Isometric Illustration in Procreate: Design Your Dream Room

1. Intro: Why is isometric design trending right now? Isometric design is an evolution of flat design that kept its simplicity, but also gained some new depths. Hi, my name is Veronica, I'm an illustrator, and in this class I will be teaching you how to create an isometric illustration and procreate. Isometric illustrations are one of the hottest design trends. They're fun, they're eye-catching, and they will look really impressive on your social media or in your portfolio. This class is very thorough and very in-depth. I will be showing you my entire process and also sharing with you all my procreates trade secrets. I also prepared some gorgeous color palettes to choose from and I organized all the brushes in one convenient folder so that the are simply ready to go. I even added some extra brushes so for your pleasure. I will be covering the basic principles of isometric design. We will go together through selecting references, doing some rough sketches. Next, we will be setting up your canvas together and choosing the brushes as well as selecting your color palette. I will show you in detail how I draw the isometric cube, how I use the isometric grid. And I will share all my techniques for inking and for coloring. This class is well suited for beginners as well as for more seasoned artists. Completing this class will help you in the better understanding of perspective, as well as learning how to creatively translate space and do an illustration. Let's not forget that its also a really fun project. Our first isometric illustration will be a design of your dream room. Join me in the first lesson. 2. Your Project: Your task will be to create an isometric illustration with me, and I will really guide you, we will do it step-by-step together. Please remember to upload your finished isometric illustration in the projects and resources section. You can upload a JPEG or a PNG, share your process, we would love to see other pictures showing you on the way. Alternatively, you can also post a video or a speed paint directly from procreate showing how you went to about your illustration. On how to export your files, you will find out more in one of the later videos in this class called exploiting. Now, the next thing I would like to urge you about is to have a look up the resources section, there is a little bit of confusion when people are within the application skill share. The resources are only available if you're in the browser, so not in the app. You have to go below the video, there's a section projects and resources, and over there you have the entire project description, and to the right side you will see the entire resources. You can see there the brushes or the color palettes and all the Pinterest boards that are made available to you, make sure to check out those. The illustration that you create is going to be awesome, I'm sure of that because isometric design is so eye-catching, it would be just a shame to keep it on one platform. Please join me in my Instagram challenge, you can find me on Instagram, you can see my handle here, and I will be hosting this challenge under the hashtag isometric magic. Feel free to tag me, and also use this hashtag because I will be checking it very frequently, and hopefully I feature some of your works, so let's stay connected over social media as well. That's it for now. I'm sure you're going to do great. Join me in the next lesson, where we talk about the isometric projections and I show you how to use the isometric grid. 3. Isometric Perspective: Welcome into the lesson about the isometric perspective. Before we dive into creating our beautiful illustration, I wanted to tell you a few words about what isometric perspective actually is. To put it into simple words. Thanks to the isometric perspective, we are able to show a 3- dimensional object on a flat 2-dimensional surface. As an example, I dug out an older illustration of mine. You can see how the isometric cube was translated into this isometric room illustration. That is what makes an isometric illustration so cool. It literally pops out of your page. Let's have a closer look. Let us take that cube shape. It already looks 3D, doesn't it? Let's imagine now that it is a 3D object. We will identify now the three planes or the three views of this basic cube shape. Here you can see it's top plane, the roof, you can see it's left and the right side, the left and the right view. If you take each of its sides and if you look at them facing then directly, not from an angle, but just straight ahead, each of those sites would be a perfect square shape. Now, let's flip this cube shape and make our room out of it. The left and the right sides are the walls of our room, and here's the bottom of the cube. That's going to be our floor, I hope you can see that. If not, let me help you. Here is the room, pretty cool. We will be creating an illustration like that together. At this point, you might be wondering, well, what is the difference between the isometric perspective and other forms of perspective that I already know? Let me give you a few examples. You probably learned about perspective a bit back at school. Here's a short recap about different 3D views. This graph shows you the perspective that you're probably most familiar with. The key element of this perspective are the so-called vanishing points. Most often you have one, two or even 3 vanishing points and then you call it a one-point perspective a two-point perspective or a three-point perspective. From those points you can see here in the picture as well, you run imaginary lines and they go all the way to the edges of your object, and those imaginary lines help you to keep the proportions better. This type of perspective, well it also allows you to create an illustration with a 3-dimensional look of a 3D look. Why the isometric perspective then? What's the difference? An isometric design doesn't use any vanishing points, that's the first difference. Instead, you can identify here three axes, x, y, and z. I know this sounds a little bit like maths. Thanks to those axes, you can present an object showing its three sides as the same time. The term isometric actually comes from Greek and it stands for equal measure. The scale along each axis is exactly the same and the angles between those three planes are always the same. They are 120 degrees. One of the skills that you learn by taking this class is learning some new information or refreshing some information about perspective and different forms of perspective. I wanted to tell you just a few words about the so-called axonometric projections. Guys, I just wanted to let you know that really this part of this lesson is purely bonus information. I wanted to let you know that isometric designs, they belong to a bigger category of projections called axonometric projections. It's basically a way to show an object from multiple views so that when the object is rotated, you can see more of its sides. That's what it really is about. Within that family of axonometric projections, there's of course, isometric, there is also dimetric and trimetric. But we will be dealing with the first one of course. The difference is with the isometric one like I've mentioned in the previous slides, all angles are the same, it's 120 degrees. You can probably guess what's coming with the dimetric perspective, two angles are the same and the third angle is a little bit off, and then with the trimetric perspective, all the three angles are different. It looks a little bit more skewed to the sides. This is just some fun facts information, but there's actually more to the isometric perspective. I hope that this information was fun and interesting to you. Learning a little bit more about the isometric perspectives and seeing the examples that I have shown to you, I just wanted to tell you, please do not worry if you feel a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of information or if you're worried about the technicalities, the maths, the angles and so on. If you're going to be using the Procreate app alongside with me as we do this exercise, then I have good news to you. In Procreate, there's a special grid that will help us to create our illustration. Just a small disclaimer here. I've mentioned that you can use any other drawing software that you're familiar with because basically the steps, the whole thinking process, the design process, it's the same. You can follow the steps that I present in this class very easily. However, I will be using Procreate 5, the Procreate app and I know that Procreate gives you those isometric grid that you can use in order to create your isometric illustrations super fast. About other programs like Photoshop, I'm not sure if this grid is available there. This piece of information is pure gold mainly for those of you who used a Procreate app. Here, a quick cheat sheet on how to access that grid, but you do not have to do this right now. We will be accessing the grids together when we set up our canvas, it's under the Canvas settings. In the next lesson, we will talk about gathering inspiration and collecting references. 4. Collecting References: In this lesson, we will be covering, collecting references and gathering some inspiration. This step is essential and I wouldn't advise that you skip it. You can draw and you can create a cool illustration without any brainstorming or without any planning. I want you to grow, and produce super cool original well thought illustration and the tips, the recommendations and the exercises that I offer in this lesson, will help you to bring your illustration to the next level. In order to do that, I would always plan my illustration. I would always study what I would like to draw. On top of that, I ask myself a few other questions every time I create an illustration. For example, am I practicing a new skill when I did this illustration. For instance, a new way of shading on your color palette. I want to create something that is aesthetically pleasing, something pretty. Do I want to create this illustration because I want to tell a story or convey some message. Basically, you will see that drawing this room, this isometric cube, is going to be the easiest part of all the stages of creating this illustration. You've got the cube, you've got the walls, you've got the floor, you're done. I would like you to grow and I would like you to create an illustration that you've never created before. An illustration that is truly unique and an illustration that shows off your interests and your personality and tells us about who you are. Who is the artist that created this illustration. Here's my suggestion. Let's collect together some references in your house by looking at a few online shops or some catalogs. By looking into Pinterest and creating a Pinterest mood board. We start with the house, the easiest one. I warmly invite you to take a break, look around your house, go to every room of your house, and gather any interesting objects or plants or declarations that you would like to consider drawing in your illustration. It's a great idea to work around the house, and look for the plants that you already have that maybe have some unusual shapes. We're all familiar with drawing basic leaves. I encourage you to walk the extra mile and look for shapes and forms that you have never drawn before, so that you can practice sketching them for your own illustration. Step two is to check out your favorite online shops. You probably have some shops that you like going to. You can go to those shops whenever you have the time and look for some inspiration there, if possible then you can take the photos of those objects. You don't have to go anywhere physically. You can just go to your browser and Google those shops that you like. Look for the shops that you would go to. Otherwise, you can go to the IKEA website. Here we see a page for some modern design. You can look for inspiration there. This is one of my favorite shops recently. You can search for the latest trends. Have a look at the color palettes or the textures, the materials that they're using. For some in this post. If you find an object, the piece of furniture or anything for a room decoration that you like. You can screenshot that for future reference. Later on you can have it at hand when you're creating your illustration. You can use this as a reference photo. If you'd like to check out some of my favorites shops for furniture and for decor. Here's the list. The third option is to create a Pinterest board, It's one of my favorites. Thanks to Pinterest, you can create a digital mood board. You can save all your resources in one place and you can access it from different devices. If you don't have a Pinterest account here that I highly recommend that you start when you can save everything. You can create beautiful boards and you can access them at anytime. It's super handy. For the purpose of this class, I created a few boards. This can be expanded, but I'm going to make those boards available. For example, here there is one boards with Bohemian vibe that I wanted to show you. It's gorgeous, isn't it? To get the links to all my Pinterest boards, you have to go to "Projects & Resources". You got to open it in the browser, it will not work in the app. Then you go to "Project description". You scroll down and you'll see the links to all the boards. I created dedicated boards for the Bohemian style, for some meditation space, minimalist, natural and witchy. I hope you can use it. Let's recap to look for some references for you to draw things easier. The first thing you can do is to look around your house that's going to be probably the most accessible one. Then you can check out your favorite online shops or you can go to the actual shops, snap a few pictures. One that I really recommend is to create a Pinterest mood board. Now it's your turn. Create a new project in the projects in the resources section, and create your own Pinterest mood board. You can give us access to the link to your board so that we can see the inspiration that you gathered for your illustration. In the next lesson, we will do a few rough sketches and we will be preparing to draw. 5. Rough Sketches: In this lesson, we'll move to the drawing exercises, which are based off of the research that you have done in the previous lesson. In this lesson, we will be doing some rough sketches to get you warmed up. As the tools, I recommend the following items. Maybe you have a sketchbook that you run on a regular basis anyway, then you can just continue using it here. But do not get intimidated by the word sketchbook. You can also use loose sheets of paper, and even printer paper will be absolutely fine. I'm also using colored pencils instead of a graphite pencil in red, pink, or blue. Those are the colors that I recommend. The main reason why I prefer using colored pencils is that they do not smudge and I can use different colors to see more clearly. This exercise is optional, but I recommend doing it because it will help you to get a little bit more focused. Write down 2-5 words that describe your dream space. It can be adjectives, nouns, for example, is your illustration going to be bright or dark? Is it going to have a lot of details or would it rather be minimalist? Will there be any interior style like Bohemian, Scandinavian, some yogi room or maybe even can, some witchy room. Let me give you an example. This is another illustration of mine, and this is the last, the dream space that I created. I wanted this illustration to be a meditation space. That's why in the left corner on the floor you see a meditation cushion for meditation. It was important for me to remember that I really want some earthy tones, some browns, and some greens so that the whole illustration looks very cozy. In general, I wanted it to be bright pastel and I even wrote down plans, exclamation mark because plants are super important. I really wanted it to look super cool with lots of plants. Taking those notes really helped me to be more focused and to create exactly the illustration that I had in mind. Now it's your turn. Practice sketching a few items that you could put inside of your room. Some examples include a bed or a sofa, a bedside table or a coffee table. Maybe some patterns for the carpet's, a few plans, but in some different shapes that you've never drawn before. Maybe some pets that you would like to put in, any elements of decor or some unique objects. You can post your rough sketches in the project gallery. Let's get started. Let's do a few rough sketches together. This is a really valuable exercise in my opinion because it will really warm you up and in the future that will really keep you focused when you're really drawing the main line work of your illustration. You can use your sketch book, but also loose paper will do. You will see for example here that I am using loose sheets of paper. I liked to work in this way because then when I'm working on my iPad, I can put those sheets of paper somewhere next to the iPad, and they're always very handy, I can go back to them. Do not try to be super photo realistic, so to say. When you're sketching makes sure that you're simplifying your shapes. I think that's the most important thing. It doesn't have to be precisely one-to-one. Just look for a shapes and also for patterns. Look for interesting patterns that you might use in your illustration. At this stage is also important that I tell you that you might be using those sketches for your illustration, but you're not forced. This is an exercise that will warm you up and like I said, maybe it will give you like a super unique pattern or unique plan or any other shape or decoration so that in the end, your illustrations will become more interesting. I hope you explore as you do this exercise, and most importantly, you have fun. Great work. I hope you had fun doing this exercise and your hinge is already warmed up. We can proceed in drawing our isometric illustration. Hopefully, you have discovered some new shapes and forms that will make your illustration look a little bit more unique and personalized. In the next lesson, we will be setting up our Canvas and we will look into some brushes, recommendations. 6. Canvas & Brushes: Now we are ready to start working with our iPad. We have our references, we practiced some sketching. So now we can set up our canvas. Those canvas packs, I'm using the majority of the time. The minimum canvas size that they work with is 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, always at 300 dpi. For this project, I recommend the square format. I like working in the square format because it's ready to be posted on Instagram. Let's set up our canvas together. On your iPad, you go to the Procreate app and then over here, the plus sign, you can set up a new canvas. You either have it saved, I already have it saved here. It says big square, 3,000 by 3,000. But if you don't have such a canvas, you go to this plus folder symbol, you click on it. This is where you create your new canvas. You can rename it. You can just say big square or anything that you want and over here, the width you have to put in 3,000 by 3,000. You can also do 4,000 by 4,000. I think the 3,000 would be the minimum that I would personally use for my illustrations. Here always 300 dpi, and here you can see the maximum number of layers, which is 55. Let's actually make an experiment and change it to 4,000. It gets reduced drastically, 29 is a little bit too little for me so I'm going back and choosing 3,000 instead and I think it's a really good, decent size. The bigger, of course the better, but it depends how many layers you're producing. This illustration will be quite detailed, so I think with 3,055 maximum layers, we're hitting the sweet spot here. The color profile is default is RGB, so you're not changing anything in here and we've the time-lapse settings, I would only recommend to double check that everything is fine here. Yeah for the video basically. For the video, if you want to have a time-lapse of your illustration drawing process. I always stick to the full HD, 1,920 by 1,080 pixels and the quality that I have by default is usually a studio quality. This is it. Then you create your canvas, it's a perfect square. You can also go back to your gallery and you can already rename it over here isometric room to keep everything clean and well organized. This is it. Now those specifications I used them for the iPad, If you're used to working with another software or with another tool, then please feel free to use your own specifications. I will be using and showing how I create the isometric illustration on my iPad Pro. I've actually bought two iPads in the past. I started off with the small one, this is the 9.7, you see the size difference and then I upgraded to the big one. The big one handles more layers and I think it's really useful whereas the small one, it's very handy if you would like to take it for the travel because it really fits into your bag like a handbag or a backpack. Both are iPad Pros, and of course, I am working with the one and only with the Apple Pencil. This is the best stencil for digital drawing that I have ever used and it's one and only. So let me show my brushes recommendations. Here in the slide you see the brushes that I'll be using as I create my illustration. I have divided my recommendations into two categories, sketching and linework and for coloring. But of course, you can use, especially if you know Procreate already, you probably have some favorite brushes, you can use any brushes that you love and that work for you. If you would like to test something new or if you consider yourself a bit of a beginner and you would need a little bit more guidance, then those are the recommendations coming from my side. For the sketching and for the linework, I start off every sketch with a pencil basically, and I wanted to underline all those brushes are native to Procreate 5, that means you will find them all in the menu, you don't have to buy any brushes. The app has so many brushes actually, the choice is so vast that sometimes you just end up not knowing which brushes to use. If you're one of those confused people who don't know brushes to use, please go ahead and try out this set. So for the sketching, it's in the sketching section. I recommend the 6B pencil. I know that some people use the technical pen, for example, or the technical pencil. Then for the inking, for the main linework, I highly recommend one of those two brushes that you see on the list, either the dry ink or the reed. I will show it on the next slide. The dry ink is in the inking section, the reed is in the organic section. Now, for the coloring, you can use so many brushes, Procreate has so many beautiful brushes there. There are two brushes on this list, gloaming and quoll, I hope I pronounce it correctly, that are quite new. They came after the update to Procreate 5. You will find gloaming in the drawing section, quoll in the artistic section and the two last brushes are, let's call them the old-timers, gouache, it's in the painting section and Nikko Rull, it's also in the painting section. They're one of the most popular brushes ever. I wanted to do you a favor, so I got it all the brushes that I recommended in the previous slide in the folder, and I will make this folder called isometric room available in the resources section. There will be all the brushes that they recommended to use over here. Hard airbrush is the one that I use very commonly as an eraser, that's why it's also here. You will see once you download it that I included three extra brushes with some textures and patterns, just for fun. I highly encourage that you play around with those brushes, especially if you're new to Procreate, identify the ones that are your favorites and just remember which ones you will be using for the linework and which ones you will be using for the coloring. Here on that slide, you see a cheat sheet with basically what those brushes look like. I hope this has been helpful. Please be informed that those are the specifications for the canvas and brushes recommendations that come from my personal experience as an illustrator. If you have your own dimensions of the canvas that work for you best or if you prefer to use your own brushes that you tested and you know in Procreate, then you're absolutely welcome to use your own. Join me in the next lesson, where we'll talk about choosing the color palette and choosing your colors for the linework versus for the coloring. 7. The Color Palette: In the previous lessons, we did quite some planning. We have gathered our references. We looked for some inspiration. Then we set up our Canvas, and we looked into some brushes that we might set up aside in a dedicated folder and use it as we draw our illustration. Every time I plan an illustration, there is one last thing that I have a look at, namely the color palette. This lesson is all about deciding what color palette you will be using for your illustration. You are more than welcome to create that at your own color palette and prepare it in Procreate, or you can use one of the three color palettes that I prepared for you. I gave them some fancy names. So here on this slide you see Pastel Candy, Tea Orange, and Aqua Dream. Just bear in mind that different color schemes and different color combinations can have various effects. The first color palette combines some warm and cool colors, and in general, is a pretty cheerful color combination. The middle one, Tea Orange, is definitely more warm and earthy and quite sophisticated. The last one, I called it Aqua Dream, is definitely more cool regarding the colors and it could have a soothing or a calming effect. Now, I like to be organized when I work so I wanted to present to you my personal hack for organizing my color palettes. You will see that within the palettes I have a certain structure and I've been using it for a long time right now, and it's been really helpful in my creative illustration process. You're going to see, for example, if you decide to use my color palettes, the colors that are most to the right side, those are the color suggestions for the main linework, for all the lines of your illustration. Now, those colors that are right next to them, more in the middle. Those are the colors that I suggest for the background. Of course, you can choose your own background colors, but I tested those combinations. They look aesthetically pleasing enough for me. If you would like to get rid of this guessing game, then you can just follow my recommendations and see how you like the effect. Those are the colors that I recommend for the background of the illustration. Then those colors that are leftmost, those color bundles, those are the colors that I recommend for the coloring of our illustration. Yeah, this structure has been very, very successful for me. I really love the way it helps to improve my workflow. Now, the hard thing to do is to decide on one of those color palettes. Well, you might remember the exercise that I asked you to do in the previous lesson, rough sketches. I asked you to think about your illustration what you have in mind and to describe it in 2-5 words. Now, those keywords will be very handy when it comes to choosing your color palette. If you were doing this exercise and you came up with an idea that you want to create an illustration that has pastel and bright, a little bit feminine, then you can just go ahead and use the color palettes that I made available in the resources section because they're exactly conveying that mood. They're very light and very pastel, but it might be that you want to do it the other way round. You want to express your own personality and style through darker colors, for instance, maybe you're going to do a witchy or magical room full of navy blues, purples, and very dark browns, and saturated reds. Well, if that is the case, then I would just highly recommend that you do give it a thought. You choose your color palette, you stick to it, you save it in Procreate. You have a few colors for the lines, for the linework, and then you have a few more colors for the base colors and all the rest, shadows, highlights that you can adjust later on. In this way, you don't have to do too much thinking. You have your color palette ready, and you can just keep drawing and coloring. You don't have to think too much. Now it's your turn. So the task is to decide on your color palette. Of course, you can use one of the palettes that I made available, but you can also create your own. Have it saved in Procreate so that when we start the drawing and then coloring, you're ready to go. Let us know in the project gallery which color palette you chose. If you create a your own color palette, make sure to screenshot it and share it to us, that we can see which color palette you're using. In case you are building your own color palette, I prepared a few tips that will help you on the way, hopefully. First and foremost, choose the color for your linework. Do a little bit of testing. Make sure to pick bright, still a little bit later and darker tones so that your illustration in the end is well balanced. Have some pure white or some off-white in your color palette. Last but not least, have a few neutral tones and some accent colors. In the next lesson, we will start drawing our isometric room, the whole construction, and I will be showing you the isometric grid in Procreate. 8. Isometric Room Construction: In this lesson, we can start constructing our Isometric room. Let's go ahead and open procreate. This is where I have my square canvas prepared, we have set it up in the previous lessons. What I like to start with is to select the background. This is the very first step that I'm going to do because it will help me to evaluate if my line work is looking good or if the future colors for the coloring pods, if they're aesthetically pleasing. That's why it's always important for me personally to start with the background. You can change your background by selecting the background color. However, I like to create a completely new layer, which I'm going to drag all the way down and rename it, background, and then from my color palette, I chose the color palette T orange. I have selected my background color, and I'm going to take this color over here in the right upper corner and I'm going to drag it onto my layer making sure it's on the correct layer. I can also swipe to the left and lock it. The reason why I like having my background on a separate layer is that later on it will be easier for me to edit it, because I like to go here in the upper-left corner to the adjustments section to hue, saturation and brightness for me to change anything on my background. Of course, you can do it here too, but this way it's easier for me. Now what we need is our Isometric Grid. This is what an Isometric Grid, looks like. You can access those grids in procreate five in a very easy way. Let's do this together. You go to this upper-left corner, to the wrench tool, to the options, and then you select the second option which is canvas. Over here you can add that to your drawing glide, but first you have to switch it on, and you do it by selecting this toggle next to drawing guide. My isometric grid is already here because I've been working on it before, but let's go together at the joint guide section. Most likely if you haven't used the isometric grid before, you will have the ordinary 2D grid. You can change the opacity of your grid, I like to keep it that about 30 percent. You can change the thickness of the grid, I have it nearly at the max and this one is quite important. You want to have like this is too little details, if the size of your grid is too big. I want to have enough details here, so I'm going to leave it at about 190, 200, 180. Once you start using a deliberate mar, you will gain a better feeling to how to use this grid. You can also change the color of the grids. I have it at white because the contrast is enough for me. Then I click ''Done'' and my grid is over here among the sketch layer. I just wanted to show you that if this grid is not activated, so to say it's not doing really anything, I can still draw any shapes I want. In order to be able to use this grid, you have to go back to your layers, click on the layer that you have, and then choose drawing assist. If you choose this option, you will see that this layer has this notification that it's assisted. Now if I wanted to do my squarely moves, it's not going to work because the brush will move alongside this grid. I start by identifying the middle of my grid. This line over here is the middle, I choose a point of intersection of those lines here. This point, I'm trying to be very precise. I draw a line all the way down, I'm going to do the lines at the bottom they will be going to the right and to the left. On the middle of my line, so to say where those two points again intersect, they meet the points of this grid line and this grid line. I'm placing my Apple Pencil right there at this point, I'm trying to be very precise. This is still a sketch and then I'm going to the right and again, going back to this point at the bottom and then I'm going to the left like that. This is going to be the bottom of our room. I do the same, but from the top. This line meets this line in the middle right here in this point. Then I go to the right and again selecting the point of intersection and this time going to the left. Now, the easiest way is to start with the floor. I'm going to select this point here and move towards the middle, and then I'm going to select the point in the middle where those two lines meet over here. Trying to be again, very precise and I'm going to go to the other side. I go to the eraser, as my eraser I chose the hard Airbrushed. For me, it's one of the best most efficient erasers and I only erase what I know is the floor, so those lines I'm not going to need. Back to my brush, now we want to create our left wall and our right wall exactly where the floor finishes so to say were those two points meet to start with. I'm going to select the point where they intersect and go all the way up, and then this line meets this line in this point over here, going all the way up. Again grabbing my eraser. Actually using the eraser also goes with the grid. What I'm going to do now is click and turn off the drying assist for you to see, and now erasing freely all the unnecessary lines that I don't need. This is my room. Now, we would like to finalize the line work for this room. We are creating another layer. We can rename it to line, I think I'm going to do lines. Back to the sketch layer, clicking on the end, I'm going to reduce a little bit the opacity. The transparency of this layer, back to my line's layer, I am selecting first of all, the color of the line work that I chose previously, this dark brown. Now this is a tough cookie. Both of those brushes are the ones that I had recommended for the line work, but they're both really cool. I think I've been using quite a lot to try Ink, so this time I'm going to go with Reed and I'm going to stick to it. You can do it free hand in this sense that to create those straight lines, you just draw a line and then you hold it until it snaps together. But this is why I have the grid, it's supposed to help me. I will again use the grid over here. Typing them to my layer, switching on the drawing assist, but this time on this other layer and we see it's there. I really want to find this point of intersection. Make my lines. I always start with the middle, choosing the point and then dragging it. The grid is actually doing all the job for you. Choosing the point of intersection and dragging the line. We've got this now, I would like to clean up the sketch a little bit, I'm going to switch off the assist. I will completely delete the sketch layer underneath because I don't need this anymore. I will also get rid of the drawing guide by switching it off, picking up my eraser, it's still the hard Airbrush, and in case I don't like the edges, I can still fix it here. This is our basic isometric cube. Before we move on to adding on the furniture and the details, there's one last thing that I still recommend to do at this stage. Creating a completely new layer, I want to start blocking in the color for those walls and the floor. In order to do that, I will use the select tool, and then one by one, I'm going to first choose a point here right in the corner. I will be tracing this entire shape so that I can color it in more easily. Now this space is selected. You will see that there are those lines in here that show that this area is not selected. I'm going to go to my brushes and I think I will use the Nikko rull over here, but you're really free to use any other brush to fill out this color. I can even drag the color over here. Let me just show you what happens when you drag it. Those beige, dusty pinks colors here. I can use it for my walls, I selected one color and one way is just to drag it like that. But I'm going to go back to my brush. The Nikko rull has a little bit of texture. It looks like a sponge. I like to use this particular brush because it will give me a little bit of texture and make it bigger. See what I mean? Then I'm going to start coloring and in this way, automatically have some texture. This is one of the walls. Now, if you're very through with drawing the lines, the whole skeleton, then you can do this trick. You can simply swipe to the left, duplicate it, go to the arrow, move to, now this shape is selected, you can flip it horizontal and very, very carefully, you can drag it to the other side. Now I'm going to swipe with two fingers exactly with this layer, to the right, to alpha lock it. I'm going to choose another color which is a little bit different, and I'm going to either drag it here or click on this layer and select Fill Layer, and that will slightly change the color. I will deselect the outer layer and taking my eraser brush, I'm going to zoom in and see if I need to fix any imperfections here. I like to keep everything tidy, that's why I'm going to select one of those layers that I just colored, and then swipe to the right with all the other layers, and I'm going to group it. I'm going to rename it something like cube coloring or walls in four, whatever you want to keep everything adjusted. Now I can select any of those layers. I can also rename those four. In case I change my mind about any color, I can go to any of those colors and then to the adjustment section to Hue, Saturation, Brightness. I can, for example, make it a little bit brighter, desaturate it, or maybe a little bit darker. The same with the walls. Two tips from this lesson are all about your organization. It is very easy to get lost in all the amount of layers if you keep adding them, and the illustration will get even more complex as we go and we keep adding the details. For example, I always keep my line work on a separate layer, and as I go with the illustration, I really try to group similar layers together. For instance, in the previous presentation, you could see that when I colored the walls, the right wall, the left wall, and the floor, I immediately grouped them together. This will help me immensely in my workflow, keeping myself organized in this way. In the next lesson, things will start to get a little bit more serious because we will be planning in bigger furniture items. Stay with me. 9. Bigger Furniture: The next step is to put in some bigger pieces of furniture into your isometric room. Now is the time to use all the references that you have gathered, to create your isometric illustration. I warmly encourage you to have a look at all the references, the mood boards and the beautiful photos that you have gathered for inspiration, have a look at what furniture you would like to include. Let's get started. I believe that this might be the most crucial step in here. It can be quite intimidating to fill out this whole cube with furniture, so that everything makes sense and the proportions are good. I like to do a little bit of pre-sketching over here. I'm creating a completely new layer and with a contrasting color, I'm going to put in some notes for myself that will help me to design the space much faster. As you can see here, I just took some notes for myself on the separate layer, I can make it invisible if I want to and in case I need to check if I'm on track, I can always turn it back and check my notes again. I want it to be a living-room, plans are very important for me. I want to put a curtain, I need some shoes space in this room, I want ta very nice boho chair, lots of pillows, a boho carpet and then also something for the books, a bookshelf and a coffee table. This is the time to use all the references that you gathered. You can also swipe from the bottom here. I have my Pinterest board ready. Take this icon and then drag it to the other side, and this already has my Pinterest board ready. I'm going to start with this cozy chair. I'm going to minimize it a little bit, but I'm going to keep it to this side so that I can use it. What I'm going to do, I'm going to block in some very rough shapes of my furniture. Important tip at the sketching point, make sure that your furniture is not hovering. Let me show you. I have this sketch of a chair on a separate layer. We're going to use to move to. If I drew it here, it would not stand on my floor. I have to make sure that all the edges of that surface that is supposed to be standing on the wall, is not hovering somewhere in the air, it has to be placed on the floor. It's also a good practice in case you have a few items, I recommend that you do sketch them on a separate layer. I'm going to switch off my notes. Right now, I have this one item which is the chair, later on, we can pitch them together and merge it into one layer, but right now it's going to be easier for me to have this item on a separate layer so that I can move it around because I have to design my space. Keep every object on a separate layer, at least for now. It will be much easier to move them around and to resize them. You may have noticed at this stage that I like to use different contrasting colors, you can use only one, but in case everything is coming too much together; like everything is green or everything is pink, you can use just different contrasting colors from this color spectrum, so that you do not make any mistake and you see everything more clearly. Use contrasting colors for the object that stands right next to each other because it will be much easier to see them better. I wanted to draw this bookshelf right now, and this is also the time to use the isometric grid. Let's turn it on. Our drawing guide is again our isometric grid. I just want to make sure that this new layer that I just created to create this bookshelf, I'm going to click on it, I want to make sure that the drawing assister is on. I'm going to move it later on, now I'm just going to create, thanks to this grid, the shape of this bookshelf. This will be the base of the bookshelf. Those are the walls of the bookshelf, they have to come from all the four corners of the base. Let's I say wanted to be that tall, and now I'm drawing the top of the bookshelf. Let me move it around for you, so this is going to be my bookshelf. I'm going to put it in the corner of my room, again paying attention that it's really standing on the floor. Maybe a slightly lighter color I want to put in some shelves. Let's use the pink, that're in the middle. I will switch off the assist and I'm going to erase with my eraser all the unnecessary lines so that you can really see the shape of this bookshelf. Yet again, you can observe that having this bookshelf in the separate layer is very handy. You can move it around, you can even flip it and put it on the other side of the room. I think I'm going to stick with putting it here. Later on, I will be putting some objects into this shelf. Do I want to make it smaller? Maybe a little bit, and again, I'm making sure that my furniture is really on the floor. In the same way, I want to create a carpet that will be occupying the majority of this space, of the floor. For that, I will also create a new layer. I will make sure that the drawing guide is on and that this layer is on the drawing assist. I have my main pieces in. I think this is a really good time when you have a few items already in your room to decide where and if you would like to have a window, in your room. Because as you can see, if you put too many items, you pretty much only have the opportunity to show your decorations and your furniture on those two walls. This is like a lost opportunity. You can decide not to put any windows in your room, but if you do; I think I would like to include and nice bright window, then you have to think strategically where it will fit. For example, here I think. This is already too small. I'm thinking of this French style window that looks like a door that will be on this side of the wall. Well, I'm going to put it on a separate layer and go ahead with it and then see how it goes, then I'm going to decide whether I'm leaving it or not. At this stage, I'm pretty happy with my design. I'm going to go ahead and merge the sketch together. I can also rename it. Let's recap for this lesson. Always do the rough sketch it's going to be super-helpful. Use contrasting colors to see things better. When in doubt, add any new items on a new layer, then you can merge them afterwards. Use the move tool to decide the position and the size of the items at this stage. Now, we can see that the isometric rooms starts to gain some shape and starts to look better. In the next lesson, we will discuss how to draw a round objects. How did they actually fit in the isometric perspective? 10. Round Objects: In this lesson, I wanted to show you a trick on how to draw round objects in your isometric illustration, such as mirror, or round carpets, or round tables. In the isometric perspective, we speak about the so-called isometric circles. An isometric circle becomes an ellipse, as you can see in the picture. You didn't have to worry about it because it was in procreate. We will be able to achieve this shape with the help of the isometric grid. Create a new layer, and now, I will make sure that it has the drawing assist. Again, I'm making either use of this isometric grids that will help us to put everything into the correct proportions. I would like my coffee table to be here, and more or less in the place of the table. With the help of my isometric grid, I will create a surface. So let's imagine that this could be my coffee table, but it's not going to have a round shape. We start with a rectangular or with a square shape with the help of our isometric grid. Also let's imagine that I want to mirror on this wall, but again, before I turn it into a round shape, I'm just going to create a shape that is, let's say rectangular again, this could be my mirror here. Okay. So right now, I have to scale it, and this could be my coffee table, but I want it to be round, and this could be my mirror, and again, I want it to be round. I create a new layer. Let's take a contrasting color. Again, with the quick shape, I will create a perfect circle, placing one finger so that it snaps into the perfect circle shape. Now I'm going to use the Move Tool by hitting the arrow. Normally, the type of move options that you would have by default is the free form, maybe you have it on magnetic. If you haven it, free form magnetic, you can change the size and the shape stays the same. If you get rid of the magnetic, you can change it into an oval and so on. But this still does not solve our problems, so to say. For us to make use of this round shape in this isometric perspective, we need to go to the start. So I'm clicking the Start in here. What I'm going to do now, let me make this smaller, you see that this circle also has four points just like a rectangle or just like a square, 1,2,3,4. The ones that are in the middle we ignored. Now, those four points need to go exactly into the points of that skeleton. It's crazy to say that we just create it. Do you see that? So we were again ignoring the middle points. We were only taking the corner points, 1,2,3,4, and we put them exactly into our skeleton, so to say. Let's do this again, but I'm going to create another layer so that I can move it freely. Let's create another circular shape like that. Snap it into a perfect circle, use the Move Tool, move it closer to the skeleton, the framework of our mirror, take one corner here. It doesn't have to be super perfect. The second corner, the third corner, and the fourth corner. Let's turn off our skeleton. Now in our isometric room, we have a perfect shape, print a mirror, and a perfect shape for our round coffee table. Now we'll work on my sketch a little bit further. My coffee table and my mirror, they are both ready. I'm switching on the main sketch layer so that I can see how those two new items fit into my new room. Well, actually this is the so-called ugly phase. Do not get discouraged if your schedule doesn't look attractive enough. It's a very important stage of planning our illustration. From now on, things will start to look even more beautiful. Trust me on that. In the next lesson, I would like to finalize the line work for those main items in the room. 11. Main Linework: Before we start adding on more and more items into our room, it is very important to clean up this ugly stage sketch, and to finalize the line work for the main furniture and the main items in the room. If you are happy with your sketch at this stage, you can hide your notes again. Then if everything is okay, if you don't feel like moving around more things, you can merge them together to one sketch part. Then you're going to be drawing on top of it. I'm selecting the color of my line work. The way I'm going to proceed is I will be drawing each of those items on a separate layer. I will be drawing them in isolation. Then the last stage of this process you're going to see will be, again, to use the move tool and to move those things around, so that everything makes sense and you're happy with the size, and with the placement of those objects. Then the next stage will be to erase the bits of the sketch, so that the picture is so complete and there's no line work. For example, if this chair being mixed up with the line work of the plant. But let me show you that in practice now. The first thing that you want to do is to reduce the opacity of your ugly sketch layer. Now it's all about tracing those lines of your main furniture. You can also use the quick shape for example, for the perfect straight line. You just draw a line and then you hold your Apple pencil at the end on the screen, so to say, and wait for it to snap into the perfect line. The same with the circle. For the mirror for example, you can also do that with quick shape. You can keep on adding some details at this stage. Now off to the table, you will see also that I'm adding more details. It is actually highly encouraged at this stage to add some extras. Also to draw a little bit from your imagination, because this will make your illustration look much more unique. At any point you can again drag Pinterest to the other side of the screen and look at your reference photos. You will see when I draw the window that I decided to put in some curtains. I saw some curtains also on my reference photo, but I drew them actually out of my memory. I didn't look at any particular reference. I just allowed my hands to draw it for me. For more, let's say elaborate pieces like for this relaxation chair, where the construction of the chair is a little bit more complicated. I felt more confident having my reference photo, and I was also able for the pillows for example here, I was able to refer back to the rough sketches that I have done. This is what I promised to you that the initial research, the sketching as warm-up exercises, this has definitely paid off for me because I was able to reuse my ideas and the whole drawing process was much more easier, and it was faster. I kept on adding the details at this stage. Here, I wanted to show you how to deal with the shapes that maybe you're not really sure of yet. For example, I'm trying to draw this chill chair over here. I already added in a lot of details here. But also side of the leg or the bottom part of this chair is quite intricate. All those elements over here. I will switch off the sketch so that you can see it better. It collided with all the blankets that keep falling off this chair, just like my initial scheduled here. Just the shape is a little bit different. The way I do that is I design or I sketch the bottom part of this chair on a separate layer. Right now I'm going to switch off the table too so that you can see better. Right now, I'm only working on finalizing the shape of this bottom here, because in itself it's also quite elaborate. There will be some spikes at the back as well. It's also like an oval shape. I'm adding all the elements that make it look more three-dimensional. Once I'm happy with this quite intricate shape, I can go back to add on the chair. What I'm going to do, I will decrease the opacity of the main chair to see if there's anything that I have to erase on this one. Alternatively, I can also do it the other way round. I can reduce the opacity of my element here to recognize all the items that have to be in the foreground. I think this is going to be easier. Then when I'm on the correct layer, making sure I go to my eraser, hard air brush, and I go in and I delete. I erase all the elements that should not be there. I want this blanket to be in the foreground. This blanket here stays. But I have to erase some elements of the base of the chair so that it all looks correct in a three-dimensional. Now I think everything is set. What I'm going to do now is go back to the full opacity, just making sure that both layers are on the max. Now I'm ready to merge it. Then I continue with the sketching, adding even more details. Again, very important. Keep every object, every piece of furniture on a separate layer, so that you can move it around more freely in case you change your mind. Drawing the carpet, adding in some fringe on both sides. Keep on adding those details. They will add even more interest. You can also resort back to your notes. Maybe you have taken notice of some interesting patterns, but alternatively you can use the stamp brushes with the patterns, that I included in the brush set. Here you see how I use it on a carpet, the flower like pattern. I basically used the whole stamp onto the surface of the carpet. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to change the color of this pattern just for the time being. I will bring it back to brown later on. I just want to erase those bits of the carpet or the pattern in this case, that are outside of the carpet outline. I'm going to put this pattern underneath the main carpet lines, and then I will proceed to erase the bits that I do not need. In the end, I will also reduce a little bit the opacity of this pattern so that it's not too overwhelming. At this stage, you might see that everything starts to merge together. I am going to get rid of the furniture sketch. I don't think I need this anymore. Our task for now will be to finalize, bring a couple of lines where those items are standing. This is still our chance to put things a little bit further or closer to the wall to move them around. An example is this chair which I have on the separate layers. Right now it's very easy to use the move tool, and to put it slightly to this side, for example. I'm happy with the composition of my room. Now, I will have to fix some conflicts in between the objects. For example, I need to erase. I think I'm going to start with this carpet, because the carpet has a very distinctive pattern. I need to erase some of that carpet. If everything is in the same color, you can still do that. You can go to your erase tool. Make sure that you have the hard air brush. Make sure that you're on the carpet layer and you can still erase parts of the carpet. The danger of having everything in one color again, is that you might be overlooking some things. I can also make sure that my carpet is on alpha lock, swiping with two fingers to the right. Then you see this mesh which tells you that this is an alpha lock. I'm going to fill out this carpet temporarily only. Fill layer with another color. Then this way I will be moving around and I will be erasing bits of pieces, with the help of a different color, so that I make sure that there are no two items on one another. That there is no conflict between the line works. There's one last thing that we have to do. You might have noticed that at the beginning of my sketching. I have reduced the opacity of the cube shape over here because I wanted to see everything clearly. Now, I'm going to go back with the opacity. What I'm going to do is also I'm going to alpha lock it and change the color of my cube to this pink neon color, or whatever color you choose so that I see everything okay. You're going to see that again, there's an overlap here. Part of the corners of the room should not be visible. The method that I showed to you here is pretty much to make up your mind than to destroy it. For example, let me show you the carpet, so that I can see my yoga mat and parts of the chair and parts of the coffee table, it was pretty much like damage control. I was erasing parts of the carpet and now this carpet is lost forever. I did that because I was very much decided about the shape of my sketch. I'm not going to be making any further changes, and I didn't want to create any extra layers to deal with that. I did that, I erased bits of that sketch and I'm going to move on. But with the cube, the story is a little bit more different. I want to still keep, preserve the shape of this cube in case I want to resize it or in case I want to make any further changes on it. I think this shape of the room is too important to erase bits of it. You could make a duplicate and then keep it for the future. That's one option. But another option that I wanted to show you which you can also perform as you work on your sketch, is to use a mask. I will show you this technique in the next lesson. 12. Using Masks: In this lesson, I wanted to show you how to use a mask so that we can work on the shape of our room without destroying it, but at the same time being able to hide some of the elements of this cube. Let me briefly tell you about the benefits of using masks in Procreate. Masks allow you to edit without destroying the original. For example, erasing is possible and you can still leave the original layer intact. A mask is attached, so to say, to the original layer. We will see that in practice. You don't have to really worry about it right now. But it's really worth remembering for the future that in order to erase something when you want to use a mask is to use the black color. Black hides so our black will be able to erase some bits. We will see that in practice. You can click on the layer with your cube, and then you can select Mask. Now in order to hide parts of your lines you will use the black color. You can go back and then by double-tapping or by taking it to the rightmost lower corner you can select your black, and then you can use any of the brushes. I think I'm going to use the hard airbrush for this purpose because it also acts as an eraser in this case. I'm switching on right now exactly all the items that I have sketched before, and I will be working on the masks. In case I change my mind, I can always get rid of this mask and come back to the original. With my black color with my brush, I will be identifying those bits that needs to be hidden, and then using my brush and the black color, you see when I use black, I start to hide parts of those lines. On the layer mask, you see exactly the strokes that I've done. I'm going to go ahead now, and with that mask, hide all those items, all those elements, all those lines that shouldn't be in the view. Things start to look even better. In the next lesson, we will be adding some final details and decorations and we will keep styling our rooms so that it looks even more attractive. 13. Styling The Room: In this part of the class, we will keep on adding new items and decorations into our room. This is quite an interesting part, quite an interesting stage because with all the small details that you keep adding into your design, you're able to tell a story, show your personality, you're able to create an illustration that is truly unique and very eye-catching. I'm going to create a new layer for all those new items. Here, you will see that those are all the elements that I've drawn before. I'm very happy with the outcome, so I don't feel like changing anything to this linework. That's why I'm going to tap, and I will flatten it. I can rename it to main sketch, and I will choose my contrast color. It's alpha locked. I'm going to fill this main sketch later with a different color so that on a new layer, I can keep on adding all those new items. The recipe to finish the sketch is absolutely the same. You keep on adding new items. I highly recommend that each of those items are on a separate layer because if you create, for example, decoration number 1 and then decoration number 2, it's just an example, having them on separate layers will help you to move them around or change the size of them. Then you will see that once I am happy with everything, everything has the right size and the right placement, I will be able to merge those layers, and eventually, I will be able to put everything into one layer for the main sketch. But before that, I want to keep everything on separate layers so that I can get rid of items in an easier way, and I can move them around better to check if my composition is good enough for me. I proceed, and I start adding some objects from my imagination or from my sketchbook, like the watering can. For the majority of those shapes, they don't have to be built with the isometric grid anymore. You just have to make sure that they are really standing on the ground or on the shelf leg in this case. Plants always make great decorations. In case you do not see things clearly, you can always change the color of one of the objects so that you can see better then erase the lines that you do not need. How to draw the books, for example, on the bookshelves items that have straight lines again. I will explain this to you briefly at the end of this little bit, showing my process. Bear with me. Keep adding all the small details, as many details as you want. This will make your illustration look super, super interesting. It's not only the object, it's also all the beautifications like some patterns or some icons, they will look really, really good. The shelves are the best place to put a lot of items. My piece of advice here is to have a few shelves. It can either be a bookshelf like in my case or in case you have some space on the wall, then put some floating shelves above the table or about the bed because this is your opportunity to fill it up with the items. You can also look at the spaces on the floor that have a little bit of room. Like I put some plants behind the chair because there was some room. Make sure you do not leave any gaps on the wall. Some options to put things on the wall are, of course, frames with some paintings or some pictures. You can also do any other decorations like wall hangings, for inspiration you can always go back to Pinterest or checkout Instagram accounts to research interesting wall decorations and always result to your sketchbook or if you find anything interesting, mark it in your sketchbook for future reference. In case you did not make it for this illustration you can always use it for the next illustration. As you go, you erase the lines that are not necessary. Since every object is on a separate layer, it will be very, very easy to move it around and to resize it. For the cup on the table, I draw it directly on the table, but if it's easier for you to see, you can also draw something outside of the room somewhere to the side and then use the move tool to drag it to the spot where it should be. Ideal is to add a little bit of interest and some fun is to include some pets, some animals, some living creatures in your space, or even people. It all depends on how you feel regarding your drawing skills. Now, just as I've mentioned, for the majority of the items that you're drawing, you're not going to be needing the isometric grid with the exception of those bits that have straight lines. In this slide, I'm showing you, you can see the isometric grid its in white, and by drawing those lines, I'm showing you how the shape of the frame or the shape of the world hanging, how it follows this grid. The trick I think basically is to look for any straight lines and to make sure that those straight lines follow the isometric grid. Have a look at how I do it with the frame, the picture on the wall, and the upper line goes along the grid, and then all the sidelines are just straight lines from the top to the bottom, they also follow the isometric grid. I hope you can see that. Here I wanted to show you how I draw books and a few other items on the bookshelf. If you look closely, you will also see that we have some straight lines in here, and again, what it means is that it has to follow the isometric grid so that everything is in the isometric perspective. The whole part of the book where you see the title, the whole length of the book is a straight line from top to bottom, and then the width of the book also follows at 30 degrees angle to the side so that everything is kept within the isometric perspective. I drew here a few lines in different colors so that you can see better how the shape of the book can match the isometric grid. Definitely a tip, make sure that your isometric grid is on. I don't think that the layer has to be on assist. I didn't draw it on assist. It doesn't have to be a perfectly straight line. I actually wanted it to be not super straight, to have this feeling as if it was really drawn by hand, so my isometric grid was just there for me to see, but the layer was not on assist. In this way, I was able to draw the books in the isometric perspective. In this way, my entire sketch is ready, all the details are added. The last thing I'm going to do is to change the color of the entire line, work back to my brown instead of pink, and then I'm going to merge all the layers and turn it into one layer with the entire sketch together. In this way, we're also ready with the linework. That means that we can start the coloring. In the next lesson, we will do the base coloring. 14. Base Colors: For some of us, this is the most favorite part of the illustration creation, mainly the coloring. In this lesson, we will be coloring the base of our illustration. You just have to make sure that your line work is really finished and you are done adding in all the details. I already chose my color palette. However, the work is not done. There's still tens of ways in which you can color your illustration. The way I like to go about this is to create a few thumbnails. If you've never created thumbnails before, then I highly recommended that you try it out and you see if you like this technique for the future. In this slide here, you see the thumbnails that I prepared all of them based on this one single color palette that I set aside for this project. You see that the colors are pretty much the same, but you can really interpret them in a completely different way. The first one, for instance, the leaves, all the plants are not the usual green, but they are rather, I chose the orange tones, rust red, and mahogany browns. Whereas the one that you see to the right side has maybe the usual way that people go about when they start coloring the plants, because the plants over there are more greenish. Play around with your color palettes. That would be my suggestion. Try out some combinations that are not obvious. For example, if you have green in your color palette, make one version with the plants that are green. But make at least one version where the plants have a different color to see if you like the effect. Try to get a good balance between the dark tones and the bright tones and do not forget about white. I think that the white color is your secret weapon. It can really make an illustration look better. Try to incorporate white in your illustration as well. I created my thumbnails and Procreate. It was very easy to use my color palette for this purpose and do the experiments. Then I copied this one thumbnail and I went ahead, created a new layer and I pasted it in. When I make it visible, you will see that my thumbnail is somewhere in the corner of the illustration. You can use your thumbnail in this way. You don't have to. You can skip that. But if you have a really good thumbnail, you can even go ahead and then hold it and choose the colors that are in the thumbnail. One option would be to take the colors from your color palette. Another one would be to prepare them in your thumbnail and then take the colors directly from your thumbnail. That's one option. Now, it's your turn. Experiment with your color combinations and try creating a thumbnail. You can also post your thumbnails into your project gallery. We would love to see it. Another thing that I would like to mention is that you do have your color palette. The options seem to be limited. However, you can choose any of the colors for your coloring. Let's create a new layer so that I can show you what I mean. Let's leave this brush on. One option is just to use this color as it is in your color palette. However, it's good to take desaturated version of this same color, slightly darker versions of this color. In this way, you might think that this color palette is actually limited, but it's might turn out that it's limitless. Because for every single of those colors, for example, this green, you can still move within this spectrum here and add variations of this color, but you stay so to say it was in the family of this color. In this way, if you're not going to be adding any new colors here, but you're going to stick to the colors in your color palette, you will just change the saturation or the brightness versus the darkness of those colors. Your whole piece will be much more consistent because you will stay within the same color family so to say. Now, we proceed in the following way. For your color work, you have to create layers that will be underneath your main sketch. You create a new layer. The strategy that I would recommend for you here is to cluster or to group, similar colors or similar objects together. In this piece, I will start with the plants, I will go to my thumbnail, and I will select the color that I chose for my plants. I will make sure that I'm coloring only on this layer. There are a few brushes that I recommended to you that are good for coloring. There's gloaming, quoll, and gouache and also Nikko Rull. You might, of course, be using different types of brushes. Those are just the ones that I really like. I will start with the gloaming brush and I keep switching back and forth and seeing what effect I like most. This is pretty much my personal way of working. I like to put in my color in a pretty, let's call it messy, way without minding the borders. For starters, you can also see that I really like brushes with some texture. You can leave this in this messy style. Especially when you zoom out, you will not really see, maybe a little bit here, that it's so messy. The way I'd like to proceed now is to switch off this Cube Coloring and to grab my Eraser tool, the Hard Airbrush, and now I'll just clean up this coloring a little bit by getting rid of the paint that went out of the edges. One obvious advantage of having similar objects in the same layer, grouping them in this way, is that in case you change your mind about the color, can Alpha lock it. You can change basically by filling the layer of the color very easily and all of those items will be edited at the same time. You can keep the color, but you can edit all those objects on one layer by going to Adjustments and playing a little bit with the brightness or with the saturation of your color. In this way, I will color the rest of the illustration. I will be coloring it in with any of the coloring brushes, and then I will be using the eraser to refine the edges. Right now, I created a new group for those layers because the coloring layers are the ones that are always the biggest in number. I like to keep many layers when it comes to coloring. With the sketch you have noticed, I told you, okay, refine and merge. Do not have too many layers with the line work. It's easier to do changes on the line work or to add some extra things or to erase some extra things. But it's not as easy to tackle an illustration after some time, one week later, one month later, to go in to change the color. It's way easier to change the color in case you change your mind, or maybe you're doing an illustration for the client and they ask you for a completely different color. It's way easier when you have those separate layers. Because then you can just go ahead and for example, for the plants, you can turn them to green if the client, for example, doesn't like the leaves in brown. That's why it's a good practice in my opinion, at least for the coloring, to keep as much as you can on a separate layer, and also to attempt to group certain things. Let me recap for you. Color all your objects. Erase any bits that are outside of the lines especially if it doesn't look too good. Clean it up. Groups similar colors or similar objects on one layer because it will be easier to change them or to edit them in the future in case you change your mind. Choose any colors from the color palette that you selected, and play around with different variations of your color palette. Stay within the color spectrum. For example, make your colors lighter or darker or increase the saturation or decrease the saturation. Have one last look at your base colors and make any adjustments before you move to the section where you add in the shadows and the highlights. In the next lesson, we will be adding in some shadows and creating more depth for our illustration. 15. Thumbnails: Hi guys. In this video we will be talking more about thumbnails, and how to test your color palette using those thumbnails. This is an extra video material that has been created after this class was published. I got quite a few questions about, how I use those thumbnails to test my colors. So I decided the best way to proceed is to create this extra video material, so that you can see how I go about it. In the previous lesson, we were dealing with the base color and I was showing you a few thumbnails that I did to test my color palette. As you know, the color palette gives you lots of opportunities. You can play around with the colors and use them in quite unexpected way. But you do not want to end up with nearly being done with your illustration and realizing that you don't like the way you combine the colors. Creating thumbnails is a very good way to test your color palette before you actually start painting. It will save you some time in case you're not happy with the end result. For me to show you how I used the thumbnails, I chose this old illustration of mine, from one of the Instagram challenges. This is the final colors for the illustration. I'm going to hide it right now. In order to do effective thumbnails, you already have to decide on your background color. This is very important. If you start playing around with the colors, and then you choose the background afterwards. You might not get the right contrast or the entire color combination might not be as fluttering as you think. Number one is to really just start with the background color. You can either create it on a separate layer. Of course this layer has to be right at the bottom. If this is your background color, then go ahead and you can create it in a separate layer or you can just choose your background color by clicking on background color and then selecting your color. Then this color will be locked in here. That's the component number one. The component number two is the actual Lineart. I'm going to swipe to the left and replicated it. Then I'm going to just rename that this is my original, just in case. I'm going to hide it. Now I am done and I have a Lineart layer that I can pretty much destroy. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go to this arrow to the Move tool, but I have to make sure that I'm on the original layer for starters. Then the arrow, and you will see that by taking one of those points, for example, the one at the top right, I can resize my Linework basically, and I can make it one fourth of this Canvas. I decide that I will try to make four different variations. Deselecting, going back to the layers, swiping again to the left, duplicating it. This extra layer is selected. I go back to the Move tool, to the arrow over here, and I drag it on top. Now I can go back to my layers, and I can merge those two layers. Those are those two layers, they're merged right now I want to save some time. I'm going to swipe again to the left, replicate again, again the arrow, and I swipe it to the other side. The outer slide that I showed you the isometric room, I did it in exactly the same way. We can pinch it again, of course, leaving the original intact. We have four frameworks, to play around with our colors. Now, underneath it, clicking on the plus sign I create an extra layer. This is basically, where I'm going to play around with my coloring. For the brushes, going to the Brush tool, I simply recommend that you stick to the hard air brush. At this point, you're really don't have, to be super mindful of staying within the lines. It's just about producing blobs of color, so that you can blink your eyes a little bit, you can zoom in, zoom out and you can see in general, if you like the scheme. Of course, the only thing that this taken for granted is again, the background color and also the color of your Linework. For this particular piece, that's just another example. I want to have a very subtle effect, so to say, very vintage looking. Now, let's go back to the Palettes and we can stick to the Tea orange palettes. That's going to be my default. I like to use the classic view because choosing my colors here in the main palette, I can still play around with their saturation and brightness and darkness. What I'm going to do now is to play around with the colors and in the end, create four variations that differ enough, so that you have different variations and then I can choose the one that I like the best. This is the outcome of my crazy experiments. I try to use all the colors in different combinations, so that her shirt is different on every piece. I also played around with the obvious colors for the leafs versus slightly more interests colors. I also have one piece that I really like. So maybe I will redo it one day. That is a little bit monochrome. The only thing I've done here in the palate was I chose one of the yellows. Then over here, in this section under the Classic view, I was also moving around, so that I do not only use the colors that are here safe than the color palette, but I also use different variations. Therefore, I stay within the same color family. I have all those crazy combinations. I can leave it as it is or even go to Palettes over here, and by clicking the plus sign, I can create a completely new color palette, if I want to. Another thing I can do, is to go back to the Layers. Right now I have nothing to lose. So I'm just going to pinch together those two palettes, swipe to the left and duplicate it. Then by either cutting it out or erasing the rest, I can keep the one color palettes that I like the most. Let's say that, this is my favorite color palette and I would like to keep it. I can go to the Select tool over here. I can select this entire piece with the colors and the Lineart, swiping with my three fingers down, a menu pops up where I can just cut it out. Then I can hide the rest, I can have this layer. I can again turn back my original Linework layer in this one, when it's selected, I go to the Move tool, I can minimize it a little bit, maybe put it somewhere in the corner, and in this way, if I don't want to use the Pallets section, I can use this Palette directly from the Canvas, so to say. So next time I color, I'm going to create a new layer under the original line work layer. Then I'm going to choose my main brush for a painting. Then I can go back and basically work on this thumbnail by holding my finger on it, and dropping the color. Then I can do the proper coloring, using all the colors from the thumbnail, so to say. So if you like this technique, you can also use it while you create your Isometric room. It's always good to try out a few variations on this thumbnail. You will see that the work that you do later on is going to be more pleasant, well soft, and you will basically end up with a result that you are really happy with because you gave it a little bit of planning and thinking. Now we can really move on, to the next lesson, which is about shading and adding shadows. 16. Shadows: In this lesson, I wanted to teach you how I add shadow. You can do it basically in two ways. I will show each of those two techniques separately. Let's start with the first one. The first technique that I would like to show you is adding shadows by selecting just a darker tone from the color that we're dealing with right now. For starters, we could tickle the plants. I'm going to make sure that I have the plant layer identified. What I'm going to do is create a layer that is directly above this layer. Those brushes for coloring, like I've mentioned before, they are semi-transparent. That means they are perfect for layering. I will choose Quoll for this purpose. I'm going to zoom into my plans and then I will select by just holding in one space the color of the plant. Then I will go to the color section. For this purpose, I like to stay in the classic view. It's just my personal preference. It's easier for me this way. I'm going to turn the brightness of my color down and maybe the saturation a little bit. It's a matter of experimenting. So right now, from this base color that I had here, I was able to arrive at the darker and less saturated color, that could be a very nice shadow. Again Quoll. You can also play with the opacity of your brush, if you do not want your shadow to be too thick or too dark. Make sure that your brush is not too big. Now, we will go to the places of intersection, for example, those two leaves. This leaf is in the foreground. So the second leaf to the left, this part should have a shadow that is being cast by this leaf. I'll go ahead. In a very freestyle way, I will add the shadow of the Quoll brush. This is one of the newer brushes in Procreate 5. I think it behaves quite like a watercolor brush. You can, of course, layer it even more and add even more depth. But I am not changing the color. Then just like with the coloring, I have to refine the edges. So when I'm done, I will erase those parts that I do not want to have. In this way I'm going to move and add a little bit more depth to each of the leaves where I think the shadow could be. I also remember where my light source is. I have a window here. So I assume that anything that is more to the right side will be more in the shadow. Then when we deal with the highlights, anything that is more to the left side, so from the side of the window will have more highlights. The second technique is using the original color. Let's maybe tackle this for the leaf here. But instead we will use a clipping mask and we will set it on multiply. I'm going to select the darkest brown of this plant. It's the same plants layer. I'm going to merge those shadows together, create a new layer. Select "Clipping Mask", and then selecting the end. I have different modes that I can choose regarding the layers setup in the colors. I am looking for a multiply. So now it's set on multiply, the letter change to m. I still have the Quoll brush. This time I don't have to look for a darker tone. Multiply automatically will make the previous layer look darker. On top of that, since it's a clipping mask, if I go outside of those lines, I will not be drawing on anything that is outside of the color, which is very convenient. I can stay within the shape and I can keep adding my shadows all the time, remembering about number one, the light source. Then number two, which leaves are in the foreground and which leaves are in the background. For instance, I might have a little bit of shadow here because this leaf here is in the foreground. Maybe this leaf over here has a shadow because there's this leaf that is a little bit above it. You keep playing around with this brush that has a beautiful texture, by the way, like watercolor. You keep adding those shadows. From my experience, the more shadows you add, the more different layers you add. Specially with the brushes that like layering. Like Quoll for instance. You will have even more depths. See all the beautiful textures that you can create. Our row has gained more depth right now. The only and pretty much the last thing that we're going to do is to add the highlights. Then our illustration's going to be complete. 17. Highlights: We're pretty much ready to finish our illustration because after the shadows, the highlights is the very last thing that we need to do, and then the illustration will be done. Just like with adding the shadows, I can show you two techniques, how to add highlights to your illustration. Let's start with the first one. The first technique is for those of you who like a little bit more control over their layers and they don't want their highlights to be too flat. Just like with the shadows we will be using clipping masks. Let's start again from the coloring section with our plants. We create a new layer, and just like previously, we select and make a clipping mask out of it, so that this layer above is connected to our plant layer. Instead of Multiply which we have chosen for the shadows, we choose Screen. It works exactly the same way, just like with Multiply. We don't need to identify manually, so to say. Any, lighter color we might, but the Screen will do that for us. From the plant, I like to select the lightest color, the lightest and the most saturated color, and just like with the shadows, we got to remember about our light source, which is here on the left side, it's coming from the window. Still using the cool brush, relatively small, and I'm adding in my highlight to the left, because this is where my light would fall. What screen basically does, is from this base color, it makes it much, much, much lighter. You're still retaining the depth of the color, like all the shading is preserved. You only make those layers of colors lighter. Another way to do that is to close the coloring section and to create a layer right above our coloring, to choose basically white, this is the easy version. I would say this is the lazy version, and to be honest, I really like to perfect my illustrations. I tend to go into a lot of detail and I spent quite a lot of time perfecting my illustrations. Oftentimes, I combine both. First of all, I do the highlights using the screen layer, and then on top of that, I use the white, especially if the brushes that I have here, if they are semi-transparent and they allow this layering. Let me show you what it looks like with white. This time we don't have any clipping mask. That means when we draw, we will be going outside of our shapes. So here we have to be a little bit more careful. Maybe I will even switch to, gouache would be good. I'll go back to gloaming and maybe reduce the opacity. If it's too little, I can always pump it up. See, let me Zoom in. That was the highlight that we created with screen, and white adds even more depths to our highlight. This is walking the extra mile and I use it quite sparingly, and I usually use it on top of my screen highlights. The more layers like that, you're going to add, look here, for example, this leaf, that was our base color. The base color was already done with a brush that is very textured, semi-transparent, and allows this layering. So there is a richness of textures and of colors. Then, again with the same brush that allows so many textures and layers, we've done the shading. You can see it here to the right. Then we've added some extra highlights with this cream layer over here, and now we're adding even more depths by simply choosing a white color and the same textured brush to add even more dimension. But in this way, I think this illustration is much more rich and much more interesting. What I will do right now is the same recipe. I will go ahead and forward the coloring section. I will add the screen layers and work on my highlights, and then when I'm done, I will go back to this layer that I created on top. Let me rename it, just white highlight. I will do both highlights, because I want even more dimension to my illustration. We are done with the coloring of our illustration. Optionally in the next lesson, we will look into some final touches for our illustration. 18. Final Touches: There is still some final touches that you can carry out so that your illustration is truly complete. You can still add a bit of more texture. For example, when you look into our brushes folder, you'll see that I've added the paper texture. I've also added to grid. In case you would like to add this grid just make sure that the grid is behind the room. So between the backgrounds and the coloring, you can choose this off-white color, for example. Changing also the size of your grid, you can add this element here so that your illustration looks a little bit more interesting as a background. This is one option. Let's hide it. Another option is to create the layer right on top, to select the color of the background, to go to our brushes and to select the paper texture to make it big enough. We do not see it yet, but we will apply this paper texture to the entire illustration. Now we will go to the layer and change to screen for example. In this way, the entire illustration, not only the background, but also see here, elements of our illustration. It's pretty, isn't it? They will get this paper like picture or texture all over so it will also look more interesting. Thank you for making it so far. My illustration is complete. You've seen how I transformed this isometric cube into a room design. I really can't wait to see your isometric rooms. So now it's your turn. Show us your final illustration. You can publish it here on skill share in Projects & Resources. You can also post it on social media. In case you want to do it on Instagram, make sure to find me. Here's my handle. Please use the hashtag, isometric magic so that I can see your works and I can feature you. In case you need some help with exporting your files both as a JPEG, PNG, but also as a process video join me in the next lessons where I will show you how to do that. 19. Exporting: Exporting your work from Procreate is very easy. You can do this in the following way. You go to this wrench tool in the left upper corner, then you click on "Share". You have a few different options here. The ones that I use on a regular basis is either exporting this illustration as a JPEG or as a PNG. Personally if I want a file in higher quality, I go for the PNG file. But JPEGs are also fine and they usually have a smaller size. So I export my illustrations using the JPEG when I'm about to post to Instagram. On top of that, you can go to video and you can export the time-lapse video of your process. Here's a recap for you. For the image, I would actually go with a JPEG. For a video, just bear in mind that when you do the export, you can either go for the full length or for 30 seconds. That means that 30 seconds will be somehow cropped. Thirty seconds is an option for those of you who would like to post on Instagram because Instagram has a time limit. I think a video for now, 2020, can be up to one minute. We're done. Congratulations. 20. Final Thoughts: Well done. You've made it all the way till the end of this class. You followed all the steps and you created your first, or maybe not first, your beautiful isometric illustration. Please remember to post your final illustration. You can also share the process with us in the project gallery here under this Skillshare class. If you're posting your work online, make sure to tag me, for example on Instagram, if you want to participate in the challenge and get a chance to be featured by me then tag me, and use the hashtag isometricMagic. If you liked this class, please do leave a review, and also follow me on Skillshare and on Instagram so that you can keep up to date with any upcoming classes. Thanks again, and I'll be seeing you soon.