Ink and Watercolor Greeting Cards on Your iPad in Procreate + FREE Templates and Brushes

1. Ink and Watercolor Greeting Cards on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. Today I want to show you how to make ink and watercolor greeting cards on your iPad using the app Procreate. I'll show you every step of my process from drawing and painting watercolors to using downloaded fonts to create a one of a kind greeting card. First, we'll create a simple hand-drawn card using banners and illustrations to decorate the text. Next, we'll use a downloaded font and a traced image to create a humorous birthday card. You don't have to be good at drawing to take this class. I'll show you a simple tracing method that allows you to turn any image into an illustration. I'll also share a set of downloads with you when you take this class, including the watercolor brushes I made for Procreate, the texture paper I use to bring a real watercolor texture to my cards, and some banners and images that you can trace in Procreate. All you need to take this class is your iPad and a stylus. I like to use the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Setting Up Your Card: The first thing I want to do is show you the master document and brushes that you can download from the course about page. If you open Procreate and click "Import" and then locate the document wherever you saved it. I happened to save it in my Dropbox, but you could also save it to your drive or on your iPad. I'm going to find the folder where I saved it. This is called card master dock. This is a Photoshop or PSD file. I'll just click the little Cloud to import that into Procreate. That should automatically open the document in Procreate. You'll see there's a ruler on the top here and then there's a few other layers. There's a sketch layer where you can use this layer if you want to just practice coloring or filling in the lines first and there's also some banners if you want to just play around with different options for the text and there's also a paper texture. I use this when I paint watercolors because I like the watercolors to look like realistic watercolor paper. You may want to use that as well. I also have a few brushes that I use often. The ones up here, I took these from the calligraphy in King and Sketching sections. These all come with Procreate and I've created a new brush set. If you want to do that, just scroll down and click "New Brush Set" and you can make your own set for your frequently used brushes. I've got the shale brush, the gel pen, the technical pen, mono-line script and the narinder pencil. Then we've got the two brushes that you can download from the course downloads. If you want to import those into your Procreate, you'll click the plus symbol here and then click "Import" and find those brushes on your computer. I have them on Dropbox. You'll see I could click each of these cloud symbols individually to import those into Procreate. I've already done that, so I won't do that right now. But here you can see all of the brushes that I'll be using in the class today. The first thing you need to do when you're planning your greeting card is decide what size and orientation you want to work with. I've chosen to do an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. If you want to print this out at home on a regular sheet of paper, then this is a great size to start with. You may be working with the different size. There's a lot of print on-demand companies and office supply stores who will print cards for you. You may want to start by figuring out the size you want to work with and then go from there. If this was my card, I would really only be working on the right half here, which would be the cover and then I may want to add a signature or something like that on the left. But I really want to know what the sender of this document is so I know how to orient my design on the right here. I'm going to grab the ruler, just make that layer visible and then create a new layer and find the center. This is 11 inches wide. At 5.5 inches, I'm going to make a line here and I'll just grab my narinder pencil and start at 5.5 inches. Let's get a black, make that a little smaller. At 5.5 inches, I'll just click and drag and then if you hold that line, it becomes straight. Then put two fingers down, it'll make it perfectly straight up and down. Now, I have a line right in the very middle of my cards, so I know how I can space my pieces on the right here. I'm going to remove my ruler and then I'm just going to sketch out how I want this card to look. This is the planning phase. You don't have to use this as part of your final piece. This will just be you're sketching layer. This is a great time to play around with a few different layouts. I think what I'm going to do is have a cupcake down here and then a candle. You can already see that that's a little too big for what I want. I'm going to make that a little bit smaller. If I click the move to auto resize, it's going to resize my line as well because they're on the same layer. I want to move my cupcake to a new layer. I'm going to click the "Selection Tool" make sure that's on freehand. Select that cupcake and then click the little dot. Then take three fingers, drag down and click "Cut and Paste." That cuts it out of that layer and paste it onto a new layer. Now, I can play around with the sizing of that cupcake. I think that's going to be a good size, but we can always change it later. On a new layer, I want to think about what text I want. I think I'm just going to write "happy birthday" for today. I'm just thinking about how I want to lay this out. I want to make sure that the word birthday fits nicely without being too scrunched. I think I'll make this a little bit smaller. You also want to be careful to not let your important elements of your greeting card go close to the edge because printing has a little margin of error. It's usually about an eighth of an inch, sometimes a quarter of an inch. You wouldn't want your y to be really close to the edge because it could get cut off in printing. Try to keep everything with a nice margin around the edge. I think that looks good to start with. I'm going to go ahead and start working on the cupcake and then I'll do the text second. 3. Adding Text & Illustrations: I'm thinking that cupcakes are a little bit more wide and short. So I'm going to play around with the proportions a little bit before I draw the actual cupcake. Maybe a little bit taller, that looks good. Now on a new layer, I'm going to grab my monoline brush and choose a width. Let's go a little bit skinnier, that looks good. For drawing this, I'm going to click and drag, and if I hold that, it'll make a straight angle for me. There I've got the left side of my cupcake or the right side. Now I want the left side to be the exact same angle, so I'm going to swipe left on that layer and duplicate it, then click my "Move" tool and flip this, and I can just move it over. You can see that little blue line pops up to help me know when it's perfectly parallel with the other one, that looks good. Now I have a nice even cupcake. I'm not going to worry too much about this being a perfect drawing, but I do like to start out with my original proportions being nice and organized. You can see there's a little bit where my brush went over the line here. I'm going to grab my eraser with the monoline brush, make that really small, and just come in and clean that up a little bit so it doesn't look like a digital painting. Same thing with this little line here that's cutting through my match, I can just come through and erase that whole line. Now I have a nice little cupcake to get my illustration started. Now I want to work on the text, and I put everything on separate layers. The only thing that's on this layer is my cupcake, and then it looks like the left side of my cupcake. I'm going to click and merge those together. Now my whole cupcake is on its own layer, and that layer is safe and I can change the proportions of that and move it around later if I need to. Next, I want to work on the text a little bit. If you want your text to be nice and straight, you can start by drawing out a guide. I think I'll go to my sketch layer that has my text on it here. Actually, let's create a new layer. On this new layer, I'm going to grab my Narinder pencil, and I'm going to go just a straight line and hold that to let it snap to a straight line, and then put two fingers down to make that totally straight. Then I'll do that same thing again on the top, that'll be the top and bottom boundaries of my text. I also want to create a boundary for the lines and the crossovers, so I'm going to put that high. You could put that in the middle, but I'll deal with high for this particular font that I want to draw today. Now I have a nice guide for my text. I'm going to duplicate that guide, and move it down here to work with my birthday text as well, because I want these to be the same. I'll duplicate that layer again and just scoot this over a little bit, because birthday was a little bit wider. Now I've just got two different layers down there. Now I can start drawing my text. I'm going to go ahead and remove my original text sketch just because it's a little bit distracting, and create a new layer. I think I'll use the same monoline pen for this. Let's zoom in, and you don't have to worry about how far left or right it is, because we can always shift it over later. So just in this point, worry about making your text to look exactly as you want it to. I'm going to make a really tall, skinny text here. You can see with these guides, it's much easier to format your text when you have something to trace over. I'm trying to just keep my letters the same width. That's one good way to make your font look really cohesive. Let's say I want my second P to be exactly like that P. I can click my Selection tool, make sure Freehand is selected. Circle around that P, drag three fingers down, cut and paste to add that new P to a new layer, and then I can duplicate that P and just move it over. Now I have two P's that are exactly the same, and I'm just going to merge that whole word together so everything is on the same layer, and then I can draw my Y. You can see it's a little bit over to the left, so I'll just grab my Move tool and move it so it's right in the middle of that cupcake. Now I'll do the same thing for the text on the bottom and, I'll add that to a new layer as well. There is my text. I'm noticing that I did birthday a little bit more spaced out than happy, so I could stretch it a little bit just to make it look a little bit more like the happy text there. You don't want to do that too much because it does change the width of the line. It'll make this line a little bit thinner, whereas the horizontal lines won't change. Just tiny little twist are okay, but you wouldn't want to have to totally change that word. One thing I'm noticing is that I don't like this A, it's really curved whereas the other ones are really straight, so I'm going to grab that A and move it down here. First I'll go to birthday and grabbed my eraser with the monoline tool, make that a little bigger and just erase that, get that out of my way. Now I'll go back to the happy layer with my free hand selection tool. Select that A, drag three fingers down. This time instead of cut and paste, I'm going to copy and paste, because I want to leave it on that original layer and make a duplicate. Now I have two As. Let's zoom out here so you can see, and then use my move tool, so just bring this down here. That looks good. I could do that with the Y's, but they look really similar, so I'm fine with how the Y's turned out. I also noticed that these are a little more close together than these are. So I think I'm going to go through and copy and paste each letter, and scrunch it just a little bit closer to each one. I'll show you one of these and then I'll speed up the video for the rest. I'm selecting this and then use my move tool. Whoops, let me make sure I'm on my right layer here. I've got the birthday and A on separate layers, I'm going to merge this together. If I get my selection tool on free hand, circle this piece and then use the Move tool, I can just scrunch that over just a little bit. I'll go ahead and do that with all of the letters on this word. I like that better, that looks a little bit more like the happy text. You can see this part of the process is really just playing around with placement and playing around with sizing. I'm going to make my cupcake a little bit smaller and move it into the center. Let's go ahead and remove my sketching layers, so I can really take a look at how this is laid out. 4. Adding Color & Banners: I think this looks good I'm ready to go ahead and start coloring. Let's add our paper layer so this is the paper texture layer. I'm also going to set this to multiply and reduce the opacity, reduce the transparency a little bit. So if you zoom in you can see it's just the texture and the more you reduce the transparency the lighter it will get. This will depend on how dark you want your paper. I like to go at about 50 percent if you set this to multiply it'll make your paint look a little bit more realistic. I'm going to make a new layer for the paint and also set that one to multiply so if both of these around multiply they'll work nicely together. On my paint layer I'm going to choose a color for my cupcake. I'm going to go for pink and you can change these colors later on. This isn't set in stone but just choose something close to what you think you'll want and then I'm going to grab the blunt edge rough brush and about medium size let's go a little bit bigger. When you're painting with this brush don't worry about going outside the lines because you can always erase it later. The important thing is to cover everything in one big swath. You don't want to have to pick up your brush, if you pick up your brush and paint you're really gonna see that line. Unless you want to do a layering effect then it's better to do it all in one paint stroke. I'm going to grab my monoline eraser, a little bit smaller and just clean up that candle. I don't mind that it goes outside the lines here, you may not like that and you may want to clean it up I think it looks like real watercolor when it goes outside the lines. I'm also going to duplicate that paint layer because I want it to be a little bit darker and then I'll merge those together. Next time I'm going to grab my cloud brash on a medium size and I'm going to come in and create some watercolor variation so this cloud brush makes it a speckled faded effect. You can do this just a little bit or you could get really extreme. I like to do just a little bit of fading and just come in really lightly with the cloud brush so it has a tiny bit of watercolor variation. I am going to do each color on a new layer, because I want to be able to adjust these later I'm not quite ready to merge the layers so this one is going to go on a new layer. I'm going to grab a brown paper color for the cup and do the same process. I'm covering this whole thing in one stroke, I'm not lifting my pen at all. It's okay if these overlap a little bit, they look like real watercolors when they overlap, so don't worry about getting a little bit messy here. I think I'll also duplicate that layer and I want to be sure these are set to multiply so I'm going back and setting each one to multiply And then I'm going to merge those two cupcake paper layers together and grab my cloud brush and just play around with the variation on this. Then let's do an orange on the flame. So I'm choosing a new layer, grabbing an orange, going to get a little brush with my blunt edge rough watercolor brush and this one is definitely going to need two layers. It's really light merge those together and get the cloud brush. We could call that finished, we can remove that center line and that could be your finished birthday card that you print. I think this would be a nice finished piece, although you may want to add a little bit more decoration. So let's remove the word happy and let's try one other option for that part of the card. With my monoline brush I'm going to come over here and create a banner. I'm on a new layer here and I'm just going to make a nice little curve. This doesn't have to be perfect it's an hand drawn illustration and everyone who sees it will know that and so it's fine if it has some little inconsistencies. Let's do some little bows on the side and then if I want to have enough room for the word happy with this I want to make sure that I space out my flag nicely. On a new layer I'm going to grab the narrow under pencil and just sketch out the basic shapes. There's five letters in the word happy so that'll be the center flag and then I'll have two on each side of that. I'm just trying to make sure they're spaced nicely, it doesn't have to be perfect but just enough so it looks like we tried. Okay. That looks good. Now I can go back to my original layer with my monoline brush and just trace over this. Now I can remove my sketch layer and go ahead and write my text in this flag. We can do it in the same font or we could do something totally different, I'm just going to do some big thick letters and not worry so much about the spacing. Okay. That's another option we could also color this in the same way. If I grab a yellow here with a blunt edge brush, let's color every other flag yellow and I'm going to put this on multiply and move it below my ink layer so it's not covering up my ink at all. Okay. That would be another great option for a card. There are a lot of different ways to make banners, I have a bullet journaling class where I share a lot more banners. So if you like doing this sort of thing, you may want to check that class out. You can do square banners, rectangular banners. There's a lot of different ways to decorate your texts so this is really just one option. Let's remove that separator line and call this piece finished. 5. Using Fonts: So for the next card, I want to do something a little bit more complex. I'm going to bring in an image that I want to trace, and I'm also going to use some fonts that I downloaded online. I've started my canvas in the same way here. This is just the master document that you download from the course downloads, and I created that separator line just like I did on the first piece. Let's go ahead and sketch out how we want this to look. I want to do a humorous card here. I'm going to grab my needle pencil, and I'm going to put a camper van in the center here, so I know it's going to take up most of that middle section. Let's move that up just a little bit. I'm going to have some text in the top. It's going to say, "You're like a camper van". Dot, dot, dot. I'm trying to figure out how I want all this text spaced. So after you come up with your lines, you can just play around with spacing these out differently. Then I want to have some really bold text here that says, "Really old". Then I want to go back to my original font that I used. So I may move vintage up to that first line. I'm not sure yet, but I can play around with that later. First I want to show you the Apps that I use to mock up these fonts. I'm going to use some vintage looking fonts because I'm going to have a vintage image, I want this to be cohesive. So I'm going to try to find two different vintage fonts and combine those together. Combining two different fonts, like a really bold font and a really thin font, those can look really nicely together. I'm using two different apps here. The first one is iFont. This is a app that's free, that lets you import new fonts into your iPad. I want to import fonts into the app pages, so I need iFont to do that. First let's just go to the internet and find a font. I always search fonts that are free for commercial use, because I never know if I want to sell these or put them on my website. So if you have any intentions of distributing these in any way, then you definitely want to use a font that's free for commercial use. There are a lot of fonts that you can get online that are free, but the license is restricted, so you want to be really careful with that. You don't want to make this beautiful product line, and then have someone take it away from you. I recommend just always using commercial fonts if you think you'll have any intention of distribution. I like this first side, it just says free commercial use fonts, and this site is cool because you can type whatever you want to see on the font. I would type my exact text that I'm going to have on the piece. So I'm typing, You're Like A, and then I can see what these fonts look like. You can see they have like 500 pages of fonts, so you'll definitely find something you like here, and then you just click "Download" and download that to your iPad. Once you download that to your iPad, let's go ahead and choose this one, you'll see a little button down here that says "Download", click that, and then you'll see it open in button. So you click "Open" and then you click "Copy" to iFont. So iFont is the vehicle that's going to move this font into your apps. So copy to iFont. Once it opens iFont, you'll see all of the options for this text. All of the files that come with it, and you'll click "Import" to iFont, and then you'll see the font showing up here in your file section. So you see, I've already downloaded some other fonts, so those are installed. But this is the new font that I just clicked on that hasn't been installed yet. I'll click "Install", and then it's saying, do you want to open settings on your iPad? "Allow" and then "Install". Then it'll say this profile is not signed, and you'll click "Install". It always says the profile's not signed, I'm not sure what that means, but I always just click "Install", and I've read about this online,I haven't seen anything that's suggesting that that could be a problem. Now that we've installed that font, when we go to Pages, it's going to show up for us. So if you open Pages, and click "Plus" to open a new document, and then click "Blank". Let's just go ahead and type our text, and I'm going to go ahead and set my text to center, and then if I click the fonts symbol down here, we can scroll down and find our font that we just downloaded. Wherever it is alphabetically, it will be here in your font list. I have noticed if you try to do a few of these in a row, it doesn't populate immediately, but if you shut down your iPad and turn it back on, it will show up. So I'm going to use two different fonts for this today. I'm going to use American typewriter. Let's make this a little bit bigger. Then for this font, I want to use something really bold and vintage looking. So I downloaded this font called Rye, I like this one, and let's make that one really big as well. I want to make it big, but not so big that it's on two separate lines, and then let's copy a piece of that text. Just to copy the formatting down here. I'm going to let vintage stay on that bottom line. I think that's going to work out well, and now I can just scroll and make sure I like this and check my grammar and everything like that. You're like a camper van, really old but in a cool, vintage sort of way. The spelling looks good. The editing looks okay. Now I'm just going to go ahead and take a screenshot of this, and import it into procreate. To take a screenshot, I'm holding the start button and the power button, pressing those at the same time. That makes a screenshot. 6. Tracing Text: Now that I have that screenshot, I'm going to go ahead and open up Procreate and click the tool symbol, insert a photo, and insert that new image. I'm going to trace over this; I'm really just going to use it as a guide. I'll take my selection tool and select that text, three fingers down, cut and paste, because I want that to be on a new layer. I'm going to move it up here and play around with the sizing a little bit. I want that text to be kind of small because I want this to be the feature text and this is really just like an accent. I'm orienting them on the top here and then I'm going to do the same thing with the other pieces of this text. Now I can remove that extra paper and I just have this as a guide. I want to make sure these two fonts are the same size, so I'm going to bring him beside each other and adjust the sizing a little bit. If you find that your sizing is getting distorted when you try to resize things, that means your move tool is not set to magnetic. Make sure you have magnetic selected because you don't want to distort the sizing of your text too much. That looks good. I think I like the sizing of all these, so I'm ready to go ahead and start tracing. On a new layer, I'm going to grab my gel pen and I'll make my text layer a little bit more transparent so I can really see it and then I'm hiding my sketch layer because I've pretty much figured out how things are going to be laid out. I've got this about 50 percent transparent so it's not blocking when I want to write. I've got a new layer and I'm going to go through with this gel pen and just loosely trace this. I'm not trying to make this exactly like the font, I'm really just using it as a guide and doing this, you don't have to do this step, but it makes it look like a hand-drawn piece. If you want your piece to look hand-drawn, then you do need to do this step. But if you're okay with it just looking like a regular font, then by all means just leave it as it is, totally up to you. I can go ahead and remove those text layers and you can see the handwritten piece is just a little bit more playful, a little bit more hand-made looking than the actual font that I downloaded. Fonts that you download are really crisp and tight. Whereas when you draw it with your hand, you get a really nice sort of wonky look that shows the person that it was hand-made. I'm going to do the same process with the larger text but I think for this one, rather than blocking in all this black text, I'm going to do more of an outline. These fonts that you get for commercial use, you can play around with how you represent these, it doesn't have to be exactly like it was when you downloaded. I might change some of these too, maybe make some of these little flourishes in the middle a little bit different, a little bit larger than they are in the actual font. I'm just going to play around with this as I work and try to make these my own. I also noticed that this text is really close together and I want to have it more spaced out. I'm going to grab my free hand tool and same thing, drag three fingers down, cut and paste, and just move this over a little bit. I want to have a tiny bit more space between the letters than was given in this font, mainly because of the way I'm drawing the font. For the next letters, I'll go to my original layer and just move it over before I start tracing; that allows me to get more spacing. I have all of my text traced and I can play around with the spacing and the sizing of this and I'm ready to go ahead and add in my image. 7. Tracing Images: You can get images from a lot of different sources, but again you want to be sure they're okay for commercial use. Unless you're just really getting a loose tracing. If you're really careful about not just totally copying someone's image, especially copying other artwork is dangerous. But if someone took a snapshot of something and said, "Hey, I'm selling my camper van. Do you want to buy this?" It's fine to take a loose tracing of that image. But if a photographer takes a picture and they're selling their piece, then that's a different story. This is an advertisement for someone who wants to sell their vintage camper. I'm going to take a really loose tracing of this, and I'm doing this on a new layer. Let's use slightly bigger Gel Pen. That looks good. I'm going to go through and really loosely cover the main outlines of this piece. Now that we have the basic tracing of that, we can remove our picture. I'm going to do the same watercolor process I did with the last. I'm going to grab the Blunt Edge Rough brush, choose a color I like. I think for this one I'm just going to do the bottom part here. I need to move my watercolor layer below my ink layer, and I need to set my watercolor layer to multiply and also make sure my paper texture is set to multiply. Let's duplicate that paint layer to make it a little bit darker. Grab our Cloud Eraser Brush, and just play around with making this a little bit more varied. That's great. We could leave it like that or we could use our Hue Adjustment Brightness Tool to change the color. If you want a different color on your camper or you could change out different images. This doesn't have to be a camper. It could be a typewriter, anything at all. You can see how this process is really flexible and you can really play around with a lot of options. One last thing that we could do with this piece if we just wanted to change the layout, would be to let the front of the card say, "You're like a camper van," and the back of the card have the rest of the text. If you want to do that after you create your card like this, go to your main Procreate gallery, click "Select", click on that card and duplicate it. Now you have two of the exact same card. You want to do this very last. You want to be sure you've done all of your steps first because you're going to have to merge some of your layers. I'm opening one of these and I'm going to remove the text really old and in a cool way, and then I'm going to merge all the other parts of this card together. Now they're all on one layer and I can just move them down so it's in the center. Then that would be the front of my card, just a nice minimalist card. We're leading the person to open the card we'll do, "You're like a camper van dot, dot, dot," and on the other card we'll do the same thing. We're removing the camper van and the first part of the text, and keeping the second two parts and merging those together and then that can be in the center. This would be the inside of your card that you would print and this would be the outside. You may also want to add your signature to the back, especially if you're selling this. But even if it's for a friend, you may want to just add in your signature on the back. If you take this to a store to be printed, then they would print this side on one and this side on the other for you. You can just take it to an office supply store, on a flash drive, or printed at home, or use one of the many print on-demand companies that are out there. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you're excited to start making your own greeting cards. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover more painting and drawing techniques for iPads. I have classes on how to create watercolor leaves, watercolor florals, and a ton of other illustration styles that you can do on your iPad. I would absolutely love to see your finished card and I'm sure we would all be inspired by seeing each other's cards. So please share what you make. You can do that on Skillshare, or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. Also, if you have any questions about the process that you see in this video, feel free to reach out to me. You can send me a message on Instagram or Facebook, or do a discussion here on Skillshare. Also, I share free downloads on my blog often. So if you'd like to get more downloads like the one you got for this class, you can sign up for my monthly mailing list on my site. Thank you so much for watching this class, and I hope to see you again next time. Bye-bye.