Paint a Vibrant Seascape in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. Welcome to my latest Skillshare class. Today, I'm gonna be sharing my full process of creating an ocean landscape illustration. In procreate. As a beginner artist, I find backgrounds and environments intimidating to paint. It was hard to know where to even begin. So in these lessons, I'll be breaking down the steps and techniques I use so you can try them out in your own work. My name is Chrissy and I'm an illustrator of nature and animals. Over the years, I've become experienced at painting scenery, and it's not one of my favorite things to do. I hope to pass on the stove to other artists. This cost will be mostly suited to intermediate artists, although beginners and advanced artists can learn some new tips from it too. A working knowledge of Procreate will be useful, although any of our digital art software, so if you're choosing, can be used to. By the end of this class, if you follow along, you'll have your own finished illustration and the confidence to go away and try painting your own unique pieces. 2. Class Project: In this class on this project is finished. You'll have a completed illustration of an ocean landscape. This means you'll have had a great chance to practice what you've learned. To do the project. I'd like you to either paint along to make a copy of the piece I'm sharing in these videos. Or you can create Unix seaside piece that uses the same techniques. When you're sharing the final images, please share a photograph of your first thumbnail and the final image. If you'd like a summary of the project at any point or want to see examples from our students. It'll all be listed in the class project tab underneath the video. When you're ready, have Procreate or sketch book open, and let's get started. 3. Thumbnailing: Before I begin any piece, I always like to have a rough plan in mind. Good preparation saves time down the line, and I find thumbnails helpful for this. Here, I'm trying to like four different ideas for the composition. And then I'll go in and pick my favorite at the end. Drawing on paper with a pen can be helpful because it means you can't erase any lines. It helps cut back on overthinking and worrying about how it looks. If you're stuck for ideas, it can be useful to browse through a site like Pinterest for inspiration. For this artwork. I know I wanted to create a landscape piece that features to see some cliffs. So I can look up photographs of these to get extra ideas. For each thumbnail. I tried to come up with different shapes and focal points to see how they all look. But you ever has to see these, so don't worry if they're a little bit scribbly, as long as they make sense to you. That's all that matters. Regular. If anything, the referee or the better because nature isn't bead and this will make things look more real and organic. If you really like more than one of these thumbnails, you can also save it for inspiration for future peace, for our time when you don't have any ideas ready. I go in and add hints of a few extra elements, like little buildings and birds to add some life and personality. Sometimes astray sketched on can look like something else. So I'll use these sometimes to build on ideas. Kinda like when you're looking at the clouds and conceive shaping them. In the end, I decided to go with the one on the top right. I'd like some of the others too, but this one has a nice simple layout, which will make it perfect for teaching this class. 4. Sketching: Typically when I'm working on a canvas size that's 6,367 by 4 thousand pixels. We're going to create a rough sketch to get an idea for the layout of the piece. I'm going to go in with a black wash brush for this. Alright, this whole class, I'll keep the current brush and color on the left of the screen so you can easily follow along with them. You can color pick the sarco or go here in Procreate to type the numbers into hexadecimal section. It's also very helpful to have a reference window open that's set to Canvas. This lets you quickly see what the overall piece is looking like and helps you to worry less about tiny details and procreate. If you hold your brush down at the end of a stroke, it automatically straightens it for you. So to start my sketch, I begin with the horizon line. If this was a photograph, this lets you know where the eye level is of the person viewing it and allows you to build the rest of the elements of it. They stopped, which was on thumbnail. I next add in the foreground cliff and hint at some graphs on top of it. Now we can move on to the cliffs in the middle ground. I work up the silhouette and gradually carve out the main shapes in it. I wasn't too happy with the positioning. So I went into the selection menu in the top left to move at about. I like to work with the freehand option with feather turned up to 4% so that there's no harsh sharp lines anywhere. With the shapes are blocked in. Now, we can zoom in and add extra detail with a smaller brush. I'm focusing on hinting up the edges of the graph and adding the textures of the rocks. If you're not too sure how you want the rocks to look, reference photographs can be very helpful at this point. I find the main thing that helps though, is to not overthink it too much. I'll let your hand create random lines that roughly follow the form of the main shape. Let's see, might increase our brush size. I'm very lightly add in some hints of shadows. This can help it look a bit more like a traditional pencil sketch. Then to finish off, let's add some color to her lines to prepare them for the coloring stage. I'm going to create a new layer and set it to clipping mask. Then let's drag in this nice pink color. I'd like the noise to be a bit darker. So let's duplicate the sketch layer by dragging the layer to the left. Then I'll pinch them together to merge them. That's no emerged the color layer two and then set the whole thing to multiply mode. 5. Base Colours: Now that we have our sketch ready, Let's start adding the main groups of color. I'm going to start off by dragging in this blue shade onto a layer beneath the sketch. Then with a Nico row brush and a lighter shade of blue, we can add some light around the horizon load onto the reflective surface of the water. In this stage, the reference window is very useful for keeping an eye on how all the colors are working together. Next, let's do a similar approach with the shade of blue that's darker than the first one. I'm going to add it to the top of the sky. And in parts of the sea that we didn't add light shade. This will add a nice level of contrast and shading that we can build on top of later. The bottom of the middle cliffs will be the most shadowed as their differs from the sunlight. So let's go in and add our darkest shade of blue. They're working in different layers can help with adjusting groups of color later if you're not happy with them. So when a new layer, I'm going to start working with white to color in the sun and clouds. Nicole row is a brush that can create some lovely painterly textures. So if you use a light hand with it, it can work very nicely for blocks of clouds like this. The only thing is it doesn't change size when she pressure. So you have to manually adjust the size frequently. If you talk with the eraser icon in the top right, you can carve out the shapes of the same brush while still keeping that nice texture. Like with the horizon line drawing, sketching. If you draw a circle and hold your brush down at the end, it will automatically tidy it up for you. We're going to add in the foreground grass, do it with this shade of green. To match the effect of sunlight on it, will make the lighter shade a little bit more yellow. We can be very rough here to try and simulate the real life randomness of graph. As the shading already hinted out on the sketch layer, will make the middle cliffs or chalky white color. I'm going to zoom in to get all the little corners with a smaller brush size. Like Christopher gone graphs. Let's add this medium shade of green to start this area. There's bits of rock sticking with and points between the grass. So we'll take keratin not cover those. We'll add a lighter yellow or green, and then move on to this island far away on the horizon. I go to make it a more properly shade as things far away take on more of the blue color of the sky. That's all the main colors don't. So let's just add some extra details before we move on to rendering and detailing that. I'm going to add a bright light reflection to the water. And then a little beach at the bottom of the rocks. Here's what our page should look like so far. So now let's move on to the next stage. 6. Rendering: Now it's time to move on to the longest part of the process, rendering. And real-time. The stage took me about two hours. So I've increased the speed a little bit just so that it's easier to watch. Depends on how much detail you want to add. You don't have to spend so long at this. Or you can spend even more time on it than this if you'd like. This is all going to style. You enjoy working on your preferences for how you want the final piece to look. Personally, I find that as long as it reads clearly in your reference window, you're going in the right direction with it. The colors we want to use are pretty much all done on the Canvas note. So this part will involve color picking those to find all the details and add an extra shadow. To do this, you can tap and hold your finger on your screen. Or if you're following along to the video, you can copy the colors I'm sharing on the left. It can be a good technique to start in the background and work your way forward to the foreground. So here I'm starting with the sky and clouds. If you'd like to create very detailed clothes. I haven't ever tutorial up here quite that. But in this case, I'm keeping them quite simple. Adding shadows to the bits that are furthest from the sun. I also like to use the brush to add in the glow of light around the sun. Next, we can move into our details to the middle cliffs from your sketch. Try to visualize these as 3D shapes and add in the shadows in the points that won't be hit from the sun above. I find it easiest to work with the middle tones, shadows first, and then add the darkest ones afterwards. At this stage, watching the reference window more as you shared rather than the zoomed-in window can help with avoiding weird-looking areas. As well as this. We change your brush size a lot so we can add in little cracks in the surface. Let's add in some shadows on the water while we're over here to help tidy up this edge, there will be some colored textures underneath. Flip the bits of blue on the rocks. Don't worry too much about focusing on tighten these up as they helped create a look of detail. Clean up the grass and the same way as the rocks. Keeping your mind for the sunlight will be hitting them. Let's move on to the foreground. Since it looks closer to us, we can be a little bit more detailed. So we'll refine these blades of grass for jumping goodbye at night to work on the water here. The light to dark purple line to the bottom of all these parks. Then add a light line underneath this tender waves contacting them. More grass. Now, just color picking and using a small brush size to remove the harsher lines here. Detail the rest of the grass though. Starting at the furthest away bits, I'm working forwards. As we tip to pink cracks, is to draw your line in with a shadow color and then add a light line alongside it. Helps out a little bit more realism. I'm going to let the rest of the stage just pay night and I'll jump in again at the end. If you've got any questions about anything that was not mentioned, please feel free to ask them below and I'll do what I can't help you. Okay, that's the last bit of that finished. So I'm going to add an extra touch here. Let's add a new layer on top of everything. I'm dragging this pink shade. We can then set the opacity to 40 per cent, set the layer effect to linear burn. Night with a big soft brush. Let's erase where there would be light. So I'll leave some of the foreground and shadow and most of the cliffs. With a smaller brush size, we can then pick out some lighter points. 7. Detailing: Let's go in low for the final stage, where we add any last details and adjust the final colors. This part is entirely optional and you can add something completely different if you'd like. I'll just show some of my process. And you can also see some light in decisiveness to the original thumbnails for this piece, I had some birds and a lighthouse in the distance. So if a dark purple that's adding some puffins, they're going to be mostly shadow, so we'll just carve in their silhouettes. Erase some parts to add the grass park into. With the selection tool. Let's add in a rectangle by dragging the same color in and then stretch out the bottom using the distort option. Will also add another rectangle on top. Then add an extra little details with the Nico role brush. Make it easier to see. We'll decrease the opacity of this layer to erase it, to bring the grasp OK, again, we'll bring the opacity back up to full again, increase our brush size. And then very lightly erase the edges to make it look like the lightest hitting it. Let's actually move this over to the left a little bit and down a bit. I'm going to duplicate this layer and then merge it to make it darker again. Then again. Let's bring the grass buck by erasing. With the puffins and Lighthouse layers merged. Let's go into the hue saturation, brightness sliders and the adjustments menu. I'm bringing the heat you up to 58 per cent, will add a new clipping layer on top of that, where we will add white lighting that can then get decreased to 30%. Here, I'm feeling quite indecisive. So I opened the hue saturation and brightness sliders again, unchanged, you to 40% and brightness to 53%. Again, I'll let the stage play out for the rest of it. The rest of the most similar adjustments and adding pink shadows using a new Multiply layer. As a very final touch, It's not in our layers. And then use the selection tool with fabric turned up very high. We'll select areas of light or shadow and then adjust them. Move to hue saturation brightness sliders again. 8. Closing Thoughts: And with that, we are now finished. Great job if you've made it here to the end, I hope you've learned some useful new techniques. If you followed along by doing the class project, please feel welcome to share it below. I'd love to see your creations. If you'd like to be notified of my future classes, you can follow me here on Skillshare or in the following places. Thank you for joining me in this class and I hope you had fun. If you enjoyed this, I currently have a few more classes up. My cloud painting one might be a useful follow-up to this one if you'd like to go into more detail on that topic.