the end of the painting. Also included is an acrylic paper texture, which we're going to add at the end. I'll see you in the next lesson where we start sketching our sunflower. 3. Sketching the Sunflower: To sketch out my sunflower, I'm using two images for my references, and that is because I want to include elements from both of these images into my final sketch. After I've imported both images, I merge them together and then create a new layer for our sketch. So with flowers, you can usually fit your petals within a circle. So for the sunflower, I'm drawing a smaller circle for the center of the sunflower and a larger circle on the outside that will fit our petals. Then for the leaves, I'm going to draw some triangles in the areas where I want my leaves to be. When you're finished drawing out your shapes for the leaves and the flowers, you can then lower the opacity of that layer and create a new layer on top. And this is where we're going to draw the flower. So I'm starting with the petals, and I'm just trying to draw them around that inner circle and keep them contained within the outer circle. We are going to refine this later on, so you can just draw simple shapes for these petals. When you are finished, drawing your petals, you can then add a wavy line for the center of the sunflower. And then for the stem, I added two curved lines, and then I sketch in the shape of the leaves following the guide of that triangle that I drew on the layer below. You can just continue adding your leaves and any other details to make this sunflower sketch complete. When you're finished adding in all of your details, you can then reduce the opacity of this layer and create another sketch on top, where you just refine and touch up any areas that you felt needed a little bit more definition. And when you're finished with this sketch, we can then move on into the next lesson. 4. Painting the Petals: We're going to start by lowering the opacity of our sketch and creating a new layer underneath. I'm using the acrylic painter brush and the light peach color to start painting the petals. I know it's a little difficult to see what I'm doing right now, but I'm painting in an up and down motion following the curve of the petals. Then you're going to use a light yellow and that same up and down motion to paint around the petal. This time, though, as you get closer to the center of the petal, you're going to use less pressure so that the light peach shows through. And this will be the highlight of the petal. Then I'm going to use a darker yellow and paint it in that same motion all around the edges of the petals. Make sure that when you're doing this that you don't color too much of those colors that you've added previously. For the petals that are in the back, you can skip the lighter peach color and start by painting the light yellow. Then add your darker yellow around the edges. Since these are in the background, there won't be much light hitting them, so they will be darker. And this is how I'm going to be painting the remaining petals all around the sunflower. One thing to remember is that when you're painting, you can zoom out to take in your painting as a whole to see if any areas may need lightning or darkening and then just add in the color that it needs. Brush has a little bit of transparency to it, but it's mostly opaque. So you can add your light peach color to any areas that you have missed without needing to go on a new layer or worrying about it not showing up. 5. Adding the Shadows: So now we are going to start adding our shadows to the petals. For the inner shadows, I've selected the light orange and lowered the size of the brush, and I'm going to be adding a few lines coming from the center of the sunflower towards the tip of the petal. But I am adding them very short and they're stopping before I get to the middle of the petal. I'm also adding a few lines to create the effect of the petal being curled or folded over. So you're going to draw your line of color, and then you are going to blend it into the petal. For the outer shadow separating each petal, I'm using a darker orange to paint the shadow and then blend it into the petal underneath. And as I was painting, the dash lights were just so bright and painting this bright yellow sunflower was just really difficult to see. So I changed the background color a bit, and now you'll see that it's much easier to notice all of the colors and the textures and the details. So if you are having the same problem where it's too bright, just simply change the background color a bit. It doesn't have to be a final color. It can just be something to help the painting process move along easier. So to paint the center of the sunflower, I used a default round brush from the Procreate library to create the shape of the middle And then I used the Aquilt painter brush at a larger size to stamp some texture onto that shape. I wasn't really liking how this was looking, but I decided to keep going until I found something that started to look how I wanted. But I still didn't like how the center was looking so it got rid of the shape that I drew with the round brush and continued stamping some texture, and it was much happier with how it turned out. So you can use this same acrylic painter brush, or you can experiment with a few different brushes in the Procreate library, specifically in the painting and in the artistic breast set. To have a lot of fun textures. So encourage you to try those out when you're painting this step and see which one creates the center of the sunflower in is stuff that you like. And once you're finished, you can then move on to painting the leaves. 6. Painting the Leaves: So we are going to jump right into painting these leaves, create a new layer below the petals, and you're gonna paint the base of the stem in that light peach color. Then you're going to add your light green leaving a few lighter areas showing through. And then I'm going to add my darker green to the left side of the stem to create the shadow, and I'm going to add a little light peach to the right side to create the highlight. If you have any color from that stem, overlapping the leaf, you can erase it and then repeat those same steps to build up the color for the leaves. Start with your light peach color. Then add your light green and darken the edges of the leaves with darker shades of green. Make sure that you're adding your strokes following the shape of the leaf. When you're finished adding your colors, you can use the acrylic painter brush to lightly blend them together, and we don't want to get rid of the texture that we painted. We just want these lines to lightly blend into each other. And as you paint, you're going to add your shadows and darken any areas where your leaves may be folded or curled over or maybe they're over the stem like this one in the front. So you're going to add all your shadows underneath. When you are finished adding your colors and blending, you can then add your final details like the veins of the leaves. So you can use a dark green to add those veins and then lightly blend them into the leaves. 7. Adding final Details: So this step is completely optional, but I want to add just a little bit more texture to my petals. So I'm creating a new layer above everything that we've just done, and I'm using the dry brush to add just a few lines across the petals and the leaves of this flower. The final step to creating this painting is to import your texture. So go to wherever you have it stored on your iPad and import it into this canvas. Then you're going to adjust the blend mode so that it shows up onto your painting. Each blend mode has a different effect, so you can choose the one that you want to go with. I went with Divide and then your painting is complete. 8. Wrap up: So we've made it till the end of this class, and I'm very excited to see your project. So head to the Projects and Resources tab of this class and upload an image of your work, then hit Publish. I also want to encourage you to leave a review, sharing your thoughts on this class so that others who may be interested can know what to expect. Thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you soon.