Limited Color Palette Illustration in Procreate

1. Limited Color Palette Illustration in Procreate: Hi everyone, I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create limited color palettes and illustrations on your iPad and Procreate. We'll cover every step of the process from building new palettes to creating illustrations that are ideal for limited palettes. In the class, we'll take a look at how to use the powerful color harmony tools and procreate, to take the guesswork out of making palettes. When you take the class, you'll get the limited color palette workbook I created that helps you build your own palettes from the ground up. You'll also get the illustration brush set that I created with lots of textures and stamps to help you build limited palette illustrations. First we will create several sets of color palettes to see you have plenty of colors to work with throughout the class. We will create a simple illustration and apply one of the palettes to the drawing. You'll see how even a monochrome color palette can create an interesting illustration that stands out online. Next, we'll combine hands in various poses with other objects to create an illustration. I'll share my hand sketches with you as free downloads so you don't have to start from scratch. I'll give you lots of ideas for objects to combine with your hands to create interesting illustrations that invite your viewers to spend more time looking at and thinking about your work. Last, we will juxtapose two or more objects to create a theme or story around an illustration. Will apply some of our limited color palettes to the drawing to come up with a few possible color variations so you have lots of objects to choose from. If you struggle with choosing colors for your illustrations or just wish that you had more palettes issues from this class will show you everything you need to know to build a palette library of beautiful color sets. I created a limited color palette drawing challenge that you'll learn about at the end of the class. The challenge will help you build a cohesive set of drawings to share on social media or in your portfolio. Stay tuned to the end to learn how to join the challenge. All you need to take this class is your iPad and Stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this resources page on the project section on the Skillshare website, not the app. Once you click on that link, you'll see that you need a password to get into that page and I'll share the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you can scroll down and you'll see the list of downloads and resources just below the image. The first one is the limited palette brush set so I'll click on that. I'm using Chrome as my browser. If you have any trouble with the browser you're using, just switched to a different browser. I'll tap download at the bottom here, on some browsers it shows up at the top. I'll tab open in and then choose Procreate as the app. Then once you click on your brush set with any document open, you should see the limited palette set at the very top. Back on the Downloads and Resources page, you'll see the next item in the list is the limited palette illustration board. On this board I've just collected a lot of beautiful examples of what you can do with limited palette illustrations. You can get some beautiful contrasts with these, and you don't have to create incredibly complex images. Some really simple images are beautiful with the limited palettes. This really only has three colors and a yellow, red, and blue, unless you count this off white cream. But this is a beautiful composition and it only contains a few colors. Everything on this board has a limited color palette and you can see that the colors here work really beautifully together and that's specifically because these illustrators have used color palettes that use the color relationships that we're going to talk about today. This one's a good example of contrasting colors, so orange and blue do really well together and there are a lot of different shades of orange and blue that you can use. In the class we're going to talk about how you can find these color palettes using the color wheel. But for now, you can just take a peek through here and maybe get some ideas for what compositions speak to you. You may be someone who likes something really complex that has a lot going on, a lot of different illustrations on a single page. Or you may be someone who likes something really simple, just one little vase and a plant with a few simple colors. This is a good time to just get a feel for what speaks to your personal style and maybe just start jotting down some ideas for things you think of as you look through here. Of course we don't want to copy anyone on this page, but this is a good time to just get a feel for what illustrations speak to your style. Now that we have some inspiration, let's go ahead and take a look at how to use the color Relationship Tools in Procreate. 3. Creating Limited Palettes: Next we're going to look at the color harmony tools and procreate and talk about how you can use them to build cohesive color palettes. Let's start out on the downloads and resources page. You'll see that the final item on this list is the limited palette workbook. I have a smaller version here for anyone who has trouble downloading this bigger version on their iPad. I'll click on that and then I'll get that download option again. I'll click download, open in and choose procreate. You'll notice that when procreate opens, it just opens whatever you had opened last. To see the document, you'll have to go back to your gallery. Get out of a stack if you're inside a stack, and then the workbook will show up in your main gallery. I'll just drag that into my stack and I'll open that up. You'll see if you open the Layers panel here, there is a palettes layer and then there's an illustration ideas layer. We'll look at that later. The palettes are all in groups. If you tap the arrow, you can open that group. Then each set of colors here is its own group. The names here correspond to the names here and then every single dot is on its own layer. Let's start with an example of how you would use this first section called monochromatic. Monochromatic just means one color. What you can do here is just choose any color and I recommend a saturated color. You can always easily take color out of something, but it's easier to see what colors you're working with if you start saturated. You can just play around with the color wheel here. Get something that's bright, maybe even like a neon. Once you're happy with that color, I'm going to set that as the middle dot color by just tapping on that layer and tapping fill. I have a turquoise. I'm going to shift up into a slightly [inaudible] zone on the color wheel. I'll make this second dot a little lighter by tapping fill layer. Let's go even a little lighter. I'm making sure there's a differentiation between these two colors. Let's go even lighter on number 1. Now I've got three colors that are pretty different from each other. I want to get something darker than my first turquoise shade. I'll tap and hold on that color to sample it, shift down a little bit on the color wheel and I'm just going diagonally. You could also go up and down this way. I like to go this way because the lighter colors and procreate are over here and the darker ones are here. I do a curved shape. Let's get an even darker color, tap on the layer and tap fill. This is a nice monochromatic scale. We'll use this type of scale for our first project. If you're not happy with this color, this is a good time to go ahead and try a different color version. Try a few different colors. One thing I like to do is just take this workbook tab, select, tap on it and tap duplicate a few times. That way you just have a few pieces to work with. You could do a red, an orange, a green and just have a few different options available for you. Back in the workbook, let's move on to the second color relationship, which is complimentary. I'm going to tap and hold the sample that middle turquoise, that turquoise is going to be my main color for all of these. I'm just going to go ahead on the first dot on every color relationship and fill in that turquoise. This is going to allow me to see a lot of colors that work well with this turquoise color. This is great for someone who doesn't feel confident with color yet, because all you have to know is one color that you like and then these tools are going to help us find all the colors that work well with that color. It's not cheating. This is something that interior designers and illustrators and artists have used for centuries. This is a tried and true method to get colors that naturally work well together for the human eye. Here on the complimentary section, I'm ready to fill in my second color, and this will be the compliment to this turquoise shade. If I tap on the color wheel and I tap on harmony at the bottom here. Then, under the colors menu you'll see a little word and you can change that to complimentary. You'll see that it chooses the color that's exactly opposite the first color that you chose. That's the way we find complimentary colors. They're on the opposite side of the color wheel. All we have to do is tap on that second color. Tap on layer number 2 and tap fill. Now we have a couple of colors that work well together, but we can also create some other colors using these. The first thing I'll do is tap on the third dot and tap fill. I have a couple of options here. I can go back to my disc and just start playing around here in this red shade, looking for a new color. I like that color. Let's do the same thing with our turquoise, filling dot number 4. The color disc is one option, or we can tap hue saturation brightness and brighten it up a little. Maybe take down the saturation, maybe boosts the saturation. This is where you're just playing with colors and maybe thinking about what would look nice with this one or this one. We're using that original shade that we know works well with this red. Just transforming it a little bit. I'm going do that one more time with the red. There's a nice dark jewel tone color. Now, I'm ready to move onto my next set, which is split complementary. Again, I'll sample that turquoise, open my split complementary group. Go back to harmony. Go to split complimentary. Now, it's giving me two different colors on the opposite side of the wheel as my original turquoise. What you'll see here is these colors are surrounding, where are complimentary color was. It's choosing two colors that are mathematically perfectly dissent from the original red. Let's grab that orange and fill, and then we'll grab that pink and fill. This is probably a color combination that you've seen before in other illustrations, because anytime you choose a turquoise, you're going to get these two colors as the split complementary. Now, let's choose some other shades to fill in these two circles. I'll just use the hue saturation brightness tool again, that's really the one I prefer to use. I like doing these tiny little adjustments. Whereas the color wheel, it seems like things just go a little too fast with color adjustments. I think I could create a really nice cream with this orange. I'm going to brighten it up and take down the saturation. I think this turquoise and that cream would go really nicely together. Now I have a nice set. You can even sample when you're coloring your illustration. You can sample from different levels here, it doesn't have to all come from the complimentary zone. These work well with your turquoise. If you're using your turquoise, you can get creative and sample around these different color relationships. I'm just going to repeat the same process all the way down here with all of these different color relationships. With analogous, we've got two colors that are beside the original turquoise. They're sampling from colors that are close to your original color. This is often something you see in nature, several colors that are similar to each other but look really beautiful together. The next relationship is triadic. These are three colors that are perfectly spaced from each other on the color wheel. Then tetradic same thing with four colors evenly spaced. Let's go ahead and fill these and then improvise on the remaining circles for all of these relationships. This is a good time to start playing around with any colors that you just absolutely hate. If you look down here at the tetradic, I never use lime green. I know it's pointless for me to have this in my color library because I'm never going to use it. If I go to number two, I go to hue saturation brightness, I can start turning that green into something that's a little closer to my personal style. It doesn't have to be that original green that we started with. Sometimes I even play around with hue. If you really just don't like that shade at all, then go ahead and experimental little bit with hue and just see what happens. I'm going to stick with that green shade. I think that looks nice with my turquoise. I'll repeat the same process with this red. Same thing with that really bold purple. I would never use such a neon purple. I'm just going to reduce the saturation, bump up the brightness. Then I like that combination a lot more. I don't even think I need that last pink one, so don't feel like you have to fill out every single color for every single relationship. You can certainly leave some blank. This is limited palette, so you can just stick with two, three, four colors if you want. You can see because we spent a lot of time just focusing on color and not worrying so much about sketching and line work and illustration elements. We were able to create a nice palette. This is why I recommend doing the process this way, because it gives you a chance to just sit down and think about color for a while and study color and see how these relationships work. My final step for this process is usually to create a new palette and just save every single color that I created. I like to leave a little bit of space in between each color set. I left a square there just to remind myself that this is a new color relationship section here. I don't have to sample my turquoise every single time. I know the turquoise is my main color. So really just have to save these other colors. You can drag these little squares around to make a little more room for your other palettes. There's my turquoise color set, so I'm going to tap on that and name it turquoise. Then you can repeat that same process with other colors that you like. The reason for doing this is because now I'm building this nice color library of colors that I know I like. I know they work well together, so next time I create a composition, I can just come through here and sample really quickly until I find a combo that I like. Once you have a few palettes that you love, let's go ahead and move on to applying one of these to an illustration. 4. From Sketch to Color: Next, we're going to create a simple illustration and color it with one of our monochrome color palettes. Let's start by looking at a list of ideas for illustration topics. Back in our class workbook, if you make this limited palettes layer invisible, you'll see the illustration ideas layer below it. This list just has a lot of ideas for things that you could depict in your illustrations. I recommend starting with something simple for this first project so we can just get the basic concepts down, but I'm going to choose a shoe. You might choose something simple like a leaf, or a coffee cup, or a clock, or whatever speaks to your personal style and interest. Grab something here from this list, and then we'll go find a reference image. If you have a reference image of the thing you want to draw or if you could take a picture of something, that would be perfect. I'll show you an example here. I wanted to do a jean jacket, and I was looking online, and all I could find was partial jean jackets. I couldn't find a full jacket in the exact shape that I wanted. I could find little detail shirts, but I had a jacket, so I just laid it down on the floor and took a picture. Then you can pose things exactly as you want, and have everything lined up exactly as you want it to be. Really, taking your own reference photos is the ideal way to do this. But of course, if you don't have one, we can go to our friend Google. I'm going to search for women's boots, and I might even add the word "hiking", so I'm going to get really specific here. I'll just scroll through here and find a few different boot shapes that work for me. I don't want to depict just one single type of boot because I don't want to be using that company's copyrighted shape. I'm taking a screenshot by tapping the home button and the power button at the same time. I'm just getting an idea here of what do women's hiking boots look like. What aspects do they have that I would like to repeat in my illustration? I'm looking at different types of clasps, different types of the bottom edge. If you see anything you like as you're taking these pictures, just take a screenshot and then you've got it saved in your photos. Back in Procreate, I'll go to my gallery, tap the plus symbol to create a new document. I like to work at 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. One tip here, if you work at the same size all the time, you can swipe left on one of these sizes that you don't use, tap Edit, and then set that to the size that you like to use, so pixels, 3,000 by 3,000 at 300 DPI. Then let's call this "Square" canvas, and tap Save. Now, I've got that size saved, so I never have to do that again. I can just tap on it and it creates that new document for me. I'm going to pull up my first reference image in the photos' app. You do have to make sure the photos' app is open for the split screen to work. The first thing I'm going to do is just pull up that photo, go back to Procreate, move this boot over to here. If you've ever taken one of my classes before, you know how I like to sketch and draw. I do a zoom out method. You start by just zooming out and looking at the basic shape. I'm not drawing details, I'm just getting this very basic shape so that it's positioned correctly on the canvas. I'm looking at angles and just an overall size. That's good enough. I'm going to create a new layer, make that first layer semi-transparent, and then get a little more detailed, checking my original sketch. As I do this, I zoom into my picture a little bit more so that I'm getting a more accurate view as I zoom in. The reason I do that zooming in and out is because it's so tempting to just start focusing on details first thing, and I see a lot of beginner drawers do that and then get frustrated, because that isn't typically how someone would draw. It's not how most of the experts that I've seen draw. They start with a basic shape, it's really rough, it looks terrible, and then they work their way down. It's actually a much faster way to draw, because you don't waste a lot of time fixing mistakes. You're just going from biggest details to the smallest details in a slow progression. I'm just going to repeat this same process over and over, working quickly, not thinking too much about little details, and then we'll pick back up here when I have my final sketch. You can go as detailed as you want with this. I'm not going to put a ton of detail in my boot, but I am going to get the basic shape. Then I'm going to be switching back and forth to these other boots, just making sure not to copy the product which this company created. Now that I've got a basic shape for my boot, I'm ready to start applying some color. You could delete those sketch layers if you're starting to run out of layers. I'll just swipe left and delete each of those, so now I just have my one sketch layer. I'll reduce the opacity of that layer. I'm going to add the color below the sketch layer so it's really easy for me to see my colors. You may not know right now what colors you want to use, and that's fine. I would just choose one of your monochromatic palettes and just start with that, and you can always change it as we work. We'll play around here with changing it after we do the original color. On a new layer, I'm going to get a bright color that's really easy to see against my background color. I'm selecting the Fluid ink brush as my color, and just choosing a size that's going to allow me to get some detail, sharp edges on here. I'll just go through and ink this entire shape, all around the outside of it. I'm also going to remove that boot image because that's going to drain my battery. You want to get that out of there as soon as you can. I'm not perfectly following my sketch. I like that these are a little bit loose. That style is really popular right now, to just show the looseness of the human hand, to not try to make everything perfect. Don't feel like if your drawings aren't perfect, that they aren't good enough because you can learn how to draw perfectly, but drawing these interesting shapes and lines is something that comes only from the human hand. I think people really like seeing that. Once I've totally closed in that image, I can just drag and drop to fill it. Now, I'm going to create a new layer above that layer. I want to put some color down on there, so I'm going to choose a different shade. I want the color to only show up on the boot, obviously. If I tap on that new layer and I tap Clipping Mask, that clips the color to be only on the area where the red exist. Whatever layer the clipping mask is pointing to, that's the layer that the mask is going to use to decide what area to mask out. Now if I choose a little area to fill in with this new shade, drag and drop the color, whoops, I need to fill that in, it's a solid shape. Now, I have this different color that's only showing on my boot. Let's repeat that same process on a few different areas of your illustration. We're making sure that's a solid closed shape. Drag-and-drop to fill that in. I'm trying to split up these colors so there isn't dense color all in one area. Let's put this color on the toe. I need another color to differentiate between these buckles and the inside of the shoe. I'm going to create a new layer, turn that into a clipping mask. Again, that's still going to be using my original red shape as the clipping mask. If I draw, it only shows up on the red. The key here is that it's on a new layer rather than being on the red layer. That allows me to keep the flexibility to change colors anytime I want to. Even if I decide, in a month, that I want to reuse this for different purpose with a different color, that option is still available to me because I saved these colors on different layers. I'm going to go back to my light pink layer and add in just a little bit more detail with these buckles. Because this pink layer is below my burgundy layer, it's going to show up below it. You may have to play around with the order of these layers a little bit, but you can also just create another clipping mask. You can make as many as you need to and put them in whatever order you need to in the layers panel for things to overlap correctly. I need something to differentiate the red of the bottom to the red of the body of the boot. I'm going to create another clipping mask at the very top of this clipping mass stack and get a lighter color. Let's choose the same color as the background, so I can limit this to four colors. Then I'm just going to create some little stitches that go down the boot. Anytime you have this issue where you've got two areas that need to be differentiated, you could use little dots, you could use a different type of texture, different color. We have a lot of options here. Even though you're using this monochromatic palette, it doesn't mean you have to have a bunch of big shapes that aren't differentiated in some way. 5. Texture and Composition Options: I'm happy with how that looks. I'm going to remove my sketch layer, I'll make it invisible and I'll create a new layer above everything else because I want to add in a little bit of texture here. I like to make a texture and the color that is in my monochromatic palette, so choose any of those colors that you want to try and maybe try a few different ones. I'm going to go with this bright red and you'll see I created a bunch of new textures for this class and if you want to learn how to make your own texture brushes I do show how to do that in my class on recipe illustrations and I also show how to make your own texture images in my texture brush class so check those out if you want to see how I made these texture brushes but for now I'm just going to grab this first one which is the correct paint, swipe it over everything. That's a little intense. I don't want it to totally overpower my illustration like this, so I'm going to click on the end symbol and just scroll down to find a blend mode that I think works well with this. Each blend mode will be different depending on what color you chose for your texture so what I recommend with this is just playing around and seeing what you like. I really like this color dodge because it has a different effect on each color, it's just really bright on the red and then really bright on the pink, so when you zoom out it creates an interesting effect. I'm going to go ahead and try each of these textures and try that color dodge blend mode and then I can see which one I like best. This is always how I do textures, I'll put a bunch of different textures down and then just make them invisible, and then in a minute I'll go through and look at each one. I find that if you're trying to multitask, you're trying to lay down textures, decide if they look good, it's too much at once. It's better to apply these changes to your drawing on different layers and then maybe relax, get a cup of tea and sit back and think about really what looks best with this drawing. If I zoom in, you can really see the difference here. I really like this third one because it's a variable texture, so I'm going to stick with that. You could duplicate it if you wanted it to be just a little bit more intense. I'm happy with how this looks but of course you may want to play around with the color a little bit. So you can grab one of your other monochromatic pallets, let's grab my turquoise that I just use and let's try something totally different by starting with a dark background and then on these layers we have to alpha lock them in order to fill them with color. I'm just going to take two fingers, swipe to the right on the clipping mask layers and the original boot layer. Now, when I tap on that layer, I can just tap fill and it only fills the boot, it doesn't fill the whole Canvas. That's why we love alpha lock so much because it allows us to change only the color that we want to change. I'm just going to take some time here to fill in the different sections and see what combination creates the best contrast. I like this combination, it really highlights the boot but it also has a lot of contrast between the little stitches and the seam, so you can see how you can just play around with this until you find a color combination that you really like. I also want to show you a few drawings that I made using this exact same process. You can see I started this jean jacket piece using the exact same process, I did a rough sketch, roughed out all the main shapes and then in layers, I just slowly get more and more detailed. I don't worry about keeping things perfect or trying to get the proportions or details absolutely perfect, I'm just trying to convey the idea of a jean jacket. You can see that I went ahead and started with color before I knew exactly what was going to be on the back of the jacket. Sometimes you know exactly what you're going to draw when you sit down and sometimes you have no idea, you just have to start drawing and see where it takes you. You can see with this piece, I needed to play around with it to get ideas for what to put on the back of the jacket, so I went ahead and started with color because I knew what I wanted to do with color. When you're sure of something, just go for it and don't worry about the details that are going to happen in the end because usually those will come to you as you work. Here's another piece I did using the idea of a suitcase with stickers of all the places you've traveled or places you want to travel. This is a great one for someone who'd like to do a few little illustrations of places that you like and you can put as much as little detail as you want into these, you could put as many stickers as you want on this suitcase and there are so many beautiful antique suitcase styles that you can find online, so just grab an antique suitcase and start drawing. Even if you don't know what stickers you want to be on it, if you just get going with the drawing, ideas will start coming to you. You can see I started this one in a different color palette because I wasn't sure if it was going to be part of my monochrome series but then I ended up changing it in the end. Really just fill it with any color that you can think of and then worry about refining the colors at the end. Here are a couple more pieces where I used that same process and I just wanted to give you an idea of the range of illustration topics that you can use for this, it could be animals, it could be tea, coffee, really anything at all, anything you see on that page of the workbook or anything that you think of, you can use with this monochrome style. It's just a way of simplifying a shape and presenting a shape in a really simple, beautiful way. Let's go ahead and move on to our next project. 6. Planning a Composition: For this illustration, we're going to combine two colors that work well together. You could pull from your complimentary set, or you could pull any two colors that you came up with when you were working on the color document. We'll start by combining some hands with some other illustration element. Let's start by getting an idea of what objects you could combine with these hands to create an interesting story on the canvas. Back on the downloads and resources page, you'll see the Limited Palette Illustrations Inspiration, tap on that. What you'll see on this board is that I've saved a lot of different types of images. They seemingly don't go together, but this is a great way to create a story in your illustration. Combining elements together that maybe don't appear to go together, but when you put them together, it creates a story. For this illustration, I'm going to combine hands and some other object. You may want to start by thinking about what other object you want to use. You'll see as I pose the hands that, whatever object you choose, it's being honored or held by the hands. So hands have a very powerful meaning in illustration. It's like you're showing something, holding something, presenting something to the viewer. You may want to think about something you really like. I'm going to use drawing tools. You could use a compass, you could use an hourglass, an Earth symbol, you could use a plant or an animal that you really like, anything here that you think would go well with hands. What I've done is created some hand sketches for you. I create my hand drawings in the exact same way that I draw everything else. You already know how I draw, there's no secret here. But I know that a lot of people don't like drawing hands and hate that process. I want you to feel free to use my hand sketches to get started, if that's something that's stopping you. If it's not, then go ahead and use one of your own hands in a pose. You can see I just take pictures of my hand in different poses, pull it beside my iPad, and then start sketching, just like we did with the boot. Feel free to do that with your own hand or use one of my sketches. Whatever works best for your time constraints and your style. Let's take a look at these hands to get started. This is just some ideas for the poses that you could use, and these are just stamps. If you just tap with your hand, and you can adjust the size over here on the left, it will lay down the hand in whatever size you've chosen. Here we have a hand that could be holding something or presenting something, pinching something, holding a plant, we could have these two together with something in the middle, we could be holding something or have something drip or drop onto the hand, same thing here presenting with a different pose, or we could be holding something like this, it could be a pen, it could be a flower, anything you want to do here, feel free to get creative with these hand shapes. I'm just going to delete that layer and choose one of the hands for this drawing. I'm going to go with hand sketch 4. The first thing I'll do is lay it down on the canvas, and I think I want to have two hands like this. I'm going to start by finding the center of my canvas. I can do that by tapping the tool symbol, ''Canvas'', turn on the Drawing Guide, edit Drawing Guide, bump up the Grid size, and tap ''Done''. Now I can see the middle this way and the middle this way. Let's tap the Move tool and move that hand, maybe reduce the size a little bit. I'm trying to leave plenty of space for my object here to have the main attention in this drawing, and I want to leave some space in between the hands so it doesn't look like the wrists are like this because that's just a little bit weird. So I'm leaving some space in between the hands, then I'm just going to duplicate that layer by swiping left and tapping ''Duplicate'', flip horizontal and shift this over. I feel like that angle is a little strange. So I'm going to delete that new one and then just shift this a little bit so that the positioning is different. Just because I and drew that sketch in one direction, doesn't mean that's the direction you have to use. Feel free to play around with tilting these, moving them around the canvas. Of course if there's a very specific position that you want, you may have to use your own hand and create your own drawing. I'm using Magnetics when I do this because I want to keep the hand on the exact same level as the other one. I'm happy with how that looks. I'm going to create a new layer, grab my sketching pencil, and I'm just going to use a pencil. I'll just sketch that pencil in, it doesn't have to be perfect. Then something you can do to give it even a little bit more power, is just some lines that radiate out from the object. I don't know exactly how I'm going to position these yet. I just want to get this down on the page, so I know how my drawing is going to be laid out. I'm happy with that. I'm going to create a new layer, reduce the opacity of that sketch, and then give this a little bit more detail. Let's draw one side of my pencil, swipe left to duplicate that layer, tap the 'Move' tool and shift it over. I'm going to pinch to merge those two layers together, then just sketch out the rest of the shape. I like those old pencils that have that zigzag mark on them. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to add in my eraser. Maybe we'll have some little ridges where the eraser metal piece is. Then I'm just going to add in some little lines to show the shape of this pencil. Now I'm going to go ahead and finalize my lines that radiate out. Let's do that on a new layer. You can be really exact with this and make it perfect, or you could keep it loose. I'm probably going to keep it loose. The first thing I'll do, I do want to make sure this is in a circle. So I'm going to draw a circle, and get it to that right size, edit shape, tap ''Circle''. Now I know that's a perfect circle. If I tap the ''Move'' tool now, I can use my center line to get this circle in the very middle, so turn off Magnetics here and you can see those little blue dots. Let me get this in the very center. I'm going to go a little bit smaller with this because I feel like, there's not enough room for my hands to breathe there, and maybe shift my pencil up just a little bit. I'm just getting these basic shapes down, creating a new layer, and now I want this to radiate out. Let's start with some simple lines across from each other. If I wanted these radiating lines to be perfect, I could merge that together, so I've got my circle and my lines on the same layer, swipe left to duplicate, and if Magnetics is on, I can move this in, I think these are 15 degree rotations. That's an option if you want this perfect 15 degree radial shape. I'm going to step back because I honestly don't want this to be perfect. I want it to be a little bit more hand-drawn looking. So I'm just going to play around with getting this close to being even but not perfect. 7. Inking and Variations: I'm happy with how the sketch looks. I'm going to make my rough sketches invisible so I can only see my main sketches, and I don't really need that circle anymore. I'm going to go through and make all these sketches semi-transparent they're not in my way. On a new layer I can start inking. I'm just going to use black because I don't know what color I want to use yet. Starting with black is a good way to start in a neutral way and not be committing to any colors as you go. It's also a lot easier to see black, for anyone who has trouble seeing the difference between the sketch and the color, I typically ink in black because it's a little bit easier to see. For hands, they shouldn't be symmetrical. Let's work in symmetry on a new layer, tab "Canvas", tab "Edit Drawing Guide", turn on symmetry for the options. I'm going to go with vertical. Then I always test my symmetry before I start working to make sure I did it right. Let's go ahead and ink this hand. The problem with the solid shape is you really can't see the fingers at all. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer, grab my eraser with the fluid ink brush and chose a size. When you're thinking about this size for this, it's a good idea to zoom out to the size that you think this will be viewed. I think this will be about where this will be viewed, maybe Instagram, Facebook, my website. I'm going to use that size to go through here and just add in these little lines that show where the hands are. This is a great way when you're using limited color palette to differentiate between shapes, because otherwise you cannot just end up with some big blobs if you're not using a lot of shading and color changes on an object. I can make my hand sketch invisible and return the opacity to my hand and make sure everything looks good there. Let's do the same thing with the pencil on a new layer. I'm just going to use quick line to make those straight lines by drawing and holding. Again, reducing the opacity of that shape, grabbing my eraser, which is still at the same size that it was for the hand. I do think that's important for there to be a consistency between the eraser lines in all of the objects, it's one thing to keep in mind. One thing you might do is note somewhere maybe on a new layer, what size eraser you used in case you close the document and forget and change your eraser size in the middle of drawing. Just something to think about if you tend to have trouble getting the same line widths, bump up the opacity. You can see I'm putting each inked object on a new layer because I want to be able to have the freedom to change these colors in different layers. I want to be sure that if I want my pencil and my lines to be different colors, that they're on different layers so that's really easy for me to do. I'm going to do some of these lines with a little break in them, so that it has that kind of sun ray look. Now I can make all of my sketch layers invisible, and I really just have my hands, my pencil and my lines. I'm going to create a new layer above my hands, and then I'm going to have a new color there, let's use a bold red color. I'm going to make this a clipping mask just like I did for the boot, because I only want this color to show up on my hand. I'm using this red and I found a gold that works really well with this red, so I'm going to fill that as my background. I wanted to show you how I got this color combination because when I found this combination, I wasn't looking for those colors. I started this with a blue, purplish tone kind of a royal blue, and I did all of the color relationships. Then I found that these two colors look really nice together and this is from the triadic and tetradic from this blue. I didn't even end up using that blue, but I found these two colors that I like together through that process. There is something to think about, you may be starting with a color that you like and you may not end up using it at all, you can use these pallets just as a way to do a mental exercise to get to the next step, and then you'll discover some interesting colors. I really like this combo tools, at some point I'm going to use that on a drawing same thing with this. It's really just a matter of doing this process, you can get to the place where you need to be to find those colors. I'm going to make another clipping mask layer right above my pencil. I just want to add a little bit of that bold color to my pencil. I'm happy with this as my color palette, it has a really simple contrast, the black is really bold, it really stands out on the page. The only other thing I might add is some texture. I'm going to go with this rough ink texture, and of course, I'll grab a blend mode to give the little bit more power on the page, and I'm happy with that. But of course if you're not, you can do that same process. Perhaps some of your limited color palettes that you created, and try some of those combos on your drawing. Change the hand colors, change the pencil colors, change whatever you need to to get to the palette that works for you. As you can see I continued this same process with the same set of hands and did a set of three, one with an eye and one with a sun. That's something you can consider once you get those hands in place, try some different objects in there, it doesn't have to be the first object that you think of, and usually as you're drawing, you'll get some other ideas. Don't feel stuck on your very first idea. I want to show you a few more things that I've done with these hand drawings, with this one, I knew I wanted to include something about time and something about a key. This creates an interesting relationship on the canvas, the viewers asking themselves, ''What does the key have to do with time or with this object?'' You can really create an interesting story on the canvas, and then if you want to have a little bit of a filler, you can create some leaves or flowers or something to fill in the shapes that are empty. In that first drawing, I did those radial marks. In this one, I ended up doing some flowers and leaves. You can fill these however you'd like, and they add to the interesting movement on the canvas. You can see that I played with a lot of color versions before I got to this final version, so this is just part of the process. We never really know how colors are going to look until we try them. Same idea here, I use the idea of burning a letter or burning a note, and this conjures up a lot of interesting things for the viewers, they're wondering, what are you burning? What does it say on the paper? What does that mean to them? What is something that they've burned and why? You can turn this into a story and maybe even ask your viewers, what does this mean to you? Or what do you think is on the letter?. Something to create a little bit more engagement for your viewers so that they feel like they're part of the composition. That's just a few ideas of what you can do with these hands, combining them with an object in limited palettes. Let's go ahead and move on to our next composition style. 8. Creating Juxtapositions: For this next composition, we're going to create a three color limited palette illustration. I recommend that you try to juxtapose two different objects in this illustration and we'll start by taking a look at some ideas for the objects that you could combine. We've already looked at this Pinterest inspiration board where I combined a lot of different objects that you could juxtapose together. You could do a bicycle with some flowers. You could do a light bulb with some fire. Maybe your theme is light or energy. You could do the theme of antique objects. You could have a phone, a typewriter. You could combine a key with water and so you're just presenting two different items on the Canvas and making the viewer ask, "What to do these items mean in relation to each other?" You may like some of the objects that you see on this page. These are all in the creative common, so you can feel free to use these in your illustrations in whatever way you'd like. But you may also find that there are some other illustrations that you want to create and you don't have a reference image for that. If you go to the Flickr Commons using the link on the resources page, you'll see there's a search bar at the top. I'm not going to use that because that searches all of Flickr. I'm going to search the commons down here and let's just type bird as an example. You'll see that there are an endless number of bird images to choose from. There are so many different poses and species. Any object that you want to find, you can probably find it on the Flickr Commons. The nice thing about using these images is that they are over 100 years old, so they are no longer protected by copyright. This is from 1878. You could include one of these birds in your illustration looking almost exactly like that and that would be fine. This is why I love using the Flickr Commons because you can be a lot more free with your use of the images, as long as it says no known copyright restrictions on that image. One thing you may think about with these compositions is choosing opposites. You might choose something beautiful and something ugly or something related to fire and something related to water. Combining things that clash or work well together, that will create an interesting story on the Canvas. You could have a boot with something coming out of the boot like a snake or flowers. You could have a rope wrapped around something. You could have this globe symbol with a compass. You could have a set of tools if you like gardening or woodworking. Think about some things that you'd like to juxtapose together and we'll pull together some reference images to get those down on the Canvas. The image that I have chosen is the snake and I'm going to include some flowers. Something beautiful and something ugly. I know some people don't think snakes are ugly. I'm sorry if I've offended you with my snake comment. In the brush set you'll find this dual pencil and this is helpful for making rope, or chord, or snake, or anything where the lines need to be perfectly spaced. That's the brush I'm going to use to draw my snake. I'll just start by getting a general idea of the shape of the snake on the Canvas. I like how this picture lets the snake loop. Here it loops one part of the snake into the other. I'm going to reduce the size of that by tapping the Move tool and then just get it into the center of the Canvas. I like to leave a lot of room around my illustrations. That's helpful both for printing, when you need some bleed space, but it also leaves enough room for the viewer to really focus on the image in the center of the Canvas. I tend to always go back through and just make everything smaller. I think most people draw to the borders of the Canvas and then you end up needing to scratch in a little bit. I like this shape, but I feel like it can be a little different right there and a little different right here. I'm just sketching the shape I want to use, reduce the opacity. I want this to be really smooth, so I'm going to try to do it sort of quickly. That's one trick for making smoother lines, is just draw a little bit faster and if you have that sketch already ready, you're really just following at like you're on a race track. I need to reduce the size of my tail here towards the bottom. I'll just grab my eraser and get rid of anything extra that's distracting. Then, I'll add in my head. You can see I'm not going super complicated with these illustrations. I'm really just getting the general idea of these shapes and I find that people really like these more simple illustrations. You really don't have to get super complex with these. I'm going to erase some lines to remind myself where these overlap. I'm happy with how this looks but again, I feel like it's gotten a little bit vague on the Canvas. I tend to do this a lot where I draw and then size down, and draw and size down because It's just so easy to get out of control with your line sizes. I'll just repeat the same process and add in a little bit more detail to my snake until I'm happy with how this looks. Now that I have my snake shape taken care of, I'm going to create a new layer, and get the sketching pencil, and then I'll just add in some flowers that are going to weave in and out of this snake. Making sure that it is on a new layer because I'm probably going to have to do a few takes with these flowers. I'm trying to think about creating some variation here. I'm going to have a rounded flower over here and over here to try to balance those two across the Canvas. Then, I'm going to have some side views of the same flowers, just kind of space around the Canvas. I want these to overlap my snake a little bit, but I don't want them to overlap in any place that already has a lot going on. For example, this little place where the snake overlaps over itself. I don't want to cover that up because that's a really nice area of that part of the drawing. I might move a flower down to here in order to leave a little bit more space for that other part. Let's reduce the opacity of that sketch, create a new layer, and grab a different color to make it really easy to see. Now, I'm just going to do a slightly more refined sketch of these flowers adding in some leaves and some paddles. If you're not familiar with this process at all and you want to dig deeper into flowers, I do have a class on art nouveau and a class on wild flowers where I go much deeper into drawing flowers. I'm not going to go into that here because I really already covered that in several classes, but you can check out those classes if you feel like you need a little help with drawing flower shapes from scratch. As I'm adding in these leaves I'm thinking about what spaces on the Canvas might need a little more visual interest and what spaces are already really complex. I'm trying not to do anything around this little overlap because that's a lot going on. Obviously, I don't want to cover up the snake's head. I'm just thinking about these things as I add in these leaves, I want some blank spaces to be filled in so we've got some nice complexity, but I don't want to go too crazy in any one area. 9. Using Three Color Palettes: I'm happy with how the sketch look. I'm ready to start inking. Again, I'll start out in black and making sure I'm putting my snake and my flowers on separate layers. I'll start here with the snake and then move onto the flowers next. I'm going to make way snake invisible while I work on my flowers. But I'm going to keep my snake sketch there just so I can see that as I work. You can see with these flower shapes, I'm just starting out with these big solid shapes. Then just like we did in the last drawing, I'll go back through later and add in a little bit more detail. You may find at some point that you need to change part of your drawing. I'm going to select that sketch layer, grab the free hand Selection tool, circle around the area I want to change and tap the Move tool. Then I can easily just make some changes there. I didn't like that the vein was coming right between two petals. I'm just going to shift that so that the petal is the center of where the vein is. It's just going to make it a little bit less confusing for the viewer. Now that I've finished my flowers, I can go through and add a little bit of detail. All I'm going to do on these veins is just erase a little mark through the leaf. Then on the flower, I'm going create a little shape here. Then to show where the direction of these petals goes. Just some little simple flowers. I think I'm also going to add in here a little triangular base to hold these flowers together. I'll add that on each of my flowers and repeat the same process on every part of the flower. One thing I can do to save myself a little bit of work from erasing a lot, I can just circle the shape that I want to remove. Drag three fingers down on the canvas and tab cut, and that cuts that whole portion out of the flower. I'm also going to make my snake invisible because I don't really need that anymore. Then I'll just continue adding in these details by erasing. Now, that I have my flowers and my snake inked, I can make everything else invisible. Obviously, I need a little bit of color differentiation between these two so I can see what I'm doing. I'm just going to grab some colors that I think would work well. These are just colors that I created using the color process that we did at the beginning. This blue and gold, I think, is a nice combo together. Now, I need to add a little bit to that snake so you can really see the details. I'm just going to grab that sketch and put it right above my snake so you can really see. I'll create a clipping mask above my snake. There's that little underside of his stomach that needs a different color. I'm just going to go through and add in that color. Now, I want to put some lines on this underbelly portion. I'll create a new layer above that, create another clipping mask. Then I'm just going to go through and add these little lines close to each other to give that underbelly just a little bit more variation. You can see how tiny details like this make a big difference in a really simple illustration. They just give it something a little more than just a simple two-color drawing. It gives a little more complexity and helps the shapes that you want to stand out, stand out a little bit more. I'm going to make the eye in that same color as the blue. I can create a clipping mask layer above my snake. Then I can just draw right on that little tongue. Now, I can make my snake sketch invisible. Show my flowers again. One thing I would like to do with these flowers that isn't happening right now, is a little bit more overlapping so that you can see how the flowers weave in and out of the snake. What I'm going to do is duplicate that flower layer and move it below my snake. Then I can start erasing on this top flower layer. Let's say for example, I want to remove this part where this flower overlaps. Because I still have that other layer of flowers below. I can easily erase on the top layer and then I am getting this nice little overlapping peaking effect. If you're doing something like leaves or flowers or a rope, you might consider giving a little bit of overlapping just to make the composition more interesting. I'm happy with this composition. Of course, now I can start playing with color. You already know how to do that. I'll just show you one extra color version. One simple thing we can do here is add in that texture, give it a blend mode so we get a little bit more visual interest here. Then let's say, for example, I want to try just the different color on the flowers. You have to fill that front flower layer. I also have to fill that back flower layer. Then let's change as well the eye and the mouth of the snake. I feel like the pink just doesn't really work on that so I'll change that to a black. As you can see, you can take a lot of time here to play around with color and get this exactly as you want it to be. You can see I tried this same composition with my monochrome color palette. I really like how that looks as well. I'm going to use this piece as part of my challenge that we'll talk about in a minute. One last piece I want to show you that uses this same idea of combining two different objects is this piece where I combined a bird and my hand. Anytime you add in the hand, you get some interesting compositions. You can see that I just added in some really simple leaves as a filler. It creates a nice interaction between the leaves and the hand and the birds. It's causing the viewer to look at the piece and ask, what does this mean? Why is there hand and a bird together? Say, you can see, I tried a lot of different options for things I could include in the drawing and ended up with these leaves and berries and using my monochrome color palette. Let's go ahead and talk about the drawing challenge. 10. Illustration Challenge: I want to propose a drawing challenge that you can use to create a comprehensive set of illustrations that you could use on your social media accounts, your portfolio or even print out onto paper. The challenge is to create nine illustrations, all using the same limited color palette. You can use any of the color relationships we talked about at the beginning of the class and for the topic of the illustrations, you could choose a theme from the class workbook. You could choose your own theme or you can do each drawing with a different theme like I've done. You can use the hashtag, ''IPad Limited Color challenge'' so that everyone else in the challenge and I can see your illustrations and follow along as you add them to your feed. You can see that I did a mixture of simple and complex drawing. So feel free to keep these simple or spend a lot of time on each one, whatever works for your personal style. So I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own limited palettes and limited palette illustrations. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to use hatching, crosshatching, and stippling to create eye-catching illustrations. How to paint wildflowers and procreate, and how to create insect animations and illustrations. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more like you've got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the limited palette illustrations that you create after you watch this class. Please share which you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section or you could share your individual drawings on Instagram or do the whole challenge. You can tag me @lizkohlerbrown color around on Instagram or Facebook so I can see your drawings. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, designers, illustrators, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you loved creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversation, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work. Check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the processes you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.