Insect Illustrations and Animations in Procreate

1. Insect Illustrations and Animations in Procreate: Hi everyone, I'm Liz Kohler Brown, I'm an artist, designer and teacher, and today I want to show you how to create insect illustrations and animations on your iPad and Procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of the color palettes and brushes I use in my insect illustrations, including 14 drawing and texture brushes that will help you add tons of depth, texture, and grit to your illustrations. I also created an inspiration board of over 400 vintage insect illustrations. So you'll have no shortage of reference material for your composition. First, we'll look at how to create a single insect illustration and turn it into several different compositions. So you can play around with the colors and layouts that work for your personal style. Next we'll turn one of our illustrations into an animation. Creating animations is a great way to get your viewers to spend more time looking at your work. I'll show you some tricks and tips for quickly creating an animation so you can easily add eye-catching movement to your work. Last we'll look at how to create an interaction in your illustrations, by combining an insect and an object with tons of layering and texture. I'll give you lots of ideas for objects and insects to combine, and we'll look at ways to create interesting interactions that draw your viewers into the Canvas. This process is super quick and fun and will help you gain some confidence for adding insects into your illustrations. You can use the projects you create in this class for your website, social media accounts, gifts, or print on demand projects. All you need to take this class is your iPad and stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: [MUSIC] The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to the downloads page in the project section on Skillshare, make sure you're on the website rather than the app to find the project section. Once you click on that link, you'll see that you need a password to get into that page and also the password on the screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see that you can scroll down and the list of downloads is just below the class image and the first item there is download the brush set, so I'll click on that and am using Chrome for this. If you have any trouble with another browser give Chrome a try. Once you click on that link, you should see the download button down here. I'll click "Download" and then I'll click "Open" at the bottom here and scroll over. If you don't see Procreate on that list, you can click "More" and you should see Procreate. If not, you may need to update your Procreate app. I'll click "Copy to Procreate" and then it'll open whatever you had open last in Procreate. So if it's in your gallery just open your document, and then on your brush list, you should see the brush set at the very top of the list. Let's go back to the downloads page and you'll see that the next item on the list is the workbook. I'll click to open the workbook again, again click "Download" open in, and then find Procreate and this doesn't open the document immediately you'll need to go back to your gallery. If you're in a stack, you'll need to get out of that stack and it'll put that new download at the very top of your gallery. You'll see when you open the Layers panel that there are two sections to this document. The first section is the color palettes, and the second section is combinations, we'll be using that in a later project. But for now the color pallets you can open up that group and every single color is on its own layer. If you'd like to use one of these pallets but you just want to change one of the colors or a couple of the colors, you can just click on that color. Click "Adjustments" hue, saturation, brightness and then you can play around with the color, the saturation, the brightness. Let's say you want more of a purple on here, you can change that and then you have a new color palette there. I wanted these color palettes to be a good starting point for you, but feel free to change them and make them your own. If you'd like to just use the color palettes as I created them, I've gone ahead and turn those into palettes and you can open those right and Procreate. Same process. Click on the Download. Click "Download." Open in, find Procreate on the list and then if you go to your colors and click "Pallets" you'll see that new palette at the very bottom of your pallet list, then you can just click "Set Default" and that will be the palette that shows right under the color wheel. So these are the colors I'll be using throughout the class. There are two different color palettes, one through four and five through eight. I'll be pulling colors from both of those throughout the class. The last resource that we'll be using throughout the class is some inspiration images. If you tap here, see the inspiration board that will either open Pinterest and a web page or the app depending on what you have on your iPad and you'll see I created four different sections, butterflies, moths, beetles and miscellaneous insects. You can click on whatever section you're working on and find a lot of images for that particular insect. I'll click on butterflies to get started. You can see there are a lot of different shapes, a lot of different spots, styles, color ideas. You can just scroll through here and start getting an idea of which ones you're drawn to, which shapes you like. I like the unusual shapes that are oblong or really tall or have really interesting shaped wings. I'll be using some of those. I just clicked on the one I liked. I'm going to click on it again to open it on Flickr. Click the download button and click original and then I have that image here. If I tap and hold, I can click "Add to photos." If you have any trouble with that because of the browser you're using, you can just take a screenshot by tapping the home button and the power button at the same time. I would recommend when you're ready, you go through this list and just find a lot of images that speak to your personal style. You could get five or six, or you could do 50 or 60, or however many you think you'll be interested in drawing. You could do that one section at a time or you could go through and go ahead and get all of the images you think you might use for this whole class. This board will be here for you whenever you need it. Take your time and peek through here to find some things that speak to you. Once you have all of your brushes and colors and images ready on your iPad, let's go ahead and get started on the first project. 3. Sketching the Shape: For this first project, we're going to create a single insect illustration and then look at ways to use it in a few different types of compositions. I'll be using a butterfly for my illustration inspiration, but you could use any insect here that works for your personal style. The first thing I'll do is tap the "Plus" symbol to create a new document and then tap to create a new canvas. I'll be using inches as my measurement. I like to work at 10 by 10 inches because that tends to work well for most of my personal uses but you may be printing this at a different size, so just go as large as you may need and you can always size down later. You'll also be limited by the number of layers you can use depending on the iPad you have, so take a look at that, 50 is a great number, you could for this project work with 20 or 30 if you needed to. Just try not to go so big that you don't have enough layers. I'll click "Create". Then I'm just going to start sketching. At the very top of the brush set, I'm just going to grab the sketching pencil and black as my color. I'm going to scoot this over here because I want to be able to see my reference image as I work. To do that, I need to first make sure that it's open in the photos app. I'll just go to the photos app, and this is the picture that I saved in the last section. You can find this on the Pinterest board if you want to use this same image. Now that that's open in the photos app, I'll go back to procreate, swipe up and I'll grab my photos app and just scoot it over to the side here. I'm going to use that bar to make it a little smaller because I mostly want to see my canvas. Because this is a symmetrical insect, I'm going to turn on the symmetry tool, so as I draw on the right side, it's repeated on the left side. I'll tap the "Actions" menu and then I'll tap "Canvas", turn on the "Drawing guide", "Edit Drawing Guide", tap on "Symmetry" and then on "Options", make sure "Vertical" symmetry is selected. So if we draw on the right, it repeats on the left. You can also play around with the color of your symmetry tool here or the thickness or opacity just with that little blue line in the middle. Then tap "Done". Then I always test my symmetry before I start drawing to make sure it's working, and that looks good. I like to start out with really rough shapes rather than trying to go through here and get the details of the eyes perfect and the antenna perfect. If I do that I'm going to probably realize later that it's all at the wrong scale, so the best way to get started with a drawing project is really rough shapes. I'm just following the outer line of this butterfly and just getting a general idea of how big are those top wings and then how big are those bottom wings in comparison. Then I'm making sure I've got plenty of space for the body and everything else I need to include. Also keep in mind that these do not need to look exactly like your reference image, in fact it's better if they don't. It's just a good way to get ideas for shapes, but you really don't need this to perfectly mimic this image, it's better if you make it your own. So feel free to use your artistic license here to just play around with these shapes, and if you find a shape that you like better just go with it. There's my really rough sketch and I'm realizing that this butterfly is a little wider than mine, mine's very tall. So I'm going to tap the "Move" tool and just pinch, making sure "Magnetics" is on and that's going to give me a little bit more room for my wings. I'll tap the "Move" tool again to set that. Then I can just expand those wings a little bit. You can see that I'm not taking time here to erase. I think erasing is really a waste of time in procreate because you can just create a new layer. There is no need to erase your sketching layer. I just keep going and drawing darker and darker to show where the correct lines are. So I don't erase any of those mistakes from before. Now that I have the basic layout, I'm just going to reduce the opacity of that layer by tapping the "N" symbol and reducing the opacity and I'm going to create a new layer now, and start doing a more refined sketch. You'll notice that doing your refined sketch is much easier when you already have that basic layout down on the page. One thing I need to check with this new layer is that it's also in symmetry because right now it's not. If I just tap on it one time and tap "Drawing Assist", it's automatically in the same symmetry that I set for the previous layer. Again, I'll just double-check that and that looks good. Now I can start doing my more refined sketch. Here, I'm partly looking at the butterfly reference image, but I'm also just looking at the page and figuring out what looks interesting. I'm not so concerned with how this person drew this butterfly, I'm more concerned with how is this going to look at this scale in my image, and does it look like a butterfly? That's the main thing. Not, does it look like a specific butterfly or specific species, but does it look like a butterfly? Is it going to read that way on the page? I'm just going to take some time here to go through and play around with shapes, try to get close to this original image but not worrying so much about perfection. 4. Adding Color and Texture: You can see here that I've just done a rough sketch. It doesn't have to be perfect I'm going to add color to this. This is just my reference sketch layer. I'm going to make my original sketch invisible so I just have that main sketch that I can see and I'll create a new layer for my colors. I like to put my color layer below my sketch layer because it's just a little bit easier to see where I'm dropping my colors if the sketch is on top. I'm going to create a few new layers here because I know I'm going to need a few different layers of color and I want those all to be assisted layers. So I'm just going to go ahead and set those to assist it by clicking on them and clicking drawing assist. So those will be my colored layers and I'm going to create one more layer for my background. I'll start by choosing a background color and I'll pull this from the class palette. This will be the green on palette one. I'll tap on that layer and tap fill. I like to put my background layer on its own layer rather than using this background color section. I find it's a little easier to recolor and add some textures to that if it's on its own layer. So that's how I do it but you could certainly use the background color layer instead. On the next layer, I'm going to start adding some filler color for this butterfly and I'll just start with this cream because that'll be really easy to see contrasted against this dark green background. Making sure I'm on that new assistant layer and that it's drawing in cemetery. I'll just zoom in here and I'm still just using the sketching pencil because I like the texture and roughness of this tool. So I'll just continue using that, but of course you could switch to any brush here. I like coloring this in rather than just doing a color drop or just filling with solid color. Because if I removed my sketch layer, you can see all these little sketch rough marks and it's hard to get that if you don't just color it in by hand. So that's why I'm coloring this in by hand rather than just dropping color into here. I'm going to reduce my brush size so I can get this nice fine line of the antenna. Now that I have that filled in, I can go to my next layer and start adding another color for the second part of the butterflies and the reason I'm doing this on a new layer is because I want to keep the flexibility to change colors at any time. If I put these on the same layer, I totally lose the ability to change my colors and I have never finished with the same colors I started with. So I know I'm going to be changing my colors. Another thing I'm going to do is just close that reference image that drains your battery and it also keeps you relying on the reference image. So get rid of that as soon as possible so you can start making your own choices and not worrying about what it looks like on the picture. I'm going to choose my next color and this will be the color for my spots. So same thing, making sure that's in cemetery and I'm just going to color in all those little circles spots that I created and I'm just adding a spot in here. I felt like that was a blank space. You can see without my reference image, I'm forced to make decisions on my own. So it's good to get rid of that so you can start making this piece your own style. Next, I want to go for the next color and of course on a new layer and I'm going to pull that between my cream and orange layers because I want that to be the black stripes in the background. Get black as my color and just start filling those in. For this, I'm going to reduce the opacity of my sketch. So I tap the N symbol and reduce the opacity because I need to really see the difference between this black and the black on my sketch. Now I can really see the contrast between those two layers. You can see I have an issue here where my black goes outside of my original lines and of course, I don't want the black to go outside of the original butterfly shape. I'll tap on that black layer and tap clipping mask. What that does is it makes sure that the black can only appear on the layer below it, which in this case is the cream layer. So if I remove the cream layer, that removes the black too and if I turn off the clipping mask, then we just have a big mess. So turn on that clipping mask and then you can just go wild with color and not worry about going outside the lines. At this point, I would like to remove my sketch so I can start analyzing the shape a little bit better. I'm seeing that the orange dots are not very big. They could take up a lot more space. So I'm going to go to that orange layer and get that orange color again and just bump some of these up and give them a little bit more power on the butterfly shape. Right now they're just dainty little dots and I want them to stand out and be much more bold. Some of them are just going to totally change the shape and this is one of the great things about insects. This doesn't have to be perfect. It can be really irregular and the more irregular you make it, the more unique your pieces, because nobody has ever in history drawn a butterfly exactly like this. So really take your time here to make this your own. Create some weird shapes and just play around with color and shapes on the canvas. You might even try some ideas like what if the central body was actually orange? So bring back my sketch layer, and I'm going to do this on a new layer because I don't know if I'm going to like it. So I'll tap one time. Tap drawing assist to make sure this is an assisted layer and this also needs to be a clipping mask layer. So I'll drag it just above my background layer and just below my black layer and I'm just going to color that in. So the nice thing about putting that on another layer is now I can turn it on and off and see if that's actually going to work for my composition or not. I can do the same thing with the new layer, making sure it's on assisted. Let's get a new color and what if every dot had a new color in it? Now I can turn that on and off and see if that's going to work for my composition. So I would recommend just taking your time here, play around with all the shapes and then we can start moving on to color. 5. Composition Options: So I'm going to turn off that turquoise and leave this orange body on for now and then I'm just going to play with color a little bit. I can do that starting with my background layer, and I'll tap adjustments recolor. Then you just want to make sure that little cross hair is touching whatever you're re-coloring. So it just needs to touch the background here and then I can start just tapping colors and seeing what background might work well with this. That's a a nice contrast, so I might choose that one. So I do this with every single composition I create. I take a lot of time to just play around with color options, and sometimes I'll just go through old palettes and just randomly click around because you never know what you're going to find when you just click on a color and see an interesting combination. This is a nice bold combination that I really like. That's just one example of what you might find. I like this green, but I think I'd like this lighter color a little bit more, so I'm going to stick with that. So you could repeat the same process with the dots. I'll get the recolor tool again. Make sure it's touching the dots and then go through and play around with color. That yellow is nice. Maybe we just want to go to a slightly brighter orange rather than that more dull orange or a lighter color like pink. So really take your time with color here. There's no such thing as wasting time on color because it totally changes the feel of the piece. So the last thing I want to do is add a little bit of texture. I'm going to change to a darker color for the background so you can really see the texture that I'm going to add. I'll go to the very top layer, and I'm going to get this same cream as my color by tapping and holding on it. Then I'll go to the insect brush set and grab speckles and just maybe one or two layers of that. Go as far as you want with this just adds a little bit of grit. Of course, I could do that in a different color too. It doesn't have to be one of the colors that's in a butterfly. So you could do the recolor tool on your texture as well. Another thing you might want to add is a little bit more texture to the butterfly itself. So for example, if I go to this orange layer here, and I put a layer above that, what if we get a slightly darker orange? So I'll just tap and hold a sample, that orange. Get a slightly darker orange in that same color family, and then grab one of these bug for brushes. So I created these brushes to have just a little bit of line texture, and it adds an interesting movement or feel to each shape. So once you paint over a shape, you can turn on the clipping mask and then it only appears on that shape. I also want to be sure I turn on Drawing Assist so that the texture is showing up on both sides of the butterfly. So I forgot to do that. Let's tap one time and tap clear on that layer. So now it's got a clipping mask and drawing assist, and now I can just go through and add a little bit of that layering. If you don't like the color contrast here, one thing you can do is tap the end symbol and scroll through this list down here of blending modes, and you may find an interesting combination. I like this bold orange that gives this just a little bit more texture than it had before. There's another interesting combination. It just makes it a little bit more red. So that might be an option. So you can just take your time here and play around with options, turning these textures on and off. Turning different elements on and off, adding different elements until you get to a shape you'd like. So once you get to this point, this is a perfect image to share on Instagram or your website. What I might do is go ahead and resize this a little bit so it's not quite so tight on the page. I'm just going to swipe all of these layers to the right and tap "Group" and then I have one big group. I can tap the "Move" tool and I can resize that a little bit. What I might do before I re-size anything or change anything is duplicate this document. So I can just swipe right or swipe left on that document and tap "Duplicate". So the reason I do that is I just want to preserve that original size and colors and sketch and everything because I could always go back in and change that, adjust it. I'd just like to have my original, and I'm going to tap on the "Title" and name that Original, so I don't forget. So now I can go into this document and do anything I want. I don't have to worry about losing my work. I can tap the "Move" tool on that group, and looks like I've got my texture in there. So let's pull that texture out of there. Tap the "Move" tool and just make my butterfly smaller. You could do 10 of these and that would be 10 posts on your Instagram or 10 items added to your portfolio. I also want to show you a few other options that you can do with this same drawing style. You can see with this piece, I started with the same idea of butterfly in the center, but I added flowers all along the outside, and if you need ideas for adding flowers to your work, I created a whole class on wild flowers with tons of reference images that you can use. So check that out if you'd like to add some wild flowers around your butterfly. You can see I did the same coloring process with the butterfly and added a little bit of texture with some blend modes as well. Another thing you could do is go to the same document that we created. We've got our butterfly totally grouped. I'll make that invisible, make everything else invisible to create a new layer and start sketching another butterfly. So you could do a single document with several different butterflies in it and just group each one as you complete it. So you have several butterflies just like this. That's how I created this composition. I just repeated that same process over and over, and I saved the large butterflies in an original document and then created this new document so I could have all the butterflies on a small scale on the same document. You don't have to have six of these. You could do three, two, any number here that works well together. I like to do a lot and then play around with how they work together, and I may or may not use them all. So the more of these you do, the better you'll get at the process and the faster you will create these. So I would suggest taking your time and making a lot of the same insect if you find an insect you're really interested in. Here's an example I did with some moths. I decided I wanted to draw a lot of different moths. So I just started one after another creating this sketch, coloring them in and trying to focus on getting a lot of different moths shapes. So I didn't want to choose any that look really similar to each other. I wanted to have a lot of different shapes and variation on the canvas. So I keep going back to the older ones and looking at them as I'm working, just so I can see if I'm doing anything that's too redundant, and you can see I'm just throwing some colors down there. I'm not so worried about the colors because I know I can change that later as long as I keep those colors all on separate layers and all grouped together. Once I get all of my moths created, I can start putting those on the Canvas, and again, this is a duplicated document. This is not my original. So I can really play around with color and size and not worry about losing all that original data, and you can see the nice thing about keeping each butterfly in its own group is it's really easy to change color so I could change the color of this entire document, have a whole new color palette with the same composition just by keeping these on separate layers. Going to the layer, I want to change, tapping "Recolor", putting that recolor tool on there and then I can start playing around with different colors. I like that green, orange combination. So you can see why working in this way is so helpful because you can have the freedom to create a lot of different color versions and composition versions as you work. So now that we've looked at a simple way to create an insect illustration and several different ways to use it in a composition, let's take a look at how to turn that illustration into an animation so it can move around the Canvas. 6. Prepping the Animation Canvas: Next we're going to look at how to turn your insect illustrations into animations that move around on the page. This is a great way to get your viewers to look at your work for a longer period of time. You can make it as simple or complex as you like. We'll look at a few different options for changing the complexity of the piece. You could use one of the illustrations that you've already created in the first project or you could create a new piece specifically for animating. I'll be working with this illustration that I created. I already showed you how I made these moths. I only use three of them because animating takes a lot of steps. You may want to start with something simple. You could even start with just one single piece, or you could do two or three like I'm doing here. Decide what works for your time constraints and your personal style. But I'll be doing three moths floating off the canvas. I just want to show you how my document is set up here. We have a texture layer on top, and a background layer on bottom, and then in the middle we just have our moths. Our moths are in groups with the sketch layer, the color layers, and the moth shape itself. This is my original. I'm not going to make any changes to this and I'm not going to use that for animation. Anytime you do an animation, just go ahead and duplicate your drawing because you're going to be merging layers, making changes, and you don't want to lose all that work that you've already done. I'll tap "Select". Tap on that document that I want to animate and tap "Duplicate". Now that I have that second document that is not my original, I can start merging layers. At this point, I'm assuming that you're already happy with your colors. If you're not, this is a good time to play around with color. Use that re-color tool and choose a totally different palate. Once you're happy with your colors, you can merge each butterfly, all the different parts of it onto its own layer. I'm just pinching and then I'm going to move it out of that group. Now this butterfly is on one layer and it's not in a group. I can swipe left on that group and tap, "Delete". I'll repeat the same process with this one. Pinch to merge all the layers together, drag it out of that group, and delete the group. Same thing. Merge all the layers, drag it out of the group, delete the group. Now I just have four layers, texture. Butterfly 1, butterfly 2, butterfly 3, background. The next thing I'm going to do is group these three butterflies. I selected all three by swiping right and tap "Group". Now I've got my three butterflies in their own group. That way I can easily duplicate that group when I get started with the animation. One more thing I want to do to set up my animation canvas is tap the "Tool". Go to Canvas and tap, "Crop and Resize". With an animation, you're going to have a lot of different frames, which according to procreate are layers. If you have a huge canvas, you're going to run into a limit with the number of layers you can do and you won't be able to complete your animation, if you're doing an animation with a lot of steps like I am here. I'm going to go ahead and size down my canvas to 1500 by 1500 pixels. Actually before I do that, let's tap "Reset". I'm going to turn on re-sample canvas. What that's going to do is re-size the whole canvas rather than cropping a portion of the canvas. The reason I'm choosing 1500 by 1500 pixels, is I'll mainly be using this for my website and Instagram. Instagram will not show anything bigger than 1080 by 1080 pixels. If you upload something larger, it's going to size it down anyway. So 1500 by 1500 is fine for most online users. Unless you want to show it huge on your website, you're probably going to be fine with that size. Once I've got that size and I make sure re-sample canvas is on, I'll tap "Done". Now I just have a slightly smaller canvas and it's going to allow me to have a lot more layers in my layers panel. Now that we have this canvas all set up the way we need it, I'm going to tap the "Tool symbol" and turn on "Animation assist". Also I'm going to turn off the drawing guide so that little blue line isn't in the middle. That's distracting. So I don't need the drawing guide, but I do need animation assist. What that does is it puts this nice little bar at the bottom that makes it easy to follow along with your animation. We've got my background layer, my butterfly layers, and my texture layer. For my background layer, I'm going to tap that one time and turn on background. Because I want that to show up on every single frame. I want to always have a background. Same thing with my texture, that is my foreground. I always want that same texture to appear and the butterflies are just going to move under it. 7. Creating Directional Movement: Now I've got my butterfly layer, is the only thing that's going to actually move. That's my animation. Let's swipe left on that group and tap ''Duplicate''. Now I can open up that group and move something. Let's say for example, the very first moth, I'm going to turn off Magnetic so it's really easy to move things. I'm just going to turn it a little and shift it up a little. That's all I'm going to do on that group. I'm going back to my original. Your original is always the bottom of the stack. Swipe left tap ''Duplicate'', and then move that new group above everything else. Again, go to that very first moth, tap on it, move it up, twist it a little, and now you can see I've got three levels here. I've got my original layer, my second layer, and my third layer. My moth is just slowly scooting off the Canvas. If I press Play Down here, it's going really fast. Let's go to Settings and reduce the frames per second. You can see exactly what's happening with this animation, 1, 2, 3, it's moving off the Canvas. Let's click ''Pause''. You'll notice here that I'm always duplicating the original. The reason for that is every time you duplicate something and procreate, it loses a little bit of quality. That's true for a lot of digital art programs. You wouldn't want to be duplicating a duplicate, because then you're making your animation progressively blurrier as you work. So by the end of your animation, with a more complex animation like this, it's just going to look like a blurry moth. I recommend just keep that original on the very bottom, just keep going and duplicating that and moving your new group to the top of the stack. Again, I'm going to that first moth, twisting it, and moving it a little bit off the Canvas. I think I'm ready to start moving this moth too. In that same group, I'm going to twist and move up a little. Things might start getting a little confusing here with all these semi opaque layers. What I like to do is go to Settings and on Onion skin frames, I turn that to one. What that does is it only lets you see the previous layer. For me, I know exactly what direction my animation is going in, so I'm fine only seeing the previous layer. If I tap on these, you can see only one other layer shows up as a semi-opaque layer. I think that makes it a lot easier to do an animation like this. I'm going to be repeating this same process over and over, duplicating the original, tapping on a moth, whatever moth I'm working on at that time, turning it, scooting it up a little. I'm just trying to be aware of where each piece is. You may not want them to overlap or maybe you do want them to overlap. I'm also being aware of directional lines. I'm making this moth turn this way. I'm making this moth, he's going to fly this way, and then this one's going to fly this way. Each time I turn and shift my moth, I'm thinking about that directional line, so I'll just delete that layer. You can see how this does take a little bit of time. But what it does is it gets people to look at your illustration for a lot longer. People want to see these moving images online. This is really popular right now to have things moving on the Canvas. It's a great way to get people to engage with their work more and you never know who that person could be. It could be someone who's looking to use you as an illustrator or someone who might be interested in buying something from your Etsy shops. Something to think about as you're working, what are some ways you can get people to look at your work longer and be more interested in it. An animation is a great option for that. Now I'm moving on to the third butterfly. I'm starting to shift that one as well. Now, every time I duplicate and shift the group to the top, I have to move the first butterfly, the second butterfly, and the third one. As you're working, it's a good idea to just check your animation. Again, you can tap Settings and play around with that Frames Per Second to speed it up. You can see right now I've just gotten a little bit of the way they've moved up about a quarter of an inch on the Canvas. I'm going to keep going with this process. One thing I'm going to do as I work is for every group except the original, I'm going to go into the group and merge the three butterflies. Once I've shifted them, I don't need them on separate layers. Having them on separate layers is taking a lot of space up on this document and I may run out of layers later. Just be sure you never merge your original, only merge the duplicates. I won't make you watch this entire process, I'll speed up my video here while I repeat the same step over and over. We've gotten to the point in my animation where this butterfly is actually not on the Canvas anymore. The last frame it had a tiny little piece of the wing on there but now, he's totally flown off the Canvas. In all my future groups, I can just delete that top butterfly. I don't even need to place it. Then I just have to worry about butterfly 2 and 3. This definitely takes some time, but it also gets easier as you do it because you have less than last elements to worry about as things are floating off the Canvas. If you find that you run out of layers as you're doing this, you can always go back to that section that we used before to re-size the Canvas and make your Canvas a little bit smaller. One trick that you can do as your Layers panel gets really big like this. When you duplicate this group rather than shifting it in little parts like that, you can shift it and then just hold up here, it'll slide that Layers panel up until you get to the very top. That's a lot easier than doing a lot of little shifts to move it up the Layers panel. Now I'm at the point where my second moth is also going off the Canvas. The last time it was right here, just a little end of it. Now it just goes off the Canvas. For all the future groups, I only need to deal with this third moth, I don't even have to worry about the other two. I can just delete them as soon as I create the group. Just I'll just duplicate the group, hold to move it up to the top, stick it in there, delete moth 1 delete moth 2, and then I can just shift moth 3 and its almost all the way off the Canvas, so I just have a few more layers. 8. Exporting and Animation Options: Once you get all of your frames created, you can, again tap played just to check out how it looks and at this point I always play around with the settings, especially the frames per second. You can make these go really fast. Just fly off the canvas. Or we could slow it down. Play around with whatever works for your style here. Once you get that set to a type that you like, you may also want to play around with the background color. You could use the re-color tool. You could add more texture on that texture layer. Whatever you want to do here to bump this up or change it. If you see a problem in your animation. Here's what I recommend. Press play. Turn down the frames per second so that you can really see where that problem is, and then as soon as you see it, tap "Pause" and then you can tap on that layer down here until you find it. Then when you open your Layers panel, you'll be on that layer and you can make any necessary adjustments. Sometimes I'll do a big animation like this and I'll see that I missed a frame I didn't turn one right. You can just easily go back through delete a layer, making it invisible, whatever you need to do to fix your animation. Once you're happy with how your animation looks, you can tap the Actions menu, tap Share, and then down here you can choose the file type. For SkillShare projects page, we would do an animated GIF. If you were going to share this on Instagram, you would do animated MP4. I'm going to tab Animated GIF, and then if you look at the file size up here, this is a really big file size, that's not going to work on SkillShare, Facebook or anything like that. We need to tap "Web ready," and that greatly reduces the size. We can also play around with the frames per second on this page so you can decide how fast you want these to go off the page. Once you're happy with that, you can tap Export, save image, and then that's saved to your camera roll so you can upload that SkillShare. Same process, if you were doing this on Instagram or Facebook, you'd tap animated MP4, web ready, play around with the frames per second to whatever you like and then tab Export. Save video. You can see here repeated the same process with my butterflies and I made them go to the sides of the canvas rather than the top. You can see how just slightly shifting the direction that you make your pieces move can totally change the feel of the composition. You can see I did the exact same process with this piece. I just made the butterflies come in and out of the canvas. Rather than starting in the middle of the canvas and moving out, I made them start on the edges of the canvas and move in and across. That takes a little bit more time, but it just looks really cool to have one stable element and several moving elements on the canvas. Of course you can do this with any insect. It doesn't just have to be insects with wings. For these beetles. I made them go off the canvas and then come back on and kind of meet each other right face-to-face. You can play around with a lot of different fun directional movement for these and just see what works for your personal style in terms of the colors and the types of insights you use. Now that we've played around with several ideas for animation, let's play around with combining your insights with other objects on the canvas to create some interesting interactions. 9. Creating Repeatable Objects: For this last illustration style, we're going to create an interaction. An interaction can be between any two objects. In this case, it'll be one insect and one object. For example, in this piece I combined my hand and some butterflies. Here I combined the praying mantises and the mug. Let's get started by looking at a few different ideas for insects and objects that you can combine and the composition. If you open the workbook and go to the layers panel, you can make the color palette section invisible. There, you'll see the combinations page in the workbook. Here I just combined some insects with some objects so you have some prompts to get you started. For example, you might take a butterfly and combine it with a branch. Maybe there's a few different butterfly sitting on a branch. Or you could use a dragonfly and a hand. Feel free to pull from here or use any object or insect that you'd like to use in your composition. I'm going to use a bee and some sunglasses. My first step is to sketch those objects so that I have some ideas for how to combine them on the Canvas. Go back to my gallery. Create a new canvas. Are we using the same size that I used last time? Ten by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I've gone ahead and picked out a bee image. But you could find any insect that you want to use for this project. I'm going to go ahead and pull that up in my photos app. Go to procreate and move that photo over to this side, and get started with my sketch just like we did for the butterfly. So turning on drawing guide, edit, drawing guide, symmetry, vertical symmetry, and done. Checking that. I'm just going to sketch this v-shaped. I think I'm going to change the wings a little bit. I wish that the wings are a lot bigger. So I'll just play around with bumping those up a little bit. I'm happy with my refined sketch so I can get rid of that reference image, create a new layer below my sketch layer, and turn on drawing assist. Then I can start playing around with color. You can use the pallets or you can just use whatever you want here. I'm going to start with a light yellow for the wings. Again, I'm just going to use that sketching pencil because I dislike that texture it gives you. Again, for my next color, I'm going to a new layer, always making sure I put new colors on new layers. I'll go ahead and reduce the opacity of my sketched layer so you can just barely see it. Now I can start working on some detail work. So always turning on that drawing assist. Then for this layer I'm going to use a clipping mask because I'm going to make some stripes on my bee. I'm just going to use a dark brownish, almost black color on there. For these wings. I'm trying to really vary my line. I'm letting it be a little bit thicker in some areas and a little bit thinner in others. I'm letting some of these lines overlap. So when I do one of these little divisions, I'll go over the previous division so that I just have a little bit more variation in that line. Now I'm going to make my sketch layer invisible so I can start really working on the details on this insect. I feel like the lines on the wings are way too dark, so I'm just going to go to hue saturation brightness and bump up that a little bit so they look more transparent. Then I want to add a little bit more texture to my bee. On the layer above this yellow, I'm going to get a slightly darker yellow and use those bug fur brushes to just bring some color and texture into there. Then I'm going to go like we did before, to the blending mode on this layers pane, and just play around with these different blending modes to see if anything interesting pops up. I really like this because it adds a ferry movement look to it. I think I'm going to do the same thing on the wings. Getting a slightly darker color. Getting one of these both for brushes. Brushing it across my wings. I'm making sure this is a clipping mask layers so I'm not getting texture everywhere, and then I'll play around with those Blend Modes, and in addition to the blend modes, you can also reduce the opacity. You may want just a tiny bit of texture like this, where you can just barely see it when you zoom out, but it's just enough to give the wings a little bit of movement on the Canvas. I feel like the legs and arms aren't standing out very well. So many go through with a darker color and sound a little bit more. Pop to those so they stand out on the Canvas a little better. Now you could keep going with this if you're not happy with your bee, create another one, try a different shape, try a different insect, and just make a lot of different options if you just can't get to a point where you're happy, just keep going. Don't worry about trying to perfect something that you're not happy with. Just make another one. I'm happy with this one. So I'm going to stick with this. I'm going to swipe right on every single layer and tap group. Now this is my bee group and this is my master bee document. I'm going to go back to my gallery, select that document and tap duplicate. Then that is my original bee. So I'm going to name that original. Now I'm never going to touch that. That's just for saving in case I need that size later on. Now with this doc, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to worry about losing my original. I'm still going to duplicate that one and make the very original invisible so that if we need that in an emergency situation, I have it there, and I'm just going to work with this one here. 10. Object Illustration: Next I'm going to create a new layer, and start sketching out my idea here. I know I want to have a table, and that blue line in the middle is distracting, so I'm going to go to the Actions menu and turn off the drawing guide, and then I can just start playing around with where I think these classes might go because I'm combining sunglasses and bees. So that would be something like this. I'm going to get a reference image, but that'll get me started with my sizing. Then I want to have a few different bees on the Canvas. So let us just sketch those in. I'd like to have one bee sitting on the glasses so they're really interacting with it. Whereas with these, I'll be able to reuse the same image over and over. With this one I'm just going to have to play around with it a little bit to get it to work in this composition. There's my bees. I'm going to have maybe some wooden planks to show the texture of this table. So it'll be something like this. That doesn't have to be perfect, but this is a good chance to play around with your composition ideas and really plan out how this is going to be laid out before you start doing any final sketching. I will reduce the opacity of that, and then I need to find some sunglasses as a reference. I'm just searching glasses on table, on Google. I'm not so worried about this being the perfect image, I just need to get the proportions right. So I'm just looking in general at these images and seeing what might help me out. I feel like this is a pretty good representation of, what I'll be doing, so we'll just take a screenshot of that by pressing the home button and the power button, go to photos. There are definitely cases where you don't want to use reference images. That is when you're depicting something exactly as it is in the picture. For example, if I did the same colors and shape and everything that's in that photograph, that would be violating the copyright of that photographers work. So what I want to do here is just use the shapes. So you can think about if the original creator would ever look at your image and say, "Hey, that's mine." Then you've copied that person. Whereas if they just look at it and say, "Oh, that's some sunglasses." Then you just use the idea of the shade in the picture and you haven't copied that person. You could also just take your own glasses. It's actually easier to use your own objects because you can pose them in the exact way that you want them. So go in your house, find the object, pose it exactly as you wanted to be, and then take the picture. I think that's way easier than finding a picture online. I'd like to show the online option and classes just in case you don't have that object, but definitely using your own objects is so much easier and you never have to worry about copyright. As long as you're not depicting a product and putting a logo or anything like that then you're totally fine using your own pictures in any way you like. I'm just taking some time to sketch out this basic shape. Make sure I've got my angles right. This doesn't have to be perfect. This isn't a life drawing, this is an illustration, which means more of a playful imaginative way of seeing an object. When you're working in illustration, don't feel like everything has to be super realistic. It can be more of a playful representation. If you look at illustrations that are appearing in magazines and newspapers and on products, they're playful and fun, and they don't perfectly depict the object. So feel free to let your illustrations just be playful and not perfect. Since I have this on a new layer, I can play around the placement and get that exactly where I want it to be. Now that I'm happy with that, I'm just going to grab a color, and I'm going to use this bold pink color. I want these glasses rims to be really similar. Let's go ahead and get rid of our reference image. I don't need that anymore. Just start filling in these rims. If I want the other side to be really similar, I can just duplicate this layer, tap the Move tool, tap horizontal, shifts that just a little bit so it's inline with the perspective. I think these need to be a little bit closer to each other. Merge those two together and now we can finish off my glasses. I'm just loosely filling these in with color. It doesn't have to be perfect. I want to have my glasses filler here and then my final piece of the glass is behind it. I actually need to put this bar or whatever that's called on a new layer. So even though this looks like it's part of the same object, it's on a new layer because I know I'm going to need to put something in front of it. I've got my first part of my glasses on this layer, second part of my glasses on this layer. Then I'm going to make a layer in between those two, and I'll just get black as my color, because this is going to be sunglasses. Fill in those inner parts, and then let's reduce the Opacity so it looks more like sunglasses. I'm happy with that for now, we can always make adjustments later, so let's just leave that as it is for now. I'm going to take my sunglasses, wipe all of those layers and group them. We could also click on Group and rename it glasses. If you name as you go, it gets a little bit easier to control these more detailed illustrations, so I do recommend doing that. 11. Combining the Parts: I'm going to make my sketch layer invisible. I'll create a new layer and drag it below my glasses. Then I want to add in my background. So I'm going to go with a light turquoise blue here. I'll put two fingers down to get a perfectly straight line, and then I'm just going to drag to fill that with color. I'll add some texture on here later, so I'm not worried about adding texture with my brush. I'll create a new layer for my table. Same thing, drag across, two fingers down to get it perfectly horizontal, and now we've got a nice table. Let's bring this sketch back above so we can really see what we're doing here. Create a new layer, and I'm going to add in the lines for my wood planks. I think I'm just going to let these wood planks be irregular. I'm not worried about them being a perfect distance from each other. Next, I'm going to bring in my bees. So I've got my bee down here in this group. I'll bring it to the top. So this is a duplicate and I've got my original down at the bottom. So with this duplicate, I'm just going to put it into place, wherever my first bee is going to be. We'll put that right there for now. So you just want to keep in mind that you never want to upsize one of these. So once you set it to that size, it's always set to that size, so we can't change that at this point. What we can do is duplicate that original bee and move it up to the top. Tap the Move tool, and create a new bee. If that was the wrong size, I would just delete it and create a new one. So just keep that in mind as you're sizing, you don't want to go small and then increase the size later on because that's going to create some blurriness. I am getting go ahead as I place these new bees and merge everything in that group. If I don't do that, I'm going to end up with way too many layers and I'm probably going to get it cut off pretty soon. So let's go ahead and just merge those as you work. So I'm thinking about directional lines here. Bees usually wouldn't fly straight into each other. So you want to make sure they're going on a path where they would miss each other. Just for getting some nice variation in there, you want to make sure everything's pointing in a different direction. If you have things that are all pointing in the same direction, it draws the viewer's eyes to that area in an unnatural way. So it's a good idea to just create as much variation as you can. But you don't want it to be too predictable. I don't want everything to face the center. So I'm shifting these so they're all pointing, if you could imagine lasers coming out of their head, there would be a lot of different directions going on. I want one bee to be behind the glasses. So I'm going to drag that one behind my glasses layer. So we've got just a little wing poking out there. Then for my last bee, I wanted him to be sitting on the glasses. So I'm not going to merge those layers yet. I'm just going to put that bee in place. It wouldn't really sit sideways like it is now, it would sit so that its wings are facing up this way. So the first thing I'm going to do is get my eraser and erase this set of wings. Or we can just grab the Selection tool, circle around that, drag down three fingers and tap "Cut". If I go to this yellow layer, I can remove all these little legs, and I can also remove one of the eyes. So I'm just removing that brown color. Then I'll go to the yellow layer and remove that. So just with removing a little bit, it's changed how the bee is facing. I actually erased the wrong leg, so I'm going to go back and erase the correct legs. So I really could erase either of these eyes. I think the top one makes a little more sense though. Of course, you could just redraw this bee. If you want it in a very specific way and you're not happy with how it's turning out with just erasing, just redraw it. It won't take long, just a few minutes. So I think I can go ahead and merge these layers now. So I've got this bee all on one layer. I'll tap the Selection too. So I'll circle around that leg and I just want to move it down here. I feel like it would make it a little bit more sense and be a little more interesting, if he had his leg wrapped around that a little bit. Then I'm going to take that whole bee, make it a little bit smaller, and place it here. So you can really play around with this. There's no right or wrong way to make this work. Play around with it until it looks exactly as you want it to. Then if you're like me, you might look at something like this and feel like it's missing something. It needs a little bit more cohesiveness or movement. So what I'm going to do is start adding some texture layers. 12. Texture and Composition Options: I 'll create a new layer above everything. For now I'll just get gray as my color but we'll work with some other colors in a minute, but let's start with gray just to keep this simple. If you scroll down here to the grid textures, at the bottom of the brush set, I'll start with that first one and just swipe this across the Canvas, and you can see it just adds a nice little swash that covers everything. You can leave it like that or you can choose a different color or get a blending mode here and play around with what happens when you change the blend mode. Here's an interesting change. This adds a little bit of a light color to everything. I might even reduce the opacity of that a little bit so it's not quite as intense. Now my illustration has just a little bit of interesting texture. I'm going to create a new layer and do this again with a different texture, so this is the second grid texture. Same process. Let's go through the blend modes. This one's interesting because it looks green here and then it looks orange here. The blend modes just have interesting ways of passing light through the Canvas. There we get some interesting effects and just keep scrolling here through the blend modes, maybe you want a light color, dark color. This gets almost neon in some places. This is where it just really depends on your style. Whatever you want to do here. Play around with these until you find something you like. Reduce the opacity. I'm going to repeat the same process with all seven brushes. For this next one, I'm going to grab a different color. Let's get pink. Let's go through the blend modes with this pink. Zoom in a little bit more so you can see. I like this, it adds a really subtle pink to everything. Just some pink swatches across everything. You can see how this makes your composition a little bit more cohesive and everything blends together better when they're unified by a single texture. You'll probably find once you get all these textures on the Canvas, so it's a little much, and you can go back to each one and reduce the opacity. It's a little bit more subtle, change the blend mode, whatever you want to do here. I'm going to keep going adding texture using all seven brushes. One last thing you may need to do, let's say you put down this texture and you think the squashes are just way too big and you wish you could have slightly smaller swatches. I'll tap on that brush, go to "Grain", and bump down the scale, so you can see how that's changing the scale of the texture. I'm going to go here to 45 percent, try this again, now those marks are much smaller and it has a different effect on the Canvas. You can do this with whatever size works for your style, maybe play around with both and see what you like. If you're wondering how I made these brushes, I do show this whole process in my class on creating texture brushes. If you want to make your own like this so that your illustrations have 100 percent unique textures and they are textures that no one else out there is using, then you can certainly do that and the process is not very difficult. Check that class out if you want to give that a try but you can feel free to use my brushes for any use. Selected all of these textures and I'm tapping group because I just want to turn these on and off to show you the difference in this composition, with and without the texture. It is a little bit boring without the texture but then you add that in and it has so much more movement. It just as more interesting to look at. It feels like an atmosphere is in the air with this texture. I want to show you how you could complete different types of compositions using these same steps. For this first composition, we use the bees over and over and rather than adding an object, I just added a texture. I've created a brush for you if you'd like to use that texture as well. I have that document open here. I just have all of my bees on separate layers and I'll create a new layer under all those bees and grab one of these honeycomb textures. I like honeycomb too the most. Then I'll just paint that over the background. So you've got this nice seamless texture in the background. I do show how to make this type of brush in my class on cut out. So if you want to make a seamless brush like this, check out that class. Here's another example of combining an object and an insect. I took a picture of my hand and just traced it and did a simple silhouette. Then added in those butterflies and did the exact same process with the textures that we just did and then played around with color a little bit. You can see how adding in all those texture layers makes a huge difference for the field, the composition, and just makes it a lot more interesting to look at. Here's an example of a mug with a praying mantis. You can just do a single insect, it doesn't have to be multiple insects. I just started with that rough sketch and a more refined sketch, added in all of those solid colors plus some highlights on the objects, and then added in that texture layer. This really doesn't contain a lot of layers, it's pretty simple when you break down the layers. You can certainly do this with any insect and any object you'd like. Then my favorite option but it's also the most time consuming option is creating many different insects with many different colors. Rather than duplicating the same insect over and over, you're creating unique insects for the composition. Then again, I just traced the picture of my hand and scattered these moths around the Canvas and then played around with a lot of different color versions. The final thing that I like to do with these illustrations is to share them. You can share them digitally, you could do print on demand sides like Society6 and Red bubble, you could share them on your social media accounts. But I also like to print these out on paper, I find that it's a great way to help yourself critique your work. You can either hang this up at home, you could frame it, give it as a gift. If you have trouble with printing or you're not sure about printing, I have a blog post where I talk a lot about printing, so I'll link that on the class downloads and resources page. But you can see, you really can get almost the exact colors that you see on the screen if you're using a grade printer. You can get these really beautiful bold colors and even if you want to share your work just online, you can print these out and take them outside and hold them and maybe have a nice picture of your hand, holding this in front of some seen outside. It's just a slightly more interesting way to share your work than to always just share the digital images over and over. So something to consider if you like to print out your work, this is a great way to share your work with the world. So I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own insect illustration and animations. If you like 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 wildflower illustrations using a free downloadable wash brushes I created. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more like you got for this class, check out my blog. I would absolutely love to see your insect illustrations and animations so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skill Share in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You can also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, designers, illustrators 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. 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 through the link on my website. If you have any questions as you work through the projects in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You could apply to my discussion here on Skill hare or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye, bye.