Expressive drawing on procreate for beginners

1. Introduction to expressive drawing on procreate: Hello everyone, Hugs it here. If you're interested in creating energetic, lively drawings, then please take my new expressive drawing. It's based on procreate, but it can be used in real life too. On paper, with pens, water colors, et cetera. It's a fun class, It's tricks and exercises to try out to open up the other side of your brain to let your artistic side out. Hopefully, see you in class. 2. Part 1, set up and brush intro: Hello everyone. Welcome to lesson one. For lesson one, we're just going to get the settings in order to get the best performance for the style that we're looking for. It's best to have the settings a certain way. Let's first click on the Cog at the top left, click on Preferences. If you go down to pressure and smoothing, this is how I have this part of the settings set up. All I've got is just got extra point added to the middle. And I've just dragged it down a touch just to give me more control over the sizes that I'm using. It's fine in the middle. Just perfectly as it is standard. I just like a little bit more control so that when I push, I can really get those thick lines. That's how I add my curve. You can see it's just just to the left of the first cube there. You might want to replicate that if you want the similar performance that I'm having. Obviously, we've got our brush pack, it's only four brushes because I want to keep things simple. And rather than bamboozle you with hundreds of brushes and you start caring more about the brushes than the actual technique. This is more one that you learn the technique first and then you experiment and try your own things. Your own brushes, et cetera, et cetera. Because this is not tied in to any particular set of brushes. Everything looks good, maybe the Ers are more important. But when it comes to coloring, if you've got your favorite water color brushes or anything, I'm sure they'll work just fine. These have all been pre set up by myself a certain way we can really get those thick and thin lines. They're quite jittery. It gives us that natural, real authentic look, if you will. The other thing I like to do is add a paper texture canvas. If you click on the Resources button, you'll actually see that I've uploaded this actual canvas. You can use this going forward. Just hit Insert file. I got it in my recent watercolor paper. Just pull it out. Pull it out however you wish. What we want to do then is we want to set that water color layer to multiply. We can maybe just take a few off the opacity, don't want to take too much because you want to keep the texture. Just take a bit and we're going to be working everything underneath this layer there like this. This is how we're set up. Okay, that's the set up. Let me just quickly run through the brushes. We got two ink pens which are very similar. There's barely any difference. One is highly bled and the other one is not basically. But they're both very similar. They both perform in similar ways, thick to thin like, so I'll be working a bit bigger than that. And the other one is, as you can see, almost identical, but on the closer inspection, it's not quite as bled as this one. This one's more punchy and in your face, personal preference, whatever you use, I switch between the two. This is more of a smudging brush, but it's quite useful for coloring too. It's a really soft brush, but I'd like to just use this to just wet up some parts at the end to create a genuine traditional look, which I'll show you this to. Paint brush is pretty much just a bit of a edit of the original procreate studio brush. I've just tinkered with it a little bit and I'll just use it to color in these days. Where is the builder brush. Why isn't that there? This one? Kyle's builder brush. So this is a Kyle I can't remember his name. Kyle Weber. Is it? I'm trying to add it right now while I'm here, but of course it doesn't work properly. Trying to get that, I'll get that added. That's another coloring brush which I'll be adding. And it is Well, that's really strange because I'm actually on the. Oh, okay, fair enough. As you can see, it's quite textured, gives us a very authentic paint look. I use this to color in as well. I think it's Karl Weber's Have a look. He shares it for free to everybody. So I'll just pass on that to you guys. And that's it for the introduction and the sort of set up lesson. So come back for the lesson to where we'll be going straight in. 3. Part 2, how to get attractive lines: Guys, welcome to lesson to first things first, a little bit about this actual method technique. Way of drawing is loose is the word, loose and expressive is what we want. We don't want accurate portraits is not what this is. This is about bringing energy in life to even inanimate objects. Anything to create more life with rhythm of your lines, et cetera. Um, so that's what this is all about, the looser, the better. Don't be scared. I don't like that line. Don't be too fussy. Go with the flow and let's see how we get on. The first thing to warm up, what I want to do is just make sure you're holding the pencil correctly. Now, you can either hold it like this right at the end of the pencil. We haven't got too much control. Having too much control is going to restrict us. We're not looking for major detailed neatness here, we're looking for a bit of a bit of freedom when we draw. You can hold the pen like this right at the end or even like this if that's how you prefer the claw super expressive, probably the most. This is when I'm drawing on my canvases and on my easel. I like to sketch out this way with pastels or pencil just to block in the big shapes. It's a very nice way to draw, but it depends how you sat. If you sat hunched over your ipad, it's not great because this restriction, obviously it's better here if we're drawing using the arm. So we're not using the wrist really so much, we're using the whole arm and we're going to get used to that. We can really get our expression going with this. Obviously the lighter you press, the thinner the line, so thin that it's barely visible. The thicker you press, the harder the line you can see we've got a real big difference there. Also, if you tilt, you're going to get thicker lines too. You can be expressive using this brush. Now now I've explained how to hold the pencil and how to do this and that with the techniques. For the next lesson, we're going to be delving straight in with a fun challenge more than anything. It's one that I want you to take seriously. Don't cheat, don't lie to yourselves. It's all about opening a part of the brain, which is pretty essential for this style if you want to add extra life. So I'll see you in the next part. 4. Part 3, practices to unlock artistic side of brain: Hey guys, welcome to lesson three. This is that fun challenge that I wanted to do just to loosen you up and get you on the right track. So I'm going to import an image here. Will do anything you want. I'm going to go for something a bit technical like the pots and pans. Okay? Now what I want you to do, I'm just going to go for that part of it, Okay? What I want you to do is stay have a good look at your picture for only say 30 seconds. Take it all in. Take the shapes in. Take it all in. Don't touch the paper yet. Just look at the picture. Look at the shapes. Okay. Now close the canvas. Now I want you to draw what you just saw. You're using different side of the brain. You're not using your controlled side. The side of your brain, your instinctive side, your artistic side. Let's just try and remember what we saw. Be honest, I've been talking so much, I can't actually remember. I can remember there's like a spatula over here. Was there another part? I really should have planned that better, but this is about having fun and it's just about showing you how loose we can go now. I have no idea what was there. I promise that I haven't pre studied that picture. It's not fresh in my brain. I literally selected them randomly. Before I did this, I'm in the same boat as you, I promise. I'm just adding some squiggly lines, showing you how the line work would work. And it still looks charming, even if you get it very wrong, because it's not wrong in a way. Okay, let's do that. And now we've done that. I want you to just open a layer up underneath your sketch layer and try and remember the colors. I mean, it was quite an easy one to be fair because they were, they were mostly green. Green, sorry, silver and silver pans. So now I've said green. I will be putting a touch of green in it. Why did I say green? And then just sort of color in? What do you think you saw? I'm still holding up high on my pencil. I don't want no control. I'm happy. So there's just a bit of a base for it there. And now I'm just going to decide my light source. This is also opening another side of your brain. You can't be too comfortable with this. You've got to get stuck in and be brave, and you'll get rewarded with lovely images. Okay, done that. I'm just going to put some highlighty bits with my brush pen. I mean. Right, that's that signature. Let's see how far off we are. We've done a quick doodle, a quick sketch. Let's bring back our picture. Oh, there you go, Mr. Pan. And I don't even know what that was, Not quite. Spatula is completely different. It doesn't really look like that, but it's really great practice because it's opening a different side of your brain, taking you out of your comfort zone so that you have to use your creative side. There's no hiding from it, fearing away, you have to get stuck in. But I'm sure you'll agree there's still something very charming about it, because your artistic side of your brain will bring more life and energy to things, even inanimate objects like such. Okay, that's your warm up lesson. For the next part, we'll be actually having a look whilst we draw. It's not always going to be like that. There is another trick I'm just going to quickly show you though. This is one which you have to be true to yourself here. This is very easy to cheat, open up a new layer. Now with this one, it's a very similar technique. But what I want you to do is, is to not look at this. Don't look at your canvas this time. Only look at the picture whilst drawing. I know it's going to be difficult on an ipad screen which is fairly small, but just try your best, only focus on what you're seeing there. Don't look at your picture. It's really tough to do. Your brain is trying to take over, is saying I want to see, I want to take over. Don't let it only look at the photograph. And just trying, try and draw what you're seeing on the photo rather than, again, it's a similar technique to what we just did, but it's just prepping you ready for this method entirely. Okay, now I have a look. Here you go. Now this is a fun technique because you can do it with anything. You can do it whilst just sat there. You haven't got to be working from a photo. Just sit there, Look at your TV. Look at something on the wall. Look at your shelves. Just stare at that whilst not looking down at your ipad. Stare at what you're seeing. See, I've got a clock up there. It's a calendar hanging up. And again, we're tapping into the other side of the brain. It's great technique. Okay, let's get rid of that for the next lesson. We shall be diving straight in. 5. Part 4, full draw along - objects: Hello everyone. Welcome back. We're going straight in this time and we're going to have a few more lessons just drawing different things. I think I've got a few animals to draw. I got to be a cat dog. I don't know if I'll draw them all, but let's do our parts again, seen as this is the one we chose for that challenge. Let's do our pots on. This time we are allowed to look and make decisions. But bear in mind, try to go with your instincts more than your accuracy. Can you pre sketch for this? It might help actually, in the beginning. For a pre sketch layer, I would just lower the opacity down. Just look to block in the absolute basic shapes of where things go because my expression will be taking over on the next part, roughing out where things go. Just to give yourself a little helping hand. Just using my head, I'm looking more at the picture than I am at my sketch. Just kind of just kind of blocking in where these objects fit on the canvas like this. So I'm looking for angles, so I'm looking kind of where this meets the top of the spatula. You know, you look for little local reference points just to go by as a guide. And there's shadow there, there's a bit of a indentation at the bottom. Okay, sketch layer done. Let's go above it. Let's ink up. Now, inking up, we don't want to go too hard all the time. Try and stay away from just pressing too hard because it's going to look a bit, it's hard to explain. But you may come across this whilst you're practicing it just gives an ugly. This is a very simplistic method, but it's still going to be done right. If it's all too thin, obviously it's going to look a bit flat and a bit boring. We have to vary the pressure to keep things interesting and to keep it lively. In general, where the light sources and the tops of items, usually I'll be doing thinner lines. And for the bottoms especially in this case is where I'll be thicker lines. Okay, so that's just my rule of thumb. The lighted areas is, yeah, I'll be doing thinner lines but very herb is still looks good. I think, you know, I'm purposely holding this pen looser because I want movement in my lines. I don't want dead accurate lines. I want movement and I want energy. See you got the thick lines at the bottom there where we got the end of the start of the other pan. Again, just looking for random lines just to keep it all interesting and fun. Now, don't feel that you can't erase or undo because of if something looks really misplaced or you slip. Of course you can double tap and get rid of it. But as a general rule, a firm I do, I do try not to do I think that it's meant to be. Okay, let's just put, try and put a streetish line there. So what we are doing, it's basically urban sketching but it's not scenery as its actual, actual objects very dark in there, so I'll probably get that a bit darker in there. Okay, well, I got my ink pen out. Show I shall sign it. Right. Let's knock our sketch layer off. This is our expressive loose doodle, which I have not decided name yet. I suppose funky portraits, I might just go back, call it funky portraits. Let's put some in blobs on and grab your clumsy, clumpy fur brush. And just very carefully smudge up some parts. Just give them a little inky smudge to give it a real are you pop in authentic twist. Okay, Not so don't overdo it. That's it. I'll do. Right. Let's add some color to this baby. I'm just going to select the color. That's going to be my flat color for the, for the pans colored in there. I haven't really put much thought into the coloring side of this yet. This is more about the expressive side of things. You can use whatever you like to color in a watercolor brush would work. Anything would work great with this style. To be fair, whatever you enjoy to use, we'll do. I'm just using this right now. I'm just trying to quickly get it in so I'm going to show you. So let's get the darkest tone, which will be, maybe there don't go too dark. Let's try and get in our darkest areas. Looking at the picture. Okay, I go to the next art, try and get a bit of that in, so now we can start to move on to the lights. I think we've got the whole top of this pan and the lights coming in. I mean, there's multiple lights so you can see as a professional photograph. So it's probably got all professional lights set up. There's multiple light sources right there. Okay. And we can also give that just a little smudgy spudgy in certain areas. Yeah. Just a little a little touch of authenticity. Authenticity. Say that again? Put a bit of a shadow on the bottom. Maybe smudgy smudge. There you go guys. So that you can go a bit further with it if you wanted, if you want to make it pop, what I would do is I'd open up a layer above, set it to overlay, and make it pop if you want to, with like an air brush or something. I think I got an airbrush handy. I should have an airbrush handy. I s okay, there's one now go very easy and you can just pop certain parts just to give you a picture. A bit of an insane eye catching performance. You can see the ***** of orange and yellow tones there. Look, see. So I'll try and grab a bit of that. I'll try and glaze a bit of that in there. You can see it just adds a whole different dimension. Might put a bit of blue glazed in as well over this side. Why not? So, there you go guys. We just quickly completed our first expressive sketch. Super fun to do. If I was being nit picky, I would be going in and I'd be, I'd be just getting rid of these these holes which are on the the spat. Is it a spatula? I'm so poor in the kitchen, I wouldn't know. Yeah, I'd be just doing that and I'd probably just be adding a little with my ink pen. I'd just be adding a little outline around certain things just to make it popped St to give it a little separation from each other. You know, that's it. If your overlay layer is too much, you're going to lower it or higher it, whatever you want. You can fiddle with this part too, after. But what it's doing is it's bringing art back to the world where I feel procreate has taken over. And it's too easy now for just anybody to just go and trace something and make a really great looking picture. But what they are missing, every single one of these traced pictures, they're missing huge life and energy. If it's not done correctly, by doing this, it's a genuine piece of art. It's genuinely come from my brain. Or from your brain? From your heart. It's not coming. You're not just drawing some stiff object. You're putting your spin on it and that's what makes it right. Drive me in the next lesson. Let's try a, let's try an animal. Let's try the bumblebee. 6. Part 5, full draw along - bee: Hello and welcome back to the next lesson. This time we're going to draw a bumblebee. We're probably going to get through this one a little bit quicker. Now we know the ropes and the process, It's all about just embedding it into your brain. Now, obviously in the last lesson, we drew the pots and pans, didn't we? First off, we drew it from memory. We shut that down and we drew that from memory. We then went on to sketch it out without looking at the paper, not looking where, we're just what we're looking at that brings on big improvements. If the more you can do that, the better. Then of course, we sketched out our actual photo using the reference. We finished off with our expressive little doodle, which looks awesome. Let's clear that off my pen. Nib is really on it, dying legs. Let's add the bumblebee, because this is what we're doing next. Let's try and do him some justice. I'm going to switch the canvas that way for this one, I like to use a very dark saturated blue for my ink. I like in real life because I do like cool blacks rather than warm blacks. So try and go down somewhere in the middle for my black. I never actually used full digital black because it's a bit too jarring and nothing kind of sits right with it. In my opinion. In my opinion. Okay, so let's lower the opacity because we're going to do a sketch. Again, I'm just looking for the big shapes. So we can see here, we got this stock coming up. Again, I'm looking more at this than my paper. The stock coming up there got a bit of a flower petal that side, and the B, I may have gotten way too big here, in fact, I have sort of curves. Curves around this way, doesn't he? So I got some wings there, some fluffy legs, some antennas, and just some little lines just so I know where the colors go. Of course there's a big petal by there there. I don't even know what flower this is. I don't think I've seen a flower quite like that. I don't think that's in the UK something. Okay. So I've just, again, very loosely, just doodled in. We all want things to go and now I'll just go out above it and we'll start thinking. So I'm going to get that big petal in first, like so. And there's a little petal popping out there, but I have a friend, Mr. B's leg or something, it's coming down there. Okay. We've got another petal popping out there and there. Okay. This is his wing again. I'm, I'm, I am looking where I'm drawing, but I'm really looking mainly at the photo because I want to try and capture stuff I may have missed on the sketch. And then we can get the other petals in trying to keep it very thick and thin. And then you just decide, then you just decide up to yourself, that's that. Okay, let's sign it, Turn a sketch off. I'm going to put some little inky splatters down because it just adds a nice little, a little complimentary effect. I'm probably just going to go a bit darker in some areas. I think I've left it a bit, could have went a bit thicker in certain areas maybe. Okay, there we go. Quick doodle and now we can start coloring. Let's get our to paint brush again and we'll just use this. Let's start coloring. Let's get that lovely orangy dark color in first, which complements straight into that lovely yellow. There we go. Now, obviously, he's black, isn't he? But we don't want to go too black. Let's trying. I'm just going to color straight over that a minute. And then I'm going to darken in all this area by there. And I'm going to pick certain little colors that I want I like the just spits there. And I'm also going to grab a bit of that highlight color which is just a gray. The blue of the flowers is catching his eyes or the purple lilac the wings. I mean, I know they're transparent, right? But they're going to be a color to them. So now we can get this beautiful lavender. And I'm going to get the dark parts first. At the bottoms I'd say that's probably the darkest areas I have actually forgot to do his leg, so I'll do that, get some of these lavender mid tones in like so I'm trying to go quicker for this one because, you know, I'm hoping to do another one to try to fit in. I got to try and keep it bite size, a bit of that green there. Obviously it's very light. Lights hitting, so we'll have that. We'll try and get a bit of the light there too, obviously. We'll add our own dimension to it as well. There's the basic color. Very quickly. I'm just going to add a bit of that because I don't know where I left it off. Maybe a bit more ible in there. I do would like to add some whites with the brush pen just to separate certain parts and give it a little bit of a, it just makes it pop a little bit more. We can give it a little bit of this smudge as well. If we've been mixing colors, just blend them together. Obviously, this is all on one layer, so we're not getting into it. We want to keep it as authentic as possible. It also gives it a nice little water coloryvibe. Okay, now what we want to do is add our punch. So we'll go in with our out of room. Let's get rid of that. We need to add a overlay layer and we can add some variation then without air brush, add some blues to the, to the leaves. You know, just the blue of the sky make you look a bit more interesting. Even add darker purples as well if you want, you see you got some very bright parts to this. And of course the yellow, I had some blue or lilac actually to our friend, and then we just pull down to black. If you want to really just glaze in some depth on the darker areas, all it's going to do is just punch the color a bit. It's not going to be too major. Okay. One thing I did forget to do was give my inky lines a little smudge, which I just like to do only here and there, just to give it a genuine look. Just enough for people to notice like, so Okay, and there we go. There's a wasp. It's fun to do and yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. So, for the next one, I think let's have a little look. Um, maybe the squirrel, I suppose. Let's finish off with the squirrel. Should we? He looks fun. Yeah, next part we'll be doing the squirrel. 7. Part 6, full draw along - squirel : Hello guys. I'm welcome back. Hello guys. Welcome back. So for this lesson, we will be doing the squirrel using the same technique. So let's start with a sketch layer, lower the opacity. Let's just try and block in those shapes that we see. Draw what you see. This is going to be a more challenging one. But this is about having Furan not worrying too much about detail. He's got this big thing. I'm just looking at the correlation relationship between the top of the ears and where the top of this bushy tail goes. And I'm happy with that. His eyes tear drop type rock there, darker there. Okay, there's the sketch. Less ink it up. I don't even know what he has actually sat on. It looks very strange, so I'll draw it very strange. I'm going to try and go even looser with this one in. We know it looks good, and let's just smudge up some bits. Yeah, we know what we're doing by now. Just randomly smudging out some areas. There we go, sign it. Okay, Sketch off and let's color. Let's grab just the base color of him, just a middle of the ground color. And let's get him colored in. This is a pressure sensitive brush. Too thin and thick. I really should have done X now. It's going to delete the whole thing. You know what I'm saying? So thinner the light you press thicker. Let's just, let's get the base color. Let's get the base color of whatever this is. I don't actually know. It doesn't look like a normal tree. And the piece colors of that in there we go, right? Let's get the darker tones in around there. And we're going to be going out a little bit more saturated to think he's very, very pale around the top area of his mid rift. He's got like a white ring around his eyes that's not light enough. And he's got the white F and white underbelly. Get these darker bits just randomly in like so unless just give it all the smudgy smudge. Not all of it, you know, just the hash transitions. Okay, I just got to, and let's go in and add some punch with the overlay layer. I want to add some real orange in there with our air brush. Just some little glazed parts where I see it. And I want to get some pinks. Just some pinky parts too. I'd like to add a bit of blue because of the blue sky. So I'd like to just glaze it ever so lightly on outdoor pictures and stuff. I mean, I don't even know what's on there, but we are just doing our best with it. And finally, let's add let's add some whites and lights. Okay. I mean, that will do is a squirrel doodle and that is that, folks. So I hope you enjoyed the class. Any questions? Give me a message on my Instagram. I'm happy to answer, but I shall see you next time. Thanks for taking the class. 8. Bonus - ink and ink wash on paper: Hello everyone. I thought I would do an expressive drawing using the traditional media. So I got some traditional media. I'm away from the tablet. I got a pencil for my initial sketch. I got a brush pen. I didn't want the ink to go everywhere. Then you see that nib there, lovely brush pen. This, I'm not exactly sure what it's called. I think it's just called the penal brush pen, not the feud, which is more softer and more like a traditional brush. It's a bit stiffer. I got the pent, ah, which is an awesome bit of kit. I got it loaded up with some diluted speed ball in could use this for a bit of a wash. I've got myself a brush which is far too big for my little travel sized Windsor Newton cotton and watercolors. But it'll, it'll do the job. We only want to add a little color and make it fun. So I'm drawing a and I'm going to try and make it as lively and loose fun as possible. So let's get stuck in. I'd like to start holding the pencil at the end. I don't want to hold down here where it's too restrictive and too accurate. I want it to be loose and especially for this first part where I'm just trying to gather shapes. So I'm just looking at the flower and I'm just really lightly just kind of blocking in some shapes and throwing in some petals. I'm trying to get the shape of this bees. Now, I just got to use basic shapes and try and get the gesture in the following, this direction, those wings in. This is more of a follow up from the class. I've just put on skill share, which is the same style. I just wanted to prove that it can be used for not just digital but traditional as well. Blocking out there, there's another petal leaf coming out there, there got some big pads behind that will probably give me enough information there, I think. So I'm going to go straight in with my pencil brush pen and try. I don't want to be drawing this again all accurate and neat and all the same line thickness. I want to be varying thickness and making it fun. So I just get to kind of go with the flow and try and be as expressive as I can. I'm totally fine with leaving bits that, you know, lines that shouldn't really be there. I'm happy with any lines to be there because I want it to just look fun anyway. Is exactly the same as what I was doing on the pro creator. You know, I've designed those brushes on there to sort of effortlessly go from thick to thin, like a brush pen wood. I like the, I like the energy it gives. Let say, variety is the spice of life. That's why I like to really mix it up with a thick and thin. I'm not worried about the jaggedy edges either. I'm actually purposely trying to. I had a bit of jaggedness to it. I know he's really fluffy but I want I could kind of keep some form. I'm just deciding whether with this one I'm gonna actually ink wash it or go streaming of the water colors undecided. I'm going to do now is just purposely adding some thicker lines just to make sure I've got the variety that I'm after in there. Even more for sort of the dark areas, very little signature as such. And so give that a minute, make sure it's dry. Obviously, once it's dry, you could probably, if you wanted to rub out the pencil, just gonna leave it on and paste over it. I think I'm going to go with the ink wash because it's ready to go. This is just speed ball in like six or seven drops. We filled up with water so I'm going to try and get the darker areas in first. I'm just going to go nice and steady. Was it on? Going to just squeeze it out as you go in with this. If you want to A little bit darker obviously. It becomes wetter then as well. But it still leaves a lovely finished product. There's more in there, you can see it's really getting wet in some parts. Oh, I do. It was just burn off a bit of that now on some lighter, bit of a lighter wash, just for, just for some lighted areas, the blobs down and we wait for that to dry. I actually like to add a bit of ink, you know, as if the ink has got out of control and gone crazy because there's not an actual dippy pen which would be better. But that's quite cool though. It gives a nice depth to it. So we've just got to let that dry. And then I think I'm going to do the same picture. I'm going to use these winds and Newton cottons because I've got a nice yellow there. Nice orange. I'm sure I can come up with something for the petals. I think it'll look good. So yeah, I'll see you in a bit.