Transcripts
1. Introduction: Do you find it scary to get started
on Procreate? Are you lost on where to
begin? Here's a little tip. Think dots. It does not get simpler than
plain old dots, does it? I'm telling you that dots
are all you need to create some really fun and satisfying illustrations
on Procreate. I'm Vinitha Mammen, a freelance lettering artist and illustrator with a background in fashion and engineering, and a top teacher on Skillshare. Procreate is my go-to drawing program right
now. I love it. I use it for everything
from drawing personal stuff to illustrating for
commercial applications. But I created nothing
on Procreate for the first several months since I got it because I
was overwhelmed. There's lots of features and techniques to go over
and it can all get overwhelming and maybe
even boring real fast unless you learn by doing. That's what we're going
to do in this class. We're going to do some very easy and fun bite-sized projects and secretly learn some of the key features of
the app along the way. What's special about
these projects is that throughout all of them, we're going to take
the humble dot and push it as far as we can. My dot stamp brushes have
been a student favorite across my procreate class
resources and in this class, I'll show you exactly
how you can make these super beginner
friendly brushes yourself. Then I'll teach you how to use them in some creative
and fun ways. Together, we'll
explore dots through nine different mini
illustration before you come up with your
phones spin on them. This class is at
a beginner level, so it's going to be
great for you even if you've never used
Procreate before. But it's also packed with
creative exercises, techniques, and tips that are great for
artists at any skill level. Particularly if you've been
stuck in a creative rut, these bite-sized projects
are perfect to get your momentum up while stimulating your brain
in surprising ways. If you're ready to hop
on the dot with me, I'll see you in class. [MUSIC]
2. Class Overview: [MUSIC] So you've decided to explore dots and
procreate with me. Awesome. Welcome to, On The Dot. Before we jump into the class, I want to just quickly give you an overview on what you can expect from this class in
terms of how it's structured, what the class project
will be, and so on. First, I will take you through the step-by-step method to make your own dot stamp brush in
two different variations. As you do this,
you'll understand what some of the brush settings mean and how playing around with them can give you
different results. Once you've made your own
two dots stamp brushes, we will put them to use to do nine easy-peasy
mini-projects. Like I said, these
will all be beginner friendly and so will
be very accessible. But they'll also tickle
your creativity and inspire you to see illustration from
a different perspective. As we do these nine
mini-projects, you will get a
hands-on feel of how Procreate works as a drawing app and even get to dabble in some of the more exciting
features along the way. Whether you want to
tackle these projects over several days to fit within the little time you
have to practice art or you want to just
straight up binge, is completely up to you. But either way,
you're going to have a ton of fun and you're going to possibly never look at dots
as just dots ever again. Finally, once you complete all nine of the mini-projects, you graduate into doing your final project
for this class. Which will include
a little bit of a twist because you'll
need to come up with an idea of your own
to combine along with some of the ideas you've
already worked on with me. Don't worry, by the
time you get there, I'm sure you'll be
left with a lot of inspiration to fuel
that brainstorm. Now, all you need to
take this class and follow along with
me are your iPad, a stylus like the Apple pencil, and of course, the
Procreate app. We will also be using some
supplementary brushes besides the ones that
we'll make in this class. But those will all be
default brushes that come along with Procreate
when you download the app. So I'm sure you're good to go. Also, I may or may
not be announcing an exciting giveaway during
one of the future lessons. So maybe stay tuned or not. So now you know a little bit of what awaits you in this class. Let's jump in and learn to
make those brushes. [MUSIC]
3. Make Your Own Dot Stamp Brushes: Here we are. We're going to dive right into this
class by learning to make some very easy but
super fun dot stamp brushes. I'll show you how to make two different variations
of a dot stamp brush. One that gives you dots
in a consistent size, and one that varies in size depending on the pressure
you apply on your stylus. If making your own
procreate brushes sounds intimidating to you and you feel like running
away right now, I promise you, this is
going to be so easy. You're going to totally flip. So stick with me. Let's open up procreate, and we'll open a new canvas. Let's just go with
this square canvas. The size of the canvas
doesn't matter at this point. We just want to be able to get into our brush
panel, that's all. Go here to the brush
library and you'll see all the brushes you
currently have over here. We can actually make a new folder for the
brushes we're making today. So just tap here and just
give this folder a name, for example, my stamp brushes. Now we are in that
folder because you can see this here is blue
for this folder. Now go to this plus icon
here to create a new brush. All of these options come up. First, let's go here to the shape section and make
sure that it's a circle. By default, the shape here is a circle when you
create a new brush. This is exactly what
we want in this case. We don't need to draw
a new shape because we're trying to create
a simple dot brush. This is fine. We're going
to leave it as it is. If you want to create
a stamp brush with a different shape, this
is what you'll do. You'll go to Edit, Import, and you'll use one
of these options to bring in something
that you've created, a new shape that you've drawn, like a star or a heart or whatever it might
be that you want. This is where you'll put it. But for now, we don't want
to change the shape at all. This circle works just fine. We want a simple circle without
any texture or effects. This works perfectly fine. Really all we need to do to make this brush is to play around
with a bunch of settings. That's what we'll do right now. Let's go here to stroke path and drag this slider over
all the way to maximum. We want our dots to be spaced
out so that when we tap, we get just one single dot. That's the first
setting we change. Next thing we want to do is
go over here to Apple pencil. You can see here that the opacity slider is set
all the way to maximum here. All this means is, depending on the pressure you apply on your Apple pencil, the opacity of
your brush varies. If you tap lightly. So this is the
area where you can test your brush as
you're creating it. If you tap very
lightly like this, you get a very transparent spot. Whereas if I tap hard, I get an opaque spot. This is not what I want. I'm going to change my opacity setting all the
way down to zero. I don't want the opacity to
change with pressure at all. I want all of my spots
to be the same opacity, which is 100 percent opacity. The opacity variation slider needs to be all the
way down to zero. Now the next thing we
do is go to Properties, toggle this, use
stamp preview on. This does not change
anything here right now, but I'll show you
what this does soon. Then you can go here
to about this brush. You can change the
name of the brush. You can give it whatever
name you want to. For now, I'm just going to call this dot stamp brush fixed, because this is a
fixed size brush as opposed to the next
one will be created. You can also add
your name in here, and you can even sign
here if you want. That's literally it. Tap here on Done and you'll
see your new brush here, dot stamp brush fixed. Let me quickly
show you what that preview setting was about. If you stamp preview
is turned off, you'll see the entire
stroke here as a preview instead
of just a stamp. That can be misleading. It's just helpful to have
a more accurate preview of the brush when we see
that one single dot here. Let's quickly look at
how this brush works. You just tap on the screen
like this and you'll get fixed size dots
wherever you tap. You can use the size slider
here to go bigger or smaller. But while we're on a
specific size setting, it's not going to change based
on the pressure you apply. That's how this works. Now, we'll take this brush
that we just created, swipe left and tap, duplicate. A copy of this brush
shows up here. We'll tap on that to go into the brush settings
for this brush. Now we'll go back to this
Apple pencil section. Remember we changed the opacity
all the way down to zero. This time, we'll move the size slider all
the way up to maximum. We want the size of
our dots to vary as much as possible based on the pressure
applied to the Apple pencil. Let's say I'm applying
very light pressure and we get this tiny spot. If I tap hard large spot, depending on the
pressure that we apply, the size of our brush varies. This is a second version
of our dot stamp brush. Just this one single change gives us a brush that
behaves differently. You can go here and rename
this to avoid any confusion. Let's change this
to varying size. Done. Now if we use this
brush and tap on the screen, we end up with dots in different sizes based on the
pressure you are applying. Here again, you can use the size slider to
change the size. This will change the range of sizes that your dots are in. If you go down here like this, then even if you
press very hard, your spots are not going
to be very big. That's it. We have our two dots
stamp brushes ready. You can use this
method to try and create stamp brushes and
other shapes as well. To give you a recap, the settings we changed are one, in Stroke Path, we change the
spacing slider to maximum. In Apple pencil, we reduce
the opacity setting to zero and size setting to maximum just for the
varying size version. In properties, you toggle the use stamp preview option on. That's basically it. Then you give your brush a
name and finish off. Now you might be wondering, easy as it may have been, why did we do all this to create something as simple as dots, can't we just draw
them manually? Sure, we can certainly draw circles like this
and fill them in. But there are two
main reasons why I like to use dot
stamp brushes instead. Firstly, one setup, it's
so much easier and more intuitive to just tap on the screen to get a
fully filled-in dot. It speeds things up quite a bit, especially if you have
multiple dots to add in. Secondly, our varying size
version of the brush gives very organic and sometimes
surprising results compared to if we were to manually
draw varying sized circles. Also, it's really cool to watch the dots just pop up on screen, which means it's great
for process videos too. In the next lesson, we'll start working on
our mini-projects and get a feel of putting our brand
new custom brushes to use.
4. Mini Project 1: Clouds: [MUSIC] Now that we've created
our own dot stamp brushes, let's use them to create some
fun little illustrations. I'm going to use square canvases
for these mini-projects so that I can put all nine
of them together in a grid. You don't necessarily
have to do that. You can go with any size and
proportion that you prefer. Let's open up the
same canvas that we created while
making our brushes. Now I created this
color palette for you. It's called on the dot. These are the colors
I'll be using across all the projects
for this class. You don't have to use these
colors, but if you want to, this color palette
is available for download through the
resource section. Once you've downloaded it, you will see it here like
this in the color panel. I'm going to pick this orange
color from this palette. I'm in the default first layer. I'll just drag this from here and drop the color into
this entire canvas. Our background is ready. Now, I go back and
do the layers panel, open a new layer by
tapping on this plus sign. We're going to draw
clouds in this new layer. For the clouds, I'm going
to go with white color. I pick the white and we'll use this dot stamp brush
with varying size. You can play around with
the size slider here. Try by making a few dots. Maybe a little bit bigger. Yeah, that looks good I think. We're literally just going
to place the dots to form cloud like shapes.
It's that simple. We start just like this
by tapping anywhere on the screen and build out something that
looks like a cloud. So simple but works so well. One of the things that goes
wrong when we try to draw clouds is that our
rounded shapes look too similar to each
other in size and shape and we end up with a cloud that
looks too uniform and weird. This is a perfect
solution to organically coming up with a cloud that
has good shape variation. That's why I love using this
brush to create clouds. Just like that, we keep
making more clouds. Keep the bottom flat
compared to the top. We'll get some
nice, cute clouds. Just keep going until you're happy with the
shape of the cloud. This one looks good to me. I'm going to move
on to the next one, somewhere around here
and another one here. If you don't like how any of your dots are looking,
you can just go back. If you feel like any
spot that you just added is not looking
how you want it to. You can just use two fingers and tap on the screen and
that will undo it. Similarly, three fingers
and tap will redo. You can use undo
and redo and keep going until you arrive at a
shape that you're happy with. I'll add one more here and some little peaking ones
on some of these edges. Just taking a look at everything
and that's literally it. We've managed to create
some cute and fun clouds so fast and so
organically and easily. That's perfect. If you've not been doing this
along with me, it's now your turn
to try it out. You've seen just how quick
and easy and fun this is. There's really no reason
to not give it a go. Once you've done
it, you can move on to the next mini-project, where we'll be creating a
cute tree using dots. [MUSIC]
5. Mini Project 2: Tree: [MUSIC] We saw just
how easy it is to use our Dot Stamp brush to
create the cutest clouds. Now, let's use it to
illustrate a fun tree. Once again, we'll
open up a new canvas. Once again, I'm using this standard square size.
Let's make this tree. Now, I'm not going with a green, I'm going with a pink for my treetop just with
one, because why not. Again, just checking that we're still on our varying
size dot stamp brush, and similar to how
we did the clouds, we're going to lay
down some dots to make clusters of tree foliage. That could be one. Let's
do another cluster here, and maybe another one here. I think that looks pretty good. You can try adding and removing some dots to refine the shape
of the edges if you like. There's of course, no rules, trees come in such a
wide variety of shapes. Really just follow your
instincts with this. Something like that. Then
we'll open up a new layer, and this is for the
trunk of the tree. I drag it like this to move it below the layer
where the foliage is. Cool. Then I'll pick this brown color from our
color palette for the trunk, and we'll go into
our brush folders and find this one
called Calligraphy, which is one of
our default brush sets that comes along
with the Procreate app. Pick this brush called
Monoline Brush. This is a brush we'll use
to draw our tree trunk. Just like that, we draw a trunk. A thick one and
then branching out into thinner branches that connect to each of
the leaf clusters. Again, you can throw in
your own twist on this and decide what shape you
want the trunk to be. This is of course not
the only way to do it. Then I'm going to give it a little bit of a
base just like that. Smoothening that
connection there. Now, if we drop color into this, the entire leg gets
filled because if you go into the Layers
panel and turn off the visibility of
the foliage layer, you can see that the trunk
is not a close shape. We need it to be a close
shape to fill color into it. We'll just go in and close off all these openings
just like this. Then we can drop color and it will stay
within that shape. Now we'll turn the visibility
of this layer back on. I'm going to pick
this darker pink and add some more dimension, some color variation
within the foliage. I'm going to go back and pick our varying size
Dot Stamp brush, and we'll open a new layer on top of the light pink layer, and just go in and add some bushy areas of dark pink
over the light pink box. Just here and there, in small clusters, just add in a couple of spots. Similarly, I also
want to do couple of darker areas below
the light pink layer. I'll open another new
layer below this layer. Then we'll add some
more dark pink spots on this layer that are peeking out from under
the light pink foliage. [MUSIC] With the same dark pink, I'm opening a new layer
underneath the trunk just to draw some ground
for our tree to stand on. Picking up our
Monoline Brush again, I'm going to just draw
a line like this, just free hand, and
I'll drop color. That's our ground. A new layer
here for our background. Let's go with yellow and fill
yellow in the background. Then let's also sprinkle
in some fruits. Let's make this a fruit tree. On top of all of
our foliage layers, let's open a new layer. I'm going to go
with a red color. I'm going to switch over
to our fixed sized brush, because I want
similar size fruit. I don't want some that are giant and some that
are really tiny, so I think the fixed is a
better choice for this. No, that's just small,
little bit bigger, and we'll just play some fruit. Just sprinkle in a couple
of them all over the tree. We can even have some
fallen fruit just for fun. That's it, it's done. You can of course,
add more trees, play around with the
fruit shapes and sizes, add flowers instead. Take it wherever you like to. But now you know a new way
to draw some fun trees. Go on and give it a try
if you haven't already, and then in the next lesson, we'll draw some
fun creeper plans hanging over a wall. [MUSIC]
6. Mini Project 3: Creepers: I hope you've gone ahead
and had some fun with the tree exercise and are ready to draw some fun creepers. Before we start, at this point, we have two of our
mini-projects done, and we can put them into
what's called a stack, just to stay a little
bit more organized. For this, I'm going to
tap here on Select. We select these two
that we just made. Then click on Stack,
and then just close it. Now we have this new stack, which is like a folder, and we can go into that
folder so that we can keep all of our work from this
class organized in one piece. Cool, so let's go on and
open up a new canvas. Again, in the same size. This time, we're going to create a simple wall with some fun
creepers hanging off of it. First, we'll go with
this yellow color and pick up our
monoline brush again. Then somewhere around
here on the canvas, we'll draw a very
freehand horizontal line, and then if you hold, without lifting your
stylus off the screen, it becomes a straight line. Then use one finger to tap on the screen to make it aligned perfectly
to the horizontal. Let me show you once more. Draw a freehand line
across like that. Press and hold without lifting the Apple pencil
from the screen. Then it becomes a straight line, and then use one finger to tap to get a perfectly
horizontal line. Now we'll just color this in by dragging and dropping
this yellow, so we have our
wall. That's done. Now we're going to draw our
hanging plants over this one. Open a new layer above it, and we'll start off with
a nice dark green first, and we'll go back to our
varying size dot stamp brush. I'm going to go a
bit smaller with the brush size
because we want it to look a little bit more dainty. Then just sprinkle
away some leaves. Leaves are not
typically circular, but we're going to make this stylistic choice to
keep them all circular. Which is basically what
I'm trying to show you through this class that you can simplify a lot of things around us into just dots, and when it's all put together, it will convey the idea even if the shapes
are not realistic. I'm just leaving
some empty spaces. Place our leaves in a bit of an up-and-down arrangement to mimic what creepers
tend to hang like. We'll do fuller clusters
in some areas and more spaced-out ones in other
parts and just go for it. Then we'll open up a
new layer above this. Go to this light green
because we like to bring in some variation in colors
to make it pop more, make it look more fun and dimensional instead of
just flat and basic, and then we do the same thing, just randomly over
the darker leaves, sprinkling in more dots, again, taking advantage of all those
gorgeous size variation we have light within our brush. The faster, quicker you do this, the more organically
our spots will form. Instead of thinking
too much about it and making very
calculated choices. Letting it go and taking
it easy will reflect on the freshness and ease of
our final illustration. Mindful drawing is good, but in this case, the more mindless it is, the more whimsical your
creepers will look. It's a good idea
to just go for it without thinking too
much about the outcome. Now at a new layer, we'll add some flowers to this, so I'm going with
this darker pink, and again sprinkling
in some dots over the foliage
that we just drew. I'm keeping these a bit more
sparse than the leaves, so just here and there. Then again, a new layer and this time some
light pink flowers. Same exact technique, just
using different colors. [MUSIC] Once we have our bigger clusters done, we can go in more
intentionally and place a few more spots where you
feel like something's missing. Now if you feel
like going back and adding some more to any
of the previous layers, you can head over to that
layer and add some more. This can be a
back-and-forth process, so feel free to jump
between layers and play around with it till you
feel like it looks complete. I think that looks
pretty good to go, so I'm calling it done. Here we have this super crazy
and fun wall of creepers just from placing some dots in a certain mindlessly
mindful way. Definitely try this out. This might actually be my favorite out of all
the mini-projects. It is so fun to do. When you're done, hop on
over to the next lesson, where we'll do a stylized
floral arrangement.
7. Mini Project 4: Floral Arrangement: [MUSIC] If you've created
your wall of creepers, then let's move on to
another botanical piece, where we draw a stylized
illustration of a simple arrangement
of flowers in a vase. Once again, I have a new
square canvas opened up. I'm going with this light pink. Then I'm going to open a new
layer above it rested on the table or the surface on which our vase
is going to set. Let's say we go with
a white surface. Pick the monoline
brush once again. Just like we did the wall, we're going to draw a
freehand line here. Hold, tap with one finger to align it with the horizontal. Then drop color. Then open a new layer. We'll draw our vase
with this color, again with the monoline brush. I'm going to just draw
a random shape here. Whatever I end up with, I'm going to call the
shape of my vase, then close it up and fill color. At this point, you can
adjust the position of your vase, place
it in the middle. If it is not already
in the middle. I want to also make
it a little bit smaller and centralize it. Then open a new layer above it. I'm picking this yellow color for my first set of flowers. Going back to our varying
size dot stamp brush, I'm going to just place
some dots above the vase. [MUSIC] I want one here, just falling over the vase. Some more around here. I'm just trying out
different positions and playing around
with it really. I'm trying to vary the sizes as well by adjusting the pressure. Let's move on to
another new layer, above or below the yellow
one, completely up to you. Then repeat the same process
to place some more flowers. [MUSIC] You can also just go over the same spot. Again. If you want a bigger
spot without doing an undo, and believe it or
not, that's it. You can of course, draw
some stems if you want to. Just open up a new layer, pick a new color and
with the monoline brush, we can add some stems. Actually, we can move this
layer below the vase layer and draw stems like
this. If you want to. [MUSIC] Personally, I
think it looks a lot more interesting
without the stems. It just has this sense of mystery and whimsy
when you leave such simple details up to the viewer to
visualize and imagine. Here we have our simple, stylized and super cool
floral arrangement. I'm really looking forward to seeing your version of this. Just take a few minutes and work one of these up for me again. Then in the next lesson, we'll take this
further and create an entire field of
flowers. [MUSIC]
8. Mini Project 5: Field Of Flowers: [MUSIC] Let's do
another floral piece. This time, a field
full of flowers. I have a square canvas
opened up here again. In my head, this is sort
night or an evening setting. I'm going to pick a dark
background like this deep green. I'll just fill the entire
layer with that color. In a new layer, we're going
to start with our flowers. I'm thinking of some yellow, orange, and red flowers. I'll pick the yellow first. Again, a varying size
dot stamp brush. Let's go a bit big. I want to bring in
some perspective here. I want the flowers that are
closer to me to be bigger and the flowers that
are further away from me to be a little bit smaller. For the ones around here, I'm going to use
more pressure on the Apple pencil
to make them big. We can go even bigger
with the brush size. These look nice for
the front ones. Then go a bit smaller, so lighter pressure
as we go away. We're trying to fill the
bottom two-thirds of our canvas with flowers,
not more than that. Now open up a new layer, pick the orange color, and then we'll do
the same thing. Some bigger flowers towards the front and smaller
ones towards the back. [MUSIC] Something like that. Now, we'll draw some
stems for these flowers. We'll open a new layer beneath bought these flower layers. I'll go with this pink color
and the monoline brush. Then find a good size and just draw some
lightly curved lines. Just connect each of our
flowers circles with the bottom edge of the canvas using some
simple curved lines. You can reduce the
brush size a little bit when you do
these smaller ones. Keep going and experiment with the direction of
the curves as you go. [MUSIC] We have our stems. Then I wanted it
to actually look like a full field of flowers. We're going to open a layer
beneath all of these. Just above the background layer, pick the red color, go back to our
varying size brush. I'll reduce the
size a little bit and just place some closely
spaced clusters of red, just randomly all
across the field. Again, this is where
you switch from mindful intentional placing to just going for it
without thinking much. We still want some of
that green background to be through from
in-between the red. Then as you come to the top, just be a tiny bit more intentional with
your dots because we want them to be a little bit
more spaced out and tiny. [MUSIC] Then as a final step, we open up a new layer up here, pick the white, go a
bit bigger if you want, and just tap once, with some good
amount of pressure. We have our moon. I want the
Moon to be in the center. We'll just select it
and with snapping and magnetics turned on,
I'm just going to move it. Once it snaps to
this golden line, we know it's bang-on
in the center. We can release the
selection, and that's it. Done. Here is a very colorful and fun
stylized field of flowers. I hope you found how we used our varying sized brush to
add perspective on the fly. Inspiring. Give this a go and don't forget to show us all how your field of
flowers turned out. In the next lesson,
we'll take a step away from flowers and draw some
string light. [MUSIC]
9. Mini Project 6: String Lights: [MUSIC] Ready to create some pretty and
glowing string lights? Let's do this. Once again, we open up a square canvas and how about a red
background this time. I'm just dropping the
red color to fill in this whole layer
and then we'll open a new layer to draw
the strings on which the lights will hang and I want these to be
in this pink color. We go back to the
monoline brush, find a good size that will
work to draw some strings, somewhere around there maybe. Then we will just draw some curves across
the canvas like that. Maybe another one like that
and maybe one more here that goes like that.
That's our strings. Now in a new layer, let's go with white and
then we'll switch over to our fixed size dot
stamp brush because I want all my light bulbs on these string lights
to be the same size. Find a good size
that could work for the bulbs and then we'll just start laying them
down along the strings. Now here we have a point
where these strings crossover and I don't
want any clashing here. So I'll start by
placing a bulb right here and then just keep adding
more bulbs from there on. Just eyeball the
spacing as you go. It doesn't have to be
perfectly evenly spaced out. Just approximately will do, and just keep going until all of our strings have
bulbs along them. If you're not happy with
any of their positions, you can, of course,
undo and go again. [MUSIC] All right. There we go. Maybe just one more right here. Now, you can either
leave it like this or take it one step further by swiping left over this layer to duplicate it and out of
these two white layers, we'll go over to the bottom
one and then go here to this magic wand icon and tap on this option
called Gaussian Blur. We can see here it says slide to adjust. That's exactly
what we'll do. We just need to use
one finger to slide across the screen like this and then we can see
that bottom layer of white dots is
just blurring out. The more you slide to the right, the more blurry it becomes. This gives our
bulbs a nice glow. You can just play around with this and see how much
glow feels right to you. I find somewhere around
the 10% range to be the sweet spot for me so
I'm going to keep it there. This is what it looks
like without the glow, and this is with the glow. Here's why we made a
copy of this layer. Because just this will look like this and that doesn't quite look like string
lights, do they? We still want to see the
circular bulbs and we want the glow to be visible
from under them. That's it. Fantastic. We've created
some super cute, super glowy string lights
in just a few steps. If you were not doing
this along with me, go ahead and whip up your
own string light piece right away before we move on
to our next little project, which is a
constellation. [MUSIC]
10. Mini Project 7: Constellation: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to use
our dot stamp brushes to draw a constellation
of stars. I have a new square
canvas opened up, and I'm going to use this deep green to fill up
the entire layer, and then open a new
layer above it. I'm going with white next. And with our varying
size dot stamp brush, we're going to play some stars
to make a constellation. Just find a good brush
size. Let's see. Yeah, something like
this should work, and just sprinkle in
a bunch of stars. We can put them down in
whatever formation you want. You can pre-plan the shape
of your constellation or just go for it and surprise yourself with what
it ends up being. I'm going to just
surprise myself and lay down the dots
in a random formation. Once we have a couple of them in the central area of the canvas, we can connect them and
see what we end up with. For our connecting lines, we'll open a new
layer below this. Go back to the monoline brush. You got a nice size
that's not too thick. Now we will connect these dots in whatever we feel
like, basically. We'll draw a freehand line like this and then press and hold to make it straight and then position it correctly
and release. This way, we can get some
nice straight lines. Yeah, just connect away. You can choose to
leave some of them out or connect them all,
totally up to you. There's obviously going
to be a gazillion, different ways in
which you can do this. Just go with your instinct. You cannot really
go wrong with this. I think that's the beauty
of many of these exercises. You're working off of
whatever the dots give us and then shaping that into a
recognizable illustration. [MUSIC] This is
beginning to give me some drag and vibes,
which I'm loving. So exciting when a random set of spots gives you something
cool in the end. I'm thinking I'd like
for this spot to be a little more on this side. What I'm going to do is I'll
go back to my layers of stars and select
around this spot like this and move it to somewhere about
there and then go back to the layer without
connecting lines. I'm just going to remove this. Select around it.
Use three fingers to swipe down, and then cut. Then we can just
connect them like that. We have our constellation ready. Now what we're going
to do is we'll open up another new layer and add
some more smallest stars. Go back to the
varying size brush, reduce the size a little bit, and then sprinkle some dots just everywhere around
our constellation. We need these to be smaller
than the initial ones we laid out so that our constellation stands out in the night sky. We can put some within
these spaces as well. Gonads, we can have some parts
with more stars clustered around and some with smaller density of
stars, just like that. Now one more step, because these are stars, it'll be fun to
have them glowing. We already know how to do this from our previous exercise. What I'll do is go to the
layer without bigger stars. I want only some of the stars in my constellation to
sparkle, not all of them. I'm just going to select
around some of them like that. This is one. Now I want to
make some more selections. Or in other words, I want
to add to this selection. I'll tap here on "Add", and then I can make
a new selection without exiting
the previous one. Maybe this one. Then add again for one more. Maybe this one. I've
selected three. Then tap on this arrow here. Now there's a box
around these three. I will just swipe down
and do duplicate. Now if we go here, we'll see this layer with just
these three dots. Cool. Now we'll move this layer below the main
constellation layer. Just like we did
with Astrium light, we go here into Gaussian blur, and then swipe
right till you see a nice little sparkle and
all three of the stars. That's our constellation. Did you have fun with this one? I'm really curious to see
what your constellations look like and to find out if you ended up with some cool shapes. If you haven't done this, definitely give
it a go and don't forget to show us all
through the project gallery. In our next lesson, we're going to create a
fun geometric pattern.
11. Mini Project 8: Geometric Pattern: [MUSIC] In this mini project, we'll create a simple and
fun geometric pattern with our dot stamp brushes. Again, we have our
square canvas opened up. For this one, I'm going to
keep the background white, so need to fill in a new color
and I'm going to go with, let's say this yellow
to start with and we'll pick our varying
size spot stamp brush, adjust the size if you need to, and then just place some
spots randomly on the canvas. Actually, I'm going to go a bit smaller and then continue placing them all
over the canvas, including along the edges. It looks something
like this with some dots just spread out
over the entire canvas. Then open a new layer
above or below that, pick a different
color, let's say, orange and do the
same thing again. This time, we'll make some of the spots overlap
with the yellow ones, and the rest of them,
just not overlapping. Obviously, we don't want
them to cover it completely, but they'll get some of
them to overlap because we're going to try something
fun with them real soon. Now, same thing with another
color on a new layer. For this layer, I'm going to go with pink and
do the same thing. Make some of them overlap again. That looks really
good to me. Now, I'm going to tell you a little
bit about blend modes. If you go into the Layers panel, you'll see we have this N here, next to all these layers. That stands for normal. That means these layers are
in the normal blending mode. If we tap on the N, we'll see a bunch of these other options. Nominal is what is selected and I'm going to go all the
way up here to multiply. Now in this case, we won't see a change just yet
because it's right against the white background and multiply doesn't make any
difference against white. But if we do the same
thing to this layer, go to multiply here, and you can see the parts where these overlap with the yellow circles have
a different color. You can also play around with the opacity slider over here and see how
that changes things. Similarly, let's change
this pink layer also to multiply blend mode and then you can see more of these
overlaps coming through. That is what multiply
blend mode does. It basically makes the
colors on that layer multiply with the colors
in the layer below it. That's how you start seeing
these overlapped areas, and that's why I asked you
to make sure that some of the spots do overlap
so you can see this. Now, I want to show
you something else, which is by far my favorite feature on
Procreate, clipping mask. I'm going to add some texture
to all of our pink spots. We have our pink layer here. I'll open a new layer
directly above it, and I'll tap on it and
select clipping mask. Then go into this
texture brushes folder and you will see
this one called decimals, which is also a default brush
that comes with Procreate. I'll pick the white color
and then I'm just going to paint with this brush all over the pink
spots, just like that. We get this nice lacy look
on all our pink spots. Now, I'll show you what
exactly just happened here. You can't tell what's happening here with this white background, so I'll just change this to a different color
just to show you. It's because these layers
are in multiply mode that all the colors
changed even though I just changed the
background color because it's multiplying the yellow and the orange and pink
with this green color now. That's one thing
that's happening. The second thing is
the clipping mask. This arrow here indicates that this layer is clipped
to this layer. This is a clipping mask layer. To show you what that means, I'm going to just remove the clipping mask and see
what that looks like. These are the brushstrokes we made with that texture brush. I'll turn the clipping
mask back on, on this layer and I'll just turn this back to normal so
it makes better sense. With clipping mask on
those brushstrokes get clipped within the shapes in
the layer directly below it. Once again, no clipping mask, the texture is just all
over around the spots. You can even draw some more here and this is what
it will look like. But with clipping
mask turned on, anything you draw
here doesn't show up unless it comes over these
shapes directly below it. That's what clipping mask does. I'm just going to
undo till we go back to how we
wanted it to look. That was a very basic
intro to clipping mask. There's so much you
can do with them and this is just a tiny
tip of the iceberg. But I wanted to show
you that so you know it exists and you can
play around with it. We have a nice and simple
geometric pattern here and we learned how to use a couple of Procreate features
while making it. Do give these options
that try as you make your pattern
tool and then we move on to our last
mini project for this class where we
will draw some faces.
12. Mini Project 9: Faces: [MUSIC] As promised,
we're going to draw some faces in this
last mini-project. I don't know if
you're excited or intimidated to hear
we're doing faces, but I promise you
we're keeping it very basic and
definitely very fun. Let's jump right into it. Once again, of course we'll
open a new square Canvas. Well, first of all,
we're going to draw four faces inside
this square Canvas. I just want to divide the
square into four equal parts. The easiest way to do this, is to use symmetry. We're going to turn on some
symmetry guides so that we can divide this Canvas
into four quadrants. We'll go here to
the wrench icon, go to the Canvas tab, turn on drawing guide, and this grid will come up, which is not what we want. We'll go here to edit drawing
guide and tap on symmetry. I have an entire
class on the ins and outs of procreate symmetry
that you can check out. It's called the
symmetry masterclass. But for now, we'll just go into options here and pick quadrant. We'll have our Canvas is divided into four different quadrants. You can turn off assisted
drawing here because we're not really using these guides
to draw anything symmetric. We just want the
Canvas divided into four so we can draw
our four faces. Tap Done. I'll start by filling this layer with
pink for the background. What we are going to
do in this exercise is create some hairstyles with our dot brushes and then create some faces to fit into
those hairstyles. We'll open up a new layer. I'm going to go with red. Again, the varying
size dot stamp brush. I'll keep it big. We'll draw some hairstyles. Maybe we'll start with
some band hairstyles, maybe some space bands. They don't have to
really be symmetric. I think it's fun to have them be a bit asymmetric in fact. Then we'll add some
smaller dots to form the hairline and the rest of the hair to frame
the face basically. Something like that.
Let's try another one. Maybe some big volume, these curls this time. [MUSIC] That looks fun. Then we can do something
else over here. Maybe go really
shot with this one. [MUSIC] Something like that. Then we can try just
a single top band like that over here, maybe. Then again, some phase
framing curls like that. [MUSIC] We can always adjust these later to set better around the
Face 2 if we need to. But for now, we just need an inspiring starting
point for our faces, which these hairstyles
we created just from varying size
dots are perfect for. Now in a new layer, that's below this,
we'll draw some faces. Let's make some yellow faces. Back to the monoline brush. We'll just go ahead and
draw some face shifts here. For this one, maybe
just a simple, basic U for roundish face. Remember to close the
shape and then fill it in. Then we'll add a neck,
and some shoulders. We won't complicate it too much. We'll just go like
this, and that's it. We're not going to go
too detailed with this. Similarly, we'll draw a
face under this hairstyle. Maybe go with a nice and
perfect circle here. Again, we'll give her some
shoulders. There you go. Just like that. We draw some very simple
face shapes for each of our dot hairstyles and give them all necks and
shoulders as well. [MUSIC] Now we'll open up a new layer above
the face layer and pick this brown color and do some
very basic facial features. With the mono line brush again, maybe go really small and we'll draw some
eyebrows up here. Eyes, a very basic nose, and then a full mouth. That's one. Very easy way. As promised, we're
keeping it very simple. But of course you can take it just as far as you'd like to, totally fine with me. You can experiment with the
style, with the expressions. The point of this exercise is just to create
some hairstyles using dots and then use that as a starting point
to build some faces. It can give you some very
fun and surprising results when you create like this based on something
you already have. [MUSIC] Here we have
our faces done. Now I want to just do something
fun with the background. I'll open a new layer here, just above the pink, and I'll fill it with orange. Then while we are in
the orange layer, we'll select it and just drag this corner over to the middle to let snaps to the
center of the Canvas. Then we'll duplicate it
and bring their copy over here and keep it there. We have a nice checkerboard
situation going on, just to add some fun. We forgot to give them ears. We can just go back
to the face layer and somewhere around the
same level as the eyes, just draw some earlobes. [MUSIC] We cannot see ears of this one. We can give this
guy some long ears, and some tiny ones on this one. You can even add
some earrings or some other accessories
on them if you'd like to. Or some makeup. I'll open a new layer here. Here's the pink with our fixed size dot stamp brush and give them some
blushing cheeks. [MUSIC] I think I'll go in
here and reduce the opacity of the brush layer so
that it's more subtle. You can play around with
it and see what works. I'm just going to leave
it at around 50%. I'll just give this girl a pair of earrings
too on a separate layer. Maybe this person can get
some earrings as well. Some long ones. There you go. I think I need
to call it done right now. But you do you and take it
wherever you want. That's it. That's the end of all our
mini-projects for this class. I hope you get all
nine of them a go, and if you did, I'm sure you had a ton of fun
with them. [MUSIC]
13. Exporting Your Artwork: [MUSIC] That's all nine of our mini-project stack. They look so nice altogether
in this stack, don't they? In this lesson, I'll
show you how to export these as images and also how you can
put them together into a nice little
grid if you like to. This is totally optional, but if you want to put all
nine of them together into a single collage or a grid for your project
submissions in this class, or you want to share them on social media as a single image, you can put them into a grid. Anyway, let's start by
exporting these mini-projects. To save a bunch of time, we can actually
export all of them together instead of
going one by one. Just tap here on "Select"
and just tap on each of them like that to select
them and then do share. You can save them as
JPEG or PNG files. I typically go with the PNG
option most of the time. Then you can just tap here
on "Save" nine images. If you want to save
them to your iPad. If you want to transfer them
to a Windows computer or a PC one way to do that
is by tapping iTunes here and then they will directly go into your
iTunes and you can hook up your iPad to your PC via a USB cable to then
transfer those images. Or if you have a Mac, you can just Airdrop it. For now, I'll just do, save nine images, and then all nine of them will show up
in your photo gallery. Cool. Now the next bit
is totally optional, but I'll show you
how I would go about making that grid with
all nine of them. The app that I
would recommend is called Layout by Instagram, and it's just so easy to
use and so no-nonsense. You can download it
and then open it up. You can see here as soon
as you open up the app, all your recent images in your photo gallery
shows up here. You just select the
ones that you want to include in your grid
by tapping on them. That's all nine of them and you can choose
a layout from here, there are different
layout options. I'm just going to go with
the most basic one right here so click on that
so there we have it. Now you can also move
them around within the grid to position them
however you like to. You don't have to
you can just keep it as it is if you're
happy with it. Or if you want to play
around with the positions, you can do that
really easily by just dragging and dropping them to a different spot on the grid. I'm quite pleased with
how that's looking. When you're happy with it, just tap "Save", and that's it, done. If you go back to
your gallery now, you'll find the grid right here. Then you can post this
on the project gallery, on Instagram, or
wherever you like to. Speaking off, don't
forget to share your mini-projects to
our project gallery as individual images or as a grid completely up to you but
definitely share it with us. Your fellow students
and I would love to get a peek into what
you've been working on. If you do share
them on Instagram, please also tag me so
that I can see your work, feel super proud of you, and even share it
with my audience. In the next lesson I'll tell you all the juicy details about your final project for
this class [MUSIC]
14. Your Class Project: [MUSIC] Now that you've completed all nine
mini-projects with me, let's talk about your main
project for this class. Your project for this class
is to combine one or two of the ideas from
these nine exercises or many projects that
we did together with one new idea of your own to create a stylized
illustration using dots. You can draw anything you like, just use dots as your primary elements
in the illustration. You can, of course, use
other brushes to supplement these dotted elements
like we used the monoline brush
during our exercises. Now, this is not mandatory, but if you want to
switch things up a bit from the square format
we've been working on, you could consider creating your final projects on an 8
by 10 inch canvas instead. But it's completely up to you. Either way, when you are done, don't forget to share
your projects with us through the project
gallery of this class. Besides the mini-projects, you can share anything from
work-in-progress photos to your final illustration or
even your time-lapse video. You can use iCloud or iTunes to get your
images and videos transfered to a
computer which then makes it easy to upload
to the project gallery. If you do want to share or even just watch a time-lapse video, don't forget to turn
on video recording before you start working
on your project pieces. I'm so excited to
see what you come up with and all the
different ways in which you are going to combine our little exercises with
your own imagination. I'm sure your fellow
students in this class would also love to see your
version of the project. Once you've shared your work, you might also want
to take a look at what others have shared and maybe even share some
of your thoughts on their work through
the common section. A big pro of a global
learning community like this is being able to
connect with each other. Don't miss out on that. We can all learn so
much from each other. Now, if that's not incentive
enough, how about this? If you take this class and
post your mini-projects and your final class project to the project gallery before
the 23rd of April 2023, you will stand a chance to win one full year of
Skillshare membership, and if you leave a
written review for this class that doubles
your chances of winning. A winner will be picked
at random and not based on how well you
do at your projects. Don't let that intimidate you. I just want to reward
you for doing the work. That's all. Sounds good. I'll let you get on
with your projects and I'll try to wait patiently till you share
them with us. [MUSIC]
15. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] How are you
feeling having completed 10 new illustrations and made
two new Procreate brushes? Does it feel good?
I bet it does. I am so proud of you
because the only way to grow is to really take
action however small or big, and you've done that today. I hope you've picked up a lot of little ideas throughout this
class and you're feeling inspired to come up with
new and exciting ways to use your new dot stamp brushes and your Procreate process. If you are new to the app, I hope this class managed to help you get a
good feel of it without making it feel
like a [inaudible] If you enjoy this class, please do take a moment to
leave a written review. It would mean so much to me and my class to get your
feedback on how we're doing. Don't forget to follow
me here on Skillshare to be notified right away when
I publish a new class. In the meantime, I have more
Procreate classes that you can check out on
illustrating florals, creating seamless
repeat patterns, Procreate symmetry, and some
daily lettering practice. Or if you want to
try your hand at some traditional paint
on paper techniques, there's also some watercolor
lettering classes for you to jump into. I also share new work
as well as behind the scenes and crosses
videos on my Instagram, so if you want to tag along on my art journey and stay
updated on what I'm up to, that would be the place. Thank you so much
for sticking with me and trusting me to teach you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Until next time, bye-bye,
and happy creating.
Vinitha Mammen, Illustrator | Lettering Artist
