Transcripts
1. Procreate and Real Watercolors: My name is Brooke Lisa. I'm an illustrator and a children's designer. Nothing can replace physically painting by hand. There's something so tactile about the real paints. About blending them together, moving it around with your brushes, it's so immensely, creatively satisfying, and that texture, it's really difficult to replicate digitally. But I love drawing and procreate. The Apple pencil and the iPad have completely changed the way that I work. But who says that it has to be one or the other, digital or handmade. That's what this class is about, taking advantage of both mediums. I'm going to show you how I use the iPad to create better painted artwork, and how I take that painted artwork into the iPad and mix it with my own digital paintings and then blend the two so that they're seamless. I'm super excited to share what I've learned and I cannot wait to see you, what you create.
2. TECHNIQUE 1: Painting Tips: For this technique, I'm going to be painting a flamingo and watercolor that I'm going to bring in to Procreate. Of course, you can be using this technique with any medium that you're creating with. Whether it's colored pencils or acrylic or markers or gouache, it doesn't really matter. When you are creating your hand paint artwork though, a couple of things that you're going to want to watch out for. Pencil lines, so especially sketches these are going to be extra work to get rid of digitally. Always draw them as late as you possibly can or better yet, if you're doing water coloring, you can use watercolor pencils, specially in the same color as what you're painting. Then you can blend that into the lines of the actual painted artwork. If you've never used watercolor pencils, they're just like colored pencils. But when you use a brush with water to activate them, they just react the same way as watercolor paints. You can just blend that into your watercolor painting and there's no lines at all. The other thing is you'll want to watch out that your colors are not so light that they're really close to the shade of the white background paper. Because in almost all cases you're probably going to want to edit out the background paper. It's going to be a lot harder to separate the artwork if it's too close is the same shade as the white paper. I always seem to end up with really light colors so it's not the end of the world. But if you want to make things easier on yourself, just paint a little bit darker. You want to take advantage of the strengths of the medium. You want to do things that are hard to achieve by digital paintings. Variations in color and texture, where it's a little bit darker and moves into a lighter gradient of color, that takes a lot longer to do digitally. Stuff like bleeds, where you have like wet paper and you a lot of paint in there and you drop it into the wet area and it kind of spreads out, especially like that on uneven spread, that's really difficult to mimic digitally. Same thing if you take water and you drop it into an area on your painting, that is a really cool effect that watercolor can do. That is not as easy to realistically mimic digitally. Now on the other hand, really flat even colors are really easy to do digitally. If you're using gouache and you want to try and get a really nice, smooth, even flat color all over, there's really no point in doing that because it's going to be faster to do that digitally. Of course, painting is very meditative and it's very enjoyable process to see that you can do that. But for me, when I'm painting, I want to take advantage of the things that it's difficult for me to do digitally and use that. Another benefit of real watercolors is that it's easy to get the paint strokes moving in the same direction of an object. For example brushstrokes that move in the direction of a wing or a lake, or a beak, that is a really cool effect that you want to take advantage of when you are painting by hand.
3. Scanning : I'm going to show you the scan settings that I always pay attention to regardless of what scanner and what scanning software that I'm using. I'm showing this using Mac's Preview, which has a scanner setting that's built in. You might be using something different but these three settings are the ones that you'll always want to be looking out for, and the first thing is what document that your scanner thinks it is scanning in? In Preview, it refers to these as "Texts", "Black" and "White" or Color. Your software might refer to it as Photo, but you're going to want to choose the "Color" or the Photo option to get high-quality scanning. Then the second thing you're going to want to pay attention to is the "Resolution", and at minimum you're going to want to scan things in at 300 DPI. You can go higher, it's like a magnifying glass, it's just going to get closer and closer and it's going to record even more detail. Typically I scan in at three or 600 DPI, and then the third thing that you're going to want to pay attention to is the "Format". Now I usually use TIFF as my format, but you can use JPEG or PNG. TIFF is a lossless file so it's not going to lose quality every time you open and shut it, which a JPEG will do. But a JPEG probably will be fine, it's unlikely that you're going to open and close and modify your documents so many times that you cause serious degradation to your file, but if you are trying to get the highest quality file that you can, a TIFF is a really good file for that.
4. Transferring from Computer to iPad: My favorite way of transferring scans from my computer to my iPad is using Dropbox. It's super efficient and it's free. You will have to download the Dropbox app on your iPad but again, it's free. I think you can have two gigabytes of storage, I believe, so you can transfer some really big files on there. It's a very, very useful tool. All I have to do is go into my files and I just find my scan in my Finder window or your Windows equivalent to Finder, and I literally just drag and drop it into Dropbox and I wait for it to upload and then I can access it on my iPad. The reason this is my favorite is that you can use AirDrop, but I have a lot of issues with AirDrop, sometimes it's just not working and also recently, I've been noticing that it has been doing strange things like compressing my files in the DPI and the sizes. I have resorted to pretty much only using Dropbox when I am importing scans into Procreate. When I export, AirDrop seems to do just fine unless the file is really large and then sometimes I have to, again use Dropbox to bring the file into my computer. AirDrop is still a super useful tool. If I go to my Finder here, I'm going to open a second Finder Window and go into the AirDrop icon and when it's working, it should pull up with my iPad. Looks like my iPad just fell asleep, so I'm going to wake my iPad back up. My iPad is relatively close to the computer. It's not in another room, so it doesn't need to be physically close. You do need to have Bluetooth enabled, and you need to have Wi-Fi on, on both devices. But it actually doesn't use a Wi-Fi connection, so it's not going to use your data. All I have to do is take this flamingo and drop it on my iPad and it will load up in there. It's a super fast, super easy way to drop files from my computer to my iPad. It's just that it's very glitchy for me sometimes. Sometimes I have to turn my Wi-Fi on and off and turn my Bluetooth on and off, turn my devices on and off, and usually I find that if my devices haven't been turned off or reset for awhile, it really doesn't want to work. So sometimes you just got to try turning it on and off again. Finally, you can also use iCloud to transfer files from your computer to your iPad and vice versa. I don't personally use iCloud, but it is certainly built-in for those of you that have a NAT device
5. Procreate Methods of Removing Background Paper: I want to show you how to remove your white watercolor paper in Procreate. Personally, I do most of this work in Photoshop because I find it a little bit easier. But I wanted to make sure that I'm covering this in Procreate so that those of you who don't want to have Photoshop or can't afford Photoshop, can do this in procreate because let's face it, Photoshop is expensive and Procreate is much more affordable. Let's dive in. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make my background color green. Because if I erase this white background and the background underneath of that is white, it's just very difficult to see if what I did worked or not. The first method is really easy here, you can just zoom in and start erasing around the edges of your flamingo. That's one way you can do this. You can also use your Selection Tool and trace out your flamingo. I'm going to just pretend I did the whole thing, invert your selection and use a three finger swipe down and Cut all the background in one go. I'm going to undo that. These are certainly super easy methods, but they don't leave a lot of room for error. I want to show you how to use masking to really be able to fine tune your background removal without having to be afraid that you're going to make a mistake. Masking is simply hiding or revealing a portion of your layer. We're going to work on hiding the white of this layer and showing the pink and the blue and the yellow on this layer. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I'm actually going to create the mask. This is all you need to know about masks. Black paint covers things up, and white paint. shows things. I'll do that really fast. Now if you use anything that is like a gray color on your mask, it's going to partially hide what you're doing. If I use black, it's completely erasing that and I just see the green of the background layer under there. If I use white, it brings it back that you can see this gray is partially erasing that. Now you always want to make sure that you are drawing on your Layer Mask and not your flamingo, because if I draw white on the flamenco, that's drawn white on there. If I hide my Layer Mask, that's gone, that's painted over. The way that you can tell that you are on your Layer Mask is that the darker blue is showing up on the Layer Mask. When you select your layer or your Layer Mask, since these two are connected in Procreate, is showing you that they're connected by grabbing both of them. They will move together, they like to stick together. But if I hit the layer portion of it, you'll see that the darker blue dots on there. Any lines or any paint that I'm putting on now is happening on the Layer Mask, and any paint that I put on now is happening on the flamingo. So I'll hide my Layer Mask and it removes that little gray that I put on there, but it did not remove that. I'm just going to undo that. The brush that you use is going to determine how hard or softer edges are. Let's zoom in here, I'm going to keep this black. I am going to use air brush, which is right here in the air brush tab. I have taken one of these hard air rushes and I've modified it so that there's no softness on the edge, like you can see there's some softness there. I just modified one of those and I'm going to use that. I am just outlining my flamingo over here, and I did that in black, and you know what, I accidentally went a little bit over that tail, so I'm going to come inn with white. I'm just going to restore that. You can also use the eraser tool to erase sections of your background. I've got a different brush than my Hard Brush that on here, but you can set it to the set a tougher brush as well. You could also use that and just use the white for restoring sections and use the eraser for removing sections. That's up to you, it's a slightly easier workflow. But back to the point about the edges, I used that hard air brush, and you can see this edge is nice and crisp and really clean. The thing is, you might not want that, you might want something with a little bit more texture, after all that's why you used watercolor in the first place. Another great brush is if I go into my Inking section, there's a brush called Ink Bleed, and I can come in here, let me set it to be black, and I can come in here. This is a lot more textured, so if I zoom in here, you can see there's a lot more roughness to this edge. It's a little bit more organic feeling. Let's say we'll just pretend that we went all the way around our flamingo, and we traced out the sections that we don't want to be there. What I'm going to do now in this closed off section is to just color drop in there, and I have removed that section. I'll undo that for now. I want to show you a more sloppy way of removing this background, but it's a lot faster. Sometimes I really need clean work, and sometimes it doesn't really matter, so I want to show you a quick way to do this. Right now I'm on my Layer Mask, I'm actually going to go onto my art layer itself, not the mask, and I'm going to come into my Selection Tool and I'm going to move into the Automatic section, and I am going to select all of this white background as much as I can. Now, that selection threshold, let me pull that up again so you can see. This works the same as color drop. Without picking up my pen, I am dragging to the left and right and I can select more of color that is similar to what I first touched, or less. As I drag it to the right, it's grabbing more of those light pinks, and as I pushed the far right, it's only grabbing more of just pure white. In this technique, I want to grab as much of that background is I can, even if it's removing some of this pink in the neck and leg and the head. I've still got my selection made, but I'm going to move to my Layer Mask, and I am going to fill this selection because it's selecting the same thing, except that I'm not on my art layer, I'm on my Layer Mask and I am going to tap the layer and I'm going to hit "Fill Layer" That filled all of that selection with black so that it hid all of that white background. Now I still have some missing areas in here, so I'm actually going to go back to my art layer, and I'm actually going to hide my Layer Mask so you can see what I'm doing a little bit better. I am going to grab some of this light pink, and I don't want to grab the background this time. So sometimes if you end up grabbing too much background, you're going to come in here, I'm going to get a little bit more really close in that pink. That's pretty good. You're going to grab some of the light pink down here, and I'm just adjusting my threshold every time I'm tapping to add another section. Now, there's a little bit of light pink there. There's some in the head, I'm not sure if that's where it was, but I'm not too worried about that right now. When I come out of here and turn my Layer Mask on, I'm back on the Layer Mask and you can tell because I'm on the darker blue of the two. This time I don't want to hide what I have selected, I want to show it. So I'm going to grab white, and I'm going to fill that selection with white. Now I have a really rough but also really fast selection of my flamingo without the white background. Now I can just by hand come in here and redraw some of this neck section. Make it a little bit smoother. It didn't get everywhere up here that I wanted to, so I'll just add a little bit more there. I noticed that there are some of my pencil marks from when I was actually painting the flamingo, I'll come in here and just erase that. Or again, you can use black and the paintbrush, either one of those works. Like I said, this is a really messy way of doing it. You can see there's a lot of little dots and messes in the paper, that was a smudge on the paper that are still in the background. But if I take my background here and I make it white, and except for a few things here and there, I don't really notice it. It's a really fast, easy way to do this work. Again, it depends on what you need to do with this. If you need to really thoroughly clean it or if you want to do it really quick. Now that I've removed the background, I can merge my layer and Layer Masks so that the background is not just hidden, it's actually fully gone. Now if you want to you can copy and paste this into a new document so you can always go back and edit this, or you can just merge them together however you feel comfortable working. To merge these together, I am going to take two fingers, one on each of these layers and I'm going to pinch them together until they pop into one layer, and now this flamingo is on his own layer and he has no background. There you go.
6. Tips for Editing and Recoloring Painted Artwork in Procreate: Now that I have my flamingo art in the canvas, I am going to actually do a little bit of recoloring to this flamingo. I prefer a peachy color to this brilliant bright pink, I'm going to use color drop. Now I covered color drops pretty thoroughly in my introduction a procreate class. I'm just going to go over it briefly here. But if you want to learn a little bit more about the tool, you can check that class out. I'm going to take this darker swatch of pink and I am going to drag and drop it into a darker section of pink. Now you'll notice that it's not covering this entire piece of artwork in pink. That's because the color threshold is about 43 percent for this piece of artwork. Without lifting up my pencil, I'm sliding it to the left and the right for it to affect more or less of the artwork. That looks pretty good to me. I'm actually going to add some light pink into [inaudible] peachy coral color into the lighter colors up there. I really like that peachy color for this guy. Now, I did lightened up the leg and the nose and stuff and and I don't really like the way that looks. I actually want to have a deeper Navy color than I originally painted. I'm just going to do the same thing. I'm going to drag and drop it in here, but I don't want it to cover the entire flamingo. I have not picked up my pencil, I'm just going to drag it to the left until it is just affecting this self-contained portion right here of the leg. Then I'll drop it onto the beak, drops down to the lower leg. I'm much happier with this coloring here. The next thing that I want to do is, I want to reshape the bottom of this foot and this foot here. If you've ever taken a close look at flamingo's feet, they're webbed. I want to create more of a webbed foot. I'm actually going to use the selection tool in free hand. I'm just going to draw some arches in here. Then I will select this section and I'm just going to erase that portion. When I snapped back out here, I like the way that that looks a lot better. I'm going to do the same thing over here, just create a little bit of a cleaner arch. Yes, I think that has a lot more flow and movement on those edges, I think it looks a lot cooler. I've gone ahead and added a few more details, some lettering, same stay weird and a little tutu and I also added this cool feathered wings. I was just experimenting with, having a little bit of more detail in the wings. With the feathered wing, I will be curious to show a little bit more of that wing and draw the tutu so that the waste of it is further up on the neck. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to be on the tutu layer and I'm going to use the transform tool. There is now not just the normal making it larger or smaller, distorting it and skewing it. But there's also a work, and this is a puppet work. What you can do now is instead of just grabbing the four corners are on the edge, you can grab any of these corners in this grid and it will hold the other pieces in place while transforming the point where the mess was. As I grab these and bring them closer to the neck, I want to push this closer and it pushes this further away. I'm going to bring this in a little bit closer. I really have something that is now synced around the neck rather than around the waist. I can even move this tutu further up by being in the free form section of the selection tool and then being in a [inaudible] and then bringing this closer to the neck while still keeping the outward like splay, have the tutu.
7. TECHNIQUE 2: Using your iPad as a Lightbox: iPads are really awesome tools and they can do a lot of things. One thing I didn't realize for the longest time was that actually my iPad can function as a light box. I like to do sketches and procreate a lot of times and it's really easy for me to undo and redo something. I can rearrange these elements really easily. I can stretch something out. Maybe I wanted the turtle down here and the whale up here, it would be really easy to do that digitally, especially in procreate, and then I could just take my watercolor paper, put it down here, trace it out. I could even create stand alone painted artwork from that. I wouldn't even need to combine the two. I can just use this as my sketch book and this as my final artwork. But if you do want to create some watercolor textures in here and then combine them with your sketch, there's a couple of things that you can do to make that process a little bit smoother. The first thing you might have noticed is that when I put this down here, you can't see anything, and the biggest reason for that is that I'm actually in a very well lit room right now. If I was in a dark room or if it was evening time, you would probably be able to see the light from the iPad coming through this paper. If you do want to use the iPad as the light box, being in a darker will help. But for those of you who do not like to live in a cave or work strictly in the dark, there's a couple of things that you can do to help yourself out. What I'm going to do first is I'm going to swipe all the way up here, and this is going to bring up my brightness and I'm going to bump the brightness all the way up on my iPad and still not yet. The key here is that you have a really strong contrast between your background and your sketches. I have my sketches on their own layer here. If I have this light blue on a white background, it would be really difficult to see. I wanted to make this black and white. Another thing you can try is actually making your sketches white and your background black. I've just created a quick cheat sheet like that. Nope, still no dice. But, depending on your light, that might be helpful. I do go over how do you change the colors on the layer? I'll just show you really quickly, if you have the Alpha lock, I'm using two fingers to swipe to create the Alpha lock, and I'm turning this on and off. You can see that is a separate layer, and then I tap here and I hit 'Fill Layer'. Then I can change the color of that. I'll undo that. I do go over all of the functions of using procreate in my procreate class if you want to check that out. But that's basically the basics of that. I'm going to turn the lights down so that you can see what I'm doing. Now that I've turn the lights down, we can finally see our light box in action. I have this thick watercolor paper on top of my iPad and I can still zoom in. I can still use my fingers. The iPad can still feel my fingers through the watercolor sheet, which is pretty impressive. In theory, I could zoom in here and whatever element I wanted to be water colored, I could use the sheet to paint that whole thing, so I could paint this whole orca or the whole manatee. But to save time, I am actually going to be painting all of these on one sheet. When I import that watercolors sheet with all of the different animals on there, I want it to line up really well with this sketch so that I spend the least amount of time rearranging and making sure that they're perfectly lined up with the sketches and the details in there. I'm not going to be perfect, but I want to make it as close as I can. I'm not a machine, I'm not going to be perfect. The first thing to making this easier, the more space of paper that I use, the more I can get really exact about that and the more detail I can add into this. If I'm doing this sketch horizontally, I'm not going to be taking advantage of the real estate that I have here. I'm going to actually turn this sideways, and the other thing is, let's say I've got this sideways and I accidentally bumped the Canvas and I accidentally zoom in or accidentally push it around, how do I make sure that I'm staying consistent? What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to use this cool gesture and it is called snap to Canvas. I am using two fingers and I'm snapping them together, and it fills the Canvas proportionally, so it fills it all the way up. Now, one thing that you might notice is that it's filling up proportionally. It's actually cutting off some of this artwork under this toolbar up here. There's one thing that you can do about that. If you hit the wrench icon and you go to the help tab and hit 'Advanced Settings'. There is this setting called 'Fit Canvas inside interface', and I turn that on. Then I'm going to, there's a little button here that says 'Go back to procreate,' and I'll hit that. Now, when I come in here and I snap it, it's going to do it proportionally. It's not going to cover any of this up with the toolbars. There's another nifty feature which is also really handy. I'm going to use four fingers and I'm just going to tap the screen, and that's going to remove those toolbars. Now if I snap a screen, it's going to take up the whole Canvas, which makes things a lot easier. Even if I'm drawing here and I accidentally go sideways, all I go do is come back over here, snap those two fingers together and bring it back, and finally, I am going to be using some cross hatches. What I want to do is I want to make cross hatches where the Canvas is. This is still just the interface of procreate, it's not actually the Canvas. I want just the Canvas. Because when I'm bringing this in to procreate, I want this to line up exactly with the Canvas, not the interface. Now, for those of you who were using a four-fingered tap to come back out of the full-screen setting. Four fingers in, four fingers out. If you were using a light sketch and you are trying to see the difference between the Canvas and the background, you might find it easier to come in here and go to the Wrench icon, go to 'Preferences' and turn off the light interface. I like working with the light interface, but if you are using a sketch, this makes it a lot easier to get rid off of scene like that interface right there. You no longer see it. It's very easy to put your cross hatch in there. I'm going to go back to the light interface in my dark sketch. A word of caution. Your iPad is an electronic and you'd generally should not be getting your electronics wet. It's probably not the best idea to paint directly onto your iPad while you're using it as a light box. I'm going to be tracing these elements and then I will be painting them.
8. Photoshop Method of Removing Background Paper: I want to now remove the background of my watercolor paintings. I do most of this removal in Photo-shop, just because I'm a little bit more familiar with it, and I'm not going to get super in-depth with this. There's a lot of great classes out there, on how to remove the white backgrounds of your painted artwork. I am just going to try and make this quick and fast. The first thing I'm going to do, is duplicate this layer. I'm going to do that using a shortcut, which on a Mac is Command J. You can also right-click and choose Duplicate Layer and hit ''Okay''. Just do the one layer. I'm going to turn off the background layer. Now, I'm doing this just because if I make any mistakes, I can always come back and start from scratch again. I'm also going to come down to this little half circle right here, like this little half-moon. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to choose ''Solid Color''. I'm going to put a black background, behind this layer that I made a nameless art layer. So it doesn't get confusing. This is going to help me see what happens when I remove the white at my background. The first tool I'm going to use is the Magic Wand tool, and I can access that by hitting ''W'' on the keyboard. Or there is a little icon right here that's got the magic wand, that is going to bring up a toolbar up here, and we are going to be paying attention to tolerance and contiguous. Contiguous means, when I click on the ''Magic Wand'', it is going to grab a selection of colors as much as it can. When contiguous is selected, it only grab things that are connected. So it's only grabbing the green that is up here. It's not grabbing the green over here or the green and my seahorse. Now, if I recheck it and then I click on a ''Green'', it's grabbing it from everywhere that it can, over the entire image. I'm just rapidly deselecting by hitting ''Command D''. You can also right-click and hit ''Deselect'', but I like shortcuts. The next setting is tolerance. Tolerance basically means this is how much of a color it's going to select. So if I hit the White, my background at 32, this is actually grabbing quite a lot of stuff. You can see actually as well, that the side of my Manta ray and my manatee and my orca, they're all also being grabbed. So if I were to hit delete right now, it would remove all of that selection and reveal the black layer that we made before, underneath of it. So I'm going to undo that and deselect. I am going to try and not grab some of these light colors. So if you really want to set yourself up for success, you will paint not that light of colors because it'll just be a lot faster and easier to remove your backgrounds. But if you need to have those light colors, and I always seem to end up with light colors. We can lower the tolerance. So if I knock this down to 12, when I come in here and select, this is grabbing a lot less. It's still grabbing a few things inside of here, but it's not grabbing nearly as much. So the goal here is to get as much of the background and as little of the artwork as possible. So I'm getting up the tolerance to 23. I'm going to click around in here. That looks really good except for if I delete this, it's going to leave a lot of mess around the tail and that's going to be a lot harder to clamp, than what I have in mind. So, when we get some theme like this is a lot more clean around all of the edges. I just have some selections in these really lightweight areas. So, what I'm going to use to clean that up is the quick select tool. So if I go over to my wand tool on the toolbar, there's a little arrow in the corner, and if I just hold on to that tool, it's going to pop up a little menu here, and, I'm going to be switching from the magic wand tool to the quick select tool. If you didn't realize, you can add and subtract from your selections. So if you hold the ''Shift key'', you can add to your selections, and if you hold onto the ''Option'' or ''Alt key'', you will subtract from your selections, and so I'm going to zoom in here. The nifty thing about this quick select tool, is that it just acts as a brush and it intuitively knows what you're trying to do. So I just hold the ''Option and Alt key'' and just brushed over that, and it took out that really pale blue. So I'm going do the same thing here. Think about it. Just a little bit better. I'll do the same thing over here, into his belly. I actually want this section to be selected. So I'm going to add to the selection by holding the Shift key and just brushing in that area. Here we go, now, it's pretty good. If I hit ''Delete'', that did a pretty good job of cleaning up all of those edges. The problem is that was deceptive. If I zoom in here, there is all kinds of crap still on this background layer. So luckily, there is a way to clean this up really quickly. So if I go over to my art layer, and you might have some nail rather than a brush icon, but click either the thumbnail or the brush icon, while holding commands. So Command click, that is going to select all of the pixels on this layer. So you can see it's grabbing all of these guys in there. What I want to do is, I'm going to select, modify, and I'm going to smooth this selection, and what that's going to do is it's going to smooth the edges of this, and in turn, because it's smoothing it, for these tiny little small pixel dots in here, it's going to move them. So I'm going to go pretty extreme here. Normally, I just go with like five or three, but in this case I'm going big. When I click on there, it has removed that selection. So if I hit ''Delete'' right now, it's going to delete all of my artwork. So that's not what we want to do. What we want do an inverse, this selection. So I'm going to select inverse and there's this shortcut right here and you can just hit ''Command Shift I''. That will inverse the selection and I'll hit ''Delete''. Now it's removed all of that little crap out there. We still need to clean this guy up over here, the edge of the scan. So I am going to hit my marquee tool that's ''M''. I'm just going to come here and I'm going to drag and delete. There's a little issue there, I'm going to delete that too. I can see that there's just a couple of things, probably from those cross hatches, which we have now deleted. So we're going to come back in here, and remember how we save that background layer? We'll, we're going to use that again. So I'm going to create another Duplicate Layer again, you can hit right-click ''Duplicate Layer''. I'm going to drag that above the black background. I'm going to turn it on, and I am going to use the Marquee tool now to save those cross hatches. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to duplicate this layer, but it's just actually going to duplicate the portion that I have selected. I'm going to hit ''Command J'' and I'll delete this background copy that I just made. You [inaudible] delete background copy. Now that I have my cross hatches on one layer, the art on another layer. I want to transfer this over to procreate. The whole point was that the background was removed, it was transparent. So I need to make sure that I turn the color fill off. Either I delete it or I just turn right there off, and then this checkerboard means that, it is transparent. There's a transparent background. Now, I just need to save the files. I'm going to go to File, Save As, and I want to save this as a PNG, If I were to send a JPEG, it would take the background and turn it white, and I don't want to do that. I want the background should be transparent. So I'm going to choose a PNG and I will hit save.
9. Aligning the Scan in Procreate: I'm now going to import my painted artwork into my sketch. So, I'll hit the wrench icon, and I'm in the image tab and I'll hit insert file. I'm getting my image from Dropbox, so I make sure that I'm in the Dropbox in the locations, and there is my artwork. Now, because I had the sketch layer selected, this inserted the file on top of that. While that's totally fine, it's a little bit easier for me if the sketch's layer is underneath or if that the painted artwork is underneath of the sketch layer, it just helps me to be able to line things up visually a little bit easier. What I'm going to do, I want to make all of my transformations in one move so that it's not resizing again and again and pixelating my painted artwork. What I want to do is I'm going to create a layer and I'm going to drag it underneath of my sketch layer. Now I'm going to insert that file again. Now it is underneath the sketch layer. Now once that we've inserted this here, it has activated the Transform tool. If I try and zoom in here to check out my cross hatches that I drew, it's going to scale the artwork. I'm going to undo that by using two fingers to tap. What I'm going to do to move around the Canvas is I'm going to hold one finger on the Transform tool right here and then I can pinch and zoom in and move around my canvas. Okay? I want to be making as many of these moves at the same time because if I move this one cross hatch to the corner of my Canvas to line it up. Then I exit the Transform tool. This cross hatch over here has left the canvas balance. Anytime that I leave the canvas, it's going to crop the artwork. So, I'm not going to be able to get that edge of the cross hatch to be able to line it up over here. I need to make sure that I'm doing this all in one go. I [inaudible] insert it back in here. Normally when I'm transforming things, I usually have the magnetics turned on, but in this case I want to have it turned off so that I can move this really freely and easily. Magnetic keeps things in proportion but in this case, I'm not so worried about keeping things in proportion because these cross hatches are going to help me keep things in proportion. Now, as I move one of these edges, it also moves the other corners over here. If I put this over here and I try and move this back, it keeps moving that one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold onto this blue node for a second and then it's going to activate and it's going to say, "Oh, you only want to move that one, we're going to keep all these other ones still. " That way, I can come in here and I can really line it up exactly. Click and hold on that one. Now it's just moving the one. I'm lining those cross hatches up very closely to the edge of the canvas. Now that I've lined all of these up, looks like this one got adjusted a little bit, maybe I didn't hold the other one down right there. Okay. That looks pretty good. Now, if I want to eyeball it now I can do that. For example, if you like this is a little bit off, so if I hold onto this one, I'm just moving this one guy right here, I can move it so that the watercolor areas more closely fitting underneath of here. Exit this guy. Now, one thing I noticed for sure is that I did not trace or paint my seahorse exactly perfectly. So, I know that this just is not going to fit the sketch perfectly. I knew that was likely to happen. Again, I'm not a machine. I am a human being and I am just a free-flowing in this. I can also see that, well my manatee and Orca have lined up really well. The turtle is a little bit off. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to select this sketch layer and I will just move the sketch portion of that turtle back just a little bit and move him back. He lines up pretty well there. Pretty easy to do. I think this looks pretty good.
10. Mixing Mediums: Adding Digital Details to Your Art: I want to start adding the details for my sketch onto my painted artwork here. I'm going to be using blending modes to create a lot more depth and complexity to my painting. I'm going to show you why. I just turned off my sketch layer and I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to paint on some of those dots that we saw before. Using a textured brush in here, I'm just using the artistic Gesinski, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong ink brush and I'll also use a hard brush. You can really see what I'm talking about here. This Gesinski brush has some texture to it. It does look nice, it blends in pretty well but when I tap on this N, it's going to open up my blending modes. If I hit "Multiply", now it's really showing me the range of colors. I'm seeing, the light of this and the dark of this from the original watercolor painting in here. It adds depth and complexity to your artwork and it looks like it blends in. It doesn't look like it's just digitally sketched on top of here. I am going to be using blending modes to add details to my artwork. As I start working on details, the first thing I want to do is turn it down the opacity on my sketch layer so that I can see what I'm doing. I'll add a new layer and I'm going to add some lightness into these dots in the turtles face and in his arm. I'm going to be using the screen blend mode, which is an under lighten and screen. Screen and multiply are very similar. Screen it just lightens the color that you are drawing on top of and the reason I like to use it is I can just sample a light color of this green that's already in the turtle and it will create a lighter shade of exactly that color. That is super nice because it takes a few decisions away from me. I don't think I have to think about like, oh, what color of green do I want to lighten this up by. It's nice to limit the colors that are in your palate when you're doing artwork. It is a little less distracting and when you have a limited color palette it can draws your eye in a little bit more. I can just draw some of these in really quickly. Now that was all fine for doing just the details inside of there but I want to get something that's really defined. I want to add some highlights on this side of the ridges of the turtle. I'm going to use my selection tool and free hand and I'm just going to draw those loops. Now I think you can see, I'll turn this off so you can see. Now I just have this selection in here. When I come in here to draw, its only going out well, you can't see if I hit the "N" correlate on there is drawn but it's only going to draw within those bounds. I don't want it to be super harsh of an edge so I'm going to undo that a little bit and I'm going to just like really lightly fill that in and I want it to be a harsh edge, too much of a harsher edge. I'll make the size of this a little bit bigger and I'll turn the selection tool off. That looks cool. I think it'll look really nice when I put the darker edges in there. The next thing I want to do is I want to add some lightness to this seahorses belly. But again, I don't want to draw outside of the lines. Even though you can't see it on this white background, if I were to turn this background into a blue and then be drawing like this, that wouldn't look so great. What I'm going to do is I am going to select the painted layer and I'm going to do that by using two fingers and holding on here and that going to automatically select it. You could also hit the "Layer" and hit "Select", but I like to use shortcuts because it's faster. Then you can come in here and just create just that belly. I will turn on my sketch so I can actually see at the top here. I want it to be all the way out there and you can do sketch inside their underside. Here is my sea horse. I'm going to turn my background back to pure white. That's starting to come along. I'm thinking that this looks weird without the dark portion in so let's start adding the dark portion of the turtle in here. I'm going to be using multiply and like I said, screen and multiply are really similar. What I'm going to do, and I'm going to grab a darker color of the turtle in here and then I'll start adding these ridges. As you can see, just adds nice dark green that matches the green that is already there. I'm going to add in turn the sketch on so I can see a little bit better what I'm doing and I'm going to add just a ridge. Cool. I like the way that this turtle shell is looking, but I feel like it needs to be a little bit darker on this backside, especially to make these ridges pop a little bit. I don't want to come in here and just draw that end. That doesn't look very good to me. I want to use more of a textured brush. I'm going to go to painting and I'm going to use the old brush. If I were to just start drawing like this, I just draw everywhere. I'm going to use that trick again of selecting the painted layer and I'm going to start drawing in here but the problem is I am getting his legs and I don't want the legs to be darker. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be removing that from my selection. I'm going to come over to this selection tool and I'm going to hold it so that when I tap it, it doesn't remove the selection that I just made. It's going to keep the selection that I just made. I'll show you like if I just happen to you, it just disappears. But if I hold onto it, it's going to reload the last selection I made. Or if you lose this election, you can always go back in here and click "Select", and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I am going to draw the any area around the area where I want to remove it. I'm not going to touch this little gray circle here because if I do that, it's going to add it to the selection but I've got to get really close to it and then I'm going to hit "Remove from selection." I'm going to do the same thing to this back leg and they're removed from the selection. When now I come into my brush, I am getting some nice dark stuff back here. We are on the white layer. No, I knew that I was not on the right layer because it was just the same color of green. I want to be on my multiply layer there. There we go, look at that. That's a lot darker. I like the textural there but like it's got Canvas nice texture inside of there. I'll turn the selection off and I can see that I've got a nice background there. That looks a lot better and that looks really cool now. I don't know if you'd have to redraw everything that I sketched in. This manatee, I'm going to turn the sketch up so you can see, add some cool texture on his back. I don't want to have to just redraw that, I just want to reuse it. I'm going to select that by using the two finger hold on there and I'm going to turn it off and I'm going to go back to my multiply layer. If I were to draw in green, I would get a green color on there. It would blend. It would multiply the blue and the green together to create a darker color but I actually want this to be a darker blue color and just start a new layer. I'm going to hold and grab some of this dark blue and then I'm just going to fill that selection in. I'll turn this off. Now this looks okay but I wouldn't mind if it was a little bit darker and I want to show you what linear burn does. Linear burn does basically the same thing as multiplying but it boost the saturation a little bit. Let's see when here if you can see the difference between linear burn and multiply. Multiply just multiplies the color that's on top of it and linear burn increases that saturation. Of course, I could come in here and I could just choose a little bit of a darker blue and I'm just going to put Alpha lock on that so I can't draw outside of the pixels that I already drew on that layer, like coloring within the lines and I can go even darker. But just other shortcut, linear burn will just intensify your color just a little bit. I've gone ahead and added a few more details and the final thing I need to do is just to erase the little cross hatches that I left in here. I'll be going to my painted layer and just using bigger eraser, just erasing those corners so they are out of the way. If I wanted to change the background color to like a light blue or whatever. That's all clear.
11. TECHNIQUE 3: The Magic of Masking: I want to go over one more cool way of bringing watercolor textures into your work digitally. If I turn my sketch layer, I still have some details that I need to fill in here of these shells and seaweed. I have taken a sheet of watercolor paper and I've just filled it up with all cool texture. I've tried to make sure to get some water swatches in here, I've blended some of these colors together. You could do this in one flat color like you could just do the whole thing in pink or whatever, but I did want to have a two toned color in here. What I'm going to do that has been scanned in, I'm going to insert that file from my Dropbox. There it is. I'm going to bring this underneath of my color. I don't actually want this to be pink and purple; I want this to be blue and green. I'm going to go to the adjustments and I'm going to hue and saturation, and I'm going to bring this down until I'm getting a cool blue and green color. I'm going to boost the saturation a little bit and nudge the brightness down just a touch. That looks really cool to me. Now, I want to just point out really quickly that the reason this example is working is because blue and green are right next to each other in the rainbow, and so are pink and purple. Now pink and purple are on the opposite ends of the rainbow, but if you were to follow up whatever comes after purple, it would be red. That's why this particular example is working is because I was adjusting two colors which are next to each other in the rainbow and the colors that I used, the blue and the green also happen to be next to each other as well. Just something to keep in mind. The next thing I'm going to do is, I am actually going to separate the details from the sketch layer. I'm going to come in here and use my selection tool and remove those guys. Okay, so now I can just hit "Duplicate contents" and that is going to take my selection and put it on its own layer. There we go, now I don't have the other details, just the seaweed and the shells by themselves. Now, the fun can begin, so I'm going to make a selection from the sketch layer and I'm going to turn it off. I use that two finger hole to make the selection. You can see if I zoom in here that that is selected. Now, I'm going to tap my watercolor layer and I'm going to choose mask and check that out. Suddenly, this is all filled in with a really cool watercolor texture. This is not the only thing that we can do. If you remember from my last lessons about masking, if you use black, you will erase and if you use white, you will reveal. What I'm going to do is, I'm using a wash brush. This is an artistic and I'm going to make this a little bit larger, I'm going to use white to fill this shell in, make it a little bit smaller, do some of these details up here. Now also, in addition to that black and white, if I use a gray color, I will get a semi transparent, so the effect is just a lighter color, which is pretty cool. I can even come in here, so the back of that shell looks like I painted it with lighter colors. We can even create some separation, we'll go a little bit smaller between the curves of that shell and I think that looks pretty cool. It was easy to do, really fast, but there's more. Right now I have both the mask and the watercolor image selected. If I come in here with my transform tool, I'm going to move both of them. But let's say that, I'm just not so wild about the texture in here. What I can do is, I can just select one of these so I can tap on my watercolor image and swipe right on my layer mask. Now you can see that it's the only one selected. If I come in here with my transform tool, I can move this around and find a section that looks a lot cooler. That little water colors splotch that I was showing you earlier, that creates some really cool stripes on the shell. You can move this around and get it exactly where you want it to be. Though one thing that you want to keep in mind is that now that I have taken the watercolor off of the page, it's off of the canvas, it's cropped it, so I no longer have that. Because I had to change the color of this image, it would probably be a smarter idea if I want to keep adding this blue and green texture to the rest of my details. It'll be a smart idea if I created a duplicate layer of this before I moved it off and cropped it. I'm going to undo this, and I'll create a duplicate layer. Now I can move this bottom one. I still have this top layer to fill in the rest of the spaces. You may want to keep in mind, and the reason I can't see this is because it's on the bottom versus a top. Now that it's easier to see what I'm talking about, when the mask is off. If I have this piece above, you wouldn't be able to see how I had moved to the texture around below there. One thing that you might want to be watching out for is that this strong, harsh edge right here isn't being shown in your area, right here the seaweed is super funky looking because there's a harsh edge from this layer. What I'll do is I'm just going to erase that from the layer mask. Remember, you can use the eraser tool or you can use black paint.
12. Final Thoughts, Resources, and Class Project: Before we dive into the class project and other resources, I want to say a quick thank you. You are the reason that I make these skillshare videos. If you enjoyed the class it would be really meaningful to me if you would give it a thumbs up or even better yet, leave a review. Even as simple as thanks for this class, it'll be encouraging for me to hear and it helps boost the class in the skillshare rankings so that more people can find the class. Thank you. If you know anyone that would benefit from the class, please go ahead and share it with them. If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the community tab, and I'm happy to answer any questions that I know the answers to. If you want to learn more about procreate, my name should be somewhere up here. If you click on that, it'll take you to my teacher page, and that'll have the link to the class there. For your class project, I want to see you use one of the three techniques to create some sea creatures. That can be sharks or dolphins or octopus, whatever captures your imagination. I've included a download of the watercolor texture in the project tab, along with a few other resources, you're welcome to use that in any of your projects. It's always really fun to see before and after pictures. So I really encourage you to share any of your sketches or if you have a time-lapse videos or anything else of your process along with your final art. Always remember, include a link to either your Instagram or your portfolio site. That way if anybody's curious about your work, they can find more from you. I'm so excited to see what you guys create.
Brooke Glaser, Illustrator
