Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. My name's Jennifer Nichols at Leila and Po studio. I'm an artist and a teacher, and today, I want to show you how to make Procreate 5X pattern brushes. I provide several brushes for you to get you started as well as some pallets. Then we're going to jump into the brush studio settings and really gain an understanding of how to create different pattern brushes, starting with basic ones, leading up to some more complicated ones, and finally, some fairly complex ones. So when you're finished with class, you're going to really have the basics for creating any pattern brush that you can think of. Hopefully, that will help you in future work. I know I use this quite a lot in my work, especially with blend modes and I have a lot of fun with pattern brushes and blend modes. So I've been doing this for a long time. I'm going to show you all of my techniques and those little tricks and tips will help you with your future work. We'll also take a look at some other brushes I have made, so you can wrap your brain around how those initial designs are created. We'll also just jump into more settings in the brush studio to get you familiar with some other settings as well. When we're done, we're going to create some really fun illustrations with vintage cars, apply our patterns to those, and finally, I have a bonus lesson for you on repeat patterns. I have a whole class on repeat patterns, but this one is the simplest way to make a repeat pattern, which is to have a background attached to it, and Procreate 5X has made this so fun and easy and we don't need any other apps. Find me in my Facebook group and on Instagram, those links are in my Skillshare profile. I can't wait to see you in class. Let's get started.
2. Downloading Resources & How to Add a Class Project: This is a short video on how to download resources for my classes. This particular class is the fall class, but it applies to all classes. For this class there's a brush set, a swatch, which is a color palette, two swatches actually, and then these are all image files. Sometimes I have individual brushes instead of brushes sets, and sometimes I have just a brush and nothing else. What you need to do is go to your browser on your iPad in this landscape mode, not portrait mode, and go to Projects and Resources in the tab underneath the class that you want. For my classes, this is just how you get to them. I don't have a password, and I don't have a link to a website. They are all here in skill share. Depending on the browser you're on, you can tap and hold, so this is a brush set, so you can tap and hold, and a little teeny tiny window pops up that says download. You can just simply tap, and when I tap download, up here you're going to see, so this is for Safari, you'll see a little arrow bounce right here, right there, and it's just got that progress bar and then it bounces when it's all done. Then when you're done with that, you can tap there and go into that. Right here in the download section is where you're going to find all of the things that you've downloaded. You'll have to remember the name of it, because it's all, I think, alphabetical. It definitely doesn't go to the top. Once you're there, you can tap on it. It's that brush set right there. It'll import right into procreate so you can go into something and it will be at the very top of your list of brushes here. Then that's your brush set. We'll go back here. When you have a swatch, you do the same thing, you just tap on it, get it into procreate. Let's go ahead and do that, download. I see it bounced right there. I'm going to tap download. Here it is right here. Again, you have to remember the name of it. It was Autumn 1, importing into procreate, and in swatches for pallets, you go to the color circle here, and then you need to go to Palettes, and it's going to be at the very bottom. I don't know why, but those import to the bottom, brush sets import to the top. Finally, if you have an image file, I've included a lot of image files in some of my classes. I'm going to start just putting them in Pinterest. Right now you'll see a lot of image files just for free reference photos, so you can tap on those and they open up in a new browser tab. You can just tap your finger and hold and add to photos and it goes to your camera roll, if you want it. If you have an individual brush, when you import that, it will actually go into a category. I don't use this very much. It's either imported or import. I can't remember which one. I created one of these. The other one was a default brush set category. As of right now, in late 2020, the app doesn't let you download resources directly from the skill share app. Make sure you're in a browser. I believe they're working on that. I believe they're working on being able to download your resources from the app as well as post a project. This video might get a little outdated when that happens, just so you know, but right now you need to be in landscape mode in a browser. I'm going to show you how to create a project. Later, there might be a way of doing this from the app. Right now we need to be in a browser, go to Projects and Resources of the class that you are wanting to post the project to, Create Project. This is sometimes confusing for the first couple of rounds when you're uploading a project. Right here that says Upload Image is actually your cover image. It's going to crop it to this rectangle, so you can create your own image for that or just put whatever image you want in there and let it crop it, and then you can title it, you can write something, but right here, this image button is what's adding your images to your project. You can actually add multiple images. There are limits. For this cover photo, you have an eight megabyte limit. But there's, I'm not sure about the limits for the photos down here, but you can add multiple images. Let's say you have a project that has multiple parts to it. You can create a project and then you can go back and edit the project and add more. Just wanted to do a little quick video on that because this Upload Image right here confuses a lot of people, that's just the cover photo. Here you can see, on some of my projects, you can see it's just showing the rectangle there. Then if you go to the project, you can see that there's the cover photo, but then I've added other photos inside. Hope that helps.
3. Resources & Canvas Set-Up: In this class, I'm going to show you how to make some really fun pattern brushes. We're going to start really simple and make some brushes that don't require a repeat pattern. For example, this polka dot brush and this stripe brush. Then actually, this plaid brush doesn't really require a repeat pattern either. There are just some little tricks that you need to know in order to make them seamless repeats automatically. Once we get done actually making some pattern brushes, we're going to go ahead and make some really great designs like this. I am providing you with some stamp brushes here. These can be made very simply. If you aren't sure how to make stamp brushes, check out my Stamps 101 class, and you can easily make some stamp brushes of your own. But I'm providing these for you in class so that we can just get right into a fun project after we make some pattern brushes. Really quickly, I'll show you exactly what I've got in my brush category here. I have a Volkswagen bus, a Volkswagen beetle, and a little Fiat. Again, you can make anything you want. Then there's three trees here, just some simple stylized trees. Down here are some of my common brushes that I give away in classes. My wide pencil stroke. This is like a 6B but without a taper so it's very easy to write with, without any pressure at all. This is a wide one and this is just my monoline. I call monoline big because it gets really big. As you can see, none of these are pattern brushes. We're going to be making pattern brushes starting from scratch and I'll show you exactly how to do that. Make sure that you have the downloaded brushes, and we can just add to this same category. Or you can go to this little plus sign up here. Sometimes it's a little tricky to get it to stay in there visible. Tap the plus sign, start a new category, maybe calling it, Pattern Brushes. Start fresh right from this brand new category. That's up to you joining them all in this category or starting your own fresh category. We're going to go ahead and start with a fresh canvas. Go to to plus sign, and then this plus sign. I do inches, so I'm doing 10 inches by 10 inches at 300 DPI. For this iPad that gets me 55 layers. Different iPads will have different amounts of layers, but we don't need too many layers for this project, so that's just fine. Then nothing else really needs to change. You can keep it on your P3 and for your Color profile and tap "Create". When you make stamps and patterns that needs to be on a square, go to the wrench tool, go to Canvas and turn on your Drawing Guide, and then go to Edit Drawing Guide. We're going to go ahead and just make our grid at the max, so we have this grid line here. I'm going to increase my thickness and opacity just so it's easier to see on the video. Now, we're setup to get started on our first brush in the next video.
4. Basic Grid Dot Pattern: For the first brush, we're going to go ahead and go to black. We always do black. Black is what makes a brush be at full opacity when you use it. I prefer that because I can always change the opacity here when I'm using something, so I have the ability to do full opacity if I want it. If you start with a gray, you won't have full opacity. You don't have the option of full capacity at all, so it's always nice to just start with black, be at full opacity, and change the opacity later if you need to. Go to the monoline brush, I'm just going to make a big circle. Let it snap. Put your finger down so it makes a perfect circle. Fill. Select it, turn on Snapping and then that makes it snap right to the center. My Snapping settings are at max, and Velocity is just at five, and that's more to do with how fast you move things around. So that snapped right to the center, which you can see the gold lines to show us that's the center. Now you have two choices, you can save this as a JPEG, so you have that image in your camera roll at all times, or you can three finger swipe down, copy all, and we're going to paste that image into our Grain source. To start a new brush, you can either go to a fresh category of pattern brushes that you create, or just staying of VW list here, and tap the plus, and we're in a brand new fresh brush. I like to change the spacing down to about 12, it defaults to about 17, 10 or 12 is good, and then go to the Grain source. For patterns, we change the grain, for stamp brushes, we change their shape. For the Grain source, we are changing the grain to the circle that we just did, and you tap "Edit" and then "Import", and you can import a photo if you saved it as a JPEG, or you can tap "Paste" if you did the three finger swipe down, tap, copy all, all we need to do is paste. I'm going to tap this so that menu goes away, and you always need to have a black background, so two finger tap and that inverts it, and tap "Done". If you don't tap done, it's not going to save, so make sure you tap done. Now you have your grain is your dot just on repeat. One of the things that you need to change is this Offset Jitter, you need to turn it off. What that does is it allows your dots to be lined up every time you pick up your pencil and put it back down again, it's lining up and it's filling in more space without it being offset. Zoom for Cropped when it's all the way maxed out and it says Cropped right here. That means that no matter what your brush size is, the circles are the same. Let me show you what that means. Let's choose a fun color. Here I'm on a pretty big size and I'm going to come down in size on my brush, and it is the same. So it is just a tinier brush size and the dot size, the grain is the same. That's not something that I use often, so I changed that Zoom all the way down to the minimum where it says Follow size. That means that when my brush size is big, my dot size is big. When my brush sizes is smaller, my dot size is smaller. With pattern brushes in procreate, you do get some pixelation when you go really small with your design. That is a bit of a limitation, just so you're aware. The other thing you can see here is I have an opacity setting I need to change. If you see the start of my drawing is very faint, I don't like that. Sometimes it might be nice, but this type of brush, I don't want that. We're going to go through and continue making changes. Your scale is just going to be how big do you want your dots? Your dots are changing size with your brush size, but you can have them go even bigger by bumping up the scale, or have them stay small by keeping the scale pretty small. That's something you can play around with. We don't really need to do anything except down here for Apple Pencil, that faded start of my drawing is because of that opacity setting. Because of pressure with the Apple Pencil affecting the opacity, so we just want that to be eliminated. I turn the tilt off, I don't know if that makes a difference with our pattern brushes, and now let's see. You can see there's no fade at the beginning anywhere I start. My dots are much bigger now. You can decide how big you want your dots to go, and how small you want your dots to go. This is pretty small, totally useless. You go back in and you go to Properties. The Brush behavior Minimum size is where you're going to adjust that. Just play around with it, I'm going to 25 percent and my maximum size I'm bumping up, and let's see how that is. Now, I'm here down at the minimum size. That's pretty big for a minimum size. But I'm okay with that because like I said, there's a bit of a pixelation issue if you go too small. Let's see. That is really big, but maybe that'll come in handy, and I have all of the in-between sizes as well. Those are just things you can play around with, and now my preview here is pretty big. Let's drop that way down. That helped, I can tell that's polka dots. You can also go into about this brush, and tap here to change the title, tap here to add your name and signature, and then create new reset point and that locks in all of the settings that you have. Then if you come back and make some more changes and you decide you don't like those changes, you can tap the reset brush and it'll go back to the last saved point that you had. That is our basic polka dot brush, and you can see that it's just making a grid. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to make it so that they're all offset in more of a diamond design.
5. Basic Diamond Grid Dot Pattern: For the diamond design, we need to go back to black, go back to monoline. This is why I have my grid on. I just need two circles here. Tap, I'm going to decrease the size so it wasn't going off the edge down there and fill. I'm going to select it, turn Snapping off so I can adjust it more precisely. I'm just making it so it's approximately in the center all the way around. Now, I'm going to duplicate that, select it, and I'm going to just turn on Magnetics for this part. That way, if I keep my blue line there at an angle, I can just slide right up along it. I know I'm going right up to the equivalent spot in the opposite corner. I can merge those two layers so they're on the same, just if you want to keep them tidy over here in the layers menu. That's it and then you can save that as a JPEG or copy all. Now from here, because you already made one brush, you can duplicate it and go change the grain source but I want to get used to those changes that we had to make to a fresh brush. We're going to just start from scratch again, Stroke path, Spacing, if you want, drop that down, you can play around with that. Grain Source, Edit, Import. Here if you have a JPEG, go ahead and import your photo. Otherwise, if you did copy all, tap your Paste. Tap to get rid of that menu and then two finger tap to invert. Make sure you tap "Done". I'm going to turn my Zoom all the way down to follow size. I think I'll just leave Scale where it is and turn off the Offset Jitter. We didn't need to do anything else with all these other settings. But for Apple Pencil, I don't want any opacity issues and turn the tilt off. I have the feeling, we need to turn Preview size, down; Maximum, up; Minimum, up. Let's test it out. Now you have little diamonds being made compared to our other brush, which is a grid. That's really fun. I like the diamonds. I tend to use the diamonds more so. Let's check our maximum size. Yeah, it's pretty good. You can always go back and change Minimum and Maximum if you ever need to later on. There's your diamond polka dot brush. Even though I'm using polka dots, you can use any shape. With the diamond one, you can even make two entirely different shapes on those two spots. Copy all. Let's go ahead and just duplicate that brush. Tap it. Go to Grain Source, Edit, Import, Paste. You don't have to invert it because we just copied a brush that had already been inverted. That is exactly what it needs to be. Super fun. That's just a simple pattern that we use to that same polka dot but for different shapes. You could do leaves, hearts, smiley faces, anything you want.
6. Stripe Pattern: Because we have our grid on, the drawing assist is set to be drawing vertical and horizontal lines perfectly. If you tap a blank layer and tap "Drawing Assist," assisted will be on, and I'm on my monoline brush. Then it just automatically draws straight lines, so it doesn't matter how squiggly you try to make it. It's doing straight lines, which is great. That's exactly what we need. This has to be done with a monoline brush. For this type of pattern, when you have something that goes off the edge of the canvas, it has to match. This little section has to match this little section. Honestly, it is the smallest, smallest bit that needs to line up. You really just need the very, very, very end to match this end. Then whatever you want to do in between is up to you, because that's where it's going to repeat. If it's on this end or this end, or this end or this end, it doesn't matter. As long as those line up. If you were to picture yourself taking an exact tile and putting it up here, this bottom one is going to line up right there with this top, and those have to be perfect. Now there are some issues with that in Procreate. The monoline brush sometimes can be a little bit not monoline. Monoline means it's got no pressure. No matter how hard you press, it's the same width. But you see the beginning has a rounded and the end has a rounded, so you need to come way off of the edge and go way down here off of the edge. I actually tried to go back and forth a couple times. I do have to say there are a couple of little buggy things with our new Procreate 5X update that are making this a little bit difficult. Hopefully they get those fixed soon. I have black, of course we always start with black. If you want to start on the edge, you can. Just make sure you're also on that edge. That makes it a little hard to know exactly how wide of a line you're going to get. Those are going to line up next to each other. So that thickness and that thickness are going to add together to make a thicker line. But you can just as easily leave a little bit of a gap over there, little bit of a gap over there. This part is just having fun. You can change the width of your line. Oops, I have a little blob there. One thing I'm paying attention to right now is this gap and this gap will combine to be one gap. It looks like it'll be about the same as this gap right here. I wouldn't want it to be an unusually large gap for the pattern or an unusually small gap. You can just eyeball it, and again, trial and error is what you're doing here. Let's copy and paste that, copy all. Add a new brush, decrease our spacing a little bit, go to "Grain," "Edit," "Import," "Paste." Now it's hard to tell that that's not inverted, but it's not. There we go. Apple Pencil, capacity down. Go back to "Grain" and turn that offset jitter off, and go zoom all the way down. Scale, that scale looks pretty small. I'm going to bump that up. Hopefully I'm not going too fast here. I'm going to increase our maximum size and bump up our minimum size, and let's see how that looks. What color do we want to do? Let's do a nice blue. Beautiful. Now if I go smaller and I fill the whole page, I can look for where my pattern might have a problem, where the lines meet up, and I don't see any problems. If I follow a line all the way up, they lined up really well. So our original pattern is repeating right here. It's probably repeating maybe three times on this page if you just look at the scale. If there were a problem, you would see a bit of a gap here. You would see a little offset or you would see where a line is wider and needs a narrower line. But this looks great. I like texture, and usually I just go ahead and make solid brushes like this and then I erase texture onto it. You can add texture onto it by Alpha Locking, and then having a texture brush that you want to just add right onto the top of. With Alpha Lock it is just adding right to the pixels that are already on the page Or you can erase. You can just erase some of it as well. That's a permanent change that you can't go back and fix. This one, you can go back and fix by just filling the layer while it's on Alpha Lock. Those are some things to add texture, but I want to show you one more way to add texture to the original brush. Let's clear this page and go back to our original design here. I want to erase some texture onto this right now. But keeping in mind that what I have up here has to match what I have down here. I need to turn on my symmetry in horizontal mode so that when I'm erasing here, it's also erasing right here. Go to the wrench tool, "Canvas," "Edit Drawing Guide," "Symmetry," "Options," "Horizontal." You can see my line here. Now I'm going to go ahead and pick a brush like Nikko Rull, which is in painting right here, and do a pretty big size. So I'm on the eraser on Nikko Rull, and I'm going to try to make sure this shows up really well here. Whatever I do down here is happening up there too. Now it's a mirror image, so this isn't a perfect solution. But it is a nice way to be able to get some texture onto this solid drawing. We can't draw the lines with texture because it won't meet up exactly in our design. So just get the very base area erased how you want it, and then turn off the drawing assist and the rest doesn't have to meet up. Because remember, only this bottom section needs to be perfect with the top section on your designs. You can very carefully erase some texture here. You want it to be a bit random. Copy out. We can just go ahead and duplicate that brush. Go to the grain source, "Edit," "Import," "Paste, " and now we're going to test that. I'm going to use a darker blue. Because of our brush setting, it's adding it on pretty thick. For this one, we're going to go into rendering and go to light glaze. Now erasing means that what we actually did was decrease the opacity on this layer, as it turns out. So if I pick up my brush and put it back down, it's going to be darker. It's going to be adding another layer of this on top where it overlaps. But I will show you that in a second. I'm going to make sure I got my whole space filled in, and you can see the repeat here. You can see this line right here and right here. That's something that you can play around with, start over and try again. But when you're using this kind of pattern, it's usually in a background and not just all that pattern is super visible like that. It may be just fine to keep it just like this, but that's just something you need to play around with. Now I'm going to show you what happens if I go over it again. You can see it's darkening. These are really fun to play around with different blend modes on your illustrations. Because of the texture that you have in the design, the blend modes just add a lot of life if you change something to Color Burn and stuff like that. I have another line brush that I'm going to show you next, Plaid.
7. Plaid Pattern: So for the plaid brush, we're going to go back to black, back to the big monoline brush. We need to go back to edit drawing guide and to the 2D grid. You can go ahead and turn drawing assist on here as well, and that turns it on, on your layer. You're making just one section of plaid. We're at a pretty big size. If you need this to go bigger, just go into the brush settings, go to Properties and bump up your size here. I'm going to go back and forth a couple times. Now, I'm going to a new layer, turning on Drawing Assist, and while I'm on that same brush size, I'm also going to do when going this direction. I'm going back and forth between two layers here. Each time I change my brush size just for consistency. What layer am I on? I'm on the horizontal layer, so I'm going to do when going this way, and I'm on the vertical layer. Do any plaid design you like, and now we need to change the opacity of each of those layers. This is up to you. I'm going down to 55 percent on both of them. What you're looking at is how dark they are, where they overlap, so you have a lot of contrast here with the lights and the darks, just like a plaid. If you want it to be a little lighter, let's try 40 percent. That might be a little too light for me. This is the part where you can just play around and is going up to 50 percent on both of them, just make sure they're both the same. Copy all or save as a JPEG. I'm going to group these layers together. I'm not joining them together, I'm flattening that into one layer, because I want to be able to adjust the opacity separately. If those were all on one layer, you wouldn't get these dark overlapped areas, so that's why I have those. Click that, go to a new layer, and let's make our new brush, and drop my spacing and down, Grain. Edit. Import your JPEG if you want, or just paste. Tap to get rid of that menu, two finger tap to invert, tap Done. Zoom all the way down, so it says Follow size. Turn off the offset jitter. I'm going to leave scale. It's at about 25 percent, turn the opacity all the way down in the Apple pencil settings and the tilt. I'll go ahead and bump up my sizes here, the minimum and maximum sizes. There's one more. Let's go ahead and go test this first. Let's test it on a nice red. Like we had with our other brush, the striped brush that had the texture, we're not getting any of the opacity issues. We want the light opacity on this. We also have a pretty big scale here. Because we're not at full opacity on our original image, we need to go back into it and go to the Rendering and go to Light Glaze, tap Done, and now let's check that. Perfect. I'm going to change my previous size here as well. Great. It is the perfect plaid brush. It's so adorable. I love plaid brushes. Now, this will get darker if you pick up your pencil and put it back down again, so if you overlap, it's not doing an offset, because we set the offset jitter to off. There's plaid and it looks like we don't have any issues where the pattern meets, where it duplicates. Remember, we just drew this one section. These are all duplicates and we don't have any problems. Next step is a bit of a more challenging pattern brush.
8. Spiral Pattern: For this, I'm going to draw a little guide here. With our grid like this, it's a nice way to show our little diamond between the little points here. This space right here can be filled in with whatever you want. Let's go back to black, go to monoline, doesn't really need to be monoline. In fact, let's go to No Taper Wide. I'm going to a new layer, so I'm not on the layer the red box is on. That's just a bit of a guide. Making a very imperfect spiral here. I'm going to select it and I'm going to make it fit in that diamond that we have here. I'm going to turn that. I want to just delete that red diamond. Now I'm going to take this spiral and I'm going to move it to the four corners and splitting it up like a repeat pattern. To do that, I'm going to copy all. Then I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to three finger swipe down a paste. That's pasted that source on a whole new layer that includes the white background. I'm going to duplicate that, always duplicating the bottom one, that's the original. Select when I turned our original spiral off so that it doesn't get affected, doesn't mess with the snapping. Turn on snapping and we're going to slide the whole image down to the corner so that the middle dot snaps right into the middle, or this corner dot snaps right into the middle. You can see the gold lines so that you know, you're in the right spot. Then we're going to go ahead and turn our original back on, bring it up above all those layers. We can combine those for white layers, so we have this on a separate layer. Now you have this design. Copy all, go up to a new brush, Grain, Edit, Import, Paste, invert, Done. Decrease the spacing a little bit. Rendering, I might go to Light Glaze on this one because I used a texturally brush. Apple Pencil, we need the opacity turned off and the tilt off. Go back to Grain, I forgot to change the offset jitter and change the zoom down, so this spiral size changes with my brush size. Properties. I like to bump both of those up, drop the preview size down and tap Done and let's see. Preview size looks okay. I'm going to go ahead and turn the drawing guide off so that does not get in the away of such a beautiful spiral design that is so awesome. My light glaze setting doesn't really seem to be making a difference here. I'm not seeing any darkness overlap, I'm not really seeing a lot of texture with my brush either, but it's okay. I like it. I can add texture later, like I showed you with erasing. That's super fun. We made that split into the four corners and then we put the same exact shape right there in the middle, but you could do an entirely different shape as well right there. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't touch the edges. On that original design here, this section does not touch the edges because otherwise it will want to be a repeating over here and over here. If you want it to touch the edges, you need to have your monoline brush on black and you need to have your layer, have the dryness system and you can do our line thing like that. Here you have the same technique we used for the flannel without reducing the opacity on those lines which you easily could still do and a spiral, which could be anything in the middle. You can really combine designs. As long as each layer is following all the rules that I've been showing you, you can combine them. Now when you have a filled in page like this, this isn't a repeat pattern that you can go post on spin flower. You can see this is cut off and it's not repeating over here, otherwise you'd see the other half of this spiral over here. It is a repeat pattern to make the brush, but that doesn't mean that filling the page with it makes a repeat pattern. What the repeat pattern is is this, that's your repeat pattern right there. That could go on spring flower. You can make the color however you want and that could go on spring flower. If you do something with color, you would do it on the spiral before you put it into the four corners because everything needs to match, including color, wherever you are meeting up, on top and bottom, and left and right. Hope that makes sense. Super fun, I love it.
9. Leaf Pattern: It's time for a more complicated one, just what you want to hear. It really is just a matter of practice. Maybe you want a leaf, I think I want to have that be a little bit bigger. This can be anything, anywhere on the page. The middle is the best place for it as long as you're not touching the edges. If you're touching any edges, you need to make sure you've got the top and the bottom meeting. So for example, if I go to a new layer and turn on drawing assist. I'll show you why I went to a new layer in just a second. I'm going to draw my line. Oh, well, that's not how I was supposed to go. I'm going to draw my line. So I have my line meeting up here and here, I might even make that a little thicker, as long as I go all the way down here and here. Now I'm going to erase this middle part, because again, remember all I need is the top and the bottom to match. So I have a leaf design here where it's going to end up looking like a row of leaves. Let's check that out, copy all, plus sign, green, edit, import, paste, two-finger tap, done, zoom, offset jitter. You can go ahead and change spacing, doesn't seem too critical. Apple pencil, properties. Let's check it out. Beautiful. Still a little bit sparse. What I would do is go back in and actually do our little trick that we did with the spiral, so go ahead and do copy all. I'm going to join those layers here, go to a new layer, turn that one off, paste and duplicate that, always duplicating the original one at the bottom, select, make sure snapping is on. Move the whole tile so you're not changing the shape, you're not changing the size, you're just moving the whole tile to the four corners. So now we have that one, I'm going to combine them into one, so we're on one layer here, we already know that repeat worked. Now we can add something else right here. I'm going to do it on a new layer, so I'm going to go back to our monoline brush. Black for our color. You can add whatever you want as long as it doesn't touch the edge, if it is touching the edge, it needs to match up here. I'm happy with that, copy all. I don't even need to join all those layers, just turn them all off. You can group them. We can just duplicate that other leaf brush we made, change the green, paste, done, done. Find a pretty fill color. Awesome, all of it. Checking our repeats. Our repeat would be right here, so those are lining up great and in between these two leaves. It looks great. It looks like I must have tapped undo before adding these, when I added these veins down here, I think I added them, I must have tapped undo to erase them again. So if you see something that you want to fix, you have your work down here. Just go back to my monoline brush on black. So that is a fairly complicated pattern brush. There's one more that I want to show you, just one more brush and then we're going to get into the Volkswagen illustrations.
10. Complex Patterns: I'm going to do a super quick run-through of a little bit more complicated brush. I want a circle, maybe it's a smiling face. I'm going to do another layer and make a flower. Again, nothing can touch the edges, and I'm just doing this super rough sketch here. I'm making that big in the overlapping, I need to erase some. I'm going to erase part of the flower so it looks like it's underneath the smiley face here. Super sloppy flower. We have Copy all, and on a new layer, I can't tell if there's something on that layer, we're going to paste. We have the white background. Duplicate that four times just like we did before. Turn on snapping and snap to get the gold lines to show up both horizontal and vertically. Combining those, go to a new layer and continue to add. Maybe I want a heart, and just some little lines, I don't know. Now I have a bit of an overlap here, so I need to erase part of this and then turn snappy enough because it's not letting me move it exactly where I want to move it. I'm going to erase part of the flower. That flower is on this white layer. If I erase it, you're going to erase some of that white, so I don't want to do that. I just need to draw white onto the flower to hide it. Right there and right there, and a little bit on the smiley face that was peeking out from under that heart there. Then go back to black and back to my heart layer, because this little part is bugging me right here. It's smaller size, just zoom round that out a little bit more. Copy all. We'll just duplicate this time. Grain, Edit, Import, paste, Done. I just wanted to show you that super quick. I did the leaf design which touched the edges on the top and the bottom, and this one didn't touch any edges, but it used the same technique as the one with the spirals, this one. Same technique, only I had things overlapping. Nothing touched the edges on the original layout, which was this. Nothing touched the edges, and then when we did our things going to the four corners, we added new elements, nothing touched the edges there either, and we filled in quite a bit of space. That's a bit of a more complicated brush and you can do all sorts of things with brushes like that. When I take a look at a couple of brushes that I've done so you can just look at the grain source. That's a nice way to wrap your brain around how brushes are made. For this leaf one, if you go to the grain source, these are mid-century class brushes. I did this repeat pattern pretty small, so it's a little bit more complicated because I didn't just do one big shape and move it to the four corners and then add another shape. Is a little bit more complicated, but you can just experiment to play around with making more complicated brushes. If you go to this one, to the grain source, you can see I did the monoline brush straight up and down, right here and right here. But then I added these two shapes along it. Because like I said, as long as the very top and the very bottom are the same, you can do whatever you want in the middle. I even thinned the line right here on both sides, and then I did a design here and then it did the opposite over there. That's a fine design right there. I came really close to the edges, but I did not touch the edges over there and over there. Then some of these are a little bit more complicated. This one was pretty tricky because I have wavy lines, but again, I had to make sure the very bottom in the very top were all exactly the same. If you look at this brush close up, you can see I have the wavy lines were all in the middle of my design, and then all of these lines are not. They're a little wavy but they're not crossing over each other and stuff because I had to make sure that the lines were going to meet up. But I actually used that really tiny level here. Then these are also just really fine grids, just like the flannel that we did. This one, I did four straight lines and then added designs inside. It takes a lot of trial and error to get things to look even going across as you can see here, where there's no big gap on either side where the pattern is repeating. I hope you have fun just doing all sorts of patterns. Next, I'm just going to show you a fun way to use patterns and make a repeat pattern for spoon flower or whatever you want.
11. Exploring Other Brush Settings: Really quick I wanted to show you another leafy brush that I did, and I did them at angles. I also used the studio pen from the inking section. I went in to the settings of the pen to properties and I bumped up the maximum size so I could get a thicker line. There's my grain source, pretty fun. The other thing I want to show you is how the shape source affects the grain. I'm going to show you with our flannel brush. Right now, we have nice crisp, clean edges, all the way around when we go into the shape source. It's because we have this crisp circle as our shape source. That leaves us with this nice clean edge around our brush. Basically it's our brush cursor. If you go into this and edit, import and just go to the source library, these are all procreates that they let you use and do whatever you want with. If you go to one of these messier ones, let's say this one called mess, tap that. It pops in right there, tap "Done". What it's doing is it's using that shape as your cursor. Can you see that? That gives you a rough edge as your drawing. Now, this is where the spacing comes into play. If you look really closely here, you can see it's a whole bunch of these shape sources of plane together that gives you this. That makes a brush, I guess. I don't like how that's looking, I'm going to go into stroke path and bring that down. It does bring my overall brush size down. Let's see how that looks. Now I don't get that weird jittery look, and it has a bit of a painty look to it. That might be something that you want to do some time with some of your brushes. You can just play around with your shape source. That one has texture to it. When you use it as a brush, it's more painterly. You can see the streaks in there. Yeah, so lots to play around with, and really the brush studio, there is an online procreate handbook. If you go to procreate.org and go to Support, there's a handbook in there and you can go to the brush studio and you can learn about all these settings and what they do. We've just been focusing on mostly the grain. In the stamp class, we focused on the shape and some of these settings and a few other small minor changes for our stamps and our patterns. But this is a really fun place to just play around. You go to a native procreate brush, duplicate it, go into it, and play around. For example, your color dynamics change the hue, and you're going to get really cool different color things because you did your hue stamp jitter. That means if you go to shape, that is your stamp, and that's what's changing colors as you're drawing, because you changed your stamp jitter. If you change your stroke jitter, then your stamp jitter doesn't change. But every time you pick up the pencil and put it back down, you get a different color. Maybe hard to see on this pink. Each stroke is different now. Whereas this one each stamp is different. Just play around with the brush studio, and you can delete. You can never delete a native procreate brush. It doesn't give you the option. You can reset it if you go in and you change some of the settings like I did on this one. You can reset it back to the default. You can see it's a lot thinner now because I had changed it to a larger brush size. Have fun. Comeback for some Volkswagen illustrations with our new pattern brushes.
12. VW Bus Using Reference Layer: I'm going to show you something similar to this. I don't know if you can really see the polka dots here. This is one of my mid-century brushes here. We have polka dots all over. We have some stamps. This is a stamp we made in the Stamp Brush 101 class and some plaid. Lots of fun here. Here's one that is not winter per se. It is a wintery color scheme, but there's no snow. The other one was Christmas Eve, of course, with the present on one of the cars. Here's the nice textured line brush we made, and of course, the plaid and the polka dots. Again, the star is from the stamp class. Here's another color scheme. Very similar. This one's a little bit different because I don't have the outlines on the car. The outlines are actually just missing. So the background color is coming through ad I'll show you that here. You can see no matter what color I make the background, the outline is showing that as well. I'm going to show you how to do this. We're going to start with a 10-inch by 10-inch canvas, just like we did for our pattern brushes. You can do 12-inch. This takes a lot of layers, so it's up to you. I'm going to go to black. It doesn't really matter what color. Go to our Volkswagen stamp brushes that I provided. I'm going to go ahead and do the bus. I'm going to do them pretty big. The reference layer is important here. You can use reference by just tapping reference on your layer that has your stamp on it. Then anything that you do on other layers is going to reference this design. For example, if I want this base color to be orange, I can now drag and drop here, even though I'm on a separate layer. It's referencing that. I can just drag and drop where I want my orange. Simple as that. Now, what's not simple is the threshold. What you don't see is the orange actually goes underneath the black here. So I'm going to turn the black off. It's good that it goes underneath because right now, I don't want a little gap and it went white pixels showing that would be too low of a threshold. But look how choppy it is. The the black is overlapping the orange here and it's hiding that choppy edge. We have to deal with those things. If you decide to do a design that's not going to include this outline, I'm going to show you what you need to once you're ready to get to that point. For now, let's go ahead and turn our background layer color down so we can see where we want to add white. I'm going to go ahead and add all of my colors to different layers. Just for now, I'm going to do black and I'm going to drag and drop my black where I want my black to be. You can see that took a little bit of work. Just so there's another option. I'm going to show you that on the next illustration, and that is using the selection tool. I'm going to go to a new layer, and I'm going to white, and I'm going to drag and drop where I want my white. That color makes it hard to see. Go ahead and get my white in here. Then I'm going to go to a light gray on a new layer again and drag where I want my gray. Again, there is a way more effective way to do this, but we're just going to talk about this reference layer thing for now, by using reference layer for this whole illustration. I have my whole bug filled in, and I have my gray on one layer, my white on one layer, my black on one layer, and my orange on one layer. Now I need to decide, what am I going to do with this? Do I want to keep the black outline? If I do, I'm just going to leave it like it is. It's perfect. If I don't want to keep my black outline, I can tap the outline layer tab select. Go to another layer. Let's start with the orange. Tap it and tap clear. What that just did was wherever the outline is touching the orange, it cleared the orange that's underneath that black right now. Let me turn the buck off and you can see that. Up here, where the white and the orange meet, you can see how the orange is now smooth line and the white is still all choppy. You see how choppy this is. You don't even have to have the outline layer on in order to do this. So tap the "Outline layer," tap "Select," go down to your white layer, tap it, tap "Clear." See that? Now we're going to do it to gray. Select, Clear. Finally, black. Select. Let's go see it in action. Here's the black all choppy. Clear. That really cleaned up all the edges. Now we can leave that outline layer off. Anytime we change our background layer color, that color shows through. Now, I would decide if that's what I was going to do right at the start because I wouldn't want to change my mind. The reason is if I turn that outline layer back on, every once in a while, oops, I missed a spot, my background layer is showing through right here. Well, here, I don't know if you can see that. So where am I outline layer cleared, I now have a little bit of a halo showing that bright background layer. If I was going to keep my outline layer on in the illustration, I wouldn't go through those steps of clearing all of those layers of the to clean up those edges that we just did, I would not do that. If this is how you want your illustration to be, just don't do those steps. Let me fix this really quick. I need to clear that gray layer one more time. That is our way of having a fun illustration where the outline layer is going to show through. The outline layer is gone, so the background layer is going to show through in all of those places instead. Now, how do we use our pattern brush on this? I'm going to do a pattern brush on the orange layer, and this is why I kept all of my colors separate. Now, I'm making the decision right now to only do pattern on the orange layer, so I can go ahead and combine my white, black, and gray layers. So I have fewer layers to work with and I'm going to add a clipping mask on top of my orange layer and go pick out one of our brushes that we made. How about the spiral? I'm going to go ahead and stay on this light gray than I'm on. I like using gray for blend modes. I'm just going to color right on top of all the orange. Now, if you go way out of the lines, then you have some flexibility. You can select it and move it around a little bit, because it's a clipping mask, it's on a separate layer. Maybe you want it to line up a certain way on your Volkswagen here. Once you move it, you can't color again. Your spirals are not matching up anymore. Make sure you're all done before you do that. Now, you can change the blend mode and have lots of options here. Those options, of course, are very different depending on what color you start out with. But a nice medium gray is a great color. It is started out with when you're playing around with blend modes. That's one method and I'm going to come back in the next video to show you one more method, and then we'll do a repeat pattern.
13. VW Bug Using Selection Tool: I'm just going to group all of those together and turn that off, and to set that aside for now. I'm going to choose black again. Let's do a Volkswagen Beetle. I always wonder what it is. Good. Lighten up my background a little bit. Now when you were doing the drag and drop on the last illustration for the reference layer, let me show you something I forgot to show you. When you drag and drop color, you have a threshold. If you hold your pencil there, you can see color drop threshold. That's something that you can slide. You can see a bar going up and down. If you go too high, it fills in everything. If you go to low. Now it's going to be not wanting to show you this. You'll start getting some pixels around where the orange meets the black. You're going to start seeing the background color showing in between. The threshold is really where the two colors are meeting up and how those are meeting up. Once you set it, you're good for that page. Then you can keep going and it should be set at a good level for you. We're not using a reference layer. Also, always make sure you turn reference layer off, which I did forget to tell you in the last illustration, because it'll keep referring to that layer as you go. I think I automatically turned it off because I set that one to reference instead. For this one, we're going to use this election. We do need to adjust threshold with selection as well. I have my outline layer here, and I'm going to press the Ribbon tool, and automatic. Make sure that color fill is not on. Although you can do color fill too, actually no. If you did color fill right now, it would be filling in your layer that has your outline on it and we're not doing that. We're going to be doing different layers. That'll make sense in a second. If you just want to fill in the layer that has your outline on it, you can go ahead and turn on Color Fill and tap anywhere you want, because you're on the layer that has the outline. I'm not doing that, because I like to have the outline layer separate, so I have more flexibility with it. I turn Color Fill off, I'm on automatic. I'm still going to select all the areas. The first selection you make is where you're going to adjust the threshold. Now, the blue is just showing you this selection. The white is showing you where the colors are overlapping each other. Put your pencil down in the blue section to adjust the threshold. You can see it adjusting up there just like before. If you go too high, it's going to select the whole page. I like it pretty high. If you find that it's not really doing what you want it to do, I would try it again. It starts out at a different level each time you try it. Maybe the previous level you had it set to. Then you can go up higher again, or lower. Once you get your first selection set to a good threshold, you're going to go through and hap on all of the areas you want that color. For this, it's nice to have the ability to tap all these teeny tiny places like that. When you drag and drop color that circle, color circle is blocking you. Choosing these teeny tiny things like this is hard. I'm going to add two-finger on top, or undo that spot right there. Those are all the areas that I want my color of my Volkswagen. I'm going to go to a different layer. Hopefully you can see. I'm going to go to Preferences and Selection mask visibility. You can see selection is there, even though those blue areas went away. I'm on a different layer and I'm going to go, let's do a fun color palette here. I have all those areas selected and I can just tap on the layer after I get my color and tap Fill Layer. I'm underneath that outline layer, so my outline is still hiding all those little jaggedy edges. I'm going to go back to my outline layer, tap Select again, thresholds should still be just fine. Now I'm going to tap all the things I want to have as black. Actually, I might change that to black. I'm going to go to a new layer, go to black, tap Fill. Go back to my outline layer. Ribbon tool. Tap all the gray areas. I accidentally tapped the line itself. Just two fingers undo. Go to a new layer again. I'm under the outline layer, tap Fill. Finally my white. Oops, I need to go back to my outline layer and tap on the white. Go to a new layer, go to white and Fill. That's my white wall tires here. For this one, I think I might just leave my outline layer showing or maybe I'll leave it showing, but I want it to be different colors. I can tap my outline layer, two-finger swipe to the right and change the color. Fill layer. I'm going to add a clipping mask or to my teal here. I'm on a light gray again. Let's do our leafy pattern. No, let's do our stripes. I may change my mind again. Let's do our plaid. Oh, I changed the shape, so that plaid is all stripy. I got to change that back. Oh gosh, that's so super cute. If you go up to these higher winds, it's darker. If you go down lower, it's brighter. Oh, screen is good. That's fun. I'm going to go back in and change may shape source. Back to the dot here. Here we go. But it worked fine for this. Now I've shown you two different styles where we're keeping our layers separate. Again, once you know, if you can combine your gray, black and white, go ahead. It saves you layers. Honestly, the other thing that you can do once you have everything filled in, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this, turn the original off. I'm just going to flatten this whole thing. I'm going to Alpha lock that, go to black and fill. This is just another way that you can use a stamp is just to get a solid filled shape. One of the things that, that's fun to play around with is just add a clipping mask on top of that and pick some fun texture brushes. We didn't really talk a lot about texture. If you go into the luminance category and the nebula brush on a nice bright color you can get some really cool effects. You can do that with or without the outline. Maybe before you flatten that, I'm just undoing. Maybe you take the outline layer out, and you just flatten the one that's got everything but the outline layer. Alpha lock that, turn it black, put a clipping mask on top of that and do the same thing we just did with that luminance brush. But now you have the outline layer there to do whatever you want with. You can make it black. Having outline layer separate gives you a lot more flexibility. Then if you decide, oh you know what? This looks really cool, but I want those white wall tires. You still have the flexibility of doing that. You can go select your tires, go to a new layer, get a white. I wouldn't go super bright white at this time, and Fill. It's just really fun stamp brushes, texture and pattern brushes are really fun to just play around with. I spent some time making this initial stamp brush, and made sure it was a really clean stamp brush because I knew I was going to be dragging and dropping color and I needed all the little gaps to be filled so that I could separate all the sections with different colors if I chose to. Yeah, so then you could even take that selected and do what we did before. Turn it off. Just like we did in the first one where we got rid of the outline altogether. Next step is taking some of these and making a repeat pattern just to super quick repeat pattern, bonus lesson. If you want more details on how to do some more intricate things with repeat patterns, that's all in a separate class. But I do want to show you how to do a quick repeat pattern with your Volkswagens.
14. Bonus Lesson: Repeat Pattern: I'm going to show you how to do a simple repeat that has a background color already set. There is a more complicated way to do one of these that has a transparent background and then you can have flexibility changing that background later. That's a separate class that you can check out if that interests you. But here's just a fun and simple repeat. Just like before when we did our two circles here to make our pattern repeat, we need to think about how this is going to repeat. I always usually turn one thing off and then think about where should I place the first couple of things. I'm just going to go ahead and place him in the middle. Nothing can touch the edge, so make sure that your Volkswagen doesn't touch the edge anywhere. I'm going to turn on my grid. Go to Canvas, turn on drawing guide, edit drawing guide, and max your grid size out. I'm going to also change my grid colors so that it's seen in the video. This is going to be cut. If you think of it as being cut here and here, and those are going to be your new edges of your Canvas. Anything that you want to have, like filling in these spaces, needs to be done right now and this is where I'm going to go and go back to my HotCocoa class, where we made since stamp brushes. I'm going to go ahead and choose our fun little snowflake. I know you don't have this, but you can just put dots on there with a monoline brush if you want. Oops, I need a new layer. I'm just going to put a few on here. Maybe a smaller one over here. I have everything I need that's touching those lines. Now, I'm going into three-fingers swipe down and copy all. I'm going to turn those all off, three-finger swipe down and paste. It's just like we made the pattern brush, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, select when, turn-on snapping, and slide the full size image to the corners. You're not changing the image sizes at all, you're making sure you have the gold lines showing up so that you know you're in the center and pinch those together, those are now one design. You can turn off your grid and change your background color to a really bright color. If you have any gaps, you'll see that bright color in the grip there, in those lines. But were good. Now we need to fill in this space. We have our Volkswagen bus down here that didn't get used yet. I'm going to bring him up and I'm going to turn snapping off so I can place him more precisely where I want him. Now, I have a lot of experience with repeat patterns. I already knew where to put the first two cars. That was a little bit of making it look a little easier than it is. That's trial and error, it takes a lot of practice and you'll get used to it. Just follow what I did. Now I have my bug or my bus, and I'm going to add some more stamps. If you add too many, it starts to look funny. I can move, oops, I want to go to freehand. I can move one of those if I want to make some little adjustments. That's your repeat. Now, it doesn't look like much and you should always check your pattern to make sure that everything is lined up. This is a step we haven't done in our brush making. We're going to copy all one more time, turn all these off, paste, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. One of the things you need to be really careful about is when you have a selection highlighted, if you tap anywhere on the screen, it is going to nudge one pixel that direction, and that would ruin your repeat pattern. Tap that and get snapping and to turn back on. This time we are grabbing the corners and we're shrinking the size down, because we're checking our pattern. It's just going to snap right into place when you do all four. There is your repeat pattern. You can zoom out and look and see if you see any big issues with the placement of your design, and you'll have to take steps backwards to change anything. But that is just a super basic way to do a repeat pattern. If you turn your grid back on, those are the spots that you need to be looking at. Another way to check is turning one of these on and off so you can see where the edges and making sure that there's no offsets or gaps going this direction and this direction. If everything is snapping with the gold lines and you haven't managed anything when it's selected. It's as simple as that. Enjoy. I just love repeat patterns so much. Now this is all locked into this gray background. I like the color scheme on this, so I'm fine with that. But going to my seamless repeat class, it shows you how to make a design that has a transparent background so that you have all these different options for making different color ways. Like if you want to have several options, several colors, backgrounds with the same exact design, you can do that that simply, because you'll have a transparent background and you can just set the color, save the image as JPEG, PNG, whatever you want to do, change the color again, save the image, change the color again, save the image. I just did the pattern brushes on top of the trees as well. I know we didn't do trees in the example, but it's no different than that. I think you can figure that out. Have fun.
15. Your Class Project!: I came back to our car here that we did the galaxy on and I just added a clipping mask above it and put a design on there with one of our pattern brushes. This is just the one that I showed you briefly in the spiral class. I just did more of a squared spiral and then played around with blend modes. The reason I like to play around with blend modes is, especially with this kind of galaxy design in the back, the color that is underneath, it affects the color of the design of the pattern brush. You have a dark blue here and a purple here, and a lighter color here and teal over here. Depending on which mode you pick, blend mode, there's some dark blues here so this one's Color Dodge. For your class project, go ahead and do anything you want with some of the pattern brushes that you made. If you want to swipe some of those brushes on a layer and post a picture of that, it's totally awesome. If you want to post one of your cars, perfect. I'd love to see anything you make from this class that has a new pattern brush. I hope you had fun.
Jennifer Nichols, Leila & Po Studio
