Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. Welcome to easy Procreate watercolors. I'm Sandra Bowers and I'm a freelance Illustrator and surface pattern designer. I'm based in BC Canada. I create different types of products for companies around the world and I also create my own products. I create patterns and illustrations for fabrics, greeting cards, educational publishing, and home decor amongst others. I absolutely love using traditional watercolors but having the ability to use Procreate to create finished pieces of art that look a lot like watercolors has totally changed the way I work. In this class, I'm going to show you how I do everything. I'm going to explain to you the Procreate gallery, how to use a color picker tool and how to create your own color palettes. How to use a split screen mode so you can have your reference images besides what you're illustrating. I'll even provide you with my picture of a moth or a butterfly that I found in the garden I don't know what it is but it's very pretty. I'll show you how to use the symmetry tool and I'll even share with you my secret tool that helps me modify my sketches so I don't have to keep redrawing them until I find they're perfect. Then the fun starts. We will create our butterfly using only four brushes, they're all provided by Procreate. I'll also show you the way that I create watercolor paper textures. I use a brush that I have created and I will provide it to you to download. I'll show you how to modify it so you can create a lot of different brushes with different paper textures to add to your artwork. This class is packed with fun little tips and tricks and an insight to how I work and by using only the four brushes and not a ton of brushes. You won't have to be concentrating on that and you can just focus on creating art. Just have fun and join me.
2. Class Project and Supplies: For this class, you will need an iPad with Procreate, make sure you have the latest version so you have access to the same brushes I do. All the brushes are included in these new Procreate. But there's one that you have to download, which is called the Candy brush. The moment of recording this class, they're still available to download for free from Procreate. I'll leave the link in the class notes. This was part of a special care package that Procreate made available to artists during the COVID-19 situation. But they've decided to make it available. At this time it's still available. But if when you're watching this class it's not, just shoot me a message and I'll give you alternatives for it. An Apple pencil is useful but not required. For the class project, choose one insect or an animal that you want, or a flower, and then one background plan to create a botanical print. You can use my butterfly on flowers if you want, just credit me in your creations. I'll provide the images in the class resources area for you to download. Also provide the background vintage paper texture and the watercolor paper texture brush on my color palette. Remember to post your illustrations in the class project area so we can all see what you create. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to write in the comments area of the class. You can also tag me on Instagram @sandrabowersart. Let's start the class now.
3. Hello Procreate: In this first lesson, we are going to understand the gallery. This is the first thing you see when you come into Procreate. Here's a gallery and here are my documents. You can rename your files by tapping on the name and you can also stack them. If you have several items of the same project, you might want to stack them. For example, if I drag this one into these, it will create a stack. You can rename that stack the same way and if I want to add another thing to the stack, I can't just drag it in. You need to drag the stack onto the new artwork you want the add. There it is if you go into your stack, you have your documents. This is a very good way to organize your documents. Here you can select several items at once to perform the same action with several items. This is really great when you're going to export it, for example to your computer because you don't have to do it one by one. You can decide to stack them. That's another way to stack. You can preview them and then you tap here and you close it. You can also share so if you're going to export to Photoshop, you press this one. You can create PDF, jpegs, pngs, tiffs or animated gifs. You couldn't duplicate, so it just creates another exact copy of your file or you can delete it. You cannot undo these so make sure you're deleting what you already backed up or what you don't need. You can also import and it will create a document with that file. You can also import that picture and again, it will create a document with that image or you can add a new document. Here you have some preset sizes and you can also create your own size here, give it a name. I'm going to work at 11 by 15. Why? Because if I'm creating a 5 by 7 card, I want this to be double plus I give it one inch or the bleed, so that'll be 10 by 14 and I add one each for the bleed. Make that inches at 300 DPI so I can print it later. Here you can choose a color profile. Now you can work on CMYK and RGB. CMYK and RGB, as I'm going to show you later, changes the colors a lot. I usually work in RGB here you can choose your time-lapse settings into the quality. I don't choose 4K or anything because it takes up too much space and I don't need it but you can choose it there. Here in the canvas properties you can choose a background color and you can also choose to start with the background hidden so that it would starts with a transparent background. Let's click "Create" and it creates a document with those specifications. Next time you need the same document, you just stop here and at the end of your stack you'll see it here, vertical card. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about colors.
4. Color Picker: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the color picker and the colors in Procreate. This is an RGB document. I painted it with different colors, especially with these ones on here that are more neon like. I'm going to show you the difference between RGB and CMYK. I'm going to copy this layer and I'm going to go to the gallery and create a new document. Let's make it the same size, 11 by 15 inches and in color profile, see the last one we had was RGB 2014. We're going to choose CMYK here and you can import your CMYK profiles also if you want. Let's test it with this generic profile. I'll go into that document. I'm dragging three fingers down and paste my layer. Now you can see how muted these colors are. I'm going to just copy that layer. Let's go to the gallery, go back to this document. I'll create fingers down and paste them. I'm going to make them smaller so you can see now you can see how different they are. Let's put them here so they touch the other one. You're going to see how these two colors have a slight variation here. The reds are the same. These purple got more muted here but this is where the problem comes. CMYK doesn't like neons. This is what you have to be really careful with it. If you use CMYK and you think your colors are too muted you can fix it by going to hue saturation, brightness and you can make them more saturated and dilute so to fix neon problem a bit but they don't match exactly. That said, I always work in RGB here in Procreate and if I need the CMYK files for my client, I take it to Photoshop and there I pick the colors to make them a bit brighter. I can touch this line up here and drag my palette out and that way it's always there on my document. It's pretty handy if you're choosing a lot of colors and you like it there or you can just close it and it goes back here. I'm so used to it being tucked away that I still haven't gotten used to it being out there but I think it's pretty handy. Let's drag it out and I'll show you the different types of palette. Here we have the radial arm where you just move these around and you'll see all the possibilities within that range of color. Or we have this square and we have complimentary colors. Here, you can change the brightness to make it brighter or darker. If I touch here where it says complimentary, I can get split complimentary. Analogous or triadic. The triadic which is four colors. This can help you choose color palettes if you're not sure. Here, it can work with codes. If you know the hex code, you can write it down here or you can just use those lighters. Finally, the color palette. Here I have my favorite colors and auto palettes I have created. Let's close this so we can see that bigger. Here you can create a new color palette. You can press the name and call it butterfly for example. You can have one per document or project or you can have one with your favorite colors like mine. You can set it the default so that way it will always be down here. Now we're going to add colors to the palette. You just touch here and it will add it. Then you go to the green and you touch here. If you don't like one just hold it and then press delete when it appears. Or if you want to change that green for that purple for example, you just leave it pressed and press set and it will change it to the color you have selected. You can also move them around and rearrange them just press them once you select them just drag them move them around and rearrange them, just press them and once it's selected just drag it around. This is also very useful. Let's say I have this purple selected. Here, you can see my previous color, which was a yellow. If I press this it goes to yellow again, then if I press it again, it goes to my previous purple and that's super handy to just go back and forth between two colors. Finally, a little deep on how to choose perfect whites and blacks. You go to your color palette and you have the disc open. You tap twice, and it goes to a perfect white. You'll see it's a perfect white here because the code is ffffff. Six f's and for the black, which is all zeros in the hex code, you tap here into dark area and double tap and it goes to the perfect black. See, all zeros in the hexadecimal. For the gray, you can double-tap here in the gray area and it takes you to a 50 percent gray, which I don't know the hex but you can see here that it's 50 percent black. That's pretty useful too. I'm just going to create a color palette with you so you can see what I do. The way I create color palette is really inquisitive. I have a colored theory class on Skillshare. I'll leave a link to it in the notes. It's color theory without the theory. You'll just have to try what you like and don't think too much about what goes on and what doesn't just do it from your gut. I'm selecting a hard airbrush but use whatever brush you want. Think about what colors you're going to paint. For this illustration, we're going to need some oranges and yellows. I don't know if I'm going to paint the leaves or not. I'm going to start here with a yellow and choose whatever yellow I think looks best. Let's make this bigger. Now we're going to need an orange. I'm going to add an orange and probably a sort of red, a brown and some teal. I'm going to use a color picker here so I just leave it pressed on the color and it chooses that teal I had before and we're going to create a more muted version of it. Just drag it towards the gray. This always ensures that it goes together. Now, creamy yellow. I can't really explain what I'm doing because like really I'm just playing around with colors I like and adding them. This is something you're going to have to experiment on your own. I am providing this color palette in case you want to use it, so it will be downloadable from the class. Please don't be constrained about color theory. It was something that used to bug me down a lot and a lot of people said I had bad taste and I just followed my instincts. If there is one compliment that I always get from art directors, it's my color palette. Don't get bogged down don't be sad, just keep learning, keep improving, keep trying what you like best and you'll come out with something that's truly you and it's going to work. If you have absolutely no idea what you're doing and your colors maybe don't match. I'm going to teach you a trick and they will always, always match. I can't assure you that they will look pretty but I can assure you that they will go together. On top of your colors, you create a new layer and you grab any color. I like using yellow but this would work with any color. I just find that the yellow doesn't change my colors too much but pair it with different colors and you'll see that the difference. Drag this and drop it here and it will feel your whole layer and then go into that layer and press the N and change the blending mode to multiply and I will reduce the opacity. What this does is that it adds the same color to all the previous colors, so it makes them all go together. This is a trick that you can try with any material. I use it in my clay creations, in my watercolors, in my acrylics. If you always mix all the colors with other color then they will always go together. What do we do now is we feel our color palette with this colors. I will need these pressed to access the color picker and add this yellow to my palette and add every color the same way. I also like to create a darker shade of each color. I go to the classic view and choose that yellow. Here I'm going to reduce the brightness. Some I might bring down more but usually just around here and add every color the same way. This way you're ensuring that all your colors work well together and you have colors to create your shadows. If you want, you can create the same thing but a brighter version and use it for highlights. I'll select the original color and just move these here for highlights and I would do that with all the colors. There, now we have a super complimentary color palette that actually works. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk to you about using the split screen for reference images. Then we can start drawing.
5. Split Screen Mode: In this lesson, I'm going to go over the split screen mode, which is really useful for using reference pictures. Make sure that when you're using pictures, you either take them or you own the rights to them because the photographer owns the rights to the pictures, so you cannot just copy any picture you find online. Drag up slowly and I want to access my images, but it's not here in my stock. I just have to go out of Procreate and I'm going to access my photos, and that way it will be here on my recently used apps. I go into Procreate again and now it's here. Hold it for a second and I drag it up and here you have it. Here's the image and see that you can move these around, but it's covering up the menus, so you want to drag it up from the top and make it a split screen. Now you can change the size of that screen. You can change the size here and this way you can paint here and use your reference picture there. You can also use Safari, for example, and look up things online while you're in the app. Once you want to get rid of this, there's a line up there. Just separate it and drag to the right. Now you know how to split your screen and put your reference images there. Now we're going to talk about the symmetry tool in Procreate.
6. Canvas Symmetry: In this lesson, we're going to talk about canvas symmetry. We have our canvas here and we go here to actions and in canvas, you have drawing guide. Turn the drawing guide on and you can see it here. But we're going to go to edit drawing guide because we have different options. The 2D grid, the isometric, the perspective and the one we're going to use, which is the symmetry. What the symmetry does is that whatever you draw on this side, for example, will be reflected on this side, so those different options. Vertical reflects to the side, horizontal reflects to the bottom or the top. Quadrant reflects in four quadrants and in radial it rotates in a circle, so radial symmetry. Just make sure that assisted drawing is turned on and vertical, if you're creating a butterfly. You can also move these if you don't want it to be centered or you can click here on this dot and press reset, it goes to the middle. You can also use this green dot to change the position and again reset it goes to the middle. We're going to keep it this way. Here you can change the opacity of your line if you don't like seeing it so much or usually like having it very low but so you see what's happening I'm going to keep it high. Same with the thickness and here you can change the color of your guides. I'm going to leave it there and press "Done". Now if you go into your layers, you'll see that your layer is assisted. You could click on and you see it says drawing assist. Now everything you draw here gets reflected here. You can also draw on the side, though which is really handy because some things are easier to draw on the side. I just keep going back and forward between sides. If you create a new layer, that layer won't have the assisted. What I draw here is not going to be reflected. If I want these layer to have the assistance too, I just have to click here and select Drawing Assist. Then you can see it's an assisted layer and again, I have my symmetry. Let's say you're done with your symmetry and now you want to create different patterns in each wing. You just click here on your layer, deselect drawing assist and now you can go back and add different elements to each side of the wings. If you don't want to see that line anymore, you just go back to actions and turn your drawing guide off, and that's it. Now you know how to do these. It's super easy. It's great for creating geometrical designs, reflected the designs or even creating mandalas somethings for your backgrounds. I use it like that a lot. In our next lesson, we're going to start sketching our butterfly for real, not an ugly sketch like this. Well, I'm an ugly sketcher but we're going to start sketching our butterfly and using some brushes.
7. Sketching: In this lesson, we're going to create the sketch of our illustration. We already have our colors chosen and now we need brushes. Procreate has amazing brushes. There's a lot, so I like to organize them. See mine here, I have a bunch of these folders where I put the brushes I use for each type of illustration I create. Now we're going to do the same thing. So every project needs a different type of brushes depending on what you want to achieve. Here we want to achieve a sort of botanical illustration. It's not going to be totally scientific. It's very stylized, so we can make creative choices. I don't like working with too many branches at a time. So we'll only choose four for these type of illustration. First of all, I want a pencil. Here is sketching, there's this one Peppermint. I really like this pencil. It comes in the newest procreate updates, so make sure you have the latest update. What I like to do is swipe left and duplicate it and then I'll go into that brush. Go through about this brush, touch the name and I always have my initials SB. So I know I've modified it. What I'm going to change here is streamline. What's the streamline? I have a high streamline, I can create very smooth lines. Did you see when I was sketching the butterfly there that my lines were really ugly? It's because this streamline of this brush comes at zero, so it's harder to create smooth lines. You see it's modifying my strokes. It makes my lines way smoother. You don't want to have it at a 100 percent because you lose precision but I do like to have it at a high point. So that's the only thing I'm going to change for my brush. I want it all to be in one set. So I'm going to slide this down. When I see this plus sign, I'm going to create a set that says botanical. Again, I add my initial, so I know I created it. I'm going to go back to that sketching folder, select the peppermint I created. I'm going to press that brush and bring it here to my botanical set, just drag it on top until it opens and drop it there. I'm also going to use a water brush. Here In water, there's this brush called wash that I like. So I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to put it there. Just go up until you see your set and drop it there. I duplicate the brushes before I move them because I don't want to disorganize my original folders. Finally, this is from the set called sweet treats, as I said in the class project video, if this brush is not available at the time you're watching the class, just write a comment or contact me and I will suggest something different. Anyway, I downloaded them and I really like this candy brush, see this is very watery and it gives a really nice watercolor effect. Here I'm pressing harder and you can see what it does. We're going to duplicate this one too and add it to the set. Never liked having the brush that I'm working on at the beginning because it's hard to drop things under. So I'm going to move it down here, so I can drop things in easier. From the drawing set I really like these over and brush to create solid shapes. I'm going to duplicate it and leave it as it is and just drop it here. You can also share your sets by tapping on the name of the folder. Okay, that's all the branches we're using. We'll start to sketch with this peppermint, just choose whichever color you want. It doesn't matter, it's just for the base sketch, and we're going to bring up our butterfly, drag it up and place it here and let's make it a bit smaller. Open the butterfly and make it bigger. Right now I only want to concentrate here in this half because I'm only going to draw half of the butterflying. I'm making very loose strokes, I'm not overthinking it. What I do is look at the image and look for basic shapes. These breaks up the images here. It's like a triangle here, I'm a very messy sketcher and I usually don't even show this part but here it goes. Once you have a very basic shape like that, you can start making decisions to alter angles and not parts. I'm not trying to create a super anatomically correct illustration because I want this to be very stylized. I don't even know if this is a butterfly or a moth. I just found it flying around my garden then thought it was pretty. So that's sort of the basic shape. Now for some markings. I'm being pretty liberal with my marking interpretation. So that's my very rough sketch and now you've seen how I actually sketch in real life. Now let me introduce you to the super-useful liquefied tool. Go here to the adjustments and grab your liquefied tool and here you can change the size. That's basically the only thing I ever change. I just want to get the size right. So I'm not moving the whole thing but just little areas of my drawing. I'll start using these to modify things. Just drag my pencil around and modify it until I think it looks nice. This is a super useful tool because it will make your sketch look better without having to redraw things a million times. I've closed my reference image now because I don't want to depend on it anymore. Now just follow my instincts on what I think looks best. You couldn't do this obviously if it was a real scientific illustration, then you would have to be supper accurate with what you're seeing but this is not it, so I like the silence drawings and I get to make all the choices depending on what suits my soul carry on. Okay, I like that much better. So I'm going to press this tool again and now we're out of there. What I would do now is create a new layer and make it assisted and reduce the opacity of this one by clicking on it and tapping on the n and reduce the opacity. Then go back to my assisted one and I'll create a better sketch. I'm not even going to draw the markings right now. I'll just forget about them. I can delete these and turn off my drawing assist now. Go to canvas and turn off my drawing guide and now I can resize these. I choose the select tool and make sure uniform is selected and just make it smaller and then I can move it around. Okay, now I'm going to bring up my flowers. I'm just going to create another layer. Again, we're going to create another messy sketch. Let's say here we are going to add some text. You can also reduce your transparency here. That's basically where I want things to go. Just because see, in my mind, I have this square and I want to fill it up nicely. So that's what I will try to do. I want to add some of these flowers. Remember this is going to be behind the butterfly. I want a flower here and maybe another one coming up here. Maybe one here and then just leaves or little buds. Here you can see a little bud back there. So maybe they'll be a little bud here and maybe one here. Turn up the opacity and draw a flower like this. Again, this is a very stylized illustration and I'll start with very simple shapes. A circle here for the yellow part of the flower. See here it's weird. It's just like flat. Don't even think that they're petals or anything, just think about the simple shapes and whatever doesn't make sense to you when you're drawing, just change it. You can draw the base if you want or you can just do it as a final part of your sketch. That end up being too big but you can always select, choose free hand, select that area and if I decide to move it around, that's the cool thing about digital illustration. Let's make a circle here, and on the yellow thing. You can also use a liquefied tool here. Now I don't want to look at my reference anymore. I want to create the stems and some leaves. I also want to fill this space. In my mind, I'm thinking how the eye of the viewer will be moving through my illustration. So the main elements make a flowing line like that and now I just want to add a bit of balance here and here. But I want things that are settled and won't distract the person too much because if I make it too busy then the eye doesn't have a place to rest and the illustration would be too saturated. I still want my butterfly to be the main focal point. I'm just making up leaves. Leaves are one of my favorite things to paint in the world. See what happened here. Now I have these wide area that I really don't like. So I'm going to erase that and think about adding something like this, and maybe the flower buds will be here, I think I want to make the background just like a pencil sketch. Yeah. So now I will look at it very small. So zoom out a lot and see if it's working or not. I can see it's still heavy on this side. So I just want to add a bit more things here to balance it out. I should probably clean this sketch up a bit. I wouldn't do it in my real working life and waste time on it because I'm not going to use it but I'll probably clean it up a bit for your sake and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll start color blocking.
8. Color Blocking: In this lesson, we're going to start coloring our illustration. I have my cleaned-up sketch here. I am going to turn off the background flowers, because we're going to concentrate in the butterfly. If you want to use your line work, the colored things in, there's two options. You can just choose a color and drop a color in. If it overflows like this, move your pencil to the left or to the right to change the amount of color that fills in. So just move it to the left until it just fills that wing. That's what I want, so I release. But if later you want to edit something, you're going to have your outlines and colors in the same layer. So that's going to become a problem. The best thing to do is to make this a reference layer. What this does, is that it tells Procreate to use these guidelines as a reference, as if I was filling in this layer, but in a new layer. So I'm going to create a new layer and drag it down, and then I can do exactly the same thing. But everything is in its own layer. The outlines are in one layer, and the colors are in another layer. This gives me the ability to edit them later, way easier. Or there's another way, if you don't want to use the outlines, you can just use these as a guide and redraw everything. I'm going to touch here and set this to, "Multiply," and make it a lower opacity so it's transparent. I'm going to create a new layer and drag it underneath. I'm going to rename it, "Butterfly," and I'm going to start painting there. Since I want both sides to be painted at the same time, I'm going to touch on it and turn on, "Drawing Assist." I will choose my, "Oberon Brush." I sure hope I'm pronouncing that right, because I'm saying it many times. Before I color the wings, I'm going to set my background. So I'm going to insert an image. Here, you, "Add," "Insert a File." I'm going to use my old paper texture. I have provided this in the Class Downloads. I created it so you can use it too. It's a bit dark, so I'm going to go here and go to curves and play around with this until I find something I like. I think that's better. Just touch there again, twice, and now we can really start painting our butterfly. Turn, "Drawing Assist," up there and I am going to rename it to, "Background Paper." Then rename this one to butterfly and turn the, "Drawing Assist," on. I like to choose a light color. The reason I don't just draw the outline and then drop in some color is because, here you can see a clear difference. This is solid and this has a bit of a texture, that's why I like this brush. If you're going for this solid fill, just use that and it's way faster. Body view on the texture, you're going to have to color it in. So I am going to create another layer underneath this one, and I'm going to rename that to, "Bottom Wings." Again, I'm going to do the same thing. You can use the same color or just use another light color. Why do I start with light colors? It's because as in watercolors, you want to start from light to dark, because it's going to overlay color, one on top of another, so if you start with a very dark ground, it's not going to work. Then on top of everything, drag that there. The, "Body," makes sure it's assisted. I'm going to use my peppermint brush and choose a darker color, and draw the antennas. Now we have our base colors, and in the next lesson, we're going to learn how to shape these by using Clipping Masks and Alpha Locks.
9. Masks: In this lesson, we're going to start shading these, and we're going to use masks and alpha lock. First I'm going to delete my sketch, and we're going to start coloring these wings. If you swipe to the right with two fingers, you get that checkerboard in the back, that means alpha lock. What that means is that everything I paint stays within that boundary, but it in that same layer. So then I want to edit the background, it's going to be very hard. So I'm going to undo that and show you a non-destructive way to do it. This uses more layers, but I'm going to show you a trick later so it doesn't really matter, but if you're really, really pressed for layers, you would use these alpha log technique. Just go ahead and swipe right again to eliminate the alpha lock, and we're going to create a new layer on top of it. If you click here, you can see there's clipping mask. So again, everything I paint stays within the boundaries. See doesn't go to any other place. But now it's in a different layer. So if I wanted to change the color of my wings in the background, it would be super easy and it wouldn't affect the details on the outer layer. This is how I like to work. If I think I might have to edit things later. I'm going to paint the color here, and this is going to be the base color. I'm going to go to the base color, touch here and set it to multiply. These are blending modes. So if you just drag up, you'll see that the instance that they create. Here, we're going to use multiplier. Our butterfly wings are set the multiply, but our top layer is set to normal. I'm using the wash first, let's bring up our reference layer. So it's darker here and lighter here, and then it has darker outlines here. So I'm just going to be very free with my coloring. I'm going to add some yellow first. Make sure that my transparency is not too high because watercolors are very transparent. I'm just going to tap, and I'm going to go darker with a red here. Maybe grab a brown. See I'm not even tapping here because if I tap there then center of my brush is there, they can make it smaller and I'm tapping out here. So these edges start becoming burnt. Sometimes I drag it, sometimes I tap in some places to make those darker. I want to go in with the candy brush and maybe some orange. This creates a totally different effect. I like to mix bullets. I'm not lifting and if I lift I can make dots in textured areas. I like to go back and forth between colors because that's like a really nice thing about watercolors. If I wanted to choose a very light color and go lighter here, it won't work. It would just start like moving the colors that are there around. So I'm going to create a new brush. I'm going to duplicate a candy going through it. Here in polar dynamics, I'm going to bring the lightness to like 41. I'm going to go here and rename these. Can be light, press done, and now it will actually work through lightened areas up. I can make it less transparent. See it will lighten up areas, and then I go back with this one. I'm just playing around, I don't have anything planned before hand. I think that looks nice, and this is what happened. I didn't have a reference layer turned on for my color layer. If that happen to you, just go ahead and select this, track down with three fingers. Copy-and-paste. Go here to turn it over to the other side. Move it to the other side, and heat here. I'm going to select that layer and select clipping mask. Because these way I can select here and move it around and position it perfectly where I want. Now I can merge those two. Now we're going to paint the rest, but we have some overlapping areas here. I want to fix that before I start painting. I will select the butterfly wings, and that selects those. So if I go into my bottom wings now and I erase, I will just be erasing the area that is overlapping, and I press there to de-select. If you set the body to multiply, you'll see that there's also areas that are overlapping for both wings. So I'm going to select them, and then going through the top wings and erase that area, and the same with the bottom wings. So now nothing is overlapping. I'm going to set my bottom wings to multiply, create a layer on top, clipping mask. On these, I'll make sure that drawing assist is on, and now I can start painting. So I want these wings to be a bit red, and I want this area to be much darker so you can see like a shadow between the wings, and here I'm going to reduce the size of the brush and not a darker color because this is what traditional watercolors do, they sometimes leave an edge, so this makes it more realistic. I like an edge. So now the body, again create a layer on top set the clipping mask, set the drawing and ceased and start coloring. It's quite dark in the middle or on the side. So I'm adding a bit of yellow and then some dark red in the middle. Okay, that's great. So now we have our butterfly painted, and in the next lesson, we're going to add some details.
10. Details: In this lesson we're going to add details to our butterfly because details are what bring things to life and this is my favorite part. I'm just going to make this very big because we're going to focus on these wing. Go of my Layers and create a new one on top of my butterfly wing. I'm going to set that again, the Clipping Mask and Drawing Assist. I'm going to select Candy and add my details with it. You can get really creative here you don't have to follow the picture. I'm just going to use it as a basic guide, I'm not really trying to copy it exactly the same. Then I'm going to use my peppermint brush to create smaller details and I can add some more details. I like this because it looks like color pencil with watercolors, which I absolutely love but you can create the details however you want. At this point, I'm not following the reference much, but you can follow it as much as you want. It's your style, your illustration, so just do whatever makes you happy and experimental/. Try to make it super realistic, make it very stylized, make it childish, see whatever you like best. See it has this little white things there, I think they are cool so I will add them there. Our colors are not painting exactly the way they are here, like see this is not very white and here it doesn't look white because it's multiplied. I just reached my limit for the layers, so what I do now is go to Gallery, swipe to the left, Duplicate and now I have butterfly, I call this butterfly 2. I go in there. Now here I will merge this part and by the way I have more layers now but if I ever want to go back into that layer here, I still have all my layers intact. What I do usually is just take all those files and put them into one file in Photoshop so I have everything together. I'm going to skip the rest of the thing up but it's basically the same process. I just like this cool symmetric creates this cool textures without even thinking about it. We're done. I'm super happy with how my butterfly turned out, I hope you're happy too. If you are not, just keep trying, the cool thing about this is you can just delete it or duplicate it and try again. In the next lesson, we're just going to create our backgrounds sketches.
11. Background Sketch: In this lesson, we're going to create the background sketch. I'm going to slide through to the right. In all my layers that make up the butterfly and click "Group", and then I'm going to rename these group butterfly. Since I don't have many more layers, I'm going to go out to the gallery, swipe to the left, duplicate and open that up. I'm going to flatten this layers. That means that my butterfly is all in one layer now. I'll move my sketch up here. Now, I want to create a layer on top of that background under my sketch. I'm going to make my sketch multiply, reduce the opacity and I'm going to draw here. These one is going to be called sketch. I'm going to use my peppermint brush because it's a lot like a pencil and I liked that texture but feel free to use anything you like. I'm going to use this brown and I might change it later. I'm just going to start creating the background illustrations following my sketch. I want the background to the detailed, but I want it to look very hand drawn. You can open up the reference if you need to. Just not usually looking at reference a lot, so makes me worry about what I'm painting this way it's much more fun for me and I can create my own star. I'm not following my sketch exactly, I rarely do. It doesn't matter that I'm going over my butterfly because we will erase that area later. I'm just going to continue doing that and I'm going to speed it up because I'm basically, just tracing and drawing here, so you get the idea. I'm going to make it a bit thicker and darker for this details here. Not over thinking this too much, I'm just feeling in the space in a way that seems organic. Now, I can go in with the eraser and the eraser is that overlap. If you want to add a text here with a text tool. You go here and add text, and you choose your font here, or you can import the font if it's not there and the size, and then here you can write. Then you can just move it with this. Make it bigger or smaller, and there you have it or you can just write it. To make it look more like a botanical illustration so I will create another layer for that. Now, I'm going to write down some scientific information I Google, which is truly not scientifically accurate. I'm going to hide my sketch, and I am going to organize this. Make sure free hand is selected. You can use this line down here to make sure things are straight so now that it's straight, you just move it up. Now, again, select this, grab it, bring it here, make it straight and center it there with the line and finally, this one. Then I want to move the whole thing down. The spot here is kind of crooked, so I will just select that part, rotate it a bit and then D looks really crooked. I'll select that rotate it a bit and that looks better. You can also create a frame. If you make a line and you hold, that line is going to be straight. Then if you place your finger down, it snaps to an angle. I'm going to do that up here too. We want to make that smaller so just it grab here, transform it. This is to show you that you can transform everything you're doing, that's the cool thing about digital. Don't be scared to make mistakes. I really like how that looks, but I don't like that it's going over my flowers. I'm probably just going to erase, this part and just leave the lines there. That's better, I'm going to rename these texts. The only thing I'm going to do now, is delete my sketch layer, the ugly sketch layer, not the good one, and then I'm going to create another layer on top of my sketch, and I'm going to add details to the flowers. I'm basically, just going around adding details. You can change if you want with your pencil on the side. I'm just going to time-lapse because, its just going around and creating little details. In the next lesson we're going to add one finishing touch, which is our water color texture and that's it.
12. Final Details and Conclusions: In this lesson, we're just going to add some finishing touches and say goodbye. I have finished my background illustration. What I'm going to do now is just add some things so it looks more like a watercolor. I'm going to go to the top of my stack. I'm going to choose a brush that I'm going to add to the download area of the class. Is this Crunchy paper SB? It's a brush that uses procreate grains to create different types of paper. What you can do is duplicate it and go in and go to Grain. Here you can Edit, Import and go to the Source Library. This is procreate source library, and it has a bunch of textures that work really great as background papers. Pastel papers, Sketch paper, Charcoal. There is more papers here, like Wet paper, Recycled, Munch. You can set any of those. Let's choose this Distressed Canvas for example. Just go to the, About this brush, rename it so you know what it is. You have all these textures that you can apply on top of your illustrations with just a brush. For this one we are going to use a Crunchy paper SB that I include in the class downloads. On that top layer, I'm going to select these yellow. Try to use light colors that go with your illustrations. I always like using yellows because it gives a [inaudible]. I'm going to select that brush. Make sure that the opacity is set to maximum and the size. I'm going to start painting with it and I'm not lifting my finger. There I have filled the whole canvas with that texture. What I do is use these blending mode to make it look more realistic. I'm going to use Screen here. Sometimes Linear Burn, Color Burn, Multiply work really well. Want to use Screen because what I have here is very dark. I wanted to show the grain on top. I'm going to reduce the opacity a bit. I think that's enough. Do you see it there? It's subtle. I want it to be less subtle on the background. What I'm going to do is just duplicate this layer. I'm going to bring it down under my butterfly. Let's make it bigger so you can see what I'm doing. I'm going to touch here and modify the opacity a bit so it shows a bit more on the background. Rename my layers. That is it. Now our illustration is ready. I hope you enjoyed this class. I hope you'll learned a lot. We looked at procreates, calorie, the color beaker, how to create color palettes. We learned how to use this symmetry tool and prepare our canvas and learned about CMYK and RGB colors, and we learned how to use procreates, water brushes and how to use the overlay mode. I hope this gives you the tools to create your own illustrations and you'll feel more comfortable with procreate now on everything that it has to offer. You can follow me and tag me on Instagram @SANDRABOWERSART. Remember to follow me here on SKILLSHARE so you get notified when I post new classes, and if you like the class please leave a review and shared with your friends. I'll see you soon. Bye.
Sandra Mejia, Illustrator + Pattern Designer
