Illustrate a Cardinal in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome. This class is all about learning how to illustrate using procreate. We're going to be working on a cardinal today. I will walk you through my process of using layers, shapes, textures and line, to create interesting illustrations with depth and personality. My name is Rebecca Howe and I'm an author and illustrator. I'm so happy you're here today. We'll be using an iPad with procreate and an Apple Pencil. This class is for anyone with a basic understanding of drawing and using procreate. Whether you're a professional, eager to try new markets or subject matter, or someone just looking to try something new, this class is for you. By the end of this class, you'll be able to create illustrations with interesting lines, textures, shapes, and layers. Thanks for joining me today. I can't wait to see your work in the project gallery. 2. References: Let's talk about references for just a minute. Using reference photo is not the same as copying or cheating, as long as you don't copy someone else's work and call it your own. Using reference in your work means studying what already exists in order to inform your own understanding of a subject. For instance, if you were writing a research paper, you'd go to the library and read a pile of books on your subject. You would then synthesize what you understand about the subject and create your own hypothesis or overall statement of the subject matter. This isn't plagiarism or cheating. It's studying and learning and then creating your own ideas. Same goes for learning art. Next, let me show you how I'm going to use the split screen on my iPad to see both the reference and the procreate screen. Right now I have my browser window open, and I'm going to pull up from the bottom until these quick references pop-up. I'm going to click on Procreate and then I'm going to bring it out and put it right to the right of my browser window. Grab this middle toggle, and move it over so that my references are small and my canvas is quite a bit larger. I'm right handed, so I want my canvas on the right and my references on the left. We're ready to go sketch. 3. Sketching: It's time to sketch. I like to start with sketching because this is where most of my planning happens. I'll decide on my subject, my arrangement, and what gestures I like best I'll experiment with different forms, sizes, lines, and get everything in place before I start the final art. For me, planning is 80 percent of the work. I learned this the hard way by jumping in right to the fun part and getting frustrated. If we plan well, then making the art is fun and we're free to experiment. Let me start by showing you how I organize my gallery. You can see here that I have this entire class in a stack. So there's a stock called Cardinal. Within the Stack, I have a bunch of canvases that represent each video in this class. So I'm going to click on the one for sketching, and within here, I'm going to use layers quite a bit because I think what I'm going to do is make a bunch of different sketches and then choose one. So I'm going in here and I'm going to select black. One of my favorite brushes for sketching is a brush called dry ink. It comes with Procreate. It feels the most like sketching on paper to me, and I'm really trying to do away with using paper as much as possible because then I'm really portable with my work. I just need my iPad and my Apple Pencil. So let's get started with some sketching. So I'm going to use my references on the left to choose a few gestures to sketch. By the end, I'm sure we'll have one that we like. [MUSIC] Within my sketch I'm going to use some black lines or filling in where things are black because I know my Cardinal is going to be pretty much red and black. Just to remind myself, within the sketch where there might be black. So when I get to the color detail, I can put some of those lines in, sorry about that. Move it around my screen. [MUSIC] So I'm going in and make another layer, turn off this layer and do some sketches on this new layer too. I'm actually going to draw these individual feathers on a different layer. That way I can delete the overall shape that I already drew in underneath. [MUSIC] So I went in and erased that original line from underneath and that other layer. [MUSIC] If I decide to use this sketch, I'll clean that up a little bit more. All of these are just really fast gesture sketches. I'm going to merge these two together so that that whole bird is on its own layer. [MUSIC] I think this is a bit too wide, so I'm going to take my Selection tool and I'm just going to squeeze it together and move it here, I think that looks a little better. [MUSIC] Even though I'm only going do one final cardinal, It's really great to do a lot of sketching, because every time you make a new piece of art or sketch, you're putting the work into becoming a better artist with more new ones understanding of your subject, your materials, your techniques, and you could become that much better when you start your next piece. I've got to narrowed down to two that I like the best. This one here because it's got a lot of personality in its gesture, and I like this one here because it has a lot of movement. Both of these to me are interesting to look at and would be fun to work with. I think for this piece, I'm going to go with this bird because it gives me lots of great feathers to work with and play with. I think that the bird down here would be great for a more narrative piece, but since we're working with a one-off, let's go with this bird here. Now that we have our sketch picked out, let's move on to plan our color. 4. Color: It's time to plan our color. That's right. We're planning it all right now, ahead of time, so there are no frustrations later. Whether you choose a limited palette for your collection or use a rainbow of color. You'll want to make sure you have color harmony. There are so many potential things to think about when you're making color choices, but for now we're going to keep it simple, and break it down to a few simple considerations. Think about the mood and where your art will be used. Primary colors tend to feel happy and energetic, like in this piece by Christian Robinson in his book, 'School's First Day of School' or look at this piece by Rahele Jomepour Bell. This also uses bright primary colors and has a cheerful feel to it. Look at this piece by Carmen Saldana, if you're going for a broodier or moodier piece, try blues and grays and smoky colors, or reds and oranges with browns and neutrals mixed in, or this piece by Julie Flett that has a gray overtone throughout the entire piece. Also consider the overall temperature of your piece. Reds, yellows and oranges are warm, while blues and purples and greens are cooler. Neutrals like beige, brown, black, grays and white work in both cool and warm pieces. You might consider using a monochromatic color scheme for your piece, meaning using one color plus blacks, whites, and neutrals, like Vanessa Brantley-Newton does here in this piece. Consider what Francesca Sanna does in this piece from her book, 'The Journey.' She takes the complimentary color set red and green, and uses variations of each to create a compelling piece with a lot of color harmony. Finally, let's look at this book cover by John Jay Cabuay, he uses a rainbow of color, but he does have an overall color scheme. The piece, I would say is overall cool, but he uses warm color throughout to create complimentary, and harmonious color. I think for this bird piece, I'm going to stick with the realistic colors of my bird. Many of the colors in my reference photos are red and black with some neutrals, and I think they'll look nice together. It turns out the natural world does a great job with color harmony. It's time for the fun part. Let's get painting. 5. Painting Part 1: I often call this stage painting, even when what I'm doing a lot of the time is collaging and layering textures that I've already created. The first thing I'm going to do is create a Canvas that is 11 by 14 inches big. It's a pretty standard size and it's easy to find a frame. If you don't already have an 11 by 14 Canvas created over here, click on create custom size and select Inches and hit 11 by 14 in height. Make sure your DPI is at least 300. I'm going to go with 400 because I like to work a little bit bigger than I need to. It's a lot easier to shrink a piece of art than it is to grow a piece of art, wanted to create it. Hit Create. Then I'm going to go back out into my gallery and grab my sketch. This layer has my sketch and the colors that I already chose for this piece. I'm going to go over to the wrench and hit Copy. Another way to do this is to swipe with three fingers, and you can copy that layer. Go back out to gallery and into our piece. I'm going to slide my three fingers down and paste, or you can go into the wrench like before and hit paste there. I'm going to go into my color, hit palettes, and you can see here that I had already created a palette for the colors for this class. But now I want to create a row of colors that I'm using for the actual bird. I'm going to click and hold on this red, and I'll select the color and I'm going to stick it down here. Then I'm going to click and hold on this lighter, red, orange and also put that in, and then I'll stick my neutrals in. I have my colors ready, and I can now erase this part. Next, I'm going to clean up my sketch a little bit by creating a new layer on top of my old sketch and re-sketching my whole bird. As I sketch the new bird on the top layer, I'll erase the underlayer a little bit at a time to make sure I'm getting the lines that I want. Now that we have the sketch cleaned up a little, I'm going to start creating textures. One of the first things I tend to do is choose one brush to make a texture over the entire object, and then from there I'll start to layer other textures and vary the textures, colors, and layer modes. In the class description, there are two links to two sets of brushes that I really love and use all the time. I'm going to select my Frankentoon Poster Marker and that main red color. Choose a new layer and create a wash over the entire bird. All of these procreate brushes will end up having a repeat pattern to them. You don't want to have those lines or repeat patterns show up in your art. So what I do is I'll take that layer, select it, rotate and make it bigger. I still get the texture in there, but I eliminate a lot of the repeat pattern of it. I'm going to go into my layer and click on the little N for normal. This is where you're going to find your layer modes. Everything I'm doing now is still in normal, but I'm going to take down the opacity to about 65 percent so that I can cut out the shape of my bird. I'm cutting out just the outside edge of this entire bird for this layer. It doesn't matter if things aren't perfect. In fact a lot of times I'll editing my sketch via my shapes. Now I'm going to go down here and invert my selection, that would deselect my entire bird area, and it will select the outside area. I'll click this selection tool and just drag that off the screen. If you take the sketch away what you have now is a silhouette in that first space layer for your bird. From here, we are going to be creating the depth and detail of our bird. Let's go ahead and turn our sketch back on. I'm going to select the area of our bird that I want black. Actually, I'm going to decrease the opacity of the sketch and stick it on top I'm going to increase the opacity of my red. I'm going to use my selection tool and create that black mask that cardinals wear. Go into this magic Wand tool and go down to hue saturation and brightness. I'm going to take the brightness all the way down to black. Now before I click out of here, I want to make sure that the shape of this is exactly how I want it. If this wasn't the shape I wanted, I'd hit Reset, De-select, and then try again. But I like that. Let's say you de-selected by accident. If you click and hold the selection tool, it'll select your latest selection, and then we can just go into hue saturation and brightness and pull that brightness down one more time. I'm going to create a new layer and choose a different brush with different texture on it. I'm going to go with bonobo chalk and I'm going to choose our red. But what I'm going to do with it is go to the disk and select a slightly darker red so that we get some contrast. I'm going to click on my base layer and this menu pops up and I'm going to hit Select, and then I'm going to go to my new layer, and I'm going to put some of this bonobo chalk on top here. As you can see, what that does is it puts texture on top of this bird without going outside the lines, so I'm not going to have to cut that out. One thing I do a lot is I'll go to my base layer and I'll select an area that I want to be a slightly different color or have a collage look to it, and then I'll use my three fingers to drag down. I'll copy and I'll paste that. Then with that new section selected, I'll play with it a little. We want this to be a little lighter. I'm going to go into my base layer and start cutting out individual feathers so that I can layer them on top of each other. One at a time, I'm going to go in with my selection tool and select a feather and copy and paste it. Once that's pasted and no longer in the original layer, so I'll open up my Layers panel and click on the original layer to go in and cut out more feathers. I'll do this over and over again until I have all the feathers I need cutout. For these feathers on the wing, what I want to do is actually create these lines without having to draw them. I want to make them more tapered. With that first feathers selected, I'm going to go into hue saturation and brightness and take down that red to almost a black. Then I'm going to go to my eraser tool and get a soft brush. Make sure it's big enough to give a pretty good taper. We're going to keep going like that until I get through all of them. That's going to give us the contrasts we want without having to draw the lines. Looks pretty good. I might want to go in and take a little more off each one of these. I'm going to then go ahead and pinch all of these together, and that makes them into one layer. I'm not going to collapse it into my bird layer yet, because I don't know if I want to put something underneath or in between those quite yet. I'll go back to doing these cutouts in my main bird layer. This doesn't really need a shadow up here because it's not being shadowed by a feather. We're going to make one down here just to differentiate where it comes out of the bird's wing. I'm just going to get that little bit of a shadow and then go back and clean this up a little bit, and then I'll zoom out and see what that looks like. We're really getting a great sense of those feathers in there. I'm going to go in and clean up those feathers right now and get rid of that. But because I don't want to collapse these two together yet, what I'm going to do is hit this layer and simply press and hold my selection tool. It'll select the exact same spot, drag three fingers and cut that out too. I think I'm going to have to do that up here as well. There. Now I have more of the shape that I want for those feathers. 6. Painting Part 2: Let's keep picking up feathers from the tail and do the same thing. I'm also going to take some of this and I give it a jagged edge here so that we can get the illusion of feathers coming over it. Here's something I like to do too, is well, first, I'm going to fix the lines on this so that it's clear that this feather comes in here. I'm going to duplicate this feather. I'm going to move it around a little, make it a little smaller, put it behind there. Make it somewhat darker, and it's going to give you more depth and layer. Most of the time I won't duplicate a feather that's already there, except I knew that I could hide most of this one and in fact, I'm going to hide even more of it, and I'm going to choose 'Warp'. I'm going to pull some of it out up here. You can see that line all the way up through here, and then I'm going to choose 'Distort'. It was going to pull it down and warp again and pull it up. But usually what I would do is go down to the original layer and draw on where I want to see another feather. Let us see one right there and I'm going to copy and paste, and since I already darkened and change the colors of these top feathers, what I'm going to do is drag this right on the top and it's going to have that original color, so then when I scroll out, you're getting a lot of variations there. Let's go in and work on her eye. Go in and select a white or off-white, and I'm going to choose my dry ink paintbrush and make another layer on top that's too thick. I want to just work on getting something really minor, and I'm just going to give that eye a line, so that's the shape and size I want it. How's that look? One of the things you should do throughout this process, I haven't been because I've looked at so many cardinals that I don't really need to as much is to go and look at your references. Always references. See what kind of color you have around the eye, serve a white light glare, but then darker red feathers around. I make a layer on top of that, and select our red, and maybe take this other marker and make a little texture on top. Take the opacity down, and then I'm going to take my Selection Tool and I'm going to get some red feathers around the eye. Invert that. Drag three fingers and cut out the rest. Pull up the opacity. One of the things that is happening here is that on this base layer of the bird, I chose that area to turn black and I turned it black. Another technique it would be to select that area, copy and paste it, and then make it black, so that way you can move it around. If I had done that, I would probably go in and cut some of this black off. Actually, that accidental mark right there was kind of. I'm not going to do it on that layer, but that might fix our problem. I'm going to bring the white on top of this red, and I'll go in with my heart airbrushed eraser and get it out from inside there. I'm going to pull this away from the eye here. It gives it a natural look. The more details you add, the better. I'm going to just merge that one down and create a new layer and take that brush. I like what that did. I'm just going to make some texture on top here. I'm using a specific brush in here that I want to use as an eraser now. I'm going to just click on the eraser tool and hold it, and now that's the eraser that's selected. I can go in and I can erase with the same brush, which might give me the same texture when I'm erasing. Pull the opacity down on the eraser so that it doesn't have as many hard lines when I erase. That looks cool. I'm going to put some more layers of feathers around the eye. I'm just going to go in and cut out shapes. These a lot of shapes in my work to create depth and detail. Copy and paste those. These can be moved around and used in a lot of different ways. What I'll do is I'll put them to the side, change their color, keep them selected and pull them over into my bird's head. Then we've got all these different variations on feathers. Since we're on our base layer, we can draw right over those feathers we just stuck in there and I want to get some long ones. We can go other parts of the bird too, to get some more, that way we have them all at once. Now that we're finished with the feathers for the head, let's move on to putting some feathers in the body. Let's put some feathers down here too. Next, let's move on to the beak. I'm going to use the same technique of cutting out shapes on the base layer and copying and pasting them on. From there, we can change the color and opacity to give some depth to the beak. It's time to move on to the feet and the legs. I'm going to cut out the part of the base layer that is the feet and the legs and I'm going to make those darker. I want to put another texture onto our feet. These are textures I created on paper in real life, that I keep in a folder on my iPad. I'm going to go in here and grab this one and see if it gives us the texture we want for our feet. Since this textures rate over the feet in a separate layer, I can tap that layer and create a clipping mask so it goes right to the feet and I can check out what that looks like. Do you see how it added line and texture to the feet that I wouldn't otherwise have? Got to make it a little bit darker actually. I really like that. I'm going to use the same technique to put some texture on top of my entire bird. I'm going to go in and choose this texture here that starts out blue, but I like the lines and variations in it, so I'll mess around with the colors and layer modes until I get it just right. I think our cardinal looks pretty good. Now let's move on to creating our files. 7. Preparing Files: Let's talk about some basics on preparing your files. I recommend saving a high-resolution copy of your piece as a JPEG wherever you save your files. To do this, click on your "Actions" tool, which is the little wrench, and go to "Share". From there you can choose a number of different kinds of files to create. From saving a raw procreate file, to a Photoshop file, PDF, JPEG, PNG or TIFF. I save all my files in Dropbox. Click there, and a dialog box will come up where you can search for the right folder for this project. When I'm finished with each project, I also save a copy of the procreate file in Dropbox. Exporting a procreate file is a little bit different. You can't simply click "Save to Dropbox". Navigate over to where "Copy to Dropbox" is. Click there, and then find the folder you want to save it in. Now what if you want to change the size of your file before saving? Navigate over to your "Actions" menu again, and click on "Canvas". From there, click on "Crop and Resize". You can drag in from the sides or corners to resize your image. But you can also type in the dimensions you're looking for in the dialog box below. Make sure the re-sampled box is unchecked if you want to maintain the same amount of pixels in your image at the smaller size. This is important for printing high-quality images. If you're creating an image to use on your website, that has smaller pixel dimensions, you can re-sample here. If you're going to be resizing or using your original art in some other way, I recommend going back out to your stack and duplicating the file by sliding left over your original and hitting "Duplicate". That way you can save your original work in case you mess up or make a mistake later. That should cover us for saving and resizing basic files. Please let me know if you have any questions about saving or resizing other files. 8. Final Thoughts: Thanks for joining me today. I can't wait to see your work in the project gallery. Feel free to leave questions and comments and requests more classes from me. I love seeing your work and I love interacting with artists' community.