Personal City Skylines in Procreate: Drawing the city you love the way YOU love it!

1. Let's Go: Hi, I'm Adam. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Hi. I'm artist and Skillshare top teacher, Adam Palmeter. Today I want to teach you how to create one of my signature styles of artwork, the abstract city skyline. For years, I've been painting skylines from around the world while I travel. This class, I want to teach you how to create and personalize a city skyline that you love using only a handful of reference photos, your iPad, and my favorite illustration app, Procreate. Let's head to NYC, home of the world's most famous pizza and one of the world's most famous and most recognizable skylines. New York is where I got my start, selling artwork on the street. At the time, I was painting almost exclusively New York City skyline. There's something about New York that makes you just want to join the hustle right there out on the street. I painted a lot of skylines. I used to actually hand paint all of my city skylines. It was a long and difficult process using oil-based enamels and chopsticks. It was super messy, stunk up my apartment, and it took forever. I had to hover so closely over my artwork, on a flat surface, slowly letting that paint drip which created each and every line and dot of my skyline. But now, through the power of Procreate, I have figured out how to create the same artwork digitally right here right my iPad without having to get enamel everywhere. Now that I've simplified this digitizing process, it's so much easier to go from photo to drawing with a reference building, to organizing a skyline the way I want it all in a New York minute. What you're going to be focusing on in this class are your illustration skills. By using reference photos, you have a chance to explore city architecture through simple illustration and tracing over these references. This is really going to help you develop your artistic abstract brushstrokes right here in Procreate. Best part about this class, you can follow along right with me using the exact same reference photos or you can just apply the skills you're learning today to the city of your choice. Just swap out the photos for your favorite skyline. What you learned today is applicable to any city so you can create a personal city skyline. In fact, if maybe London or Paris is more of your speed, don't worry, governor, I've got your back. Does that help? If I'm drawing the Statue of Liberty, you can follow along just as easily with the Eiffel tower. If I'm drawing the Empire State Building, you can draw the Colosseum or the Las Vegas drive-through my parents got married in. [NOISE] The point is you can use all of these techniques to create and recreate any city you want. You can upload this to a print on-demand website and make a gift for a personal friend. Back when I lived in Brooklyn, my best friend Tommy and I loved Antonio's pizzeria. I went ahead and uploaded this image to a print on-demand site and sent him this cool little gift. Tommy, you had a chance to check out the artwork. You really enjoy this. Yeah? Yeah. There you have it. Tommy really liked it. Thank you, Tommy. With simple abstract brushstrokes and a little artistic flare, you'll learn how to capture the essence of the city, the way you like. After all, what is art, but life the way you see it. You love a certain building from your city, make it the center of attention by using reference photos that you can find online or even just photos you take on your phone. This class is a great blend of creativity, composition techniques, a unique study of architecture, and, of course, all the fun Procreate tips and tricks you're going to learn right along the way. Think of this class as a personal love letter to the world, one city at a time. Join me for this easy, breezy Procreate class where the only things you'll need are your iPad and a vision of the city you love. But before we get started, don't forget to click that follow button right up top so you can follow me here on Skillshare. That means you'll be the first to know as soon as I launch my next class, have a fun life update to share with my students, and occasionally I give away a free Skillshare membership only to my followers. Click the follow button up top and you'll be the first to know. Also, if you want to see where I'm doing art or performing stand-up comedy, you can follow me on Instagram at adampalmeter. Without further ado, let's dive right into your personal city skyline. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to be designing your own digital personal city skyline using Procreate. You're going to learn how to edit it, arrange it, and even play with fun stuff like colors. All of this right here on your iPad. This is not your typical skyline, this is going to be the way you make it. You can incorporate your favorite buildings, even buildings you don't really care about, they're out of there. You can put in your favorite cafe, restaurant bar, the place he proposed, all these wonderful places I'm going to be putting in my favorite pizza shop and we're going to get to that in a little bit later. I also really want to hear from you about what city you chose. How did you change it? Why did you change it? What did you add that was important to you? I want to hear about how much fun you had in this class too, and you can tell me why was this the greatest Skillshare class you've ever taken and how many of your thousands of friends will be taking this class as well. Oh man, you have friends, that's great. The point is this is your customized skyline and you can make it any way you want and I'm here to show you just how to do that. Without further ado, let's jump into supplies and I'm going to talk about what it is that I'm going to be using today. 3. Supplies: For this class, you're only going to need two things, an iPad and the app Procreate. I'm also going to be using an Apple Pencil as my stylus, but if you don't have one, you can just use your finger. I've teamed up with True Grit Texture Supply to give you your next favorite brush. Happens to be my favorite brush. It is the little smoothie comic anchor. I've included that free brush in the class assets just down below. Thank you so much to True Grit for supplying us with such amazing Procreate brushes, all of my favorite brushes, as well as handing out this free one to all of you taking this class today. Thank you very much, True Grit. We've got our tablet, we've got our stylus, we've got our brush, we've got an amazing attitude. Let's take all of this and concentrate this wonderful energy into the creative part of this class and start creating our artwork. 4. Reference Photos: For this class, we're going to be using reference photos to create our personal city skyline. I love reference photos because it makes it so much easier when it comes time to trace. We're literally going to be tracing over these buildings and adding our own artistic flair. When I used to paint these city skylines, I would have to eyeball it by watching a photo on my computer and then just painting it freestyle. Now, using Procreate, it's so much easier just to upload reference photos and digitally trace over the buildings themselves. In this class, you're going to be learning the best way to trace over these reference photos while adding your own artistic flair to make this city yours. Let's talk about reference photos and where to get them. I use a website called Unsplash. Now, Unsplash has a huge library of royalty-free photos and videos for you to use. Because we're doing New York City, it was really easy to type in NYC and get a whole slew of skyline photos that really show off the life of the city. Unsplash has so many photos. If not New York City, go ahead and type in any other city you want and Unsplash she puts out there and you can figure out what city you want to draw today. As I mentioned, I'll be doing New York today. I've already uploaded all of the exact same photos that I'll be using into the class assets folder. As a bonus, I've also included London and Paris in there as well. If you have another city in mind, just go ahead and check out Unsplash and see what they got. Maybe you want to paint your own little neighborhood. If that's the case, take out your phone and go get some photos. It's very easy if you want to include your own home, apartment, castle, I don't know where you live, but it's very easy just to go outside, take your phone out, just get a picture, send it to your iPad, there's your reference photo. As you're compiling photos for your skyline, it's nice to think about the different components that make your city special. For New York, we have probably the most recognizable city skyline in the world. We have the Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron Building, Brooklyn Bridge, you name it. You can keep on going on. Paris has the Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, other French buildings, I'm sure. Dublin has the Guinness gates, London has The Eye and Big Ben. Is there a little Ben? The point is, what does your city have? What are the real big characters of your city skyline? Those are going go be the big, iconic hero buildings of your skyline. Now, let's talk about the little guys. These are the secondary heroes or the buildings that are part of the skyline, but not exactly stealing the spotlight. In New York, this can mean the Chrysler Building or the Flatiron Building or the church I'm going to draw. Now this is the personal part of your skyline. This can be your favorite restaurant, your favorite cafe, or that favorite ice cream shop, where you dropped your ice cream last week and cried in public. It could be anything. The point is, this is going to be the personal part of your personal city skyline. For me, I'm going to be including Antonio's Pizzeria. Now, this pizza place was directly across the street from me when I lived on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn years ago. It's still my favorite pizza to this day. I think it's a special part of New York for me personally. I'm going to drop that right into my skyline. It may not be iconic for anyone else, but it has personal meaning for me. It is easily the most fattening building I'll be putting into my skyline, but easily the most delicious. Go ahead and download around 2-3 heroes, 2-3 secondary buildings, and maybe a couple of your own personal photos to put it in there. Now that we have a collection of great reference photos, we are ready to get into the best part of the class, which is drawing. 5. Practice Strokes: We got Procreate open. This is what my gallery it looks like. It's time to start a new Canvas. Now, I want to start a brand new Canvas. So I'm going to click this plus sign up in the top right and let's go ahead and make a new canvas. Now, let's work with our dimensions in inches. I'm going to make a 20 by 20 inch Canvas, that gives me 300 DPI and 14 layers. Create. Now, let's find that brand new brush we've downloaded. We're going to click into our brushes. I'm going to be using the little smoothie comics anchor, which you can find for free in the class assets. Usually, when you import a brush, it shows up all the way here at the bottom of all your brushes under imported. Sometimes, it shows up all the way at the top of your brush library. Either way, find the brush, click it, and here we go. If you don't want to use a little smooth comic inker, you can also use probably the most comparable brush I found called syrup. It's a Procreate default brush, and you can find it here in your inking folder. Where is it? Right there, sure. I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the brush we're going to be using today, the little smoothie comic anchor. Thank you again to True Grit Texture Supply for giving us this fine brush. I've been using this brush for almost two years now. It works really well with my style of digital illustration. Check out these strokes right here. As you can see, they bleed out on the sides just like a real anchor one. But it turns out here there's really sharp, almost like porcupine quills. So it's got a nice contrast to it. It's got this really organic feel at the beginning of the brushstroke and a really sharp digitized feel over here at the end. Let's get rid of these using two fingers. I want to show you how I use my brush. Now, when I trace, I'm just making lines. You can make lines the way you make lines. This is the way I make lines and using this brush, I go really easy, just quick strokes, top to bottom and then bottom to top. I try to meet right there in the middle and let's do that again next to it. One, two see it's fat here on the ends, thin here in the middle, and then let's just put a little hat on that. Same way. A few quick squares. Boom, we have a nice building. All you need is two fingers if you want to go back, three fingers if you want to go forward. This is my style of drawing. You can draw how you want, but my style is a bit more abstract, a little messy, but that's how I tend to have fun while I'm creating my digital artwork. Let's do another building right next to it. Boom. You can have some fun, you can loosen up. You can take these few brushstrokes. Play with your brushstrokes. Notice the pressure that you're using. If you push down a little harder, it's going to come out a lot quicker if you push down nice and light it comes out nice and light. If I push down hard and then swipe right off of the iPad, it creates these little sharp edges here. Now essentially, that's the basis of what I use to create my abstract city skylines. Thank you again to True Grit Texture Supply for supplying us with my favorite new toy. Alright, let's get rid of all this. I'm going to use my two fingers. Bump. Now for the neighborhood, where I like to do is start out with a long strip of justice, nondescript urban looking buildings to give us the front row of what our skyline is going to end up looking like. You can see here, and Some of the skylines I've already done all of them begin with a straight line of these nondescript urban looking buildings. While we create the neighborhood, we're also going to be practicing our drawing skills here on Procreate. So let's start by putting up the drawing guide. We're going to click our wrench. Make sure our canvas here is highlighted. Go to drawing guide. Click that and look at that. It gives you this nice grid. Now, I only use this just for a quick second. Let me show you. On this layer, this first layer, I'm going to change the color to, let's say, a nice light blue or something. Go back to our brush and I'm going to make one straight line all the way across following this drawing guide. Now, without removing the tip from my iPad, you see that it just straightens out all by itself. Nice and straight. You can move it all along, but we're going to make one straight line. This is just going to be for reference to make sure that my buildings stay roughly within the same line. Let's try that one more time. All the way across without moving the tip of our brush, straightens out by itself. Pick it right up. There just one straight line. Now that we have our reference line right here at the bottom, we want to make sure we add another layer on top of our blue line layers. So we have Layer 1, which is our blue line, and Layer 2. Now, we're going to take some practice brushstrokes we are going to be making our little city buildings. If you mess up, just use two fingers to go back and let's just have some fun. My style is this, making tiny little brushstrokes, little squares and rectangles to make little city buildings. Look at that. How easy is that? It's literally just a bunch of lines together. Look how small that is here. I want to make this cool neighborhood street skyline going all the way across this line right here. I don't want to make it too big because I wanted to leave some nice room for perspective when we add our heroes and our secondary buildings. I want to go across this skyline, making really small abstract buildings. Now look how messy that is. That's why this is fun. They don't have to be perfect. Try to get these lines to connect a bit over here, if not, just go ahead and highlight your eraser tool, bring the eraser down the size down quite a bit. Zoom in and you can just clean up these little building whiskers, I guess they're called. But yeah, check this out. You see it's blotchy, it's messy, but that's a 100 percent part of why this artwork works. We have these little buildings and now I'm going to play with different windows. So we have these little circular tops, these rectangular tops. So we have three little buildings right here, initially, this is going to be most of the entire neighborhood. But what you can do is start to add little details to each of them, and that's going to give them each their own unique character, add a little diversity to your neighborhood. Let me show you. Let's see, for this first one right here, let's throw an antenna right on top, boom. As you can see, my brush strokes are very fluid, very organic, I'm not trying to be too straight. I'm just trying to let the brush come right off the Canvas to get these little points going on over here. So I want to get rid of those, let's use two fingers 1,2. So this one's got a little antenna. Let's give a little chimney to this one, again, two lines and a simple square. Now, how about this one right here? This one could maybe use a roof. Let's go ahead and put a small triangle at the top, you fill that in with two lines and then, hey, how about a little dot right here, and why not? We'll put a little antenna up top here. Now, let's not forget about the windows because we can make those just as cool as anything else. So for our first building right here, I'll add two small lines. It's not a huge detail, but when you see all of them lined up afterwards, all these small details, we'll start to work together. Again, we're going to go through these windows, and adding these little lines. Cool. Now, our second building, let's try something different. Instead of adding these little lines, let's do little crosses. So we'll do like little windowsills like that, there we go. Now, if you want to make it nice and straight, just like we did with our blue line, without moving the tip of your brush, keep it straight, and it will straighten itself out just like that and you can move it to make it just as imperfectly perfect as you want. Good. Now, let's go to this one. Instead of adding the two lines, let's just add one, along the bottom. Cool. We've done a bunch of lines, let's move on to dots. What I like to do is add a few abstract dots, just filling out the space. One thing you'll notice here, along the bottom, I don't put a line on the bottom. I leave it open, I let it breathe a bit. This way, you can add things like dots, maybe a small accent square here and there, a few more dots, but it gives you a chance as we build our composition, to start adding these cool little details. But for now, let's go ahead and get rid of these squares, we'll keep the dots. Let's finish creating our little neighborhood across the bottom. Now, if you mess up, it's not a big problem, just take your two fingers, click and it brings you back one full step. If you want to bring them back, three fingers, 1,2,3, and we're getting the whole building back, just about all of it, and we can continue. I'm going to make little tiny squares, again, I'm not spending a whole lot of time. It's the abstract feel, it's having fun, getting your hand moving, getting a little bit of artistic exercising. Now I'm just going to get going and make some more buildings. We've got our city here, and as you can see, it's full of all these deliciously messy little lines. I'm sure you've noticed that this brush loves to bleed out. It helps you get these little wispy ends, and these big thick beginnings, for all of these little lines here. I've gone through, and made different windows, different windowsills. We got antennas, we have chimneys, I've added a few dots here and there, and the dots and the antennas really helped to fill out this neighborhood. But as you can see, I've left two small spaces right here on the sides, and we're going to get to that later on, and we're going to fill those in with something fun. But if you enjoy your neighborhood now or you want to take another try at making more buildings, go right ahead. Now we are ready to move on to the heroes, but let's take a moment to appreciate our neighborhood. If you have a look, these are very generic urban looking buildings. They can generally fit into most cities, but again, if you want to change it a little bit to be a little more characteristic of the city you're making, you make whatever tweak you need to. Again, these are just my style of buildings. The point of this, is not just to warm up, but to create this very generic city looking block, this neighborhood. It's not very characteristic of any city, but it's characteristic of every city. This is really just filler, and so our neighborhood should look nice, messy and abstract. Now we're ready to move on to the defining characters of our city, the ones that are going to make it your city. Let's move on to the heroes. So get those Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings ready, and we'll see you in the next video. 6. Hero Buildings: [MUSIC] Let's talk about heroes. Let's talk about the buildings that help define a city. For New York heroes, we're talking about the Empire State Building, World Trade Center I, we're talking about the Brooklyn Bridge or the Chrysler Building. I'm going to be drawing a handful of those in this video. Again, if you're following along with another city, just think about what are the iconic buildings of that city but now since we're doing New York, let's start with an easy one, King Kong's favorite, the Empire State Building. As I mentioned before, we have reference photos to trace over using our new fun abstract style. I'm going to make this really nice and easy. To add that photo to your artboard, we're going to go up here to your Wrench under Add, insert a photo. These are the reference photos that I've pulled offline earlier. Let's find the Empire State Building. Tap it once, it appears right on your Canvas. Now let's get a big size. Probably easier, let's go back into our layers. We're going to hide the neighborhood, and hide that blue line. We don't need it anymore, is really just for a reference point. We can go ahead and erase that whole layer. Swipe left and hit "Delete" but we're going to keep the neighborhood. It's good to keep the neighborhood, that's where everyone lives but what I've done is hide that layer just by clicking this checkmark. We'll turn it back on later. What we need now is another layer on top of our reference photo. Let's click this plus sign here. We have a layer that is above our image, and that is the layer that we're going to be tracing on. I don't want to trace on the photo itself because when we delete that photo layer, it'll take my artwork right with it. Let's make sure that blank layer is selected. It is, wonderful. Click the brush again to make sure you're on little smoothie comics anchor. We are, fabulous. Now, for drawing on top of our reference photo, let's think of using a nice bright color that's going to contrast against the photo itself. This way we can see our artwork much more clearly. This photo was taken around sunset. We've got little peach, we've got this city gray here. I'm going to use something nice and bright. Let's go ahead and change this color to a nice bright yellow. Let's test that out and see if it contrasts. It totally does. It's also super high up there. Bring our brush size down just a little bit. Now that we're using a reference photo, what I like to do is trace, and just get a basic outline. I use those abstract movements to make it more interesting. Let's start right up here at the top. I'll find the big shapes first. We got here on this side. We can move around the photo to make these brush strokes a little easier for you. If it's a little more natural to come from the top versus the side or vice versa, you can move the entire composition to make it easier for you. I'm over here. I'm just getting these strokes out here, making it a little blotchy. Again, you just go on across. Look at that. I'm going to add a couple of dots right here. Still continuing to get the larger shapes. Now we're going to do these long lines down the side. What you can do is a couple of things. One, make one big stroke and try to get the line to the side of the building as evenly as you can like this. Let's see. If you didn't like it, go ahead, back up, two fingers. That one lined up pretty well. Then let's see if I can get it from the other side. Try to connect. Oh, they did connect, a little bit of a whisker on that side but look at that, that's a nice, decently straight line. If you want to cheat a little bit, what you can do again is make these lines all the way down hold, and then it straightens up for you. You can stretch that and make it nice and short, nice and long. Sometimes when you're creating architecture, it is helpful to get those very, very straight lines because it'll give it a little bit of structure. It doesn't have to be perfect. Now we've got this basic structure. Let's get over here to the spire. Spire is going to be really easy. Again, you're just letting your pencil float around the shapes a bit to get these fun abstract fields. Just throw together a little scribble. Let's see, I don't even know how to do that. I put a little scribble at the top, maybe just a couple of quick lines, maybe a couple of dots. There we go. Now what we can do is move on to the windows. We're going to start with some long windows. One, 2, 3. As you can see, there are three on this side, so three on this side. That's starting to look pretty good. Now, again, just like in our neighborhood, I'll add little lines in the windows to give just a slight bit more detail that really helps fill it out. Sometimes it's a little line, sometimes it's like a little dot but either way, it gives just a little bit more spice to our work. Now let's finish this all the way down through the entire building. You can play with directions, sizes, also adding details like those dots we talked about, just to break it up. Each row can be nice, and as abstract as the last. [MUSIC] Looking pretty good so far. Let's have a look at our artwork now without the reference photo. Go into our layers, find the image here that we inserted, and let's hide that for a quick second. Check that out. Now let's go back to layer 3. Let's change this color to black. Either have it pre-loaded or you can drag the circle all the way to the bottom right. Click and hold the color and drag it across, stop on one of your lines, and without pulling your stylist tip from the iPad, drag it straight across and it'll fill up the same as our neighborhood. Now we have our first hero made. One thing with Procreate is you do have limits and how many layers you can use. While using these things like the reference photos, after we're done using them, we don't need them anymore. Let's go ahead and just get rid of them. We're going to go into our layers, we're going to find this one. We're not interested in them anymore, so just like Tinder, let's swipe left and come to Delete piece. Plenty more efficient to see. At this point, we have two layers. We have our Empire State Building, and our neighborhood. We can toggle on or off for visibility but for now, let's turn these off and upload our next hero, which is going to be the Chrysler Building. Let's go ahead and go back to our wrench. Insert a photo and remember, all you have to do is tap to bring that photo right into your Canvas. We're going to do the same thing we did with the Empire State Building, and we're going to make that nice and big. Now click the arrow to set the transformation, and just like before, we're going to put in a new layer just above this building, and we're going to work on this fresh new blank layer. At this point, I don't need the drawing guide any more. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that by clicking on the wrench, going over to our Canvas, drawing guide off, making sure we're on the layer above our image. We are. We have our little smoothie comics anchor. Let's change that color back to that yellow so we can see our work. Triple-check our layers, we're on the blank layer. We should be wonderful. Guys, you know the drill. I'm going to get to work on this and make it nice, and beautifully messy. Why don't you join me? [MUSIC] The Chrysler Building is looking pretty sharp. I'm pretty happy with it. Let's go ahead and hide our reference photo. Then we're going to get change that color again to that black, and see just how crispy this looks. Again, we're going to drag that color over to one of the lines, and it changed everything else black. If this happens, no problem, with two fingers. Boom, we just didn't hit one of the lines. There we go. Again, slide to the right real slow, and now we have our Chrysler Building. I'm going to add just a few more little dot details. Make sure we're on the right layer. Just a few dots to even it out a little bit. Now that we're finished with this, same thing as last, we're going to go ahead and get rid of this image. We don't need it anymore, it's just taking up space, so get out. Gone. Let's turn off the visibility of our Chrysler Building again. Let's bring our next hero up to the stage, the World Trade Center I. Let's click our "Wrench," "Add," "Insert a Photo," find the World Trade Center. Boom. Now using our arrow, we can size this again, just about the full page. We want to get nice big as possible. That looks good, and now we're sized. Let's click back to our brush. Let's go back to our layers, add another layer, and make sure it's on top of our inserted image. It is. Let's change that color back to our favorite yellow. Get our brush going, rinse and repeat [MUSIC] As you can tell, the Trade Center doesn't have as distinctive style as you would find in the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building. It's really a bunch of just flat glass windows, so for this one, let's take it easy. Let's just add a few more dots. Finish up the end here. Here we have it. Same as last time, we're going to go into our layers. We're going to hide our image first. Go back up to our color wheel, change the color to black. Drag that color all the way to one of the lines right across, and there is our World Trade Center. Right about this time, you might have one building, you might have two buildings, three, four, five, six, who knows? But you can make as many heroes as you want. You can make your city as crowded as you want. I'm going to keep it simple and only do a few. Now that we have our heroes finished and we're all happy with them, and now it's time to move on to hero juniors. Let's get started. 7. Junior Heros: [MUSIC] Now it's time to get to the junior heroes. These are the smaller, iconic buildings that you'd see in a skyline. We've done the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Center. These are massive buildings. Now, let's get to the smaller ones. Let's start out with Lady Liberty herself, the Statue of Liberty. Let's start by hiding our World Trade Center, getting rid of that photo. We don't need it, dead weight. Let's add another photo. Let's go with Statue of Liberty. Just as before, we're going to size it nice and big, filling up that board so we get good details. Excellent. Now, remember to add a layer on top. We've got it, Layer 6. Click back to our brush. We're on the right layer, we are. Let's find that nice and bright yellow one more time. Now, let's get to work on this beautiful gift from France. Now, because this is a statue, there aren't straight lines as you'd find in the buildings we've already drawn. For this style, I like to get very abstract, a lot of squiggly lines, I like to let my hand just do its thing, and just get the overall shape. I don't think anyone's going to mistake the Statue of Liberty for anything else once it's finished, so trust yourself. I trust you. [MUSIC] We got Lady Liberty looking good right now. Let's have a look without the image, tether that off, change our color to black, and make sure we're on the right layer, we are. Once again, drag that color over, and boom. Look at that. Well, I can tell what that is, I hope you can, too. I think that is going to be a fantastic addition to our personal city skyline. Hero Junior number 1, done. Now, let's move on to, let's say, the Flatiron Building. We're going to get rid of our image like always, hide Lady Liberty. Let's go back to our wrench, grab our photos, grab the Flatiron Building, size that up real nice. Now, I'm actually going to use this photo for two different drawings. I'm going to do the Flatiron Building, and then this little clock here in a little bit, but for now, let's focus on the Flatiron. We're going to add a layer on top and get back to work with our yellow. [MUSIC] As you can see here, this is an oddly shaped building, it's got a ton of windows. It's also a weird perspective because the building itself is so weird. Instead of doing all these windows on the side, I'm actually just going to follow along these lines. I'm going to make sure I have my brush on. There we go. I'm going to follow along these lines just to get a little continuity. That's also going to show the structure of the building. It's going to show its angles. Now that we have these lines coming down, let's go ahead, dance it up with a few details. [MUSIC] Now that I've got this rather futuristic-looking Flatiron Building, I'm going to change gears, and I, actually, want to draw this little clock here to add in. What I can do is add one more layer. Hide the layer we just did, so we know we're on a different layer now, and just continue drawing this fun little clock. We're going to add that right next to our building. It's got these little ornate details. Now, for the little circle here, we want to get an actual circle. What we can do is lightly trace around this gold edge here, and just getting a straight line, once you connect that circle, stop and hold, and a circle will present itself. We can make it as small as we want or as big as we want, and here. Now, we just have a little more of that structure that we can play off of with our abstractness if you so will, and I will. This is, obviously, going to be a clock. Let's just go ahead and make a couple of hands-on that clock, bring that down here, add a few of these dots for good measure. Now, we have our abstract clock. Two images for the price of one photo. Now, we have the clock and the building on separate layers, so we don't need the image anymore. We can just go ahead and get rid of that image. Now, both of these layers, let's go ahead, change the colors as we have been. There we go. We have our black clock right here. Go back to our Flatiron Building layer, drag that color there, boom. Now, we have both on different layers. We can go hide those as we make our final little junior. We're going to go to our wrench, insert a photo, and let's go ahead and get the New York Public Library. I love the New York Public Library ever since Ghostbusters came out. This is a pretty easy building. We're just going to get some outlines done, make a new layer, get back to our friend yellow. Let's get to work. [MUSIC] Now, we have the library, just the overall outline of it. Let's have a peek. Turn off that layer, turn it to black, boom. That looks pretty sketchy. This is the part of the class where you get to add that personal touch. It could be your favorite cafe, favorite bar, that restaurant you love, that animal shelter that keeps telling you you can't keep coming to adopt cats, but I want them. Today, we're going to be doing Antonio's Pizzeria Restaurant. This was a pizza place right across the street from me in Brooklyn, New York. Still has the best pizza, so I'm going to add this to my skyline. Very simple neon signs, just a few squares and a little bit of text, but it's an important place to me, so I want to add this into my skyline. Make sure we have a new layer, get to our yellow, and begin. [MUSIC] We've got our little Antonio's Pizzeria. As always, we're going to get rid of the picture, change the color to black, drag that all the way across into one of the lines, and make it nice like that. We've got our heroes, we've got our junior heroes, we've got our pizza place. Now, it's time to move on, arrange them all into the city that we love. 8. Arranging the Composition: We have all of our buildings done. Now we go through to the fun part, which is arranging a nice city composition. Something you might not know about procreate, if you shrink something down and then try to blow it back up again, you're going to lose a lot of that clarity, it's going to start to pixelate. Before we get into this arranging and re-sizing, I want to build a contingency plan. By making a copy of this Canvas, I will always have a backup of all my original elements to go back and resize if I need to. Start by going into our gallery, select our entire Canvas, duplicate, there. Consider that original Canvas a safe version of your work before we start to play around. Let's go into our gallery and there we go, we have two copies of our original work. Let's go into our most recent one, and here we have all of the elements plus a couple of pictures we can get rid of. Delete and now we can begin our composition. What I'm going to start with is the neighborhood, let's open that up. Now the neighborhood is really roughly just about the parameters of how wide our city is going to be. But now, let's start with our heroes, I'm going to drop our Empire State Building right in the middle. What I want to do, I'm going to click to make it visible and make sure we're on that layer, click our arrow to size it. Let's bring this down maybe right about here, I'm going to place that right in the middle of our composition. Now let that size, you can see over here there's going to be a little bit of overlap. That's totally fine, I'm going to show you in the next video how we go through and mask that out. For right now, we're focusing on composition. How do we want this to look? Now we have all of our elements out, let's just play with the composition. I think this composition is looking pretty balanced. We've got our heroes in the middle, we've got are juniors on the side. Now I'm going to show you how I use the eraser tool to clean this up a bit and make it look a little bit better. Because if you're going to erase it, it never happened. Let's jump over to our next video. 9. Erasing: [MUSIC] We have our composition, it's a little bit messy, but we like where our buildings are. Now it's time to go through, and erase what we don't want there. Let me show you how. First things first, let's go into our layers and let's put our neighborhood all the way at the top. Can do that by clicking on it, holding it, and dragging it all the way to the top. Now, one-by-one, we're going to go through and see what we want to keep, what we don't want to keep. Easiest way to do this is we're going to keep this layer black. That's going to be our neighborhood layer. Then we're going to go into the individual elements, change the colors, and then erase around to make sure we get nice crisp lines. For example, let's start with the New York Public Libraries. It's right here. I'm going to go to the library, it's highlighted. I'm going to find a new color. Yellow is going to show up a little too light on this white background, so let's go ahead and find a blue. I want to zoom in a bit right on top of the public library. Bring that blue. Look at that, we can see every part where the blue is, that is going to be our library. Now it's overlapping on top of our city, which means our neighborhood is you go all the way up here to the top. Now we also have the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty flanking either side of that. Let's go ahead and hide that for a second. We're going to hide that one and that one. Now it should look like this. I like to erase and leave a small white border between the buildings. What I'm going to do here, I'm going to click my eraser tool, zoom in a little bit, and I'm going to make, you can adjust the size of our eraser, this, I'm going to make just a slight line above the neighborhood. You go through and trace around the neighborhood. You see what's happening there? There's this white border that's just cutting out all those blue. There we have it. We have this clear line separating the neighborhood, and our public library. Now what we can do is go through and clean up all the little bits of blue right behind our neighborhood. That's going to give it a little bit more of a sense of depth that's going to show there's clear distinction between the neighborhood and our public library. Now what you can do is go back to our color wheel, click on black, drag that over, bring back that black color. There we go. Now let's show our Trade Center and Lady Liberty once again. Let's do the same thing for these two heroes because I want the public library in front of these two buildings. So I'm going to make sure on my board they are in front. This Trade Center is down here. Statue of Liberty is down here. Let's start with the Trade Center. Click on our blue again, here we on the Trade Center. Let's make sure on the right layer. I'm going to drag that over. Now let's get our eraser and let's go through and get rid of that blue. Same way we did before. Keep just a little bit of a border in a library. There we go. Now let's change that back to black. Drag it over. There you have it. Again, there's clear distinction between the neighborhood, the library, and the Trade Center. Now let's do this. Lady Liberty, let's change her to blue. [MUSIC] We have my personal New York skyline. However, what's it missing, pizza, of course. We want to add the final element. This is our Antonio's Pizzeria. We're going to bring that up here. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop it right into the front of my neighborhood. I like it. It's street-level. It's not a huge building. I want it to be right there. Let's see. I'm going to size this. I think I want to drop that. Let's see. How about right here? It's right now and it's hard to see. What we're going to do, I'm going to change that color and give that to blue. Now what I'm going to do is actually move this all the way up to the top in our layers past the neighborhood. We want to erase around the neighborhood for our pizzeria. That's how important pizza really is. We want to highlight our neighborhood now, not the pizzeria, our neighborhood. Get our eraser. Let's go clean up. Again, you can make this crisp as you want. As you can see, the pizza place is overlapping a couple of different elements. We're going to have to go through a few of them. Let's see. Let's get rid of this first. I'm going to go back to our pizza layer. Change that back to black. Now let's go clean up one more thing, the Flatiron Building so we can read our pizza sign. Look at that. Here we are. We've got all my elements. I've got my pizza place right down in front. This is a personal city skyline for me. This is the way I love New York. Now that we have our composition all filled out, I love this, I want to add just a few details. I'm going to keep it on my neighborhood layer. Go back to my brush. I'm going to add a few little rectangles, a couple more dots maybe, just something that ties the city together. Of course, you might think, why is there a window right in the middle of the sky? Because it's art. But this does do a good job of adding a touch of energy, I think, to the city. I like to make these dots flying out into a direction. Get a couple over here. About one more little thing right there. Then at the end, I put these little end caps here, just these little slashes that bookend the entire city. Add a few dots along the bottom. Again, just abstractly filling it out. Feel free to add as much or as little as you'd like. I'm feeling pretty good about this composition. How about you? Thank you very much. It is nice, isn't it? Now we're going to move on to our final steps, which is playing with colors and saving. 10. Color Exploration: We have a classic black-and-white composition here. I love that contrast like I said before. But now you can have some fun, and play with the colors of this entire composition. Now, the first thing you should do is actually merge together all of the layers into one complete image. How did we do that? Go into our layers, and we're just going to pinch them all together. Look at that. Boom. Now, we just have one layer called Layer 4. That's a little underwhelming. But regardless, it's our layer. We're going to take this image right here, and now we can play with the whole color scheme of the background and all the things that we've drawn. First things first, let me show you how we have black right here. Let's turn this whole thing blue. We can drag blue over here, get on one line. Wow, the whole thing lights up to the color blue. Now, let's say we want to change this background color to something like how about this pink right here? We have this beautiful blue and pink. We can even just change the background color to black, and our layer could be something. Drag this over here, fill out our whole city. Now, we have a hot pink New York City. The combinations are endless. Play around see what you like. Personally, I love having that classic white background with a black city on top. It's just classic. It's got great contrast. Reminds me of those little cartoons you'd see in The New Yorker. One thing that could be cool to play around with, is it now that you have just one layer, we can add another layer, bring it behind our city, and now you can start to play around with all stuff. Let's see. I can do these big accent lines here in the back, or you can change your brushes. How about you can play with some spray paint. Grab this fat nozzle right here, add a little bit of texture, or a background to your piece. This is a great opportunity to start playing with those those texture brushes you might not always have a chance to play with. Now you figured out your composition, you figured out your colors, let's move on to saving our images into our next video. 11. Saving: [MUSIC] Now we're all set, we're all finished. It's time to save and export our new masterpiece. How do we do this and why do we do this? Well, that depends on what you want to use it for. The first thing I like to do is save my time lapse video. Time lapses make great social media content and it's really easy. Let me show you how. In our Canvas, we're going to go all the way up here to the wrench, click "Video", and here it says Time-Lapse Replay. First, let's go ahead and watch it. [MUSIC] Wow, what a journey. By now here's how you can export this to share this on social media for all your friends. First, I'm going to click "Done", go back to my wrench. Under Video, we're going to click Export Time-Lapse Video. Now I always export at 30 seconds because that's what does the best on social media. Now at this point, I usually just AirDrop it to my phone. Next step, let's make a JPEG. JPEGs are essentially the universal file type. If you want to send it to a printer or share on social media, JPEG is your answer. To do that, let's tap that wrench, click "Share", click "JPEG" exporting. Then once again, I usually just AirDrop that to my phone. Last but not least, what if you want to print this say on a t-shirt? The first step is you don't want a big white square on your t-shirt. Let's go ahead and remove the background. We're going to go into our layers, toggle off the background. Now go to our wrench, and we're going to export this as a PDF. No. Just kidding. We're going to export this as a PNG. PNG is that one of the only file types that lets you save with a transparent background. If you need it to be a transparent image, turn off that background layer, and then save it as a PNG. Those are the typical files that I'll save to when I finish my artwork. Speaking of t-shirt, art prints, all the fun stuff you can make with this. If you want to turn this into a fun gift for yourself or for a loved one, I've got some killer bonus tips for you in the last video of today's class. See you in the video. [LAUGHTER] 12. Next Steps: Let's chat about some final action steps you can take to really utilize your brand-new artwork. Number 1, you can upload this to a print-on-demand website and make a gift for a personal friend. I'm going to run through a few rapid-fire ideas for you. I just mentioned print on demand, but there's another huge component to that. You can make that artwork public and other people can buy it, strangers, family, friends, friends of family, family of friends, strangers of family of friends. Anything's possible. The point is, by setting up a POD shop, you're setting yourself up for potential sales. My two favorites are Redbubble and Society6, go check them out. There you can see what your artwork is going to look like on thousands of different products. Or if you don't want to hassle with online files, just send that JPEG to a local printer. Have them print it out to a standard size, buy a standard size frame for your wall and you got your own birthday present. Congratulations. This makes a fantastic wedding gift, especially if you can somehow blend two cities together, the grooms and the brides. Now, in the past, I've been able to do this, let's say, for example, New York and San Francisco, where I would do half the San Francisco skyline with the Golden Gate Bridge that turned into the Brooklyn Bridge, which led to New York. It was a nice marriage of two cities for two friends who are no longer together. Just kidding, they're very happy and have a whole bunch of kids who owe me money. Last but not least, how about that MySpace background? It could be time to really turn it up. Now if you've enjoyed my positive attitude today, I recommend it two other classes that I have involving Procreate. One, are you obsessed with your pet? Are you obsessed with someone else's pet? Have you had a restraining order put on you because you love dogs so much? Well, this class is for you. If this sounds like you, check out my Skillshare class, Easy Pet Portraits in Procreate: Draw Animals as DIY Gifts using POD Website. Essentially, you're going to be using a lot of the same skills you learned here but just for little cute little pushes faces. That's enough out of me. If you just want a nice and easy relaxing class on your iPad, you can take my class, Procreate and Chill: Unwind with Easy, Digital Illustrations for Self-Care. It's basically meditative exercises in Procreate. If you like this class, you'll love that one, it's easy, repetitive, meditative brushstrokes, a lot of the same ones you learned in this class. In fact, you might enjoy it after this class. So why don't you go ahead and click on that class right after this class? Guys, before I get out of here, I have two big favors to ask for you. One, go ahead and click that follow button up top and follow me right here on Skillshare. That means you'll be the first to know the second I launch a new class, have fun perks to share with my students, and you'll be the first to know when I give away a free Skillshare membership to one of my lucky followers. I do that a handful of times a year because I love you. Favor number two, please leave a review on this class even if it's short and sweet. I'm very grateful for that. These reviews mean a lot to me. One, I read all of them personally, and two, it helps my class gain traction right here on Skillshare. You guys are doing me a solid. Guys, we have created our cities together, we've been through a wonderful class together. Thank you so much for taking this class and I'm going to catch you on the flip side.