Easy Procreate Watercolors - Create Botanical Illustrations on your iPad

1. Class Trailer: Easy Watercolors in Procreate: Hey, today I'm here to tell you a secret, how I have traded this for this, mostly. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to create gorgeous botanical illustrations using procreate on your iPad. I'm Sandra Mejia and I'm a freelance illustrator and pattern designer, and I license my art for different companies to put on their products. A lot of my art is created using traditional watercolors and although traditional watercolor past will always have a special place in my heart, using digital watercolors in procreate is so much easier. Especially if you're working commercially, because if a client comes back and they want to change something, it's so much easier when it's done digitally. I don't have to carry a lot of paints in my bag. I can just pack my iPad and then I can paint anywhere, and the best best part is I don't have to spend hours in photoshop cleaning up the paper texture out of my watercolors. Let me show you exactly what I do to create these watercolor elements to create this composition. For this class, we're going to be using a limited set of brushes because that's my preferred way of doing this, not being confused with a ton of brushes, just focusing on creating some art. So those are included with the class and also the color palette. And I'll show you all the basic techniques that I use to create my watercolor style. We'll get comfortable with the brushes, we'll create some greenery, very loose greenery, and then we'll start creating our floral elements. So we're going to go through a path of painting simple flowers and going up in complexity until you feel really comfortable painting anything. I'll even show you how I create some little friends for my compositions and how to export each element individually without a paper texture so you can use this in stickers, clip part, or anything you want. Finally, we will bring all those elements into a file and build a beautiful composition. As a bonus, I'll also show you how I create a decorated letter. You can use this to sell clip art or to create your own stickers or to create personalized wedding invitations, for example. I'll also give you my reference images and sketches and my base procreate files. This why if you're super eager to start painting, you can just use my files and start practicing your watercoloring techniques. Join me, and let's start painting digital watercolors. 2. Class Project and Resources: For the class project, you're going to create your favorite flowers and arrange them in a composition or monogram. Or you can also follow along with my flowers on the files I have provided and just practice on them. Remember to download the resources. This class includes appropriate files, so they're ready for you to go and just start adding paint to them. It has the JP sketches. If you rather work with that. It has the color palette, I'm using it for the class and the brush sets that I'm using for the class. If you want to get the complete watercolor brush set, you can sign up to my newsletter and get it for free. This is not required for the class. It's totally optional. I provide all the brushes that I use in the class in the class resources, so download those too. I'm also providing some reference images that I took. So if you want to use that, that's good too. Remember to share your projects in the project gallery, I would love to see what you create. Okay. So make sure you download everything and in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to install the brushes and the color palettes. 3. Installing Brushes and Color Palette: Okay. So after you have downloaded all the files that are available with the class, I have mine in iCloud Drive, but you could also have them on your iPad or Dropbox or whatever you chose to download them. You'll find them here. So When I double tap on it or I open it, it will import directly to procreate. When you go into a file and you go to your brushes, you might find them here at the top. This time it imported here, but sometimes it's at the bottom of your stock. So make sure you check there if you don't find it at the top here. Also, if you import just one brush and not a whole set, it will usually import here to this folder called imported. That is how you install the brushes. Included with this class is the mini watercolor brush set, which has these four brushes and the SM watercolor stamps, which has the stamp brushes. Now I know how to install brushes, and I'm going to show you how to install the color palettes. For example, here, I have my swatches, and if I double tap on them, they will import to procreate also automatically. When you go here, they will be either the first palette up here or they'll be the last one here. Usually they're the last one. If you want to work with this palette, you just stop here and set as default, so that when you drag your palette out like this, that's the palette that you will see. If you haven't worked with a color picker before, in procreate, you have different options to pick colors. Here you can just choose whatever color and here you'll see what you're choosing. And here you slide it to change this This is a similar way, but the slider is here and then you move it around here. This one has different types of color theory things. Complementary, it shows you the complementary colors and you just drag them around, and then the one you touch is the one that's going to be chosen. You can do split complementary, analogous antratic. I never use this, but if you like color theory, you might like it. Then there's here, which is super useful if you know the hex code, for example, if a client gives you the hex code, or if for example, you're doing something for spoon flower and you need a specific hex code, then you input it here. But if the palette is out here, it has some limitations to what you can do. What you have to do if you want to input that hex code is closed here. And then when you open it here, don't drag it out, and that way, you'll be able to type in the hex code. Enter and see, that's your new color here. Same with the palette. When it's docked here and not outside, you can create new color palette, and it will be up here, your new color palette. What you can do is go to the classic mode, for example, and start choosing colors and just stop here to add them to your palette. If you want to delete that, just leave it press and delete this watch, or it replaces it for the current color. You see here that there's two colors. You can also set these colors like this one is setting this color, but if I touch here, I can change this color, and this is called the secondary color. What that does is that if you're painting, for example, I'm painting something green, let's choose this brush. If I'm painting something with this green, and I want to go back to that secondary color, I can just press here and it will change to that previous color. Just leave it pressed. Leave it pressed. This is great if you're alternating between two colors constantly. It'll save a lot of time. Now that you have your color palette, I'm going to go back to my botanical soft and set it as default because that's the one that I'm going to be using for the class. I'm going to drag it out here. It's easier to choose colors this way than to go in here and choose a color and then go out. I prefer to have it always here. Now you know how to install your brushes and your watercolor palettes and how to use the palettes. Let's go to the next lesson and start with the watercolor basics. Oh. 4. Digital Watercolors Basics: In this lesson, you're going to get comfortable with the brushes and I'll teach you how to add a paper texture and all the little basics so that you can feel comfortable working with these new tools, and then we can start creating some florals. In the gallery, let's go and create a new document. You press here, and here I have some preset sizes. So I have created. So come already with procreate, and you can organize this, you can delete presets by swiping to the left or you can edit them, or if you don't have the size here for what you want to create, you just press here and you will create a new preset for your canvasses. You can call this one like vertical or whatever you want. Here you establish the size. Let's say we want an 11 by 15 ", I always work at 300 DPI, so I can print my work later and it's a good resolution. Here we'll tell you how many layers you have available to work on Procreate. This will change depending on your iPads capacity. Here in the color profile, I always work with this RGB color profile because the CMYK colors in Procreate are always more muted. If a client ever wants my work transferred from RGB to CMYK, I do that in photoshop, but usually clients take RGB files and there's no problem with it. Also some print on demand sites require RGB files, this is great. Just make sure that if you're using very neon pinks and yellows and greens, when you're going to transfer that to CMYK, it's going to be a bit more muted, have that in mind. I don't touch anything else here and I click Create. Now I have created a new document, and the next time, if I go to the gallery and I want to create a new document, that preset will be saved here. Here, if you tap on the name, you can rename it. Let's say basics. Now you can go into that document and we're going to start with the watercolor paper texture. There's several ways of doing this. You can import a picture of a watercolor paper, or you can add different layers for the watercolor paper and make it more complex. Sometimes if you've bought watercolor brush sets, they come with canvases and sometimes they have five, six layers, and they look amazing, they do give different types of depth. To the illustrations, but I like to keep it very simple and just work with one layer. I add that by using watercolor paper texture brush. The cool part about using a brush to the texture is that once you have that brush, you can duplicate it And then when you go into the Brush studio, if you go here to grain, you'll see that this is the texture that it adds to the paper. If you go to edit Import, there's a source library by Procreate, and it has a bunch of textures here that you can use as papers. So there's this paper macros really good, sketch paper, There's also this one munch and recycle. Just experiment by using these types of paper two and tap twice so that this gets inverted and then pressed on. Here you have it. This creates a totally different texture that you can use in your paintings. Just press done, and now you have a different type of paper texture to add to your art. So here, in the mini water color set, this is the first brush add paper texture, and it says set layer to linear burn. Remember to always do that. With that brush, I'm going to go to the color picker, and I always use a gray that's around here, and I am going to make my canvas very small because I want to paint it all without lifting my pencil. So you cannot see what's happening here. It's very light, but I'm covering my whole canvas. There's some watercolor texture now, but I wanted to be a bit more obvious. What I'm going to do is duplicate that layer. See that we can see the watercolor paper texture much more. Now I'm going to pinch those two layers to merge them together. I'm going to set it to linear burn. This is a blending mode and it changes the way this layer is going to interact with the bottom layers. With linear burn, it's going to make it transparent and the grain is going to ingrain itself in the layers I paint underneath. If you've never worked with procreate before and you don't understand what layers are. It's like sheets of tracing paper. Every layer you create, it's as if you're layering sheets of tracing paper. This is really good because if you want to change something underneath, you don't have to affect every other layer. You can just take that piece of paper out and fix it or erase it or whatever and then put it back in and the other layers are left intact. So you're going to see how this works as we progress in the class, but that's kind of a basic explanation of what a layer is. So you see that I press plus here to create a new layer. I'm going to drag this layer underneath, and this is where we're going to draw. This layer, I don't touch anymore. If you choose a gray that's too dark and you see that your paper looks muddy or too grayish, I have to sum in a lot here for you guys to see it on camera. Make sure you're standing on the paper layer and go here to adjustments, use saturation brightness, and here in the brightness, just drag it a bit to the right so you can still see the texture, but it's a lot brighter. So I think mine is good there. It's at 54% and I'm just going to touch here to release it, and that is my paper texture. If you want to make sure that you're not painting on it by mistake, just go to your layers, swipe to the left, and lock that layer. That way you won't be able to paint on it by mistake. Let's go to this layer and start painting. Now we're going to choose our colors. If you install your color palette, it's down here. If you haven't set it as default, do so now so that when you drag it out, this is the one we see you can totally work with a different color palette. This is just what I'm going to be working on today. Let's go to a brushes, and I don't like working with a ton of brushes at the same time because then I'm more worried about choosing the perfect brush and not about just painting. I want this to be fun. It's the same approach I use with my watercolor illustrations. I basically just paint with two brushes like a very thin one and a bigger one because I can't be bothered to start changing 1,000 brushes. So this is a very simple way to approach watercolor painting in procreate. I feel that once you have this down and you have the technique down, you can start experimenting with other brushes and start adding to the mix. But for beginners, and even for me, I still do this, I like a very basic set. So this is why this set only includes these brushes. And these two do basically the same thing. Just one has rough edges and the other one has smooth edges. So I'm going to show you. Let's choose this purple, for example. Here I'm pressing very softly and here I'm pressing hard. Then I can go and press softly again and blur those edges. I'm pressing really hard, really soft. It changes the size and the amount of paint that you're laying down on the paper. This one is the ultimate feel rough and that's why it has those rough edges. Now the ultimate feel smooth, I'm going to make it bigger. It's the same. Here I'm pressing normal. Here I'm pressing harder and here I'm pressing really soft. Okay. This one you see has smoother edges than this one. That's basically the only difference. I'm going to show you what happens if I turn off the watercolor layer because some people don't like working with overlay layers. I have some texture ingrained in the brushes. I created these brushes a long time ago and I still love them and I still use them for my commercial projects because of this. If I don't want to have this overlay layer, this will still have some watercolor texture. This is your choice if you want to use the overlay layer or not. So let's add another color here to see how they mix. I'm going to add this pink, for example. Sometimes you tap your color and it doesn't actually change. So sometimes you have to tap it again for it to change. So let's add some pink. I'm pressing softly here. You'll see that these are very transparent brushes and it starts overlaying the colors. If you add another layer, it starts making that color even darker. Let's go back to the purple. It starts making everything darker as if you were painting with the real water colors. Works exactly the same for this one. You can overlay and make areas darker. You can change the size and make it really, or you can change the size and then use it to add details. So they both can be used in the same way. And if you press softly, it goes lighter and then if you press hard, it goes bigger and darker. This is why I love these brushes because you can use them for details too. You can follow along in this class with any brush you have, like if you have purchased another brush, that's great. The technique is going to be exactly the same. Now let's see what that other brush is for. So let's say I have this here and here. Then I added a bit of pink around here. And then I want a darker purple in some areas, and I was like adding textures. I can press very, very lightly to kind of blend that into there, so it's not like very obvious. This one's blended and this one's not. But sometimes you lift your pencil and you're like, and then you have those lines. That's what the water blend brush is for. So I just blends the colors, and you have to touch softly. If you press hard, it goes very big. That's also an effect that you might like. It blooms the colors a lot. But if you press softly, it's just going to merge some colors into the others. It's going to blend it. And I don't like to blend it too much like this because then you've lost the watercolor effect. So just blend it enough that the color is kind of blend and sometimes leave some hard edges like here because watercolor does do that. So that will make it look a bit more realistic. Okay. This is the basics of working with watercolor brushes and I've made it the most simple way possible for you to not get overwhelmed with this technique. Now we're going to start practicing on creating some foliage. So let's go to the next lesson. No. 5. Painting Leaves and Greenery: In this lesson, we're going to start creating some greenery. If you haven't imported your files yet your Procreate files, just go to your files and you'll find them here, for example, greenery in Procreate, and you can just double tap on it or click open and it will automatically import into procreate. Here you see it. I have created a stack group here, I have everything organized per project. If you want to do that, just create a new file and have a square, then you drop in any color. You add a layer, and then with a brush, probably like sketching brush, let's say, peppermint. Choose a different color and write the name of your stack. You can center it, and then just exit and go to the gallery. Now you can drag this into here, and it will create a stack. Now when you create new documents, you can put them inside here, and that way, your art will be very organized. Let's say you already have a stack created, and you have another document that you want to put into that stack. If you drag your document into the stack, it won't work. You have to drag the stack into the document. It's weird, but that's how it goes. This way, I keep everything very organized. Let's go back here and I already have my greenery here, so I'm going to open it. I have created some basic shapes to guide you. This is how I usually work. I create a sketch like fast sketch on one layer, and that way, the sketch guides me when I'm painting. You can totally follow along without a sketch or create your own sketches, that is perfect too. So I'm going to delete this title, and I'm going to use the watercolor paper texture here. But I don't want to create it again. So I'm going to go back to the gallery and go to the basic file that we just created, and I'm going to go to layers and drag this layer out with my other hand, touch gallery, touch the document, I want to paste it in, open the layers and drop it in here, you'll see that it pasted with the normal blending mode. I have to tap on it and make it linear burn. And because my document was horizontal, this one pasted vertical, so I'm just going to touch there and I'm going to tap here and press 90. That way, it's rotated to a 90 degree angle and I'm just going to drag it out. It doesn't matter if it overlaps a bit. There I have it. So there's my paper texture. Sometimes I like to keep my layers very organized. So if I go to the layers panel and I tap here, I can rename this paper. And I'm going to lock it. Now I have my sketch here. But if you were starting on your own to create some sketches, what I would do is add a new layer. I'm going to drag it underneath. I love sketching with the procreate brushes. I love this peppermint or the six B pencil. The narner pencil is great too. Let's sketch with the six pencil, for example. Let's drag our palette out and choose this color. You would just create your sketch of your leaves. I'm doing this very loosely. You can take your time, and then you would have a sketch layer. I'm going to delete this because I already have a sketch layer. If you're working with these sketches or with your own sketches, let's go here and adjust the opacity. I want to make this very transparent so I can barely see it. I usually work with it light, maybe like this. But it's a bit easier for you to see on camera. I'm going to turn the opacity up a bit more. I think that's enough. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to drag that underneath the sketch, just leave it pressed and drag it underneath, and I'm going to call that paint. Usually, I like working with a lot of layers in my work. But for these very basic shapes, we're going to work in only one or two layers. Let's grab the brushes. I love the ultimate feel rough. I love those rough edges, so I'm going to use that one. If you like more smooth edges, then choose this one. So here, I am going to create very simple shapes at just the brush size. And don't lift your pencil until you're done with a shape. Because if you lift it there and then you go and do this, you'll have that long line there, and then you're going to have to go to the water blend, make it smaller and kind blend that out. And then it's more work for you. For these very simple shapes, I just like doing them without lifting the pencil. Let's go back to the ultimate feel rough and I'm going to delete that leaf. And I'm going to continue doing this. This is just for you to try your hand at it and start getting used to the brush. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. Just play around with it, start getting used to the pressure. Press softly and then press. Don't let the sketch contrive your drawing. I feel like if you're trying to follow the sketch too closely, then your drawing looks like a bit force. Sometimes I like leaving these small gaps because that happens in watercolors too, like in traditional watercolors. Let's turn the sketch off so you can see how this looks. And here, if you want to blend that out, just go to the water blend, and I'm going to make it very small. I'm just going to blend that a bit. Great. You have your first leave. Let's turn on the sketch again and keep doing this. I'm going to use the ultimate feel smooth here for those of you that like really smooth lines. I don't know why I was working with that palette, but I'm going to go back to my botanical soft because that one is too muted. So I'm going to set that one as a default and drag it out here. And continue working with this one. So let's choose this color, for example. This is a big size brush. You can reduce the size if you want a bit more control. I'm going to make the line here. And if you want to try adding different colors to it, like darker areas, you can do so too. Or even different shades of color in some areas. I'm pressing very softly. You can do that too. This is how it looks. You can keep practicing with those. Again, this is just for you to start feeling comfortable with the technique. I'm going to color in this one so you can see what I do if, for example, it has different colors, like the flowers on the leaves. I want to create the leaves in the background and the colors in the foreground. I'm going to create the leaves in this layer, and let's choose this green. I'm just going to create the stems first. And then the little leaves. And now, in another layer, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to call it flowers. And there I'm going to add the flowers. So let's say we want them yellow Okay, so I'm going to turn off this sketch so we can see what's happening here. Right now, I don't like the overlapping areas, so I'm going to use my water blend brush and make it a bit bigger and just blend them out a bit. See that when you overlap, the color gets darker. So when you add the water, it also helps to create some splashes of darker areas. If you want to do more of that, you can go here and choose your color and add a darker color, for example, if I want a bit of orange here. I can go back to the water blend and kind of tap it, so it expands. And I can drag it out more if I want. See, I can drag it out more. Or I can leave it very concentrated. So you can layer as much as you want like that. And then if you want to add another detail, for example, I want a very bright center. I can do this. There we have our flowers. I'm going to show you this one and then you can practice on the other ones if you want. I'm going to the leaves. Now I'm going to add the little berries in the other layer. So what you can do is just choose one color for and add some and then add a second layer. This is the same color. But I'm adding a second layer on and even a third layer on others. And this way they all look different. Or you can just do this and add some red and then choose a different color. And then this one, maybe. And that way, you have some variation and some overlap. Or even some you can add a totally different shade. And then when you turn it off. This is the different types of effects you can create. Okay. I'm sure now you're super familiar with the brushes and how they work, and now I'm going to show you the technique I use for creating more complex artwork. I would use this in one layer where I draw directly and painted in one or two layers for very simple shapes like this one. But if I'm creating a complex flower or something that involves more leaves, more layers, and I want more control, this is the technique that I use. I'm going to create another layer and I'm going to call it base. And here I have two options. I can choose a brush that has texture, for example, the peppermint. See it has some texture. So when I drop some color in, the treshol is very high right now. So I have not lifted my pencil and I'm dragging it to the left and you'll see that the treshol starts reduced and the area that is covered by the pink is reduced. So once it's contained inside my shape, I can stop. And then I can go back in with my pencil and try to fill in this gap. And this is way more time consuming. But it's kind of the only way that you can feel in shapes fast and then keep this kind of more rough outline. Let's do that. But because I like my watercolors being cut out perfectly, and I don't care if they have very smooth lines. I'm going to go to the calligraphy set that comes with procreate, and I'm going to choose a monoline brush so that when I create a shape and I fill it in. I'm done. So this will make your life easier. Here we're going to practice something. Let's practice with a leaf and create any shape of leaf, it doesn't matter and fill it in. And then let's create another one here. Maybe it's one of these leaves that has holes. I just fill it in. I create this in any color that I want because it doesn't really matter. And then I go to the layers. I swipe right with two fingers and that turns on the alpha lock. That means When I paint on this shape, it only paints inside the shapes. So that's what alpha lock does. What we're going to do is choose a very light color. I always choose the first one here and go to the layers, tap on it, and fill layer. I like this color because I can't see it. It's not super obvious, but I can still see what I'm doing. That's why I don't fill it with totally white, and it gives me a base for my water colors. Now, what I can do is go to my brushes and choose the brush that you prefer. I'm going to make it bigger and I can start feeling in the shape. So let's say that we want the greens. So I like starting with a light green and maybe filling it in. I'm adding different pressures from the start, I create some variations in color. And then I'm just going to continue adding very randomly areas that I want darker. You can follow reference image and do it realistically. I cannot and don't like painting realistically. So I just add darker and lighter areas wherever I want. So I'm going with darker greens. And this is why this palette starts with lighter colors, and then it progresses towards darker colors of that same hue. Okay. I'm just adding this randomly and I'm trying to leave some areas where it would be obvious like this. Do the brush stop there. I can also add different tones. Because when I paint in real watercolors, I like doing that. I like touching my palette and getting some blue in there and just creating some variation in the tones, and I think that's what makes watercolors so pretty. Now that I have that, I'm going to go with my water bland and blend some areas. I'm going to make it bigger. Here, I don't like this part. This one. I like these variations. Again, I'm not super picky about this. If you're doing very realistic, you may want to go in very carefully and see where you want to plan the areas. But for me, I think this looks good. Now I'm going to go back to this brush and make it very small and I'm going to add some details. You could add some details in that same layer we're painting on, or you can use clipping mask, which is amazing. If you press plus here, you'll get another layer on top of this leave. If you tap here, you can choose clipping mask. What this does is very similar to the alpha lock, where if you paint your only painting inside the shape, but the difference is that because it's on its own layer, then you can do different things to it like you can hide it or delete it. You can play with the opacity, you can play with the blending modes, You can change the color, you can make it bigger or smaller. So it's really handy to have it separated. I think it gives you more possibilities. Now let's delete this and start creating details. Try different ways of creating details. This will all vary depending on your style. Just experiment, make dark details, light details, try different things if you don't know what your style is yet. Then I love either changing the opacity here or changing the blending modes. Look at that. It's so cool because it just changes colors like a real water color. I love. I don't know. I love light details. So now we're just going to paint this other one in a looser way. So I'm choosing my brush, and let's choose this color, for example, and make the brush really big. I'm pressing softly and then harder here in some areas. Again, I'm going to do that again. And then you can even add a darker color and with a smaller brush, just create some shadows. If you want to make it lighter, just press softly. Maybe make it a bit bigger, so it's easier and press softly. Pressing hard and then pressing soft. Then you can darken some areas here. Just variating the pressure. So there you have it. This is a technique that I use for painting everything in watercolor. In the next lesson, we're going to start painting some flowers. 6. Painting a Pansy: In this lesson one, we're going to paint some floral elements. I'm going to go into the florals file, and this florals file already has the paper and all the parts of the flowers painted so that we're saving time. It will also have the sketch imported. I just don't have it here yet so that you can see how I do that. If you go here into actions, you can add insert a photo because I have this sketch in my photos. And then I drop it in here, and this is another way to add a sketch. And now I have this to guide my drawing. So this has a white background, so I don't see anything in the back. So I'm going to make the white part transparent by tapping here and setting this to multiply. What this does is that it creates a tracing paper effect. The only thing I can see now are the black outlines and not the white background. And I'm going to reduce the opacity so that I can see what's happening in the back and tap here. And now if I turn on these layers, you can see that all the parts have been painted. We're going to use exactly the same technique that I just showed you, and this is how I paint every element. But we're going to use it again and again so you can practice it. Let me take my palette out. And we can start painting this flower. I'm going to make this one purple and yellow. Maybe I'll start with the yellow. The way to reference pictures while you're drawing is using a split screen. If you go up here slowly, you'll see your last use apps here, and I don't see my gallery here. So what I have to do is close this and find my gallery and open it and then close it again. And I can go back to Procreate. So when I drag this up, I'll have my gallery here. If I drag this here, I can drag it to the left or the right, whatever you prefer, and I drop it in there. I can then find my flower and I can move these like this. I reduce the space, and then I consume in here. And paint by using this photo reference. If you want to be super realistic, then you definitely need a photo reference. If you want to paint like me, which is way looser, then you might want to follow it, but you don't have to. In the next lesson, I'll show you a different way to use reference images in your canvas also. If you go to the layers in this file, you'll see that I have already created all the layers here so that you can just start coloring with your watercolor techniques and you don't have to take so long to create your base petals. But what I do is basically let's hide all these layers. In the calligraphy section, I like using the monoline brush. So what I would do here is select petals that are not overlapping, for example, this one and this one. And I fill them in. Because this is a smooth brush, it all gets filled in the same. I think I'm going to add this petal to the same layer too because I want the colors to spread here in the middle. I drop in that color, and then I need to create another layer for this petal in the back, so I'm going to create a layer, drag it underneath. The I would just choose a different color. It doesn't matter right now, and then I create a closed shape so that I can drop color in. That way, I will create all the layers for all the florals. And once I have that, I would go to each layer and swipe with two fingers so that I activate the alpha lock. And then I'm going to choose a very light color and tap here and fill layer, tap here and fill layer. And I would do that with all the layers. That way, I give each layer a light base so that I can start adding water colors as if they were traditional water colors because this is how they work in real life. They go from light to dark, so I want to recreate the same experience. If you see the file I have provided, I'm going to delete these two. It has one layer for the seeds. It's very light here, but you can see it. So it has another layer for petals and another layer for petals are in the back. And then one last layer for these petals here and the stem. If you want, you can create a set of layers per flower, like I did here, and then you go and add other layers for another flower. But I like working this way because then I don't need as many layers. Then if I need to separate the elements, I will show you later how to do that. This is also great. If your iPad doesn't have too much capacity and you can't add too many layers. This is a great way to save layers. The way you choose what to draw on each layer is what I said. Draw things that are not touching each other. For example, in this flower here, I want to draw the seeds in the middle. And then I want to draw some petals. S one touch themselves, but it's okay because I want the paint to merge between these two petals. But I want this petal and this petal to be differentiated from this one in the back. That's why this one is in one layer, and then this ones here are in another layer. So, here, I added this ones, and I still want this one to be differentiated from this ones. So I added this layer. And you'll see this more clearly as we start painting. But that's my thinking behind the way I create these layers. So I like working from the back to the front, and this layer only has this part here, so we're not going to touch it yet. We're going to go to this one. And you'll see that here, if I turn it off and on, you'll see that this petal is there. So I'm going to go to my brushes, and I'm just using my ultimate field rough as usual. I'm going to make my brush big and start using some yellow here. Oh, no, that's the purple petal. I'm going to start with a light purple and I'm just going to slightly start adding color. You see that the borders are white. So I'm going to try to leave the borders unpaintedm if you paint them, it doesn't matter. We can just go back later and add some white. So I'm just adding more and more layers of color. And the reason why I like adding two different types of purple is because it will give it some variation, just a tiny bit, but I think it makes it look more like real water colors. And again, I'm not creating a scientific illustration here, so it doesn't have to be super accurate. I think at a bit darker here. And then go back in with some pink maybe. And you'll see that here it has white in the middle. So if I use this brush to add white, it would actually add it unlike real water colors. So I'm going to reduce the size and add like veins here. I add a bit more white here. And you'll see that it looks very digital. I'm just going to go in with, like, a softer hand and kind of blend it out and add more white here, and then I'll use my water blend to just blend it in a bit. That petal is ready and I want to start painting the front. I'll go to this layer, which has the front petals. I'm going to choose yellow, and I'm going to go get my ultimate feel rough brush. Make it very big and start adding some color here. See, I'm tapping very softly. I don't know how to show this in video, but I'm really softly and then harder here. That's how I create those hard edges, wh I love. And then softly again. And then her And then I lift my pencil and then I do that again in different areas. I think this is enough for the yellow, so now I'm going to start adding these details. So I'm just going to make my pre smaller and grab purple. I want it to be even smaller. I'm not sure that those details are dark enough. So I'm going to go to the layers and create a new layer on top of that and set that as a clipping mask so that I can create the details on this layer, and then I can change the blending mode or the transparency or the color without it being attached and painted in the same layer as the petals. Even if I make a mistake or something, then it won't matter because I'll be able to remove it or fix it really easily. I'm just following the picture slightly, not super super realistic. And then here. And then I'm going to go to the layers and play with the blending mode. I think multiply it looks better because it looks like it actually was painted on top of the yellow paint. So I'm going to go back to the petals layer with my brush, I'm going to make it larger and I'm going to make this area here darker and it has a bit of green there, so I'm going to choose this kind of orange and add it to this part here. And then a tiny bit of green there. Now I want to add white to this part. And this part here. Then here in the borders. If I want to make that super obvious, I can go to the sketching set in Procreate and grab the six B pencil, for example, and just make it really defined. Then I like using the water blend and just blending this edge a bit. Okay. So I'm kind of happy with this. I'm going to show you one last trick to create more variation in colors, but now I'm going to close this reference layer, so I just closed out like that. And then we're back here. I'm going to turn off the sketch so I can see how this is looking without a sketch. And I can see there's no definition in the borders. So I'm going to grab this yellow and grab my brush and a tiny bit of color in some of the borders. I. Maybe here. And I'm going to make it way bigger and just kind of like touch slightly on the border, like tapping. And then you'll create those kind of blooms. Yeah. I like that much better. So another trick is going to the selection, and here you have free hand selected and you just go and select some weird shaped area. Here in feeler, we're going to smooth it out. Now it won't have harsh lines. Then if you go here to adjustments, hue saturation, I'm going to change the hue, so you can see the areas that are selected. This way, you can use this to create variation in colors. Here, making it more pink, or you can keep it at the same hue and just change the saturation. I made it super saturated or even the darkness and the brightness. Even if you change it a bit here, once you release it, there's going to be more variation in the tone. Let's do that here too. In the purple one. I'm going to select some parts here. Feather it, and then go to saturation brightness and make it a bit more saturated and maybe a bit darker. And a touch here to release it. And I think that looks much better. So now that flower is ready, we're going to continue with this one. 7. Painting Simple Florals: In this lesson, we're going to continue painting some florals. Again, we're going to start with the back layers. Let's think about this. I'm creating these elements so that later I can create a composition with them. I'm trying to think about the colors. I don't want the flowers to be too yellow or then all the flowers will be pink, I want a variation of color. If this one is yellow and purple, and this one is going to be shades of red because it's a puppy. Like these shades of red. Then maybe I should create another yellow one, I'll make this one another yellow, and then I'll make this one pink. Then these little ones could be purple. Or I could make this one pink and this one purple and this one red. These sys here could be yellow. Let's stick to the original plan. This is, I didn't cut this part off because I want you to see how my mind works when I'm making decisions. This is when I'm making decisions for colors of my element. Let's start with pink. Again, I'm just pressing harder in some areas and lighter in others. I lifting my pencil to create darker areas here. Then going in with a way darker pink. I see I press harder. I'm trying to smooth out some of the edges. I always like adding a tiny little bit of another color. So I'm going to add a little bit of yellow here. Just very softly. Just so it looks like if you were painting real watercolors and your touched a bit of yellow in the palette. Now I'm going to go to the ones and I'm going to start with a bit of yellow here now that I have it in my brush and then start with the pink and do the same thing. I'm keeping in mind that if the back is dark, I want to keep the borders a bit light so that you can really tell the difference. If I make these the same tone as these, then you won't really be able to see what's happening there. And I'm going to grab this pink now and add some darker shades. And I can make my brush smaller and add some little. On the way you add detail. Again, it's something very personal. This is what I do when I'm painting real water colors also. I'm going to go back to the back petals and do the same. I'm not pressing hard on my brush because then I create very thick lines. I'm barely applying any pressure. And then I think this back layer needs a bit more color. So I'm going to add an even darker shade here to create some shadows between those petals. I'm pressing softly here at the end so I can blend it. Yeah, I think that looks better, and I'm going to do that here too so that this front part has some shadow cast on these petals. I'm going to go back to this layer and add a bit of this dark here too. Yeah. I really like that. Now I'm going to go to the seat and just paint that yellow. I'm just tapping my brush in different areas. And then I'm going to add a bit of orange here. Just to make it darker in the bottom so that it looks like the lights hitting here. And this is in shadows. It can even make it a bit there. Now I can go with a very small brush and just add some details. I think those are too dark. So I'm going to add way lighter details. I'm going to use this orange here. Then you can see it that much. I'm going to turn off the sketch layer so I can actually see what's happening. I like it much better like this? It's more subtle. I'm even going to add some white. Yeah, I think that looks great. So now we have another flower that's ready. Let's make these little small ones. These ones are going to be very fast, and they're all in one layer, so they're here in the petals. Those I said, I wanted to make yellow because this one is going to be purple and this one is going to be red. So Again, see, I'm just varying my pressure randomly and I'm trying to not think about it much because that way, I feel like it's more random. If you're thinking about it too much, then I don't know. It seems a bit contrived and it's not as much fun. A bit of orange in the middle. I like to do it like these because then it's like real watercolors where you don't really know where the watercolor is going to go. Sometimes it's going to create some fun effects there. I really like that. For these ones in the middle, let's try these red and a very small brush. Try some dots like these. No, that doesn't look right. Maybe a solid middle. Maybe a larger solid meddle. Yeah, I think this looks better, so I'm going to do that. Okay. Create a very simple solid center. I am not adding too much detail to these elements because they're probably be too small. I don't want those details to get lost. When you're reducing it, you see that you cannot really see the details much. In this one, you can't because those are really wanted to stand out, but I like it to be like these subtle. If you're using this in a very small area, it's not going to look muddy, it's just going to look like it has almost no detail. For this ones, I'm just going to add very fine lines a little bit here. I Great. Now let's paint this one. This one is going to be purple. Let's go here to the back of the petals and grab the light purple. That is too small. Make the brush big. You can be using any colors you want. I just want you to see how I use light colors and then I start going. Because if you start with very dark colors, then that would take away from the watercolor effect also. I'm going to go dark now. And then we could even add a bit of this bluish here. And we can go to the selection and grab the middle part like this. Fetter it. And go here to hue saturation brightness, and I'm going to make it more saturated and then a bit darker. Great. I'm happy with that. I'm just going to add some details, so I'm going to reduce the size and use that same purple. Now, I'm just going to add some veins in the middle. In real life, I'd be turning my canvas constantly because it's way easier to draw lines in one direction. But I'm not making you easy. I'm just going to continue like this. Okay. If you want, you can add some white like dots. Try different markings on the petals. I'm just making this up, but if you don't know what to do, look at pictures of flowers like the markings are crazy. So you can get inspiration from that. I'm going to add a white outline on the border. Yeah, I think that looks way better. Now I'm going to go to the next petals and do exactly the same thing. I'm going to start with some of the blue. Just again, I won't show up much, but I want that color change. And then I'm going to go in with darker. And some shadow here for this. Again, use the selection. Better it. Let's go out a bit of saturation and reduce the brightness a bit. Yeah. Then I want to separate this weird petal we have here. I'm going to make my brush smaller and with the dark purple, I'm just going to create a shadow here so that it looks like it's folded. And I'm trying to separate it from the back petal, so I make it way darker and I'm going to go in with the white and actually give it a little white outline. And use my water bland brush in a very small size to blend this border out and this one here because I don't want it coming into this petal. I actually want that part of the petal to be So I'm going to add some darker areas. So middle lines. So detail. And then some markings also. And then I want to add some white to some of the petals here. This will separate them from the ones in the back, and it also looks like they're folded in a bit, which I think is really cool. Now we only need to paint the middle part. Go to the seeds layer. I'm going to make this just yellow tiny bit of orange here. Then let's try little white dots again. Yeah. I think that looks good. Now we're done with this flower too, and we're going to go to the biggest one. Oh. 8. Painting a Poppy: In this lesson, we're going to paint a puppy. This one actually has three layers, so we're going to start by painting this one and this one has a stem and some petal. I'm going to start with the stem and just paint this green a little bit of this green. And then make it darker here. I don't want to touch that petal, so just make it darker here. Now the petal. I want to make my brush really big. And I'm going to add a lot of red here. I'm not going to add details until I'm done painting all the petals. I'm going to go and see this one has a petal here too, so I'm going to go back to this color and paint that one. Now I'm going to go to this layer. Then I'm going to start with a yellow base in some areas just to create that variation of color and then go back to the pinkish red here like salmon. I. Then some more red, especially here in the middle. Sam two red there, so you can see that this is a different petal than this one. I'm going to do that and just make it red here and leave it light there. Great. Now the last layer, I'm going to add a bit of yellow two. And then add this Now I'm going to add red and I want to keep this side light, but this one darker. That's to a red. Because this flower has such huge areas, you might want to go to this layer, for example, that has this big petal here, and you can create a clipping mask and use the watercolor stamps and maybe use this one and stamp it there. Now we can move it so it covers the whole. I'm going to go and play with the blending modes, and I think this one is really nice because it brings out some of the yellow and deepen some of the red and look at this texture here, that is really pretty watercolor texture. But I think it's too bright, so I'm just going to reduce the opacity and just make it subtle enough that you can see it, but it's not super super bright. I think I don't need to do it to the other petals, but you can. If you want to just duplicate this layer and then drag it underneath here, tap it so that you can make it a clipping mask also and then you can move it around. See here. Can you even expand it so that it covers both petals there. Then I won't add it to the front ones because I think that would be too much. I'm just going to go back into each layer and deepen some shadows to differentiate what's happening here. In this back one. If in your color palette, you don't have a very dark color of the one you want to use. You can always go here, if you go down, you're using the same shade of color. Now let's go back to our brush. That way, I can use a darker shade of that color. I'm just adding shadows here. I don't really like these petals. You can also select areas of your painting, if you drag down with three fingers and you cut them, then they're gone. I think that looks so much better. Don't be afraid to change things afterwards. Now I'm going to go to this layer and add some shadows here. Pressing hard in some areas to create lines and then softer here to blend it. And if you don't like one of the borders, just go to your water brush and modify the size and just blend that in. And then go here. We'll use it to separate these two petals. Maybe here. Same here. Now I blend this side. Then I can blend a bit here. Now I want to start adding lines. Especially puppies have a lot of lines in their petals. I'm just going to make a small brush and with the same dark color, I'm just going to add lines. I'm trying to push really softly, so I'm not creating defined lines. And if you're not sure about this part, you can do it in a different layer like we did with this one. Just so that if you mess up, you can erase it or you can recolor it or use blending modes. I'm going to rotate my canvas here because my lines are so ugly when I don't. I'm starting some lines from the middle and then some lines from the top. I can make a harsh line here if I want to divide these petals. And then one here. I think that looks better. Now I'm going to go back to the other layers and create the lines. I'm going to speed this part up because it's just adding lines. C see that I'm curving my lines. I'm trying to follow the shape of the petals. And finally, the last layer. I'm going to deepen the shadow here too. And actually go back to this one and deepen the shadow here too. You can also add. You can also add darker marks. Here, we add it lighter. Here, I'm going to add darker. This is just a style I like. I always go back and forth between all the layers, and I start by creating a very simple layer, and then I start adding more and more details and more shading. Don't be worried about jumping back and forth. Great. I'm now missing the middle part, so I'm going to go to the seats layer, and here I want a very dark green. I'm going to start with this green. I'm going to add more grain here. If I turn my sketch on again and I make it less opaque, I'll see the shape of it, so it's like a pot in the middle and then it has this black little hairs. I really don't know how you call those in English. I'm going to reduce the opacity a lot. Actually, I'm going to turn it off and keep working in my seats. Just making these darker here and then adding a tiny bit of lime green. Just to make it a bit lively. And then with a very small brush and that same light color, I'm going to create some indentations here. Just to start giving it that rounded shape. Then I'm going to go in with a darker green and start defining the shape. It was coming like this. And if you so in, you'll see how ugly that looks. But when we use the water bland brush. Then it will look much. And now, I'm just going to create a layer on top. And I'm going to use in sketching the six B pencil. And with black. I'm just going to create some seeds. Just go randomly around. Sometimes I just press, sometimes I drag my pencil this way, it creates different sizes of seeds. Then I don't like this part here, so I'm going to go and erase this. And just go back in and add some other seeds. Now I'm going to make my pencil and I'm just going to create lines like this. I don't worry if you're going in there, we're going to move this layer later. It looks really good. So I'm going to bring it underneath the seat. And it automatically became a clipping mask for these petals. So if that happens, just touch here and deactivate clipping mask. Now, this green thing seems like it's floating there. And I don't like that. So I'm going to have to give it more shadow here. So go back to my watercolor brush and go into the sat part. Give it away darker shadows. I'm going to go to these petals. I'm going to grab this red here. If I leave it pressed, I can grab colors from my canvas. So that's the color I have now, and now I'm going to create a deep shadow here. I might even want to go deeper, so go back here and bring it down even more and add a bit more of a shadow here, and then go back to the petal and add a deeper shadow in that part. Now it looks less like it's floating and more like it belongs. I want to try making this a bit bigger. I think that looks way way better. Just going back to the seeds. I'm going to add a tiny bit of yellow here. I really don't like that. Sometimes there's things that don't work when you've tried them out and you see they don't work, don't be scared to go back and change things. I really don't like that seed. I'm going to go to the seed layer and grab my eraser and I'm going to erase that whole thing in the middle. I'm just going to create another layer so that I can experiment here. And with my watercolor brush, I'm going to grab that black, and I'm going to see what happens if I just add a black center in the middle. I just want to make it even bigger here. And I can add a bit of light to it here. I can also go to the layers and go here to these little hairs and make them alpha locked. And I can add a bit of these color so that there's a variation in shade in them. And I'm going to try to make them bigger. I like this so much better, never be scared to waste time and experiment other things. It's never a waste of time. Just keep tweaking things until you find something that makes you happy. I'm going to do one final thing and I'm just going to bring this down a bit, make it a bit bigger and bring it down a bit. Yeah. I'm super happy with these flowers, and in the next lesson, we're going to create a really complex floral. 9. Painting Complex Florals: That was. In this lesson, we're going to paint some more leaves and one of our most complex florals. I'm going to go to the florals file and open it, you will see that this is a sketch, and it's an imported JP because I created this as coloring sheets for you. But I have already imported it into the file, so it's ready for you to go. If you have something like this that you have imported as a photo, just go here and set it to multiply so that the white becomes transparent and you can only see the black ink, and then you can reduce the opacity. And I have my paper texture here also. So I'm going to just set that to linear burn and I'm going to lock it. And I have gone ahead and already created all the shapes, like the solid base so that we can go right into the coloring part. But if you were doing this on your own, you would just create every shape. And for example, for the flower, this is a very complex flower. I created a bunch of layers. The way these layers work is I create layers that are not touching each other. See here back petals and I start from the back to the front. Petals, back petals and it starts going to the front the front, the front, and then the little detail in the middle. Okay. So let's start by painting the flower. I'm going to drag the palette out. I have my ultimate field rough selected and I'm going to go to my layers and start painting the back layers. So I think I'm going to make it shades of pink and yellowish. I want my brush to be very big. I'm going to be painting in a very loose style. This is not realistic. If you want to paint realistic and you have a reference image, you can go here and in Canvas, turn on the reference, and here you can choose an image. I'm going to import an image. Then you can have your reference image here. You can so that way you can start painting here. If you want to do something way more realistic, this would be great for you, supers in, and then you can start painting petal by petal. Again, I'm not a realistic painter, so I'm just going to start painting loosely. What I'm trying to do is that the petals inside the inside part of the petals will be darker and then the outside will be lighter here. The insides are darker and then they go to very light almost white on the outside. I'm pressing very softly when I'm going outside and lifting my pencil and adding more paint to the inside. I'm not sure which petals are on these layers, so I go around painting and see where it paints. The press in very softly and darker. And then softly, so it blends. Then sometimes I like to just add darker splashes like that that look very, very defined. I can go to my layer and see that there's only four petals there. So now I can go to the next layer. I want to add some yellow to these petals to some of them. So I'm going to add some yellow. Just because I feel that flowers are not always exactly the same shade. They have varying shades. There's this petal here. Let's see. I have one more petal on top and then two here. You could hide all the layers and then just show the ones that are on this layer. But I don't want that because I want to see how these petals that I'm painting are interacting with the rest of the flower. Because here, for example, I need to see these other petals to see how much paint I need to add to this petal. If I had this he then, then I wouldn't know if this was going to show up or not when these other layers were turned on. And then I go to this layer. You can also turn it off and turn it on and see which petals they are. Don't overtake this. Just try to have fun. And if it doesn't work out, you just start again. I'm also trying to add contrast between other petals that I have painted already, so see this one is very light here. So I'm trying to add darker pinks here, so it really shows up. Let's go here and see where this is. S here, these little areas details are going to be yellow. So I want this to be very pink so that they have a lot of contrast against the yellow. And I'm going to add a tiny bit of yellow too. And then here. Same here. I want to make this really dark. Now we're painting more petals here, so I want to add more yellow. And then because this one is touching this one. I want it to be lighter so I don't add so much pink. Same here. I don't want it to be exactly the same pink as this, so you can see the difference. I'm just going to make this one very dark here at the base. Those are all painted. Let's go to this ones. I'm keeping this one pale because it's against this pink. And don't worry, for example, about this fold here because this is this fold here. I'm just adding some colors and then we'll come in and add more details later. I want to add some yellow there. Sometimes I just press so that it creates a bloom of color. And then the ones. I want to leave these edges here, so I'm pressing really softly. And again, I want to so yellow. The layers done, this one. Again, leave the borders very white and then darker here. I think it was this one. And then Yeah. If I was painting like a realistic botanical painting, then this process would have to be way longer and you'd have to be very careful that you're actually following the reference picture. And then this one is this big one. Then we have all these little ones that are kind of faults, see? Those I want to keep very light. I'm just basically adding a tiny bit of pink at some point in some places, but not much. Where are they? Here. Okay. And finally, the middle part. Those are going to be yellow. So I'm going to start with a light yellow and fill them all in, and I'm pressing harder in some areas. And then I'm going to reduce the size of the brush and start adding a darker yellow in some areas. I'm pressing hard and then softening the borders. And then I can even go in with like a light orange and a smaller brush and start creating some differentiation between them. And at this point, I like turning off my sketch so I can actually see how it's going to look. So I'm going to turn off my sketch and continue filling this in. Maybe I want to have more yellow, so it's like a deeper yellow in some areas. So I'm just lifting my pencil up a lot and placing it down again and again, so it creates a deeper yellow. I think that's looking good. But if you look here, there's green inside. So that pedal there. That's the middle. It's this one. This one. I want to go into there and just start adding some green. And now I think that looks better. What I'm going to do now is now that everything is colored, start adding some even deeper shadows here. I want a bigger brush so I can soften it better. I don't want to make this super dark either because the nice thing about water colors is that they're soft. So if you add too much color, then it would be too concentrated and it won't look that much as real water colors. I just want to do this in some areas, especially in the back petals here and maybe here. So, it's this petal. These inside parts of the flower, I want them to be Again, not all of them. Now I'm going to jump to here. Because this is the middle. I do want this to be darker. Maybe some of these petals. I want this one, so there it is. Okay. Did I hide some? Okay. There they are. Okay. I like that. You can also add lighter details. So for example, in these petals here, you can grab your light, very light brush and add some details like this, like opposite as to what I did before. Or you can go to your layers and on top of this one, but under the yellow details. You can create a new layer and set that to add, for example, and add some lighter details. But here, you have to be careful that this doesn't happen because it's not a clipping mask on this petal. You can just erase those parts you made a mistake on, and now you can add details to all the petals. At the end, if you think that's too much, you can come here and reduce the opacity. Or you can try different blending modes. And those ones are a much subtle effect. So I like that, and I'm going to do that for every petal. Just because I think that gives it way more definition. When I work in traditional watercolors, I also do it in this style. I also add these kind of lines. So if you work in traditional watercolors, also, try to bring that into your digital style. Here you can also use this to add some more definition to certain areas. If I want this to be lighter, I'm going to lighten certain areas. Then you could add another layer. In that one, you can add darker details. For example, here in this fold. I want to make this darker. And I want to make this petal like this so you can see that the petal is folded. I want to make this. I want to create some definitions in these petals. Yeah, something like that. The only thing is I'm not happy with this green here, so I'm going to go to that layer and I'm going to make my brush bigger and add green maybe. Because it looks too flat right now, it's too solid green. I. So I think this looks better and I'm happy with how it is. So now we're just going to go and paint some leaves. So while I put a lot of detail in my flowers, I don't like putting so much detail in the leaves because I want them to be the hero. So I'm going to close this reference now and I'm going to start painting some leaves. I'm going to go to this layer. And I'm going to make my brush very big. And I think these leaves need to match with this grain here, so I'm going to start with this grain. And I'm just going to go really fast on the. I want to give them an initial coverage. And I'm pressing hard in some areas. Just so that when I'm creating the background, I'm already establishing this variation of color. And I'm going to start adding more and more layers. And then go even darker with this screen, for example, and add some darker areas. I'm going to add a bit of blue again, just to create that variation of color. If you want to create more of a watercolor texture effect, you can use the watercolor stamps. The way you use this is that we're going to use them as stamps. We're going to stamp them on top of our image so that this texture just ingrains on the image itself, and it looks like watercolor textures. Let's try this one, for example, and go to the layers and create a layer on top of the leaves and set that to clipping mask. We're going to do this in an extra layer so that then you can move it around and modify it. Let's choose a darker green. I'm going to stamp this one here, and I just pressed once and see, it's a very big size. You can see it here. If this is not a clipping mask, you can see the stamp here. Now if you set it as a clipping mask, you can move it around. We don't want this line here. We can move it like this, maybe Or you can also use a water brush this water blending brush, and you can blend these areas here if you don't like how they look. So that gives a very cool water color effect. And the cool thing about having it in a different layer is that now you can reduce the opacity of it or you can change the blending mode. See it that way more intense. There's so many options with the blending modes. I'm just going to leave it at multiply and maybe reduce a bed so that I can see the colors that were underneath, without it and with it. Then you can use a different stamp here if you want. Maybe this one. I would create another layer, set it to clipping mask and tap one here so that I can move this one around. You can also make it bigger. I like that one, but it cuts up here. I'm going to use a water brush to blend it. And that looks more natural. Then I'm going to set that to multiply two. That one, I actually like it to be really dark. Maybe I'm even going to duplicate it. I'm going to move it up here. Rotated there. You can do this on the flowers too, but I prefer a very subtle effect on my flowers, so I'm going to leave it as this. Now you can add details to these leaves if that's your style, my style is very detailed. I'm going to show you how I add details to it. But you can leave them like this. I'm just going to create another layer. Set that to clipping mask. I'm going to grab this brush and make it very small and with a darker grain. I'm just going to add some veins. And if at any point, you see that you need to darken some areas, then just go ahead and go back to this layer and add more shadows or whatever you want to add more color. I'm going to make my brush really big and I really want these areas at the bottom to be. So I'm going to add a bit more color here. I'm thinking later when I'm going to create my composition. If I'm going to put the flower here, I don't want this to be super light, so it doesn't create any contrast with the flowers that I'm going to put on top. That's why I'm going way darker on the leaves and leaving the flowers soft and subtle. I also like darkening some of the tips here. I like that. Now I'm going to do this really fast and add some detail to all these leaves. Go back to my super small brush and go back to my detail layer. And if I want to change the blending mode for the details, I just go here and try other type of blending modes. I'm liking the color burn here because see how it's shifting depending on the color underneath. So I think I'm going to leave it as is. And now we're done with this lesson and in the next lesson, we're going to create another type of floral that mixes flowers and leaves in the same illustration. 10. Painting Multiple Flowers and Buds: In this lesson, we're going to paint one last floral that mixes greenery and flowers in the same illustration. Let's go to Florals two and I have everything ready for you to start painting right away. If you want to use a reference image for this, you can pull up the image included in the class. Just choose the best method for you to use a reference. I like using this one best. I'm going to make this flower very pink and yellow just like this one, but I'm also going to add some shades of red. So that red poppy that we painted before. That's the only red thing we have for now. So we're going to have to add some red in some other areas, so that doesn't stand out like it doesn't belong. So never use one color in one place of your illustration and that's it because then it looks weird. Just use that color in other places. That way, everything will tie up together very nicely. I'm going to drag out my colors. I'm going to go to layers, and I'm going to start painting from the back to the front again. This one is those little tree things up here. I'm just going to swim in there so you can see it and grab a green paint that I'm going to add a bit of blue here just because we've been painting a lot of green leaves and I want to incorporate a bit of this blue too. Maybe add some dark here. Then we're going to continue onto the next layer and do exactly the same thing. Maybe a bit of this green. And I'm going really fast because I'm not paying a lot of attention to this. This is not a part that we need to be very detailed. The center point of attention will be the flowers. Let's go to this layer. Is there any bit of dark here? Now, let's go here. This one has these ones and the bottom stem. A bit of blue. And dark. Let's go to the stem. Correct. It has some parts here too. And now we can go to the next layer. And this is where the petals start. These are the back petals, and what I'm going to do is just paint them pink. I'm just going to create a soft base of pink. Now that I see where they are, I can add darker pinks. These are the back petals, so I want them to be than the front petals. I'm going to probably add some of that red now here in the tips, maybe a little bit in the middle. Great. Now I can go to the next layer. Then the next layer is the green things here, so I'm going to go back to green. Don't spend too much time on that just very simply a bit darker here. Next layer. I'm going to start with light pink so this is the other petals. Basically, these petals. I just realized I forgot this petal in the back, so I'm going to go back there and painted. Let's go back here. I'm going to add a tiny bit of red. And I'm going to go to the next layer, and that's the top of the petals. So that'll be this part. I'm noticing that this petal was left unpainted, so I wonder what layer it's in. Oh, it's in another layer. Let's add a bit of yellow to the ones. And then work on the darker areas for those maybe with this pink. Maybe here. See they're kind of darker in the outside. Not that I'm following the reference a lot, but Great, maybe at a tiny bit of red to these petals also, so it's not just in one. And then I think I'm going to go a bit on this one. And make some shadows with pink. Now you can really see the difference between the petals. Finally, I'm going to go to this one and just painted a light pink. Now we're going to start adding the yellow. I'm going to go to a bright yellow and make my brush much smaller and go to this petal. That one would be this layer, layer seven. I'm just going to add some yellow in the border. Maybe make my brush a bit bigger. I'm going to blend it out a bit. So it's a very intense yellow, so I'm going in with many layers. I think that was the only one that was on this layer. So now I need to find that layer. So I think it's this one. I'm going to add some yellow for the other flowers. Not that one. And then this one is here on its own. I think that looks good. So now, I'm just going to add some little lines to everything so that it matches the style that I was using before. So make my brush very small and with a dark pink, maybe. Let's try this one. I'm going to create this line in the middle here. I'm just going to add a little bit of lines to the petals. And now we go to the next layer. Next layer of petals. I think that's enough for details. I'm not going to add more details to anything else. I think we're done with this flower and in the next lesson, we're going to create some bugs to go with our flowers. Oh. 11. Painting Insects: In this lesson, we're going to create some little friends for our flowers. Let's go into the complements pile, and here we have two butterflies and a dragonfly I wanted to show you this middle one where the butterflies open because we're going to be using something really cool that Procreate has that it's the symmetry tool. If you go here, you'll see that I already have all the layers for you and we have our sketch. It's already deemed. We're going to start painting our butterfly. You see that there's a line here in the middle of this file. It's because I have the symmetry activated. But I'm going to show you how to do it. If you go here to actions and you go to Canvas, you'll see that the drawing guide is on. If you turn that off, you won't see that line anymore. If we turn it on and we go to edit drawing guide. When you first come into this menu, it's usually a two degrade. If you go here to symmetry, you'll see the line appear. There's different types of symmetry. This is a vertical one where everything we paint on one side gets reflected to the other. Horizontal one is the same thing, but up and down, and then there's quadrants. What I paint here gets repeated in this tree and radial, same thing. But for now, we're going to use a vertical one and you can change the color of that line here. And you can change the opacity and the thickness, if you want to see it more or less. Here you can move it around. So I'm going to place it in the middle of my butterfly and press done. Now I have my line there. I hope you can still see it because I made it very, very thin, but here it is. If we go to the layers, we'll see that the only one that says assisted is the sketch layer. That's because we added the assisted layer only to that. Whatever I paint here, that is not going to affect it. But because I do want that to affect it. I'm going to go to this layer, which has the top wings, and I'm going to tap it and press drawing assist. Now that one is assist set two. I want to add that one to the bottom wings also. That would be this one, and I'm going to tap it and drawing assist. I'm not going to do it to the body because I just want to paint the body normally, and we're going to start painting in this layer. Let's rug the colors out. Let's think about this. For choosing the colors of the butterflies, I want to see my elements this way to see what colors can complement them. And I'm thinking I want to add some dark because I have a lot of dark here and I don't have dark anywhere. I want to add dark black also maybe kind of browns. I definitely want to add some more yellow to these and maybe some sort of orange because here we added a bit of red, but it's not enough really. This one is still standing out. I want to make sure I add a bright red and some yellow and some black to my complements. So I'm going here And again, I have to take up my colors and make sure I have my brush selected and make it very big. Let's start with some yellow. S, everything I'm painting here is getting repeated here. I love this effect. For butterflies, I love creating splashes of color like this. I think it gives really nice texture to the leaves. I'm going to add a white border and I'm pressing harder in some areas and softer in others. And I'm making some areas really, really dark. Now I'm going to add a bit of red. I pressed really hard there, and that's why I created those jagged edges. I'm not even following my sketch. Just creating markings as I go. Maybe I'll go back to the black and create a little circle here. Maybe I can create these texture lines. That's too, so I'm going to make it and I'm going to create these lines. I like how that looks. Some people don't like painting black watercolors. I love painting, even in traditional watercolors, I love painting with black watercolors, choose the colors that suit your art the best. Now we're going to the top layer and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to start with the darker yellow, make my brush very big and just start adding some color here. I want to leave some areas that are kind of white like that. I want to make this part really dark, so it differentiates itself from the bottom wing. I can maybe even go back to the bottom wing and then add some red here. I think that looks nice. Let's go back here and add some red only to the top. And I'm going to go in with the black maybe create a border also. And then we can just create some and reduce the size and then create some not so small, and then create some of these lines here too, some details. Great. Now, if you want, you can create a top layer and set that to a clipping mask and then go in with a yellow, for example. Let's make this bigger and create some additional markings. So that this is not so plain, see, because the clipping mask is not assisted, it only drew it on one side. So you need to make sure that you always paint on assisted layers if you wanted to paint on both sides. So I'm going to turn the drawing assist on that layer and make some markings here. That doesn't look that pretty, but if we go to the blending mode and we try different blending modes out, I think that one looks really, really nice, gives kind of a bright pop of color. Now because I don't want these layers to be assisted anymore because I'm going to be painting these other elements here. I'm just going to tap on each one and turn off the drawing assist. And I can continue painting everything normally as we have done until now. I'm going to go to this layer and paint the body. The body is probably going to be black also not super dark. And I don't have antennas for it. I can create a new layer and make this very small and the antenna. Great. There's our butterfly. Now to get rid of this line, we go to the Canvas and we turn off drawing guide, and then we don't see it anymore. Now we can start painting these guys. Let's start with the back layer and make our brush very big and that should be the back wing. Maybe I'm going to create this one in shades of green And again, add some black. For now, I'm just going to add some lines to this. Maybe some detail like that. And now go back to the other layer and add this wing. Again, I'm going to choose this screen. I'm going to try to leave a white border on the side. Just add some markings like this. And then let's hot some black border. And then lines like that and then dots again. I think we have to go dark here. So that this wing will be differentiated from this one, and I'm going to go back to this one and do exactly the same thing here. Yeah. That way, it's much better. Now I'm going to go to the top layer to create this wing. I'm thinking if I create the same color. I think I'm going to go dark on this one. I'm going to add some And I'm going to add some black here to the two D side. And then just go add some details like the If you don't want to make this up, you can search for reference images for butterflies and you'll find a bunch. I want to create some green detail here. And that doesn't really show up that much. I'm going to create another layer on top and set it to clipping mask, and I'm going to say this to screen and see how this works out. See, that's much better. Yeah. I like that. Now I'm going to go to the body, which is, I think here. Yeah, layer three. And I'm guessing the body is going to have to be black also. I'm just going to keep him very light. And go to this layer where I added the antenna and I'm going to add the legs. And usually they're kind of hay, which is creepy when you think about it. I don't like looking at insects up close. Those pictures of you look up online and have details. No, thank you. They usually don't look as cute as you think. Let's give this one more of a moth antenna. Which that part, I think it is actually really cute. Great. I can give you a happy phase two. You don't have to, it might be cute. Maybe here. Nope. Cute. You can add a little bit of light to the eye, for example. So much better. Now let's do this guy and now that we're there, we can do this light of the eye too. Let's go back to our layers. The back layer will be the back wings. For him, maybe a purple dragon fly. That'd be cute. I'm going to add a bit of black just to melt this here. Great. Just make this size smaller and choose this purple and add the little details. The wings are so detailed when you look at them up close. Again, that's when I don't like looking at the bogs clothes because then you see not just the cute wings but everything else. I'm scared of mo bogs. Okay. Great. I'm going to add a tiny bit of this green here. And that way we can make this one fit in with this one. Now let's go to this wing and add some green before we start and then go back to the purple. I'm going to make this one lighter. And then go to this one, which I will make even lighter. Okay. So now that's looking very convoluted and you can't really tell what's happening when you're seeing it so small. So I'm going to have to go in to the back layers and start differentiating them. So let's go to the back layer. And I'm going to choose an even darker purple. And I'm just going to create some shadows. Here. And here. And then I'm going to go to this one and create this shadow here. And I want it now it's differentiated from this one, but now it's like blending in with this one and you don't know what's happening. So I'm going to go and choose white here, very light color and just add this to the border. And I think that makes it much. I'm going to do the same thing to the top wing. And I just realize I didn't add green here, so I'm going to add some of this one here. I'm going to paint the body, which is in layer tree Let's start with this light black. Then what you can do if you want to make this smoother transition between this and this is you can go to the top wing and turn off the alpha lock. Then you can use the water blend brush to blend it out a bit. Go back and forth. That way, it looks like it's blending into the body, which I think looks so much better. Okay. You can add more detail to this if you want. Let's turn on the alpha lock for this again and choose the brush and then add some dots to this one two if we want. Just to stay consistent with the same style and do to the other ones. Okay. And there we have it. Now, our complements are ready too. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take all these elements and put them together in a composition. And how to export them with a transparent background so that you don't have the paper background going everywhere, on your element. 12. Exporting Icons with Transparent Backgrounds: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to export the individual elements with transparent background. Right now, the watercolor paper is applied to the whole Canvas, not just the individual elements, and I'm going to show you how to export them with the paper applied just to the icons. This is super useful in case you're going to make stickers or you're going to use your elements in a composition like we're going to do later, or if you're going to sell clipart. What I like to do is go outside my stack into my Procreate gallery and then duplicate the whole stack Now this stat, I like to name watercolors plot. And now when I go in here, I'm going to delete this basics because we don't need that. When I go in here, I know that whatever I do here doesn't affect my original icons because I'm going to flatten them and they're each going to be in one layer. So if I want to modify something or change colors or do something, I still have my original icons in there, and I will be affecting them by doing this. I'm going to go into each file, and I'm going to show you something. If I turn the background to a dark color, You'll see that the paper texture is applied to everything, and I only want it to be applied to my icons. So the best way to do this is to merge all the icons into one layer, and then I'm going to delete the sketch because we don't need it anymore. I'm going to swipe to the left to unlock the paper texture, and I'm going to create a clipping mask. That way, the texture is only applied to the icons and not the background. So if I pinch these two, I have deleted the texture from all the background layers. Here you'll see that these elements are very transparent and these ones are not. This is because I drew these ones directly with the watercolor pencils. I didn't create a basic shape first and then colored them in. So what you want to do with these ones if you don't want them to be so transparent is you can duplicate this and merge it, and then they will be way less transparent. If I turn off that background color, you'll see that every element is transparent on the border, like no paper or anything else. What I want to do is go to the selection and make sure free hand is selected and I'm going to select each element, and I'm going to cut and paste and then go back to that base layer and do the same thing for every element. Drag down with three fingers, cut and paste. And I'm going to speed this up because it's exactly the same process every time. Select, cut and paste, go back to the original layer. Select, cut on paste original layer. Okay, so now we have everything on its own layer. You can go into each layer and name each one by double tapping, rename fern. I don't know. You can rename everyone if you want to be super organized. Right now, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to go to the gallery and go into the next file. I'm going to do exactly the same process for all of them. So I'm going to merge all my colored layers, delete the sketch. Unlock the paper, create a clipping mask with the paper and merge, and then I'm going to cut them all out. I'm going to cut each one of these individually. Now we have each element on its own layer. I'm going to turn off the background color just so I know which ones I have done. I'm going to go here and do exactly the same thing. This is going to be super sped up. When you have just one element and you don't have to cut and paste anything, it's just one element. Okay, now we're done creating all our transparent pagrons but how do we export these? If you go here, share then you can share layers as PNG files. And that way, I'm going to save it to my iPad or you can save it to dropbox or whatever. That way, when you go to the gallery, you'll see that the three layers were exported. The only problem is that it exports with the whole Canvas size, so this is not centered. The only work around I found for that is taking it to photoshop and then saving it as the right size there, so it's not the whole Canvas. Or the other thing you can do is you can go into that file and then move every element to the middle. And I'm going to turn on the background color so you can see what I'm doing. And then just go to ambas crop and resize. And then crop your ambas. Like this, so you're not touching any of the elements done, and then turn off the background color and export it like that. Share PNG files. I'm going to save it to my iPad again, so that when I go into my gallery, instead of them being like that, they're actually full images in the middle of the page. So I'm going to do that to every one of my files. I'm going to go here, Canvas, crop and resize, I. D, and then I'm going to share it PNG file and save it. And then this one. Go to Canvas, crop and resize. I'm making sure I'm not touching any of the elements. De export PNG files. I'm actually going to move this one a bit up. And finally, this one. You can if you want to see this because it has some marks here. So now, if I go into my gallery, I have all my images here as transparent PNGs. In the next lesson, we're going to create a composition. 13. Creating Compositions: No, no, no, no. This lesson, we're going to be creating a composition with all the icons that we have already created. In surface pattern design, each individual illustration, it's called an icon. We're going to bring everything into this file and arrange it. If you're going into the composition file, if you downloaded my files, you'll see that I have this sketch here. You can follow it or you can create your own composition. I'm going to make this sketch transparent by setting multiply to it and then reducing the opacity. Now I'm going to import all the layers underneath my sketch. I'm going to go to gallery and grab my first file. In the layers, I am going to select all of them. Swipe to the right. And once they're all selected, I'm going to hold my finger and with my other hand, go to gallery. Open the composition file, and don't drop them in there. Just go to the layers and drop them in the layers panel. And now they're all there. We're going to do the same thing with our other elements. If for some reason, your iPad has a very limited number of layers. What you'd have to do is create a smaller Canvas, but don't create it too small because remember this is raster and you cannot make it bigger later. Or what you can do is import as many elements as it allows and then start merging your layers so you free up space for more icons. For example, if you only have seven layers available, you would bring in five icons because these two are already there. And then you place them wherever you want, and then you merge them and that's one layer, and then you bring on over more and more icons until you're done with your composition. That's not the ideal, but it's a work around. Because we're going to be working with a lot of selection of layers. What I'd like to do is go here to the actions in preferences, we can go to gesture controls, and we're going to go to layer select and you'll see that I have this activated. This is a quick menu button that appears here. I'll show you in a second, and it says Apple pencil while holding will invoke layer select. You can also do it with touch or even simply touching with a finger. I don't like using this one because if sometimes you touch by mistake, it changes layer and then you're painting in a layer you didn't want to be painting on. What I like to have is this one or this one activated and then you press done. Now if I press this button here, and then I tap on here, it would select that layer. Then I can move it around really easy. This way, it's going to be easier to work with layers. You see sometimes a lot of layers come up, and this is why having your layers with names is really useful. But you can also see what's in that layer here. Now it gives you an option to choose which layer you want to select. Let's say I want to select this leave. I just stop there. Then when I move it, It saves me a lot of time from going into the layers and then selecting here and then coming here and selecting here. But it's a preference and you can do what suits you better, just try to make your life easier and optimize the time you spend designing. Before I bring in more elements, I'm going to place these elements around in the composition. Let's start. That leaf is not even in my composition, so I'm going to turn it off for now. That was one of the examples we had. Same with this leaf. Maybe I'll just delete them or you can use them in your composition if you want. Let's start with these flowers. Those are down here. I can rotate them here. And you can also change the size if you want. And you don't have to be super precise. This is just a guide. Just assemble it as you see fit. I just want you to learn how to assemble your Cas in a composition. So now let's choose this one. I I wish it would just select it that way, but it does. It would save a lot of time. Usually, I work in compositions in photoshop because it does speed up the process, but you definitely don't need to have photoshop. Procreate is super capable, so you can do everything here. I really like this part. Once I have all the icons ready and I can just start moving them around and trying different compositions and seeing the whole illustration come to life is super exciting. Okay. And here, if you have a part that you don't want in your composition, you can do two things. You can straight up erase that area that is overlapping or that it's showing somewhere where you don't want to show. Or if you don't want to affect your icon permanently, you can go to the layers and then if you on it, you can create a mask. And you'll see this white appear here. These acts as the name says, as a mask. Whatever I'm going to paint here in black is going to hide things in this layer, and whatever is white, it's going to show things. If I go to the brushes and I'm going to select let's say this pencil. This is a six pencil. Black is selected now because it automatically does that because I'm on the mask. Okay. So if I paint these, you'll see that everything I'm painting in black gets deleted. And if I want to bring back one of those parts, I would just go to my colors. Let's go to the classic view and choose white, tap twice here in the corner and it would choose white. I can just bring back those areas later if I realize I do need them. Let me do that and I'm going to leave it like that because I don't want that stem coming out of there. If at some point you're running out of layers and you have a lot of masks, you can just pinch them, and then the changes will be applied permanently. I do have that icon saved in another file, so I don't care as much here to erase it because if I ever wanted it to bring it back, I would just go to the other file and import it. Now let's go to this one. So now let's continue creating our composition. I don't like how that one's looking there, so I'm just going to make it smaller and place it here. I didn't even add this one to the sketch. I'm going to try it down here and later we can move things around if we don't like them. You will see that because this greenery, we painted in just one layer without creating the base layer and then adding color on top. They're very transparent. If you want to overlay them like this and you want this one to be visible, what you can do is go to that layer, the one you want to be visible and select. Now that layer is selected. Now we're going to go to the layer underneath. Which is this one. And we're going to erase these parts that are overlapping. It'll be very easy because only the parts that are overlapping are selected. And then when you release it. It works perfectly. So we're done with this one. Now, let's bring in some more icons. Again, if you're running out of layers, you can just merge all of these. I'm not going to do it yet. I'll go to the gallery again and now bring in these florals. I'm going to do the same thing again. Just go to the layers, select them all, drag them out, go to gallery. Go to my composition file, open the layers, and drop them here. I think this ones might be a bit too big, so I might have to resize them. Let's start with this puppy here. If you can't see the sketch, just make it a bit darker. Maybe that's easier. Now, let's continue the composition. I want to put this flower on top of this one, so I'll just go into the layers and drag this on top. And then I can continue moving my layers around. Again, I want this one to be on top of this one, and, I want the purple to be on top of this. I'm going to drag this one underneath all the flowers. Yeah. I like that water. Now I'm going to continue moving this ones. Let me turn off the sketch here so you can see what's happening. C. These ones don't have the same problem that this one had because when we created these ones, we made the basic shape and then we painted on top of them. If you want something to have a transparent background, just go ahead and paint with your watercolor pencil, don't make a base layer and then paint on top. But if you want things to have a solid background, so they're not transparent. The way we did everything else, other than the greenery, that's the way to go. I really like doing that because I like having the ability to overlay layers like this and not have to worry about the transparency. But if that's something you want to do, then now you know how to do it. I'm going to turn the sketch back on. Make it a bit lighter. And I'm almost done positioning these flowers. Now I'm going to bring in more elements. I think I still have enough layers to do it. I'm going to go to the gallery, and I didn't use the complex florals in this composition because we're going to use it later in the monogram. But I did use this one. What I'm going to do is just go into that file and it only has one layer, so I'm going to bring it out. And drop it in here. I dropped it in behind these flowers because that's where it goes. But if you dropped it in somewhere else, you can just rearrange it later. I think this one is way smaller. Great. Now I'm going to bring the insect friends. Go to the gallery. Go here. Select all of them, drag them out. Go back to the gallery, go back to this file, and I'm going to drop them in at the top. I'm just going to drag this one down because I want these insects to be on top of everything. I'm going to reduce their size because they're huge. So I don't even know where this one goes. So I'm going to drop it off here. And I'm going to start with this guy. Let's make it stand here on these leaves there. Maybe there. And then this one goes here. Oh, yeah, I didn't use the butterfly for this composition, so I'm going to delete it. And now I'm going to turn off my sketch. I see here that I use those little yellow flowers again, so I'm just going to turn off my sketch and assess the situation here. I do think we need some yellow here because the yellow is very concentrated here on the bottom. So I'm going to duplicate these little flowers and add some here. And maybe rotate them so they don't look like exactly the same. I'm going to place out one there, but I want it to be on top of this flower, so I'm just going to drag it up. And don't be scared to assess your composation, move things around until you're happy with it. I like how that looks. So now we're going to work with this paper texture because we already saved all the icons with a paper texture. I don't want more texture on top. That might be the effect you want. But They already have a bit of a subtle texture. I don't want to have even more. So I do want the background to look like watercolor paper, so it looks more realistic. But what I'm going to do is drag this layer to the bottom. And that way, we have it just on the back. I think that looks way better. If for some reason, you're finding that your colors are not looking like they all belong together and you need to bring all the palette together as a cohesive palette. There's a little trick that I use for digital art and traditional art, and it's that if you mix every color with the same color, for example, you choose a yellow. When I'm doing water colors, I choose above titanium, for example. For digital, I choose a type of yellow always. Then you mix every color with that color, then they will all go together. How you do that in digital is you go to the top of your stack and you add a new layer. Again, if you don't have space for layers, just merge things down and then you'll have more space. I don't want to do that because I do have the space. I want the ability to move things around later if I want to. I'm going to grab my colors And from our palette, I like this yellow, for example, and I'm going to drag it in and drop it on top of the whole Canvas. Now in the blending modes, I am going to go to either like linear burn, color burn, multiply. I'm going to reduce the opacity because I don't want it to be that yellow, but this looks more like a vintage illustration, which I love. So that's before adding anything to it, and this is adding some yellow. Then I will just go through the whole stack until I find something I really like. This divide is really cool. If you like blues and purples, it creates such a pretty effect. I really didn't like using purples, but I've been into purples a lot lately, so I really like that divide one. But I'm just going to leave it at multiply at a 9% capacity. I think that looks better. If you want to center these to the Canvas because we had this title here, it's not centered, you just select every layer. Except for the background, and I like grouping it that if I want to do that later, I don't have to select everything again and you can just move it around. I'm going to place it centered in the canvas. That's it. Now you can print this and you can create a writing card from the or you can use it in so many other ways. I would love to see the compositions you create, either follow mine or create your own. Now in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to use the elements in a different way by creating a decorated alphabet letter. 14. Creating Decorated Alphabets: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a decorative alphabet. I'm going to use my initial. You can use your initial, you can create the whole alphabet, whatever you want. So we're going to be working on this monogram file, and I'm going to bring in some of the elements. The first one that I'm going to bring in are the complex plurals. Just grab them all. And you know the drill. Let's make this and see what else? I have the moth here and leaves and the. Just bring in any element that you want. I'm going to reduce that again. I'm going to go here. Maybe I will use my butterfly there, so I'm going to bring them both. I'm not going to bring this one in, so you can also choose which ones you want to bring in. Then finally, some greenery. Let's bring this yellow one too, just in case. Okay. Let's start with this one. This is the same process as I showed you before. I'm going to make this way smaller and I'm going to leave it here because I don't know where to put it yet. I don't know where that one goes either. Or this one because it's not in the sketch. I'm just going to place the elements that I do have in the sketch and then I can start experimenting with the rest. Let's place that there. I'm just going to leave the ones to the side. I think this one doesn't go there. Yeah. These ones look way better here. I'm going to bring in this other element that I didn't bring in. That's this fern. I'm going to bring this flower to the front. I'm going to create my initial. Here, you can just use any font that you have. I'm going to go to layer here at the bottom because I want the later to be in the background, and there I can go here and add a text, and then I can choose an S, for example, if you double on it, it will be selected, and here you can choose fonts. You can use fonts that you have. Done. And then I can make it a way bigger. Just make sure you have commercial license to use the font if you're going to sell this or something like that, or you're going to use it commercially. So that's how you do it by typing in the font. I prefer drawing my letters. I'm going to delete that. In this layer, I'm going to go to my monoline brush, which is here in calligraphy. I'm going to choose whatever color, and I'm just going to draw my letter. For this, I like going into the brush, and here in stabilization stream line. You'll see that here if I draw lines, If I make the stream line bigger, it will be less precise, but my lines will be less shaky. Also here in civilization, see. My lines look a bit smoother. So I like having that control over my brush, especially when I'm doing lettering. So just press done when you're done, and I'm just going to do it like this. You can draw the whole letter if you want, but because this part is not going to be shown, I choose not to. Now I'm closing off the shape, and I'm going to drop it in with color. This way, I can see that here it's too, so I'm just going to go around and correct it. Great. Now this part. I'm going to close it here. Pretty crooked. I'm going to close it here again. And that's much better? And now drop the color in. Now we can go and see things that don't look so pretty. You can also use eraser if there's an area you don't like. The curve letters are the harder ones. If it was an A, it would just be straight lines. Okay. I like that. Now I'm going to turn off this sketch. I'm going to see if I want to include some of these elements on here. I think this guy has to be smaller. Yeah. I think I might place this one here, let's see, but way smaller. I don't want to saturate it either. Like I don't want it to be super busy. Maybe there pot on top of the leaves. So let's just bring it up and move it a tiny bit up. Rotate. Yeah, I'm just going to make it a bit smaller. So I'm just showing you all the process of me moving around the composition and trying elements in different places so you know how it goes in real life. I don't think I'm going to use this one. Or this one. So I'm just going to delete them. Also this one. I might just move this leaf around a bit. I think I need to tilt the flower also. Make it a bit smaller. Maybe I'm going to duplicate this leaf here. So select it, drag down with three fingers and duplicate. And now we can move this one here. I'm going to make it smaller. I don't know. It's kind of missing something there. The flower looks like it's floating too much. Oh, that's much better. Yeah. Yeah, at least I think that's much better. I just want to move that leave again. Yeah. And now because that's where I stopped my letter, I'm going to go back in there and just complete it. Now we just need to make the letter look a bit more water color. So I'm going to go to the layer where I have my letter. Turn on alpha lock and let's bring the colors out. And again, I'm going to choose this very light color and fill that layer in. And with the watercolor brushes, I'm going to paint it as if it was watercolor, and I think that's going to look more realistic than just having a solid color. So I'm going to make my brush as big as I can, and I'm choosing this very dark color. And just going around, pressing my brush harder and softer in different areas. I can go in again if I want to make it darker. Maybe here where the leaves are. Yeah. That looks better. Again, because this brush has already some watercolor texture on it, you don't need your watercolor paper texture on top. But if you want to add that texture to the paper, then we can just choose another one of our files, and I'm going to select the paper and the overlay, and I'm going to drag them out. I'm going to bring them here. The overlay layers always become normal and 100% opacity when you bring them into another file, so you need to go back and fix them. So I think it was 9% multiply and I'm going to bring my paper texture to the bottom. There. There you have it, you can create a whole alphabet like this also. If you want to export just the letter with a transparent background, then go to the gallery, duplicate that file. Here you can flatten all the elements. Then let's delete the sketch, and then use this as a clipping mask, so it's just on the letters and merge it because everything already had paper texture applied to it, I'm not even going to use the paper texture, so I'm going to delete it. Turn off the background. I'm going to go to the Camvas crop and resize. And just resize it, so you don't have all that extra space around your icon, press done, and now you have it with a transparent background. If you want to save it, just go to share PNG. We're done with this. In the next lesson, we're going to wrap things up. 15. Wrapping Things Up: We've come to the end of the class and I hope you had tons of fun creating your watercolor florals or whatever subject you chose to illustrate. You can use these techniques to paint anything else you want, animals, cities, everything. Keep experimenting with them. I hope you really like the way that I create watercolors in the iPad. There's tons of different ways of doing this, but this is my preferred way. And you can use these icons for tons of different things. You can create stickers. You can sell them as digital assets. You can create compositions and sell that on products, or you can license your artwork. There's tons of different uses for this. Remember to post your projects in the project area. I can't wait to see what you create and follow me here on Skillshare and make sure to join my newsletter where I have a bunch of freebies for you and I keep you updated of everything that's happening with me and new class lunches. See you soon. Bye.