Transcripts
1. Introduction: hi. Today I'm going to teach you how easy is to create an ink illustration, turn it into a stamp brush and add color to it in Procreate 5. I will draw a California poppy, but using the same techniques, you can draw anything you want. I will use some brushes from my “Essential Collection” of realistic watercolor brushes and a paper texture brush from my collection of “Seamless Paper Texture brushes for Procreate”. If you want to follow along with my brushes, you will find a link to purchase them in the description of this video. If you prefer to use other brushes, go ahead, your floral illustration will look amazing no matter the brushes you use. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started.
2. The Basics: Before creating any stamp brush, there are a few things you must know. Your canvas has to be a square. If it's not square, your illustration will look distorted. Also, I recommend you to use the default the square canvas, which is 2048 by 2048 pixels. It doesn't matter if you use a bigger canvas as Procreate will adjust it down to the right dimensions, which are 2048 by 2048 pixels. But if you use a very small canvas, Procreate will scale it up and your stamp brush will end up looking pixelated. Probably you’ve already tried to create brushes in Procreate and you don't understand why they don't look at expected. Why does my brush look semitransparent or even worse, why can’t I see it? Well, because you used the wrong color value. White is the only color we should use if we want to create opaque a stamps. The lighter the color we use for creating our drawing, the more opaque will be our stamp, or what is the same the higher the value, the less transparent our stamp will look. if we create our illustration in black It will be completely transparent. That's why we won't see it if we use it as a stamp. Also, it's important to choose the right brush. If we use a low opacity brush, we will be painting using mid-tones, which means that our stamp brush will be semi transparent. Once our illustration is done, we have to decide where we want it to have its anchor point. In Procreate the anchor point of our stamp is in the very centre of the canvas and we can't change that. So we will have to move our image. We can place it centered or place the bottom of it in the center of the canvas, or place it wherever you want. Just keep this in mind. or your stamp will end up stamping itself wherever it wants to. Okay, And last but no least, before coping your illustration to create your stamp, make sure all you want to be copy is in the same layer. Or turn off the background visibility and use the “copy all” option. In the next video, we will make the illustration we're going to use to create our stamp brush
3. Drawing: So the first step… Create a square canvas! I downloaded this beautiful image from unsplash.com. If you want to use the same reference image, you will find it tapping on the “Projects & Resources” section. Remember that this section only appears if you are using the Skillshare website, not the app, ok? All right, step 2! Let’s draw! I will use my favorite brush for sketching. The Peppermint brush. It is a default brush and you will find it in the sketching set. Let's create first a rough sketch in order to place everything where it should be and try to get the proportions right without losing too much time. Once you're happy with it, create a new layer, decrease the opacity of the first one and choose a brush to create your line art. I will be using another default brush, the “Dry Ink”. I will start drawing the outline... If you're worried about how shaky your lines look, I recommend you to draw flowers. You will nail the pedals. They look way more realistic with those wavy edges, right? Now let's add volume to our illustration. We will do that by shading our illustration. Flick of your wrist to make fluid lines and vary the length of those lines, always following the shape of the petals. You can make dots instead, or combine lines and dots, as you prefer. Make more lines to make darker the areas that are in shadow on the reference photo. You can also vary the thickness of some parts of your outline to differentiate what’s in shadow and what areas are more illuminated. Try not to go outside the outline. This shading technique is also a great way to create the illusion of texture. I am mainly just following along the structure of the petal. If you are drawing something different, just keep in mind that the angle of your lines may change in response to the angle and direction of the forms of your subject. - You can use a different shading technique for the stalk, so you can differentiate the texture of the petals from the stalk. Let me darken this area a little bit more... and this is done! In the next video, we will learn how to turn any illustration into a stamp brush.
4. Creating a Stamp: The next step is to center the illustration and make it white so we can see it when we turn it into stamp. Remember, anything in black will be transparent. I want the anchor point to be at the center of my flower, so I will turn on the drawing guide to help me out with this task. I am going to rotate it too, so I can control better the angle I want it to appear... and then just match the blue dots with the guidelines. Turn it to white tapping on invert color. It is still there, see? You don't have to change the background color, I've change it just for you to see the illustration better. Okay, Now make sure you are on the flower layer and let's swipe with three fingers downwards and copy it! In case you've used several layers to create your illustration, turn off the background visibility and tap on “Copy All” instead. If you don't have your own set of brushes yet, you can create it tapping on the blue button. If you already have one, just tap on this plus sign ond we're in... the Brush Studio. We have a ton of options for creating amazing brushes, and today we will see a few of them. Procreate brushes are formed of a shape and a grain. The grain is the texture that goes inside the shape. In this case, we don't need to change the plain texture that comes by default. What we need to change is the default shape. So, tap on “Edit” then “Import” and finally “Paste”. Don’t forget to tap “Done” for saving the changes. Here we can test our brush and see how it is looking. Right now, it is stamping our illustration many times and very close to each other. So what we have to do is to increase the space between them. Go to “Stroke Path” and set “Spacing” to Max. Now we have bigger gaps, which makes easier to use the brush as a stump. Some of the flowers have less opacity than the rest, we need to fix this because, in this case, we want to control its opacity with the brush opacity slider on the sidebar. So, go to “Apple Pencil” See? The Opacity is set to “Max” which means that that the more pressure we apply when painting with our pencil, the higher the opacity. Set it to “None”. Now go to Properties. We are creating a stamp so, we will switch “Use Stamp Preview”. This will not change the behavior of our brush, but it will show us the preview of it as a stamp instead of a stroke. I will also decrease the preview size to about 10% just because I've done this before and I know we will see the whole illustration in our preview if we set it this size. Now, set the maximum size of the brush to max. So we have a wide range of sizes to choose from, using the brush size slider on the sidebar. And finally go to “About this brush”, name your brush and create a new reset point so in case you need to modify something or you want to keep playing around with the brush settings, you can revert those changes. Ok? As you see, you can also sign your brush and include your logo. Tap ‘done’, and Voila! Our brush is ready to be used, so let's create a new layer and see how it works. As we said before, we can change the size of it using the size slider on the sidebar and you know, every time with tap on the screen, we will stamp the shape of the brush, which in my case, is a flower. If I rotate the canvas and tap, the flower will appear rotated. As you see, the stamp always points at the top of the screen. That's because by default, when we create a new brush, the option “Orient to screen” is turned on. I prefer it to behave this way but if you don't, simply switch that off. Exit to the gallery and create a new canvas. In the next video, we are going to use the brush we've created and the ones you can download from the Resources section to create an ink and watercolor botanical illustration.
5. Stamping: All right, rotate the canvas and let's create a paper texture background. I will use one of my custom brushes, but you can do this simply importing an image of a paper texture into Procreate or using a default brush like “Soft Pastel” that you will find in the Sketching Set”. Now we're going to create a different layer for each stamp. One for the flower If it is too small, it will look better if you undo it and create it again, so it does not look pixelated. Okay? Now let's create another one for the leaves. As I said in the previous video, you will find all these stamp brushes in the Resources section. And another one for the bud. Yes, you can use just one layer for the ink illustration but I prefer to do it this way so I can easily change the position, size and angle of the stamps. I think I will add more leaves... in this case... a bit bigger... and let’s place it over here... Let's move the bud Mm, something is off Now! much better. Select all the layers but the paper one and let’s center our illustration As you see the stamps overlap. We can easily sort this problem out using the eraser but what I usually do is to use layer masks instead. Why is that? Because layer masks just hide part of our drawing instead of erasing them permanently. So this way, if I don't like how my composition is looking, I can make those parts visible again. To sum up, for getting rid of the overlapping parts we will create layer masks. Before erasing anything, we must be sure that we are on the layer mask. We will use the eraser tool to hide the parts that overlap, and we will use white, and the paint tool, for making the erased parts visible again. I think this needs more leaves. This time I'm thinking of a small one. Yeah! I like it there. So let's create a mask and hide the overlapping parts. Okay, let’s center it again And, of course, sign our illustration using... a stamp brush! Once our ink botanical illustration is done and before start adding color to it, If your paper texture is an image, you must place it at the top and change the blend mode to multiply tapping on the N. If you used a default brush, you will probably have to leave it at the bottom and modify the blend mode of the watercolor layer, if at all. If you used one of my paper texture brushes, you can place it at the top or at the bottom. Create a new layer and place it underneath the signature layer. We are going to start adding color to our illustration!
6. Coloring: Procreate comes with some brushes that can be used for creating digital watercolor illustrations. You will find most of them in the water set, although they one they call watercolor is at the bottom of the painting set. There is also a nice watercolor texture brush called “Blotchy” in the calligraphy set. I think these brushes are good for you if you're a beginner or if you are just playing around with the app but, if you are like me and you're trying to create realistic watercolor illustrations on your iPad, you will soon feel that they are not enough. So, as I said in the intro video, I will use my custom brushes instead. I will start with the “Glazed Edgy Oval”. I will use this brush for creating a flat wash. As you see, I am not staying inside the lines and I am living some gaps. Yes, I am doing this on purpose. This way it looks like real watercolor to me. Each time I lift the pencil, my first wash will be dry magically and I will be painting wet on dry. This is the miracle of digital painting. Now, I will imagine this is still damp and I will use the Bloomer brush to add more color to the bottom of the petals, soften a little bit some of the edges of the first washes and create a light blooming effect. Even though you are watching me painting, it's difficult to see how much pressure I am applying. So let's see this in more detail. This brush is pressure sensitive. This is what I get with light pressure. If I increase the pressure, I get more paint and If I press even harder, I get this. What happens if I press harder and then lighter? If I do that, I will lift paint, OK? With these brush, I can also create smooth transitions applying light pressure lifting the pencil and going over the same area again and again until I feel happy with the opacity of my painting. To get a more saturated color, I just need to tap a few times over the same area and then blend the colors together. So for creating a realistic watercolor effect, we just need to have fun combining all these variations in pressure and adding more or fewer layers of paint. Real watercolors are kind of unpredictable because they need water. It's not just that the amount of water is hard to control. The paint behaves differently when there is too much water, not enough water, etcetera. It's also because as the water evaporates, the colors become lighter on sometimes settle on the surface in unexpected ways. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love watercolor unpredictability, but that is what makes harder to get a realistic watercolor illustration. With digital watercolors, we have total control. We can decide, for example, that we want a wet edge effect and we want it exactly here and making this shape. We can create more. And if we don't like how it looks, simply tap with two fingers and make it disappear. How hard is to cover up our mistakes when working with the real watercolors? Well, as you see, there is no problem working with the digital ones. The only issue is that we will need many different brushes to mimic those wonderful watercolor effects. Another thing that we can't do with real watercolors is to add a light color on top of a dark one and expect the result to look lighter but that's a quality that we can add to our digital brushes. To emulate the strokes we make with almost dry or slightly wet brushes is easier. In fact, there are few default brushes that can help us to create dry on dry effects. For example, if you don't apply too much pressure, you can get a really nice texture. using the “Blackburn” brush that you can find in the drawing set. Um, in the organic set, you will find a brush called “Reed”. If you tilt your pencil, you will get an interesting texture. Let's choose a dry brush for painting the leaves. And this color. If the result is too dry for your taste, use a brush that pulls paint and softens the edges. Instead of black, I'm using blue to add shadows. Adding lights and shadows to our flat illustrations help us create a sense of volume. And this blue is also the complementary color of the orange I used for painting the flower so it will help me darken the shadow areas without leaving them muddy. To finish this off, I will use this pale yellow to get warmer lighting and soften some hard edges. Oh, I almost forgot, let's add some splatters of different colors and sizes! Well, this is done. I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and it has inspired you to create your own ink stamps and watercolor illustrations on your iPad. It's so please leave a review and share your ideas and illustrations. I can wait to see them. Bye for now!
Lettie Blue, Architect & Digital Illustrator
