Gouache-style Effects in Procreate - an Autumn close-up - Painting a Toadstool Postcard

1. What wil you discover through this Class: When I think of autumn, one thing automatically comes to mind and there are toadstools. In this lesson, we're going to create an autumn postcard and the main subject, the star of this painting, will be a beautiful toadstool. One of the photographs I've taken from a toadstool, we're going to use that as a reference for this painting, but that's not all we're going to do. We're not only going to paint, we're going to create our own brush. We need a special brush to create this special scene. And I'm going to walk you through the steps on how to take an existing brush and turn it into a brush that is way closer to quash painting than the standard procreate brushes are. So we're going to have some fun together, not only creating a brush, but also of course, painting this beautiful autumn scene together. 2. Tweaking a Brush: As said in the intro to paint this postcard, we need a brush, we need a special brush. We need a brush that is closer to the ah, than the standard procreate brushes. In this lesson, I'm going to take you through the steps on how to turn a standard brush into a brush that is way closer to A than it currently is. Before we're going to start with this lesson, I want to show you. Here on the right, you see the standard procreate gouache brush, that is this one. You can find that one in painting and gach that has some texture in it. It's quite nice, but what it doesn't do is if you look here at the transition, it doesn't do like gach really does. When you go over a layer again with a new gach color or a wet brush, it's going to blend in. This brush actually doesn't do that. What we're after is more like this, where it blends in a little bit. Where the color blends in the stroke blend in. And where it doesn't only layer but also interacts with the previous layer. We need that. I'm going to add a new layer above this, probably height everything. I'm going to show you that brush, There it is. The gas brush, I've got just one color. If I lay it down like this, it's a bit large. You get a layer like this. If I put a next layer, as you can see, it doesn't interact with the previous layer. It just puts on a next layer and a next layer and next layer, you get edges. Even if I go very soft, I cannot blend these edges away. It just creates a new edge. Layers and layers and layers, Real. If you have a gouache painting somewhere, Benjamin, you should have a painting somewhere. There it is. As you can see here, there's a nice transition here too. You can get harsh lines, but you can also transition very nicely. Or as you can see here in the green where it transitions the darker colors into the lighter colors. And the other way around, you have that choice. But this brush doesn't give me the choice. What I need is I need to create a new brush. And in this lesson, we're going to go through that process. So you need to find that brush that is in painting and ga, what we're going to do, we're going to make a duplicate of this. So I'm going to slide it to the left and I'm going to say duplicate. It says Ga one. We can rename it whatever we want. We're not going to change a lot of things in the brush, but just what we need now. You have a lot of options, most of them are set. We're not going to touch. But the two that we're going to touch is rendering and wet mix. We're going to go to rendering. Now, at the moment this brush is set to a light glaze, and that means it just puts over another layer, a light layer over the previous one. What I want is a more heavy glaze. So you have a few options here. Glazes and blending. Now, blending is when you put another layer on it, it blends with the previous layer. Oil brushes, for example, do that. Ah, brushes do that, but not that strong. So I don't want that. I'm going to go to heavy glaze. What this does is a normal glaze keeps the tone you put down consistent. But with a heavy glaze that keeps not only the tone consistent but also the paint opacity When you're mixing it, it keeps that also consistent. We want that, the flow and everything. I'm going to put on the max, I want that. But I also want some wet edges because I want these edges to blend in. That is this option here, the flow. If it's not on the max, in yours move it to the max. The wet edges, I want somewhat edges around 12, 13% 14, somewhere around there. Then if you want it precise, you can type here. And if I want 13% then that's it. Now, I touched, it wasn't the idea. I put it to Max. There you go. Now I can put it to the 13% What this does, it softens and blurs the edges around here of the brush strokes you make, that mimics the pigment of paint bleeding into the paper. When you use in real life, you use what color paper, the pigment goes into the paper, and this mimics that a little bit. The next thing we're going to change the burnt edges too. I want the edges to nicely burn into the previous paint under it, and I'm going to put this to 50% 50% there you go. And what this does, this creates a color burn effect around the edges again. And it also darkens the edges when you overlap a little bit. We need that later on because the brush is going to be slightly lighter than what we see here. Now if we get some stronger edges, that just looks better. All right, I've got that. The rest. Let's see. I'm not going to touch that. I want to leave this to multiply and normal. These are the mode the burnt edges are in, it multiplies whatever is under there. And the blend mode of this brush. I want just normal. All right. The next thing we're going to change is the wet mix. Now there's a lot of options here. We're going to start with this one, the pool. What the pool does is dihute, pull the paint and the color of the brush stroke into the previous strokes, the previous layer you already put down. But while it is on, this doesn't work like I've demonstrated. It doesn't do anything. It just puts the layer on layer on layer. And it doesn't interact with the color and the paint, the previous one. Why is that? Because pull only works together with the other settings. You can slide this on enough and it's not going to do anything. You can actually test that. We can do that right now. It's now at 85% I'm going back to this canvas, Put down this color. I'm going to put down the next. Now it should pull this color right here at the edge into the previous one. But as you can see, it doesn't do a thing. I'm going back to the brush. I'm going to put this to zero. None of it. As you can see, I'm getting exactly the same thing. It's not doing anything. Let's put this poll then to the max. They go max, done again. As you can see, it's not doing anything. It's not pulling that paint into the previous layer three times. Exactly the same thing because pool on its own doesn't do anything. We need to adjust the other settings. We're going to start with the dilution. What the dilution does, it simulates how much water you mix with your paint. You get a more wet paint and a more wet paint can go into the previous paint. Now, I don't want the pool on the max, by the way. I've got to slide that back. We're going to go to 96% Around 95, 96% fine. The next thing is then the dilution. We need some dilution now, you can play with that. You can put it all to its max, and as you can see, now it's gone. Now, it's not going to blend anything anymore. All my paint is gone. We need to find a nice middle spot. We're going to go somewhere around 44% Now, if we do this on its own, the paint is now gone too much. We need to change these two settings here to the charge and the attack. What the charge does, it determines how much paint is applied to a stroke. Now there's a little paint, if charge, you can see it dark. And again it adds more paint. I want to go say around 26% Let's move it there for now. And the attack, we're going to change that to what does the attack do? It adjusts the amounts of paint that sticks to the canvas. If you put it higher, there's more paint sticking to your canvas. If you put it too high, it just defeats the whole purpose of blending. We want to have some attack, we want to have some paint stick to the canvas, but not all of it. It gets darker again. Let's say 35, 36% Let's go there. The next thing we're going to change is the grades. This determines the chunkiness and the contrast of your brush. Now it's very textured. I can demonstrate that though. Let me clear this canvas for now. Clear What we have for a brush now is if I put down this brush, you see there's a lot of texture in it. And if I put down the next one, as you can see see now, I can work away these edges a little bit if I don't press too hard. If I press really hard, it puts down a lot of paint. If I press down a little, it blends away these edges a little bit and that's what I want. But I don't want this text paint. What I want to simulate is as if I'm using a smooth paper, a hot press paper. Now it's more simulating a cold press paper where you see the texture a lot. Let me find an example for that. The example is, this is cold press paper where you can see a lot of the texture coming through. This is hot press paper where it's nice and smooth and the colors, as you can see with rug wash, start to pop and you get nice, smooth, strong paint. Well, here you get this texture. With this painting, I don't want all the texture, I want something more smooth like this. And I want the brush to do all the texture work. I don't want this lots of texture, so I got to get rid of that. And how do I get rid of that? That is by the grade. I can invert it by going to negative. So then the stroke inverts, I can make it stronger, but I can also get it away by putting it to. So all the way now I should get a nice smooth brush stroke. My brush is not totally perfect because I realize I have not say, I said counsel on the previous one. Let's go for the heavy glaze. Said this to 13% there you go. And my burnt edges, was it 44% higher, Even 50% you can't do that, 50% There you go. The rest, I kept like this. This is now. Okay. These are the settings. A heavy glaze flow to the max, wet edges, 30% burnt edges, 50. We're leaving this to the settings it takes then dilution goes to 44% the charge to 26, the attack to 36, the put goes to around 95% and the grade is smooth and the blur, and the blur, jitter and the wetness, jitter. I don't want this to blur, I don't want it to jitter with all kinds of little edges. I'm fine with this. We should have a different kind of brush now let's try that. As you can see, this puts a nice smooth paint with steel. If I zoom in some texture in it, but if I put now a second layer on it, you say, hey, nothing happens exactly the same as there. But if I now very lightly touch this, I can actually pull this paint into the other one and work that line a little bit better away. Let's go zoom in. I can take that, see that edge is slowly disappearing because I can blend that in. Now if I want that, if I put a different color on it, I'm just going to get whatever color I have here for the demonstration. It should now actually blend these two colors. If I go very lightly, you see that there's a very light green. See that you get a different brush. This is what I like. This is good lower, a little bit. Now the brush behaves differently to a smooth brush. Now the brush is called one. I don't want that, I want to make sure that it's got a nice name. I'm going to about this brush on one, I'm calling this, press the spelling checker and did it right. And hot pressed. You can put your name, you can sign it like this is paid by Benjamin. And I want to actually call that art by Benjamin with a small letter. There you go, by. By Benjamin. And there you go. Now it's my brush, hot pressed. And that's the one we're going to use. Now that we have a brush, we can start painting with it. In the next lesson, we're going to set up a canvas, do the sketch. And after that, we start painting. 3. Setting up and Sketching: Now that our brush is ready, we need to set up our canvas to paint on. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm also going to show you in this lesson is how to sketch the whole scene. We're going to create a sketch as a guide. Now if you really don't want to sketch at all, the sketch is supplied. But I would really encourage you to come along with me and sketch the scene before we start painting. I've still got this canvas. This is just a random canvas I need to make a card of. Now, this depends on where you're at. You can, if you're in the stage, you want to make your postcard US size. If you're in Europe, you want to make it European size. I think postcard in US is four by six in Europe, about 10:15 centimeters, something like that. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to use an four. And you can use for the US a letter size so that if you want to print it on a larger paper, you can still do so. But if you want to shrink it down, you can do that. Shrinking down is not a problem in procreate. It just goes fine. But if you want to blow something up, you get all these pixels and edges and things. We're going to work slightly larger. And what we're going to do, we're going to tap the plus, we're going to say a new canvas here. We're going to change the dimensions. Now the first thing, you either choose inches or you choose centimeters. If you're doing inches, you may want to do it 12 " wide. You want to do it I think around 8 " high, something like that. You get a nice size, we'll check that. That pretty much looks like a postcard. 12 by 8 ". If you're in Europe and we're going to change this to centimeters or millimeters depending on let's go millimeters, I'm going to do this in a four, then the width would be 279 millimeters by 210 millimeters. Now when you create it, make sure this is on 300. You want it to be 300 DPI to print nicely color profile. I'm not too worried about S. Rgb is fine. Don't change it to CMYK if you do that. This is for printing press, there's a lot of people in procreate, make the mistake to put it to CMYK somehow. There's a persistent, incorrect, outdated information online that you should put it to get a better print. That is not true. You're limiting your colors unless you plan on printing it on a real printing press. Even if you have a graphical laser and I've got one, an expensive laser that puts out high graphics, even that one's SRGB these days, stick to the SRGB. Most printing goes fine with that. The rest I'm not too worried about, I don't mind canvas properties and all of that is fine. The dimensions are important. I've cut my dimensions, and I got my color profile right now. If you end up with two layers here, then you may want to change the size a little bit down. But I'm sure you've got still plenty of layers left to paint in, because we're not going to need many layers anyway. I'm going to say create. I'm going to work in this size. Now you can see it's slightly higher, It's slightly different than that one. I'm going to use the European size this, I can just shrink it down and if I get the real postcard with it, this is postcard side, see I'm getting a perfect size, the same size, same height, about the same with the same ratio. And that's important. All right, good. That's my canvas. Now I want to paint on my canvas. I'm going to only use this guache brush. But first of all, I want to make a sketch. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go to sketching. I'm going to pick one pencil. Hb pencil is fine. I'm going to pick a color, I don't want this green color. I'm going to slide this somewhere to the blue. Doesn't really matter where. Slide it to here where I get some, not a black color, but a bit of a grayish color. I like that because graphite isn't black, grayish. I'm using that. And now I should get a nice line. That's fine. The next thing we're going to need is of course, a reference. Now I've got the reference here on a different screen. I'm using it like this, so I'm putting this up right so I can look at it. And I might just as well do that right away. I'm putting it upright like this so I can view it. But there's another way you need to download of course reference that comes with the class. You can add that into Procreate as a reference, you tap on the wrench, You go to canvas, slide this on to reference. You say image. If you have it on your canvas, in your photo role, your image, then there you go. You can move this picture around, you can enlarge it, you can pick it up on this and put it wherever you like. Then you have your reference to. Now I prefer, for this one, a larger reference, I'm going to put it. Where I can see it. But you can do it this way. If you don't want the reference, put it away, There you go. Download the reference and we're going to use that. We're going to not totally follow the reference but roughly first of all, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create the cap. Now a little bit here, I'm looking at the reference, it's a little bit under an angle. I want the cap to be slightly larger than in the photo. I want to tool to take up nice space in my drawing. Like with this, uh, painting, I want it to be, of course, the center stage of the image, but slightly larger than it is in the reference. There we go. I'm just sketching that in. Let's see, I'm just sketching in. There you go. I like that. That's nice. Just an arch and a straight line under an angle. If you don't want to sketch, I'm going to provide the sketch with this class so you can use my sketch. All right. The next thing is of the star. Now I've got the, I need the star. I want it a little bit under an angle there go straight. I don't want this to be straight down, but I want it to be slightly under an angle two. That's all there is to it. And that's it. Now the ground, I'm going to make slightly different round this a little bit. I'm going to add the ground to it, basically something like this. That's the first part. Now the scales I'm not going to draw in, I'm going to paint them in. I want a rough reference. The next thing which I see on my reference are these leaves. I want these leaves to be in it, and I want, of course, the blades of grass, a little bit of this moss. We'll do that with the paint again. But I do want leaving it. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to put it right there. I'm sketching in the stalk of the leaf actually that is technically see a branch there now because pretty sure this might end up as a tree eventually. There you go, There it is. No, no noticing that end is around here and that one goes, there you go there. That one I'm just following roughly as you can see, quite roughly the example. And the next one, it is straight here, but I'm going to move it slightly so it looks a little bit nicer then It doesn't seem like it's growing out of here. I'm moving that one slightly over. There you go. There's that one, there's the second one, and then there's a third one behind. I want this to overlap the other one slightly. And that one goes right there. Since I've got my mushroom larger. This one doesn't go right there on top but comes under it, but I don't think that's an issue with it. We're moving it around a little bit. There's the last one, this one Stark to. I'm going to give that a little bit of an interesting right. There's my element. So I've got these leaves. There you go. I've got my toadstool, and I'm fine with this. This is enough for the sketch. Well, that's it. We finished setting up everything, and our next step, we can actually start painting together. 4. Painting the Toadstool: We've got everything we need. We've got a brush, we've got a canvas, and we've got a sketch. So now we can start painting. So we've got the sketch. The next thing is we're going to paint. Of course, for that I'm going to add a new layer by tapping this. Plus we're going to get a new layer above it, but I don't want it above it. I want every layer to go under my sketch that I can clearly see what I'm doing. What I'm also actually going to do, I'm going to lock the sketch that I don't paint accidentally on it. To lock it, you move it to the right, to the left that is not in the right, move from the right to the left. And you say, look, now I can't paint on it. It gives me this notification, and I'm going to say Counsel, All right, good. There we are now for the mushroom, of course, totes too. We need some red. I'm actually not going to start with the red. I'm going to approach this really as a Guh painting and we're going to go with the hood first. If I want a nice bright red color in a Gah painting, I'm going to start with yellow. May sound strange, I'm going to move this to the yellow, doesn't really matter where. As long as it's yellow, somewhere in between the green and orange. I'm going to move this over to a nice and there we go with ah, painting. What I would do actually first is the background, but I'm not going to do that with this. We're just going to paint and then we'll do the background finally. Because with procreate we can add layers anywhere we want. But with ah painting, I might actually have started with the background and then work from there. All right, I've got my brush, so I need to go to these brushes where we put it, there was painting somewhere down, it should say hot press. This will be my brush. The size we can go slightly larger, around 16% if you want to do do you press with two fingers or this little undo button? All right. I'm going to put my first layer in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to paint. I'm going to make sure I'm not lifting my pencil per accident. If I do lift my pencil per accident, what happens? Then? You get a second layer. And I don't want that, I want one layer. This is good enough for this yellow. The next thing which I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the next color. I'm going to move this into the orange. I want to get a nice orange color. I'm going to go for a slightly smaller one, and I'm going to do some orange right on this side. There you go. I'm pressing nice and hard. But when I'm going to the edges, I'm pressing really soft. And as you can see, that starts already blending now. I don't want that too much blended. Keep on press now, do less pressure and there we go, we're going to get something like this. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. There you go. Good. I'm going to do that next color. I'm going to pick, I'm going to keep on going, is going to the red. It's just touching the red. I'm going to lay down a red color that is a very light red. And that's the whole idea. I'm going to put that on everything as you can see. Now these other colors start mixing in really nicely. That's the whole idea. You keep on going, keep on. If you press hard, you get the color. Go with less pressure, you get a slight color and you start mixing more. If you want the strong color, if you want the lighter color, go a little bit lighter. And somewhere in between until you get what you want, that's a layer like that. I'm going to put down another layer on top of it. But right here I'm going to go with little pressure because that's where the sun is a little bit. There you go. I want this to be a nice transition. Go over it one more time. There we go. Now, there I've gone outside too much, so I'm going to redo this part. Get my transition in a little bit better. Get the nice strokes in. There we go. I'm going to go for a lower brush, 5% I'm get my edge in nicely. There you go. Now I like this. If I like the shape except for under here, we'll put it a bit more straight. Now here I don't want all that red like my shape. I'm going to preserve this. And I'm going to add a new layer on top of it where I'm going to keep on painting. And we're going to use a clipping mask. Clipping mask, What it does, it make sure that it paints only on whatever is under it and it won't go outside It only regard where I've painted already. We're going to go for a nice red. There you go. We're just sliding this over, keeping this in the same position. That is a too small rush. Going to round 10% There you go. If I paint here now, as you can see, nothing happens. Well, something happens, but we can't see it. There you go, Here I'm going to go a little bit less pressure again so that I get this under it again, this color. But on top I want a light spot as you see here, a new layer, There you go, with a light color. There we go, that's a nice high light like that. Now I'm going to the next color. I'm just keeping this sliding. This should be a nice dark color. Now, there we go. I like that. That works fine for this. At the edges. I'm going to blend this a little bit. There you go. We can do this quite roughly because then you get also the shapes in the tos to the nice shapes. I like this, this is looking really good. I'm going to get this brush to 5% because I want these edges to be like this, a bit stronger. There you go. And play with this a little bit here. Change the pressure, press hard, then press a little bit so that you get these nice transitions, these interesting shapes. There you go, there nice. All right, next thing is there's, of course in this cap is a nice highlight. We need that to be in there. We're going to try to see what happens if we do white. We're keeping this red, we're moving this to the white. Let's say add there. There should be some highlight white in it. Little bit there. Now, with hardly any pressure, will try to blend this in, but not with this color. Because if I do that, as you can see, this should be okay. Then a bit white. I want the blending to be done with some red again, because this is too obvious. Now, is it? I'm going back to that red color, that middle red. Now it should keep my colors. I'm going to not a dark red but the one before it. I'm pressing so that I can blend this in nicely. Going over it, picking up this color a little bit. There you go, blue strokes, And now we've got some nice highlights. I'm going back to that white again. I'm going to try to pre. Now I need one good stroke, and then I'm going to hard press and blend this in. I'm going to do that here too, again. There you go. And you can see it makes some very interesting strokes. There we go. Let's check that I like that. That looks nice, doesn't it? I may want to have a little bit of white there too, some high light. But I want to work that away. There you go. Nice, good. All right. Painting looks rather nice. See, this is looking really good. I like that. I'm not sure if I like this, but for painting this works, so I'm going to not touch this anymore. I like it like it is here. The next thing of course then I need is the stock. We can do the scales. Well, we're going to do the stock, okay, I'm going to do the stock on a new layer. We just on top of this add a new layer. But I'm actually going to move that layer under the hood. Next layer under the hood. You could rename all these layers, of course, give them names. If you want this to have a name tap on it, then say, rename. I taped it twice they go, and you can give it a name stock like that. Then you can rename this the hood or the cap, whichever one you prefer, and then you know what you're doing. All right? I need my sketch back. Of course. Otherwise I don't know where I'm going now. In the photograph it is quite white. What I want a bit of yellowish color, I'm going to the yellow. I'm pushing it a little bit to the yellow color. I'm not getting a white, white, yellowish tone. And that should work very nice. Go back to my painting, which I have about 5% Let's go to 8% that's nice. I'm painting this in, that should go nicely under the hood even if I go too far, so matter at all. Now that is the base. All right, that is nice. I could now hide the sketch and see, you got that nicely. Except for this part I don't like go for a smaller brush. Had a bit of a better line there, right? I like that better. This now needs to be slightly wider. There you go. I like this. I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Add a new layer, tap on it. Say clipping mask. And here I'm going to play with this color because I want to make sure there's some shadows in it and things like that. Now we're here, what we're going to do is I'm going to move this to the grayish side like that and add in discolor on top of it. That is now a very strong there go. I'm going to move by hard pressing, paint this in a little bit. Now you can see I get these nice strokes there which I actually want. I'm pressing now I'm playing a little bit so that I get a little bit of definition texture on here. Some strokes here and there And I like that. All right. That looks pretty nice, doesn't it? Good, I want a little bit darker on it. A little bit of a darker shadow. Now, I'm going to exaggerate this a little bit more than it is in real life. And I'm going to move this to the blue halfway to the light blue. I'm going to get a little bit of a blue color in the middle. Blue, grayish color. I'm going to add a new layer. I like this layer below it, so I want to keep that. I'm going to say clipping mask again. I can experiment with this now that's a good color, Just around the edge, perhaps around there. I want to lay down a layer like this, might have slightly more there now without hardly pressing it. I want to get these blends in a bit. There you go. Oh, that is nice bit more. Here I'm pressing a bit more and then I'm blending it in. See, now we're getting something really interesting. See, that's the power of a brush. It simulates a, uh, brush way more than the standard. I might want to have some dark spots there because that looks nicely here. I'm hardly pressing, adding a few here, there is a hole in it. I see that. But I'm not going to do that hole. I like it like this. Now look at that. That definitely looks like a mushroom, doesn't it? The only thing I want to change, I'm going here. I want to add a little bit of shadow around there, a little bit more up here to create a little bit of a nice rounded shape. There we go. There is a lot better. All right, I think I might leave it like this and not touch this anymore. What would be next, The scales. Well, we're going to add a layer on top of everything obviously. And I'm going to call this then right away the scales, I want that color back. I had that of whitish color. That yellowish of white color, there it is. I'm going to see if this brush will make nice scales and it will with one press. That's the whole idea. Let's go, let's see. How large do I want? I've got it on 7% now that's too large. Let's stick to the five. What we're going to do is what I'm doing is we're pressing in these scales. And I don't want it all the way under here. I want it a little bit less than it is in the image. And we're going to work on these scales in a minute. Let's add a couple here. Smaller here, so I'm pressing less bit larger there. There you go. Let's see, do I like this? Yeah, I do perhaps want one there, maybe one there. I like this. This is a nice arrangement of scales. This one goes up there. Okay. For the next one, I'm going to lower this a little bit, 3% Now I'm going to tap on them like this, and I'm going to make the color a little bit stronger, especially on the site, the top and the site where the light is coming. To make it myself easy, what I'm going to do is to get this a little bit stronger, I'm going to add a new layer on top of this. I'm going to move this to the bottom. This will be my background layer. I might just as well rename it background layer, but later on we're going to actually work on the background. But for now, I just want a color in it so that I get a nice contrast. Doesn't matter which color. To take a light blue color for the contrast. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold this slide. I need to get rid of this. Now we've got the wrong color. There you go. Hold this, tap it there. And it should go right away. Everything. Now I can see my scales a lot better. And I can also see that this scale here is terrible. What I'm going to do, I'm going to get an eraser. I'm using therefore that airbrushing. A hard airbrush, I'm on the background, right? I need to go on the scales. I'm actually going to remove this scale completely. And this scale I don't like, might call slightly larger. The rest I'm fine with, but I don't like that scale. Okay. I'm on the scale again. I got to go back to my, uh, brush instead of the eraser. Pick my color again. There you go. That is on the hair a little bit. I like that. That's good. See, that is a lot better. That looks way nicer. Now, I got to continue this, obviously from the drawing. I can see that from the photo. I can see the sun is around here somewhere shining from this side. That is what I'm actually bringing in with these colors. There you go. I like that. Now I'm going back to that grayish color. Dark grayish color. Let's try that and see if that is not to that in this edge a little bit. I don't mind if I go over on to the hood itself. But I'm not pressing hard. Now, if you have a problem with pressing, what you could do is also slide the opacity and lower it to about 50% and then 50, let's say. And then press that should pretty much give the same idea. See that works. But if you can tap lightly, then please use that instead. And now look at that. See, now we're getting some nice scales. I said that is a bit over the top perhaps, but for this drawing, it looks nice. Am I saying drawing I am painting for this painting, it looks nice. Get some nice definition. Do I have the I want a bit more here. Perhaps a bit more there. Now I'm going to that middle color, we have that other gray. I'm going to make a little bit of a transition between the colors. So on top of it, there you go. That should fill up this. The gaps I have in between the high light and the dark color, see like that, is still a bit transparent. So we want to create a little bit of a transition there I think I am. We might have a little bit more there. There we go. And knife, but that definitely is missing the dark edge It, and this one I want slightly more. They go. All right, good. There's my toch too with some nice scales. I like that. Now let's go back to the stark and layer where the clipping mask on top of the stark. We're going to use this dark color steel perhaps. That is a little bit too, a bit more here. Now I'm using strokes again with that small brush. Yes, I do want that a bit stronger than what I have here. If I've gone too strong, then very lightly I can move this color around. That's better. Good. I like that better. All right. Going to move this larger, going back to that middle gray, and add a little bit of that middle gray around there. Blending this in. There you go. Now that is nice. All right. Good bit. Perhaps here, some more tones and now I like the shape of this. All right? And we're going to stop with the toads too and leave it like this. Well, the main star of our postcard is ready, is looking really good. I hope yours is looking great. But it's an empty scene on that toadstool, a bit lonely. So we need to add some more details, some more elements to it. And we're going to do that in the next lesson. 5. Creating the Plants: Let's give this toadstool some company. In this lesson, we're going to paint the plants that are next to the toadstool on the photograph. We're not going to paint everything that is in the photograph, but just some main elements to support the scene and actually create, turn this postcard into a full atom scene. Well, we've got a toadstool and probably from the video you might notice is getting slightly darker. We're approaching autumn and it's a rainy day today. Even some of the leaves are starting to turn. There might be some changes, but I'm pretty sure you can see the ipad very well. That's what it is. The most important thing, of course, now we've got this part. This looks really nice, doesn't it? The next thing is we need a sketch back, and we're going to work on, let's do the leaves first. All right, We're going to do the leaves now. Somewhere we need a new layer. It doesn't really matter where we put this layer, since it's not influencing the others. We need some green. Of course now bit of, it's not an autumn green, it's not a light green, it's not a dark green. I'm going to move this somewhere in the middle. I'm going to decide what color I like. I'm going to move this to the green. Let's go for a middle green. In the middle of the green and slightly there in the middle. I would say around here. Let's give that a try. That's a good color. I like that. That is good enough, right? We're going to do those leaves. 5% I'm going to do. I'm going to do the A leaf. I'm not lifting my brush, that's my first leaf. And if I don't have the Pt shape, that's okay. I'm going to go for 4% I think, because otherwise I won't manage the corner here. Yeah, that should go. Well, I'm going to do this one now. There you go. I'm going to have the stark, the branch over it later on keep the same pressure. There you go. Don't lift it, because otherwise you're going to have a second layer there. That's the next one. And then the third one that goes over the other one a little. I noticed that button of the shirt is tapping on the ipad. Let's move that up a little bit. All right. I've got these, that's nice. I'm going to lower this to about 2% And I'm going to give this a dark side that should be here. As you can see, it's not going to do much. Only a little bit, might be two. I'm going to remove that. Let's go 3% let's go a little bit darker. I'm sliding this down to a darker color. That's better. I'm making a mistake. I need a clipping mask for this because I like the shape. The shape is fine. Add a clipping mask on top of the leaves. Clipping mask. Rename the leaves to leaves. There you go. All right, to the clipping mask. And then I can go outside and I'm doing the same as with the toads to not totally the same at the edge. I'm pressing really hard where I want to dark, and then when I'm approaching the other color, I'm letting go of the pressure that I can move it in, create some nights color like this one. Let's see, this one, we need some strong color right there. And remove it, because I want to make sure you can actually see very well. I'm going to go for a dark color under here, that this is a different leaf then this one. If I hide the sketch now you should see clearly two leaves now. All right, this one under here, that is pretty much going to 4% in the darker color. I'm now half pressure, I would say, giving it a darker tone, but not a dark. Dark. Because the dark I want there, there you go. Actually I'm going to blend this in a little bit. Creates some nice blends there. I want this to be even darker. I'm going, there you go. The blue background is coming through a little bit still because this is a bit opaque paint. Because of the glaze, right? I'm checking the photo down here, it is actually quite dark. And round here too. I'm just creating some nice strokes like that. Let me hide and look at that. See nice paint strokes a bit too much perhaps. Let's go over it, this one a little bit with a light pressure blending that in a little bit more. There you go. All right, that's now I want some highlight on these leaves too. I'm going to a lighter green, definitely. This one where the light comes. I'm going to press hard, but careful there. Now, I'm going to blend it in a little bit, only a little bit of pressure. I like that. This one on top, here on the back a little bit. Let me blend that in. There you go. Now I'm getting nice and this one only on the edge. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go for a small brush. Let's see if I can get the edge and I can get the edge nicely, like this painting. The edge basically. There you go around here. We want that to create a little bit of that fault. There we go, See that looks nice. Let's go for light, no white but still a little bit green in it, like this for 2% there. Go give this a nice highlight here and then blended in a little bit. This, I want to have a highlight here too, so that you can clearly see blend that in a little bit, that there's a different leaf there. There you go. We're going to do that right there on this edge to brush this in a little bit, nicer than it is a little bit here too. There you go. All right, those are our leaves. I like them like this. That's good. Maybe I want that dark, really dark color around this edge here, a little bit under here is a shadow. But blend this a little bit and then create this into a one again, only at the bottom. There you go. Oh yeah, that is good. Might do this one slightly nicer. There we go. Next thing we're going to do the stalks. Those go under it, on top of it, that is 21, goes over it, the others go under it. We need two stalks. Layer under the leaves. I rename that. Stalks in the back. That is not back, starks back. I'm going to the red orange there here. See where this brown color appears? I'm going to do it. Wow. A little bit like that. I think I'm okay with that. Not in the red, In the yellow. Somewhere in between the red and the yellow's still orange. I got that. Let's see if this is small enough. This brush? Yeah, that is good. I've got it still on the 2% I think. All right. I'm going to paint in a. There you go. That's one. This will be two. Now that one continues here. All right. This one we need to have to have in front in a minute. But let's add some highlight here too with the same call. I'm going, I want a clip mask now, again that we only touch it. I want some dark at the bottom, under here, and then a little bit at the edge. There you go. That's more than enough. Let's hide this sketch for now so that we can clearly see what we're doing. I'm doing this here, under there, then some dark here. Now I notice that I need to go back to this mask to that previous color A I on the right layer. All right, I renamed that per accident. Did name that I want this to be better of. Now I'm going to the clipping mask. I'm going to that dark color, there you go, under here. That's impossible. What I'm doing here, there should not be a shadow there. Let's remove that, because this is way behind. I'm going to do that the same as the other one. There you go. Nice. All right, and some highlights. So basically slide it up to a lighter color. I want that to be the transition that in a little bit. Here goes light, then there's a high light there. And I'm going to stop there, paint that in a little bit. That's good enough for these, right? These looks good. The next one I need a layer on top of it. Rename the stars in the back. I want to rename this Starks Fronts. Only one really, but that works. All right. I'm going to do the same here. Pick that middle color, get back my sketch. And this one is right there, painting that in till I'm meeting the ground. There you go. Now I'm going to move on top of it. Say clipping mask again. Get that dark color first. I want, I hate my sketch so that we can see what happens. The dark color around here bit under there too. Didn't move it all the way up. It's little bit under under the leaf. I might give this a mid tone till about there. A bit darker there. There you go. Now we're going to go that light color. I want some highlights right under there. There you go. Nice. Okay, good. Those are ready to those are our leaves. Easy as that. All right. The postcard is starting to look better and better, but this is not something I would send to anybody, the floating elements. We need more. In the next, we're going to add more. 6. Adding the Ground & Ground Cover: This postcard needs more. It's still too empty. We've got a lot of space. So we got to fill that with some more elements. In this lesson, we're going to do the ground and things that grow out of the ground. We're getting there, we're going to add some ground under it. Let's bring back the sketch. And I want to have some ground here. The ground goes actually in front of pretty everything. I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to rename that and say the ground enter for the color. I want a brownish color to something like this. Lighter, darker, perhaps a little bit darker. And I need some brown. There you go around here. Let's go for the middle. And makes it nice for everyone in the middle, middle, middle, but further down. And then somewhere in the middle into the red, but not as light, as orange as the previous one. There we go, We need a larger brush. Let's go 8% for this. What we're going to do is I'm going to paint in the grounds. Need to make sure it goes in front of that mushroom too. Now I have a problem because I lifted my brush and I should not have done that. Let's go again. There you go. Keep on pressing. I'm not going to go all the way down. There you go. But I'm creating a bit of a transition like this between the background and the foreground. And make sure this is another car on top of it, that it is nice color. There you go. I like that. That's good. That's all I'm going to do for the ground. But we need some shadows in it. We need a clipping mask again and clipping mask and we need some shadows. We're going to go here to the dark gray and let's see how that looks. Oh yeah, that looks good. And create a little bit of a shadow around here. Now, we've got to play a little bit with this brush. There you go, nice. But here we need strong shadow. There you go, I like that. Then some shadow around here too, for the leaves and the starks branches on top strong. A little bit less strong around here, too strong. Then there you go. We can remove the sketch. We don't need it anymore. There you go, I like that. Let's add a dark color, one more layer like this. Let's add a little bit of transition there. I could correct this a little bit. Yeah, let's do that. Let's go back to the color. Let's add a little bit there now. That is better. Let's do that. There you go. A bit more playful. Good, I like that. All right, that's the ground. Well, over the ground in the photo there's grass. We're going to do a bit more grass in here and then I'll show you how to turn that grass into an interesting Ss and keep it painfully, but we're advancing nicely. Or not, we need a new layer. And this is going to rename, going to call this simple. Because everything that's on the foreground will be on this layer. And we're going to play a little bit with that. I want a green. What I'm going to do, I might get some of olive green, so more to the yellow, olive green like that. I think I might like that. Now I want some grass blades, but I'm noticing this brush actually is not behaving the way I want it to be. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate my own brush. We're going to work with some taper, and there is no taper on this brush, and I want some taper on this brush. The taper is that it ends smaller like you see here. I'm putting this the size to about 28% the bottom. I'm not doing the top. I'm moving and making a taper and let's see what happens. There you go. It's not really tapering yet. We're going to play with this a little bit. Do this again. Opacity pressure. Let's leave that to that. Yeah, there you go. See that is good. Now, we got a tapering brush. See that? We're going back. I'm opacity and I'm going to add my own taper on top, not at the bottom. That makes it really easy. Now, I can create blades of grass wherever I like. That's the first one. I want to lower the size to 2% Now I'm going to go with a lighter one. I'm going to add some more even in front of the mushroom. Yes, I do like this. There we go, that's enough. And I want a really nice dark one. Go back to the 4% add a few like this going there, bit thicker. There we go. I like that. That is good for this. Now we're going to move to the back, we've got this background layer. What we're going to do, I'm going to clear this background layer and I'm going to use that actually for my grass place. The next one I want longer, I'm going to go to 3% I want to pick a different color for this green bit darker they go, these will go in the back. The need to go taller too. And then there's one long one in front of it and the other, I don't want that long. There you go. See now that looks very nice. Let's go for a really light color in the back too, to fill it up a little bit. A few long ones. There you go. Now let's do a few really dark ones to behind here, that looks nice from behind there. Now we've got this here. I'm going to remove that in a minute. Go, that looks good, doesn't it? Right now I want some different color too. I'm going back to that brown that is still there. I'll go to the yellowish yellow. Move it to the orange around there. Let's add a few of these blades to get that idea that we have a bit more autumn color in. There you go. I like that. That is good. All right, now here some problems. What do go to take the eraser and as that away the background, the foreground. Obviously, I want the foreground in front of it. That's it. Okay. Now this is a bit uniform. I want, this is a bit more playful. What I'm going to do is actually on the foreground, I'm going to add a new layer on top of it. And I'm going to add some sting splatter myself so that I have full control. You could use a splatter brush for that. We're going to just that what we're going to do first is the color we already have. We need a brush back again. Let's see, I've got it on 3% and just add a little bit of these brown colors. I'm going to erase whatever is in front of this. I don't like that with the splitters. I don't want them on top of that. There you go. Now we're going to bring back that dark color. There we go, right? Nice and vary a little bit. Press hard press a little bit less to get some variation in this. Okay, there we go. I like that. I think I'm going to stop here. You can do this as much as you want of the only thing which I want to change with the front, the foregrounds, I want to have some really light blades, especially right there so that you can see them really well bit thicker blades. They go add a little bit of variation and now you can see some nice blades there. All right, and that's that this postcard I would send to almost send it to somebody. It's just not totally finish. Of course. Need a background, perhaps some finishing touches, but that is the for the next lesson. 7. Adjustments & the Background: Let's add the finishing touches to our gas autumn painting. Not only the finishing touches, we also need, of course, a background. I don't want a white background on my postcard. Some postcards that looks good. Some paintings are great with white, but this one really needs a background that contrasts the elements that are on it already, but also complements them. Let's start painting. We're going to finish this painting. In this lesson, what we still need is work a little bit on the ground. Get a bit of a nicer transition between this line and the four and the background. And of course, create a background transition between the grass and the ground. And we need a background what we're going to do, the ground layer, let's under the ground layer or above? Probably above. Let's try above. If we do that, we get a clipping mask. So you have to unclip it. Oh, I did that wrong, right? Let's redo that. Even I make mistakes. They go, I should have gone above the clipping mask. They go. Now we've got a layer above it. Let's see, we're going to use one of these colors. I still have this green color. Might work. I've got that. Let's go for 5% and let's go for an opacity of 50% on top of here. That's it. Let's add a little bit of color. There you go. A little bit of extra color in the background. Even move that onto the foreground. Move that up a little bit a day ago. Make that slightly fill that in a little bit day ago, go back just a layer Now I'm going to 100% going to 2% I'm going to add some lines like this, create a bit better transition. See between the backgrounds and the rest. There we go. Might even do a little bit there. Good, that's better. Just a little bit so that this is not so obvious anymore. Now, I don't really like, if you go really soft, then we're removing that. That's better right now. The last thing we need is a background. I want a bit of an autumn color, yellow, ocho column. I'm going to the background. I'm adding a layer above it, but I need to this layer on top of it so that this last layer is really at the bottom. I'm calling this the background color. Okay, So that I really know what that will be. All right, for that I want some effect behind it. Now, I might go back to the original as brush. Let's first pick a color. I want a contrasting color. I'm moving this to yellowish orange. I want a yellow ocher color, a bit like this. Perhaps a bit more darker orange. And then not on top, top, but a little bit down. We're going to try this color. Let's see what that brings. Now I want a different brush. My brush, I want that original gouache brush. Let's move it all the way up. Let's press in like this, create a background. Yes, that is great. Some darker colors here, a bit lighter there. I think that is fine. I'm not going to do anything about this anymore. That is my paper. Sorry. Yeah, that is a paper, is it? But that is my painting. Now, you can play, of course, with whatever you like. You can make this a different color background, do a different texture. There's plenty of brushes, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to leave my painting like this. This is my guache Autumn painting. Our postcard is looking really good. You can print this, send it to somebody, post it online. It's really nice. We're finished with the postcard. But in the next lesson, I want to give you a project, an extra to do with all these techniques you picked up. Now I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. There's much more to Autumn: Well, that's one postcard with a toadstool. But autumn has much more to offer if you would go walk in the woods or just along the side of the road here in Autumn there's a lot more to see. There's actually a lot of fungi and mushrooms and toadstools, other fungi that grow, that you could add to a beautiful postcard too. I would challenge you to, as a project, create another postcard with all the techniques you already picked up and of course the brush we've created together and create another autumn scene. You can do pine cones, acorns, and of course different mushrooms. There's plenty to pick from. Create another postcard and once you're done with it, I would love to see it. So please post it, make sure I see it. You can post your results of the class and the Ra project here at the project section at Skillshare. Then we can all see it and enjoy the beautiful artworks you've created. Now if it is not autumn at your place or you can't find any autumn images, I've supplied an extra reference, as you can see already here for you to use in the projects. If you can't find anything, use that image and create another postcard with that. Thank you for being with me in this class. I hope you really enjoyed it just as much as I enjoyed creating this class.