Illustrate a Monochromatic Character in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the Skillshare course about creating a monochromatic character illustration. Monochromatic illustration utilizes only one color, also known as a hue in different shades, tints, and values to create a cohesive piece. It can be both challenging and simplistic at the same time. It pushes you away from the traditional coloring methods that you may be used to, but also simplifies understanding value because you're only using one color. Hi, I'm Shannon Sharma and I'm a self-taught illustrator. Your class project will be to create your own character using only one color. Yes, only one color. Only one. Now, we're going to add some flair to it by adding another color of contrast to your first color. For this class, you will need an iPad, an Apple pencil, and the Procreate app. If you don't have these, it's all right. You can go ahead and use anything you have around at home, such as paper, pencil, and colored pencils. This class is for beginners or anyone looking to challenge themselves with something new. I believe that everyone in the world has something awesome that they're scheming up. So let's get your gears turning and let the plotting begin. I can't wait to see what you create. 2. Colors and Associations: All right, we're going to dive right in with understanding colors and their associations. Now, as you might know, colors can affect your moods and feelings. For an example, when you walk into a restaurant, how do colors play into the atmosphere and the design of the restaurant? You should be aware that the same color in different cultures may have different meanings. For an example, white. White in India or some parts of India, represents death and mourning. However, in the United States, black is associated with mourning and death. As we continue, I want you to start thinking about your character design. Think about what emotions you would like to portray in your character and the color that might be associated with that feeling or association. To begin, I'm just going to review a few colors and their common associations. To start off, I'm going to go ahead and review red. As we know, love is associated with red, we think of Valentine's Day. Different restaurants will actually use the color red in their logos or in their restaurants to instate a sense of hunger. Anger, when you think of anger, you can think of the movie Inside Out. They represented Anger the character, by using the color red. Another popular association with the color red is also fire. Moving on to the color blue. Blue is associated with depth. When you think of depth, you can think of the ocean and how deep it is. In politics, politics are very serious and they require people to trust them, which is why blue is a common color used in politics. When you're at the beach, you also have a sense of calmness when you're looking out at the water. So blue is associated with depth, trust, calming, and also seriousness. The color yellow has both positive and negative associations. On the positive, it can be viewed as something representing energy or sunshine. On the negative, you can think of the caution signs like caution wet floor do not slip sign. It also is a color that when painted in rooms, makes people feel the most uncomfortable. Pink has a very playful and young association to it. When you think of the color pink in movies, the first thing that comes to my mind is Legally Blonde, it's a very funny movie and unfortunately, the color pink is often associated with females, doesn't mean that it can't represent some masculinity. However, most commonly it's associated with females. It also represents compassion and awareness. You can think of the breast cancer awareness symbol when you think of the color pink. Next we have the color brown. Brown is actually my favorite color, it has been since I was a young child. It's simple, it means you're grounded, it represents nature, has a sense of foundation, and also can represent being dirty. I know when I told my mom when I was young that my favorite color was brown, the first thing she said was, "Ewww, that's the color of feces." Yes, it is the color of feces and represents stuff that is dirty. However, I very much love the color brown for its more positive associations. Color purple is somewhat of a love and hate relationship with me. When my mom didn't like my favorite color brown, I then proceeded to ask her, "What is your favorite color then?" Hers was purple, so for a brief time, I changed my favorite color to purple because I was sad that she thought that my favorite color brown, had represented something dirty. Purple can be associated with royalty and power. You can think of all the kings and queens in their luxurious robes wearing the color purple. It is also thought of something representing gloom and also poison. Nightshades, they're flowers and plants, are purple in color and are often poisonous. So poison can be represented by the color purple. Green represents jealousy, money, nature, and luck. When thinking of a holiday, the first thing that pops in my mind is St. Patrick's Day and its association with green and luck. In nature, green is overly abundant in rainforests and in the desert for green cacti. It is something that you can think of money or at least the US dollar is associated with green and the character disgust, in the movie Inside Out was represented by the color green as well. Next up, we have the color orange. Orange is a very stimulating color. It can represent success, adventure, and also has a tropical feel to it. You can think of Orangetheory Fitness which is a gym. Their main color is represented by the color orange for stimulation and success. The color orange is often used in Halloween. We often think of Halloween which can be a very adventurous kind of holiday. It wouldn't be fair if after following orange didn't come black especially after talking about Halloween. The color black can be seen as something representing power. Darth Vader is a very good representation of this. Black is associated with evil, mystery, you can think of Zorro and his mask, and fear. Last but not least, I will be talking about the color white. White is viewed as something representing purity and innocence. Opposed to that, it can also be a symbol of surrender. You can think of someone waving their white flag, surrendering to the opposing enemy. White can also be a representation of the cold. Snow is white, so it wouldn't be surprising to associate the color white with being cold. Now that we've talked about colors and their common associations, I want to talk a little bit about your project.Your project will be to create a monochromatic character, meaning you're going to create a character using only one color. The main color will be for the skin, the hair, the eyes, the lips, and majority of the clothing for your character. Once you have that main color, you can then begin thinking of a secondary color to contrast the first. We're going to use that secondary contrasting color to create an accessory like a bracelet or sunglasses, it could be a belt or even a hair piece. It can even be part of a background so long as it's not the dominant color and your character stays true to its one-color monochromatic theme. Now that we've reviewed the project, I want to go over some details to help you with your character. I want to briefly talk to you about value. Value means the lightness and darkness of a color. For this example, you can see with the blue here on the slide. On the left hand side, it gets lighter as you add white and darker as you add grays and black. Tone is also something that you'll be using in this project. It is adding gray to a color, very simple and you can see the progression from left to right as you add gray. A tint is adding white to a color. As you can see on the left-hand side, it's very blue and as you move progressively up to the right, it gets lighter because it's adding white. A shade will add black to a color. Starting from the left, it's a lighter shade. You start adding black to that color and it progressively gets black. A very important concept you will need to understand is contrast for your main project. We will be using contrast to pick one color and a secondary color to make your character pop. Now, you can see here on the screen I have a very basic color wheel. The color on the top-right is orange and on the bottom-left is blue. Those two colors are complimentary to each other. They're almost like opposites. The same can be said for yellow and purple, green and red. All of these are complimentary colors and can be used to create your character. If you decided to use yellow as your main color, you can then use purple as your secondary. If for whatever reason you do not want to use a complimentary color, you can go ahead and reference this color wheel. You can use colors that aren't exactly across but as long as they are not touching like shown on the slide right now, that means you can use blue and yellow or blue and red. However, you shouldn't use blue and purple or blue and green. Congratulations, you have finished this slideshow on different colors and their associations. You have also gone ahead and reviewed what the project is and the details required to understand how to create a monochromatic character. Let's go ahead and dive in next to the basics of procreate. 3. Intro to Procreate: We'll begin by opening up the Procreate app, so go ahead and pull that up. You'll be welcomed by the Procreate Gallery and to create a new Canvas, you're going to want to hit the plus sign in the top-right corner. I usually use the square, is good for posting Instagram photos. Now, we're going to hit the gallery button, again, because we want to rename our new Canvas. Hit ''Gallery''. Click only once on the untitled artwork name on the bottom and rename it to whatever you would like. I'm going to use monochrome. Tap back into the monochrome Canvas that you just renamed, and this is what you should see. Starting at the top left corner, you see Gallery and to the right of that you'll see something that looks like a wrench. I'm going to go through all of the little buttons here. Within the wrench, you have an add button where you can insert files, photos, take a photo, and that's also where you're finding your cut, copy, and paste. In the Canvas, you can crop and re-size or flip the Canvas. That's good for getting a different perspective of your current drawing. The share button will help you save your file as a PNG or a Photoshop file or a PDF or any of those that you see there. The video make sure that your time lapse recording is turned on. This will be how you create your 30 second video for your time-lapse. The next two you won't have to worry about so much the preferences or the help. We're not going to be touching those for this project. Next, you'll see something that looks like a magic wand for adjustments. The only few that we will be using is opacity, noise, and maybe hue, saturation, and brightness. Next, you'll see something that looks like an S. That's good for circling different portions of your drawing. It'll allow you to make selections. Next up, we have the little pointer or clicker, which I have shown and drawn an arrow to on the screen that will be used for when you make a selection, it allows you to either re-size whatever is selected or move that selection to a different location on the Canvas. Next up, I will be showing you the brushes. It looks like an icon of a paintbrush. I use the inking brushes for when I'm sketching and inking my characters as well. I use the stinky ink. I'm not sure how you pronounce that, but that is my favorite one to ink in. You can use other ones such as the technical pen. I know that's a pretty good one. This is how it would look on the screen here. I'm just going to change the opacity. If you look to the left, you'll see two sliders, one on the top and one on the bottom. The top one will change the brush size. That's good. If your brush is too thick, you can make it smaller or larger depending on what your needs are. In the bottom, we'll change the opacity. Opacity is just making it more transparent or making it more visible. Next step is the Eraser tool. I'm going to skip the one next to the paintbrush icon just because it is not something that I generally use when making a character. A highlighted in blue is the eraser that's going to allow you to erase any marks that you make and you can also resize the eraser using the two sliders mentioned before, the top one being the size. You can change the size of the eraser or you can change the opacity of the eraser using the bottom slider. The next thing you'll want to learn is how to create layers. I'm just going to draw a circle and go over to the two square looking icon. When you first open that up, whatever you draw on the Canvas to start off with, will always be your layer 1. Now, if you want to add a second layer, you can go ahead and click on the plus icon next to layers on the right-hand side. That will create a new layer for you. You may also look at the checkbox near the N next to the layer or the layer name. That will allow you to choose whether or not you want that layer to be seen or not. You've created your layers and you want to rename it. What you're going to do is tap ones on the layer. That should bring up a menu on the left-hand side. You click ''Rename'' and you can type in the layer that you would like. For this project, I like to separate the sketch, inking, and color layers. Just, for example, when I had done the ink, I just renamed it Ink, and now I tapped once on the Layer 2. Hit ''Rename'' and then I'm going to rename that layer color. If you want to rearrange your layers, you can go ahead and take your Apple pencil, hold it on the layer that you want to move. Then once it's selected, you may go ahead and drag it up or downward towards any layers that you want to rearrange. To select colors, you can go to the top right corner. It's a black circle on the screen. You tap on that. Right now I have the disc open. It will have the major colors around. You can slide that larger circle to pick a color, and then the smaller one inside to create a different value of that color that you would like. On the bottom, you can see I just changed over to classic. That will bring up a square version of the color wheel or just the inside of that circle for the different values. Next, you can go ahead and see how the value icon will look. This will make it so that you can slide the different colors for the hue saturation and brightness, and red, green, and blue down below those. We're not going to be making a color palette for this project. I will leave that to a later class. Going back to the disk view of the color wheel, once you pick your color or hue that you want, you can go ahead and zoom in on that inner portion of the circle. When you do that you can zoom to make it larger or smaller. That inner circle is what we will be working with once you have your color chosen. Any of those different tints, value shades for a color that you pick will be able to use to create your monochromatic piece. A very helpful feature in Procreate is something called the reference tool or feature. When you select a layer, you go ahead and click on that double square, it'll open up your layers. You will then want to click on your ink layer. Once you tap on that, it'll open up a window, and on the left-hand side, you'll scroll down and see the word reference. When you do that whatever you create on your ink layer, it will stay within those lines. Using whatever you make in that layer as a reference. It's like if you were coloring in a coloring book, all the lines, whatever you drag and drop from the color will stay within the lines. You would make that reference layer the ink layer, and then click on your color layer. Whenever you want to drag and drop a color, you can just click and hold that color wheel on the top right hand corner and drag it down to wherever you want to fill in for that color. It is a very useful feature and will save you lots and lots of time as opposed to just sitting there and coloring in everything individually. That just about wraps up all the basic knowledge you will need for Procreate to start creating your own monochromatic character. Next up, we'll start learning about how to do some beginning exercises to prepare for character creation. 4. Sketching Warm-Up: Before starting our monochromatic piece, it's always wise to start off with a few exercises. Exercises are a great way to develop your character in different poses or gather ideas on what you think you may want for your character. To begin, I'm just going to start off with a few quick sketches. I'm thinking of doing a tropical theme, so my character will be orange with green as the contrasting color. I'm going to start off with just a few quick rubs to get an idea of what kind of pose or what kind of accessories I want my character to wear. You can use very wavy lines, you don't have to be so straight when trying to get the body position. This helps make positions look more natural with characters instead of very rigid. I'm going to go ahead and speed things up a little bit, but enjoy the speed drawing. Don't worry if your creation and your sketches for your idea is not coming out to the way you'd expect. This is just a rough sketch. It can be messy. That's the best part about art, is that it's messy. If you're a perfectionist, it's alright. Do not worry about this sketching phase. I'm sure you'll be just fine. Now that you have some ideas, it's time to choose a pose. I'm going to choose the first one that I did. Next, we will focus on how to ink and put the sketch into Procreate. 5. Inking your Character: To start out, we're going to take a picture of this sketch that we drew in the last video. Just take a quick picture with your iPad and then go back into Procreate. Hit that little wrench that we mentioned before in the Introduction to Procreate video. Hit the ''Add'' button and you will insert a photo, go into your camera roll and select that photo. When you insert a photo, that pointer on the top right will be selected. It will allow you to navigate and change the size of the image that you just inserted. I'm going to change the opacity. Again, click on the icon that looks like the magic ward, select ''Opacity'' and use your Apple pencil to slide left and right to adjust the opacity to what you feel comfortable to. Make sure when you're doing this that the layer with the image is selected. When you create a new layer, this will be Layer 3 but it's going to become our sketched layer. I'll rename the previous layer I had as Ink, for our example. I'm going ahead and rename it Picture, since this is the important picture. I'm also going to take away the reference feature on this layer. Going up, I'm going to change the position of the color layer to be underneath Layer 3. It's going to be our new sketch layer. I'm creating the Layer 4 to be our Ink layer and we want that on top of everything. I will now go ahead and rearrange. Ink will be top color sketch and then Picture will be the order of those layers. I'm going ahead and start in the sketch layer. I'm going to start doing a very rough sketch over the sketch we just imported from our sketchbook. To do this, I will be using the Gesinski ink brush. If you don't have that, you can go ahead and use the technical pen that works just as well. Now that we have our basic sketch, I'm going ahead and select the black color for my Gesinski ink brush and start inking on the Ink layer. Inking can be pretty difficult, so don't be afraid to re do the same line over and over again. You want to make sure that you have nice fluid lines instead of wiggly and scribal lines, it will make all the difference in your character. In a moment, I will be showing you a trick I learned for the eyes. It's really simplistic and it really helps to make sure that the eyes are even in both directions. What you're going to want to do is once you have one of the eyes created, you are going to ahead and use the selection tool. You'll draw the circle with the selection tool around the eye and then down at the bottom, you will hit the duplicate symbol, which are the two circles. Once you duplicate it, you'll see in the layers that there is a new layer. You'll go ahead, use the selection tool, circle it once again in the same area, you'll go back up to the pointer, and it will allow you to have the option to flip horizontally, which is what you'll want to do. You will be able to move the eye over to the other location. It might look a little weird right now, but you can still use the eraser tool to get rid of the iris line and redraw it in a position that will look more natural. So don't freak out if it looks really weird right now. You can go ahead and change it over with the eraser tool as shown right now. The other thing that I like about this tool is that, if for whatever reason one eye looks like it needs to be longer or shorter, the blue dots on the rectangle allow you to move that up or down so that you can also change the shape of the eye as well. Once you have the eye in the position that you'd like, go back into the layer section and tap on the layer that was created from the new eye. You want to go ahead, tap on that one layer on the left-hand menu that pops up, select ''Merge down'' and that will merge it down to your original inking layer. I'm going ahead and speed up the process a little bit and we'll see you at the finish line. We've just about completed the inking phase for our monochromatic character. You may want to choose a different color if you want to stay true to the monochromatic theme. Just choose a darker color for the inking line. However, if you want to use black, that is totally fine as well. Next up, we will be learning how to color our character to a true monochrome theme. 6. Coloring your Character: When coloring, you want to make sure you're on the color layer. I have previously gone ahead and created the color layer ahead of time to get the correct color scheme I wanted for the video. I'll create a new layer for color and disable the other one that I had created, and I will just use it for reference for colors. It is at this time that you want to make sure that your ink layer is the reference layer so that when you drag and drop colors, it will fill in within the lines. You will also want to make sure that the brush that you're using is very opaque, and it won't take several strokes to make sure that it is solid. As you can see, I have decided to use the color orange for my character due to her adventurous spirit. I will be using the color green for the contrasting color. If for whatever reason you come into a problem with the color dropped tool. I know I had an issue where when I was dropping the color, it would fill the entire space instead of what was inside the line. There's two things that could actually be going on. One is that you are not closing in your lines completely. Make sure that all of your lines are very solid and attached to each other. The second problem that could arise is that the color dropped threshold is too high. To fix that, all you'll want to do is drag and drop the color. Hold the Apple pencil in place for just a second. A color threshold will appear just below the gallery, gray line or black line. You can slide the Apple pencil to the left or to the right in order to decrease or increase the threshold. Decreasing the threshold seemed to solve the issue of it filling in the entire space. It became more sensitive to where the lines were. As a general guideline for how you should color your character. I generally go ahead and do a mid tone for the skin, something in the middle, the hair will be darker, and the clothing will be even darker than the hair. Now with orange, if you start getting darker by adding grays and blacks, you actually get some brown. As I go along, you will see the color brown because it is in the color orange's value range. For the background, I'm going to choose green leaves to give a more tropical feel and add to the adventure for representation. When deciding what to use for your contrasting color. Try not to overemphasize the color. It'll take away from your monochromatic character theme. It's better to focus on one or two items that are not generally biologically necessary. Any accessories such as I could have used the hat, I could have used the pencil, or paper in the pocket. I could have used the belt, but the majority of the clothing should stick to the monochromatic color of your choice. I'm just going to take the last few seconds to finish up the leaves, and after that, we will prepare to learn about adding shadows and highlights to create depth in the character. 7. Shadows, Highlights, & Noise...Oh, my!: I'm going to briefly discuss how I do shading and highlighting. I generally use the airbrush, the medium airbrush for adding shadows. I've selected that there and I change the size as well as the opacity to get the effect that I'm looking for. When taking color for the cheeks or adding blush, I use a darker shade than the skin tone. For this, I just took a sample from the hair and started using that to add a blush to the cheeks. However, when I saw it all together, I realized it was too dark so I turned down the opacity so it wouldn't be as visible the next time I applied it on the face. Sometimes it can be difficult to get an understanding of the use of the airbrush, so make sure you're playing around with it in changing the opacities as well as the sizes so that you can understand what works for you. Whenever I want to use a really dark shadow, I will use a darker shade as well. However, I will increase the opacity all the way up on the airbrush so that that color really shows through. I would go ahead and start adding all the shadows to your character, pick a light source and try to the best of your ability to capture the shadows of where they would naturally fall. Now to add highlights, I would go ahead and create a layer on top of the ink layer, you can change your brush to a more solid brush like the technical pen. When you do this, go ahead and select the color white, because you're going to be drawing on top of the ink to create that highlight. Right here I'm just adding a shine to the eyes that's going over the ink layer, which is why you will not see the black lines underneath. I usually highlight the eyes, the nose, and the lips, and maybe sometimes pieces of clothing. Using these two techniques, you should be able to effectively add shadows and add highlights. One more thing I want to mention is how to add noise to your character. Adding noise adds a texture to what you've created, it almost has a grainy look to it. I personally enjoy that, however, if that's not something you find aesthetically pleasing then by no means will you have to add noise to your character. I'm going through the different layers I created to remove any unnecessary layers because once I go back to the gallery and duplicate it, I don't want the unnecessary layers duplicated in that new file. I'm going to go ahead and hit select, duplicate my first file, it duplicated and it always is usually to the left. So I'm going to open up that new file that I created for the duplicate. Once I'm in, I'm going to merge down all of the layers. By doing this, it allows me to use only one layer to apply the noise instead of multiple. Again, I'm just removing some of the unnecessary layers. Something I didn't mention before, but if you want to add a background, select the background layer and you can go ahead and change the color by selecting a color on the color wheel. However, for my character, I am just going to stick with white, that way I can go ahead and show you what the noise will look like without the distraction of the background color. If you don't want a background color, you can go ahead and just deselect that layer, it will make it transparent in the background. Now to create noise, you're going to select the layer that has all your merged layers, hit the magic looking one tool and then select noise. With your Apple pencil, you'll be able to slide right or to the left to increase or decrease the percentage of noise. I find that I like a range of under 20 percent to over 12 percent. You've created your character and you've added noise for texture, now you're going to want to download the image so that you can show all your friends and family of what an amazing job you've done at creating this character. You'll go back to Wretch, you'll hit the share button, and then choose the type of file you'd like to export it as. I usually do PNGs, however, you are more than welcome to choose whichever file you would like. I'm looking for my character in the camera roll and as you could see, the noise did add some texture to the character and this image is now ready to be shared with the world. So have fun and I can't wait to see what you've all created. 8. Make a Time lapse in Procreate: In order to create a time-lapse video in Procreate, you will need to select the wrench looking icon on the left-hand side in your gallery, and then select a video. On the bottom, there should be an export time-lapse option. You can choose either the thirty-second video or the full length video. It will take some time to export but once it finishes, you will have the option to export it to your photo gallery. Now that it is almost on exporting, I can go ahead and on the bottom-left, save the video to the device on the iPad. I'll go ahead and open up my photos. At the very bottom you will see a thirty-second video, and this is how the time-lapse would look. 9. End Clip: Congratulations for completing this course. Hopefully, you all have learned a little something about how to create your own monochromatic character. We've gone through different colors and what they represent with different associations and how value, tone, shades and tints can help interplay into creating a monochromatic character. You've also learned how to create a 30-second time-lapse video of your character creation. If you enjoyed this course, please go ahead and follow me on Skillshare. I'd really appreciate it. That way you can stay updated on all the new classes I'll be posting. If you want to see what I'm scheming up outside of Skillshare, go ahead and follow me on Instagram. Otherwise, go ahead and take a look at all the other student's work to see what inspired them to create their character. I can't wait to see what you create until next time.