How to draw a Dragon in Procreate with Watercolor Brushes

1. Welcome to the Class!: Welcome to the class how to draw a little dragon in Procreate. In this class, I show you how to use a sketch and fill it with color. In the end, you'll have an illustration extracted from the white background, but with a water color texture. You can even sell as illustration sets on various marketplaces if we haven't met yet. Hi, my name is a I'm an artist, geographic designer, and a teacher. And I'd love to create digital products to set up a sustainable business. I believe that with digital products, you can create sales for years to come no matter if you need some extra money to spend or build a sustainable business. In this class, you do not only get the sketch, but also the Capell, so you can jump right in. You'll also get a PDF with the links to the other material I use, but you can, of course, also use what you prefer. That's up to you. Join me in this class and learn how to draw this little dragon. 2. The Material: Well, this class you will need my template with a little dragon, which I'm going to add in the material section of this class. It is embedded into a document here with some texture. When we zoom in, you can see a better watercolor texture and a layer where you can draw. I will also include a color palette we use for the little dragon. Of course, you can use whatever color pet you want, but maybe for the first try, you just follow along with me and draw with that one. What you also need is your Apple pencil, of course, and your ipad. I'm using the approcriate where I'm going to color the dragon. I also use Julia Dreams brushes. These ones here. Watercolor brushes from Julia Dreams, because I believe this is one of the best packs which actually exists. You can easily use them and use brushes to draw in watercolor style. And then to blend in, it's really nice and very handy. Maybe get the pack if you have other watercolor brushes you are happy with, of course, you can use them as well. But if you don't have and you would like to draw all these illustrations that I highly recommend to get this watercolor brushes pack. I don't want to create them for myself because I believe this is one of the best packs ever. She has really done an outstanding job with these brushes. If you are serious about creating illustrations and water colors style, I highly recommend to get this brush pack. You will get a link to this in the class section as well. 3. Exploring the Brushes: Let's start by exploring Julia's brushes. When I have installed my brush pack, the watercolor realistic watercolor brushes, they are here, included in my brush library. You just tap on it here. And then you find something like Julia Dreams brushes, something like that. There are 11 brushes included. We will actually need just two, but of course, you can experiment and you can try out different brushes. But for this class, we will just need two of them. And this is the first brush. I just tap on that and grab a color from the color palette, which I have included. I have opened one of her canvases. That's how they look. They have a paper texture included and a drawing layer actually. Here are the textures included. It gives it a realistic watercolor look. When I zoom in, you can see that it looks like watercolor papers. Let's zoom out and let's try the brushes. I'm going to close that and I stay here on the drawing layer and just grab July dreams first brush and then I start to draw a line. When I press per, you see it gets wider and when I lift it up, it gets smaller. That's the first learning here, because that's what we need in a bit when we fill our dragon with color. The second thing is let me do another brush stroke with another color. Because we are going to mix colors later on. I have a lighter one now. Let me pick one more and put it next to it. I guess you can hardly see it. I go over it a bit more often. Now, this looks like typical water color back. Usually we use this blending mode. In water colors, what we need to do is in real water color, we would add some more water. The colors would flu into each other. Here we need to use the water wash brush. Let me pick that one. Let's see if we have the right size. When I go over it, you see it's blending in. I have here set it to 30, 40, 47% When I now go over that here, you see the colors blend in nicely. The more I go over it, the more they will blend in. Of course, you can experiment with that. Again, that's totally to your liking. You always have the option to tap with two fingers and it's gun again. We need to do that again. Now the colors are flowing into each other is very nice. That's a realistic water color look. That's what I like so much about these brushes because I have hardly seen that any other brush that can get this realistic look done. That's why I use Julia's brushes for that. You can play around a bit with that, but you get it. You see what it does. It just make sure that the colors go into each other. Here you have the water wash brush. And to fill we use the Julia Dreams First brush. What we might also need, maybe not for this class, but usually you might need that, is the line brush. That's the one when we want to draw something. I just tap here and pick a black color. You can see what I mean, when you tap on here, you see it jumps to black. I can just draw a line, as I would do if I have a pencil and draw on a watercolor paper, of course, to give it a more realistic look, I could also get into that gray here. Yeah. But that's how it looks then can make it smaller. You see that's looking even more like graphite. Yeah. That's what we want for this kind of work. Now, I have just created a few of these. I can just delete them because I don't need them anymore. Next step, we will get our template in the little dragon and start drawing. 4. Colouring the Dragon: Now let's import our little dragon. For that, we go here on the wrench icon, and then we click it. Then we say Insert a file, because I have created a folder for you called Little Dragon, and that is what you are going to import. Just click on that is a PNG file and it's imported. Now you see when you go here, it says inserted image. Let's close that. We need to get that out here. If that happens, don't worry, we just need to get that out here. Of this we can get an overview again. Here is the inserted image and here is the texture. We are going to create another layer between the paper texture and the inserted image. To draw on that one, let me first position the dragon correctly. And to do so, I go here to the transformation tool and just set him here into the middle of the document more or less because he's smaller, maybe like that. Okay, now let's zoom in again, go back to the layers panel, and now we are going to add a new layer. Now the fun part actually starts. We are drawing on this layer. We are using this one as a guideline to fill it with color, but later on we just turn it off and then hopefully our dragon is drawn. We just have the one without the lines. Let's get started with that. I am now on layer 13 because here are more layers. You can easily rename that one. Just tap on it and say rename. I just say now. Yeah. Maybe you can just name it Little Dragon if you want to. Let's do that. If you haven't installed your color pallet yet, just swipe up here. Go to your Cloud folder and then open the little Dragon folder where I have included the color pallet. Just tap on it and it will open and procreate. And once you have done, you can go to your colors and here pellets. And it will be here on top and chosen by default. You can see that there is a little blue thing here. You know this color pelt is chosen for default. Once again, let's make sure we're on the right layer where we can draw inserted image is the one with a dragon. We need that layer to turn it off, but for now we just draw on the dragon layer. We start with the brightest color here, and that is the one for his tummy. I pick that color. I'm also going to pick the first brush. Now we just need to talk about the size of the brush, but we will see when we draw. Whenever you lift the brush, of course you will get some edges. That's not the end of the world. That's actually okay because we have the blender brush later. But if you don't want that, just don't lift the pen. Let's give it some shading. I'm using this color, but I'm going to make it a little bit darker. I have a little bit of shading here. Go to the color palette and just go a little bit down. We can save this color palette of this color on our palette. Maybe we need it later. Um, okay, now let me just draw over it. Usually we have the new color, new layer, but we don't have that here. Otherwise we cannot blend in. Or if we would have it, in this case, I draw everything on one layer. I just go in here, draw a little bit, you see go off again here a little bit. Maybe go darker as well, maybe with this creamy brown. Okay, when you feel now the tummy looks good. You can just go ahead to grab the other brush, the water wash brush. And now we can blend it in. Let's see how that goes. Maybe it's too big, but it looks good. I reduced to 30% If you've gone over the edges like me here, you can always move to the eraser tool, just tap on it and press it down. You see now it has the same settings as the brush has. You see what happens. Now I go back, I need to be a bit more careful to erase that. If you lift your pencil, you have these edges here and you put color on top. It adds up a bit. That means that you can your water the blender brush more easily on this. Let me do that like that for now and then you see what I mean, I'm just adding a little bit brighter color. Then I'm going to use the blender brush, the water wash brush here. You see where I want to have more color. I don't go over where I want to have it blended, I just brush over it. We can always work on that later. Let me first go back to the other color and draw the other arm here. So now for the wings, I'm going to use the cream color and you just fill them. So I want some more defined edges. That's why I added some darker color here on the edges and now blend it in. Again, I've added some more color here. I have more brush away, push to the edges, don't forget, you can always in. And then just brush along. Really looking nice as if you were doing the washing technique in watercolor. So now we need some black for his face and then we're done. I'm going to switch to the line brush. Now you see it has 10% maybe 20. Yeah, I think that I can draw well with it. Okay, we need to fix some mistakes here. Going back into the colors I need, let me go back to the palette and pick the same color again here. Now we need the line. Let me quickly turn that off here. The inserted image, you see it looks much different. Let me get that back, because I'm going to need the lines here, and then we just turn it off. Okay. Now let me turn that off and you see it is ready. We can leave it as it is, or we can start to brush a bit more here and there. So give it a little more depth, or give it here a little more depth, but basically we're done. 5. Extracting from a Watercolor Background: We start by duplicating our layer just in case something happens. We can always go back, swipe to the left over the layer and say duplicate. Now you can work on one of them. Let's open one. Now we delete all unnecessary layers. In our case, it's a sketch layer. This one here, it's turned off anyway, so I can just swipe to the left and say delete. Now we duplicate the layer with a drawing. Again, swipe to the left and say duplicate. We turn that layer off, select the layer on the bottom. Now we go to who saturization. Go to this tool and say who saturization. Just swipe everything to the right and you see that your object just disappears. Now we go back to our layers panel. You can see that here is the object. Now we swipe to the left and say duplicate and merge that. We do that again, swipe to the left, duplicate and merge that we have a better filled. Now we create a new layer. One has to be between the white dragon layer and the drawn dragon layer. Once we have that, we need to fill it with white. Go here and make sure you have we double tap here. You have white picked. Go back to layers, then just we fill the entire layer with white. You can see here that it worked. Next step is to unlock the paper texture. Swipe to the left again, click unlock. Now we merge these three layers, the white one, the dragon, and the white created layer. What happened now is we merge the layer which has been turned off. Let's go back, double tap, and you see it comes back, make sure that it is turned on and it's very important. Now let's do that again. Merge it, and you see it keeps our dragon what we need, of course. Now go to the white layer, tap on the thumbnail, and click Select. Once done, click here in Word and you see that everything on the outside is selected. Let's go back, go back to the layer with the dragon now. Swipe with three fingers to the bottom and say Cut. Now we just turn those layers off and you see our little dragon is ready. Next thing would be to export that guy as a PNG file. Let's click on the wrench icon. Say Export Share here first. Then we export as a PNG. You can now save it in your files. You can say Safe Image, but then it will have a background again, a white background, and saved in your image. That's not what we want. You would click here on Safe Two files. It opens your icloud drive or whatever you have here, and then you can give it a name and save it here to your Lod drive. 6. Your Project: Now it's your turn In this class, I want you to fill out the little dragon, grab the sketch, then draw, fill it out with the colors you have. I have added a color palette for you. This is how it should look for you, little dragon color palette. Then you start to fill the little dragon as we've done here. Then once you have done that, we are going to extract it together. You have just a little dragon left and you can draw something with your illustrations in best case, you make a lot of them and sell it as a little package.