Modern Folk Art Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate + Free Folk Art Stamp Brushes and Templates | Liz Kohler Brown | Skillshare
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Modern Folk Art Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate + Free Folk Art Stamp Brushes and Templates

teacher avatar Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Modern Folk Art Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate

      2:00

    • 2.

      Inspiration & Downloads

      5:21

    • 3.

      Making Brushes

      4:49

    • 4.

      Complex Brushes

      7:44

    • 5.

      Symmetrical Compositions

      9:47

    • 6.

      Fonts & Lettering

      5:47

    • 7.

      Combining Stamps & Drawing

      3:32

    • 8.

      Symmetrical Painting

      8:55

    • 9.

      Adding Variation & Texture

      6:12

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About This Class

In this class, I'll show you how to create modern folk art on your iPad in Procreate.  I’ll show you every step of my process from planning and sketching to creating brush stamps and balancing a composition.

I'll show you how to:

  • create a single-color symmetrical illustration inspired by Swedish folk art
  • use the free downloadable templates and brush stamps I made to create a balanced, playful piece.
  • combine lettering and illustration to create a multi-colored piece inspired by Scandinavian folk art
  • balance shapes and color around the text to create eye catching illustrations that make your lettering stand out online and in print.
  • create a symmetrical flower and leaf painting using gouache brush textures.
  • combine multiple plant shapes and colors to create a modern twist on Mexican Folk Art.

When you take this class you get all of the brushes and templates I created as free downloads so you don’t have to start from scratch.  I’ll show you how to create your own brush stamps so you can turn absolutely anything into a brush stamp illustration.

All you need to take this class is your iPad and a stylus.  I’ll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus, or even your finger.

Here is the Pinterest Inspiration Board

Here is the Class Downloads Page (The password is shown in the first section of the class.)

You can pick up Abbie's Scandi Folk Brushes that I mentioned in the class here.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Liz Kohler Brown

artist | designer | teacher | author

Teacher

Hi there!

I'm Liz Kohler Brown, an artist, designer, and teacher who loves helping creatives find their style and sell their work. Before you dive into my classes below, you might want to start with the basics in my free mini-courses:

Learn all the basics of the app Procreate so you can easily follow any of my Procreate-based Skillshare classes:

See the Procreate Foundations Mini-Course

Learn the basics of the professional surface design app Affinity Designer so you can ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Modern Folk Art Illustrations on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. I'm [inaudible] , I'm an artist, illustrator, and teacher. Today, I want to show you how to create modern folk art on your iPad, and co-create. I'll show you every step of my process, from planning and sketching, to creating brush stamps, and balancing a composition. First, we'll create a single color symmetrical illustration inspired by Swedish folk art. I'll show you how to use the free downloadable templates and brush stamps I made, to create a balanced, playful piece. Next, we'll combine lettering and illustration, to create a multi-colored piece inspired by Scandinavian folk art. I'll show you how to balance shapes, and color around the text to create eye catching illustrations that make your lettering stand out online, and in print. Next, we will take inspiration from Mexican folk art, and create a symmetrical flower and leaf painting, using blush brushes, and textures. I'll show you how to combine multiple plant shapes and colors, to create a modern twist on this ancient art form. When you take this class, you get all of the brushes and templates I created as free downloads. You don't have to start from scratch. I'll show you how to create your own brush stamps, so you can turn absolutely anything into a brush stamp illustration. All you need to take this class is your iPad, and a stylus. I'll be using the Apple pencil, but you could use any stylus, or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Inspiration & Downloads: The first thing I like to do when I start one of these projects is to take a look online or in a book and find some folk art that fits well with my personal style. ally like these bright bold colors, a lot of animals and plant forms. But you may find something totally different that works for you. You can look through my inspiration board and I'll put a link to this in the class description or you could create your own board that has a lot of examples of things that fit your personal style. You can see there are a lot of different options here. If you go with something that's Mexican inspired, you'll see a lot of bright contrasting colors and usually this white background. You'll also see these in black and white as well. So you could start with a simple black and white piece with some silhouettes. In other parts of the world, you'll find some Scandinavian style prints and you'll also see some more modern takes on folk art. This board combines some traditional forms and some modern forms of folk art. You can see there's really no rules here. It's whatever colors you want to combine. But typically you're working with a limited color palette and some simple patterns and shapes. One thing I love about this style is you can take something really simple like a tree shape and just fill it with some pattern. It doesn't have to be anything complex. You can just find a silhouette that you like and fill it up with some color and pattern. That's the great thing about folk art. It's defined as art by non-artists or amateurs, and so it doesn't have a lot of rules. It's really open to the cultural and personal interpretation of the creator. For your pieces, you could go with something a little more complex, creating a shape and filling it with some complex patterns, or you could start with something really simple. Just repeat a shape throughout your canvas and fill it with a few different patterns and shapes. I'll show you a few different options today so that you could look at most of these and figure out how you could create something similar in your own work. Let's go ahead and get all of the brushes you'll need for today into procreate. You can find the link to get to this downloads page in the about section of the class, and you will need a password to get on that page, and I'll show the password now. Once you open that page, you can scroll down and you'll see there are three options here. Download the brushes, download the ivory font and the hot cocoa font. All of the brushes are in this single file, so you can click and hold that line and then click "Open" in a new tab. Once that new tab opens, you can click, "Download" and then open in. I'll click, "Copy to procreate" here this is the only program that this file we'll work with, and that will automatically open up procreate for you. If I open up a blank document here and choose black as my color, I'll see that brush set at the very top of the list. So you should see folk art, and then all of the brushes here on the right. At the top you'll see a few brushes that already come with procreate the Nair under pencil, the technical pen, and the monoline. Those already come with procreate. But then you'll see my dry wash brash, and then a ton of stamp brushes, and then two templates at the bottom. You can start by just playing around with these. I'll start with one of the vine brushes at the top here and just drag across the screen. You could do that in a circular pattern and you can do it left to right or right to left. I'll make that layer invisible and create a new one. Those are all the vine brushes. They all have a similar pattern with different shapes, and then you'll see some stamp brushes. These are great for putting in the center of your canvas or to decorate the outer edges. Once you pass through all of these flower and leaf brushes, you'll see a house, and we'll be using that on one of our projects today. You'll also see several animal forms. I created some animal silhouettes, and I also did stamps that have those silhouettes filled-in with patterns. If you want to do your own pattern, you can feel free to use that silhouette and make your own brush. I want to go ahead and show you how to create your own brushes. 3. Making Brushes: You may like the brushes that I created, but you will probably eventually get to the point where you want to have your own brushes with your own personal style. When you are ready to do that, just go to your gallery and create a new document, so I will click "Create Custom Size" and I will work it by 10 by 10 inches. It's important here to work at a large size because this is going to set the maximum size that you can use this stamp for. I want this branch to be 10 by 10 inches, so I can use it on any document and it can display up to 10 inches in size without becoming blurry. If I created, this a 2 by 2 inches, then in any document it can only ever be 2 by 2 inches or smaller. Starting at 10 by 10 gives you a lot of flexibility for your future projects. When you're making a brush, you want to work in black and white, so I have black here and I'm just going to grab my Monoline brush, which is in the Folk Art set, but this one comes with Procreate, and I'm just going to draw a really simple line. I'm going to start by increasing the brush size here and then just draw these leaves, this doesn't have to be perfect because you can always adjust it as you go. I'll just take a few minutes to get this fine, just as I'd like it to be. Now then I have this solid shape of how I want this brush stamp to look. I may also want to add some pattern or decoration on top of that, so I'm going to create a new layer, set that to white, and just come in and draw some little openings to decorate this leaf from the inside. Now that we have this shape created, we can easily turn this into a brush stamp, so I'll click the tool symbol, click "Share:, click "JPEG", "Save Image", so now I've saved this to my iPad. I'm going to go to one of these stamped brushes here. You don't want to use a vine brush, but uses stamp brush, so I'll just choose this first one here. Swipe left, click "Duplicate". Now we have a copy of that stamp. Click on it one time and then you'll see over here on the right source, so we want to change the source of this brush from this floral to this branch that we just created. I'm going to click "Insert Photo", find that on my iPad, and there's my shape. Now I can remove this for my Canvas, create a new layer, and let's just choose a random color here. Click one time, and there's our brush. You can see it's exactly what we created but now we can use that shape with any color that we choose on the pallet. You'll notice here I turned my Canvas sideways so that made my brush lay down sideways, if you turn your Canvas, the brush will still lay down in the same direction, so if you're having trouble with a brush, you may just need to turn your Canvas. That's especially true with these fine brushes. These work really well when you have your Canvas in the right direction. But when you turn your Canvas, they don't work. If you're having a problem with your vine brushes you create, that's probably the issue. Now that you've seen how to create this simple leaf shape, you may also want to do some more complex shapes. Here I did a squirrel and you can see I just used a picture of a squirrel, and traced it to create this really simple illustration shape. I've done the same thing with a fox and then I just added a white layer that has some decoration here to create a fox down. You can really easily turn any shape into one of these stamps. You just need to create the silhouette and then add some pattern on top. You could even do this with your own dog or your house or your church or anything that you want to turn into a stamp. You just need a quick photograph, put it on your iPad, and then do a short tracing. 4. Complex Brushes: For this next brush, I want to create a flower shape and, I want to have these symmetrical paddles that all have the exact same pattern. So I'll show you how I do that here. I'll make this layer invisible and then create a new layer. I want that layer to have a drawing guide. So I'll click Canvas, make sure drawing guide is on, and then click Edit Drawing Guide. I want to set this to symmetry because I want to create a symmetrical drawing. Then I'll be sure that assisted drawing is on. Then click Done. So now if I get my monoline pen on black and I'm sure I'm on that same layer that says assisted. I can draw my paddle shape here and that'll be the shape that I repeat. So if you're not happy with that, just tap two fingers and step back and keep playing around with it until you got a shape you like. So I'm happy with that shape. Now I want to add a little bit of decoration on top. I can do that on a new layer, or I can do that on the symmetrical layer if I want the pattern to be symmetrical. I'm just going to do a normal layer. So I'm creating a new layer and I've got white selected as my color and, then I'll just add a little bit of decoration. I'm happy with that paddle. So I'm going to merge my two layers together. So I've got my pattern and my black paddle on the same layer. I'm going to duplicate that layer. Click the Move tool and click the Rotate button until it has flipped a 180 degrees. Then I want to be sure that magnetic is selected because I want this little guide here to help me make sure that this is in the very center. So you can see if I take it away from the center, this line becomes lighter, whereas if I move it to the center, I get this nice magnetic guide to help me. So once you're happy with the placement of that, you can merge those two layers together by pinching. Then duplicate that layer, click the Move Tool and then click Rotate one time. Then rather than duplicating that new layer that you just created, you want to duplicate the original. There's one issue with procreate, where every time you duplicate something, it gets a little bit more blurry. So I try to only duplicate my original and never duplicate a duplicate. Now we have the same pattern horizontally. I'm going to duplicate my original paddles, click the Move tool and put those in the empty space. Now I can do the same thing we did with the original stamps. Click Share, save as a JPEG and turn this into a stamp. So the last step that I want to show you is these vine stamps. These are really easy. You really just need to be aware of a horizontal line across the page. So let's say for example, if I take my Narendra pencil and draw a line across this page, and we're going to hold down two fingers to make that perfectly horizontal. Then I can create a new layer. With the monoline brush, I'm just going to draw some paddles that I want to come off this edge. I'm happy with that one. I think I'm just going to duplicate that, click the Move tool, flip vertical and magnetic is selected here. So I can get that nice guide to help me and then I'll just make sure this is close to the middle here. Now I can remove my Narendra pencil layer and I've got these two paddles on different layers. Click Share, save as a JPEG and click Save Image and so now I can go to one of my vine brushes rather than the stamp brushes like we did before. I'm going to go to the vine brush. Swipe to the left and click Duplicate, click one time, and then make sure you're on the source section. Insert a photo, select that new vine brush that we just created. Now if I make them invisible, you can see my vine brush. I can go horizontally, or I can also turn in a circular motion. One last thing to keep in mind about these brushes is that you can adjust everything about this brush. For example, if you go to general and you scroll down, you can ingest the size limits. So let's say you want your brush to be way bigger. You just increase the maximum size. Now the largest size is really large. You may also want to increase the minimum size. If you don't ever want this brush to be tiny, then you can go ahead and bump up the minimum size. So you can do that and there are a lot of other options here. I won't go through all of those today, but feel free to play around with those and just see what it does to your stamp brushes. So one thing that you may have to adjust when you make one of these vine brushes is the spacing. So if you go to your brush and go to the stroke section, you'll see here there's a spacing adjustment, that just suggests how close these pieces are to each other. If you put them all the way together and just makes one single stream and you can slowly increase the spacing. If you find that your vine pieces or squished together, just bump up the spacing a little bit. If you're not really in the mood to make your own brushes or you just really want to try out some more brushes before you make your own, there's a really great resource at uproot.com.au, This is Abby uproot. She creates a lot of nice iPad and procreate tutorials and she also makes a lot of great procreate brushes. So here's her Scandinavian Christmas brush set. So this is a great folk art style set of brushes that you can pick up and put straight into procreate and start using. I got the original idea to do some folk art drawings and procreate from Abby. She has a great tutorial on using these brushes. So check these out if you just want to try out some holiday themed brushes. 5. Symmetrical Compositions: For this first project, I am going to click create custom size and use inches and work at ten by ten inches. I like to work at this size because I found it works well for most online and print uses, but you can use whatever size here works for your final use. I'll click Create. I like to start with a colored background for these so I'm going to go ahead and start with a mustard background. I'm just clicking the background color layer and choosing one from my favorite colors. The next thing I want to do is create a new layer, and that layer is going to be my template layer. I'll do my template in black, so it's really easy to see. For this template, I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of the brushes section and get the square and the circle template. If I click that one time in the center, then click the Move tool and click Fit to Canvas. Then, that'll make this square fit perfectly to this canvas. I also like to reduce the opacity of this template by clicking the N symbol and reducing it here just so it's not quite so prominent on my canvas. One note here, if you use a Rectangular Canvas, you can easily adjust this template to fit. Just click the Move tool, turn off magnetic, and just squish it until it fits your rectangular canvas. Next, I'll create a new layer and that'll be where I put my stamps. I'm going to use white for my color here. Two contrasts nicely with the mustard. I'm going to put one stamp right in the center, and that's going to be my house down. So you can use my house stump or you can create your own house stump by just taking a picture of your house or some building that you like and creating this kind of silhouette and adding some pattern on top. You can see all I've really done is draw on the outside, the roof, the windows and added some pattern so this is a really simple stamp to make. I am selecting magnetic here as I adjust the size because I want to be sure that I don't mess up the proportions of my house. Then I'm just going to get this in the very center of the canvas. You can zoom in and click the Move tool and just carefully adjust this so it's perfectly in the center. Now I want to do some pieces that are symmetrical. They are the same on both sides. I'll create a new layer and I tend to put every new stamp on a new layer. That way it's really easy to make adjustments later on. I'm going to grab my fox stamp here, and I'm on this new layer, I'm going to click one time. Actually, I'm going to make this a little bigger. Okay, now it looks good. I am just going to place this on the right side here below the house. Then I want to have that fox reflected on the other side. I'll swipe left and click duplicate. Now, I have two foxes right on top of each other. But I want to flip one fox over so I'll select that fox and also select the guide. To do that, I'll just swipe right on the guide and now you can see that they're both selected here. Click the Move tool and click flip horizontal. Then I can click the Move tool again and that set. Anytime you want to reflect something, you have to both select that item and select the guide because the guide is measuring the distance across your canvas so it's going to make a perfect flip, whereas that single element would just flip across itself. I am going to continue the same process here with several different stamps, just laying down a stab and then making it symmetrical. One note here is that you can make adjustments to the stamps. I created these, but you can feel free to make changes and still call the piece your own. What I'm going to do here is take the monoline brush. I've got the eraser selected with my monoline brush. I'm just going to give this squirrel a really wide eye so he has a lot of character on the page. I usually try to add in some pieces in the center that aren't duplicated, as well as some pieces that are symmetrical across the page. For example, these two flowers are kind of balanced by this flower in the center. I'm trying to think about those things as I build this piece just to create some balance and to have some pieces that reference each other so It's not just totally random on the whole page. I'll add another piece on the top here. Now I want to add in just a little bit of decoration on the outside to finish this off. I'll create a new layer and grab one of my vine brushes. I'm just going to pull this vine brush down really quickly and smoothly across this piece. I can see now that this swirl is a little bit too big. This is why it's great to do these on separate layers, because now I can just delete one of them and make this swirl a lot smaller and redo it. I try to keep everything on separate layers. You do eventually run into a limit to how many layers you can create so you will have to merge some layers eventually. But for now I'm trying to keep them all separate for as long as I can. I ran into the same issue with my leaves. I'm just going to reduce the size of this leaf and make it symmetrical again. I'd like to try to balance my vine so that I have some really light vines mixed with some heavier vines. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller and contrasts these solid vines with these hollow ones here. Now I can see that these vines are a little bit close to this centerpiece so I'm just going to select magnetic and make my center piece a little bit smaller so it has a little more room to breathe. Now I can remove my guide layer and just take a step back and see if I want to add anything else. I could add an additional vine on the bottom. I could add some more pieces in here to fill this in. At this point, I'll just play around with some options. I can see if I try to create a new layer, I get the message maximum limit of 18 layers reached. That means I need to merge some of these things together. So anything I'm really confident about, like these two plants or these two leaves, I'm just going to pinch those. The two squirrels, the two foxes. I'm merging this together so I can make room for more layers in this document. Okay, so I'm happy with how this turned out. The only last thing I might do is go to my background color and play around with some different color options. Maybe even create a few different color versions of this document. These are nice to share on Instagram and ask everyone, what color do you like? What color should I make for sale or what color goes well with this certain event? So, I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. 6. Fonts & Lettering: For this next piece, I'm starting with my canvas in the exact same way. This is 10 by 10 inches. I'll start by setting my background color to a dark charcoal black. On the next layer, I just want to sketch out some text that I want to add to the center. I'm going to grab my Narinder Pencil with white and just sketch out my idea for this quote. I have the basic placements set here. I know I wanted to say, "EVERYTHING is hard BEFORE it is easy," and I want these two lines to be in all caps and these two to be in cursive. Now that I know my general placement, I like to use the Over App to add text to my pieces. The Over App is free and it makes it really easy to customize your text and you can pull it straight into Procreate. I'm going click the plus symbol here, and I'll choose "Transparent" as my background because I want to be able to pull just this text into Procreate without any background. I'll choose square as my orientation since that's how my canvas is setup, but you can choose any orientation here depending on the size of your canvas. The next thing I'll do is add some text, so I'll click down here "Text". My first line is EVERYTHING. I'm going to type that, and I'm using my Ivory Font that I created. If you'd like to try out this font, you can download it in the Class downloads page. Also, if you'd like to see how to make your own fonts, I have a class on how to create fonts on your iPad. It's a really easy process. The two fonts that I'll be using for this project today, I made using the same process that you'll learn in that class. Check that out if you want to learn how, but you can also just download these fonts from the Downloads page. My first line will say, "EVERYTHING." This is using the Ivory Font. I'll change the color to black, and I'll change the size here to pretty large. Let's go with that. Then I can get that yellow line to help me place this in the center of the canvas. Then I'll click the check symbol to set that type. Next, I'll do my next line, which says, "is hard." I'm going to use my Hot Cocoa Font, which you can also download. I'll change the color to black and increase the size a little bit. I'll continue the same process with my whole quote. You can see that I'm putting the word "BEFORE" on top of the word "EVERYTHING" in order to be sure the sizing is the same for those two words. You don't have to do that. They don't have to be exactly the same, but that's just my personal intention for this piece. That looks good to me. I'm going to click the Share button and click "Save" to photos. This is going to save as a PNG file. When I open Procreate, click the tool symbol, click "Image", insert a photo. Now that I've inserted that you can see this is just a black text with no background. It's really easy to insert this into your document without having a clip out your background. That's a little bit hard to see. So let's click that layer, click "Select". I have white selected as my color, so I'll click "Fill" and that fills it with white. I can make my Narinder Pencil sketch layer invisible so I can just see this. I'm just going to step back and make sure that sizing is right. I think I want to make it a little bit smaller because I'm going to do a wreath shape around it. I want to leave plenty of room for my wreath. I'm happy with that. The only thing I really want to change here is, I want this text to all be the same width. This one is really wide and this one is really thin, and I want to even those out. I'm going to reduce the opacity of this layer, click "Plus" to create a new layer, and then click on the Monoline brush. I'm just going to go through with my Monoline brush and trace all of these words. That's also going to give it a nice handwriting feel. I like to do this when I do folk art pieces because folk art does not do well with fonts. Because folk art is really about drawing things by hand, making everything by hand, so I like to do this hand-drawn texts to go along with my folk art. I'm happy with that, so I'm going to make the original texts layer invisible. Now, I can start adding some decoration to this. 7. Combining Stamps & Drawing: I like to go ahead and set my color palette in advance, so I already have my colors planned out. You can do that by finding a picture that you like or an artwork that you like and using some of the colors from that. It really just depends on your personal style here, but these are the colors that I'm going to use. I'll create a new layer and I'm going to start with my brushes down here and I'm ready to start making some of my stamps symmetrical, so I'm going to lay down my guide. Now because this is a black Canvas, I'm going to use a different color, so I'm going to use white as my guide color. I'll go to my guide brush and making sure I'm on a new layer and I'll click that guide brush one time, click the Move tool and click Fit to Canvas and then like we did last time, I'll reduce the opacity of that so I can just barely see it. Now I can start playing around with the placement of my stamps. One thing you may also want to do at some point is move some of these pieces and if you move the one on the left, you also want to move the one on the right. That's really easy to do, click the first one, swipe the second one left, just like we do with the guide stamp and then click the Move tool and you'll see both of those are selected. You just want to be sure magnetic is on because you want to get that nice guide that helps you keep this in the very center of your Canvas. Now that I have all of my stamps in place, I'm going to go ahead and merge some of these together so I have smaller layers to work with, so then I'm going to create a new layer, that I'm going to use to fill in all these little extra spaces. I'm going to use my monoline brush with white and just go through with a slightly smaller brush that I used for my text and just add some little swirls to fill in all these little strangely shaped areas. I'm happy with how that turned out, so I'm just going to remove my guide and let's go ahead and call this piece finished. 8. Symmetrical Painting: For this final piece, I want to create a modern folk art symmetrical piece that's inspired by Mexican folk art. I'm going to use a lot of bright colors and a lot of plant forms that interweave around each other. I'm going to start by setting my background, and I'm just going to use a light cream background for this one. Then on my next layer, I want to start drawing some symmetrical vines that helped me lay out my composition. I need some symmetry help on this layer. I'm going to click Canvas, turn on drawing guide, click edit drawing guide. Turn on Cemetery and make sure assisted drawing is on. I'm using vertical here. You could use horizontal, you can use quadrant if you want all four squares to be symmetrical. It's totally up to you here. I'll click Done. Then I'm going to grab a nice green color that I want to use for my vines. I'll just take some time to play around with balancing these throughout the canvas. I know I want to have one large vine in the center. I'm going to make my brash a little bit larger here. Then I want to have a few that are balanced throughout the piece. I'll just take a few minutes to play around with some layouts here. This doesn't have to be exactly how my final piece is laid out. With this at least gives me an idea of the general layout that I want to use. I can easily grab the eraser and make adjustments to these as I work. Just having a general template can make it a lot easier to lay out your composition. I'm going to create another layer here. This is just going to be a sketch layer. I'm just going to get a black and get the Narendra pencil. I know I want to have a large flower right here, so I need to leave a lot of room for that flower. I want to have a medium flower here and here. So I need to make those vines shorter. I want to have some little flowers here and here. Or maybe up here. These are just guides that are going to help me set my piece up so that everything fits onto the canvas nicely. Then I want these pieces to be branches. I'm just going to draw some little branches here just to remind me of what I'm going to do with those. Then I'll just fill in the rest with little leaves and branches. This is my main composition. This is a great place to be when you're getting started. I'm going to go back to my green layer and start working on my main flower. I want my stem here to be small at the top and large at the bottom. I've got my mono-line brush again. I'm just going to play around with this and you can see the cemetery is taken care of by this tool. Once they get that, how I'd like it to be, I can start adding my leaves. I'm just going to drag and drop colored add those leaves in. Okay, that's going to be my main central flower, it's really big. Then the other ones are going to be smaller just as decoration around them. I'll go ahead and start working on the leaves for all the other vines. I've gotten to this point and realize that I don't like where that vine is. I could just erase it or I could move it. If I use my selection tool and move it like this, it doesn't actually change it on the side. If we do that, then we would need to do our Symmetry tool that we did on the last piece. What I usually do, if there's a piece that I really don't like is just use the free-hand selection tool to circle it. Drag down three fingers and click cut just to get rid of it. Now that I have all of my leaves laid down, I can go ahead and start adding in some flowers. I'll create a new layer. I want this to also be a symmetry layer. If I draw a flower over here, it will repeat on this side. I'm going to go to my canvas, in the tool section, turn on drawing guide, edit, drawing guide, symmetry. Turn on assisted drawing. Makes sure vertical selected and click Done. I want to stay on that same layer and start drawing some flowers. I'm going to start with the center flower here. I want to move this below my vine layer so that my flowers peeking out from behind that green level section. Now I'm just going to drag and drop to fill those in. If you don't like the shape of these flowers, you can just keep playing around with it until you're happy with the shape. I'll continue to do the same thing for the rest of my flowers. If you want to add a little bit more layering to these flowers, you can create another layer that's below that first layer and just start adding in some shapes that just peek out behind here. You can see if I don't totally closed my shape, you can see if I remove all my other layers. This new paddle shape isn't totally closed, so there's a little space right there. When you do your color drop like this, you need that space to be totally closed. You can always make those other layers invisible if you're having some trouble with a particular layer. I think I want to add a couple more flowers up here where I have the circles. I'm going to go back to my green layer. Click and hold on that green. I'm using that exact same color and just put a little stem in there for my new flowers. You can really go back and forth between all these layers until you're happy with the result. You don't have to complete one layer and then move on. You can really just jump around from layer to layer and add details and pattern as you'd like. Okay, I'm happy with that initial layout. I'm going to go ahead and remove my sketch layer. Now I just want to go to my green layer and add in some other vines in a different color that are going to help really fill this in. I'm just going to come in and put some random leaves in this nice olive green color. That will really help just bring focus into the biggest flowers in the center and create a nice symmetrical layout. 9. Adding Variation & Texture: Okay. So, I'm happy with how those green leaves look. But now I want to disperse my color a little bit more. It's very intense yellow right in the middle. What I'd like to have a little yellow scattered throughout the page. So I'm going to go to that flower layer and I've got my yellow color, and I'm just going to throw in some little leaves throughout this piece. You'll see this as a common style in Mexican folk art. There'll be a lot of little random circles and dots and leaves just scattered throughout the piece just to balance the color out a little bit. So I'm going to repeat that same process with the other colors in the composition. So you can see how spacing out that color a little bit really bring some life to this piece. Another thing I wanna do is add a little bit of texture. Right now, this is very flat, but I want it to have a gouache look. So I'm going to go to my flower layer here and swipe right with two fingers. So that's going to let me put this in a state called alpha lock, which means I can only paint on whatever's on this layer. So all of these colored flowers that are on that layer, I can only touch those right now. So what I'm going to do is get a lighter color that's slightly lighter than that pink I'm already using and get my Streaky Semi-Dry Gouache brush and I'm going to come in and just add a little bit of texture. So I might start by just doing some lighter colors and then also pulling in some darker colors, maybe at the bottom. You can see when you zoom out, that really adds a lot of variation to that piece. So it's not quite as dull and flat as it was before we added this extra layer. So you can go as far as you want with that. You can create a really dramatic painted look, or you can just use it to add a little bit of texture. So I'll go ahead and do this on all of the flowers and leaves. You can see I made a little mistake here. I got a little bit of pink on this blue, I'm okay with that. I think it looks nice, but if it bothers you or you can just click and hold and then just paint over that section and you can really easily get rid of it. So you can see I'm intentionally trying to make one side darker than the other. That adds a lot of variation and especially when you step back, you can really see the pieces that have a dramatic variation. So now I'm going to go to my leaf layer, swipe right again to alpha lock, the green layer. Now I'll do my gouache texture on these pieces. So you could keep going with this piece. You could add more decoration in between these pieces. You could add some texture to your background. If you wanted to do that, you can just create a new layer and get a maybe semi brown color, and then just add a little texture into the background. So if you want this piece to look like it was actually painted, you may want to go a little further with adding a lot of this extra painting decoration. I also have a class on painting gouache in Procreate. So you may want to check that out if you're really into this gouache style, I have a lot more gouache brushes that I share in that class with different sizes and types of strokes. So check that out if you want to try more gouache texture stuff. But for this piece I'm just going to add a little bit of texture and then reduce the opacity a little bit. So I just got that tiny bit of variation in the background. I'll put the pieces side by side so you can see the difference between a textured piece and an untextured piece so you can see how that really adds a lot of variation. So I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. So I hope you enjoy this class and that you feel inspired to start creating some modern folk art on your iPad. If you like this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to paint realistic watercolors using the free downloadable brushes I created. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads on my site. So if you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would love to see the final folk art project that you create for this class. So please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any question about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.