Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello, procreate lovers. This is a class for everyone who would like to make things a little bit faster, to streamline your workflow, and to make things a little bit more smooth and more efficient. Welcome to my first procreate class. In this class, I will teach you how to create your own custom brushes, how to make them completely from scratch. We will use nature, plants, flowers as inspiration, and we will create stamps or custom brushes that we can use to create a beautiful custom illustration, and I can also show you how to make things a little bit faster. In this course, I will show you how I choose my reference photos to create my beautiful custom planned precious, and I will give you some tips, and best practices on how to choose the brushes for your creation. The brushes that I'm using in this course, I actually needed to procreate, so you will have everything you need to complete the projects. Next, I will show you how I actually used the stamps and maintain the illustration work, and then we will move to three exercises. The first one creating a very elaborate leaf stamp, and the second one creating a more of a block style leaf brush, and the last exercise will be to create a magical, inspirational quote illustration, where you can create the background completely on your own using your newly created custom plant brushes. Let's create a beautiful illustration together, this class is very well suited for beginners, people who already started a little bit to work with procreate, but I also give some other insider tips that might be useful for more intermediate people so all levels are welcome. Let's start at the head and then in the next lesson, I will briefly tell you what materials and tools we'll be using for this project.
2. Tools & References: In this lesson, I would like to tell you what tools and materials you are going to need so that you can participate in this class real fast. Since it's a class about the Procreate app, it's available on the iPad Pro or some iPad models that are compatible with this beautiful thing, the Apple pencil. I have actually two iPads. I started off with the smaller one, the 9.7 iPad. It's the format of a notebook, A5 format, and I think it's perfectly fine, especially, if you're just a hobby artist, if you want to draw for fun. It's super convenient to take it on the go to your holidays, to a cafe or just to sit on the sofa and have fun doodling. So I think this iPad Pro 9.7 is absolutely fine. Then if you're a little bit more serious, if you would like to invest in your career as an artist or as an illustrator, I thought this will be enough, but then I got tempted when I got the bigger iPad. This is the biggest you can get right now, 12.9, and I'm super happy with it, even though it's a much bigger format. This is A5 and the other one is about A4. There's a pretty big size difference. However, this one has better specs as well. This one, the bigger one supports bigger canvas and higher resolutions, for example, that's why I would recommend if you're super serious about your art career, then get two or get the bigger iPad. Of course, you need the Apple pencil as well. This is by far the best pencil, I tried out different ones also on Samsung tablets and this one has great pressure sensitivity and I seriously cannot live without it. The Apple pencil and the iPads. Now, I will tell you a little bit more about other materials and references that you might need to create your brushes. Cool. Let's start by opening our Procreate app. I created a new stack here with some materials for you guys. Let me first talk about how to gather references or reference photos for your custom brushes, and then I'm going to give you some tips and recommendations about the brushes that I'm using to create those stamps. Starting with the references, there are a few strategies that you can pursue here. The first one is to have a look at your books that you already have at home or maybe you see books at your friends or family. Let me give you an example here. I have actually this one beautiful album about vintage flowers and this is where you can actually take the inspiration from. Over here we have beautiful roses, you could then go to your camera on the iPads and simply snap a picture of the photo that you like and then import it and work on it to create a brush out of it. I encourage you to look for any books that you have around or maybe even magazines. I don't buy too many magazines that's why I don't have it here with me today. Look at those beautiful dahlias, for example. Great compositions. There must be some magazines or books that you have at home that you can use for this purpose. I think it's really important to talk about copying at this point. All the photos, all the examples that I'm showing, especially from a book by an author Vic Brotherson, this is only an inspiration. If I decide to actually use a flower or a leaf from this book, I'm going to snap a photo and I will redo it. I will make it my own. I don't think that you should copy the entire composition. Let's have a look at this photo. If you copied the entire photo and if you made an exact brush stamp out of this composition with the exact flowers, with the bucket or even with the stool, I wouldn't recommend that. This is a copyrighted image. It belongs to someone else. I would just like to ask you not to copy entire compositions out of the photos that you find. Anyway, I will show you even better tips on the way that do not infringe anyone's copyrights. Maybe you even have some gems at your home. I'm very much interested in Buddha's Mimosa yoga teacher. I was very happy to find this second hand book in the store with Tibetan Buddhist Symbols. Gorgeous. They're actually beautiful. They actually have an entire sectional also on some plant attributes. Perhaps you want to use also that. Snap a picture, maybe of that tree. Again, I would modify it. I wouldn't copy it entirely one-to-one. This is only an inspiration. You also have to think about what shape or flower or plant you want for your particular illustration, so up to you. Books and magazines, that was the first option. This one is tricky though. You have to be really careful with copyright. My favorite one, the favorite option, the one that I would highly recommend for you for this project is to look for sources of inspiration in nature and to go outdoors. Even before you go outdoors, maybe you have some plants at home that have beautiful shapes, your own plants, again, you can snap a picture and you can use it to create your brush. Perhaps you bought some plants, some flowers for your vase and you can also use it to snap a picture or this one. I've been using it so many times for my Instagram photos. I actually collected it about two years ago, it went dry and it has really beautiful shapes and I can also use it for this purpose, just snapping a picture and then importing it to Procreate and using it to trace as my reference photo. Another great idea, however, still a little bit tricky, is to look for inspiration on sites like Pinterest or Google Images. However, again, never copy someone's art or a photo or a full composition. Stay safe and take your own photos. This is the best advice that I can give, but in deed, on Pinterest, you can at least get ideas about what plants you're looking for. Here I'm on Pinterest page, and I just typed in eucalyptus Leaves. As you can see, there are also some artworks here, you're not allowed to copy any of those. But for example, this one, this is a very beautiful shape that I could actually imagine using to make a brush. I'm going to screenshot it and then immediately I'm going to crop it here then save it to my photos. Next time we can use it for our project.
3. Brushes Recommendations: We're done with the references. Let's go back to Procreate. I'm going to open this file where I talk briefly about the brushes that I am using. Actually, you can do with just the brushes that are native, to Procreate. You don't need to download anything fancy. I just have two brushes here that I can recommend to you. They are by my fellow skill share teacher, Liz Kohler-Brown. I participated in many classes of hers'. She has beautiful classes. Everything on Procreate, and more. She's such a nice person. She always gives free brushes that she uses for her classes. I'm going to give you two recommendations of the brushes that I downloaded from her class. That I think could be very good for this project. However, you don't really need anything super fancy. Let me just choose some bright color here. You can use the brushes that are already in Procreate. I'm going to put another layer here, so that I can draw on a separate layer. This is by far the best brush that you can get. I have a folder here. You can also create another folder by selecting plus, and then just naming your folder, then put the brushes that you're using over there. I'm going to delete that because I don't need it. I created my own folder over here. I think it was either the Dry Ink brush that was either in the sketching section, or the calligraphy section. But in general, what we're going to see, the brushes that I recommend here have a very similar shape. You see they have a body here. They have a filling, and they have very pointy endings. Let's for example, try out this Dry Ink brush. If you're not sure where to find this brush, just follow this general shape that you can see here and experiment with any brushes that are here already in Procreate, native to Procreate, to get the effect that you want. The Dry Ink, I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. It has a beautiful texture, and you see the shape that I was just talking about. Allows us to really vary the lines. If you're pressing harder, then you're going to get a thicker line. What I want you also to see here is that, this brush is very beautiful when it comes to texture, because it has those speckles. It's not fully opaque. Then the edges of this brush are also not very blunt. They are very soft and they also have a lot of beautiful texture. Probably 90 percent of the time I'm going to be using the Dry Ink. Then another beautiful brush with a gorgeous texture is the Shale Brush. It's also there in Procreate if you need to buy any extra brushes. It has a slightly different texture as you can see. I think it's a little bit more like graphite. Like a pencil, has a pencil feeling, again, beautiful texture, and you can then press harder and lighter. You can get all the lines that vary in thickness. For example, if we're going to be making a leaf of a fern, you can really vary the lines, and there's a beautiful texture that you can create with this brush. Then if you like a little bit more of an opaque feeling, there's this Script brush. It's also native to Procreate. Not a big fan because I really like the textures within, but if you want to try it out, it has the same shape. It can vary in this line. If you want to use that, then just be informed that there's this brush in Procreate that you can maybe, experiment with. Now this one is a brush that I downloaded from a class by Liz Kohler-Brown, from her class about chalk. Chalk art. It's called controlled opaque chalk. I absolutely love it. It's still a little bit different, and it has this chalky feeling. Again, I'm all in for texture. See how beautiful it is? Again, a variety in the thickness of the line, and it has this graphite feeling. I think it's really gorgeous. For the shapes of the leaves of your plants, I recommend those four brushes: the Dry Ink, the Shale Brush, the Script, and in case you're taking Liz's class, Controlled Opaque Chalk. Then for some textures, sometimes I paint a shape. Let's maybe, paint the shape of a leaf so that they can demonstrate what I mean here. Sometimes I like texture, sometimes it's still a little bit too blunt for me. I can use those brushes either as a blending tool or as the razor tool. Then they can add a little bit more interest into the texture of the plant. Those two brushes, the Splatter and Flicks, they're actually also within Procreates, and I think there are all really here in the folder that I created. But scrolling down, I think they're somewhere. Not, I thought it's in water, but I think it's in spray paints. The Splatter is here, and the Flicks is also here. However, I copied them to my folder. I can go to my eraser tool, maybe to the Flicks. And then I can add a little bit more interest. That it was a little bit too much, by using those textured brushes to erase a little bit of the color, and to give a little bit more dimension to what I'm creating. This brush over here called Vintage Scuffs, it's also from a class by Liz Kohler-Brown. All the resources will be enlisted into description of this class. I think it's also a very nice one. In case you would like to create some further beautiful texture, you can vary the size of this brush, and just gives a little bit of those scarves as if the paper was old. Yeah, I think it looks very, very interesting. There's a whole bunch of other brushes that you can get out there in the web. But for the purpose of this class, I highly recommend either that the brush is to be confined in Procreate, or the ones from Liz's class. That's basically all that you need. Now you know how to prepare your reference photos, so you're good to go. You know what tools you're going to be using to create your custom brushes. Now we can really get started.
4. How I Use The Stamps: In this lesson, I would like to quickly show you how you can use those plants or stamp brushes to your own advantage so that you can speed up your workflow. I selected the few artworks that I have done in the past. I wanted to show you how I use the brushes that I created. If we for example choose this pattern over here, I created a few brushes already a while ago, and I put them into a variety of folders. For example, here you can see my old entire folder with plants, with leaves and with flowers. For this pattern over here, for example I used this. This is one of my favorites to Sage leave pattern. Let me just presented to you what it looks like. By playing around with those leaves, with all the colors of the leaves and also with the opacity of those leaves, I was able to create a beautiful repeat pattern that I could later on use for my shop. This is one example. Now, this is also projects that we will be doing within this course. I sometimes create those inspirational quotes that have to do with yoga with a little bit of positivity and to make them even prettier apart from just the writing. I also include the background that is based of those stamps. Here again, I added some text and I added a little bit of specs in the background, and the entire background over here are the different leaves that you can see here. We're going to zoom in. It adds a little bit more interest. You can make it monochrome like here, just the shades of blue, or you reduce the opacity of those stamps if they're on a separate layer. I have a whole variety actually. I have those plants. I've made some icons which I'm going to show you now. I created recently a lunar e-book and to promote it and also to beautify it a little bit, I created those stamps for that purpose and I use them as well. For example, this is a page from my e-book. I was able to use here those stamps with the eye. This one over here. Then this little break in the page, I have another separate this one. Let me show you. Too big. In this way you can very quickly reuse those items and to create something very professional looking. This entire table here background for the test is also my favorite sage leaf just in the background. The same when I was creating some promotional materials, for example, I wanted to inform that my Etsy shop is open. Again the Sage leaf and a little bit of a fern leaf and the eye stamp. You can see in all those layers here. The fringe leaves, the eyes. Just by choosing the color and then playing around with the opacity of those elements, I was able to put an illustration together that was super fast. Also it kept my branding very consistent because all those brushes I reuse them. I have some brushes that have to do with some magic like this hand with the stars. I've made brushes that I have the shape of a crystal, the math, and I use it quite a lot. They have many more. There was a phase when I was doing a lot of succulents for one arts challenge on Instagram. I have some trees over here. It's really up to you what you would like to create. You can really do a lot and then you basically create a dedicated folder so that you get a little bit more order into your folders, and everything is much faster. Over here I made a custom portrayed for a friend of mine. To create this gorgeous background over here, and even to add a little bit of this fern and leaves texture into her hair, I also used the stamps. It's actually in the file here. Let me open it and show it to you and getting rid of the person, the original background, and then I basically added first a little bit of texture. Then some plans, some ferns. Again, I played around with the colors. I have some beautiful colors here selected in my pallet. I basically just chose different colors of this muted green. Then from the Magic section, I added some stars. It's not that visible and I added some ice from the ice stamp. Then I flattened everything to this one background because procreates, depending what size you choose, it allows a limited number of canvases. Since my background is very detailed, I decided to do it in a separate file, then I duplicated it and flattened. From here, I copied it, copy. I went to the original artwork where I worked on the actual portrayed of the person, created a new layer. This is here, the background that you can see that I basically just copied from the other file. I was able to insert it straight ahead. It was so easy to actually use that to my own advantage. It could speed up my process, and it's still original. It's not cheating because everything that I've done here, the ferns, the leaves over here, it's all done by me. But to speed up things a little bit, cheating a little bit, I created the stamp so that they can use it later on because they're so time consuming. Have a look at this fern for instance. By the way my signature, this one over here, I also made the stamp out of it. In my patterns, I Created different variations of my own stamps. Super useful. Going black to this beautiful fern, let's get rid of my signature, create a new canvas so that you see the level of detail. Yeah, I could have drawn it again, but would be very time consuming. It's very detailed. I created as an advance and now all the brushes that I have here, I can later on use it to my advantage and use it in any future art that I would like to create. I think it's really handy and I highly encourage you that you do the same.
5. Leaf Stamp Elaborate: In this lesson we're ready to start with our first exercise. I highly encourage you that you take a photo of your own and use it as a reference photo for this first exercise. I'm going to go back to my photos folder here. I already selected one of the photos that I took when I was out in the wild. I really like the shape of this leaf, so I would like to give it a try, import it into Procreate and play around with its shape and create a brush out of it. You can do it directly here from the photos folder, clicking on the Share icon, and then choosing Copy. Then you're going back to Procreate. To create your custom brush stamp, you need to create a Canvas that is a perfect square. I do recommend that you go for the highest size or the biggest size possible. Even though it's at the risk of having fewer layers within Procreate, but maybe you want to give it a try and choose the size that I have here, 4,000 by 4,000 pixel. I usually work with this format. I think it works pretty well for any dimension of the future artwork that I'm creating, because if your Canvas, and then if your stamp is too small, if you are doing some beautification on an artwork that is a bigger format, you cannot maximize your stamp too much because it will lose some resolution. That's why whenever you create new brushes or new stamps, go for the biggest Canvas that you feel most comfortable with. We already copied our photo. We go to this little icon here and we paste in our photo. I'm going to immediately rename it that it's my original. Since I would like to be reusing it, moving it in places, sometimes I might be cropping it and losing the information on the photo. I will swipe to the left, and I will immediately duplicate it and then get rid of this original so that I can have it for any future reference if I might need it. Then immediately here, we'll reduce the opacity of the original photo and create a new layer. I can also rename, for example, lines and play around with the Move tool and with the photo that I selected, to choose the shape of the leaf that I'm interested in, which is the one in the middle. Then I try to position that's really in the middle of my Canvas. It's okay if there was going to be some white around it, but try to make it not too small. This is going to be too small. Try to make it at least 50, 60 percent of your Canvas positioning, the leaf that I'm interested in, right in the middle and then deselecting and I have my shape. The brush that I'm using will be the dry ink, so my favorite. Then the color doesn't matter where you are at the disc. You double-click somewhere at the bottom here, or in the classic view here in the corner, and then it's going to select the black basically. We need the black. I'm checking if I'm on the right layer for the lines. Zooming in and I'm going to adjust tests if I am happy with the thickness of my line. When I zoom out, it's still visible. If you go a little bit too thin, so I lowered it, and you go a little bit thinner when you zoom out, you're going to see that you're actually not seeing too much. Try not to go too small or too thin. The first step is to trace the general shape of the leaf that you have selected. Do not be afraid to go outside of the lines to modify it. It's going to be yours. This is just your reference photo and you can do with it whatever you want. Then as you go along, I highly encourage that you really vary, again, the pressure of your lines because it adds more interest, and also you can break your line, so you don't have to go like that all the time. You can also make it even more interesting by sometimes breaking the lines. Think it looks nice too. I am zooming out just to see if I'm happy with the shape of the leaf. I can also get rid of the background. I see that I would like to fix, for example, those bits that are a little bit too thin. Feel free to still go over and to fix your shapes. When you're done with this step, the next one will be to add even more detail. We're going to do that on a separate layer. This is my general shape. I will rename it Fines, and I will use this extra layer to create some stamps or vines that are coming out of this leaf as you can see here so that it's even more interesting. You can leave the same thickness of the line or you can go a little bit lower. Just experiment and have fun. Those were the lines that I could see quite clearly in my reference photo, but now I would like to go even more wild and I would like to add even more detail into the leaf, not really caring too much above the reference photo anymore, because as a stamp, if we again get rid of the background, it looks quite simple, but one goal of making those stamps is to save time. Usually what looks best are pieces that are very elaborate, very detailed. Then this is where we have to save time because we spent, for example, one hour on adding detail to that leaf and we would like to reuse it. Again, we will put a little bit more effort into this piece, add even more vanes, maybe some speckles, we're going to see, so that its really worth making a stamp out of it in the end. For more visual appeal, it's nice to leave some of the veins like a standalone veins. For even more interest, you can actually bundle some of the veins together tighter or least tighter like that. Again, varying the thickness of the line, perhaps also changing the size of the brush. When you zoom out you see its even more detailed, looks very pretty. Then another technique is to go to the far edge of the leaf, this frame over here, the outside frame, just to create really small specks of lines together that originate at the [inaudible] where two bits of the leaf meet together. This is what I mean. Also lifting your pencil every now and then so that the line gets broken. Looks also very nice. As I go, I try to move to different sponsors. You see this one that looks already quite nice and quite detailed, but it's either your meditation and you're enjoying doing those lines in this repetitive way, or you get a little bit impatient, so stay with me. Do your bits with as much detail as you want and just move around the piece, changing sides, rotating your Canvas, and also occasionally zooming out and having a quick look if everything looks great also when you zoom out, that's important.
6. Leaf Stamp Block: Okay. In the previous exercise, we created the blueprint for our plant stamp that is a little bit more detailed, a little bit more elaborate. Now I would like to show you how to create another stamp out of this one, that has a little bit more filling inside, so that we can also use some texture brushes with our Eraser tool. So you can create a completely new shape using a reference photo, or you can also just stick to the shape that we already have in here. So I'm going to stick with the shape that I have here. I'm going to duplicate this one, because this is the shape that I will be using, but instead, I'm going to fill it with some black color. This one, I'm going to group it, and save it for future reference when we will be actually creating our custom brush and I will get rid of it for the time being. I want to fill this shape with color, but for that, I need to make sure that there are no gaps. So I will quickly go now through the shape, and see if I can drop the color in. Right now it's not possible because there are some gaps, as you can see. So I will try to get rid of those gaps and eventually to fill all the shape with one black color. When you try to drop your color to fill out this space in the middle, you can also hold it. Over here, you see when you're holding it, that the ColorDrop Threshold shows up in percentages. You may want to see how far you're able to actually go, before it bleeds to the entire page, and this is it. So right now we're still on the dry ink brush. If I would like to have the same brush for my Eraser tool, I stay within this brush, but then I click and hold onto the Eraser tool, and it will erase with the same brush that I'm using. The next step is to refine the lines. So sometimes I see that I'm missing some details. In this part, I'm going to try to fix some of the details that went missing when I filtered the color. You can already guess that we will be using the Eraser tool to erase some of the bits, so that we see the veins, but there are the erased parts and we will also modify a little bit the shape of the leaf. Again especially when you go into the leaf, I encourage that you vary the the thickness of your brush, so that it looks more interesting. Sometimes you will see that there is some paint missing, there too many speckles. It's because this brush is quite textured. So when you keep holding on to the black color, it will switch again to the Brush tool, and then you can also use your brush to fill out any gaps that you think, don't look good or even adapt further the shape of the leaf by adding a little bit more color. Okay. I'm quite happy with the general shape of this leaf. Maybe one more a bit here because it looks a little bit cut. I like the texture of this brush. When you zoom in, you're going to see that it's not just blend, a straight line, it has a little bit of fluffiness to the edge. That's why I like it. Now I'm just going to get rid of at least one layer of the original reference photo because I don't need it right now. I'm going to experiment with the composition, with adding a little bit more details. If I still want to save the original of this block of color, then it's a good thing to again swipe left and to duplicate it, and to leave it for later in case you've made a mistake, and you don't want to double-tap too many times to come back to the original. The original will be here. We can hide it for now. I'm going to go back to the Eraser tool with the current brush, and I will add a few more vines in the middle so that I can see if I can make it a little bit more interesting. I would like to get rid of some of the places that I erased over here. I think I overdid it a little bit. So again I'm holding onto the black color and this switches back to the brush tool. Then I can again fill it with color because I think I erased a little bit too much. Maybe also reduce this one, maybe even more. Remember to zoom out quite frequently to see if you're happy with the general shape of your leaf or of your flower. You can also do flowers. You can do actually anything you want after watching this lesson. Okay. I'm happy with this shape. Now I will go to the Eraser tool, and I'm going to use one of those textured brushes, the Splatter, the Flicks or the Vintage Scuffs to add even more interest to the piece. Let's have a look with the Flicks for instance. Then here, you can also change the size of the Flicks, you can make them smaller. I also recommend you play around with the opacity because, see they've very gentle here, little specs that may be are not going to be super visible, but at some point, you will be able to see that this leaf has some texture. It's not just black, there's something going on. I will go to the other brush, the Splatter brush. I really like it. Also reduce the opacity, stay on the safe side. Remember, if you're not happy with where this is heading to, you can just delete the current layer, and you can again duplicate the original block of color, and play around with it over and over again. Okay. I'm going to stay. Oh, that is nice. So this leaf gets a little bit more speckles. I will try out the Vintage Scuffs brush, maybe leave it at its full opacity. Yeah. Reduce the opacity a little bit, that's a little bit too much, and keep dabbing onto the leaf especially in the areas where you see they're a little bit too black, you would like more texture. Maybe I duplicate this one, hide the original, and see what if I really did a lot? Does it look good? No. I'll get rid of that and I'll go back to the original. Okay. Try not to overdo it. I think it's better to keep it simple. But thanks to that, we have another pattern or another blueprint that we can use to create our custom plant brush. In the next lesson, I will show you how to do that.
7. Create The Brushes: Okay, so in this lesson we finally make our brush. After having done the previous two exercises in your layers, you should have now two of your blueprints of the shapes that you just created. The first step that you're going to do is for every of those forms individually, you have to save them into your photo gallery. You do that by going to the menu and then share, and you just save it as JPEG onto your iPad. Easy. So that you have the image that you can use to create your brush. You do the same with the second blueprint. You can actually create as many as you want. It can be like 6,10, whatever. The steps are the same, you can even work on the same Canvas in the same file if you still have some layers left. Now for the second one, the same saving as JPEG into our gallery. As you could see in the previous lessons, I have all those stampy brushes saved in different folders, so you can also organize your own brushes later on in similar folders. For the sake of this presentation, I'm going to duplicate the brush that I already have and show you what settings I have, and then if you would like to create this brush from scratch, you just click on the plus sign, and this is where you import the photo. This is where you choose the grain source. I will show you that on the brush that I already have so that on your iPad at your own pace, you can create this custom brush from scratch on your own. Then later on when you have one brush, it's enough just to swipe to the left, duplicate it, and all the settings will be preserved. The only thing that you got to change is the image. Super easy. It's all about creating the first one. Yeah, I'm going to rename it straight ahead so that I do not confuse it. Garden leaf. Done. In the shape source, this is where you insert your photo. You have to also check if the shape is inverted. You will recognize it by seeing the dark black background and then the image will be white, so make sure this is set like that. Then you go to Insert Photo, recently added, for example, and you choose your leaf. Then in the grain source, you have to leave it blank. You can check it also in the library. You've got to scroll down and there's going to be one shape that is called blank. You basically have to select this one that says blank. Cool. The source is done. Make sure that again the shape is inverted in the general. The next one here, for instance, you see the preview. You can make it smaller. Sometimes you upload something that looks like that. You can make it smaller so that then in your gallery of brushes, you see what shapes you are going to be using. I think the rest of the settings here are quite standard. Smudge is at 50 and then the size limits, you can also play around with the size, the ultimate size of your brush. I think I'll put it even to the max. You can put it to the max. I put it a little bit before. It doesn't really matter. You can also choose the minimum size of your brush. You can also replicate, have a look at the screen and replicate exactly what I have here. This is it for the general settings. With the pencil settings, I leave it as it is. I make sure that the size is to the max, opacity is zero, no bleed, no smoothing, and all the other settings also remain the same. They're off. Just make sure that this is also the case with your brush. With the dynamics, it's all about how the brush, along with the Apple Pencil behaves. I think it was also quite standard flow to the max. Jitter, none. Speed also off and the middle jitter is also off. In the grain, everything also quite standard. I have it to the max here to the right side, follow the size so that I can then adapt the size of the stamp. I think this is it for the grain settings. Shape also, you don't have to change anything in here. Then the stroke, it would matter if you would be making like a calligraphy brush, I think. Again, size is max, opacity is max. I do not want it to be transparent. This is pretty much it. If you would like to create your custom brush now, if it was a little bit too fast, you can go back in this video and go through the settings that I have just shown to you. Right now, I'm going to create the remaining shape by again swiping to the left, duplicating, and I'm going to go back to this one. Going to tap gently here and add the little number 1 over here. This is a duplicate. Again, I'm going to rename it and this one will have number 2. As you see, let's go again one by one, the settings are exactly the same. This doesn't really matter that much. Dynamics also. Maybe now the preview should be the same because what you want to do right now you're going to leave the grain source and shape source as it is. The only thing that you're going to change is the image. You click on "Insert a Photo", and voila, we have our elaborate shape now. Going back to the folder, you see, that's why it's important to also just to preview this, not too big, not too small so that you see exactly what brush you're using. Now we can test it. Let's get rid of this. Create a new Canvas. Play around with the colors. Right now I have the elaborate one. I can also increase the size. Maybe change the color, work on another layer, go to the more blocky style leaf. Way too small. Those are the, I see the texture, it's so beautiful. Going to erase this one. Just making sure that I have the hard brush. That's usually the approach that I use for erasing. Then depending on what layers you're working, you can play around with the shapes that you're creating. Maybe one more underneath. The elaborate lines look very nice on the top. Then the more filled in color leaf will look great as a background. You can play around with it here too. Try changing the opacity for the previous one as well. Maybe increasing the size, perhaps using a completely different color. Let's choose this one. I'm going to swipe with my two fingers to the right so that it's alpha locked. Click on it and fill layer and we'll choose the new color. That looks nice too. But by now you see how it works. Reached the maximum amount of layers. One more before I finish, maybe the elaborate one on a separate layer so that I can move it freely. Yes. Then now I can merge everything together. Yeah, so we created our custom brushes. Like I said, if you have any more shapes, you can just duplicate it and insert a new photo and you will create now your own gallery of your custom plant stamps. Its really cool. Once you are done, I would invite you to finish your brushes, to prepare them and put them in a dedicated folder so they are always at hand. In the next exercise, I will show you one last bit. An illustration with an inspirational quote where you can use those stamps to create an interesting background for your writing. Join me in the next exercise.
8. Closing Thoughts: There you go. You created your own beautiful illustration using your custom brushes, your custom stamps. I hope they will prove very useful to you and they will streamline and make your artistic workflow a little bit more efficient. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you created. Make sure that you upload to the project gallery. Also, go out there. I highly encourage you that you really use real plants, that you go for a walk. Maybe you gather some leaves that you see on the way and you use those as your reference photos. No need to make photos of photos of photos or look for inspiration on Pinterest. I would really encourage you that you use your own references. Then all the rest of the materials will be listed in the description of this course, in the project description. I would also like to share the stamps, the brushes that I created with you. I will include the file and in case it's a little bit too hard for you to create your custom brush from scratch, then feel free to use mine. Basically, like I showed you, just insert the photo that you want to use. All the other materials and resources are also listed in the description. I hope you had fun and I'll see you in next class. Bye bye.
Weronika Salach, Art with MAGIC
