Procreate for Beginners: Make Your First Illustration

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Sarah Rain and I'm a surface pattern designer and artist living in beautiful Japan. Welcome to Intro to Procreate. Now for years I'd heard people raving on about how great Procreate is, but it was only earlier this year that I finally bit the bullet, bought an iPad and tried it out for myself. I have to say it did not disappoint. I'm absolutely loving working in it. But that's not to say there wasn't a little bit of a learning curve to begin with. And I scoured the Internet. I watched loads of tutorials, and I even read the Procreate handbook to put together this class to answer all of my own beginner questions. In the class, we're going to work through three exercises and then finish off by creating an illustration of our own. In exercise 1, we're going to explore brushes and create a folder of favorites. In exercise 2, we're going to learn how to create precise shapes like straight lines and perfect circles. In exercise 3, we're going to learn how to use the symmetry tool and begin working in layers and with textures. Finally, we're going to create our own illustration based on a season or event. Now when you create this illustration, I'd love for you to have someone in mind so that when you're finished, you can send it to them and that's pretty cool. But don't worry if it doesn't work out because we're just learning and is all part of the process. By the end of this class, you're going to be fully equipped to confidently illustrate and procreate and you're going to have the freedom of a new tool, and that's really exciting. This class is for artists of all levels who are new to Procreate, and all you need to follow along is an iPad and an Apple Pencil. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: So start by opening Procreate. If you haven't downloaded it already, you can get it from the app store. When you open it, you will see all of your artwork and canvases. If you're opening Procreate for the first time, you're going to see the default pieces that come with that. Now, from this welcome screen, we can do a few different things. We can rename our artwork. We can do that by tapping on its title and just typing in the new title, something like flower girl and hit enter and that's going to change. We can delete artwork, of course. To do that, you just swipe left, "Delete". Delete this artwork? Delete. That's going to delete it. We can rearrange our artwork really easily just by dragging and dropping. To do that, you hold down on the piece that you want to move and just drag it to wherever you like and that's going to move it. In Procreate, we can also create what's called a stack, which is like a group or a folder. If we want to keep some pieces together, we can create a stack like this. We just hold one piece of artwork and place it on top of the one that we want to form a stack with and when it goes blue, we release. You can see now that it says stack. We can tap on the title stack there to rename it. I'll just call it Procreate and hit enter. We can add more artwork into our stack by doing the same thing. Just hold it down, move it, and drop it right in and release once it's open. Now if you want to remove some things from your stack, it's pretty much the same. You just hold it down and drag out. Make sure you're in the screen again before you let go and it's going to drop it there. We can do multiple pieces of artwork at the same time. If I go back into my stack, I can show you that if I want both of these out of the stack, I hold one down, hold on down, and with it held down, I can tap on another one. You can see there's the number 2 there, which means it's picked both of those up. If you have lots of pieces in here, you can just tap them all and it will pick them all up and we can drag them out together back to the welcome screen. They've separated again now. Of course, from this screen, we can create a new canvas for us to work in. To do that, we're going up to this plus symbol up here. When I tap this, it says new canvas and we can hit here to create a new one with our own dimensions or it gives you a few pre-existing sizes that we can choose from. If you create your own canvas size, it's also going to show up here as well. For now we're going to click New Canvas up here in this plus icon. That will give you the options for your canvas that you're going to create. Here we can choose whether we want to work in millimeters, centimeters, inches, or pixels. I'm going to leave our pixels and we can input the width and the height. You can see it's wanting to put in 4,000 there. If we do that, that's 4,000 pixels width and 4,000 pixels height, that's a DPI of 300. It's going to give us 37 layers. Now the number of layers available to us changes depending on the size of our canvas. If I was to make this bigger, for example, 8,000 by 8,000, it only gives us six layers to work with. If I was to make this much smaller, let's say 1080 by 1080, it gives us 250 layers to work with. It's just a matter of what you need the canvas for, what you're creating. Basically if you need a big canvas, you just need to be aware that you're going to have fewer layers to work with. There is one other thing that I want to show you in here, and that is the color profile. If we go over here, we can change from RGB to CMYK if we like. I'm just going to put it back to RGB. Of course there are some other settings, but we're not going to go into that for this class. For now, let's just hit "Cancel" and let's create a screen size document, a screen size canvas. 3. Settings: Now, we have our new canvas. I'd like to show you a few of the settings that I use. Now, these might not make much sense to you at the moment but as you use Procreate, you're probably develop some of your own preferences. It's really useful to know where the settings are so that you can change them. First, we want to go up to the spanner up here or a wrench if you're American, we'll go up to the Preferences and to Gesture controls. Now, gesture controls are like shortcuts that you do with your fingers. Once we go into the Gesture control options, let's go down to General. In General, we want to have Disabled Touch actions turned on. This says, "Finger touches will only perform gestures." I'll show you what that means. I'll turn this off for now. If I draw with my pencil, it obviously picks it up and creates the shape that I drew. You can do the same with your finger as well. With that setting disabled, sometimes if you're drawing and then your hand brushes against it, you accidentally get marks that you don't want. We want to turn that off. I'll go backup to the spanner, Preferences, Gesture controls, and we want this Disabled Touch actions on. Now, I'll show you your first gesture, which is undo. To undo, we just tap with two fingers and it'll undo the last action. Let's tap, tap, tap, tap and it will undo. You can see there also that I accidentally moved it a little bit so you can move your document around. It can be easier to draw that way. When I first started using Procreate, I actually kept on moving the iPad around like a bit of paper. Another thing you can do is say you're working like this and you want it back to normal is you can just pinch it, and it's going to go back to normal. Back up to the spanner, Preferences, Gesture controls. Now, the next one we want to change is copy and paste. In copy and paste, I have Three-finger swipe enabled. That means that if I use three fingers to swipe, it's going to show me my Copy and Paste options. Let's try it. Three-finger swipe, there we go. Now, I can do copy. Three-finger swipe again, paste. You can see now there is another one. Can do it again. Three fingers, paste. It's copied it again. This also when you copy and paste it, it brings up the Transform controls. To tap out of that, we just tap here. I'll go over those controls later. Back up to the spanner, Gesture controls, and the next one that we want to change is eyedropper. For this one, I have it set to Tap square. Tapping square will invoke or dismiss eyedropper. I'll show you what that does. The Eyedropper tool is a way to select color. The way I've set this up, all I need to do is tap the square here and it's going to bring this up, which is the Eyedropper tool. Now, if I have some other colors, I can show you. Let's get a bit of orange up there, but muddy orange. If I tap the Eyedropper tool, I can quickly just change color. See, that's the color that we have at the moment on the bottom and the new colors, the color on top, because I'm tapping on the white. If I tap on the red, it's going to turn red. Just having the option to press this little square to get the Eyedropper tool up is really useful. Next, spanner, Gesture controls, and the last one that I want to change is erase. Here I have square plus Apple Pencil enabled. It says, "Apple Pencil while squares held will always erase." Here, we have our brush and our eraser. To get rid of this, I can just go up to the eraser up here and start rubbing it out, it's quite small, make it a bit bigger. Or I can go back to my brush, just tap on my square and that also erases. So I can draw when it's released, and tap and erase. That's very useful. It means that you don't have to go up and change with your pen every single time that you want to rub something out. In the next lesson, I'm going to go over your layers. 4. Layers: In this lesson, I'm going to go over the layers. We just tap up here to access the Layers Panel. You can see we have three layers here at the moment. We can tap here on inserted image or the text. It's going to open up all these options on the left. The top one is rename, so we can tap that to rename it. Let's call it Heart 1. Hit "Enter". We can also merge layers together. Again, if we tap this, it will bring up the options. We can go to merge down. That's going to combine these two. We can do that. Another thing we can do is toggle the visibility on and off here. We can turn it off, turn it on. We can turn them all off, turn them on. If we tap on the "N" here, we can change the opacity of the layer and also the blend modes, which we'll talk little bit about later. Now, if I want to delete a layer, I can just swipe and tap delete and that will get rid of the entire layer. I have another option of clearing the layer. When you clear a layer, it means that the layer itself is here, but the contents is going to disappear. You can do that by tapping and hitting clear. There we go. Now we have a blank screen and we're ready to talk about are our brushes in the next lesson. 5. Brushes, Colour and Eraser: In this lesson, we're going to go over brushes, the eraser, and how to choose colors. Up here we have our brush, our smudge, and our eraser, and under these there's a brush library. The brush library is the same in each one, same for the smudge, and same for the eraser as well. Now, up here we have our color. In colors, there are a few different ways to choose your color. We have this which is called the disk, which you can change the color like this and then change the saturation. We have this one called classic, we have harmony, we have value where if you know your numbers, your percentages, and your RGB values, you can type them in directly, and we also have our pallets. Now, Procreate comes with a few pallets but you can also make your own. To make your own, you just come up here and tap the "Plus", and then create new palette. We can name it if you tap on where it says untitled, you can type in a name, my colors for example, and hit "Enter", and then you can start adding your colors in. Right now we have this yellow selected and so if we tap in here, that's going to bring it in, and if we go back to our disk, we can select another color. Go back to Palettes, tap, and they will bring it in. Now if there is a color that you want to remove from your palette, you can just hold it, and then Delete swatch comes up and if you tap that, it will disappear. Here when you make a new palette, it becomes your default which means that when you have the color picking options open, your default palette is going to show up here. If we go to Palettes and we make ascend your default by clicking "Set Default" and come over here, then that palette is going to be your default palette and appear at the bottom. Now let's look at the brushes. If we go over here, we can see that we have lots and lots of different brushes and they're all organized into folders depending on what they are. We have our sketching, inking, drawing, and within each one, there are a bunch of brushes. Now, there are a lot of brushes and it can be a little bit overwhelming, so I suggest that you just try these out. That's really the only way that you're going to get to know them. You can just scribble away, try each one, go through the list, and try them out. If you tap on them, these settings are going to come up, and so you can customize these brushes as well, but we're not going to go into that in this tutorial. Now the same thing is true for the eraser. When we go up here, we have all the same brushes, and of course they're going to erase in different ways to each other. It's really a matter of finding which ones you like and figuring out what works with your workflow. Now it's worth pointing out, I'm going to hop back to my brushes for a second, hit "Blackburn". There is one of my favorites that this top slider here, this affects the size of the brush. So that's it large and if I bring it down, it becomes much smaller, and the bottom slider here is the opacity. If we bring it down, it becomes much more transparent, and when it's up, it's at full capacity. Another little tip is you can see just now the eraser is set to glomming, but my brush is set to Blackburn. If I hold down the eraser it'll say up here, you can see it, erase with current brush. That means, so it's now become Blackburn. That's a really quick way of changing your eraser to match your brush, and sometimes you want that if you want to attain a certain line quality or a certain texture. That brings us to our first task. 6. Ex.1 : Exploring Brushes: Task one is to go through the brushes that you'd like to try. You don't need to try them all. For example, if you don't think you're going to use any spray paints, you don't need to try them, but go through the ones that you think you might want to use and save three to five to your favorites. I have my favorites folder up here, and I have four brushes in here. Now the reason why this is helpful is because learning a new app or a new program can be overwhelming. So by limiting your choices and finding ones that you like now, you're going to make the actual art creation much easier for yourself. To create your new favorites folder, we're just going to drag down here and then tap the plus with your other hand, and it comes with Untitled Set. We can name that maybe My Favourites, since I already have a Favourites. Enter, now all you need to do is go through the brushes and when you see one you like, let's say Freycinet, is that how you say that? I'll just try, whoops, not that way, dragging it, holding and dragging it until you see the plus sign and release, and that's going to drop it in your favorites folder. Keep going until you have three to five, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Ex.2, Pt.1 : Precision Drawing and Colour Fills: Exercise two. For this exercise, we're going to need to download the worksheets. You can find them in the Projects & Resources section just to the right here. If you click on them, you can download them. They should appear in your downloads folder. I'll just open my Finder. They have appeared here in my Downloads. Now, we need to send them to our iPad. We can do this by shift clicking them both and then right-clicking, and going down to Share, AirDrop. Now my iPhone is showing that my iPad isn't, there is. Done. It should have sent over there now. At the moment, you've probably got a bunch of scribbles on your page. Let's start by getting rid of those. You can go up to the Layers panel and just swipe to the left and hit "Clear," and it'll get rid of that for you. The next thing we're going to do is import worksheet number 1. To do that, we'll go up to the spanner, go across to Add here on the left, and then insert a photo. Once you've gone into that, it has accessed your photos. The worksheets that you sent across earlier using AirDrop should be there. Now we're going to choose this one which is worksheet one. Now the first thing we want to do is, go up to the Layers panel and lower the opacity. To do that, we're going to tap on the N and then just bring the opacity down to maybe about 20 percent or 25 percent so you can just see it. Then we are going to add another layer by tapping the "+." We want to drag this new layer underneath the first layer. As you can see here, we've got a few different lines. I'm sure by now you've had a little go of just drawing freestyle and seeing how the organic lines work. But how do you achieve perfect lines? That was one of my questions when I first started. I was really surprised to see that is really easy. That's what I really love about Procreate, is that you almost get the preciseness and the perfection that you would in Illustrator using the Pen tool, but doing it with your hand. That's why I really love it. First let's start with this line here. I'm going to zoom in. Just so you know, the brush I have selected is the Monoline brush in Calligraphy. I'll show you why in a moment. To do a straight line, we can just draw over it roughly and then don't let go. You see how that snapped into place? I still haven't let go. As long as I don't let go, I can place this wherever I like. Even though I've placed it, you can see here, it says, Edit Shape. So if I tap on "Edit Shape," it shows these points here. We can still edit them even after we've placed the line so that's really useful. I'll bring them back so that they are on top of the line. There we go. As far as I'm aware, once you tap off it, and the points disappear, you can't edit anymore so just be careful. Now, I chose Monoline because if you use another line that has more texture to it, for example, Blotchy, and we do the same thing. Draw a roughly straight line, hold. It retains the qualities of the brushes. Now, that's a really cool characteristic. But it depends on what you're going for. Again, I just wanted to show you the difference there. I'm just going to go back to my Monoline just for demonstration purposes. Now, we're going to do the triangle. To do that, we do the same. We just draw over it roughly. See, it's really wobbly my lines, but hold it at the end, and it's going to create a perfect triangle. Again, we can go up to Edit Shape, and we can move the points around. If we're tracing something, we can match the points exactly and get it to where we like very easily. Just tap off it to set out. We'll move over to the circle. Same with the circle. Now, it's very hard to draw a perfect circle. But luckily, we don't need to worry about that in Procreate. Wobbly circle, hold. You can also adjust the size by dragging in and out before you release, get it roughly where you want to, let go, and go up to Edit Shape. Now, here if I tap circle, it's going to become a perfect circle. Then if I move any of these points, you can see it's changed to ellipse because it's not a perfect circle anymore. If I snap circle, it's going to make it perfect again. Let me zoom out for a second. Let's do the square while we're doing shapes. This is the same. You see, I haven't quite tapped out of it. There we go. Let's draw a square. Very wobbly square. Hold. There we go. Edit shape. It's pretty much spot on, to be honest. Not much editing needed and tap out. Now let's zoom out and come up to the curve. Now for the curves, it's a similar deal. Let me just show you. I'll just draw over my line, hold it, and it will snap. Again, I can move the end to wherever I like. I can make it small, I can make it big, try and match my curve as best as possible. I can edit shape if I'm not quite there and move the central point to get to more to where I like it. Now, it gets a little bit more tricky with an S-curve because it only wants to go in one direction. When you give it two curves it gets a bit confused. I'll show you what I mean. If I just go over the S and hold, its going to think it's a straight line. So I'm just going to tap with two fingers to undo that. For this one we need to tackle in two stages. I'm just going to move my canvas around a little and draw like, tap back to my brush, go round like this. Hold it, try and get as close to the curve as I can and then I'm going to draw a second one. My hand, touched it there. I want to backtrack a little bit so the transition is smooth. You know what I mean? So I'll start up here and go around like this and hold it. Its done a pretty good job. But again, this bit is not quite perfect so maybe I can edit that in Edit Shape. I can move this so that it joins up a little bit better. I move this one, it might make that a bit smoother here. There, that's looking better now. I can tap to set that. Now you've had a go of those. Let's try a slightly more complex shape with this little bird here. How I would do this is break it down into separate lines. Maybe I can start with a triangle here for the beak, hold. Perfect. Then, the curve of the head to about here. See, that's a little bit too curved for my liking. See if I can edit it, bring that line in. Not quite, I'm going to draw again. Depends how much of a perfectionist you are. There we go. That's better this time. Just keep working your way around. It doesn't quite work with the snap sometimes so you need to gauge at what point you want to go freestyle, freehand and when you want to use a snap. See that does not look so bad freehand. So I might just erase this little dodgy edge here and start from here. Maybe I'll go this way this time, to here. That's pretty good. Walk my way around here. Well, my hand slipped there so I'm going to do that again. It's really hot here in Japan just now, so my hands are a bit clammy. That just sometimes means that the iPad doesn't quiet respond to the way I want it to. So I go around like this. All the way around. That'll do, I can fix that little bit later. Maybe I can join it now. Going to edit that, just to get this arc nice here where it is joining. That's better. Now I am going to show you how to fill a shape. The easiest way to do that is to just drag the color from up here in the color panel. So we just tap here on the circle, drag it out and drop it into our shape and that's going to fill it. The only thing to know is that this is a perfectly flat shape. So if you're shape has some texture to it, it's not going to fill it so nicely and I'll show you what I mean. Right now, I have the dry ink selected. If I draw a shape, you can see that there's a lot of texture to this line. If I try and fill it now, do you see this line around it? You can also see the color drop threshold here. I'm still holding on it, I haven't released it. If I slide it to the left, this line becomes more prominent where the textured outline starts. If I slide it to the right, the threshold is higher, so it's going to blend in more to the edge. But still, well, blend in so much so that you can go all the way to fill the whole canvas if you want it to. I'm going to drop it around here. But you can see that it hasn't carried the texture into the fill. So if I just go back, I'll show you that my other way to fill an object is just to color it. Then you can keep the same texture as the outline. That often looks much nicer than just a plain fill. Of course, it depends on what you're doing. If you're happy with really clean lines or if that's exactly what you want, then of course that's very useful. But if you want to retain texture, then that isn't going to work. Should we try filling in our bird? Just drag it over, and maybe we can use the eraser to draw some features. What brush am I on? Let's have a look. Blackburn, that should work. Yeah. Going to make it a little bit smaller and draw in an eye. A bit smaller still maybe. An eye and a wing. Could swap over to the brush and draw some feet, maybe. There you have it. Your first illustration. 8. Ex.2, Pt.2 : Select and Transform: In this lesson, we're going to look at the select and transform tools. You can find the selection tool up here, it's this S shape up there. When we tap on it, we can see that these options come up. This one that's selected now freehand, means that we can draw a selection freehand, just as the name suggests, just like that, and that will have selected the bird. Now, if you have rectangle selected, the selection is going to be in a rectangle shape. You can see that I had add selected, so this second rectangle has added to my first selection. Now if we go over to the Transform Tool, which is this arrow up here, we can transform both of them together at once. I'll just go back to my selection. Oh, if you hold it down actually, it loads the last selection. If you accidentally tap off it you can come back to it very quickly. That's very useful if you've spent ages doing a complicated selection and then you accidentally tap off it, you can get it back just by holding down on the S. Now I have my two selections here. I can also remove a selection. Say I only want to select the bird, I don't want the triangle anymore. I'll just tap remove. Go over this selection that I don't want and it will remove it. Now it's only going to affect the bird. From here, I can copy and paste my selection very easily just by tapping copy and paste. That should have made a copy now. We can see it right there. Now let's look more at the transform functions. If we go over here, I have my birds selected and from here, let me just get rid of the other stuff. That's better. From here, we can scale it like this. We can flip it like that. Flip vertical, flip horizontal. We can rotate it 45 degrees, just like that. I'm going to double tap to go back, to finger tap. We can also rotate using this green ball, just like this. You can see it snapping there, and that's because I have snapping enabled. Here when you tap snapping, it has magnetics and snapping. If I turn magnetics off, its not going to snap to anything. But with that set, it will do it in increments. You can see there as well when you tap it exactly on the dot, you can also input your angle that you want it by. I can say 45 and it's going to do that as well. The other thing that I wanted to show you here, is this is set to uniform, but we can also change it to freeform, which means that is not constrained. Just two-finger tap. We also have distort, which will allow you to distort it, as the name suggests, and warp as well. Those are the main functions of the select and transform tools. 9. Ex.3, Pt.1 : Symmetry and Drawing Practice: In this lesson, we're going to practice what we learned doing worksheet 1. We're going to start in the welcome screen here and import worksheet 2. To do that, we're going to go up to Photo which is in the top right-hand corner, tap that, go across to photos and your worksheet should be in there because we transferred them over earlier. Just tap on worksheet 2 and that will open it up. Again, we want to go up to the layers and start by lowering the opacity. We'll tap on the end here to do that and lower it down to about 20 percent. Now we're going to create a new layer again. I created two by accident there but that's fine because we're actually going to create three, one for each color. Now, I'm just going to bring this layer up to the top, this background layer or sketch I should say. I'm going to name my other layers according to their color. Now, the reason that I'm putting each color on different layer is so that we can change the colors very easily later. I'm just going to choose three colors and name my layers those colors just so I don't get confused. But we can change some later, so don't worry too much about it. We can also add more colors later today if we'd like. I think I want a red from apples, so I'm going to tap here, tap again to open up the menu and touch Rename. I'll just call that one red. I would like a green for my leaves, so I'll name this one green. I would like a brown as well, I think, so I'll name that one brown. Again, don't worry too much about these because we'll probably change them later. Now, before we get started, I want to show you the drawing assist tool which is very useful. To do that, I'm going to go up to the spanner. You see how it says drawing guide, I want to enable that. You can see the enabling that brought up this grid, and we can edit the way the procreate assists us by editing the drawing guide. Right now I have 2D grid selected, and that's why is it a 2D grid pretty much. You can also have isometric perspective. Perspective is useful because it brings up the perspective lines and we have symmetry, which is what we're going to use today. We're going to use symmetry because as you can see the sketch that I drew is very symmetrical, and is very useful having the symmetry tool on because if we draw one side is automatically going to draw it on the other side. Now if I tap into my "Options", you can change the symmetry line from vertical to horizontal and we also have quadrant and radial. We want the symmetry line to be vertical so that it reflects left and right. But if we wanted it to reflect up and down, we would have horizontal selected and we have the other options here as well. Let's put that in vertical. Make sure you have Assisted Drawing turned on. Then we can change the opacity of the symmetry line, we can make it darker or lighter and we can change the thickness, thick or thin. We can also change the color as well. Think I'll make mine blue to match the sketch. Now we can hit "Done". Although we just enabled the Drawing Assist tool, we have to manually enable it on each layer. If I was to begin with the red, I'll just tap on red, tap on it again to open up the menu. Here it says Drawing Assist, so we'll tap on that. Now you can see it says assisted down here. This means that if I start drawing, it's going to draw on the other side as well. I'll just tap with two fingers to get rid of that. I am going to choose a red color for my apples. The brush I'm using for this is dry ink. I like this one because it has a nice line, but also it has a nice texture too it as well. That's not looking very red, is it? Is because my saturation goes down a bit, I was looking at this color. Let's bring it up to about here. That should be fine. Again, we can change the colors later. I'm going to color in this apple, and you can see the other one is coloring in as well. So that saves us a lot of time. Also we can get it really precise if we want to. We can draw with or without Drawing Assist, we can toggle on and off whenever we like. For the central apple, I could keep it on or I could turn it off, it's up to you really. I'm just going to keep it on, I think I don't mind if it's completely symmetrical. But sometimes you don't want things to be completely symmetrical, so it's nice to be able to turn it on and off. Next, I'm going to change to green, go into my green layer and turn Assisted on, Drawing Assist, and then choose a nice green color, maybe something like that. I'm just going to start coloring the leaves because that's the most obvious thing. Things like this, I don't really know what color they are going to be yet, so I'm going to leave that to later and just start with the most obvious things. The rest will probably reveal itself as I progress. I'm just going to fill in the leaves for now. Next I think are these swirls, and here we can practice using the curve tool. It's not really the curve tool, is it? You know the curves that we practiced drawing in the last worksheet, there we go. I just held it until it snaps, and then I can make sure that it's exactly on my guide, and do another one and hold. There we are, move my canvas round. I'm going to start here in the symmetry line and across the line for this one, and there we go, I can release. That line's a bit faint, so maybe I'll go over that again. There we go. Now I'm going to move on to my browns, so I'll go into brown. This already has assisted on, tap over here to choose my color, be something like that, and I'll start drawing in my branches. Again, it's up to you if you have them perfectly straight. I probably won't for this part of the tree, because a tree is organic and it has lumps and bumps. But stylistically, you might want it to be totally straight. I was influenced by Art Deco when I drew this. Art Deco usually is very precise actually. I'm just going to freehand this and see how it goes, went pretty well. I'm using the edge of my pencil and it creates a nice texture. I'm just going to increase the brush size to color in. Make it smaller again for the edges, and then I need to decide what color I'm going to make everything else, now that all the obvious parts are colored. I think I'll do these curves and again, I'm not sure if I want to freehand this or use the curve snap. Let's try. I'm going to curve snap it. Can you tell I'm a perfectionist? I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it hinders me, because it takes me forever to do anything. The same with this one I'm going to snap it here I think, yeah, and then continue the line. That's a bit wonky, but I'm going to leave it because you don't want to watch me doing this all day. These ones I definitely want to snap. Again, crossing the symmetry line. There we go. Snap. Let's do some more red and let's tackle this shape here. Although it's a square line, I'm just going to draw a loop, an angled line I should say, and then it's going to snap it into angles. I'll release it here across the horizontal line that I want it. I'm going to match this point to here, release and then edit shape. Then I can move the points so that they match the sketch. Then I'll tap somewhere else just to set that, and I can tackle these guys, snap, and one more, snap. Now let's do this Art Deco shape up here. I definitely want to snap this line, snap, and then I think I'll take the next part in two stages. I think I'll set one curve here, snap, and then the other one. So round, snap, and round, release, perfect. These are our snap, then a nice semicircle here, snap. Good. A couple of diamonds. Again, we can use the square snap, just draw half of it, and it's going to snap for me. Oh, sometimes it goes crazy if you're not quite precise, so I'm going to do that again and do with my two fingers. See it was this part, it wasn't precise. That's better, color it in. It's a wee bit small but I can live with that, snap, and then there's one more here. Not sure I want this to be red, but it'll do for now. We're getting there, almost done. I'm just going to add some green here, and then we'll move on to the next stage. Green, well I need to do my stalks as well. One, snap, two snap, three snap. You are going to get sick of me saying that. Maybe I want those to be brown. Yeah, I want the stalks to be brown. I'm just going to undo, go into my brown, go back, add my colors to brown too and make my stalks brown. Now it's time for you to experiment a little in this space. You can try out the different brushes and just see what they do. Yeah, you can make this drawing a lot more interesting, I'm sure. You probably want to turn the assisted off or leave it on, it's up to you. I guess you could leave assisted on and create some symmetrical shapes if you'd like. Or you can do more organic shapes and turn assisted off, and then it doesn't need to be symmetrical. Have a little play and I'll meet you for the next lesson, where I'll show you how to change colors and how to add texture and shadows. 10. Ex.3, Pt.2 : Editing Colour and Adding Texture: Now you've had a little play around, let's try adding some texture and changing the colors. First, let's begin by getting rid of our under sketch. We'll go up to the Layers, and let's just disable the visibility on Layer 1, and that makes everything a bit more vivid. Now, let's try changing the colors. I'm on my Red layer here, and I can go across to the Magic Wand up on the left and tap on "Hue, Saturation, Brightness", and we want to select "Layer". Now, these options come up in the bottom. Here and Hue, we can change the color, quite like the pink. We can change the saturation so we can make it black and white or really saturated. We can change the brightness, we can make it black, white, or somewhere in between. I like the pale pink too, actually. I think I'm going to go with quite a rich pink, something like that. Now, we can adjust the greens. I'll go back up to my Layers panel, to the Greens, up to the Magic Wand, Hue, Saturation, Brightness layer. The gold is quite nice, isn't it? It's very autumnal. I might go with that. Slightly more green? Yes, that looks good. Now, for the brown. Same again, Magic Wand, Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Layer, and see what happens. Quite liking the blue but I don't know if that's a little bit too crazy. Let's go with the warm brown, maybe. Make it a bit darker. Plus saturation, perhaps, no warmer is better. Anyway, I'm going to settle that like this, and then we can add some texture. To add texture, one way is to do it directly on the layer, but I don't actually like doing that because then it's difficult to change afterwards. I like to work in a non-destructive way. I'm going to show you this way but it isn't the way that I usually do it. We'll go up to the Layer, I'm going to start with the Red, and I'm going to tap it again to open the menu, and I'm going to tap on "Alpha Lock". I'm showing you this more to show you the Alpha Lock function because it can be useful for other things. Also, if you have a very large file and you don't have many layers to work with, you don't always have the option of using separate layers for your shadows. I'm going to Alpha Lock, I'll zoom into this apple, and I'm going to use my Flicks brush, which I have saved in My Favorites. There are lots of texture brushes that you can use in textures or airbrushing, and you can just go through them and see what works for you. I like flicks. I'm just going to eye drop here on my pink, which makes the circle pink, and then I'm just going to choose a darker color and start drawing my texture. Make it a bit bigger, a bit smaller. What the Alpha Lock does is that, it makes it so you can only draw where there are already pixels. You can tell if it's on or off because it has this checkerboard grid in layers, that means it's on. When that on, it's constrained to where there's already pixels on that layer like this. Just zoom out, and you can see that it makes a big difference. But saying that, I'm going to undo and show you a way that's undestructive. Is that the word? Let's go back until it's gone. There we are. This time, I'm going to go up to my layers. I'm going to turn Alpha Lock off, and I'm going to create a new layer above this one. Tap on it to bring up the menu and select "Clipping Mask". Now, Clipping Mask does pretty much the same thing as Alpha Lock, except you're on a separate layer. If you create the shadows or draw anything on this layer and decide you don't want to anymore later, or you want to change the colors, or you want to do something to it, then you can just turn it off and on. It hasn't effect to the layer below it at all. I'll show you what I mean. It behaves like we did before with the Alpha Lock, and it's going to look exactly the same. Except this time now, if we don't like it, we can just get rid of it or we could come up to Hue, Saturation, and we could change the color of it. Basically, we can change it independently of the color of the apple. That's the way that I prefer to work. Here, we can add highlights as well. Again, we could draw the highlight directly on this. But if you want to keep it editable and you have enough layers, you can actually create another Clipping Mask. If you create another layer on top of this, tap it and enable the Clipping Mask, it's going to clip it to red still. Here, I could select a whiter color and I could add a highlight to my apple, maybe up here, and that makes all the difference. Again, we can just turn it on and off. One last thing I want to show you in this lesson is the background. Right down at the bottom, we have Background color. When you tap that, it brings up the color picker. That's the only thing you can do on this layer, and you can choose what color you want for your background. I think I want to keep this quite warm so I'm just going to have light cream, and that just makes all the difference to warm it up rather than having a white background. There is your first illustrative exercise. Now, feel free to share this on social media. But if you do, please tag me and let people know that the original sketch was done by me. I'll see you in the next class where we're going to start working on your class project and final illustration. 11. Final Illustration: Sketch: Now we're ready to make our own illustration based on a season or event. Now, when you make this, I'd like you to have someone in mind so that when you're finished, you can send it to them. This could be a Christmas card, or a Halloween illustration, or maybe a ice-forming present. You can make it as simple or as complex as you like. The first stage, is to make a good, clear, solid sketch. It's important to work everything out in the sketch stage and that will make life much easier later on. Now this is a procreate class, I'm not going to go into much depth, but I usually begin by creating a mood board of ideas. Then I'll sketch out a few composition ideas and then choose one to take forward and work into a more refined sketch. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to import your sketches into procreate. 12. Final Illustration: Importing the Sketch: We're going to begin by creating a new canvas, and we'll go up to the plus sign here to do that. We want to click on the plus sign again, where it says new canvas. Now I'm working in pixels here, and I want my width to be 4,500 and the height to be 6,300. It's already there, but let's type in again. You might be wondering how I arrived at this number. I actually have a Skillshare class that explains resolution and what resolution you should be working in if you want to learn more about that. But basically this time let me show you. I had a greeting card in mind for my final illustration. Greeting cards are normally five by seven inches in the US and in the UK. Now, in pixels, if we're printing at 300 DPI, we want that to be five times 300, which is 1,500 pixels, by seven times 300, which is 2,100 pixels. That is the pixel dimension that we want. It's always good to work bigger. Simply, by times-ing these numbers by three, we're going to keep the same dimensions, which is roughly like this. It will fit a standard greeting card size, but it's going to be a little bit bigger. If I decide that I wanted it to be a poster, then I have that flexibility. So 1,500 times three equals 4,500, and 2,100 times three equals 6,300, and that's how I arrived at that number. Again, if you want to learn more about resolution, I have a Skillshare class on that as well. Let's create that. There we are. Now first, I'll show you how to import a sketch from another Procreate document. If you drew your sketch in Procreate, we just want to go back to gallery and open up that sketch. I have the Santa sketch there. All I need to do is, I'm going to do a three finger swipe to get my Copy and Paste options up. Copy. Come across to my gallery, open my document, three fingers swipe, paste. There we go. It's easy as that. Then we can resize it or do whatever we like. I knew my sketch was going to be for this, so I made it the same size so it fits perfectly. Now, if you are working on paper, it's equally as easy to import it into your document. Let me just get rid of this for now or at least turn off visibility. For a sketch that you've done on paper, you just go up to the spanner icon here. Go to Add and insert a photo, and this will open up your photos tab. I'll just show you, all your photos on your iPad. I have my worksheets in there, or if we go back, I'll just say cancel, we have the take a photo option. If I hit that, we can just take a photo with our iPad. I got my case on, so just make sure you get the case out of the way of the camera. Put my sketch down. Take a photo. It's flipped the screen upside down, but it says use photo here. I'll just tap that, and it's going to import that right into your canvas. Here you can move it around, change the size. I would probably flip it so that it matches my canvas like that and then flip the whole canvas around. Or if you know that you're working in landscape, you can type in the dimensions when you're making your canvas, so that it's going to be the same way around. Again, you can fill this just by hitting the transform tool. You can make full screen. Can change the angle of it a little. Set that. Unlike before, we can just go up to the layers, tap on the N and lower the opacity as well, so that we can draw over it and it's not very obtrusive. That is how we import our sketches. 13. Final Illustration: Colours and Shapes: I have my sketch in here now and I'll just turn the opacity down, tap on the end, down to about 20 percent, and then I'll create a layer for each color. I'm not sure exactly how many I want yet, but I know I want a navy. I'll name that navy, and I want a pinky red for the Santa suit, I'll call that pink. I want a gold I think, and I want some snow, so I'll make one called white and that will do to start with. I'll just move my sketch layer right to the top. I can rename that sketch, and I'm also going to lock this just by swiping left and hitting Lock, that way nothing will move. I'm going to start by blocking in the main colors and I'm working using the dry ink brush which is one of my favorites because it has a lot of texture. That's my first phase, so I'm just going to draw in all of the obvious lines and shapes in the correct color layer. I'm going to fast forward the parts where I'm not talking so that I don't bore you with hours and hours of coloring, and let's see how we go on. I'm going to start with some pink. Now I'm going to fill in these pink parts, so I'm going to turn on my drawing assist. But as you can see, the options in here at the moment because I haven't set it up in this document. I need to go up to the spanner, go to, I think is Canvas, yeah, Drawing Guide. Edit drawing guide, go across to symmetry. In my options just make sure it's on vertical. I want to change the color of it to blue or brown maybe. That will do, and I'll just hit Done. I'll go back to my pink layer and now you can see it says assisted, and that's just going to speed things up a little bit when I color in these flowers. Now I think I'm going to move on to a different color. I'm going to make my background navy now I think, and I'll do that actually here. I'll click on that and choose a nice dark background maybe like that, Done. I think I need to turn my sketch up a bit, because I can't quite see it now. Oh, this is locked so I'll just need to unlock it for a moment, then I can bring the opacity back up, and I can see it a bit better, quite far off actually. There we go. In fact, I have a max, but that's only because my background is dark. I'll just lock there again and I'll add my snow. I'm going to make this a complete white. 14. Final Illustration: Refine and Add Details: Now I've finished blocking everything in. I'll show you how it looks like without the under sketch. I'll go up to my layers and just turn the visibility off my sketch layer. You can see it's looking very flat, but everything is blocked in, all the main shapes. At this point, it requires little bit of tidying up because you can see here it's looking a bit rugged parts, the lines aren't quite meeting. That will be my next stage and for you as well, to clean everything up. Now once everything is cleaned up, I'm going to adjust my colors. I'll just skip the tidying for now and go on to colors. Here, I think I'm going to make my navy a little bit darker. So I'll go to background-color, and yes, that's better, I wanted something a bit less saturated not quite black, although quite like the black but a deeper navy. That looks good. Let's have a little play around with the pink. I'll do that by tapping on the layer, then going up to the magic wand up here, and going to hue, saturation, brightness and layer. I'm wondering, well this is going to look a bit more red. This way, I quite like that but let's look at the other colors. Blue is quite cool. But you know what? I think I do quite like the pink after all. Maybe it can be a bit lighter. Saturation is probably okay, I don't want it to be too crazy. Yeah, I didn't really need too much tweaking, actually. I've just spotted now that I've missed this little bow and beard, but that's okay, I'll fill that in later. You can also see that I added this bright pink as well, that wasn't there before. Now let's see, if I want to change the gold slightly. I think it looks fine, but often if you play with it, you can make it look even better. I think it needs that pop. I'm just going to make it a little brighter and that makes it stand out against the dark. Obviously, I don't want it like that. Makes it stand out a bit more. I think the saturation is fine, yeah. Put that back to where it was. Just for fun, let's see what it looks like in different colors. You know what? I've quite liked the lavender, but I'm going to go back to my gold. So you can tweak your colors like that and tidy all of the parts up. Make sure more gold. I want to be on the correct brush, dry ink, and the correct color would help. Now I can't sample it because I changed the color slightly, so I'll get my color picker by tapping here and sample the color from the new colors like that, and we can just clean things up a little bit. Again, this is the part that is slightly tedious. I'm not going to make you watch me do all of this. The next stage after you've cleaned everything up is to add the details if you have any. I'll turn my sketch back on and show you more details I have. I have the pattern on my Santa and also his facial features, and the little eyes on my bird. That's about it. I will quickly draw those in and then after that we'll do some texturing. 15. Final Illustration: Texture: Now I've touched it all up and done all the details. It's time for the final part, which is texturing and shading. We went over this in the last exercise, but I didn't show you how to add an overall texture to the background. That's what I'm going to do first. I'll open up my layers panel and create a new layer. I want this to be above the white and background colors, so that it's in the perfect place. But if it's not, you can move it so that is just above the background. Here, I'm going to select a texture brush. Now, there are quite a few in here, and again, it's just a matter of playing with them. But the one that I'm going to go for is in organic and is called clay. Oops. Now, it's already set to a big size and that's what I want. I want the color to be the same as my background color. I'm just going to tap the square to get my color picker up. That's me selected the color now. I'll just make sure I'm on the correct layer, and I'm going to start coloring in. Now, you can't really see it at the moment, so I will just turn off the background color so that you can see what I'm doing. I'm just drawing in the texture. We can see how this looks. We might want it to be a bit stronger or a little bit less. That looks quite good. Let's see how that looks with the layers turned on. I'll turn my background color back on. At the moment, it doesn't look like anything has changed because it's the same color. Now, we want to change the blend mode so that it's going to show through. We'll click on the end here. The blend mode is set to normal at the moment. We have a whole bunch of different blend modes here. If you've used Photoshop, you'll know what these are. But basically, is the way that the layers interact with each other. On normal, it's just plain color on top of color, they don't interact. But if I click "Darken", it's going to darken. Multiply, it'll multiply. Some of them change a lot and some of them don't change much at all, but you can just go through them and see how it looks. Quite like screen, screen looks quite nice. Color Dodge as well is quite nice. Overlay too, much more subtle. I think I like either overlay or screen. Let's see how screen looks with the opacity turned down. That looks quite nice. Let's see what overlay looks like. I think I'm going to go with the screen, with it turned quite far down so there's just a subtle texture. See here. That now looks like it's on a nice textured paper. This at the moment is affecting my white layer as well. If I don't want all these birds and everything else to have the texture on it, I can put those on a different layer. With my white layer selected, I can come up here to my selection tool and just select everything that's white. Three fingers to get into my copy and paste, and I'll just tap cut and paste. That's going to put them all on another layer. I can just move that above the texture layer and now it won't affect it as well. That's how you do the background. Now, for each individual layer, is just as we did in the worksheet. I will create a clipping mask over my pink layer. With pink selected, I'm going to hit the plus sign and create a new layer, tap on it and select clipping mask. This means that whatever I draw in here is constrained to the pixels below it. I want to have shading and texture on my pink and on my gold, so I'll do another one for my gold as well. Plus, tap, clipping mask. I think that's all I need. Going back to my pink shadows, you can rename them if you want as well. I'll go up to my brushes. This time I'm going to go with flicks, which is one of my favorites. Because I'm working with pink, I want to see what it will look like if I just sample this bright pink and use that. I want my opacity a little bit higher than that, but no at maximum. Make sure I'm on the correct layer. I'll just start drawing in my shading and my shadows. That's a bit strong. Turn down my opacity a bit more, turn up my brush size. That's better. Adding shadow really just makes everything pop, as you can see already. It just brings so much more life to a piece. I will crack on with that. I'll meet you once I'm finished, and that'll be it. We're going to export after that, so I'll see you there in the next video. 16. Export: I finished off my illustration and now I'm ready to export. To do that, we go up to the spanner in the top-left, and go across to share. We have a few different options here for what kind of file we'd like. We can export it as a Procreate file, or if you'd like to edit it further in Photoshop, you can choose PSD and it'll retain all of your layers, or if you're finished with it, you can save it as a JPEG. I'm just going to select JPEG for now. We'll say exporting, and then you can choose where you want to send it to. I'm going to AirDrop it to my computer. There we go. It's as easy as that. While we're here, I'll show you another little thing you can do. Go up to the spanner, go up to video, and we can watch a time-lapse of our drawing. If we go up to time lapse replay, we can see our entire process, which is pretty cool. Mine took ages, so it's really long. I'll just hit done there and you can export it as well. If you go up to the spanner, you can see that there's an export time-lapse video option, so you can hit that, and choose full length or 30 seconds. Mine was very long, so I'll just hit 30 seconds and it takes a few seconds there to export it. Then you can do the same as before, and choose where you want to send it to. I'll just send it to my laptop, and it's as easy as that. Those time-lapse videos are really good for sharing on social media. In the next video, I'll show you how to connect something like One or Dropbox to backup your work. 17. Backup: In this video, I'm going to show you how to backup your work using a service like OneDrive or Dropbox. Now first, you need to download whatever you use onto your iPad. So in my case, I use OneDrive. So I've downloaded the OneDrive app. But we're not actually going to use the OneDrive app, but we need it. So first, we want to connect the OneDrive app to our files. So we'll click on this file icon on our iPad, go up to locations, and with that tapped, we want to select Edit, and then you'll see that OneDrive appears here, and we just want to enable it, and that means that the file's app can now access my OneDrive. So I'll hit done, and when I go over to OneDrive and I go into files, we'll see that all of my OneDrive is now synced. So I'm going to come out of this just now and open Procreate, and here, all we need to do is open up our files again, and we can drag out and hold it until it snaps in here and release, and that's just going to allow us to see both apps open at the same time. Now, I have a Procreate folder in here, where is it? here it is. So I'll just open that, and literally, all you need to do is drag your artwork in and it saves it there like magic. Again, you can do multiples at the same time. So I could select this one, for example. Select please, and then tap some others, and then drag them all over at the same time. So that's a really quick and easy way to backup your work so that if anything happens to your iPad, you know that is always safe on the Cloud. 18. Thank You: Thank you so much for watching my class and I'm really, really looking forward to seeing your illustrations. Please share them with us in the class project section for us all to see. If you post them on Instagram, please tag me at styrene design. As a final note, I just want to add the illustrations Take time and learning a new skill takes a lot of time and dedication. But as long as you keep going, you'll get there and you'll be approved before you know it. Thank you again.