Live Encore: Color Lineless Illustrations in Procreate | Simon Ip | Skillshare
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Live Encore: Color Lineless Illustrations in Procreate

teacher avatar Simon Ip, Digital Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:34

    • 2.

      Getting Started

      4:27

    • 3.

      Tracing Your Sketch

      4:34

    • 4.

      Adding Color

      4:18

    • 5.

      Using Shadows & Lines

      6:25

    • 6.

      Adding Depth to Your Illustration

      7:07

    • 7.

      Final Thoughts

      0:51

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About This Class

Enjoy a relaxed coloring session and finish with a charming lineless illustration!

Simon Ip has always believed there’s a lot of beauty in keeping an illustration simple. In this class—recorded using Zoom and featuring participation from the Skillshare community—he shares how to achieve that look with lineless, flat illustrations that still have a lot of life. 

While he has a more in-depth Skillshare class going over how to create your own lineless illustration from scratch, Simon makes it extra easy in this session by providing the initial sketches for you to work from. Think of it as an elevated adult coloring class!

Throughout the 30-minute session, you’ll learn how to:

  • Break down an illustration into shapes so you can get the image across without lines
  • Create a harmonious color palette
  • Pay attention to light an shadow to elevate your illustration

Along the way, Simon will share some of his favorite Procreate tips and techniques. Perfect for artists of all levels, from Procreate beginners to more experienced artists looking for a relaxed creative activity, you’ll leave with some new digital illustration techniques and a charming illustration to share with your friends. All you need to participate is an iPad with Procreate and a stylus. 

_________________________

While we couldn't respond to every question during the session, we'd love to hear from you—please use the class Discussion board to share your questions and feedback.

Meet Your Teacher

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Simon Ip

Digital Illustrator

Top Teacher

I'm a trained medical illustrator turned digital artist, specializing in creating visually stunning content on Procreate. As a top teacher on Skillshare, my passion is to inspire others to find joy and wellness through art.

Follow my artistic adventures and explore classes where I teach:

Digital Art on Procreate Animation on Procreate Dreams Finding Your Drawing Style and Inspiration

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Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] We think using traditional art that there's only one way to color. But if you use Procreate, then you rethink the way you're doing it. Hey everyone, my name is Simon. I'm a digital content creator and illustrator. You may recognize my work from my Instagram account at Simon's designs, where I love to draw about really mundane things and sweet moments of everyday life with my partner. Today's live class is all about creating a beautiful lineless illustration. That means that we're going to cover building shapes, finding a harmonious color palette, and always remembering where your light source comes from. I think this is such a great exercise, especially for beginners, to understand that there's a lot of different possibilities using digital art to change the way we think. I want students to know actually that there's a lot of beauty in trying to keep an illustration simple. Often whenever people wants to start drawing with Procreate, they dwell too much into white to get all the cool texture palette. This type of illustration, it's very simple shape that we're using. Sometimes that's all we need in order to create a nice illustration. I think that a high-quality illustration is an illustration that looks simple to do, but it actually isn't. This class was recorded live and I got to interact with the audience as I was drawing. Let's get right into it. 2. Getting Started: Hey, everyone. My name is Ali. I'm a producer on the content team. My pronouns are he/they, and I'm super excited to introduce our instructor for today, Simon. Of course, my name is Simon or Simon. I'm French, I'm also Canadian, and I'm currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm a digital content creator and illustrator, and I really like to draw about things that brightens people's life and then make me happy. We simply share a personal project that is dear to me, that's called my 100th happiness. There I shared a little bit of sweet moment I share with my partner throughout the year 2022. Awesome, and you've been creating classes on Skillshare content, right? Yes. I've been creating a class. I think I started working on Skillshare a little bit more or close to a year now. Yeah, exactly a year ago and I create a class to inspire people to draw again and also using Procreate. These are the type of topic I'd like to talk about. How to get out of a creative rods, inspired, have an upcoming class about keeping a visual journaling using Procreate, so stay tuned for that one. It sounds so fun. It's been on my iPad and jump into this Procreate world. It just looks so fun. Especially, coming out of the pandemic, everyone has been inspired to be creative again, which is beautiful. In that vein, what are we going to do today? Today, I just wanted to share with you a fun little exercise. You've probably seen that I've been sharing two different types of images for you to color. It's a clean line image and at the top, you will find the color palette that we're using. Today is more of a coloring exercise and we're going to color. But the little twist is that we're going to color and then remove all the lines. It's really coloring with harmonious color palette and also sharp and clean edges. Awesome. Lines are there at the beginning to just guide you so that you can just remove them later and it's a little effortless, that's beautiful. How does an exercise like this help you in your creativity and in your flow? Well, I think this type of exercise for me forces me to create a very clean line drawing. I think that's the secret of line list illustration, is that in order to have this really cool drawing at the end, you need to be very confident with your line to be able to remove them at the end. Also, it inspires me to pick a color palette that I think is quite harmonious together, and also to know and identify where the light sources come from. Because those type of thing, sharp edges, meaning clean shapes, and colors, and knowing where the light hit, these are the things that are really going to give a huge impact. Some type of whom to your illustration. Awesome. What can I expect to come out of this class with? Is there any skill set or technique in particular? Yes. I'm going to cover different things. But from a technical point of view, because we will be using Procreate, they'll learn how to set up the colors, create a flat illustration, clean out some of the edges, and also practicing your mind to knowing where the light source comes from. Usually, it's a longer process because we started with a sketch and then we started with a clean line, and today just went to do my favorite part and share it with you guys, which is coloring. That's why here we're just skipping a few steps and we're going to color it together. Awesome. What materials will students need to follow along with you there? You guys will need an iPad. You'll also need the software Procreate. Why are we like about Procreate? Is that right now is a onetime fee where it's like $999, I think and in case of price change and a stylus, Apple Pencil. 3. Tracing Your Sketch: We are going to divide it into five different step. The first one will be to color the base in the flesh color, the second one to use flat colors so we'll achieve some type of a flat illustration. After we'll add some darker colors, fourth, I clean up the edge, and then I'll use a little technique that using gradient map on adjustment. But I know it's just jargon. When I'm saying run all, let's just dive right into it. I have this illustration. This is my boyfriend and he's eating a dumpling. That's the illustration that people wanted me to color, or want to color with me today. Here on the color palette, I've saved the color palette as well, so I'll have easy access to it. I usually use this really pink color to draw his skin tone. If I use two fingers now I'm going to reduce the opacity to maybe five percent. Usually, I like for good practice, to lock the line layer just so I don't start drawing on it and mess up everything. Then I usually like to use a technical pen. This is a technical pen under the inking category. It has been modified, so it has a streamline of 100 percent here, and Streamline means that it's a tool to help you smooth and your stroke. You'll see that even if I'm shaking a little bit, I'm shaking a little bit because I'm a little bit nervous because everyone is watching me drawing right now, then it will help me to adjust the line. The first step is really to put the color down. This is not really the fun part, but the reason why I'm doing this is because afterwards we are going to use a clipping mask to start layering the colors on top of it. I'm just personally curious what kind of dumpling is imaginary dumpling is your boyfriend eating in this. I hope it's my mom's dumplings because they are the best in the world. Just so everyone knows, she's currently in Canada, so I haven't seen her or eaten her cooking in more than two years because of the pandemic. Oh, no. What's your favorite dumpling that she makes, or does she always just make one like that's mom's dumpling? The favorite one that she makes I think is the one with pork, a bit of shrimp sometime, water chestnut, and a lot of secret ingredients and I'm not even sure. But the best part about my mum dumpling is really the dough. She makes her own dough and I think that's what makes it so special. Oh, absolutely, that's magical. Does she boil or buy them? So we have this big argument, Eli. Well, we're quite divided at home where my father prefers them fried and my mom prefers them in a soup or broth and actually I prefer them also in a super broth because I think it's more satisfying. I can talk about dumplings and dim sum all day. I'm glad, I can appreciate different types of foods. I think I wouldn't be able to be with someone who was a picky eater. Also, just a quick little tip, make sure that you close your edges properly when you trace in order to create the foundation because we're going to fill it up with color. I don't know if you remember, maybe I'm old, but whenever we had our first computer, we had this paint program and in order to paint you need to do this whole outline and then drop the color. If there was one little opening, then the color would start bleeding everywhere. So that's why I'm trying to make sure that I close all the lines because it's the same principle. Guys, our hard work is done. Now, I'm going to see if I didn't mess up and I'm going to start dropping to color into Patrick. It seems that's doing okay. Something that you want to be careful, you probably saw when I drop the color, there's something called color drop threshold. If the color drop threshold is too low, sometimes you'll see that it's not filled in properly and there's some jaggedy lines. So just to double-check here, I like to remove the lines, and that seems to be okay. 4. Adding Color: The first phase was to create this type of outline. Now I'm going to start adding different type of colors on top of it. I've decided that this shirt will be some type of a green-gray, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with clipping mask, but clipping mask basically allows me, for example, so if I were to make the layer on top, which means the green layer, dependent on the layer at the bottom, so the pink one, you won't see me drawing outside of the lines. I'm just going to do it quite roughly right now so you know what I mean. I'm always really bad at explaining what a mask does. I think right now I just like know it by heart, so I apologize. I'm purposely doing it a little bit roughly now, so you understand the magic accusing a clipping mask here. Same principle. Now we have the outline. I'm going to drop the color again, make sure that the color threshold is. Usually, if it's above 80, I think it's good and there's no issue. Oops. You can see this is his shirt. If I click on layer 10 or do a shirt and then I go to clipping mask, you'll see how it starts fitting his body and it's not bleeding everywhere. I just love always toggling the lines back and forth to see how I'm doing, if I'm not messing up. So far, so good. Now I'm going to pick this yellow for his hair because he's a dirty, mousey blonde. I don't know how you call it. Simon, Jessica would like to know how they can change the opacity of the fill-in when they're dragging it simultaneously with the Apple Pencil. To change the opacity of the fill-in, let's look at the shirt, for example, if I double tap on it, then you'll be able to get the opacity. Then you can just drag it right or left. Now I'm super excited because I always loved to see what people were doing. During the eyebrows, I just want to make sure anything else which should be yellow. I'm not sure if I'll do the chopsticks yellow or that darker mustard. Let's skip it. You know what? Let's do the chopsticks yellow as well. I just removed the clipping mask for a second because I want to make sure that I close my lines properly. Putting back the clipping mask with this part. Now I'm going to draw the cap. We actually have two illustrations. One that you can always work on it a little bit later and this one that we're working altogether right now. Does the other one have a dumpling? Very important. No. [LAUGHTER] But it's still with the theme of eating. It's me eating a sandwich. Foods from different cultures. Exactly. For different foods, we just love to eat. Now I forgot to add a white. I actually don't really like to add a white that's really pure. What I'd like to do is I'll just go here. If you go here at the top left corner, you usually get a very white wipe. Just going to select type of grayish white. I forgot to add this one in the color palette, so we'll improvise. Just doing roughly, because I'm going to put it under the yellow layer. 5. Using Shadows & Lines: Now we can have our base color. I'm going to use a little bit of darker colors in order to play a little bit more with the shadows at some lines, and also at the details of the face. If I go back to my color palette here, first of all, I need to draw his eyes. When I was younger, I loved to add a lot of details to the eyes of my characters, and I don't know why in the recent years, I became really lazy and I just like to make little small beady eyes, but that's just the way I draw now. Now that we're going to start adding a little bit more of darker colors, we need to understand where the lights come from. You'll see I usually do it in a very standard way, but I love to add my light source on the top-left corner and that's just something that I've always been doing. So I'm going to add this little light bulb for your reference. Actually, this is the wrong layer. To help us know where the light and the shadows should be. So you'll see in a lot of illustration, the light source, you often see that a lot of characters have a shadow underneath their chin, so that's why I'm going to add right now here. Maybe I forgot to say why I'm using this darker pink, but I use it also to create a few lines. I know I said it was lineless. We need a little bit of details, but lineless in the sense that we don't have, let's say one black thick line that goes across all the character. Let's see. I'm going to add a little bit more detail on the shirt. So you can see it's starting to feel a little bit less flat the moment we start adding a little bit more darker colors. Because remember, this is how he looked like previously, when we only put the flat colors. I'll add more detail on the cap. One of my favorite shortcut actually is to undo. I'm not sure if she can see me undoing because you only see the screen, but if you tap gently twice with those two fingers, you'll undo your last stroke. We have a question, are you using just darker colors or black and then lessening opacity to make it similar to the background? In preparation to the course, I actually selected the color palette and I made sure to add a darker version of these colors. But they are not black and I'm not lowering the opacity. A little tip is if you want for example to find the darker color of let's say this yellow, you can go to "Classic", and then go to the last row and start toggling it a little bit towards the left where it will become a little bit darker. Even at this level, it could be a good darker version of this yellow one. So this is what we have so far. It's a very simple illustration. I'm just going to look around, make sure that the edges are clean. For example, I don't really love this part because we can see it's not super clean. Now is the time to edit a little bit our lines. Someone would like to know, how do you come up with or make your color palettes? That's a really good question. There's an app that I use that's called Coolor, C-O-O-L-O-R-S, I think. Coolors.com, it's a pun. I usually go on this app and trying to find harmonious color palette, and it can help you find color palettes that are complimentary or they're monochromatic. Now I'm just cleaning a little bit the line. I like the edges to be a little bit sharper, and I like to use the eraser tool for that. Also, for the eraser tool, I'm using a technical pen, so similar to the brush that we used. We have another question. Are you adding the darker colors on the same layer as the base for that color? No. I actually try to have everything in different layers so in case I mess up like I often do, like anyone else, then it's easier to just start from scratch or just erase that specific layer. Also, a tip that I usually give my student that is really difficult to follow, but to make sure to lock or to name also your layers names that make sense. This is just a quick exercise, but sometimes it is too much to just name everything that you create. Now we have this, it still looks a little bit flat. It's not bad actually. I'm going to add more shadows a little bit more to the chopstick. I'm going to select this layer. 6. Adding Depth to Your Illustration: We've created a color base, which is the pinkish color. Then we add the flat color, and this is the color of the shirt, the cap, the hair now the basic. I added darker colors. By adding the dark color on both, I'm able to create also nice lines. We have a better idea where the ships start and end. I clean up the edges a little bit as well. Now I'm going to add a little bit more depth to this illustration. I'm going to duplicate this illustration. I'm going to flatten it. It's a little locked selection. If you press on a group of layers, you can flatter it. The reason why I duplicate it that's something that's irreversible. You can undo, but you cannot save your layers if you're too far down, if you create too many actions after that. I'm going to flatten this. Now I went to Adjustment, go to Gradient Map. Go to layers. Here, if you want to play a little bit with creative map, you're able to change the colors. Now, what I like to do is for example, I like Venice. I pick Venice. I go to multiply and I go maybe all the way down to 40 percent, it's 41 percent. I create a mask. You can see that this version is little bit darker than this and it's a little bit warmer. The reason why I created that is that I'm going to add a little bit of light now. I create this layer mask. The layer mask means that everything that's white reveals and then black hides. Now I imagined that the light from the top-left corner is shining on the top of the cap. Just a thin line. Here as well. We have another question coming in. Sure. What would be the cleanest brush for line art that comes with Procreate? The cleanest line is anything that goes in this section, inking. I love to use technical pen. That's one of the default pen that I use a lot. The only difference is, like I said, I use one that is using streamline because if I use the technical pen without streamline. Just to show you, it's a little bit. You can see that I can wiggle or jaggedy line. If I change the streamline all the way here, we can create a very smooth line. That's my little tip. Any inking brush, but my favorite is the technical pen. That's why I was saying earlier that this exercise is really good for you to understand where your light source comes from. Sometimes I like to create just a little crappy sun like this on the top left corner to remind me of like, well, if this is where it would hit the character more or less. A little bit on the cheek. Just a quick little simple exercise. You can already see that it's adding some type of layer cheater drawing. It's not as flat as this was earlier. Drawing hands or fingers is probably my least favorite thing, but I force myself to do it. You can see here also, I didn't clean up the lines properly, but we're a little bit short on time. Just imagine that this is something that I should have done during the cleaning line part of it. It also looks so cool and amazing. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. I told you about undoing. Every time I mess up, I'll do this a lot to remove it but if you want to redo, you do the same movement but with three fingers. I think it's super important for people who get into Digital Illustration, Procreate, or even Photoshop Illustrator to know this type of quick shortcuts because it saves you a lot of time at some type of glossiness, cheated dumplings. People know that, maybe it's boiled like I said earlier but it's still gooey. Yeah. More or less, this is the last bit of the illustration where we add a gradient map. This is a technique that I like to use in order to add a little bit more depth. Some other artists or some other way to do it, of course, would be to, let's say, pick a bright white color and start adding, let's say highlights like white highlight to give a little bit more dimension to the illustration, but I like the other technique. It makes it a little bit more fun. You can see the difference because we started from basically a line drawing and then we created that base. From that day, we started adding color on top of it to have a very flat type of illustration. It just looked like a effect to art without any depth. From here we started adding a little bit more of darker colors, lines, details. We remember our light source. Of course, I duplicate it. This illustration, I flatten it. I went to gradient map. I just meant gradient map selected one went to multiply, lower the opacity of that one. So lower the opacity here. Then created a mask where I just revealed to places where actually the sun will be shining on the character's face. Maybe to finish up, add a little bit of a quick color background. I'm just going to get rid of this little sun. This is the type of line list illustration that I like to make. It's quiet simple. I think we've completed in 30 minutes. A lot of rambling from my end. No. All good my dumpling obsession was a distraction, I'm sure. No. [LAUGHTER] This is so cool. 7. Final Thoughts: Do you have any final thoughts you want to share with students? Yes. Just go buy an iPad. I don't work for Apple, I swear, but go buy an iPad, get Procreate, have fun experiment. I think it's such a good platform to start drawing because the pen is very pressure sensitive. You have a myriad of different types of brushes that will allow you to experiment. This is just one style, but you can take so many different type of tutorial and explore your own personal style for Procreate. That'll be my little advice I would say. Then regarding to this drawing, my other advice would be [LAUGHTER] just have fun and experiment with different color palettes.