Procreate Projects: Design Cute Character Bookmarks

1. Introduction: If you would like to learn the basics of Tokyate, build on existing skills, or put your own creative spin on a fun illustration project, then this class is for you. I'm Dee Smith, a professional illustrator and qualified teacher based in Scotland in the UK. I have illustrated everything from children's books to greetings cards that have been licensed worldwide. I use Troquet for all of my art because it's super intuitive and it's great fun too. In this class, I will share all of my skills and experience with you. Let's find out more about the class project. Bookmarks are fun and easy to make. I'll give you some insider tips into trending themes so that you can add a showstopping piece of art to your portfolio, and you will have some adorable bookmarks to gift or sell. We will explore how to create cute and simple characters too, it's an action pack class that will give you lots of new skills, which you can then use for other projects. The possibilities here are endless. Who is this class for? Beginners, you can use the bookmark template, color palette, and pattern brushes to get you started. I will take you through each step of the illustration process and you will learn the procreate fundamentals as you go. Experienced users and pros, you can build on existing skills and apply these to put your own unique spin on the class. Aspiring illustrators and artists, you will have a commercially relevant piece of art that will bolster your portfolio and you'll have cute bookmarks to gift or sell. If you would like to learn more about me, you can visit my website, or you can give me a follow on Instagram. 2. Project Resources: For this class, you'll need an iPad with the appropriate app installed and an Apple pencil or stylus to draw with. I have included some project resources to get you started, let's head straight over to the projects and resources section and I'll show you how to download these. Tap on the project section of the class and scroll down to download resources. There are four files here. Funky pattern brushes, bookmark template, trending themes sheet, and color palette. Select funky patterns and when prompted, click Download. Go to your Downloads icon, which looks like this. Tap to open downloads and select funky patterns. This will export into your iPad downloads. Locate the file and then tap on this and it will import straight into Procreate. If you go to the brushes icon and tap to open, you will see these brushes at the top of the brush library. Tap on the brush set and you can see the different pattern brushes that I am giving you to use as you like. Go to your downloads and tap on bookmarks. This time, the file should export straight into Procreate. Mine has gone to the top of my gallery. Tap to open the bookmark template. We will come back to this in a few minutes. Next, go back to Skill Share and download the sheet entitled Trending Themes. Repeat the process and it will export straight into Procreate. This file is purely for reference and to give you some themes to choose from in the class today. Open it and have a look and think about a theme that inspires you. Finally, repeat the download process to export the color palette. This one will save into your iPad downloads. Once in Procreate, you will find it in the color library. It should go directly to the top and automatically set as your default palette. We have our class resources sorted, join me in the next lesson where we will get sketching our characters. See you there. 3. Sketch our Characters: In this lesson, we will begin to sketch out our characters. Let's open the bookmark template by tapping on it. I have set the template at A four size, which is a standard sheet of paper that you can print on a home printer. The DPI is set to 300. This just means that when we print, it will be nice and sharp. The template has four gray sections, which will be our four bookmarks. Each bookmark will be approximately 2 " by 6 ", which is a standard bookmark size. We're going to sketch on a new layer, so we will need to go to layers, which is located here and tap the plus sign. You should see a new layer above. Let's hold and drag it to the bottom, our sketch is beneath our template. Think of layers like sheets of paper. Each time we add to our art, we will use a new layer. This means we can easily make changes at any time. On the new layer, we can now draw. Let's go up to the brush library, which is here, tap to open. I is split into brush sets down the left. Let's scroll down and tap on the sketching set. On the right are various sketching brushes. Choose six B pencil or any brush you like to sketch with. On the first gray bookmark template, start to draw a character within your theme. I'll start with fruit because it's fairly simple and I can draw fruit from memory. These can be simple. Bookmarks are small, so we don't need anything too detailed here. Don't worry too much about composition at this point because we can sort this later. If you make a mistake, you can use a two finger tap on your screen to undo. To redo, you can tap with three fingers. Once you've sketched some simple shapes, you can add some fun faces to create characters. Again, I think simple is best here. I like to use button eyes and I like to keep them quite low on my shape for extra cuteness. I tend not to bother with noses, but you can add a nose if you like. Pause here and spend a few minutes adding in some cute faces. Now we've got our sketch. Et's think about composition. At the moment, I have big blank parts, so I'm going to copy some of the fruits and then fill up the space. To copy, we are going to go to the selection menu here, tap on the S. Check free hand and then draw around one of your shapes. Tap on the gray circle to complete your selection. Now drag three fingers down the screen, which activates the copy and paste menu. From here, select Copy. Next, drag with three fingers again. The menu will return and this time tap on paste. Now it looks like nothing much has happened, but you actually have two shapes sitting on top of each other. If you move your pen, you can drag the copy into a better position. Now, I have snapping toggled on, which makes it tricky for me to move my shape. I'll tap this to open it and I'll toggle off both snapping and magnetics. That's better. Now I can move my shape more freely. You can use the green nodes to rotate your shape, or you can drag the blue nodes at the corners to resize. Once happy, you can tap the arrow icon to deselect. We can fill any small spaces with little details, so don't worry about this for the moment. Pause the video while you copy and paste. You can also select and move an item into a better position like this. Draw some stars to fill the gaps if you like. Dots or sparkles work well, too. Our first bookmark character sketch is complete, and I think it looks great. In the next lesson, we will begin to color. See you soon. 4. Adding Colour: In this lesson, we will color our bookmark. Let's go to brushes and select the inking set. From the inking set, choose the brush called dry ink. From the class color palette, select your first color. I'm going to color this pair here, so I will select the lime green. To choose a color, tap on the color library which is here and select from the palette. Tap the circle to close. Go to layers and add a new layer by tapping the plus sign. Hold and drag this beneath your sketch layer. To make our sketch layer less distracting, we can change the blend mode to multiply. To do this, select the letter N on your sketch layer, which is here. Scroll until you find multiply. Slide the opacity of the layer down by moving the slider. We want it to be faint, but we also want to still be able to see our sketch. Begin to color on the new layer you created. I tend to trace the outline and then fill it with color. You can zoom in on your canvas by pinching two fingers. You might need to reduce your brush size. To do this, drag on the brush sizer slide, which is here. As you can see, this brush has a nice texture. We are going to keep all our main shape colors on this same layer. Move on to the next shape. I'll color the strawberry. I need to go to the color library, tap on the circle to open this and select the color from the palette. Tap the circle to close. Continue this process for each main shape, keeping them on the one layer. Pause the video and finish this. Now we have our main shapes colored. Let's add the details like stalks and leaves. We are going to do these on a new layer. Go to layers and tap this. Tap on the plus sign to add a new layer. This automatically goes above, but we want to hold and drag the layer so that it sits below our main colors. Let's do that now. Go to the color palette and select a brown for the stalks. Paint these in. You might find you need to reduce your brush. To do this, go to the brush slider on the left. Next, we want to add leaf details. Go to layers and tap plus. Then hold and drag this layer below the stalks. Select a green from the palette and paint in the leaf details. That is looking good. Let's go to our banana layer. I want to add some brown, so I'll tap on the layer with all my main colors. Then I'll tap plus to add a layer above this. Now, tap on this new layer and from the menu, set it to clipping mask. A little arrow pointing downwards will appear. This means anything we do on the clipped layer will only be visible on the layer underneath. Using clipping masks is good practice because it means we can go back and make color changes if we need to. Choose the brown color from earlier and paint on some brown. You will see it clips directly onto our shape and we don't have to worry about going over the edges. Now for the really fun part, let's add faces to our characters. Tap on layers and tip plus. Drag the layer below so that it sits above our main colors. You can see it has automatically clipped onto this layer. Go to colors and select a black. You can do this by going to the color disk and double tapping near black. I will automatically select a pure black for you. Start to paint over the faces you sketched. I do all the eyes and mouths first to save me changing the color. We will do details like cheeks, teeth, and tongues afterwards. Pause the video and keep going on with this part of the lesson. Okay. Next step, keep to the same layer, but choose a pink from the colors for our cheeks. To add tongue details, open up layers and tap on the layer with our faces. Select Alpha lock and note that a checkered pattern appears. Alpha lock means that we can paint directly onto a layer without going over the edges. Select a pink brush color and paint a tongue on some of the characters. Then select a white color, and add in some teeth. 5. Adding Details: You will need to tap on your face's layer and tap back on Alpha lock to unlock the layer. This allows us to paint on it again. Go back to the sketch layer, turn this layer off by tapping on the tick to uncheck it. This lets us get a better idea of how it's looking. I think it looks really fun and we have some really cute characters. Next, I would like to add some details to the leaves. I'm going to go to the leaf layer and Alpha loc that layer. To do this, we tap on the layer and select Alpha look. When the checkered pattern appears, we know we have locked the layer. I'm going to zoom right in and hold a finger on the leaf to color select. This color is now in my color library. Tap the circle to open and select a darker version of this screen, dragging your pen on the color disk. Now pain on some details. I'm going to add some details onto the main shape colors, so I want to find this layer. Tap on the layer and set it to Alpha Look. In colors, select a white and pin on some simple details. Those are looking great, and I think the little details make all the difference. In the next lesson, we will add a background color and some fun patterns. See you soon. 6. Background and Patterns: In this lesson, we will add a background color and fun patterns. Let's open layers and tap plus to add a new layer. Drag this right to the bottom. Go to the selection tool, which is here and tap to open. A menu will be activated at the bottom. Tap on rectangle. Tap the top left corner of the bookmark outline and drag the rectangle to color this whole shape. Don't worry if it is slightly bigger because we will trim these after printing. You do want to make sure it's not smaller though. Next, go to the color palette and select a color that will work well against all the other colors. Then drag and drop into the rectangle shape. This is a really cool procreate feature called color fill, and it is a great time saver. Add a layer above this by tapping plus, then tap the new layer and apply a clipping mask. In colors, select a lighter shade of the blue and then go to brushes. Choose the funky pattern brush set. Select a pattern brush you like and paint over the background. If the pattern is too intense, you can go to the pattern layer, tap N and drag the opacity slider. I'll keep mines at Max as I like how it looks. I'm really happy with my bookmark. I think it looks really cute and now I'm going to group all my layers together. To do this, write swipe on all the color layers. You don't need to select the sketches here. On the top of the layers menu, tap group. You can minimize this by tapping on the arrow here. I tend to keep two versions, one which has the layers and one which is merged together. Let's do this. Write swipe on the new group and tap duplicate. Now tap on the layer and select flatten. Now you have a flattened bookmark and one with the layers intact in case you want to go back and make any changes. For example, you could change the background to a darker color like this. Your challenge now is to repeat this process for the remaining three bookmarks. Look at the theme sheet and try out some other fun characters or keep the same design, but try out new background colors and patterns. Here are some examples of other themes I have used to inspire you. Once you are done, you can join me in the next lesson where I will show you how to export and print your bookmarks. 7. Exporting for Print: You will now have four complete bookmarks. I've changed the background color of mine and added some different patterns, and I really like how they look. Let's prepare the file for printing. We need to make sure we hide our original template layer. Go to layers and uncheck this layer. The original template was already set to A four size and at a DPI of 300, we would tend to always print in 300 DPI, as it will always be good quality. If you ever want to check your Canvas size and the DPI, you can tap on the wrench icon, which is our Actions menu. Do this now. Select Canvas and then go to crop and resize. We aren't changing anything here. I just want to show you how to access this. Tap on settings to open and you can see the size of your Canvas here and the DPI here. We are good to print. Let's just cancel this to close since we didn't make any changes. Now we want to tap back on the Actions menu and we're going to choose Share. Under the share image section, choose JPEG, then hit Save Image. This has now exported the bookmarks into your camera roll. Now simply print as you normally would. I have my printer app on my phone to do this. I'd recommend printing onto cardstock. Once printed, you can laminate your bookmarks to make them more durable. Great job, everyone. In the final lesson, I will show you how to share your final project in the class gallery and I will offer some final thoughts. See you soon. 8. Final Thoughts: I Congratulations on completing the class and creating your own cute character bookmarks. I hope you had fun and learned something new along the way. I really hope you continue your procreate journey and apply these new skills to create your own unique works of art. I can't wait to see your finished projects. Please do post your projects. Posting your work is a great way for me to leave you some positive feedback and for you to interact with fellow students. Be sure to comment on their work too. I know it will make someone's day and the chances are they will leave you a comment right back. Head to the Projects and Resources tab within the class. From here, click Create Project. Follow the prompts relevant for your project and then click published and finalized. If you enjoy my class, then please give me a follow to stay up to date on any future classes and announcements. Click the follow button next to my name on top of the video lesson player on your profile page. You can learn more about me on my website and Instagram too. You can share your work on Instagram if you like, but please tag me so that I can reshare and leave a comment. Finally, please leave a clash of you. It really helps my class to gain traction and I would appreciate it so much. Thanks so much for drawing along with me today. See you soon.