Procreate for Beginners: Botanical Contour line drawing

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi guys, I'm Priscilla, and welcome to my Skillshare class. In this class I'll be showing you how to create one of my favorite illustration styles, botanical contour line drawing in Procreate. This is an incredibly versatile and minimalist illustration style that can be used in a myriad of ways, like on logos or business cards, art prints, invitations, as well as motifs for fabric design and apparel. In this class, we will be using the app Procreate to create a contour drawing of a monstera leaf. I will take you through ways to embellish your illustration with flat colors and abstract shapes, as well as how to use lighting and texture to enhance your composition. We will finish up with creating a mock-up to really make your work stand out, and you won't believe how simple the process will be. I will also be providing free Procreate brushes, a color palette, a Pinterest board for inspiration, and royalty-free images to use as references so you can take all the guesswork out and focus on mastering the technique. This class will also give you a beginner friendly overview of the app as we create so that you finish this class not only with a beautiful illustration, but also a clear understanding of how to use Procreate and make this incredibly intuitive app work for you. A little bit about me, I am a trained teacher with two degrees in science and arts, masters of teaching, and over a decade of experience teaching in the classroom. I'm also a freelance illustrator, a surface pattern designer, lover of fashion, and owner of Cadwell and Ink, which is a boutique design studio located in Australia that specializes in a range of services from creating original textiles to creating custom illustrations and logos for businesses. I frequently use this style of illustration in my own surface pattern designs, which have been featured on the Spoonflower website and most recently in Her Umbrella magazine. A few years ago, I transitioned from traditional art to digital art, and I have never looked back. I love how Procreate has helped to streamline my design workflow and given me endless options of creative mediums to explore in a digital space. I'm so excited to be able to share my process with you. All you will need for this class is your iPad, the app Procreate, and a stylus. I will be using the Apple Pencil. At the end of this class, I want you to come away having had a whole lot of fun creating a beautiful art piece and have a deeper understanding of how to create digital art using the app. Enough talking, let's get started. 2. Class Project and Resources: [MUSIC] I want to quickly go through your class project and how to access the class resources. Your class project will be to create a one-line contour drawing using any of the skills you have learned in this class. You don't even have to wait until you have completed the whole class. If you put your own spin on a technique that you've learned, I would love to see it in the project section. It's always inspiring for other artists to see your work as well. You can upload it as a stand-alone artwork or as a mock-up using one of the images I've provided in the class project tab just below this video. You can also access the free class resources in the resources tab and they can be downloaded to your files on the iPad and then opened in your Procreate app. All right, let's dive in with an overview of the app and its tools, as well as some new features from a recent update. 3. Creating a Canvas: If this is your first time downloading Procreate, you can find it in the App Store. When you open the App Store, the app has a black background and a multi-colored painted stroke as its icon. You can also see how powerful this app is by the art pieces showcased on the page. It's really intuitive art program, and I absolutely love it. When you open the app, it opens to a gallery view and this is where your Procreate canvases are stored. We will be creating a Procreate canvas by going to the plus icon at the top right-hand side. Once you tap it, it will open up a series of pre-made canvases that come with Procreate and tapping on any of these will open up a canvas according to the dimensions that are shown and it will be added to your gallery. But if you want to create a custom canvas, you can tap on the folder at the top right, which will open up a new window where you can set your canvas size in millimeters, centimeters, inches, or pixels. I'm going to use pixels to set up our canvas. I'm going to make a square canvas with pixels size of 3,000 by 3,000 pixels and 300 DPI, which is the standard resolution for printing. And it will show me that I have also got 70 layers to play with in the canvas. Then I'm going to tap the text at the top untitled canvas and name it something I can distinguish like contour line illustration. This is a super important step otherwise your final image will export as untitled drawing and that's going to be really hard to identify. So when you are done. You can then go to the icon on the right-hand side and hit "Create" and your Canvas will open up. If you haven't already, please go to the class resources section, which is found in only the web version of Skillshare and download the class resources for your files. Dropbox is a great option for this, but you should be able to load your color palette and brush set directly to Procreate by tapping on it, tapping "Export" and then selecting Procreate to open it into. I will go through the tools we'll be using in the next lesson and where to find the brush set and color palette once you have added it to Procreate. Once you've downloaded your files, I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Overview of Procreate tools: In this lesson, I will be giving you an overview of the Procreate interface and tools. There are quite a few hidden menus and tricks that are not immediately obvious that I will cover as well and I hope it will help familiarize you with how to make the tools work for you. If you're already conversant with Procreate and the recent updates, feel free to skip to the next lesson. First things first, whenever you tap on an icon or a tab in Procreate, a blue color will show you that a particular tool has been activated. Keep an eye out for that if at any point something is not working the way you thought it should. You can also use two fingers to pinch the canvas to zoom out and spread two fingers apart on the screen to zoom in. As a starting point, I've already placed a stamp and a few strokes on the canvas in layers to show you how some of these tools work. On the left-hand side of the canvas view, you have some texts that says gallery. Tapping this will take you back to the gallery view, and then tapping on your canvas will bring you back to the canvas view. The next icon is the wrench icon. When you tap it, new headings open in the menu below. I'll go through each briefly. The add menu is where we can insert reference images and files into the canvas. You can also add text here, which is a great new addition to Procreate. Double tapping on the text will bring up a special text menu and tapping on the name of the text will bring up the special text interface where you can select a range of texts that come free with Procreate. You can then adjust them as you feel in terms of the spacing, the alignment, and other properties. You can also import a font from your files on the right-hand side. Once you pick a font, tapping on the keyboard will allow you to type the blue highlighted text in that font on its new layer. We're not really going to use this in this lesson, but feel free to add a quote or text to your final illustration once you are finished. Next in this tab, you can cut or copy a selection or copy canvas which will take an image of the entire canvas to paste as a new layer. The copy and paste function can also be activated by swiping three fingers down on your screen to bring up The copy and paste menu. Tapping on the x will remove this from your screen. The next menu is the canvas tab, where you'll find your canvas drawing guides and adjustments like cropping or resizing your canvas. Tapping on this will open up a new window where you can tap "Settings" and change your canvas size. This is great if you want to change the size for printing after you have begun an illustration. Tapping "Done" will return you to the canvas view. Changes in this particular menu will affect your entire canvas, such as flipping the canvas vertically or horizontally. Your share icon is to share files in a range of formats and animations and we will touch on this in our export lesson. The video function is for your time lapses, which is one of my favorite features in Procreate. Procreate always create a video time-lapse of your entire process as you work so that you can export it when you are finished. This is great for use on social media. But as videos take up a lot of space, if you want to save a bit of storage on your device, you can always turn off the time-lapse for your canvases here. Preferences allows you to set your own functions for tools like a light or dark background for your interface. You can adjust the scrollers to a right or left-hand orientation. You can also adjust the pressure for the Apple Pencil. There's also a new setting here that allows you to project your image to a new screen via airplay or cable if you need a bit more screen real estate as you draw. This is also where your gesture controls in Procreate live, which allow you to really personalize the way that you use your tools. You can come back to this section after I go through the tools and really make them work the way you naturally gesture. Tapping "Done" will take you back to the canvas view. Lastly, there is a help menu for support along the way. The next icon looks like a magic wand and is your adjustments menu. This allows you to change a whole range of existing strokes that you have placed on the canvas from color and texture adjustments that we will be using in this lesson. But there are also a lot of fun functions that we won't be touching on like you may want to have a play with the blur functions for making shadows and the liquify and cloning tools. The ribbon icon is the selection tool and tapping it brings up a new menu at the bottom so that you can make a range of targeted selections of objects on the canvas. We will touch on these a lot. The arrow icon is the transform tool that allows you to move and transform your image on a layer in a range of ways. It also has a menu that appears on the bottom of the page for more transform options, provided you have a stroke on the layer that is activated. If the menu does not pop up, you probably haven't put any strokes down yet, or you're on a blank layer. This menu also has a great feature called snapping, which allows you to align elements in layers to points on your canvas, like the center lines and also in proximity to other elements. If you find this annoying, you can just toggle to disable this feature. On the right-hand side, the first icon is the Brush or Pen tool. This will give you access to the Brush Library. There are at least 100 or so native brushes that come with Procreate for free, which is a great starting point. You can purchase and download brushes as well in Procreate and when you import them, this is the section they will be added to in their own category at the top of the brush sets. Right now you can see the contour brush set that I imported from the class resources at the top. Tapping on any brush set will open up a hidden menu which will allow you to rename a brush set, delete it, share it to save in files or duplicate it. There is also a new category in the brush menu that has recently been added, called recent brushes and this is always at the top and has a star next to it. This will show the last eight brushes you used from any category and really simplifies your workflow if you are using brushes from different brush sets. When a brush category is activated, you will see a blue color and then on the right, the specific brush that you are using will also be highlighted in blue when activated. Tapping on the brush will also open up a brush studio where you can adjust the properties of any brush to make them suit your style, which is what I have done for the studio and monoline brushes we will be using. But that is a whole other class. Tapping "Done" will take you back to the canvas view. If you slide to the left on an individual brush a menu is revealed that allows you to share the brush to your files, duplicate it to make a copy if you want to make adjustments without damaging the original brush and you can also delete a brush in this section. The next tool is the smudge tool which looks like a hand with a finger smudging. It's going to allow you to smudge or blend your strokes using any of the brushes in Procreate. I can tap the smudge tool and then select the noise brush in the brush set to use for smudging. I'll then use it to smudge the stroke on the canvas and you can see the effect that it has. If you want to smudge with the same brush you are using for your strokes, then press on the brush first and then long-press on the smudge icon for a few seconds. That will reset the smudge brush to the same brush as your pen strike. Now when you use it, you will see that it is the same stroke as your pen. The smudge brush is useful for mediums like charcoal and watercolor brushes to achieve blended looks. The eraser tool is next and works the same way but in this case you can erase your strikes on the canvas using any of the brushes in your brush sets. You can also use the long-press function to make the eraser the same brush as your strike brush. The next icon that looks like two pages is the layers icon and it's going to show you the different layers you are working on in Procreate. The plus icon at the top allows you to add a new layer whenever you need to and the layers do not react with each other. I've already got a few elements on the Canvas. By the way, long-pressing on a layer allows you to move the layer up and down. I'm going to use the move tool to move the element around to show you that the two layers do not interact. You can adjust your elements independently if you have them on different layers. You can also turn the visibility of a layer on and off by taking the box on the right which is really useful if you want to focus on strokes without being distracted by what's on other layers. Per tip, long pressing on a tick box will also turn off all the other layers except the one that you are working on which is a new Procreate feature and long-pressing again will turn all the layers back on. Working in layers is a brilliant feature that we'll be using a lot in this class. There are few more hidden features. Tapping on a layer shows a pop-up menu on the left-hand side and you can make targeted adjustments to the layer using this menu. Tapping the layer again will collapse it. Sliding a layer to the left is going to reveal more options to lock, duplicate, or delete a layer. To lock a layer means that no changes can be made to that layer while it's locked and trying to trigger the notification that reminds you that the layer is locked. You can then unlock it by tapping unlock or swiping to the left again on that layer and tapping on lock. Tapping duplicate makes an identical copy of your layer and deleting will delete the contents of that layer. Tapping on the end on the layer will open up a series of blend modes in that layer that will affect how that layer is going to interact with other layers beneath it. Just by scrolling through the options you can see on the Canvas how those blend modes are now affecting how the layers interact. You can also just tap to activate a mode. Swiping with two fingers to the right on any layer activates and deactivates a great function called Alpha Lock which you can see by the checkerboard background on the layer. You can also activate this by tapping on the layer and tapping Alpha lock in the pop-up menu. The tick will show if a feature is activated here. This function lets you only draw in the areas that have existing strikes only. I'll take a moment to show you how that works. Only where you have pixels will the strokes show up. I'll just deactivate that Alpha Lock. The bottom layer in any Procreate layer panel is a background layer. The default is a white background but you can adjust this at any time by tapping on the layer and tapping a color on the inner circle of the color disk. The outer circle selects the color family and the inner circle the specific hue. You can also just tap a color from your recent history or tap of color from the default color palette at the bottom. I'm going to leave this on white for now. The menus at the bottom are the same for the background section and the color menu. I will talk about that when we look at the color menu next. The color menu is the circle at the top right-hand side and when I tap it you will see that nothing has changed except the text at the top does not say background, it now says colors. This works the same way as the color disk from the background except that it now determines the color of your brushstroke. You can use the disk or color palette to select your colors. At the bottom menu you can pick different views for selecting these colors. The classic view gives you a square view where you can choose a color and sliders to adjust the color families. The harmony option allows you to select your color and colors that will harmonize with it. Tapping on the little circles will adjust your stroke to the harmonies and tapping anywhere else outside of those little circles will create a new color harmony. At the top-left is some text that allows you to choose variations of the color harmonies and these are helpful for creating cohesive color palettes. Value allows you to use HSB and RGB sliders full precise colors or you can type in your hexadecimal cards manually which is great for using specific brand colors. The pallets icon opens up your color palettes. Whenever you want to select a new pallet or import a color palette, you will see it in this last menu. Like the brushes, there are palettes that come with Procreate but this is also where any imported pallets will be stored. You can either tap them from files or you can use the plus button at the top of the menu to create a new pallet, polar palette from your camera, and a palette from your files, or add a palette from an image in your photos where Procreate will draw colors from the photo to make you a palette. Whenever you import a palette you can always tap the three dots on the right to set it as your default palette so that when you are in your disk view, that is the palette that will show at the bottom to use in your illustration. I am going to make the contour palette our default palette for this illustration. You can also share, duplicate, or delete palettes here. The second tab at the top is the cards where you can expand your color palette into cards and color descriptions like paint cards at a hardware store. This is great if you are perhaps colorblind or vision impaired and need descriptions of the colors. I will take it back to the disk view. You can now see our palate at the bottom. Another new hidden feature is that if I tap and hold the gray line at the top of the color palette, I can drag it anywhere on my Canvas to use instead of having to go back to my color icon to select colors. I love this feature. You can also tap X to return it back to the menu as well. As we are creating our illustration, you may need to undo a stroke or redo a stroke. On the left of the screen you will see the undo and redo arrows and tapping on them will do just that. Procreate also has a great shortcut for this. A two-finger tap on the screen will undo and a three-finger tap will redo the last strike. Another great function for erasing is that if you want to erase everything on a layer, a three-finger circle on the screen will clear the whole layer for you. The two scrollers above these hours are for stroke size and opacity. The first one adjusts the size of the brush stroke and the second one adjust the transparency of the stroke. Tapping the rounded square in the center also allows you to select a color from your Canvas easily and change your stroke color. You can also just long-press on the screen to select a color. Those are the main things that you need to know. Take some time to have a play with the different tools as it's the best way to get more familiar with them. I will see you in the next lesson to give you an overview of contour drawing and insert our reference images. One last note on colors. If at any point you want to add a color to a pallet, long-press on an empty space and that will add the color. You can hold on a color for a pop-up menu to come up to delete it. See you next lesson. 5. Overview of Contour Drawing and Inserting a Reference Image: [MUSIC] Contour line illustration is a style of illustration where you use an outline to show the form of an object. I really love this minimalist style because it gives a real hand-drawn feel to your illustrations, while at the same time being a beautiful way to communicate a theme or idea. This is why you see the style in logos and minimalist art prints. For this class, we're going to trace an image, but as you get more familiar with this style, you should work towards looking at everyday objects and making simplified contour illustrations of their forms. This will rapidly improve your hand-eye coordination and you're drawing technique. Traditionally, you keep your pen on the Canvas most of the time to create one continuous line. That line can be a single line or an overlapping line, which is a style we'll be using here. In a digital medium though, I find it's fine to take your pen off the canvas as sometimes in Procreate, keeping the line in one position for too long will activate a quick shape tool that changes your line into a shape. In this medium, it's better to do the illustration in a sequence of connected strokes. The objective is not to create a perfect identical copy of the object, but rather an abstract interpretation of that form that really captures the beautiful imperfection of the object. There are two styles of pens that you often see with contour drawings, and I've included a monoline and a studio brush in your brush set that I've modified from the native Procreate brushes. With a monoline, the stroke size is constant and does not change with pressure, whereas with the studio pen, your stroke will be adjusted based on the amount of pressure you put on your stylus. It's really up to your personal style, whether you want a uniform stroke or not, so I've included both. The important thing is that both of these brushes are opaque so that you can create an enclosed shape when we start adding colors. The first step of this process is to insert a reference image. We'll be using a simple monstera leaf that I've included from Unsplash, a royalty-free image by [inaudible], and I'm hoping by now you have saved that to your photos. Now, there's a special way that we're going to add this image. First, tapping on the "Wrench" icon at the top-left of Procreate and then the "Add" icon. You will then see texts that says, insert a photo. Instead of tapping this, if you slide this text to the left, you'll see an option to insert a private photo, which is just that. As you create your contour drawing of this shape, Procreate's time-lapse feature won't show the inserted image and this is great if you want to export a time-lapse of your workflow. I will see you in the next lesson to start on creating our drawing. 6. Creating Contour Botanical Drawings: [MUSIC] Once our image is inserted, you can go to the top left and select the Transform tool or the Move tool to position it centrally on the canvas. We are then going to go to the Layers icon at the top right and open our layers. Then we're going to head down to the private image and tap the N on the right-hand side to reveal the opacity slider. We're going to lower our opacity to approximately 40 percent. Next, we are going to tap the plus icon and create a layer above it. We're then going to tap on the layer and tap the text in the pop-up menu that comes up that says Rename, and then we're going to label this linework. Lastly, head to the brush menu and select your brush. I'm going to grab the monoline brush for my illustration. I'm going to set my brush size to approximately 20 percent before we start. We're going to start by creating our outline of the leaf shape. You do not need to do this all in one line, so take your time and create a series of connected strokes. We're going to roughly trace the outline of the Monstera leaf. Take it slow and try and get the curves of the leaf shape as it moves in and out. Remember that as you draw, you can always use two fingers on the screen to zoom in and out. You can also use this to rotate the image until it's in a position where you can see the direction of your stroke. Rotate as you go and just follow the curves of the leaf. Take your time and continue all around the perimeter of the leaf and also feel free to use the two-finger tap to undo if you need to redo a stroke. That is the beauty of creating digitally. If you feel like there's a bit of overlap where the lines don't connect perfectly, you can just use your eraser tool with the same brush and tidy up any stray edges. Make sure that as you bring your line back to where you started, that you connect the line so that you close the shape fully. You can check how this looks without he background image, by going to the layers panel and unticking that layer, and taking a look at your linework. Once your happy, we'll move on to step 2. We're now going to create a double line for your linework using the first line as the template. So start at the same point and this should follow the first outline, and should be close to and at times overlapping the first line, and following the general shape. The objective is to making it look organic and loosely hand drawn. This is going to add a lot of visual interest to the illustration, and it gives a sense of fluidity and motion to the illustration as well. Now that we are done with the exterior, we're going to do the interior veins of the leaf and the spaces. I'm just going to turn my image layer back on first in the Layers panel before we do this. We're going to start with the center vein and take the line down the vein in a narrow v shape and then back up again, and it doesn't matter if the lines overlap at this point. Again the objective is to make sure that you connect this back to the top where we did the outline of the leaf. We're going to repeat this with the interior veins, and the only thing I would say, is make sure that these veins don't go all the way to the outside of the leaf, because we want them to be able to be filled with color when we do the next section. Next we're going to do the same with the holes in the leaf, so first one line and then do a second double line. Again, make sure that the circles are enclosed. Once you are done, and happy with your image, we can go back to ones layer's panel and untick the background image. Finally, we're going to make a copy of this linework layer by swapping the layer to the left and tapping duplicate. Then we're going to select the bottom original layer, but this time when I swipe to the left I want to lock that layer. It's always good to have a backup of your linework, and I'll be showing you several techniques to enhance your linework in the next few lessons. This makes sure that we can continue to make a copy for each technique, so that by the end of the lesson you'll have a whole series of our prints and images using this linework as a foundation. I'll see you in the next lesson to enhance our first version with flat colors and abstract shapes. 7. Enhancing the Illustration with Flat Colours and Abstract Shapes: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we are going to add some flat color and shapes to our contour line drawings to enhance them. To start off, I'm going to create a layer underneath our unlocked linework layer by going to the layers panel and then pressing the plus at the top. Once it's created, I'm going to long-press to pull the layer underneath the linework layer. Tapping on the layer, I'm going to select rename from the pop-up menu and rename this layer flat color. To create our shapes, I'm going to activate a grid on our Canvas to help position our abstract shapes so that our image is a bit more symmetrical. On the left-hand side, we can tap the wrench icon and then Canvas, and then toggle the drawing guide on. Tapping edit drawing guide, the text underneath opens up a new window, which will allow you to adjust the color of your grid lines and the type of grid at the bottom as well. We will use the 2D grid for our shapes, but you can also adjust the thickness if you would like to see the guidelines more clearly. Clicking done at the top right, and we can head back to our Canvas. Just to note, this grid will not show up in your final piece as we will deactivate it when we are done. Now we're going to create a few shapes on the Canvas, and I'll show you a few different ways to do this. The first will be a window shape on the bottom right-hand side of our leaf, and for this we'll be using the monoline brush in the brush pack for even lines. I will also select a color from our color palette. On the left, I'm going to set my brush size to about 50 percent and we're going to use the grid to draw out a line from one point to another. If you hold your stylus on the screen, this will activate the quick shape function, and you'll see that it's been activated because an option will appear at the top of the screen that says edit shape, and tamping that text will activate blue circles on your shape. This will happen with any shape you create in procreate, not just lines, circles, triangles, rectangles, etc. You can also use the blue circles to adjust your shape until the line or the shape is exactly the way you want it. This is one of the features that I love about procreate. You can see that as I move a blue circle, the line can also be repositioned. I'm going to do this one more time to create an arc for the rest of our shape using a midline of our grid lines to position the top of the arc before I bring the line down and hold to activate the smooth quick shape which should give us a really nice arc. Making sure that the ends are connected, we're going to fill the shape. We do this by heading to our color icon at the top right-hand side and dragging the color into the shape and letting go. The shape should now totally be filled with color. We're going to repeat this process on a new layer with a circle shape. In our layers panel, we're going to tap the plus and create a new layer. This time we're going to tap the layer, rename, and label it circle. Next, we're going to select a new color from our color palette. This time I think I'll go with a pale yellow and on the Canvas, draw a general shape of a circle with our stylus and then connect the ends. Hold your stylus on the Canvas to activate the quick shape tool, and also this time, without lifting up your stylist, place one finger on the screen and your shape should pop into a perfect circle. Now we can fill it. Because our circle is on a new layer, we can now use the move tool with the arrow to move and resize it anywhere in the. Canvas. I'll show you another method this time to create a rectangle. I'll create a new layer and label it with our rename function in the pop-up menu as rectangle. I'm also going to grab a new color from our color palette, this time, a muted pink. With this technique, we're going to use the selection tool to create a filled shape, so if we head to the ribbon selection menu, then at the bottom menu that pops up, we're going to tap the rectangle shape and also activate the color fill. This tool is going to fill the shape we create with the color we have chosen from our color palette. Back onto our Canvas, I'm going to use my grid lines to position our rectangle on the left-hand side, and you will see that the color fill automatically fills our selection. Also, it's now level with our window shape because we used our grid lines to position it. I still feel like the composition needs a little extra to balance it out, so I'm going to add a few abstract lines on the right-hand side using the monoline brush. First we'll create one more layer. This time we are going to label it lines. I'm going to try and keep this roughly the same length and on the guidelines. It doesn't matter if these are not exactly even because I will fix this a bit later with our eraser tool. Now I want to create some gaps in these lines, so I'm going to long press on the eraser tool so that I can erase using the same monoline brush. This will allow me to make uniform breaks in the lines as the quick shape feature works with the eraser the same way that it does with our monoline brush. I'm going to go along the grid lines and just make breaks in each of the lines so that it looks like our lines are dashed as opposed to full lines. I also really like the color, but I want the lines in a muted green, I think similar to the window shape. I'm going to select our layer again and Alpha lock it by choosing Alpha lock on the layer menu, and then I'm going to select the olive green we used earlier and this time tapping on the layer, I'm going to tap fill layer from that same menu. Now because we have the alpha lock activated, only the strokes that we have placed on the Canvas are recolored instead of the whole layer. We can now head back to our wrench icon and turn off the drawing guide. That's all for now. But take a bit of time and have a play with creating some abstract shapes using some of these techniques. I've also linked to Pinterest board in the class resources to give you some inspiration and I'll see you in the next lesson to play with some color adjustments. 8. Adjusting Colours Using the Adjustment Menu: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we are going to have a play with some colors using our adjustments menu and color fill functions. Thankfully, color changes are a really simple process in Procreate, but they can have such a dramatic effect on your composition. We're going to organize our shapes from the last lesson into a group by highlighting each layer and you can do this by swiping to the right. Then at the top, once they're highlighted, tap the word group. Now, tapping the group again will allow you to relabel this group., and I'm going to type in originals. That way we have a backup of all our loose shapes. I'm now going to duplicate this group and label the new group flattened shapes. I want all these shapes in the one layout before we start adjusting colors, so I'm going to tap the group header and then tap flatten in the pop-up menu. This will collapse all my shapes into the one layer. I can now untick the originals, move them to the bottom and save them for later. Now we're going to make sure that our flattened layer is selected and then head over to the "Adjustments" menu on the left. We're going to go through the first four color adjustment options. The first is the hue saturation and brightness menu, and this opens up a new view where you'll see three sliders at the bottom. Now because we've combined the shapes as we make these adjustments, it will affect all the shapes simultaneously. You can always go back to the group shapes if you want to adjust the colors individually as well. I'll begin with the hue slider. You can see that the hues of our shapes are being changed as I move the slider, then with our saturation slider, and then finally the brightness slider. Now there is a new option in our adjustments menu at the top of the screen to adjust either the whole layer or just a section using the Apple pencil. I'm going to tap the menu at the top and select "Pencil". Now this allows you to use any brush in the brush menu and make adjustments. You'll see that the brush icon is also activated now as well. In our brush menu, I'm going to select our noise brush and make a few strokes on the canvas, and then adjust the sliders again. You can see that the hue, the saturation, and the brightness now only affects the new strokes. I'll just undo this using two taps on the canvas and then go to our next color adjustment which is color balance. Now color balance works in a similar way, but targets a mix of colors in a single image and allows you to color correct by increasing or decreasing a specific color value. Like taking the redness out of a photo. You have the option here of adjusting different tones independently. You will see the most marked differences when I tap the brightness icon on the right and then adjust based on mid-tones in the image, as most of our colors will fall in that range. I'll undo and head to the curves adjustments. The curves menu allows you to adjust the brightness and contrast as well as the color balance by moving the lines in the graph displayed. You can also use the pencil mode with this as well but I wanted to show you a really fun way that you can adjust the colors using shapes while in this mode. If I tap the "Selection" menu at the top left-hand side, and then make sure color fill is unticked at the bottom. I'll also select the rectangle tool. Then, when I head back to the "Adjustment" menu, you'll see that the selection is still active. You can just as easily do this with a freehand selection or an ellipse selection as well. Now when I tap "Curves" and alter the graph trend line, you can see that the changes are only applied to that area. This is another really easy way to incorporate some abstract shapes and colors into your work. I'll undo again with the two-finger tap and go to our last color adjustment, which is the gradient map. The gradient map allows you to map different colors to different tones in an image. The colors in the image marry up on one end of the gradient with the shadows and the other end of the gradient with the highlights in the image. When I tap "Gradient Map", immediately you will see pre-made gradient maps at the bottom and a change in our image colors in a consistent gradient. Using your finger or stylus across the screen will allow you to adjust the intensity of this map on your colors. You can see by the blue line and the percentage at the top of the screen how this works. Tapping on any of the pre-made maps will apply the colors in the gradient to your image. You can also use the pencil tool here for a targeted gradient, but a gradient map is really meant for the overall composition to make it more cohesive. Procreate allows you to adjust any of the existing gradients by tapping on a square and accessing a popup color menu, and then selecting colors from any of the views we mentioned in our color menu lesson. Then as you tap the gradient line, you can also add a new square, which will allow you to add a new color along the gradient. You can also create your own map by tapping the "Plus" icon. I'll just select a new map. Then the square view to show you how this works. Tapping the gradient line will bring up a new square and tapping it again will allow you to select your colors. Once you are happy, you can tap Done and you have a new color palette for your abstract shapes. Changing your linework and background can also give a very different feel to your artwork. I'll just duplicate the linework and group these colored abstract layers in one version of the linework and place them at the bottom of the stack. Now I'll create a layer below it by pressing the "Plus" icon and this time I'm going to select a terracotta color from our color palette. This time, I'll tap the layer to access the menu and fill the whole layer. This simple change then adjust the whole dynamic of your illustration. To increase the contrast, I'm going to duplicate the linework and this time I'm going to make the linework white by Alpha locking with a two-finger swipe to the right on the layer until I see that checkerboard. Then I'll grab white from my palette, tap again and fill the layer to change the linework into white. Lastly, I'm going to tap the bottom dark layer, tap the "Move" tool, and then place a few taps on my screen to move it ever so slightly to the left and upwards to create a shadow of the linework. You can also adjust the opacity of the black layer to make it a bit more transparent by tapping on the layer and then reducing the opacity slider. This allows you to reduce the intensity while still maintaining the crispness of the linework. If you would like to blur the shadow, remove the Alpha lock and go up to your "Adjustments" menu and select "Gaussian Blur". Now sliding your stylus on the screen will increase the blurriness. This is a great effect for creating shadows in illustrations in general. But for contour line images, I like the line crisp, so I'll just undo that effect. Overall, a color change can really enhance your image. The last thing we'll go through is adding a fill color to your linework. To show this effect, I'm going to label and turn off our shadow layer by unticking it. Then I'm going to fill our terracotta layer with black to maximize the contrast. Now you can see the linework in white very clearly. We've talked through how to fill a layer with the color drop or fill a shape with the color drop. But this time I'm going to fill a linework using the reference function. This function allows you to use your linework as a template, but then fill it in on another layer. I'm going to go to the linework layer, tap on it to bring up the side menu, and then tap "Reference" at the bottom of the pop-up menu. This is going to select the outline and allow me to fill it in a new layer. Now we can use a light green color in our palette. Select a new layer, and then pull the color fill into the interior of the linework and let go. Now I can remove the reference activation from the side menu. You can see that as I untick the layers, the color has perfectly filled the interior of my contour illustration. Now I can adjust my fill and my linework independently because they're on different layers. That's it for this lesson. Take some time and have a play with the color fills and the color adjustments. Then meet me in the next lesson where we will add texture and lighting effects to our illustration. 9. Adding Light & Texture: In this lesson, we are going to add some texture and lighting effects to our flat color. Now I'm going to select a slightly darker green from our palette and fill our base just so that we can see these effects a bit more clearly. We're going to add the texture in areas in our leaf where we would naturally see highlights and shadows. The first thing we need to do is determine where our light is coming from. On a new layer I'm going to sketch a circle to show you where I imagine my light source would be. So we would expect to see the highlights on the side that is closest to the light and then on the opposite side the shadows would be in the areas of the leaf that would be furthest away. We'll start with the highlights. You always want to use a color that is lighter than your base color. So I'll select a lighter green from our color palette and I'm going to choose our fill layer and make sure that the alpha lock is activated so that the strokes will be restricted to that shape. Then I'll select our noise brush and make sure that I'm on the fill layer and we can now start to create a noise gradient on the side of the leaf that is closest to the light. I'm going to make more strokes with this brush closer to the light source and thin it out as I move towards the center of the leaf to allow it to blend into the base color. Now we're going to do the same thing with the shadow side. Selecting a dark color from our palette dark and then our base color and still using the noise brush. We're going to make more concentrated shadow on the furthest side from the light to create that shadow effect and just reduce that gently towards the center. All of a sudden, you can see more dimension in your leaf just by making these simple changes. I'll turn off the light source layer so that we can get a closer look at our leaf. I'll now group the line work and the texture layer together and name it Leaf Texture 1. I want to add another leaf to the composition so I'll move the Move tool just to minimize this first group as a whole. Now instead of reinventing the wheel I'm going to duplicate the whole group and then rename the bottom layer Leaf Texture 2 so it's not confusing. I'll take a moment here and use the Move tool to tilt the leaves a bit so that you can see one just behind the other. I want the leaf behind to be a bit darker as it would have a shadow from the leaf above and to do this, we're going to do a simple color adjustment on the texture layer. I'm going to open up the group in the layers panel and tap the texture layer of leaf 2 then go to the Adjustments menu to our hue saturation and brightness. The beauty of being able to adjust these sliders is that it adjusts our whole gradient together. Adjusting the hue also slightly adds a bit of visual interest. For a bit of fun, I'm going to add a circular orb in a layer just behind these leaves. So in our layers panel, I'll create a new layer, take a golden yellow from our color palette and use a quick shape to make a perfect circle on the canvas by closing the shape and then placing my finger on the canvas. I'll then get the color drop and pull that golden color to fill the shape. I'll just turn off the other leaf layers as well so that we can see the circle clearly by long pressing on the tick on the right of the circle layer and then I will reactivate the black layer as well. This time, we're going to use a new technique to create a color gradient on our circle. We're going to grab the selection tool and at the bottom menu of the selection, we're going to pick freehand selection tool. We're going to use this to select the area on our circle that would be closest to our light source and then close the selection by tapping the gray circle. At the bottom menu we're now going to tap the text feather and use the slider to increase the feathering on the outside of the selection. This will help create a gradient for us as we make our color adjustments. With our selection still active, if we head to the hue saturation and brightness adjustment, we can modify the sliders to increase the brightness and saturation to mimic that light source. That looks pretty good but we have to do the shadows as well. To do this while our selection is still active long press on the selection tool with your stylist to reactivate it and this time we will tap the text at the bottom that says invert. This is now going to flip our selection to select the shadow side of the circle but still maintain that feathered gradient. Again, heading back to the Adjustments menu, we'll use our saturation and brightness sliders to make this side darker. This is a great way to create your own gradients, highlights, and shadows when you are creating illustrations in Procreate. Just a note here while your adjustments are activated there is a great new hidden function in Procreate that allows you to preview any of your adjustments to see if you prefer them to your originals. While our adjustment is there, if you tap on the screen again with your finger you'll see a menu pop up that allows you to preview a before and after by tapping preview. You can also undo, cancel, apply, or reset the changes using this menu. This gradient looks good but I want to take things up a notch by adding some noise texture using a new technique so that the composition comes together with the leaves. I'm going to reactivate the leaves again before we do this so we can see how much texture we have in them in comparison to the old. Still on our circle layer if we head back to the adjustment menu this time tapping noise adjustment. You can now use your stylus on the screen and swipe from left to right to increase the noise texture in the layer until it is similar to the texture we did manually in the leaf. Now there are a host of options to adjust the level of texture and noise. So have a play with the different options until you're happy with what suits your creative style. Okay, that's it for this lesson. I encourage you to have a play with these techniques and in the next lesson I will show you how to export your illustrations in a PNG so that we can make a mock-up of our artwork. 10. Exporting Files and Final Thoughts: In this lesson, we are going to export your file types. When you're exporting files in Procreate, you need to export your files using the wrench icon, which shows our Procreate settings and then select the Share tab. A range of file formats will be shown that you can export your image and illustrations in. The first is a Procreate file which will export your entire Procreate canvas. This file type will then open in any device that you work on that has the Procreate app. The second option is to save it as a PSD file. This file type is great if you want to use another program like Photoshop or Affinity Designer as most digital design programs and apps will be able to read this format. This file type will also export all the layers as separate layers in a single file. A PDF is also a flattened format, but it's generally not used for images, but can be opened on any operating system or software. The other file types are going to be flattened file types and we'll create a flattened one layer image of the visible artwork on your screen. A JPEG file is a compressed image file, which makes the image slightly smaller for easy storage and minimizes the quality slightly. It's still great for social media purposes and is the most commonly used format for these mediums. If you want to maintain the high quality of an image, you could use the TIFF format. Both of these will save the entire canvas as an image, but the TIFF file format will retain all of the high-quality and details and information from your image. If you have no background activated, both of these types, the TIFF and the JPEG will still insert a white background and save it with a background layer. But if you want to use your designs for motif on a business card or clothing, like a t-shirt or tote bag design, this becomes problematic because you want to be able to move it around without a white square background, and that's where your PNG files are awesome. Because you can save them with a transparent background and place the design on anything from clothing to mockups. Whenever you are saving as a PNG, make sure that the layers that you want are visible in the Layers panel, and make sure that you have all of your background layers deactivated and can see the Procreate grid. Select the file type PNG from your settings menu, and save the image to your device or to your file storage, like Dropbox. If you're using Dropbox, you can also name the file as you save it. If you would like to save it as an image, it will save to the camera roll on your device. Take a moment to pause the video and save the different versions of your artwork that we have covered in this lesson as PNG images by activating just the layers that you want without the background and go through from the original line work through to your abstract shapes and to our last version with the two leaves and the sunset. By now you should have saved a PNG version of your images and we're now going to make a mockup to display your work. A mockup for art and design purposes is a model of your artwork in a real life scenario that you can use to promote or market your artwork for potential clients. That can be showing your artwork as a motif on a t-shirt, on a wall, in a frame, etc. You essentially just superimpose your art into an existing image so a potential client can see what it would look like to scale. I'm going to show you how to use your PNG images to create a mockup in Procreate. I've placed an image from Unsplash into your resources section. Unsplash is a wonderful source for royalty-free images for commercial use. Now I want you to import the mockup image by tapping on the wrench icon and going to the Add tab, and then select Inserting a File. Now if you've saved it to your photos, you can use the Insert a Photo option if it's in your files, use the Insert a File option. If it's not automatically size to your canvas once you insert it, tap the Transform tool and then adjust until it fits on your canvas. Now you are ready to insert your PNG image. I'm going to insert it both as a JPEG and a PNG of the same image so that you can see the difference. With a JPEG, you can see the square will move everywhere with my image, but with the PNG it's just the illustration with no background. I'll just delete the JPEG now. Next, select your PNG image and place it where you would like in the mockup frame, and you are done. If your image or your mockup has a texture to it, you may want to change your layer to a multiply mode, which will then impose the texture on your illustration as well. Now you can export the whole canvas as a JPEG to showcase on your social media or on your website. You can find a whole range of mockup images on Unsplash to use in this way to showcase your artwork, and you can also use the PNG files on print on demand sites to create clothing. But I won't go into that in this class as I have a whole lesson on it in my liner cut class here on Skillshare. I've also linked my Unsplash collection of images with blank spaces to use for mockups in the resource section, so that you can have a play with different styles of mockups with your images. You are done. Thanks so much for doing this class with me. I would love to see your creations in the class project section of this class. It gives other students taking this class inspiration for their own creative directions. I've already placed a few examples of mine for you to look through as well. If you have some time, I would love it if you could leave a review on the class and feel free to add ideas in the class discussion section if there is a class you would like to see or a technique you would like me to expand on in a new class. You can follow me here on Skillshare at Cardwell and Ink Design to be notified of new classes, and if you are on social media, you can tag me at Cardwell and Ink, ink with a k. I'd love to see and reshare your projects. Have a great day people and happy creating.