Procreate Basics 2: More Digital Sketchbook Techniques

1. Intro: Hi. I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman. If you've taken my Procreate basics, keeping a digital sketchbook on your iPad Pro class, you'll know that I'm a big fan of keeping a digital sketchbook. Using Procreate as a digital sketchbook was a beautiful way for me to get acquainted with the app and learn how to use it in my own work. As an artist, it's important to grow and explore and to try new techniques because you never know what's going to take your work to the next level. In this class, you will learn several skills and techniques that are fun and approachable and that can be applied to professional work as well. You'll be learning these skills in an abstract way by playing around in your digital sketchbook and then start thinking about applying them to the art you're creating every day. Each section of the class features a short breakdown of new techniques followed by a sketchbook technique exercise where you'll apply what you've learned. We will learn about quick shapes, color drops, layer mask, clipping mask, blending modes, and drawing guides. Then we'll do four technique exercises to practice what we've learned. Whether you're brand new to Procreate or a seasoned pro looking for inspiration, by the end of this class, you'll master several new techniques to be added atmosphere illustration arsenal. Head on over to the next video and let's get started. 2. Quick Shapes and Lines: If you're brand new to Procreate, you might want to start with my Procreate basics, keeping a digital sketchbook on your iPad Pro class. It covers things like choosing a document size and resolution, as well as some basic techniques that we won't be going over in this class. This class assumes you have at least a very basic knowledge of Procreate to build on. If you don't definitely go to the first Procreate basics class and get started there. In this class, you'll find one to two short videos demonstrating the tools we'll be using and then I'm going to follow that up with a longer technique demonstration video. First off, we're going to chat about quick lines and quick shapes, and then we're going to chat about clipping masks and then we're going to work on a sketchbook technique. If you've taken my other Procreate basics class, you know one of the reasons that I love drawing digitally is using my iPad Pro as a sketchbook. I just think that it is so much more fun and I definitely feel less pressure when I'm not using a fancy sketchbook where I'm afraid I'm going to mess up the paper, so I can play around a lot more. In this class, we're just going to be doing some abstract drawing, we're just going to be doing shapes and lines, and squiggles and stuff like that, just to learn some of these additional techniques. Then once you've learned the techniques through the sketchbook practices, then you can think about how you would translate that into using these techniques in your illustration work, or your design work, or whatever it is that you're doing. Let's get started with quick lines and quick shapes in this video. This is one of the most magical things in Procreate, and I use it all the time, especially in lettering work. This function allows you to make lines, circles, rectangles, and triangles with perfectly straight edges, which I know sounds like not that impressive, but it is very impressive. I find myself when I'm working in Photoshop, moving my work over to Procreate temporarily so I can use quick lines and quick shapes whenever I want to. I'm just going to do a really quick demo for you. Let's start by doing quick lines. I've just got an 8.5 by 11 inch document selected here. I'm just going to be using Procreate's brushes that come with the app, I'm not using any fancy brushes, these are all native to Procreate. I'm going to the "Inking" section and choosing the "Dry Ink" brush, which is one of my favorites and I'm going to show you how quick line works. For quick line, I'm just going to draw a line, hold my pencil down and you can see when I hold my pencil down, it snaps into place, and now I have the ability to drag my align around wherever I want it. Now once I let go, you see up here it says, "Edit Shape". I can tap on "Edit Shape" and now I've got my end points on my line, so if I need to make it smaller or bigger, or if I need to drag it around some more at this point, I'm able to do that. I find this to be really handy for lettering. I also imagine that it would be really helpful if you are doing comics and you need to draw boxes or anything like that, anything where you need to have a nice quick straight line. Now, because I have chosen a brush that has a lot of texture variation and a lot of width variation, you can see that it's brought that over into the line. If you wanted to have a line that didn't have that, you would just want to choose a brush that doesn't have as much variation in it and you will notice that you're going to get a nicer straighter line. Like with this one, I've used the fine tip brush, and you can see here I've got a much finer, more perfect line. Let's also talk about quick shapes. With quick shapes, the theory is actually exactly the same, I'm just going to draw a shape, hold my pen down, wait until it tops in place, and then I can edit my shape from there. Let's just do a circle, to start off with, I'm just going to draw a circle shape, hold my pen down, you can see it says right up here, "Ellipse created", and I've got a nice ellipse, I can resize it and pull it around if I want to, or I can let go, tap on "Edit Shape". Now when I go into "Edit Shape", I can have my ellipse which I've already drawn or I can top circle and it's going to make this a perfect circle for me, and then I can use my endpoints and drag it around if I want to and turn it back into an ellipse. I think that's super fun. You can also do this with triangles, so I just draw a triangle shape, hold my pen down. It actually created a quadrilateral because I had a little wacky shape there, but lets hit "Edit Shape", and we'll talk about these anyway. Now I can straighten that out, I'm just grabbing my endpoint, straightening out my triangle. Then again, I can grab any of these anchor points and I can move my triangle around, I can reshape it to be whatever I need. I've also got other options in a triangle here where I can switch my shapes over, I can add more endpoints and really play around, I can make different shapes, I can go back to the triangle and it's going to give me a perfect triangle, which again, I can stretch out if I want to. Then I can also do this with a rectangle or a square, so same thing. I'm just going to draw a rough rectangle, I'm going to snap it into place, I can hit "Edit". Now, I've got my endpoints shaped here so I can make this a quadrilateral, I can drag these around wherever I want to, I can tap "Rectangle", it goes back to being a rectangle, I can tap "Square", it makes it a square, and then I've still got my line, so I can pull this around as much as I want to and reshape it. Then again, I've got a polyline, so If I need to pull my end points out, I'm able to do that as well. There we go, that makes more sense, so I've just got a bunch of endpoints there. Yeah, so there you go, I can pull my shapes around. I just find this tool to be super helpful in all kinds of work. It's something that we're going to be exploring in this first exercise that we're going to be doing next. Before I move to the next exercise, I'm just going to go ahead and fill in the shapes. I've just got my brush still selected and I'm just going to fill in the circle shape with my dry ink brush, just scribble in some color in here. Now there is another way to do this, but we're going to cover it in a couple videos, so you know it already, you can go ahead and do that. I've got this set up now, and now let's head on over to the next video and we're going to learn about clipping masks. 3. Clipping Masks: Clipping masks are actually a pretty recent addition to Procreate. I'm teaching this class in Procreate 4.2 and clipping mask is as new to that version of Procreate. If you've watched my previous Procreate classes, you might have heard me complain about how Procreate didn't have a clipping mask feature and I didn't like it because I love using clipping masks in Photoshop. So ignore the previous ranting, there are clipping masks in Procreate and they are awesome. When you create a clipping mask, basically what you're doing is you're just ensuring that any marks you make on a layer are going to be clipped to the layer below that, which means any marks you make would be clipped to this circle shape, they wouldn't go anywhere else. I'm just going to show you what that means really quick. I've got my shapes here and I'm just going to add a new layer, tap it, tap on clipping mask, and you'll see now it added a little arrow and it indented this layer, which lets me know that anything I draw on this layer 2 is going to be clipped to layer 1. Let me just show you what that means real quick. Let's just pick a lighter color. I've still got my same brush selected and then we'll just make it a little bit smaller. Let's just add some lines to the circle, you see the marks that I'm making are only sticking to the circle and that goes for everything on this layer. I've got the circle and all of these lines on this layer. I can go in here on these lines and also add some patterning and some details, which is fun, and it only sticks to the shapes that I have, my clipping mask clip too. If I go back up here, I tap and I untap my clipping mask layer, it's going to turn off my clipping mask, you can see that this is no longer indented, and now I can see my lines that I've drawn, they're just everywhere. If I want to go back, I just tap my layer again, tap clipping mask, and now we're back in that nice and neat area, so that's awesome. What I love about clipping masks is that they are non-destructive. That means that I can add details and texture and then I can turn my layer on and off to see what I prefer. If I'm not sure about these details, I can tap and turn this layer off, see what it looked like before, and I can turn it back on again. I can have several layers of clipping masks if I want to test how maybe different details or different textures look or things like that. I can make a new clipping mask underneath here. Let's pick a lighter color, and then let's pick a texture brush. I'm going to go to Sketching and pick artists crayon, which is one of my faves. Then should say I wanted to add a little bit of texture here, so I'm just scribbling that in on my circle. Then if I want to see, what did it look like before, I can turn my layer off again and I can see if I want to keep the texture or if I want to remove the texture. In this case, I don't like it, so I'm just going to swipe and delete the layer or I could leave the layer there also as well, it just depends on what I want to do. Another thing and I really love about a clipping mask is in addition to being able to turn my layers on or off to see what I prefer, I can also move things around. If I have my clipping mask layer selected, I just hit my Transform tool. Now I have the option to move things to over if I want to, if I want to move them in a different position, I can do that. This is really fun if you've got any pattern or anything or just anything that you want to scoot around, this makes life a little bit easier. When I'm done, I can hit "Reset" if I want everything to go back where it is. The last thing that I want to show you really quickly with clipping masks is that this is a really great way to test out different color options for an illustration, especially if you've got line art and you feel like you want to change the color of it, this is a super simple way to do that. I'm going to turn this off, I'm going to make a new clipping mask layer. Let's say that we just want to change the line art on this triangle shape. I've got out my lighter color selected and my brush. Let's go back to our dry ink brush. Now I can go in on this triangle shape, and I can just recolor it. There are a few different ways to do things like this in Procreate, and just any digital art app like Photoshop, Procreate, whatever. I love that there are several different ways to do things, and this is just one of the ways that I like to recolor portions of my illustration because this means I can go back in, again, I can turn the layer off, see if I like it or not, and then if I do like, I've got the option to turn the layer back on. I love how this lets me explore, test things out, and really just do a lot of experimenting without having to worry about destroying my art work or really making a big commitment to colors or anything like that when maybe I don't want to. Let's go ahead and head on over to the next video, we're going to take a look at our first sketchbook technique, where we're going to be combining quick shapes with clipping masks just to do some fun color play. Head on over to the next video and let's get started. 4. Sketchbook Technique #1: In this exercise, I'm going to start by filling a page with quick shapes, circles. You can use any shape that you want to, you can use quick lines, whatever is feeling good to you. I just think keep it simple, keep it to shapes and lines and things like that. I'm going to stick with a pretty limited color palette, I think I'm going to leave over here in this pink magenta area in this palette. I'm going to start making some circles. As you work through your circles, if you do want to overlap some of them, which you probably will, just make sure the overlapping circles are in different layers. As I go through here, you're going to notice that I'm going to keep like my base layer of circles is going to be on a layer and then I'll make a new layer and I'll put my overlapping circles on that, and then if I want to have more circles overlapping, I'll put those on their own layer as well. That's going to help a lot with the second step of this process, which is going to be when we start using clipping masks. Let's go ahead and get started, I'm going to be using my dry ink brush again, and I'm going to be making some big circle shapes on this 11 by 8.5 sheet that I've got laid out in Procreate. I'm going to go ahead and speed things up for a time lapse, and then I'm going to come back to you guys in a few seconds and we'll talk about the next step in these compressors. I've got a page just generally filled up with some open and closed circle shapes. You'll notice that I kept each color on its own layer, so that means that this point where I'm going to start making clipping masks to add patterns onto my circles. It's going to be easy for me to manage that, and it's also going to be easy for me to manage if I decide that I want to change some colors. Like these lighter colored circles actually wonder if I would like them to be a little bit lighter than they are now or maybe a little bit more saturated and lighter, not really sure, that's something that I'm going to play around with in a few minutes. But that's one of the reasons why I like to leave some layers at this point, so I've got some room to play with. I think I'm going to add a background color, maybe just as light pink color just to make everything look a little bit more cohesive. Now what I'm going to do, I still have my dry ink brush selected and now I'm just going to go in and I'm going to start adding some details and some patterns and things like that. I'm going to create a clipping mask on my bottom layer here with my very dark pink. I'm going to select a darker color because I really want to have a lot of contrast. Then basically I'm going to be going through here, I'm going to add some patterning, we're going to do some lines, maybe some dots, some crosshatching, just whatever feels fun. I think this is, like I said earlier in the class, this is some sketchbook practice for your iPad Pro. This is a really fun place to be playful and maybe try some things that you wouldn't necessarily try if you were using regular paper and pencil because maybe you would be a little bit nervous about ruining things, but we don't have to be nervous here because this is digital and we can undo all of this if we want to. I'm going to go ahead and speed things up on a time-lapse here, and I'm going to continue adding some more details, I'm going to do clipping masks on all three layers of circles here probably, and then at the very end, I think I'm going to go without a clipping mask and I'm just going to add some patterns that are offset from the rest of these shapes. We're going to have a lot of fun. I'm going to go ahead and start at a time-lapse and I'll see you on the other side. We're all done with this sketch book piece. You can see here that I have added just some texture details with some clipping masks on each of my circle layers, just turn those on and off. Then I also did some extra details, I used a very dry ink brush from Procreate for all of these. Added some extra details on top here, I added a few more open circles and some line details, and then in the background over here, I added just a little bit of a white pattern because I thought it made it look fun. I hope that you've learned a lot in this sketchbook exercise. You should have practiced filling in quick shapes and using quick lines, and you also should have practiced using clipping masks to create patterns on your shapes. You can also use clipping masks to change the colors of things and to try out different textures as well. I hope that you've learned so much during this practice session that you can start thinking about how these techniques can be used in your own illustration and design work. Let's head on over to see the next video. We're going to be talking about reference layers and color drops, and then we're going to learn another fun sketchbook technique on our iPads. 5. Reference Layers & Color Drops: In this video, we're talking about reference layers and color drops. These are two things that go hand in hand. Procreate developed these two things for comic book artist, but it's also a pretty snazzy technique for sketchbook play and for other types of illustration as well. Let's start out, let's just make some line art real quick. I'm using the same brush that I was using before, this is my dry ink brush. Let's just draw a flower real quick. Just make the center circle, and then we'll just do some rough petals. When I'm doing my sketch for this part, I need to make sure that my line art is closed. I'm going to try to make sure that I don't have any gaps anywhere, and you'll see why, here in a second. Just going to draw a rough little flower, give it a stem and a couple of leaves as well. Awesome. If I wanted to add color to this, this is a super easy way to do this. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to start by setting this up as my reference layer. I'm going to go to my Layers, tap, tap on "Reference" and it's going to show up under my layer name here that this is a reference layer and then I'm just going to make a new layer. Because I have this reference layer here as Layer 1, what that means is that I can do a color drop and it's going to use my line art as a reference. Let's pick a yellow for the center of the flower here. I'm on my empty layer, I'm just going to grab my yellow, drag it across to where I want it, and now it fills in. Here's the cool thing, is this yellow is on its own layer. I wasn't dragging into this line art layer. My color is on a separate layer from the line art, which is awesome because I can change my color if I want to. I can use clipping masks and do any number of other awesome fun techniques. But because I've got this line art layer set as my reference whenever I'm doing my color drop, Procreate is using that as the reference. If I turn off my Reference right here, and I go back to this layer, it's just clear that, let's just delete that, we make a new layer. Now if I drag the yellow into this Layer 2 into the same spot, it fills the entire layer because that's not using this line art as reference. If we undo that, go back and turn my Reference layer back on, back to my layer here, drag my color, and it just fills that spot. Then I can go in and I can do the same thing for the petals. As long as I've got a nice closed off area of line art, it is going to allow me to color drop all the way around. Then let's also just do the leaves. There we go. That's awesome, right? That's a fun thing to do. In this next video, we are just going to be taking a look at how we can use reference layers and color drops to create a fun sketchbook page. We're going to be doing a lot of doodling and then a lot of color dropping after we create a reference layer. I think that you're going to find this technique to be really fun. I think that you're going to find a lot of ways to apply this to your illustration and design work as well. Head on over to the next video and let's take a look at this technique. 6. Sketchbook Technique #2: All right. For this technique, I'm going to start out by just covering a page with some line or doodles. I'm just going to stick mostly with straight lines, I'm going to do some triangles, diamonds, squares, whatever. I'm just basically going to be doing a lot of overlapping lines. I'm sticking with my dry ink brush, which I really like. This is also a place where just like in the last video, you can use quick lines and quick shapes if you'd like to, so we're just really going to be filling the page with marks. You just really want to make sure that you are on a separate layer. Make sure you don't have your artwork on another layer here. I'm basically just going to go through here, I'm going to make a bunch of quick lines just to cover my space as much as possible and this is just going to make shapes as I go, and then I'm also going to go in and just add some smaller details to break up the space, and just make this page really fun. This is a sketch book exploration class, so in addition to learning some new Procreate techniques, I hope that you're just taking some time to have some fun, play around with some colors and some shapes, and maybe learn something new that you're going to be able to apply to your work. I'm going to go ahead and time-lapse the rest of this. We're just going to finish filling out the space, just adding more details and lines. I've got my lines drawn in here, and now we're going to start having some fun. The first thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and set this as my reference layer. That means when I start doing my color drops, everything is just going to drop right in here, and then I'm just going to set up a new layer for myself. You can leave this above or below. I just put it below my line arts just out of habit. I've got color palettes selected, let's just set this one as default. Then let's start dragging and dropping colors. I'm just going to randomly pick some colors and just do some color drops throughout here. I'm just going to go ahead and get started on a time-lapse on this because I'm just going to be dragging and dropping my colors, and then when I'm done, I'm going to talk about some other options that we have and how we can incorporate some of our other sketchbook lessons with this lesson as well. I'm going to go ahead and start the time-lapse and I'll see you again in a couple of minutes. I have got this completed now. I've got my line art and then I've blocked in my triangles, rectangles, stripes, whatever random shapes that I've got here. I've blocked all this in with color. Let me show you another fun thing that we can do with our line art reference layer. I'm just going to make a new layer on top. This time instead of dragging my color over into the shape, I'm actually going to drag my color over into the line art instead. I'm going to grab my color here, I'm going to drag it over the line art, and then you see I've got this color drop threshold right here. I can slide this to the left or the right and it's going to make the color fill more of the area, more specifically, so if I go to 100 percent, it fills the entire area but if I go back down a little bit more, I can keep some of my texture from my line arts. You see there I've kept some of the texture and the unevenness and the fun stuff. I've got this on its own layer now. I can just keep dropping colors in there until I get a line or color that I like or I can come over to my adjustments and just adjust my hue saturation and brightness until I get something that I really like. I like the lighter color so maybe we'll leave that how it is. Let's actually just leave it black, that's fine. We'll just go back to the original line on color. That's just an option of something else that you can do. Another option is you can go back in and you can use your clipping masks again, and then I could go back in here with a detail brush, or with a texture brush like my artist crayon, and I can start scribbling in some texture, and it's just going to go on the colored beds, it's not going to go on my background color or on the black line art. Now I can also, though, go to my line art. I can make a clipping mask there if I want to and I can start adding some texture and some details to my line art as well. This is one of the things that I love about digital art as there are so many things that you can experiment with and play around with, and there are so many different techniques that you can use to achieve a certain look so there's no one right way to do things. It's a matter of learning a bunch of different techniques, trying out a lot of things, and figuring out what speaks to you, and what's going to work best for the kind of art that you want to create really. Then I definitely don't like that, so let's delete that. This is our finished piece for this particular section. Go ahead and head on over to the next video and we're going to start talking about mask layers. I'm going to show you a really fun negative space technique that we're going to be using for mask layers. 7. Mask Layers: In this video, we're going to be learning about mask layers, which are different from clipping mask, so don't get those two confused, but it's just another way that we can edit our work non-destructively. We can change things, test things out, get rid of things that we may not need right now, but still have the option to go back to them later, so it's a really fun exercise. What I'm going to do is let's just do a really quick demo of mask layers in this video, and then we're going to use that technique to do a fun sketchbook page in the next video. I'm just going to start by choosing a color. I've got my brush selected and I'm just going to go blob. For demonstration purposes, I always feel like it's nicer to start out with just some basic shapes and objects when you're learning these techniques, and then you can translate it into your own illustration work later. It's a little bit less complicated that way when you're just trying to grasp things with basic shapes. I've got this on a separate layer. What I'm going to do now, let's just pretend that this is part of an illustration, and let's say that I wanted to edit this illustration. Let's make another layer beneath it and let's just add another circle. Just so we have something else that adds a little bit of not really complexity, but I guess extra interest to what we're going to be doing here, so I've just got two circles, I've got each circle on a different layer, and I'm going to turn my pink circle back on right now. Now let's say that I want to possibly edit this pink circle, I want to get rid a part of it or I want to show a part of it, but I don't want to erase it because I don't want to destroy what I have here completely. I might want to have the option to edit this later. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to tap on the layer with the pink circle. I'm going to tap on "Mask." You can see here it makes a brand new layer that's called, Layer Mask, so clever, right? This part is really fun. I'm on my Layer Mask, you can see it's highlighted in the lighter blue color. I'm on my Layer Mask and I've got my Dry Ink brush selected. Now, I'm going to select black. When I'm working on a layer mask, if I want to hide a part of an illustration, I'm going to use black, and if I would like to reveal a part of an illustration, I'm going to use white, and if I use gray, it's going to give me just a transparency effect. I'll show you what that looks like in a second. I'm just going to pretend that I want to get rid of a part of this circle, I want to turn it into a half circle for whatever reason. I've got black selected and I've got a brush selected, and I'm just going to go in here, and I'm going to remove part of that circle. It looks like I just erased that, right, but I didn't. If I go back over here to my Layer Mask and I turn this off, my circle is still here. I was able to remove it without getting rid of it, without making any destructive changes to it, and then I can just turn that layer back on. Now if I decide I want to bring a part of my circle back, I'm going to select white. Because I have white selected and I'm using a layer mask, I can add part of my circle back in. I can have the entire circle back in if I want to and then, I can also go in, like I said, I can choose gray, maybe I can choose gray, there we go. Now if I color with gray, you can see it's adjusting the opacity, so it is erasing the darker color, but it's giving me some transparency here, which is another really cool effect that I'm getting. This is just the basics of using layer mask in your illustration. You can obviously use it for a lot more complex things. This is a good time to start thinking about how you might be able to apply the concept of layer masks to your own illustration work. What we're going to do next is we're going to hop on over to the next video and we're going to play around with layer masks just to do a fun negative space, painting exercising, in our digital sketchbook. Head on over to the next video and let's take a look at that. 8. Sketchbook Technique #3: In this video, we're going to be looking at our third procreate sketchbook technique for this class. In this one we're going to be working with mask layers to create a fun negative space painting. The first thing that I'm going to do is just for my brushes, I'm going to select, let's go to painting and just select any brush that's got a little bit of texture on it. I'm still using this pink, blue, and purple palette here, so I'm just going to stick with that palette, my brush is pretty big and I'm just going to fill in this space with some color. It doesn't have to be pretty, it doesn't have to make any sense, just block in some color here and you can layer it up as much as you want to, just as long as we've got some color blocked in. This is just going to be the base, for our sketch, we're going to cover this with black, and then we are going to use layer masks to reveal the pretty texture beneath it. Let's just pull a lighter pink just to get a little bit more variation and you can use any brush you want to. I've picked a brush that covers a large area pretty quickly with a lot of different color. Then we'll just add maybe a little bit more blue over here, get some nice variation, and then maybe a little bit more purple. I think I'm going to finish it with just a little bit more of this bright pink, so I think that's really fun. I'm going to create a brand new layer now, and I'm going to set black as my color. I'm just going to use the same nice texture brush that I'm already using, and basically I'm just going to make this entire layer black. Now, you can just do a color drop and just make the entire layer black if you want to, but if you follow my work, I love texture. I'm just going to really lightly go over this layer and does out some black, so you can already see some of the brighter colors are already bleeding through. Now what we're going to do is we're going to make a layer mask, and we're going to be able to erase using black and one of our brushes, and we're just going to draw in some fun shapes. Actually, let's go ahead and start with gray instead, and let's play with some opacity here. I'm going to just be using my trusty dusty dry ink brush here, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start blocking in some shapes, and you'll remembered because I've chosen gray, it's going to give me some transparency. If I choose black, it's going to get rid of this block entirely, and if I choose white, it's going to bring it back, and we're going to be doing that in just a second. We'll just take a look at what that looks like. I'm just going to speed up the video real quick, and I'm going to keep on adding in shapes using the gray. We've got this really pretty opacity, and then we'll look at adding in some more fun details in just a minute. I have got my layer mask created, and you'll see here I can just turn that on and off if I want to, and I've used grade this point, so I'm actually going to go down some black now. I've still got my dry ink brush selected, and what I'm going to do now is just add in. Well it's like tree, some branches or maybe were underwater and this is like jellyfish, and I'm just doing this over top of the transparent effect that we already have, and I'm also going into the black as well. I'm starting to see some of that pretty bright color that I have underneath. I'm just going to continue on making these little tree branch or tentacle shapes, whatever works, and I'm basically just going to go ahead and fill up the rest of the sketchbook page like this, and I'm just going to speed up the video a little bit while I do that. I've got my page filled up now. You'll see on my layer mask I've used both black and gray, so I have the transparency and then I have the completely erased part. Remember, this is what our original background looked like. This is what it looks like before we did our layer mask, just black. Then when we do our layer mask, we can see some of the pretty pinks and purples that we had on our background layer. The last thing we can do is we can choose white, and on our layer mask, we can go in and we can get rid of anything that we've created here. Black is to reveal and white is to cover up again. For example, maybe I just want to cover part of these dots that I've just drawn in here and make them look like little half moons. Pull those out. Then maybe I want to go back through and make my brush look a little bit smaller, and maybe I want to just erase or hide part of what I've done. I can do this on the part that is completely revealed and also on the part that is transparent, and I can do that anywhere on my layer. Then if I want to, I can turn this off and go back, I can delete this layer and start all over again. I can make any adjustments and changes that I want to on this layer mask as long as I'm either hiding or revealing something or just partially hiding, revealing something with my transparency. This is definitely something that you can apply to your illustration work. It's going to be really useful because as you know, we love non-destructive editing. We love being able to go in and change things and not have to worry about ruining the artwork that we've created, so I hope that this is a super fun technique for you, and I hope that you're already thinking about how you can apply this to your illustration work. Head on over to the next video, and we're going to be talking about the lasso tool, which is one of my all-time favorite tools, and then I'm going to be teaching you one last sketchbook technique in this class before I send you off to do your project. 9. Lasso : In this video, we're going to be talking about the lasso tool, which is one of my favorite tools in Procreate and in Photoshop as well, because it's a really versatile tool, and it's just one of my all-time favorites. I just think that it's so much fun to play with. In this video, I just want to show you a quick overview of the lasso tool in procreate before we move on to learning some other techniques and applying this to your sketchbook and procreate. You're going to access the lasso tool right over here. It looks like a little squiggly ribbon shape, is what I think it looks like. You've got a few options that you can select from. You can actually choose shapes from here. You can do an ellipse if you want to, fill that in with color, texture or whatever you want to. You can also do a rectangle the same way, which is super handy. What we want to do is we are going to be looking at free handing. That's going to be a really fun technique that we're going to use in this class. I also find free handing just to be really interesting in general. I'm going to do is, if I had a sketch here, I would follow that, but I don't, so I'm just going to draw random shape. There we go, buds, that's the simple version of the lasso tool. You can do this with any sort of shape that you want to. I can add to my shapes and I can also remove from my shapes, which is super handy. Let's just draw another little blob here. If I want to add to that I tap add, now I can draw additional shapes and it's going to create one single shape that's lasso altogether. Just keep going here, we're making an amoeba absorbs I guess, a blob, if you will. That if I want to remove, I can do the same thing. I can make a shape, here we move. It's going to remove whatever I've selected from that shape. Then when I'm done, I can either do a color drop or it can just use a textured brush and I can fill in the space. That's something that's really fun to play around with. If you have taken my lasso tool magic class for Photoshop, there are a lot of the techniques that you learned in that class can be applied to this as well. That should be the basics of the lasso tool and Procreate. Basically, what we're going to be doing for our sketchbook technique is we're just going to be using the free hand tool. We might add and remove some bits if we need to, but probably not. We're probably just going to freehand some basic shapes, and then you can also use the rectangle tool, or you can also use the ellipse tool here. There you go. We're actually going to talk about a couple of other things before we move on to the last video of the class. The next few videos we're going to be chatting about blending modes and drawing guides. Head on over to the next video and let's take a look at blending modes first. 10. Blending Modes : In this video, we're going to be chatting about blending modes. Blending modes are powerful tools, when it comes to layering color, and texture in your digital art. I'm going to walk you through the effects that each one will create, but I highly recommend taking time to play around with them, and see which one works best for you. To demonstrate that, let's just make a couple of colored blocks here. I'm just going to pick rectangle, and we'll just add some texture, and then we're going to make another one that we'll layer on top of it. Let's just make that one maybe a lighter color. Well, that's literally the same color. How about we try to just make that a different color? We actually get some variation here. There we go, that's a little bit better. I've got my two blue colored blocks here, and I've got them set up on different layers. I'm going to be focusing on layer two here, which is going to be this brighter blue that we just drew, and let's take a look at what blending modes do, when you use them. To access your blending modes, you're just going to tap on the letter N here, and it's going to bring up a whole list of things here. You're going to have options for darken, lighten, contrast, difference and color. Let's take a look at what each of those look like. The first thing that you need to know, is you've got an opacity slider up here, which we talked about in my first Procreate basics class. You can just use this opacity slider to get some cool effects already, but let's take a look at some other things. If we go to multiply, basically what we're getting here is, we're going to be able to see through this top shape under the bottom shape. That's what a lot of these are going to do, but you're going to get a lot of different effects. This is multiply. Again, you can use your opacity slider to make this darker or lighter. That's what normal looks like. Then let's go to linear burn, which is a very similar situation, except that it's going to make the area that the two shapes share, where there's any overlap. It's going to make it a lot darker, and more intense. That is actually a really cool effect as well. You're going to have something very similar with color burn. With color burn, if you have a white background, whatever is showing on the white background is going to disappear. Which is why this is disappearing, the rectangle is still here, if I go to normal it's still there, if I go to color burn it disappears, because color burn on white is nothing. You'll still get this really cool effect right here though, which I really like. I'm going to hop back over to normal, in between each one of those. Just so you can refresh in your mind what it looked like originally. Darken, really actually doesn't do anything in this case. That's not the best example. Let's pop over to normal again, and let's switch over to our lighten options instead. These are going to do pretty much what it sounds like they're going to do. They're going to lighten the options. On something like this, where I have a white background, again, much like color burn, the lighten options, are most likely going to cause whatever is on a white background to disappear. I've got this cool effect over here, where I can just see this little bit of the rectangle that I have. Add is going to be the same thing. It's going to make it really bright. Now, if I had a darker color background, this would be a different story and you would still be able to see the square here. Color Dodge, same thing. Let's go over to contrast, where we're going to have overlay. Again, a lot of these where you're getting a lightening effect, if it's on a white background, you're not going to have anything on, but you will get some really cool Screen Tony effects like this; difference. This one's really awesome, because this is where a lot of different color play comes in. See this is super fun. I love doing sketchbook exercises, we're going to do in a couple of videos. Where we're playing around with blending modes, and layering different colors and shapes. Just because you get some really unexpected color combinations, and I find that to be really inspiring,I really love this color combination right here. This blue and orange and this brown color. I love it, it's fantastic. Subtract is actually very similar to difference, and you'll actually find that, some of these are going to be depending on the work that you're doing and the kind of colors that you're using. A lot of these are going to look pretty similar, and I just really recommend that you take some time to go through here, and explore and figure out what works best for you. Personally, I have maybe two or three blending modes that I use all the time. I love using color burn, I love using overlay, and then I also love using hue and saturation. Which we're going to talk about right now. Hue, I don't know if you guys can see in the video here, but it just changes the hue of this little cross section right here. It's just almost like a turquoise color, and then that's normal. Oops. There we go, that's normal before I made a big blob. Saturation, actually, you can't really see it at all, on the white background. Color, you get a really pretty overlap again. Then luminosity, you get this gray scale overlay situation. This is going to be something that you're going to experiment with, in the last sketchbook technique for this class. It's going to be really fun. Just like with everything else in this class, I want you to be thinking about how you can apply these techniques, to the work that you create every day. How can you apply these techniques to your illustration work, or to your digital paintings, or whatever it is that you're going to be doing in Procreate on your iPad pro. The last thing that I want to touch on, is going to be drawing guides. Hop on over to the next video, and let's take a look at those. 11. Drawing Guides: Hi. In this video, we are chatting about drawing guides. I actually touched on perspective guides in the first Procreate basics class, but things have actually changed a bit since I filmed that, so I wanted to take another look at it, and show you some awesome things that you can do with it now. I've got my document here. I'm just going to go to my Actions menu. Under Canvas, you see you've got an option for "Drawing Guides", so I'm going to tap that on. You can see it already brings up a drawing, although we can edit this. I'm going to go to "Edit", "Drawing Guide", and I've got all these options that come up here. The first thing is, across the top here, I can slide this and choose whatever color I want my Drawing Guides to be. I'm just going to set it to a darker blue for this class, so you can hopefully see a little bit about what's going on here. You've got 2D grid which you start off with. You can use this slider right here to adjust the size of the grid. This is really awesome for lettering, or comic book layouts, or anything like that, I love it. You also have an isometric option which is going to give you your angles, which also, I think, is really awesome for lettering. Again, you can change the position of the grid, and you can also adjust the thickness of your lines, and also the opacity of your lines right here, which I thought was pretty cool. Then we went over this in the first Procreate basics class, which is perspective grids. To create a perspective grid, you just tap to create a vanishing point. You can actually tap to create multiple vanishing points if you want to. You can see it overlays your perspective right there. So I actually, for the next exercise, want to work with symmetry, which is going to be really fun. With symmetry, you've got a few different options. You've got vertical symmetry. What symmetry is going to do is, it's going to be whatever you draw on the left side of the screen, it's going to replicate on the right side of the screen. This is something that's really fun to just play around with, and it's something that you can also think about adding to your own repertoire. If you're designing patterns or Mendelow's or anything like that, this is super fun. We've got a few options. Like I said, we can do vertical, we can do horizontal, which is going to reflect top to bottom, we can do quadrant which is going to reflect in these four quadrants, and then we can do radial, which is going to reflect on these axes right here. It's going to do your symmetry in a circle, and that's actually what we're going to do. You can also move this, the center dot right here. Let's just leave it where it is for now, and let's tap "Done". Now, if we go over here, I'm going to go back to inking in my trusty dusty dry ink brush. Anything that I draw is just going to be replicated in a circle shape at this point; it's going to be replicated on every single access around here in a circle shape. This is really fun if you're maybe creating snowflakes or something like that for winter or if you want to create some tiling repeat design, this can be a really fun way to experiment. I'm going to go ahead and just clear my layer and I'm going to go back in and I want to edit my drawing guide. I can actually move my center point. Let's move it down here. Let's hit "Done". Now, when I go back in and draw again, you can see that my focal point has moved over to the left, and I can move it actually wherever I want to. There we go. We are going to be combining the last three things that we've gone over. That's going to be the Lasso tool or Blending Modes, and our Drawing Guides, our Symmetry tool here. I'm actually going to clear this off for right now. I'm going to leave my symmetry guide how I have it with my anchor point down here, go ahead and hop over to the next video. I'm going to go over the final sketchbook technique for you. 12. Sketchbook Technique #4: This is going to be our fourth and final sketchbook technique. With all of the new lessons that we've learned and Procreate. I'm going to start by turning my drawing guide off because I'm not going to need it for this first section. If you are new to drawing guides if you have used any assister drawing guide like the symmetry or anything else like that. Make sure you come in here tap off drawing assist and that's going to allow you to draw freely on your layers. I'm just going to start off by selecting the lasso tool and I'm just going to draw in a bunch of rectangles just randomly. I'm just trying to fill up the page is all I'm trying to do here. I'm not really focused on anything else, I'm just going to be playing around the shape and color. Then I'm going to go back to my painting brushes, just select a brush that's got some texture. Whatever you want is fine, however you want to do this is fine to a sketchbook. I'm going to make a new layer and now I'm going to do another layer of rectangles. I'm going to overlap these a little bit this time. I can overlap them, however, I want. Then I'm just going go in with my same brush, just going to fill in those rectangles. Then let's go ahead and do another layer of rectangles, and we're just going to do a little bit more overlap. Just do a little bit more overlap on the space where we're going to be doing our blending modes next. The more overlap we have, I think the more fun effects we're going to have when we start working on blending modes on these three layers. I'm going to select another brush you can select any brush that you want to, any sort of texture brush that you want to use is fine. I love how the textured layers when I've got a nice textured brush, but you can also do color fills or anything that you want. I'm going to turn this layer off, then on layer two, we're going to go into our blending modes. Let's start tapping around a little bit. We'll see what we like, I'm just going to try out all the different blending modes. Just so we can go through these again, you can get a feel for what they look like, and I really like multiply. I think I'm just going to adjust the opacity a little bit too. Then we're going to do the same thing on layer three. We're going to turn our layer back on, and we're going to go in here. We're going to start playing around with our blending modes. All right, I really like how the color bar looks there. I'll start opacity again. Let's go and let's actually add a background color. Let's see, so that's fun. Okay, there we go, we've got a background color now so we can see all of our overlapping square shapes where a rectangle shapes where we've been playing around with our blending modes. Now, what I want to do is I'm going to use my symmetry guide. I'm going to make a new layer here. Let's pick white as our color and then we're going to go back, and we're going to turn our drawing guide on. Now our drawing guide is going to be back where I started up. You can see my focal point is right down here. I'm just going to make this brush a little bit smaller. I've gone back to my dry ink brush. Now I'm just going to add in little bits of radial symmetry. You can see that time it doesn't work. So look at this it's not creating any symmetry at all. That's because I've gone in and I've turned off my drawing assist, so I need to turn that back on. Now I'm going to get my symmetry just like I wanted it. I'm just going to add in some little details. Just some more squiggles and some overlay. It looks like another little sea creature I guess. Just add on some more and then maybe one more little squiggle overlapping. All right, and so that's fun. Then the last thing that I can do is I can just set up a new layer if I want to. You can see here that I don't have drawing assist turned on, so I'm not going to get my radial symmetry, and I can turn off my drawing guide if I want to. Then basically I'm going to go in with my dry ink brush and I'm going to add in a few more details. All the techniques in this class are more about just playing with shape and color and technique and just really filling in space in your digital sketchbook. Not so much worrying about drawing the perfect bird or animal or human character or whatever it is that you're filling up your sketchbook with. This is more just having fun, experimenting, seeing how things work. Then once you see how things work, then you can get into worrying about applying that to your illustration work and worrying about anatomy and character and things like that. These have just been a series of fun explorations. I really hope that you've enjoyed these explorations. I hope that you'll head on over to the next video after this, figure out what date your project assignment is, and share it with the rest of the class. I also hope that you're going to have fun with this and general and that you're going to start filling up your digital sketchbook, especially if you're new to sketching and drawing digitally and painting digitally and you're brand new to Procreate. I think that these exercises are a great way to get comfortable with the app and not feel so much pressure. I knew when I started in Procreate, I was so frustrated because it wasn't exactly like Photoshop and I was so frustrated because I couldn't make the exact work that I was making in Photoshop. For me, doing digital exercises like those has really helped me get a handle on what Procreate can do. Even beyond Procreate, I think that the sort of exercises have made me a better artist. I learned a lot more about color, and I accidentally stumble upon inspiring color palettes when I'm doing blending modes and things like that. These are just fun, playful exercises, all right. I filled up the rest of my space with some dots just for fun. This is a cool effect. This is something that I'll do over and over again, I think it's a fun exercise. All right, so that's it for our techniques and our sketchbook exercises. Head on over to the next and final video and I'm going to chat with you about the project that you're going to be doing for this class. 13. Your Project: Your project for this class is to create a piece with at least one technique I've shared in the class and share your project under the your project section. The four techniques we covered are quick shapes and clipping masks, reference layers and color drops, mask layers, lasso blending modes, and drawing guides. If you're sharing your work on Instagram, be sure to tag me @Stephfizercoleman, and also use the hashtag #Stephfcskillshare. Share student work on my Instagram stories each Monday and would love to share yours too. Thanks for watching my class. I hope you had fun and I can't wait to see your project.