Illustrated Maps on Your iPad in Procreate + 18 FREE Stamps and Brushes

1. Illustrated Maps on Your iPad in Procreate + 18 FREE Stamps and Brushes: Hi everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator, and teacher. Today, I want to show you three different methods for creating illustrated maps on your iPad and Procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of the brushes I made to create my maps as free downloads, including some texture brushes, drawing brushes, and a set of illustrated location marker stamps. First, we'll create a playful illustrated map marking a few destinations and roads in a city. I'll show you some ways to decorate your map using drawings and stamps, plus some easy ways to add texture and variation to the composition. You could use this process to create a restaurant map, an art gallery map, or just mark your favorite places in the city. Next, we'll create a detailed drawing of a city streets, rivers, and major landmarks. We'll use the structure of the city to create an abstract watercolor painting with bold pencil lines then we'll remove the pencil lines to get a soft watercolor abstract view of the area. Next, we'll create a detailed roadmap inside the outline of a city's perimeter. I'll show you an easy trick for getting a complimentary color palette for your map. Then we'll use bold color to fill in sections of the city. We'll add illustrations and text to highlight the city's popular attractions, then add texture to get the map or real paper field. You could use the processes you learn in this class to create gifts for friends and family, or you could create digital downloads or printable images for your business. The great thing about this process is that it's perfect for all levels. If you're just getting started withdrawing, I'll show you some easy tips for tracing that'll help get you started. But if you've been drawing for a long time, this is a great time to showcase your drawing skills and create a highly detailed and eye-catching map. All you need to take this class is your iPad and a stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger, so let's get started. 2. Downloads and Inspiration: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page in the About section of the class. The About section doesn't show up on the app, so if you're using the app, switch to a browser. You will need a password to get into this page and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you will see the options to download the brushes and get the other class resources. I'm going to click "Download The Brushes". Once that downloads, you should see the option to open and procreate, if you don't click more and scroll over to see procreate on this list. I'll click "Copy To Procreate" and then I will just open whatever you had opened last. I'll open a document click on the brushes and you'll see the set at the very top of your brush set list. You'll see all of the brushes and the stamps here at the bottom. If you go back to the class downloads page, you'll see the option to see the Pinterest inspiration board. If you click on that one time, it'll open either the Pinterest app if you have that, or it'll open Pinterest and a browser. If you scroll through this pin board, you can see there are so many different ways to illustrate maps. You can do something that's a little more abstract like this piece or you can do something that's a little more accurate to the actual city. You can use watercolors, you can actually draw the buildings that are within the space that you're covering or you can do something that's more of an illustration style like this piece rather than doing an actual map, they discovered some of the destinations and then filled it in with some pattern. You can also just use color to highlight certain parts of the city. This is a really nice city map with simple black lines that just fills in parts of the city. You may want to start by scrolling through here and figuring out what fits your personal style best, what pieces you're drawn to. I really like the abstract maps. It depends on what mood I'm in and what city I'm working with. But I think this piece is really beautiful. It shows the layout of the city, but it doesn't have any destinations. But this one is really nice as well. We have a lot of the important parts of this city highlighted with really simple illustrations. This is something you could do as well. So take a minute to scan through this board and think about what works best for your personal style. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project. 3. Colors and Borders: For this first project, we're going to create a hand-drawn map that highlights some of the important features of a city. You could also do a state or a country with the same style. I'm going to highlight restaurants that I love in Chiang Mai, Thailand. But you could choose any topic. It could be the best hiking spots in your state, or the historical sites in your country or local businesses in your neighborhood. Just think about some locations that are important to you or important to the person you're making this for. Don't worry so much about perfect accuracy. This is more about exploring the locations in the city. For example, I'm going to choose the restaurants that I like, but that doesn't mean these are the best restaurants in the area. They're just the ones that I like and I visited a lot. Keep that playful and personal rather than trying to be perfectly accurate. I think this project is a lot more fun that way. The first thing I'll do is create a new document custom size. I'll be working at 10 by 10 inches. I've gone ahead and chosen the colors that I want to use for this piece. I'll get the first brush in the set just so you can take a look at the colors I'm using. This will be my background color, and this will be my drawing color. I chose these two colors because these are the colors that you see all over Thailand. Anyone who's visited Thailand would recognize these colors as the colors of Thailand. Next, I'm going to use a little bit of turquoise to highlight, and then also a little bit of white to bring it all together. I like to do this first thing just to get an idea of how my colors will work together. I always do a little bit of overlaying with colors like this just to be sure that they work nicely together. Next I'll swipe left on that layer and click clear so we can start fresh. Then I'm going to choose the background color and that's going to be my yellow. I'll click that one time and click fill layer. Next I want to add a little bit of texture to this layer, this flat yellow is a little hard to look at. I always do my textures on separate layers just so I can go back later and change my mind if I need to. On that new layer, I'm going to get a slightly darker color. I'm just going to go to where that yellow is and pull down a little bit so you can see the slight difference in those two colors there. Then I'm going to grab one of these paper textures that you see on the list. Let's take a look at the few different textures just so you can get an idea of these. This one's more of a speckled version and this is more of a paper woven texture. Then there's just a regular, Maybe handmade paper texture. You can play around with these and see what works best for your personal style. I'm going to go with the paper texture here. I'm just going to cover the whole canvas and go over it a few times to make sure it's all covered without picking up my brush. That may not be quite drastic enough for you. You can always just duplicate that texture layer rather than just painting a new layer like this, it's better to duplicate because if you just paint over it again, you're overlaying one texture on another and it almost becomes a solid layer. What I do is just duplicate that first texture layer to get a little more grit. The next thing I want to do is add a border. I think these maps look really nice if they have a little bit of constraints to hold all of the images in place. I'm going to grab a new layer and get that red color, which is my drawing color and I'm going to get the vertical dotted line brush that's in the brush set. This brush goes up and down. If you have a problem with the direction, just turn it, but it works both ways. Once you make one stroke with that, you can put it into place. I want to have just maybe a quarter of an inch on the side here. I'm going to put that piece in place. Then I want to put the exact same border on the exact same distance from the edge on the side. To do that, I'm going to duplicate that border. Now I have two of those lines. I'll create a new layer and then I need something that will be a guide to help me flip this across the canvas perfectly. I'm just going to grab one of these random stamps. It really doesn't matter which one you choose. I'll hit it one time and it needs to be within the canvas so if it stamps and it doesn't fit on the canvas, just make it smaller. I'm going to click the Move tool and click Fit to canvas. That's going to make it grow all the way across the canvas so it's touching the edges perfectly. Now that I have that stamp stretched perfectly across the canvas, I'm going to go to that layer, click on the end symbol and reduce the opacity to zero. That's just my guide. I usually rename that layer to the word "Guide" because I don't want to get confused about which is my guide and which is my border. I've got my guide selected. I'm going to swipe right on one of those border layers. Click the Move tool and click Flip horizontal. That puts this border perfectly on this side, the same distance it would be on the other side. You could do that by eye. But I think it's always better to do things with more accuracy because we have those tools and Procreate so we might as well use them. Now we can delete our guide. We don't really need that anymore, so I'm just going to get that out of the way. I'm going to merge my two border layers together. Swipe left to duplicate them, click the Move tool and rotate. Now I have a perfect border all the way around. It's the same distance from the edge. I'll click the Move tool to set that. Then I'm going to reduce the opacity of those two layers because I don't really want to see them prominently. I just want to use them as a guide. I really want this piece to have a hand-drawn look. Anything that's really mechanical like this, I want to give it a little bit of a hand-drawn feel. I'm going to grab the dry ink brush and I'm on a new layer here and let's check the size of that brush. Once you get a size you're happy with, you can just start going through and quickly making a rough sketch of those dots. Doing it this way just gives it a hand-drawn feel. You can really see that this was drawn by hand. But then it also has the accuracy of being the correct distance from the border and also being the right distance from each other. One thing you may want to adjust with this vertical line brush is the distance between the two pieces and the size of the marks. If you want to do that, go to general, and size limits. I just clicked on the brush one time to get these brush options. You'll see here, you can change the size limits, you can change the minimum size and the maximum size. If you're not happy with how these lay down the first time, just adjust that. You can also change the stroke which changes how far these are spaced from each other and that's in the stroke option here. I'll continue on that new layer, marking all the way around the canvas for my border. The next thing I'll do is just delete my old border layers so I'll just merge those together and delete. Now I just have my nice orderly hand-drawn border. 4. Sketching Your Layout: The next thing I need to do is create my map. I need to know the proportions of the city and where all of these locations are on the map. I'm just going to open up a web browser and search the words Google Maps. I'll click on Google Maps and then you do have to be logged in to do this. If you're not logged into your Google account or you don't have one, you would have to create a Google account to do this, because you're going to make a map on your account where you mark all the points. If you don't have that, go ahead and do that step now. Once you're logged into your Google account, you can click that little menu here on the left and then you'll see the option My Maps down here at the very bottom of this list. I'll click My Maps, and then I'll click create a new map at the top here, so it'll show anything you've created. If you've never done this before, this will be blank. I'll click create a new map and then it just starts you out with this image of probably whatever country you live in. The first thing to do is start searching for a place that you want to have on your map. I'm just going to type the name of a restaurant that I like in Chiang Mai and it found this location. Once you find your location, click Add to map, and then you'll see over here you get a layers panel. My first restaurant is over here, Ristr8to lab. I want to change the color of this dot because there's a lot of blue on this map and it's going to be a little confusing. I'm going to change it to a color that Google doesn't tend to use, which is black. Just click this little color dropper here and then click black as my color and you can see it changes it, and it changes it over here on the list as well. I can click the X to get that out of my way and then I'll just continue the same process until all of my locations are on the map. Once you've marked all of your locations on the map, you can zoom out and just see the layout. You may notice that a lot of the places are bunched together in a single section and then there's some outlier that's really throwing off your map. If that's the case, I do recommend taking that point off the map. You want to choose places that fit well within a composition if you're going to use this exact style. There is some places I had out here that just didn't work for my composition, so I removed those. I'm just going to zoom around until I can get a nice layout of this area and I'm going to just take a screenshot once that's nicely laid out, so I feel like I could fit my square map right here. I'll take a screenshot by pressing the home button and the power button at the same time. One thing you may want to do is also take a screenshot of the list of places. If you click legend, then you can see the full list there and you can take a screenshot of that. I have that especially because I'm doing some Thai restaurants that are hard for me to spell. I am going to have that list nearby just so I can reference it as I add my text to my map. Next, I'll go back to procreate and insert my map. I'll click, Add Insert a photo, and then choose my map. I'm just going to place this so that everything has enough space. I do want to use the outer edges, so I think I can make this a little bit bigger. One tip, make sure magnetics is on whenever you resize your map, otherwise you're distorting the proportions of your map and changing the locations. I'm going to zoom in and out a little bit here just to be sure I'm leaving enough space for everything, but it's also nicely spread out. I'm happy with that layout. I'll click the Move Tool to set that and then just reduce the opacity of that a little bit so I can see what I'm doing here. I'll create a new layer and I've got that same pen, the dry ink with that same red color. What I like to do here is use a thicker brush for the larger roads and a thinner brush for the smaller roads, but you really can do this however you'd like. You really don't have to do all of the roads, you just need to do what you need for someone to be able to look at this, someone who knows the city and say, "Oh, that's that road that I drive down all the time." It doesn't have to be a really detailed map. This is an illustration it's not cartography, so don't worry so much about it being perfectly accurate. Think more about your composition and what's going to look nice with all of your location illustrations. For example, this street continues all the way down here, but I know that I want to have some text over here explaining what this map is, so I'm not going to draw that street. This is going to be more of a drawing area. But I do need these main streets so that it's really clear what part of the city I'm working with. The next thing I'll do on a new layer is start marking my locations. I need a reminder of what's in each place, so I'm going to insert a photo and insert that list of locations. I'm just going to move this over here, which will crop that image. Really all I need is that list of names, so I'm just moving this around the canvas to crop out what I don't need. There's my lists of names. I'm just going to go through and look at this list and then place a marker on the map that shows where that thing is. The first one is Ristr8to Lab, this is a coffee shop, coffee lab. I'll click the plus symbol to create a new layer and I've got red as that color. I'm pulling a marker from the stamp list that I created, but you could also create your own stamps. If you're not doing a food map, these probably won't make much sense for you except for the compasses. Feel free to make your own stamps here, which is super easy to do. I'll just show you the document where I created one of these stamps. I just drew a black outline on a white paper and this needs to be pure black and white. Then we can just save this image as a jpeg. I'll go back to my gallery, you can go to any of these stamps that I've already created, swipe left, click duplicate, click on that duplicated one, click source and insert a photo, and then insert that stamp. That's all it takes to make your own stamp. It really only takes a couple of minutes, but feel free to use my stamps as well. I'm going to use this coffee and tea stamp first and I'll just stamp it one time and then put it in place. I'm using the magnetics tool to make sure I don't distort the proportions and I've got this coffee shop down here. I wanted to be close to the border, but not all the way on the border, so I'm giving it a little bit of breathing room between the border and the illustration. I also have a couple more coffee shops, so this is a drawing guide. I'm not worried about it becoming blurry, so I'm just going to duplicate this and put it in place in a few more spots. Now I have my three coffee shops marked. I'll create a new layer and put down the rest of my stamps for the rest of my locations using the same process. Now that I have all of those locations in place, I can make my map layer invisible. You can see this isn't exactly where all of these places are. Like this restaurant is actually on this side of the street, but it just won't fit in that location, so I moved it to the other side of the street. This is your map, this is an art piece, an illustration, it doesn't have to be perfect. Someone might say, "Oh no, actually that restaurants on the other side, but it doesn't matter. This is all about making your beautiful piece, not about really telling people where to go. The next thing I'm going to do is add in my text. I'm going to make sure I'm spelling everything correctly and laying it out in a way that makes sense for the illustration. This is just going to be a sketch layer. I'm going to do this on a new layer and I'm going to use my narrow wonder pencil on a small size and just go through and figure out where I want this text to be on the page. As I'm writing these, I'm really thinking about how they're laid out on the canvas. I don't want there to be a lot of text that stacked right on top of each other, so I'm really trying to make the text be to the left or the right of the piece beside it. This piece is a little bit to the left, this one's to the right, some are on a single line, some are on two lines. Depending on the layout of your map, you may have a totally different layout and different ways of setting up your text. At this point, I also like to make little adjustments. I'm on my text layer here, I'll click the selection tool, click free hand, and circle that text, and then just move it over a little bit. This is a good time to just make sure your layout looks good and then later we'll go through and refine all of this. Now that I have all my restaurant names taken care of, I can hide that restaurant name layer. I'm going to create a new layer for the name of my map. You can just put the city here, you could label your map, say exactly what you're showing on here, it's totally up to you. I'm going to write Chiang Mai Foodie Map. I'll click the Move Tool to just move that down a little bit because I really want that to dominate this corner. Then I'm just going to play around with adjusting all these parts so they fit really nicely with this text. 5. Adding Text and Illustrations: I'm happy with this layout. I'm going to create a new layer, and that's going to be my drawing layer, so I'll move this layer all the way to the very top. I do like to rename these final important layers, just so I don't get confused later, so this will be my drawing layer. I'm going to go through to all of my illustrations with the dry Ink brush, at the very top of this brush set, and I'm going to just go all the way around these illustrations and really make them look hand-drawn. I'm going to merge all of my stamp layers onto one layer, so I'll just pinch these, and they're going to go all onto one layer. Now, you can see all of these little drawings on a single layer. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer so you can just barely see those. Now when I'm working on my drawing layer, it's really easy for me to see what I'm doing. I'll take just a few minutes to go through here and redraw all of these to make them look really hand-drawn and loose. Now that I have redrawn all of those pieces, I can go ahead and make that first stamp layer invisible, so now you can just see the drawings. I'm also going to go on a layer behind those drawings or under those drawings. I'm going to add a little bit of color just to make these stand out more, so I'm going to grab this turquoise color. I've got my drawing layer on top, and this is my new layer. Let's call this my color layer, and I'm going to go through, loosely, with a larger brush. I'm going to let this go outside the outlines. This is a hand-drawn piece, so it's nice to have some little imperfections to show your hand, and I'll continue this process with all of my illustrations. I want to make this stand out just a little bit more, so I'm going to make a new layer and call that my white layer. I'm going to get a pure white and just go through and add a little bit of contrast to each of these. I like this brush because it shows some of the original color underneath, so you'll get some of that nice color blending if you use this method. Now, I'm ready to clean up my writing, of all of the restaurant names, so I'll go to that layer and reduce the opacity so it's almost totally transparent. I just want to barely see that spelling. One tip here is to always start with the largest piece of text. You know you need enough space for the largest piece, so all the other pieces will be easy because they'll easily fit into their spots. I'm going to create a new layer and get a totally different color here. Let's go with a black. Then, I'm going to use the grid brush that's in the illustrated map set, and I'll get a slightly larger brush here and just paint over that text. This is on a new layer, so it's not going to affect our text or illustrations. I'll click the move tool and make sure magnetic is on and then just resize this to fit the text. I know I want my letters to be two squares high and one square wide, so I need to have enough space across here for all of these words. I just need to count these letters and make sure there's enough. That looks good. I'm also going to make this grid layer semi-transparent, click + to create a new layer, and then decide what size I want my dry ink pen to be. I'm going to use that red color again, and I'll just go through and really slowly and carefully make these fit within these squares. This doesn't have to be perfect. We're using our handwriting here, and we want it to look like handwriting, so I'm going to take my time, but I'm not going to obsess over these being perfect. I've found that I need to be able to see a little better, and my text isn't going to fit right there, so I want to shift all of those layers so I can see. That's going to be my writing layer, my grid layer, and the layer that has my text. I've selected the writing layer. Now, I'm going to swipe right on the grid layer, swipe right on the writing layer. Now, I can click the move tool and that's going to move all three of those. I'm just moving it up a tiny bit so you can see a little bit better. I can always move it back down if I need to. Now, I'll make my grid layer and my sketch text layer invisible. My regular text layer, I'm going to take a look here and see if I like the layout of that. I want to shift the second line down, so I'll click the selection tool, click freehand, circle around that, click the move tool, and just shift it over a little bit. That way, it's nicely centered with the top word. There's my first piece of text. I'm going to continue the same process with all of my text, and I'm going to use the same grid so the sizing is the same. I'll just put this in place, where it needs to go, go back to my text layer, and start writing. Now, I have got all of my text written out. I can make my grid invisible, and I can make my sketch text layer invisible as well. Now, I just have my final text, and you can see, there's a little bit of adjusting that needs to be done with this. It's not perfect, so I'm just going to take a few minutes to go through, click the selection tool, select the text, and then put it into place. I will continue the same process with all of the words. I can also see that I need to move this symbol so I have enough space for this other text, so I'm going to find my green and white layers and just merge those together. I'm happy with how it looks so far, so I'm fine to merge those together. I'll click the selection tool, select that coffee cup, click the move tool, and just shift that up. I also need to move my drawing layer, but I still want to keep that separate, so I'm going to do these in two separate selections. First, I'll move the color, then I'll go to the drawing layer and do the exact same thing. I can see that this text might be a little large to fit in this bottom corner, so I'm going to go to my text layer, click the move tool, make sure magnetic is selected, and just make all of my text a little bit smaller. What that does is it's going to leave me a lot more space, in this area. I need to do a little bit more adjusting now, but that's fine. The most important thing is that everything fits on the page. 6. Filling Space and Creating Color Versions: Now, that all of that text is taken care of, I want to highlight it a little bit more. I'm going to create a layer below that text flare and get white as my color. Then go through and just with a larger dry ink brush, just add a little accent that helps this stand out. You can see if I zoom out, that really stands out a lot better than the texts that doesn't have anything behind it. This step is optional, but I think it helps bump up your text a little bit. Now I want to do the same process with the text on this side, just starting with a grid, deciding how tall I want each one to be, and then writing the text with that same brush. I've sized my grid so that these letters will be two squares across and four squares up-and-down, because I want to keep that same ratio that I'm using with my other text. With my other text, it was one-by-two, so this one is two-by-four. It'll be the same lettering just with a larger brush. Now I can make my grid invisible and I can also make my original text sketch invisible. I can see I need to make this a little smaller, so I'm making sure magnetic is on. Then just bumping down the size a tiny bit. Now I'm going to add that same white border that I added to the first bit of text. I'm happy with how this is laid out, but I do want to add in a few things just to fill in the extra spaces that are empty. The first thing I'm going to do, is add a little compass up on the top here. I have this as one of our stamps for the class. I'm just going to put this in place, resize it with magnetics on. Then I'll do the same thing I did with the other stamps, just making it semi-transparent and then tracing it with this dry ink brush. I'm going to add the same color accents that I added for the other pieces, starting with the turquoise layer underneath and then adding in a little bit of white as an accent. I also want to add in a little bit of personality to this map to show a little bit more about the city without putting actual locations on the map. One thing you see a lot in Thailand, is these little shrines. There's a lot of different shapes, but I chose one of the common shapes and created a stamp for that. I'm not worrying so much about where these would actually be in real life, I'm just filling in my map. Every time I duplicate one of these, I'm duplicating the bottom layer, which is the original layer. You never want to duplicate a duplicate because then it will just start becoming blurry. Just something to keep in mind as you're working in procreate. It's okay to duplicate the original but not the duplicate. I'd also like one over here, so I'm just going to work for a second to shift all of that stuff over to the right. At this point, if you're really confident with all of your drawing, you could go ahead and start merging your layers together. For example, I could merge my writing layer with the white background that it's on. That's totally up to you. You may not be ready to do that yet, you may still want to be able to change and shift your illustration, but I'm going to go ahead and merge all of my illustrations and all of my text onto a single layer. That's just going to make it a lot easier for me to just shift things around. The next thing I'll do, is just add in some really simple trees. This works well on almost any map. If you need a little something just to fill in the background, trees are a great option. Find out what trees are common in that area and just do a simple sketch. One thing that's really common in Thailand, is mango trees, so I'm just going to draw this really simple tree and then get my eraser with my drying brush on a small size, and just erase some little mangoes. Then once you have that tree, you can duplicate that and place them around the Canvas. You could also draw a new tree each time, it doesn't have to be the exact same image duplicated. This is really up to your personal style. Some people like having recurring elements that make it more cohesive and some people like having a lot of variation. There is no right way to do this. It's really just what's your personal style. I'm going to work just for a second to fill in all of these blank spaces. I shifted a little bit of text around as well so I could fit more trees in. Maps are usually pretty busy. There's a lot going on on a map and it helps your eye bounce around to have a lot of different pieces going on. You can see how the white really brings your eye straight to the text because that's really the most important thing about this map. Everything else is declaration. This is about the places that you love and the title of the map. One last thing that's optional, but I like to do because I think it adds a lot of visual interest to the map, is to just go through and add some little sketch marks. I'm just adding some little lines and this could be interpreted as grass or maybe roadways or houses. It doesn't really matter, it's just a way to visually fill up some blank space. Again, just help the I bounce around the Canvas. I'll take just a minute to fill all of these in. I'm happy with how this map turned out, but I do always like to take a look at what some color versions might look like. I'm going to go back to my gallery, click ''Select,'' tap on my ''Map'' and click ''Duplicate.'' Now I'm just duplicating my map because I don't want to mess with that. That's my original. I want to keep that safe in case I realize I spelled that word wrong or I need to move that shrine over to a different place. With this duplicated version, I'm going to merge all the layers. I'm just going through and merging everything. Now I've got one single layer. I'm going to go to hue saturation brightness and just play around with some different color versions. So you can change colors, you can also change the saturation. I'll take just a few minutes to come up with a few different color versions. Then I'll just duplicate that layer, make the first one invisible, and do another color version on top of it. Here's four different color versions from that same map. Here's a pink and blue version. These aren't the colors of Thailand, but I like these color so I might use that one. The next one, is pink and orange. Again, I really like bright bold colors. This doesn't really represent Thailand very well, but it's a beautiful color palette nonetheless. Then a green and pink version, as well as an orange and green version. I do recommend playing around with this. Generally, the first colors that I choose are not the colors that I end up with. So I really recommend trying out a few different colors because you may find that while you like your color palette, there's a way better color palette out there waiting for you. I will call this piece finished and go ahead and move on to the next one. 7. Creating Selection Areas: This next project is a great way to show your love for an area without being overly descriptive or adding a lot of text or landmarks. This is more of a representation of the landscape and the natural features that make a place unique. One thing I love about this technique is that it's a really easy gift for anyone, not just someone who likes art. People love seeing an aerial view of their city. If you can make it beautiful with some water colors and some abstraction of the city areas. It turns a city landscape into a beautiful work of art that I think almost anyone can appreciate. The first step is to choose a location. I've chosen a location in Virginia, where I have some family called Lynchburg. I'm sure there's a lot of beautiful landmarks here. But what I noticed about Lynchburg is it's a beautiful landscape, beautiful mountains and River. I really wanted to highlight that on my map. The first thing I'm going to do is choose the area that I want to use. The actual city is more like this space, but I want to frame this river. It's really prominent all the way across my drawing. I'm just going to take a moment here to organize this space. I'm also looking in the center here. I want to be sure I'm zoomed in enough to see some smaller streets. I wouldn't want to zoom out like this far because you really can't see the little streets. I'm going to stay pretty far out, but close enough to see a lot of that white area. When I'm ready, I'm just going to take a screenshot with those two buttons. Then I'm going to go to my procreate document. This is the exact same size that I started with last time. ten by ten inches at 300 DPI. I'm going to click Add, insert a photo, and then insert that screenshot. I'm just going to take a minute to place that exactly how I want it to be. I'm happy with this placement. I've got the river cutting across. That's going to be a nice blue line across the piece. I've got some roads which are going to be big white marks across this way. I'm kind of thinking about colors and space. I've also got some dense areas here and here, and then some more open areas on the edge. You want some contrast, you want a little bit of variation, but most importantly, you want to show the beauty of the landscape. This is a great time to just use your personal style to make a decision about how you want to map out this place. The next thing I'll do is create a new layer, and get black as my color and choose the narrow and a pencil as my brush. I'm just going to go through and start outlining these areas. One thing to keep in mind here is because we're doing this as a watercolor. You want to leave enough space for your watercolor lines. This river is really then. I'm going to widen it a little bit because I really want to be able to show that deep blue color. If I left it as thin as it naturally is I wouldn't be able to do that. You can see I'm going a little bit outside where the natural blue area is, just. I can really highlight that river which is an offshoot of the main river. I'm going to continue this same process with the rivers and then with the larger streets. I'll just make a big open space like this then with the smaller streets. I'm just going to draw lines. I'm not going to worry about these being perfect. These are going to be really loose drawings of these streets. They're really just a way to mask out where I want my watercolor to be. You can decide, do you want to do every single street or do you want to just do the Main Streets? It's really up to you here. You maybe can start with the basics and then fill in more details if you'd like. I'm going to take just a few minutes to fill in this whole map with as much detail as I like. I've gone through and drawn all of the streets on this map and just left the rest blank. Now I can go ahead and remove my map layer. One thing you may want to do is duplicate your pencil layer. It'll make it just a little bit darker, a little bit thicker. That's totally up to you, but I do like to do that. I'll probably remove my pencil layer later. It doesn't really matter, it just makes the selecting process a lot easier. I want to start adding some water color to this piece on a new layer, below my drawing layer, I'm going to grab my watercolor paper texture. You can choose any color with this. You could just go with a light gray. I recommend just playing around with it a little bit. You can see if I just do a light gray, you're getting just a tiny bit of texture. You could go the slightly darker gray and get even more. It's really up to you here. You can always reduce the opacity of that layer later on if it ends up being a little bit too strong for your taste. The next thing you want to do is start making some selections for my color. I've chosen a few different colors here. I like to use a few key colors and then a few shades that are kind of similar for all of the earth areas. I'll have blue as my water and then really just shades of pink and brown for everything else. You can go with any color palette you'd like here. I'm going to be doing all of my painting on new layers. I'm going to set all of those layers to multiply. I'm also going to set my paper layer to multiply. What this does is it helps the paper and the paint blend together. They look like they're actually connected rather than just lying right on top of each other. Every time you make a new layer for your paint, just be sure to set that to multiply. I'm going to click on my drawing layer. Before you click the selection tool, you may want to change how easy it is to see your selection. I'm going to click Tools, Preferences, and then this is selection mask visibility. This is going to change how easy it is to see what you've selected. I've got a pretty high at 57 percent, so yours is probably going to be lower by default. I recommend bumping that up a little bit. It's going to make it a lot easier to see your selections. Next, we need to set our threshold for our selection. I'll click the selection tool, click Automatic, and then click on one area. It doesn't matter where then zoom in. Take a look at the area and see how it looks. You can click and drag to change how much is selected. Right now the selection threshold is at zero. That means it's selecting a very small portion of pixels, whereas if you drag it up higher and higher, you can see you're getting a little more white on the edge of these that means it's selecting more and more then it starts bleeding into other areas. Our goal is to select only one little portion and a little tiny bit of the black. I'm going to stick with about 45 percent. You can kind of play around with this and get a threshold that works for you but I find 45 percent works well for this process. 8. Adding Variation and Contrast: Next I'm going to go through and just select random areas. Taking a look at my colors, I have eight different colors. I want to select about one-eighth of this area, so that I have enough space for all of my colors. This gets a little bit tedious when you get into the smaller spaces. Take just a few minutes to cover about one-eighth or however many colors you have that portion of the canvas. If you make a mistake with your selection, let's say you accidentally select the line like that, you can just tap two fingers, so just step back one step so you don't lose all of that work you did. I'm happy with that for my first color, I'm going to make sure I'm on that new layer, and that new layer is set to multiply. I'm going to grab my first color and get my upland edge rough watercolor brush with the size of that all the way up, and then I'm just going to go through, and without picking up my pencil, I'm going to cover all of the spaces that are highlighted. You can see here why changing that selection mass setting is helpful with all of the lines that I've made here on the canvas. It's a little bit hard to see what's selected. Just having that selection mass a little bit higher can be really helpful in this case. There's my first color, I'll click the selection tool to remove that. Later on I'm going to go through and add a lot of variation to this watercolor. Maybe even add in a few different shades, but for now I'm just going to keep going. I want to get all my color down, and then I can start playing around with variation and making it look a little bit more like a watercolor. I'm going to repeat the same process with all of the colors. One thing I want to note here, if you have any trouble with a specific area, like if there's some area that doesn't select correctly, it's probably that your pencil didn't totally cover that area. The selection tool needs a completely closed space. If you have even a tiny little opening like I have right here, it won't work. If you miss just a tiny bit with your pencil, then you'll just have to go back and fix that on the pencil layer. I'll go ahead and work on all my other colors with the same process. I've gone through all of my colors, but I haven't filled in all the spaces. Now, I'm just going through and doing the remaining colors with one of the shades that I've already done. I'm just keeping an eye on where I did that color last time so that I don't have too much of one color in a single area. Now, that I have one layer of color on every area except I purposefully left the roads blank, I'm going to consider this document, my master document. I'm never going to make any more changes to this one. I'm always going to work in a duplicated document, because I want to preserve these colors and this sketch. I don't want to change any of that. I want to be able to go back to it. The first thing I'll do is just double check that all my watercolor layers are set to multiply, then I can go back to my gallery, select this document and click duplicate. On that duplicated document, I'm going to start playing around with the color. Let's say, for example, you think there's way too much of that one gray color. You can go to that layer, hue, saturation, brightness, and adjust that layer a little bit to make it brighter or darker or more saturated. This is a great time to just make sure you have a lot of color variation, then we can start playing around with bumping up all the colors. What I like to do here, is just merge all of my watercolor layers under one layer. I've got my sketch on one layer, and then I've got my watercolor painting on the next layer. I'm going to duplicate that painting layer a couple of times to get it really nice and dark, and then merge all three of those layers together. Then I'm going to get my eraser tool with the spotty watercolor eraser on a medium size. I'm going to start going through and adding in variation all over the place. I like to really take my time with this part of the process because that's what's going to give you that realistic watercolor look. Watercolors are very unpredictable. They change and move around with the water that's on your brush. You really want each square to look like it was treated individually with a little bit of water and a little bit of pigment on a brush. I'm going to take quite a bit of time here to play around with this, adjust the size of my brush. When I get down to the smaller squares, I'm going to make my brush even smaller, get really close and do some detailed erasing on each piece. As you're working on this, you may start feeling that you want a little bit more contrast. You can duplicate that layer again, if you want a lot more light and dark variation, duplicate, merge those two together, and then keep going with your erasing. You could keep going with this, you could keep adding more and more variation, adjusting the colors a little bit. What I'm going to do is go ahead and remove my black outline, because I feel like I can see what I'm doing a lot better once that outline is removed, and that really high contrast watercolor looks better that way. What you could do is leave your pencil line and then just stick with the lighter watercolor by just reducing the opacity. That looks nice as well. It's really up to you here. The last thing I'll do is play around with some color versions. I'm going to duplicate that first watercolor layer, and then on the second one, the duplicated version, I'm just going to play around with some colors. Here's a really nice green and blue version that I want to keep. You can just keep going with this. It doesn't have to be realistic colors. You can go with whatever colors work with your personal style. Here's a nice pink and green version. You can see how, once you get this basic layout done, you have a lot of room to play around with some different colors and options. I'm happy with this piece. I'm going to go ahead and move on to our next project. 9. Creating Detailed Maps: This next project is a really great way to combine illustration and maps and really highlight the important parts of a city. You could do this project with a city like I'm doing, or you could do a whole state or country or any other geographical region that you want to cover. The first thing I'll do is open up a map of the area, so I'm just going to go to Google maps and type the name of the city. I don't know if this works with all cities, but most cities you'll get a border. If you don't get the border, you can find a different map of the city online and overlay it with this map, and I'll show you how that process would work. First we're going to get the silhouette, I'm going to take a screenshot of that. That's going to be my main composition, but I also want to know all these tiny streets on the edge. I'm going to start by just zooming in and getting all of those little areas, so I'll just go a tiny bit at a time. I'm just going to work clockwise and make sure every little area gets covered. If you mess in area, it's okay. You've got this map, you can always come back and take more pictures. Are we starting this with the same size that I did the others 10 by 10 inches, and the first thing I'll do is set down my silhouette map. The first picture I took that shows the whole city, and I'm making sure magnetics is on here so I don't distort the proportions of the city. Then I'm just going to size this on the Canvas. Next, I'm going to start bringing in my other screenshots one at a time and placing those over the map. I'll just start at the bottom and work my way up and I'm placing all of them before I do any resizing. Now, make every single one invisible except for the very last one I placed. I've got my silhouette on the very bottom, and I've got this map here on the very top and all the others are in-between. I've got that first one selected, I'm going to reduce the opacity so I can really see both maps. Then I'll select all these other maps by swiping to the right, so every single one is going to be affected when I resize this one. The reason to do that is that now you only have to resize these one time and they'll all be the exact same size. I'm going to zoom in here so you can really see the streets behind this map and you may need to go a little more on the opacity, and I'll just take a minute to make sure these maps are sized exactly the same. I mainly using the main roads and the rivers as my main guides. Once you have that first map resized, you can start going to each layer of the other close-up maps and reduce the opacity of each one and then put it into place. I find it easier to remove the magnetic setting when you do this. Magnetics is great when you're resizing, but we've already done our resizing, and at this point we're just putting these into place so we don't need the magnetic setting right now. If you have any trouble with this process, one thing you could do is, go to your silhouette layer and create a layer just above it. Get black as your color and any brush the pencil would do fine, and just go through and draw these main streets. If you knew that, it might be a little bit easier to line up your map, I always just do it as I showed you with the making each one transparent. But that can be difficult depending on your iPad screen, so feel free to use an outline rather than the method that I'm using. 10. Adding Color and Illustrations: Now, I have all of my detail images and my silhouette in place. The next thing I'm going to do is draw my silhouette. I've gone ahead and selected the colors that I want to use for this project. I wanted to show you how I selected these colors. This is a really easy way to get some beautiful colors that work well together, and it's the Adobe color wheel. If you've never used this before, you'll see this is a really simple way to create complimentary colors or contrasting colors. I just clicked the link that's in the class resources, and you'll see over on the left here, once this opens, there are a lot of different options; monochromatic, complimentary, compound. I typically use compound, because I get a nice variation of colors, but play around with these others and you'll easily see how these are creating colors for you. Once you select one of those, you can start moving around the color wheel, and you can move in and out, and you can also move around. Based on whatever the color you select here with the white circle, it's choosing all of the compound colors that work well with that color. I chose a combination I liked that felt like the city to me, and the city's Asheville, and I feel like you see a lot of muted vintage colors there, so I went with that. But once you find a color palette that you like, you can take a screenshot, open Procreate with your normal document that we've been working on. Open that screenshot, and then over here on your color palette, if you click the Move tool to set that, you can zoom in, click and hold on that first color, and then click anywhere on an open space on your color palette. You just repeat that process with each color, and then if you want to remove a color click and hold to delete, and that's how you can create some really nice color palettes for your projects. I went ahead and chose these beforehand, and I'm going to use this dark brown as my silhouette. I'm doing a layer that's above all of my map layers. I'm just going to move that all the way above my detail and my silhouette layer. I'm going to use the mono line brush for this. This comes with Procreate, but I threw it into the brush set too. I'm just going to go all the way around this red line, and create my silhouette of the city. Just like the first map, this doesn't have to be perfect. No one's going to reprimand you if you don't have an absolutely perfect map. Just use lose marks and have fun with this. Don't worry so much about accuracy. Now that I've filled in the whole area, I just want to fill the outside with a solid color. I'm just going to drag this color circle to the outside. If you do this and it fills the entire page, that means that there's some little area in your line drawing that's not totally closed. You just have to zoom in and go around and make sure you cover all the areas. The next thing I'm going to do, is go through with a larger brush, and just fill in these roads. I'm sticking with the same layer where I drew the silhouette. I want to keep everything on the same layer. Now that I have all of the main streets drawn in, I'm going to start doing some of the detail work. I'll make one of these detail images visible and bump up the opacity a little bit so I can really see, and then I'm just going to zoom in and start working on some of these smaller streets. I just want to be sure my layer with the drawing is on the very top and all of my detail layers are below, so I can just go through and reveal one detail layer at a time and work on that area. You may also want to make the first map invisible so you can really see the details. I'm just going to get a slightly smaller brush, smaller than my main roads, and go through and start working on these. Again, you don't have to do every single road. It's totally up to you here. But you'll see that the more you do, the more detail and intricacy you reveal in the map. I'm going to go through and do almost every road on here. But you do this however it works best for your personal style and for your time constraints. It takes a really long time to fill in all these pieces, but it may be worth it to you depending on what your plan is for this project. I'll go ahead and take a few minutes to fill this in. I filled in all of the little roads throughout this whole piece, and now I want to start adding some color. I want to drop some color into areas all over this map, but I don't want to mess with my original layer. I'm going to create a new layer and drag that below my original, and so on this layer, I'll be dropping my color. On the outline layer, I'm going to click one time and click "Reference". The layer right below it is going to reference the layer above it. You'll see if I am on this layer below my outline, I click and drag, it knows exactly what area I want to fill with color. That's a great way to not mess up your original, but have some nice flexibility with changing the color of this later. I may want to change this to a slightly different blue without messing with the outline, so I want to keep this on a separate layer. I'll take just a few minutes to do color dropping all over this piece. Now, I want to start using a second color. I'll just create a new layer, click on that second color, and this is below my outline layer, which is set as my reference layer, and now I can just start clicking and dragging that other color without messing up my blue layer. Before we move on, I always like to take a minute here to make sure the colors are really balanced. Sometimes you'll have a lot of one color over here and not enough over here, and you just need to balance that out. You can easily go back and forth between these two color layers, and just change your color and drop that new color in. Take your time with this. This is the essential part of this composition, and this is the part that everyone's going to notice first. So you really want it to be eye-catching and nicely balanced. The next thing I want to do is sketch out how I want the rest of my elements to be laid out on the page, and I need to remove that reference layer. I'm going to click on my outline layer, click "Reference", so now we have a clean slate. I've got my new layer above everything else, and I have white as my color, and I have monoline as my brush. I know I want to have the word Asheville up here, and I know I want to have a little box around it, so I need to leave space for that box. I also want to highlight a few important things in the area. I'll just add those in and sketch the little images that I want to include. This is just the brainstorming time. You can figure out maybe what are five or six things that are really important to this place, and then you scatter them around the canvas. Obviously the name of the place should be pretty prominent. I could have put that down here, but I like that it's sideways and everything else is horizontal, so it draws a little bit more attention to that area. I'm going to make my sketch layer semi-transparent, so I can really see what I'm doing, and I'm just going to draw some of these by hand and some of them I'll use a stamp. For example, for local food, I can use my beet stamp that we used in the first project, and I'm just going to put that here, and then I'll trace that later. I'm just going to put that right here, and I'll just go through, piece by piece and do some sketching. I'm going to make my mono line brush a little bit thicker, and draw some mountains here. One great thing with the new Procreate update, if you want to draw a perfect rectangle, just draw it, and then hold, and it'll create a nice rectangle for you. Of course this doesn't have to be perfect. It's an illustration, so it can have that hand-drawn look that has imperfections. It really just depends on your personal style here. I'm going to go ahead and redraw this beet, because I want it to have the same line thickness as my other drawings. I'm going to take a minute to redraw this music note, so I have a little bit more of a structure to work with. I'm on that semi transparent layer, and this is a great way to start if you are new to drawing or you don't feel comfortable with drawing, the first step is just to sketch it out to get your basic form and figure out how you want the piece laid out. Then the next step is to redraw what you just drew on your final layer. I'm just going to go around this outline, and really take my time here just to make this line nice and smooth. Doesn't have to be perfect, but I want to at least make it really clear what the shape is. For the sides of this cup, I'm just going to draw and hold, and then I get a beer pined shape. For my last drawing down here, I want to use an actual building that's in that area, that's really familiar to anyone who lives there called the Biltmore House. I'll click "Insert a photo", and I have a picture of the Biltmore House on my iPad, and I'm just going to put that in place and make it mostly transparent, and then move my drawing layer above that layer, and then I'm just going to go through and do a really loose tracing of this building. 11. Refining Text and Illustrations: Now that I've finished tracing that piece, I can remove that picture layer and then I can return my sketch layer and start working on my text. Just like I did last time, I'm going to start with the longest piece of text which is hiking and biking. I'm going to get a pink as my color with my grid so I can really see this. Just like we did in the last, so I'm just going to paint this grid and this is on a brand new layer. Then I'm going to figure out how big I want my text to be. I think that looks good. It's going to be wide and too high. Then I'll get a pure white as my color and the model line as my brush. Go through and write this text out. So I can see I need to make this a little bit smaller to fit everything. I'm just going to shrink this a little bit with the magnetic setting on and then move my grid over a little bit to fit all of my words. Now then I made my text a little bit smaller. Those lines are slightly thinner, so I am going to redraw that because I made my text a little bit smaller. Take just a second to do that. You'll notice that if you ever have to redraw something, it's always better the second time. One thing you may want to do is go through and write all of your text, and then rewrite all of it, and I guarantee it will be better the second time. It's good that I did that longer word first because now I know the size that all of my smaller words should be. I'm going to take that same grid and go around all these other areas and fill in my text. Now I'm going to do the same process with my city and state name. You can see if you turn this on the corner, it's not quite perfect, but we can make it more even later on. As long as it's matching up with the grid, you've got straight letters. I'm going to go ahead and choose a slightly larger brush size for this, because I really want it to stand out more than all the other little pieces. I didn't really follow the grid with the state portion, but I did follow the lines of the grid. This doesn't have to be perfect, this can be a very loose version. I also didn't follow capitalization rules, but that's fine. This is a hand-drawn piece and little purposeful mistakes like that make it look just even more hand-drawn. I'm going to go ahead and remove my sketch layer and remove my grid layer. Then I want to get that text to be nicely placed in that corner. I'll get my free hand selection tool and get that text to be right underneath the name. I'll select that whole layer and turn off the magnetic setting and get that nicely placed in the corner. I also want to add some text around this piece. You could use the straight line tool by clicking and holding, or you can let it be a loose hand-drawn piece. I like that this style is loose and hand-drawn, so I'm going to stick with that. I also want to give this piece a little border. I'm going to go around the outside of this and just loosely draw a border. I think if these were just a tiny bit smaller, it would fit better in this corner. I'm going to turn on the magnetic setting and then turn it off to put this in place. The last thing I'll do with this border is just go through and add some little lines just to make it really clear that this is the most important part of the piece. This is the title that explains what the viewer is looking at. Next, I'm going to take just a minute to make sure all of this is placed really nicely. It's a little bit scattered because I have the grid and I had the sketch layer there. Now that everything is in its final form, I can just take some time to place everything really nicely. I'm happy with the placement of those, but I do want to highlight them a little bit more, blending into the background. I'm going to get this bright orange color. With the monoline pen, I'm just going to go behind all of these and add in some color. You could just do the color drop if you want to create a reference layer like we did last time. So I'll click "Reference", then the layer below it is my color dropped layer. That'll work for some of these, but for others you'll just have to draw it in by hand. You'll notice you do have to turn off your reference layer in order for color drop to work correctly on other layers. For example, if I want to do a color drop on this orange layer, I have to turn off that reference. If you don't, then it won't do the color job correctly. 12. Texture and Color Versions: So now that I have all of my text and image taken care of, the last thing I like to do is add a little bit of texture. So I'm going to start with the orange layer, I'll swipe right to Alpha lock that layer, click "Select", and then "Create a new layer". So that way I'm putting my texture on a new layer. I'm going to get a slightly lighter orange color and for this one I'm going to use the woven paper texture and I'm just going to go over everything one time to give it a little bit more of a 3D feel. I'm going to do the same thing on the background layer. Two fingers swiped right to Alpha lock, click "Select", "Create a new layer", and then get a slightly lighter color and go over the whole thing and so that's doing our road lines and everything because we left that all in one layer. You may also want to do the same thing on your color layers so now I've got a lot of nice texture on this whole piece. You may want to try a few different types of texture if you don't like the woven try the paper texture or the speckled so one last thing I always like to do, go back to the Gallery, click "Select" and "Duplicate" so we can try a couple more color versions of this before we call it finished. On that new version, I'm going to merge all my layers together and let's duplicate that a couple of times. On the top one, let's try a pink shade, some pink and green, on the next one let's try a blue shade with some blue and orange, that one is nice as well so you can see how these pieces are never really finished. You could continue playing with these and coming up with a lot of different color versions and especially if you're working with a friend or a client to create this, they'll probably want to see a few different color versions before deciding on a final piece. So I like this version so I'll call this my final piece and let's go ahead and call this project finished. So I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own illustrated by apps. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad, like how to create realistic pastel drawings using the free downloadable brushes I created. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads and resources on my blog so if you'd like to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see that illustrated maps that you create after you watch this class so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the Project Section or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. So if you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work, check out the group. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.