Folk Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate + Free Paper Texture & Folk Art Brushes for Procreate

1. Folk Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown, I'm an artist, designer and teacher. Today I want to show you three different ways to create folk style illustrations on your iPad and procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of the brushes and stamps I used to create my folk illustrations, including eight paper texture-brushes, 19 bird and botanical sketch stamps and 13 folk art illustration stamps. I also want to share with you the folk art style font I created so you can add some playful text into your postcard designs. First, I'll show you how I like to create an inspiration board to get started with my folk illustrations. Then we'll create a detailed, symmetrical line-drawing combining animals and plants with bold color. I'll show you some tricks for creating a realistic paper background and a few different ways to create inclines and color fills for your illustration. Then we'll cover several ways to recolor your illustration to create multiple color versions. Next, we'll create patterned animals and plants in a rectangular format that's perfect for print on-demand projects. I'll show you a ton of resources and ideas for folk art patterns and reference images so you can start building your own library of shapes and patterns. Next we'll create a folk art composition around the theme by combining stamps and hand-drawn elements. We'll cover several different methods for creating stamps, then combine multiple illustrations in a collage style composition with bold color. What I love about this process is it allows you to quickly create a beautiful illustration that you could use for print on-demand projects, gifts, or client work. I'll show you how I set up my files to make them easy to upload to print on-demand sites, and how to keep the images flexible so they work for a wide range of projects. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the Stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any Stylus or even your finger. So let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page in the project section right under this video. And you'll find that you need a password to get into that page. I'll put the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see that there's a list of downloads and resources. The first one is the procreate brush set. So to download that and put it in procreate, I'm going to click and hold and click open in a new tab. That will open a new tab and it'll take just a second to download. Once that downloads, you can click Open and procreate. If you don't see that, click More and then find procreate on that list. I'll go ahead and click Open and procreate. And then it'll just open whatever document you had opened last. And you can click the very top brush set there called folk illustrations. And that contains all of the brushes that I'll be referring to in the class today. Then if you go back to the Class Resources page, you'll see that the second item is find animal resource images. So I'm going to click and hold and open a new tab. And this is where I'm going to start my first project. I'm going to start by looking for an animal photo that inspires me. And you could go with anything here. You could choose butterfly, you could choose a bird like I'm going to do. There cats and monkeys and anything you want to use here that has a nice silhouette that you could turn into a line drawing. So all of these images are in the Creative Commons, so they can be used for personal and commercial use. So I'm going to start here by finding an image that I like. I'm going use this cardinal right here. And then I'll just click the download button over on the right. And it will ask me what size and I'll just say original, which is the largest size. Then it opens that image in a new tab. I'll click and hold and click Save Image. So this animal is going to be the centerpiece for my project. So now I want to find some plants that work well with the shape. So because this is a North Carolina bird, I'm going to find some plants that relate to that theme. So you may wanna do a theme where you choose an animal, find out where it's from, and then choose some plants that relate to that animal's location. Or you can just go with plants you like. It's really up to you here. Next I'm going to start building my inspiration board and procreate. 3. Create an Inspiration Board: Before I start these Illustration projects, I really like to create an inspiration board, where I combine all of my reference images, colors, and a few sketches to get me started. I want to show you where I like to get some of my reference images and then how I turn that into sketches and color palettes to use as inspiration. So to start my inspiration board, I'm going to open Procreate and go to my gallery. I'll click the stack where I have all my folk art drawings, and then I'll click plus to create a new canvas. Create custom size. I'm going to work in inches at ten by ten inches at 300 DPI. You could work at any size here. You just want to be sure you're working at a size that gives you enough layers to do a lot of different color layers. I'll probably be doing 20 color layer, so I want to be sure that number is high enough that it gives me that flexibility with color. I'll click create, and now I'm going to start inserting all of my inspiration images. Go to the tool section and insert a photo and grab that cardinal that I just saved and put that over on the canvas. I click the move tool and then pinch to resize that and then making sure magnetics is on so I don't distort the proportions of my bird. I'm going to repeat this same process with several platforms that I've saved. I've got some flowers, a few different leaves, and these are all North Carolina plants that I just found on Google images. I'm not going to trace these, I'm just going to use them as inspiration. When that's the case, it's fine to use any images even if they're copyrighted images, because we're only looking at the shapes were not tracing or not copying the composition. I just want to see how these leaves are shaped, how these petals in the flowers are shaped, and get some inspiration from those. I'm going to repeat the same process with all of my images. I've left a little space in between each of these because I want to have a little space for my sketching. I'm going to grab the nerrender pencil, which comes with procreate, but I put it at the top of this folk illustration sand, because we're going to be using this a lot today. I'll double-click in the black section to get black as my color, and then making share among a new layer. I'm just going to practice drawing some of these forms. I'll look at this leaf here and just do a quick sketch so that I can feel out what is the shape of these leaves in general. I'm not trying to copy how these are spaced. I'm just trying to figure out their overall shape, and especially things like, does the stem come off of the main branch or as the leaf immediately coming out of the stem. It looks like these have a little bit of a space here and extra stem, so I'm just adding little things like that and to get to know the shape. I'm happy with how those leaves look, so I'm going to move on to my next plant. This one, I like how this plant looks, but I am going to change it a little bit, so I've still got this rounded shape, but I'm not going to have these all connected. I want to have them as separate leaves. It's totally fine to change the plant. You don't have to go with exactly what you're seeing in the photo. It's really just a starting place especially if you just don't know where to start or you're feeling a lack of inspiration. Just grab a few plants and start from there and maybe change them a little bit. Nobody is going to look at this and say, it's wrong because I didn't draw the North Carolina plants correctly. It's really just for me as a place to get started and feel comfortable with my shapes, without the pressure of just creating all the shapes from scratch. With these berries, I'm just drawing these little branch shapes and saw a little circle on top. This will be really simple. Just kind of filler plants, and then the last one is this flower here. I like this flower, but I wish we are getting a slightly more interesting view. A lot of times when you look at folk art, you're seeing a profile view of something rather than straight up and down. I think what I'm going to do is pretend that we're turning this flower to the side and draw it from the side as if the flower hasn't opened yet. I can't see the leaves, so I'm just kind of making up what I think these leaves would look like. I'm not too worried about the shapes being perfect, and then when I do my line work on my final piece, I'll go through and just erase all these little overlapping spaces on the petals. Now I have an idea of how this piece is going to be laid out, and I've got my bird as my central piece, and I'll do a tracing of that. The last thing I want to do is just get an idea of color, so I'm selecting each layer that I want to move and just scooting it over to leave me a little bit of space for color. I want to move over just the sleeve, so I'm going to get the selection tool, make sure free hand is selected. Circle that leave, click the move tool and then scooted over and maybe rotate it a little bit. We can grab color from these pictures. I kind of want bright red and I'm just using the variable ink pen on the largest size here. There is a bright red and I want to be sure I'm doing this on a new layer. I'm going to repeat the same process with all of the colors that I want to use for this piece. One thing I like to do with leaf shapes is get my base color, then go to the color wheel and get a lighter color. That's on that same range, kind of just moved towards the white area a little bit on the desk and then we've got a lighter green. Let's go even lighter, and then one more stage lighter. I'd like to do that for a lot of my colors have a dark, medium and light version of each one. You'll see I've already saved all these colors here in that fashion. I have turquoise, lighter, and lighter, so that I have some flexibility to add different layers of color to each piece. You'll see as I create this piece, how I use these colors. One thing I usually do after a setup my colors in this way, is I go to the hue saturation brightness tool and sometimes just bump up the saturation, sometimes change the hue totally. It really just depends on your personal style here. Work for just a little bit to get some colors that you like, and then I'm just going to click and hold each color and then click on my palette to save that as part of my palette, and then of course, if you don't want that in your palate anymore, click and hold and click delete. Now I've got all of my inspiration images, hold my sketches and all of my colors planned out. That's a lot less pressure because now you only have to think about your composition. You don't have to spend time thinking about all of these things as you're creating, essentially trying to multitask as you work this way, we're doing one step at a time, and now you can focus just on putting these in a nice composition together. One thing you could do at this point is go ahead and share your inspiration board as a skill share project. It's nice to share your final project, but it's also interesting to see other people's inspiration boards and to be able to share your own, so if you'd like to do that, you can click the home button and the power button at the same time. That saves it as a screenshot, then we can go to the photos app. Click on that screen shot, click, edit, click the crop button, and then just crop that to remove all the procreate gallery information, and then I'll click Done. Now I can go to skill share right below the video, and in the projects and resources section, we'll click create a project. You have one section here for the cover and one section here for the images, so go ahead and add this as an image. Click in the main area and click Image photo library and then choose that image from my camera roll. You can also put a cover up here. You could put this main images, your cover or one of your final pieces as you recover. I'll just put my inspiration board is my cover for now and maybe change it later. Once you have all that done, you can enter a title. You could also enter some text down here if you want to write something about it and then click publish, then you could go back later once you finish your other projects and add them to this page by clicking edit project. 4. Setting Up Your Canvas: So now, I'm going to take my inspiration board and turn that into a symmetrical folk illustration. One note here, you don't have to work in symmetry. If you'd rather do something that's asymmetrical or maybe just a single image in the center surrounded by plant forms, you could definitely do that with this same process. Back to procreate, I'll open up my inspiration image layers panel, and I'm just going to merge all of those items together. I want to have that accessible but out of my way. I'll just make it invisible for now. I'll click "Plus" to create a new layer. I want to create just a simple cream background. I'm choosing cream as my color. Clicking on that new layer and clicking fill layer. That's my background layer. I'll click "Plus" to create another layer. Then I'm just going to drag down into a slightly darker cream. You can go as dramatic as you want here, you could do a really dark version or just a slight textured version. Just play around with it here and see what works best for you. I'm just going to go as a slightly darker cream. Then making sure I'm on that new layer, I'm going to grab a paper texture. I have several different paper textures here, and what I recommend is trying to layer a few different textures on each other. This one has a handmade paper feel. So I might layer that with something that has a little bit more consistency like this one. There's no right or wrong way to do this. Just play around with it and see what texture works best for your personal style. You could also do it on multiple layers, do each paper texture on a different layer. Then you can turn that on and off and see whether you like that or not. I'm going to go with the slight texture. I use two or three different textures together. If I zoom in there, you can see what the texture looks like. Once you're happy with that background layer, what I like to do is just merge the texture with the main cream color and then just rename that by clicking on it and clicking "Rename". I'll just call this background. Then I'm going to swipe left on that layer and click "Lock". I always do that because, I don't want to accidentally paint or draw on my background layer. That's just one option if you worry that you may destroy your background layer. You can always recreate it if you do, but it makes your life a lot easier if you keep your layers organized. For that same reason, I'm going to click on my inspiration board layer and just name that inspiration. Then this new layer, I'm going to rename that to be guide. This is where I'm going to put down some guide that's going to constrict the shape of my illustration. I'm going to get black as my color. And then on that guide layer, I'm going to choose a shape. I've included a circle and a heart, but you could go with any shape here. You could do just a square, or rectangle, or maybe the shape of some form like an animal or a letter. Go with whatever works for you here. I'm just going to go with the simple circle. You can adjust the size of this template over on the right. I'm just going to click one time to set down that circle. I'll click the Move tool and then I'll click "Fit to Canvas". Now, it's all the way at the outer edges of the Canvas. I don't actually want it to be that big. I want it to be a little bit smaller. So I'll click the Move tool, make sure Magnetics is selected and then just pinch a little bit. You want to be sure you're pinching with both fingers and rather than just one. That's going to make sure that this stays right in the center.You can also double check to be sure that's in the center by turning on the guide, click "Canvas", drawing guide, edit drawing guide on 2D grid. You can bump this all the way up. If you need to change the color of that grid, just slide along the top here. Click "Done" and then if you click the Move tool with the guide layer selected, you can see those little blue dots are lined up with your grid. You may want to zoom in a little bit to see if that's the case. My blue dot is right along my grid lines, so that looks good. I'm going to click on my Layers panel and on my guide layer, I'm going to reduce the opacity a little bit by clicking on that end symbol and reducing the opacity. Then I can see my guide, but it's not really prominent on the screen. I'm also going to lock that guide layer by swiping left and clicking "Lock", that prevents me from drawing on that layer, or moving that layer accidentally. I'm going to name my next layer sketch. This is where I'm going to sketch out the general shape of my drawing. The first thing I'll do, on a new layer, is I'll import my bird. I'll click the two symbol, add, insert a photo, and then find my bird. Because this is going to be a symmetrical piece, I want to place this on either the right or left side and make sure that sized exactly as I want it to be on the Canvas before I add in any other elements. It's really all about the bird here and everything is just decoration. I want to be sure that's getting priority in terms of placement. So I'm happy with where that bird image is, I'm also going to reduce the opacity of that bird. On a new layer, I'm going to just do a basic tracing of this image. I'm not worrying too much about details like all these tiny little feathers. I'm just going to do a general shape here. I'm not going to worry so much about every little aspect being perfect. I'll take just a few minutes to do that. Another thing I'm thinking about as I'm doing this is breaking up the shapes into solid parts. I'm going t be dropping color into these parts, so I want to make sure that I'm creating these solid closed areas where I can drop color. For example, I want to make sure that foot is going to have its whole own area, so I can drop some brown right onto the foot and leg area and it's going to get closed off by that little feather area. So that's one thing I'm thinking about as I'm working on this. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to remove my image and just make sure that that's laid out exactly as I want it to be. One thing I don't like here is that his feet are kind of curved like they should be going over something. I'm just going to change this image here and make it as if his feet are just tucked under his body. Feel free to make little changes like that. This doesn't have to perfectly represent the photo you're using. In fact, it's better if you make some changes, because then it's not just a direct copy of a reference photo. Use that as your guide and then take a lot of liberties to make adjustments. Now, I want another bird that's the same on the opposite side that's totally symmetrical. I'm just going to duplicate that bird, and then I'm going to select both the bird layer and the guide layer. To do this, I need to unlock the guide layer because I need to use that as a guide to help me flip this. So I'm unlocking the guide layer, swiping right on one of those birds, clicking the Move tool and clicking "Flip horizontal". That uses the guide to flip those perfectly horizontally across the Canvas and then I can just go back, and now I can name this bird and merge my two bird layers together. If you're not sure where to start with these birds, I went ahead and created a lot of different birds stamps that you can use for the sketches. If you see a bird on there that you like, feel free to do the same process that I just did. Place the bird, duplicate it , swipe right on the guide layer, click the Move tool, Flip horizontal, and there's the beginning of your composition. You can feel free to use any of those. I trace those all from birds from the Flickr Commons resource that I showed you earlier. 5. Layout and Sketching: We can go to our sketch layer that I created and I want to be sure that layer is set to symmetry. So I'll click on my tool symbol, click canvas, edit, drawing guide, symmetry. Then I want to make sure that the correct symmetry is selected. So this is vertical symmetry. It's going to do symmetry from left to right. You may want to use one of these other options depending on your composition. But for me, I want to use the vertical symmetry here. So I'll click done. Make sure that minor under pencil is selected and on my sketch layer, I'm just going to take a minute to sketch out where I want all of my shapes from my inspiration board. So you can bring back your inspiration board if you've forgotten anything. Or you can just do it by memory depending on how comfortable you feel with those shapes. So I always check my symmetry before I start zooming in, in drawing. I usually start with just general shapes. So I'll put a flower here and I think another flower would fit here. So I'm kind of just mapping out shapes at this point. I'm not too worried about perfect sizing or perfect dimensions or perspective. I'm just blocking out areas and thinking about repeating shapes. So, one way to make your piece look cohesive is to repeat the same shape in several different areas. So I know I've got at least one, two, three, four, five flowers. I'll do one in the middle and just play around with the sizing of all of these, and then do the same process with my leaves. I'm also trying to think about having these flowers come from different directions. I have one that's shooting up, I have one that's shooting down, and then some that are shooting out. I wouldn't want to place them all in the same direction because that's just going to create too much emphasis on those flowers. Whereas I really want the bird to be the central most important part of depths. And the flowers are really just decorative. So you can see this is a really loose sketch. I'm really just mapping out shapes, mapping out the areas where each of these plants will go. Now, on that sketch layer, I'm going to reduce the opacity and duplicate that layer so that I keep that assisted feature. Click on at one time and click clear. So now I just have a blank assisted layer and I'll increase the opacity to a 100%. So, on this new sketch layer, I'm going to repeat the same process, but it'll be a more refined version. So I'm going to go through really thinking about how exactly I want this inking to look and going deep into even a little detail lines. So I'll take just a few minutes to do that. You can see how this new sketch doesn't perfectly match my original. That's fine. I'm really trying to make some adjustments here to make sure things are spaced nicely. You can see how this is much more refined than the first sketch layer. I'm really getting an idea of exactly where I want to lay this ink down. So, I'll start with all my flowers and then I'll move on to the leaf forms. You can see how I really try to vary these leaf shapes. If you make every single leaf the same, it gets a little bit redundant. But if you intentionally do some big variations, the piece just has a little more visual interest overall. So go ahead and start adding in these leaf shapes one at a time. So this is always when I just take a moment to step back and make sure everything looks right. So, you'll often find this stage that some things need to be adjusted that you can go ahead and start adding in some of the fillers like those berries. So I'm really saving the berries for that purpose. I want to find spots that just aren't quite filled, then really use the flexibility of that shape to totally fill that space. Then I'll just decide on a size for these berries and zoom out and make sure that looks right. They seem a little bit large, so I'm going to reduce the size. So, I think that process is really important. Just zoom out a little bit before you go too deep into any one shape to make sure it looks right with the overall proportion of the piece. 6. Inking Your Sketch: So once you're happy with your sketch, it's time to start putting down some inclines and you'll see that I like to do my inclines and a color that's slightly darker than the color I planned to fill each object with. But you can certainly do all of your inclines in the same color like black or white. So just choose whatever works best for your personal style here. The first thing I like to do is go ahead and make my original sketch layer invisible. I don't need that anymore. I just need my main sketch layer. I also don't need my guide, so I just like to get things out of my way so that I can really see what I'm doing and just organize my layers a little bit so I don't get confused with all the new ink layers. I'll drag the inspiration layer here below the background. I can delete my bird image. I don't need that anymore. I can merge my bird with my sketch. So now I've got all of that on one layer. I can delete my original sketch. I can delete my guide. Now I just have the background and the sketch and everything else is out of my way. Another reason I do that is because you are limited to how many layers you can add in procreate. So I like to go ahead and clear all that up before I start drinking so you don't have to worry about that later. I'm going to create a new layer, and then I'll set that layer to vertical symmetry Canvas. Turn on the drawing guide, edit drawing guide, symmetry, vertical, done and you can set that color to whatever you want. Press done. Before I start inking, I'm just going to duplicate that a few times because I just need a bunch of assisted layers and I don't want to have to go back and do that over and over, so I'll just duplicate a ton of assisted layers here. Now these all have vertical symmetry. The reason I do that is because I want to have each color on a different layer. I want to retain the flexibility to change any color at any time. So every single new color I put down, I'm going to do that on a different layer. I'll go to my sketch layer, click the "n" symbol and reduce the opacity so I can just barely see it. Then on a new layer, I'll get my first color, and I'm going to start with this dark pink pitch kind of color, and I'm going to use the variable ink brash. Let's go with a small size here. I'm going to have my brush on four percent, and the nice thing about this brush is its pressure sensitive so you can get thin lines or thicker lines just by pressing if you have the Apple pencil, of course. So I'm going to start by adding in these outlines. And I'm being really careful here to make sure I close my inclines. So for example, I wouldn't want to do this because when you zoom in, there's an open space here. Later I'm going to come through and do some color dropping, so I just want to double-check that every single line I create is totally meeting the other. I always intentionally go through the first line a little bit just to make sure I'm fully closing that space. So if you have some trouble with your color dropping later on, you know that the step wasn't done properly and it takes a lot of extra time. So just double-check that as you ink. The nice thing about starting with this sketch here is, right now, I don't have to think about shapes at all. I just have to think about making my inclines look nice and smooth. I find that the less you have to think about with each step, the better you can complete that step. So starting with this sketch just takes a lot of pressure off right now you can kind of just relax and think about the inclines. Notice how the pressure sensitivity changes as you put your pencil down. So I'll take just a few minutes to complete the inclines on all of these shapes. So once you're happy with that, it's time to go to the next color and I just want to be sure that I move to my next assisted layer so that I'm not adding a different color on the same layer. So that was my marine layer, and now I'm going to do the leaves in a darker green. One thing you also may want to do is move your stem and leaves below the actual flower. That way when you start these stems from the flower, you don't have a weird overlap area. I'm happy with those leaves now I'm going to go to a new layer and start working on my next green color on my leaves, and moving to the next set of leaves, again, I'm going to move to a new layer. I also want to make a note here, if you do accidentally not moved to a new layer, it's not a huge deal. You can always separate things onto a new layer, so let's say I wanted to move one of these leaves onto a new layer. I can get my free hand Selection Tool. Circle those leaves, dragged down three fingers and click, cut and paste, cut it off on layer, paste it onto another one. Then we've just got that shape on a new layer, so I'll just tap two fingers to step back because I don't actually want to do that. But you understand the process of you do make a mistake there. It's not a huge deal. So I'll do my last set of leaves now and then move on to my cardinal. You can see that I decided to make the beak a different color. It just didn't look quite right and red. So there are some times where you need to combine multiple colors on a single layer just depending on the shape. 7. Adding Fills: So once you have all of your inclines finished, it's time to start filling in the composition with some color. I'm going to be using different colors for each platform, but you could certainly use the same color for all of your fills if that works better for your personal style. The first thing I'll do is decide which item I'm going to color first. I'm going to color my flower petals here. I can go ahead and make my sketch layer invisible. I don't need that anymore. I'm going to click on my flower petals layer one time and click reference. I want this color dropping that I'm going to do to reference that layer. Meaning, grab one of those assisted layers that's up here and just drag it below my flower petals. So on that layer right below my flower petals, I'm going to grab a different color. I'm just going to drop the color into every other petal. You could do the same color on every petal. That's just totally up to you. I like to do different colors on the flower petals just to really differentiate each petal. I try to vary which petal is getting the color, so sometimes it's the center, and sometimes it's the one right after the center. I'll do the same process with a slightly darker color. Now I will repeat the same process with the next shape, which would be the leaves for these flowers. I'll click on that leaf layer one time, click reference. That's changing the reference from the flower layer to this new leaf layer. I'll drag one of those assisted layers just below my leaf layer and get a new color. Then I'll just drag that color into every single leaf. I think you get the idea here. I'm going to repeat the same process with all of my leaves. I'll start with these rounded ones at the top, setting it as a reference layer. Bring one of those assisted layers right below it and get a lighter color. One thing you may want do at some point is change the color of one of these lines. I wish that I had made my cardinal lines a little bit darker, more of a shade like that. What I'm going to do is swipe right on that cardinal layer and I'll put in the [inaudible] , so I can fill it with some color. I'll click one time and click fill layer. I'm going to check and see if that's dark enough by grabbing the lighter red that I want to use on a new layer and just draw it in there. I like that, but I wish that this was a little bit darker, so I'll click on that color and then go tiny bit darker back to my cardinal layer click fill. Now you can see I've got a really dark layer. I'll check it out, the red I want to use and I like that contrast, so I'm going to use that color to fill my cardinal. First I'll, just make sure that I've set as my reference layer, my cardinal outline. Then on that layer right below it, drag and drop to put that color down. For these feathers, I'm just going to color every other feather so that I can have an alternating color on the feathers. I'm just going to draw some brown on a new layer over this existing beak color because I really want that beak to be brown. Then I can just get a lighter brown and fill that up on a new layer below that layer. 8. Detail and Color Versions: So once you've finished filling in the illustration with some color, it's time to start adding in some detail work. Obviously this part is optional, but I think it adds some beautiful contrast and visual interest to the whole composition. So I'm going to start with my flowers. So I want to make sure I'm on the layer that contains these ink lines.And I'm going to grab my same pen, variable ink pen and make sure it's at a nice size. And to get that color, I can just click and hold on the ink line. I think I'm just going to add some little variation lines at the bottom of each of these flowers. So I'll take just a minute to do that. I'm going to repeat the same process on some of these leaves. And I'm just double checking that I'm on the layer that contains these green ink lines. Now that I've added some detail to those, I'm going to set that as a reference layer and go to the layer below that that already has some color to do it. I'm going to get a wider green and just drop it in there so that I have a few different greens going on on this piece. Now I'm going to repeat the same process with all of my other leaves. For the berries, I'm just going put a little white dot on each one, rather than adding in any decoration. I'm just going to dot each one like that with the variable ink brush. I always finish my work by creating a few different color versions. So I want to show you a few different ways that I like to create color versions of this type of illustration. So first I'll go to my gallery, then I'll click "Select" and click on that illustration and click "Duplicate.". And I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that three times because I know I want to do a few different color versions and I never want to edit my original. I want to keep my original with all of its layers, all of the inclines separate from the fills.So I never touch that original again unless it's to make an edit. I'm going to go to my first duplicate. The first option here would be to change the color of one single element. So let's say, for example, the red and pink is a little bit of a clash for you and you're not happy with how that turned out. So I'm going to merge the pink flower inclines with the pink flower fills just by pinching this together. Then I'm going to click on that layer, click hue saturation brightness and just adjust that one element to get a different color. So you might find that a blue would be a nice contrast here, rather than competing with the red. We could also bring down the saturation a little bit or bump up the brightness. So this is a great time to play around with individual elements. You could do the same thing for any elements here. You just want to be sure you're merging the correct items. So you find the outline, find the fill, merger together, hue, saturation, brightness and then make some changes on that individual item. So that's our first option in terms of changing color. So the next option, if I go to my second duplicated item, would be to merge all of the ink layers and make those a single color. So I'm going to merge my beak layer with my bird layer. So first I just need to get these all together. So I'm going to get all of my inclines and just move them so that they're all beside each other. And then one at a time, I'm going to merge those together. So once you have all of your inclines merged onto a single layer, you can go to hue saturation brightness and maybe change it to a different color. Or maybe just take the saturation all the way down and take the brightness all the way down and turn it black. So you can get a really nice contrast between the fills and the inclines if you just turn that incline black. Another thing we could do is merge all of the fills or merge all of the fills except for certain items. So let's say for example, I'm going to merge all of the fills except for the bird and the pink flowers. So now I've got the pink flowers on one layer. I have got the bird on one layer. Then on this other layer, I can go and just do something totally different. I could adjust the colors of those. I could bring down the saturation and bring up the brightness so it's all white. So then you can get a nice color contrasts between the pink and the red, but then you just have that white kind of filler. If we do one last color version change. What I'll do for this one is first merge all the inclines and turn those black. So we can turn those black by going to hue saturation brightness. Or you can just get black and my color palette, swipe right to alpha lock that layer that has all of my lines on it. Click one time and click fill, that turns all of those black. Now I'm going to keep my bird fill on one layer and merge all my other fills under one single layer. So what I want to do is get a bright turquoise to contrast with the red. So find a turquoise on my color palette. Go to that fill layer, swipe right, click one time and click fill. So now I have some nice contrast here. The birds really stand out and the blue is really just decoration. So I really suggest you take some time to play around with color versions. Once you do all this work to create these beautiful lines, you can get so many different pieces and ideas out of these single inclined projects. So I think you can see why it's important to keep your layers organized here so that you do have this flexibility when you get to the end. One last piece I want to show you is a non symmetrical option. I've done a very similar piece, but with the inclines, I just use the Nurinder pencil rather than the variable ink brush. So I've done the exact same thing I just added in a tea pot in the center. So this piece is not symmetrical. It has a little bit more whimsy and movement to it. So feel free to ignore the symmetry part of this and just go for something that features a central image. And you could do this with a sewing machine, a cup. Really any object that you could think of to put in the center and then just surround it by some flowers that you like. So let's go ahead and move on to the next project. 9. Creating a Design Area: For this next project, we're going to create some bold patterned illustrations. I'll be using birds as my inspiration, but you could use any animal here. You could also use an object like a bicycle or sewing machine or anything that works for your personal style or interests. The first thing I'll do is create a new image, create custom size, and I'll work in inches again, and for this one I'm going to work at 14 by 20 inches. I find this is a good size for print on demand projects, it works for a lot of different uses like art prints, notebook, cell phones. I like the shape, but you can obviously work at any size here. I'll click Create, and I'm going to start like we did last time by choosing a color and filling the layer with that color, then on a new layer, I'll get a slightly darker color, and I'm just going to alternate a few different paper textures here to get a little bit of variation. You can see I went with a subtle paper texture, but you can go with something more dramatic, you could use a darker color, you could do more layers, whatever works for your style here. I'm going to create a new layer and go to Canvas, drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and on the symmetry tab I'm going to turn on the quadrant symmetry. That's going to repeat all four corners the same image, so on that layer I'll get black is my color, and narrator pencil as my brush, and I just want to create some kind of shape here to hold my image. There are a few different ways you could do that it depends on if you want to have the exact same distance from left to right and top to bottom. I might start by just sketching in a shape that I like. I'm happy with that shape, but I want to measure this perfectly. What I'll do is on a new layer, I'm going to go up to the top here and take a measurement. I'll just draw this line, stop at where my border is and then put down two fingers to make this perfectly snap to 90 degrees. That's my measurement line back on my layer where my guide will be, I'm going to click one time and click Clear, so now that's blank, and same pencil, I'm just going to draw a line across here that perfectly meets that guide. Again, I'm going to put down as two fingers. I'm going to click the Move tool on my line and make my line perfectly meet. I'm going to be using that as a measurement just using the Move tool to make sure this line perfectly meets that line. I'm going to take my move tool with this line layer selected and rotate that two times so that it's perfectly horizontal, and then take it over to the edge. I just want to zoom in here so that I can get a closer view and pull this line right to the very edge. I'm measuring the exact same distance from here to here and here to here. I can go back to my assisted guide layer, draw a down like this and hold to get a straight line, two fingers down to your perfectly 90 degrees. Then I can just make my guide layer invisible and erase this extra line that I don't need. I have this nice shape in the center, and at this point you could get your Move Tool and with magnetic selected pinch to make it smaller. Really just depends on what size you want to work with here. There's no right or wrong way to do this, it's really just your personal style. It doesn't have to be the exact same distance right to left, top to bottom. I could change this item so that it's a little more tall than it is long, so fill out what works best for your style and you may do a few different pieces like this and each one has a different shape. If you'd like this shape, you may want to go to your gallery at this point and click Select, click on that item and click duplicate. If you ever want to start that document again without having to do all that work, you've got that right there for you. I do tend to do that because I like to work in series, I'll maybe do five like this before moving on my next project. It's totally up to you if you think you'll be doing more of these, that might be worth your time to just make a duplicate. 10. Creating Shapes and Patterns: The next thing I want to do is start bringing in some images. On a new layer, I'll click "Add", insert a photo, and find the image that I want to use. This is the image I got from the website called Pixabay. You'll find a link to this and a few other websites like it. On the section here that says,"See More Vintage Image Resources". There's vintage images, they're modern images, all kinds of free resources with images that are free for personal and commercial use. I use the one called Pixabay that you can find from that side. What I like about this image is it's a nice horizontal piece that's going to fit really nicely across my image. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that so I can really see how the swan fits within my guide. I'm making sure that magnetics is selected anytime I'm resizing because I don't want to distort the proportions of this bird because it would make it look a little bit off. Once you have that in place, we can create a new layer and get the variable ink brush, again, I'm just going to start with an outline. I'm not worrying so much about this being perfect. I'm just going to do a really loose flowing tracing of this bird. I'm also adding in those areas that you can't see that are under the water. That's something to think about. A lot of these bird images you can't quite see everything you need to to get the whole picture. Another thing I'm going to do here is simplify this drawing. I want to have some space here to add in some pattern. I'm just going to break up these wings into few different spaces. I'll try to do four total. Then I'm just going to drag and drop to fill this whole shape with some color. You can see it looks like a swan, but it's definitely a simplified version. I'm going to reduce the opacity of the black layer a little bit and get my eraser tool with the variable ink brush and just erase some of these basic features of this piece. So the beak and then I'm also going to go through and turn these areas where the wings meet at the back into some spaces for pattern. I'm going to get a medium size brush here to create a line that's just bold enough to see, but not too distracting. I'm also going to close these areas off, even though those aren't naturally closed on the bird, I'm trying to close off areas where I can add in pattern. That's something I'm always thinking about as I create these folk art pieces is, how am I going to break this up into a pattern? There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's really just following the shape of the original form and then just choosing some spaces to cut it apart. For example, the neck here, I'm just going to break this into a few little robust shapes. You don't have to break it up as much as I have. You could just do more solid space. It's totally up to you here. I'm going to make this swan picture invisible and increase the capacity of my solid block 1. Then I'm going to start going through and adding some pattern. One thing I like to think about as I add pattern to these is variation. If I add some lines up here, then I'll add some dots below it. It's really just a matter of thinking about what pieces are surrounding it and earning something different beside it. I'm going to show you a few different patterns that I like to use, but I also want to share with you a resource of a ton of different patterns. If we go back to the Class downloads page, "See the Pattern Pinterest Board", click that one time and on this board you will see a ton of different pattern ideas. If you're having trouble knowing what pattern to fill a piece with next, just go to this board and find a pattern. You, of course, wouldn't want to copy multiple patterns from the same piece. But let's say, for example, curved horizontal lines. That's a great idea here or maybe some triangles with lines separating them. What I do is if I'm just having trouble thinking of an idea, I'll go to this board and grab one idea from one piece and then go back to my illustration and start drawing. You can see I've already got three different types of variation here, some solid lines, some dots, then just some little curved fish scale type pattern. I'm going to repeat this process just playing around with some different pattern ideas on each piece. We've decided to break this pattern into two pieces. Then I just need to adjust as feathers around it. You can see I really just play around with the shape. Once you get the basic shape of a bird, it doesn't have to remain perfectly as it was in the picture. People still know that it's a bird. In fact, folk art always has these little inconsistencies in it and that's what makes it folk art. So feel free to play around here and just try something and add in your own personal style. That's what's going to make this piece look unique, is changing things, making things different than someone might expect. Now that I've completed a bunch of pattern on this piece, I'm just going to click "the Move tool" shift it over so it's right in the center. I like to leave some big blank, open areas, that just depends on your personal style. You could fill everything with pattern here. But I like to leave some contrasts for some dense pattern areas and then some big blocky areas. I'm going to create a new layer and repeat the same process with the different bird on the bottom. Again, I chose a bird that has a horizontal shape to it. I reduce the opacity of it a little bit. I'm realizing, while I like the shape of this bird, I do need to change it a little bit so it fits my composition better. Number one, I'm going to just have one wing and not show both. Number two, I'm going to change the overall shape of this bird so that his legs are actually on the bottom rather than the side and shift the tail over as well. Again, sometimes you tracing something and sometimes you just use it as inspiration. In this case I'm using half of this bird and then the other half I'm going to make up. So I'll start by tracing the parts that I like. Then I'm just going to bring the body down around the back like this. Then just add in some tail feathers here that meet the same line as these back feathers. Another thing I'm going to add here is just some little stick legs. You see this a lot in folk art, it doesn't have to depict the piece perfectly, just has to show the shape of that thing. Again, I'll make this semi-transparent so that I can see just where to put a few basic elements of this bird. If I feel like I have a big dead space, I'll just break it up into pattern. It doesn't really matter exactly what the pattern is, it just coordinates that area off and shows you that's the breast of the bird. I'll do the same thing here with the tail. 11. Filling Space and Adding Color: Now that I have those two birds in place, I'm going to create a new layer to add something in the center. I'll turn on my symmetry tool. I'll set that to vertical symmetry, and click, "Done." On that layer, I just want to play around with some shapes. You could do a flower shape here, you could do some leaves. You can even put another bird in the center, whatever works for your personal style here. I'm going to take just a minute to create a flower shape. Now that I've created the shape, I'm going to go ahead and break it up into a few different patterns. Of course, there's no right way to do this. It really just depends on the style of your piece. I'm just going to make some lines across my petals here. But you could also make lines to separate the petals. You could keep it connected to the stem, or disconnected from the stem like I did. I'll take just a few minutes to add some veins to these leaves. What I like to do at this point is choose a shape to fill in some of these other areas that are open. I'm going to go with a really simple leaf shape. I'm going to start by sticking with symmetry layer that I was already working on. Just go through here and add some really simple leaf shapes. Just curve into these open spaces. You can see that they got a little bit too high on this one. What I'm going to do is go to this side and adjust so that it works well for this one side. What I would like to do to finish off those leaves is just come through and cut them so that we have one side that's detached. Then we can add a little bit of color too. I want to repeat that same process on the bottom, but my bird is a little bit too big. I'm just going to get the move tool and shrink it down just a tiny bit so that I have space for at least a few leaves in there. So I've done all the leaves I can fit on this cemetery layer. I'm going to create a new layer that's not set the asymmetry. I can just go through and fill in some of these areas that were on one side but not the other. I just merged that new layer with the symmetry layer. All my leaves are on the same layer now, and I'm going to create a new layer and do some leaves just here in the corner because that's not going to work with the symmetry tool. At this point, I like to just merge all of the black layers together and delete everything else so I can make my guide invisible. I've just got that black layer and then I've got my background layers below it. Now I want to start adding some color to this. I'm going to set the layer to, "Multiply." Multiplies, going to blend this color with my paper texture so that I have some nice texture showing through every time I add a little bit of color. The first color I'm going to add is just some light pink, peach color. I'm just going to add it to these inner sides of my leaves and that should fill all of the areas except for the detached parts. For the next color, I'm going to get a bright pink. I tried to spread these colors out. If I put some pink here in the center, then I'll also go down and add some to the bird at the bottom just so the colors are really spread out. I'll continue here just dropping color all around this piece. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I think the color and the contrast between the spacing and the patterning is really nicely balanced. I wanted to show you one other piece with a similar feel. I created this piece with the same idea. I created some birds on the sides, and I added a teacup and a teapot on the center. This doesn't have to be centered around the bird. It could certainly be centered around another object like a bicycle, a sewing machine, whatever topic you want to cover. Then I've just added in those same leaves here. This is also a great chance to add in some text. That's really easy with the new procreate texts tool. I'm just going to click "add text". Then I'm just going to type tea time. The font I am using here is one I created specifically for folk art illustrations. If you want to use this font, you can download it from the Class Downloads and Resources page. To do that, just go back to the page, click and hold on the link that says, download my folk art font. Then click "Procreate". Or if you don't see procreate, click, "More", then choose procreate from the list. That will add the font to your list of fonts in procreate, and go to, "Edit Style" and make sure that's centered and it is. Then choose black as my color. I'll click the, "Move tool" and move that into place. Just zoom in a little bit here and get the sizing and placement right. Then you have a nice art print all centered around the theme of tea, and these could be tea leaves. You could change them to green if you want to have more of a tea leaf feel. That's just a couple of ideas for how you could use the same style for a lot of different compositions. Let's go ahead and move on to our last project. 12. Creating Your Collage Pieces: For this last project, we're going to create a collage style illustration around a theme. So the first step is to choose a theme and then we'll create a ton of stamps surrounding that theme and finally combine them all into an illustration. So I'll be using the theme of art and crafts.But you could go with any theme here. It could be gardening, cooking, music, anything that works for your personal style and interests. So let's get started by taking a look at some inspiration. So I'll go back to the class resources page and you'll see the folk illustrations Pinterest board. If you scan through this board, you'll see some really interesting themes. Here is a potted plant theme. They created a lot of different potted plant shapes, fill them with some pattern, and then put a few various plants around the image. You could also do an abstract piece here are just some abstract shapes layered on top of one another. Or you could do some kind of insect or animal. So you can scroll through here and see all of the various options and maybe even get some ideas for your own piece. Here's a nice one with fish in various colors. You can choose a single image and then add some text. So I recommend you start out by just scrolling through to get some ideas for some color palettes, and maybe also for some content for your image. So I'm going to choose crafts as my theme. And I like to start by just brainstorming. So I'll create an image that's 14 by 14 inches at 300 DPI. And click "Create". You could work in any size here. I like working at this size because it allows me to put this onto different canvases for print on-demand projects. So you can choose here whatever size works best for your final use. I'm going to grab the Narinder pencil with a pure black, and I'm on this new layer. I'm going to start by just writing out my theme. And then I'm going to take a minute to think about some shapes that would work to represent this theme. We've got a lot of ideas here: scissors, pencils, a paintbrush, sewing machine, glue, a thimble, a bobbin, a needle, a notebook. I might not do all of these, but I like to start with a lot of ideas so that I have a lot to choose from, rather than just trying to create a few great ideas. Just put down a ton of ideas and then pull the best ones out. So I'm going to make that layer invisible and start with the first item on my list, which is scissors. So for this one I'm going to do a tracing. So I'll insert a photo and I have a picture of scissors here. If you're going to do this, you could decide. Do you want antique scissors? Do you want modern scissors? So there are some style choices to make there. Then I'm going to create a new layer and make my scissor layer invisible. Get my variable ink brash on that new layer, and just start with a silhouette, just like we did with the birds. You can see I'm following this tracing very loosely. I'm not trying to perfectly capture this exact pair of scissors, but I am just using the basic shapes to help get me started. Just Like we did with the bird, I want to break this up into some color spaces. So I'm thinking about that as I create each of these, how will the handle separate from the base of the scissors? How will the blade separate from each other? Where do I want the colors to meet? I'll take just a minute to plan that out. I'm happy with how that looks. I'm going to return the opacity to that image and make my photo of the scissors invisible. One really important step here is making sure that you're working with pure black and white. So when I get my black color, I'm double-clicking in the black section and that's getting a pure black. The white will automatically reappear white background. So you don't have to mess with that unless you've already changed the background on this palette, then you can just double-click in the white area to be sure you've got pure white. If you don't do that, the stamp that we're creating won't set down a pure color. So I'm going to click the tool symbol, click "Share". I'm going to save this as a PNG file. I've tried saving it as a JPEG and with the recent procreate update, it's saving with a different color background. I'm actually using PNGs to create my stamps now. So I'll click "PNG", "Save image". You can just go to any of the stamps that you see here on this list. "Swipe left", click "Duplicate". Click on the "Stamp", click "Source", insert photo, and then choose your scissor image that you just created. Then you could rename that. You could go to general and adjust the preview so that it shows up differently in that window. I'm going to be repeating the same process with all of the other ideas on my list. The next idea on my list is pencils. On a new layer, I'm going to set it to "Symmetry canvas", turn on the drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and set it to vertical symmetry. Click "Done". Using that same variable, ink brush, I'm just going to draw a pencil. So you could do a thin pencil, you could do a thick pencil. It really doesn't matter. This is your own personal style and pencils come in all widths. So you could add an eraser here on the bottom. And then maybe some lines to show the bottom of the eraser. You could add in, maybe the sharpening lines here, and maybe even a little bit of black on the tip to show the pencil has color on the end. You could go deeper with this. Maybe you want to just totally fill this piece and then start erasing your shapes instead of drawing them in. Either way works, I just suggest that you choose a style and stick with it. So if you've been a erasing the designs on your previous stamps, go ahead and erase them on this too, so that your work has a cohesive feel. We could add in some decoration. You could put some pattern across your pencil, break it up into spaces, and add different patterns in each one, whatever you want to do here, just go crazy and maybe try it three or four different ways just to see what works best for your style. I'll go ahead and do the same process. "Share", "PNG", "Save image", "Swipe left", "Duplicate", "Source", insert a photo, and insert the pencil. I'm just going to adjust the preview, so that pencil looks nice in the window. I just renamed that pencil. I've already made all my stamps but when you're doing this, you would just repeat the same process over and over until you have all of the stamps that you want to use. Then we can start working on our background. So just like I did in the last piece, I'll click "Fill layer" with a cream color, get a slightly darker cream and add some paper texture. 13. Assembling and Coloring: On a new layer, I'm going to get black this my color and start adding in my stamps. I put all of these stamps in the set. If you want to try out my stamps, you can feel free to use these. I'll go ahead one at a time. Put down my stamp, put it into place wherever I think works for the composition. One note here, when you're adding these stamps, you want to be sure to put them down at the size that you want to use or bigger. You don't want to make it small and then try to enlarge it later. Enlarging always leads to blurriness. You want to start large and make it smaller rather than starting small and making it larger. I repeat the same process with all the stamps I want to use in this piece. You can see that I am putting each stamp on a different layer. I want to retain that flexibility so I can go in and adjust the arrangement at anytime. One thing I like to do with these is make sure that the spaces in between objects are either really close or big enough to fit leaves. For this piece, I scooted it to the left, a little because I know I can fit a leaf right there, but I don't think I can fit anything there. I'm just going to smash those two together so they're nice and close. That gives me plenty of space to add my filler leaves. Obviously, you don't have to do the filler leaves. I think it adds a nice foul look to the piece, but it's totally up to you here. Just like we did in the last piece, I'm going to go through and fill in all these empty spaces with some nice flowing leaves. Again, I always try to think about the direction of elements that are similar. Because my last leaf sat here was facing down, I'm going to make this one facing up. That when someone looks at the straight down get their eyes drawn to the patterning of leaves. The leaves are really just filler. If you make them in different directions, it gives more of a feeling of a filler rather than an essential part of the composition. Once you're happy with your composition, I like to just go ahead and merge all the images onto one layer. Then I can start color dropping on all the little areas that I want to add color too. I'm also going to set that layer to multiply again by clicking on the en symbol and clicking multiply. Just so that color really blends in nicely with my paper. I'll take just a few minutes to work on all of these colors spaces. One last thing I like to do with these is try them out on different sized canvases. Sometimes this is really tightly packed way works well for social media, but not so much for art prints are greeting cards. I'm just going to click on that layer and click the Move tool, drag down three fingers and click copy. Now I have that saved to my clipboard. I'm going to go back to my gallery, create a new canvas that is 21 x 30 inches. This is a size I would like to work with, but you could go with any size here that works for your final use. I'll just do a quick background here. Once you're happy with how that background looks, you can drag down three fingers and click Paste. That's going to paste that image that you just created into the very center. We can set it to multiply because when you copy something, it does not copy the blending mode, which is multiply in this case. I'm happy with how this turned out, but I'm going to make my paper a little bit brighter. Just so that is all really visible, so my color is really shining through. That will be a beautiful art print or could be the front of a greeting card if you made it a little bit larger than the greeting card. I'm going to go ahead and call this piece finished. I want to show you one last option for this type of composition. A piece that I've already completed. I didn't use the leaves on this piece, I just kept it really loose. This is definitely an option. If you'll like the more loose open feel of this piece, just keep it simple and add just a few stamps and forget about the leaves. That would be a really nice print on demand project as well. I hope you enjoyed this class that you feel inspired to start creating your own folk style illustrations. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create vector surface designs in Affinity Designer. How to create hand-drawn botanicals, and how to combine metallics and ink to create detailed tiles. Check this out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of iPad downloads and resources on my website. People like to get more resources like the ones you got for this class. Check out my website. I would absolutely love to see your fogarty illustrations, so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare by taking a screenshot and cropping it in the photos app, just like I showed you in my class, or you could put your image on Facebook or Instagram and tag me at Liz Kohler Brown. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, and digital planners. That's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad, drawing, painting, and digital planning. Get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world and conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work to help the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You could reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.