Magical Pastel Dragonfly in Procreate

1. Introduction : Hello, my name is Jennifer Nichols. I'm an artist and teacher and a fabric designer. I loved the Procreate app and teaching everything I know to you. I've always been a teacher and I've been teaching Procreate for quite some time now. And it has been so fulfilling to help other people on their art journeys to improve on their skills. Learn more about Procreate and just have a more fulfilling creative outlet. I have dozens of classes now on various topics and styles. So there's something for everyone. I love making procreate brushes. I teach how to make procreate brushes as well, but I gave away a lot of Procreate brushes to my newsletter subscribers, also to people who take my classes. But be sure to sign up for my newsletter as well. And you'll get access to all of the past brushes that you've missed. And continuing to access each month to new free brushes. You can find a link to sign up for my newsletter over on my profile. And also in the about section of this class. I first taught this class in a creative retreat that I was part of. And I'm really excited to bring it to everybody else who wasn't able to be part of that retreat. I'll show you a very easy and colorful round and then we'll delicately put together the dragon fly in a very simple way. You're gonna be surprised at how simple and beautiful this project is. I do provide a bright color palette for you that you can use. Any color palette, any color palette. You can use your very favorite colors. You can do some fun things with warm and cool colors. Anything goes. It's a really fun class with gorgeous results and I can't wait to see what everybody makes. Be sure to post your class project so everybody can see what you make. Leave a review so we can all see what you think of class. And I'll see you in class. Enjoy. 2. Downloads & Class Project: Alright, to get to the resources, you need to be in a browser in landscape mode like this. And this is Safari. I hear about some other browsers having some problems. So if you have problems, try a different browser. If you go to the projects and resources tab, this is also where you create a class project and your resources are right here. Really quickly. For creating a class project, you just tap that button. This first button is specifically for the cover image. This button, the image button down here, we'll add images to the main part of your project. And even though you can only have one project per class, you can come back and edit it and add as many images as you like, and then publish. Your class project, of course, is to create your own gorgeous dragonfly, and I would love to see it. To download these resources. I quickly wanted to mention that if you have taken my pastel chickadee class, you do not need the brush set of genes pastels. That's the same brush set. And you'll just need the dragonfly brush and the bright pastels palette. So for downloading anything here, you just tap on it. It will ask you if you want to download, you just say yes, you can see it. Download right there, and tap on the other one. Download, tap on any of the ones that you need, and then you can get to them right here. Just tap on it there, or in your files app right here. And it will be in recents, and it'll be the very top ones right here. These are not zipped folders, so you can just tap on them and they will open up right into procreate. If you have Procreate already open, then they will just go ahead and import. Just like that. When you have a zipped file, you have to tap on it first and it will end zip. And then you can find the resources within it. Your brush sets will be at the very top of this list. So the dragonfly is a stamp that you're going to need along with the pastels. And your pallets will be, if you tap this palette option at the very, very, very, very, very bottom. And then you can drag and drop it and reorder it however you like. This sparkle brush in case you missed it in the intro, Is a brush. I teach you how to make in the Dual Brush class. You can find that class by going to my teacher profile and going all the way down to the brush making classes and the Dual Brush Class is right here. You can see the sparkle brush right on top. And be sure to check out my other classes while you're there. I've got quite a few of them. Alright, let's get started. 3. Prepping the Canvas: So here's one example of many that I've done. They all turn out a little bit differently. So we'll just see how it goes today. The first step is going to be to set up our canvas and get this lovely background. You can create any canvas size you like. So if you have a favorite size you like to print or post online, whatever you want to do. I'm gonna go ahead and create an eight by ten at 300 DPI. So if I tap the plus sign, plus sign again, go two inches. And let's see. I think I might make it eight inches wide and ten inches tall so that I have something different. I don't think I've tried a portrait mode for this work yet, so that's just something different for me. And for color profile, I always choose this. Interesting. This very second when it, this actually is, something's wrong here. This should say Display P3 right now, it says unnamed, but yours might say Display P3. I don't know what's going on with that. And then the one directly under it. This very first sRGB profile is a great profile to use in general. So I don't have a lot of details on color profiles, but this works really well for me. And tap create, your Jens pastel brush set has way more than what you need for this activity. We're gonna be using this side stick pastel and this soft pastel and blender. But if you like a different look than what those are giving, then try out some of the other brushes as well. These are gonna be pretty smooth. And then we're also going to be using some of these texture brushes. So we'll get a nice texture on the canvas. You'll also need this dragonfly stamp. So first let's get our textures. And to really see our textures, I'm going to change our background to something that is not white. So I'm going to bring it down to a mid tone gray if you want to just go straight across to gray for now, that will work. I'm going to add a few layers and just kinda come to the top here and start with some textures. Play around with these textures. If you have not taken my chickadee pastel chickadee class yet, then there's some really great information about the textures. But I'm going to go ahead and do. I really love this craft paper texture? So let's do craft paper. And on a mid tone gray. So again, just kinda go straight across and you can play around with this. And then we're going to change the blend mode to color burn. Figure out what size you want. You can see the grain size changing and whatever you do, just make sure that you cover the whole canvas without lifting the pencil. And then hopefully you can see that texture on there. Now here's one thing about Color Burn. It doesn't show up on all colors. So I'm going to come down to a different layer and just pick a, a fun brush and get some colors on the page. So if you find your bright pastels palette, then if you just tap on one of the colors or you can tap on the three dots and set as default. That's two ways to get it to set as default. And then you can switch to this disk mode or whatever mode you like to view your palette in and have your bright pastel palette here. This is probably pretty close to the gray that we've been choosing here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and pick a bright red and get some bright red down. I don't know if you can see this, but the texture of the color burn is barely, barely, barely showing up on that. And then if you get a really light pastel, the Color Burn layer barely shows up on that as well. But some other colors do just fine. Let's see. So you can see the speckles and you can still see them on the pastel. But what really works is getting a layer that is on multiply and you can test out other layers, other blend modes as well. So here I'm back up to our blend mode layer or Color Burn texture layer and I'm just going to duplicate it. And I really like it like that too. I'm going to switch that one to multiply. So I tapped on the N and now I've gone down to multiply. Now you can see here, if I come back down to this colorful layer and add a white too. Without the multiply layer, you really can't see any texture on the white at all. But with the Multiply layer on, you can see the texture, but it's very gray. And you can see it's very gray on the pink. So we're just experimenting with trying to get some texture that shows up well on lots of colors without changing the color to drastically, it will change it some. I'm going to turn the opacity down on the multiply layer. And I've zoomed in and I'm watching the pink and the white mostly to make sure that it's not looking super gray. And I can still see some good color on that red. And I think I might go ahead and duplicate this Color Burn layer again. Maybe we could have used a darker gray to get it to show up a little bit more. That craft paper layer itself, it's just speckling. It doesn't really show up super-duper well, so it's not a really obvious texture. Now, I think I like that. I'm going to test out some more colors. It's showing up quite a bit over here on the gray, showing up on purple. We've got an orange. How about a yellow? Yeah. And so I'm going to swipe on my three texture layers. I can probably combine it. Let's try this. Let's watch and see if this makes a difference. I'm going to combine the two Color Burn layers here. And nothing changed. So that's good. So it kind of just joined them into when. It looks good. I think I like that, but let's group those two texture layers together and just toggle them on and off and decide, did those really change the colors so drastically that it's going to make it really hard to figure out what color to really choose when you want to pick a red, for example, I think it's good. It's adding texture and it's adding depth. But it hasn't darkened anything to too much. It does darken some of it, but I think we're good. So that again was the craft paper texture and definitely play around. You can see that this one is going to be darker. So if you test that one, if we just come in here and add a new layer and maybe change that to color burn. Choose a gray. That's darkening things quite a bit. So if you turn that one on and off, look how bright that oranges getting. And I'm pretty sure the camera is showing these two colors way brighter than they actually are. So definitely test out. This one looks like a totally different color with that layer. Test out all sorts of different layers of texture. I like doing two sets. So a color burn and a multiply of two different brushes. So you can do another one with the pastel board or whatever you went. Then you can clear this layer. You can go into the wrench tool and go to videos, turn the time-lapse off, purge it, and then turn it back on. So now all of that testing that you just did isn't going to show up in your time-lapse if you like to use time lapses. So that's nice. You can label your layers here. I'm really bad about that. Maybe just label the group textures. But I do recommend labeling layers. So it's been about three months since I've done this lesson. When I came back to review which layers that I used, I had no idea. So if you think he might use the information in the future, if you come back and go, ooh, I really like those textures. I wonder which textures, those where it's probably a good idea to go ahead and label your layers. I'm just really bad about it. I think I was gonna go ahead and do the background in this video, but I'm going to push that to the next video and we'll get started on the background. 4. Background: All right, Here we are. Let's go to the very bottom layer. And I'm gonna go ahead and darken my background a little bit more. I don't want it black. If I, if I go black, it's not going to show any texture at all. I'm gonna go pretty dark. And let's go to this side, stick pastel. So if you think about this color wheel and three colors, so you have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. So three colors in a row, no matter where they are on the color wheel, are analogous colors. So red, orange, yellow, orange, yellow, green, yellow, green, blue, and so on. If you're choosing analogous colors next to each other, then when you smudge, they're going to blend really well. So red and orange blend together really well. Orange and yellow really well, and so on. If you're choosing colors that are complimentary, so they're on the opposite side of this color wheel from each other. They are going to get a little muddy when you blend them. They still look really good together though. I really like this blue, for example, like this bright blue and red together. So if you're putting complimentary colors near each other, just be careful when you're smudging. We're gonna be adding a bunch of colors right now and then we're smudging them. If you want. This side, stick pastel smudges as it goes. So not really, but it kinda makes it look like it is smudged. And think of this as a little piece of pastel that you're holding on its side and wrapping around on the paper. So as I'm thinking about colors, I want contrast, I want some darks, and I want some lights. I don't want it to be all these brights. So I am going to add some black, even though I have this dark background. And I am going to just keep that in mind. I'm probably not going to use white at all. Maybe it will look good. I haven't experimented with white and I'm not wanting to do stripes, but that is a really fun Look. If you wanna do stripes or circles, start out with a super bright center and get darker and darker, anything you want. So I'm just going to pick some of my favorite colors. And you can see here it, depending on the size canvas you used, the percentage is different. So if you want a small piece of pastel is just going to take you longer to fill your page. If you use a larger one, if you use a really big when you're not gonna be able to get very many colors on there before it's all filled up. So just pick something a little in-between. I think I'm gonna go for about this size right here. Alright? And I'm really lightly holding my pencil and just add in some color without it looking like stripes. Bouncing around a little bit. I know I didn't stick with an analogous thing here because I really like the bright blue with the red and the pink near each other. But you can stick to some analogous colors. I'm going to go with this real navy here. It's not quite dark enough for me here. Maybe even black. I've been here. I might stick with black just up in the corners. They cover up that navy blue. I'm not a fan of that right now. And I don't think I want the green next to the black either. I'm also not doing just a little tiny patch of color. I found that it ends up being kinda too spotty, I guess. I don't know how to explain it. You just do whatever is your preference here. And this will take experimentation as well. Of course everything does. Use maybe just your favorite colors. Did I do this orange yet? I don't think so. I'm personally being a little bit careful about getting black next to orange and yellow just because I worry about it looking like a bumblebee or something. Alright, so I have some dark and then all of my brights. And I'm going to tap and hold this smudge brush so that the same brushes selected for that. This is another thing where you can change the size to get different looks. So a smaller size, again, take longer. But you can have some really cool smudgy streaks going on that aren't going to smudge big chunks at a time. So that's a really fun Look. I mean, a two-finger undo there and go a little bit bigger. Personally. You could also smudge with this blender brush here or the blending fingers brush. Definitely test out and I barely tapping, just like I was barely tapping when I added the color. And the reason I'm barely tapping is because I can drag color and keep the texture that way. I don't want to smooth something until it's got no texture except for the texture layers that we just added. I really liked the brush texture too. So depending on your own preferences for that, maybe you want a smooth texture for your pastels. I'm really liking this color down here. So spend some time doing some smudging unless you just like it exactly how it is once you get your color on. This part really is flexible. It doesn't really need to be any certain way. And that's it. That's as simple as that. And so when you're ready, when you're done and you're happy with your background just however stripy, certainly a morphous you want it to be. Comeback to the next lesson, I will show you the dragonfly. 5. Dragonfly Body: All right, Time for our dragonflies. So go to the dragonfly brush and get a pretty big size. Well, let's go to a new layer first. We're gonna go to a layer just under the texture layers because this is just gonna be our sketchy outline brush is not going to be used in the final design. I'm going to choose a different color here. So you can see it. Since this is a sketch layer that we aren't using in the final design. You can move it around quite a lot. Normally in Procreate you can, you really should only move something one time. You can move it a lot while it's selected before you de-select it. But once you de-select something, you should just keep it how it is. So you may have noticed that if I'm pinching my canvas out here are my screen, it's not even my canvas. I can move the canvas around, but if I pinch in here, I moved the selection around. If you're way zoomed in and you can't really get to a space where you're outside of the canvas like this, I'm barely able to do. Then you can tap and hold that arrow and then pinch inside of the selection to move the canvas around. And pinch outside of the selection to move this selection around. So that's just a little trick. That is fentanyl. So now is the time to pick where you want your dragonfly to be. And since it's a sketch, you don't have to worry about if you change your mind and move it. If you have it going off the edge and you de-select it will crop it, but you can two-finger undo to get it back to its original state or just re stamp it. I'm gonna make it pretty big. O when Look, I keep seeing online is a really big version that's kind of off to cut in half like this. So that's kind of fun. I think I'm just going to do what I've been doing a lot lately with this. And that is just sort of add an angle and crop it a little bit over here. Alright, so I'm going to de-select that. Now. If you have some darks and lights had, you can't see the whole outline? I can see all of the white outline. Go ahead and alpha lock by two fingers swiping to the right. And it's a good idea to alpha lock the layer anyways, so you don't accidentally draw on that dragonfly layer. But it's also a good way to go ahead and change some of the colors. For example, I could choose black and go back to my pastel and say, I wanted this area right here to be more noticeable. I could change just the outline of that area right there. If you have if you're dragonfly, is over dark and light colors and you can only see part of it. Just darken or lighten certain areas so that you can see the whole thing. I'm gonna go ahead and leave my white. And I'm going to turn the opacity way down. So you should turn your opacity down as far as you can so that it's not really impeding your actual art. Let's go ahead and just go ahead and add a couple more layers down here. We have our dragonfly Alpha locked so we don't accidentally draw on it and our background. So let's go ahead and go to a layer right above the background layer. And I'm going to start with the body itself. We're gonna do really transparent, sparkly lovely wings. But let's go ahead and get that body there. And the body is something that you can do with most of these brushes. Just play around. If you haven't experimented, I'm going to choose the pastel pencil. And I'm going to choose a pretty dark gray. Just for the base. I intended this stamp to just be a guide. There are so many different shapes of dragonflies. So you can use this as a guide, but make it super skinny, make it really abstract, whatever you want. So I'm definitely going to make mine just kinda skinnier just because I haven't really tried that recently. And I'm on a pretty big size. And I'm just going to, whoops, that ended up being this just as thick as the outline. I'm just going to spend some time maybe fast-forward this and just start filling and just a base color of the dragonfly, of just the body and the eyes and the head, and the legs. If you want legs, you can change this color later, so don't worry too much about what color you're choosing. It's gonna be on its own layer. So you can alpha lock that layer and change it at anytime. And you can see I'm bumping out at each of these segments just as a little bit of a design choice there. What dragonflies do? Amazing segmented bodies there. I'm filling it in pretty solidly. Also, I'm gonna be using clipping masks. On top of this. I'm just trying to see if I got a similar look on both sides. Since I'm not really following the outline. I'm going to go with the full big eyes here. This brush has a very solid edge and then a faded edge. So depending on, if you want the solid edge on that outside edge, you might want to turn your Canvas so you can get it like that and have the solid edge right where you want it. And I'm going to go for a smaller size to do these legs. Or you can do these legs on a different layer. And I'm being really sloppy with these legs. Now we're gonna go to a layer above it, tap on it and tap clipping mask. So the only color that's going to show up now is right on top of whatever we have on this layer. So that'll be nice. We don't have to try to stay in the lines. I'm going to choose some greens and bright pinks and bright blues. And just get some fun symmetrical designs on here. So first think about if you're going to have light coming in what direction? So if you, if you pretend like you have a light up here and it's shining on this dragonfly. Then maybe put some light colors on this top-left kind of facing that direction on the eyes, especially. And we'll get to that. But also along this side. Along this side, if the light is over here, might be a little brighter than the other side. Generally, let's just go ahead and do some back-and-forth symmetrical designing here. And I'm going to, I'm going to stick with this pastel pencil. I think. If I do some sort of green design here, I'm gonna do the same thing over here or similar. You don't have to follow these lines. This is the first time I'm choosing to follow these lines actually. Then whatever you do over here, It's just really doesn't matter as long as things are symmetrical. It's going to look like a dragon fly. If you want to put some little cut diamond shapes in here. Some lines that go all the way across. Switch to a new color, maybe a bright pink, move it up brighter a little bit and get some splashes of pink in here. It's kind of a psychedelic you can do to a new clipping mask if you don't want to. Add this right to the layer that you did with the green. You can do a new clipping mask and have them separate. I'm going to choose black and come in around the eyes a little bit, just to add some contrast, we're going to brighten those eyes. Maybe up here on the little nose. I know they don't have noses. Maybe you get some fun. Wet. I might go under. So I'm gonna go under this green layer. I'm going to tap on the body layer and add another layer. And it's automatically a clipping mask because it was added underneath another clipping mask. That's really nice. And I'm going to come in here and get a little dark areas here. And they're sort of makes this segment stand out a little more where they are divided. Maybe on the sides here. You can always come back to this two. And then either layer works for the eyes. I really like the blue eyes. So I'm going to choose first this really vibrant blue and get some blue on there. Maybe some of that teal. And a super bright blue eyes are really going to reflect whatever's going on out here. So you can do all sorts of crazy colors here. Maybe a little splash of green. And then finally, a little bit of white. Remember our lightest coming from up here. So if we do a really firm spot of white, it's going to make them really look shiny when you zoom out. I think they need a little splash of pink too. How about just some pink on this inner curve here and the outer curve here. Alright, so spend some time on that. And I'm also going to get some lighter reflective areas on the back of this, but I'm gonna do it back up on a higher layer. You can do it right on the layer you did your colorful Stefan or add yet another clipping mask. If you want to tap the plus sign or just grab one of these layers that's already there. All you need to do to make it a clipping mask is tap the menu or the layer and tap clipping mask. I'm just gonna go ahead and do it right on the same layer as my greens and pinks here. How about the green and go really bright with it? It's really bright and neon here. Yeah, I like that a lot. I think I am going to go to a new layer just in case I change my mind later. So go to a new layer and tap clipping mask and my light is coming from over here. So I'm just going to put some highlights here. Some bright, bright, bright green here and there. On this top left side. Makes a big difference. Alright, spend some time on this. And when you're ready for the wings, start your next video and we will do the weightings. See you then. 6. Dragonfly Wings: Layer 1: Okay, For the wings, we're going to go up and layer not a clipping mask. And we're going to choose white. And we're gonna go to this soft pastel and blender brush. Again. Just my recommendation, you can try some other brushes. And I'm going to go to a pretty big size. I'm just kinda thinking about how big my wings are. This is our layer where we're just doing some very faint transparent anise on our wings is transparent as a word. Alright. So I don't want it too big. I don't want it small because I don't want just little tiny lines. And it's okay if you go out of the lines because you can erase. And there's a few things to focus on. So I don't want to fill the whole wing with white, even faded white. I want some of it to be completely transparent. So I am going to focus on a little bit on the tips of the wings and also this inner corner here and sort of along the top. So I am going to go right along the top here. Inserted define the top of that wing. I don't want it to be just a line though, so I'm fading it down here as well. I am going to focus a little bit on that tip. I'm going to come back and erase some of these areas here so that are outside the lines. It does not need to be the same on this side. In fact, maybe where it's over a dark color, it might be a little bit more transparent. In that case, I might tap and hold and get that same brush on as an eraser and take some of that off. This bottom wing. I do want to focus a little bit on this just so I make sure I can see that the wing is there, right there and they're going to go a smaller size and also define this area a little bit right here and here. And then come out bigger and spread some of this white around a little bit. Sorry, I'm talking so quietly and concentrating. And again, I'm going to erase maybe on a smaller size and sort of clean up my edges. If I went out of the lines anywhere, I don't want it a sharp edge. So I am using that same brush to erase width. Alright, and then if you turn your outline layer off and see what does it look like without the outlines at all? I kind of see a stripe here, so I'm not liking that. Alright? So we can come back and do more to this layer. We can add or remove from this layer at anytime. If you want to label it, if you can't see it very well there, you can label it. And in the next lesson, we're going to add all the details. 7. Dragonfly Wings: Layer 2: Alright, in case we want to change more on this layer later, we're gonna go to a new layer. And here is where we're going to have fun with details. So we're going to stay on this same brush. This is a great brush, the soft pastel and Blender, we're gonna go pretty small. So if you can't quite get it small exactly to where you want it, get it close, and then drag your pencil out and you have much more precision over your sizes over here when you do that. So I'm just testing it out here. I want we're gonna be doing sort of the main outlining. And so I don't want it to dominate the whole illustration. So pick a pretty small size. We're gonna do some white and black. So you can do them on two layers. I'm going to do them on the same layer and have them overlap and smudge each other a little bit. So I'm going to start with white, and then I'm going to switch to black. I do not want to have everything super outlined like this. So what I'm doing is I'm pressing and lightening up my pressure and heart, my pressure enlightening my pressure and just getting some wisp beer lines. And I'm personally choosing to not trace very many of these lines. The stamp has quite a few lines on it. You can trace as many or as few of those as you want. But let's now focus on the outer edges of those wings. So I'm going to zoom way in so I can show you what I'm talking about. I'm going to press enlightened and press enlightened. I do want to make sure that I can really see the wings up here in this area, that they don't just disappear into the body. And I also like to focus on these little corners here and these outer edges here. For this, it's fun to just kinda do a little swoop down and around like this to define that bottom edge of that. Can go over it again. And remember, we're gonna do some black to say you don't need to have every area like this super defined in white right now. And you don't need to do the same exact thing on both sides, so don't worry about that either. Again, it's nice to turn the outline layer off and see. Does it look like a wing? It does. It looks like a wing. That's good. I'm gonna go stay on this layer and switch to black. You can go to a new layer if you like. And I'm going to do this same thing with some black just here and there. Not necessarily following the same lines as my white lines. In fact, I'm really liking the white. I've always used a black with the white. I've never just use white. I'm not liking them next to each other like that. I think I might make sure they're overlapping a little bit. So I'm just kind of figuring this out as I go making changes. I might be doing it differently from the last time I've done this demonstration. One thing that a lot of dragonflies, if not all, maybe have their top wing here, is this big patch right here. It's like a big spot. So doing that on both sides would be kind of a neat thing to really define it as a dragonfly. I'm going to turn my outline layer off and see if I like that. I think I mostly like it. I'm not a big fan of my little loop, the loop, so I've got down here, but I'm going to leave those. And I being well, actually, you know what, I'm not going to leave those. I am going to carefully erase the black. Try not to erase the white. Maybe I'll just leave that white one or the one. And then I'll come back with white and just do something else here. Okay? I don't see a very good definition right there either. Alright. So spend some time on your sort of main outline areas with the black and white or black or white. And look in here on top of the dragonfly and make sure you can see hints of the wing outlines overlapping the body here. If you can't see them very well, it doesn't really end up looking like the wings are attached to anything. And then the final step in the dragonfly part is to get some really fun splashes of color on these wings and we'll do that next. 8. Dragonfly Wings: Layer 3: Alright, we're gonna go to a new layer. This layer can be under or above the black and white that you just did. I'm going to go under. So here I have the layer that has this faded white. And I'm just going to add a layer right on top of that layer. And that way if I end up going out of the lines, it's not going to overlap my black and white here. What I like to do is look at the colors I have underneath. Those colors are gonna be reflecting in the beautiful iridescent dragonfly wings. So if you have like I do blues and purples and a little orange over here, I'm going to think about those colors when I'm adding some specs of color on this side. And over here I'm gonna be thinking about the yellow, green, and blue, maybe some pink. So that's how I'm doing my color choices. And I'm not choosing these colors exactly because they'll blend in to what we have down here. So what I'm gonna do is bump up the brightness on all of these and add little blobs of color. If you look at a real dragonfly wing, it looks like a mosaic. So we're not getting all of that detail, but we are going to get a tiny bit bigger of a brush size. And we're still on this soft pastel and blender unless you want to pick something different. Let's start with this swing down here. I've got some bright blues and some yellows and pinks. So what I can do is grab the pink and then just go really fluorescent with it. Just bump it up to super saturated and bright. So I'm not necessarily just gonna go with pink on top of the pink area and blue on top of the blue area. That's not really important. Stick with these general colors in this, these two wings here. And it'll look great. I've just been doing little dashes like this. I'm making them pretty solid. I'm not really doing really faded faint colors right now. I'm following the lines. If you want to turn your outline layer back on, if you, if you don't have too many of these main lines traced, turn your outline layer back on and follow the direction of these different little flowy sections like over here, and it's all going down this way. Over here. You can come down this way and just get some dabs of color here and there. I think I'm going to put some pink up in here as well with just a few of these little hints of color. Without doing filling in the whole entire wings. You're going to really give it that mosaic lip. I'm going to pick the bright blue. It go towards white, eminent saturated got going all the way to the edge. But I'm also brightening it. I can't really see that blue in that area. I'm gonna go to yellow and bump that up really bright here. I don't have any yellow over here, but I think it's okay if I add a little yellow because I've got yellow that might be reflecting over there. Definitely adding some yellow up in here. Let's go back to that really vibrant greens. So we can, if you still have it there, you can grab it there or just tap that green and go way up here. Neon green. Yeah, great color. Might be going a little crazy with that. Green. Probably shouldn't have added green over here. Actually, there's really no green nearby. The yellow is a little closer to the yellow here, but the greens way over here. Maybe I'll come down here and add some green. I don't have too many colors right in here. I think I might go ahead with some bright orange. Let's see if I can get it to look nice and vibrant. Might need to go in closer to white. Yeah, that orange isn't really showing that for me. So take a look. If you zoom out and make sure that you have a nice disbursement of colors and approximately the right amount of dots on both sides. Not the right amount, but kind of a similar amount. So you're not really concentrated with the dots on this side and hardly any on this side, for example, I only have green and yellow here with a tiny bit of blue over here. I think I might get some of that bright pink. I'm going to go back over to pin, can get some pink in here now. And I think I want something right there. Also can have a big void right here as well. I want something really bright there. I think I might pop that bright green there. Alright, so this is different for me every time and just have a lot of fun with it. You can even do some white that'll make things look really shiny. So any amount of white, we'll just really make things pop. Like if one little patch that I was talking about on each wing, right about there on each wing. White or black there would look really good. And then any other little hints of white here and there will really make things look shiny and sparkly. That is the sparkle layer, mosaic layer, neon layer, whatever you wanna call it, Have fun filling in as much or as little of your dragonfly wings as you like. Next we're gonna give him a shadow and make him look like he is hovering above this rainbow pond, maybe whatever you wanna call it underneath him. 9. Blend Modes & Shadows: So for the shadow of the dragonfly, we're going to duplicate this body layer. So just swipe it to the left and tap duplicate. This top one is still connected to these clipping masks. So we'll leave that one alone. And we're going to grab this one and you can move it around. We might want to change the color of this and we're gonna be moving it down here and we're gonna be blurring it. But one of the things that I like to do is test out some different colors and blend modes. So to make this a little easier, I'm going to group my dragonfly all into one and group and just turn them off. So I'm going to go to this layer above. And I'm going to put a stripe. I want to cross as many colors that I have on this page as I can so I can see what the blend modes are gonna do to all these colors. And I'm just doing some dark, light, medium gray, white, even although white we don't need right now because we're doing a shadow. This is just a fun experiment to do with blend modes. Now I can just play around with this one layer and see what these colors do for Blend Modes. So let's go up to the top and start with multiply. So the white just disappeared. The white was right here. But then multiply on this light gray. Looks really good. We might want to go ahead and do that for our shadow layer, for the dragonfly. And we can reduce the opacity. It looks good across all of these colors. It is very gray looking still. Multiply dark, that lighter gray disappeared and darken. Color Burn. Color Burn is one of my favorites. But if we used this light gray, for example, it's gonna be really vibrant purple over here, wherever that shadow of the dragonfly is covering up any of that color and it's gonna be really bright here. So that might not be the best option for a shadow layer here. Linear Burn works pretty well. Overlay with black works to darken things for most of the time. But you can see here with red, it makes it still quite bright. That's not bad. So the hard light with this dark gray is not bad. I love doing this plane with blend modes. Subtract is interesting on this black and dark gray. I think I'm going to stick with multiply, multiply with this lighter gray. So the white was here. We can't see it at all. And this lighter gray is a good one, I think. So. I'm gonna delete this layer. Well, actually, you know what? If I want to remember what shade of gray, What's that? I can just go back to normal. Now I can see it was that one right there. But I have the textures turned on so I can't really just select that color. But if I turn the texture's off, then I can select that color and turn them back on. And then maybe just turn this layer off for now in case you want to use it again later. Let's turn our dragonfly back on and go down to that shadow layer. And you can alpha lock it by tapping here or two fingers swiping. And we're just going to fill it with that gray that we liked in our example and turn it to the multiply blend mode. Now I'm going to alpha locket here and reduce the opacity a little bit. And I'm going to blur it. So go to the magic wand, Adjustments, menu, Gaussian blur. It won't blur if it's Alpha locked, so make sure you turn that off. And I'm just kind of watching him as I swipe. You can see the blur setting there and I'm going to swipe to the right and blur him quite a bit. So I'm at 5% here, 8% now, it might be a good idea to turn the opacity down after you blur it to. So I'm turning it back up a little bit. Alright, and I'm happy with that, and I'm going to move that shadow layer into place. I don't want it to just be a straight duplicate of that same shape, the same angle. So if you change the angle of it a little bit and get it tucked under there, if you have it a little further away. Our light is coming from this side, so we actually need to move the shadow to that side, in which case I'm going to tip it this way a little bit. So I'm having the head and the legs a little closer to the actual body of my dragonfly. And I'm having this abdomen be a little further away from the actual body, so the shadow is further away here. And that's going to give it a look like it's pointing down a little bit like at this. The head area is lower to the ground or whatever this rainbow layer is. And the abdomen is raised up a little bit. So if you don't want it to look like that, you can straighten it out and move it out here a little bit and the whole thing will look a little higher off the ground. Be careful and figure this out before you de-select, because right now I've gone off the edge here, so it will crop if I de-select it. So spend some time figuring this out. Technically, your shadow layer should be pushed this way a little bit too, if the light is coming from it here. So you don't want it to just be lined up, up here. Alright, I think I like that, but I think I'm going to blur it somewhere. I can't help it. I have to play with blend modes somewhere here. Yeah, color burn, linear burn actually works pretty well. I would probably reduce the opacity. It just depends on the colors you've got your shadow layer on top of there, um, the color of your layer and the blend mode you have, and the color that's underneath are all going to play together. So I'm gonna go back to, oops, I'm gonna go back to multiply and bring that opacity back up a little. Here we go. Zoom out. I do like that a lot. And I am 100% complete with my base drawing at everything. But come back to the next lesson and I'll show you a couple of more fun things that you can do. 10. Final Touches: Alright, one thing that's super fun to do is do some swirls and smudging on that background. But I spent a lot of time on that background. I really liked that background. I don't know if I'm going to like the changes I make to it. So I'm going to duplicate it and turn off the original in case I want to come back to it. So now I have the duplicate and I can do whatever I want. I'm gonna go ahead and make sure I'm on the right layer, go to the Smudge Tool and pick my brushes that I was on. And I'm going to go to maybe the pastel stubby blender. Definitely play around with all of these and see what works best for you or any of the other brushes that you have. If you can smudge from dark to light like this and pull some of that dark out. That's kinda fun. Or pull some light into a darker area like this. I might go to a smaller size. Different brushes are going to smudge in different ways. Some of them might not have a lot of pulling power. So this is just a fun, fun way to get some swirls. Saturday swirled there. They're not showing up super well on this one. So that's one option and then play around with it all you went, if you don't like it, you can always come back to your original, maybe go to that streaky brush and pull some Lyons who it could look like it's raining a little bit. That's also kinda fun. You could splatter, splatter paint splatters all over and add speculate dots. You can add another layer and be adding all sorts of things to this. And then, of course, if you have my magic sparkle brushes, they are called Jen star dust brushes. I think this star does starburst dust when is a nice one, white or whatever you want. And this is really pressure sensitive. But you can add some, maybe some sparkles to your wings. Adds a little magic for sure. And then I always like to zoom out and decide what I like, how much I like something. And maybe you can toggle between the two different backgrounds that you have. Now, I'm thinking I like this STP when actually I really like this blue pulling down into the pink and the orange pulling up right next to it. Remember, you can always come back like we talked about the very faint white layer. You can always come back and make adjustments to that. Now that it's all complete, maybe you want to erase some areas. Like actually I think I do want to erase some areas. So having this be a little less white. Here is good. There's one more quick thing I want to show you that's fun to do when you're playing around with an alternate background is to change it with the hue saturation brightness. So select it and go to the Adjustments menu, hue saturation brightness. And you can change, it's going to change every single color. So you're going to want to change the colors on the dragonfly wings as well. So play around just like this. This kinda looks like Aurora Borealis, doesn't it? You might find a policy. I like that a lot. It's a little more tropical instead of rainbow, so that's at 46%. So I'm going to remember that number and I'm going to go change my layer here of the little reflections on the wings as well. So I can go in and find that layer. I'm going to duplicate it and keep the original. And then just adjust one of them and go down to 46%. With that too, it did make a difference, not a huge difference. But one of the ways you can see the difference is if you're still in this mode, you can tap the layer and tap preview. And you can go toggle back and forth between the original and the current setting that you're on. So I don't know if you can see I'm changing. They are a little bit different. And then you can just go ahead and apply it. Or you can exit by tapping the brush and it will apply it. So that is just a slightly different color version. I really love it. All right, see you in the next lesson. 11. Text Tool & Thank You!: Alright, Just one last thing for those of you who maybe aren't as familiar with the text tool in Procreate. I am going up to a layer above my group of my dragonfly layers. And I think it's going to add a layer anyways, but I'm going to the wrench tool. Add and add text is automatically goes to whatever color was selected. So that worked out. And I am going to save, Thank you. And triple tap there. And you can tap on the font name there or tap the double A's here and find a font that you really like. I'm just gonna go to Cherry Here. I have a whole class on working with fonts, finding free fonts, importing, deleting and playing and all the things and making them look like hand lettered fonts and everything. So if you aren't familiar with how to do all of this, definitely check that class out. But this is just a fun way to say, to turn your illustration into a little thank-you card. There's a ton of things you can do with the font, but I just wanted to use this as a way to show you that text tool and say, thank you so much for taking this class. I can't wait to see what everybody makes. I hope that you have fun with these brushes and with this style. I can't get enough of this pastel, smudge the background. I do it a lot now. Definitely go check out my pastel bird class. We do a little smudgy background in that as well, but it's a more realistic bird class. If you want to tag me on all the places where you follow me, I would love to see. Thank you.