How to Use The Symmetry Tool

1. Exercise 1: How To Use The Symmetry Tool: In this exercise, I'm going to be showing you the four different ways that you can use the symmetry tool. We'll look at Vertical, Horizontal, Quadrant, and Radial. I want you to create one initiation for each of these options. You can either follow along with the illustrations that I'm creating or you can create your own. So I'm just going to the spanner here, turn on Drawing Guide and Edit Drawing Guide. We're going to head over to Symmetry here, and look our options. So we have Vertical, Horizontal, Quadrant, and Radial. Going to start with Vertical. I can play around with the Thickness of my line, the Opacity, and also the color. If I pick a dark color, I'm just going to come down with the Opacity to make sure that it isn't too distracting when I'm creating my illustration. Press done. I'm going to be using the Jelly Gouache Brush Pack by Mac Ford. You might know her as The Gladdest Thing on Instagram. She's an amazing artist and I love using her brushes. If you don't want to spend money on brushes, don't worry, there are so many different brushes in procreate already. Just make sure that you're picking a bush that has a good thickness. I'm going to use the jelly round brush, and we're going to draw a dragonfly with the vertical symmetry tool. I'll click on here and put on Drawing Assistance. So always make sure the Drawing Assist is switched on to the layer. So you have this merit effect. I'm going to start from the middle, and I'm going to bring my wing up and just fit it in this way. I love how you can get these really nice textures. Then I'm going to bring the wings down and then arch and flick up. Now I have the basic shape. I'm going to add a new Layer, put Drawing Assist on, and then with my red we'll start filling out the body. Now put a circle, come down, and then slowly bring the bottom to a point. So I'm just going to bring these wings out a little bit more just to give it more balance, go back to my red, and then with a new pencil and with a 6BPencil, I'm just going to draw the antenna. So now add some details onto the wings now. I'm just going to just play around with some funky patterns. Really quickly I was able to get this dragonfly. I'm just going to move this down [inaudible] slightly. This is the great thing about creating your illustrations on different layers, you can easily move them around. So I'm just going to bring that down slightly, making sure I got Magnetics, switched on so it doesn't move from the center. I really like that. I'm just going to, with my finger, swipe on the Layers and put them into a group, "Rename", Vertical. Then I can hide this ready for my next illustration. I'll go to the spanner, Edit Drawing Guide, and then go over to horizon. Click Done, then making sure that I have drawing assist switched on that layer, I'm going to start to draw my fish. So I'm going to start from the middle line and flick up and then zig zag down. I can just fill that to save time. Then bring the body up and down in an arch. Then you have your basic shape of your fish. What I like to do is add a new layer, but I won't turn drawing assist on, just so I can start to add some details that aren't symmetrical just to balance out the main shape. So I want to have my fin up here, quite big. Then at the bottom just a little bit smaller. Then the lips. The eye. So it's really good to use a symmetry tool for getting your basic shapes down. Then we have a more imperfect brush, you can add details to just give it a little bit more visual interests, so it's not all perfect. Again, I'm just going to repeat the process. Swipe and group, rename horizontal. Hide that layer, add a new layer, drawing assist, and then head over to the next option. Quadrant now is really interesting for creating diamond shapes and flowers. So I'll just show you now. So with my smaller bush, just so I have more control, I'm going to just turn on yellow. I'm going to create a diamond. Let's start up here in a point, and then slowly bring this to another point. Fill this in, and then you can always just kind of play around with how much you want it to come out. You'll get used to this with your line work the more you practice. But you can get some really cool shapes using the quadrant. Just going to make that smaller, and just create a star now. Do the same, and you can hold your pencil down on the screen to get this line. I'm just going to put it up there. Just fill it in. Then I'm going to repeat this process, but have these come out a bit smaller. I can bring that down there, hold the line, fill it in, and then I'll do the same on the other side. I'm just going to make that smaller and put it in this corner. Now I want to show you guys what to do with the Radial. So Radial gives you just a little bit more symmetry because instead of just having four, you have all of these lines that you can work with. For all of the options, you can move this around. So like I'm showing now because I'm demonstrating lots of different shapes on one page. I can move this around and place it anywhere on the canvas. I'm just going to press done, and I'm going to show you what you can do with the Radial. I'm going to create a circle. Doesn't have to be perfect. I really like using this for a few different reasons. Just make sure I have Drawing Assistant. I can create suns like this, which is quite a basic shape. But if I go over to Edit Drawing Guide and put rotational symmetry on, I can create a sun with a lot more visual interest. So I'm just going to bring my brush from the center of the circle and zigzag it out. You get this kind of flex. I'm just going to grab a little bit of a thicker brush. You can see that the lines are no longer mirroring what I'm doing, but they're rotating each line. You get these really cool sun-like shapes that you can use in patterns, and then I can just make that a bit bigger. You can also create really nice flowers. You can have the petals coming out like this. This is also rotational, or you can put Rotational Symmetry off and have the petals coming around like this. You want to create your petals from the center and then arch them round and meet again at that line. We can do it on this one as well and meet in the middle. This is a really quick way to get these flowers. I'm just going with my red now and I'm going to create a circle, just an imperfect circle in the middle. So I want you to create at least one illustration for each of these different options. Once you've done that, join me in the next video where I'm going to be showing you how to turn these shapes into you own stamp brushes.