Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Imagine a scene with me. You've just sat down with
your iPad in a comfy spot. Your favorite place to draw. In your drawing app,
you've started a new file, opened up the brush palette, and then immediate overload. Has this ever happened to you? Hi, I'm Jessica Deel. I've worked as a graphic
designer for the last 10 years, working on a variety
of projects, from branding to web
design to video, and within the last three years, I've been adding digital
illustrations to my portfolio. That scenario we just imagined, that used to be me. It took lots of time and trial and error
to find brushes that I like to work with
and that feel like me. After three years of practicing
digital art on the iPad, I've developed a
low-pressure framework for sifting through the brush
library quickly to find and save digital brushes that
I love to use in my work. In this class, we'll practice
simple methods for choosing a small suite of love brushes from the multitude of
options available. We will breathe, we will doodle, we will get messy digitally, and have some fun. This class is for iPad artists who want to get started
with digital drawing without being overwhelmed
by brush choices. Throughout your
digital art practice, it's helpful to have a
method for working through or eliminating decision fatigue so you can finally get
to the good stuff. Making art. Together we'll
approach this hurdle through the lens of curiosity and experimentation to choose five favorite digital brushes to use in your own art practice. I'll demonstrate
my narrowing down process in Adobe Fresco on the iPad Pro though
this class could also be useful for Procreate
and Adobe Photoshop users. Make sure you bring your
drawing tablet to follow along. You'll learn how to add new digital brushes
to your brush pallet, how to test out
new brushes using experiments to help you
decide what's right for you, and how to save your favorites so you don't have to go
hunting for them again. There are so many
barriers to creativity, don't let picking
a brush keep you from making art
that you'll love. Let's get started.
2. Your Class Project: Hey there. Welcome to class, in this class I
invite you to follow along with the video
lessons as we conduct a series of enjoyable
experiments created to help you find
digital brushes that you'll want to incorporate
in your art making. Over the years these
are the techniques that have helped me move past, feeling overwhelmed and stuck at the
beginning of a project and build my own
library of MVBs, that's most valuable brushes that I use in nearly
all of my work. In the first experiment, you'll explore
through mark making, now mark making is
exactly what it sounds like making marks
on your canvas, you'll just jump right in and
see what each brush does. In the second experiment, you'll reference a
favorite artwork or artist to help guide you to brushes you might like to use
in your own work. In the last experiment, you'll use drawing guides
to play without pressure, I've provided templates
as a starting point to try out different
digital brushes. As you work through
these experiments, I expect that you'll find
some digital brushes that you love and we'll
want to use again. I'll show you how to save them
to your favorites palette so you can access
them again and again without having to scroll
the entire library. Going through this process
now will save you time and possibly some anxiety when starting your next project. Once you've completed
your experiments and saved your brushes, you'll document your top five in a list to upload to
the project gallery. Now, you don't need to complete all three experiments
to finish your project, you could successfully complete your project after
only one experiment, but I hope you'll try them all. In case you're
strapped for time, here's some criteria to help you decide which experiment
is right for you. Experiment 1 is best for
beginner digital artist who may have no idea where to start or for artists
who like to dive right in and are okay using a
loose and messy approach, this is the easiest
activity to get started and it's usually the
first thing I do when trying out new brushes. Experiment 2 is good for artists who have an idea of
the simulated medium they would like to work in or a style they would
like to achieve, we all have art or artists
that we love and admire. Referencing existing
art and textures that you already enjoy
can help you quickly decide on a brush
category to test out. Experiment 3 is for artists who prefer an easy
structured approach, or artists who are feeling a little shy about their talent, drawing guides can help
instruct the final outcome of your experiment and guide
your brush choices. Don't get hung up on
the term Drawing Guide, it's basically just
a coloring page. You can choose one of
the following templates, a landscape, flowers in a vase, a pre-written phrase, or
a character skeleton. Whether you choose to do 1,
2 or all three experiments, I am so excited to have you
on this journey with me and I can't wait to see your
brush collection at the end. Ready to dive in? Here's what you need to be
successful in this class. You'll need a drawing tablet. You could use any drawing pad or drawing tablet, ideally, one that has a stylist for a more natural drawing
and sketching grip, I'm using the Apple Pencil 2. You'll also need a drawing app, I'll be demonstrating
in Adobe Fresco, so the brushes I use and the menu flows I show
will be native to that app. However, there's no reason that you can't follow
along using another app, like Procreate, Adobe Photoshop, or some other equivalent. Just know that
there may be times when the steps don't
align correctly with what you're seeing
in these videos, I've provided a guide
in the projects and resources section
to help fill in the gaps for Procreate users, so if you get lost or stuck, try looking there first. If the guy doesn't help
you get back on track, lean on me or your classmates by asking for help in
the class discussion. Now, let's go ahead and
get your project started, you can start your
project in the projects and resources tab by
clicking Create Project, enter a project title, and under creating
personal project, include a sentence
or two explaining why you chose to take this class and what apps or equipment you'll be using as you work
through the experiments. You can edit your
project at any time, so don't try to make it
perfect the first time around, hit "Publish" and you've
already completed your first step to
overcoming brush overwhelm. Okay, now that that's out
of the way let's dig in, meet me in the
next lesson to get to know the brush menu and learn how to add new
brushes to your library so you can test them out.
3. Brush Library Overview: In this lesson,
we're going to go over how to manage
your brush library, including how to add brushes to your library palette
and then save your favorites as you're working through
your experiments. I'll show you how to do
this in Adobe Fresco first, and then I'll do a quick
demo in Procreate. Here we are in Adobe Fresco. First things first, I've created my art board at 8 and
1/2 by 11 inches. Now you can make yours any dimensions that you're
comfortable using. However, I have created the drawing guides and the final project worksheet
at these dimensions. So if you go with 8 and
1/2 by 11 with yours, then it will make a
more seamless import when you're ready to use them. One of the things that I
really love about Adobe Fresco is that they have
three different types of brushes in one app. They have pixel brushes. These are the ones
that have lots of great texture and variety
within each brush. There are live brushes
which are created to simulate paint
details as closely to real life as
they possibly can, and you have vector brushes
which are scalable. This is really exciting. You can bring this into any publishing software such
as Adobe Illustrator and you could blow your art up
as big as you want to or make it as small as you want to, and you would never
lose quality. For these tutorials,
we're going to be focusing mainly
on pixel brushes. The feature we'll be
using throughout all of our experiments today will
be the Favorites panel. Once you've saved a brush
to the Favorites panel, you can access it again in
any art that you create. You'll know your
brush is saved to the Favorites panel
because of the blue star. Let's see where this
is in our library. See the pen is not saved. The pencil is saved. We can easily add a brush to
our Favorites panel simply by tapping the brush
and tapping the star. Then you'll see it has been
added to my Favorites list. Let's say I've changed my mind and I don't want to
save the pen after all. I'm simply going to tap the
blue star and it goes away. You see it's super easy to
manage the Favorites panel. You can save brushes
to use across artworks or even just
for one project. Now that we learned about
the Favorites panel, let's go back to our brushes. You can see that Adobe
Fresco comes with lots of brushes preloaded in
the app for you to explore. They also have a library section where you can add
new brushes to try. To add new brushes,
we're going to tap here under Add Brushes. You have two ways to add
new brushes to your app. Discover new brushes takes
you to Adobe's brush library. Import from files is where you would add brushes that
you've downloaded. Let's go to Adobe's
brush library. There are lots of cool
sets to choose from, and I would encourage you
to try as many as you can. This set is new and I
haven't explored it yet, so I'm going to add it now. Hit "Done", open up my
brush palette again, and there it is. It has loaded in my
library brushes. Now I also have
some brushes that I've downloaded that
I'm dying to try. So let's go back and
import from files. In order to import new brushes, you'll need to save them
somewhere you can access them, either on a cloud service
or directly to your tablet. This is the brush
set I want to add, and I'm just going to
tap it and let it load. You can see it's
added to my list. One last thing I want to
talk about before we get started is storage space. I will be doing you
a disservice if I didn't mention that
every single one of these brushes takes up
valuable space on your tablet. So be mindful of that
as you're working so you don't get yourself in
a pickle down the road. If you find this
list is getting a little long and it's
causing you problems, let me show you what not to do. Select the three
dots here at the top and go to manage pixel brushes. Next to each brush set
is a toggle switch. You can toggle on and off. Let's turn this off
and see what happens. You can see it removed the
lettering set for my list, but it's a trick. It's not gone. Managing brushes from this menu remove some from
your list visually, but they are still installed
and taking up storage space. If you would like to
remove them permanently, we'll have to do
something different. Just as there are two
ways to add brushes, there are two ways
to remove them. Adobe makes it really easy
to remove their brushes. Open up that menu again
and hit "Remove". If you want to remove
brushes that you imported, you'll need to do that through
the Creative Cloud app. Let's go there now. Swipe, loop. Here we've switched to
the Creative Cloud app. I've navigated to
Files and Libraries. Here, you can see the
brush set that I imported. In order to remove it, we'll need to hit
the three dots again and permanently delete. It's going to ask
you if you're sure because you cannot
undo this action. In this case, yes, I want
to permanently delete it. Now you can see I do
have another brush set here that was downloaded
from the Adobe library. I could unfollow from here
and it would remove it. However, I usually just
do it within Adobe Fresco because it's easy and it means I don't have
to switch apps. Now, let's go back
to Adobe Fresco and see how this change
affected our library. Voila, it's removed from my list and it's no longer
taking up storage space. Now that we're in Procreate, tap the brush icon to
visit your brush library. In Procreate, there are two ways to save brushes that
you want to use again. The easiest way is
to pin a brush. You can do this by visiting
your Recent panel, swipe a brush over,
and hit "Pin". Once you've pinned a brush, you will always find it at
the top under this panel. If you want to remove it, swipe over again and unpin it. But let's say you want to save a collection of
brushes in one place, similar to the way
we did that under the Favorites panel
in Adobe Fresco. To do that, drag
your library down, tap the plus sign, and
it creates a new set. We'll save this as
favorites. Hit "Enter". So we created a
new favorite set, but there's nothing there. Now let's add some brushes
to our favorite set. To save this brush to our
new favorite set, hold it, drag it over, and drop
it into the new set. You can see it's still
under Sketching, but it's also under Favorites. To remove a brush
from your Favorites, swipe over and hit "Delete." Hit "Delete" again
and it's gone. If you go under Sketching, you'll see it hasn't
removed the original brush because it made a duplicate
to put it in our Favorites. Now that we've
covered a couple of different ways to
save our favorites, let's talk about how to import brushes that
we've downloaded. To do that, tap the plus icon. Then select "Import". Again, you'll need to
have saved your brush set to a cloud service or
directly to your tablet, and tap to import. You can see our new
brush set right there. One last step to make sure we've covered all of our bases. Let's talk about
how to remove it. If you want to remove a
set you've downloaded, tap the set and hit "Delete". It will ask you if you're sure. Hit "Delete" again to
remove it completely. FYI, from here on, all demos will be
created in Adobe Fresco. If you're following
along in Procreate and you get stuck or lost, come back to this video or
download the guide provided in the class resources under the
Projects and Resources tab. Are you ready to break
out the brushes? The fun finally begins
in the next few lessons. Meet me there to
start exploring.
4. Explore Through Mark-Making: In this lesson, we're going
to explore brushes by making marks on our canvas to see how they look and behave. I've selected a
set to try out and we'll work through
them one by one. This exercise is great
because we get to get messy and forget
about perfection. You only have two goals
with this exercise. Fill your canvas and try as
many brushes as you can. Here we are in Adobe Fresco. I've opened a new file
and I am ready to begin. For this exercise, I'm going to be exploring the spring 2022 brushes
from the Adobe library. Now there's not a lot of
structure to this exercise, I'm just going to take
it brush by brush and start laying down marks to
see what each one does, and I'll make sure
to save any that I want to revisit to my
Favorites panel along the way. You see, I like that
texture right there. That's pretty unique. I don't know where
I'll use it yet, but I know I don't want to
forget which one it is. So I'm going to make a
little mark right there. If I wanted to be very
organized, and I do, I might switch to a
different brush just so I can make a note of the
name of the brush. This is in case I forget to save it to my Favorites
while I'm working. I can always come
back to it later and see what the name
of the brush was. Let's keep making marks. When I run out of room, or at least in this case I
feel like I probably need a little bit more space to really see what this brush does, I'll start a new layer and
hide the one I was working on. That way I can start fresh, but all of my notes and all of my mark-making
is contained within one file.
Let's keep going. I wanted to pause just to
show you what I did there. This was called Pellets Alt. I zoomed in really
close so I could see the difference between
these two brushes. I can see this one has
just a little bit more variations within the brush, and this one comes off
a little bit darker, almost like a screen print
or a stamped effect. I like the different tones
that are in this brush here, so I'm going to stick
with this one for now. There's also one more variant, and we'll take a look at
how that one works, too. I really like how this
one responds to pressure, but I think I'm still going
to stick with this one. I might just make a
note of this for later if I decide to come back and
save it to my Favorites. For this last one, I had
a little bit more space. So I decided to really play with what applying pressure
does to this brush. I really like the
texture that I got when I had this really light
hand, and I think I might want to try that texture
out later to see what all it can do and how
it might affect my artwork. So I'm saving it
to my Favorites. We can see that I have four layers of what might
look like a total mess. But if we open up my
Favorites palette, we will see I have 1, 2, 3, 4. Four new brushes that I didn't
know about before today. I'm really excited to try
these in future work. Now it's your turn. Find
a brush set that you're curious about and go make
marks on your canvas. Don't forget to
save your favorites and make notes along the way. Take some screenshots
of your mark-making experiment and add
them to your project. When you're done, continue
to the next experiment. Or if you're ready to
finish your project, visit the video called Publishing Your Project
to get started.
5. Explore Through Referencing Art: In this lesson, we're going
to reference our favorite art to try to reverse engineer
our digital toolkit. We'll be looking closely at
how each piece was made to extract the tools that
were used to create it. Then we'll look through
our digital brush library to find similar tools
to use in our own work. Grab your art reference
and let's get started. Before we get too deep
into our experiment, let's talk a little bit
about where to find references to use
in this exercise. The good news is
inspiration is everywhere. You can be inspired
by books, movies, album art, product
packaging, traditional art. The list just keeps going. I keep a collection of vintage books and
illustration anthologies, so I always have inspiration
at my fingertips. I also maintain a Pinterest board called illustration style. That way as I'm
scrolling through the site and I see
something that I like, I can save it immediately. For this experiment, I've pulled several different references and I'm going to make
notes about them to document what I like about them, what tools the artist
may have used, and what brushes I can use now
to create similar effects. You may be inspired
by a specific medium: watercolor, acrylic,
charcoal, pencil, or you may have a favorite
artist or illustrator whose work that you just love. Whatever your inspiration is, I encourage you to find
five distinct sources to use for this exercise and don't be afraid
to mix it up. The goal here is not to
copy someone else's style. The goal is to find what
lights you up creatively. If you still need to
gather your art reference, pause the video and come back when you're
ready to continue. I'm going to start today by pulling all of my references into my art board so I
can see them all at once. To place the artwork
on my art board, I'm going to select this icon
Place and select photos, and you can see
I've saved all of my different references and I'll bring them in one by one. I've pulled in all
of my art references and I know this
seems like a lot, and it probably is, but I wanted to make
sure that I was giving you enough material so that you could see that even with all of these
different pieces of art, we can still start to pull
out some common themes. Now my process for choosing these reference pieces was
simply thumbing through my books and my
Pinterest board to see what lit me
up when I saw it. I literally was waiting
for that feeling of, "Oh, I like that." Not necessarily trying to find any visual themes
in that moment. Now I'm going to duplicate and rearrange this layout
so I can start grouping these references
into some visual themes. Now I have things
grouped together by the themes as I see them
the most immediately. You don't have to do this in your own project if
you don't want to. But for the purposes of
discussing what I'm seeing, this just makes it a
lot easier to zoom in and talk about
these things together. I've made a separate layer, so I am ready to
take some notes. With this first group, one of the things that
I'm seeing immediately is all of this lovely
background texture, especially in this
particular piece. It's almost like they've
taken a dry paintbrush and you're seeing all of the
lifted areas of the canvas. I love the texture that
has been created here. You can see some of that same background texture
in this piece as well. One of the other things I
noticed was the similarity between this area here. If we zoom in, you can
see that dry brush, scratchy texture there, and that is also
present in this piece, which I'm guessing is probably a digital piece where they've
simulated that texture. Either way, I really,
really love it, and I think that's something
that I might want to try in some of my
own art pieces. Let me make that note now. Now moving to the second group. Here, I've left all these pieces layered because what I'm really the most interested
in is the line work. I love how all of these
lines are bold and slightly imperfect
so that really gives it that handmade feel, which can be difficult sometimes to really simulate
in a digital medium. It's something I might like to try to achieve in my own work. So I'm going to write that down. Moving on to the third group. Now these all feel
distinctly different. But the thing that
I'm seeing throughout each piece is this
feeling of layering. Every single one
has this feeling of being built up over time. Now this last group
might seem like it has nothing to do with
any of the others. Because I'm a lettering artist, I wanted to make sure that I'm looking at some lettering pieces to see how I can elevate
my own lettering work. If we zoom in, the thing
that I'm seeing the most is lots of texture. There's lots of stipples, scratchy line work and some
doodles, some splatter. I feel like these
kinds of details really bring a project to life. So I'm going to
write these down and we're almost ready to
start talking brushes. Now that we've made some
notes about what we like about our art references, I'm going to go back
through and brainstorm on what kinds of textures I might be looking for as I'm looking
through my brush library. Here are some of the
notes that I made. For my background texture, I'm looking for something
that's maybe a canvas or just something grainy. For my line work, I want something with
a hand-crafted feel. So I'm going to be
looking for an inky pen, something that
isn't too refined, or a brush pen, something that will give me a
nice, wobbly, variated line. For my details, I'm going to rely on
lots of transparency. Maybe with some paint washes, possibly watercolor
or a marker brush. Usually, marker brushes
have a little bit of transparency built into them. So I think this is a good opportunity to
play around with those. Lastly, I already made a note about a stipple brush
or a splatter brush, but I also wanted
to add a pencil. A pencil is already
one of my staples, but we're going to see
if we can use it to create this sketchy,
messy sort of a look.
6. Putting Art Observations to Use: Welcome to part 2 of the
referencing your art lesson. We're going to pick
up right where we left off with our observations, and then we're going
to take it one step further by organizing
our notes and then using that information to start building a brush library that you'll love to
use in your work. Let's keep going. Now that we've done that, let's hide our references. We've gotten the information
that we need from them. So we don't necessarily
need to look at them again until
maybe the end. I'm going to rearrange and
regroup my notes a little bit. That way, as I'm experimenting
with my brushes, I can try them out
next to each notation. To do that, I'm just going to select and duplicate
this selection. Then I can move it around
and it's on a new layer. Now that we've got our
notes reorganized, I've added some dividers just to help keep things a
little bit tidy. Now I'm going to go through
my brush library to try to find examples of each one
of these types of brushes. I'm going to do that now and I'll speed up
the video so you don't have to watch
the whole thing, and we'll come back to it and
talk about it at the end. This was a really good
example of why we take notes through this process. As I was going through this
paper texture library, none of these had
distinctive names. They were literally
just numbered, which I guess is an efficient
way to make a brush set, but it doesn't really help me as an artist when I'm
going through so many and then I'm trying to go
back to one that I liked. If I didn't save it along
the way or make a note, I would have to go through
all of that again. In this case, I was able to
narrow 30 brushes down to four background
textures that I really liked and wanted to try
seeing all of them together. This texture stands
out the most to me as like a pressed paper. Then I also really liked this one because
it was simulating that printed dot background, and that's something that
really appeals to me, too. I'm going to save these two and let the other two go away. Now I have found some background textures
that I'm happy with, and I've saved all of these brushes to my
Favorites panel. I'm just going to
continue working through these other sections
in the exact same way. I'll speed up the
video again and I'll pause if I need to
highlight anything. One thing I want to
point out is that I made some adjustments
to this brush to see if it was going to behave
in a way that I liked. You can make adjustments
to your brushes using this fly out panel here. If you tap the circle, you can change the color. If you tap the number, you can change the
size of your brush. If you tap this little
transparency icon, you can change the flow, which essentially
is controlling how much of that color or medium
is being put on the page. If you tap the little swash, you can change the smoothing. Lower smoothing is
a jerkier line. Higher smoothing means that the program will help you out
by smoothing out your line. Let me show you what
that looks like. Here are two lines that were
made with a similar motion. This one was turned
all the way down. The smoothing was at zero. This one was turned
all the way up. The smoothing was at 100. This is a nice drawing
assist feature to have. It can really help you keep
control of your line work. One final option are
the brush properties. You can change a lot
in the brush settings, like the blend mode, your pressure dynamics,
which is how it responds to the pressure
of your pencil. Velocity dynamics, which
is how the brush responds to how fast or slow your
pencil movement is. You can adjust the
stylus pressure. We won't be going into
these brush settings today, but just know that
they're there and you can use them if you want to. Now I'm going to continue. For my final brush, I've
just been going through a stipple brush set to see which one of these
that I liked the best. I'm really making some
quick decisions based on density and volume
and, in some cases, some end up being very similar-looking once
I lay them down. So it really comes down to which one feels
better to draw with. They all have slightly
different settings. So it's really just a
personal preference which one works
the best for you. In this case, I only
really need one. I think I'm leaning more
towards this Stipple 8. So I'm going to go
back to my notes. I separated this out so that I could play around a little
bit and have some more room. My notes page was getting
a little bit full. I'm going to keep this so that I can see this
comparison later, but I'm going to add this
Stipple 8 to my notes. I have finished my notes. I've found examples of each one of the details
that we mined from our reference art and found a corresponding brush that
creates a similar effect. I made sure to save them to my Favorites palette
so that I can easily access them again when I'm
ready to create artwork. Now it's your turn. Pull your reference art into your art board and start
to make some notes about what it is that you are
enjoying about each piece. Then go to your brush library to find brushes that will help
you recreate each detail. Make sure you're making
notes and saving your favorites to your Favorites
palette along the way. If you're ready to
finish your project, visit the Publishing Your
Project Video to get started. If you want to keep exploring these new brushes
that you've found, meet me in the next lesson where we will use
drawing guides to help us play and really
put them to the test.
7. Explore Through Playing With Guides: In this lesson, I
want you to channel your inner child and play. I've provided
drawing templates to help inspire your exploration. Choose from a landscape, flower's interface, a
pre-written phrase, or a character frame. Download your favorite
template from the class resources
and let's go. I've saved my
templates to my iPad, and now I need to import
one to my art board. To do that, we'll go
to Place, Photos, and you can see they're all
lined up here at the top. I'll choose the landscape one. I'm going to resize
it to fit my board. Hold down this little
touch spot to resize everything proportionally
and hit "Done". Notice that your
template is transparent. What this means is
that you can work on top of this image
to create your own, or you can work below it so you can always see your guidelines. However you choose to work, I recommend locking this layer so you don't accidentally
draw on top of it. Tap the layer and
hit "Lock layer". Now it doesn't matter what I do. It won't affect this layer. You'll also see that there's not much detail in these templates. That's because I
want you to rely on your brushes to fill in
all of the juicy details. If you've completed
the other lessons, this is a great
opportunity to put the brushes that you
saved to the test. Apply them to any of
these templates to see how they feel as part
of a larger artwork. If you're starting here
with the drawing templates, let the scene guide you to
brushes that might make sense. For example, you might use a brush that looks
like foliage here. In the background, you
might use something that conveys grass or sand. For the sky, you might use color washes to create
a beautiful sunset. This is where you can really
let your creativity fly. I'm going to work on
the guide using some of the brushes that I found through the previous experiments, then we'll reconvene at the end to do a
little show and tell. Welcome back. Now that I have
completed my experiment, I wanted to just talk you through my process a little bit. Firstly, I gave myself
a time constraint. Since I was working
on all four templates just to show you what
it would look like, I wanted to make sure that
I was doing focused work. You can choose to set a timer for your
experiment as well, or give yourself as much
time as you need to explore. I used my notes from
experiment number 2 to guide some of my choices as I worked through
this experiment. As a recap, I already
knew that I wanted to incorporate some bold,
imperfect line work, some grainy texture
in the background, lots of layer details, and some scratchy,
sketchy textures and possibly some splatter. I worked in all black and white, so I wasn't distracted
by having to make color choices and
I let the template tell me where would be a good opportunity
to try some of the brushes that I had
saved in previous lessons. I made sure to work in layers so that way I could go back and change any element of the drawing without
affecting the others. This gave me the freedom
to change my mind and make some comparisons in
case I needed to choose between two
or more brushes. As a final step, I'd like to take a closer look
and analyze my work to see what's working for me and what maybe isn't working as
well as I had hoped. I'm going to zoom in. Here's what's
working well for me. I'm really loving
the layered look that I was able to achieve
with the marker brush, both in the background and
in the details of the tree. I'm also really
enjoying this worn off background texture
that's happening and the bleeding edge
of the line work. Here's what's not working
for me in this image. I was really excited to
use this brush here. I really love the
texture that it has when viewed up-close. But when I zoom out and see the entire
picture as a whole, most of that detail is lost and it's just not as exciting to me. The other element that I struggled with was
this wet brush. I do like the final effect, but it was just a really
hard brush to work with. I had a difficult
time controlling it and getting it to do
what I wanted it to do. So for that reason, I probably will remove
that from my Favorites and find a different brush
to get a similar effect. Lastly, this foliage brush
was really interesting. It's not one that I normally
would have chosen to use, but it seemed to work well
with this particular image. Since it is so specific
to landscapes, and I don't usually work
on landscapes often, I probably won't keep it
in my Favorites palette. I'll just pull it up
when I need it again. Before I call this
project truly done, I'll create a new layer and make some final notes about
the brushes that I use in this image and I'll go ahead and
adjust my Favorites palette so that way I'm only
saving the ones that I really, really love. There we go. I have completed my experiment and made
notes about my brushes. If you're having
trouble remembering which brushes you
used in your image, go to your brush palette, hit
"All", and select "Recent". All your most recently
used brushes will be there and that can
help jog your memory. Now it's your turn. Download your favorite template, import it into your art
board, and start playing. Set a timer for focus work, or give yourself time to try as many brushes as you need
to find your favorites. Make sure to work in layers and save your favorites
along the way. When you're done, meet me in the next lesson to publish
your final results.
8. Publishing Your Project: You did it, you completed
your experiments. Now it's time to choose
five new favorite brushes and share them in the
class project gallery so your classmates can
appreciate them too. If you're happy with
more or less than five. That's fantastic. You can type in
your list or upload a screenshot of your
favorites collection. I've also provided a project
template for you to fill in your top five
brushes and include a swash or a doodle to
show what it looks like. Download the final
project worksheet from the class resources under the
Projects and Resources tab. In your browser, you'll find
the tab below this video and the download links will
be on the right-hand side. If you're using Skillshare
mobile app, select "Projects", and then the link that
says tap here to access this class' project details
and upload a project. That link will open
up a browser window where you can download resources and create or edit your project. Once you've downloaded the final project
template to your device, you can import it
to your artboard by selecting the Place icon, tap the file and it
should load to create a new layer on top of all
of your other layers. Position it on your artboard and then create a new
layer to fill it in. When you've got it
all filled out, do a quick export under Publish and Export to save it so you
can add it to your project. Speaking of, let's
visit our projects. If you haven't already start your project now in the
Projects and Resources tab, by clicking, "Create Project". If you started your project
earlier in the class, click on your project to
open up your project page and then select "Edit Project". Make sure you enter
a project title and add a cover image. A great cover image could
be your final brush list, a screenshot of one of
your finished experiments, or an image of you working
through one of the lessons. Under creating personal project, include a sentence
or two explaining why you chose to take
this class and what apps or equipment you used to work
through the experiments. Add your list of favorite
brushes by typing in the list, uploading a screenshot of
your favorite palette, or uploading the completed
final project worksheet. To do that, select images
under Add more content, and navigate to your image file to add it to your project. You can stop here if you'd like, but if you want to
make your project more engaging for
your fellow students, here are some other
things you can share. Images of art you created
using the brushes that you discovered
through your experiments, images of artwork you've referenced for your experiments, images of any art
that inspires you, even if you didn't use it
as a reference this time, your thoughts before and after completing your experiments. Any revelations you had while
working through this class, or any feedback you'd like
to share about the process. I'd love to see the results
of your experiments too so feel free to upload those to the project gallery
along the way. You're welcome to check out my class project
for some examples.
9. Thank You & Closing Thoughts: Thank you so much
for being here. Through this process
I hope you've discovered and saved a set of digital brushes that make
your heart and your art sing. If that's the case,
congratulations, you've just eliminated a big old barrier
to your creativity and you can expect an easier start the next time you
sit down to make art. If not, that's okay. Keep looking and
keep experimenting. Remember, art is a journey, not a destination, and your
journey doesn't stop here. For deeper discussions
about art or creativity, follow me on
Instagram or TikTok. To receive tips on leveraging the creative process to
manage stress and anxiety, sign up for my email
list @thatsthedeel.com. If you're ready to continue exploring your
digital art tools, here's a list of other
Skillshare teachers and the classes that were instrumental in getting me to the next level of my
digital art practice. I've also included links to these classes in the
project description. Even though some of
these classes are using analog tools
in their demos, don't be afraid to take their lessons and
practice digitally. You can learn a lot from people who work in
different mediums and you just might develop your own unique
process along the way. Goodbye for now, and good luck.
Jessica Deel, Human first, creative second.
