How to Draw and Paint in Procreate | Lisa Mitrokhin | Skillshare

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How to Draw and Paint in Procreate

teacher avatar Lisa Mitrokhin, Live life in full color.

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      What you will learn in this course

      0:20

    • 2.

      Getting started - create a new canvas

      0:49

    • 3.

      Drawing tools - brushes and erasers

      1:22

    • 4.

      The UNDO shortcut

      0:16

    • 5.

      Sketching - using layers

      2:29

    • 6.

      Timelapse replay

      1:00

    • 7.

      Drawing outlines

      2:50

    • 8.

      Painting - adding color

      4:15

    • 9.

      Combining layers

      1:56

    • 10.

      Painting playback

      1:07

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About This Class

In this course I will take you on a step by step journey from turning on your ipad to completing a beautiful colorful illustration in Procreate. 
Procreate is not always very intuitive, but once you know the right buttons to press, you will be hooked on this program. 
I will cover creating a new document, creating layers, grouping and merging layers, various drawing tools, several painting options, and much more. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Lisa Mitrokhin

Live life in full color.

Teacher

Hi, I'm Lisa Mitrokhin. I was born with a pencil in my hand. Over the years I've transformed from an illustrator, to a tattoo artist, to an oil painter, to an art instructor. I have over a dozen published adult coloring books, and I teach adult coloring and drawing technique on YouTube and other platforms.

I believe that anyone can achieve the same visual results as mine. My job as your instructor is to help you understand WHY a certain effect works, so that you can apply it to limitless other coloring pages or drawings.

As an instructor, I give the gift of knowledge and technique, so that you don't have to rely on tutorials forever but rather go out and make your own art.

When I teach an... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. What you will learn in this course: Hello and welcome. I'm Lisa, me talking. And today we're going to be working in Procreate. I will show you my drawing process and share with you these amazing life-changing tips that will allow you to start drawing in, Procreate right away and create amazing art like this. 2. Getting started - create a new canvas: I highly recommend that you use Procreate on your iPad. I find that that's just the perfect size screen for me to work on. And you can use Procreate just with your finger or with a stylus. This is the stylist that I use. To get started, just click on the app and open a new canvas. To create a new Canvas, you need to click on the little plus sign up here. And you will be given an option for canvas size. There are lots of options that are already offered to you. You can also create custom size and resolution canvasses. But I suggest that you just start with the default option, P3, 15, 36 by 2048. And that will pop open a brand new clean white canvas for you to draw on. 3. Drawing tools - brushes and erasers: Up here in the menu bar, we have a bunch of icons. That icon right there means layers. Every new canvas, by default comes with a background color which is set to white, and a new layer called layer one. Next to the Layer icon, you have the color icon. When you click on that, you are presented with an entire color wheel and different values and saturations of color. Whatever you select, that's the color you're going to be drawing with. Now, on the far left, in that bundle of icons, we have an icon for brush. When you click on that, that will give you all of the selections for your brush tools. This is the brush that I picked in the colors that I pick. The other thing that you have on the screen at all times, or these 2 bar on the left-hand side, the one on the top, adjust the size of whatever tool you're working with. The one on the bottom, adjust the opacity. One other tool in the menu on the top right is the Eraser tool. When you select that, you are now working with an eraser. Same things apply to the eraser tool. You still have your two levers. Want to adjust the size and want to adjust the opacity. 4. The UNDO shortcut: The undo function in this app can be done very quickly with just a single tap on the screen with two fingers. 5. Sketching - using layers: I like choosing a tool that's very close to what I would actually use in real life. So I pick pencils or charcoals or something that actually has a texture to it. And they start sketching very, very roughly. So in my layer one, I am very, very roughly sketching the outline of my face and the structure of the face the way that I would with pencil on paper. So I mark up where the eyes go and mark up the center. And everything is really, really rough. Now that I have this, open up the Layers menu again and you see that on our layer number one, we now have a little doodle preview that's very useful when you have several hundred layers. Now, I want to keep drawing, adding more and more detail with every single new layer. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to drop opacity on the layer that I've already created. The very first thing in that drop-down menu isn't opacity scale, which right now is set to max by default. So just tap on it and drag it to any percentage of opacity that you want. Now, in the same layer menu, I'm going to create a new layer by hitting the plus button layer to appeared. Press anywhere on the screen and you'll be drawing in layer two. You can always check what layer you are drawing in because in that drop-down layer menu, the layer you are drawing, it will be highlighted in blue. So now in my layer two, using the same brush or pencil, I'm going to continue to doodle. This is the doodle stage. Do not skip it for me. This is how I approach all of my digital drawing and it's especially important for me to be able to draw freehand so that my art, my digital art, comes across with the same style and with the same level of detail as my analogue art. So to give you an idea, now that I have two layers of doodles, I'm going to add yet another layer to continue doodling. A little bit more refined each and every time. I also like to doodle in different colors. I often doodle in blue or purple or red, but rarely in black. And after about a half an hour of doodling, I came up with this. As you can see, the lines are already a lot thinner, a lot cleaner. And my character is very well-defined. 6. Timelapse replay: One of my favorite features of Procreate is the time-lapse recording function. Well up here, that's your Actions menu. Click on video. We're going to click on time-lapse replay and watch what I've done with the sketch. Look at the roughness of my lines in this sketch. This is as free hand and as locally as it gets, but it's shaping itself with every single layer. How do I know how to get that attention of detail? Because I'm drawing over my own lines. I'm essentially tracing my own work with every single layer. This though, you draw a layer, you drop that transparency, you draw another layer over it. You drop the transparency. And that allows you to really fine tune those details until you get to something like this. 7. Drawing outlines: I'm a coloring book artist, is drawing in fact, is meant to be an adult coloring page once I'm done with it. So what I want here is clean, sharp black outlines. Let me point out one other thing. On every layer. Next to each layer there is a checkbox. If the box is checked, the layer is visible. If the box is unchecked, the layer becomes invisible. Layer 12.3 are now unchecked, meaning they are invisible. Layer four is the only one that I have visible at a full opacity. Let's drop that down just a little bit, maybe to about 60, 65% and add a new layer. This new layer is going to be my outline layer. And there are two ways that I like to make clean and smooth outlines. One is with a calligraphy pen in your brush menu. Go down to calligraphy and select Mono lines. Set your color to black or whatever color you want the outlines to be. Adjust the size of your brush and start following the outlines. That looks a little too thick to me. So I'm going to undo with my amazing undo feature, just tap the screen with two fingers. Let's make that line a little bit thinner and continued to follow the outline. Now the cool thing about the calligraphy pen is that it kind of adjust itself as you draw. So it's very difficult to draw jagged lines. That's why it's so cool for this particular stage of the drawing. You can do it in small bursts or you can keep practicing. And eventually your lines will get smoother and smoother on your own. And you'll be able to do longer outlines with the calligraphy function helping you out along the way to smooth things out. Of course, you can use your eraser tool as well to make tiny adjustments. I like this way, but it's actually not the way that I do outlines most of the time. Most of the time. I just freehand them with another kind of a pencil. The pencil that I actually used for outlines is just the very basic sketching pencil called Procreate pencil. It's a default, a pencil for sketching, but it's quite excellent. The calligraphy option is interesting. It's definitely pleasant to watch your lines clean up on their own as you put them on paper. But me, I like to have a little bit more control. I like to freehand my outline. So I usually just use sketching pencils, try out a whole bunch of these to see which one is best for your purposes. This is the one that I like quite a bit and now I can just settle in and trace all of my doodle work with the pencil that I selected to create this really nice, clean line work. So that I can turn this whole illustration into an adult coloring page. 8. Painting - adding color: Back in our Layers menu, layers 12.3 are invisible. Layer four can be deleted because we don't need those blue outlines anymore. And I'm actually going to get rid of all the other layers as well because I'm never going to use them. I got what I wanted. I have my clean black outlines on Layer five. That's all I'm going to keep. So now we only have our background color, which is white, and our transparent layer with lines on it, which is layer five, and that's my black outlines. That's all we have. So I'm going to add a new layer, which automatically gets added on top of the stack. But I need that layer to be below my drawing lines. So how do I do it? I'm going to take layer five and drag it up. So press and hold for just a little longer than you usually would, and then drag and drop. Now, let's select our new layer, which is now technically the first one above the background and it's underneath my lines. Let's see what happens when we add some color to it. The color gets added underneath the lines. Let's do some painting. Pick a skin tone, and start coloring. Make sure to choose a brush that you like. Play around with the brush menu. It is a Pandora's box of effect. But how do we stay within the lines? We chose to work on a separate layer. Obviously, the lines are not actually connected to what we're coloring. There are two ways that I like to use. One is just to make this broad wash around the area that I'm painting. Then take an eraser tool and erase everything that's not needed. The second way is actually to create the shape and automatically fill it in with color. To do that, click on the little squiggly icon on the top menu and select freehand started drawing an outline, the area that you wish to fill in with color. Follow the outlines that you already have. And you will see a dotted line appear. Follow this in a single stroke until you come back to the point where you start it. Once there you will see a single gray dot. Make sure that your pencil meets that dot to close the area. As soon as you tap on it. It's colored in, in whatever color you had selected and your color wheel. That's a really nice, fast way to complete a certain area, especially for a shape that's unusual. And I do use this quite a bit in my art. But on this one, I actually want to spend more time painting this. I'm going to stick with the first method. I'm going to set it to something large and I'm just going to very roughly color the whole area. That's her skin tone. And I'm going to start adding new layers and new colors to create the definitely shadows effects that you will have on her face. Ultimately, don't be afraid of color. All colors can be adjusted and manipulate it. That's the whole point of a digital program. But for me, the best part about and how I actually select digital programs that I end up working with. I tend to go with the ones that allow me to work as close to my actual analog process as possible. So I'm going to add my purple shadows, very, very exaggerated, and I'm going to smudge them with my finger. This is something that I would have done in real life when coloring with pencils, I would have used my finger or a Q-tip do actually smudge the effect. There is a finger tool up there and when you click on that, that's you smear tool. You can actually touch the screen and smear your effect. This is one of my favorite things about Procreate as well. It's very cool. Here's another cool thing. If you have a whole bunch of colors on the screen already and you want to go back to a certain color that was very specific, you may not be able to get that same color again. Simply hold your finger on the color that you want. In any layer. It doesn't matter what layer you, and just hold your finger over the colors that you want. Press it hold and this circle will appear featuring the color that you're looking for and that will automatically become the color that you are now using in your inkwell. Very cool, very quick way to just switch your colors. 9. Combining layers: As I showed you before, you can just grab your eraser and erase all the extra colors that you don't want around her face. However, we now have a whole bunch of layers. So what do you do? Do you just erase every single layer that can be very tedious and very inaccurate. So what we want to do is we want to collapse all of those layers into a single layer so that our racer will apply to everything that we've painted at once. Here's how you do it back in your Layer menu, you can see that we have layer two, layer three, and layer four, all of which together create the skin tone that I have so far to create a group, grab a layer and drag it into another one. Now I have a new group. Within the group, I have layer three and layer two. When the group is collapsed, it has all the same controls as individual layers. For instance, I can make a group invisible. I can combine groups with other layers and other groups. Once the group has collapsed, you can also rename it. However, a group is still a collection of layer, so we can't apply an eraser tool to it. Well, we need to do is to collapse all these layers. Groups are a great way of organizing things, but they don't actually combine the layers. That's an important distinction. To collapse these layers, click on your group and select flatten. Now, that turned my collection of layers into one single layer. Now I can apply my eraser tool to it. When you are actually doing skin tone coloring on, when you're doing full page painting, you will have dozens and hundreds of layers. So it's really important to understand layers, groups, and collapsing them. So now I'm just going to take away all the excess paint, leaving only her skin tone. 10. Painting playback: So let me play back for you. Just the skin tone coloring on the witch for you to see all of the different layers that have done. Notice as I'm adding my pigments, as I'm adding my shadows and my lighter areas. And every once in awhile you'll see that spill around the periphery disappear because generally that's how I do it. And instead of outlining the areas and filling them in, generally just color in that whole area with multiple layers until I get the effect that I want. And then I collapse everything into single pancake layers so that I can go around them, use my eraser tool to clean it up just like I did on the hat. And after about three or 4 h of work, I've come up with something like this. I hope you enjoyed the show. I hope you learned a lot. So give it a shot, have fun, and I'll see you in another video.