Magical Beings: Traditional Media Meets Procreate. Part 1: Owls

1. Class Introduction: Traditional or digital paint on paper or iPad. It's a question many artists forever ask themselves. But what if I tell you that you can do both in the same art project. Hello, lovely creatives. I'm inviting you to join my new class. Magical beings, traditional media meets propri. My name is Irina Young. I'm a UK based illustrator behind the brand of Busy Miss Studio, and I'm a big fan of both traditional media and digital art. If you follow me on social media, you know that I find a lot of inspiration in traditional watercolor, pastels, colored pencils, and I also love my procreating. Usually, it's either this or that. But in this class, I'll show you my favorite kind, a mix of both. Whether you already love your watercolor or you do exclusively digital art. I encourage you to broaden your horizons and join me in this magical journey where I'll share my secrets and techniques of combining traditional watercolor with procreate and together we'll create an adorable whimsical character that you'll be able to use for your illustrated story. In this class, we'll create this owl full of texture and character using traditional watercolor and procreate. I'll walk you through every single step from the tools and materials you'll need for this class to adding finishing touches to your character in procreate, making it unique and adorable. I'll share my inspiration sources, give you tips on watercolor and digital techniques. And in the resources section of this class, you'll find a very detailed guide with my recommendations on tools and materials. So if you are ready for something magically new let's begin. 2. Tools & Materials: Tools and materials you will need for this class, I'm going to start with the ones that you will definitely need. And in the end, I'm going to mention the ones that are optional depends on your preference or depends on the mandatory materials you use. You will most definitely need watercolor paper. I've prepared three types of paper for you. For this type of class, for this type of activity, wet on wet. I personally use cold press paper, which is quite textured, quite gramy. But I've also prepared some smooth paper, hot press, just to show you how different your sort of shapes will look on different types of paper. I'll be using some hot press paper. This is called press paper. This is the brand I'm using. Honestly, I'm not really sure where I got it from and when and how the circumstances of it, but it's quite a nice paper for that kind of exercise, that kind of art. And one of my favorite things is this caddy sketchbook. I'll leave all the descriptions of the paper, all the information below in the description for this class. So this is the paper. It's soft. It's almost like fabric, and the fact that it's sketchbook also gives at some winning points. What's the most thing to remember about watercolor paper is that it needs to be at least I would say 200 grams weight, but preferably 300 grams your standard watercolor paper. And because if you take thin paper, like cartridge paper or something, this is just going to disappear. It's your paint and water going to destroy it. So make sure that your paper is suitable for watercolor use. Next thing that you will definitely need, you will need some water. You will probably need big brush. See, I've got these two. So it depends on which one I see first I use. I'll be using them for wetting the paper, larger areas because with smaller brush, it might be quite difficult to use to cover larger areas with water and we will need to do that. You will need smaller brushes. I leave all the material descriptions below in the description for this class. I would take a couple of different sizes to experiment, which you prefer because some larger shapes, obviously you might need the bigger brush, some smaller ones, you will need smaller ones. I wouldn't take a tiny one because that's not the point because all the details will be adding and procreate, but we'll need these brushes to create our large width on width shapes. Of course, you will need watercolor paint, and I would like just to dwell a touch longer on that. I use my sort of custom made watercolor set. I've built it from different brands, different materials, materials, different brands, different colors. I selected the colors that I mostly use in my artwork. See, I created like this little, um, pans, like half pans, this rather. And I made little sticky labels where I put the brand of the watercolor and the color. So in case I run out, I, um, I can refill some of the watercolors. I've actually handmade myself using this natural pigment. I'm not at this point, I'm not hugely encouraging you to do that because that's quite a big exercise. And unless you do watercolor painting on a regular basis, you probably don't need to complicate your life in such a way. Um, you also don't need to buy some expensive watercolors with granulations like Daniel Smith, Schmike. Again, if you can afford it, if you know that this watercolor painting is something you do on a regular basis or you intend to keep doing, I would definitely recommend to invest in some better brushes and better watercolor paint. But if you are a beginner, if you are just starting with watercolor, I'll list down below the brands that I recommend, which are very, very much on budget. And they will give you beautiful results as well. Just the rule of the thumbs is just don't take the cheapest one. I also have some handmade watercolors here that I ordered, I think, from EtS, and I'll be using them. But as I said, you know, use any watercolor as long as it's not the cheapest worst quality. You might need a piece of cardboard and some bulldog clips. I use that kind. So why we need them for. So when we wet our paper and especially when we start making shapes on the paper, obviously, watercolor paper will start buckling, warping, easier to clip a little bit like that just to make sure that the paper stays in place. And that's it. So if you use a sketchbook, if you use pieces of paper like separate sheets of paper, you might need some sort of cardboard, which you will clip it on this. That's what I do sometimes. And that's probably enough two sides because it's not going to warp in a horrible way, once it's clipped like that. But again, that's optional. It's up to you. Paper towel, also optional, handy to have it in case you need to remove excess water from your paper or from your brush. I also have some pencils here that's just a generic HB two pencil quite soft and here I have a watercolor pencil. That's for sketching your shape if you have to, but I encourage you not to because especially once you start using a simple graphite pencil, you immediately want to use an eraser and that's where the trouble start. You just start um drawing drawing, raising and you're not happy and, if you absolutely have to, if you feel more confident creating your shapes first in the pencil, then go for it. But again, watercolor pencil, for example, I use it sometimes for sketching shapes, but that might not work for our wet and wet technique because if I sketch something on the paper and then cover the paper with water, it will just dilute the pencil. The water will dilute the pencil and you won't see it. So see yourself. But again, remember that once we start working on our watercolor stains digitally in our procreate software, we can obviously remove all the imperfection, anything you don't like, it will just be more work for you. That solves so if you want to be more time efficient, I wouldn't use pencil at all. I also use such a thing as heat gun. It helps me a lot, especially when I don't want to wait for the watercolor to dry because obviously it can be quite a long time and you don't want to spend hours, absolute hours and days on one type of artwork. This helps me a lot in my process. If you don't have it, you don't really need to go and buy it because you can just use a simple hair dryer. Of course, in the second part of this class, we will need your iPad with procreate installed on it, and you will need Apple pencil. In terms of procreate, we'll be using default procreate brushes in the group charcoals and maybe in sketching if you need thinner lines. 3. Preparations: Right, guys. So in this part, we're going to do some preparations for our work. This step is optional. You can omit it, but I strongly recommend doing this sort of warm up testing exercise just to make sure that you achieve the results you are looking for when you actually create the shapes for your character, and particularly in this class, we are creating owls. We spoke about the paper, we spoke about the paints and what we will need right now, we will need your paper and you paint. Whether you have more than one type of paper or just one, let's just try and test it how our paint is going to behave on wet and wet using this or that paper. As I mentioned in the previous lesson where we talked about tools and materials, I've prepared three types of papers for you. This one, I used it before and I didn't like it, but I decided to include it in this class just to show you that some papers are not going to be probably the best option for this type of exercise for this type of artwork we are working on right now on this class, but I'm still going to show you just so you can compare. Maybe we'll save you some time as well. And I'm going to use some of these pins. And also, in this lesson, I'm going to give you an idea of what exactly we'll be doing when we create our owl shapes. So let's start with testing this sketchbook page. So I'm going to take my big brush, one of my big brushes, and I'm going to dip it in the water, and I'm just going to cover my page with the water. This paper in this sketchbook is amazing. It's like as I said, it's like fabric. It immediately absorbs water and creates this lovely, lovely base for our wet and wet shapes. Usually, to make sure that you properly wet your paper, you just check your paper like that on the light, so it should be glistening. It shouldn't be dry, but it also shouldn't have big puddles. So I would say mine is prepared. And what I'm going to do? I'm going to take my brush. One of my brushes I prepared, and I'm going to start making shapes wet on wet. I'm going to drop some of the water on my watercolors, or you can just spray them with water. Depends on what you prefer. I'm going to take some pigment, and I'm going to create some shapes. This one, for example, is going to be a round shape. I can try mixing different colors. This exercise is actually going to help you get yourself familiar with your watercolors. To see the pigments because some of the, for example, see this English red type color is less pigmented, but this orange red is much more pigmented. See almost like guash. I'm just going to create random shapes, trying different shapes and seeing how they look on the wet paper, trying to mix in different colors together and see how they work. See, I'm creating no geometric shapes, but more organic shapes. So like adding some different colors into the same stains. I encourage you to experiment different techniques. See like I'm adding and the colors start bleeding into one another. All these techniques you can use to create your owls. You can see because it's wet on wet technique and the paper is so textured, you get this beautiful beautiful texture coming through your watercolor panes. And the most, I think, amazing thing is that look how it bleeds on the paper, creating this fluffy edge, and that will be very handy for our owls because owls can be very fluffy. I tried one type of paper. I'm going to try another one. I'm going to set this aside to dry. And next paper I'm going to try is quite similar to the one I've just tried. It's also quite textured. This time, I'm going to experiment with slightly bigger. Watercolor brush. See this paper, despite the fact that it's also textured, you can see through it very nicely. However, it's not a textured as the previous one. Look how the paint is flowing. It's beautiful, isn't it? See what I was talking about when the paper buckles, that's starting to buckle now. It will be flat again once it's dry. For this type of exercise, for this type of artwork, I don't see any problem with that. For me, that's enough that it's fixed on the paper on the cardboard, so I can just experiment with different shapes, sizes of shapes, colors. And now let's try my least favorite type of paper. I'm going to set it aside to dry as well. And this time I'm going to try this one. It's smooth paper, hot press. It's also a little bit bluer, a little bit colder, tinted it. So I'm going to cover this paper with water and you can immediately see that it's not as absorbent as the previous two because it's harder, it's smoother. But let's see how it's going to work with our watercolor, how it's going to interact. We're going to take the same six colors, and I'm just going to create a little circle. Here, makes sense. This exercise is also good not just for testing the paper, but also remember for testing your watercolors. Which ones work together best? Which effect you prefer? Maybe you prefer three colors and one stain. Maybe you prefer just one. This paper also, I can tell immediately I've not properly read the specification for this paper because I just didn't like it, and that's it. I knew, to be honest I didn't buy it. I think it was a gift. But I can tell that it's not a cotton type of paper. Previous ones was cotton. That's why it almost felt like fabric, and that's why it stayed wet for longer, allowing me to create these beautiful shapes. And this one, see, it's already dry. I didn't really have time to experiment with different shapes. See, it's dry. That's it. There is a slight effect of the paint bleeding into paper and the paints bleeding into each other, but not really that much. So now let's try our stains and let's compute them. That's how stains dry. And let's compare them. So I'm going to unclip it from here and see. You can immediately see that. Obviously, the best, in my opinion, the best paper is this one, of course, in the sketchbook because not only it stayed wet for longer, allowing me to think about what colors and shapes I want to use instead of rushing quickly, making random shapes. Sometimes rushing is not that bad, but in this case, I quite like the piece it was drying with. This paper is not too bad. I also like this fluffiness. See the fluffy edges it created. She's quite nice. This one that is what it is. You can see that for me, this paper is just slightly thicker than printer card paper and the effect. Because the watercolors I use are quite nice handmade, good quality that pulls it off, and I suppose you can work with it as well. But if you have a better type of paper with cotton and a nice grainy structure, I would encourage you to use that one because this kind of paper will give you the best results for your artwork. 4. Inspirations: Now, guys, let's talk about inspiration before we start creating our shapes. We want to know what exactly what we are looking to create. In this listen, I'm going to tell you about my three main sources of inspiration. And the first one I'm going to start with is the one that's available for everyone is Pinterest. What I usually. I create a new board and they start adding images, illustration that inspire me in this or that particular topic of art. You can see that in my board, I've created the sources of inspiration from different types of Owl illustrations. Some of them are from different artists from the past like this one, for example, and there are also illustrations from my childhood books. That I remember and that bring me so many nice memories, and that hugely affect my art as well. You can tell, probably. And yeah, I even added a few pictures from other illustrators, but be careful because we're not going to copy anything. We're not going to make it in such a way that it's going to be recognizable that it's definitely someone else's illustration. No, we're not going to do that. We just want to inspire ourselves with different shapes because see some owls a setting, some are flying, some are fluffier, some are smoother, some have bigger heads, some smaller heads, some are not outs at all, but I just like the textures of them interest. Another source of inspiration can be books. I think in one of my previous classes I showed you the books that inspire me. For example, I've got loads of books that I absolutely love and I use all the time for inspiration. So see, different types of vowels here. As shown in different ways, different postures, different motions, different types as well I see snow. Just so much inspiration you can draw from the sap of illustrations. That this book is Birds of Britain and Europe. I also have my go to massive encyclopedia of birds of the world. And of course, there are owls here as well. And they're also presented in different. They're mostly sitting, of course, because you probably see better all the sort of features of owls when they sit like this, and that's the probably normal position to be because they're watchers, they sit and they look and they watch and they're ready to hunt. But you can also see some in motion. Yeah. I even have this little pocket guide. It's called Scottish Birds and sometimes I use that. Usually, I don't use this type of book as my illustration inspiration, but it also contains quite interesting information about different birds if you want to learn more about dols and little pictures and yeah. But obviously, not everyone has books, so Pinterest is probably the first go to tool of inspiration. Finally, I highly recommend watching some videos, paying attention to the way owls behave, the way they move, imagining how their feathers feel to the touch. Perhaps you even have some owl place nearby where you could go and see with your own eyes, take some pictures, and film some videos. We are quite lucky to have an owl center not far from where we live. I always bring tons of owl pictures from there. Finally, always pay attention to the way other artists create their characters. For example, there are some cartoons from my childhood that still hugely inspire my art. 5. Owl Shapes in Watercolour: Now we've got everything prepared. We are ready to create. We've got our Pinterest inspirational board. We've got our sketchbook, in my case, a sketchbook. In your case, it could be individual sheets of paper or maybe paper block. In this case, you won't need bulldog clips. But I'm just going to clip my paper a little bit just to prevent it from buckling too much. And I'm going to begin with wetting my paper. I know that this paper is going to stay wet to complete. I'm going to use my little palette that I have here and I'm going to experiment with different brush shapes. Looking at my Pinteres board, where I've collected some of the owls and shapes I'm going to use. First of all, obviously, I'm going to use shape of a sittingol sitting on the t branch or something, and I'm just going to start making a shape on this side of the owl's head. S I'm going to use this horn type of owl mixing in different colors. Guys, again, to reiterate what I'm doing right now on the wet paper with the watercolor brush and watercolors I'm creating a shape that I'll be using in procreate to make my fluffy owl. I'm mixing in different paints, different colors just to make it more interesting. You see, that's the shape of an owl sitting on the branch. Now I'm going to create one with a little bit of a side view Let's again, like a little horned owl. It's all very, very approximate shapes. Whatever we don't like, we can adjust and procreate. That's why we love that magic software. See I'm adding different colors here and there. I'm going to create another one sitting like this but flipped over. Why I'm creating a few because I want to see which ones I like best because I'm only going to choose one for this class, but I might choose the rest for some other artworks of mine because I can see that I already love those out shapes. What's important, guys? Obviously, on this stage, we're not going to add any details and probably we couldn't even if we tried because the paint is flowing. Is colors are bleeding into each other. So we definitely not going to be able even if we try to add eyes or little feather details. All of it we're going to do and procreate once our shapes are dried and we've transferred them into our iPads. Look at this fluffy look so funny. Now I'm going to swap the brush to a smaller one and I'm going to try and create maybe a little baby owl, which is just going to be a fluffy ball. Just here with a little bit of different colors combined together. Yeah, I can see that my paper is already drying, so I want to little wings here. Little feet. We'll see. I'm going to create a few shapes here as well on the side of my sketchbook. Yeah, the paper is still wet, but it's already drying. I'm going to try and work a little bit faster. I'll probably do one out flying as well. I'm just going to maybe wet the paper a little bit more to create more of this fluffy effect. To All the details like weak eyes, definition of feathers, I can add already Procreatee. Just wanted to wet the edge a little bit. And that's the shapes I've created. I'm going to try them now and see you in the next lesson. 6. Photography: So, guys, now our shapes are dry, and I've still not decided which one I'm going to use. I'd love to use all of them because I absolutely love. I can already see in what way I can utilize each of these shapes. However, this class obviously we're limited in time, and I'm going to use just one. But again, I've still not decided which one to use. Let's do the next stage. Next thing we're going to do is to photograph our shapes and transfer them and procreate. There are many ways to do that. Some people scan their watercolors. I don't scan. I've not really scanned my watercolor works for a long time because I believe that camera is rendering the color so much better, especially in the daylight. What I would do just to make your job easier. If you work on your iPad, just photograph your shapes with your iPad. I prefer if your camera is better on your phone, for example, which could be quite the case as well, photograph them with your phone and transfer them to your iPad via airdrop or just email them to you or save them on your iCloud, et cetera. The main things that I would consider is First of all, use as best camera as you can. Just the best one. If your best camera is on your phone, use your phone to photograph the shapes. If it's on your iPad, use your iPad. If you have a professional camera like Cannon, use that one as well, whichever you prefer. And second most important thing is that you need a lot of daylight. Is the best light for photographing your watercolor is during the day, either morning or very, very early afternoon depends on where geographically you are. Should be sunny weather or avoid direct sun rays of sunlight. But you can always cover your window with a little bit of white curtain if you have one. But the best time is kind of like a beautiful bright daylight without direct sunlight. In this case, your colors will be at its best despite the fact that we will obviously have to do some manipulations and procreate to clean up our shapes. Still, the more daylight you get, the easier it's going to be to work with your shapes and procreate. I'm going to photograph my shapes with my iPad. So I have them directly there. So I'm going to bring the camera of my iPad as close as possible so I can see all this beautiful texture of my shapes, and I'm going to photograph each shape individually because I'm going to create high resolution of my artwork. Now, let's check. That's it. That's my photographs ready to be transferred and proclq. This beautiful texture you can see. 7. Procreate: Part 1: We photographed our shapes. I use my iPad camera to photograph them, and now I'm going to transfer them in procrade. As I said, we are limited in time in this skill share class. That's why I have to use only one shape of mine though they are all amazing. Trust me, they all turned out to be really nice. Um, so now I'm going to show you the basic manipulations you can do with your shape to create your nice owl fluffy owl character. So I've picked this shape. So today's owl is going to be this one, and I'm going to show you how I create a lovely cute owl full of character using this watercolor shape. In Procreate, I'm going to select choose this plus icon and I'm going to select a four paper. Partially, the reason is because it's high resolution, and I'll probably use it for printing, a card or something. I've created the A four Canvas, and now I need to add my OL from camera roll to my canvas. I'm going to click on this range icon. I'm going to select insert a photo because obviously, after photographing the pictures, they've been saved on my iPad and here is my owl. I'm going to make sure that I stretch it enough to fill most of the canvas because in this case, you can see all these beautiful textures there because obviously the camera photographs, it's really well. And now I'm just going to click on the layers to make sure to fix the photograph on my canvas. Next thing I'm going to do, I'm going to get ready. You see like we've got a lot of other stains and objects around that we don't need for our artwork, at least not on the stage. I'm going to choose the select too, and with the free hand option, I'm just going to roughly draw around my to select only the shape I need. Close the selection line and I'm just going to click Copy and paste. You see, if you switch this layer off, you can see that it's created cut out of my my watercolor shape. I'm going to get rid of this layer because I don't need it, and that's a very important part right now. We're going to try and make it look nice and organic on our paper, on our canvas. First of all, it's very important to mention guys that in this class, we're going to be using light background for our owl, which means from pure white to some different shades of milky white, cream of white, et cetera. I'll explain to you why. Um, so the color I'm going to choose from my background is this cream white and now you can see that I can see the cutout edge of my owl and I'm going to get rid of it. For that, I'm going to go to this adjustment section of the menu, and the very first thing I'm going to choose is carves. And now I'm going to do some manipulations with curves to make sure that I get rid of this dark edge of my owl. What usually works for me, see this very bottom corner of the curves, I'm just going to drag it a little bit along to the right and what it does, it brings the colors up, makes the colors more saturated because obviously the camera does distort colors. And you can't help it. It is what it is. And this top corner, I'm going to drag along to the left. You can see that the edges start disappearing. They definitely turning from blue to more yellowish white. And that's pretty much it. I'm quite happy with that. You can always try and move this metal thing. But I can see already that this is how it's going to work for me. And now you can see that there is still this cut out. You can still see it. That's when we're going to use darker color blending mode. You can see that at least in the top part of our owl, the edge has blended in nicely to the canvas. This edge that you can see, we're going to remove with eraser tool. But now going back to my comment that the background should be light, why I did that Because to get rid of this cutout edge, I had to change the blending mode. If our background color is dark. You can see that our just disappears because darker color mode only brings up darker colors. If we go to normal, it will be still cut out. If we go to try different other blending modes, you can see that darker color is still not going to work. We need to get rid of the edge. Of course, there are ways to do that. You can always use the eraser to erase the edges of this l. I'm not going to dwell on it because for this technique, I'm going to use lighter background. But maybe in my next class, I'm going to show you how I use shapes on the darker background and how I erase the edge. So going back to darker color and changing our canvas back to this milky white. I'm going to choose u charcoals, it's a default set of brushes and procreate and I'm going to use fine charcoal, erase it, raise it to vine charcoal, and I'm going to reduce the opacity a little bit and reduce the size of my brush. Very gently with gentle motions, I'm going to erase this paper edge. From my owl. Try not to erase this nice fluffiness because that was the whole point of using wet on wet technique. You see I'm erasing here, just defining the feet a little bit better. Now, this edge, I'm going to delete erase and I can see this bluish paper. I still see it here. Again, very gently. I'm trying to preserve this. I remember how paint floated when we put this watercolor stain on the paper. I'm trying to keep this effect as much as possible, but adjusting the shape to create more of an owl shape. I think I'm just going to stop right here. I think that's already quite beautiful. You can see all these color transitions. You can see all this lovely texture of the paper. You can see these granulations of the watercolor and I'm quite happy with that. 8. Procreate: Part 2: S What I'm going to do next? I'm going to give my owl eyes. I think I mentioned in my previous classes that I always try to give my character eyes because that what brings it to life and it kind tells you what to do next. Once the eyes are in place, you know already where to go from there, what to do, what to look for. So, um, I'm going to create a new layer, and I think I'm going to use vine charcoal brush again. But this time, I'm going to bring the opacity to 100%. And the size maybe to around 10%. This time, guys, I'm not going to give you any color palettes because I gave you the freedom in the previous lesson to choose your own color palette for your watercolor. But now, depending on your colors that you picked for your owl, you will be using your palette based on these chosen colors. What I suggest that you do, you can create a new palette and add different swatches and that's what we're going to do create it on top of it. Now I need the light color because first, I'm going to create these two circles for the owls big eyes. Now I'm going to put my finger on this little square between these two sliders and it's going to activate the color picker. Using my own colors, my own owl, I'm going to pick the color, the light color. I think this one is quite nice and I'm going to immediately add it in case I want to go back and use it again. I'm going to make the two eyes. I'm going to create a circle. If you don't trust the steadiness of your hand, just create two and place them side by side. I would probably pinch them together. You can always play around trying to adjust them. And now I'm going to add darker parts of the eyes. I'm going to create a new layer and using vine charcoal brush, I now going to try and pick darker color from my owl. I'm going to put my finger on the color picker, and I think that the darkest part is somewhere here. I'm going to try and pick some dark brown color. Just this let's draw circles for the middle part of our owl's eye and put it here. Now we've got eyes, some sort of eyes, and I'm going to just add a little bit of light just to make the eyes a little bit more alive. For that, I'm sorry, let's add the color swatch to our palette for the highlight of the eye, I'm going to just use white color. I'm going to reduce the opacity a little bit and reduce the size of the brush. I'm just going to add a little bit of a highlight here. Hoot hoot. See, it's already looking quite nice. Now I'm going to add the beak. Our owl's beak, it's an owl so the beak is going to be more crooked type with the same brush. Basically, vine charcoal is one of my favorite default procreate brushes that I use all the time. The beak, I'll probably make it this reddish color. Again, I'm going to select the color pica. I'm going to add this color to my palette in case I want to go back and use it. Let's play around with the nose shape. I'm going to try maybe different types of noses, noses, beaks, obviously. Yeah, I think I quite like this one, a little bit of a side view. And it just makes our character a little bit even more adorable and you've got personality already. Now what I would like to do next is, I'm just going to define a little bit more of the wings of the body, only a little bit because I don't want you to spend hours unless you want to, of course, creating your character because let's be honest, I think you will agree with me that this is already a character. It's already. You can already put it in the book. It does look to me slightly unfinished, so I'm just going to literally do a touch of work here. But now adding darker colors to define the parts of the body, I want to make sure that I don't make this lovely texture disappear. What I'm going to do, let's put all these facial features in the same group. Sorry, I actually forgot to add some blushy checks, which I always do. Six B compressed. Brush I'm going to use, and I'm just going to pick a shade of pink. I usually use this type of shade. You can add it to your owl and I'm just going to add little blushy checks. I think that's quite nice. That's our facial features here. As I said, I'm just going to define the wings a little bit better and just generally make more of an outline of the body. I'm going to try immediately use the multiply mode because I'm going to add darker colors and the brush I'm going to use, I really would like to use the most delicate one of these charcoals, and I would say it will be to be compressed. And the colors, I can use the ones that I've selected already in the palette, but I would like maybe to pick some other color. I think this may be reddish, brighter brownish color. Let's add it to our palette. We have it in case we want to go back to it. Let's try and experiment. I'm going to increase the size of my brush opacity. I'm just going to try and define the wings a little bit because you see the body is here and the fluffy wings are on the sides. I'm just going to use my brush, pay attention guys that the opacity is reduced because I don't want any harshness because I don't want this beautiful watercolor paper and texture disappear, and maybe I'll pick some other shed. Maybe this shed. Let's add it. Add a little I would like to add a little bit of dark brown on the feet. So I'm going to choose some darker brown color here. It's really dark. That's added to our palette. And I'm just going to add a little bit here. I think I'm going to add a little bit of darker shading here on the horns or ears or how you call it. You can always see, I can see that there is a little bit of a lot of whitish areas, lighter areas. I'm going to again select some orange brown and I might just add a little bit of that shading around the face. I can see that there is a lot of darker concentration here, which is actually really nice, but I just want to soften it a little bit. I'm going to add the new layer and change the blending mode to lighten and I'm going to select some lighter color with the same brush which is to be compressed, I'm going to increase the size, and I'm just going to Maybe not lighten. Let's try screen. Lighter color. Sorry, guys. Lighter color. I'm just going to soften this dark apart a little bit. I love this brush because it also creates this extra fluffiness. Let's add little feet. I'm just going to use one of the colors I've already picked. I'm going to grab the smudge two and using vine charcoal with reduced opacity, I'm just going to blend them the feet into the owl's body. Obviously, going forward, you can add a G branch or something, but it's not the point of this class. The point of this class is showing you how you can utilize the traditional media to finish it up and procreate to create this lovely character. The last thing, I'm going to add as I always do is hand drawn texture. I'm not going to dwell too much on it, guys, so I only tell you what brushes I'm going to use. But if you check out my class called texture Magic 300 texture, I think it's about sleeping rabbit. That will give you the idea on how I use different textures. The brush I'm going to use is vine charcoal and I'm going to reduce the size of and just remember the rule of thumbs, when you use darker colors, I would select multiply mode. When you use lighter colors later, I'll use normal mode and just play around with different textures. And now it's time to use some lighter textures. So I'm going to add a new layer, keeping it on the normal mode. I think I'm going to be using the same brush which is fine charcoal. The only difference is that I'm going to reduce the size really, really down, right down. So it's quite a thin, delicate brush stroke. I'm going to choose the lighter color, and I'm going to add some textures which are lighter. And just like that, our character is adi. I don't know if we can call it a finished illustration, but it's definitely a finished character. This can give you the inspiration to create maybe a story about this character. You can try and create different shapes on the watercolor paper with the same character using same colors, but in different situations in life, one sleeping, for example, one with babies, one flying in the air, one hunting a mouse or something. You can create a whole story about them, create a whole book if you like. And yeah. Here I've added some elements that I've also hand painted with watercolor, but just not wet on wet effect. I see you guys, here I set my owl on a branch. I created also using the same technique, watercolor on paper, and it's already looking more complete, more finished. I encourage you not only to create your character, but also if you can, if you feel inspired, add different elements around it or even a whole story. 9. Final Words: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you've learned something, and I can't wait to see your illustrations here. Please make sure you share your magical characters here on Skill Share or upload them on Instagram and don't forget to tag me at my Underscore Busy underscore. May, thanks again and see you soon. Mm.