Picking the Perfect Procreate Brush

1. Introduction: You ever opened Procreate, looked at all those brushes, and thought, Which 1:00 A.M. I actually supposed to use? Maybe you've downloaded tons of brushes over the years, but you keep reaching for the same two or three. Or maybe you try a new brush, make a little scribble, decide you don't like it, and never see it again. Hi, I'm Lisa Bardot. I'm an Illustrator, digital art educator, and the brush maker behind Bardot Brush. I've been using Procreate for over a decade and making brushes for about as long. Made hundreds if not thousands of brushes over the years, and I've spent a lot of time testing them and figuring out what makes one brush better suited for a job than another. And one thing I've learned over the years is that there really isn't one perfect procreate brush. The perfect brush really depends on what you need it to do and how you want your artwork to look and feel. In this class, we'll explore different types of procreate brushes, and more importantly, what makes them useful for different jobs. We'll look at things like texture, pressure response, opacity. Edge quality, blending, tilt, size, and more. So you can start making more intentional choices about the brushes you choose. I've also put together some resources so that you can follow right along with me, including a Vardo sample pack of some of my favorite brushes I made, a procreate file for experimenting with different brush types, a brush testing work. And my eBook, Brush up a guide to Procreate brushes. Then we'll take everything we've learned and put it into practice by drawing a whimsical snail illustration together. We'll start with the sketch, build our shapes and colors, add texture and shading, and finish everything off with linework and little details. As we draw together, I'll talk you through not just which brush I'm choosing, but why, why one brush works better for shapes, another for texture, and another for fine details. You're welcome to follow my choices exactly, but I also hope you'll experiment. Try a different brush, play with color, make it your own. The end of this class, I don't want you to walk away with a list of my favorite brushes. I want you to feel more confident opening up your brush library, trying something unfamiliar, noticing how it behaves, and deciding whether it's the right tool for the art you want to make. So grab your iPad, your Apple Pencil, and let's get brushy. I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project: For our class project, we're going to create this whimsical little snail and mushroom illustration together. We'll work through the illustration in stages, starting with a sketch, then building our main shapes and colors, adding texture and shading, and finishing everything off with linework and little details. This project is really a chance to put everything we're learning about brushes into practice. As we draw, I'll talk you through why I'm choosing a particular brush for each part of the illustration and what qualities I'm looking for. You can follow along using the included Bardot Brush sample pack, but I also welcome you to experiment with brushes from your own library. In fact, I encourage it. Try different texture, swap out a brush, change the colors, and add your own little details. Your goal isn't to make a snail that looks exactly like mine. It's to practice thinking about what you want a brush should do and choosing one that helps you get there. When you're finished, be sure to share your project. On the Project and resources tab of the Skillshare class page, click Create Project. There, you can upload your finished illustration and write about any brush discoveries that you made, tips you found interesting, or anything else you learned along the way. I would love to see your snail illustration and all the brush choices you made while creating it. In the next video, we'll talk about the tools you'll need and the class resources I've created for you to help you learn more about Procreate brushes. See you in the next video. 3. Tools & Class Resources: Before we begin our class, let's get you set up with all the tools and class resources that you're going to need. So first of all, you're going to need an iPad with Procreate installed. I recommend Procreate version 5.4 or later, so you have all the same brushes and features that I have. Just so you know, at the time of filming, I am running version 5.4 0.14. So if you are watching in the future and things look a little bit different, that's why. I also highly recommend having an Apple Pencil. This is going to be the best possible tool to draw with on your iPad. So I highly recommend an Apple Pencil, make sure it's one that's compatible with your particular iPad model. And then I have some downloadable resources for you. On the projects and resource tab of the Skillshare class page, you'll find a link to download the resources for this class as a ZIP file. Once you download the ZIP file, you'll find it in your files app in the Downloads folder. And here's the zip, so I'm going to tap it to open it up. And then let's open up the folder and take a peek. Let's start by opening the Bardot Brush sample pack. Inside here, you're going to find the brush set, and we're going to be using these brushes in the class, especially to do our illustration, so make sure these are installed. All you should have to do to install them is to just tap on the file, and it will import into Procreate into whatever brush library you're currently in. There's the sample pack right there, and it has all the different brushes. We'll talk a little bit more about the brushes in the sample pack as we get into the lesson, but I've included various brushes from some of my favorite Bardot Brush sets for you to try out, and we'll be using them in the illustration that we're going to do in the class. And I've tried to include at least one from most of the different categories that we're going to be covering so you can get a chance to get what they feel. There's also a little user guide to go with the brushes, which goes into detail about what they do, what brush sets they come from, and you can definitely take a peek through that as well. Over here, we have a Procreate file called Types of Procreate brushes. We'll tap that, and it should open into Procreate, and here it is right here. We'll be using this during our lesson to kind of swatch out some different brushes of the different types of brushes. I'm giving you a copy of my brush up eBook, a guide to Procreate brushes, and in it, we talk about all kinds of things, just really deep diving into brushes, including how brushes work. How they respond to your input, ways to test to procreate brushes, different categories of brushes and types of brushes, which we'll be talking a lot about in this class, and library organization and so much more. So definitely give that a look through if you want to deep dive and learn more about brushes. And then finally, is the brush testing workbook. This is another Procreate file. We're going to talk a little bit about testing out brushes and trying to figure out, you know, what uses they might be good for, what categories they might fall into. So we'll talk about this a little bit later on in the course. So once you have your brushes downloaded and installed and you have your Procreate files in Procreate, you'll be ready to go. 4. What Makes a Brush "Perfect"?: So let's just start off by saying, I know the name of this class is picking the perfect Procreate brush. But really, there is no one perfect brush. A brush can be perfect for a particular job, a style, or just perfect for the moment. So there's always some questions I ask myself when I'm trying to decide what brush to use. First, what am I trying to do? Am I sketching? Am I trying to draw a solid shape? Am I coloring in by hand? Am I trying to shade or add texture or blend color? Am I trying to draw tiny details or add special effects? All those questions matter when you're trying to select a brush. Next, I ask myself, What do I want my art to look and feel like? So do I want artwork that feels clean or rough and textured? Is it trying to be soft or painterly? Is it graphic, gritty, handmade, smooth or expressive? So I'm trying to think about the aesthetic of what I want my art to look like because that will deeply influence my brush choices. And finally, what behaviors do I need from the brush? As a brushmr, there's always moments when I'm creating art and I just need a brush to do a particular thing. And because of my experience doing brushes, I can go into Brush studio and make it do exactly that, and it's really gratifying. So it's important to understand the types of behaviors that brushes can have, so you know what to look for when you're choosing a brush. This can be things like the brushes, opacity or translucency. It's how it responds to pressure. You can program a lot of things into a brush to respond to how heavy you press with the Apple Pencil. You know, the edge quality of the brush strokes. Are they textured? Are they smooth? How does it respond to tilt? Does it have the barrel roll feature if you have an Apple Pencil P, which is a really awesome feature. How does it work at big sizes or at small sizes? Does it blend and move colors around? Are there color dynamics in the brush where it changes color as you work with it? Or does it have any fun special effects? Well, talk about a lot of these things in the next lessons. There's one important thing I wanted to point out, and that's you don't want to choose a brush because of what you're trying to make. Like, for example, if you're trying to draw trees, and you might want to know, is there a good brush for drawing trees? It's not as simple as that. It's more about, like, what style of trees am I drawing? Am I trying to draw, like, bold and graphic stylized trees or something more realistic with lots of detail. Or just like really textured trees. Like, all of those questions would lead to a different brush. So keep in mind the aesthetic and the style of what you're trying to go for in your art versus, like, is this a good brush to draw this particular thing? As we go into the next lessons, we're going to be talking about brush categories. Now, I wanted to say that these categories are not rules, they're not hard and fast. Some brushes can exist within multiple categories. Like, a single brush can be great for texture. It can also be good for shading or maybe at a small size, it's good for linework, like all within the same brush. So things can exist in multiple places. And then also these categories are more based on the stages in a drawing workflow from sketching to building your shapes to adding shading and texture to adding the final details. All these categories are kind of based around those different phases. So with that in mind, let's look at some broad categories for brushes and what qualities tend to be useful for each. I'll see you in the next video. 5. Sketching Brushes: Let's start by opening our types of Procreate brushes workbook. This file is set up using page assist. That's why we have this toolbar at the bottom with different thumbnails of all the pages in a book, and you can go between the pages just by tapping them like this. We're going to go through this together and talk about the different types of Procreate brushes. So let's tap over to the first page pencils and sketching brushes. So these are going to be brushes you're going to use for sketching, construction and planning out your artwork. So those preliminary phases of creating your artwork. And let's tap over to the next page where we have a blank page. We're ready to test out some brushes to really get a feel for what you want to look for in a pencil or sketching brush. So let's go up to our brushes, and I'm going to open up the Bardot Brush sample pack. And choose the sketching pencil. This is a brush that's from my pencil box brush set, and I created it specifically for sketching. So let's give it a try. First, we're going to select a color, so I'm just going to choose black as my color. And my brush size will just start I'm at, like, 35%, but you can always change the brush size as you're testing. So some things to look for in a good pencil brush. So you want it to have pressure sensitivity, meaning when you draw lightly with it, you get these really light marks, which are good for sketching out shapes like this, really lightly. And then when you press heavier with your brush, you get these darker marks. So you can go over and refine your sketching with a more confident darker line once you kind of set those guidelines in lightly. A good pencil brush is usually responsive to tilt. So when you hold it upright, you get marks like this, but when you hold it more kind of sideways down towards the Apple or down towards the screen, you get these, like, shading marks, and you can, you know, go straight from up to down like that. So that's good for, you know, adding shading into your sketches. And you wanted to have that pencil like texture. So let's look at some other brushes that will do well as a sketching brush. I'm going to go into the Procreate Library. If you missed what I just did. I happen to have a library for all my Bardot Brush sets. And so I'm going to pinch my two fingers together to get to all the libraries and open up the Procreate Library. We'll play around with some of these Procreate Library brushes that were introduced in Procreate 5.4. So let's start by going into the Pencil set, and a brush I really like is Pelon. So go ahead and choose that, and we'll test it out. So this one has a little bit different texture. My brush size is all the way up, so I'm just going to bring that down. And we'll try kind of light marks and heavier marks. You see it can do that. We can also try tilt, and that definitely has some tilt response, so we can add some shading and things like that. And so I try to just look for a brush that has these qualities, and then, like, a nice texture that I enjoy working with when I'm sketching. Swansea is another one that I like from the pencil set. That one's a little bit bigger. It has a really nice texture to it, as well. You know, you can get heavier marks if you press harder. There's also some brushes in the classic library, which are the brushes that are from Procreate prior to the 5.4 update. So one of the ones I really like from that set is I I I the six B pencil. That one also has a really nice texture to it and all the same kind of response. So some questions to think aloud as you're testing out brushes is, can I sketch, very lightly with this? Can I make a stronger line without having to change brushes? So I want to use the same brush to do those two things? Does it respond nicely to tilt? Do I enjoy the texture? Does it feel like this brush, I can control it really well? Like, does it feel controllable to me? Your favorite sketching brush might be different from mine because the feel and the control really matter here. So just think about a brush that feels good to you. Alright, let's go on to shape making and coloring brushes. 6. Shape Making & Coloring Brushes: Next, we're going to look at shape making and coloring brushes. So when I say shape making and coloring, what I mean is building the main shapes of an illustration and being able to fill areas with color. And let's go over to our blank page and test out a brush. I'm going to go back to the sample pack. And for the shape making brushes, I put in the ink, and this is from my basic tool kit. So let's give that a try. As you can see, it's a very solid brush, completely opaque. You know, try layering your strokes so you can really see exactly how opaque it is. Like, it's not see through at all. You can also draw a fully closed shape and fill it with color drop like this. And then you have a shape that you can add texture and, you know, other details onto, which is really great. Let's look at some other brushes that would be good shape makers and coloring brushes. In the Procreate Library, in the basic set, we have this Yager brush, which is a monowidth brush, meaning it's always one thickness. It doesn't respond to pressure, and it's super smooth. So if you want to draw some shapes that have a really smooth edge to them versus this one that has, like, a little bit of texture edge, you could find a brush that has a smooth edge. And then, of course, there's everything in between and beyond, you can choose a brush that has more of a textured edge to color with. So let's take a look at the ink set, and let's try this whopping brush. This one's a pretty cool brush. It has a really textured edge, and it has a little bit of texture inside the brush strokes, which can be interesting. It doesn't have to be a fully solid opaque brush. Like, if we go into the charcoal set and we choose pipeline, this is also really nice opaque brush, but it has a really nice edge texture. So you can color in a shape by coloring it by hand like this to get that kind of handmade feel, and that also can be a shape making brush. But you get that nice texture because you're coloring in. Over in the classic library, a brush I really like is in the drawing set, and it's called Blackburn. And this brush has a really great edge texture to it, as well. It's got this nice dry brush effect, so that can be really nice for creating your shapes, too. Now, keep in mind, if you are using a brush that has texture inside the strokes like this brush Oberon, also from the drawing set, I'll draw a little shape here. See all that texture. You don't want to fill those with color drop because if you do that, you'll kind of have a mismatch of texture. Like, you'll have some solid fill and then kind of, like, texture around the edges. So if you're doing a brush like this, I just recommend kind of coloring it in by hand so that you can match the texture. So when you're thinking about shape making and coloring brushes, choose based on how solid you need the shape, whether you want it completely filled in and opaque with no texture, and how clean or texture, do you want the edge? Do you want something that's super smooth or do you want edge that has a little bit more texture to it? And whether you care if you can or can't use color drop with it, and you need to color in manually, which is just fine. Either way is great. Okay, let's head over to texturizing and shading brushes. 7. Texture & Shading Brushes: Let's go to our next category, texturizing and shading brushes. This one's pretty self explanatory. These are being used to add texture, shading or highlights to flat areas of color. You're looking for brushes, of course, with a lot of texture. And then when it comes to shading, brushes that can transition from a sparse texture to a more dense texture. Let's tap over to our testing page. And I'm going to head back into the sample pack, and I've got a couple of brushes here that work well for texture. The first one is this crumpled texture brush. This comes from my watercolor wonder brush set, and it's kind of meant to emulate, like, crumpled paper, like, being pressed into paint. And it has this really beautiful texture, especially how it, like, layers when you kind of add multiple strokes on top. And then we have press fine. This is from my texture maker set. And so this one is pressure sensitive. So if I were to go really lightly, I kind of get a mark like that. If I go really heavy, I get more dense texture, and then, of course, I can smoothly transition from kind of sparse to a dense texture like that, which is great for shading. There's lots and lots of brushes in procreate that work well for these purposes, and I'm already out of room. So if this is happening to you, just go ahead and tap new page, and you'll have a blank page to work with. Let's go into our Procreate library and take a peek at some brushes that have great texture. So I'm in the charcoals set right now, and let's try out this underwood brush. So this one has this kind of grainy, charcly texture. Try different pressures, so light pressure to, like, heavy pressure and then kind of transition between the two. You also want to see if you can build, so you kind of do a mark and then layer on top and keep layering and see if you can get darker and darker. Let's see if we can find a different one that can do that. Let's go to the pastel set, and we'll choose the Patamelon brush. And we'll try light pressure and heavy pressure. There's definitely a difference there. I can go even lighter. I'm going really light and now I'm going heavier and heavier and I can use that for shading. In the basic set, we can use the forest or brush for shading. Now, this one doesn't really have any texture, but it is good for shading because you can go from light to dark like that. And then if you're just looking for pure texture, go in the creative set, and there's some fun brushes in there. This one's called Potina. I'm going to create a new page. Lake Echo is a really cool brush. And this one actually has some color variations. So I've just chosen a blue color there. And you can see there's lots of different variations in the color. This brush has some color dynamics built into the settings. So that's kind of what you're seeing there. We can go into the comic set and try kind of like a half tone texture. So it all just kind of depends on the texture that you want for your art, you know, and what brushes that you'll choose. There's a few different kind of half tone ones there. So, this one's a fun one to keep exploring on your own. Just kind of go through and get some ideas of, Oh, this might be good for, you know, adding texture to trees or grass or rocks or whatever it might be. Something important to note is that a texture brush isn't automatically a shading brush. So when you're thinking about shading, you want to think, can I build the value gradually? Can I control the density of the texture and does pressure help me transition from light to dark? Texture is going to be like visual character. Shading is going to give value and form to your artwork. And sometimes the same brush can do both beautifully. Let's go to our next page, which is painting and blending brushes. 8. Painting & Blending Brushes: So painting and blending brushes are used for creating painterly marks, blending colors, and mimicking the look and feel of wet paint. You'll go for one of these brushes when you want kind of a painterly aesthetic. You want colors to interact. You want, you know, smeared or blended edges or, like, a wet media feeling and kind of softer transitions between your colors. Let's tap over to our mark making page. And I'm going to go back to the sample pack. And I have a brush in the sample pack called soft shading. And this brush I actually made specially for readers of my book Drawing Digital. I have a copy right here. Here's my book, and it's all about learning to draw and paint on your iPad. So it takes you through all the basics of learning how to draw but doing it digitally. So it's a lot of, like, drawing fundamentals and then also, like, digital art skills as well. And so I want to show you these pages right here where we talk all about Procreate brushes. Different types which we are going into now, things to look for, brushes to try and things like that. So I made the brush for readers of this book, and we use it in this fun project. Where we draw a stylised self portrait and use it to do some shading on the face. Let's go ahead and test that one out. Let's first start by trying it with heavy pressure and you can already see some of the pulling that's happening. You'll notice this best, especially with the painting and blending brushes when you try it with multiple colors. For this one, we're not going to stick with black. We're going to choose some other colors. So I'm going to choose a blue and you see how these colors pull around. I can pull some of the black and get a different, maybe more of a purple. And kind of blend and soften the transition. And let me just show you an example of how this brush could work. We could have kind of some hard edges, you know, some colors where there's a sharp transition from color to color, and then we can use the soft shading brush to kind of smooth that out like that. So that's how we can do a little bit of blending with that particular brush. And then let's go into the Procreate library because there's a lot of really great brushes for doing this style. So let's go into the oil set, and let's try the brush called platypus. So for this one, make a few marks like this and then, like, pull pull another color out. And try it with light pressure, and you'll see how the colors kind of mix and blend and pull around. We can try a lot of the ones in this set are going to do something like that. So lovely is a really fun brush. I like that one. You can see how if I do heavy pressure, it's pretty solid, but then I'm kind of lightening up my pressure as I go down, and it's kind of smoothing out those transitions and blending. I'll try different color and kind of use light pressure and watch that blend like that. Let's go ahead and add a new page. Let's check out the paint set. And try this Lena brush. Hopefully, I'm saying it right. And this one's very solid with light pressure, it's a little bit more diluted, it looks like, or definitely a little more translucent. We can try and layer some strokes, and if I make the brush size a little bit bigger, it's probably easier to see. But see how it pulls the color around. This one is actually really nice. I'm going to grab my other blue color and just kind of pull that around and blend it. And, of course, heavy pressure, it's going to deposit a lot of color. And with light pressure, it's going to be more diluted and pull color around. And that's all based on the settings of the brush. So what to look for when you're looking at these, you know, painty blendy brushes is how much new color does it deposit? Is it purely kind of a blendy brush or does it add color like these two? How much existing color does it move around? Some pull color more than others. So just kind of layer strokes and don't do any pull. Does it feel wet? Does it feel dry and streaky? Let's see, we've got this peacock brush from the paint set, which is really dry. That could almost be a great texture brush, too. Again, brushes can be in more than one category, and that's totally fine. I don't think this one's going to have as much kind of pulling color around. I'm trying to go light pressure, but it doesn't seem to be having an effect. So that's, like, a cool, streaky effect. If we go into the watercolor set, let me make a new page and try out this bridge water brush. So this one almost feels kind of wet as you're drawing with it, but it doesn't look like it's going to, you know, blend strokes together or pull color around. Let me try the purple color. Yeah, not really. Let me try Philosopher falls. Now, this one's interesting. If you do that again, go kind of heavy pressure. It's going to be more solid. And then if you kind of let up on pressure, as I go around the edges, it kind of ends kind of soft. So that's kind of interesting for, like, a kind of good kind of transition, but it's not like, go to pull color around. It's going to layer, kind of like that. Some other brushes I wanted to show you were from my playful painters brush set. This is the brush set that I designed, and it's honestly one of my favorites. All the brushes are really designed to be very streaky and lots of paint pull and lots of texture. So dotty roll is one of my favorites from that set, and I'll go a little smaller with the brush size so you can see it. But already you can see just how, like, blendy and pulling it is. This one's also quite streaky. It has this great texture. Let me grab the blue color, and we can kind of lend the colors around, which is fun. Well, let's try goopy paint. That's another really fun brush. Grab that color. Yeah, and lots of pulling and blendy and kind of just like textured marks. So for the painterly brushes, you want to think a lot about the interaction between the brush and existing color, which might matter just as much as the brush mark itself. So learning how it behaves in relation to what's already on the canvas and then of course, the texture as well. Let's tap over to our next category, which is linework and detail brushes. 9. Linework & Detail Brushes: So linework and detail brushes. These are going to be brushes that you're going to use for those fine details and final touches of your artwork. So you want to look for brushes that are ideal for precise linework or small scale textures. So let's tap over to our testing page. I'm going to go into my sample pack, and I have a really fun liner kind of detailed linework brush. This is called Gritty Tilt Liner, and it comes from my Guash paint box. Guash paint box is actually one of the first brush sets I ever released. Ten years ago, there's been a lot of updates to it since then. Guash paint box and basic tool kits were the first two. But this brush is really fun. I'm going to switch back to black as my color. And you can just kind of do a stroke and see the fun texture. This brush, if you hold your pencil upright like this, it's kind of more of a solid mark, but if you go kind of more tilted, it gets more textured. So that's where the gritty tilt of the name comes from. Um, and another fun thing is you can kind of do these, like, flicking motions where you're doing like light pressure, heavy pressure, light pressure to get these beautiful tapered ends. So pressure sensitivity is going to be really key for these kind of, like, linework detail brushes as well. And you also want to pay attention to brush size. So really large sizes might not be ideal for doing this kind of linework but at a smaller size, they can look really, really great. So kind of pay attention to that. Let's take a look at some other brushes that will be good for doing linework. I'm going to go back to the Procreate library, and let's go to the ink set. Actually, let's go to the pen set. There's a brush called Minki that's really great. This brush is very fun. It has a really great texture to it, kind of like bleeding pen, good pressure sensitivity, so I can get marks that have these kind of tapered ends to them. And I can also vary the weight of it as I draw, which is really key for kind of line work. So that one's really fun. I'll make a new page. And there's a brush in the ink set that I really like called nowhere else. And this one feels just like a marker to me. I love the texture inside of it. It does have a bit of pressure sensitivity and kind of tapers at the end on the strokes. So that's going to be really good for doing kind of this linework, but I really love this brush. So, you know, as you can see, the texture inside the stroat can be solid, like some of those others, but it can also be kind of, like, papery or watery or gritty. Like, the texture of these brushes is really fun. This one's whopping, which I think I pulled up during our shape making. But at light pressure, it's a really thin, dainty line. But when you go heavier, you get this, like, splochy bleeding look. So you can kind of see me going in between here. And that could be a really fun effect. You know, certain pencil brushes, I think, also make good linework if you wanted to have kind of that, especially at small sizes, but to have that kind of pencly texture for your linework, I think that could be really good, too. So this one Swansea, which I believe we looked at as a pencil brush earlier. Over in the comic set, let's try this Billy button brush, which is another really kind of fun textured brush. Not so much the tapered ends. It's kind of has a blunt end. So if that's something that you want in your line work, you can definitely choose a brush like that. Another brush from my gouache paint box would be something like this detail liner, which is a pretty kind of simple brush. But the ends have this nice kind of texture to them. So when you experiment with pressure, you kind of can see that. So again, when you're looking at a good linework brush or detail brush, you want to think about, you know, how does it look if I kind of draw straight line? Does it handle curves really well? I'm going to have to make a new page. So straight line, curves, doing curves. I always like to do these kind of loops when I test a brush, and that helps me test out the pressure so I can see how it responds to pressure, kind of like light pressure up, heavy pressure down. Does it have that kind of tapered look when you kind of do the light heavy light, kind of that little flicking motion for your line work? You know, and you can also see how it responds to tilt. Not all of them have a response to tilt, but some of them do. And then, of course, play around with size, too. You know, at a certain size a brush could be really great for doing line works, but if it's really large, it might not. Here's another one from Guash paint box, fine green liner. So this one has a little bit more texture to it, so if you want, like, textured line work. There's so many possibilities when it comes to this. All right, let's move on to pattern and stamp brushes. 10. Pattern & Stamp Brushes: Pattern and stamp brushes. These are brushes that could be used for doing repeating shapes, motifs. They can also be used for textures or really just applying decorative elements quickly and consistently. So let's take a peek at some different pattern and stamp brushes. I don't have one in our sample pack, so I wanted to show you a couple that are in the Procreate library. So there's not a lot of pattern brushes in the default Procreate brushes. If you go to the design set, there's a couple down here, like Iron Stone, Homestead, and snow Daisy. And they all actually layer together to create this kind of, like, graph paper effect. So if you wanted to create a digital, you know, graph paper, you could do that, which is pretty cool. In the classic library, like the older Procreate brushes, there's a few. I think there's under the vintage brush. There's like Myrtle, which is kind of a fun kind of sprinkle looking brush. This is fever, which has a pattern built into it, newsprint. Again, these are textures, but they're also patterns, too. And then I have a really fun brush set called Imperfect Patterns. It's one of my favorite brush. I say that about them all, but I love this set, and I have some really fun kind of patterns in it. So this one's wavy wood grain. I have kind of, like, some waves, little leaves. Well, let's go do a new page. You can see some scales. So you can see, like, that could easily be like the texture of a dragon or, you know, a scallop roof tile kind of thing. If you need, like, quick rocks or cobblestones or something like that. These kind of specialty pattern brushes can do this really quickly and add this decorative element to your work without you having to draw everything 1 million times. So that's kind of the idea behind them. And then of course, there are shape brushes as well. And these are going to be stamp brushes, usually. There's not really a lot in the default brushes when it comes to that. So I'm going to show you my misshape and shape set, especially, I have a version that responds to the Apple Pencil Pros barrel roll feature, which are pretty fun. So these are basically shape stamps. I can twist it and turn it, and then just stamp, and I can have that little design element, you know, in my work, and I can layer fun little shapes and colors and things like that, and just kind of have fun playing with shapes. And this is really quick and easy because one, you get to, like, be playful with it. But then you're also not having to draw these things every time you want to do it. There's even, like, a brush where you can make your own shape. You can make your own shape stamp, which is pretty fun. So those are very, very fun. You know, and talking about brushes, every brush is made up of a shape. That's actually how procreate brushes work. So I'm going to show you a page from my eBook. I'll go back to the beginning here. Okay. So every Procreate brush is made up of a shape. The shape determines the form of the brush stroke. And then there's also a grain, and this determines the texture within those strokes. So you can combine those two things with a whole bunch of different settings that define the behavior of the brush, and that's what makes a procreate brush. So how these stamp brushes work where it's just like a single shape is, you know, we start with a shape just like we would. And we have this kind of spacing property. When these shapes are spaced really close together, they create like a solid brush stroke, but when you space them apart, as you can see, especially down here in the bottom one, you start to see the individual stamps, which would be this one in this case. And so that's kind of what's happening with these stamp brushes. This is just the individual stamp. So, yeah, they're a lot of fun. And I have another set as well, which you can get as a part of my imaginative maps class, which you can take right here on Skillshare. And so these are all fun little stamp brushes where you can kind of draw with them. These are boulders. Like, we have little mountains, cacti. So, again, that just makes really short work of adding these decorative elements to your artwork. All right. Let's tap over to lettering and calligraphy brushes. 11. Lettering & Calligraphy Brushes: Ettering and calligraphy brushes. So this one's kind of self explanatory, but these are brushes that you would use for doing hand lettering, calligraphy, decorative writing, and expressive letter forms. So some things to look for here are brushes that have a high smoothing feature. So there's a feature in Procreate called streamline, which smooth out your brush strokes, and it really makes it great for doing things like calligraphy. You might also look for a brush that has a pressure sensitivity, so you can get those thicks and thins. There might even be an angled shape to it. I'll show you some examples. I don't have a specific lettering brush in the sample pack, so let's go into the Procreate library and we'll visit this lettering set. Let's try out this brush called Providence and we'll just try making some marks with it and you'll probably see that it's really smoothing out your brush strokes. I I try to draw fast, it's not really capturing that expression, it's smoothing it out instead. This is going to make it really lovely for doing letter forms. You can see it's great and it smooths it out. It's also an angled shape. So if you can kind of see on my screen, I'm using the hover feature that shows the brush cursor. And you can see how if I go this way, it's kind of a thin line because of the angle of the actual shape stamp. And of course, if I go this way, it's going to be thicker. So just like a calligraphy pen would that's exactly how this is going to work. And then pressure sensitivity. So as I was going down, I was pressing harder and getting those thicker strokes. So let's take a look at some of these other brushes in here. There's a brush called Nightingale, and this brush is kind of cool. It does definitely have the smoothing capability, but it also has it has kind of a shadow built into it, which is kind of neat. So let's try I don't know, do the smoothing on that's really nice. And it has that cool shadow effect. Let's try wide awake. And this is, like, really smooth. It's a really angled, kind of a shape like that. This one actually has a response to barrel roll. So as you can see, when I twist my Apple Pencil, which is the Apple Pencil Pro. This is just a feature for Apple Pencil Pro. It changes the angle of the brush stroke. So if I go this way and get these thin strokes, if I turn it this way, I get thicker strokes. And I can kind of use that to do my lettering, too, which is nice. So, maybe have a thick down stroke there, and then, like, go to do some little letters like that. Change angle. No, it's not the best, but you get the idea. So what you're looking for here is especially a brush that has that stream line where it's kind of smoothing everything out for you a bit. That's kind of fun or might have, like, a fun special effect that would be good for lettering. So let me This brush has it's called Ruby Rose, and it has a dual color feature. So you can set one color as your primary and one as your secondary, and then it will do both colors, which is pretty cool. So again, I set one color pink, and I set the other color as black. You just kind of tap between the two. And anywhere where you overlap the stroke, it kind of combines, which is kind of neat. You can do some fun stuff with that brush, too. Alright, let's look at our last category, which is specialty brushes. 12. Specialty Brushes: Our last category we're going to explore together is specialty brushes. So these are brushes that are used for creating a specific effect like fur, foliage, splatter, glow, smoke or other things that might be hard to draw. This is one thing I love, love, love about being able to create procrete brushes is usually there might be something that I want to achieve. And so I have the brush knowledge and know how to be like, Okay, if I just change these settings, da da da da, I can get it to do that specific thing, and I don't have to, like, sit there and, like, draw and render every part of the illustration, if that makes sense. Let's kind of dig in and look at some specialty brushes. In the sample pack, I do have one. It's called combed, and this comes from my fur and fluff brush set. And you can actually get this as a part of the How to draw fur class that you can take right here in Skillshare. And I designed it to help draw fur. So you don't have to draw every single little strand. Let me go a little smaller with this brush. But I like to you can kind of use it and see how it looks like lots of strands of hair. And I like to do it with, like, kind of like a little flicking motion like that kind of curving out, and you can get this sort of like furry texture, which is really great. So this is a specialty brush that helps you draw fur. Maybe you could find some other uses for it. I don't know, waves or water or something like that. I have a brush called ceramic glaze, and these are brushes that were designed to emulate ceramics. So actually, glaze, ceramics. And so they have the texture as if you're using, like, streaky under glaze. And I have a brush called the darkening crackle glaze, which adds a crackle effect, so that's definitely a specialty brush as well. Also, like, a texture brush. Let's take a look at the classic library, because there's some really good specialty brushes in there. So let's go into the luminant set and check out Light pen. Again, this is the classic library. And I'm going to pick a color as well just because it definitely works better if you're using a color. And I'm going to draw over this dark area because it looks better when it's over dark. But you can see it's kind of like this glowing light effect. And you could achieve something similar with, like, blur and using blend modes and things like that. But having a specialty brush kind of make short work of that. This one's called glimmer and it's a bunch of little stars and things like that. In the organic set, which again, is in the classic library, there's some foliage brushes, so there's sword grass. So why don't we pick a green for that and try it out. So this one looks just like grass, which is pretty cool, like, bushy grass. Snow gum is another kind of foliage leafy brush. So these are all just meant to do, like, a very specific purpose. There's paper daisy, lots of fun brushes in there. And in the appropriate library, I'm sure there's lots in there as well. Over in the street art set, you can choose Elizabeth Street, and this is meant to be like spray paint. It's pretty cool. Kind of running out of room here. But yeah, these are some of the specialty brushes, and there's definitely a lot. So specialty brushes can be a great way to save time, but they can also spark ideas as well. I'm sure there was an intended purpose that the brush maker had in mind when they created the brush. But as an artist, you might have your own ideas about how to use them, which is really fun. So now that we've taken a look at some of the different categories of Procreate brushes, we are now going to get into our Illustration. 13. Further Brush Testing: So we've just spent some time going through the different categories and exploring brushes and picking out what qualities make a brush good for a specific purpose. But if you wanted to dig a little bit deeper and really test your brushes, I'm going to tell you about my brush testing workbook, which is included with the class resources. So it's basically a little workbook that you can open up here and Procreate. There's some information about, you know, kind of how to use it, and then a video companion, which helps you learn all about how to test brushes and really goes deep into it. So basically, you pick a brush and then use these testing pages. You write the name of the brush, the brush set, the creator, whether it's like a Procreate brush or, you know, if it's a Bardot Brush brush or, you know, another person that made it. And then we have the best four uses. And this is kind of like your categories that we've just gone over. So you save that for the end, and then you go through and you test a brush's size. You test the stamp. You test the opacity, the tilt, the pressure, speed, orientation, and then you just make a bunch of marks kind of like we did. And as you're doing that, you're coming up with ideas of like, Oh, I really when the brush did this, and I could use the brush for that and you can write notes. And then when you're done, you can write down, like, Oh, this would be a great linework brush or good for shape making, or you can kind of add that in there. So it builds upon what we're learning today. So if you want to learn more about this and be guided through testing brushes, check out my YouTube video, how to test a Procreate brush. I will put a link down below, so you can check that out and you can test out some more brushes. But we are going to head into the next part of this class, which is putting all of the knowledge that we have to work as we create a fun little snail illustration. If you're ready to VM, let's head into the next video. 14. Illustration Project Intro: Now that we've looked at a wide range of different brush types or categories, we're going to put everything that we learn into practice into an actual illustration. So we're going to be drawing this fun little whimsical snail illustration. And you'll notice that a lot of the stages of our drawing workflow reflect the different categories like sketching, shape making, coloring, adding texture shading, that sort of thing. So as we go through this, just know that you do not have to follow along and do exactly what I'm doing. In fact, I encourage you to kind of branch off on your own and try different brushes. So if I'm saying, Okay, we're going to do a sketching brush now. You can pick your favorite brush for sketching or a different texture than I'm doing, you know, that sort of thing. So please do kind of check out some of your own brushes and, you know, add them into the mix. All right, if you are ready to draw, let's get started. 15. Project: Sketching the Snail: Welcome to the next part of this class. We are going to be diving into our illustration where we're going to put all of our brush category knowledge into use and identifying the different parts of this illustration workflow and brushes that would be appropriate for each stage. So let's head into our gallery view and we will create a new Canvas and get started. So you're going to start by tapping the plus sign in the upper right. And for the size we're going to be doing today, we're going to be doing a canvas that is 2,800 by 3,500 pixels. If you don't have a template for that size, you can top this little rectangle with a plus sign. Make sure you're down here in pixels and type in 2,800 and then tap over to height and choose 3,500 pixels. Give your Canvas template a name and then hit the checkmark. But I already do have a template for that, so I'm going to open that. Before we get started, I want to say that I really encourage you to add some personalization to this. So feel free to draw it in your own way, change the colors up. You can use different brushes if something else feels better to you. You can add decoration and pattern, your own final details, you know, really make it your own if you want, or feel free to just follow along with me, learn what we're doing, and then maybe try it again on your own and add some more customization, try different brushes. We are going to begin our illustration with a sketch. So let's head into our brushes. And I'm going to go back to the Bardot Brush sample pack. These are the brushes we're going to be using for today's illustration. And, of course, we're going to start with a sketch. So we need a pencil brush. We're going to use the sketching pencil. And for the color, we're going to just choose black. And we're going to do a really simple sketch for this one. We're doing a snail illustration, and so we're going to start by creating a base for our snail to sit on. It's going to kind of be a round shape like this. So I'm using light pressure and doing kind of sketchy lines for that. And then we're going to have our snail shell. So let's kind of draw that right here in the middle. Again, I'm just going really lightly to start. And then the snail body. So we're going to draw kind of curve up like that, and then come back down. And kind of flatten out, and then we have, you know, the snail's tail like that. And then we're gonna have a couple of mushrooms here. So we're going to just draw kind of these mushroom shapes here, one there, one a little bit smaller, kind of over there. Again, we're keeping it pretty loose. And then there's this mushroom stem and we're going to even have one little mushroom kind of coming out of the side here. So our sketch is quite loose. I'm going to go ahead and just use the transform tool and kind of scoot it over. So we've got a really loose basic sketch, and now we're going to use a little bit heavier pressure to kind of define the details a little bit more. So let's start with the shell. So I'm going to kind of draw the shell, and it's going to curve around. So we're going to the whole, spiral bit of it's kind of going to happen towards the back half. You can see, like, the lines are thicker there, and then they're a little bit thinner over there, if that makes sense. We'll just draw that line there, and then we're going to draw the snail body. You can still use sketchy lines. That's fine. Just do a little bit heavier pressure. At the bottom of the snail, we're going to add these fun little wavy curves in, then draw the back. Like that. Then you can draw your mushrooms just a little bit more. Finneas, like that. A curve the corners a little bit, kind of make it rounder at the bottom. And then we'll draw the little stems going with a bit heavier pressure than I was to kind of darken everything up. And our little mushroom here. And then we've got our kind of base shape here. Okay. Our snail is also going to have a little antenna, so kind of draw those on. And then there will be a face, as well, so feel free to draw that on. I'll smile. We're going to add a pair of glasses so you can sketch those in. And that's pretty much all we need to do for our sketch. Now let's prep the sketch for moving on to the coloring phase. So we're going to go up to our layers. We're going to tap the plus sign to create a new layer, and we're going to drag this new layer underneath our sketch, and then we're going to reduce the opacity of the sketch. So it's just barely visible and we're just using it as a guide. So we're going to tap the little N here on the sketch layer, the one with the sketch, and then just go down. I like to P at about 15% for the opacity just so it's visible enough that we can see it as we're working. And we will start coloring this in the next video. 16. Project: Building Shapes + Color: The next phase of our illustration is going to be building shapes and coloring in. This is where we're going to employ those shape making and coloring brushes that we explored. In our layers, you want to make sure that you're on a new layer underneath your sketch layer, and we're going to start by setting our background color. Tap here in the layer panel where it says background color. And I'm just going to choose like a nice, deep, forest screen. Want to make sure you can still see the sketch. Siting the background color first is going to help you pick appropriate colors for, you know, everything else that also work with the background. So it's good to start with that color. And now we'll start drawing the different shapes of this piece on different layers. So let's start by drawing the shapes of our snail. So let's go to our brushes, and we're going to choose the inker brush. This is our shape making brush when we want kind of a smooth ish edge. So go ahead and choose incor and then for the color, I'm going to choose kind of like a light brown color. And now we'll draw the shell. So we're going to a little smaller with my brush mat, like 35%. So we're going to draw the outer shape of this shell. Kind of make sure it's a completely closed shape like this. And then you can fill that in with color drop. Now, this brush does have a slightly textured edge. So if you have a problem where when you drop in your color drop, I'll just do it really quick to show you. You have a little bit of the background color peeking out. You just need to adjust your color drop threshold. So to do that, you would drag and drop, but then hold your pencil on the screen and don't let go and move as far as you can towards the right until that line goes away to increase the threshold. If it doesn't all work in one way across, you can always do it one more time and keep moving the threshold up, but it's this little blue bar across the top. Okay. So something to keep in mind if you have, like, a kind of textured brush that you're trying to use color drop with a little bit darker with this color now that I'm looking at it, because I know the snail color or, you know, the body is going to be similar to that color. So I'm just going with a little bit kind of darker, grayish brown, and then I can actually drop that right on top, like that. So now I'm going to do the body, and this is going to be on its own layer. So I'm going to tap the plus sign in the layers panel and move this underneath the shell. And the reason why we put it on separate layers is because it makes it a lot easier to add texture and details later on, which you'll see. So I'm going to choose kind of a peachy, light, peachy pink color and kind of do a little test. It feels a little bit bright, so I'm going to come in just a little bit. Okay, so I've got a good color for my snail body. So now I'm just going to trace the outline of that. That's a little wavy line there. And then you can't really see it, but you do need to make sure that you have a fully closed shape. Like, if I were to look behind there, I do not have a closed shape. So just make sure you actually close the shape if you want to use color drop to fill it, and then you can fill it with color drop like that. And this brush has pressure sensitivity, so the harder I press, the bigger it gets. And so that's actually going to be perfect for drawing these little antenna. I'm going to actually start light pressure and get a little heavier pressure to create this sort of, like, tapered shape for the antenna. My take a couple practice tries. But brushes like this where you can, like, draw a whole shape in a single stroke versus having to draw, like, a little triangle and then color it in. Like, if you could just draw it all in one stroke because of the brushes settings, like, that's awesome. So there's my little antenna, and then, of course, we'll add little dots on top. So we've got two of our main shapes done. Let's actually switch over to doing this ground surface. Now, let's switch our color. I'm going to do kind of a yellowish green, kind of a light color, and you can test it. That's a little bit bright, make it a little darker. That's a little bit better. Now, I could use this same brush to do that, but I want to create something that's a little bit more textured for this shape. So I'm going to switch over to this toothy pastel and use that to draw this kind of grass texture because I want it to feel kind of earthy. So I'm going to just go do the outline like this. As you can see, the shape has a nice textured edge. Whoops. I did not create a new layer. Don't forget to create a new layer when you do this. Go up to your layers, tap the plus side, and then we're going to drag this underneath the two stale layers. And let's try that again. So I'm going to kind of just draw the outside. And then I'm going to color this in by hand. I don't want to use color drop because I still want to gather or, you know, utilize some of the texture of the brush. But I do want it to be pretty solid in the middle. So I'm going to go over it with a few different brush strokes, kind of lifting my pencil each time. And the cool thing about this particular brush, and you might start to see this is it actually adds more texture as you layer on more strokes. So it's not just, like, a flat color like this is. I have all this texture within, which is pretty great. So I can add some texture inside, and I have this nice, you know, texture on the edge as well. Now let's draw the rest of our shapes. We have some mushrooms to do. So we are going to create a new layer, and we'll put this behind or underneath our grass layer. And let's switch back to the inker brush. And we're going to choose a nice almost reddish orange kind of color for these mushrooms. It's not like, super bright. It's a little bit of orange to it. And then we're going to draw the mushroom shapes. So just kind of trace over those like that. And fill them in. Move that one out a little bit. And then we'll do the other one as well, and fill that in. And then we have this little guy here, and, you can do that on that same layer. Oops do it one more time. I feel like the color that I chose is still pretty bright. So if you need to adjust your colors, you can. You can always go up to the adjustments layer, go to Hue Saturation Brightness, sorry, the adjustments panel. And ops and turn the saturation down a little bit or brightness, kind of get it to the color that you want it to be. It was just looking like a little bit too intense for me. Here we go. Okay, so we got our mushroom tops. Now we need our mushroom stems. So we're going to create one more layer. It's going to go underneath the mushroom, so go ahead and drag it to the bottom. And then we're going to choose kind of a creamy color. So I'm over here in the, like, orangy yellow colors. And then kind of, I don't know, grayish cream. I don't want anything that's too, like, super bright for this. So I'm going to use that to do my mushroom stems. Okay. And then we have this little guy here. So we're going to do much thinner. This is why I was gonna put it on a different layer. So I actually need this stem to be above the grass layer, so it looks like it's sitting on the grass. So we're going to have to move some things around, but that's okay. I'm going to undo that one. And all we need to do is actually move the grass underneath the two mushroom layers, and I think we should be good. So we have the mushroom caps, the stems, and the grass underneath all that. And now let's draw. Yay, okay. Just kind of had that in the wrong order, but we're good now. And then just kind of draw the bottom, like a little rounded edge like that, and we're going to make it look like it's sitting in the grass in just a little bit. So these are all the base shapes for this illustration. Now we get to focus on adding texture and details and things like that. So we will do that in the next video. 17. Project: Adding Texture + Shading: All right, so we've got all our bay shapes done. Now we're going to add texture and shading. So we're looking at that category of brushes and thinking about what brushes would be appropriate for the types of textures that we want to add to this. So let's start by adding just a little bit of base texture to this, kind of like we did on the grass. We already have a little bit of base texture on it, but let's add some base texture to the snail. So let's choose our crumple texture brush just to add some subtle texture all over. Now, I mentioned that we put everything on separate layers, so it would be easier to add all the texture and details later on, and the later on is right now. So we're going to use a feature called Alpha lock to lock these shapes so that we can just add texture within the shapes. So to turn on Alpha lock, you tap on a layer. So I've got the snail shell, tap on it and choose Alpha lock from the menu. And we're going to do the same thing to the snail body, but there's another way you can do it. You can take two fingers and swipe to the right, but you're going to be looking for this checkerboard pattern. So now we can actually go ahead and lock all of the shapes because we're done creating the shapes. Now we're just onto the texture and shading part of it. So we're not going to be changing how these shapes look at all. Okay, so let's start with our snail shell. And I'm going to again, we're using the crumple texture, and I'm going to sample the color that I already have for the snail shell and just go a little bit darker, a little bit more saturated. So I'm kind of going this direction. You can kind of test it out and see If you don't see anything, you might need a different, maybe a little bit darker. Okay, so now I'm starting to see some texture, and I'm going to go to maybe 30% with my brush, and I'm just going to do a few marks just to add some base texture to it so it's not just, like, flat. And I'll do the same thing for the snail body. So I'm going to sample the snail body color. I'm going to go a little bit darker, and then I'm going to make sure I'm on the layer with the snail body. And then we can add some of this darker color, you know, to the snail body, as well. So we have this really nice subtle texture. If we wanted to add some base texture to the mushroom caps, we can go to that layer with the mushrooms. We can select the color we already have of the mushrooms. And let's do a different texture this time. We'll use that toothy pastel. And we should just be able to without even changing the color, just based on the settings of this brush, just kind of go over it, and we have some base texture on the mushrooms, which is really nice. Here. So now we've got some texture on those, and we can actually keep going right now with the mushrooms and add a little bit of shading, too. So let's do shading with the same brush, and we'll just go a little bit darker with the color. So I'm going to go a little bit darker. Again, I'm going this direction, maybe a little redder. And just on one side, I'm deciding right now that my light's coming from this direction. So all my shadows are going to be on the opposite side. So I'm just going to shade one side of this mushroom here, this darker color. And what I'm doing here is I'm doing heavier pressure towards the edge and then kind of lighting it up so that it kind of, like, fades off. So that's the shading part of this. So heavier over here and then kind of lightening up. So it'll transition smoothly since it's kind of like a rounded shape. And then I'll also do this little one here, adding a little bit of shading. And then I could go even a little bit darker, a little bit redder, and just add a little bit more shading to one side, like that. Just kind of make it a little bit more dramatic. Give it a little bit more form. If you turn off your sketch, you can kind of start to see how the form is happening there. We could even I just turned the sketch back on, go a little bit lighter. So if I sample the color I already have got little oranger, a little lighter. Well, maybe I don't like that color. I'll do it one more time. Sample the color. Maybe just go a little lighter, not go to orange. We can add kind of a highlight on this side by doing, like, really light pressure. Just like a little bit. Nice. Okay. Now, we'll come back to the mushroom caps in a little bit. But since we're using this is toothy pastel brush, let's also take a peek at the floor, the grass. So go to the layer with the grass. Again, we have alpha oc turned on. And we're going to select the color. Just use the eyedropper to sample that color. And let's go a little bit darker, more saturated, maybe even a little cooler towards the blues. Whoops. We do that one more time. A little darker, more saturated. And we're just going to add a little bit of shading underneath the snail, so it looks like he's actually, sitting on the grass, not like, floating on it. So I'm just going to add kind of an oblong shape underneath the snail and maybe go a little bit darker, a little bit smaller with my brush and get it just a bit darker in there. So now it looks like he's actually sitting on the surface. We can add a little bit of shading under our mushroom, too. Like that. And now let's add a bit of shading to our snail body. I'll go to the layer with the snail body, and we're going to select the color we already have and then just go a bit darker because we're going to add just a bit of shading under the shell like this. So we want to add a little bit of shadow kind of wherever something sits on top of something else, so that's what this is. So there's a bit of shading there. And then let's take a peek at our snail shell. So we're going to do something a little bit different for the shell. We're going to use a clipping mask to do a lot of our details. So what you want to do is select this snail shell layer, the shell, tap the plus sign to create a new layer, tap this layer, and we're going to choose clipping mask from the menu. And the great thing about this is when I use a clipping mask, whatever I draw on this layer will only appear within the shape of the layer below it. But it's still its own layer. You can move it around and change your blend mode and do all kinds of things, so you have a little bit more flexibility. So let's start by we'll start to add some details using our linework brush, and then we'll kind of come back to shading in a bit. So let's switch over to the gritty tilt liner. This is the brush we're going to use for all of our linework and details. And then we're going to choose the color we already have, but go a little bit darker, and you can kind of test it out and see how it's looking. I think it looks pretty good. And then we're going to use this brush to draw all of our lines on the snail shell. So we're going to use it. I'm going to kind of keep it tilted a little bit because I want to get that texture to draw this spiral that. I'm gonna do that one more time. That's looking good. And then we're also going to draw these lines, and you can see you can draw right off the edge of it. And because the clipping mask will only show, you know, within the shape of the shell, I'm going to do these little curvier. Since the shell is kind of a curve shape, we would want these lines to kind of curve around. Then here, you want to be a little careful to stop the line when you reach this other edge. Another thing to be careful is you don't want the lines to kind of touch at the same place. That creates a bit of a tangent. So kind of just watch out for that. All right. We're almost there. Lena swirl it around another time. There we go. Okay, so that's looking pretty good for the snail shell details. Um Okay. Now we're going to add a little bit of shading to this. So we're going to create another layer. We're going to tap it and choose clipping mask. And this time, we're going to use a blend mode to add our shadows. And the reason why we do this, I'll show you if we were to shade, I'll grab the toothy pastels and shade with the same color, we kind of lose those lines. But if we were to shade with a blend mode, and I'll walk you through this, so don't worry, um it's going to darken both the line and the shell, so you can actually see that looks like a shadow. So let's do that. So on this new layer, we're going to undo that real quick. Going to tap this little N, and we're going to choose multiply from the list of blend modes. It's the one right at the top. And then we need a kind of lighter color to do the shading so it's not so intense, like you can see, even with this kind of gray color, it's really dark, so I'm going to go a little bit lighter, kind of test that out. That looks pretty good. So this is the color I'm using if you want to use that color too. And then we are going to add a little bit of go big with my brush, a little bit of shading inside, kind of the spiral shape like this. And then along this edge as well. I would also be a little bit of shadow right where the shell meets the bottom. I'm doing pretty lightly here, especially as I bring the shadow out, I can go even more lighter with my pressure, it softly fades. If you just did the same pressure, it would look like this and you'd have a really harsh edge to your shading. I think that looks pretty good. And you could go a little smaller with your brush size for these kind of smaller areas. That's looking pretty good. Up next, we're going to add some linework and final details. 18. Project: Linework + Final Details: Yeah. And now we can add some other details. So I'm going to add a layer in between these two clipping masks. So tap on the one that has these stripes and then tap the plus sign, and that will automatically be a clipping mask since it's between two other clipping masks. And we can add some light colored details now. So I'm going to sample the base color and just go a little bit lighter. Kind of test that out. That could be a good color. And then let's try the Combed brush, the fur and fluff brush. And let's go pretty big. Oh, yeah, I think that'll work good. So I'm at, like, 80% big for the size of the brush, and I'm just going to use that to add some curved marks in between. Just to kind of add a little bit more texture and also a little contouring because we're doing these curved lines, it looks kind of contoured, and it feels like the shell is curving, which is nice. Again, I'm doing really light pressure. If I was going to go heavy pressure, it'd be pretty intense. It'd be like that. So I'm doing like super light pressure, just kind of in there. So we have this nice subtle kind of contouring and texture. And then we can even come back in with our gritty tilt liner, maybe go a little bit lighter and add some fun little kind of dots. This will kind of be like a design element that will add to the snail and a shell, adding some little fun dots to kind of give it a little style and kind of a fun texture as well. So we'll kind of keep all the dots on the highlight edge, so they'll be on the kind of outside opposite to where the shadows are. Just doing real quick little marks. There's our fun little shell. I'm still feeling like these lines are a little bit dark, so I'm just going to go to my hue saturation and I think they need a little more saturation, maybe a little lighter. You can always adjust. That's why it's good to put things on their own layers. That's looking pretty good. Let's work on our snail body. We're going to use the same method where we're going to use a clipping mask. We're going to tap the plus sign. Tap sorry, we'll let me do that again. We'll tap the body, tap the plus sign to create a new layer, tap the new layer, and choose clipping mask. Then we'll sample the color of the body. And then we're going to go a little bit darker, more saturated and kind of try that out. Go a little bit darker. Looks pretty good. Okay, so the details on the snail body are pretty simple. I'm just going to draw kind of a line across the bottom and then like little marks. This is kind of meant to in a stylistic way, show the bottom, you know, that kind of wavy edge of a snail's body where it touches the ground. So that's kind of what this is. And then we'll also add little dots, you know, just so we kind of have that consistency in the piece. Again, this is just, like, a stylistic choice. Adding these little marks. Very cute. Maybe some on the tail. Okay. All right, so that's all the details for the body. Let's now focus in on the face. So we're going to do the face. Let's create a new layer above the body and the body details layer, and we'll start to work on the face. So I'm going to choose not quite black, maybe like almost blackish brown for the color of the eyes. And I'm going to zoom in and maybe go a little smaller with my brush size. I'm at 13%. And I'm going to draw the eyes. With the gritty tilt liner, I'm still using Gritty Tilt liner. And then I'm also going to do the mouth like that. And then I'm going to do the glasses, as well. For that, I can actually just sample the red color that I've already used for the mushrooms, and that'll bring in some consistency into the piece. So when you can, you know, reuse colors in your piece, and that'll help it feel more cohesive. So let's go ahead and draw the glasses. So cute. Maybe I'll draw them a little farther apart so I can draw the little line in between here. I'll scoot this one over. And then this one can be a little farther apart and then a little line in between. It's very little. That's okay. Okay, so there's my little I'ma do it one more time. There we go. Okay, so he's got his cute little glasses. There's just a few more details that we're going to add to this. We're going to now zoom in and pay attention to our grass. I'm feeling like the grass is a little bright, so I'm going to actually use my adjustments to change it. I'm going to slick the grass layer, go up to my adjustments and choose hue saturation brightness. G to darken it a little bit. Maybe a little less saturated. There we go. I don't know. You can always adjust if you want. But now let's make a new layer above the grass. And this is going to be for all of our grass details. So we're going to sample our grass color, just like the main color, and then go quite a bit lighter and see if you can, maybe that's a little too light, but you want a color that's going to stand out against the grass color, and this is going to be kind of like to draw our individual blades of grass. And so for this, I like to just draw like little kind of roopings all over kind of randomly. You don't want them to, like, evenly space, but little kind of blades of either, you know, two, three, or four, little bits of grass. And I'm doing little fast strokes so they kind of taper at the end, like that. And then also add some actually, this is where we're going to move the layer because I actually need this layer to be above the body because I want some blades of grass to be over the top of the snail, so it looks like he's like, sitting in the grass. So I'm going to move this layer with all the little lines, the blades of grass up to the top. And this might happen to you. Sometimes if you move a layer above other clipping mask, it thinks it wants to be a clipping mask, but I don't, so I'm going to go in and uncheck that. Okay, let's try this again. Now that that layers up at the top, we can add some little blades of grass. Kind of that helps it feel like, you know, it's sitting inside, you know, in the grass and there's blades kind of popping up. We're going to do the same thing on this little mushroom that's popping out of the grass, just kind of add some little blades and definitely add some that kind of peek out over the edge of the, you know, grass shape. And that just gives, you know, the whole thing a little bit more interest, breaks up that solid kind of grass shape. So go ahead and add a bunch of blades of grass. And then we are going to add some stuff to our mushrooms. Here's just a few more things left to do. So let's start with our mushroom tops. We can actually use the same layer to do the mushroom tops, and all we're going to do is add some white little spots. So let's use the same kind of creamy white color that we use for the stems. And let's go pretty big with the brush. And you're just going to draw some little marks like this that kind of look like little white spots on a mushroom. Some can be, you know, bigger, some can be tiny. You can group them together randomly, you know, kind of however you want to do it. It's nice if some of the spots kind of stick off the edge like this because then it looks like, you know, they actually are sticking up texture wise on top. So go ahead and add however many little little spots you want to add to your mushroom. That looks good. And then do this little guy down here. Okay. So that looks pretty good for our mushroom tops. Now we just need to add a little bit of detail and shading to our mushroom stems. So let's find the layer with the mushroom stems. And again, we have Alpha lock on it already. So we already have this color selected. We just need, like, a darker version of it. So let's go into our color picker and get, like, a darker version. Kind of test that out. I might go even a little bit darker than that. And we're just going to use the s gritty tilt liner to just draw some lines up and down it just to add a little bit of texture and contour to it. Just add a few lines like that. It looks like the texture is kind of going up and down. And then we are going to add a shadow cast by the mushroom. So there would be a bit of shadow on the stem cast by the mushroom. And we're going to use a clipping mask to do that with a blend mode, because, again, if we just kind of shaded it in, we would lose the texture of the line. So that's why we use a blend mode. So I'm going to tap the plus sign. We're going to do a clipping mask and a blend mode. So we're going to tap this new layer and choose clipping mask. And then tap little N and choose multiply. That's our darkening blend mode. And we can try this color we already have. I feel like it might be a little bit too dark. I'm going to go a little lighter, a little more gray, kind of test it out. That looks pretty good. But I'm going to use the toothy pastel to do these because that's what we've been using for all our shading. So you want it to be pretty solid, like, right under where the mushroom cap is, and it kind of comes down at a diagonal because, again, the light is coming this way. And we'll do this little guy over here. I'll shrink my brush eyes a little bit. You could add a little shading to the side if you want, but not super necessary. And we are just about done. Let's turn off our sketch. So go into your layers and find the layer with the sketch and just uncheck this. And we can kind of take a peek at how it's looking so far. I feel like this body might need a little bit more shading, so I'm going to go to that layer with the body. And I don't really want to use the toothy pastel to shade it. I get darker cook. I think that might be a little too intense. So I'm going to use the crumple texture. So let's go to the crumple texture. I'm going to select that color, go a little darker. Ooh, go a little smaller, too, and just kind of add shadow on one side. And then kind of underneath too. So it's like one side is kind of light like that. Just gives a little bit more form. And then starting to lose some of these details I've drawn. So I'm going to actually turn this layer with these line details into I'm going to turn on a blend mode. So I'm going to tap little N and choose multiply, and that's going to be really intense. So one easy fix for that is if you go to this opacity slider, you can kind of drag it back and forth until you get it like the darkness that you want. And then if there's any other, like, shading you wanted to adjust, you can do that, like maybe on the shell. I might come in with that crumple the crumple texture and just add a little bit more. You know, just kind of add those little finishing touches, tweaking it, if you want. Looks pretty good. And then there's one more step that we're going to do, which is to add some texture to the background because everything has all this great realistic looking texture, stylized texture, but the background is like computer flat. So I'm going to actually go to my background color and make it a little darker. And then I'm going to create one more new layer. I'm going to drag this new layer all the way down to the bottom. And this is where I'm going to put some texture for the background. So I'm going to select the background color and then just go a bit darker and we'll use the crumple texture. And we'll go pretty big. And then I'm just going to, like, tap and kind of just add some texture all over. Again, just to add a little bit of base. Texture, so it doesn't look so like computer flat. So that is the full Illustration workflow where we hit a lot of those brush categories. So we did sketching. We did shape making and coloring. We did texture, shading and linework. So as far as, like, a normal illustration workflow for me, those are the main kind of steps that I usually hit when I'm creating an illustration and Procreate. But then, of course, if you're wanting to add, you know, specialty brushes or add a glow effect or, like, fun little patterns, you know, with pattern brush or something like that, those could be additional steps into your workflow. But I think this one turned out so cute. And I can't wait to see what you all have created. So up next, I'm going to tell you how you can share your project and some final thoughts as well. So to share your work from Procreate, you're going to go up to the Actions menu, share, and then you can share it as a JPEG. You can save it to your camera roll or your files app or wherever it makes sense for you. Then I want you to go into the Skillshare class page. Then I want you to go into the projects and resources tab of the Skillshare class page and create a project. You can share your finished snail illustration, as well as any thoughts you had about going through this process, understanding the categories of brushes, any brush epiphanies that you had along the way. Or other things that you learn. If you came across a brush you're really excited about and you want to share it with everybody else, please put that in there as well. I would love to hear about everything that you explored during this class. In the next video, I'm going to tell you how you can share your work. 19. Share your Artwork: I hope you had fun doing the Illustration part of this class. I am so excited to see what you've created. Please do share your work in a project. So to share your work from Procreate, you're going to go up to the Actions menu, share, and then you can share it as a JPEG. You can save it to your camera roll or your Fils app or wherever makes sense for you. Head over to the Projects and Resources tab of the Skillshare class page and click Create a project. There you can upload your finished artwork and you can share anything else you want to about your explorations of brushes if you chose different brushes, notate which ones you chose and maybe why. And then any other brush discoveries or things that you've learned along the way would be really great to read in there. I can't wait to see what you've made. Up next, I'm going to share some final thoughts as we conclude this class. 20. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing the class. We explored a whole bunch of Procreate brushes, looked at what makes each one useful for different jobs, and then put that all into practice for our adorable little snail illustration. The biggest thing I want you to take away from this class is you don't have to memorize which brush is best for every situation. Start by thinking about what you want the brush to do and how you want your artwork to look and feel. Then pay attention to the qualities of the brush that can help you get there. And remember, you can always change your mind. Sometimes it means making a few marks, trying out a brush in context, and experimenting a little before you can decide if it's the right fit. I hope this class inspires you to explore some of the brushes that are already sitting in your appropriate library, especially the ones you scroll right past. Use the class resources whenever you want to dig a little deeper and get to know a brush better. Thank you so much for taking this class. Until next time, Happy Art Making.