Illustrating Animals In Procreate Workshop

1. Intro: Think you can draw animals. I get it. And you're not alone. Most beginners feel that way. It can be a pretty intimidating topic, but by the end of this workshop, you will be surprised what you can create. Welcome to the Illustrating Animals in Procreate Workshop. Hi, my name is Alexandra, A KD art Mother. I'm an artist, illustrator, online educator with over 90,000 students worldwide. My superpower is that I make complicated art topics easy for beginners, even very beginners. In this workshop, I will guide you step by step through the process of turning a reference photo of an animal into a stylized, charming illustration and procreate. Whether you are brand new to digital art or looking to grow your confidence, you learn how to break down the visual elements, simplify shapes, and create an artwork full of personality. All while having fun. We will go through my favorite design process that helps you to improve your skills pretty quickly and doesn't require any supernatural talent or skills. We will start by identifying basic geometric shapes in reference photos. Do some observational sketching, and then turn that into a clean linework by exaggerating and simplifying shapes. We'll add a pinch of character design. And while, you'll have some adorable results that you can be proud of. I will show you my personal illustration technique, but you will be free to complete the illustration your way if you wish. Okay, I can't wait to get started, so grab your iPad, and let's get into it. 2. Sketching: Hi. Hello there. So welcome to the workshop. I'm so excited that you are here. So in this workshop, what I'm going to show you is, how do I illustrate animals or make these really cute characters from animals, and it is a very simple process, but it requires some observational drawing and sketches, and this is what we are going to basically do. So the whole process looks like this. I choose a reference photo. I can start illustrating animals from the knowledge that I already have. But in order to have knowledge about how to draw animals, I need to observe them. And this is why it is necessary to have observational drawings to learn things about things, okay? And then we can approach, you know, illustrating animals just from our imagination. So if you are a beginner that I guess you are, I really want you to implement these observational drawings just for fun into your schedule or, you know, art practice, um, basically just to gather knowledge about things around you and this applies to everything. So if you want to draw objects, you need to observe the objects. If you want to draw, I don't know, or illustrate scenes, you need to go out and actually draw real life scenes, and then you can, you know, invent things in your head. So basically, we do observational drawings with basic geometric shapes, and then we can transform our observational sketches into something really cute, for example, like this. So what I prepared today are three different animals, a parrot, a fish and a lion. And I'm going to create just very rough sketches. I will show you how I transform these sketches into basically linework for my illustrations, and then I'm going to illustrate one of these animals based on which sketch I like the most. Now, before I even start, I want to give credit to the images that I found online on the website, unsplash.com that are, you know, freely downloadable images. And they are really beautiful. As you can see, you can also get inspiration for your color palettes from these beautiful images. So now you can just, you know, take out your iPad and observe the images with me and do some little sketches. And then later on after the workshop, you can just do it on your own. All right. So let's just get started. I imported the photo into a screen sized canvas. And what I'm going to do is to choose a pencil brush, and procreate comes with a wonderful pencil brush that you can find in the sketching, and there's the six B pencil. This is my favorite one. Now, I want you to create a new layer above the photo. And well, based on the photo, what color it is because we are going to at first find the basic geometric shapes that we have in these animals. That will give our base, for example, for the illustration itself. So choose your colors wisely. I think I will go with a very light yellow so that you can actually see what I'm drawing. Let's see if you can see that. I will make the pencil big yeah, you can see. So I will draw with this yellow, but you can draw it black, whatever, you know, just to see the shapes. So what I'm going to do is to basically find the basic geometric shapes in these animals. And what are those there are circles trangles and rectangles. And into circles, I include ovals as well, and into rectangles, you have squares as well, right? So for the head. We have a circle. I will just draw in here. Mm. We have a triangle for the beak. Then we have an oval, and we have another triangle. Okay. Now I can take this shape and put it to the side. I observational drawing. This means that this is going to be basically the base for my observations. And we can actually, let me show you this thing. I can duplicate this construct and put it aside so that I can have something to relate to when I'm doing the observational drawing. I made it a bit smaller so that it fits here. The point is that you keep your eye on the original drawing, and I will basically just lower the opacity of this one so that I can see the original artwork. Now I'm changing my color to black. I keep the six B pencil. I will create another layer, and I can just start with short little, lines and I will make the brush a bit smaller to draw the shape of the animal. I can see this circle ends here and there is a part of the animal that goes like this, and here is the back part, and here is the beak that I can draw here like this. The eyes approximately here. Like this. And here is the body. Here is the little leggy. Like this, I can draw something here that it is standing on. And, this eye doesn't look really good, so I will just make it like this. And yeah, I have a little drawing for the parrot. Now, this is an observational sketch, and let's change it a bit, and now we can use our imagination to make an illustration base from this sketch. Now I'm not going to look for the reference spot on too much. I will just add some details, and I will work a bit and exaggerate. So when we are illustrating, exaggerating features is a basic thing. So, for example, making the eyes bigger or the beak a little bit, you know, curvy or the wings, et cetera. You can either add things or you can simplify things. So I will just create another layer about this basic sketch. I will lower its opacity. And I will just try to make simple shapes from its body parts. So let's say, I will add some smile into. So I separated the beak, as you can see. I just add it here. I can add a giant eye. I will just add it here. I will make it a circle and add the big big iris into the middle. For example, like this and make the head a bit bigger. Exaggerating, you know, as I already told you, will help. With expressing, I don't know. I love this curve here. I think the position of the body is not the best, but we can always change, right? So I want to exaggerate this part bit so that it is a little bit pride, little parrot you know, has his chest out like this. And I want to simplify the back. I think I need to make it a bit smaller. And Oops. Like this. I will add the tail. I tell I mean the wings. And what about the tail? Like, I don't really like it. And I think and now I'm completely, like, now going away from the original sketch, so I will turn it off. I will need a branch going here. And I want the tail to have some, you know, I will add these things here. Yep, I will add the eyes, add the eyebrow. I will maybe add a little head. Like this because character design is all about adding elements and accessories to give personality to our illustrations. Okay, so now we have a parrot with a hat. Can you see that? And I can improve this when I'm starting to illustrate. But let's just move on to the next animal so that we can apply the same process. So here is this beautiful fish. This fish is really beautiful. So I'm going to add another layer. Choose this yellow. Keep my six bit pencil. And just look for the base shape. So we have. We have a little triangle here and a circle for the head and an oval. And yeah, we have the tail here. Let's say these are two triangles. We are keeping it like, you know, we are not copying the outlines and looking for basic geometric shapes so that we can see where we can exaggerate. If we want the head to be bigger, we know that we are exaggerating the circle, okay? And then we are going to play with this fins. So I'm going to duplicate this little one. I will put it here and create another layer. I have my black pencil, and I will just start lower the opacity of the original one. I will just start sketching it. I hope that you see because this is a bit smaller. So I am with short lines looking at the reference image and kind of do observations about this fish. Okay. I see here here and here are some fins that basically look amazing. I love how it looks. And I already started to think about things. So yeah, this observation drawing is also good because it just starts out your creativity like it starts to go. And as you can see, I did this sketch, like in a minute, probably. So I will create another layer and lower the opacity of this little um sketch. And now I can work on creating an illustration of it. Alright, let's do this. I allow this curve. So I'm adding it. It has has a little mouth here. So I will just add that. He has his head. I'm going to add big eyes because it is always cute to have big eyes. Oh, he's a surprise little fish. And you can exaggerate, again You know, you can make like shapes bigger. You can think about beautiful fin. It has this shape, but we can create a differently shaped one, but I like this shape, actually. So it starts kind of here. And like something like this. And he has a little fin here as well. Wow. I love it. I love how it looks like. Then you can progress from this to add more gestures and things like that and details. But let's just move on to the lion. I will create another layer. I will choose this yellow, and I can totally see this diamond shape in the middle. Can you see that? I can also see the oval here and here are the eyes, basically, here are the ears. And for this one, I will just basically add the circle or this oval or this organic shape around the head and just place it next. I will make it a bit smaller, and I will just choose my black. I will choose my six B pencil. And basically, I will start with, um defining this shape. I don't know how it will go, but yeah. This is the base shape for his face. He has his ears here. And here is a triangle as well that I didn't there, but I can just sketch it there slightly or lightly. I can add the nose. It doesn't need to be perfect, okay? More you do observational drawings, the better you will get. And yeah, this is a little nosy. A little and kind of as you can see here is this shape, so I can just imitate that and add the ice here. Yeah, d. Well, thanks and Hedy thing. Okay? Oh, Igered. Okay, Oh, I've drawn onto the yellow. Okay, whatever. This is a normal, my mistake. It's okay. I will create another layer, and I will just lower the opacity of this sketch. I love how it turned out, by the way. Well, let's just exaggerate and do it more illustratively. Okay, so this is a pretty complicated, like, animal, right? It is more complicated than the fish was. So I can just stylize. This means that I can change this base shape of the head from this triangular to more basic one. So, for example, to, you know what pops up in my mind, um, let's see. It can be a bit rectangular if you want to make it for kids. It can be more oval, so it's a nice lion. I will try to keep the character of this face and do a little head shape like this and place the ears on top or maybe it can stay here. Yeah. And I will add some shapes. So for example, this shape is really characteristic. I can simplify the nodes as well. And add another shape like this and make it simpler. It is all about having fun and playing, you know, I'll add eyes like this. And I can use this shape for this part. But it is missing some parts, you know, so to create the effect that it is fur, I can just cut out of. As you can see, there are these wavy things, so you can add those. You don't need to, but it looks fun. This is very stylized, but you have seen my process. And yeah, basically, to do a little recap on what we did was basically getting reference photo to learn about animals and do an observational drawing. Then finding basic geometric shapes within these body shape so that we can have points to relate to. And then we can use these structures to do observational drawing and really sketch out the animal and then use our sketch as the base for the illustration. So it's a whole complete transformative process from going from a reference photo to an illustration. You can simplify body shapes. You can exaggerate, you know, parts of the body. You can add character with accessories. That's character design parts rather, but illustrations are about characters, you know. So if you want characters, you need accessories. And I love to add, I don't know, glasses to my character. So yeah, let me do that. This is lion weight glasses. And then, yeah, you can find the basic geometric shapes and simplify and change them to give a different character or make these animals, you know, cuter. So this diamond shape is pretty edgy, so it speaks with, like, shape language, that it is dangerous animal, but you can make them cute. And this is for practice, okay? So if you want to practice drawing animals and illustrating animals, it is good to do this several times so that you, you know, learn how you are drawing different animals and how you are changing them. It is all about play. And yeah, so let me just choose one animal that I am going to illustrate, and which one should it be? I don't know. I love this fish so much. I love the colors. And I think it is, um, mainly the simplest. So I think I will go with that one. 3. Illustration: Alright, so the first thing that I'm going to do is to pick up colors from this one because I totally love how it looks like. So I will go to palettes. I will create a new palette. And I could just import a photo to choose colors from. So if you hit the plus nine, you can just add new palette from photos and you can import a photo. But I'm just going to pick them up now, and I will start with the lightest color. It is this very light. And we have very light yellow here as hoops. I didn't mean that. I will tell it swatch. I meant this light yellow. Yeah. Then we have darker red, even darker red. Here is some pink and dark purple. And you don't really need to, you know, fully copy how it looks like. You can simplify everything. So what I'm going to do is to lower the opacity of the sketch, of the sketch. And create another layer below the sketch. And from the brush set that you get, it is the rtters ultimate brush set. There are six brushes, and these are the ones that I'm going to use, but you are totally free to use whatever brushes. The main point is that the basic shape that this fish has it's going to be done by an opaque brush with a clean edge. So this is the clean shaper for me. Just make sure that you have a brush that is opaque and choose a base color for it, and I will choose this pinkish red color. And I'm just filling in the shape. And you can adjust the sketch or the character design or the linework for yourself. I just want to show you my illustration technique. And if I don't like the shape, I just go in with the eraser that has the same brush as the eraser and oops, and I will make it smaller and make light adjustments to the shape so that it is perfect. Okay. Cool. I will create the fence to a layer below, and I will choose a different color. Probably this lighter orange. And as this one is a layer below, I will just add it there. And I will yeah, start working on them. So I will alpha lock all three layers, and I love this shape of the head in the front. So I will just go back probably with a different color, basically, and I will try this yellow. I can see that, this color is kind of the bottom part, but let's just see. So for the head, we can have maybe just one. I really love this very orange color, so I will try to add that rather. Okay. And now I'm going in with the shader brush and paint around a little bit. And I want this very pink color. I can just pick up from here or my little palette. And to the main body, I will make it a bit bigger or I don't know, 10%. I will just add in into the into this part. Yeah, can you see that? So I want basically to lighten up the fish. So from the top, it will have lighter colors. I can just go in with this shader brush here like this. And in the bottom part, I want a bit darker, and I see a little bit of purple here that I think I can add. Here. Don't worry about the head. Now, I will just choose a darker version of this ocher color and add in in the front, and I will add back with the original color to the top like this. I will go even lighter in the top a little bit. You can use texture brushes as well to do this. I love this pink as well. I will just choose a texture brush. I have a texturizer here or is this very pink? Pink. Yeah. And I will create another layer and make it a clipping mask. And I want a very saturated pink. And I will choose my texturiser brush. And I'll just add some dots here and there to the whole fish, and it will create this wonderful texture. Can you see that? I love how it looks like. In a second, it will look even better. And don't worry about the pink going into the yellow and stuff like that. And I will go to the fin now Yeah, it is alpha logged. I will add what is very pink to it, and I will go back with this yellow and the shader brush. I will turn off the sketch so that I can play with it a bit more. As you can see, I can lighten the fin, so it differentiates from the base, you know, shape of the little fish. I can add some colors to the end. This bottom one, I will make it even more yellow. Make this. And I will add back this yellow to the head of bit. Oh, I love the shapes that are coming out. Beautiful. And yeah, you might wonder what about this very light color, and this is where details come into place. So I will create another layer on top and choose the sketching pencil. And I will just add some details. So if I want to simplify, I can actually add cops that's very dark. I go even lighter. I can add linework. So I can kind of do a little bit of linework around these shapes so that they are more different. And I can add details like this into the fin. Cool. And I can add a little bit here. You can add more lines, and I will add this to the end as well. Really cool. And you can add the scales. So you can add these things here. This part really depends on the illustration style that you have, how you are used to drawing things. I really love this base colored and some shading, some little texture and very simple details on top. This is basically how I love to draw things. I will do a line here. And on top, I will create another layer. I will turn on the sketch. I will just choose white, and I will add the ice. I will erase from it to have it more. Solid. And I can create another layer clipping mask, choose black, and add the little pupil here. Really cool. And I can choose this very dark one. And to any of the layers, I can just add the little eyebrow, the little mouth. If you want even more details, you can add eyelashes. You know, you can customize your little fish. So now, this is a girlfish and I will turn off the sketch. And maybe I'm not really satisfied with the details. So if I go in to the details layer, I can play around with blending modes. I often do it. So, wow. This colored dodge adds some very interesting things into it and the vivid light, as well. Oh, wow, okay. The dark one doesn't look very good. Oh, I love the vivid light. Yeah, let's keep it that. Yah, cool. It looks so cool. And let's change the background color to black and wallah, here is our little fish. If you want even more definition because I can see on camera that it is not very, um, you know. In contrast, I can go into the main shape, Joe the shader brush and add more contrast. So I can just darken it like this. And or maybe the fin, as well. Let me see the top fin. I can make it this dark, but I don't like it that way. I can make maybe the edge a bit darker. Okay, and maybe the bottom one. Because the shader brush adds texture. So yeah, I think the color palette is pretty similar. I misses some red, but it is totally okay. It was just an inspiration. And can you see that I had a reference photo and with the process that I've shown you, I already have a little character, and I think it is super cute. Okay. Now I'm going to illustrate. All the others. And I will apply everything that I've done here. I can just add some, I don't know, the environment and things like that. So that can be fun. Yeah. So what I'm going to do now is to illustrate the other ones as well and apply this whole process to those sketches as well, and I will have three little animal characters. Alright, so here are all free little illustrations. I think they are so cute, and I put them together to this image with some decorative elements, and it is just finished, and I'm so happy how it turned out. Now, um so the process is the same as you could have seen. I've done the same. So let's just do a little recap on how we progress. So we had a reference photo. We found the basic geometric shapes in the body. Based on that, we did an observational sketch, and then we transformed the sketch, exaggerated parts, simplified parts, and then did the illustration, and my illustration process was filling in the basic shapes with color, then adding shading texture and some detail on top. And I hope that you like this workshop. And if you create something based on this workshop and you are sharing it on social media, make sure to tag me so that I can see it and share it with my audience because I'm always so proud of you guys. When I come up with something to teach, you always do better than me. You are so creative and you just need some guidance and some push. But yeah, I believe in you and I hope that this workshop helped, and it was a pleasure to have you here. 4. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing the workshop. It was a pleasure to have you here. Make sure to share what you created with the help of this workshop on social media and tag me as the Artmother so that I can show you off because I'm so proud of my students. They mostly outdo my idea. So go to Instagram, find me as the Artmother, follow me, and, yeah, also stay up to date there. If you want some freebies, I have something for you. Go to my website and sign up for my newsletter to get access to 46 Procreate brushes I personally created and some color palettes. It was really, really, really fun to be here with you and thank you so much for supporting me with your presence and for investing in yourself and your art journey. It is really important. I hope to see you somewhere else, as well. I wish you all the best and happy creating.