Having Fun Drawing on Photos in Procreate: Carving a Halloween Pumpkin

1. Intro: Hi. My name is Lettie and I am a freelance illustrator who loves teaching all about the app Procreate. You can find most of my online classes here, on Skillshare, by simply tapping on my name. Today, we are going to carve a pumpkin without making a mess and getting our hands all sticky. This will be our essential carving kit: A photo off a super nice pumpkin, an iPad, Procreate, and an Apple Pencil or a few fingers. All set? There we go! 2. Carving: The step one is to insert a photo into Procreate. There are many websites from where you can get royalty free photos that you can use for your projects. For example, Pixabay.com or Unsplash.com. The photo I will use was taken by Keenan Sultanik and it is available for you to download with this class. If you want to take and use your own photo, that's great as well. OK, Once we have our wonderful photo imported, Let's start carving! If you don't want your pumpkin to look like it's been attacked instead of beautifully curved, I recommend turning on “Drawing guide” tool. You can use the “2D Grid” if you want to create an intricate design or “Symmetry” if you want to create a face. I don't want both sides of my pumpkin face to look exactly the same, so I will use a drawing guide only as a reference. Let's create a new layer, name it... Face... tap and hold on the canvas to invoke the color picker. We need to pick a dark color from our photo. And choose a brush you feel comfortable with. I will use the Technical pen. Just one thing, we don't want to create perfectly a straight lines so set the Streamline of your brush to None.For once, wobbly lines will look better than perfectly straight. Okay, lets start drawing our pumpkin face! I'm not very good at carving so I am drawing very shaky lines to make this more realistic. But if you are very good at this, feel free to make cleaner lines but not perfect Ok? What a piece of art, right? Let’s fill it using the same color. Make sure you have your ColorDrop threshold set high. We don’t want to get gaps between the outline and the fill. If the color feels the entire canvas is because our lines are not completely joined. We can decrease the threshold, but I recommend you to undo, close the shape, and fill with color again. Now pick a medium orange color. It will be our base color. Duplicate the face layer. Tap and hold with two fingers to select the layer content, now tap on the layer and select “Fill layer”. Go to the top layer and then tap transform. We're going to turn our flat and ugly face into a curved one. So let’s decrease the size of this layer... this way and turn it into a clipping mask. We don’t want to see this part. Now, use the selection tool to move the holes for the eyes. Much better, Right? Mmm, I will move. this a little bit up Okay. select the clipping mask and tap and hold on the eraser to select same brush we were using for painting. Use the eraser to get rid of some of the black to add depth to our pumpkin teeth. Okay, it's time now to add lights and shadows. Create a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. Place the new layer just above the orange one. We want the black layer to remain black. We are going to apply lights and shadows only to the flesh of our pumpkin. Once again, choose a brush you like. I will use the Soft Brush because it is really easy to blend different colors with it. Now we have to determine where is the light source or sources in our picture. In this picture, it seems to be, at least, two light sources because both sides of the pumpkin are illuminated almost with the same intensity. So, in our drawing, these parts should be also more illuminated than these. Okay, let's get down to work! Use the color picker instead of the color wheel to select different shades of orange from your picture. This way your illustration will look more realistic. To make these look right you just need to have in mind where the light sources are. Blend the colors making circular movements also make strokes in this direction to simulate cuts made with a knife and create uneven surface. Remember to use lighter colors for the outer edges and darker for the inner ones. Take your time. Okay. As you see, we just need to add layers and more layers of colors, which is exactly what we do when creating traditional art right? And keep doing this until we feel happy with the result. Remember also to be gentle with your Apple Pencil. If we add too much pressure, we will create sharp edges and too much contrast. If we do that, we will waste a lot of time using the smudge tool to blend the colors together. So if you don't have an Apple Pencil, or if you find hard to control the pressure you apply, simply decrease your brush opacity. This will make your life easier 3. Adding Texture & Final Touches: Hey, how is it going? Are you having fun carving your pumpkin? No sticky hands, no seeds on the floor, no smelly pumpkin flesh everywhere... no pumpkin pie... Oh, forget in the last one, It does not help my argumentation. Anyhow, where were we? I know, we were going to add texture, because our drawing looks too smooth. So, create a layer just above the Lights and Shadows layer, name it texture, choose a dark color and fill it. The layer we just created is a clipping mask. That's why we only see the color here. Now go to Adjustments and tap Noise. Slide all the way to the left. We don't need so many colors, so go to hue, saturation and brightness and desaturate the layer. Now we need to apply a blend mode to be able to see our hard work. I will choose screen because it is the one that looks better in my case. But play around with the darken and lighten sets of blending modes, to see which one works better for you and the colors you've used. I will also increase the size of the texture. Yeah, about there.. And now let's decrease its opacity, we want a subtle texture. I’ve applied the screen blend mode to my painting, so now it has texture but it looks a bit lighter done before, right? So I can go to hue, saturation and brightness to compensate for those changes. Okay, final touches. We’ve achieved a clean finish, maybe too clean. So let's draw a few strands. Go to the top layer. Tap on the eraser. For this I recommend you to use the Technical Pen. Decrease the brush opacity and size... and start getting rid of those perfect edges. Don't forget to zoom out to see how is it looking okay? And having said that, let's go into fast mood. Well, this is done. Please share with me your carved pumpkins. I love to see what you create. Thanks for watching and see you next time. Bye!!