Learn to draw with Concepts on Android and Windows tablets

1. Intro: Hello, my name is T0 and I'm a graphic designer, artist and urban sketcher. I make art with a variety of tools, including traditional as well as digital tools. In this course, I'm gonna give you a quick introduction to how you can create digital hand-drawn art with the concepts. Concepts is an app that's available on the iPad, android, and Windows. If you happen to be using the iPad, I recommend you check out the ADA cost that I have, which is concepts on the iPad. In this course, I will be using concepts on Android and on Windows. These are some of the artworks I have created over the years. I really love this app because it's simple to use. And I loved a vector art style. I loved the flat coloring style. And there are also many beautiful and wonderful texture brushes as well. In this tutorial, we are just going to be drawing something really simple just to get you familiarized with the digital art workflow. This is gonna be a very hands-on to Toro and I invite you to draw along with me. But at the end of the course, you should be familiar with the app and what concepts is capable of. So let's get started. 2. Tools Needed: The tools you'll need in order to follow along with this course would be the app, tablet and a stylus, profitably and active stylus. To find the app you can hit to their website, concepts dot APP, and on the website there will be links to different app stores where you can find an installed app. You can find an app from the app installs from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung. After you have installed the app, just open it and you should be presented with this screen where direst nothing because there is no artwork yet. Concepts is free to use. However, it's based on the freemium model, which is to say that certain tools and features are locked behind a paywall. So now let's tap on this probe button here. There are two ways to assess all the tools and features. The first way is to pay for a subscription model, which will give you team collaboration features as well. And since we don't need that, we will just go with one-time purchases. And the thing that I highly recommend you to get would be the essentials set. I cannot remember exactly how much this is priced at. It's probably around us tend to $15. So it's a onetime purchase and it's really worked on money. This will give you access to the tab and whole selection, transform tools, infinite layers. With the free version, you only get up to five layers. So this infinitely yours is very, very useful. And in this course we will be using more than five layers. And you also get more fall formats to export to, including PNG, which is a lossless file format. Even if you do not buy the essentials set, you can still follow along with the cost is just that there will be some situations where you will face limitations. For example, when I create more than five layers, you won't be able to do so. You can only make use of the five layers, starting with the SNR shows set first and after you are more familiar with the app, you can take a look at what other things you may want to buy, such as they are brushes. I have actually purchased almost all of their brushes because they are so good. Other than the app, you will need a tablet and a stylus for drawing. You can use a tablet that's running on Android or iOS on Microsoft Windows. And it would be great if your tablet actually supports and active stylus. And active stylus is append that can be detected by the tablet. So this allows you to rest your palm on the display while you draw and write. This, we will not introduce any stretch strokes. However, if you'll tablet doesn't support and active stall this. When you read a poem on a display, it's going to introduce straight strokes, such as these strokes that you see here. If your tablet does not support an active stylus, you can draw with concepts. You just need to buy a rubber tip stylus or a disk tips dollars. However, it is two pens that I have here. They are not going to be as accurate, compact to this active stylus, which also has tilt and prejudice sensitivity support, and also comes with one site button fall shortcuts. 3. What is Concepts: It is concepts. Concepts is essentially are vector illustration at what is vector. You can think of a vector as mathematical formula. So all the lines that you see here, the colors, the shapes on this are based on mathematical formulas. And the advantage or vector art is you can zoom in like all the way. And the artwork, we'll retain the sharpness. Here you can see as I zoom in all the way up the lines, osteo first shop for a really nice and I really liked the flat coloring style of this IP compared to non factor apps. When you zoom in other way, you will start to see pixelation with the line art. This is one advantage of vector art. You get to see like really precise or very sharp lines, very beautiful, flat coloring style. The file size for vector falls. First small. You can create a lot of artworks, many artworks, and it will not use up that much storage capacity on your device. Being able to create vector art is one of the main features of this app. The other feature that are really like is this ad has an infinite canvas. This illustration that I have here is actually off my neighborhood. And if I want to, I can continue to draw on and on and on. Because there is no limit to the size of this canvas. It's an infinite canvas. And when I want to save the file, well, it's really safe, but if I want to export the fall for sharing online, I can just zoom into whatever portion that I want to take a screenshot and share it online. Now, just because this app uses vector, doesn't mean that you cannot create textures. Actually, this app has very good textured brushes. This is a growing off my daughter. And for this drawing I used the pencil brush and the pastel brush. And you can see the lovely textures create that with the brushes. And again, this is Vector ops, so I can zoom in all the way and everything will be very sharp, very detailed. This other the three main features of concepts. It creates vector art. It has an infinite canvas and it has a lovely texture. Brushes. 4. User Interface: Let me introduce you to the user interface or concepts. This is how the UI looks on Android. It's going to look rather similar on Windows. This is the gallery page, and these are all the artworks that I have created over the years. You can use your fingers to zoom in and out to reduce or increase the size of the thumbnails. There are the different projects or folders on a site here. And when you tap on this plus button, you can create a drawing or you can create a new project or folder. There are reason that a plus button here for you to create a new drawing that's go into this artwork to have a look. Here we have the gallery button. Once you press this button, it's going to go back to the gallery. Sometimes I use that button to save my fault. Files are saved automatically, but sometimes I just want to make sure that it's really saved. So I press that fall to go back to the gallery page to see whether or not my fault is actually here. These are the tools located on the wheel. You can assign up to IT tools, and this would include the redo and undo button. For example, you can set all the eight twos to become pens and just choose a different color for each pen. You can enlarge the tool just by zooming in. You can reduce it by zooming out. You can move this will around just by tapping and holding on the will and just move it anymore. One, when you tap and hold, there will be another pop-up box that appears. This will allow you to change the wheel into a toolbar which will appear on the site of the tablet. In this case, I prefer to use the wheel to change the toolbar back into a we'll just happened Hold and drag it over to the circle icon and it will turn back into her will. Other UI elements that are on display would be the layers palette. Same thing you can tap on the layers palette, tap and hold and move the layers palette around. You can do a quick tap to collapse the layers palette. There is the sorting mode here, which is either manual or automatic. We have all these different layers here for welcome that I have created. On this side. I have seven layers here. And eyeball icon allows you to turn the visibility of the layer on, all off. You can tap here to get into the layers options where you can select the items on the layer. You can lock the layer, duplicate the layer, clearly layer much delay or DHL, or you can change the name of the layer. The slider here allows you to adjust the transparency of the year. So I have line art on this layer and when I reduce this to 0%, the line disappears. You can also do a quick swipe on the Layers palette to reduce the amount of space taken up by the Layers palette. Or if you wanted to just tap on it to turn off the layers palette. The other UI element is the precision palette. So under precision, you can choose to turn on or turn off the grid. You can have snapping or no snapping. And if you need help drawing lines, you can choose to turn on HDR arc order, guide the top right corner of the display, you can see the amount of Zoom, the rotation. This is the Import button, the Export button and Settings button. You can reset the zoom to a 100% and the rotation to 0 degrees very easily, very quickly just by tapping on the Zoom or rotation numbers here. So now it's at a 100% zoom. Let's take a look at the settings under Workspace, you can change the paper or the background, so you can choose between different textured paper or you can choose a colored background to draw on. I'm just going to choose plain white. Here. You can choose to grid. You can adjust the odd what size by default, this is set to infinity and you can change the units. You can just leave all of these at the PFAD values. Let's take a look at stylus section. This is where you can adjust the pressure sensitivity of the pen. If you are using an active scholars that supports 2D and pressure sensitivity, you can choose to enable or disable tilde and pressure. The most important setting here is actually under a finger action. By default, this should be set to do. However, when we are drawing, we really want to have palm rejection so that we can rest our palm on the display while we draw. Personally for me, I will set it to Penn converse. The other very useful functionality that you can choose these select. Since my pen has a site button, I can assign that a shortcut to the Cite button. In this case, I have pen Canvas, what a finger action. I'm going to choose, Select Folder, Cite, button, think are actually determines what's going to happen when you have your finger on the display. So I have set it to a pen converts. So when I use my finger to touch the display, you can see it's set to pan the canvas to move this around. Finger gestures are still supported. I can zoom in and out and rotate. For the Cite button I have set it to select. So when I press this button here, I can just draw a selection to select the items that I want on my artwork. Next, let's look at the settings under gestures. So I have all these settings and enable so I can use my two fingers to zoom in and out with snap to rotate. I can tap and hold. That's the amount of time you need to tap and hold. It's not a shortcuts for your finger actions. If you use two fingers to tap on the display, It's going to undo. And if you use three fingers to tap on a display, it's going to redo and their results. So this four-fingered tap, you can look through the different shortcuts and just assigned shortcut stood a different finger actions. There aren't many settings to go through, thankfully. And as you can see, the user interface design of this app is very clear and simple and minimal list. In the next lesson, I will show you how to backup your artworks. 5. Backup Your Art: In this lesson, I want to show you how you can backup your artworks on concepts, the backup system is different on Android versus Windows OS. So let's start with the Android version first. These are all the artworks I have on the tablet and they are all backed up online. But the backup system is not turned on by default. So to turn on the backup system, just go into the gallery pitch and tap on the Settings button. The Android version of concepts users google Drive to backup your fall. This means you will need to have a go drive in order to back up your files. So you just have to sign into your account and turn on backup to Google Drive. Now, there is something very important here under the instructions. Says that the app is going to backup your fall. However, the backup doesn't sync your drawings across devices. So what that instruction means is oil falls here are backed up. However, if you have another Android device and other Android tablet or phone, or the artworks here will not be sink to the other Android device. If you lose your tablet or your tablet is damage. All these files are still available on Google Drive. You can just import them back into your new tablet. You can tell your artworks are backed up when there is a little cloud icon just below your artwork. Now let's talk about how we can back up your artworks with concepts on Windows. To back up your files on Windows, you will have to rely on backup services or solutions that are available on Windows. Google Drive is one of them. Personally, I use Microsoft OneDrive because it also backs up my whole computer, not just a files with concepts. Same thing. Let's go into the settings and have a look. So currently I am saving all my concepts at works under OneDrive folder directory. This is an online folder. So if I go to one drives website, I will be able to assess those files as well. If you are using Google Drive to backup your Windows computer, you can set the gallery folder location to your Google Drive. The backup system on Windows is better compared to Android. With Android backup, there is only backup. There is no thinking across multiple devices. However, with Windows when you use Google Drive or when you use Microsoft OneDrive, there is backup and there is sinking of your artworks across multiple devices that are also using the same backup system, regardless of whether you are using concepts on Android or on Windows, just make sure you set up your backup system before you start drawing. 6. Let's Draw: Let's grow. Let's use the pen tool to draw a rectangular block here, this will represent the hotel. That's move this slightly up and draw the cutaway. We have a very simple drawing, a very geometric drawing. Just to get you started. Let's draw a palm trees. The palm trees are overlapping. The hotel behind we have another palm tree here. Maybe a shot one here. Next, I'm going to color it. To color it, I'm going to use the fill tool. Just tap on Monday or Tuesday or choose Fill. If the setting is set to automatic, which is the fought. Each time you select a tool, a layer will be created for debt tools. So for example, when I selected the few tool, a few layer was created. If I select the pencil tool, notice how the pencil layer is selected. And if I select a few two again, the LEA will automatically switch to the Field tool. And if I select the Pen tool, the layer will switch to the pen tool. When I'm drawing with a pen, I'm drawing on the penalty or if I'm using the feel drawing on the fuel ear, this is quite convenient. And this is very important to know because sometimes when you create a new layer, manually sorting, we'll switch to manual. If this happens and your select tool, you will not have the layer created automatically for you. You have to switch back. Having a salting set to automatic is very convenient and can really speed up your workflow. Let's select a color, maybe this yellow color for the beach. I'm using the fill tool. I'm going to just draw a rectangle here. Now, one of the downside of this app is it does not have a field bucket tool. So if you want to fill an area, you have to draw the shape. Next, let's slow that are darker, yellow color to draw it across section. Now, if the fill tool is above the pen tool, for example, if it looks like this, just drag it down beneath the pen tool. Again, make sure to salting is set to automatic. I want to extend a *****, maybe foot it up. So let me just create another field to here. No, I have two shortcuts, one for this color and one for this color. This will allow you to switch very quickly between different colors. For example, I'm using disk green to color the leaves. And I have another green, maybe a yellow green color some of the leaves as well. And I want to switch back to this green. I can do so very easily. This sketch is coming along quite nicely. Lattes. I have a gray wall grown that's neutral. That's for all this pot here. And notice as I draw, it covers the leaves because I'm painting on top of the leaves. One of the downsides of this app is there is no way for you to quickly move this gray beneath the leaves. So the mall tedious way is to create a new layer. Like what I've just done. This layer is for the for the ground, for the concrete ground, just tap, move this layer beneath. Use the selection tool here. There is no selection tool, just tap on it and choose the selection tool. Remember earlier you can go into this setting distalless here to set the selection tool Cite button. I'm going to use the selection tool to select this, ground, the concrete and drag it onto this layer which has beneath now in the gray shape is on its own layer. And notice the assaulting has switched from automatic to manual. Now we have the gray beneath the trees. Next, I want to color the building with white. So I'm going to tap on this color wheel here and select, let's not have white, Let's have 0. Now when I am coloring it, I'm coloring it on the layer with the gray shape. This is going to be on top of the gray shape. Next, I wanted to change this to blue because I want to maybe draw the windows. I'm going to draw the windows here. And I'm going to draw the windows here. 7. Erasing and Masking: Next, let's create smaller windows and all this big blue shape here, I will show you how to use the eraser and a hot mosque tool. Let's select the hot mosque and select a weird that you want, preferably one we've inlines. Let's just you find this into smaller sections. It may look like I am drawing white lines or maybe I am erasing the blue, but actually I'm applying masking over the blue. Notice as I draw. I did not erase the trees because the trees are on its separate the year. Alright, so this was raised all created with the hot Moscow T2. For the window here I will be using the eraser tool. Let's use slice. Slice is the eraser too. I wanted to have this at five points as well. That's urease slice. What happened there? It didn't work. If you find that you are you raising your line art or auto colors, make sure to check that you are erasing onto correct layer. And options here is set to the active layer, which means you are erasing on the active layer to currently, instead of all the layers that you raise. The difference between the eraser tool and hot Moscow T2 is eraser tool. You are actually creating separate shapes. You're slicing the shift who create smaller shapes. Let's say I wanted to change the color of the windows here. And that's just select the Windows. That's the selection tool. There are three options for the selection tool. That was the color picker, the Lasso tool, and the item picker. So make sure you choose the Lasso tool and make sure you are selecting items on the current layer and change it to the active layer here. If you find out you are selecting the trees and also the line art, just make sure you are when you're selecting on the active layer that's selected windows here and change it to a different color. Maybe let's change it to a rate. Notice what happened. I also selected the concrete on the ground, so that's undo. Let's use two fingers to undo. Just tap. I need to lock the concrete first, select a concrete audit ground, lock it. Now select the Windows. Notice IF was selected. But I need to lock the building as well. So lock this as well and select. These are some of the downsides with concepts. There are all limited selection twos. You really have to know what you are working with. But all this will become second nature as you get more practice, select the Windows and change it to some other color. Let's change it to rate. To change all the windows, you have to select all the windows because all these are different. Pots has changed this to a rate as well. For this area here, for the windows here, this was created with the masking tool, which is to say that this blue shape here is actually still in one shape. If I select the blue shape here, notice how this is a big shape. It's not divided into smaller shapes. So if I change the color here, I can change it very easily. Instead of selecting the windows one-by-one using the lasso tool. 8. Digital Art Workflow: When it comes to the digital workflow, there are many ways to achieve the same result. Whether you want to use the eraser on a hot mask will depend on which you prefer. Let's add more details to the sketch. I'm going to choose the pen tool again to draw something on top of the building. Be cost of salting is set to manual. I'm actually drawing on the color, the year. So if I turn off the color layer, this color layer, notice how they line up disappear soul. Let me just undo this and set my salting back to automatic. Now when I select the Pen tool, I will draw on the pen later. When I select the fill tool, I will draw on the fuel layer. Let's select the pen tool to draw on the penalty year. Now I feel like I want to add some water on the beach slow. I select the field who switch to a different color. And now I feel like I wanted to draw more details, more line art on the top. So let's change the pen tool again. I'm switched automatically to depend too. So this is quite convenient. Using the automatic sorting can be quite convenient. I was wanted to throw some trees here. Now I'm going to switch back to painting the water. So I use this FIO2. I want to maybe have lighter water here. That's drawl, something darker just to create the cross section. Okay, so we have some nice cross-section going on for this area here, I want to use the slides to erase just to give it this three-dimensional loop. Now let's go back to drawing by selecting the pen tool and zoom in. Let's have some chairs on the beach. I need to color this. Let's make this white. So I'm going to again use the fuel tool. As mentioned, that there is no field bucket, so I have to draw all these shapes. Another limitation of concepts is there is no multiply mode. So to add shadows, what I have to do is create a new layer. I'm going to call this layer Shadows. Not having the multiply mode is quite unfortunate because the multiply mode is pretty convenient to walk around to create shadows is this. Choose the fill tool. Select black, set the opacity to 50%, and just paint onto shadow layers. So let's see how this looks. Let's have to sunlight coming from this direction. Downside is at 2D shape. When you do that, you can see all these overlapping shapes. So if you want to draw are very nice shadow, you have to draw it with one continuous shape so that you won't have any overlapping elements. It is look slightly better. That's erase some of the shadows here because the leaves are lit by sunlight. So I have that you raise their selected I can just raised his potty here. You have to erase a continuous shape, for example, you cannot just erase in the middle of the shadow. You have to erase from outside into the shadow. This sketch is almost done. I just want to be at mall chairs on the beach. I'm going to use the selection tool to select mine OT for the chairs and it'll sort of shadows and also the colors. Let's see what happens when I use the Lasso tool to select. Move this around. I'm only selecting the shadow layer. So this means I have to set the lasso to select all the layers. And let's see what happens when I do that. Oops, I'm selecting the line art, the shadows and also the beach. So I need to lock the pitch down. Let's select Auto things that you. Don't want to select and lock it and try again. All right, so that's smoothness around. Okay, so now I have to correct things selected. Just tap on this duplicate button here and move it around. Before I do that, maybe I wanted to have the chairs on its own layer because maybe I don't want to have chairs at this pitch. So what I can do is I can create a new layer and drag this selection onto that layer. Oh, actually when you select your items and create a new layer, it's automatically pushed onto that new layer. Now when you tap on the eyeball, you can see the chair disappears. Another downside of this app is there is no grouping functionality. Most specifically, there's no grouping functionality for the Android and Windows version of this. You do have to grouping functionality with. The workaround to group is to place all those elements into its own separate layer. Now that I have the chairs on its own layer, I want to duplicate this. I can use the lasso tool, select the chairs. The other way to do it is to just tap on this layer and use the selection tool here, which will select all the items on the layer, in which case there's only this little item here. So it will just select that duplicate and move this to here and tap away. Now if you want to do the same thing again and press tap on deselect, it will now select both items. So if you want to just select unshare now you have to use the lasso tool. Next, I want to make this beach small, dangerous. I'm going to draw a shock in the water. So to do that, I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to select the fill to change the color to it is gray color. I'm going to zoom in here all the way. This is a vector app. You can zoom in all the way and everything will still look very sharp. For a nice shot here. I just wanted to add the fin of the shock that's at some white site. This looks quite nice. It looks very dangerous. Let's rename the layer, call it shock. Now one quick way to see you-all growing is to double-tap on this Zoom button here. And it will go back to 100%. If you have your OT like this, it's rotated. You can double-tap on the rotation button here. And it will again automatically rotate it to 0 degrees and tap here and double-tap here. It will go back to 100% zoom. Next, I feel like maybe I shoot at some sin here. I can just maybe just select the same color as the earlier. Unfortunately, for the Android version of concepts, there is no recently used colors, so you have to remember the color that you used earlier. So let me just draw this part here. And maybe here as well, make sure you are coloring on the correct layer. So I'm not coloring onto correctly or I have to undo and go back to the field later. Now I want to erase this part here, so I've just selected the eraser or the slice tool, and notice nothing happens. That's because the colors were locked earlier. In order to erase the lock layers, I have to ignore the lock. Just type on this option here to ignore the lock. And now I can erase the lobbed toddlers. Currently there is a mixture of locked and unlocked items. So if you want to unlock everything, you have to select everything and unlock to do that, just use the selection tool, select lasso, and make sure to include locked layer. This will allow you to select everything including locked layers. And type on this lock button here to unlock. Now odd items on locked. This sketch is done. The last thing I want to do is to create an empty layer right at the top of all these leaders. Let's drag this all the way to the top. I shall just name this blank. I do this to protect all the layers beneath. So for example, if I open this fall into future, I accidentally introduce some straight strokes here. I can just go to the topmost layer, select everything on the topmost layer and delete them. So this is a protective layer to protect all the elements beneath. Oh, I wasn't wanted to show you the transform tool. Let's select this pump tree here using the selection tool and duplicate it. So that's moved as palm tree all the way to the left side. And you can scale this down. If you use one of the four corners to scale the pump tree, notice the scaling is not proportional. So let's undo. To scale this proportionality, just use your fingers. Accidentally selected something that's just SCOTUS slightly smaller, and move it into position. 9. Goodbye: We have come to the end of the course. I hope you have enjoyed the course. Before you go. I just want to say a few more things. I highly recommend you check out all the brushes that are available within concepts because each brush has its own characteristics and style. And you can mix and match different brushes to create your own style and to make your art look more interesting. How far you want to take your art really depends on you. In this course, we have just drawn something really simple, but we've concepts, you can actually draw them really detailed illustrations. Finally, to live this cause a review to help other students know whether or not this course is helpful. Alright, thanks for following along with me. See you in the next course. Bye.