Procreate Highly Textural Mixed Media Cactus Art Including 25 Brushes and Mixed Media Assets

1. Intro to Procreate Highly Textural Mixed Media Cactus Art: Hi guys and welcome. My name is Dolores now sprint and I'm coming to you from sunny, Manitoba, Canada a little bit late in the evening here, so my lighting isn't great. But I thought I'd go ahead and finish this class before it got really dark. It's a very ambitious project. It's taken me all day. It's a mixed media, highly textural cacti composition. While I'll try to say that real fast, we're gonna be doing all kinds of different things with my different cactus plants that I've drawn. I've got three which is very ambitious. You could definitely just stick with one to start out with. I have added tons of texture and a lot of collage, all kinds of paint and come up with a very interesting finish. I'm hoping that you'll enjoy it because there are a lot of steps involved, but I think you'll find it really fun to do. Overall, I think it's kind of surprising the way it ends up at the end. This is one of the things about this type of art. If you've ever done this in real life and you've done all the cutting and pasting and gluing and painting. You know that this can be a very involved project one way or the other. In Procreate. It's kind of the same little bit less mass, but in the end, you end up with a really interesting finished piece. I am really loving it and I think you're going to really enjoy it too. Just make sure you set aside a little bit of time because you're gonna get really into it and it's going to take longer than it looks. Now if you haven't done so already, I'm going to invite you to hit that follow button up there. That way you'll be informed of any of my classes and any of the posts that I put out here. I'd also really encourage you to get out to my website at the loris art dot ca, add your name to my mailing list there as well because that way you're informed of any of the new classes I put out in my school of art. I also send out announcements anytime I post any new artists assets, and sometimes they're free. So you want to be on that list. I guess without further ado, let's get into the project. I'll see you in lesson one. 2. Lesson 1 Creating the lnitial Sketched Composition: Hi guys, welcome to lesson one. Lesson one here is the sketching stage. I'm gonna be showing you how to draw three different types of cacti. You can definitely choose to do just one of them if you'd like to for your first attempt here, they can be very time-consuming if you have all three. So that's something to keep in mind. Let's get to it. All right, to do this project, I decided I would do a complete sketch before starting. Now, cactus are very easy to draw. I can walk you through how I did each of these. I've got them on separate layers so that I could move them around, which I did already and resize them a little bit. I will make another layer here, just so that I can demonstrate my process. I'm going to choose just a black pencil. The pencil that I use is just a six B pencil, which is part of this sketching set here in Procreate. First of all, I want to start with the pot. The pot itself is actually pretty easy to draw. I've seen lots of tutorials on this, but basically just need to have your oval. So I'm just going to sketch a quick if I'm in the worst angle. So I'm gonna have to change this here to draw my oval. And at the end I'm just going to hold so that I can make sure that it's a perfect oval. You can also go in and edit the shape if you need to. You can make the overall level bit more shallow if you'd like. Kind of depends on the perspective that you want, but I don't want the pot to be super open or shallow over like this will work just fine. Once I have that first oval, I'll duplicate it, move it down a little bit. The distance that I want the rim to be. And then I'll just sketch in the sides. You'd see that that's gonna give us that nice kind of a rim. I think I've just gone back a step here because I'm gonna make it ever so slightly smaller. You can make sure that you've got them lined up to each other by putting your snapping on. And you can see that central line, we'll come on to show you that you've got it positioned correctly and you can see this one is now a little bit smaller. So then I can get that kind of an angle there. Now because it's on a separate layer, it makes it easy for us to erase. What we really want is just the bottom line here. So I'm erasing all of that out. So I've got the rim to my plot. If you wanted to have that RAM also on the inside, you could definitely leave it and just erase this part. I mean, it's almost at the right height there where it could be the soil. It's up to you. I personally like it better when it's like this. I'll draw my soil in there separately if I need it after, then I will take one of these ovals. Again. Probably that same one will duplicate it. We can pull it down, be the bottom of the container as well. The only thing is the perspective we'll change here. So what you want to do is get your work and you actually want that part of the circle to be deeper. That's just the way it is with a perspective. And you want to make it a little bit smaller. So I'm gonna take this snapping off for a second. I'm gonna make it a bit smaller, but the snapping back on so that I can make sure it's lined up and I'm gonna make a shallow pot. In this case. Really those sides were almost perfect the way they were. So that makes a pretty good one. I would probably round the corner out a little bit on that and just erase that off. This one might be a little bit too much, just want to round it off a little bit. That's your basic flowerpot, kind of a bowl-shaped one in this case. Now, like I said, you could draw in your soil, you could just leave it for now because the plant that I'm going to draw here is going to really probably fill up the space. You can grab all of these, put them into a group, and flatten them so your pot is easy to move around and it's all on one layer. Now, let's just move this over a little bit. So we've got some room to play here. Now, depending on the kind of cactus that you want, this one here is a very common one, very easy to make. These kind of rounded shapes are very forgiving and then you can add all of these little, I don't know what you call them offshoots, flowers and I don't know. That's one style. This one. It's also very common similar shapes, but in this case they come off like branches. So this is kind of, I think it's called a tree cactus. This first one was a prickly pear, and then this one here is basically like an aloe Vera. I have a crazy elevate her plant and it grows all over the place. So depending on which one you choose, you may want to do all three. I will demonstrate the prickly pear. So let's go back to our bowl here. And what I'm gonna do is just continue with my sketching. I'm using my six B pencil and I'm drawing these sort of paddle sheets. The kind of like a beaver tail. That's the shape that you want. You can't really do an oval. It just doesn't look right. It's a little bit too perfect. So you have to have it wider. And then it comes down in a strange way. And you can put two or three large forums in there. It's nice to vary the sizes and no thickness of them. You can have one kind of tucked in behind. She definitely the same thing with this area here, folks, as if it was in tucked in behind here. Once you have that general form, the way you like it, you can erase any sort of extra lines that you've got in there. And I should have done that on a separate layer, silly me. I'm going to backtrack here, add a new layer. Once you've got your basic shapes in there, you can start adding your little offshoots. And they're basically the same shape. They're wider at the top. They kinda come down to a point as they are added to the main stem. And they can vary in sizes. I've seen really small ones and then really big ones on the same main stalk. That's the basic idea for that prickly pear shaped. So you can go through and add as many of those little offshoots as you want. Now, as far as the tree cactus, that one is more, I'm going to add a new layer for that. That one is more tall shapes. So there are often paddle shaped. This is just a rough sketch, so don't sweat that too much because we're actually going to be redrawing these when we paint them. So you've got your basic stocks and then you're going to make offshoots. And I found that it was easier to do this sort of thing and then go in and join them with short stalks. Now, these were a little bit too far away. You want them fairly close to your main stem. And again, you can vary the sizes of these. Sometimes you can even see them on these tree cactus. This is literally growing right out of the tip of them. You can make a little branch first if that's easier for you. Those branches do have a bit of a thickness, so make sure you show that we definitely have some smaller ones if you wanted to. So you've got good variety going on there as far as the composition. So that's a very quick and easy sketch of that type. And then there's the aloe Vera and that one is just like a crazy lots of stems going in all different directions. You can have some that I do a new layer, yes. You can have some tucking in behind. If it's gets a little confusing for you, you can definitely work in layers. So you could have this base layer done, add a new layer. And you could do some of the overlapping, this way. One here. And you could easily go in here and reduce the opacity so you know which one you're working with and you can go in. And if these are supposed to be in the front, then you go on that original layer now and you can erase all of these overlapping lines more easily. See how that worked. Bring it back up to full, full opacity and just go in and pretty much fill up your planter and your composition of that particular plant by adding a ton of extra little stalks here. And that's basically it for how to draw these. When we get to the point where we're going to be putting soil and whatnot in there. Then we're gonna want to be making some changes in here. And for each of these plants, I would duplicate the plot so that you could group all of the aloe Vera together. So I would grab this, this and this and group it. So that would be one, then this one and this ungroup it. If that was on, turn off this one. Now you see that you've got that altogether with its own pot. And then this one and this one group them. And now you see you've got that complete pots. So then at this point, you could grab each of the groups and make a pleasing arrangement. So what I would suggest to is that you might want to make different pots so that you don't have all of the same pots. I'm going to give you a few of these little parts sketched out so that you can just use it as a brush. And I've actually created a few of them here in my, no, I don't have the plots in there yet, but I've got prickles. I will fill out this set and you'll have a whole bunch of different brushes that you can choose from to help you get through. It's a bit okay. And quickly, you know, at this point it would be just to figure out a really nice arrangement and having them separate like this. It's a lot easier because you can vary the sizes and so on. All right, so that's basically the sketching stage. In the next lesson, what we'll do is talk about the arrangement a little bit more and then how to get ready for the coloring, which will start in the next lesson as well. 3. Lesson 2 Blocking in the Main Colors of the Cacti: Hi guys, welcome to lesson two. Lesson two here we're gonna block in all of the color for the plants and the plots. Let's get to it. I just duplicated my file so that I could actually delete these. I want to keep them so I haven't been my other file so that I can always go back to that other idea or layout. And I probably will. But you can see here I've got three different flower pots basically drawn with the same technique. You know, some of it's just very roughly done, but it'll be fine for what I need. And at this point what I wanted to do is start blocking in some of the color. So in order to do that, I'm going to be painting with a bunch of different brushes. Some of them I will supply to you, but there's a lot of them that are built right into Procreate here. And we can go down to the inking brushes. And I'm going to use this one called Inca. No, I think I'm going to use dry ink. Actually, I liked this dry ink. I've used it quite a bit. It's very nice textural brush, so you can see it here. When I use it, it has a ton of built-in texture already. I'm going to use that to block in some of my colors here. Now, I'm also going to be working in layers. And so I'm going to want to keep each of these plants in their own folder so that it's less confusing. So I'm going to add a layer for each of these at above each of them. And then I'm going to take and group each of them. And I know you rarely see me do this, but I'm going to rename them. I'm actually going to deal with these guys. So this one is going to be the tree cactus. This is the aloe. I'm just going to scribble that out and print the word allo in here. And then this one here is the prickly pear, rename purple and name it. Okay, there we go. So now we can start blocking in and I think I'll just hide whichever ones I am not working on for now. So I'm gonna start with this prickly pear. What I want to do is work on that blank layer there. And I'm going to choose in our scheme here, wants something with bringing in it, but I want to have a lot of other colors to play with as well. So where are we going to use here? You know, you have too many pallets when you went into trouble. I'm going to choose this one. Let me set it as my default. Go back to my desk, clear this and these will be the colors that we'll use for this illustration. I can give you this palette. And what I should do is immediately share it and stick it in the folder for this class in media. And that way I will remember to attach it to this class. So I'm gonna go with the green that's in here. I worked with the palette, but then I'll often just alter the colors a little bit as I'm working, but I still try to stick with the palate in general. So that's just that's just the way I work. Now what I'm going to also do here is I'm going to separate some of these different levels out so that it'll be easier for me to do the texturizing and shading or colorizing or whatever it is I want to do I think I'll do this one all in one form and I'll do this one. And then this grouping, your three, I think I'll do on a layer itself. So let's start with the back most one. So for that I'm going to go with this color and I'm basically just inking it in. I don't want to go too small, But I don't want to go too big either. I want to be able to keep some nice definition there. So I'm gonna basically draw the shape as it cuts around. And you can choose to do that differently too, if you would prefer to draw the whole shape and just let the leering speak for itself. You could do that too. So in that case, what you would do is draw this all the way down, draw this entire shape, and draw that. And you'll see that it'll now be hidden by this one when we create it in the foreground. So I'm just kind of going through and I'm not being too critical with my drawing. I'm trying to keep this a very loose and casual style. I'm going to have to close this shape here in order to be able to fill it. I am going to use this for filling. You can see that there's a bit of a halo that is produced at the edges. So you want to pull that threshold up fairly high. So I'm going, I'm well over 50% here. Can you see that it's still leaving a bit of a line there. So what I would do is go in and try to just get rid of some of it so that it doesn't look like it's too much of an outline and you know what, we're adding tons of texture to this after. So I wouldn't worry about it too terribly much, but I'm gonna go in now. And the threshold that I've picked learned about 90% now, I can use it and it should do a pretty good job of all of these student. A tiny little bit of that touch-up. So now I can hide that one. I'm gonna go to a slightly lighter color to do these new layer. And as I'm going through here, I can take the time to make small changes. This maybe something I noticed now that I'd like to add or take away. You have a right. You are the artists so you can do whatever you would like. So I'm just going to quickly fill that one in mind. Some of these, it might be just as fast or just do this to fill it in. And like I said, I'm not worrying too much about this, these little halos that are formed at the edge because like I said, I might be changing from a bit. Okay, so now we've got this one left. So let's go a tiny bit lighter again. That we have some difference that when we already did, right? And so you can see I've added a few extra little bits here and there. And let's fill this one. I don't know. Sometimes it's faster just to color it in his neck. So let's show all of the layers now to see how they look together. And you can see I've made one mistake here where I've got this one on the same layer as that. They don't touch those. So I think I'm just going to leave it for now. I think we'll be okay and we can go through and do things like fix up the shape at the bottom, anything like that that you need doing. You can go ahead and do, and you can see that it has turned out just fine, nice and textural, lots of depth. So I'm gonna go through and quickly do the other two plants and I'll just fast forward that for you so that you don't have to sit and watch us. I do the whole thing. I think for this one I'm going to switch to these sort of teal colors. So I'm going to, this one is going to take a little bit more figuring because of the layering. So we've got to figure out how we want to do this. And I think I will make several layers. So I'll start by doing some of these bigger ones in the background. And you can go all the way in. Threshold, had to bring it back a little bit so that it would work. So you saw what I did there. I just dragged and then I hold to get it to be not choosing to much of the area to do. That's what I would consider my first layer. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that so I can see my lines. For my next layer, I'll add a layer and then switch to a slightly different color and then do a bunch more. And basically what I'm doing is I'm just trying to avoid two that are together. I'll not do this one necessarily because it's touching this one, but I could do this one. So I'm going to now grab this one. And maybe this one in here. Here I've grabbed it, hold it in, and then I'm pulling to reduce that threshold so that it'll color in there. Okay. Maybe I'll do a couple of these little ones. What would you say? That one? Maybe I'll go darker for some of these new layer. Don't forget the worst for that. Now in this case, I am stopping at one of the other color areas too, because I'm not sure that I want these necessarily all to be in front, like this one here. It might just be easier for me to do this. I have a bit of separation. Actually. I'm going to switch that eraser to be the dry ink as well. So it erases with the same texture. Then I can use it to do things like this. Pointing, pointing the tips of my leaves are my stocks, whatever you want to call them. I don't know what to call them when they are cactuses. So these would be tucked in behind so I'm stopping them. But you could also just use the power of the layering to help you get some of those hidden. So I'm doing that one. Let me do this one, that one I'm gonna do separately. So I'm gonna do a couple of these on it, even another layer. But at this point I just want to show you that if I was to bring these up to full opacity, then I could do things like take that layer that I just did and slide it underneath so that is tucked behind some of those. So that means I could have had some of these actually drawn all the way down and it would have been fine. So I'm going to go slightly different in color again, and I am going to draw it, this one in the back because it needs to be behind all of these and I can still follow my sketch easily. I had some of that line on the other layers, so optical back and take that out, which you see how nicely that works to help put some of those in an order, right? So it looks like it's in behind and you can see how really loosely I'm drawing these. I'm not being overly careful to perfect all of the shapes. And I think that that is really important for this type of art that I'm creating. A really needed to be quite casual and quite funky looking. So I'm going to go in with an eraser and do a bit of touch-up. And then I will do the third plant and I'll time-lapse it for you. And then we'll be ready to go into the next lesson, which will help us to do some of the work on the textures because they'll have all of the plants drawn. 4. Lesson 3 Suggested Finsishing on the Flower Pots: Hi guys, welcome to lesson three. Unless a three here we're going to focus on doing those flower pots. Let's get to it already. So we've got our three basic cactus shapes here, and I need to just fill out my pots here. I'm gonna do them within each of the layers that they belong to. So let's start with this one here. I am going to shut those off temporarily just to make it less confusing. And I'm going to use these kind of Terracotta colors, I think for most of the plots, maybe these browns. So let me start with this color here. Probably your quintessential terracotta color. So here I'm going to actually use the oval to draw the shape and fill it. Then I can duplicate that. Of course I did on the sketch layer. Of course, always try to be good at this when I'm demonstrating and even then I still run into different little issues. So we've got that first one. Let's duplicate it. Pull it down just like we did with the sketch. Make it slightly smaller. I'm going to join sides here. Then I can go ahead and fill and, you know, what I'll do is I'll fill this area differently than this area so that we can get the look of dimension here. So I must have a bit of an opening here somewhere. It doesn't want to just fill without me really dropping the threshold. I don't know. I know why. I don't have them on the same layer duck. So I've got a merge it down. Then I can fill that. Don't want to fill that bit at the top. So I think that I will what I'm trying to do fill this rim part here, so merge it down, so it's on the same layer. There we go. Now, I can bring that threshold up quite high and you can see it fills it quite well. You see that little bit of edging. Again, we're gonna be adding a lot of texture to this, so I'm not too worried about it. I'm gonna go with a slightly darker color to fill this part because it would be shadowed anyways, I don't mind that the rim is lighter because it's as if there's light hitting it from the top there and you can choose to fill that soil in. Maybe we'll do that last. Let's just finish this part here. So I'm going to turn mine this way so that I can draw a curve. I'm gonna do it in this color. If I've done this a little bit differently than what I demonstrated to you in the first lesson, but that's okay. There's always a lot of different ways you can do anything. So now in this case I want to go a little bit. I want to put this color, but I'm gonna be doing some shading afterwards. So I'll maybe just go a tiny little bit different just so that we can see the difference here. Okay? So that's just a little bit lighter and we will be making some changes with the texturing and the shadowing. Now for the soil, Let's just add another layer here. Let's go with just a really dark version of that same family. And I would just go on top of everything here and then just draw. You can keep it could be smooth. You can have it texture like I just did here, like as if the soil is loose and bumpy. If you want a perfect curve along the bottom there, you can even do it with your eraser. And you can hold the eraser just the same way as you do when you're drawing a line and you want to smooth it out. So that has smooth out the bottom line, you have to decide whether or not you want the cactuses to be in behind there or not. And I'm thinking that it would be better if they were in French. And then you could also go to the cactus itself, use your eraser and then just also mimic the shape of those little piles of dirt so that it looks like the dirt is surrounding the bottom of the plant like that. Make sure we're on the right layer. So I'm just making it so that the bottom is not just one straight line. Okay. Believe me that little detail you're not going to really ever see. I can keep my sketch off there for now. And let's go through and do the other two. So I'm gonna shut this one off for now. Let's go to the aloe. And in this case you can see I did just a very plain pot with no rim. I'm going to do that one, maybe more of this BG. This is going to make it more beige by dragging it into this part of my color picker, it will switch into the yellow layer here. I'm going to add a layer, of course, this time I'm not going to forget. I'm going to lose that color. Let's just go ahead and draw the first oval. And it's nice when you can move it around like this. And you can also with an ellipse, you can edit the shape of course, so we can make some slight adjustments there to get it perfect. Maybe I'll bring that up a little bit. Then I'm gonna duplicate it, pull it down here, and you see the perspective of it has to be different. So in this case, I'm gonna use distort to allow me to do that. And you know, what I could do here is actually just erase this part of it here and then I could pull my straight lines in like this. There are actually a little bit curves tool. I think I'll not use my straightening method. One thing about this dry ink is that quite often you're left with little openings that allow the fill to flood your whole background, which if that's not what you want. Yeah, I don't know why it's doing that, but I'll go around the whole edge again. So I myself still had a bit of an opening. They're going to quickly get rid of that. And in this case, I can draw that slightly darker part of the plot there. In fact, if need be, I can just hide all of these layers, including, including this one if I wanted to, I think I'll leave it. This one is still that oval. That's why I wasn't able to fill because I wasn't I didn't hadn't silly me. I had not flattened those two together. So of course it was filling the whole background. Wow, I'm gonna duplicate that, pull it down to make that shaded area there that I need. And I think in this case it's touching. So I'd be able to use it to fill. So I'm just going to merge it down, which is what I should've done the last time. And I'm gonna go with a slightly darker color to fill in. That might be just a bit too dark and I think that looks pretty good. So once we put all our other layers back on, we can see that worked out great. And then as far as the soil again, we would on a separate layer with something quite a bit darker and you can just draw it in. Let's pull that up too above that so we can kind of put a bumpy layer of soil in there and fill it and then make any adjustments that you see that are necessary here. Now that you've got your pot in position, you can adjust any of these to make them look like they're actually coming out of the dirt and I think that's adequate there. So we've now got those two. So we just need to do the pot on the prickly pear. And you know how I did that? Of course, this one maybe we'll go quite a bit lighter. So we're gonna use this kind of a creamy beige color. I'll go darker for this initial oval will make sure that I have the prickly pear layer, add a layer, draw my first oval. You can make it just a little tiny bit bigger here, duplicate it, bring it down, make it a little bit smaller. This time I will remember to merge it down so I can fill this one. I'm gonna have to adjust a little bit on these plants, but that's okay. Or maybe I can just pull it down. I think it's gonna be better if I cleaned that up separately. I'm going to make another layer for the bottom part of my plot. This one, I'm just going for it. I'm not, I'm not just dragging down the oval to make the bottom. I think I can for all this went in. Okay. Remember to close the top there and I thought I had the lighter colors selected. Let me just fill out. Okay. I'm gonna move that one underneath, so I think we're gonna just erase these. Now I could've done that also by selecting, grab that layer there, do an automatic selection so that is selected and then you can go onto the layer that you're trying to effect. So this layer here, and now it's protected because of that selection. And so I can erase that off really easily. The only thing I need to do here is to fill that in. I'm going to do that with a darker color. Sure. I'm on the right layer and that pot is basically ready to go as well. I'm actually don't really like the way that selection clear that edge. I'm gonna be doing some highlights and stuff on these though, so I'm not going to worry about it too much. And now I've got my three pots of plants ready to go and we can start doing the fun part, which is going to be the texturing and adding the mixed media kind of stuff that we're going to be doing. I can see here this little plant hasn't got a perfect edge. So there are some little adjustments that I'll make and I'll do that off camera so that I can come back and be ready to start with that texturing. In the next lesson. I'll see you there. 5. Lesson 4 Dimension and Definition of Cactus Forms: Hi guys, welcome to lesson four. Less than four here we're going to focus on adding dimension to our three different plants. There are different techniques. I'm going to show you all the techniques that I used. Alright, let's get started. Here. I have hidden all of my other plants because I want to focus on this prickly pear just to show you how to do some of this work with creating dimension. Can you guess how I did that? It's really not too bad. I will show you the steps. This is actually what my shading looks like. Like probably doesn't even tell you anything there at all either. So let me just walk you through it. I'm going to delete the one that I did. And while right away, can you not see the difference? You know, that little bit of dimension gave us that real sense of depth. Once you delete it, you can really see how flat your platforms are. So let me show you how I did it now you can use any other brushes. You could probably stick with that income. You can use the posca. I think I'm gonna use the posca because I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna be also using it as my eraser. I need an eraser for this as well. But what you do first is make a new layer, so it'll be just above what you've got there. You're gonna take your marker and it can be nice and large. And what you want to do is just add a line wherever you think you're going to want that dimension. So I'm basically adding it wherever the appendages would join. And then same with all of these little appendages at the top. I think that's what I'm gonna call them appendages. I'll get rid of that little bit there. We will be doing a lot of erasing. Here. I think I'll just do short lines. And it looks super weird right now. What we're gonna do next is of course blur it. I'm going to blur it to be quite soft. I think maybe about 6%, 5 percent would be good if you don't think that that's wide enough. You could have gone with a thicker marker to start out with, but I just wanted to, I'm gonna see if this will work, so we'll leave it at that. And what I'll do here is make this a clipping mask so it'll be stuck within the platform itself. And then I still want to make these into kind of harder lines here. So in order to do that, I'm gonna grab the eraser, which is a Posca and that line there, I should have done a little bit overlapping into the main part. So I may go back and change a couple of them. But you can see now that using the eraser with a really hard brush gives you a nice edge there. Let's try it with the dry ink as our eraser and see if that's going to look okay too, because sometimes it's nice to just have a little bit of texture. So I actually don't mind that that's still giving us a nice line there and it matches the texture of what we've got. So maybe I'll go through and do that instead. These, I'll probably have to move a little bit that I've done that. Now, a case like this where you're I'm trying to stop this here, but I'm afraid of effecting that one a little bit too much. You see how that's too much of a hard line there. I could go in with an eraser that is really soft like an airbrush. The soft brush would be good there and just kind of inland a little bit back to the dry ink. So I'm basically just going all the way around and doing that wherever I had one of those lines and I forgot one here, I'll have to go back and do that when you agree. Now that has really given that sense of depth for this one that I forgot, I would have to do a new layer, go back to my marker, brush it in, apply the blur and then go back and add that, erase that. And of course this one would have to be a clipping mask as well. And you can't go in and of course merge it. So that's kind of a point there. I'll probably go back and fix, but you can see how this all works together now to really make it look like we've got that dimension that we're looking for in a case like this where I didn't have the line in exactly the right shape. I can go a little bit higher. I just use my freehand selection and pull that down to position it where I need it and erase anything that is not in the right spot anymore. But yeah, I mean, that really helps. I think it really makes it look dimensional. Now let's throw our other shaping behind here. Now with this one, in order to make this look better, I think I would lighten the whole thing. So I'm going to use my hue and saturation. I'm going to brighten it and maybe just slightly changed the color of I'm going up tiny bit more to the teal side. And I'm gonna go through and do all that shadowing. But I'm also going to do a little bit of highlighting. The highlighting what I'll do is add a layer. I can use the same technique in a way or I could use an airbrush for something like that. I could sample the color and go even a little bit lighter and see I could just brush in a little bit of highlight into the middle of it like this, just to brighten it. And I can also do the same thing on the tips of some of these. Now of course, we're gonna make this into a clipping mask so that it's now enclosed within. You could add highlights. It stuff on this as well. So I've added another layer in-between the shadow and plants. So that gives it also created an automatic clipping mask. And I can go in and add a little bit of the highlighting in there. Now we haven't started with any of the other stuff like the texturing that we wanted to do. I wouldn't go too crazy with the highlights right now because we can do some of that with our mixed media. But now we can go through, I can hide these three for now so we can work on this one. And I'll go through the same steps. So I'm going to add a layer, get that Posca marker, darker, draw wherever I want that shadow dimension to show up. And we're going on the top. So behind the big shape. Now let's blur it. And then we can go in and erase. Now the other thing you could do is at this point you could duplicate this one, hide it, go to that bottom one, do the blurring. Then we could go back to this layer here, use it as a selection. So use what we're gonna do is select all the background behind the lines here. So I'm going to use automatic selection and see what's happening is it's leaving the lines as what's open. And that will be what we can use to go to this layer again and use it to help us this erasing while protecting that shape. But you don't want to go anywhere on this side of the line, like on the outside of the line, but on the inside here. It'll help you to get that hard line. You see how that is making a nice hard edge just based on the results that I had. So I think that's good. I can get rid of this layer and deselect. And you can see that helped us to make that hard line. It's not perfect. I wasn't super careful when I did that original. So I can take and adjust ever so slightly wherever I need to. And then this will be a spot where I would want to go to the soft air brush to just soften this edge here. You can decide, I mean, is it, is it faster to have done that selection or just as easy to go in with this. Maybe this gives us a little bit more control. Actually, I wanted that dry ink right. Now that one's got a lot of dimension two and the other one back on and see how that looks overall. We've got tons of dimension here. This is great. We can make adjustments always on our opacity and whatnot to make it blend in a little bit better. I'm pretty sure that multiply is the blending mode I would want any of these burn ones can work, but you can also still reduce the opacity. I'm going to leave it maybe on multiply. And that's one that's completely ready for the next step, which is gonna be the texturing. So I'm going to go through and do this sort of dimensioning on each of the plants. Now, in a case like this one where we've got these different layers already worked out. In this case, what I want to do is create a shadow behind this dark section that will cast a shadow onto this one. So I think the easiest way to do that it will be to duplicate this layer, a goal. On the lower layer here. It just hire the top one for now because I want to show you this. I'm going to go on the shadow layer or what will be the shadow? I'm going to darken it. So you see how I've darkened it there. And we could even desaturated a little bit and then go back to the Gaussian blur. And let's just turn that other layer back on. On this layer though, I'm going to apply the blur. And then you'll see what happens here where that you can see here has spread and will cast a shadow onto this one here what we need to do though, is to actually click it, this one. So we'll do a clipping mask and then you can see that it has cast that shadow. Now in my opinion, that's not dark enough. So I'm gonna go into the curves adjustment here. And I'm going to darken it. And you can see what's happening here. As soon as I darken it, you can see that it really casts a nice shadow onto the branch, has more the stalks. I really need to find out what the lingo is for this, but it casts a shadow on this part of the plant. And I think that's great. You know, it's so easy and we've done it so quickly. So that one to me has enough to mention I'm not gonna go in and do any of these darker ones because I think that these because they're darker, you can tell that they're in behind, right? So those two we've done and they've worked out perfectly. Let's go to contestant number three, which is the tree cactus. And you can guess the exact method that I would use for this is same as I would on this one here. Now, one thing I did do on this one is draw some of those little appendages quite a bit lighter and on their own layer. So in this case, doing the shadow on them will be super, super easy because we can just add a layer above, go in with the posca, we can sample the green, but we can go in quite a bit darker. And we're just putting a line at the base of each of these little lighter green appendages. And I'm gonna show you something That's really making this ideal way to do it. First of all, we'll apply the blur you want. I think I'm gonna go bigger. Let's go, let's go double the width. So let's go even wider. So I'm gonna go back to each of those spots and just make it thicker. Now we'll apply the blur. Let's make it a clipping mask first and then that way when we apply the blurred so you can see it now that they're really solid. But if we go in and apply the blur when it's a clipping mask, we can kind of see a little bit better how that helps us to give or get the dementia. In this case, I have those in front, but I would grab both of those and now slide them in behind and pull this one. What am I doing? Slide this and this behind this layer. So you can get the dimension really easily like that for this back one you know what to do, add a layer, go through. That color is probably fine for this as well. Actually turned like it's more like that. I'm going to go through and draw a line at the base of each of the appendages. That one's not necessary. This one and this one blur them, make sure that they're a clipping mask and then go in with my eraser, which is the dry ink. And just do a nice edge on that and get the shadow off anywhere that it's not supposed to be. I think now we've got the dimension in there. Great. So we'll be able to start doing the texturing in the next lesson. I wanted to show you that once you've got the clipping mask, so that was this one here. You've got that clipping mask That's shadowing in here. I can still go in on this layer below and fixed something like this that I've done incorrectly. So I'll go back to my dry ink and I just hadn't fully drawn that can go in anywhere else that I see a glaring error and I have now given a lot of dimension to this piece. I can see I'm missing a couple here, so I'll make a couple of corrections. But now we're ready to start doing what I consider the really fun part, which is adding our textures and making this into truly mixed media piece. All right, So I'll meet you in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 5 Textures and Mixed Media Finish ldeas: Hi guys, welcome to lesson five. Less than five here I want to start adding some of that texture in detail. We're gonna focus on the aloe Vera for this lesson. Let's get started. I thought it would be good to start this lesson by looking at a little bit of reference. So this is my Pinterest site. I'm gonna go to my saved arch or my boards. And I recently just put a whole bunch of mixed media cactus art together into a board that you could use as reference for this next stage. So there's a ton of wonderful examples here. And really all of these can be categorized as mixed media. So taking a look at something like this, for example, you can see some of the different textures that have been put in background elements. This area in the back looks like it was done with a bubble wrap kind of finish that created those little bubbles. Obviously some collage working here and just some patterns have been added. Let's see if we can find something quite different. This one was actually a collage piece, but I thought that, that was a very interesting way to do some of the finishing. We can definitely add some of that texture with mixed media brushes that I've created. Which of course you know how to do since you've taken some of my classes, I'll also checking once I've found something that I like, there's always suggestions below that are very interesting. So here's a really good example again, of collage that's been done to add texture and detail too, the different parts of the cactus. So let's go back to my main board again. Some of these, it's just texture. That's the reason that I would have pinned them. And in this case, it's just very simple textures. I've actually created some brushes here for these spikes, which I will give you. So that'll be something fun that you can play with. I love these little flowers that have been added there. Very casual and they can be drawn on at the end. This one is just gorgeous with It's really modeling, kind of textured that's been put on there. It looks like watercolor or it could be Inc. and that's given so much life to each of the different platforms. So you can go through my board, then look at all of these beautiful suggestions that come up to give you some ideas of what you can do to really make your piece interesting. Now here, this one I liked, I liked the dramatic highlights and shadows. Unfortunately, there must be a very small version of it because it's not coming into focus. But take a look at some of these and I just love how purples are being brought into these and pinks, all kinds of different beautiful highlights and things. So we're going to experiment with a whole bunch of different stuff. We'll see how it turns out in the end. So let's flip back into Procreate now, the question ends up being, just, what kind of a look are you interested in and getting with it? And let's try starting out just with textures. I'm going to work on my Aloe, so I'm going to just shut these other ones off just to help us really isolate it and get a good idea of what we could do here. I think I'm going to, with this one experimental little bit with kind of texture plus collage kind of finish to it. So remember that we've got each of these separate so we can add a clipping mask to each of them and add our texture in there. So I'm going to make a new layer, and I've done a new layer there, I'm going to make it into a clipping mask. And then I'm gonna go into my texture sets here and I'm just going to grab something that I think might work. I'm gonna grab one of these that has a bunch of writing and stuff. So it's obviously like a collage finish that I'm going to put on this. It's on its own layer. We could do it really in any colors. I'm going to maybe flip into more of a bright. I'm going to go right to the very full brightness, but I want to go a little bit more tuition in here. And you can see that it's only going to apply to the layer that I have it clipped to so I could stop there and be happy. Honestly. Like that's the first step and I just love it already. But I could also go in now and add additional texture with just a plain texture. So here are some of my plane textures I can go in and with something like the recycled paper. And let's try something really radical. I'm gonna go to the pinkish hue there. I'm gonna go quite a bit smaller, and I'm just going to start adding a little bit of purple to these and maybe it could just be on the top edges. You can decide on how you want to affect your color, whether you want it to be on the top and it fades into the darker color at the bottom. Or if you want to go the opposite way here, you could even switch to a different texture. Let's go with something like a charcoal. And I could go into a darker purple and go quite a bit smaller and then just come in at the edges here and just at the bottom mainly to add further dimension. So this is giving you the sense of these pieces having some thickness. And so there is your shadow. And of course you can go through and do the same thing with highlights. So we could go to a finer texture. Maybe I'll just do this green ink wash and now go to a really bright pink and white. All my brushes were so big. But you could do something like this where you're adding some really bright highlights on some of the edges. Once you start doing that, just keep in mind that you want to be consistent with your highlights and shadows. So you want to make sure that you're gonna be doing the same thing on all of the different parts of the plant. So in this case I've got highlight here and shadow here. I should probably pull the highlights down a little bit further. And then what I would probably do is keep the shadow more on this side in this case, or the bottom part of them. I already have fallen in love with this. I think this is gonna be so gorgeous when we're all done. There are lots of steps I know, and it is a little bit much, but if you remember to just do it methodically, add the clipping mask, decide on your color, go in with your texture, and I'm going to sample that. Then go darker too. I can tell that the last piece I was working on must have been really big because my brushes are just humongous. So I'm going to take a look at that brush and I'm probably gonna go in and reduce the green a little bit to match the proportion of this particular size of document I'm working on. So I'm going quite dark in at the bottom here, but then I'm going to switch it up, go kind of medium in the middle. And I'm going to go quite a bit lighter and maybe even a completely different brush. I'll go back to that recycled paper and I'm just adding some brighter tops there. So this is what I mean by it being the fun part. Now you can just really go to town with all of these different textures that you have that I've either given you from other courses or you will have here in your package, I'm gonna grab this old handwriting for this part and adding some texture in here. And you can see how this is really starting to give depth all of my parts here. And I'm still keeping in mind that some of these were lighter, some of them were darker, so they should be in the back and darker. So this one here, which is those darkest leaves there, I'm going to add a clipping mask, but I'm gonna go in really dark with my texture, especially at the bottom. I'll go a little bit brighter towards the top and reduce migraine so that my dots are a bit smaller. But I've added some real texture in the back parts there too. And I'll do the same thing with this, which is really my back most layer. So this one should be the darkest. So I'll make that into a clipping mask. I think this one I'll do lettering, but I'm gonna go in and make the grain quite small. I've gone quite dark on that one. And what do you think? I mean, I think that's so fun and really fabulous when you're done. I'm gonna go through and do some work on the other plants. I'll come back and explain as I'm going through it so that you know what I'm doing. And we'll work on the pots, we'll work on all of it. I mean, we've got lots left to do, but it's really going quite quickly in my opinion. So that's the one plant. I'm gonna turn the other one on just so we can see what a comparison like, how flat this looks in comparison to this, how fun this looks. So that's what we're gonna do on this one here. I'm gonna go to this one for my next lesson. I will meet you there. 7. Lesson 6 Prickly Pear and Tree Cactus Details: Hi guys. In this lesson we're going to focus on adding some dimensions to the prickly pear. We're also going to be bringing in some unique textures to make it really interesting and make it really mixed media. Let's get to it. For this one, I wanted to try something completely different. And I've gathered a few little collage bits that I have done in the past or have collected. And there's a couple of other things and I've saved them into the Class Assets folder here. So I'm going to go to Insert a file. These are the images that I have collected. This is one of them. It's not going to have let me grab more than one at once, but I'm gonna bring two or 34. These are crazy collages that I've done in the past and for whatever purpose, can't even remember lots of different things here. So this is actually a picture or a picture of actually what it was, was a bunch of different students work. I was putting this altogether into an example, kind of a file that I had, examples of different things we could do for this. I don't even remember what the unit was about, but it was something that we did in our heart journals in class. Then I've got things like this. This is a picture of some beautiful lace that my mom created. And she is quite the knitr, quite the crochet or for some reason I had copies of these, so I'm gonna hide three of those to start out with. And just with one here, I want to apply some texture to my prickly pear. So these are all going to be for the prickly pear. So I'm just going to drag them into that layer. They're all become clipping masks, which I guess it's alright because I think that's what I wanted to do with them anyways, but I'm gonna hide, Well, that's the one that I wanted to work with first anyways. So here we have, and this is just like I said, collage that I created for who knows what reason. I was probably doing a bunch of artwork for my agent and I would have incorporated this into one of the large artworks that I had done. So, I mean, it's perfect as a good example, I'm going to drag it down to be just above the layer that I'm working with, but below the shadowing and stuff that we had done around those. Now you can see already that my shadows are a little bit lost, but not quite dark enough. So in a case like that, I would go into the layer and adjust it. But let's first play around with the blending modes on this layer because see what might look good to actually blend that layer into the background. I really liked that. That's overlay. Soft light. Hard Light is kinda cool. I mean, they're all really cool. You just have to kinda go through them and then just make a decision like something like this is nice because it's all become monochromatic. But I think that reminds me too much of my own brushes that are then of course only one color. So I think I'm gonna go back to one of these other ones where the color of the collage still remains. And yet can kind of show through. And I think I can just play with the opacity a little bit. I like that. I think that's kinda neat. And the nice thing is, because it was a crazy collage that wasn't the same all the way around. It really looks like individually create a collage for this one and then another one for this side. And that works really great. And now what I can do is go to the shadow layer here. I've got it on multiplying. Remember I had turned it down so I could then bump it up a little bit if I wanted to. Actually doesn't look that bad at that 50 or 60%. I mean, I like that too. That's really fun. And I mean, it doesn't really match with what I'm doing on this side, but there's so many different adjustments I could make here, like this layer itself. I could go in now and go to hue and saturation and move that slider until I do get a color that makes it work a little bit better with that side. So right about there, that looks pretty good. So there is a completely different method. And how fun is that one too? I'm just in love with this. I think this is gonna be so much fun for you guys. Of course you can also still above that layer, add a layer which because it's between two clipping mask, it automatically becomes a clipping mask and you can go in and still additionally add texture. So we could go in with something like the splatter and grab a color that works. And go in and just adds additional color or texture. Let's go in and reduce the grain. Their scale is a little bit smaller and go in and still do all that same stuff that we did on the other one, which was like adding dimension just with the shadowing and blending. Oh, I love that. I think that's just great. So let's do the plant that's behind it. So that would be this one here. And let's try my mom's daily. I mean, this is all about experimenting, right. So I'll turn that on. And why is it not visible? Let me aperture. It's just not in position. Silly me. Of course it's way over here, so the pattern might be a little bit too big for what? It kinda clashes with those other ones. But remember, we can also still go in and do things like this, play with our blending mode. And we can still reduce the opacity. And now it's looking really cool. And that can just be one of many layers. So we could go in and grab one of these other ones like this, which I do have a brush that I've created with this texture. But let's just do it in this way just so that we can have the fun of playing with it. So something like this would be fun to colorize. So we'll go into the human saturation and I'm going to bring the brightness up a little bit and fully saturated, which shouldn't really work because it was a black image, but it does, it kind of turns it purply. And then we can go in and move the saturation slider till we get to a color that we lie on again, we can go in here and blend. Now I liked that difference. It is not the right color, but I do like the effect. We could also on this layer invert it. So it's the opposite. And of course we can go in and change the color now that we've got the different blending mode. Now that doesn't seem to be making much of a difference. Sometimes the layer order makes a difference. So I'm gonna just move it above and I've got it on difference, but maybe I'll invert it or leave it on color dodge, but I'm going to reduce the opacity there. And that's an interesting finish two, I'm going to bring those write down though now one of the things I want to do here too is to really make that front stand out against the back one. So let's duplicate that layer. I'm gonna close this for a second. We're going to grab this one here. So that's no, actually I'm going to grab this one. I'm gonna duplicate it. I'm going to fill the bottom one. So select first and this color will be fine. So we'll go back and we'll fill it with that color. You can see it's block here. Let's go to the Gaussian blur, and we're going to blur and you can see it creating a nice blend that's bringing it up. Remember that we have to clip this one, this back layer, so make sure that you slide it in-between some of these clipping masks. So then it has clipped to the plants and is therefore behind the front plant. So I'm thinking still that this back plant has maybe just a little bit too much going on. I'm going to reduce the opacity on those. And I think maybe what we can do is just go in and darken it itself. So we're going to go to the layer. So that's the main color layer. We can go to the hue, saturation and brightness. I kind of look neat. I didn't mean to do that, but I'm desaturating it and I'm darkening it. But it did kind of look neat. Getting a little bit of another color on there like that bluish Navy kind of shadow effect ties it in better with that plant, Don't you think? So? Again, we've just added so much interests to this one and let's just take a quick look at the other ones. So we're gonna close his prickly pear. We didn't use this one here, so I'm gonna grab that and put it into the tree cactus layer, and then maybe we can play with it a little bit. So let's bring that to the top. Let's maybe just put it on one of the stalks here. So we've got it Just on the one. We can move it around till we like what part of the image is showing. I'm thinking right about there would be good. And let's check out these blending modes to see what might work. I'm not really loving any of these in particular, and I think it's because of the color of the image. So I'm gonna leave it on overlay. We're gonna go to the hue and saturation. And let's just move this around until we find something a little bit more appealing. So it could be, in this case, it's just not gonna be ideal for this particular layout or this image. So I can take this and really reduce the opacity. And then we can just start playing with textures again. So I'm going to add a layer and then I'm gonna go in with some of the other things that I have. Let's say some nice handwriting. Again, the scale is quite a bit too large, so I'm going in and reducing the scale, adding some purple here. Here's that marker lines that we used in the background here. This is the brush that I had made out of it. You can keep them separate so that way you can go in and make adjustments individually. So something like that might work. We could do another layer. And let's go in with just, this is kind of just a grainy paper. And I'm going to sample that green, go a little bit darker. And I'm just going to paint some of that in here and they're mainly on the top edges of all of these. Then I'm going to go darker. On the bottom edges. You can always go in and darken up some of those shadows that you had originally put on with the Gaussian Blur. And at any point, you can just take something like an airbrush. So I've just got the it with a soft airbrush, medium airbrush, and I can go in and just kind of airbrush additional dimension on there if I would like. So I'm adding just a little bit more darkness around the edge of it. Again, that helps to give that impression of the curves. I'm going along that outside edge bottom mainly. And then I can go back with a good texture that recycled papers seemed to work nicely on the other ones. So I'm gonna try that one again. And this time we're gonna go lighter and quite a bit smaller. And I'm just going to add brighter highlights. I think I'll keep it like that for now. And always go in with other textures after I want to do this 1 first so that we get a better idea of the overall plant, how it's going to look. So now we're gonna switch to this. I'm going to add a layer, make it into a clipping mask. Since I've already got that recycled paper, I'll go in and do. I'm highlighting and shadowing a little bit bigger. And remember all these little guys were separate. So that's this layer here we're going to add, and I'm gonna highlight those a little bit too so they really stand out and then start adding some of our fun texture. So it will make sure it's a clipping mask. If you add it to the top of the pile, you have to make sure you designate it as a clipping mask. And I'm gonna go back to some of those other textures that I have in my massive mixed media selection. So now I want to switch to somebody who's colors so that we can tie it in. So right now I'm painting onto those little tiny appendages. So I'm gonna make my green fairly small here. And this one is just crazy. It's got a little bit of everything in it. And then I'm gonna go somewhat lighter, make it into a clipping mask. Oh, I see. I'm on this one. I thought it was on this one. See. No, I'll leave it off of that one. Go to this one, add a clipping mask, and I'm adding mixed media kind of a finish to make it a little bit more interesting. So this is what I'm doing. I'm going through on each of them and I'm going to do this kind of texturing and adding detail. I'll do a bit of it off camera and show it to you in a time-lapse at the end. But then in the next lesson, we'll go through and we'll do the plant plots. Alright, so I'll see you in that next one. 8. Lesson 7 Additional Treatments on the Plant Pots: Well guys, welcome to lesson seven. In this lesson we're going to focus on adding the texture and dimension to the plant pots. Let's get started. Okay, so I started to do a tiny bit of work here on the pots and I'm not sure I like this one at all color wise. I don't think it works with my overall color scheme now, so I'm going to find it here. I've added some shading to it. I'll turn that off temporarily and let me just go into hue and saturation. And let's just shift this desaturated a little bit. Maybe make it a neutral kind of a teal color. So I'm just I mean, it's practically gray. I've reduced the move the hue so far over and reduce the saturation to 7%. So that's kind of, I don't know, it makes it a little bit more cohesive in my opinion. And let me turn on that shadow again, which is not going to be correct color wise either. So we'll go in and also shift that all the way down and desaturate it. And even then it's not great. So I've sort of rough color coming through here. Let me just erase that right off of there. And now I can go in and start using some texture. I'm gonna go back into my textures here and just add a couple of things that might be interesting. So I'm making a clipping mask. You can add switch to that gray color and go a little bit darker and add some of that in there. I'm also going to reduce the opacity of it, so it's just barely there. And now I'm really losing that shadow that made the rim. Also this handwriting is not in the correct perspective. So what I'll do is go into liquify, set my push really high and see if I can know that's not going to work. What they are my own layer liquify and push it to be in a curve that can work that way. You can also do that by going into your selection and going into warp. And you can warp to create that correct perspective. Although I did find that other one was a lot faster. This is a little bit more picky, but it works. That's given us a little bit of something going on in here. And I think I'm going to erase it on the inside because it would have to be going in the opposite direction. And I'm just going to erase the very top. And so that still remains a little bit brighter. And I think I'm going to make a shadow underneath here again. So I can do that by adding a layer, making it a clipping mask. I'm going to just a basic brush. So I'm gonna go back to my posca, going to drag that shape across Gaussian Blur. And then we want to cut that top section off by erasing. So make sure we have, I guess a dry ink would work. Let's make a nice straight line there. And we've got our rim back so we can just reduce the opacity there a little bit. And that worked. That's one thing you could do for adding some interest. And one of the pots, I would've been better off to have kept this back section separate. You can still do it by selecting. So you can go into freehand selection here. Then Cut and Paste it separate. It's a clipping mask at the moment, so I'm gonna pull it up and take it off of Clipping Mask mode. And then this one we can actually add a clipping mask to. Then use our texturing, maybe one of these. And dark enough that we can add some dimension to it. She would get in quite dark in the corners there and you can see how that's really made a difference. So basically you go through and do that on each of your pots. So let's go to one of these other plots. This one here, I've already got a clipping mask there. So that's this brown one here. We can go in and add some texture, doesn't matter which one you could still do. The same thing as I did before with those imported textures. Let's import something else. Oops, that's wrong. I want to go Insert a File. Let's insert this one and that's just collage. I'll bring it to the top so you can see that's just a bunch of lettering that's being caught and put together. And then it looks like I did some kind of a glaze over top just to sort of and neutralize it a little bit. So let's bring that one down in to this layer right above the plant pot, make it into a clipping mask, what already is, and then reduce it right down so it fits right onto the pot. And I don't know if you could define mixed media anymore than this. I mean, we've got a lot of different things going on here. You can decide what you want, whether you want that much going on or not. Let's try a different blending modes here or something about that difference that's really attractive. Overlay works nicely too, and we can just reduce the opacity there. We can also still go in and let's use the Liquify this time to curve this a little bit so that it matches the perspective a little bit better. The anything that curves within there just helps to suggest that shape that would be in perspective. We could change the color of that pot at some point to we can also not sure if it would work, but we could try to alpha lock that one and see if we can go in and paint in some texture. Doesn't really work because it doesn't, there wasn't enough white in there for the Alpha Lock to work. So the alpha lock off, and I'll just put this on another layer and then use a blend mode. I think I like this, add the bass and I'm going to reduce it down a little bit. That's given it a bit of texture. And I'm gonna do one more layer, make it into a clipping mask. And now we're just going to add a little bit of darkness on the sides and decide what you think is the best color for that based on your composition and what you've got going on. And I don't mind that we've got some of this gold in here. It adds and ties in with some of these other bits of gold that we've got going on. My color scheme has changed completely from what I had at the beginning, but I don't mind that sometimes it's just the way it is. It's one of those go with the flow kind of projects. Of course, you can always continue to add layers, continue to add clipping masks, and go in with other little textures that you have like some of these Marx. Let's grab some purple here just to tie it in and reduce the size of the grain. And I'm just adding these little dots in here. And I think that also makes it interesting. So I'll quickly do this one as well. Time-lapse to show you. And then we'll probably be pretty much done what we're doing at this stage, as far as adding our Mixed Media to each of the plants and the pots. And then the last thing we'll be working on our background. So I'm going to quickly do this one here. I wanted to show you one brush that I had that was really cool. I think it's in my new set, this wooden Charles here. And I'm going to sample the colors so that we're pretty close to it and you can see how it just instantly gives it that effect of actual wood. I'm going to add a clipping mask to bottom part as well. Change my color slightly. And I mean, could you have done could you have done anything faster than that? That is instant texture. Of course, I can still go back and add some shading and all that kind of stuff, which I probably will do. I'll do that off camera and then that way we can come back in the next lesson and really start working on the background. But this has been really fun. I have to say. I'll meet you in that last lesson. 9. Lesson 8 Finishing Touches and Final Details: In this lesson, we're gonna be adding tons of texture and detail to the background. I'm gonna be just giving you a bunch of ideas and you're gonna take it whichever way you want. Let's get to it. There are so many different things we could do at this stage. I started adding some little dots in here and those could be where some of the needles come out. So I've done the one just quick layer, just basically just adding that kind of a blue. And I just stayed with the dry ink brush and just kind of dotted dotted them on all over. So it's a layer that's above everything else in my prickly pear. I'm going through and just doing some quick thoughts. You could go with a different color on this one here, worth your design is gonna be completely different than mine, but I'm just showing you some of the things I would do. Let's maybe go deeper. Other thing you could do instead of dots is you could run lines. I don't have those clipped currently so you can see how I'm going over the edges. Then I could go in and actually make this a clipping mask. And then of course it's going to cut off right at the edges. Now, I'm not sure why those dots disappeared there. I guess I put them on this layer. It doesn't matter. I can just cut it and move it real quick. I'll just cut and paste. And then now that can be merged with this layer instead, once you've got those lines, you could make the clipping mask. And I have created a quick brush, but you know, what I discovered is the hut. It looked exactly like the stitching brushes that I had done for the felt application class. So you could definitely go back and use those as well. But these are the particles that I made. So I could go with whatever color is going to work on the background that I have at a layer. I'm surprised I haven't run out of layers yet because wow, that's a lot. Actually, I don't need a clipping mask in this case because I want to go around the edge here and I definitely need to not have Eclipse, so it shows you can't see it too well against that background, but, um, you can make your background darker. I've got just a soft pink here, but we are gonna be working on the layer to add some interest in behind these in this lesson. So let's just go and put those particles on anyhow and then we'll go through afterwards and decide. And so those particles are very fine featured, let's just say you could use these cross stitch brushes as well if you wanted to get to sort of really thick, kind of a funky looking stitch line or not stitch line, story, prick-holes line. So there's that, that was the thickest crossed which but then we had kind of an in-between one which also could look quite nice to add that sort of quickly. Look. So you know, I'm gonna go back, of course, and perfect all this before I show you my final, but I just wanted to show you a whole bunch of different ideas. You could also just kind of go through and add particles above those are on those dots there. So let's go with a really bright blue and we can just go through and add the circles like this. So these are just ideas for you. You could do it whichever way you'd like. Let's switch over to this one here for a second and we'll talk about other things you could do to make the cactus more interesting. One of the things I tried was doing a single line and you can use any brush. I'm going to use a Posca paint marker. I'm gonna go darker and I think I'm going to go more into the purple family. You could draw, Let's make a layer first. And you could draw, I'm going to go a little bit smaller. You could draw a rib and we'll just call it a rib, will go into the Gaussian blur and blur that quite a bit. And then go in with an eraser. And we're gonna use just for now the Posca paint marker, just so that I can show you how that would look. So that's kind of a shadow. It makes it go deep in on that spot. So that's something that you could do. You could add a bunch of them or you could even take this one, duplicate it, and flip it horizontal and have another ribbon here. And if you needed to adjust the shape, you could either use the warp or you could use that liquefy trick that we did. Get your brush nice and big. And you could use that to help massage it into the right position. And then along the edge of that half a new layer, Let's collapse these into one. And on the new layer you could go in and use your stitching or whatever the particles brush. You could run a line is on there. Now that's a very good job of lining it up and you get the idea. So that is also very nice. It does give it that depth. You could do another one in the middle here, infinite it up a lot, and then go in and erase one side of it. You can make this one into a clipping mask or you don't even have to worry about that erasing like I was just doing. We could just pull it down and it would belong to the other layer, which is the one down here. And that adds that deeper shadow in there. I got it below all my there we go. That's a little bit better. Maybe let it down a little bit or change the opacity of it. Then go back to the stitch, are going to keep calling it the stitch, the prickles and add that row in there as well. So I could do that all the way along on all of these. And I think that would really make it look like cactus. They're all going to look a little bit different. This one, I wouldn't do that to you at all because it's an aloe Vera. This one. If you really take a look at an aloe Vera plant, has a lot of texture along the edges that you could go in and research and try to figure out. So I'll likely spend the evening adding the rest of my details here, but I want to show you real quick also what you can do for a background. So I'm going to add a layer which I do want below the prickly pear, and I want to keep it fairly simple now I've got a background color currently on there, so I'm gonna go in and go into that and take it back out again to white so that we're working with a really clean slate here. And I'm gonna take some of those great big texture brushes. Let's just try one of these. This one is called building scott. What looks like buildings in the background that could work. The color may be not the greatest because it's blends a bit too much. So you might want to go into sort of an opposite. So if you look at the color wheel here, if you've got blues and you're trying to make a contrasting background than the best is to go to a complimentary color. And that's going to make plants or whatever it is you have in your foreground really stand out. And the nice thing about that one is because of that line there, it makes it look like you've got sort of a table and then you've got an upper part of it. So we can just keep that as is. We could go a little bit darker if we wanted to in spots will get smaller with the brush that matches that too much. So let's do like that line across there. So that's something you could do is add a line. Let's just do it with the Posca pen and go right across. You can hold your one finger on the screen to make it perfectly straight. Then I would blur it and then take the eraser, which is probably still the Posca marker, and go across again and cut the bottom of that off so that that's really smooth on the bottom, but it fades out at the top. And let's just move it down to line up to that line that we already had going on there. That's just a coincidence. So you, of course, are gonna have yours looking a little bit different than this, but I think that works nicely and you can definitely enlarge it and put it on free form so I can increase the height of it there. Remember that you can always pull this out if you want to get really fine adjustment. That's given that real depth, like as if it's a table edge and there's some shading going on in the background. And then let's just look at some of these other textures that we might be able to add to make it interesting. And I'm purposely not going right to the very edges with this because I'm feeling like that's kind of nicer for what we've got going on here. If you feel the brushes too big or the texture is too big, you can go into the grain and reduce that texture down a bit. Reduce your brush size a little bit so that you've got a bit more control. And I think we could use some texture texture. So I'm going to go in and grab something like this. Let's sample a little bit of blue or quite a bit more neutral, and then just add little bits here and there to keep it interesting and looking like it's mixed media. So let's blend that a little bit. I like that effect, how it's giving that sort of stucco texture there. This one's kind of neat gotten vintage lettering. So let's add a layer here. Go kind of grayish. And I mean, I could go on and on. And basically I'm just wasting your time here because you're gonna come up with some probably much better ideas than I have. And you don't, don't forget, experiment with your blending modes, come up with some really neat, interesting background. I'm sure once I go and sit down and really relax and take a look at what I've got going on here. I'm gonna make a lot of changes. Remember that going into human saturation at this point is helpful. You can work on adjusting your colors that you've already got color there. So why not work on experimenting in this way by just taking a look at what you can do. Some like this looks really good. I like that. It's brighter yellow, that's kinda neat. So I might end up going with something like that. So this is really the experimental stage where we'll go through and do a whole bunch of customizing to make our artworks look individual and just as interesting as we can possibly make them. So I know I'm gonna do some more. I'll come back to you with that time-lapse I promised. You can take a look at my process with all of this. All right. I know for sure amoxicillin is I want to do is add shadows and stuff underneath and beside each of these to make them look a little bit more like they're integrated with the background. You can do that. And I think I've showed you in so many classes, just duplicate whatever it is that you are making a shadow from. I would duplicate this one, take this one that's underneath and select it and let's fill it with a darker color. Use your blur and then adjust it. In a case like that, you can go quite a bit bigger and if anything, erase some of it off with your soft airbrush to get the shape that you need. I think I would do the same thing with the plants in the background and I would add a bit of a shadow behind them to make them look like there are maybe a shadow side. I'll do all of that. I'll come back and debrief with you in that final lesson. 10. Lesson 9 Time Lapse, Mock Ups and Conclusion for Skillshare: Well, we've put it in all kinds of effort here and we've come up with some really cool cactus forums. So this first part here is basically just all the stuff that we did, all the steps that we took. So you'll see as I go through the sketching stage, adding all of the little appendages and so on. You'll see that eventually I get to the point where I have completely run out of layers. And that's when you'll see me separate these into three different artworks. And that's coming up at the end when all of this has colored and all the stuff that we did together in class. So we're at the point here where we're going to start doing the sketch that I did actually with you. So that original sketch was what I had when I was working with but this is the one that I did together with you. I eventually go back to the original sketch to do all of the painting, but I think I'm gonna go back to the one that we did together as well. Because I think it's completely viable, very, very similar. And it would be kinda fun to get that feeling of making a collection. So here I am adding all of the color blocking for all of the different ones that we created. And remember that we went through and made sure some of them were darker or lighter, trying to make it look like something's, we're in the background and some things were in the foreground. When you see it like this. It's kind of interesting and you know that you can do this yourself. You can record any of the things that you create before you start a project. Just go to the Wrench icon here and go to the video and set the time lapse recording to the on position. And then at the end, you'll be able to go into this bottom setting that says Export time-lapse video. And then at the end of every project that you do, you can go back and take a look at all of the steps that you went through and all the progress that you've made. So here of course, we're showing all of the shadowing. We're trying to create some depth. And in some of the cases like with the, I think it was the prickly pear and maybe the two texts as well, I ended up really bumping up those shadows once I had added all of the texture and mixed media elements. Sometimes I look back at these time lapses and I almost can't remember all the steps that I took. And it's quite fascinating to look back at how I went through and did it. So here I'm adding that two dimensional. Now I don't think I did this, all of this in class. So you can see me experimenting and trying to figure out what kind of a look I was after and also the effects that I wanted to create. So we're getting closer to what ends up being my finished pieces. But I think it's right about here that are ran out of layers. Here. I switched into the aloe Vera and start adding some of that background stuff. So some of this you didn't necessarily see me do, but it's all stuff that we went through in class. So bringing in the different collage pieces here, I did use some in the backgrounds instead. So I had started with just doing the texture brushes, but then I thought that adding that collage and the background really made it look mixed media and these little flowers were quite easy to draw. So this is something you could also consider adding to one of your plants. So in this one here you sought, as I experimented a little bit with creating those shadows. And you can see me going in here and putting them in a lot deeper. So I'm trying to make it darker and trying to just give it a little bit more drama. I like the way this turned out. When you look at it real close, you think, Hey, maybe those little circles can be done differently or maybe the shadow could be done differently. But when you look at the overall finished pieces, it definitely looks like it all worked. I want to show you the mockups I created and you can tell me what you think. I've got a bunch of different mockups here to show you. So there'll be the greeting cards and also a few other pieces. I always feel like it's fun to do it in this way so that you can see how that might look once you finish it. How to work with backgrounds, how to add things like lettering. There's so much that you can do once you have your work. I'm so glad that you've followed through with this project because it's a really time-consuming one. I find. It's a kind of thing that you really have to want to get to that end product. You can really go in so many different directions. And I really feel like the brushes helped a lot to save a lot of time. But of course, incorporating all of your mixed media elements, if you've got photographs of any of the work that you have, you can definitely use these as fillers and to add texture and to really make it look like a mixed media piece. Now if you haven't done so already, I'll encourage you again to get that follow button up there or to add your name to the mailing list on my website. That way you're always informed of my new classes as I post them. Being on the mailing list of my website, you will also get any information I send out strictly for the School of Art or my artists resources that I post there. Remember to check out my two Pinterest sites, Dolores, Dolores NASTRAN, and teach a divorce now script. I have that board that I created for you for this class, but there's always so much more to see. And you can check out boards like my artist's inspiration board, where there are tons of ideas for different illustrating techniques. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and I will see you in my next class. Bye for now.