Flourished Calligraphy Layouts in Procreate | Molly Suber Thorpe | Skillshare
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Flourished Calligraphy Layouts in Procreate

teacher avatar Molly Suber Thorpe, Calligrapher & Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome!

      2:00

    • 2.

      Document Setup

      4:08

    • 3.

      First Pencil Sketch

      10:27

    • 4.

      Points of Tension

      3:59

    • 5.

      Flourish Sketching

      18:22

    • 6.

      Refined Pencil Sketch

      9:24

    • 7.

      Calligraphy Pen "Inking"

      9:15

    • 8.

      Layout Refinements

      4:51

    • 9.

      Finishing Touches

      5:00

    • 10.

      Color!

      5:06

    • 11.

      Thank You + My Glove

      1:18

    • 12.

      Can You Do Me A Favor?

      0:52

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About This Class

This project-based class is a guided demonstration of a flourished calligraphy layout using an iPad Pro and Procreate.

The demonstration is start-to-finish, and filled with my commentary every step of the way. I show you how I set up my document, make a rough pencil sketch, refine my sketches, draw in flourishes, "ink" it with a calligraphy brush, polish the final design, and recolor it.

This class is very relaxed. I wanted it to reflect the actual design process of a professional calligrapher creating a polished design, from sketch through final artwork. I show all of my work, leaving nothing out, so you can watch me make every stroke...and erase every mistake.

Prerequisites: This class is for students who already have some experience with Procreate lettering. If you need to learn the ropes first, start with my comprehensive beginner's class: Procreate for Absolute Beginners.

Downloadables: I've included the Procreate calligraphy brush and guide sheet that I use, as well as the layered Photoshop file of my finished design. These are available to students as free downloads in the Your Project section. They are intended for personal use only.

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➤  Useful links:

+ Articles: 

+ Procreate brushes & add-ons:

+ iPad Accessories:

_________________________

Get my FREE Lettering Toolkit, including practice sheets, lettering guides, and Procreate brushes, at mollysletteringtoolkit.com

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➤  More tutorials:

+ My calligraphy books offer more lessons and inspiration

+ My YouTube channel is full of free, bite-sized tutorials, and I upload a new video every Friday!

+ My other Skillshare classes are all about hand lettering, from how to digitize calligraphy and make flourished layouts, to mastering the art of lettering on the iPad.

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+ Tag me in your projects on Instagram: @mollysuberthorpe. I'd love to have a peek at your work!

+ Sign up for my Workshop News Bulletin to stay informed about my upcoming, in-person classes.

+ Visit Calligrafile.com, my massive online resource guide for lettering artists and creative freelancers, with 1,000+ recommended supplies, books, online classes, and helpful links.

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Some of the links above are affiliate links.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Molly Suber Thorpe

Calligrapher & Designer

Top Teacher

I design custom lettering for brands and individuals, Procreate brushes for artists, fonts for designers, and freelancing tools for creatives. I’m the author of four books for lettering artists and teach the craft both online and in person.

 

 

I’m lucky to have worked with some awesome clients over the years, including Google Arts & Culture, Martha Stewart, Fendi, and Michael Kors. My work and words have been featured in such publications as The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Weddings, LA Times, and Buzzfeed.

I love connecting with my students so please please share your projects with me. If you do so on Instagram, tag me with @mollysuberthorpe so I’m sure to see it!&nb... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Welcome!: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm [inaudible]. I'm a calligrapher, graphic designer and author, and today I'm going to demonstrate for you how I make a really flourished calligraphy layout design on my iPad Pro, using the Procreate app. I'm going to walk you through everything from the beginning, how I set up my document, to sketching with pencil, to refining those sketches, to inking with a calligraphy brush pen in Procreate, and finally, how I refine that into design, recolor it, and export it for print or web. You do need to have a little bit of experience with Procreate and lettering to take this class. But if you need to freshen up or learn from the beginning, you can go and take my previous class, "Mastering iPad lettering with Procreate Four", which you can find on my Skillshare profile page or in the class description below. I also have given you some downloads in this class for free, which include my own customized calligraphy brush and the guide sheet that I use in the example that I demonstrate today. I've specifically made this class very relaxed. I wanted it to reflect the actual design process for a professional calligrapher creating a design from scratch, from sketched through polished design. I show a lot of my working in real-time, or only slightly sped up so that you can actually see me make every single stroke. I think that it's important sometimes to remind ourselves that even professional calligraphers have to erase and start over, and that there's something meditative about that process and how we can improve every single time that we do it. I hope that you enjoy that and can grab a cup of coffee or tea and relax into this class along with me. [MUSIC] 2. Document Setup: As I mentioned in the introduction, I want to go through absolutely every step of this with you so that we're on completely the same page and you can follow along with everything I'm doing. So getting Procreate open. I'll just let you know that I currently have version 4.2.5 installed. If you don't, you may want to go check and see if you have an update or if by the time you're watching this video that's outdated, ensure that everything that I'm doing is still going to be possible. So coming up here to the top right plus sign, we're going to create a Custom Canvas. I want to immediately change the dimensions of this inches. I personally enjoy a ratio of 4 to 5, which will create an 8 by 10, or 16 by 20 inch design. I like to keep a higher resolution so that I have the option of printing it in a much larger size later on. So let's put this width that, let's say eight, the height at 10 inches. Let's change the DPI here to 500. The reason I changed that is because it set the maximum layers only to 16 layers when I had the DPI at 600. I probably want a little bit more than that. I'm going to throw a title in here, just going to call this skill share 8 by 10, 500 DPI, and hit done. Before we begin sketching out our quote, I want to add a grid to my file, that way, I'm going to have some baselines and metallic slant lines to work with. It doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to adhere to them all, but it's a really good starting point, especially in the sketching phase. I've given you a file for this extremely basic grid and you can download it in the information section of this class. Then airdrop it to yourself, e-mail it to yourself, throw it onto your cloud, anyway that you can't get it onto your iPad and insert it here. So I'm going to the wrench tool, Add, Insert a file because I have mine in the cloud. But if you have it in your photo album, you'll insert a photo, and selecting it. Now, with magnetics turned on so that the ratio doesn't change when I enlarge it. I'm just going to enlarge it to fill up my page. I might enlarge it even more than that later to expand my lettering and to enlarge the X height, but we'll have to see. Coming over to the Layers palette, I'm tapping once and renaming, calling it grid because I'm obsessive about keeping my layers organized, then swiping left to lock it. Adding a new layer. This will be my first art layer on my sketching layer. I'm going to come over to brushes. I'm actually going to choose a pencil to really emulate what pencil sketching is like. So I have created some custom ones of my own, but to stay on the same page so that everybody's using the same thing in this class. I want you to come to the default brush library here called sketching, and select one of these brushes, you can play around with them. Let's choose this 6B pencil today. Tapping it once to open the settings, I want you to make sure that streamline is turned off, which gives us maximum freedom of movement. For calligraphy, I often like streamline, turned up to medium or high. But for sketching with pencil, it's a must for me. For a lot of erasing too, to have streamline turn off so that I have ultimate control. The quote that I've chosen as one of my favorites by William Morris. it goes," Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believed to be beautiful". So I'm going to take the beginning of this quote and I'm going to try to see how much of it fits on the first line. That's going to dictate the line size, and then going from there we'll figure out how many lines and then we'll figure out how to stack them together, and now the flourishes to complete the overall look and layout. 3. First Pencil Sketch: Taking just the beginning, have nothing in your house. I have the feeling, not all of that will fit on this line and the style I'm thinking of but let's have a look. I'm not focusing at all on making the letters as beautiful as possible, I'm definitely not focusing on flourishes. I'm really just focusing on how many letters and words I can fit on a single line. I'm giving myself some decent margins, starting right around here. Normally I write pretty lightly with the pencil, but I'm trying to push down harder to make sure that this shows up in the video for you. Already, I know that that's too big an H. This is the only thing on this layer, I'm coming up and I'm tapping the "Select tool,'' magnetics is on. Let's see, resizing it to about there and going back to my brush tool. Three words in here. I'm going to select them and move them approximately centered on the page, nothing to perfect. I'm going to move it up one baseline. Now I have to think to myself, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful", will that fit on here? I'm not sure. Let's see. It might be quite a few lines which would actually make a very beautiful layout if we connect them with a lot of flourishes. What I want to do is make a new layer now for my next line and that layer it's going to be really easy to move my lines around or redo one without having to deal with extracting or erasing from a more complete single layer design. Have nothing in, next is, your house that you. That fit three but it's too big, it's bigger than the other slightly, so I'm shrinking it a little bit, vaguely centering it, moving on immediately without any refinements to line 3. We're really going to have to see here because I might not be able to fit everything. New layer for the fourth line. I'm not even worrying about whether the spacing between my lines is even. New layer, new line. Forgot the comma over here on this line. Going back to this layer. I am pretty happy with this division of words and lines, but not completely. On the second to last line, I want to remove "be" and move it down to the last line. I'm coming back to the previous line, simply taking my eraser tool at a pretty large size, erasing the "be", coming back to the most recent line, moving it over, and just adding "be" here. Do you see how rough this is? This is nowhere close to even nice calligraphy. But sometimes it's actually refreshing to let go like that and let yourself just make something that is ugly and you wouldn't really want anyone to see but here I am showing mine to thousands of people. Now let's just do a tiny bit of refining in terms of centering and in terms of just making sure that our x heights, meaning the height of our lowercase letters, which do not have ascenders or descenders, is roughly the same. Just so that we know that the spacing and size is pretty close to the final product. Starting with line number 1, which will be the lowest of our design layers. I'm going to select it. I'm going to move it up, again, just one baseline here and to be honest in procreate, sometimes these automatic guides that appear sometimes show you that things are centered. It doesn't actually mean that it's centered on the paper. Sometimes it works out that way, sometimes it doesn't. I tend to eyeball it and trust my eye much more than trusting these ruler guides. Coming to the next layer, I'm going to try to zoom in a little bit to make sure this is as visible as possible on the camera, selecting it, I think I'm going to move it up one line and that means that there will be 1,2,3,4 baselines in between the top and the second line. Very roughly centering it again. Let's do the same here. Next line, 1,2,3,4, that means this comes up one line. Same with next, I'll just keep going. I do not care if lines at this point are overlapping or they look wonky. Now I think I'm going to come in and add one new layer and write out the by line, William Morris. I think I'm going to do this in more modern all caps style. Again, so loosely. Because all of this has yet to be refined. Zooming out, very roughly centering it. It's quite large compared to the text overall, so I'm going to want this much smaller. Selecting it, shrinking it, moving it back to approximately the middle, up slightly. Now I'm going to turn my grid off for a second. This is going to look a lot more cohesive once we add flourishes and refine the letters but you're going to see that right now there's too much space at the top and I really don't like that. First of all, now that I have this base pencil sketch and I was able to quickly move around the lines, I have no problem combining the lines into a single layer. That's going to make it easier to move the whole design around, it's going to make it easier to warp it or tweak it if we need to, because we're still going to to actually another layer of pencil sketching over this in a second. So one very quick way to merge a bunch of layers is to pinch them altogether. Now I'm going to just rename this "one". You can do whatever you want but to me that just signifies first draft. I am selecting and moving it a bit more centered on the page and I'm actually going to shrink the whole thing in so that we have some larger margins and then I'll shrink that grid to match. Actually, no, I'm going to shrink that grid to match right now. I'm going to unlock it, I'm going to turn it on and I'm going to combine into a folder so that it's grouped, my sketch and my grid, and that way I can transform them together at the same time. Tapping on the top layer that I want to group, I'm saying combine down, not merge down, combine down. Now, I have this one folder that contains both. If I hit ''Select,'' I can squeeze everything in here. That feels pretty centered on the page, so let me zoom in for the camera to really capture that. Good. Now I'm just going to toggle the grid off for a second so we can see what we have to work with here. 4. Points of Tension: With draft number 1 complete, I'm now going to go through and critique my work with a very critical eye. I can do this just by looking, but for the sake of this video, I'm going to set up a red colored pencil and make a new layer. First of all, coming back to my pencil tool, that's fine. I'm going to turn my whole art board upside-down. This is a design trick that some people use because seeing your letters upside-down makes it much harder to read them and so your eye can focus a lot more on the design and the layout and not get distracted by the words themselves. I'm going to start by looking for what I call points of tension. I think of that as any area where two strokes are about to touch, but they don't quite, basically, like the interaction between two letters, or two lines, or two strokes feels awkward and needs to be resolved. I'm just going to circle those here on a new layer. Right here, this is a great example. Something has to be done here for these to work better with each other. Right here, these are too close. Right here, this is quite close and I think a bit right here, that's a very awkward area. Now, coming in and I'm looking at places that have way too much space in them, big empty spaces in my design. Basically, places the eye would go when looking at the design and would immediately zoom in and see whiteness and those are areas we're going to have to fill with flourishes or creative letter shapes. This area is something of a space, but it's going to be pretty easy with the cross of this ''t'' to do something about it. This area though, between the ascenders of these two "bs", there's a lot of creative stuff that we can do. We're going to have to fill that in. This is a big white space. Over the "o" here is a nice white area that we can do something with I'm sure. Here, again, big white space. Sometimes I have to zoom in and out to really grasp which areas of whiteness are distracting and which aren't. This feels like an empty space that needs filling, so does that. This somewhat maybe not so much. Then up here, on the top line for sure, these two areas. Sometimes, you don't even see the whitespaces necessarily between lines as much as at the beginning or end of a line, because some lines inevitably, are going to have to be much shorter than others. While that can look good and certain designs, sometimes you want to try your best to even them out a little bit. In the longer lines, you're going to have shorter flourishes at the front and end and in the shorter lines, you'll have longer flourishes at the front and end and that adds just a little bit of balance. Yeah, I'm turning it on the side now, but I'm seeing that right here, and right here on this line, and here, and here on this line, here and here on this line. If those areas were filled in, the entire design would have a more cohesive, rectangular shape. 5. Flourish Sketching: Now, my red penciling is done. I'm coming up to this art layer. I'm just going to reduce the opacity a little bit, so it's not so distracting and I'm going to rename it red so I'm not confused. I'm going to make another red pencil layer now. Here I'm making its own layer, and I'm going to focus on flourish sketching. I'm not even really focused now on fully refined design. I'm going to focus now on filling in these spaces and resolving these points of tension. Let's go line by line, section by section. We decided that this H and Y have a point of tension between them. First, let's come here to our pencil line and pencil layer and reduce that opacity dramatically as well. That will just help the red not contrast more with the lettering beneath. Let's lower the Y and lower the H and expand it slightly. Instead of this hump on the Y, oops, I'm writing all my pencil layer, my first draft layer rather. That's still too high. Yeah, we can do something like that for the Y for sure. For the H, we'll definitely have more fun with it in a minute. I don't usually use the eraser tool a lot when I'm doing sketching unless some lines that I made are really distracting me. Filling in this blank space, what we are going to be able to do? Where do we have a ascenders or descenders? That's the first question. Can we pull an ascender or a descender into that space? I think we can take the ascender of this H to fill in either this space or this space or both. Looking ahead, I see that this G here and this T cross in the H ascender are very easily going to fill this blank space. I'm not going to worry about the ascender of H, I'm going to worry about filling in this area with ascender of H. Now for this space, there's actually so many options that we can have fun that we can experiment in a few ways. Here's my T. There's so many fun ways to flourish the T-H ligature, but I think we have more examples later. No, we actually don't, but let's play with a few options. I can cross the T, make the T cross turn into the H. In which case, I'm not really doing much to fill this space and I'm going to have to use this G descender for that purpose. That's one option. I'm actually going to turn off this layer, make a new layer to practice, to test out a different option. What if this G didn't have descender, this T a very minimalist crossbar, and then we just do something with this H, like we did with this H. I'm going to toggle between those two options and see which one I prefer. Definitely I prefer option number 1 because it makes me feel like I'm bringing the first layer down to the second and the second up to the first. Whereas my second option was going to have a big flourish here and a big flourish here and almost no descender flourishes from line 1. Coming back to this layer I'm just going to keep going. The crossbar of this T because there's a lot of flourishing going on there I don't want the left side of the crossbar to have any flourishing at all. I'll keep that part simple. Let's draw in the trunk of the T here. Now, I could do something really fancy and why not. We can always decrease the flourishes if we need to. Now going back up to the first line a little bit, I just want to see about refining the flourishes in this T-H here. What we have done here in previous version, maybe we can actually move up here to layer 1. Since I saved that, I'm going to turn on, going to select it, I'm going to move up here, I'm going to erase that G descender that I had, zoom out. That's going to be fine, but I don't want it so big up there. Making sure I'm on this layer and using this selection tool to make my own selection, I can go cut this flourish part in half roughly and turning off magnetics so I have full control, and merge it a little bit closer. You want to actually redo that completely, so I'm reducing the opacity on this, maybe in a layer. Yeah, sometimes starting again freehand helps a lot more. I'm going to delete that layer below so I don't need it anymore. Now I have relatively better cross flourish on the H that will require only a tiny bit of refining. I'm going to merge this layer by clicking it and say merge down and now all these red flourishes are on their same line. Let's keep going. Right here, we have a situation of a blank space above this Y and to the left of this Y. Now, I sometimes do break up words that are in script and use the descender of a word that's in the middle of the word to fill up a space. Let me show you what I'm talking about instead describing it. If I did that right, this Y and this O wouldn't technically connect but of course they would look connected in that the flourish of this Y it's hugging the baseline of the word and they would look like a pair. Let's try something else though. Let's try the end of this R to get creative. Yeah, I like that better and I'll tell you why. First of all, it doesn't break up this script, and I really do that when it's absolutely necessary. It doesn't break up the script. It fills this area and this area too. Has a double purpose, and then to give this Y a nice classic shape I think. Yeah, maybe a bit lower or a bit higher there. Then, this Y can have flourishing at the beginning, and it won't look like two Y's flourished one on top of the other. Next is this empty space. In this empty space I have the top of this d or the flourish, the t. There's a big flourish here on the r, and if I flourish the top of this d, it could create a point of tension. I think what I'm going to do is keep the center of this d really basic. I think that this t is what's going to fill up this space. Now, this is a great moment to think about how your flourishes interact with each other. Here I add two lines with the letter t. I've chosen to somewhat flourish both of their crossbars. I don't want them to look too similar because creating a repetitive pattern in the design is going to distract. So I don't like that option. I might go with something like this so that where the crossbar of the t exits, it's not a big curl like I have up here. The big curl is a dramatic one on the left side. Continuing on, I'm just going to keep going and insert my commentary when I think that it's really needed. Here, I've reached a point where I realized that my first sketch, this o and believe, are too far apart, the space is just wrong. Coming back to my layers on opening up that first pencil sketch. I'm going to select the word believe and move it over slightly, I think that's going to be a lot better. Now, I'm back to my read. You may notice that up here, I spent a long time figuring out how I wanted this b to interact with the t, and that I kept this l and this k pretty compact because that is the longest line of a quote and I really don't want to add any length if possible. Now, down here on the believe, and again I'm in the position where I have b in the line right above that has a flourish on it. Do I want this b to be flourished? If so, how do I make sure that it stands out and it's differentiated? Let's play with that a little bit, and let's see if we can get something either out of this l or possibly something more creative. I flourished this l and I really hate it because in fact is directly underneath this b, the flourishes are pretty similar and they would have to be in order to come all the way to the left to fill up this space. I'm mixing that and I think I'm going to go back to a lightly flourished b here, something like that. If this r is going to have some [inaudible] to it maybe, then that can somewhat fill that space, and then this l can actually be kept pretty simple. Now, we have this t o here and we have this f coming down from the line above. What are we going to do about this? I do like doing this to ease sometimes, but not right here because it looks like it's the end of the sentence, it fills up the space between the two works, so that's a no. I may have to either rely on the l or you can really try so many options. Things you might not think of, it doesn't have to even be a ascenders or descenders that create flourishes, I don't always, as you see right in both the lowercase letters here. But when there is a tricky situation and I'm really trying to see how things fit, I sometimes have to. I think for now the crossbar of the t is what we'll go with and maybe we will change it downward. This last line, be beautiful, is the very shortest lines, I would love to add extra flourishes, to the front and end. Since I have now slash b at the beginning, I'll keep this b pretty simple. I think that this is good enough for this stage. Next we're just going to do even more refining and to create one cohesive pencil sketch, and then we're going to ink it. 6. Refined Pencil Sketch: Let's look at what we can turn off here. We can definitely turn off this red layer, which was the first red layer that we need, to show ourselves the points of tension and the blank spaces. We can reduce the opacity of the second red layer. I'm saying red to the second red layer that we made, and now emerges to roughly the same opacity. It reduces to roughly the same level as the other pencil sketch that we had. So now what we can do, making a new layer on top, going back to a black. Staying on your pencil, I'm going to turn on streamline very slightly, because now we're really refining curves, and streamline does help a lot with that, especially when you're using the iPad's extremely slick screen. It doesn't have that tooth to hold the pencil to paper, the way that real pencil and paper does. So I'm going to go over this and really start refining the curves. Now is the time, by the way, if you really want to adhere to a baseline or slant to four cylinders to do that. Sometimes you're going to see that the spacing is a little bit off, so what I've just done here, is I want a bit more space between the O and the T, so I selected the work that I have so far on this layer. I'm just going move it slightly to the left, so that now when I work on this T, there is additional space. Now just like step 1, I'm going to put each of these on each line on their own layer, one line per layer. That way, we're going to be able to perfect the centering and the line spacing at the end of this step. I'm realizing that on this top line, I really made sure that the x-height was roughly within the x-height region of my grid. Zooming in a lot, hopefully, you can see these grid lines corresponding to the x-height line, the baseline, and to some degree there are of course exceptions. They go slightly above and below, but for the most part is stuck in that region, whereas in this part of my sketch, for example, the overturn of this h extends way above the x-height line, so I'm going to remedy that in this step. I'm zooming out, so that I can look at this o and this o. I'm already realizing that they're different and I'm trying to figure out how important that is to me to go back and fix, but I want this o to resemble at least a little more closely this other o in the line. Yeah, I am going to go back to the previous layer. For the top line going to delete that o. Now it matches just a little bit better to the rest. Here I'm just coming back and comparing this s from two lines before to this s, to make sure that they are similar. I don't believe in making letters all exactly the same, but I do believe in having style that looks purposeful. So having some similarities does bring the design together. Here, I made the decision to extend this r a little bit in the previous line, but it's going to create a point of tension with this b that I already designed. So I'm just going to come back up and redo that r now. There's too much space here between this b and this e, so I am just selecting that area and screen over a bit. I'm not going to go over the byline William Morris, because I think it's fine as is, and it wasn't flourished anyway, so there's not much sure fine. So now, we can turn off the pencil sketch. We'll save it because, like I said, that William Morris byline is there and we'll go over it later. We can turn off all of our red, and now we're left with our more refined sketch. If we turn off the grid a little bit for just a second, we can see how the end result, or something close to what the end result will look like. 7. Calligraphy Pen "Inking": Now it's time for the fun part, which is the inking and making it actually into calligraphy. What I want you to do is come over here and I don't actually really want to merge these onto one layer right now, because I might still want to refine the design line by line. So I'm going to combine them like we did before into a single folder so that I can easily manipulate the whole design as a group. So coming here I'm going to hit combine down. Let's see, down here what's now called layer six is my top line. So I'm just going to click and drag this up to the top of the group and going from bottom to top, put these in the correct order. So we have, turning on and off the group, we have the entire design here. Now, I'm going to say Pencil sketch, it's the name of the whole group. Now I can turn back on the grid here, and I'm actually just going to remove it from that bottom group, and I'm going to make sure that that first pencil sketches is just completely turned off. Before getting started inking we need to make sure that we're all using the exact same brush. It has taken me a really long time to refine this particular brush and create exactly the brush that I want. So this is fully customized by me. So now that we have imported the brush that I've given you, you can open up your layers panel and we're going to make a new fresh layer, and we're going to reduce the opacity of this sketch here just so that when we trace it, it's going to be a lot easier to see our new design. So I know it's a little bit tedious but since I didn't want to merge all these layers, I'm going to put each one individually down to about 25 percent. Okay. Now here is this layer, the new fresh layer and here is my custom brush and I'm making sure that I'm on pure black. Also make sure that your brush is set to 100 percent opacity as mine was not just now, and I am using this brush at 12 percent brush size if that helps. Okay, and you're used to this by now but new line new layer. Now for the byline I'm just going to turn on that pencil layer from the very beginning, and I have to move it up above the grid because the grid is covering it right now, and then here at the top I have a new layer just for the byline. Let's see, I'm going to move the grid slightly so that at least the baseline will align with my vinyl here. I'm going to try it out with the exact same brush size, but we'll see how that works. 8. Layout Refinements: Now you've turned off all my pencil layers so that I just have my calligraphy showing, and I'm going to group them together like I did this pencil sketch layer, so that I can either transform them as a group or still transform them individually. So again, just combining down and working from the bottom up, to rearrange them from first line down to last line. I'll just title this Calligraphy. Now you see this one group is all combined. So, now I have to ask some critical questions to myself. Let me zoom in on this a little bit for you. Is everything properly centered or centered optically to how I want it? If not, now's the time to move around the layers a little bit. I'm thinking with this, you do not layer, probably should be moved slightly to the left, I forgot the dot on the, I believe. I'm feeling that even though the line heights are technically the same, optically there are not and that's partly because of flourishes and the fact that some lines have more ascenders and descenders than others. So, what I'm feeling is that if I move this second line down a little bit, it will optically make the line spacing between the top three lines more even. Yep, pretty much. Same for the second to last line here, or believe to. William Morris is not centered at all. So, let's take care of that and let's move it down slightly. Now I ask myself if anything looks ugly and should be redone, and to my eye, yes, absolutely, I don't like how this flourished turned out or this crossbar of the T. So I'm going to go in and redo that now. The way I generally do is to redo this one up here, I'm going to reduce the opacity dramatically, make a new layer, just redo the part that needs redoing. Going to the layer underneath. Turn the opacity back on with my eraser tool, just erasing the part that I redid. Turn this back on. I erased slightly too much. My cat is telling me that if I don't give him dinner right now he might actually starve to death. Now I want to redo this T crossbar up. But here I have these two layers now, because I have this h stem separate from the rest of the line. So I've just merged the two. But now coming back here to this crossbar, I'm going to again reduce this opacity, make a new layer above it. Fix this crossbar. Let me start by erasing the original crossbar. That's much finer and nicer. Just going to reposition it slightly. there. Perfect. Now I have merged the new crossbar with that line. Now, you could call this done, but we're going to make some more picky refinements and change the color around, so stay tuned. 9. Finishing Touches: So first of all, here are some of the really picky refinements that I sometimes do and other calligraphers may do as well. One of them is going in and completely evening out all of the fine lines. You see how it's very easy with the iPad to increase up strokes pressure. We go here from a thinner stroke to a thicker stroke,and technically, the thickness here and here are much thicker than the thickness there. Do I care? Not always, but sometimes sure. It depends how formal I want the look to be. If I wanted to do that I can come over to this layer and you can create a copy of it for yourself if you want, by the way, so that if you mess it up, you have something to go back to. I'll actually do that so I can show you a before and after. I'm turning off the original, I'm working with my copy. I'm going to to my eraser, setting it pretty small, and just following along the thin lines here and there, and [inaudible] around to see if there are anymore dramatic instances of it [MUSIC] and so forth and so on. I could keep going like this to the entire design if I wanted to. I think that right now, what I'm going to do is look through to see if they're in really thick or chunky lines that need to be slightly refined, and I'll do that. I'm also going to look for instances like this, that are squared off that I would rather have look a little bit more rounded. [MUSIC] Now just to show you the before and after, if I turn on lets see a take look at right here in this region, before, after, before, after. It's very resettled. Now, unless this is going to be printed really large, I honestly don't know a good reason to spend a lot of time doing such fine refinements, because in a lot of instances of printing, unless it's a very, big difference, you won't actually see the difference that much. But refinements like tweaking curves and things like that, that is very beneficial because obviously that's much more noticeable. Now, here's one thing that I've noticed and this happens all the time when you think your design is finished and then you come back and look at it with fresh eyes and you just see something that you think is such a glaring issue that you can't believe you didn't spot it before. I really don't like the spacing between you and do, it's much, too big. I think I'm going to move you over to the right and then probably center the line again. So that's the third layer,you see, this is why it's nice to have separate layers for lines because I didn't have to weave between the line above and below [MUSIC]. So now spacing is better, but now it's a bit to the right, so I need to recenter whole line, better. 10. Color!: Now let's talk about color. Black and white is such a classic combination that I often have no problem keeping my designs just like this. But let's start with the reverse, the other beautiful classic white on black. Now I'm going to merge all of my calligraphy layers, and if you want to make a copy of this group so that if you ever need the individual layers again, you can have them, that's fine. I'm just going to merge them all, so I'm tapping a group and I'm saying Flatten. Now I'm renaming it and I'm going to rename it black so that now I can copy this layer and then make a white version of it. There are so many ways to recolor things and I go into more versions or more options in my other class, mastering iPad lettering with ProCreate 4. What I'm going to do is just pretty basic. One, I'm going to tap it once and click "Alpha Lock". That means that everything else in the layer except for it's content gets frozen. It won't be affected now, whatever I do on the layer will only affect the content of that layer. Now if I choose another color, let me do something obvious and not wait for a second. If I you choose red, save, and I now tap my auto locked layer and say Fill Layer, it filled it with red. Let's do that with white. That's not even a pure white because it's still showing up here. There we go. Fill again, that's pure white. Now, come in the layers palette to the background color, tap it, and I can change it to pure black. I'm going to change it to a soft black that go really dark charcoal. There you go and voila, you have that classic inverted look which is really stunning. I mean, I love that. I absolutely love that, you could put this on a t-shirt. There you go. Obviously, the sky's the limit here and you can make any combination that you want. Rather than showing you various combinations, now, I'm going to show you how to change individual words and not the entire design. I'm going to rename this white now. Let's say that I just want to make a few of the words pop. Let's say house, useful, and beautiful, I want to be a bold new color. What I can do is I can select holding my selection tool, then come here and I can select just those words that I want to be their own color, house, useful, and beautiful. I'm avoiding the comma after useful and the period after beautiful. Oh yes. Now I have these three words selected, and I'm going to swipe down with three fingers. I'm going to select "Copy and Paste". You could do cut and paste too, but then you're breaking up your design a little bit and I don't think that's usually necessary. Now I have this layer here of only the three words, and I'm going to click it and also lock it again. Now I'm choosing any contrasting color. Let's get a nice one here, how about peach, and tap again, Fill Layer. Now just those three words changed. Maybe more like a golden color. You see how that works, I do sometimes like this I made a series like this that had white backgrounds, black text and then the most crucial keywords of the design of the quote were in red and it ended up being a very, very nice effect. That's one way to break it up, of course, you could do that as well with your byline or any combination. But I'm going to turn that off for now and just go back to my white on charcoal and now you're ready to export this file for use in print or the web or anything in between. Me personally, when I export this file, I go here to share and I do PSD, I make it a Photoshop file. Because then all of my layers remain. When I go to Photoshop, I can treat it just like a Photoshop file and I can do even more editing on my computer that may be easier to do than on the iPad. I find certain things like honestly centering and recoloring can be easier on the computer, especially if it's going into a lab design or something like that that's on my computer anyway. Once I select the Photoshop file, I'll usually have my AirDrop enabled and AirDrop it right over to my desktop computer. But you can, of course, upload this to your Drive or Dropbox or any cloud backup that you have, which is really helpful too. 11. Thank You + My Glove: Thank you so much for following along with this class. I really would love to see the work that you've come up with, and hope truly, that you share in the community section of this class so as your peers and I can all see it and comment on it. Also, please ask questions using the community section. For every one person who does ask a question there, I know that there are multiple people who have the same question. It's really beneficial to not only yourself, but others to post on there. As a final little bonus. I'm just telling you because I know I'm going to get this question, I do in every video, what this glove is, this screen glove is that I was wearing. It's by a company called SmudgeGuard, and I'm going to leave a link below. These are by far the best ones that I've found, and I only found them relatively recently. They come in small, medium, large. They come with one finger or two fingers depending on how many fingers, usually, based on how you hold your hand will rub against the screen. I cannot work without one of these, and this is the best fitting one as I have relatively petite hands and most of the others that I found were a one size fits all solution. I'm now addicted to these. 12. Can You Do Me A Favor?: Thank you for following along with today's class. I hope you really enjoyed it and I have only one small favor to ask of you before you go. In the coming months, I'm looking to add a lot of new content to this channel and I really want to know from you what content you want to see. For example, today's class where I did a project and I give commentary as I went, was after I got some requests for how I make flourish calligraphy layouts. If the format of this class appealed to you and you want to see more like it, please tell me, or if you have other very specific topics that you want me to address or types of projects that you want to see, let me know that too. You can do so in the forum section of this class, or you can head to my website mollysuberthorpe.com and email me directly through the contact page. Either way, I hope to see your work and meet you in the forum and discussion section of this class. Thank you.