Procreate Practice: Creating and Illustrating With Texture Overlays

1. Intro: If you follow my work you know that texture is my jam. Texture is the thing that takes a digital illustration beyond the flat and boring stage. While there are several ways to add texture to your Procreate illustrations, in this class we're focusing on just one method, and that is texture overlays. In this class, we'll start out by creating texture overlays in Procreate, and by putting marks on paper. Then we'll chat about a couple of ways to import textures into Procreates. Because this class is about more than the simple practice of using texture overlays, I'll show you how I take an illustration from this, to this, using a series of texture overlays. I'll talk you through my thought process when creating my overlays and when applying them to my illustrations. In this class, you'll learn how to make overlays, how to import them to Procreate, how to use them on individual bits of an illustration, how to layer them, how to use them on your backgrounds, and how to unify an illustration with a texture overlay. By the end of the class, you'll learn how to create and apply your own texture overlays, and with that knowledge you'll be on your way to creating wonderfully unique illustrations. Head on over to the next video, and let's make some texture overlays. 2. Tools : In this class, you'll learn two methods for creating texture overlays to use in procreates. One method uses brushes you already have with procreate, and the other method involves actually painting with watercolor, ink, or drawing with markers, whatever you have on hand. So, feel free to use one method or both methods, whatever most inspires you and whatever works best for you. The tools you're going to need. For this class, you're going to need an iPad with procreate installed and some sort of stylus. I use an Apple pencil, but if you're using something else, that's fine. I'm working in procreate 4.2, so, if you're using a newer or an older version, things might look a little different, but should generally work the same way. For creating painted textures, you'll need watercolor paper or any sturdy paper. If you're going to be using a wet media like paints, you'll also need whatever you want to paint or draw with. So, watercolors, inks, any kind of paints, pencils, markers, brushes, whatever you have on hand is fine, nothing fancy is needed. So, don't feel like you need to run out and buy a bunch of stuff. I'm going to be using the iScanner app on my iPhone to scan and my paints and textures, but I'm also going to be taking photos of them and I'm going to show you what both of those methods will give you for our final product. Head on over to the next video, I just want to talk just a little bit about texture overlays, and then we're going to start digging into making some overlays and applying them to your illustrations. 3. Notes on Texture Overlays: Texture overlays are a quick way to add texture and depth to your Procreate illustrations. There are several ways to add texture to your digital work, but we're focusing on overlays in this class. Overlays can be used on their own, layered on top of one another, or used in addition to textured brushes and other techniques. What I love about texture overlays, is that they save time. I can create the same textures with brushes, but if I make a texture overlay, I can reuse it across many illustrations and save myself a ton of time in the long run, so I find them to be so helpful. Before we dive into the class, let's just take a look at a couple of examples of art with and without texture overlays. The first one I'm going to show you, is the project that I'm going to walk through for this class, and that's going to be this owl illustration. You can see here's the owl illustration with no texture, it's just flat colors and details. Then this is the same illustration that has got several texture overlays on top of it, so you can see it's really a big difference as far as like texture and depth goes. It depends on what your taste is. You might prefer this flat look, but I prefer a textural illustration, so this works really great for me. If you're taking this class, I assume you're interested in this technique as well. Then the other thing that I wanted to show you, is the project from my layering color and texture in procreate class, and that is this cactus illustration. It's got a little bird on it, so we already have a ton of texture on this illustration that we did by layering texture and color just like the class title said. Then this though, is what this illustration looks like when we do a texture overlay on it. You can see it just unifies everything and just adds a little bit of an extra layer of depth to it. Let's head on over to the next video, and we're going to start out by making some texture overlays, and then I'll teach you how to apply them. 4. Digital Texture Overlays: Let's get started with digital overlays. The simplest way to create texture overlays in procreate, is to use the apps native brushes paired with some blending modes and some other adjustments. You can make your textures as simple or as complex as you'd like. I like to start out by thinking of what my final illustration is going to look like, so for my work, that often means that I like a dry brush texture, I really like that dry brush quash look. When I start out with some idea of what my final illustration is going to look like, that hopes to inspire the textures that I'm going to create. If you're working in a watercolor style or working in a colored pencil style or something like that, that's going to inform the type of textures that you're going to create. Like I said, this is the easiest way to get started creating textures because we can just do this in procreate. I'm going to be using just some of Procreate native brushes, maybe I'll throw in a brush or two from a new brush pack that I've purchased recently. We'll see how it plays out, I like to just play this as it goes and see how it turns out. Like I said, I love a dry brush texture, I'm going to go ahead and experiment with that and see what we can come up with. I have got a document set up here. Let's actually double-check what size it is. Now, what I want to keep in mind when I'm setting up my document for my textures, is I want to make sure that it is big enough, that I can use it on a variety of illustrations no matter what the size, so you can see here that this is actually an 11 by 14 at 300 DPI, which is great because that's a pretty good size based on the work that I do. Because it's a texture, you've got a little bit of leeway as far as making it bigger than it originally was, that's something that you can do with your finished artwork, but because it's a texture and we'll be applying it later using blending modes and you won't really see it, it's okay if it's not, gigantic and you have to readjust it. Anyways, there's 11 by 14, this is a perfect size for me. I'm going to be using to make this texture, I'm just going to be using gray tones. You're going to see why that is as we get into the part of the class where we start talking about how to apply these textures. Let's just say that it has less effect on the color that you've created. Now, if you want to do colorful textures, you can definitely do colorful textures, you can try them out and see what it looks like, and you can also make colorful textures and then when you're done with it, you can just go into your hue, saturation and brightness, I don't have anything in here now, let's make a little blob here. You can give it a hue, saturation and brightness, you can desaturate it, and that'll get rid of your color and you're still going to be left with a nice gray. Let me go ahead and clear this layer out real quick. I am going for that dry brush look so let's take a look at what we're doing here. I should also say that normally when I work on these, I've got portrait orientation and I've got landscape right now, just because I'm filming for you guys, and I want to make sure that you can see what's going on a little bit better. This fits the screen better. I'm just going to go into my brushes, and basically what I'm looking for is just something that has got a little bit of a rough texture, so I'm just going to poke around here real quick and see what I can find. Like I said earlier, I really want to stick with things that you can get in your procreate where you don't have to buy new brushes. I think I am going to go under organic and I'm going to go with twig, lets take a look at what that looks like. See here it's got these really nice dry brush lines. I do really like that. Let's go ahead, and let's just make a texture out of this. Let's just make it a little bit bigger, and basically all I'm going to do here is just go in, and just make some scribbling marks, and this is so I can just overlay this on my artwork and it's going to make it look like I have used a dry brush paint or colored pencils or whatever, and this is just going to be the first one that we're going to look at. I'm just going to go in different directions here. Basically, I'm just making a mess. Again, you'll see a little bit later when we start using blending modes to apply this to the illustration, you're not really going to see this in a lot of detail, it's just going to add a layer of texture to your art, so it's not going to look like a sheet of terrible scribbles like I'm doing right now. I'm going to speed things up real quick, and finish covering this entire page and just this one texture and then we're going to take a look about how to make a grunge texture after this. I will meet you on the other side of the music. I've got this nice texture overlay here created with the some scribble, dry marker, pencil, marks that I have done and I'm using a brush that's native to procreate, it is under organic and it's called twig. Let's go ahead and work on another texture, and for this texture I'm just going to be using a few different brushes and then let's go ahead and use some blending modes and some adjustments as well, so I'm going to go ahead and make a new document. Let's just rotate our canvas. For this one, and I think I'm going to go for a little bit more of a grungy look. Here we go. I'm just going to go ahead and start blocking and a little bit of a grungy background here, that's a nice texture. Again, I'm just using brushes that are native to procreate. Now for this one, I'm going to make a new layer for each brush that I use, and there are few reasons behind that. Number one, I want to be able to go in and change things if I need to, although procreate basically has unlimited undo states, maybe not unlimited, but a lot. It's easier to be able to go in and just delete a layer if you've done something that you don't like instead of having to sit here and tap undo for five minutes while you undo 200 strokes, especially when you're working on texture like this. Again, I'm just thinking about my final artwork and the kind of texture that I like my final artwork to have, it's such a good thing to keep in mind when you're working on these textures. Just keeping your final result in mind makes it a lot easier to create anything usually. I'm going to go in, and let's just play with the blending modes a little bit, and now let's make a new layer, and I think for this one, let's do a lighter color. Let's see what else we might add in here for this. Again, I'm just looking through some of the brushes. That one's pretty cool. Looks like a concrete block and see if it's, I like the texture of that, maybe not for the this though, but I'll note that for future. Let's go with rusted decay to get that nice grungy situation happening here. I'm just going to make like some random blobs with it. Then I think I might also go in with a lighter color, and guys, I know that right now this just looks like the scribbling have a crazy person. What does this mean? But I promised when we add this to our illustrations, it's really going to bring them to life and add a lot of texture and depth. I do like that's not sure if I want to do any plunding modes this time, light and that's pretty cool. As you can see, I really just have a flip through see what I might like and what I might not like. I think I like hard light that really gives me a lot of fun texture to work with. Awesome, let's make one more like this, and then we're going to talk about doing painted overlays where we're actually going to create our texture on paper with paint or pencils or whatever, and then we're going to take a picture of it or scan it, and put it in procreate so we can use. Last one, these are really fun to make, so I think that if you guys started making these, you're just going to find it's a really good way to pass an hour. Obviously, I'm not going to waste that much time right now guys but just know this is super fun. I'm going to go ahead and use under spray paints, I'm going to use this brush called flicks because for our sample illustration, I'm going to be drawing an owl with some branches and some leaves and stuff like that, and I feel like this might be a good texture for maybe the owl's feathers or whatever. I don't know, we'll see so much of this as just playing it by here, seeing what you think might work, and the cool thing is if you make a texture and it doesn't work out now, it might work out for another piece that you're making down the road. Even if you're not going to use this right now, it's still a super fun exercise, it's super fun to figure out what you like, and what you don't like, and how many different fun textures you can make. Think about how this can be applied to your work, I think that's really awesome. This is really cool, so we've created three textures now, I've got some other textures in here that I've already done, and I'm going to share all of these with you guys. If you look under the your project section of the class on the website, not in the app, you'll be able to download a zip file that has all of the textures that I'm creating for this class, so you'll be able to use those in your own work if you want to, you. That is going to be it for these textures, so we have done a dry brush scribble, a nice grungy texture, and then over here we've done a nice sparkly texture that I think is going to be really awesome for the bird that, and I'm going to illustrate for the example for this class. Head on over to next video, grab some paper and some paint or some markers, whatever you have, and let's get started creating some painted overlays. 5. Painted Texture Overlays: In this video, we are going to be looking at how to create some painted textures that we can use in Procreate, or really in any digital program that we want to use. You can use these in Illustrator or Photoshop or Affinity Photo, whatever you're using will work just fine. The reason that we're doing this is because I feel like sometimes achieving the texture you want, requires actually putting paint or a pencil or pen or whatever on actual paper. Sometimes you just can't achieve the exact effect that you want digitally, and it just means that it's a good time to get out those long neglected paints and really spend some time making a mess. Sometimes it's just fun to get out your art supplies, especially when you're a digital artist and you're always in Photoshop or Procreate or whatever. It's super fun to just get out your real art supplies, I guess. I'm kidding guys, digital artists are too, obviously. It's what I do. Anyways, it's just fun to drag out your art supplies and just take a look at what you can do. I'm going to show you guys what I'm going to be using. Now, you might be using different things when you're creating your textures. Because again, I'm thinking about my desired result when I'm working on the owl illustration I'm going to be showing you here on the next few videos. I am wanting that dry brush, sort of gouache look, maybe a little light colored pencil, scribbly situations. Basically I'm making a lot of textures that I think I am going to be able to use really well in my own work and you'll be doing that too. You might be using different things that I'm using. Don't think that you need to go out and buy a bunch of expensive art supplies to do this, just don't buy anything, use what's on hand, use whatever paper you have. If all you have is colored pencils, use that, if all you have is graphite pencils, use that. Don't feel like you need to buy anything or spend a lot of money to do this. This is just a fun activity to take your digital art to the next level. I'm going to show you what I'm going to be using and then I'm going to go ahead and paint a couple of textures. One thing I'm going to be using is this tube of acrylic wash. It's not super expensive. It's really affordable, which is good because I'm going to waste a lot of it when I make these textures. I'm going to be applying that with this really pretty big brush right here. This really big brush is just one that I already have on hand. It's an inch and a half. It's got really rough bristles. I think it's going to be good for laying on some nice texture. Other things I might use, I've got a gray Posca pen and a black Posca pen. These are just paint markers. They have this really thick nib on the end. These might be fun to add some scribbles with. Then I've got a selection of Tombow dual pens that have got the brush tip and then they've got a fine tip. I maybe using some of these. Again, I'm sticking with gray tones because I like my texture overlays to be neutral colors, so I like them to be grays or browns. If I do like color overlays, it's just not what I like for my work. It might be what you look for your work, so try it. Again, if you do your textures and colors, you can always convert them to grayscale when you get them into Procreate, so that's cool. Then the last thing that I have is a watercolor brush pen. This is a black one. I don't even know if it has any life left in it. I thought it might be really good for the dry brush look that I'm going for. As far as paper goes, I've got two options here. I've got a pad of Strathmore mixed media paper that might work. Let's take a look. See, this has got a nice smooth texture. I think this might be what we go with just because if you get anything that has, like, this is a block of Canson watercolor paper. You see this has got a little bit of a texture to it. When I take a picture of it or I scan it in, it's going to get that little bit of a texture, which, if you're doing like a watercolor overlay for Procreate, then you might want to use a watercolor paper, but I think for the look that I'm going for, I don't necessarily think that this is going to be the paper I'm going to go with. I'm going to with the Strathmore mixed media. I'm going to go ahead and start. You guys can't see this off-screen, but I've got a little glass dish over here. I'm just going to start by putting acrylic wash in there, and then I'm going to get started making some messy marks on my paper. Let's get ready to experiment and let's see where this goes. Again, my goal is just to have a really great dry brush texture. I might find that this isn't what I want and I might need to try something else. We'll see how it plays out. Dig in this so far, guys. I'm just basically clumping some paint on here, just drag it back and forth across. I'm getting this really great texture. I think this is going to be really awesome in Procreate. I haven't had any water to this acrylic wash or anything. I'm just using it just straight out of the tube. Like I said, I'm using not very expensive supplies because I don't want to feel bad about being wasteful, but use whatever you have. If you've got Crayola markers, used Crayola markers. If you've got Crayola crayons, use those. I think that's awesome. Honestly, I like this already. Let's keep this one. Let's just tear this off, and we'll put it to the side for now, we're going to let it dry and then we're going to work on maybe two more textures. That way we've done three digital textures and three painted texture, so we're going to have a ton to work with when we get into Procreate. Grabbing my brush again, I've actually got a little container of water now and I'm using the same gouache that I was using, but I'm really going to water it down now. Let's just take a look and see what effects we're going to get. Again, I've got this dish off-camera here. This is going to be super wet. I don't know how it's going to work on this paper. We'll see. I'm just going to go back and forth on the page here. Again, just really getting that awesome firstly texture. You can get all the way across without re-wetting. Yes. All right, guys. That looks super awesome too. Now, because I'm going to, again, be illustrating an owl tree, I think some of this is going to be really gorgeous for the tree branches. I'm super excited about how this one has turned out already. Let's tear this one off very carefully, it's pretty wide over here on the sides. I'm going to tear this one off. There we go. Set it over to the side to dry very carefully so I don't make a mess of my desk. Here we go. Now, the last one that I want to do is, I think I'm just going to make some scribbles with some different markers. I don't even know it's a pick. I'm so excited here. Let's see what this guy has. This is my watercolor brush. I'm basically just going to make some random scribbles on this page with some of my different brushes and just overlay them and we'll see where we use this. We may be able to use this on our owl, or we might be able to use it on the leaf shapes. Again, I really just like to give myself some options. This is a really great marker to be creating texture with because you can see it's pretty well dead. It's got a little bit of life left to it, but not a whole lot. This is getting some really fun texture here. Basically, what I'm trying to do is imitate that grungy texture that we made in Procreate where it's just a lot of random blobs of texture, is the super artistic way of describing it. You'll see, because this has got, like, it's almost out. We're getting this really nice texture of the paper too. Again, this is the smoother paper of what I had. If we were using the watercolor paper, we'd be getting a lot more texture. Again, this is just a pad of paper that I had. Both of these are just pads of paper that I already had. I didn't go out and buy anything new for this, I've just grabbed art supplies that I already had in my studio. Don't feel like you need to go out and spend a bunch of money on paint and markers and whatever, these are just things that I already had laying around. That's always kind of a fun challenge too. Is going through things that you already have and seeing what you can use for textures. I know a lot of people are, scan and like fabric textures, like Jenna and nets. Or we'll take photographs of actual wood or fences or concrete or all sorts of stuff. There's so many different ways that you can create these digital textures that you can use. This is just one of them. Guys, this is looking really good. I'm digging it so far. I'm actually digging this so much I'm nervous about layering anything else on top of it, but we're going to experiment and see what happens. I'm going to take my N35 Tombow marker, I think. I don't know. I'm just basically using the side of it and I'm just making some long strokes. Again, just thinking about textures that I might be able to use on my owl or the tree limbs, branches, and the leaves, or maybe even the background because I'm going to show you guys a fun way to just use textures as your backgrounds for your digital illustrations. Just make it a mess. Having some fun here just covering the page. Just using another tumble here, just adding some more scribbles in the opposite direction. Last but not least, I'm going to bust out my Posca markers or Posca pens. I think I might just do, I don't know what I'm going to do. It helps if it works. Here we go and we're getting some paint over there. [inaudible] needs to make some fine straight lines. They were really great texture. Can also use these to make like really nice old dot in your illustrations. These are just fun to play with. I mess around with these an awful lot at my sketchbooks. These pay markers are super fun. All right, I think, I'm going to call it done on this one. I like it. I'm afraid if I add much more, I'm going to ruin it. Let's just leave it how it is for now. We've got three textures now that we created with our paints and our markers, just using basic stuff and just using blacks and grays. We have this scribbly texture. I created two dry brush gauge texture. I use this with water down a Krug wash and this white brush that I showed you guys earlier and then this is the first one that we did that is- that I just did with just the Krug wash that wasn't watered down or anything and I've got a really great texture out of it, so I'm super excited about this one. Okay, so now we've got a few ways that I can get these into Procreate. I'm actually going to meet you over in Procreate and I'm going to show you two different ways that I add these into Procreates and the two different looks that I get when I do that. So I meet you over in Procreate. All right, let's take a look at how I got my textures into Procreate and what I'm going to do now. These three right here, I've already imported and I just took photos of those with my iPhone. You can take photos with a digital camera. Honestly, most phones these days have such great cameras that just snapping a photo is going to work just fine. You can also scan these and if you have a scanner. Scan them in on your computer and then send them over to Procreate via Dropbox or whatever. The other thing that I've done is I actually use the Scanner App on my phone and took a scan of each of these three, and this is what two of them look like right here. I'll open these up in a minute and show you the differences because it's just kind of- it's nice to have options, always. But you'll kind of see from looking at these that you'd get some different effects when you use the Scanner App, because the Eye Scanner App on your iPhone is basically just going to be scanning everything in black and white. It's not going to be getting anything in Gray, so you would have two totally different looks. Before I show you the differences in the textures, let me just show you really quickly how I import these in case you don't already know. I'm just going to tap on "Import." This is going to take me to- because I've already imported things, so it's going to take me to my Dropbox folder called "Textures." All I'm going to do is just tap on the texture that I want to import and It's going to download it and it's going to open it up in Procreate for me. So yes, that's super simple. All right, so this is one of the painterly textures that we did and it's been scanned in and you can see that we get this really kind of nice grunge effects right here where we scanned this in, this looks pretty awesome. [inaudible] here on the side too. I'm really digging that. Let's open up- that was this painted texture. See the difference, how cool is that? This is still a really cool texture that we can use for our- I still really like this. I'm super happy with it. Probably the only thing that I would want to do is just do a "crop and resize" and get just rid of my drawing board which is showing. Maybe I don't need all of these edges right here, just going to hit "Done." Now I've just got my texture left that I'll be able to use. I'm just going to go in and do the same things like with this one, the edges were kind of bent up, so I've got my hand in here. Let's just crop and resize that guy. Let's get rid of these edges here. Let's get rid of my fingertips. Hit "Done." and that one is ready to go. Actually, since we're looking at that one, let's take a look at- okay, I totally like guys, this texture that we looked up from the scanner is this guy, and this guy is actually this guy from the scanner. You see the solid black areas are the ones that have really got that sort of grungy sort of texture. I love this.I think this is going to look super good on my illustration that I'm going to show you guys in a minute, where it's got all this really fantastic texture. I'm super happy with that. The last one that we need to clean up is going to be our scribbled texture and again, I'm just gonna hit the wrench icon crop and resize, just drag my corners in, hit done. That looks really good, it's ready to use. This is the last one that we scanned in and that's the one that we just cropped and resized. You can see again, it doesn't- because it's scanning app is only scanning in black and white, so this is just black scribbles and not get any gray or anything that I had when I create it as so, I don't know if this is going to be useful or not, but it's pretty awesome anyway, so we're just going to leave it as is. All right guys, so far we have done three painted textures that we turned into six textures. Here are the ones we took photos of, and these three are the ones that we scanned. We also did three digital textures that we made in Procreate. So far we've gotten nine textures and I've got an extra four here that I'm also going to give you. Head on over to the next video and I'm just going to talk about your texture pack real quick and then I'm going to start showing you how I apply these textures to an illustration project that you can follow along with. Live and Procreate 6. Texture Download : In the Your Projects section, you'll find a link to download this texture pack. I've created this texture overlay set just for you. You can use it in your class project and you can also keep it for your personal and commercial illustration work. Be sure that you are looking at Skillshare on the website and not in the app because if you're in the app, you may not have access to the Download section under your project. If you're looking in the app and you don't see the Download, hop on over to the website and check there and you'll find the texture pack Download over on the right-hand side of the Your Project section of the class. 7. Applying Texture Overlays: We have all of our textures that we created, we painted, and we also made some digitally, and now I want to take a look at how we can start applying those texture overlays to an illustration. So we're going to start simple and then we're going to work our way up from there. The first thing I want to show you is I've got my illustration set up here, and you'll notice that I've basically got everything on its own layer, so I've got the background color on its own layer, the owl and his eyes and everything are on their own layers, the leaves are on their own layer, the tree trunk, and then the little owl feet had to come in front of the tree trunk for this. The reason for all of these layers is that we're going to be using clipping masks to apply our texture overlays. Having the various parts of our illustration on its own layer is going to make our life a lot easier as we start out here. I want to go ahead and start with a simple shape, just like I always do when I'm teaching, I like to work from the easiest things to things that are a little bit more complicated, so we're going to start with the leaves. This is going to be layer 4, so we're going to go ahead and tap on that. Now, one side note here, for this illustration, I'm just going to be using texture overlays and flat colors paired with maybe a little bit of detailing at the end, so if you've taken my class on layering, color and texture and procreate, you can actually combine those techniques with these techniques, but for this class we're keeping it simple and we're just going to be focusing on texture overlay. So we're not going to be using texture brushes or anything like that. I've just blocked in my flat colors here, and I've just used the dry ink brush from the inking section of procreate, and I've just done some nice flat colors. You can also use the lasso tool or whatever method you want to use, because this particular technique that we're learning looks a little bit like cut paper, sort of illustrations, I think it's nice to have like some fairly clean edges. You can see I've got a little texture on the edge here, but not much. So anyways, another tip before we get started with textures is to make sure that your colors work really well before you start doing texture overlays, because if your colors are not working well at this point, if you're illustration is not legible at this point, it's just going to get worse when you start adding textures. So that's just another thing to keep in mind. Let's get started with our leaves, so I'm just going to tap my gallery and I'm just going to go back to my textures that we created for this class, and I'm just going to take a look at them and try to decide what I think is going to work best for my leaves and I think what might work really well is this scribbly texture that we created here, so I'm just going to swipe with three fingers, copy, and now I'm going to hop back over to my illustration, and I'm just going to swipe with three fingers, paste, and now I've got my scratchy texture over my leaves. Now, this just looks kind of like a mass right now. So what we want to do is we are going to tap on this, we're going to tap on create a clipping mask and you can see now that our texture is only on the leaves of this illustration, you can't see it anywhere else. So that's a good start. Next I'm just going to tap on the letter and on my layer here and this is going to take me into my blending modes. I am just going to see what blending modes work best for the look that I'm going for. I tend to use color brown under darken, overlay, under contrast, and then I'll sometimes used hue saturation, or color, and I'm just going to go in and adjust the opacity somewhere between 25 and 50 percent when I'm using a texture overlay. It just depends on the overlay that I'm using and the sort of look that I want. So I think we're going to stick with color brown on this, and we might come back later and add an extra texture. So here's the cool thing. If you guys have taken any my other classes and seen my other videos on YouTube or anywhere, you know that I love options, I love being able to move things around. The cool thing is if I decide I want to resize this, I can just pinch it, resize it, move it around, I can use one texture in several spots on my illustration, whatever I want is fine. So is super easy to adjust these. You can see here I'm just going to Zoom in a little bit. I've just got this really good scribbly texture on my leaves, I think that looks really cute. Let's go ahead and we're going to continue with adding more texture to this illustration, so head on over to the next video and we're going to learn about layering texture overlays and we're going to see some cool effects that we can get when we're working on a tree trunk and branches. 8. Layering Texture Overlays: Adding texture overlays to the leaves was actually really easy and straight forward. Actually, this entire process is pretty easy and straightforward. I think you're going to have a lot of fun with it. In this video, we're going to be learning about layering texture overlay. That's when we want to use more than one overlay either on one object or on an entire illustration. We're going to start on the tree trunk and branches. I'm going to pick Layer 2, which was my tree trunk and branches. I'm going to head back over to the gallery and I could use a couple of different textures on this one because they really want to get some depth. Let's take a look at our texture options here. I think that I'm going to go with this texture that we scanned in. Now, if you're using a texture that's black and white like this, you're going to get a lot of contrast, which might be what you want, it might not. I tend to just use my textures in gray and white instead. It's a little bit more laid back. You can always go in and adjust this if you need to. I'm just going to copy my selection again, back to my illustration, three finger swipe, paste. Then I'm using the pinch and expand motion with my fingers so I can make sure that it fits my entire tree area. Select my texture layer, clipping mask, and now it's clipped to my tree shape that I've got here, then I'm going to select a blending mode. We'll just tap through some of these real quick. This is always a point where I just bring it to see what I like, what I don't like, see what works in what ways. I think for this one, people do multiply, and [inaudible]. We're going to do Linear Burn. I'm just going to go ahead and pull the texture down to about 25 percent. Like I said before, I like to usually keep my textures between 25 and 50 percent. I usually don't use them at full force. We want to add another texture on top of this one. When I was doing my painting, I really liked the idea of this one for the tree trunk because it's got really good on variation in it. Again, just like the previous one, because this was a scan and not a photo, it's actually going to be black and white, and I really want it to be gray and white. I'm going to go to my hue, saturation, and brightness, and I'm just going to pull my brightness up a little bit. Going to three finger swipe, copy. Go back to my owl image. Then I'm going to three finger swipe and paste. Now, I'm just going to make sure this is big enough to fit the tree trunk. I'm going to go to my layers. I'm going to create a clipping mask, and that you see now I've got two clipping mask layers. We have got the tree trunk, we've got our first texture, and now I've added our second texture. Then I think I might work a little bit with the directionality of this, so we might be adding another texture on top of this just for fun. I think on this one, we're probably going to do Color Burn at about 50 percent. You can see the original texture underneath here, and then you can see these really nice lines as well, so I think that's a really cool effect. Now, one thing I want to do is I want my stripy texture, I want it to fall with the curve of the branches a little bit at least. I'm just going to go in with an erase tool real quick. I'm just going to erase the stripy texture that I just put on here, and we're layering texture, so this doesn't have to be perfect. If you wanted it to be perfect, you could use the lasso tool to select those areas. You see I've got all that erased now. On our stripy texture, you'll see that I've just got the trunk now and I'm going to be able to go in and add it to my branches. I've still got the texture in my clipboard. No, totally messed up all, guys. Let's go back and pick up our texture again. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Let's copy that. Back to our illustration, swipe, paste. Now, this time, I'm going to have this follow. I'm going to focus on this top tree branch first. Again, I'm going to create my clipping mask. Then let's go ahead and just add our Color Burn at 50 percent. Now, I'm going to go in with my eraser again, and you'll see here I've got all this extra bud that's showing here that I don't want it because I've already got my stripes going vertically on this trunk and then this piece of the branch, I'm going to do it separately here in a second. We'll go ahead and erase that as well. I think that looks a lot better now because it looks a little bit more like a tree. Let's do this one more time. We're going to be following this branch down here. Do clipping mask, Color Burn about 50 percent, and then I think maybe let's adjust this one if we can. That looks pretty good. Then I'm just going in with my eraser one more time. I'm just erasing the little extra bits that are hanging over here. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect. What do you think? That looks pretty great. Let's go back and then turn in our underlying texture back on again. Let's leave it on Linear Burn, but I think maybe we might just bump it up a tiny bit. There we go. I think that looks really awesome. This can be applied to anything. You can lay your textures everywhere you want to. You can use multiple textures on each object. Like I've said before, the thing that I really love about creating texture overlays is that instead of having to meticulously draw in like the bark on the tree here every single time, if I have a texture overlay, I can reuse that across various illustrations and it saves me so much time. Let's go ahead and head on to the next video, and we're going to complete some more of this illustration by talking about unifying texture overlays. 9. Background Textures: So before we talk about unifying texture overlays, I want to talk about background textures real quick. Texture overlays can be used to create quick backgrounds for your pieces. Again, we can use textures individually or we can layer them for extra interest. Let's take a look at a texture that we might be using for the background. This has an owl and maybe it's a night scene, so I think I'm going to go with this grungy texture that we created. I just want to make sure that everything was merged here. Again, I'm going to three finger swipe, copy that texture, go back to my owl and now we're going to be adding this texture to the background. Let's paste it and then we're just going to resize it a little bit. Maybe let's rotate it too. I think, because this reminds me like a cloudy background like maybe like a cloudy night. Just go in and adjust our blending modes, and let's see, it looks spooky. So I'm going to go ahead and just pop this down to about 25 percent. You can see that I'm getting a really nice texture, but it's not fighting with the tree so much like value-wise. So I do like that. Now, another thing that you can do on your background, just like on the foreground, is you can layer textures if you want to. So I've got maybe the sky texture, and then maybe I go back in here, and maybe I want to use this texture as part of the background as well. So I'm just going to go into hue saturation and brightness. I'm going to lighten that a little bit, then I'm going to copy. Go back over, there's a lot of copying and pasting involved here. Let's paste it, and then maybe use it like this so it looks like there are some other tree trunks in the background. Let's see what happens if we do that. I'm not sure that looks like tree trunks, but we'll see. I definitely I'm feeling, I like this. I think it looks a little bit better. Let's see. That brightens up the background a little bit and I really think it hopes that owl pop against the background, and I think the sky still looks dark enough that it could conceivably be like darker, dusky, or whatever. We've got our background finished now and basically what we're going to be doing in the next video is, we're going to finish the owl because we need to add some texture to our owl. We're going to add just a few details and then we're going to talk about how you might add a unifying texture that is going to bring the entire illustration together. 10. Unifying Texture: So we've added our background texture, the texture on the tree, then we've got some texture on the leaves and now let's go in and just add a little bit of texture to our owl character. I'm going to turn my sketch "Layer" back on real quick so I can see what I was thinking of. Let's see, so I think I'm probably going to do a couple of textures on my owl so let's go back and look at our texture "Gallery" and see what we have to choose from. I think maybe, I was originally thinking about using this little speckling texture but I just am not sure if it's going to work really well so I think instead we'll see what we can use here. Maybe this texture which I made for you guys. This is included in your texture download pack that you can get under the your project section of the websites so let's just see what it looks like if we add it to our owl. I'm just going to make it really big so you can really get a lot of that texture. So, well, let's go ahead and just bump that down a little bit, it's going to make our colors look crazy. So I can see now that this texture really isn't going to have analytic enough variation in it to really make much of a difference here. Well, here we go. If we use it as an overlay it looks pretty good. So I like that and then let's go ahead and just add one more texture to our owl, I want to get his eyes and his wings and everything with a really nice texture too so let's pick maybe this cool gray texture here, copy it, and a lot of this is just trial and error. You're going to think that something is going to work out really well and then you're going to get it on your illustration and you're going to discover that it doesn't really work out that well after all, which is fine. So let's go ahead and just make our clipping mask so we can see what's going on here and we're actually going to be going in and erasing part of this as well. "Multiply" in a go at about 50 percent and I'm really just focusing on the wings, and the eye, and also the beak areas so those are the areas where I want to make sure I've got some texture because they don't really have much. That actually looks cool so now I'm just going to go in and erase outside of the eyes, the beak, and the wings. I'm just sort of roughly erasing not being real specific about it. So, I think that looks pretty good and then I think we just need to go out and cut his feet on a separate layer here because they needed to be in front of the tree land. So, I think I'm just going to go ahead and add that same texture and then maybe this time we will do an "Overlay." I think that looks pretty good. Then actually now that I see those, I think I'm going to go back and do an extra little texture on his beak because I think that overlay on this field looks really good. You see? Like I said, it's just trial and error, it's just figuring out what works best and sometimes things don't work out that well, sometimes they do. Let's go in here and just erasing around his beak. So there we go, I think that actually looks pretty good, I think one more thing I'm going to do is just go in here and erase this texture on his eyeballs, it seems it's a bit much. Again, like I said, this is just trial and error, this is just a matter of figuring out what you like, what your taste is, what reads really well on your illustration. So I think only real problem that I'm having is right here, I forgot to erase on his tail and I think that that's blending ain't too much so I'm just going to erase part of that texture because I really like the site over here I think that looks really awesome and adds some interests. Now that I'm in here, I think I'm just going to add one more texture. I know guys keep saying that I'm done but then I just keep thinking of, like, one more place where texture look really good. So we're just going to create a clipping mask, we're going to go ahead and just do our "Overlay," do it about 50 percent and then I really just want to highlight this little area right here so I've got my eraser selected and I'm just going to think will just go this way, just meet up right here, that looks cool. Now I'm just going to pick my bigger eraser and erase the extra bits. So what I want to have the texture on it just this little spot on his forehead here and we're going to go in a minute and add some details because we need to give them some feathers, small details on his chest, and things like that so. Yeah I think that looks super fortified. So next up, let's talk about adding a unifying texture and then we're going to go in and just add some final details and take care of everything. So the unifying texture is going to be a texture that goes over the entire illustration, it's not something that you always need but sometimes it's nice to just have one texture over the entire thing that really helps to unify the piece. So even if you haven't used a lot of other textures, you can actually use a unifying texture overlay on any of your artwork just to really make everything cohesive. I always think of it as like the opposite of an underpinning that you might do if you were dealing with acrylic painting or something like that, I flipped the texture of related does the same sort of job of making everything feel cohesive and it's from the same light but it's just an overlay instead of an underpinning. So let's take a look at what texture we might want to use as owl overlay. So let's see what we have, that might be good. I'm thinking maybe this grungy texture right here might work really well. Let's see what we've got, let's take a look at the sky right here. We've got that emerged on one layer, I think maybe I'm going to make it a little bit wider and you don't have to make lighter here, you can just adjust it as you paste it but I like to do these adjustments in advance. Now keep in mind that if you're doing these adjustments on your textures and you go back to your gallery, this adjustment is going to be permanent. So if I want to undo this adjustment, there is where I originally was and now when I come back into it I'm going to have my original texture so just keep in mind that as you're moving around your saturation and brightness sliders when you're making your textures, that these are going to be permanent adjustments because when you go back to your gallery then it's gone. So it might be helpful to duplicate your original file and then just make your adjustments on a new file, whatever works best for you. So we're going to go back to our owl illustration, I'm going to paste. Go ahead and make this a little bit bigger and I think maybe rotate it so the lighter part is going to be in the top, maybe like a little moon, maybe cool. Just sort of to indicate a moon and then same as always, we're just going to be choosing our blending modes, we're going to test things out and see what works. I think color burn is going to be pretty crazy so that may not be a good choice. I think whatever we go with, we're going to be dealing in like the 25 percent range because we really just want us to unite our illustration, we don't necessarily want it to overpower everything that we've already done. So you'll see on this one, this is just over all of my other layers that's just sitting on top of them, it's not clipping masked to anything. So I'm just going through here seeing water like, I think maybe that brightens it up too much. Really know that does match at all. It actually does add a really nice flow, very unifying texture I do like that so far I think "Overlay" might be our best chance on this one. I think "Overlay" is going to be the winner because I think that it makes the illustration look really clean and fantastic. So that is all of our texture that is finished up, we've done individual textures on the leaves, on the tree trunk, on owl, we've done layer textures on the background, and then we've done a unifying texture over the entire thing. So basically what's left at this point is just to do some final details on owl and see how our final illustration turns out. So head on over to the next video and let's just go through the process of adding the final details. 11. Final Details: Alright guys, so that's it. I've just gone in with one of procreates native brushes, which is one of my favorites. That's called the dry ink brush, and I've just used that brush to add some extra details. I added some more detail texture on the trunk. We added some little line art to the leaves, and then we added some stylistic feather details to our owl. Then I also added some little star glow onto the background, which I think is really cute. I hope that you've learned so much in this class about using textures. I hope that you're thinking about how you can apply that to your own work. About how you can apply that with other techniques that you've learned in procreate and other digital art apps as well. Head on over to the next couple of videos, and I just want to wrap up, and I want to talk about your project for this class. 12. Practice Makes Better: I love texture so much in my illustration work, but there's definitely such thing as too much texture. There are no hard and fast rules. It's art, so what you need to do is practice, experiment, think about illustrations you enjoyed looking at, and then solely figure out how much texture is just right for your work. I sometimes will duplicate a file and try a few different versions of texturing and then compare the final results before deciding which version I prefer. Especially if you're just getting started adding texture to your illustrations, I think it's important to compare different textures and how they look and how they affect your illustration. Another big help is printing out your work. That's a really good way to see if you're using too much texture or too little texture, if it's making your illustration difficult to read. I always find that seeing my work on paper helps me pinpoint things I wouldn't have noticed when I'm staring at a screen. If you have a printer at home, it doesn't have to be fancy, it could just be a regular old inkjet printer, try to print out your illustrations. I mean just smaller versions. You don't have to do huge versions if you don't want to, but printing them out and taking a look at them is really going to help you grasp how much texture you want and what looks good. Again, it's just a thing where you need to make time to experiment with these techniques. You just always need to remember that practice makes better. 13. Your Project: Your project for this class is to create an illustration using your own texture overlays that you've created or the ones I provided for download here in the your project section over on the right-hand side. I want you to share your illustration with the class and or post it to your favorite social media accounts. I love to see the work that you're creating. I'm always excited when projects get posted to my class, and I do my best to give feedback and leave comments on class projects within about 24 hours. Sometimes it's a little bit slower, so I hope you forgive me, but I really do my best to comment and leave feedback on everything because like I said, I just love seeing projects, it's so fun for me. If you're going to be sharing on Instagram, use the hashtag #stephfcskillshare for a chance to be featured on my Instagram stories. I post student projects every Monday on my Instagram stories and I would love to share yours as well. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you make, and I hope you had a lot of fun with this class and I hope you have a lot of fun with this class project as well.