How to Add Shadow and Light in Procreate

1. Welcome to Class: For years I created flat illustrations because I was too intimidated to add dimension to my work with shadow and light. I never thought it looked right and declared that my style was flat and worked like that for years and years. At the time, I also hadn't quite figured out how to properly use Photoshop and hadn't tried to understand all the tools such as adjustment layers. It all just seemed too difficult, but then Procreate came into my life and all the same tools that I had seen in Photoshop just seemed a lot more accessible and intuitive to use. I took the time to understand the program. I finally understood how to use adjustment layers and started to incorporate more texture and depth into my artwork. My artwork is totally for the better of it. My illustrations have gorgeous depth, texture, and color and I keep pushing myself to try different techniques to make both my illustrations better but also efficient to create. That's what I will be sharing with you in this class. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another class from me, Kristina Hultkrantz. I'm an illustrator and surface designer from Mariefred, Sweden. Though I am classically trained, I went to art school for drawing and painting in oil paints, I consider myself a self-taught digital artist because we didn't learn those things in school, and I taught myself that after graduation. It's been slow going, but when I was gifted the iPad Pro and purchased Procreate, I was really blown away by the program and how intuitive it was. I've also learned so much and I'm so happy to share everything that I have learned with you. In this class, I'm so excited to teach you all about how to use adjustment layers to easily add shadow and light into your artwork. I will take you step-by-step as I create a flat illustration and then we'll bring it to life by the end of the class with lovely shadows and lighting using adjustment layers such as soft light, multiply or add. It's going to be easy and fun, I promise. Let's get started. 2. Supplies and Class Project: The supplies that you'll be needing for this class are pretty simple. To follow along most easily in this class, you should use the app Procreate with the iPad and Apple Pencil as that is what I will be using. But you can also most likely follow along this class using other types of tablets or other softwares such as Photoshop. If you haven't already checked out my Digital 101, get to know your Procreate brush class yet, I really highly suggest that you do that because I will be mentioning that class a little bit too often in this class, and I almost see it as a prerequisite to this class, so that you can get to know your Procreate brushes and how to use texture in your artwork. This is more of an intermediate class that jumps up of what we learned in the previous class. I highly recommend that you check up on my digital texture 101 class, I will have it linked below in the class description, I think it's one of my best classes, it's been staff-picked here on Skillshare, and I really think that you'll find it helpful. As for the class project, we will be creating a simple textured illustration together, and I will show you my process of building this illustration up layer by layer and adding at the end adjustment layers for shadow and light to really bring depth and interest into our piece. So that anyone can follow along in this class, I have made some photos available that I've taken of really cute, abandoned Swedish-red houses. You can happily follow along using the same image that I have used or one of the other ones that I'll make available to you to use in this class. 3. Intro to Adjustment Layers: [MUSIC] All right, my friends, now it's time to get started learning all about adjustment layers. In this section, I'm going to do a quick rundown of how all of these adjustment layers work and why you would want to use them in your artwork. This might go a little bit too fast for some of you, but don't worry, throughout the class, I'm going to be repeating and showing you examples of how I use this. By the end of this class, it should all make sense and you're going to be completely comfortable with adjustment layers. Let's get into it. All right, it's time to learn all about adjustment layers and why they are so incredible to use. Now, I'm not sure if you're the same as I was, but I found adjustment layers really intimidating to use and really didn't understand how to incorporate them into my work. But now that I've been using procreate and I've thought that Procreate really makes adjustment layers just more accessible and easy. They're not that scary anymore. I have to admit also that I haven't 100% learned exactly what every single adjustment layer does, because there's quite a few, but you can always just play around with them like I do and then you'll of course get some favorites as well. First off, let's just create some blobs of color because they just need something to show you what these are. I'm going to be using my brush library from my digital texture class, the favorites that we created together. This is the dry ink brush. It's my absolute favorite. I'm just going to create some circles here too show you how these adjustment layers work and how I use them. Where we have two blobs and then on top of that, I'm going to make a clipping masks and I'm going to draw with some other color. I'm going to use a dark or light color on one and a darker color on the other. Let's use this evolve and I'm going to do a light color texture and then a darker color on the other one. Then I'm going to show you how this later affects, let's zoom in a little bit, how this affects what happens to these layers, because right now it's a regular color on top of another color and whatever you are creating, it's just like on top. I don't know how to explain this. We'll just have to look at it. Now we're on normal, as the N, N for normal. Then we have all of these other ones to play with. We'll start at the top with multiply. You can see with weight, you multiply the color by the colors that you put on top. If you put a light color on top it multiplies and white disappears but the dark melts in. Didn't really notice a difference with this one, but I will have to show you in other examples we can darken. Here I also need to move you down, maybe darken. Color burn, again here you can start to see very subtle changes that it changed with the light one and then dark ones mainly just black. Linear burn, normal again, lighten. For that one you can see that the black one disappeared, that layer screen. Here you can see slight texture changing color. Dodge, add one really increase the vibrancy of the light one. A lighter color, overlay, soft light. You can start to see that there's some things happening with all of them. Vivid light, it became very saturated on the white one. Linear light, pin light, this is trying to get the ones I have no idea what they do. Hard Mix, difference, exclusion, subtract, divide, hue, saturation, color, luminosity. There's so much to play with here. Going back to normal. That was just with light. Let's add one more color blob just so we can see, oops. Use a dry ink. Do one more color and we can see a little bit more stuff happening. Go back in and multiply so it mixes the pink with the green dark pin that disappeared, color burn. Lighten, screen. Yeah. Just had to go in and play with these different adjustment layers. But even though I went through this and showed you this, I'm not sure if you really understand how are you going to use this in your illustration. I thought that I would show you how I would and jump right in and show you which ones I like to use and how you can choose. Let me just get rid of these. I'm going to show you quickly three of my favorite adjustment layers and how I use them. If I were to make a simple illustration here, I will make a little, let's see, pot, I'll put green flowers, leaves, I mean, let me put some pink flowers on top. Here we have a very simple illustration and I can use adjustment layers to go in and add more depth and shadow and light without having to change different colors. Also what's great about having these adjustment layers that I will show you in a little bit, is that when you go to switch out colors it's less work. Let's start off with choosing a background color as well. Okay? First off, we're going to add a shadow underneath. A shadow, it's nice to use something that's purpley or blue or grayish. I'm going to just make a simple shadow like this, but here you see it doesn't really melt into the background really well. But if I go in and I choose multiply, it melts into the background. Also, you can adjust how much opacity. We can bring it down a little bit so the shadow is more subtle. You can give some shadow to the vase with some texture. Again, I will use the same color here to show you. Here we go, add some texture and again, it's not a matching color, but if I go into soft light, that's very subtle. We need to use a darker color. You can see that it comes to light and with soft light, the dark you get, the darker the shadow will be. To add some outline details to the piece without having to change the color of my pen for every single item and I can do this really easily and quickly. I can use a light gray color set to multiply on top of the whole piece and I can just go in and add details to all of the areas. Here you can see it became a dark green for the leaves. For the petals it became a purple to match that. I can easily go in and add lots of details without changing the color of the outline brush [NOISE]. Same thing here. I was going to add some details or something like that to the vase. Here we go. Then what's even better with these adjustment layers is that later when I go to change the colors, we can go to hue saturation. Because I did everything with adjustment layers, then it's going to continue. You don't have to change everything. It's the last step. Here the blue and the middle part turned darker blue. If we wanted to change this vase, change the colors here and it follows. You will adjust as well. I hope that this makes sense to you. It was just a quick rundown of how to use adjustment layers and why to use them. But in the next section, we're going to jump in even more. Here I can show you with the background color as well, how it follows along the shadows change with the piece. It's really handy to use adjustment layers in this way so that you don't have to change so much. Also, I think the textures and colors melt into each other better when you use adjustment layers. Yeah, that's my introduction to adjustment layers and how to use them. In the next section, I'm going to show you how I really use them even further by showing you them in my pieces. [MUSIC] Now it's your turn. Take the time to test out the different adjustment layers on swatches like I showed you. Play around with using different colors too, so that you can really try to understand how each adjustment layer interacts. 4. How to Use Adjustment Layers: We got a gist of what adjustment layers do and where they are, where you find them, how you adjust them and play with them and hopefully, you've had a lot of fun with that. But now it's time that we learn how to actually incorporate these into our artwork because otherwise, there'll be no point to this class. I want to show you now using examples from my own portfolio, how we would go about using adjustment layers to deepen shadows, depths, light and this is going to be so much fun. I also have a really sneaky little fun trick to share at the end. We got the gist of adjustment layers. Now how do we properly incorporate them into our work? I want to show you one of my favorite ways of using an adjustment layer at the end of grading and illustration to really bring your illustration to life. Here's a recent illustration I finished. I have just used flat areas of color and then gone over with texture brushes. But I haven't done that much shading or it's quite flat still, even though there's a lot of texture going on. On top of this illustration, I can start to bring it to life and melt it together by having a layer on top and using soft light, which is my newest favorite adjustment layer. We'll start off with a medium dark gray. I'm going to choose this eagle-hawk brush, which is a native procreate brush. It has nice soft edges and milky, so it's going to be great for adding shadows, so there's not harsh edges. We're just going to melt everything together here. I'm just going to go in and start adding some more shadows. It's great to do this at the end like this, rather than on every single layer. As you see, I've added texture to every layer, but if I went in and added even more shadow to every single layer, there would be so many layers. This is a way of me being able to add a little bit more contrast to my piece without having to do so much work on every single layer. This can just be like the last final touches of the piece to make it really come to light. I'm so excited to share this with you. You can really add depth and because it's on top of the entire illustration, it melts the whole thing together. Then if you mess up, you don't have to go into every individual layer and change it. You can just turn this off and see how you like it. You need to make sure in the layer. With soft light, it's quite subtle. If you want a little bit harsher, you can have different levels of the shadows that you're adding so you can make it a darker color if you need some areas that are even more shaded, like here under the table or by these bushes or this window maybe. Look how nice that looks. Then we could even take an even darker black. We want to really darken some of the areas. That was too dark, I think I'm going to be able to see that table that's there. If you added some areas of shadows that you don't want, you can of course go in and erase that. It's a really beautiful way of adding shadow and depth to your piece really simply. I could add a little shadow to his head. Look I made his face come more to life. If it becomes too much, you can always just erase it a little bit. There we go. Just have fun playing with an illustration to add the depth in shadows. Again, I can show you how it looks. We just toggle it on and off. Just see how it really deepens the whole illustration. Maybe I went a little bit too far so you can always turn it down a little bit, so it's a little bit less. Here we can do that, I show you that, see how it's quite flat and everything's the same tone, but then we added the shadowing and it became a little bit more vibrant and add more contrast. I love this so much. I want to show you how you can also add in light if you wanted to. That was with shadows and I love using soft light to add shadows. Multiplier is also a nice option, but I usually find that one a little bit too dark, but I can show you that as well, so I'm going to toggle that one off and add another layer. With Multiplier you're not going to want to use black, because it becomes very dark. I'm on my eagle-hawk brush again. I'm going to turn it to multiply this time with a lighter gray. We're going to show you how that works. But with Multiplier I feel it doesn't melt into the piece quite as much. It's like I'm adding a layer of black rather than it melting into the piece and making it dark. But multiply can be good for some darker shadows, as you can see, if we use it subtly in certain places, or use it to add shadows to different areas. But as generally to add some depth to your piece, I feel like soft light's better. I'm going to turn off multiply again. I'm going to turn on my soft light. You can see that keeps the vibrancy of the colors but just darkens them a little bit. Now we're going to talk about adding light to your piece. If you wanted it to have some glow or sunlight or something like that, you can add in lighter colors. We're going to take this light yellow and again, we're going to have the eagle hawk brush because it's quite subtle. We're going to go into, usually I like add; it can be a little intense, so let me show you if we're going to add a little light here is if the sun is hitting my grandpa's forehead here, it's really glowing. The nose, the cat. Things are a little bit too intense, so you're going to have to definitely reduce that just to make it look a little bit more subtle. Let's see, 25 to lighten it up here. It became a little bit too much, so we'd have to go in and erase around the edges there that I went too much. It's a beautiful way of adding highlights. You just have to be careful with this one because it's very intense. Maybe you can toggle that on and off and just see how it brings it to life, a little bit more shadow and light. Get rid of this one, and I'm going to put these in a group. I'm going to show you again how I can use Multiply with a light gray. I can go in and show you how to darken these real shadows. Now I have shown you how I go about adding adjustment layers to my illustrations to really bring them to life with adding a lot more vibrant shadows and light. Now I can go ahead and show you what it looked like before. You put these all in a group. You see my illustration is still quite flat. There are some textures going on. Like I said, I had many things in different layers, but it all is regular colors. By going in and adding my adjustment layers with soft light, a little bit of Multiply for extra dark shadows and some add light, I'm able to add this and give this scene a lot more vibrancy and it's pulled together, and draws you in. I hope you enjoyed this technique. That is one technique for using adjustment layers by adding them at the end. Another way that you can use adjustment layers is to use them on separate objects, and I can show you that. When I created this illustration, I created the different objects on separate pieces. The girl I have drawn on a flat. Let me turn off all this to show you how it's been built. Because you can't add adjustment layers to a group yet in Procreate, there have to be a workaround. When I drew this girl, I created the flat object as a ground, then I'm going to build up off of. I had my sketch. I created the ground of how the entire objects you can see it's a flat image. Then I built up on that in layers. Here was some color texture to her skin, her face, her hair. Here again, on that layer, I just add a little bit of texture and it flat color blocks of her clothes. I can make her a little bit bigger. I added fine patterns to her clothes. Then I went and added, this is actually on Multiply, so I used Multiply outlines to add some little detail lines without having to change the color on everything. The dark blue hair became a dark blue line for the hair and then the short had a purple line. It's really easy to use. I use adjustment layer from Multiply to add some shadow to her shirt. Here I added some more detail to her hair. Here in soft light, I added all the shadows to her entire body and hair and everything. As you can see again, it just went from being really flat and fun, to really vibrant and pulled together. Then I also use soft light and, for this one too, with a white to bring vibrancy. That's an option as well. If you thought add in the other section was a little too vibrant, soft light with a white or light gray will add a light vibrancy. That's how you can also build up in different objects if you don't want to create, if you think that it's too messy to have to erase around different objects, if you had the shadows on top to the final piece, if you understand what I mean, that's quickly another way that you can use. Adjustment layers onto different objects rather than the final piece. You can build them into your piece as you are creating the artwork. Going back to the other illustration that we were playing with, I want to show you a really fun trick that you can do with Multiply and adjustment layers. We can turn this into a night scene. We're going to add a new layer. I'm going to choose a dark blue. Now we're going to fill the entire artwork. It's just blue. But if we go into Multiply, and we reduce it slightly, you can see now it looks like it's dark. We can use the eraser to create very, we use it very lightly when we bring down the opacity and then you can start to erase some sections as if there's light being shone. If there was a lamp here, we could make it look like there was a lamp above them. We'd have to probably draw in a lamp, so it looked a little bit more for real. But this is a way of adding some really fun light. There we go. Now it suddenly became a night scene. In just two clicks and a little bit of erasing, we have added some really dramatic lighting to the scene, which I think is really fun and cool way to play with this. Inquires he is having a coffee in the middle of the night outside, but he's hanging out with his cute little cat. Don't worry if you thought that I went over this section a little bit too quick. In the following sections, we're going to be starting on our class project, and I'm going to show you step-by-step how I build up an illustration, including all of these adjustment layers and how to really bring your illustration to life. [MUSIC] Now it's your turn. Play around with adjustment layers on several of your illustrations, test out adding adjustment layers at the end of creating your flat illustration with vibrant shadows and light. You could also test adding adjustment layers as you work on one object like I showed you with my time machine piece. Then you can try to figure out which technique you like best and which would you like to continue with on your class project. You can also do some mix of the two. Also, remember to try out the night scene technique illustrations to really play with dramatic lighting. 5. Project: Sketch: [MUSIC] Now, we have learned all about how I go about using adjustment layers in my own work. I've given you several examples. We're going to jump right in and start on our class project. Take a look at the Swedish red house images that I have made available in this class to see which one you would like to pick if you want to choose something other than the one I'm using in class. Otherwise, follow along exactly what I'm doing with the same photo. Let's get started. Now, we're going to get started on our class project. I'm going to show you from start to finish how I go about building up an illustration with my adjustment layers. I'm going to just choose a A4, pretty big canvas standard. They're a little bit too long. Don't even like an A4, actually. Should I do? No. Skip that. I don't like it. Let's do a square standard Instgramy type illustration. Like my Digital 101 class, I want to make this accessible for everyone to follow along so you can use the same photograph as I am using. I've made available my Swedish red houses folder again to you in this class so that you can use one of my images that are quite simple and to just figure out your textures and shadow and light. We'll choose one together again. I'm going to use the Reference option, and I'm going to bring in an image. I chose this one to use, just the old window, an old abandoned red Swedish house. I think that this just allows us to simply create an illustration and anybody can draw this. Again, I'm going to use my favorite brushes from my Digital 101 class and we're just going to get started by making a sketch. I use a darker color with the HB pencil and I'm just going to sketch out my illustration. Make it a little asymmetrically, we're going to add in the window. some [inaudible] with these corners. The outside of the house is just horizontal. Then to give some life to this illustration, this is tree here with some branches, with little birds on top. Here's my very rough sketch. I'm going to include the trunk of the tree a little bit more. Here, it's mainly branches, but I thought it would be more interesting to add the trunk. Again, this is your illustration, so feel free to add in birds or some other detail. You can have the window open or somebody looking out, or you can create your own illustration altogether. It doesn't have to be this, I just want to. If you're not focusing so much on what you're drawing, you can more easily learn the techniques. If you're also trying to learn how to draw people or objects and things, then you psych yourself out. Image like this is a lot more simple for you. Here's my sketch, and that is the first step to creating the illustration. In the next section, we will start to build up the illustration. [MUSIC] Now, it's your turn. Sketch out your image. Whether you chose to use the same photograph as me or one of my other photographs I made available for this class or your very own illustration. Sketch it out with a pencil brush on your digital canvas. 6. Project: Add Blocks of Color: Let's get started on building out this illustration with color and I'll show you my process to make this really simple and nice. Then since the background is red, I'm going to choose a nice not green reddish color. We can cop with this bricky read. The classic Swedish Red House color followed, yet. It comes in different shades, but we don't need to get into specifics, but I got good brick, reddish color. Now I'm going to start building out different layers. Here's my sketch layers have to remember not to draw on that. Have that on the top I need to create this window. I need a white, some as quiet white but I'm going to do more grayish let me use my favorite dry ink brush to go in and create this window so slight texture there. Going to reduce my sketch a little bit so that I can see what I'm drawing a little bit better. I like this brush because it does give a little bit of texture even if it's quite flat. Because we're drawing a really old window, it's not perfectly straight and perfectly flat textured, so this is great. So here my lines are quite wonky, but again it matches my diode I like when I keep things wonky, then it turn out that way and you also matches though it's a cold winter. The white window frame is finished. Behind that, life easier, I'm going to make a green, something like this. Again, we're going to add in lots of textures and then we're going to add in the shadows later. We're just fighting in the general colors first. On top of that, there's a grayish slightly green middle. Go on top of the window frame. There's some latches that are also in this green color. Just to differentiate them a little bit, I will make it slightly darker. There is the window done and the background is also created. We're going to add in these branches. Let's see, I'm going to use a different brush. I'm going to use this ink one. I'm going to take this B, she grayish brown. That's too texture. I'm going to have to use Maya's all round filler just to give the leaves some texture. Again, in my texture class, I keep mentioning, but it's liquid pre, requisite to this class because they go over all the fundamentals of how I built up an illustration with texture. If you still haven't checked that out yet, I highly recommend that you do because I'll go into texture in so much detail. I think it's my nerdiest class I've ever created. You can really tell how excited I am about brushes in Procreate and how much I love this program. The more random, the better here. I'm going to do different tones and we're going to do slightly darker as well. [NOISE] these leaves are all the exact same color. Even lighter just to do some [NOISE] great issue. That is my illustration, very flat and it looks pretty horrible right now. But we're going to start to make this actually look like something. Let's start adding some texture in here. We're going to need a layer on top of the red background to add some texture here. I'm going to choose a slightly darker red and we're going to figure out which brushes to use let's use my soft green brush. It has this really nice greediness. It looks like the facade of the house. Then stripes. I'm going to add that sometimes a little bit darker in areas of all the photo, a little bit to start to add areas where it's going to be shadow or more texture than other areas. That looks good. We can try another layer as well with even darker, we can go for C, what this area is really textured. Top artists, crayon. Then we're going to go in and like I've talked about before, we're going to use a multiply to add some line work. Let's use, this ink we use dry ink but quite small, Danielle leaves. We're going to set this one to multiply. I'm going to choose, see what it looks like this. I'm going to go in and add some lines to be that different. What's it called? Different boards? The house boards? I think these lines are slightly too dark. I don't want them to stand out this much. It's good that we can have this on a separate layer and just decrease the opacity go down to 50 percent. My lines are also not straight. We can go in and also in this [NOISE] switch to the pencil, and then I can go in and add nuts to the wood or different wood textures. I'm just doing scribbles and lines and all, I don't know, what is this? Make it look like the wood is worn and has different areas, and you can have an open, as a cracks and things like that just to make it not so perfect. So I'm going to go in and do that, add some light periods, scribbles. It just does an example again, just to show you how nice it is to have things on separate layers. Let me just show you that I have the background color. If we wanted to change the house to yellow house, we would have to go in and turn these layers and read those colors as well. But if we had them as adjustment layers, they would have now changed as we went, but that's okay. [NOISE] But sometimes it's nice when you're building up your illustration to change the colors. It's not very often that you are going to be changing the colors constantly. So now, I have given a lot more life to the background starting to look like wood. Here, we have a lot more going on with textures, with fading, but we can do that later with our shadow and light. But if we wanted to, we can go above and beyond and add a little green that's here because it could be fun. So I'm going to choose a grayish red, and green, I like this artist crayon 1 one again. This one, I think we're going to have to be quite subtle with, just add it to some places like that. This one, I feel like you also like to add a little bit lighter, but then also not as opaque. There. So it melts in a little bit more. So you reduce the opacity and I lightened it a little bit. So now we have a lot of life in the wood background. So let's move on to the window. So here we need to also add a clipping mask, and I'm going to add some gray tones on there, using again, this soft green brush just to make it not look so perfect. You can get some pencil to make it look more like, and see the edges and some details like that. Again, you can add a little wood texture by doing some scribbles and drawing nuts or something like that. That's good. Moving on, we want to add texture to this gray one. So clipping mask, I'm going to choose the lighter grayish. I think again, this artist's crayon would be great for that. Just add that in. [NOISE] I'll also use a slightly darker, grayish one to add some depth again to that there. [NOISE] This stick in the middle need some [NOISE] texture. [NOISE] The latch thingies, the hinges [NOISE] need some texture as well. So I'll pick that green and a slightly darker, then we'll go for this soft green there. [NOISE] This way they stick out a little bit better and more pronounced. They seem to have some other details, I can go on there with a gray with the pencil, brush and just draw on circles where they have been screwed on or whatever it is. Again, that's pretty simple way of adding the texture, and then we need to work on our tree trunk because this one is looking very way too flat and it's not melting in. So do the [NOISE] green brush again and just go all over with a darker color, you can do a lighter color on some of it. We can do even darker with this speckle green. [NOISE] I also want again, to add some textures myself with the pencil brush. Give it that bark, the bark of the tree look. Can you guys see that I'm not being too precious, I'm just be a little crazy here? One thing that's making the tree look a little bad out of place is that it is sticking out too much so we need some shadow behind there. We can duplicate the tree, and I can move it to the side a little bit, and here we can use multiply to turn that into a shadow. It's a little bit to your face, so I'm going to reduce that, let's see, down to 70 or 65, then you get a really nice shadow that melts into the building with multiply. If you think the edges are a little bit too pronounced, you can blur it a little bit with Gaussian blur, just a little bit, and you just use your pen to swipe to the right, just a little bit, I think would look nice, so it looks a little bit more realistic. Thirty-seven percent, I think looks nice. [NOISE] To make the window look like it's more a piece of the building as well, so it has a shadow as well, we can do the same thing we did with the tree, we can duplicate the window frame. I'm going to change the color of this by swiping to the right with two fingers and choose a new color, like this grayish red is good. I'm going to fill it and I'm going to offset it. Now, you can see that it's not working at all, so we're going to multiply it and it's going to melt into the background. It's a little too harsh of a dark shadow, so I'm going to reduce it down to 65 or something. Now, the shadow is a little bit too harsh here, I don't want that, so I'm just going to erase it. So I'll use eagle-hawk, that seems good, and just erase that so it's not such a sharp shadow up there, but a little bit just to show that there's different layers. So now we have a very simple illustration here built up with flat colors and a little bit of texture. It still needs a little bit more depths, as you can see. It's starting to come alive but in the next section we're going to add our adjustment layers for shadow and light. [MUSIC] So now it's your turn to build up your illustration with flat layers of color, add textures, and start to add a little dimension with different tones of light and dark. 7. Project: Adjustment Layers: [MUSIC] Time for some fun. We're going to start adding our adjustment layers. I'm going to start with the shadows. In this image, I'm going to do my technique for just adding everything on top of the final illustration so you really melt it together. I'm going to make sure that I make a layer at the top of the illustration, I'm going to use a medium dark gray, I'm going to use this eagle hawk brush like I did before, and I'm going to set this layer to soft light. Now we're going to go in and add more depth and melt this illustration together with some shadows. We can see also looking at our image that it's a little bit darker at the top, the roof is shading a part of the house up here. Then this shadows on this side of the house are a lot darker. Well, it's underneath the window over here. There's some shadowing going on by the side of this window on this slide, as well as the textures are a little bit darker over here. I want to make sure to add some more texture into the green shadows, and by the edges a little bit more shading. As you can see, sometimes when you go over the certain areas it melts it together more. If we want certain areas to be even darker, we can create an almost black or black if you want really darker areas such as up here I still want it to be quite dark at the top. This white is very white. I'm going to make it a little bit darker at the bottom corner, shaded by the tree a little bit more. Tree I think looks a little unnatural, still looks like it's sticking out a little bit too much, so I'm going to try add more shadows to that on the side to give them more depth. I'm going to add more shadowing where the leaves are sitting as well to bring that to life. Now that we've added some shadows to make that much more interesting and has a lot more depth, we can also test to see if it was a little bit too intense because our original image is quite light and this is currently a little bit too dark possibly, so we can reduce what we did a little bit. Maybe down to 80, maybe we went a little too crazy with that. Next step we can play around with adding light. I previously showed you using the add adjustment layer, but that was quite glowy and intense. You can use soft light as well. You can start with light gray, change it to soft light. We can do the same thing that we did before. Here is lightening areas, if you needed that. Don't really need it there. Down here at the bottom where it's sun bleached, can add that in. Here it's a little pink, maybe the trees a little bit too. Tops of this window you can add a little bit more light there. Not much more than that. You can see, again, if we create a group for these two adjustment layers, so we can easily toggle that off and on, we can see what it looks like before and after. Here's our first image. That was really nice, and we could build it up with textures, but just by adding a little bit more drama, it did bring the illustration more to life. Again, if you think that you maybe went a little bit too overboard with the shadows, you can always adjust your adjustment layers that's what they're there for. Also with these adjustment layers, you can change different brushes. I can go in with a really dark pencil in this case. Still on my shadows layer, I can go in with a darker brush and go in with details if I had missed something. If I wanted to add more details like this, can go in and this layer with this almost black or black pencil and add in more. Just things to really make sure that things are defined. Remember that you're on top of things, so here I went over the branch so that doesn't look very good. Just erase, just be careful when you're drawing. Simply add more lines just to make sure that everything is good. Same thing with if you needed more on the tree or something, you can use a smaller brush like that there. You can add in details on this layer as well, the final details to make everything stick out, especially these hinges look really good with some extra or maybe on this wooden middle part of the window wasn't defined so much. There's some more ideas for you in here. There we go. That's looking pretty much done, I'd say. Feel free to add anything else to your scene by bringing it to life with a figure or animals or something like that, or just leave it like this. It's going to be really fun to see what you come up with in your class projects. [MUSIC] Now it's your turn. Add adjustment layers on top of your final illustration to bring it to life with shadow and light, and extra outlining details. 8. Bonus: Character: [MUSIC] Our class project is finished. It was really simple, and I hope that you're able to follow along and thought that that was fun and that you'll want to incorporate that into your work. So that I don't leave you hanging, I also wanted to do a bonus section here and show you how I go about doing this with a technique that I quickly ran through about creating an object and clipping masks and adjustment layers on top of that. That will hopefully make more sense in this section as I go over that process quickly as well. As a bonus for this class, I wanted to show you also my process as I quickly went over how to create an object and have the adjustment layers built within the objects so that you can build up an illustration slightly more precisely. If you're doing a large scene with multiple different objects and you want to have the shadows built onto the different objects rather than building up the shadows and light at the end and you prefer to be more precise, so I just want to make sure to show you this technique as well. Again, Procreate doesn't allow you to put these adjustments on top of a group, so it makes things a little bit difficult; that's why I'm doing this technique, but it's fun as a way of working, and there's no wrong ways of working. I'm going to add a photo I took off my sketchbook with a cute little character here. It's a simple character just to show you this technique. I'm going to use this to build up an illustration. But like I showed you, really quickly, you have to start with filling in the shape. I'm going to choose a random color. It does not matter what color it is. I have been using a skin tone. Let's give her a nice golden skin here, and I like my dry ink brush, and I'm going to use this to fill in the entire object. Now we have my character fully blocked in. In order to see what I'm doing, I need to move the sketch on top. Another way of using adjustment layers is actually, when you have a sketch that has a white background, you can use Multiply, and the white will go away. Just reduce it down a little bit, so I can just barely see my sketch, and I'm going to start working on my illustration on top of this blob of color with clipping masks. I'm going to think about the order in which I would build up a item. On a person, it's quite easy. You start with the skin, and then you add on the clothes and hair so as if it's on top of each other like it is in real life. I can start by adding her clothes, so underneath the first layer is socks and her T-shirt. What color should they be? Add a clipping mask. I'm on my dry ink. I will give her a nice light pink for her T-shirt, and I'll match her socks to her T-shirt. Next step, we can do shoes and overall, so I'll do another clipping mask again, overall. Yellow color might be nice. You've got to be careful and precise not to put color where it's not supposed to be. here we go. Shoes, we can make those darker brown color. If going back and you want to add on a pattern or something to something, because we're already working in clipping masks, that makes it a little bit more difficult, so we would have to do things in Alpha lock mode. Here we go. If the pink socks, I wanted to add some green stripes to them, I would Alpha lock that layer so that I can color off the side of the edges. There we go with that. The clothes and shoes are already there. We can move on to doing the plant pot. The plant, I want nice, dark green leaves. The pot, I can do that on the same layer. Shall we do it, this nice tealish color? Just make sure to get the hands. To match that, maybe I'll give her a nice, blue hair. In her hair, she also has a little a hair tie, so I'm going to do another layer. We can do the pink again. Now we need to go in and add some details such as her face, so I'm going to put that layer underneath the hair just in case. I'm going to use that blue again for her eyebrows. I'm just going to simply do it like this. I'll make some whites for her eyes. Need some details for the skin and nose and things like that so I'm going to choose a darker shade of the skin tone to add in some lines for the nose, and some freckles. [NOISE] Eyelashes maybe I'll do eyeliner too. [NOISE] This person definitely has green eyes, so I will give them green. I'll use the same dark brown for the pupil to bring life into the eyes. I will then give them spot. We need a mouth so I'm going to do the pink but slightly darker version. Need to be darker because the skin tone is darker. We go so now we have a very simple, I think the hair maybe we need some sideburns here because otherwise, it's quite strange hairstyle. That's strange, but there you go. It's a little bit more connected to our head. [LAUGHTER] Maybe at this point I can turn off my sketch. It's very flat, as you can see. Now we can use our adjustment layers to live in this up. I'm going to use and go in and do my multiply trick, clipping mask and using a gray and either the pencil or the dry ink, but just quite thin. I'm going to go in and add in different detail lines so I can make sure to maybe the chin line here. I can create a pocket on the overalls. I can do some stitches. Now it looks quite gray. You can always change the colors. Add some buttons here. T-shirt needs some work like this, some pockets. These outlines might be a little too intense so you can always reduce them down a little bit to me, a little bit more subtle. I can turn my sketch back on, see if I missed anything. I should add that little knee details. Can go in and add some details to this shoes like darken soles. You can add some lacing, very simple lacing. The t-shirt maybe should have some stitches as well. The pot, you can give the pot simple design like that. Go add some more defining the mouth like that. You can add more defining on the eyes and make a little shadow for the eyelashes. It's nice. We can add more defining lines on the ribbon and even the plant. Here we go. Now we have some more defining elements here so now we're going to add some texture to this so we can do another adjustment layer and this time with my soft light. I'm going to choose this soft brush. I like the Eaglehawk one. We're going to use a darker to give some texture to the hair and the side of the face to figure out which side you want the light to be coming from. Maybe the light's coming from the right. On the left side of objects and you have more shadow or underneath things. Good. That's the first layer overall, texture and things. If you need to go a little bit darker in some areas, you can reduce the brush size and maybe darken this gear a little bit underneath the neck to make them really shadowed there. This side under the clothes, the side there, add more layer may be here by the pants or under the socks, under the pants there to the shoes. We already brought so much more texture in here and they can give texture to the hair sitting on top and it's also a little bit more texture going on in the hair. It looks as if it's sitting on top of her head obviously and shadowing her face a little bit. Same thing with this plant pot, shadowing her hand. Here we built up so many nice shadows, just using one soft light brush. It's starting to look really good and maybe in the mouth need some shadowing and underneath the mouth so it looks like the lips or something's going on here. Again, we can go back into this multiply layer and I can use my almost black or no, like a medium and go in with a pencil and I can add some hair details like that. Let's call this illustration almost finished. You want to give her some, looks like she's not floating on the ground, so we need to add a shadow underneath. Can do classic gray shadow. Let's use this Evolve brush, see what that looks like. That looks nice. That was a rundown, a little bonus video of how you can also be a little bit more precise with this, and you can build up your illustration with objects like this by using clipping masks and then adjustment layers to melt everything together and make really simple gorgeous shadows. This one I didn't do light. I remember that so let me just quickly go over that if you want it to see, so I'll go in with a light gray on soft light again. We wanted to add a little bit of light here. Clipping mask and I'm going to go back to the Evolve brush. We said that the light was coming from the right so we can add some light coming on to the plants. Her hair maybe a little bit on this side, on her nose, or this ear. If I like the nose. Just a little bit more subtle light in there as well if you want a little bit too far with the shadows. Now I'd say that the illustration is complete. I hope you enjoyed this little bonus video as well. I could show you how I go about being a little bit more precise with my adjustment layers on top of objects, and this is one way of building up an illustration. I hope you liked it and of course, incorporate any of these techniques that I've shown in class into your artwork. [MUSIC] Now it's your turn. Test out, building up a object using this technique of filling the entire object and using clipping masks to add the details and bring your character or other item to life. 9. Next Steps: [MUSIC] Wasn't this fun? My hope is that this class has really made you more comfortable using adjustment layers and that you're going to want to incorporate them into your work. I found them really helpful in the creation of my illustrations, and I only find that they saved me time. But it also I feel like they really melt together my illustration and really bring it to life and it just looks better, just feels more put together. I don't know. I also want to really stress that there's no one way of making art, and I hope that you take tips and tricks from this class and other classes that I teach. But also from other teachers here on Skillshare and beyond. It's important that you learn from multiple different sources and that you're testing out things for yourself so that you're always creating unique, individual artwork. I have a couple of things that I would love for you to work on next. I would love for you to keep playing with adjustment layers and not just the ones that I showed you in class. Can you figure out a way of using some of the other ones that I didn't show maybe and have you found a personal favorite of your own and how you want to use them in your work? Play around with old illustrations too. Can you breathe new life into them by adding adjustment layers and playing with the shadows and light in your older pieces? Finally remember that this is supposed to be fun. Art-making is fun. If you're on your journey of creating, developing your illustration style, I want you to know that this style is something that is constantly going to be evolving. As you learn new things, it is okay to adapt and change your style. It doesn't have to be so concrete or perfect. A part of being an artist is expressing yourself and learning new things in developing. I just want you to not take yourself so seriously and really have fun with this and explore as much as you can. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] That's it. Thank you so much for taking this class with me and learning about adjustment layers. I really hope that you found it helpful, inspiring, and that you have learned something to add to your Procreate workflow or whatever program that you are using. I really look forward to seeing you at class projects and how you are going to be interpreting the images that I have shared with you, my Swedish, red houses. These are the facade that I worked on the same photo or if you choose to do one of the other photos or a complete illustration of your own. Please make sure to upload your class project to the class gallery and let me know if you'd like any helpful feedback on that. I'd be happy to give that to you. If you'd like to hang out with me outside of Skillshare, you can find me on Instagram at Emma Kisstina. I also have a very supportive Facebook group, Emma Kisstina Insiders, that you can happily join. I do monthly feedback sessions and other themed videos and things and I'd love to have you there. Thanks again so much for watching. Please make sure to check out my profile, where you can see the 20 plus other classes that I teach here on Skillshare, and I will see you next time. Bye.