Procreate Essentials: A Designer’s Guide to Digital Illustration

1. Introduction: Hi there. My name is Dan Scott, and in this Procreate Essentials course, I've teamed up with my good friend and professional artist Nathan Brown. We both worked really hard to make sure that this is the absolute best procreate course on the planet, focusing on the tools that are really important to both beginners and designers. So sign up and get ready for Procreate Essentials with Nathan Brown. If you've ever opened Procreate and thought, Okay, this is cool, but kind of a lot, or like it's speaking a different language, you're not alone. Especially if you're used to more structured tools where things live in menus and panels, Procreate can feel loose, fast, and a little unpredictable at first. Now my goal in this course is to help that new language start making sense. Hey, I'm Nathan Brown. I'm an Illustrator, a painter, an educator, and I've been working with both traditional and digital tools for a long time. I use Procreate every day for sketches, finished illustrations, client work, and personal projects. And over the years, I've learned what actually matters when you're starting out and what just adds noise. This course is designed to help you learn Procreate the right way. Not every way, not the perfect way, a clear practical path that actually makes sense. You'll learn how to sketch, paint, choose colors, work with layers, add texture, and bring everything together into finished illustrations all inside Procreate. But more importantly, you'll learn why things work the way they do. So you're not just copying steps, you're building real confidence. And we'll learn through hands on demos and real projects. So by the end of the course, you'll have polished illustrations you can confidently add to your portfolio. This course is made for creatives and designers who want to add Procreate to their tool kit. You don't need any previous Procreate experience. You don't need to be good at drawing. And if you're already familiar with more traditional design tools, you'll get to apply those same skills in a new way that unlocks a more intuitive hands on approach to illustration. And one last thing, don't worry about perfection here. This course is about experimenting, getting comfortable, and building momentum. Procreate is an incredibly powerful tool, and once it clicks, it's a lot of fun. So take a breath, grab your iPad, and let's get started. 2. Getting Started in Procreate: Alright, you're here. Welcome to the course. Before we start creating full illustrations, I want to make sure we're all set up the same way. A few minutes of setup now will save you any frustration later on. So in this video, we're going to get Procreate ready, make sure you've got the exercise files and make sure your workspace looks like mine. So when I click something, you can follow along easily. Now, if you haven't already, go ahead and download the exercise files using the link on this page. Once they're downloaded, you may need to unzip them depending on your device. Inside, you'll find the projects files that we'll use throughout the course. Now, it's not mandatory to use my files. You can absolutely follow along with your own ideas, but having them ready will make things smoother as we move forward. Now, for this course, you'll need an iPad that supports Procreate and an Apple Pencil. Now, I do recommend the Apple Pencil because the pressure sensitivity is what makes drawing and painting feel natural. Now, make sure you're running the latest version of Procreate. If you don't have it yet, you can grab it from the app store and install it before continuing. Now, once that's done, go ahead and open Procreate and you should land in the gallery view. The gallery is where all of your artwork lives, so you can think of it like your home base. From here, you can create new canvases, organize files into stacks, duplicate work or export finished pieces. And when you open a canvas, you'll see your main workspace, your canvas in the center, tools across the top, brushes on the side, layers panel, and color panel. Don't worry about memorizing everything right now. The goal here is just to get you comfortable with where things live. Now to make sure that we're starting from the same place, I recommend not modifying any default brushes just yet. If you've previously adjusted brushes or changed gesture controls, you may want to reset those to default so that when I demonstrate something, it behaves the same way for you. And don't worry. Later in the course, we'll absolutely explore customizing brushes and preferences. But for now, consistency will. Oh, and a quick note before we move on. This course is designed to be hands on, so I encourage you to pause the video, try things, experiment, and even rewatch sections if something doesn't click right away. You'll get more out of this by doing and not just watching. And don't stress if things feel awkward at first. Every new tool has that learning curve, so give yourself permission to experiment. Alright, now that we're set up and ready to go, let's jump into something fun and start creating our first simple illustration inside Procreate. 3. The Procreate Interface: Now let's dive in to the Procreate interface. Before we do, I want you to keep this in mind as we're going through it, because whenever I'm drawing on traditional paper, you know, on a tabletop, I like to have on the surface with me all the tools that I need. So whether it's pencils, erasers, brush, paints, paper towels, whatever it is, because the last thing that I want to do is have to get up, walk across the room to get something or start digging through a drawer, looking for something because it interrupts my workflow. And I really think that's what the designers of Procreate had in mind with putting together this interface because everything is right at hand or it's very quick to access. And that's great. So let's go ahead and let's jump in. All right. Let's start out here with our blank Canvas. And I'm going to start over on the far right up top here. We have our color picker. Now, we're going to just be taking a quick overview of all the menu items and all the tools just so that you're familiar with where they are. Now, don't worry if you don't quite understand what everything does, because as we go through the course, we're going to be taking a look at each tool and each menu more extensively. Alright, so starting off, we've got our Color Picker, which you may be familiar with how this looks if you've ever used Photoshop or Illustrator, and that goes for layers as well, which is our next menu item. And this is a very simple layers panel, but it does all the things that you would want it to do. A creative layer for us to work on, and I'm going to select the brush tool here, you'll see the brush library. And I'm going to make squiggly line here. And then the smudge tool. Does exactly what you might expect. It smudges our paint, and the eraser tool simply erases. Okay? Now, moving over here to the far left, we have the transform tool so that we can transform anything that we put down. We've got a selection tool so that we can select portions of our drawing. And move them around and do whatever we need to do to edit. We also have the Adjustments panel, which has lots of different effects and adjustments that we can make to our creations, which again, we'll be going over more in depth later in the course. We've got our Actions menu, which includes things like Canvas adjustments, share video capture and preferences and things like that, which again, we'll be going over more extensively. Now, there's a link here to the gallery, which is going to take us back outside of our canvas. Over here on the left of the screen, we have our brush size, and we have our brush opacity. And then we've got a undo and redo arrows, those icons there. And then this little square here, I'll show you if you just simply tap that, it brings up a quick menu, and this is for, like, new layers flip vertically, clear layer, merge down, just some different tools that you may want to have, like, a quick access to. Now, you can tap quick menu and you can create your own quick menus to do like maybe you have some custom tasks that you want to have quick access to. Also want you to be aware how to access the copy and paste menu with three fingers, you just swipe down, and you have cut, copy, copy all, duplicate, cut and paste and paste, and then an X here to close that out. Okay, now, that's a quick overview of all of the tools that surround our canvas. Again, that's like laying our pencils and brushes and paints out around our paper. Now, there is another thing that I want to show you about the interface, and this was really the game changer for me when it came to digital art because I had tried in the past to work with, like, tablets and monitors and just different tools to create digital art. But this right here, it's a very simple thing, but it really is what sold me on the iPad and Procreate, that is gestures. So let's take a quick look at how you can use gestures, just a few simple ones that really will transform the way you work. Okay, so we have our squiggly line, and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to delete that. And I'm going to make a new one here for us. And I want to show you you can just tap two fingers to undo or three fingers to redo. Take two fingers to pinch to zoom out and zoom back in. Take the same two fingers, and you can rotate. And for some reason, this is just like reaching in to the screen and handling the art. Being able to use my hands to access what I'm creating, that's really the game changing element for me. I just it feels like it's more intuitive. Like there's less of a barrier between me and the artwork. And I think that you are going to see that more and more as you work through this course. So I want you to try these out, the real simple basic gestures. Let's try it again. So squiggly two fingers, undo, three fingers, redo, and then pinch to zoom to rotate. Okay? And one other quick one while we're at it. Drawing a line and then holding it will straighten the line. So we can do that with shapes as well where we just hold our pencil tip down, and it will straighten those shapes for us. And we'll be using this again later in the course. 4. Your First Project Brief: Let's start out by just making something fun right off the bat, and we'll do this with just a simple drawing, a simple subject to give us an idea of just how Procreate feels, kind of how some of the most basic tools work and where they're located. And it'll give us something fun to focus on in doing that. So the first thing I want you to do is head over to randomprojectgenerator.com, and we've got some projects over here on the side if you scroll down to Procreate Sea Creature. I'm going to tap on that. Now, we're going to let the random project generator decide on a subject matter for us within the basic idea or concept of sea creature. So I'm going to generate my project. It looks like I'll be doing an octopus as my subject. You've been asked to create a quick illustration of a Sea creature. Your subject is an octopus, and the goal is to explore brushes, layers, and colors while having fun, of course, not to make a perfect drawing. We're going to keep it simple. It's going to be playful and unique to your own style. Alright? So let's jump over to Procreate and let's see how to do that. Okay, over in Procreate, the first thing that we're going to do is tap the plus icon up in the upper right hand corner, and we're going to choose Screen size. It's the first option under new Canvas, and that's going to give us a canvas that is the same resolution as our Screen, which is a really good option for just doing some simple sketching. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate this canvas because I feel like an octopus is going to fit better in a vertical composition versus a landscape. So I did that by just taking two fingers and just rotating the canvas. Okay, the first thing I want to do is select a brush. We're going to need a good sketching brush. Now, I'm in the Pencil section of the Procreate library, and I'm going to go with this Scopus pencil, which is just a really good pencil that I like for doing some basic sketching. Now I'm going to switch over to the color circle over here, the icon in the upper right, and I want to make sure that my color is set to black or really dark gray. Okay, so we're going to start out with some basic shapes. But before we do that, if you want to go ahead and just make some squiggly lines and just kind of test out the look and feel of just drawing some random random bits in Procreate here, just to give you a sense of how the Apple Pencil, just drawing on a screen, just how it feels overall. Okay, so to clear this layer, we're going to select the layers icon in the upper right, and I'm going to tap on the layer thumbnail, and I'm going to choose clear. Okay, now, I recommend that you start your sea creature with the most basic shapes possible. So for my octopus, I think I'm going to begin with a circle. And then I'm going to attach a rectangle below his head here. I'm gonna use this to make up his head and maybe what might be considered a body. I'm going to attach all of his legs too. And I think his eyes might be right in here. It's got a really nice alien look at the moment. Now, if we want to take what we are drawing and move it around or resize it, we can tap the arrow icon up here on the top left. Now we have the transform menu, and our drawing is selected. Now we can use this to move the drawing around or we can scale it down a little bit. And I think I want to scale my octopus head down so that I have some room to put the legs. So choosing the brush again, now we're free to draw. So I think I'm going to maybe try to put a leg up here. So he's got eight legs, so make sure I've got room for all of them. So there's two. So maybe there's another one that comes down and another one maybe that comes down further. So now, we've got one, two, three, four, so I want to make sure maybe this one just comes out like this. And then this maybe it could be shorter. So you can see that this is just a really rough, really simple sketch that we're going to build on. Now, another thing to point out here is, if we have a line that we don't want, it's just a two finger tap to undo that and then a three finger tap if we want to redo. Okay, so I'm going to remove that line and go back. See if I can squeeze another leg maybe right here. Maybe that one's further back. And let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Maybe there's another leg back here that's just kind of going back behind. Maybe something like that. Okay, I'm gonna add a little bit of shape to these lines. They're just kind of guidelines for me. I'm going to move him, scale him down one more time. And I'm going to let this be my rough drawing. So I'm going to use this drawing as a guide to maybe create a little bit more of a refined version that we can then paint. So if I add a new layer, I'm going to go to the layers icon again. I'm gonna tap this plus the top right. I'm gonna create a new layer. But before I begin to draw on that one, I'm going to turn the opacity of this first one down. I'm going to tap this letter in here to bring down this menu, and I'm gonna just turn the opacity down to maybe 50%. Alright, going back to my layer two. And in fact, we can even call this if I tap on the name here and choose rename, we'll call this rough. And we'll do the same thing here. Layer two, we'll call it refined. So now we can use this layer to go in and refine our drawing. Now, you just saw me zoom in and I do that with two fingers by just expanding, contracting the canvas there, two fingers. And now I'll begin my more refined sketch. I also like to rotate the canvas a little bit when I'm doing a more refined sketch. Back to my sketch lines. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect. Don't forget that. We really have a tendency to try and make things perfect like this. I think it's just like as being artists and designers, like, we just want to make everything perfect. This is just an exercise for us to get to know, Procreate before we take a deeper dive. So don't worry too much. We just want to have fun. I can remember my my first attempts at Digital Painting were just it's a horror story. But it just takes time. You'd have to be patient with yourself. And as you go through this course, you're gonna see all kinds of improvement, and all of this is gonna begin to feel like second nature. So as I go further here, I think that I might want to leave my rough sketch layer visible in this final little drawing because I think it adds a little bit of extra life to the piece. Okay, so he's gonna have these little suction cup things here, too, so I'm going to add those where I think his tentacles might be, like, turning outward, they're going to be on the bottom. And then for this one, we'll put him on the outside so that it looks like his tentacles are twisting and turning. Okay, maybe we want to add see about some eyes here. My eyes are a little lopsided there, but that's okay. One's a little bigger than the other, that's fine. Maybe he's got kind of shape to his head here. Okay, I'm gonna go with this for my sketch, and next up, we'll take a look at adding some color. 5. Your First Drawing: Alright, so how do we add color to our simple sketch that we just created? Well, let's start by adding a new layer for our color so that we can keep our color and linework separate. So I'm going to add a new layer with that plus icon. Again, this time, I am going to tap on this layer, and then I'm going to drag it down below all the others. Okay? So the color layer is going to be beneath the sketch, so our sketch will remain visible. Now I'm going to select a I think this octopus might be orange. So I'm going to go with just a light orange color. It's maybe kind of a middle tone. So if we wanted to do maybe some shadows or some highlights, we'll have some room to do that. Okay, so for our brush, our paint brush, let's go with something real simple. We're gonna go over to the paints section here within our brush library. And I'm going to choose this very first one valia. I'm gonna make sure that the size is up maybe around 20%. Okay? This is just a really simple, nice brush that doesn't have a ton of texture. It also can be sized down to a really fine point, which will come in handy on the tips of the tentacles. G just begin to fill in some color, my octopus. I'm not going to worry too much about being perfect. I'm not going to try to stay inside the lines. Everywhere. I'm just going to be kind of loose with this color. Now, if we get way outside the lines, we can always come back with the eraser. And one quick tip is to tap and hold on the eraser, and the eraser will switch to the current brush that we're painting with. Now, the eraser tool and the smudge tool, they use the exact same brush engine as the brush tool. So you can use any brush as an eraser or paint brush or smudge tool. So I'm going to come back with the eraser and clean up my lines just a little bit here. Size my racer down just a little bit there. I'm using these two sliders over here on the left. This is controlling the brush size, and this is controlling the brush opacity. So right now, it's set to 100% opacity, and my brush size is down around 20%. Okay, maybe just a little bit more cleanup. Okay, so if we're thinking about the light source in this image, maybe the light is coming from this direction. Maybe it's coming down from the top. So if that's the case and the tentacles are rounded, let's see if we can add a little bit of dimension to the octopus with a darker color. Maybe we'll go a little bit more red to give us a nice color that we can use for some shadow. I'm also going to size my brush down. So maybe maybe his tentacles turn under. A few areas here. Like that. Maybe because of that light, there would also be a highlight. So I'm going to select the original color again by just you can use the brush tip or you can use your finger and just tap and hold, and you can see the little circle that pops up that allows us to pick or pick the color that we're touching here. So let's get the orange that we used in the beginning for the octopus. Now, the reason I did that is because I want to choose a lighter version of it. So maybe it will go up a little bit and maybe a little more towards yellow. So this should work as a good highlight color for us. So maybe there's a highlight there. And then just all the places that I think the light may be hitting Okay, while we're at it, we can take a look at the smudge tool here and I'm going to tap it and hold so that it switches to the same brush that we've been using. Now I can kind of smooth. You can use it to smooth a little bit of this color, but we don't want to do we don't want to over smooth or over smudge because it tends to make things look a little blurry, so we don't want to overdo it. So maybe just a couple quick smudges there for that color. Now let's go over maybe want to add maybe we want to add a little bit of a highlight to some of those suction cups on his tentacle. You go and head with another lighter version, maybe not as light as our highlight color. Let's see. I'm going to go ahead and add these to a new layer just in case I want to change their color or make a separate edit. It's a good tip is anything that you want to be able to control separately, you want to put on another layer to make it easier for you to do that. Okay, so now I've got all my suction cups. That's my technical term for octopus anatomy. I'm going to color in his eyes here as well. And let's go ahead and do another layer above everything else and switch to a real light color. And we'll use this to maybe add, like this little specular highlight in the eyes. Okay, last up, let's add a background color. Let's get another new layer. We're going to tap and hold and drag this one down to the bottom, and let's choose a nice blue color for our background. Get maybe this sort of aqua blue and we want to use the same brush or maybe grab a different one? I'm gonna leave it up to you, however you want to do it. Let's get maybe make piece. Let's see what that one looks like. It looks like it might have a nice kind of watery texture. Let's try one more. Maybe this one, abalone. Okay, yeah, that's gonna work. I'm gonna size it down a little bit, though. And I'm just gonna make some diagonal brush strokes here for my background. And I want to size it down a little bit. Same as we did before. Make it fit a little bit better in the composition. Okay, as a final step, let's go ahead and add one more new layer. And let's tap and drag that all the way to the top above everything else. And let's go back to our other paint brush that we were using here. And let's get a really light yellow, almost white. And this is going to be like our final brightest highlight, almost like a rim light around the edge of the octopus. So I'm going to start here with the head. Maybe a bit there on top of the eye, and there's to be some here, maybe a little bit of light there. Okay, I think we can call this one done, but before we move on, I want to show you how you can save this image so you can then refer back to it at the end of the course, and you can see how far you've come with your Procreate knowledge and skills. So to do that, let's choose the wrench icon in the top left corner. Again, this time, we're going to go to share. And here you can choose the native Procreate file format, which will retain the layers PSD format, which Procreate can also open. That's a Photoshop format. That format will also retain the layers. We can do PDF, JPEG, Ping, or TIF. A lot of times I choose JPEG if I want to save a lower resolution, lower file size flattened image. So if I choose JPEG, I can then export it. I can print it. I can save to files, or I can save to my photo library. 6. Class Project 1 - Sea Creature: Alright. Now it's your turn. But remember, this first project is all about just getting in, getting your feet wet, and having some fun right away. So let's get started by taking a look at the project guide that you can download in the course resources. Okay, we'll be using the Random Project Generator at randomprojectgenerator.com, and we're going to use this for two prompts during the course, but this first is for the mini project that focuses on a Sea Creature Illustration. Now, the requirements is to generate your prompt. We're going to use at least two layers, one for line, one for color, but it's okay if you use more. And we're going to apply the color using brush tools and the color picker. You'll also likely use the eraser and maybe even the Smudge tool. So you want to keep it fun and experimental. Again, this is just warm up, so don't worry about perfection. We're just going to just focus on getting comfortable with the look and feel of Procreate. So your deliverables are to export your finished artwork as a JPEG. You're going to upload to the class project assignment section of this website, and you can share your work on social media. Be sure to tag, bring your own laptop. You can find them on Instagram at the Link here. And you are also welcome to post to the Facebook group or LinkedIn Group, which is Linked as well. Okay? Remember to take your time, enjoy yourself, and I think you'll be surprised just how comfortable Procreate feels even when you're just starting out. 7. Using the Gallery: Alright. In this section, we're going to be taking a look at the Procreate gallery. Now, think of this gallery as, like, your home base where all of your projects live. It's like walking into your studio and seeing your completed works along with some works in progress and maybe all of the associated bits like sketches and thumbnails that you're keeping with those projects. So let's go ahead and let's jump in, take a look. Okay, the first thing that we're going to see is all of the current projects that I have that are either completed or maybe works in progress, everything that I have still within Procreate. So now, one thing that we can do that's really cool from the gallery is to preview what is inside the canvas. So in order to do that, we could just take two fingers and just expand on the thumbnail. Now, this gives us the ability to swipe back and forth, almost like you're flipping pages of a sketchbook. So this is just going through everything in the gallery. And in order to close it out, all we have to do is pinch our fingers together, and that closes out the preview. Now, you'll also see that I have several projects here that look like stacks of different canvases, and you can kind of preview what is in the stack by hovering the tip of the pen over the screen without actually touching it. And if we tap, we can see what's inside. This is like project folders, like keeping all of your work within a folder. So in order to create these, let's first create a couple of new canvases. So I'm going to tap this plus icon up here in the top, and I'm going to choose a new canvas, and then it immediately opens up. Now, all of our new canvases will be placed in the upper left hand corner. Now, in order to create these stacks, and we do this by tapping and holding, and we can drag the canvas around. Now, you can do it with your finger or you can do it with the tip of the pencil. And if we hover over another canvas and drop it, it's going to create that stack. So now, within the stack, if we create another new canvas, it's going to place it within that stack. Now, one good tip here is to begin to name your canvases, begin to name your files. Now, this is one thing that I'm not particularly good at. In fact, sometimes I have maybe like ten different canvases and I have to open them up or preview them to see what's in there. Now, this is like a habit that you should make early on. Like, if it's a canvas full of sketches, title it sketches. If it's thumbnails, title it thumbnails. Don't wait until you have 2020 different canvases, and then you have to, like, click in and out to see what's within them. Go ahead and try to name your files as you work. So let's just call this one. Sketches. Spell it right. Sketches. And maybe this one would be, I don't know, rough draft. And this one might be Final. Now, in order to open up and change the name of the file, all I'm doing is just tapping the name, and then you can change the name. And you can do the same thing with the stack itself. So maybe we would call this new painting. Now let's talk about file management, and we'll jump into this project here. So here's another example where I didn't name this one. So this is my sketch, and this is my painting. So one thing that you might want to do that I highly recommend is to make copies of your work before making, like, a big change to the project or a change to the painting. So, for example, I typically will have a file that contains my sketch, and I might have one or two files that contains, like, a version of the painting. So maybe, for example, if this were the final painting, but I decided, Oh, maybe I want to make, like, a color change within this, like, try some variations on the color. So one thing I can do is just swipe to the left. I can choose share, duplicate or delete. Now, obviously, we can delete the file from here, but be aware that once you delete within Procreate, there's no undo for that. So make certain that you really want to delete a canvas before you actually do that. So I'm going to choose duplicate here, and it's going to duplicate now, one thing that does happen here from time to time is when it duplicates the painting, sometimes it will put it outside the stack. It doesn't always do that, but sometimes it does. So in order to fix that, all we have to do is drag that one in, and I'll place it right there in the first position or the first spot, and I'll name this one ion variation. I spell it is that right? Lion variation. Yeah. Okay, so that would maybe be a different version of the painting, maybe where I change the colors or just try something different. Okay, while we're here, let's go ahead and take a look at our menu options in the upper right here. So we've already seen that the plus icon is where we go to create a new Canvas. And we also have select Import and photo. So select will give us the option to select multiple canvases. So we can select them. We can take and drag them. We can drag them outside of the current stack or we can select again. We can delete from here as well. So we would have preview and share and duplicate. So this time, we want to delete these. Now, the photo button here is to import photos from your photo library, and then import would be to import files from either your iPad or maybe ICloud or Dropbox or a USB drive. Now I've got some files here. These are Procreate files, and I'll choose one, and it imports it and then again, places it into the upper left corner. 8. Working with Canvases: All right, now let's take a look at working with canvases. Now, it's a good way to think of canvases as going to the art store and picking out the right paper or the right canvas in the correct size. Now, when you're starting a project, you want to take this into consideration because the last thing that you want to do is be working on a project that is in the incorrect size. For example, if you were doing a T shirt design in the size of a postcard, the final outcome wouldn't be the right size. Therefore, you would have to scale it up, which is always a bad idea for digital art. Now, the way that we create a new canvas is from the gallery, we're going to click the plus icon in the upper right here, and it's going to give us the new canvas panel that opens up. Now, there's several sizes here that come with Procreate by default, but what we want to focus on is creating a new canvas. Now, you do that by tapping the little plus little stacked box icon here in the upper right. And we've got the custom Canvas window that opens up and gives us a lot of options to work with here. Now, the first thing that I want you to notice is the maximum layers here. Now, if we have a canvas that is 4,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels at 300 DPI, that gives us a maximum of 48 layers. Now, if we change setting something higher, like 6,000 pixels now we're taken down to 30 layers. Now, another thing that beginners might overlook is the DPI setting. And typically, I will work at 300 DPI. I never really go below that because 300 DPI is considered to be the standard for high resolution files, the standard for print. So even if my project is not intended to be printed, I will still work at 300 DPI just because you never know in the future when you might want to print something or you might need a higher resolution version of what you're working on. Okay, so we have some other options over here on the left. We've got color profile, and it selects SRGB, IEC six by default, and that's usually where I leave it. There's also some other options here like CMYK, which is really for pigment or for printing. RGB is for light, meaning like monitors and screens. Now, CMYK, there's lots of different options here. And if you're working with a printer, they may have a specific setting that they want you to use. But typically I will always work in RGB and then convert to CMYK later because CMYK will limit the colors that you can use. It will limit some of the looks and effects of layer styles and layer settings that you can use. So typically, I always work with RGB. Now, we do have some time lapse settings because Procreate will record a time lapse of what you are creating, and these settings are for whether you want it to be recorded in ten ADP, two K, four K, low quality, studio quality, et cetera. Now canvas properties are just involving the background color. Do you want the background color by default to be mid tone gray or white or black? I typically always leave this as white, and background is visible. Now, if we switch back over to dimensions to create the settings for our custom canvas, I oftentimes work by default with a 4,000 by 5,000 pixel Canvas at 300 DPI. That gives me a maximum of 48 layers. Now, if you're used to Photoshop, that might seem like not enough or might seem intimidating, but really I don't ever run out of layers because I'm not often working with more than 48 because it would quickly become overwhelming or confusing to me. So I try to work strategically. I try to keep layers at a minimum, just as a good method of practice. Now, we can name this canvas by just tapping on the untitled Canvas, and we can call it my Canvas. And again, 4,000 by 5,000 pixels, 300 DPI, maximum of 48 layers, and working in RGB. So we'll tap create. So now, when we go back out to the gallery and we tap the plus icon down here at the bottom, we have My Canvas now as an option that we can always choose from. So switching over to that canvas, if we choose the Actions menu, which again, is the wrench icon in the upper left, and we go down to Canvas information, we can see a similar window that pops up that gives us some information about this canvas. So here we've got dimensions. Now, we have the 4,000 by 5,000 pixels, but you can see that the physical width and height is 13 by 16 ", which is really that's pretty large, and that's a good general size because I try to relate it to maybe the equivalent paper size, which would maybe be 12 by 16 or nine by 12. That gives me a large enough painting surface that if I did want to print it, I could print it at a nice size. Now, we've got some layer information here. We've got the maximum layers again. We've got the amount of layers that we've used and what layers are available. If we go to color profile, we can see our current working SRGB profile, again, video settings, and statistics just provides us with some interesting information like total strokes made, track time on this piece, and total file size, which is always handy to know. Now, as a small project, I recommend that you go through these settings yourself and that you create your own custom canvas in a size that you feel like that you will often use for sketches and general painting, a size that you feel like something that you might often use. Now, don't feel like you have to memorize all of these settings as long as you are comfortable with creating your own custom canvases and then where to find all of these options in case you need them, you'll be good to go. 9. Using Drawing Guide & Drawing Assist: All right. Now that we've got our Canvas set up, let's talk about some tools that can help us in making sketching and planning a little bit easier. So the drawing guides and Drawing Assist are like invisible helpers on the canvas that can help us to keep proportions and spacing and perspective, all of that in check within our composition. So to start out, let's take a look at how to turn on the Drawing Guide. So if we click over on our Actions menu, which is the wrench icon, and we turn on Drawing Guide, and then right below that, edit Drawing Guide. So what we have to start out with is a simple Toti grid. Now, you're probably most used to using a grid maybe to help you with composition. So this grid is completely adjustable in that we can change the opacity of our grid lines here down below. We can change the thickness. And we can change the grid size. Now, we can also change the color from this rainbow colored line up here at the top. So I'm going to choose a blue. Now also notice here on the bottom right, there is an option for assisted drawing. Go ahead and tap to turn that on. Now, the grid is also editable from these dots that we see here. There's a green one and a blue one. The green one will rotate the grid. The blue one will move the grid around on the canvas. Now, if we tap, we can reset those. And now we're going to click Done and go back to our regular Canvas here. So now when viewing the layers, we can see that layer one has a label underneath that says assisted. And what that means is that when we draw on this layer, everything that we draw will stay locked to those lines. So no matter what kind of line we're making, it's just going to lock in to those grid lines. So we can turn off the assisted option here on this layer by tapping the layered thumbnail and then unchecking Drawing Assist. So now we're just using the grid as a visual aid, so we can draw like we normally would without any lines being locked to the grid. So let's go back to Edit Drawing Guide, and this time, let's take a look at isometric. I'm going to go ahead and scale the grid up just a little bit here. I'm going to turn on assisted drawing. I'm going to tap done. So now we have layer one with a grid, and it's labeled assisted. So the isometric grid is exactly like it sounds. It helps you in drawing isometric shapes. Maybe your project requires you to draw a room or a series of boxes or something that just requires perfectly drawn shapes. Okay, now let's take a look at our next option under Edit Drawing Guide. Now we have perspective. So, this one is really interesting because typically, if you're familiar with, like, traditional drawing or painting where maybe you have a landscape or a scene and you want to keep everything in perfect perspective, the perspective grid can be kind of complicated and difficult to create in a traditional setting. But with Procreate, this is extremely easy to just tap anywhere to create your horizon line. Now we have a single one point perspective with the lines going to the vanishing point. Now, if we want to add a two point perspective, we can just tap to create our second point. Now we can raise our horizon line up and down in the scene. We can drag the vanishing points off of the canvas, and we could even create a three point perspective. We're down on the ground. We're looking up at some tall buildings or something like that. This would really go a long way in helping us draw a more complicated scene and everything remain in perspective. So assisted drawing is already on for us. I'm going to tap done. Now we have our perspective grid. We're on layer one. It's labeled assisted, so now everything we draw here is going to stay in perfect perspective for us. Now, this is a simple set of lines to create these tall rectangles. But without the aid of this perspective grid, this would be pretty complicated to draw and to keep it in a perfect perspective like this. Okay, back over to Edit Drawing Guide. Now let's take a look at symmetry. Now, this one contains a lot of really fun options and gives you the ability to create some really amazing things. Taking a look first, we have vertical symmetry, which is just this vertical line in the center of the canvas. I'm going to go ahead and tap done on that. And again, we have layer one that's assisted. Now, anything we draw here I'm drawing in the left. It's going to get repeated on the right. So now it makes it really simple to draw a symmetrical object. Now, going back to Edit Drawing Guide, under options here on the bottom right, it's the same for horizontal symmetry, and we can also choose quadrant. Notice that rotational symmetry is off, so let's take a look at that. I'm going to tap done. Now our canvas is divided into quarters, and wherever I draw on the canvas, it gets mirrored into those other quadrants. So you can see if I just jump around here, it's going to mirror whatever I'm drawing into the other spaces. Now, if we go back to Edit Drawing Guide, and this time we turn rotational symmetry on, now what I'm drawing, instead of being mirrored, it's being copied in the exact same angle in the exact same place within the other quadrants. This is a really fun and powerful tool to just kind of unleash your creativity and create some really amazing patterns. It's just a quick project, let's try and see if we can create a simple arrow that we could then reuse in a project. Okay, so I'm going to clear this layer. I'm going to go back to Edit Drawing Guide. And for symmetry, I'm going to choose vertical again. Let's make sure that rotational symmetry is turned back off. I'm going to tap done. Now I'm going to start with a simple diagonal line, and I'm going to hold it so that it straightens out. I'm going to draw a line back towards the center and hold it until it straightens out. Move it up a little bit. Now a vertical line I'm gonna hold that as well. My one more line back to the center that I'll hold straight. Now we should have a solid arrow shape. G to choose a yellow color, and I'm going to drag that color to fill the shape. Okay, now I'm going to turn off assisted drawing by tapping the thumbnail again and deselecting Drawing Assist. And I'm going to turn off my grid by going to the Actions menu and turn off Drawing Guide. Now I have this arrow I can increase size, and I can move around in a project to use to point out this really tiny bug. 10. Class Project 2 - Draw an Arrow Using Symmetry: Right now, once again, it is your turn. For this project, we want to draw a simple arrow using symmetry tools. So we're going to create an arrow of whatever color style that you like using the symmetry tool and Drawing Assist. You want to keep it simple and have your arrow point to something fun on the canvas. Now, don't worry too much about this. This project is just to familiarize yourself with Drawing Assist and Procreate. So just have some creative fun with this one and be sure to upload and share your design. 11. Book Cover Brief & Canvas Setup: Okay, now let's take a look at the project that we're going to be working on as we continue through the rest of the course. Now, we're going to need to head over to randomprojectgenerator.com. This time, on the left here, we're going to be looking at Procreate Book Cover. Now, as we move through the rest of the course, we're going to be working on this book cover project because I think it is an excellent way for you to learn the different aspects of Procreate using a real world project. So once we've taped Book cover, let's now tap Generate My Project. And what I get here is horror book about Discovery. You've been hired to design a book cover for a horror story set in the medieval Kingdom. The book explores themes of discovery, and your goal is to capture the mood and the essence of the story in a single illustration. Your design should reflect the atmosphere of horror, take inspiration from the medieval kingdom and visually communicate discovery through the color, brushwork and layout. Be sure to consider the tone and style and don't forget to leave space for the title and the author name. Now, this is a great way to really inspire you and get you to thinking with these random prompts. Let's try another one and just see what we get here. A fantasy book about redemption. So the same thing, same prompt, but it's replaced with some different themes of fantasy, redemption, things like that. So you can see how a fantasy story might look a lot different than, like, a horror type story. So this is a great way for you to really get your creative wheels turning to really get you thinking about a potential design, which we're going to again, work through as we move through the rest of the course. Okay, I also want to take a look at the project Guide file, which you can download. And once you open it up, you can see that there is a description of the brief for each project. There is requirements and deliverables. And this is so that you can have all of the aspects of the projects as we go along. You can have these at a glance and you can refer back to them and be reminded of what's required and what you need to work on for each one. Okay, at this point, I want you to go ahead and generate your prompt, and I want you to save it so that you can refer back to it later. Mine is a Sci fi book about isolation, which I think is a really interesting topic and theme to explore in a design. So that's going to be fun to work on as we go. Now, while we're at it, let's go ahead and let's create a canvas that will specifically be for our book cover design. So if we tap the plus icon in the upper right corner and then tap the other plus icon here next to new Canvas, we're going to create our own custom Canvas. Now, I'm going to switch over to inches, and I know that a typical, like, pocket size paperback is 4.5 by seven. So we're going to start there 4.5 on the width, 7 " on the height, and we're going to go with 300 DPI because that's the standard for print. And we're going to have a maximum layers of 365, which should be more than plenty. Now, another thing that we need to consider in our sizing is bleed. Now, bleed is just a little bit of our design, a little bit of background color that extends beyond the actual size of the trimmed design. So usually an eighth of an inch is enough, so we'll do that on both sides. So that would change our size to be 7.25 on the height and the width would then change to 4.75. Now we can also tap untitled Canvas here and change that to book cover Canvas. So now we'll tap Create, and we now have our book cover Canvas file set up and ready to go. 12. Moodboard & Thumbnails: Now let's take a look at laying some of the initial groundwork, the initial foundation for our book cover designs. The first thing that I want to do is walk you through my process for creating and setting up a moodboard and for doing some initial sketch thumbnails, just get some ideas flowing and just to get us to thinking about what our design might look like. Now, my prompt is for a sci fi book about isolation. It just so happens that I am an avid collector of paperback books from the 60s and 70s. So I have quite a collection of these to just kind of have on hand to reference. But now, if you don't have your own collection of books, which I suspect you probably don't show you how to source a few good references, good material for your moodboard on Pinterest. Now, one thing I do want you to consider, which we mentioned before, and it mentions it in your prompt, is that we want to leave room for the typography. So like the title of the book, any subtitles, the author's name and things like that. So if you were to imagine this particular book cover, without the typography, there's going to be lots of blank space in this upper area here to allow room for that. So we want to think about that with our initial thumbnails and our illustration so that it doesn't cause us a problem down the road when we start to add the title and author name. Okay, hopping over to the Pinterest app, this is just a search for 1960s pulp science fiction book covers, and it gives me a huge selection of reference to choose from. There's lots of great things in here that just really kind of inspire layout, inspire colors, inspire style, so many great stuff. I love the artwork from this era, and I'm probably going to lean into a little bit of this look, this sort of style as I work through my book cover design. Now, if we tap one of these, and let's go ahead and I'm going to tap the three dots here in the middle top portion of the screen, and I'm going to choose Download image. Now I'm going to put together a collection of several of these images that appeal to me so that I can reference in my moodboard. Now to create my moodboard, I use an app called Visref. It's VIZ REF, one word, and it's just a really simple app that you can basically just store images in and you can rearrange them. You can zoom in, move them around. It's just a simple app or just maintaining thumbnails and reference. Now, the great thing about having my moodboard separate from Procreate is that we can open up Procreate on the right and leave Vizref open on the left. To do that, I'm going to swipe up from the bottom. I'm going to choose Procreate and drag it over to the right. And then I'm going to use this middle bar here and just drag to resize VsF to be a little smaller. And then I've got my moodboard sort of arranged in a vertical stack here so that it all fits really nicely on the left. Now, to give us a canvas to draw our thumbnails on, I'm going to tap the plus icon here in the top. I'm going to choose a custom canvas size that I created that I often work from. I titled it My Canvas. It's 4,000 by 5,000 pixels at 300 DPI, and this just gives us a nice size to work from. When working on thumbnails, I like to start at a small size in just a rough layout or orientation of our book cover, which we know is taller than it is wide. Now, I'm going to take this and I'm going to duplicate it twice. And just so I have three copies here because I'm going to do at least three thumbnail designs, just give myself three concepts to choose from. And I recommend doing at least two to three more than one because you oftentimes will just explore ideas through thumbnails, and you just want them to come quickly and just kind of go with something that might work that you think might be a good layout and just free flow your ideas because at this stage, the thumbnails, you're not investing a lot of time and you can just kind of work with just a free flowing set of ideas. So, for example, let's start with one here. Now, if you remember, my project is a sci fi book cover. It's set in a coastal town and explores themes of isolation. Now, I considered that as I gathered some of this moodboard reference here, like images of just one character, just something like this might work really well, something that is just kind of moody colors, kind of dark color. One single character or something like that. So let's just start with a very simple layout, a simple concept in mind, and you can choose any pencil brush that you like. I'm going to go ahead with the Bruni or Bruni brush from the pencils in the Procreate Library. And again, we want to keep this kind of fast and loose just to explore some ideas. So I'm going to start with just a simple box up here that will represent the space for my title. And my concept again was dealt with isolation. So maybe maybe I'm going to keep everything kind of in the center here. Just kind of everything's going to be kind of align to the center of the cover. So maybe my lone little figure here is standing. This is just a guy. Maybe he's walking toward the viewer, maybe he's walking away. We're not going to really be able to tell that. And maybe there was there's a coastal town. So maybe that town will be here. In the background, we'll put a few like maybe there's a lighthouse. That might work. Maybe there's just a little group of houses off in the distance. And if it's a coastal town, there's probably going to have to be so I want to say, there's a lighthouse maybe right here, but maybe something like that. And so if it's a coastal town, there's got to be some water that's off in the distance here. So maybe there's a bit of land it's kind of like a hillside, hillside here. And then maybe there's a boat in the water to kind of represent that. Maybe it's a sailboat. So you can see how I'm going really fast. Like, it's just to represent an idea, and I'm just kind of free flowing some thought here, just like, Well, maybe this will work. You know, it doesn't have to be perfect. So here's my little coastal town. And so we need to probably incorporate some kind of a ci Phi element. So maybe there's just this large planet off in the distance. There would probably be some kind of clouds or atmosphere. And I don't know. Maybe maybe the title doesn't take up that much space. I don't know. Maybe maybe not. Maybe there's some ships, like some spaceships or something, like off in the distance. 'Cause just kind of looking at my reference here, I'm seeing like these, like, like that. That's not a spaceship. Like, these sort of shapes right here that just kind of look like the 50s looking sci fi, like your typical science fiction like this right here, just this really elongated oval shape, something like that. So right here, right away, and then there's probably some space down here for the author name, and maybe right here is a little subtitle or something that kind of describes the book. There's probably some space. Well, maybe maybe there would be some space over here or maybe, like, our landscape kind of comes down this figure. He's looking off at his town. Maybe he's been left alone here, and then there's, like, some space invaders, something like that, something that gives it a sci fi element. So, isolation, moodiness, sci fi. You know, this will probably work as a good concept for thumbnail one. Okay, now, I have refined this first thumbnail a little bit further, and I have gone ahead and created two additional thumbnails. On my second one here, I was kind of thinking that the ship would be larger and that the title would be down here in the lower left, and then my loan figure would be a little bit larger than in my first concept. So that's my second idea. My third idea was maybe to have the main character's face there. He's by himself, and he's kind of surrounded by these spaceships that are coming in to his little coastal town with the lighthouse, maybe some boats down here. And I was thinking the title would be stacked up here in the upper left corner. Now, something that you can keep in mind as you're working on these is that you can just start out with, like, some basic shapes to kind of build these out. You can just sort of use, you know, just some shapes like that or something like this to just kind of try and visualize just using basic shapes. I just kind of makes the compositional portion a little bit easier. Also, you can think a little bit about the flow of the viewer's eye. So remember, in the beginning with this first one, I was kind of like, Well, everything's going to be sort of aligned to the center. And with this one, I was kind of thinking, well, it's sort of curved in the layout. And then this one is sort of a zigzag. So if that gives you an idea of a little bit of what I was thinking as far as the flow of the layout. Okay, here are my three completed thumbnail sketches. Now, when you're working on yours, remember to keep them light, keep them sketchy. You just want to explore some ideas. They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to be completely rendered. You just want to have some kind of an idea to go on as we work through the further stages of this project later in the course. 13. Default Brushes: Alright. Now let's take a look at what I consider to be the most exciting part of Procreate, and that is the brush library. Now, it was the brushes that initially drew me into procreate in the beginning because of their very natural, very tactile feel when compared to traditional counterparts. And that has really just continued to improve over time, especially with more recent releases of the app. Now, keep in mind, there are a lot of brushes in the default brush library, but our goal here is not to memorize all of them, but instead to just become familiar with the library itself, how it's organized, and how you can find brushes to use, and how you can keep track of them. So let's go ahead and get started by taking a look at the brush library. And we're going to do that by tapping the brush icon in the upper right corner. You're going to see immediately that all of the brushes are broken down into these fantastic categories by medium. So we've got pens, pencils, inks, oils, watercolor, charcoal, and so on. So that makes it really convenient because they're so well organized. Now, how do we begin to learn what brushes that we might use. Now, I mentioned before, you're probably not going to use all of these pencils because that's really not how drawing works. Usually, you might pick one or two pencils to begin a drawing with, and you don't really break your drawing flow to go and choose another pencil. So that's what I recommend as you're working with Procreate. You want to find your brushes and have an idea of what you want to use so that you don't break your creative flow and begin brush hunting because that really can take you out and really distract your process. Now, how do we choose a pencil, for example? Let's just take one of these. And what I recommend is doing a little bit more than a squiggly line. Like, by default, we just really just want to make a squiggly line and then move on to the next one, make another squiggly line. But really, it helps if you draw just a simple little shape or something that just feels natural to how you might really use the pencil. So if I just draw a leaf here with this one, it gives me an idea of how that pencil feels. I'll try another one and draw a similar leaf. It's basically spending a few more seconds with the brush. With the pencil so that you have an idea of what it feels like. So the same can be said with the paint brushes, for example, if we take a look at watercolor and we choose a color for our leaf and just see how that brush feels. Like this one feels really soft. So maybe we want something with more of a hard edge. So that one definitely has more of a hard edge. So the one here on the right feels a little bit more like a detailer brush. So that just gives me an idea of what that brush does and what it feels. Now, as you begin to explore the brush library, you begin to use the different brushes, you're going to find some that are your favorites that you want to keep track of that you don't necessarily want to hunt down every time you are painting. So let's take a look at a couple of different ways that you can begin to organize your favorites and you can keep a running list of brushes you like to use. So one quick way is the recent folder or recent section here in the brush library that's at the top. This will keep a running list of brushes that you have recently used. Now, this list will continue to rotate with brushes as you are selecting them from the other brush categories. But we can pin our favorites to the top of the list here, and we do that by swiping left on the brush, and we can pin it. We can swipe left. We can also clear the brush from the recent folder. We can swipe left and also find the brush in its original location. Another method that I like to use to keep track of my brushes is to actually create my own favorites category here. Now, we're going to do that by tapping the plus here in the upper right. And we're going to create a new set, and I'll title it my brushes. We can tap on this set and we can rename it capitalize brushes. And we can duplicate it. We can also customize the icon, which is handy, so I'm going to change that to a paint brush. Now, to add brushes to this new set, let's go over to an existing set, and I will swipe left on one, and I'll tap duplicate. And I recommend doing this so that I leave the original brush in its location. So I'll take this brush, and I'll tap it and then tap and hold until I can move it around. Take my other hand here and go over and tap the M brushes category that I created, and then drop that brush in place. Before we move on, let's take a look at a couple of other aspects of the brush library. So if we swipe down, we'll get a search menu here at the top, and we can search for brushes or brush sets. So if I type inks, I get the inks set. If I type watercolor, I will get all of the brushes with the word watercolor in the title. Now, if we tap the little down arrow next to Procreate Library, we get the back to Library's Link, or we can pinch and get there with a gesture. Now, we have our classic library, which is the old brush library for previous versions of Procreate. We've got the new library that comes with the latest version of Procreate, and I've got my own custom library here with all of my custom brushes. Now, to create a new library, we can tap the plus icon, create a new library, or we can import a library from files. Now, if we tap here and go back to the default library, the plus icon here, we can create a new brush, again, create a new set, or we can import brushes from files as well. So now I encourage you to explore some of these different brush sets and just experiment with them, kind of become familiar with what some of these brushes do. Use them in a way that really gives you a sense of what the texture is, what the stroke feels like, and you're going to naturally come across some favorites, some that you might want to explore further or try out in one of your pieces. And I highly recommend that you duplicate that brush and save it into a favorites folder or into the recent folder, like I just demonstrated. But again, don't worry about mastering all of these brushes or even memorizing exactly what each brush does. I just want you to understand how to navigate the brush library and how to organize and sort your own brushes. 14. Brush Settings: Now let's take a deeper dive into brushes, looking specifically at the brush studio. Now, why does the Bush studio matter? Well, this is where all of the settings are for each brush, and there are a lot. You can really fine tune how the brush looks and how it feels and just how the brush behaves. Now, as beginners, we don't really need to memorize every single setting here. Our goal is really to just understand a handful mainly that affect the important things like flow, line quality, texture, and pressure. To get started, let's go ahead and tap the brush icon in the upper right to open the brush library. And we're going to create a new brush by tapping the plus icon here and then choosing Create New Brush, and that's going to open the brush studio for our new brush. I'm going to go ahead and tap done so we can go back to the library, and you can see the new brush that we created is here at the top. Now, to open the brush studio, more existing brushes, all you have to do is select that brush and then tap on it again and open up the brush settings in the studio for that particular brush. I'm going to tap done here and I'm going to select my untitled brush, my new brush, tap it again to open the Bush studio. Okay, now inside the brush studio, what do we have here? We've got a drawing pad here on the right. We've got some different categories of brush settings on the far left, and then we have the properties for those categories in the middle. So as we go through these categories, we'll see the settings for each of those categories pop up here in the middle. Now, on our drawing pad here on the right, we have a testing area so that we can create a stroke. And as we change settings, we'll see the settings for that stroke change here, and then we can also continue to make strokes as our settings change. Now, to clear this, we can take three fingers, and we can make a zigzag pattern here to clear that. Or we can go up to the drawing pad setting here, and we can change the preview size. We can change the color. So if I choose pink, we get a pink stroke, we can also clear the drawing pad here and reset all brush settings. All right, taking a look first at stroke path. We've got several settings here, including spacing, spacing jitter, jitter lateral, jitter linear, and fall off. So what did these do exactly? Well, first, let's take a look at spacing, and it does exactly what you might think. It adjusts the spacing of the brush shape. So as we continue to increase the spacing, we get a dotted line for our stroke because the shape that makes up this stroke is a simple circle. Now, spacing jitter is going to randomize the space in between those shapes. And jitter lateral will adjust the Y axis, and Jitter linear will adjust the X axis, like in line with the stroke itself. And then fall off is going to be how much the opacity decreases as we create the stroke. So let's go back to a zero setting here. Now we have more of a solid brush stroke that you're used to seeing. So these settings really come in handy, especially once you're dealing with textures and things where you really want to control how far apart the spacing of the shape is, the brush shape, and how randomized it is. Now moving on to stabilization, this is a really interesting one because it can really come in handy where you have to have a precise line or precise curve, like if you're inking a drawing or you want to eventually convert something to a vector illustration and you need really clean lines. So as you can see here, this is my curve with no stabilization. But as I increase the amount, pressure, the amount of stabilization, you can see that line getting smoother and smoother. The motion filtering adjust how much motion is in the line and go all the way to almost straight here with 100%. And same with expression is sort of fine tuning how the line looks based on the amount of motion that was in my stroke. So as you can see with all of these stabilization settings turned up, we get a much smoother line, almost like you would see in a vector illustration or just someone with a really, really steady hand. There's what those strokes look like originally with no stabilization on. Now taking a look at taper, this section is going to deal with the beginning and end of a stroke. So if I create a new stroke here and then turn the size up and adjust the taper, we're going to see that it's really just affecting the beginning and the end of the stroke. So we can do opacity if we want the end of the stroke to have a bit more softness. And then pressure and then how fat or narrow the tip is. And we can adjust kind of where it starts in the stroke here. Now, we also have the same setting for touch strokes as well. So these would be strokes that were created with your finger. So if I were to create another stroke with my finger and no settings here, that stroke is not going to have the same taper as one created with the pencil. Alright, now hopping over to shape, we have the default shape here selected that is just a regular circle. But we can tap this edit button here in the top of the settings, and we can change our shape by tapping import. And then the source library is images that come with Procreate specifically for shape and grain. So if I tap source library and choose maybe this ink dry, which is very different from a regular circle, and we can see what kind of change that has on our stroke. So now if we change the rotation, we can see what kind of effect that has. If we change the scatter, the stroke becomes a lot more soft, and it's changing the way that, again, the shape is being laid down throughout the stroke. Now, we can turn up the count, which will thicken the stroke by adding more shapes throughout the stroke. We can turn up count jitter, which will randomize that count. Okay, now over to grain properties, we have a similar situation that we have with shape, except this time, we are adding a texture to the stroke itself versus a shape. So if we go over to Edit again for the grain this time, and we go to import and Source Library, now we have a library of textures to choose from. So I'm going to go with this paper mush. I'm going to select Done on that. So now you can see that there is all kinds of texture added to this stroke. Now, we can do a moving texture or texturize. Now, this setting basically works like a mask where we are using the stroke to reveal texture on the canvas, whereas moving is more of a randomized texture throughout the stroke. And we can adjust that with the settings here like scale movement. We can zoom in or zoom out, making the texture larger or smaller. We can affect the rotation of the texture, creating more of a soft effect. And then, of course, the depth is adjusting how intense the texture is. I also want to point out brightness and contrast down here will also have an effect on the depth of the texture as well. Now, also looking at the setting for blend mode here, I often leave this at Multiply, but you can tap this here, and you will see some of the blend modes that you might be familiar with from Photoshop in the Layers panel, you'll see things like color dodge, light and darken and Multiply. Now, these will also have an effect on how the texture comes through on your stroke. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and leave this texture for our stroke for now as we move through some of these other settings. So let's jump over to rendering. And in order to show you this one, I'm going to need to change the color of our stroke. So let's get pink, and let's also get blue. Now as we go through here, we can see the different rendering modes and how they have an effect on color. So light glaze, uniform glaze, tense glaze, heavy, uniform blending, and intense blending. So let me switch back here to intense glaze. Now, all of these can be further fine tuned with the settings here below like flow, wet edges, burnt edges. And then, of course, similar to what we had with our texture, we've got blend modes, so we can change these, and you can see in real time how that affects color of your strokes. Switch this back to normal and you can see how this rendering setting will really give you a lot of control how strokes overlay each other. For a wet mix, I'm going to need to take you back out to the regular canvas to kind of show you what sort of effect this has, but it basically controls how the brush smudges and blends and mimics wet paint. So let me go ahead and turn a few of these up. So we've got dilution. It's going to affect how diluted the paint is. I'm bring up attack and grade. So we're gonna tap done here, and I'm going to go ahead and lay down some blue paint with our brush, zoom in, and I'll grab let's grab green. And you can see that it's controlling how wet this paint looks. Now, this is really great for an oil paint type effect, and you can really fine tune how paint will interact and mix over existing strokes. Describe another color real quick. Try red and you can really see how even though we have this texture, we're getting this soft painterly effect. Okay, we can further fine tune this painterly effect within color dynamics. So you can see within the color dynamics setting, we have the same adjustments broken into categories stamp color jitter, stroke color jitter, color pressure, et cetera. Somebody to change our test stroke color to pink again? Now, if we look at the stamp color jitter first, and let's just change the hue, you can see that it's changing the color, it's randomizing the color for each of the shape source stamps. So for this brush, remember that that is just a circle. Now we can also change the saturation, lightness, darkness, and secondary color, which is just the last color chosen. So let's reset all of these, and let's make the same adjustment this time for stroke color. Now, this is going to adjust the color for the entire stroke. So now each stroke we add is going to be a slightly different hue. Now we can change, again, the saturation, the lightness, the darkness, and again, the secondary color. Now, we also have color pressure and color tilt. So color pressure, we're going to be changing the color. I'm going to change the hue here. So now we're getting a hue change based on the pressure that I'm applying to the stroke itself through the pin. Of course, we can also change the brightness and saturation again and secondary color. Okay, same goes for color tilt and barrel roll. Let's just use the hue here. Now, this is a color change based on how much I am tilting the pin. So you can see here that as I draw straight up and down, or if I tilt the pen, it begins to change the hue. The more I tilt the pin, the more extreme the change is. Now, taking a quick look at color dynamics, we've got some controls and adjustments for speed. Now, by speed, I mean that the speed of the stroke itself. So if I make a slow stroke versus a fast stroke, now make some adjustments here to size, opacity and spacing. And then, of course, we have a little bit of jitter control as well. So you can see what's happening to a fast stroke versus a slow stroke. Now taking a look at the settings for the Apple Pencil itself. This is where you can really fine tune how your strokes behave and really get a natural like feel. So if we take our size, for example, and let's go ahead and bump that up, if I create a new stroke here with very light pressure at first and then increasing the pressure as I go, you can then see what kind of effect size has on the pressure of the stroke, meaning smaller stroke with lighter pressure, thicker stroke with harder pressure, and then we can even reverse that, as well. Okay, same goes for opacity. We can change the opacity of the stroke. We can change the flow of the stroke. We can also change the bleed, which I can only really describe this setting as an intensity of the texture, like deeper the deeper the texture looks. And this is really handy for creating, like, a strong charcoal or pastel type brush where texture really comes into play. Now, the pressure can be adjusted through the curve setting here, so you can really fine tune how the pressure behaves. Now, I usually leave this at default, but that is personal preference. We also have the same settings for tilt, the degree of tilt, how much opacity, gradation, bleed is affected by the tilt of the pencil, and for barrel roll, as well, meaning how much rotation you are giving the pencil through the stroke. Now in our property section, we have some general settings here like orient to Screen, and that basically controls the brushes shape alignment with either the iPad Screen orientation or to the canvas. And most of the time, I want all of my brushes to orient to the canvas and not the screen. Smudge pool will also affect how much paint is smeared through a stroke using the smudge tool with this brush. Typically, I leave that somewhere around 75%. And brush behavior maximum size, maximum opacity. This controls the size and the opacity controls that are on the left side of the screen when we're painting. So if we don't want this brush to be sized any larger than 100% or any smaller than, let's say, 10%, so you can make a tiny version of this brush, but no smaller than 10% of its original size. Same goes for opacity. If we wanted the max opacity to be around 60%, keeping the brush very transparent, no matter how high the opacity is set. Now, the preview setting controls how the brush looks in the brush library. So if we set to use stamp preview, we're using just the stamp instead of this brush stroke itself. We can control the size. We can control the pressure minimum pressure scale. Wet mix and tilt angle if we had some tilt added to this brush. Now, under about this brush, we can add some info about the creator, which in this case, is me, so I could add a photo of me here. I can add my name here. And I can even add a signature. And last up to change the name of this brush, if we tap and hold, we can select rename and change it to my new brush. Okay, so now we have an understanding of how to create a new brush and how to navigate the settings within the brush studio. 15. Customizing Brushes: Let's take a look at a couple more items pertaining to brushes. One is customizing existing brushes and saving and importing your own. Okay, I'm in the default Procreate brush library. I'm in the paint set, looking at the brush titled abalone. This is a great textured type paint brush that's got some nice dry brush strokes in there. But let's say we wanted to customize or tweak the settings on this brush a little bit. What I recommend is that you swipe left on the brush and tap duplicate. Now, this creates a copy of the brush. From here, you can then select it, tap it again, and enter the brush studio for the duplicate brush. Now we can make some tweaks, some changes. I'm going to go ahead and add a bit of stabilization to this brush. And we've got our duplicate that we've edited, but we've preserved the original brush so that it retains its default settings. Now, if we wanted to save our new brush for future use, all we need to do is swipe left again and this time tap Share. Now we can save a copy of this brush in our files on our iPad, and we can move it to different devices if we need to. Now, we can also import our own brushes. We can do that from tapping the plus icon in the upper right, and this time tap import from files. Now from here, we can import individual brushes, brush sets, or entire brush libraries. So if I choose a brush, the brush imports, but where does it go? Well, if we scroll up here towards the top of the library, we see a new category is created for imported. This is where all of my imported brushes are going to land by default. Now, if we want to delete this library, we can tap and hold on it and choose delete. So now we have a good method for editing or customizing existing brushes. We know how to save brushes and we know how to import our own. 16. Designing Custom Brushes: Next project, let's go ahead and create our own custom sketching brush for use in our book cover project. To start out, I'm going to go over to the Pencil set, and I'm going to scroll down and look at lofty. So let's go ahead and see what the original lofty sketch brush looks like. Just a nice smooth pencil stroke. Let's duplicate this brush for use as the base of our own custom brush. Now, I've got lofty two, which I'm going to tap and hold and then choose rename. And I'll change it to my sketch brush. Now let's go in and take a look at some of the settings. Now, I want to add a little bit of stabilization, which this brush didn't originally have. And I want it to be real slight, so I'm just going to bump everything up just a little bitty bit, and I'll be able to test that and make adjustments as needed. Let's also take a look at the shape. Now, we have a kind of soft edged charcoal looking shape here. Let's see if we can create our own based on this. So I'm going to tap done here, and let's go back out to the gallery. And I'm going to create a new file. I'm going to choose this square, which is 2048 by 2048, which is the default for shape and grain sources for Procreate brushes. And I'm going to go ahead and set the background as black. Now, from here, I'm going to set my brush color to white. Now, we're going to need a pretty grainy textured brush. I think I'm going to try this Asa brush under the charcoal set. And let's just make a very large couple of strokes here to sort of mimic the shape that we saw for the original brush shape. But let's see if we can change this up a little bit. Let's change over to black for the brush again. And I'm going to make some upward strokes here to adjust the opacity of the lower portion, kind of make a gradient out of the shape. Now, let's go ahead and save this by tapping the wrench icon in the upper left and choosing JPEG. We'll save that to a Photo Library. Now moving over to our original file, let's go back to our custom brush under the Pencil set. So I'm going to tap on my sketch brush again. Now we're going to tap Edit for the shape source. Now I'm going to tap import to import our own shape source from the photo library. Now we need the background on this source to be black again, so I'm going to tap it with two fingers to invert it. And then tap done. Let's go ahead and test our new shape source by making another stroke here. It's very similar to the original brush. It looks like maybe our stroke is a little bit more solid. Let's see if we can add a little bit more texture. We're going to go back to the brush library. We're going to tap our sketch brush again to enter the brush studio, and this time, we're going to go over to grain, and let's see if we can change the grain source. We want to tap edit here, import. And this time, let's pull something from the source library. This one looks pretty grainy. So does paper mush. That's a pretty grainy source. There's canvas. Let's go ahead and try this one. I'm gonna tap done here, and then done again. Now, let's try another stroke. Okay, so we've got a little bit more texture in here. Let's see if we can bump that up even further. Alright, under the grain behavior for our grain source, let's scroll down, and let's change the brightness and contrast. I'm gonna take the brightness down and the contrast down just a little bit. And we can see in our drawing pad that our stroke looks a lot more grainy. So let's see if that translates to the actual brush and tap done. Let's try another stroke. Okay, now our stroke looks quite a bit more grainy than it did before, which I kind of like in a pencil brush. So I think I will leave my settings here, and I will use this brush to sketch out my design for my book cover. Now, for this project, I highly encourage you to tweak some of the settings and just play with some of the grain and shape source options and see if you can create a pencil that feels very sketchy and feels very natural to your drawing style. 17. Class Project 3 - Create a Custom Brush: Alright, it's time to dive in to creating your own custom brush. So for this one, you're going to design a simple custom sketching brush for use later in your book cover project. The requirements are to duplicate and modify an existing Procreate brush, experiment with the shape, grain and Apple Pencil settings, and save your brush in a custom set for this course. The deliverables are to export your custom brush, if you'd like to share it, upload an image of your test strokes and final brush name. Remember to have fun with this one, experiment with these settings and dial them in to create a sketching brush that looks and feels right to you. 18. Working with Layers: Layers are one of the biggest advantages of digital art because they allow us to be experimental and completely confident as artists, knowing that we have essentially an infinite amount of does and redos. Now, in case you are new to the concept of layers, you can think of them as stacks of clear acetate, one on top of the other, allowing you to work on any one of those sheets separate from the other. So the final artwork would be what you see from the top of the stack. The layers also allow us to reorder the artwork and allows us to hide and show different parts of the artwork so that we can completely experiment, and the entire piece remains a living part of the art until it is completely finished. Whereas in traditional painting, once the paint is dry, that portion of the artwork is essentially completed. In Procreate, we can find the layers panel from this icon of two stacked boxes in the upper right hand corner. So if we tap that, we can see the layer stack for this piece that I've been working on, and the layers are ordered as the topmost layer is in the foreground and the bottom layers are towards the background. So the layer that I've been painting on is layer 17 here with the red watercolor. Now, I can show and hide this layer by tapping the checkbox here on the right to hide that layer, tap it again, to show it. Now, we can also reorder layers by just tapping and holding on the layer and then dragging it down to change the layer stack. Now, that changes the look of the piece because there are other layers now on top of layer 17. Now, as you can see, the selected layer is highlighted in blue, and that lets us know what layer we're working on. Now, one quick tip is to always check the layer that you're painting on, especially if you have a piece that already has lots of layers in place. So that way, you are certain that you are painting on the right layer. Now I'm going to drag this one back to the top. Now, we can also swipe left here on the layer, and we can lock it in place. Now we see the little lock icon here so that that layer can't be painted on. So you can see now when I try to paint on it, it tells me that the layer is locked. Now we can also swipe left here to unlock it, swipe left again to duplicate it. That creates an exact copy of the contents on a new layer above. We can swipe left again here to delete a layer. Now, to create a new layer, we can tap the plus icon here in the upper right hand corner of the layer's panel, and that will create a new layer on top of the one we had selected. Another important item to note here is if we tap the layer's thumbnail, we get a menu to the left where we can rename, select, copy the layer, we can fill the layer, we can clear its contents. We can set Alpha lock. And if we set Alpha lock, it essentially locks everything except the layer's contents. So this is really handy if you want to change the color of the layer you've been working on, and it just isolates the content so that you can freely edit just the layer's contents, just the strokes that were within that layer without changing anything else. Now, to turn off Alpha lock, we can tap that thumbnail again and then uncheck Alpha lock. Now, we also have mask and clipping mask, which we'll look at in a bit. We also have invert, which will invert the colors in the layer. We have reference, which will set the layer as a reference, and then merge down and combine down. Now, merging down and combining down is a good time to mention how we can manage our layers because especially working on a piece like this, we might begin to have a large amount of layers that might become a little bit hard to manage. So in order to merge multiple layers into one, there's a couple ways we can do that. So let's create some new layers here. And we can merge these with a gesture by pinching together those layers, we'll combine them into one, or we can tap the thumbnail and select merge down, and that will merge them down individually. Now, what's the difference between merge down and combined down, where we might have a situation where we don't necessarily want to merge layers or flatten them down into one, but instead, we want to leave them separate but have them group so that our layers panel is more organized. Now, there's a couple ways to do this, and I'll show you first with gestures. We want to select the first layer and then swipe left on the layers we want to add to a group and then tap group from the upper right there. And now we have what is essentially a folder or a group with this drop down arrow showing all of the layers within that group. Now we can also do this from the layer menu if we tap the thumbnail here and this time, select combined down, which will add just a layer below, and then we can select and drag additional layers into the group. Now let's look at some situations that we might have in a real world example where we can manage our layers. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is delete this group that I've been working in. So I'm going to swipe left on the group, tap delete. So I'm going to create a new layer here. I'm going to tap on it and select rename. I'm going to call it watercolor. I'm going to go ahead and add back some of my red watercolor details that I had going around the eye here. Now, what if we have a situation where we want to take the contents of the layer that I just painted and we want to create a new layer to maybe edit the colors or add some additional painting too, but we don't want to necessarily harm what we've done before. So in this instance, I would use three fingers and swipe down to bring up the copy and paste menu, and I would select Copy. And then do it again to select paste. And now we have a duplicate of that layer that I just created. Now, remember, another way to do that is to swipe left and tap duplicate, which also creates a copy of the layer's contents. Now I can turn the initial layer off and I can do some edits to this layer, like maybe, for example, I wanted to do a bit more smudging, or maybe I wanted to try changing the color to something else. But no matter what I choose to do, this gives me a way to preserve what I had created before in that initial layer that I can always revert back to. Another aspect to the layers panel that I also want to mention is the concept of opacity and blend modes. So if we take this layer and we duplicate it a couple times to really make it stand out and make it more opaque, then I'm going to combine these layers into one. Now, if we tap this little letter in here next to the checkbox, we're going to get an additional menu that allows us to change the opacity. Of the contents of the layer, and it allows us to change the blend mode. Now, if you're familiar with Photoshop, you probably already know what some of these blend modes do. They essentially give you the ability to change the way contents of layers mix together. So I'm going to leave that set to normal for now, and I'm going to change the opacity to 70%. Now, another real world example that you might run into is moving layers from one file to another. Let's say, for example, we are working on multiple copies of this artwork, and I've added some additional layers to this one that I want to add to the other file. So let's go ahead and we've got this one selected. I'm going to swipe left to select them both, and then I'm going to tap and hold and move them outside of the panel. Then with my left hand, I'm going to select Gallery. And then I'm going to select my other version here, and I'm going to drop them onto the Canvas. Now we can see that both of those layers have now been added to this additional file. Now we have an understanding of the concept of layers, how they work, how we can use them to our advantage, and how we can keep our files organized as we work on a piece. 19. Masks and Clipping Masks: Take a look at masking, and you can think of masking as another tool that you can use to work non destructively, meaning that you can always revert back to what you've done previously. We're not destroying anything that we have already put down. Now, there's really two types of masks in Procreate. There's a standard mask which you can think of from a traditional sense as using frisket or masking fluid, where you are essentially taping off or covering a portion of a painting, then you're going to paint and then remove that mask to reveal what's underneath. Now, there's also clipping mask which you can think of as just a tool to help you color inside the lines. So first up, let's take a look at masks. Now, I've got my octopus drawing open from earlier, and I'm going to be using this to demo these features. So let's go ahead and turn on the color shape layer, and I'm going to turn on the background layer. To add a mask to this layer, I'm going to go ahead and tap on the thumbnail or anywhere in the blue highlighted layer here, and I'm going to select mask from the menu. Now, you can see that it adds a layer mask which is filled with white, and it's above our color shape. Now, if I paint solid black anywhere within this layer mask, it will hide what's underneath. Now, if I use gray, basically anything between black and white, it's like lowering the opacity on the color shape layer below. So I'm going to go ahead and use black, and I'm going to be painting with the brush that we use to paint the octopus. I'm going to go ahead and size it down. Now, I can use a mask to clean up the edges of the drawing like we did before. But the difference is this time, I can turn the mask on and off and reveal what is underneath. So the edges are being cleaned up, but they're not necessarily lost. Now, another good tip here is to notice whether or not you are painting on the layer mask or you are painting on the layer itself. You can tell by which has the brighter blue highlight. So right now the layer mask is selected, and now the color shape layer is selected. So when you're on the color shape layer, it's going to go back to whatever color you have selected. And if you paint on it, it's going to hide where you painted the mask. Now, if I undo that and I go back to the layer mask, now it switches back to black here in the upper right, and we go back to hiding what is below. Now, as I mentioned before, if we select a color other than black or white, something maybe like a neutral gray, it's like painting with a brush that the opacity is lowered on. So let's do that, and let's also select a softer brush, maybe something that has a softer edge. Let's go over to basics and choose maybe this foster brush forester brush that has a soft edge. Now let's say maybe we wanted to knock back the intensity of the tentacles so that they appear to be slightly transparent. Maybe that adds a little bit of depth, maybe they're further back in the water. So now you can see that my layer mask contains some black lines that we use to clean up the edges of the octopus, and it also contains some large softer black shapes that are hiding or knocking back the transparency of the octopus' tentacles. So this is a good method in lieu of erasing because once it's erased, it is gone. But with a layer mask, you can make some of these changes and some of these edits, but you can always go back to your original color shape to get back anything that you might need without having to redraw it or repaint it. Now, to remove it, all we have to do is swipe left on the layer mask and tap delete. Now to add a clipping mask, all we need to do this time is just tap the plus to add a layer above our color shape layer, and I'm going to tap on this layer and this time, choose clipping mask. Now, you'll see that a little arrow is added out here to the left of the layer's thumbnail, and that indicates that it is masking the layer directly below. Now anything that we paint on this layer is confined within the layer belows shape. Now, I often use this for adding texture and for shading. So let's take a look at an example of both. So if I delete the clipping mask layer, and I create a new layer above the octopus, and let's grab a brush that has some more texture in it. So maybe the charcoal brush, maybe we'll get this underwood and just size it up and make a very light texture over the whole octopus. Now if we turn this layer into a clipping mask, all of that texture is confined within the shape of the octopus. Now we can do a color adjustment and change that to something that matches maybe the texture that an octopus might have. Now, we didn't have to erase any edges. We didn't have to stay within the lines, so it was very, very fast to make that quick texture. So we can even add to it by maybe selecting a lighter color and making another pass. Now, this is a really quick way to add texture within a shape in a painting, and it can save you a ton of time. So let's also add an additional mask that we can use for shading. So I'm going to select the color shape layer again and I'm going to add a new layer with the plus icon. Now notice that this new layer, because it's between the mask and the color shape layer, this layer is also set up as a mask, as well. So let's grab a color here within the octopus, and let's make it darker, maybe more red. And let's go back to our brush that we originally used to paint the octopus. Now we can go in like we did before, and we can paint some shading. Let's go ahead and see if we can just drag it above the texture layer so that it appears above the texture. Now we can go back and we can add some of those shading elements that we had before and add some dimension to the octopus. And then we can also use this layer for highlights as well. And it all stays within the shape of the octopus. Now, a good way to remember which is which is to think of layer masks as hiding part of a layer, so it's great for subtractive edits, and a clipping mask is great for adding contents on top of an existing shape like texture and shading. So it's great for additive effects. Alright, to help you further with this concept, let's try a really simple exercise. I'm going to go over to the basics brush set, and I'm going to choose Stanley. I'm going to size it up a little bit and do one tap to create a circle. Now I'm going to tap this layer and choose mask. And for the mask, I'm going to get a middle gray tone, and lets you choose a softer brush like we did before. I'll go back to Forrester. And I'm going to use this brush on the mask layer to hide a portion in the upper left here to make it appear like there is some highlights. It's falling at the top of our circle, and you can see that I'm just using a real imprecise method here. I'm just loosely painting over the circle. Now let's add some shadow by creating a new layer on top of those. And this time, we're going to choose clipping mask, and I'm going to get a darker blue for the color, and we'll use the same soft brush that we had selected. Now I'm going to paint a shadow in the bottom right portion of my circle. And I think I want it to be even darker, so I'm going to do a hue saturation adjustment, push that a little bit darker. Now, as a final step here, I'm going to make my color just a little bit darker and let's get another textured brush. We used underwood before from the charcoal set, and I'm just going to lightly paint in some texture just to create, like, sort of this planet kind of look. Now, we have hid a little portion of our circle here using a mask, and we have added some shading and some texture using a clipping mask. And because it's non destructive, we can always go back to our original circle shape. 20. Blend Modes: Let's take a look at blend modes. Now, just the term blend modes sounds a little bit intimidating or like it might be an advanced feature, but it's really not. It really is just a matter of how paint on one layer affects the paint on the layers below. Now, we're going to use our trustee octopus painting here to do some blend mode experimentation and study. First up, where do we find blend modes? Now, if we open up our layers panel, we'll see that by default, all of the layers have this letter next to them. I've got a new layer here above my main octopus paint layer, and if I tap that, it opens up a list of all of the blend modes. Now, again, normal is set by default, and that is just normal color interaction between layers. Now, if we add a little bit of paint to this layer, kind of got this drab orange color. And we go back and we begin to change the blend modes. We can see how much it affects that paint and how it interacts with everything underneath. So you can see there are a lot of blend modes, and you definitely do not have to memorize all of these. But there are maybe three to five that are very handy and that you will likely use often in your routine workflow. The first one I want to show you is the Multiply setting. It's found at the top of the list. I'm going to go ahead and clear this layer. And I'm going to change my color to maybe a bluish purple, and I'm going to move it over to more of a neutral gray, and I've got the same paint brush we've been using on the octopus. Now, I have this light purple selected, and you might think, well, that's not a good color for shadows, but when it interacts with the paint underneath on the multiply blend mode, you can see that it actually really is a nice color to use for shading this octopus. So I'm gonna go ahead and add a few more shadows here. Now, let's see what happens when we change the blend mode back to normal. You can see that the color lightens back up to what we have selected. Let's just scroll through a couple of different blend modes. So we've got linear burn, which is more intense, color burn, which is more of a saturated version of the two colors combined, Shade, darken, and again, multiply. And Multiply is just a much more softer. It's like intensifying the darks, which makes it really good for shadows. So let's go ahead and make another new layer. And at this time, I'm going to switch over to maybe a light orange or something that would be good for a highlight color, make it a little bit more yellow. Now, on this layer, we're going to switch over to Screen for the blend mode. Now, this one is going to intensify the lights. If I paint a large section here, you can see that it just intensifies the lighting. So this makes it really great for creating highlights and light effects. So now we have further rendered the octopus with some layer blend modes. Now, let's take a look at a couple more that might be handy. Let's create a new layer here, and let's set this layer's blend mode to overlay. Now, overlay is like a combination of screen and multiply, and it just really intensifies the color and the saturation of the layers beneath. So let's use the same brush here and let's get maybe a little bit darker version of the main orange color for the octopus. And I'm just going to paint along the edge of my highlights here. So there's a little bit of a transition from the highlight color to the base color of the octopus. Now I'm going to do the same thing with the shadows. Let's go back to our sort of purple bluish color. And I'm going to paint along the edge of the shadows. So now we've got this glow effect that's happening, and we're doing that very simply and very easily with the use of blend modes. Now, I do want to make a mention of a couple more that I think that you should be familiar with. And the first one is soft light. So soft light is a less intense version of overlay. So if we zoom in here and we change this layer's blend mode from overlay to soft light, you can see that the orange in the face of the octopus changes to a less intense version. So let me add a stroke here so that you can see that a little better. So if we get a real intense orange here, maybe make it more yellow, this is what overlay gives us. This is what soft light gives us. Okay, another one to note that I think is handy is the color blend mode. So let's go ahead and add a new layer here, and I'm going to switch to maybe a green. And let's switch the layers blend mode and scroll down all the way to color. And this one is really great for doing some recoloring, but blending it really well with what is on the layers below. So if I begin to paint this green, now, it has a real nice transparency, and it feels like maybe I painted over the octopus with watercolor instead of a more intense paint. So let's go ahead and change the blend mode back to normal so that you can see the difference. So here's normal, here's color. There's more subtlety and more transparency to the color blend mode versus just painting green onto a layer with normal blend mode. Now, just to illustrate this further, let's go ahead and change the color with a hue saturation adjustment for this green layer. I'll change it over to something like intense pink color. Now, if we change it back to normal, you can see that the pink has less transparency and intensity when in normal blend mode. Now, as for the rest of these blend modes, I encourage you to experiment with them, see what they do, play around with them, but don't expect yourself to memorize all of them. Just knowing a handful that you can use in your day to day workflow to speed things up and make your work more efficient is what I recommend. To show you a couple of real world examples and how I used blend modes to finish out this portrait of a golden retriever, let's take a look at the layers panel here. I've got the painting on the bottommost layer, and then I'm tinting the entire painting by just filling a layer with a light pink color, and that is set to multiply, and the opacity is down to 28%, and you can see the effect that that has over the whole painting. And I did this just to sort of give it a little bit of a vintage look, and it's not so bright white. Now, I painted some more details onto a layer that is set to normal blend mode, and then the final layer here has a blend mode of overlay. Let me turn that on so you can see that it just creates some additional glow with a very soft airbrush. And you can see in the layer thumb that it is just around in a few areas just to give that little bit of a glowing effect. Okay, now we have an idea of what blend modes are and how we can use them to further enhance and simplify our workflow. 21. Book Cover Composition: Alright, it's time for another project. Now, we're going to be creating a sketch composition that's a little bit more refined than our initial thumbnails, and we're going to be using everything that we've learned so far, using our sketch brush and maybe some blend modes and some masks if we need them. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to choose a thumbnail sketch that I like the best that I'm going to take over to my composition. So I think that I like this one overall. I like all three, but I think this middle one here is my favorite composition, and I can kind of visualize the sketch and some of the details. So I think this is the one that I'm going to use. So let's go out to the gallery here. And the first thing we want to do is let's create a larger canvas to work from. So I'm going to go ahead and tap the plus icon, and I'm going to choose my Canvas, my typical 4,000 by 5,000 pixel canvas. Okay, now I want to add my book cover in the correct dimension so that I can sketch on top of that. So let's go back to the gallery. Let's go over to our book cover canvas here that's in the correct dimensions. And let's take this layer one here that has the gray tone fill, and I'm just going to tap and pull that out, tap and hold, and then tap gallery, and then go over to our new canvas and drop it here. Okay, I want it to be bigger because I want to create this painting at a larger scale than what it will actually be printed at. So I'm just going to go ahead and drag this to a larger scale. And I'm going to use this as the layout to create my sketch from, and it will be at the correct dimensions for our final book cover size. Okay, now back out in the gallery, I have changed the name to refined sketch comp for this canvas. So let's go ahead and grab the thumbnail sketch that we chose here, and I'm going to use the selection tool, which is in the upper left here. It's the little icon with the ribbon. And I'm going to draw a selection around that middle composition. And I'm going to three finger swipe, copy and head back over here, and then three finger swipe again and paste. Now, I'm also going to need to scale this up to match to match the size of my book cover, and I'm going to use this as just kind of a rough guide or layout for my sketch as I begin to add details and refine it further. Okay, you'll follow the same steps up to this point. And then from here on out, you'll need to begin to refine your sketch. So take your time and just use your sketch brush, build it up, pay attention to some details, and add some elements in that you think fit the design and overall feel for your thumbnail idea. Now, I've already begun to build my sketch up here, and we're going to take a look at that and I want to show you how I used some blend modes and a mask. Alright, I had to resize and reposition my thumbnail just a little bit to sketch on top of it and better fit in the overall layout. But on a new layer, I began a more refined sketch, paying closer attention to detail. And taking my time to really lay out what I thought would be a nicer composition, and it's a little bit tighter sketch that I can build upon and begin to paint. Now, I also begin to lay in some middle tones to give me an idea of the level of contrast that I would need to proper render this sketch with paint. So my first is a mid tone here, and it's just a very light gray. But notice that I have the blend mode set to multiply. So as I add that in, I can get a better idea of the painting and where those middle tones will be. Now, I've also got another layer of darks, and it is also set to multiply, as well. Now we're starting to see it build up in contrast and get an even closer idea of what the final might look like minus color. So the last one is a lights layer, and it's just a lighter gray, and the blend mode is set to overlay. Now, this gives us an idea of the overall lighting situation. And then I also just added in some stars here at the top, which is just some little dots that I sprinkled around because I figured there might be some dots around this spaceship or space station, and maybe we're kind of looking into space. Now, I also added a layer mask to my original cover size here, and it was just to create some painted borders, just to give it the overall painted look around the edge versus the hard edge shape that I have. And I used a mask here because I figured I might want to come back and refer to the actual size or dimensions of the cover, but I just wanted to give it that extra bit of hand painted feel for this composition. Now, remember that we need to keep open spaces for any text that's going to appear on this cover, like the title and maybe the author's name and maybe even a subtitle or something like that. So I've left some space here. I feel like I want to stack the title here is kind of what I'm thinking. Maybe the author's name is up here or some sort of subtitle. The author's name might fit down here as well. I think there's going to be plenty of room for that extra bit of type, but just keep that in mind as you're sketching. So I'm pretty excited about how this is coming together, and I hope you feel the same way about yours. I even think I may have a title for this book. I think I'm going to call it the Tide Beyond the Stars, because that sounds really like 1960s Sci five, and it just feels right for this cover. I haven't come up with an author name just yet, but I'm sure it'll come to me as I work further. So remember that you still don't have to be perfect with this. We're still treating it as a rough layout, but we just want to dial in the details a little bit further. You can see that mine's pretty rough, but it's just a step above the thumbnail. We're now working at a larger size, and we can work in some of that detail, and it just starts to feel a little bit more like a step towards completion. 22. Class Project 4 - Layered Composition Sketch: Alright, now, it's your turn. Once again, this time, we're going to create a rough layout for your book cover concept using multiple layers, masks, and blend modes. So your requirements for this project are to create a sketch using multiple layers, line, color, shadows, et cetera, experiment with clipping masks and blend modes, Multiply, Screen and overlay being the most useful. Keep all major elements on separate layers for flexibility. Now, your deliverables are to export your rough sketch as a JPEG and upload to the class project assignment section. Remember that your sketch can still be rough at this phase. We just want to further refine our chosen concept beyond the thumbnail stage. 23. Color Picker & Palettes: Alright, now let's talk about color. So for artists and designers, color can sometimes be an intimidating topic and can stump us from time to time, but luckily, Procreate has provided some great ways to manage color and makes color selection easier for us. Now, throughout the course, you have seen me access the color panel here from this circle icon here at the top. So when I tap that, it opens the color panel. Now, there are a couple of options down at the bottom. First up is disc and classic, and I usually leave mine in classic mode because it makes the most sense to me for color selection, and it's just what I'm used to. So moving the circle up towards the right corner adjusts the saturation and lightness. Moving it further this way towards the left desaturates the color, then moving it down this way is desaturating and adjusting the value, the lightness or darkness of the color. And then we have this top slider here, which is adjusting the hue. Now, down below here, we have a color history which we can clear with this button here, and the history collects colors as we paint with them. So if we paint with this green, it becomes the first color here in our history swatches. So if we choose a different color, and paint with it. Now the blue becomes the first swatch and green becomes the second until it's filled all the way across here. When this row fills up, the last color will get bumped off as we paint with a new one. Now, below the history swatches, we have a collection of colors. Now, this is a color palettes, which is selected from the palettes menu, which we'll take a look at here in a sack. Switching over to disc, we have the same options available to us, but it's just presented in a different way. So it's just a method to get to the same colors as classic. But this time, we have the saturation and brightness in this center circle here, and we have the hue in this outer ring. Now, another item to note here are the two swatches in the upper right. So one is the primary color, and the other is the secondary color, which can be adjusted separately. Now, some brushes in Procreate will utilize two different colors, and this is the way that you can make that selection. Whether you choose disc or classic for your color selection is completely up to you. It's really just the method that you like and that makes the most sense to you. Now, next up, we have harmony. Now, this is a unique feature that I really love about Procreate because we now have a value slider here at the bottom. I'm going to bump it all the way up to the brightest here. Now we have complimentary as the scheme. And no matter what we choose using either circle, the complimentary color is adjusted as we go. So if we were to choose this purple, this green is the complimentary color. Now, if we tap complimentary here, we can choose a different color scheme like split complimentary. So no matter which circle we choose, we get the other colors in a split complimentary color theme. And I tend to like triatic. I like to have at least three colors in a color scheme to work with, and triatic is one that I use often. Now, if you're a bit more technical minded with your color selection, there is a value area here where you can adjust the hue, the saturation, and the brightness separately, or you can adjust RGB, or you can enter a hexadecimal value. I mentioned palettes before, and the one that I have as the default is called Daisy, and that can be accessed from the far right here at the bottom. Now, these are all palettes that I have installed, and I can change any one of them to the default by just tapping the three dot icon here and choosing set as active. Now when I go back to my classic color picker, I have this new palette set as the default. Now, we can also view these palettes as cards here at the top. This gives a generic title to each of the colors and you can view them in a larger space. Now we can also create our own palettes by tapping the plus icon here in the upper right, and you can take a photo with your camera. You can import a file and you can import a photo, and a color palette will be automatically generated from that file or photo. This last menu item here gives us the option to restore the example palettes that are the default for Procreate. Now, we can also tap the plus icon here and create a new palette, and that new palette will automatically be set as active. So when we go back to our Color Picker, we'll see an empty palette below. I can tap the title here to name it. Now as we choose different colors, we can tap inside each individual tile to add that color to the palette. If we want to remove one, we just tap and hold and choose clear swatch. Now, as a mini project, I encourage you to explore the colors panel, try out the different selection tools, and even create your own palette. Now, this could be a palette that you might use for your book cover or just a palette of colors that you like for future use. 24. Filling & Gradients: Alright, now let's take a look at how color can be applied. I'm going to start here with a simple circle. And instead of tapping the color icon here in the upper right to open the color panel, I'm just going to tap and drag it over and drop it in the circle to make a fill. But there is a problem. If we zoom in here, we can see that there is a visible border between the fill and the linework. So let's undo that and let's see how we can remove it. So I'm going to drag that over again. But this time, I'm going to hold my pin to the screen surface, and I'm going to drag it to the right to adjust the threshold slider here at the top. So that removes our fill by bringing the threshold up to around 30%. I'm gonna create a couple more circles here. Now I'm going to drag again to fill the first one, and I'm going to tap continue filling, and then I can just tap within these circles as well to continue that fill into other shapes. We can also recolor shapes by dragging and dropping as well. So if I change the color here and then drag the color over, drop it onto the shapes to recolor them, but our original color is not preserved. Another method for doing this would be to create a new layer and set that layer to clipping mask and then drag that color and drop it onto the canvas to fill all of those shapes. And this method will preserve the original color that we used for the shapes. Now, what if we want to create a gradient within this circle? Now, Procreate doesn't have a native gradient tool, but there are several options that make creating gradients easy. I'm going to select my original blue color, and I'm going to make a lighter version of it. Now, one option that we have here is to turn on Alpha lock. And grab a soft airbrush. Now, if we paint our gradient using Alpha lock, it is going to paint on the original layer, making any future edits more difficult. So let's go ahead and let's undo that. Turn Alpha lock off. Let's create another layer, and let's set that to clipping mask. Now, when I paint onto the clipping mask, the gradient and the original shape are separate. So let's go ahead and get a darker color of the base color. And I'm just painting very loosely back in the other direction. Let's get this one again. Make a lighter version. Get this one again, make a darker version. Then I like to go ahead and choose adjustments and gaussian blur and then do a blur to fill or smooth out that gradient. If we go back to our layers, we can see the paint for the gradient and the shape are separate. So if we wanted to remove that gradient, all we'd have to do is swipe left and tap delete. Alright, let's take a look at another method for using color fill. If we open our layers panel here, I'm going to turn this layer off, and then I have a layer underneath that has some black and white linework, and it is flattened into one layer, meaning that the white background and the line work are all on the same layer. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select that layer and I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. And what that does is only show the blacks in the layer. So all the white disappears. Now, let's go ahead and tap the layer, and we're going to set it to reference here. It's the last option in the menu. Now I'm going to create another new layer and I'm going to move it to the bottom. Now we can use this layer to fill color, but it's going to use the linework layer as reference. So here's what that looks like. Let's select a yellow. Now I'm going to drag and drop in to the flowers petals. And you can see that it is adding that color to the layer underneath, but it's using that linework as reference. We can then create another new layer and let's change the color to green. And we can drag color there as well, and it continues to use that reference layer as a guide. And now, the great thing about this because we are on a layer underneath the linework and that linework layer is set to multiply, we can then just use a regular paint brush to fill in the areas that are miss, those little small detail areas. So like out here, we have some yellow, so I'll switch back to the yellow and my yellow layer, and I'll just paint in some of those missed spots. When adding this color method to your workflow, it really can speed things up and allow you to work more efficiently. Now, a common mistake here is to fill color on the wrong layer. Now, it's perfectly fine if you are filling all of your colors on one layer, but if you are trying to keep your colors separate, it's important that you check the layers panel to make sure that you're dropping colors onto the right layer. Now, as a mini project, go ahead and create some simple linework to familiarize yourself with some of these color techniques. Try these drag and drop methods, create a simple gradient, and soon they'll become second nature, and you can use them in your future work. 25. Using Textures: I wanted to take the time to do a quick chat on textures. Now, I believe that textures are an integral part of painting and Procreate, but they're often overlooked or they're a less obvious feature. Now, if we take a look at this painting as an example, and I show you the layers, there is the painting underneath this collection or group of textures. Now, the group of textures consist of several canvases, several brushstroke textures, and they're all set to different blend modes and various levels of opacity. And I adjust those settings to really fine tune how the textures blend with one another and affect the overall look of the painting. So if I were to turn this group of textures off, you can see what a difference it makes in the painting itself. Textures off, Textures back on. And then the final painting, which included some layers of paint above the textures. Now, the layers on top of the textures also include various levels of opacity so that some of those textures below will show through in the final painting. Alright, let's go ahead and have a look at a more simplified example. I've got a new layer that I'm going to draw another simple circle on I'm going to fill that circle. Now, what we have here is a very digital look. There's very clean edges. There's very unified color, meaning that there's no variation in this orange circle. It's just a very smooth, even coverage. Now, in traditional painting, this is not the case. There's always a little bit of variation in texture, a bit of variation in how light falls on the brushstrokes, and those things have a lot of influence over the final look of the painting. In some cases, with digital artwork, we're not trying to mimic traditional looks. So this kind of smooth and clean lines may be perfect for what you're creating or what you're working on. But I want to go over applying textures so that you understand how both sides work. Now, I want you to also understand that there are really two ways of applying texture, and one is via brushes, and one is through importing additional textured files or photos. So let's start by taking a look at brushes. So if we create a new layer and we set that layer to clipping mask, let's take the color of our circle and let's make it a little bit lighter. And then let's get a textured brush. We'll go over to the grunge area of the library, and let's get this motor sport brush here at the bottom. And we'll just lightly apply a texture or on that clipping mask that will appear over the circle, and then let's also get a darker version of the color. And do the same thing. So now we have applied a little bit of texture to our circle, and it just breaks up that very smooth and plain look of digital art. Now, let's go ahead and also apply a layer mask to the circle. Now we can change the edges of our circle so that they don't appear so clean and smooth. Let's select a black brush here and let's get one that has a more textured edge. Maybe this pepperberry brush might work. So as I go around the edge of the circle, we're removing some bits or hiding some bits of the edge so that it appears to have a little bit more of a natural or organic look. Now, we can add some back by switching over to white. Add a little bit of that edge back. So now our circle through a couple of different masks has a look that is less digital and a little bit more organic. Now, as mentioned before, we can also apply textures via files or photos. I happen to have some scans of some traditional watercolor that we can apply. We'll do that from the Actions menu, and we'll choose insert a file, and I'll grab one of these watercolor washes. And then that gets added onto a new layer above everything else. If we set the blend mode to let's try overlay, and then let's drag it into our clipping masks here. Now we have a bit of grunge from our brush and some watercolor texture from our wash that we just imported that are being combined together over the circle shape. Let's go ahead and turn the brush texture off. So now we can see that we have more of a watercolor look here, and I'm going to turn the opacity down just a little bit so that it blends more with the color underneath. Now, what about the background here? What about this plain gray background that we've got? Maybe we want to add something that sort of unifies the background with the painted shape that we have. So let's insert another file. This time we're going to do it maybe below everything else. So if I create a new layer, drag it below everything else, and then go back to the actions, insert file. This time, I've got some noise textures that fill the entire canvas. So let's import one of those. And I'm going to go ahead and drag it out to fit the entire canvas that we have. And maybe we should drag this one on top and then set the blend mode to overlay as well or maybe multiply. Let's try that. Multiply, and then I'll change the background color to something more of a light tan or yellow. Now we've added some background texture that blends a little bit more with the watercolor circle that we've created. So let's go ahead and turn the opacity down on that one, create a new layer, and let's import one more. I'm going to grab another one. And again, I'm going to resize it. This will just give you an idea of how you can stack textures to create more of an organic look in a painting. So I'm going to set this one to overlay and probably want to turn the opacity down on it, as well. So let me go ahead now and just show you if we create another new layer, go to drag it below. And I'm just going to get a watercolor brush. Let's just grab something from the watercolor section of the library. I'm going to get this we'll just use this brush that we have selected tansy. And if I choose get more of a reddish orange. Now, if I paint with this brush, you're going to see that it blends because the brush is transparent and the textures are transparent as well, and they're having an effect on each other because of the layer stack. So it just gives you a more organic look to a painting. So we can even change colors here. And even that color has a more natural sort of look, given that it is being affected by what is underneath and the textures above. So if I turn those textures off, you can see how much different those brush strokes look without them. Now, one thing that I do want to mention here, and it's a common mistake that I see a lot with digital painting where the artist is applying textures is the texture scale. You want to make sure that the scale of the texture matches your brush strokes and the artwork you're creating. So for example, let's just say we had this one here. I'm going to turn this one off. And let's go ahead and bump up the opacity, and we're going to set this to multiply so that you can really see it. Now, the scale of the texture matches the canvas size and what we've painted really well. But if we were to change that and scale this texture way up. Then suddenly those brushstrokes don't look natural with what we've painted. It looks like it's too large. The scales don't match, and it really throws the realism off. So make sure that your texture scale matches everything else in your painting. Okay, this should spark some inspiration for you and just to give you some ideas of how you can apply different textures to really get some natural and organic looks out of your paintings and procreate. 26. Working with Adjustments: Right now let's take a look at color adjustment. Now, if you are used to working in Photoshop, you'll already kind of have an idea of what these adjustments do, but there are some differences in Procreate. So let's go ahead and start by looking at my layer stack here, and you can see that this painting is built up of several different colored layers and some textures here at the top. I'm going to go ahead and select the orange wash layer. So if I turn this off and on, you can see exactly what's on the layer. So if we go over to the magic wand icon up here in the upper left and tap that, we get the adjustments menu, and we're only going to be focusing on the first four here that pertain to color. Now if I select hue saturation brightness, we now have some sliders here at the bottom, one for hue, one for saturation, one for brightness. Now, because we're on the orange wash layer, when I make an adjustment here, it's only going to affect what's on the layer. This is a great way to really experiment with color because sometimes my colors may be slightly off, or if I make an adjustment to the hue and take the saturation down a little bit, maybe I can blend colors or unify them in a way that just wasn't there when I was laying down the initial brushstrokes. So to apply this change, we can just tap the brush icon again. Now we're back to regular painting mode. I'm going to two finger tap to undo that and go back to the original orange that I was using. Now, I want to show you a different way that these adjustments can be applied, where it affects the entire painting versus just one layer. And I actually like to work this way because it preserves all of my layers but allows me to adjust colors to everything at ons. So if we do a three finger swipe down, we can choose copy all and then three finger swipe down again and tap paste. Now, that creates a layer that we can then drag to the top. And it's got the entire painting now all on one layer. So if we go back to hue, saturation and brightness, Now when we make this adjustment, we are affecting all of the colors together. Now, there is one other way to fine tune the adjustment at this stage. There's a drop down here at the top, and if we tap that, we've got a new option for layer or pencil. Now, if we choose layer, we are adjusting the colors of the entire layer. But if we choose pencil, we'll notice that the hue setting drops back to 30% so that we can see what we are painting. So we could really fine tune this and just affect only the areas that we are painting with the brush. So you can see here that I'm just painting below the beak and changing some of this to a more pinkish purple. Now, of course, we can change the brush to a different brush, so we can try maybe if we go to basics, we can try this hard edge brush, then you can really see what kind of effect that it's having because that brush has a very sharp edge and is opaque. I'm going to undo that. Now, we can also continue to make adjustments to where we've painted. So if we just want to change that painted brush stroke, we can also blur the edges of the brushstroke. Now I'm using the blur or smudge tool to blend in what I've painted. So I'm going to switch the color again to more blue. So you can see here by working this way, we can really, really fine tune our color adjustment. I'm going to go ahead and tap the magic wand icon again to exit out. I'm going to two finger tap to undo, so we go back to our original flattened layer for the entire painting. Now let's take a look at the color balance setting here. I'm going to apply a color balance adjustment to the entire layer. And again, we have the same layer and pencil setting. But this time, we are going to stay on the entire layer. Now we are adjusting the colors within the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights. So if I have the shadows selected here, I can make them more blue or more red. Apply a little bit of magenta and a little bit of yellow. Now if we change the mid tones to be more yellow or more blue, more cien or more red. I think I kind of like the Sian adjustment. And then the highlights, I usually leave the highlights alone with a color balance setting, especially with a watercolor, because if I push the highlights to yellow, it's, of course, going to affect the background paper. So I want that to stay white, so I'm going to leave that setting alone for highlights, but I'm going to apply the shadows and midtones change that we just made. Now, we can also just tap anywhere on the screen once and we get the preview undo, apply, cancel, and reset. By tapping and holding preview, we will see the original versus the changes we just made. We can undo, apply, cancel, reset, we'll reset our settings back to the default. We can apply to apply the changes we just made, which then resets the sliders back to their original state, but the color changes are applied. Now to exit here, we can tap the brush or the magic wand again. Now let's take a look at Curves. Now, again, you will recognize the Curves adjustment from Photoshop. If you're used to working there. I'm going to go ahead and tap on the curve line here and pull this down to adjust the darks. I'm going to add a new point here, push it up to adjust the lights just a little. So if we bring that up, then we start to get more color into the darks, pulling this point down will dull the highlights. So we get some really interesting effects. We can make adjustments to each of the RGB channels here. Here's red, green, and blue. So, for example, if we wanted to affect only the blues, in this piece, we could add points here and make adjustments to the curve. So I'm going to go ahead and tap the brush icon here to apply those changes. I'm going to to fingertap undo them to get back to our previous setting. Now before we look at gradient map, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer and I'm going to apply the gradient map to the topmost layer. Let's go ahead and select the magic wand icon again and this time, select gradient Map. And there's already some default gradient maps to choose from here, and they have names for each one. Or we can tap the plus icon and we can create our own. And the color selector that pops up is just like the one for the color panel. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to choose one of the defaults. Let's go with Breeze. Now, if I tap and drag to the left or right, you'll see that it is making an adjustment at the top for the slider. So it's like changing the opacity of the gradient map. So I'm going to leave it at 100%, and I'm going to tap the brush icon to apply that setting. Now, the reason I did a duplicate of our original layer was that I wanted to change the blend mode here to overlay and then take the opacity down to around 30%. Now, this is like applying a gradient map adjustment that is unifying all of our colors. So if I turn it off, you can see the effect that it's having. It's very subtle, but it does have a way of unifying the colors. Now, again, all of the adjustments that we've just made here are non destructive because we can turn these layers off and we can go back to our original painting, and it's unaffected by those changes. Now, my typical workflow will involve making these adjustments to colors or unifying the colors through these additional layers near the end of a painting. But sometimes I do like to add additional layers above them for any final highlights or additional detail. 27. Working with Reference Images: All right, let's take a minute to talk about working with reference. Now, working with reference images is something that you are likely to do on almost every project that you work on. And fortunately, there are several different ways that you can manage reference images within Procreate. Let's go ahead and start by adding a reference onto a new layer. So we'll do that by creating a new layer, tapping the wrench icon, and then add and then insert file or insert photo. Now, our reference image is added here onto a new layer, just like it is when you import a texture to use in your artwork, we can, of course, resize it and move it around. Now, the problem here is that it is on the canvas itself. So if we move it around, no matter where we move it, it's kind of in the way of what we're actually working on. A better way to open a single reference like this would be to tap the wrench icon again and this time switch over to Canvas and then turn on reference. Now, this opens a new window with our Canvas set by default, but we actually want to use image here, and we can tap import image. I've got that same reference image imported here, but now I can move it around and it's separate from the canvas. I can also resize it. I can also pinch and rotate the reference image here. I can zoom in on it, resize. I can do a lot more with the image itself inside the reference window. Now, if I want to replace it, I'm going to tap Import again. And import a new image. Now I can scale this one as well. Now, even though our image is open in the reference window, we can still tap and hold to sample different colors from the image for use in our artwork. But the problem here is that it is only one image that we're working with. So when I imported this one, it replaced the one I had previously. Now, another option that we can use to work with multiple reference images, like you saw me do before, is to use an app called Vizref. I'm going to tap it here and drag it over to a new window or a split view window. Now I have multiple references here that I can then resize the sref window to be a little bit smaller. Now I've got multiple reference images here on the left. I still have my main reference window open here in Procreate, so I can tap and close that. Now I can use these as reference as I'm working on my piece. 28. Developing Color, Mood & Atmosphere: Alright, now that we have explored color, let's take some time to continue on with our main project by adding some initial color, mood and atmosphere to our cover illustration. Now, I've got my illustration here with my refined sketch and the bit of tone that I've added to it. So if we open up the layers here, I went ahead, I created a new layer, and I'm painting this layer underneath my tones just to give some color there. And because the tones layer is set to multiply, that color is going to show through, and it's going to be affected by those tones those gray tones on the layer above. So the colors a little bit muted, but it does start to create or give me a general idea of where I want to go. Now, to punch these colors up to add some saturation and begin to cover up some of my sketch lines, I added an additional color layer above the tones layer here and began to paint more saturated color. Now, this is just one approach to color. You can do these layers in whatever order you like. For example, you can add a color layer above your sketch, and as you can see, that begins to cover up more of my sketch lines, and it gives the overall piece more of a painterly feel early on. Now, for this initial color stage, I was using brushes from the paints selection here. I was mainly sticking with peacock and she oak. Both of those had a really nice paint like texture that I liked a lot, so I just stuck with those to give it a kind of a painterly feel. Okay, now let's talk about some of my color choices here and give you some things to think about when choosing your colors for your cover. Now, I wanted to have kind of this ominous type of feel. So I wanted the sky to be red and just kind of dark. And I was just thinking about the sense of danger that maybe red invokes. And then it kind of fades off to yellow here as it begins to go down towards the planet. And I used blues and greens in the planet because I'm thinking, Well, maybe the planet is more of a peaceful type of atmosphere, but there's this ominous red that is looming in the sky. So as the painting goes back towards the other way, I begin to go towards this purplish color as it fades toward the red sky. Now, another thing to think about is red and green are opposite each other on the color wheel, so they are complimentary colors. Now, when it comes to texture, you can see that I'm getting some texture from the brushes themselves. Those brushes have a really nice brush grain or texture in the stroke. But I wanted to add some additional texture to the overall piece. So to do that, I went ahead and I brought in a texture file, and its layer blend mode is set to multiply so that it's basically transparent over the piece, only showing the darks. Now, this does create kind of a vintagy look to it because I left the color in the texture, that sort of tannish brown, so it's really having an effect overall in the colors. Now, another thing I want to point out is that my painting has kind of this smoothness to it that some of my reference does not have. Like, it has this kind of grain because the reference is printed material. So I wanted to add some of that grain in to just kind of unify the textures. So I have an additional layer here with some noise texture. This layer's blend mode is set to overlay, so you can see that when I turn this on and off, it's just giving us this slight grain texture, kind of like paper would have. Now, to do that, I just created a new layer shows a medium gray I did a fill and then noise, and I bumped the noise up to about 60%. Then did a Gaussian blur to the noise at about 2% and then set this layer's blend mode to overlay. Now, this is a technique that is probably specific to my project. Depending on what you are doing, you may or may not want to add many paper grain textures like this. Now, another thing that we might want to do at this stage is do a little bit of experimentation with the color, maybe see how we can change things to be a little bit different. And one way that we can do that is doing a three finger swipe, copy all, three finger swipe again and paste. Now, this adds a flattened layer above everything else that is everything in the document. So it's just like flattening all layers and adding it to the top of the layer stack. Now here we can do adjustments like color balance, hue saturation and brightness, and it will affect everything in the piece, giving us an idea of how we can shift the color. So, for example, if I chose color balance and I wanted to shift all the shadows to maybe be cooler or warmer, I think I like maybe making the darks a little bit more red because that sort of adds to the ominous feel, and then maybe we want the midtons to be a little more yellow. These are just ways that we can just experiment with color and see if anything fits or clicks better than what we laid down initially. Alright, now, feel free to add some color to your cover project at this stage. Remember to experiment with color variation and textures and see what you can create in this initial color stage for your cover project. 29. Class Project 5 - Color & Mood Study: Alright, this is a fun one. For this one, you're going to develop a color palette and experiment with lighting and texture to define the tone of your book cover. So the requirements are to build a cohesive palette using Procreate's Color Picker and palettes, add paper texture and subtle adjustments like hue saturation and Curves, focus on atmosphere and mood rather than the details. Now, the deliverables are to export your study as a JPEG and share your process and insight in your project description. So enjoy this stage and have some fun experimenting with color. 30. Sketching & Inking: All right, now as we move through the course, let's take some time to explore some drawing and painting techniques with Inprocreate. Now, we're going to start by looking specifically at sketching and inking. We'll be focusing in on pencils, pens, and inks. Now, looking at pencils here first, it really does not matter which pencil that you choose as long as it feels like a real pencil to you and feels comfortable in the way that you draw and sketch. For example, I'm going to switch down here to Huntsman. Now, one thing to note about pencils is that the sliders over here on the left are going to control the size. So if we want a really large thick stroke and the opacity, if we want a real light stroke. Now, how do these sliders apply to a traditional counterpart? So think of no matter which pencil you choose, think of this size as a hard, fine tip pencil versus a large soft tip pencil. For example, this might be this might be the stroke of a mechanical pencil. And if we move the slider up, this might be a number four H pencil, a hard lead pencil. As we move further up here, it might become a three B pencil, and then all the way up might be like a six B or seven B pencil. Now, the same can be said with the opacity slider here. So if we go down on the size, we might think of the more opaque line as a softer pencil. And if we take the opacity down, we might think of it now as more of a hard lead pencil that's creating a lighter gray line. Now switching over to pins, you might think of these as more of a clean, almost vector like stroke. Choosing this one here, you can see it's really clean, and this is a line that is varied with pressure. So light pressure versus hard pressure will give you a thicker line. This is a line that would vectorize very easily and very cleanly. Now, I want to also tap on this brush again here to open the brush studio, and you can see there are some stabilization settings applied to this brush by default. So let's go ahead and let's duplicate this brush. I'm going to tap on the duplicate to open the brush studio settings for it, and I'm going to push the stabilization settings up some, and then the brush stroke becomes even more smooth. Now, that's something that I will do often, especially with pencils. If I want a smoother, cleaner line, I'll often duplicate the brush and punch the stabilization up to get a smoother line and just keep two versions of that brush, one more stabilized than the other. Now, speaking of stabilization settings, if we go back to pencils, most of the pencils don't have any stabilization by default. And that's really handy for when you're drawing, especially with details. You really don't want the line to be smoothed by the software. You want to keep it as true to your pencil stroke as possible. So again, here, if I wanted to make a stabilized version of this particular pencil, I would duplicate it and then change the stabilization settings for the copied version. Now, looking at the inks, this is a selection of brushes that fell a little bit more like traditional inking media like nib pins or small brushes. So if this one, for example, is going to give us a very rough ink line that is just got a nice gritty texture to it and feels like it's being applied to a textured surface like a gray paper. As we go down the list, these brushes feel a little bit more like they are being applied with a large brush because you can see some of the brush texture in the stroke. Now, you might ask yourself, when do I use these particular brushes? Like, why would I select ink over pens, pencils, et cetera? So going back and looking at my cover project, let's zoom in on our main character here, and let's take a look at a couple of brushes. Maybe we want to grab a dark ink like color here and if we chose a pin, it's probably going to be a little bit too clean by comparison to the rest of our overall look here because we've got a real traditional looking textured piece, so maybe those feel a little bit too vector or a little bit too clean. So let's try maybe inking with some of the ink pens. We'll try Swift, which is going to probably give us a little bit more gritty line. So maybe if we wanted to begin inking some of the details here, maybe we'll also try this one that's Wapping's the name of it. So it's giving us this real sort of gritty line here that we can apply some details with. And so you can see, again, if I switch back to pens, it just feels like the pen might be for a different project. Maybe it's just a little bit too clean. So maybe for pencils, maybe we would want to apply a colored pencil here. So using Huntsman, we could get a color and choose a lighter version and apply some details that would be more like colored pencil. So these are just some ways that we can use pens and pencils to sketch and draw with and apply some detail and rendering to a piece. 31. Painting & Rendering Techniques: Now let's have a look at painting and rendering techniques. Now, for this video, we're going to primarily be focusing on the oils, the paints, guash, watercolor. Now, this can certainly apply to markers and pastels, charcoals, and so forth. Really, any brush that you would use to fill in paint or to render a subject. I've drawn this shape with a pencil brush so that we can use it as a guide for filling in and rendering, just like we would any sketch that we might be painting. Now, what I consider to be probably the most important element of painting is are my brushes opaque or are they transparent? Now, opaque, meaning an oil or an acrylic that's going to cover everything underneath, whereas a gouache or a watercolor is going to be more transparent, and you're going to be building up values using layer over layer. Let's start with an opaque brush like an oil. First of all, I'm going to create a new layer that I'm going to drop below my sketch shape here, and let's switch over to an oil brush, and we'll go ahead and go with this one. Maybe olive will work. Now, I've got this light orange color selected, and we can certainly fill in a shape like this by just tracing the outline and then dragging and filling in the shape. But what I prefer when painting is instead of filling shapes by dragging and dropping, I prefer to just color in the shape as though I was painting it with traditional media. And the reason for that is most of these brushes have built in texture and layering that gives them more of a traditional look, and it builds texture as I paint. Now, oil, again, is opaque. So if we were to change colors, maybe a more red or orange, and let's just grab a different brush, maybe we'll go even more red so that you can see it better. You can see that it just completely covers what is underneath. So this is a very opaque brush, and we don't have to worry about building up values layer over layer because everything on the top layer is covering what is underneath. Now, if we were to do this with more transparent brushes like watercolor, for example, it's going to be a little bit of a different technique. Switch back to my light orange. Let's go over to a watercolor brush. I'm going to use penguin. And I'm going to fill this in, and you can see right off the bat, it's much more lighter. Now, if I pick up the brush and using the same color, I just begin to paint again, it has the effect of real watercolor where it's building value by layering. Every time I pick up the pin tip and begin to paint again, it just proceeds to get darker and darker. Now, one thing that we can do to smooth out some of these edges because watercolor would not typically have these real hard edges. If the layers underneath were wet, the colors would bleed into each other. So one way to do that is to use the smudge tool, and I often use the same brush that I'm painting with to also smudge with. So if we come in and just soften some of those edges, it will begin to look like real watercolor that has been layered one on top of the other. Now, same goes for the edges. We can also use the eraser tool. And again, I often use the same brush for the eraser tool and come back and clean up the edges. Now, another thing to consider when using watercolor or transparent brushes is that your pencil lines will show through underneath your painted layers. So this is an excellent technique when you want your pencil sketch to still be a visible part of the finished painting. Okay, I want to show you again, just an example of blending and racing with opaque brushes versus transparent brushes. So let's switch back over to oil. And I've got this orange color again, and I'm going to create a swatch of paint here. And then I'm going to tap and hold on the smudge tool so that the same brush is selected, and I'm going to blend that out a little bit. And then I'm going to tap and hold the eraser. Now the same brush is selected for the eraser. I'm going to come back and just erase a little bit of the edge as it fades out. Now, doing the same thing with a transparent brush, let's grab a different watercolor brush. We'll try cascade using the same color. And you can see how different the color looks by just choosing a transparent brush. And I'm going to tap and hold the smudge tool. And same for the eraser. Now, you can see how the eraser still leaves a little bit of paint behind because the eraser itself is also transparent. Gonna smudge back into that a little bit. Now, you can see how just using the same color and an oil brush versus a watercolor brush, just how different they look using the exact same technique. Back over to my cover illustration here, let's take a look at how we might block in some color to further render a portion of the painting. Let's zoom in here to this little rocky area that's kind of on the waterline and how we might use an oil brush. Let's just keep the same one we were using before. I'm going to sample a dark color here and make it even darker. Now we can use this brush to cut in some of these rocky shapes here that we've got on the coastline. I'm creating some of the darks. So I still want it to be fairly abstract and not overly detailed. Now I'm going to sample a color, this green color, make it lighter, and create a few highlight areas. I'm not looking at any reference here. I'm just kind of adding shapes in where I think light is probably falling onto these rocks. Now, as I zoom out here, you can see that we've added some more detail in that helps to render this rocky beach area. Now, there's more value contrast in this spot because we've added some darker darks and some lighter lights. And that will begin to balance out as we do the same thing all around the painting, especially in the middle focal point area. 32. Adding Details & Effects: We've hit a stage in our project where it's time to start looking at some details and maybe some effects to start getting to a point where it's more of a finished piece. Now, we've been hitting the large colors, the tones, and just the things that we need to lay down the initial bits of the painting that we have to work our details into. So that's how we know that we really can't do anything else to this painting except to zoom in and start to finalize some of these details. Now, on mine, I already have added a detail layer, and I'm going to show you that detail layer turned on and off. So you can instantly see that some bits come into focus. So focal areas have more sharpness, and there's just more definition to the overall piece. So turning that off and on again, you can see what's happening. Now, let's take a look at how we might approach this stage in the project and some steps that you can take in your own. Now, the first thing I want to point out to you is a brush that I used to create all of these details. Now, the brush that you choose doesn't have to be this specific one, and you may even choose more than one. I just want to show you the one that I chose and why I chose it. So I pulled this brush. I'm not even going to try to pronounce the name Loi it's from the gouache section, and it can be found right here. Ike made a copy. I moved it over to my book cover brushes, and I'm going to show you why I chose this brush because I liked the fact that it had this really nice texture and opaque guache look to it. But when I take the well, let me show you real quick. Light pressure here has even more texture. But when I take the opacity down to maybe 20% or so and I use light pressure, I could get even more texture out of it. Now, another aspect about this brush is when I scale it way down, maybe around four or 5%. I got a nice detailer brush out of it, as well. So just this one brush had all of the variety that I needed to complete all of the detail in the rendering and this painting. Now, another thing that you may notice is that I went ahead and painted all the way to the edge of the page. And the reason I did that was just to give myself all the extra bleed that I might need to shift this painting around to make room for the title in a later stage. Alright, now, let's zoom in here and let's take a look at a few of the techniques that you might use when you're rendering out your piece. Let's open our reference backup in Isref. Now, one thing that I want to point out that is good to know and good to just be aware of is the use of rim light and glowing effects that are really common in a piece like this where we have multiple subjects, or we have a background, middle ground, and foreground because we want to be able to guide the viewer's eye, and one way we can do that is through lighting. If we notice here in our reference, you can see this little bit of rim light on this subject that is separating him from the background. Now, we can probably find that in some other areas, too. Like, here we have some glowing lighting that is kind of acting as a rim light and also a little bit of reflected light. So that's just a way that you're going to see really often when viewing subjects like this, it's just that little bit of rim light can add some separation to the background and set the subject apart. So let's take a look at how we might do that in this piece. So one good tip is to avoid the use of white in a painting like this because white is going to look very stark and very cold. Instead, I like to try and use just an off white or a color that is really close but not quite there. So this is a yellow that is almost there, but not quite. It's not pure white. And again, I mentioned that this squash brush when scaled down, makes a really good detailer. So for our subject here, let's add a little bit of rim light around the edge. And when I zoom out, you'll really be able to see how this is an effective way to set the subject apart, making him more of a focal point. Okay? So you can immediately see just how that bit of light can really set him off and separate him from the water that's in the background. Now, we could also add more lighting up here to the ship, since it's kind of a focal point as well, and maybe we want to change color to be a little bit more of this bluish green. So if I turn this on and off, you'll see that now there is some separation of both of these subjects from the background. So we can go all around this painting, and we can sample colors, make them lighter, and add just a little bit of little touches of light here and there. And this is a technique that really pushes the painting the details to a completed state. It adds a bit of lighting and a bit of dimension, and it really pushes the painting to more of a refined look. Like for here on the edge of the mountain, I may not go as light, since it's further in the background. Maybe just apply a little along the edge here. Now, another thing that we can do to sort of blend this rim light into the background is to use the smudge tool very lightly and just blend smudge some of the rim light into the background, giving it a more subtle effect. Now, what if we wanted to really push the lighting in this piece beyond what we are just painting? Because painting rim light and lighting effects, we are painting in light, but what if we wanted to push it further and make the lighting more intense? Now, one way to do that is to create a new layer and set that layer to overlay for the blend mode. And again, we're going to come back here. Let's go with maybe the top of the ship here and let's get a Let's sample a yellow color. But again, we're going to push it a little bit brighter. And this time, let's get a softer airbrush. I'm gonna go over to the basics brush category here, and I'm going to get Forster. I'm going to take the opacity down, and I'm just going to paint in some very subtle lighting effects. I'm gonna paint some along the houses here and onto our subject. And let's go ahead and get an orange as well and push that a little bit more saturated. Okay, so when I turn this layer on and off, you'll be able to see the effect that that has. It's just a really subtle lighting bit, but we're pushing the lighting further to be more intense. Now let's go ahead and go further. Let's get a yellow that's almost white. And maybe the size down here so we can get a few of these stars to start to glow. And I'm just being really subtle here. Changing the size of my brush as I go because all of the stars not all the stars will be as intense. You can see our overlay layer here and some of the paint that's on it and the thumbnail and turn it on and off. You can see the change that that's making. If we create a new layer, we use the same forest or brush, turn it down, turn the opacity down. We can soften some of the edges of the stars here. Take the opacity down on both layers just so it's a little more subtle. And now there's some additional glow in the sky that wasn't there before. So it punches up the lighting. I punches up the color to just be a little bit more intense and vibrant. Alright, now, this gives you an idea of some of the detail and lighting that you can add in your own piece. 33. Bloom, Glitch & Halftone: There's a few more effects that I want you to be aware of that come built into Procreate. And these are effects that you may not need to use in every single project, but it's good to know that they're there and what they're capable of doing. Now, we're going to start here by doing our usual three finger swipe down and copy all, and then three finger swipe down again to paste a flattened copy of all of our layers. And I've put it at the top here of the layer stack. Now, these additional effects are found here in the adjustments menu. Now, we've taken a look at the color adjustments. We've taken a look at Gaussian blur. But there's also motion blur and perspective blur. Choosing motion blur, you'll see the motion blur setting here at the top, and there is a drop down, same as before with layer and pencil. Now, to adjust the amount of motion blur, take the pen and swipe it left and right, and you'll see the slider there at the top of the screen. Now, I don't think this particular painting needs any motion blur. So I'm going to undo that. And this time, I'm going to go back and choose perspective blur. I'm going to take this perspective point, and I'm going to move it up over the ship here. Let's see about adding some perspective blur just around the spaceship. So to do this, I'm going to choose pencil, and then it automatically bumps up to 40%, and I'm going to choose a large airbrush. We're going to go back to Forrester. You can see that it's just blurring the stars around the ship here, and I'm going to go ahead and bump it up some more around 60% so that you can see the effect that it's having. And that's just one option that might work with perspective blur on this painting. Now, this effect would take some fine tuning, I think, but this is one way that we might potentially use a blur filter or blur effect in this particular painting. Now going to the next one down, you saw me use the noise filter earlier, and sharpen is exactly what it sounds like. We can swipe left or right here to add some sharpness to the overall painting or the layer that we're on, and then back left to remove some of the sharpness. Okay, so now we're getting down into more of, like, special effects that you probably don't want to overuse. You want to use them sparingly here and there when it actually adds to the painting and doesn't distract too much from it. So first, let's take a look at bloom. Now, I'm going to swipe right here with the pen, and you can see that it's adding these light blooms to the lighter areas in the painting. So if I zoom out, you can see what that's doing. And that really is kind of like a photo type effect. So it probably wouldn't really apply to this particular painting. Of course, you can adjust the transition. You can adjust the size and the burn amount. Okay, going back over now, we'll choose glitch. Now, this is an interesting one because while this is more of a photo or video type effect, it might produce something interesting for our spaceship. So let's go ahead and swipe right here to see what this does. It just adds all this pixelated digital looking effects, but maybe we can change it too. That's artifact. Let's try wave waves or glitchy type effects. Signal and diverge. Okay, now diverge might give us something interesting here. Let's back it down to zero, and let's choose pencil. Now, we've still got our airbrush selected, and I'm going to paint in around the ship, making the brush a little smaller, and just paint some glitchy looking effects around the ship, making it look even stranger. Let's take maybe the blur shift and move the green shift a little and Zoom changes the size of the glitchiness. So we might get something interesting there that makes the spaceship look a little bit more mysterious with all these strange lighting effects going on. So this is one way that we might use glitch in this particular painting. Now, again, I do think this would take some fine tuning and some editing to really blend it in and still keep that painterly look and less of a digital look that this particular piece has. But this is a possibility that we could use in this painting. Now taking a look at halftone. Now, this is another way that we can get a printed look like we did with the noise layer earlier. So if I zoom in here and I swipe right, you can see these bits of halftone coming in, and this is a full color halftone. So you're seeing various color dots building up to make the different colors. So I can swipe left to shrink the size, swipe right to increase the size. And if I switch over to Screen print, we've got a different amount of printed noise. So again, we want to make that probably smaller. And then newspaper will create a black and white version of the halftone. So if I select that, you can see in the layers here that the halftone created is just black and white. So if I create a layer under that and fill it with white, you can see it has more of a newspaper look. Okay, now let's take a look at chromatic aberration. So if I select that, now we're going to get another perspective point here, and I might move it above back up here to the ship, and let's try adding go up to maybe 30%, so you can see what that's doing there. It's like taking color separation and adjusting them so that they're offset. And we can adjust the amount or the fall off. We can adjust the transition. And if we choose displace, we can change how far away they are from each other. There, you can see it a little bit better. So it's like a CMYK plate or an RGB plate that is offset or shifting away from each other. So it creates a really interesting effect, but it is a little bit more of, like, a video or photo effect because it kind of looks like a negative. So I don't know if this one would be something that we would use in this particular project, but it still does create some interesting color shifts. Maybe if we were to use it and keep it very, very subtle, we might be able to create something pretty interesting. Alright, now shifting away from these more special effects. We've got two more. We've got liquefy and clone. Now, if you're used to working in Photoshop, you'll instantly recognize these two tools. Liquefy will give us lots of options to distort and transform a piece. So, for example, if we just use push here, I'm going to move my brush size down, we can push the pixels around and reshape the drawing. For example, if I wanted to make this guy a little bit taller, maybe his head a little bit smaller. His shoulders a little more squared. You can see what's happening here. And this is a really effective way of editing the final details of a sketch or a painting, you can really change the way a final painting looks or you can edit on the fly as you're going. This liquefied tool is very handy if you decide, well, you know, this guy needs to be taller, he needs to be shorter, maybe this house needs to be taller, but I've already painted so much, I can just pull up a little bit and make this house taller without overly distorting the piece. So now if I were to go ahead and commit these changes and turn on and off this layer, you can see the changes that we made here just using the liquefy tool. Okay, now looking over at the Clone tool, this is a really handy tool to use to copy pixels from the source here. If I move the little source circle around, I can then copy the pixels wherever I need them, and this really comes in handy when you are trying to edit or clean up some artwork. Okay, now we have an idea of some of the special effects and tools that we can find and Procreate to further enhance our artwork. 34. Class Project 6 - Final Illustration Pass: Again, it is your turn. So let's head over to the project guide. Let's go down to our next project. This is the final Illustration pass. So you're going to bring together all the elements that you've created and everything you've learned thus far to create your final book cover illustration. We're going to combine all of our painting layers. We're going to come in. We're going to add some details, finishing touches, add some effects if you think they apply, and also some textures to complete the illustration portion of the book cover. Remember that we want to ensure some space for the title and the author text. We're going to export a final illustration as a JPEG or a ping. We're going to upload to the class project section, and don't forget to post a social media and tag, bring your own laptop. And this is an exciting one, so I can't wait to see what you guys share. 35. Selections & Transform Tools: Now let's take a look at some more advanced features within Procreate. The first that I want us to look at are the Transform tool and the selection tool. Now, it's the arrow icon and the ribbon icon found up in the left hand corner, and I consider these to be advanced features because it can be kind of confusing as to which tool does what because there are a little bit of similarities in what they're used for. Taking a look at the transform tool first or the arrow icon, let's create a stroke on a new layer here, and let's tap this tool, and immediately we get a selection box around the stroke. Now, if you look at these blue points all the way around the selection box, any of these can be tapped and held with the pin to transform or reshape the stroke. Now, also notice that freeform is selected by default. Freeform doesn't pay any attention to width or height ratio, so it allow us to resize the width and height independently. Now if we select uniform, the width and height ratio are locked, we can then scale the stroke, keeping the aspect ratio intact. Distort will allow us to edit the shape by tapping each point and moving them individually. Now, warp will give us even more control over distorting the shape by creating some dividing lines that we can then tap and drag to warp the shape. Now, also notice the orange and the green points on the top and bottom of the selection box. The green point will allow us to rotate the shape, and the orange one will allow us to change the orientation of the selection box. Now, we also have some settings here on the bottom, some shortcuts for flip horizontal, flip vertical, rotate 45 degrees, and fit to canvas. The reset button here on the far right can be tapped to reset to the original scale and position. Now, snapping refers to an invisible grid and how the shape orients to it. So, for example, if we turn on magnetics and snapping, then we try to rotate, we can see that the rotation is sticking to a grid versus more of a free form rotation. Now the last option that we have here on the Transform panel is the interpolation option. We have nearest neighbor, bilinear, and bicubic. Now, this refers to how new pixels are calculated when we scale or transform our art. This is not something that I've ever really felt the need to change. The default is bilinear, and I've always kept it there. But if you're working on a different type of art, maybe pixel art or something that is sharper in nature, you might want to change this to nearest neighbor or the setting that works best for the type of art you're creating. Looking at the selection tool, let's go ahead and tap that ribbon icon in the upper left. Freehand is already selected for me as well as AD. Now, if I create a selection with these two settings, let's just say I wanted to select a portion of this stroke. I could do that with a freehand selection. I could then change over to the Transform tool and transform just that portion of my stroke. Now going back over to the selection tool again, using freehand, I could select a portion of my stroke again here, then tap Add and select another portion. Then use the transform tool to scale both my selections at the same time. Now, if we create another freehand selection, but this time with remove selected instead of add, we're basically doing the opposite and choosing what we don't want to include in our selection. So this time, if I were to choose transform, I will then be transforming what was outside my selection. Now, if we choose automatic and we tap and hold on the color that we want to select, and then click and drag, we'll adjust the threshold of our selection. This is really handy when we want to create a selection of a specific color, and maybe we want to click and drag to change a portion of that color. Back over on the selection panel, if we choose rectangle, we can then create a rectangular selection. Now, we can also choose color fill, and when we create a selection, it will automatically fill with the selected color. And we can copy and paste from this panel. We can also adjust the feathering, which is the softness and hardness of the selection's edge. We can also save and load a selection. For example, if we wanted to save these shapes, we could tap Save and load the plus icon, and it saves that selection for us. So now if we were to delete these, now, if we tap the selection tool again, tap Save and load, selection one, and it loads the selection again for us. And our last option here is clear, which will clear the current selection. Now, again, if you are used to working in Photoshop, these selection tools and transform tools, they're going to be familiar to you, but they're just accessed in a different way, and the gestures and controls add a new element to how these features work. 36. Preferences & Gesture Controls: Let's take a look at some more advanced features, specifically when it comes to preferences and customization. Now, fortunately, Procreate has a ton of options when it comes to customizing. So let's go ahead and take a look at that by starting with the Actions menu up here in the upper left. Tapping that, we see all of the items under the Actions menu, and we've already looked at a few of these, but let's move over to video. Now Procreate automatically records a time lapse video of everything that you're doing, and you can export that video at any time by tapping Export Time lapse video, or you can turn the video recording off by flipping this toggle switch here, and it will ask you if you want to delete the existing video. Now heading over to preferences, this is where we're going to find all of those customization options that I mentioned before. Now, we can switch from dark to light interface, which gives the entire Procreate interface a different look. We can switch to right handed interface, which you might want to use if you are left handed. We've got dynamic brush scaling here. Now, this is a setting that allows your brush sizes to maintain a consistent size, no matter whether you are zoomed in or out on the canvas. Now, we've got a project canvas option if we're using multiple screens. We've got the brush cursor on and off, which allows for the brush cursor to be seen while you hover the pin. Under that, we've got advanced cursor settings. Now, this will give you the options to change that whether you want to show while hovering, show while painting or show both, high contrast or active color. Now below that, we have the option to store your brushes in iCloud. And now we get in to some more advanced customization options here with pressure and smoothing and gesture controls. So taking a look at pressure smoothing, now, these settings are global to all of your brushes, meaning that they will override individual pressure and smoothing settings per brush. So if you wanted to set a global stabilization, a global motion filtering, you could do that here. Now, with the pressure curve, you can fine tune how much pressure it takes with your pencil to affect the brush. For example, moving this point over would mean that it would take less pressure from my pen in order to get to the max opacity of that brush. Moving this point below would affect how much of the brush we're seeing with lighter pressure. Now, there is no setting here that is going to be universal. This is something that you would have to adjust to your own liking and to the way that you prefer to draw and paint. Now, one option that I have used is to give a bit of an S curve to this setting while drawing, and it seems to relieve a bit of the pressure from my hand because I don't have to press as hard to get the max opacity of the brush. But again, it is something that you have to play with and experiment with to find the perfect sweet spot for you. Now, looking at gesture controls, we have a ton of options here. All of the categories for each setting are here on the left, and then the settings are on the right. One setting that I do like to use under smudge is to turn on the touch, so a finger will always smudge. So I'm going to tap done on that and show you a quick example. When using traditional charcoal, you might put some marks down on the paper and then smudge those marks with your finger. Now, using this setting is a perfect way to mimic that. So if I were to draw some charcoal marks here and then use my finger to smudge it, notice that I don't have to switch to the smudge tool. It just knows that my finger will automatically smudge those marks because of that gesture control setting. So this is one setting that I do like to use, especially when working with charcoal or pastel, because it just gives me more of that real world feel. Now, looking back at our gesture controls, you might also want to erase with your finger. So this would activate that setting. You'll also see some options for square plus touch or square plus Apple Pencil. Let me show you where that is. The square that it's referring to is right here on the left between the size and opacity sliders. And if I hold that down with one finger and then use the pin, it switches automatically to the eraser, and as soon as I let off, we go right back to the brush. Now, this is just a quick shortcut that would keep you from having to go back and switch tools back and forth. It's just a quick way to switch to the eraser and back. As you go through and you explore all of these gesture controls, another interesting one that I like to use is under clear layer. Now, right now, it's set to scrub, so scrubbing back and forth with three fingers clears the layer. So let's take a look at that. If I take three fingers and I make a Z shape, I think of it like wiping off the canvas. Another interesting setting that you might play with is found under layer select. Right now, I'm going to turn on touch just to give you an idea of what this does. Now, I've got a layer with the number one on it for layer one, and the layer two has the number two on it. So if I'm on layer two with that selected and I use my finger to touch what is on layer one, you'll see the layer one pop up and it changes the selection to layer one. Now, if I do the same thing again with layer two, you'll see that layer two is now selected. Now, this is an interesting and quick way to switch between layers, but it might become confusing depending on how complex your artwork becomes. Now the last few settings under preferences is rapid undue delay. You can change the time for undues selection mask visibility, which is automatically set to 25%, and the size and opacity sidebar, whether or not you want it to be visible. The gesture controls are completely up to you, I suggest that you explore all of these options and you find the settings that work best for your workflow. There is no right or wrong selection here. It really depends on what you prefer and how you like to work. But it is amazing that Procreate gives us all of these customization options so that we can tailor it to our needs. 37. Working with Type: Now let's take a look at adding fonts and working with Type in Procreate. Now, I'm going to add my type for my book cover design, and I'm going to do that as a demonstration for working with Type. But before we get into it, let's take a look at how we would add additional fonts to Procreate. Now, you will need an additional app to do this. You need an app that will manage the fonts on your iPad. I'm using one called any font. The only font I've added to my iPad beyond the defaults is one called Good Brush. Now you can add additional fonts by tapping the plus icon up here at the top. You can import them from ICloud from Dropbox or from some of these font websites. Alright, now, I am back over in the canvas that we created for our book cover design. It is 4.75 by 7.25 ", which is about the size of a pocket or trade paperback size novel. Now, to add Type and Procreate, all we have to do is tap the actions icon in the upper left and then tap Add Text. We get some text here at the top, and it's placed on a type layer. We know it's a type layer because of the letter A there in the thumbnail. Now, if we double tap on the text itself, the keyboard pops up and we can then change the text. I chose a title for my book earlier, and I'm going to use a tide beyond the stars, which sounds perfectly sci fi. Now, obviously, I want to change some of the style and appearance of this type. Now, in order to do that, I'm going to double tap and highlight all of the text. Then I get this new panel that appears up here at the top. I'm going to go ahead and select the font name. And I get this window down here at the bottom that has my font style design and attributes. Now, I want this title to be all caps, so I'm going to select all caps here on the right. And I think let's go with Helvetica New, but I want to use a condensed bold version. Now, the reason I want a condensed bold type here is if we go back to our reference, we can see that several of our titles here have a very condensed and kind of tall type face, and there is really tight line spacing here. So I'm going to adjust the letting I'm going to go ahead and drag my title to the center. And maybe I want some urning to be a little bit tighter, as well. And let's change the color to be something darker, like a dark brown for now. Okay, let's go with this and just add in the background painting just to see what it looks like and how they fit together. Okay? Now, in my layer stack, I already have my noise layer from my artwork, and I have my brushstroke texture from the original artwork, as well. And I did this because I wanted these textures to be above the titles as well. I didn't want to place the titles on top of these textures. So I'm going to go back to my artwork, and I'm going to turn those layers off since they're already over in my other file, I'm going to three finger swipe to copy all, head back over to my bookcver file, three finger swipe and paste. Now, I'm going to drag this down below the type layer. Now, we've created some space in our artwork that would allow for the title, but I can already see that it's probably not enough. So we're going to have to make some adjustments here in order to get things to align properly. Let's assume that we probably need about that much space for the title above the ship. Move it up a little bit, maybe something like that. Now, how will we fill this blank space in the top area up here because we need a little bit more bleed than that. So in order to fill that space, let's go back and grab the clone tool at the bottom of the adjustments menu here. Let's move this up. Let's make sure we have a soft airbrush selected. Bump the opacity all the way up and fill in all of this space. Okay, so now we have some space available to move our title up closer to the top. Now, one thing that is bothering me here is that my type is dark and the background is kind of dark. Most of my reference has a lighter title against a darker background. So let's go ahead and change our type to a lighter color. I'm going to turn these textures off here and I'm going to sample my background color, turn them back on. I'm going to double tap the type on the canvas. Or I can also tap the layer thumbnail for the type layer and then choose edit text. I'm going to double tap again to create a selection. And let's change the color to a lighter color. And I think I already like that a lot better, but the background now is a little bit too light to properly display the type. So let's go ahead and see if we can darken the background so that our type will read a little bit better. So I'm going to create a new layer between the artwork and the type. I'm gonna change this layer's blend mode to overlay, and I want to select a dark reddish brown color. And I need that soft airbrush again. I'm gonna go down to the basics brush category, and I'm going to use forester. I'm going to make sure it's pretty large, maybe take the opacity down. And now I'm just going to darken in that background space behind the type. Maybe make my color a little darker for another pass. So now my type is beginning to stand out from the background a little bit more and become more readable. Now, let's also go ahead and see if we can do some color adjustment on the background painting. I'm going to make a copy of it. I'm going to swipe left and tap duplicate. And then with that new layer selected, I'm going to do a hue saturation adjustment. And make it a little bit more saturated, maybe a little bit darker. Now my type is reading even better. And I think that I will be able to use a darker type below for the author's name down at the bottom. So I'll have light colored type at the top and then dark colored type at the bottom. Alright, now I have resized my painting a little bit more, and I've done some more color adjustment, and I've added some more type to finish out the cover. Now, I added a couple of tag lines here at the top, another incredible science fiction novel, an extraordinary tale of Galactic Adventure. Down here at the bottom, I have added JLHrington and edited by Ivan Howard. JL.Harington is completely made up. I just thought it sounded like a science fiction author name, and I got this edited by Ivan Howard down here because I figured, well, maybe he's an editor, and he edited rare science fiction, and he also edited the stars. I thought that was just kind of a fun addition. Now, all of these layers remain editable type, except for $0.50, the price up at the top here. Now, if you want to turn a text layer into a graphic like this, all you have to do is tap on the layer thumbnail and choose rasterize here, and that will turn the type layer into a shape, which you can then go into and edit with the eraser, which is what I did for this $0.50 mark because it had a line going through the scent mark, and I wanted to remove that. So through this demonstration, I hope that it gives you an idea of what you can do with type, how you can manage type in your cover design, and some different ways that you can play with the color, the placement, and then all of the settings that you usually can find within type controls, like kerning and spacing and so forth. 38. Class Project 7 - Final Book Cover Design: Alright, the time has arrived to put together the final book cover design. We want to bring everything together with type and illustration to complete the final cover. The requirements are to apply title and text to your completed illustration, make any final adjustments to the overall piece. The deliverables are to export your finished design for both web and print. Upload to the class project section and share your brief and inspiration. Remember to post on social media and be sure to tag, bring your own laptop. This has been a really fun project to work on throughout this course, and I'm excited to see your results. 39. Intro to Animation Assist: Other fun feature of Procreate is the ability to create animations using Animation Assist. Now, I've got a stack of layers here, and I want you to think of each of these layer groups as individual frames of animation. So each individual frame contains the elements that can be moved around individually or animated individually. So as I turn on these layer groups, it's like each cell of animation being laid one on top of the other. So I have this ball here with a shadow underneath, and as it gets closer to the ground, the shadow becomes darker and smaller. So let's go ahead and turn on Animation Assist from the Actions menu. Now we have a new panel down here at the bottom, which will act as our animation timeline. So as I come back to the layers panel and I turn on the visibility for each group, you'll see that frame get added to the timeline below. You'll also notice that each of the layers groups opacity gets knocked back some so that we can see the current frame of animation that we're on. So as we move through the animation, you can see the underlying frame and lower opacity. That setting is called onion skin. Now, onion skin refers to a semi transparent layer underneath that shows how the animation is progressing. So we can change the onion skin frames. Right now, it's set to max. We can knock that back so that we only see the last three frames or move it up and see all of them. Now, the onion skin opacity refers to how opaque or transparent they are, and we can also change the color of our onion skin layers. Now, if we go ahead and hit play on this animation, we can see that it's running through our layer groups, and we have our bouncing ball with shadow. Now I'm going to tap pause, and I'm going to go back to settings, and let's change our frame rate to 24 frames per second, and we'll see the animation get a little bit smoother. I'm going to hip pause again. Now, looking at settings, we have a loop. So what's happening is our animation starts here, it ends here, and then jumps back to here. Let's go ahead and change the playback to PingPong, so it will go to the end of the animation and then reverse back to the beginning. So now the animation's a bit smoother because the ball hits the ground and then the animation reverses bringing it back to the top. And if we change that to one shot, the animation only plays once. Now, from our animation timeline, we can also add a frame, which adds an additional frame to our layers panel. We can also select a frame, move it out, and then drop it into a new location within the animation. We can also tap and duplicate the frame. We can set a hold duration for a specific frame. So if we want this specific frame to hold for three additional frames, that's what that would look like. We can also tap a frame and delete it from the animation timeline, which also removes it from the Layers panel as well. Now, if we try to paint on a frame that we have selected, it's going to pop up with our group and ask us which layer we'd like to paint on. Now, if we go back to our Layers panel and we create a new layer, we drag it to the bottom, and I'm going to fill it with a color. Now we have that layer as the first frame in our animation. When we tap that frame, we have an additional option for background. Selecting this will allow that background to persist across all frames in the animation. Now, when we're done with the animation that we've created and we're ready to export it, all we have to do is tap the Actions menu at the top, select share, and then share layers, which is the bottom portion. We want to choose animated gift, animated ping, or a video format like MP4. Now, Animation Assist may seem like a very simple feature. It's very easy to learn, but it is also a very powerful animation tool, and it really opens up some new and fun creative ways to use Procreate. 40. Class Project 8 - Animate Your Book Cover: Okay, now it's time to animate one simple element from your book cover project. You're going to use Procreate's Animation Assist. You'll bring a small part of your cover to life, for example, a blinking eye or flickering light. The requirements are to use Animation Assist to create at least three to five frames. You want to keep it simple, focus on movement that enhances the design, export as a looping gift or MP4. The deliverables are to export your animated file and then upload and share how animation enhanced your artwork. For my project, I cropped the design down to fit within a tower sized banner ad. My thought was maybe there would be a banner ad for the book release that might appear in the sidebar of the publisher's website, and I simply just animated some of the stars and lights around the spaceship. So keep this project simple and use it as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with Procreate's Animation Assist. 41. What's Next?: Alright. If you're watching this, that means you made it to the end. And I just want to say, genuinely, that's a big deal because most people don't finish courses. They start them. They watch a few videos, they get busy, they get distracted, or they doubt themselves. But you didn't worked through this entire course. You went from Where are the buttons to building a full book cover illustration from scratch. That's not small. I want you to think back to your very first lesson. Maybe you weren't sure what DPI meant. Maybe layers felt confusing. Maybe the brush panel felt overwhelming. And now you know how to set up a proper canvas, build non destructively with layers, use masks and blend modes with intention, create and customize your own brushes, control color and mood, combine illustration and typography. We even animated a small element of our design. That's real progress. And here's something important. Don't compare your final project to someone else's. Compare it to your first project. That's the only comparison that really matters. Alright, so what now? Well, here's the honest answer. You keep going. Not in a pressure field. I must become a professional Illustrator tomorrow kind of way, but in a small, consistent, curious way. So here's a few practical next steps. Revisit your random project generator and create a new brief or redesign your book cover in a totally different style. Take a photo you've already drawn and maybe repaint it using different brushes. Limit yourself to three colors and build something from that constraint. Maybe even animate something just simply for fun. Small projects like these build real skill, and repetition builds real confidence. Now, if you loved this format, structured lessons, projects, quizzes, check out other bring your own laptop courses wherever you found this one. There are deeper dives into design, illustration, typography, animation, and all kinds of creative paths. If you're hungry to keep building your illustration skills specifically, I've got more courses you can jump into, as well. But here's the key. Don't wait until you feel ready. You're ready now. And don't forget to share your final project. Upload it to the class project section, post it in the groups, share it on social, not because it needs to be perfect, but because putting your work out into the world changes you. It moves you from learning privately to creating publicly, and that's a big shift. You might feel like it's not professional enough. I still have so much to learn. My style isn't there yet, but that's normal. Every artist you admire has a stack of awkward early work behind them, and you just added yours. And that's exactly what growth feels like. Remember that Procreate is just a tool. You're the artist. The software didn't make you better. You did. And the best thing you can do now is keep drawing, keep experimenting, keep finishing projects, even small ones, especially small ones, because momentum beats motivation every time. Alright, thank you for spending this time with me. I'm proud of you for finishing, and I hope you're proud of yourself. Now go make something amazing, and I'll see you soon.