Minimal in Minutes: Create A Simple, Stylish Hand Illustration in Procreate — Fast.

1. Setting the Stage: Class Breakdown & Project: If you are anything like me, drawing relaxes and inspires you. Every time I create, I end up with this amazing, unique feeling unless it looks ugly. Then I get a tantrum. So in order to avoid that, I created these snack sized sessions where we'll create a beautiful minimalist illustration together. The best part, it takes less than 30 minutes. Intrigued. Then join me for this minimal in minutes, where we will create this cool tattoo inspired hand drawing together. Hello, and welcome everyone to Minimal In Minutes, a series of mini classes designed for you to relax, learn, and simply enjoy the creative process without the overthinking drama. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I release a new session every month. So if you don't want to miss out, follow me here on Skillshare. My goal is to always come up with something you'd love to learn how to draw. So this month, I thought I'll show you how I draw hands, as I draw them quite often. If you have suggestions for me what to draw next, please drop them in the comments. After the first lesson, you will already have created a beautiful sketch that might look something like this. The second session is designed to finalize your artwork and, of course, add some much needed color. This class is filmed in Procreate, but feel free to use anything else. Now before we get started, here's a little something about myself. My name is Sandra Staub, and I'm an illustrator, graphic designer, and muralist with over ten years of experience. I recently turned my other passion, beer into my profession by becoming a beer semeler. So occasionally you will see me draw some beer inspired items. Today. Today, I drew inspiration from traditional American tattoo, something that actually influenced my style quite a bit. So I hope you'll like that. I'm also raising teacher here on Skillshare when I'm not working on client commissions. But let's keep this short and simple and get right to the good part, the sketching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. From Idea to Sketch: Create Your Minimalist Design — Fast & Easy: Let's start by sketching the hand. I either use my own hand as a reference or I pick a reference photo to work from. I want the hand to be something like this and the dagger to go through here. So what I do is breaking down the hand into geometric shapes. Let's start with the palm. It looks something like this. Now I'll start adding the fingers. You can break them down basically into rectangles, as you can see here. It helps me as well, thinking of where the next finger actually starts, even though this line will not be visible in the final artwork. I might have drummed the finger together a little bit too closely, so I will redistribute them because I want the palm to be definitely visible. That looks pretty okay so far. So now all I have to add is the thump. Usually, that's a little bit tricky for me, but I hope that you will not struggle quite as much as I do. Again, using my own hand as a reference comes in very handy. And here we go. Now, that wasn't so hard, was it? I'm just going to scoot over the thumb a little bit so I get a bit more of palm. This part is fine, so I can leave that. Alright, of course, this sketch doesn't really look like what we want it to look like in the end. But I proceed from here by creating a duplicate of this sketch. I talk about the visibility of one of them, and put this one in a transparency. Then start adding some style to this hand because you might know that when I draw hands, they don't really look like this. They look more polished. So let's give them some style. I usually draw these pointy fingertips, but you can give them any kind of style you want. Of course, now we're also going to eliminate these lines here that were merely meant as guides for us. Now with all these lines that we're guiding us, we can see if the proportions are actually right or if there are some adjustments that we would need to make. In this case, the fingers are a little bit too long compared to the thumb, and also the wrist is a little bit too wide. Let's fix that. We simply adjusted a few lines, and it's already looking much better. It still feels a little bit too long, though, so I will simply make it a little bit shorter like this by scaling it with the free form tool. Now, what do you think? How does it look? The ring finger still feels a little bit too thin compared to the other ones, so I'm fixing that quickly. And maybe the little finger could come a little bit closer. Actually, I liked it better before, so I'm just going back. Now, this part still looks a little bit odd to me. So maybe let's just change this a little bit, as well. That looks much better. Let's scoot around the thumb a little bit to see if it looks better or worse. I think it was actually in the right place all along. So let's leave it here and maybe rather experiment a little bit what happens if we mess around with the index finger. Right, and that was it. That's what fixed it. You can see that the hand changed quite a bit from the initial sketch. But the structure is more or less still there. Now I can move on to adding some details. So in my case, I'm going to draw a dagger through the palm. But you can draw other things if you feel like it. Since I'm a minimalist illustrator, I will draw my dagger using the symmetry tool. I've never really drawn a dagger, so I'm just kind of, like, seeing what works and then mixing and matching with some style elements of my illustrations. This seems like a pretty good start, but I kind of wanted to be a little bit more minimalistic, so it matches a bit better my style. Yeah, that feels much more like me. I added a diamond up here just for funsies, but I think I'm gonna replace it with a moon. Now let's place it through the hand and finalize our sketch. Now let's add some little details like some drops. Have you've been watching my videos for a bit, you know that I love drops. A I added some leaves as well, but honestly, they don't really go with the vibe, I think. And that's the thing about minimalist illustration. I rather leave out what doesn't fit and spend some extra time to maybe find something that does fit because without the leaves, the composition just doesn't feel quite balanced. Alright, I'm pretty happy with my sketch. So let's finalize this illustration and also add some color. Don't forget to share your sketch in the class project because I would surely love to see it. Don't miss out on the second part. I see you there. 3. From Sketch to Artwork: Polishing Your Minimalist Design: Alright, welcome back to the second part. Now we're going to finalize our illustration and add some much needed color to it. I start by redrawing every single element of my sketch on a new layer. That gives me flexibility in the coloring part. Pick a dark color for that that contrasts well with your background color. In my case, I use a light pink and a dark blue, but you can use any two colors that contrast well. So, for example, a dark green and a light orange or a salmon color. It could also be a deep purple and maybe a soft mint color, but feel free to use any color and revise them later on. I quickly redrew the dagger, as well, because it's going to be overlapping with the hand. Before I add the color fill to my hand, I wanted that to be ready. Now I just drag and drop the color, put the layer in transparency, and I will draw the lines of the hand that you currently cannot see. I add a new layer, and turn it into a clipping mass, and I use the background color for that. Now let's redraw the tiny decorative elements that balance out the composition. Don't worry too much about color just yet. I think in order to balance the composition out, the handle of the dagger will also need to be solid fill color. I proceed just how I did before by adding some lines on a clipping mask. Now, let's do the same for the dagger as well by using the background color as the color for the details. Now all there is left to do is maybe fixing some tiny details, maybe add something more to the hands to make it a bit more interesting for the viewer, and that's it. I'm thinking of putting the color of the lines in the dagger, maybe in the color of the hands in the darker color. Let's see what happens. I think it helps, but maybe we can also put the dagger in a different color. For now, I'm only using four colors, the background color, the darker color, and the accent color. And, of course, the color white, but that's always kind of like an in between color for me. So it's an easy go too if you're kind of stuck with your color selection. I feel like the dagger is a bit too dominant, so I want to see what happens if I put it in a slightly lighter version of the background color. I quite like it, but I want there to be just a little bit more contrast. So I'll adjust the brilliance and saturation just a bit. Yeah, this feels really good to me. I added color to certain shapes on my canvas as well to balance out the composition a bit further. And now, last but not least, I could add a couple of decoration to the fingers. Well done. We've finished our minimalist hand drawing with a dagger. Now join me in the next lesson for a quick wrap up. I see you there. 4. Course Recap: Wrapping Up Your Minimal in Minutes Experience: Well done, you made it to the end of this class. I hope that means that you have a beautiful hand illustration ready to share with us in the class projects. And don't forget to add your signature. I really hope you enjoy creating today's minimalist illustration and gain some useful insights into my workflow. As always, if you have suggestions for what to draw in our next sessions, please leave them in the comments. If you like this session and want to watch more of them, you can join my patron to get early access. You can also find the wallpaper pack of today's illustration, as well as some other cool goodies and exclusive content. Of course, you can also find all the previews minimalist in minutes sessions right here on Skillshare. If you caught the minimalist bug, check out my other classes here on Skillshare. If you hit the Follow button, you'll never miss out on my newest classes. Thank you so much for watching and for creating with me today. I hope you feel relaxed and inspired for the rest of your day. See you next month. Bye.