How to Create a Luscious Foliage Illustration in Procreate

1. Class Trailer : Welcome to my first Skillshare class. Hi there, I'm Francesca, an artist and illustrator based in Milan. My work is inspired by nature, the strength, and beauty. I believe that nature is an artist herself. In this class, you will follow me in my creative process. You will learn how to create beautiful luscious foliage illustration. While acquiring the basic skills, you need to start working with Procreate. We will discuss together the importance of creating and engaging in illustration and how to achieve that. Theory and practice will go hand in hand. The class is open to all levels. I will be working on an iPad in the Procreate but if that's not available to you, you can use any other digital painting software. See you in the class and don't forget to have fun. 2. Project description : Your task is to illustrate your favorite garden. It can be a tropical forest, your city park, your backyard, an imaginary garden. It doesn't matter. Just make it interesting, joyful, luscious, using the skills you've just gained in this class. To-do, at the end of the class, you will upload your illustration in the project and resources section in JPEG or PNG. Also, I will love to see how your work will come to life, so post your reference pictures, your sketches, and also the process video if you want. Give feedback to other students' projects. Remember that Skillshare is all about learning together, so you're welcome to comment on other students' work. Also, remember to post the finished illustration on social media and tag me. I'm at Francesca_inart on Instagram. I can't wait to see your work. In the resources section, you will find my reference pictures, my final sketch, and my palette. If you have any question, feel free to ask them in the discussion section. I will do my best to answer them. 3. Procreate basic: As I said, this class is open to all levels. I've introduced this section on Procreate basic only for beginners. If you're already familiar with Procreate, feel free to skip to the next video. I'm going to make it short and cover only the basic stuff because I don't want to overwhelm you with the unnecessary information. If you're interested in more classes on Procreate to get you started, check the links in the resources section. To create a new Canvas, hit the plus icon. This is a selection of presets and previous Canvases I've used, but we're going to create a new Canvas together. You can set the dimension in pixels, inches, centimeters, or millimeters. I'm going to choose millimeters. Make sure you're creating a Canvas as big as you want your final piece to be, regardless if it's going to be reproduced on a digitally or will be printed. For example, if you create your illustration in A4 size, and then you need it in an A3 size, which is bigger, you will lose quality in the process. While if it's the other way around, you will not lose any quality at all. I will create an A3 size Canvas, which is 420 width and 297 height. Three hundred is a good DPI. You can even go higher, like 600 DPI, but you'll see that if I put 600, Procreate says that the file is too large, so I'll keep it at 300. The maximum number of layers available depends on the dimension and the DPI on the Canvas. Then let's set the color profile. If your illustration will reproduce only digitally, you can set it as an RGB mode. Because I want to print my illustration, I will set it as a CMYK profile. I print at home, and I've had the best result when my illustration are in a CMYK profile. I'm going to title my new project as SkillShare Class. Let's hit "Create". This is our new Canvas. You open the layer section by tapping this icon on the right top corner. Of course, if you're going to hit the "Plus" button, you will create a new layer. You can untick the layer to hide it. If you swipe left, you can lock the layer so you won't be able to change it until it's unlocked. You can duplicate and delete the layer. You can change the layer opacity. Let me show you. Tap with two fingers on the layer, and you'll see that you can slide to adjust the opacity all the way down. I show you how to merge layers together. You pinch the layers, just like that. You can move the layers, of course, select it and hold it, and you will be able to move it around. If you drop it on top of another layer, you will create a group. You can keep it open, and you'll be able to see all these layers, or you can close it. You can also hide the whole group. You open the Layer menu by selecting the layer. There are many options. You can rename it, select it, copy, clear it, but I think the one I want to show you is the Alpha Lock. It's a very cool feature, and I'll show you how it works. Alpha Lock gives you the ability to draw within the layer shape and boundaries. To quickly access Alpha Lock, take two fingers and swipe right on to specific layer. Alpha Lock is extremely useful to quickly change layers, fill colors, and you can tell it's enabled because the layer thumbnail will have a checkered background. In the top menu bar, you see this arrow, is the Transform button. When you tap it, it will select the color layer and bring a transform toolbar. It's a very useful tool I use a lot. You can use different transformation method, like uniform, which preserve the image ration, or freeform, which stretches and squashes without maintaining the original ratio, and then distort them. Warp are probably my favorite, and you'll see how I use them later in the class. They create very interesting shapes. Then the icon next to the arrow is the ellipse tool, which allows you to select a part of the layer and move it on its own without changing the layer. You can also copy the selection and paste it into another layer. Let's talk about the color palettes. If you hit the color icon, you will open your colors picker. You can choose the one you prefer, the disc or the classic. I'm not going to talk about the harmony and value today. Then you have your palette library. Procreate comes with many palettes ready to use, but you can create your own from camera, file, or photos. The one you choose as default will show up under the color pickers and the history. The iPad allows you to split screen and use two apps at the same time. Open one app first, in this case is the Photo app, and then drop the second app on the side. In this case, Procreate. Select and hold the picture you've chosen and drag it and drop it into the library. Procreate will give you all the swatches from that picture. I'll show you two quick shortcuts. If you want to fill an area with color, you can tap the color circle in the top right and drag and drop it where you want the color added or changed. Be sure that the shape you want to fill is closed, because if it's open, it will color the whole layer. Also, you can switch between the current color and the previous color by tapping and holding the color circle. Let's talk about the brushes. On the right top corner, you'll find the brush blend and new erase icons. You'll see that when you hit them, the same brush library will open up because you can do all these three things with the same brush, which is really useful when you want to erase your blend and maintain the same texture you've used to paint. If you press and hold the erase icon, it will erase using the current brush. As you can see here, I can erase keeping the texture of the gesso brush. On the left, there are two sliders. The one on the bottom controls the opacity of your brush. Let's lower down the opacity. Seeing this is, of course, as opaque. Then let's bring it back to 100 opacity, while the one on the top size of the brush. Then let's play with the size. This is really small. Then here, the biggest size. Procreate comes with many sets of brushes ready. But you can always buy and download many more or create yours as well. I will suggest playing around and trying them so that you can find the ones you like more. My favorite two and the ones I use the most are these Copic Marker, which is very smooth and allows me to play with opacity and layers, and the Narinder Pencil, which is part of the sketching set. I like it because it looks like a very soft color pencil, and it creates a nice contrast with the smoother Copic Marker brush. You can use two brushes on their sides, and it will create different type of mark, like if you were shading. You have complete control on your brushes characteristic. You can add a settings within an individual brush in the Brush Studio. Select "Brush" and click on it again, and the Brush Studio will open up. I'm not going to show you everything here. But for example, here you can change the stroke path and its properties, like spacing and streamline. More streamline means more strokes stabilization, and it will flow more because it reduces any wobble happening. I encourage you to try. Is quite useful when doing calligraphy or proceeding drawing. If you want to make changes, it's a good habit to create a duplicate first as a backup, and then you change the duplicate. Then pressure control is another great tool. The pressure curve controls to way your Apple pencil responds to pressure. You will find that with some brushes, the strokes will get bigger in size the more pressure you apply, or other brushes will get more opaque with pressure. Last but not least in this section, the quick gestures. They are very useful when working in Procreate. They're lot of them, and they make your process so much quicker. I'll show you some of them. To undo, you tap with two fingers. Then you redo, tapping with three fingers. If you scrub with three fingers, you will clear the layer. You pinch and twist to rotate. Then if you do a quick pinch, fit to screen, and a four-finger tap will open the full screen. Four-finger tap to revert back. 4. Brainstorming and finding inspiration : What does luscious mean to you? To me, is something rich, luxurious, joyful, excessively ornate. In my mind, it's full page illustration rich in colors, textures, shapes, and details. Something that makes me want to be transported in it. You know, like in the Mary Poppins movie, when they jump into the paintings on the pavement, that's exactly what I want to achieve. I will show you one of my favorite books that I own, which is Painting The Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. We will look through many of my other books, and I will show you the work of my favorite artist, and I'll explain what we can learn from them and why. I encourage you to look for inspiration and find the subject of your illustration with me while I'm looking for mine. You have a botanical garden or a city park nearby, just go outside and pay them a visit or just look closely to your house plants. I do that all the time. This book was first published on the occasion of the exhibition Painting The Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. It's well known that within Europe, impressionists were the first to portray gardens from life. They focus on their colors and form rather than using them only as backgrounds. Gardens held a great aesthetic importance for these artists. Well, we can say the gardens and nature have been a source of creative inspiration for centuries. Gardens are usually very busy subjects to paint and illustrate because of their nature. They are full of life, colors, shapes, details, so simplifying the subject and creating engaging composition can help a lot. I want to quickly show you how painters like Monet, Renoir, and Nolde have approach painting a garden. Here, in Woman in a Garden of Renoir, the composition follows the standard rule of thirds. The image is divided into third, both horizontally and vertically. Then the focal point, the lady, is placed on the intersection of these dividing lines. Then there's this path leading our view towards her and these two lines of trees are reinforcing the composition. I can say that here we have a very strong composition, also quite a standard composition too. While in the artist's garden at the third, Monet gives us a very different arrangement. The foreground is empty and guides us towards the middle of the painting and to the bottom on the stairs, and these kids are in the middle of the painting and they are of course, the focal point of the art work. Then sometimes there's no focal point at all, like in this painting, Large Poppies by a Emil Nolde. When the viewer is looking at this painting, his eyes can wander around without anything grabbing their attention. This kind of composition is an option that you might want to consider for your illustration. It's a little bit harder to compose, maybe, but what can help you if you follow these option is a good color palette, and remember to create an area with less details whether your work can rest his eyes upon. If you want to look closely at some of these masterpieces but you don't have art books at your disposal, or you can't go to museum, I would suggest looking at Google Arts & Culture. You can also zoom a lot into the paintings. Well, not even in real life you're allowed to be this close to a painting. Books about houseplants and gardening are perfect for finding references. You will get lost in the amazing world of plants. It's hard not to get inspired while looking at these beautiful foliage. You can search for pictures about garden so that you can copy the arrangement, but then you can draw completely different plants, like the ones that have caught your attention because of their shapes and patterns. Look at these one, just reminds me of a Monet or a Renoir painting that we have just seen. I'm not trying to create an illustration that's botanically believable, so probably, I'll put together species that don't belong to the same habitat or they bloom in a different season, but I don't really mind about that. I'm really into cacti and tropical leaves, and I'm guessing my final illustration will be some kind of tropical garden or even a glimpse of a tropical forest. Unsplash is another great tool in your hands. It's a website where you can find free usable images. I will create a collection called Skillshare class, and I will link it in the resources section so that you can easily find my reference pictures. 5. Create an engaging illustration : When creating your illustration, you want to fascinate and engage with the viewers. You want to grab and hold their attention. I'm here to give you the tools to improve your artistic composition. I will help you to use them mindfully. Which are the most important aspect you have to keep in mind when creating an artwork? To me is the composition, colors, values, and textures. These can be applied to any medium and style. Each of these subjects will be discussed in depth in the next section, when we will be sketching and painting together. So that theory and practice will go hand in hand, and it will be easier for you to understand, and for me to explain. I will anyway give you a quick overview, so that you know what you have to keep in mind, when watching the next lessons. Lines, focal points, edges, contrast, and balance, are the elements of composition. Within them, contrast is the one that matter the most to me. Contrast gives energy to an artwork, and makes a composition more engaging. While colors tell a story. Which time of the day it is. Is it cold? Is it warm? It provokes feelings in the viewer. Good color palette, can do wonders to achieve a great result. Values are as important as colors because they create depth and perspective. Textures make the illustration more tangible, alive, overall, more interesting. Well, see you in the next lesson, and we will start sketching. 6. Sketching and composition : This is the final sketch, but how did I get here? First, I want to remind you that everything that you will see is a time-lapse. I don't draw this quickly. Actually, I'm very slow. I take my time to think and I can't show the whole process, otherwise, this class will be extremely long. I like to start with a very rough sketch because at the beginning, I'm mostly interested in creating the foundation of my composition and not the details. As I've told you, ready gardens, forests are very busy subjects and having a strong foundation is important to illustrate them successfully. But first, a little bit of theory. Let's see what's the definition of a focal point. They refer to the areas that demand the viewer's attention and which all elements converge. You can create one strong focal point or many soft ones. When creating many soft focal points, the viewer can look at the painting as a whole instead of being attracted only by one object. Multiple focal points provide the rhythm to the picture. I know that for my final illustration, one different soft focal points that will help the viewer wonder in the artwork. What do I mean by lines? Lines are leading towards something and the viewer's eyes are drawn along them. They are obvious or implied and they can be curved, diagonal, vertical, or horizontal. I will give you some example. Look at my lady in the jungle. There are clearly two diagonal lines leading towards the lady, which is in the center of the illustration, and it's a focal point. Or here, my blue hosta. I've decided to build the illustration on a spiral, and there are many different focal points along this spiral. I will baseline assertion on organic line. Nothing straight, so maybe something curved and round. When working in Procreate, I keep my reference picture open on my iPad or on the laptop if I have it with me, and I will insert the reference picture on the screen if I'm not using the split wheel. This rough sketch is a one single layer and it doesn't have to look great at all, there has to be a good starting point for your illustration. Now I'm sketching quickly some of the plants which caught my attention when looking for inspiration. I'm trying to outline some composition, and as you can see I'm changing my mind a lot, erasing and moving stuff around. Here is a very rough sketch. Before we go any further though, I want to talk about the other elements of composition and finish our little theoretical explanation. Edges in art are the transition between two shapes of color. They can be hard, or soft, or lost. Soft and lost edges create depth and sense of distance. They can also make an object less significant because it's out of focus. While hard edges drew attention, they're usually positioned close to the focal points. We'll see how important edges are in the next class while painting. Contrast is the juxtaposition of difference. It's a matter of arranging opposite elements and it creates variety and rhythm in a picture. Contrast is powerful. It can be applied to all the elements and make your artwork. It's a common denominator. There are many different kinds of contrast. When composing and painting your illustration, you can create contrast between shapes, small and big, round or sharp. Values, dark and light. Colors, like gray and saturated, warm or cool, or texture, transparent and opaque, smooth or rough, and as we've just seen between soft and hard edges. Balance refers to how the elements of the painting relate to each other in terms of the visual way to create visual equilibrium. One side does not seem heavier than another. A balanced work is pleasing to the eye, and balance can communicate a lot about a work of art and can contribute to the overall effect. I will try to achieve balance by placing the different focal points mindfully. Now that my rough sketch is there, I'm going to draw the final one. I will lower the opacity of this layer and start drawing on a new one. When I create the final sketch, every element that I draw is on a separate layer so I can move them around. I will move them around a lot, trying all different possibilities. This is one of the benefits of working digitally with layers. Here you can see how I'm using Distort and Warp to change the shape of this leaf so that it can fit the space vector. I changed my mind and decided that I like this allocation too much to not put it in the foreground. I found this picture on Unsplash, that really speaks to me. I love this waterfall and stream running through. I'm going to use it and create a curved line along the illustration. Also the pond in the foreground can be that area with this details where the viewer's eyes can rest upon. I really like the shape of colors of these palms and I think they will be great in the background. When sketching this kind of foliage, it's not important to make it perfect, also, they will be far away, so they have less details. I will draw them directly with the pencil when coloring. This bright orange against middle cool sage green is gorgeous. Here's the final sketch. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the background. If I want to have some sky showing through the trees or not. The sketch of the background is rough, but the foreground and the middle ground are quite neat. I really like these allocations, the rum plants, and this plant on the right I love. I want to color it purple or lilac for some nice pop of color among all the green. The waterfalls and the stream create an s-shaped line along the illustration, and the line is basically dividing the picture into halves which are well-balanced. These four plants are my focal points and there are two in each of. 7. Painting: colour and textures Pt One: Here's the peak of the final illustration, but as in the previous lesson, let's start with some theory first. I wish there was time and space for a full lesson on color theory, but unfortunately it's not. Color is the quality of an object with respect to life reflected by it. In art, color is a powerful visual element. Color theory terms are hue, saturation, value, and temperature. Here is the overall color name, blue, green, yellow, etc. Saturation defines a color's purity, a less saturated color is greater and less intense. Value, how light or dark a color is. Temperature is the relative warmth or coolness of a color. I can't stress enough on the importance of a good color palette. Here, I'll show you the color palette that we'll be using, and you can find it in the resources section as a downloadable PDF. I like to have an organized selected palette instead of choosing new colors every time. Having a selected color palette helps create a cohesive piece. I use cool and warm colors, grayer and saturated colors, remember I want to create contrast between colors too. I've organized them by hue and value. Of course, there are many greens, but on top of them I wanted to introduce a purple and a hint of orange and blue. Texture is the perceived surface quality of a piece of art, everything has some kind of texture. When painting digitally, you can create texture using different brushes. As I've mentioned before, I use a smooth Copic brush and a color pencil brush like the Narinder pencil. You make textures when you mix transparent layers with more opaque ones too. I will flatten the sketch into one single layer, because if you remember I have only a maximum of 34 layers to work with. I have the sketch on one layer and the color elements divided by layers in another group, so that again I'm free to move them around. As I keep going I will create many layers. As you can see, these round plants are all in different layers especially because they overlap, so I can erase part of one layer without erasing the one overlapping. When I hit the maximum number of layers, I will merge some together, the ones that no longer need to be separated. I have lowered the opacity of the sketch underneath, and you'll see that sometimes I will turn it off completely so that I'm not distracted by it, and it's easier to make the final color element work on its own. I don't make outlines usually, but if you like them you can do so. Remember to study the plants texture, shapes, and lines in the reference photo when coloring, nature is the artist we inspired from. Here, I first used a Copic brush and then I went in with the Narinder for details. The Copic marker allows me to build the opacity which I really like, and gives me a lot of control. I'm painting these plants with a bright cool green. I first created an even layer of color, and then I used alternately a yellow green and a dark color green to make the stripes. I wanted this Alocasia to be of a dark, warmer green compared to the green of the round palms on the background. Same as before, I started with the Copic brush and then with the pencil. Sometimes I would use only the Narinder pencil to coloring, I use this bright yellow green and then a slightly darker and less saturated version of the same color to do the outline. To make the shadows of the rock, I've kept the first layer transparent and then I mark the shadows with the second layer building the opacity. I decided to have the waterfall on the background faraway to give the sense of depth in the piece. As the viewer can imagine the stream running through the illustration to get to the palm on the foreground. How did I approach painting the water? I decided to start by painting what's behind the waterfall and then I've painted layers upon layers. Very unsaturated blues and greens. Then I've added some whitish layers. Water is in blue, it's mirror where everything around me reflects. This is why there's some green and brown and blues in this waterfall. When painting, every stroke was made following the flowed water. This helps give motion to the waterfall. I wanted this plant to stand out. Such an interesting shape and color. If you want to repeat an element, you can select and duplicate. Then with the transform tool, you can modify and make it smaller, flip it horizontally or vertically. It's a great trick, especially when you want to create repetition in a piece. I painted the pond the same way approached the waterfall. The direction of the brush stroke is really important to give motion to the elements in the illustration. 8. Painting: colour and textures Pt Two: After painting the big plants in the foreground, it's time to fill the gaps, let's say, with smaller plants. This process can be a little bit tricky. To paint these ferns, I'm using only the pencil and a scribbling motion. I will duplicate the movement of these layers. I'm trying to achieve a full look, I don't want any white of the background to show through. The ferns in the darkest color are in the 1st layer, then there's the 2nd layer on top with the medium green, and then the last layer in the lightest color. Also, these ferns are getting smaller and smaller the further I go into the illustration. This is probably my favorite way to color and it works really well when painting the banana tree. I draw many horizontal lines along the leaf, overlapping them slightly to create this pattern which is characteristic of this plant. I approach this section of the illustration as I did with the ferns, building layers of colors and texture from dark to light. In the end, I decided to go for a sunset sky, with hint of lilac and pale orange. As final touches, I checked if something was missing. I outline the banana tree because it looked too unfinished. I branded the edges of those distant palms. Then I step back and look if the values are right. They usually aren't, so I create a layer for highlights and one for shadows on top of all the other layers. Because I went for the sunset sky, I did the highlights in that pale orange. The light of the sun is hitting the water on the waterfall and those distant trees, it's reflected on the surface of the pond. To make these shadows, I use a dark blue color at a lower opacity. For a very intense highlight, I use the pencil because it's opaque. I'm turning on and off these two layers so you can see how these final touches affect the painting. Here, a bonus time-lapse of the whole coloring process. 9. Outro: Congrats, you're at the end of this class. I cannot believe that you decided to join me and you've made it this far, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I hope my class has been useful and that you had fun too. Remember to post your illustration in the Project and Resources section. In the Resources section, you will also find my reference pictures, my color palette, my final sketch, and the links to other useful classes on Skillshare. If you want, you can post your project on social media too and tag me, I'm @francesca_inart on Instagram. Follow me here on Skillshare to stay updated and be notified when I will release a new class. Also very important, your feedback on this class is more than welcome so they will know what I've done right, what you liked, and what I can improve. Also, if you have suggestion for future classes you'd like to see from me, just let me know. Until next time, take care.