Procreate Basics: Keeping a Digital Sketchbook on Your iPad Pro | Stephanie Fizer Coleman | Skillshare
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Procreate Basics: Keeping a Digital Sketchbook on Your iPad Pro

teacher avatar Stephanie Fizer Coleman, children's book illustrator/bird artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro video

      3:17

    • 2.

      Tools

      2:22

    • 3.

      Why a Digital Sketchbook?

      4:27

    • 4.

      Setting Up Your Canvas

      4:16

    • 5.

      Interface Basics

      13:55

    • 6.

      Quick Tips & Tricks

      4:09

    • 7.

      Brushes

      6:51

    • 8.

      Layers

      8:36

    • 9.

      Color Selection Tools

      4:24

    • 10.

      Let's Sketch Together

      14:54

    • 11.

      Organizing Your Digital Sketchbook

      4:03

    • 12.

      Exporting Your Sketches

      6:31

    • 13.

      Your Project

      1:19

    • 14.

      Bonus video

      4:31

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About This Class

If you're new to Procreate or not-so-new to it but still not in love with it, this class is the place to start.  I'll walk you through the basics of keeping a digital sketchbook in Procreate from setting up a canvas to completing your first 7 days of digital sketching.  

As a 10+ years user of Photoshop, I went into Procreate expecting it to be a simpler version of Photoshop and when it wasn't, I felt frustrated.  Forever stubborn and determined to work my iPad Pro into my workflow, I decided to start small with Procreate by using it as a digital sketchbook.

Allowing myself a no pressure situation to grow more comfortable with Procreate was just what I needed and I think it will help you too.  Too often we expect to pick up our fancy new art tools and create AMAZING art RIGHT NOW.  These days I'm a big advocate of small successes that lead to bigger ones and that's why I'm hoping you'll join me on this digital sketchbook journey.  

Take this first small step in getting to know Procreate and soon you'll fall in love with it too!

What You'll Learn in This Class:  

  • How to set up your canvas in Procreate
  • Necessary interface basics
  • Several quick tricks to make your process simpler
  • Choosing the best brushes 
  • Working with layers
  • Organizing your digital sketchbook
  • Exporting your sketches
  • And there's a sketching demo where I walk you through my entire process from scribble to finished sketch

After This Class:  

  • Keep up with your daily digital sketchbook practice
  • Remember that it's sketchbook and it can be whatever you want it to be
  • Challenge yourself to explore new techniques in Procreate
  • Look out for my next Procreate class, all about color and texture(coming soon!)

Happy sketching!

After you've finished this class, head on over to the sequel Procreate Basics 2: More Digital Sketchbook Techniques to learn even more about Procreate.

Meet Your Teacher

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Stephanie Fizer Coleman

children's book illustrator/bird artist

Teacher

 

Hi! I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman, a picture book illustrator and licensing artist known for creating wildlife illustrations full of layered color and texture. 

One thing I'm passionate about, whether I'm illustrating a children's book or designing a series of greeting cards, is creating digital work so full of lovely detail and texture that it's tough to tell whether it's a digital painting or a "real" painting.  

I work in Photoshop and Procreate and have developed a style of working that blends both digital and traditional elements.  I enjoy playing around with pattern, texture and brilliant colors in my work. Animals are my favorite subjects to illustrate and I'm thrilled to be illustrating the kinds of books I would have loved w... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro video: Hi, I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman, a children's book illustrator, and licensed artist. For the past 10 years or so, I've predominantly worked in Photoshop, but these days, Procreate has also become part of my workflow. Because I have so much experience illustrating in Photoshop, I went into Procreate thinking it was going to be a mini version of Photoshop, and I learned pretty quickly that that was not the case. Procreate is more intuitive, and I think overall it's simpler to use. But when I first started using it, I just couldn't let go of the fact that it wasn't Photoshop, that I couldn't import my Photoshop brushes, and that I couldn't find brushes that worked exactly like my Photoshop brushes. I found the experience to be a little frustrating at first, and honestly I gave up. I ended up setting Procreate aside for awhile, but I am pretty stubborn, so I knew that my iPad Pro and Procreate were powerful tools that I wanted to incorporate into my workflow, and I was going to figure out how to make that happen. For me, the first step was just accepting that Procreate is not Photoshop, it's its own app and it's wonderful in so many ways. Once I came to terms with it not being Photoshop, I really felt like I was in a better place and I was ready to move forward with adding Procreate to my workflow. The way that I did that is I started using Procreate as a digital sketchbook. Because I really felt like when I went into Procreate trying to make a final piece of art, it was a little frustrating because I had certain expectations, and I was just having a hard time making it work for me. The digital sketchbook approach helped me get comfortable with Procreate, learn about the interface, and the basic tools that I needed, and then when I was comfortable using Procreate's digital sketchbook, I moved on to creating final artwork with it. That's what this class is all about. It's all about using Procreate as your digital sketchbook, and just getting comfortable with it as an app, and learning about the interface, learning about brushes, and all fun stuff like that. In this class, you are going to learn about setting up your canvas in Procreate, choosing the best brushes for sketching, building color palettes, understanding basic preference settings, working with layers, organizing your sketches, and exporting your sketches. Of course, I'm going to be sketching right along with you, so you'll be able to learn from my process as well. Challenge in this class is going to be to begin your own digital sketchbook practice in Procreate. I've created five lists of sketch prompts for you to work from as part of your project, and to provide an inspiration for this class and beyond. I'm also going to be sketching alongside you, so in addition to seeing one of my sketch demos in Procreate where I talk you through my entire process, I'm also going to show seven days of time-lapse videos. You're going to see seven different sketches that I've done, all inspired by the sketch prompt list that I gave to you. Grab your iPad Pro, and let's get sketching. 2. Tools: Alright, so before we get started, let's go over the tools that you're going to need for this class. Obviously, you're going to need an iPad or an iPad Pro, with the procreate app installed. So I've got that 12.9 and iPad Pro. You can also install procreate on just a regular iPad, although not all of the regular iPad's will allow you to use the Apple pencil. There is a new, smaller sized iPad that will be compatible with the Apple Pencil, but some of the older generation, smaller iPads, you just will be able to use a different stylist instead. You need the iPad Pro or an iPad with your procreate app installed. Then you're also going to need either the Apple pencil, which is this. Now my Apple Pencil, I've got this ergo grip on it, which makes it a little bit thicker at the bottom and makes that a little bit more comfortable for me to hold. You can find these on Amazon and it really improved the whole Apple Pencil experience for me. If you don't have an iPad Pro or an iPad that is compatible with the Apple pencil, you will probably want to find another stylist just so you could really take advantage of the painterly sketch booking sort of aspects of procreate. So one of the other stylists is that I've used, that I like is, a Wacom Bamboo stylists and it looks like this. Of course, I definitely don't like it as much as I like the Apple Pencil. But if you don't have an Apple pencil, this is a really good option to consider. So the other thing that I would recommend that you have that is a 100 percent necessary, but does make your life a lot easier when you're drawing on your iPad Pro is a matte screen protector. So I've got a matte screen protector on here already, and what it does is it gives the screen a little bit of tooth. So it's not so much like you are drawing on glass, it feels more like you're drawing on paper, especially when you combine it with the Apple pencil. So highly recommend it, and you can also find those, usually on Amazon, if you just search for matte screen protector, they usually come in a pack of two because they're kind of tricky to put on and you will probably ruin one of them while you're putting it on and the second one will go much better. That's really all you need to get started to this class. Go on to the next video and we're going to talk about setting up your canvas in concrete. 3. Why a Digital Sketchbook?: So you might find yourself wondering, what's the big deal about keeping a digital sketchbook? What's the difference between a digital sketchbook and a regular sketchbook? So I'm going to give you some of the reasons that I am loving keeping a digital sketchbook these days. Some of these are going to apply to you, some of them are not. You may have your own reasons that you want to keep a digital sketchbook. One of the main things I love about keeping a digital sketchbook is the portability. Obviously, you can take a regular sketchbook and a pencil everywhere with you just like you can take your iPad Pro in your Apple pencil. But the thing that you don't have with a regular sketchbook is the ability to have color at your fingertips unless you want to drag around tubes of paint or colored pencils or whatever else you want to use with the iPad Pro and procreate, you have the bonus of portability and you also have the portability of color, which is super important as an artist. It's definitely a thing that I love about using a digital sketchbook. Now I'm not sure if this next thing is something that everyone does or if it's just sort of a weird thing that I do. But I like to keep my sketchbooks organized in some way. So sometimes I organize them by subject matter we are going to organize them by a project that I'm working on. I just like to have some sort of organization so it's easy to find things. That's another thing that I really love about keeping a digital sketchbook, especially on procreate because it allows me to organize my sketches however I want to. So if I want to organize by date, like if I want to have all my sketches from a month together, I can, or if I want to organize by subject matter or by project, it's super easy to do that and it's super easy to find what I'm looking for when I need something specific. So it definitely love that feature of sketching digitally. Another big plus is that a digital sketchbook is not wasteful, and that's good for two reasons. Obviously, we want to use less paper whenever possible. We're artists, so we go through a lot of paper anyway. But the other thing that I love is that I don't have to worry about being precious with paper. So if I have a regular sketchbook, maybe I feel really precious about what I'm going to put on the pages because I feel this pressure that everything be beautiful and perfect in the sketchbook. If it's not, I'm the worst ever. So I feel like with a digital sketchbook, I have far less worry about being precious with paper. If I don't dig the sketch that I'm working on, I'm literally one tap away from making it disappear, which is fantastic. If you follow my work on Instagram or if you've taken one of my Photoshop classes, you know that one of the things I love about working digitally is how easy it is to modify your artwork. That's definitely something that I love about having a digital sketchbook as well. It's super easy to resize elements of your sketch. It's easy to move things around if you want to. So instead of having to erase on paper and make a mess and ruin my sketch, all I really need to do is just lasso whatever I want to change and then move it, resize it, erase it, whatever. It's super-easy to do. So that's definitely another plus of sketching digitally. Finally, I've loved keeping a digital sketchbook because it's transitional. So for me, that has meant that I've used my procreate sketch book as a way to get comfortable without filling a lot of pressure and sort of ease myself into creating final artwork and procreate instead of just picking it up, trying to make some final art and then being frustrated because it doesn't come out how I think it should. So it's definitely easier to transition to using procreate fully if you start keeping a digital sketchbook. I would also say if you're new to working digitally altogether, keeping in digital sketchbook will help you get comfortable working digitally and because it's a sketchbook, like I said, it's not a finished piece of art. So you're going to end up feeling more comfortable experimenting. Of course that's going to lead you to make better digital art at the end, and that's definitely what we want. So what we're in the next video, we're going to jump into setting up your canvas. Then after that, we're going to learn some basics about sketching and procreate. 4. Setting Up Your Canvas: Okay, so to get started, we're going to set up your canvas and procreate. To begin with, you should have your iPad or your iPad Pro. You've got the procreate app installed, and when you pull the app up, you're going to see this screen, which if you're new to procreate, isn't going to have all this artwork on it. It's just going to have a thing four sample pieces of art and a bunch of blank space for you to fill it in, which is exciting. I'll talk more about how I have this organized as far as my spot sketch book goes, and my other work, and procreate later on in the class. For now we're just going to go through the process of setting up a custom canvas. The first thing that we want to do is just hit the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner, and that's going to pop up our new canvas menu. Now, if you're new to procreate, you're going to find that there are already some options that are listed here. You have an option for canvas the size of the screen size, a canvas the size of whatever is in your clipboard, square canvas, a 4k, an A4 and a four by six photo, and then the rest of these are just ones that I've saved for myself. You can ignore those and I'll show you how to save those as well. What we want to do is click on create a custom size. I'm creating a custom size because this is my digital sketchbook and I want to make sure that it is 8.5 by 11 inches, so that it's going to be easy to print if I decide I ever want to have any of these pages printed out either at home or by ordering a blurb book to have it just saved, so I have a sketch book and it's not just all digital. That's just my preference. Here in the menu that pops up when we go ahead and select the option to create a canvas. Now you notice that it defaults to pixels, and I'm just going to go down here and I'm going to switch over to inches instead, so I'm just going to select inches. I know that I want it to be 8.5 by 11. That's great. You'll notice that my dpi is set at 300, so you can go in and change that if you want to. I'm choosing to leave it at 300 because like I said, I'm maybe printing some pages from my sketchbook, and honestly, I just feel like it's a good habit to be in to be keeping your work at least 300 dpi. Because when you start working on final artwork in procreate, just like in photoshop or anything else, you want to make sure that it's a size that is printable at high resolution. I go ahead and leave it at 300, even though this is my sketch book. My color option, I'm just leaving at SRGB for right now. Then where it says entitled right now, that is not the title of your sketch book page, that's the title of this canvas. If I want to save this canvas size that I'm creating, I'm going to give it a name, so it'll save it in my options. I'll show you that in just a minute. Now the other important thing on this screen is that if you look right here above the number pad, there is an option that says maximum layers. What this does is it tells you how many layers you can have at this size and this dpi. The higher the size you have, the less layers you are going to be able to have. If I change this to, let's just go ahead and say we change this to 40 inches by 40 inches. Now it says our canvas is too large and we're not going to be able to have any layers. Let's just change that to 20 inches by 20 inches, and now you see our maximum layers is 10. So we know when we get into procreate, we're only going to be able to have 10 layers. Now super important when you're using procreate as a sketchbook because you probably won't be using more than a couple of layers, but as you get to the point where you're using procreate for final art, it's definitely going to be more important. Alright, so the last thing that we do before we're going to create our canvas is we're just going to name it. I'm just going to name this sketch book page, so I have it for reference when I'm done, I hit done. Now you see it's made our canvas and we're ready to go. One other quick thing is let's go hit the gallery option in the upper left-hand corner, and then let's go back to our canvas options. If you notice all the way down at the bottom here, it's added my new canvas, sketch book, page 8.5 by 11. Now whenever I get into procreate and I'm ready to make a new sketch book page, all I have to do is hit the plus sign, hit sketch book page, and it automatically is going to make me a page that is 8.5 by 11 and I'm ready to go. 5. Interface Basics: Let's take a moment to just look at some basic settings and options and the interface before we get started. We've got our Canvas pulled up here. This is our a and a half by 11. Now, if we wanted to go back to the gallery, obviously we've just said the Gallery option, it takes us back to a gallery, and then we can go back into this Canvas by tapping on it. So we're just going to go across the options from left all the way to right, and the down the side of the screen. The first thing that you're going to see is your actions menu, and the first option there is image. This is going to be where you can import any photo or a reference image that you have, or if you're importing something from Photoshop or another app, you're going to do it here, either insert photo or insert a file. This is also where you're going to find the options for cut, copy, Canvas, and paste. I'll show you another way to access those in the next video as well. The next one over is Canvas, and this is actually kind of a cool thing in it that I'm going to show you. The first thing that you can do is you can just flip your Canvas horizontally or vertically, which obviously we don't have anything on here right now. We're not seeing anything, but if you're working on a piece of art and he needed to flip it. This is where you could do that, and we can also go to Canvas information, and this is going to tell us all of the information about our campus. It's going to tell us the size is going to tell us how many layers we can use, how many layers we have used. It'll tell us the video length of the time-lapse that it's doing, how many strokes we've used, the DPI, the color space, the amount of time that we've used it, and also the image file size. That's just kind of get an idea if you get in here, but you just want to make sure that you're at 300 DPI or that you are at the correct size, you can go to your campus information. The cool thing I want to show you here is the Perspective Guide. Right now I've got to turn off. I'm just going to go ahead and turn right perspective guide on. Going to go to edit perspective guide, and I'm told to tap to create a vanishing point. I'm just going to go ahead and just tap or random spots. So I've got my spots elected and I can actually move this spot all around. It can move off the Canvas if I want to move it up, down, whatever direction I wants you. I can also add an extra response. If I tap again, it's going to add another spot, and another spot, and another spot. I can just keep on going as long as you want to. But who would want to do that? If I want to undo my perspective spots that I can just go ahead and just hit undo option and we'll go back to the original. I can have undo again and it'll clear everything off of there. Let's just pick random spot again. We'll pull it up here, we'll hit done. Now, we go back to our canvas. You'll see that it's got perspective lines. If you want to be drawing something in perspective and you need a handy guide, this is really fantastic. I'm just going to go back in here. I'm going to turn our prospective got off and this will go away in a minute. What should be our next option and our actions menu is the Share option, and this is where you're gonna go if you want to export your sketches and you can also do this from your gallery page. I'll show you that a little bit later as well. This is going to give you the options to export either as procreates native file or as a layered Photoshop file, a PDF and JPEG, PNG or tiff. So you have all sorts of options if you're exporting, this is really handy. Next over is going to be the video option. This is going to be where you control your time-lapse replace. If you're seeing all those timelines replays on Instagram, this is where they're coming from usually. You just want to make sure under time lapse recording that this is actually blue and it's switched on. That means that anytime you are drawing in your sketchbook and procreate or making any art in procreate, it's automatically going to be time lapse recording. If you're doing a time lapse and you mess up or you just want to start over, here's what you do. Go ahead and do this. It's going to say purge video, select a purge. It's going to get rid of all the video that you've done up to that point. Turn your time lapse recording back on and it's going to start all over again with your recording. If you're halfway through a piece of art, that's where your time lapse recording, it's going to start. Definitely think about it before you purge the video. It's not something that I do often, but every now and then I'll just mess up so badly that I'll just want to start over like halfway through. The other option that you have is to start a live broadcast. That's just if you want to live stream somewhere like on tweet or something like that, and you'll need to have that setup to actually do anything. If you're drawing and you want to watch your time-lapse video, which is always to find, I never get tired of it. You're just going to tap on top. In the Preferences menu, you've got a bunch of different options here. Some of these I'm going to cover and some of these I'm just going to say play with them on your own, check him out. The first option that you've got is a light interface it so if I turn this on, it's going to switch to ligate pale gray interface instead of the dark interface. Either one of these is fine. I just prefer the darker interface because that's what I have in Photoshop. It's just what I'm used to looking at. Same thing here. You've got the option for a right-hand interface. If you turn this off, it's going to switch your brush modification options over to the left-hand side of the screen, and then if you turn it on, it'll swapping over to the right-hand side of the screen. I'm left handed and I actually prefer to have my brush options over here, so I'm not accidentally hitting them with my hands when I'm drawing because I don't wear like one of those little gloves or anything. I found that even though this is really great with palm rejection, it's still not perfect. I always find myself like accidentally adjusting my bras sizes and whatever, so you have to pick the one that works best for you. Then the same thing with brush cursor. You can either have it on or off. It's very much like Photoshop, and then all of these options are just options for how the brushes and different functions are going to work on here. This is just something that you would have to play around with, and I'm not going to get in too much depth about apps right now. The next thing that you do want to look at is going to be connect third-party stylist. If I select this, it's going to give me all of these stylus options. If you've got the Apple pencil, you don't need to worry about this because it's connected via Bluetooth, and it doesn't really matter. If you're using something else like that Wacom, [inaudible] stylus that I recommended you would have Wacom even turned her stylus on, and then once you turn your stylus on, it'll be connected here, and then you'll have your pressure sensitivity and all of your other brush settings that's just going to make it work a lot better. So edit pressure curve is another thing that's just going to be personal, and this is just going to change the amount of pressure that you need to put on your Apple pencil or your stylist to get the strokes. So maybe you want to press down harder, maybe you want to lighter. It just sort of depends, and if you have a santigue, it's very similar to going into your santigue pen settings and adjusting the pressure on there. Again, just something that you're going to want to play with on your own, and then the last option is going to be our advanced gesture controls. So I've got mindset. I said that my apple pencil works on whatever tool I have selected and so that my touch is gestures only. So that means that I can't accidentally paint with my finger or use the brush tool with my finger if I haven't turned on. The only thing that I can do is just like the two finger tap to undo and some of the other gestures by I'll talk about. Again, this is just personal preference. You can have all these setup how ever you want to, and then this is your eye dropper so you can decide how it's going to work. For me, I have my eyedropper setup, so I mostly do touch and hold. Again, we'll talk about this later. So not super important right now. Then the same thing with the quick menu. You can have this set up to pop up if you do one of these things. I don't really have it set up because I like to keep things as simple as I can. I'm going to close out of that, then the last thing on here is the help option. This is just where you're going to go into your advanced settings. Customer support can leave review, you can restore purchases, which is like if you've purchased brushes or anything like that. So this is where you would do that. So the next tab that we're going to look at on our interface is going to be the adjustments menu. If you've used photoshop before, you're going to recognize a lot of these options. The things that I used most frequently on here are the opacity, which I used to just change the opacity of a drawing or sketch or whatever I'm working on. That's something that I'll go through later with you when I'm talking about sketching, and then the other thing is that I use often our hue saturation and brightness, which can't really see right now because this layer is empty. I'm just going to scribble within brush real quick and just make a color. We'll go back in here. We'll choose hue, saturation and brightness. This is just going to bring up our hue saturation and brightness sliders, and it's going to allow us to change the color of whatever we're working on. So I can just drag these around, pick a new color saturated, and then make it either brighter or darker, and then if I'm done, I can reset it if I want to start over or undo it if I just want to go back. Then the last option that I use frequently under the adjustments menu is the re-color option, and actually to do that, I need to make sure that I've got my little scribble here selected, and I've got a new color picked up here. Let's just go to recolor, and then I'm just going to tap where I want the area to be recolored and it's going to recolor that area. If I want to color it again, is pick a different color, and then I can just switch through some. This is something that's definitely kind of fun. The other options that are in the menu, you might find them useful for your own work, but I'm just going through what I use most frequently and just trying to keep it simple synthesis just. So the next option and our interface is the selection tool, which is right here. It looks like a little squiggly S for selection. I usually refer to it as the lasso tool because it reminds me of velocity tool in photoshop, which I use all the time. If I just select this, I've got it set to free hands down here at the bottom, which is going to give us the most freedom for our sketching and illustration work. I'm going to do is just draw a little shape here, and then I can drag a color into it, or I can use a brush in it or whatever I want to. So this is something that I use all the time. Maybe not as much in my sketchbook work in procreate, but definitely and like the final artwork that I create. Then the last tool on this side of our interface is going to be the transform tool. So go ahead and select this. When you select Transform, it's just automatically going to select the entire layer that you've got picked out. It selected the heart and also the little scribble that I made. Now I can just use my pencil, drag this around, and I can also use these options here. I can flip it horizontally and vertically, and can also rotate my canvas in small increments. Just handy, I can stretch it to fit my Canvas or it can undo those things I've just done. I can redo the things that I've just done, or it can just get rid of it completely and go back to my original option. Another thing that you can do with the move tool is you can actually just select an area that you want to resize and rotate it. So to do that, I would just pick my selection tool again. Let's say I just want to move like a little space in the middle of this little hearty shaped blob. Go back to my move tool, you can see they're both highlighted because I can use the lasso tool and the Move tool together, and now I can pull this piece out and I can adjust this piece as much as I want here so I can just pinch it and rotate it and do all of the things that I was doing with the entire Canvas. Then once I'm done and moving this, I just had them move till again, it turns off all my selections and I'm ready to go. The next things that we're going to look at in the interface are going to be everything over on the right-hand side. Or if you have your interface of opposite, this is going to be over here. Some of these tools we're going to talk about in other videos. I'm just going to skip over them right now. This is the brush tool right here, the smudge tool and the erase tools. We'll talk about these and the brushes menu. I'm not going to go over them right now, and then also we've got the Layers option right here, and we're going to talk about that in another video as well. Then this is our color palette and wait for it. I'm going to talk about that in more depth in another video, so we'll just skip it for now. The other thing that we just need to take a quick look at these options right here. So this is going to be our brush size slider. It just allows us to easily change the size of our brush, and then this allows us to easily change the opacity of our brush. So that's super handy, and then this is going to hit your little home button here, it's going to pull up your eye dropper tool. There's another way to pull that up too, and we'll talk about that later. That's the less easy way to do it, but it's still nice today, and then this is just going to be our undo options and redo. So we can just undo everything that we did. This is automatically set to go back 200 steps, which I think is quite enough. I have my photoshop undo set to about 40 steps and that's always been enough for me. So 200 as fantastic. Then if you want to redo it, you're just going to hit your little forward arrow down here and you can redo everything that you just undid. So that's super handy, and if you're like me and you love illustrating digitally, you will love the undo option, it is fantastic. All right. So in the next video, I'm just going to show you some quick tips and tricks that you're going to find to be really useful, and then we're going to get started learning about brushes and selecting colors. 6. Quick Tips & Tricks: In this video, I just want to show you a few useful tips and tricks before you really jump into using Procreate as your sketch book. The first thing that I want to talk about is zooming in and zooming out, which you're probably already familiar with because it's a pretty common gesture for your iPad. All you're really going to do if you want to zoom in, is you're just going to pinch your fingers, zoom in as far as you want to, and then if you want to zoom back out, you just going to pinch your fingers in instead of out. Then the same thing goes with rotating the Canvas while you've got it pinched, you just rotate your Canvas and that's it. That's a nice easy trick. Now one of the other things that you're going to use all the time, I already told you that over here you've got your undo and redo options. I tend to use these more often just because they're so simple there right here. But you can also do a two-finger tap and it will also undo. You just tap two fingers, it will undo, and you can go all the way back just like we did before. Another thing that you want to do is if you're zoomed way in on your Canvas, let's say you're zoomed in like this and you want your Canvas to be smaller and fit the screen again. If you do a quick pinch with two fingers, it will fit the Canvas back to your screen. I did a quick pinch and now it's back to regular size. Again, I'm just zoomed really far in, do a quick pinch, it automatically resizes itself, so that's super helpful. Now one of the other things that I think that you'll find really helpful, especially if you want to do a comic or something, anything like that, anything that requires a straight line. This is awesome. I've got my brush selected over here, and I'm just going to draw a line, and I'm going to hold my pencil down. When I hold my pencil down for a second, you see it made a perfectly straight line and that's the quick line option. Let's do that again. Just going to draw a sloppy line, hold my pencil down and while I'm holding the pencil down, I can move the line around a little bit, so that's super helpful. If you want to make like a box or something, this is super helpful for that. Like I said, if you're working on a comic or anything, this is really fantastic. That's not a super even box, but you get the point. Then if I wanted to undo that, I can just two-finger tap and everything goes all the way back. That's pretty awesome. The next thing is, if you remember earlier I told you that the cut copy and copy canvas and paste options are right over here, which is handy. But you can also pull up that sub-menu by taking three fingers and swiping and down the screen. If I swiped three fingers down the screen, I get my sub-menu and it's got cut copy, copy all, paste, cut and paste, copy and paste. That's a really handy thing to have. Then the last thing that I want to show you is how you can dock Pinterest or Google images or Shutterstock or whatever over to the side here. You'll have easy access to your reference images. You're just going to swipe up from the bottom and it's going to bring up your little icon bar here that's got all of your apps on it. You're only going to be able to do this with apps that are in this bar. If you don't have whatever you want to use in this bar yet, then you just need to go back to your home screen and drag the app down into this bar, and then go back into procreate. Swipe to the bar up, I've got my options here, I know that I want to use Pinterest, so I'm actually just going to tap, hold and drag it across the screen and I'm going to dock it over here on the left-hand side. You can do it on the right-hand side to totally up to you. I'm just going to drag it put it over here until it starts to slide over. Let go. It's going to dock itself. Then I can use this little sidebar right here if I want to make it bigger or smaller, let's put it back where it was. Now I've got my Pinterest reference over here that I can use if I want to you. When I'm done with this, and I want Procreate to be fully again, I can just take the sidebar, slide all the way over and it goes back to Procreate, and now I'm ready to get started on some art. In the next video I'm going to be talking to you about brushes. Go ahead and click on over and I'll tell you my favorites, and I'll tell you where to buy some awesome brushes too. 7. Brushes: In this video, we're going to be talking about brushes. One of my favorite things about Procreate is that the basic brushes are actually pretty fantastic, especially for sketching. You definitely want to play around and find out what works best for you, but I just want to show you a couple of my favorites before we get started. We're going to start over here and our little right-hand area of the interface, and I'm just going to select the brushes icon and it's going to bring up my brushes menu. I'm going to be sketching, I'm just going to choose the sketching section. If you're new to Procreate, take a few minutes and go through all of the different brush options, and see what is most exciting for you. One of my favorite brushes for sketching, and this is like a universally well-loved brush, is the 6b pencil, and actually use this on my final R2 to lay down flat colors and other details. It's just a really awesome brush. I've got it selected, and then I'm just going to switch over to gray, and I've got the brush set up to the biggest setting right now. You can see what's going on here, but you see it shades really nicely if you're using the side of your Apple pencil. Again, this is really awesome because we're going to be starting a digital sketchbooks. This is fantastic. Then it's just got really nice, smooth buttery details. This is one of my favorite brushes and I definitely think you should give it a try because you might really like get too. My other brush that I use a lot for sketching, especially when I want to maybe shade and large areas, or maybe I just want to lay down some flat colors, is the artist's crayon brush. I love it. If you know my work and I'll you know that I just love texture. I think it's so important in our digital artwork that we have lovely texture so it doesn't look flat and digital. You'll see here I'm just laying a nice flat area with the artists crayon brush, and it's just got a really great texture. I can use a lighter version of it if I want to. If I turn over on the side of my Apple pencil, I'm just getting a light shade. Then I can also make it smaller and use it for some details as well. These are my two favorite Procreate brushes that just come with Procreate. Like I said, a lot of these brushes on their own are just fantastic, and you don't really need to buy more brushes. But I mean, obviously, you probably want to buy more brushes so you can play around a little bit more. I know I always have the bad habit of telling myself that I'm not going to buy anymore Procreate or Photoshop brushes, and then of course I see another pack of brushes and of course I want to buy it, and then I always just end up using the same handful of brushes all the time no matter how many I have. It's worth it. Anyways, I want to show you guys some of my favorite brushes that I've purchased for Procreate. Then if you look under the your project section of the class, you're going to find a PDF there and I'm going to have links to all of these brushes, so you can purchase them and try them out on your own if you want to know. Now, if you guys are watching this class in the Skillshare app, you're not going to see your project downloads. You actually need to be watching from the Skillshare website which means you need to be on a desktop or a laptop computer to be able to download the PDFs. That's just something to keep in mind. Now, let's take a look at some of my favorite brushes. Then we're actually going to talk about the erase tools and everything here in a minute or two, so just ignore this for now. I'm just going to go ahead and clear this layer out, so we're fresh, and then one of the people whose brushes I super love is Lisa Bardot. Her brushes are available on Creative Market and she has some really awesome quash brushes and also some really awesome pencil brushes. I just want to show you guys a couple of my favorites. She's got these really great pencil brushes that have some really great texture and tooth to them, she's got some scribbly brushes, and some hatch mark, and cross hatching brushes that are really great for filling in, she's got textural pencil brushes like this, so fantastic. Then she's also got a bunch of quash brushes that I purchased and I love them. In Photoshop, my favorite brush to use is Kyle Webster squash, a go-go brush. I just, I love the look of the US Digital quash brushes and hers have got a really awesome texture. Again, these differently, Lisa Bardot and I will include a link in the your project section. I'll include a PDF for you guys so you'll have access to them. That's Lisa Bardot is pencil brushes and wash brushes, and she also had some other different sites that you can find on Creative Market. For lettering and for sketching, and also for filling in, Julie from up with paper has a really fantastic brush set. These are a couple of my favorite brushes from her sets. Just scrolling through, yeah, she's got these really lovely textural lettering brushes. If you're in a lettering at all, or even if you're not, these are really great for filling in flats and also for drawing as well. She's got a set of, we think maybe like eight brushes that are out right now and they are so good. Then the last ones that we're going to be looking at are these are Maxpack brushes and it's by Max Ulichney, which I'm probably not saying correctly, superstar. I'm going to again provide a link on a PDF in the your project section, and this is just a few of the brushes that I got from him. They're listed here as Max U brushes. I've been using his paintbrush, bristle brush a lot to lay down flat colors. It's just super textural and has these really awesome rough edges. I love it. Then he's also got just a pastel brushes that I use a lot for texture and backgrounds. Some contact crayon, so fantastic. These are some of my favorite brushes that I've purchased. Then of course, the 6b pencil and the artist crayon are my favorite Procreate basic brushes. Those are actually the brushes that I'm mostly going to be using in this class. Don't feel like you need to run out and buy a bunch of brushes. Honestly, I think that you should start by trying out the native Procreate brushes first, because again, super fantastic and I really think you're going to love them. In the next video, we're going to look at how to use layers when you are working on sketches and other artwork. 8. Layers: Our Photoshop classes. You know that I love working in layers. In this video we're going to look at the basics of using layers in procreates. When you open your Canvas for the first time, if you go up here in the upper right-hand corner to your layers area, You're going to have two layers already. You're going to have a background color and then you'll have layer one, which is going to be your default first layer. A cool thing about Procreate is that you can actually just tap on this background color layer and from there you can choose a color and it'll make it the color of your background if you want to. That's kind of a fun thing. Honestly though, since this is my sketch book I'm usually just going to keep a white background. Even when I do final art in Procreate, I attend to just make another layer for the background and not actually use the background layer on here. But it's still sort of a fun thing to have. These are the first two layers that you're gong to get. What I like to do is I like to use layers to refine my sketch layer after layer after layer and I'll show you what I'm talking about right here. I'm on layer one still, It haven't changed that and that's fine. Let's just say that I want to rough sketch something and then I just wanted to find that sketch. I'm just gong to go through here and pick and my 6B pencil brush that I love so much. Let's just say that I went to Lake Raven, a bird. If you guys follow me on Instagram, you know that I love drawing birds. Let's just say that I'm just going to just block and a real rough shape here. It's sort of bird like just gong to block in the basics. The way is a little tail. This isn't a particular bird, it's just a generic sort of bird. I've got my first layer here and I've just got a sort of like a really scribbly, scribbly sketch. Now if you were sketching on paper, You might just draw directly over those if you wanted to refine it or you might start out drawing with a light blue pencil and you might work over it in a darker color. You might put this on a light box and sketch over that, there are all sorts of different ways you could do that. We are obviously this is going to be a lot easier for us because we're sketching in Procreate. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back up to my layers and I'm just going to go ahead and make a new layer. It's going to say Layer two and that's where I'm going to be drawing out now. I'm going to go back to layer one first and I'm actually going to adjust the opacity of this. It's not quite so dark as it is right now. I'm just going to go over here to my actions menu and go to adjustments and I'm going to select opacity. Then I'm just going to drag my pencil across. Right up here you'll see the opacity percentage. I'm just going to go ahead and drag it down to about 25 percent. That's good enough for me and then I'm just going to tap the adjustments again, and get out of there and now we've got a much lighter sketch and I can sketch on top of that. I'm just going to go back to my layers. I'm going to select layer two which you remember is my new layer and then I'm just going to draw on that. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit, make my brush a little bit smaller and then I'm just going to tweak the schedule a little bit darker. Just stylize it a little bit. It's still pretty rough because I'm a rough sketcher so. That's fine. This is your digital sketchbook. Can be as messy or as neat as you want to. I always feel like when I sketch a little bit rougher, make digital art is better. Like if I sketch too well, It just looks really overdone and a little uptight, I think. I'm just going to go through here. Give him a little tail. You can see I'm just making some adjustments as I go from my rough sketch. Nothing to earth-shattering. You can make your eye. Now what I can do is I can go back to my original sketch layer so I can go back to layer one. Now I can just hit this little checkbox right here and I can turn this layer off. That's awesome. Now I've just got my new cleaned up sketch. I can also instead of turning this layer off, I can just swipe to the left and I can just delete the layer entirely. Now all that I'm left with is my sketch and I'm ready to go if I wanted to add some color. If I did want to add some color here, What I would do is I would just add another layer. I'm going to hit the plus sign to add another layer. Now you can see now I've got two layer twos, which was a little quirk of Procreate. What I can do is I can actually go ahead and name at my layers if I want to, so it's a little bit less confusing so I can just double-tap on that rename and then I'm just going to call this one sketch and then same thing here. I'm just going to tap on layer two rename and then we'll just call this one color. Just for simplicity sake, I guess. What I need to do now is I need to make sure that these are arranged in the correct order. I can use either my Apple Pencil or just my finger. I'm just going to tap on this and then drag it down below my sketch layer. You can see now sketches on top and then color is below that. Any color that I've locked in is going to show up under my sketch lines, which is awesome for just the sketchbook application that I'm using here. I'm just going to go ahead and just pick a random color. I'm going to pick my artists crayon brush from the sketching section of my brushes and then I'll just block in a really quick color here. We'll just add in a little bit of yellow, then maybe we'll just lighten it up a little bit. Just add some more over here. This is just my sketchbooks and I'm just kind of resonance some colors just for fun and then maybe we'll just do speak sort of Orangey I find this to be useful, Like if I'm starting an illustration project, Like a book project or licensing or something like that. I find it useful to come into my Procreate sketchbook and just use some color studies or just loosely block in some colors so I kind of know where I'm going. This is a really great practice to get into. The layers that we've got to I mean, this is pretty basic right now, so we've just got to sketch layer and color layer. If we were going to be working on a more complex final arts, we could be adding more layers for various parts of our illustration. One of the things that I've found challenging about Procreate when I first started using it, is that I couldn't use as many layers as I normally use in Photoshop. I am a person who likes to have everything on a different layer in Photoshop, Just because I do a lot of nonfiction illustration and I usually end up having to move pieces of my art around and it's easier if everything is just on its own layer and I can just screwed things around. The thing about Procreate is you don't have like an endless amount of layers anymore. That means that I have to be more thoughtful when I'm thinking about my layers and how I'm going to use them. I think it's actually made me a little bit, I'm not going to say a better artists but maybe more conscientious artist. If you wanted to know how many layers you could use, you might remember from when we set up our canvas that you can see there how many layers you have available to use. You can also go under actions. Go to Canvas and then he pulled your canvas information and it's going to tell us right here that with this particular file, which is eight-and-half by 11 and 300 DPI, We can have 59 layers, which is quite enough. It also tells you how many views, which is two so far, which is not a lot for me guys. This is just kind of like a basic look of how you can use layers in Procreate. Like I said, In a future class, I'll show you how to use layers to create all sorts of layers of color and texture and everything else. This is just kind of a starting points you can get used to using procreate and sort of get a general idea of how things work. In the next video, I'm gong to talk about the color selection tools and how you can build a custom color palettes. 9. Color Selection Tools: One of my favorite things about using Procreate as a sketchbook is that I have color basically at my fingertips. So that means that I don't have to drag around watercolors or tubes of [inaudible] or colored pencils or whatever to achieve color, I'll, I really need to do is just tap on this little icon in the upper right hand corner, and I have got color. So let's go ahead and tap on it and just see basically what this looks like. So the options down at the bottom here are going to be your basic layout options. So you have the disk option which is going to give you a desk select or these are all pretty obvious and you've got a palette listed down here, and then you've got the classic layout, which is what I like because it has got my hue saturation and brightness sliders right here. So that makes it a little bit easier for me to choose colors, and then again, I've got my default palette right down here, which is really handy. Value as another option, and for this one you'll have your hue saturation and brightness sliders, and then you also have RGB sliders if you prefer to work like that. Then you've got your hexadecimal number here, so you can enter that on if you want to. Again, palette down here. So then our last option is the pallets option, and these are, you're given some default pallets when you first open Procreate and then you can also create some new pallets, which is something I'm going to show you to do right now because it's super handy and it's actually really fun to you. So you can use this just to have a little palette of colors that you really like and tend to use a law. You can use it to build palettes for sketching or in pallets for a project that you're working on if you're doing some final art and procreate. So these again are your default pallets. So this is my default right now. These are just colors that I really like. So if I wanted to switch to a different one, all I need to do is just tap on set default and you'll see it switched to blue right here. So this is going to be my new default pallet. So if I go back to my classic layout, I'm going to have this pallet as my default palette now. So it's super easy to switch palettes out and it's super easy to build new pallets. So what we're going to do is we're going to hit the plus, and that was going to add a new palette right here, and then we can just rename our palate if we want to. So let's just call it sketchbook. Now to add colors to this, I'm just going to, I've got this set as default automatically. That's awesome. I'm going to go back to my classic layout and now you can see my palette is empty, which is so sad. I want to drag some grayscale in to here that I'm going to be using on my sketch book. So I've got a black chosen right now, and I'm just going to tap into the empty area and you can see that it added a little black box and then I'm just going to add some grays as we go through here, just different values, and I'm just pulling the slider up, and every time I choose a new color, I'm just tapping and it's adding it all the way up to white. So this is my basic sketchbook palette, and then if I wanted to, if I wanted to add some colors or some more neutrals, I can add them and wherever I went to. So if I wanted to do some Brown's, add them in here, and it can really just put these in any order that I want to. So this is awesome. So when I go back to my pallets now, you'll see this is my palate as my default. If I decide that I don't want to use this anymore, obviously I just hit default and then I go back and there's my palate, and then I can easily just switch back and forth between pallets by changing my default setting, and then when I go back to whatever layout I've chosen for my color selector, the palette of my choice is going to be here. So like I said, you can do this to just make it general like sketchbook palette or you can do this if you've got a project that you're working on, you need to work in a certain palette. It's definitely something fun to play around with just like everything else in Procreate really. So that's actually the basics of setting up a color palette. In the next video, let's actually get started on some sketching. 10. Let's Sketch Together: You've learned all the basics now, that you need to know for using Procreate as your digital sketchbook. Now, let's put all of those things to use and let's do a little sketch practice. I'm going to start by opening up a new documents. I'm just going to do the plus sign. You'll see that our sketch book page size is already saved here, so I'm just going to go ahead and tap on that, to open up a new document. Now, I think I would like this to be a landscape maybe, so I'm just going to rotate with my fingers. Maybe, we'll see I might change my mind on this. I'm going to be sketching a bird, again if you follow me on Instagram, you know that I just love drawing birds. They're my favorite thing to draw ever, so why not draw one for this demo? Then I'm also going to be doing some flowers as well. I'm going to get Pinterest setup over here to the side, with some floral inspiration, so I'm just dragging up from the bottom, I'm grabbing Pinterest. I'm going to slide it over here on the right-hand side, because I'm left-handed, so I want to be able to see this over here on the side. I've already got a search pulled up in Pinterest for wild flowers, which I think is going to really add some interest to my art here, and I'm just going to have these over here just to build some ideas. I've already changed my mind and I think I'm actually going to stick with the portrait orientation for this. This is why I love digital sketching though, I can change my mind as much as I want to, and I don't have to worry about wasting paper, making a mass, or whatever. I'm just going to walk you through my process now. I've got my little sketch book palette down here, and I'm just going to choose a really light gray, or actually a medium gray, and I'm going to my 6B pencil which I love. Then I'm just going to go ahead and start blocking in some basic bird shapes, and then I think also we're going to block in some flower shapes. I'm just looking at flower reference because I'm going to be drawing a bird that I'm super familiar with, I'm going to be drawing a chickadee. I don't really need reference for it, and I can always check over here if I need to, or look on Safari on my iPad as well, so I'm just trying to keep it simple. I'm just going to go ahead and start blocking in just my bird, and my random flower shapes, and then we'll work on the next steps from there. I've got a rough chickadee, and some wild flowers blocked in here. Then the next thing I'm going to do is just work on adding some more detail, and refining my sketch. I'm done with Pinterest for now, so I'm actually just going to drag the slider, and just go ahead and pop it over to the side, and just do full Procreate again. The next thing I'm a little bit unsure of is just the size on the page. I'm going to go ahead and just use my move tool. I'm going to select this and then I'm just going to pinch this, make it a little bit bigger, and then drag it down a little bit. I think might like that a little bit better, although this is a little close over here, so maybe we'll just make it smaller again. Move it down. Then I think that might be better, and then what I think I might do is move some of the flowers up to fill in some of the space up here. This is something that I'm just obviously sketching for fun right now, but it's something that I could see as maybe like a greeting card design. I'm just going to keep in mind that I might want to add some lettering in, so I want to leave some space for that. Then I think I might want to fill in some space down here at the bottom with another flower. I want to go to go ahead and scoop this flower up, so I'm just going to use my selection tool. I'm going to select this little bit, and then I'm going to go to the move tool and I can go ahead and scoop that up. Then I'm just going to go back in with my pencil, and maybe you just add in, another couple of flower shapes here. I don't think I'm going to do that. I'm a big trial and error sketcher. I don't know if you guys are or not, but I just find that I do my best work when I just make a mess. Just muck about a little bit, and don't worry about it too much. It's just a puzzle I'm trying to unravel, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do to fill in this area down here with some greenery. I don't know, maybe we'll just do some long wispy leaves or something. We'll figure it out as we go. I'm going to go to my layers, and I want to adjust the opacity of this because I'm going to revise my sketch on top of this layer so it's not a complete mess. You don't have to do this, I mean you can sketch right on this one layer if that's your jam. I just feel like I like to get rid of my messy under sketch so I can see my neater sketch even though it's not really neat. There are two ways I can switch the opacity, so I can either go to the blending modes here and drag this across. Well, maybe I'm going to drag it. There we go. Drag that across, and I usually just move it down to 25 percent, which is good enough for me. I can also adjust the opacity by going to my adjustments menu. Pick an opacity, and you actually see it says slide to adjust and the blue bar is already over here, and that's because I've adjusted it in my layers. I can just drag across here if I want to make it more, or less opaque. I really want to keep it around 25, so I'm just going to drag it across to close to 25, and now I'm ready to go. I'm just going to go over to my layers again, I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to grab it, drag it underneath here. You don't have to drag it underneath, you can leave it on top. Just whatever works best for you. I'm just used to dragging it beneath my sketch because that's something that I do in Photoshop. I'm just going to go back to my brush. I've still got my 6B pencil selected, and then I'm just going to start working on revising our little chickadee in wild flowers. [MUSIC] I've revised my sketch and now I want to go in and just adjust a couple of things. A little bit of shading just to the chickadee, sometimes I'll just use shading and color in my sketchbook just to remind myself of what different colors need to be. Like with the chickadee, I'm going to shade in some of the black and dark gray markings. Just so I can remember if I decide to take it to final art, and then I want to move some of these flowers around and change some of the situation. I'm going to go back to my layers, I'm going to swipe right and I'm just going to delete my original sketch. Now what I have left is just my other messy sketch. You might have noticed that part of the way through, I added a new layer and that's a layer for my flowers. Right now I've got my a chickadee on one layer, I've got my flowers on another layer. The nice thing about this, is if I'm on layer two, this is my chickadee, If I want to move it around, I just do the move tool and now I'm just moving my chickadee around and you don't have to worry about selecting around the flowers or whatever. That's the only reason that I did my extra layer there. That's something that you can do if you want to or if you don't want to, don't worry about it. I think that I am actually cool with how these were placed together, so I'm just going to go ahead and merge these layers. I'm just going to tap on my top one, merged down, and now I've just got everything on one layer. I am going to do a little bit of a erasing, so I'm going to select my eraser tool. Now now you select your eraser tool, you can actually use the same settings that you use with your brushes. You have all of your regular brush options here, so you don't have to just use a hard edge when you're erasing, you can use the same pencil that you're sketching with, or you can even block in color and use one of these awesome textured erasers to erase your sketch and work in negative space, so that's what it finds. I'm just picking on the 6b pencil because that's what I've already got and it's a pretty small brush. I'll just people to embrace these pretty small areas here, I'm just going to erase this line on the flower that goes through the tale. I think I'm going to erase this flower right here and I think I'm just going to redraw this area here. I can use the eraser tool here, or it can just do the selection tool, so I'm just going to freehand this and just less the area that I want to get rid of. Actually, let's go ahead and move this area. Let's go ahead and get smaller and lets just try to move this flower instead of redrawing it. I'm just going to move it out a little bit, I'm trying to get it to reflect this one over here and actually I like that a lot better. That's really great. I'm just going to go back to my brush tool now and I'm going to add an extra little flower in here I think. Lets add some more key little flower details real quick and just add some more of these little birds, some more little leaves. It's really cute and then it maybe able to just erase this little defray here. Again, I am just working things out as I go, just puzzling through, seeing what works for me and what doesn't. This is my sketch books, so this can be as finished as scribbly, as rough, or whatever as I want it to be. There's no right or wrong here. I think like that, lets go back and just erase this little bit here. I think I'm pretty good with that layout, and what I want to do is just block in some color on the bird. I'm just going to go make a new layer, drag it below this one and then I'm going to stick with this dark gray, I'm going to use my artist crayon brush which is my favorite for stuff like this, then I'm just going to zoom in and I'm just going to roughly block in some of these darker areas, chickadee. Just if this ends up going to a finished piece of art at some point, I don't have to look at my reference photo again because I already have a pretty good idea of some of the values here. Chickadee have a gray wing, I'm just going to go ahead and block that in as well. One tool that we haven't talked about so far that's fun for this thing, is the smudge tool. It's this little fingertip right here, I can just select it by tapping on it and just like the brush tool and the erase tool, you're going to have all of the options that you would have for your regular brushes. You can just select from any of your regular brushes to use for smudging. I've got my artists crayon selected and we'll just make it a little bit smaller and then I can go in here and smudge around a little bit, make this a little smoother if I wanted to. This works very similar to the smudge tool in Photoshop, although honestly I feel like this one works a little bit better. It's a little bit smoother, I usually find that smudge tool in Photoshop to be really laggy, so if you wanted to try to do anything painterly like the smudge tool would not go really well. When you are smudging, it's actually just working from the layer that you're on right now, so its just working on the layer where I've roughed in my colors, its not working on the sketch layer. If I went back to my sketch layer and smudged, you can see now it's working on the scotch layer instead. Right guys. I think this is it, I think that I am done sketching at this point. In the next couple of videos, I'm just going to show you guys how you will organize your sketches and how you can export your sketches, then in the last video, we're going to be talking about your project for this class which is of course going to be practice sketching and procreates. 11. Organizing Your Digital Sketchbook: In this video, we're going to talk about organizing your digital sketchbook, which is something I've talked about a little bit already, but I haven't actually shown you how to do it. Let's take a look at that. This is the chickadee sketch that we just did. I'm going to go back to my gallery and let's take a look at a few things here. The first thing that I want to do is, you notice right now this is just called untitled artwork. That's no fun. I'm just going to tap on untitled artwork and now, I'm just going to type in a name for this sketch and you can be as specific or as general as you want to be for this, you can just put the date on it if you want to. Anything goes, obviously, it's your sketch book, it's totally up to you. I'm just naming this chickadee and wild flowers. Now you can see I've got my name here. What I want do is I like to keep everything organized in Stacks and Procreate. When I showed you my little flip through of my Procreate sketchbook earlier, you notice that I've got everything. I'm not going to say I have it organized very well because I definitely have some stacks that are not organized as well as others, and then I just have like some orphan artwork like this guy that haven't been put into a stack yet. It's always a work in progress for sure. What I want to do is I'm going to take my chickadee and wild flowers and I'm going to put it in a group where it belongs. We're going to look at how to stack everything, how to unstack things, and then how to label things as well. This is going to be a fun exercise in organization if that is your jam. Rather than add to one of my existing stacks, I'm going to show you how to create a new one. For that, you need to have at least two pieces of artwork. I'm just going to go ahead and just make a new blank page. That is my sketchbook size. Now if I want to make these into one group, these two right here, all I'm going to do is tap and drag, and it's going to make a group. I've tapped my chickadee, I'm going to pull it over on top of my other piece and you can see it's turned blue right here, which means it's going to make a stack. Then if I let go, now I've got my stack. You can see that it shows the other one behind. If I go and I can look at this entire stack just by tapping on this and it's going to show me the two pieces of artwork that are in this stack and I can take them and I can rearrange them if I want to. I can move them around wherever I want. That's super easy. Now, I want to go back to my stack and I want to rename it. You can see here this is just called stack now, still creatively. If I just tap on it, I can type whatever I want to. Maybe I just want to organize this stack by subject-matter and it's just going to be sketches of chickadees, which I do a lot of. It makes sense to have a stock called that. You see now this is called chickadees. I've got everything organized. You can go through and do this. You can organize your sketch book however you want to. You can organize by subject-matter like chickadees, you can organize by the month and the year if you're keeping a daily sketchbook and you want to track that, it's a super easy way to do it. You can also organize things by project. I have a couple of book projects that are in here or like some lettering that I've done for greeting cards and some different greeting card designs. It made sense for me to organize all of those in one stack so they're easily accessible and I'm not just like flipping through everywhere trying to find a missing sketch. This is just the quick and easy way to organize your sketches in your digital sketchbook. Once you've got quite a few sketches in here, I think that you're going to find that it's really helpful to keep everything organized into different stacks. That way you can find things easily and it keeps your gallery here from looking like a mess. I love organizing things, so I find this to be a pretty exciting bonus about sketching in Procreate. In the next video, I'm going to tell you how you can export your sketches for use in other programs and apps and also for printing. 12. Exporting Your Sketches: You've got your digital sketchbook started, and now you need to know how to export your sketches. There are several reasons that you might want to export your sketches. Often, I will do my sketching in Procreate, and then I'll need to send it over to Photoshop on my desktop to create the finished artwork. Then, like I said earlier in the class, sometimes I just like to back up my sketches because I might want to have them printed later, or I might just want them on my Dropbox so I've got them backed up. Always backup all of your art no matter what it is, if it sketches, finish style, or whatever back it up in two or three places just to be safe because we don't want to lose all these wonderful things that we're creating. I use Dropbox for backing up my sketches and for passing things back and forth between Procreate and Photoshop. Now, I'm a Windows user, so things like iCloud don't work as well for me. I just find that there are problems syncing sometimes. What I really need is something that's going to sync almost immediately, and Dropbox does that for me. I can also easily pass back and forth really large files from Photoshop, that just makes it a lot easier. I'm using Dropbox, but you can use iCloud, or AirDrop, or whatever you want to use. Now, I'm going to show you two different ways that you can exports. The first way that I'm going to show you is if you're actually still in your document, this is my chicken in wildflower sketch that I did. I can go to my actions, and then I just need to go to share. You'll see I've got a list here of different file options. Generally speaking, if I'm just exploiting a sketch, I'm just going to do it as a JPEG because I don't need it to be a layered file because this sketch would not be part of my final art in Photoshop, or whatever else I was using. I don't need to export it as a Photoshop file. I'm just going to select JPEG here, and then from my scroll over, I'm going to just select Save to Dropbox. Then I've got a different folders in my Dropbox. I've already got sketches selected. If I wanted to pick a different folder and Dropbox, they would go to choose a different folder, and then I just save. Now, it's going to back up my chickadee and wildflowers JPEG. Whenever I need to pull that up, either on another device, or on my PC, I've got it easily. I'm actually sitting here in front of my desktop, and just popped up that it updated in my Dropbox. That was super fast and that's definitely what I'm looking for. If I had something that I needed to be layered, I mean, I would just export it as a PSD instead. The other way that I can do this is actually from the Gallery. I can just swipe left, and you'll see how the options here to delete, duplicate, or share. I'm going to choose share right now, and the same menu pops up where I've got all my image formats listed. I can just pick JPEG, and scroll over, and saves to Dropbox. Now, I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys that sometimes this Save to Dropbox option does not work correctly. That's usually happens when you try to export a layered Photoshop file, so a PSD file. Generally it's fine if you're just doing JPEG, but if you run into problems after, if you try to use the Save to Dropbox option, if you use the colored version instead, it usually works better. Let me go ahead and hit Save to Dropbox, maybe. There we go. Then, this is going to be the same menu right here. It's going to the same location. Here is my name. Now, I can change my file name right here. This is the second time I've exported this, I want to go ahead and give it a different name. I'm just going to tap on it and I'm just going to make it chickadee in wild flowers too so it doesn't override my other one. Unless I wanted it to override my other one then I could leave it and it would ask me if I wanted to overwrite it and that's fine. All right. Again, I export it and now we're good to go. The other quick thing that you might want to do from here, if you remember when we swipes left, we have the options to duplicate or delete. I might want to duplicate this blank page here because maybe I want to do another sketchbook page in this particular stack without going through the whole thing of making a new page, and putting it on the stack, and dragging it around. If I hit Duplicate, it's going to duplicate that page. If you keep a blank template in here, you can always just duplicate it, and start another page, and you're ready to go. If I wanted to delete it, I swipe left and then I'm just going to delete. Yeah, I want to delete it and now I've just got my basic stuff again and I'm ready to go. As I mentioned before, one of the reasons that you might want to export this other than passing it back and forth to Photoshop or whatever other app you want to use is that you might want to get a book printed from blurred, or another service, or you might want to just print them out on your printer at home. I love having a digital sketchbook for all the reasons that I talked about before. I also find that it's really important to have an actual physical reminder of my sketchbook as well. I usually keep a folder in my Dropbox where I'll just drag and save all of the sketches that I definitely want to have printed. Then, usually around the end of the year, the beginning of the following year, I'll just have a blurred book printed with my sketches from that year and then usually a separate blurred book printed with some of my other artwork that I just want to have in a bound format so it's easier for me to look back at. It's nice to have sketchbooks to flip through, and we are limited in our space on our iPads, even if you have a 256 gig iPad, eventually you're going to run out of space. I don't necessarily want to rely on my Dropbox, or iCloud, or any other backup services to back everything up forever, I just want to prepare for the worst and have things downloaded if I need them. Sometimes it's just nice to flip through a physical sketchbook. That's definitely another reason that I like to export my sketches. If you go ahead to the next video, I'm going to talk about your project for this class and I'm going to give you your prompt list. 13. Your Project: Your project for this class is actually pretty simple. I'm challenging you to start your digital SketchBook journey by spending the next seven days sketching daily in Procreate. Now under the Your Project section of this class, you're going to find several prompt lists that I've included so you can get inspired. They're organized by category, so you find less four things that I love to draw; animals, flowers, things like that, and then you'll also find a couple of lists that have different prompts like there is a list of actions and there's a list of emotions to get you inspired. There are actually 30 prompts on each of the five lists, so you can easily keep going after the first seven days of your digital SketchBook. Once you have got your seven days sketched out, be sure to post your sketches here for the class, and you can also share your time-lapse videos if you'd like to under the Your Project section. I really can't wait to see what you guys come up with. In the next video, I'm going to share my time-lapse videos from my most recent seven days of sketching in Procreate, and I'm going to be using some of the prompts from the prompt list as well. Have fun. 14. Bonus video: In this final video, I'm just going to be sharing time lapses of the sketches that I created in my Procreate sketchbook over the last seven days, and before I do that, I just want to show you real quickly how you can show a time lapse of your own, how you can watch it, and then how you can export it. I'm just going to pull up first sketch that I did here of these koalas. If I wanted to just watch a time-lapse video on here, which I do all the time because it is so fun to watch time lapses of your work, and the upper left-hand corner, I'm going to hit the wrench icon, which brings up my Actions Menu. Then over to the right, I'm going to tap on the video, and then I've got the first option there is time-lapse replay. Now, you need to make sure that you have time-lapse recording turn on. It needs to be blue. If it's not, then you're not going to be recording and you're not going to have any replays to watch your export. if I want to watch my video, I'm just going to hit time-lapse replay and it is just going to do a quick time lapse of the sketch page that I'm on right now. I usually do this. Like I said, sometimes it's just fun to watch time lapses of your work, but I also do it just to make sure that everything looks good here, so if I'm going to export this video and share it on Instagram or YouTube or whatever, I want to make sure it looks right. Everything was good, the blue bars going all the way across the top. I'm going to hit "Done", and it's going to take me back to my sketch. I want to export my video now, so I'm going to go back to the same Actions Menu under Video, and I'm just going to tap on export a time-lapse video. It's going to give me the options of where I might want to export it to, so I always export mine to Dropbox in case I need to pass it back and forth to my computer, or my iPhone, or whatever. I'm just going to tap on safety Dropbox. Just like when we were exporting our images, I can rename this whatever I want to. Just going to call it koala video. It's already got my save location here, so I'm going to leave that the same. I could choose a different folder if I wanted it to go someplace else, then I'm just going to tap on save, and now it's exported my time-lapse and I'm ready to go. For the rest of this video, I'm just going to show you my time lapses from the last seven days of my sketching. Like I said, I've used the sketch prompt list that I've provided you with and I've just picked some random topics to sketch, just so you have a nice bit of selection as far as my digital sketchbook goes, and I hope you enjoy watching, and I also hope that you enjoy getting started with your own digital sketchbook.