Procreate Illustration Hacks - From Impressions To Illustration

1. Introduction: This very specific moment in the creation process where you have all these visuals, impressions, feelings, memories after an intense experience, for example, a concert or a trip or a big life event, and you want to capture its essence. That's not easy. So you have these. You're excited to create. You have hundreds of ideas floating around in your head. And yet, you do absolutely nothing. And I get it. Knowing the exact steps and what to do after that initial spark will help you to turn those ideas into actual artworks. In this class, I will give you a simple framework to guide you from that first spark all the way to a finished illustration. Hi, I'm Alexandra AKAD Artmother, and I have been teaching digital art and illustration online for years. I'm also a Skillshare top teacher, and my classes inspired over 100 K students worldwide. And counting. And just to be clear, in this class, I'm not showing you Procreate tool hacks. We are not going to learn five secret buttons or shortcuts. What I'm going to show you are illustration hacks, creative ways of using Procreate to make the process of coming up with and creating illustrations easier, faster and more playful. We'll start by collecting free simple ingredients, an object, a landscape, and a texture. Then we will try our best to create without sketching. Then played compositional hierarchies. Use the Selection tool to build shadows and light, and I call this part Selection Tool Maxxing. And finally turn a real life texture into your own custom Procreate brush. For my project, I will be working with the impressions from my latest trip. But you absolutely don't have to travel anywhere. Your inspiration can come from a walk in your neighborhood, your favorite cafe, your garden, or anywhere else you find something that makes you say, Oh, I like that. This class is for beginner to intermediate Procreate artists who already know the basics and how the app works, but want to become more confident with illustration. And especially with coming up with ideas, getting inspiration from your environment and experiences, and actually turning them into illustrations. We are going to use an iPad and Procreate, and I will guide you through all the technical steps. By the end of this class, you will have your own finished illustration and hopefully a new way of looking at the world around you. So don't wait for the perfect idea. L et's go outside, collect some impressions, open, procreate, and let's make something fun out of them. Okay, so if you are ready, let's dive in. 2. About The Class: All right. I'm so glad that you are here. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the class structure, the class project, and the class resources. But first, I want to clarify again that we are not learning technical procreate hacks. We are going to learn about illustration workflow hacks. Okay. Why? Because there is this very specific moment in the creative process where you have all the ideas, visuals, feelings, impressions, memories after a very intense experience. Let it be a concert or a trip or something happening in your life, you know, a big life event. And you want to capture the sense of this experience. And that's actually not easy. I came up with this class after my trip to Fuerteventura. Because I would so much love to be a travel sketcher. I always bring my tools with me, my iPad with me, and I always have that illusion that when I will have some boring moments, I will not just, you know, sit and stare out of my hat and disassociate, but I'm going to actually draw my experiences right there, and I always disappoint myself. And on this trip, I actually did it once. I painted some cacti, but it felt forced. So I realized that I do this best after that experience. So when I come home and I let these visuals, feelings, everything, impressions marinate inside of me for a few days and they clear up, you know, what remains is the important stuff, because you forget so many things in the process. Then I sat down and just did this random sketch full of ideas, you know, words, my thoughts, symbols. And then I grabbed some of those ideas and turned them into illustration. This is how I came up with the framework that I'm going to teach you because it felt so liberating because with this framework, so much pressure and performance and perfectionism was lifted from the creative process, you know. Sometimes we just want to be these very perfect artists who are going on trips and, you know, creating these beautiful things and and we create for an audience. I really wanted to get rid of this pressure. This helped me really to loosen up and again have joy in the process of creation in my own way and maybe this is your way too. If this resonates, this class really is for you. Okay? So this framework has five steps. At first, we are creating an Impression Board where we collect these visuals, these photos that we take in our trips or if you don't have a trip in mind, you can just go on a walk and we choose free things that speak to us, an object, landscape, and a texture. If you are about to go out for a walk, take your phone and at first just look for an object that looks interesting. It can be a lamp, it can be an architectural detail. It can be a flower, it can be your coffee mug. It can be a plant, an animal, a person, whatever speaks to you. It can be a weird shape as well. And then a landscape, if you live in a big city, it totally can be a street view, or if you have a nice view somewhere in your town, go out and take a picture and texture, you just need to look more closely. A texture can be grass or the concrete you are walking on or a carpet that you have in your house. So there are so many things that you can collect, but I need you to focus on these three things and collect one, at least one from all these three topics. In the second hack, we are not sketching. You know, I tend to be a perfectionist. I have my workflow that I'm used to in my professional illustration work. And I found out lately that it limits me so much because I spend so much energy on perfecting a linework and the shape that, it limits me in the second part of the creation process where I'm painting, like, I'm closed up to those shapes, you know, that I've drawn. So I really wanted to loosen up and tried painting these artworks without any sketch. And it was so much fun that I wanted to show it to you. So if you also have this, you know, muscle memory of sketching out. Everything we are going to do a very little of sketching in the first hack. But in the second, we are going to just use one brush, plain colors and just paint with those. That is going to be the second hack. This is the part where we are going to also do a little bit of thumbnails and play with compositional hierarchies in a natural way. So this will be really fun. I'm sure that you will have heuric moments here. In the third hack, we are going to mix it up and basically refine our chosen variation of hierarchy or thumbnail or colors, everything that we liked in the previous hack, we will put them together to have a base illustration. The fourth hack is probably my favorite new discovery. This is the Selection Tool Maxxing. This is a trendy word lately and I just want it to be trendy. And we are going to not use a shade or branch. That was my obsession in the last decade to use, you know, grainy texture for shading and, you know, render everything. But we are going to use the selection tool and we are going to use that to build up shadows and highlights and some details in the artwork. It will be really fun. I'm sure that you will enjoy it because it has this element of play in it and randomness, and it will again help you to, you know, loosen up, uh a little bit and try out something new in a controlled environment. So this will be really fun. Finally, I love creating procreate brushes. This obsession of mine didn't disappear. So we are going to use that texture that we collected, and we are going to create a custom procreate brush from it. I will show you basically how to create this one texture brush, so we are not going to learn the whole brush creation process and the brush studio but the exact way how to create a texture brush with a seamless pattern and we are going to apply that into our twegFinally, we are going to add some details and whatever feels like it's missing from there. And this is the part where sometimes, you know, uh, our fixed ideas come back in our comfort zone and we just put everything into a little bit more comfortable visual way, but that's totally okay. This whole process is going to be really fun and liberating. And yeah, that's how the class will look like, basically. Okay, I also prepared some resources to help you in the process. So I have created, again, interactive worksheets with prepared workspaces. In the layers, you can find my own work that you can use for reference, maybe or when you are a very beginner and you want to follow me step by step, you know, you will have references to work with. You will get my usual brush set and the brush that I'm creating in this class, and my color palette. So you can use these resources to help you in the process, but I really recommend you to grab this opportunity to explore your impressions, your environment. Find your own colors and own topics that interest you. Your project absolutely don't need to look like mine. I would prefer if it wouldn't? So grab your own references, work your own way through this project. We spend so much time behind the screens that this is, again, a great opportunity to go outside and absorb your environment and focus your attention on what's around you and to see how beautiful it is. Please don't feel like you only have to upload the final artwork into a class project. I would really love to see your process photos, your Impression Board or the other photos that you have and the whole process that you are going through. If your illustration has a story behind it, I would be really honored to read them. I'm really interested in the memories, feelings and experiences that end up in your illustrations. So, of course, just share with us whatever feels comfortable, but it will be really fun to have such meaningful class projects. Alright, I think that's it. I'm so much looking forward to see what you create. So let's loose them up, go collect some impressions, and let's turn them into something beautiful. Okay, S in the next video. 3. Impression Board: Alright, so welcome to the first heck. It is called Impression Board, and I didn't name it as inspiration Board and mindmap on purpose because those are more, again, technical expressions, and they take away from the personal experience. So what an Impression Board is. It is basically collecting things that left a mark in you in some way, okay? What is good is when you, you know, have life experiences that you can turn into art. It can be travel. It can be, you know, a movie. It can be a book that you've read, a story that you heard, things that you've seen on the way to, you know, picking up your kids or going to work, et cetera, there are so many things around us, and I cannot repeat this enough. Nature is the most creative force on this planet. So a human being in itself cannot be more creative than the creation itself. So it is really words to look around in your environment and, you know, find the shapes, find the objects, find the textures, find the landscapes. These are beautiful things that surround us. So what your mission is in this hack is to look for an object, a landscape, and a texture. Now, it is totally on you where you will get these references, but try to look at it more as impressions, you know, um, and what is an impression, you see it and it starts something within you. It starts a thought process. It starts an emotion. It starts curiosity. Okay? Maybe you have a ok to your work and you see a bush that has a weird shape, and you can just take a photo of it, or you just go, you know, through a street and you see a wall with some interesting textures. You take a photo of it. Landscape. Okay, even if you live in a big city, you know, it can be a street view. It can be something that you see from your window. Landscape. It can be a scene in your home that leaves you with an impression maybe a nice corner of your home. So basically, you can take landscape as a scene, okay? Or if you have been on a trip, and not just recently, you can just go back on your camera and just look for the photos, okay, through the trip or what interested you back then. That would be another place to start. So what I'm going to do now is to go through my phone. Send the images into my iPad and place them here. That's the first step. Okay. All right. So I have the photos imported, and what we are going to do is to grab the things that left a mark in us or left an impression individually. So here it is this cacti. I really love these little shapes that are randomly connecting into each other. It is so funny. It's so funky. In this landscape, I love this road. It is very dreamy and this landscape is so plain and simple. That's what left me with a feeling. And as a texture, this might surprise you. This is this lava rock. I love these little bubbles in it. And let me give you a little spoiler what we are going to do with this texture. We are going to create a texture brush in Procreate so that we can apply it into some parts. Of the illustration, we will see where it fits, but I really want to create a brush from it and I will show you different ways you can do so from a photo, from a drawing. Let's put that aside for now. And as we are not going to do too much sketching, we are now going to just do a little impression sketching. So really just grabbing the focal points out from the image. Maybe your images are more complex and busy. So this is your time to really grab those things out from the photos with a little sketch. So what I'm going to do is to create another layer, choose black. Choose a sketching pencil, make it big, so you really don't need to go into detail. This is truly for getting the shapes out basically and kind of summarize your impressions. So let's just start with the object. I love that these are the shapes of this cacti. I'm going to kind of invent a new shape, so they are connecting like this. Here are these bubbles, if you can see them on the cacti. So I'm just add the bubble here. It is really just an impression. So these little things that stand out. Of it. But basically, these cacti, like, they connect so weirdly. I cannot get over it. So I'm just looking at some shapes and trying to put them together in a bush, basically. I need to add that I have several photos in my mind. Yeah, I really, you know, researched or observed these shapes. So they are pretty chaotic. And they have so many different little shapes or, you know, they have these basic shapes, but they are so distorted sometimes. It is really fun. So this is going to be my cacti. Kind of, I can work on it later. This is really just for, you know, getting the idea out. Now for the landscape, I can see these mountains. Here is this hill and this little road with these rocks. And now let's do the texture. So these little blobs are that interest me. So really just very roughly just grab out the point of your impression or interest and lay those down here. So these are the elements that I'm going to work with, and we are going to put this together into a final illustration. But to do so, we need to actually paint and experiment with the colors and the placement, et cetera, see you in the next video where we are going to not sketch. 4. No Sketch: All right, so welcome to the second hack. What I discovered lately because I was very stuck on, you know, creating a perfect sketch, preparing a color palette in advance, you know, before I even painted and having a clean linework and then trusting that sketch that it will look like something or look good. Afterwards, I've gone through the process. And my illustration style got pretty stiff. So lately, I really love to experiment with no sketching, and this is what I want to show you that it can really loosen it up and gives you more space for play and for experimentation because you can, you know, experiment with color separately. You can experiment with composition separately in a sketch. But what if we just go straight in and play? Also with colors. So we are going to play with colors. And what I love is to use a limited color palette. So in this worksheet, we have all these shapes. These are separately placed so that we can paint on them separately. And here are the little circles that we are going to fill with color. And as you can see, I'm already in this desert mood. So I definitely think about an ochre color it will not be sin, so I will choose a darker one, probably. Yep. And then I need color green color for the cacti. So now you can think about the object, what color it has, but it can have a different color, so it can be a blue cati, and we are going to play with that as well. But let me choose green for my kati. And I love this color. Not this one. Let's go like this. Mnh mnh. We're saturated. This is too green. Okay. This food's better. And, um, I want more of an orange maybe this color or a bech color. Let's go with beach. Maybe a slightly more yellowish one. So I will try to use these free color so that my designs are consistent. And I will choose the first little canvas and choose the texture shaper from the brush set. This brush is really textured and it is perfect for creating loose paintings, okay? So what I will experiment first with is and I'm not going to look at the reference photos. I'm not going to look at my sketches. I will try to remember from those lose sketches what it felt like, okay? What was the interest? It will stay within you. So also think about the composition, kind of, but we are going to play with that as well. So there were some hills here. And I will choose a bit darker color to add this hill like this, and I will actually fill this in. The whole. And I will choose these color again and maybe even lighter. So you can say you can play with the intensity of the color and add this road. Oops. Like this. Okay. Kind of. Okay. Now I will click this little green of mine. And as you can see, I didn't use any layers. This is going to be pretty simple. I will place my little cacti here, but I can see that it's too dark. So I will go a bit lighter. Okay. And add my cacti here. Kind of these shapes. I will choose a darker one. Forms in the back. And they had these little Thanks, here. They are a bit reddish, maybe. So I can add those little Thanks. Okay. I think this doesn't look good, okay? So These two are competing with each other. So either the road is in the focus, so this is just like, you know, a decorational element, or I need to make this a bit bigger. But what I realized is that I don't really like these greens, so I will just change my color palette, my base color palette. So let's try now on the second one. That I will make the cacti a bit bigger. Okay? So if your first exploratory thumbnail is also with this hierarchy of importance, just change them. So think about that. I will choose this more bluish color and the texture shaper, I will now start with adding and I will just create another layer over this one and make it a clipping mask so that I can work behind it. It will make it easier. I make this cacti. That's big. Mm. Like this. Like this. And is that just these random shapes, okay? So, like this. I'm not going to even play with the color variation now, because I really really want to focus on the composition. Acts. I create a layer below to automatically become a clipping mask. And I'll choose this darker color and add this as the base, you know, this rocky ground. And in the background, I will add this brown. I will add a little rod. You can see, I just changed the direction of the road and why not? I can totally do that if that fits my artwork. And this might seem a bit weird, but maybe that's just a road behind this rocky hill and I can add these mountains again in the background and make it a bit like this. Okay. I think I love it better. I think this composition works very well. And let's try something in the third one. How to improve it or do something completely different. Let's see. I just exchange the hierarchy and make the road the main focus. So I will choose this color again and let's go back to the original thing. I can keep this again. I can add now the road. Oops. Okay. Like this. So I switched sides again. Okay. I can play with more mountains. The background. So this scenery becomes more important. So this road, and I will bring this road in an even lighter color to this hill. So maybe the road road goes, you know, down the valley, up the hill this way. And what if I make this blue a bit more green? And I just Oops, make it smaller, maybe make it a bit lighter, and add this cacti all over the place. And I'm just throwing it. And there can be one here. And maybe one here in a very close way like this and I can add some rocks on the way. This looks interesting, as well. I love it, actually. But I think I will go with this one. I think this turned out pretty well. So let's just do a little recap on what happened here because maybe I was just, you know, too much in the flow. So in the previous lesson, we took photos of our camera roll Internet, a walk to our home with an object, landscape and a texture. We did some very simple sketches to grasp out the main things. The impressions themselves, then without sketch, we try to combine the object with the landscape. Okay? It is always about hierarchy. So without thinking, and this is why I didn't explain this to you in advance. Without thinking how things exist in your internal world are going to be expressed onto the canvas right away. So if you are not speculating, it might be beautiful to discover how things are in you, okay? So I didn't have the decision what I want to make, you know, the main focus of my artwork. So I immediately throw an equal hierarchy onto the canvas, so the landscape and cacti. And this is where the creator, inventor persona in you comes into the light because this is where you are the creator. And when you start to make decisions in your artworks. You start to own it more, and this is the first or second basically because the first was the impressions. This is the second point when you make your art personal because you know the decisions. You didn't just copy something. You didn't just make travel art. You were working with your impressions and then experimented with a conscious creation. This is kind of the thought process artists then have and then, you know, what makes their art so personal to them. So if you decide to go with the equal hierarchy, it's totally okay if that's what appeals to you the most, okay? And then we played with the composition. Composition is about composing the elements together to create this hierarchy. So at first, I decided to put the cactus as a center of attention and the road and the background as, you know, a scenery as a side character in the artwork. And then I switched it and made the road and the scenery the main character. Now, what we are going to do in the next part is we are going to mix it. Okay? So we are going to choose the thumbnail or the artwork that we just started. Maybe you like colors more on different ones. For example, I really love this combination for the hills. And even if in the first artwork, there were just two hills. I'm going to do three hills. I love this composition and that the sky is just irrelevant. Okay? So I'm going to take these colors with me. I will just create color palette, basically, and I will just grab these colors for myself so that I can work with them. Like this. I have the desert colors. This is the exact same one, so I will clear that. I will bring this light gray, brownish gray. This is also a different color, if I'm right? Yes. Let's go with the cacti color. I don't like this green. I will probably grab this one and this one, but I will I think work on that in the finished artwork. So what do you think? No sketching. How great it was, right? We already have a composition. We already have some colors without defining anything. The shapes, for example, can you see how different those shapes are? If I have prepared sketch, you know, the ones that I need to stick to, you know, it limits me. I would not, you know, experiment and adjust that impression of that object into the view that I'm creating. This is the magic of this hack, the no sketch heck. All right, so see you in the next video where we are going to mix it all together. 5. Mix It!: All right, so let's just mix it. This is the canvas that we are going to work on. You are totally free to create a new canvas and only work on that canvas. I'm going to work on this one, and I want my little thumbnail here so that I have a little reference. I have my color palette, right? So I went back to the no sketch worksheet. I will select this canvas and just merge it. Hold down the layer. And let's go back here and drop it. I will just put it into the side. What I'm going to do is basically work on the illustration in more depth in more detail. The first thing I'm going to do is that I'm going to create a new layer about this main little canvas layer and make it a clipping mask so that everything is within this shape. I will hold down, pick the color. I can work with my color palette as well. I will work with the texture shaper again, but, you know, work a bit in more detail. So my approximate for this part is here. So I will basically just fill it in. I will hold down to pick the other color, create another layer, again, a clipping mask, and add this other hill. Make it even smaller and you can make your eraser, this texture shaper as well so that if something didn't turn out well, you can just erase from it and adjust the shape. I will go back here and adjust this part. Oh, okay. Like this. And I love that I made this thing here. It adds a bit more to it. As if a little hill here. And I will create another layer behind it all. It already is a clipping mask. I will choose my little grayish color and add a hill here. I can leave this beach color in the background. I think it looks pretty nice. Okay. So this is going to be my background scene. I can add the sun here maybe like this as a notion of it. You don't need to go, you know, um, traditional with colors. Okay. And I will create another layer on top. Maybe start the road here where this hill ends and Okay. It needs to go out here and kind of follow this path, and it gets, you know, tighter at this part. Okay, let's like this. Okay. Nice. I will add this hail into the front. Still a clipping mask and like this. I'm not going full in detail. I really want to keep this light, and I will go back to this hill and actually continue this line. Maybe add a little hill here as well, so that it is completed. I love that with these simple shapes, what we've created, I will adjust this little road here as well. Kind of like this. Okay. I love it. And let's create another layer. Again, make it a clipping mask. I will choose the color of my little cactus. And let's work on those shapes. And as you guys see, I've started to work in a bit small manner, so I will make it a bit bigger. Okay. I can see that this road is a bit weird now, so maybe I can make it bigger. And I will click on free form and kind of squish it a bit and make it come from this side. Like this. This is why it is good to work on different layers because you can reorganize them. And as you can see, it is so different to work on a bigger scale artwork than on a little thumbnail because you might get lost in the composition, the proportions that you originally wanted. All right. So we have the base for our illustration, and in the next video, we are going to go for the Selection Tool Maxxing. This means that we are going to shade and add light with the Selection tool and not as we are used to with shader branch or stuff like that. So let's see in the next video what we can do with the Selection tool. 6. Selection Tool Maxxing: Alright, so let's just see what we can do with the selection tool. Now, we have our cacti. On a separate layer, and I want it to be alpha locked. Now go to the Selection tool and go free hand. This is a technique that is used by a lot of artists, and it can be really fun. So let me just demonstrate. I will just cut off this little piece and I can recolor, okay? I can just drop in a different color and have it a different color. Or I can go to the hue saturation brightness and Oops. I the selected, so make sure you don't do that. Go to hue saturation brightness and make this a bit brighter. You can push the color to a different color. You can add saturation and desaturate. I will create a little bit of color variation within this cactus. But I can see that this section doesn't look very good. I want to try to follow this curve hoops. Of the main cactus. Hue saturation brightness, I will push the color to a bit green and make it a bit lighter, and I will grab a I need to remind myself to select these things. I will go for this one and make it a bit more greenish and maybe a bit darker, light. Let's see. Let just make it a bit lighter. Yes. This one as well. Hue saturation brightness, saturation brightness, and also This one hue saturation brightness, saturation. Brightness, I will make it a bit darker. I will I'm doing this with every little shape. I'm selecting this. Again, hue saturation brightness. I will add saturation and maybe a bit darker color. Again, so like this, I will add hue, saturation brightness. I will make this a bit darker like this, and it already has such a nice color variation. We will play with the main shapes as well in a second. I just want to grab these little little blobs and play around with those. This is really exciting. It is a new technique I just discovered, and it is really fun. It takes away again from the pressure that I usually have with colors and I don't know. Um, you know, to make everything very nicely rendered and things like that. So it is push it a bit more to green. And it is just so easier, so much easier than just, you know, in advance, think about all the colors and stuff. This is what brought play back to me because I pretty much lost a lot of this playfulness in my artwork because of some pressures, you know, to perform and Things like that. Satura brightness, I will make it, push it to green, make it a bit lighter. Oh, it's so funny. Great. Now, let's play with the shadows. So let's just decide where the shadows will be. So probably as the sun is here, it will lighten it up. So I will just grab shapes and just make them darker. And you don't need to be precise with it. Can push the darkness a bit. And he ropes hears well. Bit darker. And I will add this shape to all of them. Oh, these little spikes or I'm not even sure how to call these darkness. Not the usual way of my shading. But it really is fun. Okay. Is almost black. Oops. Okay. And now on the other side, I will just add lighter blobs. This is just so relaxing. You can just add some nice music hoops and just enjoy the no pressure artwork of yours. Okay. So we pushed the hue saturation brightness and the lightness and darkness to create some shadows. And let's do something with the background as well. So I will go to the front hill and select an area around this cacti and push it darker. No need for, you know, shader brush or texture brush or drop shadow brush that I already have there. Then I will go for the road. And I will again select a little shape here and push it darker. Darker. But still, you know, to have this gradual thing here. Yeah. And I will play with this background as well. So I will just select random blobs and push them darker. This looks so fun. I love it. And let's go back to the road, and I will make a lighter blob. Here. What if I make it lighter. Okay, The blob shape doesn't look good, so what if I just do something like this? Okay, no. So fun. And let's play with the little heels here, as well. So I will just choose some shapes and make them darker. And by this, you know, you don't need to vary the colors that much. You are just really working with the shapes and the tuckle so effortless. And I will add some here. Push it a bit down. Well, let's go for this one. And I will Make it even darker. I was always wondering how to paint, you know, mountains. There's so much detail in them that in the first sight, I don't think I could, you know, play that much. With a mountain, but this technique is just it's just so fun. Oops. What's happening? Okay. Okay. And I will go to this back mountain and just a few don't overdo it. Oops. Oh, see. Darkness. Oops. This. And maybe I can add some highlights as well with this technique to these mountains, too. So let's continue. So about these little shapes. I will just Oops. Okay. I will just select little random shapes and make them brighter. Look, it looks gorgeous. I love it. It's so much. This technique is just brilliant. I hope you agree. So effortless to create these shapes. And, uh just add more here. Like this. And I will go back to this hill. Like this. I'm sure there is a shortcut to this one. It can be set. I didn't study. Maybe if I figure it out, I can share it in a discussion board or if you figure it out, you can share it in the class discussion board so that others can learn a little bit of trick. It is not necessary. I personally enjoy clicking that much. Um like that. Okay. I think this looks perfect. Maybe I need to make the overall cactus a bit lighter. So I will just click it, go to the hue saturation brightness and maybe make it a little bit lighter so it pops out more. And now, before we add any details and linework and stuff, let's just stop this process, take a little break to make the texture brush and then add some textures to make it even more fun. So see you in the next video. 7. The Texture Brush: Okay, so this is a kind of bonus hack to alchemize your impressions into a tool. Okay? So absorbing the environment and things that inspire you is pretty important in order to create art that is personal. So even in digital, okay, you don't have the possibility of creating your own brushes in the traditional media. Like, you can use different objects to create, you know, textures and stuff like that. But in procreate, this is huge that we can create brushes. And let me show you how to. So for a brush and I'm not going to go into explaining all the possibilities you have within the brush studio in Procreate. That's a whole other class. I have tons of classes on that. We are creating specific brushes, developing personal brush set, texture brushes, pencil brushes, et cetera. Now, I'm just going to show you how to create a texture brush. Okay? So for the base, you need a square sized canvas. Okay? Let me walk you through in a minute how a brush works. Okay? If you go to the brush library and hit the plus button and you create a new brush, you have the brush studio. The brush works on the idea that you are carrying pixels around a path. Okay? This is your path, and there is a shape that you are carrying around. This shape fits into a square, and that shape is defined within that shape. If you think of a black square that's completely transparent, what defines the shape is that there is some kind of color within a pixel. I'm saying some kind of because as you can see, at this stroke here, it is falling off. It gets transparency. Imagine a little square as a pixel. And gets filled with paint. Okay? Let's imagine a paint. It is a little bit transparent. If you are thinking about nail polish, this is a good metaphor. So the first layer is a little bit opaque, mainly in a white color. I mean, a little bit transparent. And then as you layer over it, it becomes completely opaque. Within one pixel. So within the square canvas that is the base of your brush, you have lots of pixels, right? And with lots of pixels, you can create different shapes. So here you have different menus. If you go to shape, you can see that within this brush, your base is a circle. The circle is within that square. So in a circular form, are these pixels with the full opacity placed. If I create a shape, Uh, let me just go into this brush, for example. Okay, this is a texture. Let's see. Oh, this is as well. Let's see the tick. Let's see the shaded brush. Okay, the shaded brush has this scattered shape. So there are some pixels that are, you know, not that opaque, have a little transparency. They're placed around, et cetera, from an image. This is actually, I think, created from salt. As I put it onto a surface, photoed it, and made a black and white version, um increase contrast to have more smaller scale of white and black and that's the base for this brush, and you can create several incredible things within the brush. But the second thing that a brush contains is grain. Grain is a texture behind that shape. As you are, carrying that shape around that path, you are revealing something from behind. Okay? That's the texture. That's how texture brushes work. So if I go back to this texturizer brush, let's say, this is the shape. This is a really scattered shape. This is, I think, from a pencil mark. And if I go to grain, this is the grain that that shape reveals. And we have two possibilities here a moving and a texturized texture. If I go to moving, that texture that is revealed with that shape above is going to move with that shape on that path. If not, if it's texturized, the texture is stable behind that shape, and you are revealing that texture by moving that object above that fixed texture. Okay, I hope that makes sense. Let's just see how to put it into reality. I will just insert my reference photo here. Okay. There is a possibility to create a texture from a photo. So if I want it, this is not a very high quality photo. If I wanted to create a texture from this rock, why does it have like that, okay? I would, you know, make it bigger, focus on the texture itself. It is very dark, and as we said, black is the transparent one, so you wouldn't see it, so I need to invert the image, so I will invert the image. Can you see this texture that showed up? I can go to curves and make the blacks more black with this tuggle. Here is the black, here is the white, so like that. This is not the best texture because it cannot be repeated infinitely into the other sides because texture is good when it is seamless pattern and you can do a brush like that. Let's just try it out with this texture grasp from a photo. I will click this layer and copy. Now I can go to this brush that I created, go to grain, and hit add it up here in pot and paste. Now I have this texture right here. Let's see how it looks like. I hit done, create a new layer, let's see black. Actually, it is not that bad as you can see.This texture is okay. Okay. Let's see if I edit it and hit Auto repeat. It repeats me this texture a bit more so that it is a similar pattern. Basically, you can play with the grain scale. You can play with the border overlap, you can see the squares here. So if they overlap a bit, it is smoothened. You can rotate. Oh, this looks good. You can mask hardness. I just put it on, hit done it's creating me a texture. I he done. And let's see. I don't see very much of a difference, but what if I go into grain and, yeah, moving looks better because in the texturize, you know, it is not a high resolution photo, so it is pixelated. It doesn't really look good, so moving is better. Is like moved with that shape. I can leave this brush here. You can add add it to the brush so it works, you know, better within the taper. So for example, if I want to add taper so that, you know, pressure sensitive brush, that if I push it, it becomes bigger, you need to go to Apple Pencil, and you can hit size here. And as you can see it immediately, oh, you can do that, as well. It immediately, like, tightened the edges of the brush. So now we have a texture like this, and it is pressure sensitive. So if you push harder, it becomes bigger, et cetera. This is very simple Thanks, so I will keep this brush, actually. Alright. Now I want to illustrate those blobs. Basically, the blobs from that rock is what I want to grasp, you know, from the image. So I will insert the photo again. I will just place it into the side for myself. I will create another layer. Choose my textured shaper, and I will just spend time with observing and copying those shapes. I can also make it bigger and just copy them as they are. So I can just put it into the middle and lower the opacity so that I can see those shapes. Let's just do it like that because it will be quicker. I will make my brush bigger. I'm on a new layer. I just do it. Now I'm going freestyle, and we just turn off the background and continue filling in the hole with bigger blobs and smaller blobs. Okay. Now that we have this texture, we want to invert it because again, these are going to be the shapes that will be drawn or revealed by the shape that we carry. I will choose my background to be black and this layer hit and invert and hit and copy at first. Now, I will create a new brush, go to grain. Actually, you can use it as a shape, but as a texture, it will look better, add it. I boot and paste. Hit done, let's see. Yeah. Can you see that? Okay. Let me reveal it to you. If I draw like this, you can see the squares, and we don't want that. So go to edit and see how it auto repeats it, and I don't like the border overlap. So what we need to do is to cancel. Let's make a seamless pattern from this outwork. I will go back to the original, so the black dots with the background. And I will go to the Selection tool and hit rectangle and choose the approximately from the middle hoops and swipe and cut and paste. This side will be on a new layer and I will select it and place it completely to the side I will hit snapping and magnetics so that it is in the middle. I will have some guides so that this middle dot is in the middle like this and choose the other selection and place it as well to the side. And so that this dot is as well in the middle. Can you see that color is for the middle I will just go to the close up here, it is right at the edge. I will choose the textured shaper and add some shapes to the middle and make some bigger to fill in this line here so that border will not be seen. Now I will merge these two layers and do the same vertically. I will select this below, free finger swipe, cut and paste, put it into the middle up there and put this one again here and just fill in the blanks. And now I will merge these. Again, choose a black background, invert, copy, create a new brush, grain, edit, import, paste, to repeat, and delete the border overlap. And here we have a seamless pattern. We turn off the pyre and blending as well, and it done. And now we find painting, you cannot see those squares, but you have a seamless pattern. I think it looks pretty good. The base texture could be, you know, adjusted a little bit more. So there is a little bit of overlap when painted. There are some parts that are pretty close to each other, but I don't want to overdo this. I will go back to the apopancil thing, increase the size, and now we have a nice texture brush. Maybe I can go back to shape or grain and add texturized yeah. And I will scale it less soda. It is more dense. Yeah. This removed my problem with that overlapping. I understand it now. So when you are carrying that texture with your shape, it can create those overlaps, but they are not present right now. So keep it at texturized. I can still see a little bit these squares because these shapes are a bit organized in that way. But you can spend a little bit more time on refining the base for you, but let me just show you what we have done. Okay. And I will create a new layer. And Wow, we have a nice texture, and let's just go to the next video and apply it to our illustration. 8. Applying The Texture: Okay, so we are back at our illustration. Let's just add a little bit of this texture. I have my object selected. It is alpha logged. I will create another layer and make it a clipping mask. Choose a maybe darker version of the color. The cactus is clipped onto the background, so I will unclip that one. I have a layer about I will make it a clipping mask over the cactus. I will add the texture a little bit, and let's play with the blending modes of that layer. Wow. I love this hard light thing. It looks cool. Should we add that to the whole? Let's add that. Let's try. Wow. This looks so cool. I think this is overdone, but let's just see how it turns out. Okay. I have this thing here. I need to erase it. I don't know how it appeared there. And let's go to that texture layer. You can lower its opacity and maybe go to the hue saturation brightness and play a bit Ooh. This little bit violet part looks good. Can you see that? I put it into a little bit of a violet and it adds a bit of a variety over it. It looks pretty nice. Okay. Okay. So I have it implemented. I have my landscape. I have my little cacti and see you in the next video where we are going to add some details and linework and see how that goes with our illustration. 9. Final Refinements: Now, I will create another layer over everything, and what I've thought of was adding a bit of an orange with a sketching pencil and add lime work around my cactus. Let's see how that works. Okay, I love how it looks like, but maybe I need different colors, so I will again, play with the alpines. Oh, this blue looks good. But also there's more ochre orange color. Okay. I will grab that and I forgot this one. And what I want to see are some spikes. So let's just try. What if I add some spikes around in some little clusters, smaller and bigger one. This is not overdoing it, and I can add some simple shapes. Into the inside of the cacti. Looks good. Okay. I love it. Basically, there are Vs. So smaller, some equal. A really simple way. Oh. Okay. I know what I'm doing wrong. So I will just erase these inside spikes in these bigger ones because those are the most important ones, okay? I need to change the direction of those is a bit more. So there's going to be a like that and like that. So kind of following the direction of the, you know, dimension. So I don't need to do that much or that many. A few will look good as well. This is just my perfectionism, you know. I'm sure that you have it as well. That if you are not doing it, overdoing it, you are not doing anything. This is a spiky little cactus. I think it looks so good. Maybe I need to work a little bit on the background, so it is a bit darker though, because if I create a value check layer, this is another hack from my different class and I go and fill a layer with gray and go add color, I can see my Oswek in black and white, and I can see that it blends a little bit. I can turn on and off this layer. What I will try to do is to do a little darkening at this part as well. I will select the road. Again, go to the hue saturation brightness and make it a bit darker. Okay. Maybe at this brown part as well. Hue saturation brightness, darker. There is even more variation. I will go to this front hill and with the hue saturation brightness, I think I will make it even lighter. How does that look like? I think it looks okay. Or even darker? No. The slighter one looked better. Let me see the values, I think it's kind of okay. Maybe if I go to the spikes and hit the selection tool and select this part and go to hue saturation brightness and make it darker so it blends more into that shadowy part. That's okay. Select parts of those spikes and linework and make them darker a bit. Okay, so I don't want to overdo it. I call it a day. I think it looks pretty amazing and I don't even want to add more details to it rocks or something. Maybe I will just adjust this shape for the job shadow. So I make it. I said to read it. Let me see. Unnecessary. Okay. You can do it forever. As you can see, I cannot really stop adding things, but it looks really great. If you compare it where we started, we had some images, took some impressions from it. Did some random, very low effort sketches, and then we ended up with this illustration, which is not very much rendered, which is not, you know, very perfect. But it was fun. And that was the point of this class to have fun and make personal art with our performative pressure. Okay, that was the point, mainly in this class. And you have a very cool brush. Okay, I do hope that you enjoyed this process. And that these five procreate hacks like the four hacks plus the bonus brush creation was useful for you. Let's just finalize it all in the next video, and I think it was a pleasure to have you here. See you in the last video. 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You made all the way from a few visual impressions to a finished illustration. And I hope that you are really proud of yourself because I am very, very much proud of you. What I really want you to take away from this class is that you really don't need to wait for the perfect idea before you start to create. You can go outside and experience your life. And just collect those little impressions, moments, visual things that interest you and speak to you. Then with some little decisions, you can put them together and let the illustration unfold naturally. In this class, we build that process together. We collected impressions, created ideas without sketching, mixed different elements into a composition, use the selection tool to build light and shadow and turn real life texture into a custom brush. But more importantly, now you have a framework that you can apply again again and again with completely different subjects, places, colors, and ideas. So the next time you open Procreate and think, I have no idea what to draw. I want you to remember what we did in this class. Now, I would absolutely want to see what you've created. If you haven't built your class project up during the process, this is the time to upload at least your final artwork there. Tell us where you find your inspiration if you have any stories behind it. What you borrowed from your surroundings, and I would really want to hear which of the hacks was your favorite. And, of course, don't forget to leave a review if you enjoy the class. Your feedback helps me to understand what you want to learn. And it also helps other students to decide if this class is a great fit for them. You decide to share your artwork on Instagram, make sure to tag me as a Dartmoor. I really love to show off the work of my students in my stories. Also, follow me on social media and here on Skillshare to stay updated, and it was really a pleasure to have you here. See you next time. Happy creating.