Procreate Snacks: Pencil Textured Bunny

1. Introduction: Are you ready for a little Procreate snack? In this fun mini class that's great for beginners in Procreate, we'll concentrate on learning two things. We'll learn how to tweak your tools and procreate so that you can create a color pencil look, and then we'll learn how to draw a cute bunny just in time for spring. So we'll go step by step, and I'll show you how I created the sketch for this class. Or if you want to debriese through the class a little bit more quickly, I've also provided a ready sketch for you that you can color in. I've also shared my color palette with you, so it's really easy to get started. All the resources for the class can be found in the resources section right underneath this video. You also don't need to purchase any brushes for this class because we're going to be using six P pencil brush that is already included when you purchase Procreate. Hi, my name is Mirka, and I'm a picture book author and illustrator who's worked with publishers Big and Small. I've created a range of books from graphic novels to picture books, nonfiction and fiction, and Procreate is the hercram that I mostly use for illustration. I use it to do all of my sketching, and then also many of my books have completed illustrations that I've done in if you're ready to step up your procreate game with a new skill, jump in class with me. I'll see you there. Bye. 2. Project Description: I'm so glad you're joining me. In this class, we're going to do an easy project that's going to be in Procreate on the iPad, and we're going to be creating this bunny rabbit that looks like it's been drawn with color pencils. We'll go over the sketching process first. And if you don't want to learn how to draw the bunny and you just want to skip straight into learning how to do the color pencil process, I've already created a ready made sketch for you. But if you would also like to learn how to draw the bunny, you can follow me step by step as I go through my sketching process and thought process for coming up with the image for this class. And once you have your bunny rabbit on your canvas in procreate, then it's ready to tweak our brushes and get our color palettes ready and then color your bunny in. You can either follow the color palette that I've provided you. But really, bunnies come in all different colors. And so you don't have to go with a white bunny like I did. You can choose to do a brown bunny, red bunny, blue bunny, whatever color bunny that you want to do. Also change the flowers in the background, and you can change the egg in the sketch into something else. If you don't want to make it into an Easter theme, you can make it into a wooden sign, for example, and it can say happy spring, or you can just put the bunnies hands down and just do a cute bunny with some flowers or some grass. Once you're done with your project, I hope that you either take a screenshot or post an image underneath in the project section, which can be found in one of those tabs right underneath this video. All the resources that I mentioned in this class, like the color palette and the sketch and the watercolor paper that I scanned in, all of those can be downloaded in the projects and resources tab underneath this video. Without further ado, let's get to our main project, set up our canvas, and get to sketching. 3. Sketching: So let's start with creating our canvas. And if you don't already have an eight by ten that you've created before, we can create a new canvas. And then I'm going to change my measurement into inches over here, and I'm going to make the width into eight, and then the height into ten. And in general, I think this is a good size to start with if you're just doing this for if you're planning on doing a poster, then you obviously want to go bigger, but since this will be more of a postcard size or something that I'll share online, I don't need to go any bigger than eight by ten, and even a five by seven might be enough, too. I'm going to set keep my DPI ups at 300, which allows me 70 layers, and then I'll hit Create after that. And so now we have our Canvas. And so I wanted to share the original idea I had for the card. It was a little bunny kind of sitting on its side like this. But when I was thinking about the class, I thought it would be fun. To make it more of a greeting card design. And so I added the Easter egg and flipped the final design around. And so we'll go through drawing steps on how to create our design. But if you would rather skip the sketching part altogether, I've already created a ready made sketch for you that you can use. But let's go through the steps of sketching something like this first from simple shapes. You can kind of see from this top sketch that I was using a triangle that has a right angle on it to create my sketch. And so we'll start with the same things over here. We'll just be using one brush for this class. It's the six B pencil that comes with Procreate, and so this is just the unedited, and in the next video, we'll talk about how I like to change my brushes. But just for sketching, I'm just using the six B pencil as it is, and I usually like to go a middle gray when I'm sketching. And so to get our bunny going, I know this is the general area of what I want my card to be. And then I know that my bunny, I want my bunny to be central in that area, I usually sprinkle flowers. You know, if we have flowers, I want there to be multiple flowers, and then we've got the ears, and then the body's kind of divided up into three segments. And then this is where the arm is, and then this is where the rest of the body is plus the tail at the end over here. So that's kind of how I get my sketching going. And then I know I'll have an Easter egg over here. And instead of the Easter egg being completely, you know, vertical, I felt like it would look nicer if it was on its side a little bit. And then in my original one, I didn't have an Easter egg, so the feet were down over there. But with the Easter egg, I wanted the bunny to be holding it. And so I tried a couple of different ways. So at first, I tried to sketch just one arm over here, but it looked kind of funny. And so in the end, I ended up putting my Easter bunnies hands up a little bit higher on the egg, so then it looked like it was kind of leaning on it. And so now let's start working on sketching our bunny rabbit. So we'll start with kind of a tear shape, and then we'll add. And since the bunny's kind of looking off this way a little bit, I'll make this side of the cheek bigger, and this side of the cheek smaller. And then also I'm moving the eyes with that a little bit. And then where my two lines are I'll create depending how big you want your ears to be kind of aiming right at this intersection right here with one of the ears, and then a little bit of space, going up with the other ear and also aiming down here at this intersection. And then getting the tip of my ear and going down to that same intersection and same thing over here. So this ends up being a little bit smaller and this inside of the ear ends up being a little bit bigger. And then I'll draw the muzzle inside over there. And then, so this is my bunny's nose. And because it's turned a little bit sideways, I'll make this side bigger and this side smaller. And then we'll continue with the shoulders, there's one paw and another paw. And then this arm will come. And then continuing on this line where triangle is going, adding the bunny's bottom over there, and then the curve for the leg, and then his little foot. So this is kind of an oval or you could think of it like a curl going in like that, too. And so there's little his little paw. And then where this little triangle is, that's where we'll add. His tail. And then instead of doing the letters kind of this way, where they're falling kind of off my page, I wanted my letters to be going up, so they're more more kind of positive and happy feeling. And so to sketch my letters, I usually just do very lightly first and then I'll sketch on top of them. And then you could write spring or you could write Easter. So I have Easter on our card, but you could write spring too. And then if you end up running out of space, I could either take my letters individually and move them over a little bit. What I'm working on. Sometimes I'll do that or sometimes you could also just erase everything. And so maybe this one, I'm going to just squish it in a little bit. And now now I've got room for my letter G over here. There we go. And I feel like this P is looking a little awful over here. And so sometimes it just takes a little bit of a while. See, there's a little bit of a slant over here. I want to make sure I'm adding that same slant down over here. That looks better. Then to start with my flowers, we have daffodils growing right in our yard, and so I wasn't using any references. They're fairly simple flowers to draw. So they have some petals that kind of radiate out. Usually, I end up drawing five or sometimes I'll draw six. And then there's kind of a trumpet shape. And then if we're looking straight on, there's usually a little bit of a curly. This line is curly, and then it kind of goes in. So we'll do one over there, and then to make sure that not everything looks the same, I've added this one over here. So I'll draw all my little pieces first, and then we'll draw our trumpet shape. And then draw the rest of our flour there. And then we've got I added some tulips. And the tulips, I made very simple shapes. And then because I have these two, I like to have things and threes or just to make sure that things are kind of balanced. If I'm imagining there to be a lot of kind of greenery, back behind over here like that. Then I want to make sure that I'm kind of balancing all my colors out. And so I'm doing a little bit smaller flower over here, so red, red and there should be, in my opinion, one more to balance the red flowers out over here. And then if I have two big yellow flowers, I added there's no room to put another. Maybe there could be a yellow flower there. But since there's only two things over here, I added a small little just coming up flower down there. Then usually my greenery, I just kind of add that around with very loose lines first, and I thought it would be nice for some of the leaves to kind of cut in front of the egg just to give it a little bit more dimensionality. And then once I have kind of my general sketch done and it fills out my space nicely, then what I usually do is just lighten it up and do another layer on the top, and then I go in and I work those lines in more carefully. And when you're using just two fingers to tap, that erases. And then I've chosen to do slightly bigger eyes and so you could do just little dot eyes like that, which would be super cute. And if you want to have a little bit more of a directional glance, then what I've done is basically color this in and then add a little pupil in there. And so the same thing I'm going to start with going here, and then the it's usually around or down this way. And then if he's kind of looking towards us, then this eye be around like that. And so then it's just coming in. Sometimes I need two passes and sometimes one pass is enough to sketch my thing out before I start coloring. And you can use the curves, the snapping curves and procreate to your advantage. So over here, if I'm going around over here, And then I can go to Edit ARC and to make it more of an egg shape. It won't do an egg shape, so that's why you got to mess with it a little bit, and you can't do the whole egg all at once. So we'll do something, like, Well, you can also, use your liquefy tool and push. I'm thinking a bat a little bit bigger. So I'm just pushing that in to be more of a egg shape. And then I don't know if we want this to be super jaggy at the bottom over here so we can simplify some of those lines a little bit. Both daffodils and tulips have kind of similar leaves, and so it's just a matter of layering some in there and trying to make it lively. So, like, this is very even two that look exactly the same, so maybe we'll do a skinnier one, something like that. Trying just to vary it, maybe something like that. So they're not all going the same way. So just trying to vary the directions of things. All right, so we can delete or just put that one away, and now we can look at it as a whole. And to me, the head, so this is the great thing about proctF me right now, looking at the head, it looks a little bit small. So what I can do is I can grab the head. And make make sure I'm in my uniform section, and then I can make it bigger. I can move it. And so maybe that's good. I'm also thinking that my forehead for my bunny looks way too big. And so then I'm going to come in over here and just simply move his forehead down. And so that looks a little bit better to me. This just needs to come out a little bit. And then I feel like this hand is going too low, so I'm going to bring this elbow up a little bit more. So I'm just going to do stick letters for right now, and then just use a thicker brush to draw them instead of trying to do them draw them in a fatter style. Trying to look at this slant, make sure I'm doing the same slant over here. Alright, there we go. Now, you can if I wanted to still, like I said, sometimes I'll do extra rounds, and so still not happy with the shape of this eye. I'd like for it to look a little bit more friendly. There we go. That looks nicer. So I'm gonna erase this guy behind over here. There we go. Alright, so now we have our sketch sketch all ready over there. And so our sketch is ready. And so, as I said, you can either sketch your own bunny where it'll have a little bit more of your flare or if you want to work through this class a little bit faster, you are welcome to use the sketch that I have provided for you. And so I'll use this one since that's the one that I shared with the class. And in the next video, we'll talk a little bit about color palette, and then we'll tweak our brushes, and then we'll get to coloring. 4. Set Up Colorpalette: Alright, so in this video, we'll talk about color palette really quick. And so you can find your color palette underneath in your color menu, so you can go to Color Palette. If you wanted to create a brand new one for this piece, you could hit the plus sign over here and hit Create New palette, and then it gives you a brand new palette to work with. And to add colors to a palette, I usually use the color disc. What you do is you just pick any color, and then you hit it. And if you ever want to change a color, then or delete a color, you just hold for a little bit, and then you can either delete the swatch or set the current color. So for today's video, I've already created a color palette that you are welcome to use. You can download it and then upload it onto Procreate. And what you would do is you download it onto your iPad, and then to upload the color palette, you go from here. You go new from file. And then you would find your color palette wherever you saved it. So mine is right over here. It says spring bunny color palette. And then I hit that one, and then it just imported my new palette in. And since I already have two of them, I'm going to delete this one. Alright, so this is the one that I'm going to be choosing colors from. And in general, the colors in this end are the colors that I'm going to be using for the bunny. And then we've got colors for the flowers over here and for the Easter egg, colors for the leaves over here, and then just some other random different variations. The yellows are for the daffodils. I've also included and if you don't like using this and you want to pick colors from somewhere else, also you could ei take a screenshot of the color palette. And so if you wanted to use it either as a reference or paste it onto a paste it onto your canvas, then, so you could use this over here and color pick from here by just holding down or the other option. Sometimes what I do is I just add I can just add colors onto my canvas directly. And then instead of always going up here to switch, I can just go in here and switch colors from here, too. So sometimes that's honestly the fastest way for me to work. And so if you wanted to paste this onto your canvas, too, you're welcome to do that. Either way you want. And depending on what you're working on, you can also pick your own color palette. Like, so we're going to be working on kind of a white bunny, but if you wanted to have a brown bunny, then you could add colors to your color palette in this section to add colors for your bunny rabbit. And in the next video, we will work on tweaking our six B pencil a little bit so that it'll give us a nice hand colored look on our final piece. 5. Tweaking Brushes: So in this video, let's get our brush ready. And so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using the six B pencil that comes with procreate. And to create a variation, you can see I already have a couple of variations, and I just title them so I know what each brush does differently than the original one. So just to show what I usually do is, if this is my regular brush, it looks like that. I usually have a version of the brush that's streamlined, so you can see how this one, it doesn't want to make it doesn't want to make these loops. It's streamlines. But if I'm doing curvy lines or something, it'll just make them a little bit smoother. But what I don't like as much about this one as if I'm trying to color things in, it ends up just being kind of grainy and so and not quite what I was looking for. And so with this brush, what I wanted to work on, if I'm coloring it with it like this, I wanted to just add a little bit of variation to it. So I made this brush called color shift. And so to adjust your brushes, you swipe over to the left, and I duplicate. I don't mess with the original brush, and then we go into a brush settings by tapping on it. And then from here, we're only going to shift a couple of the settings over here. And so we're going to go to the so I don't like the graininess over here as much. And so we can play movement. Kind of play with both. See if we can get a little bit of a different kind of grain in it. We can also zoom it, see how it changed. It's kind of there's a lot of big kind of trunky things in here. And so if I'm changing the zoom, see how it makes that texture a little bit smaller. And so let's play with this one. So when I go this way, they become very smudgy. And when I go this way, so a lot of these settings, I just play with it to see what I like. And then when I go this way, it becomes more kind of grainy like this. And so we'll go somewhere in between, something like that. So we went to the grain, and we changed the top three settings, and then to get the color shifts, I don't mess with the stamp color, but I go with the stroke color. And with this one, it's hard to see it right here, but I change these ones up a little bit. And so I usually don't touch the darkness, but I usually change this and I change them very minimally. You'll notice if you change it too much, then your colors are going to change too much, but I just want there to be a little bit of a variation. And so you can play with these and you can set them up. So here's how I've kind of set them up. I have hue at 4%, then I have saturation at two. Then we'll add a little bit of a lightness shift in there, and then we'll add a bit of a secondary color. And you can always come back and mess with these and change them around a little bit. And so the kind of the basic dt here, I'll switch the hue. You kind of know what's saturation and lightness makes it lighter and darker. Saturation makes it less saturated and less saturated, and the hue shifts the colors a lot. And so if I'm over here, I tap and it does yellow. Does red and orange. And so this is too much color shift for me. And so, going back over here, putting this down a little bit less, let's see. We'll go with four. Now when I'm coloring with it, so we have this orange color. I'll give us a little bit of a variation, but it's very minimal. It's much less. So there's a yellow, orange, kind of orange, but it's still pretty close to and so that just gives me a little bit more of a lively. And so now I can compare these two. So it's a little bit smoother maybe than what it used to be before. But now changing the texture of it or changing the whoops. Changing this just a little bit just gives me that little variation in the color. And then for the last thing, I want to be able to draw a little bit bigger. So a lot of times what I'll do is I will go to the maximum properties, and I'll switch this up. So right now, I think it was at 9%, but what I want to do is I want to be able to go quite a lot bigger. And so now that just enables me to get a little bit of a bigger size. And then, lastly, when we go to color, I usually set my opacity down. So I'm not at full opacity because then it's just hard to hard for it to kind of see through or kind of the layers of colors to seep through each other. And so I change it, so I'm about, you know, a third down or so. And then when I'm messing with my colors, then it's nicer because the colors kind of show through. Show through there. And then I can lightly color, and I can get those nice variations and more of that hand hand drawn look with my color. So in order to change the title for the brush that you just created, you would go to the brush. You would go about this brush, and then you just tap on the top, and then you can change it to whatever. So for me, I've I've labeled mine color shift. Oops. So now I know it's my original six B pencil with the color shift, and then hit Okay. And so now in the next video, let's get to our actual coloring of this image. 6. Coloring: Alright, let's start working on our illustration. So over here, what I'm going to do is start another layer underneath my actual image layer, and I'm going to set my sketch layer to multiply, and I'll have it on the top. And I can bring the opacity down, so it's a little bit easier. We can even lock this just to make sure. A lot of times I'll lock these things just to make sure that I end up not coloring on top of them, and we'll start working on our layers over here. And usually what I would do is I would do I'd probably work all the leaves in the background in one layer. We can do the flowers on a second layer, then do the bunny in a third layer and our Easter in a fourth layer. And then that way it's easier for us to go back and fix any mistakes that we have. And so let's start with our flowers. We'll start with our daffodils over here. And we got to make sure we have our correct pencil selected. I'm having my opacity down. You can change your size. And so I'll pick let's pick. I'll pick the darker color first, and then we'll just start coloring it in. And so every time I lift my pen up, it'll pick a slightly different shade of yellow. And you can reference the final sketch for to look at the colors that I've used. But basically, setting up those settings is really what will give your what will give your piece the handmade look. And you can either sketch a little bit kind of looser or you can do multiple layers on top of each other. It's up to you how you want it to look. And so this is using a fairly small brush. We could also increase the size a little bit if we wanted a little bit less of a grainy or a little bit more of a rougher, kind of bigger texture, a right now, if I'm printing this as a greeting card size, you can't really see my sketch sketching over there. And so I just love the way that the colors shift. And then that way, I'm able to get a lively surface over here. And it's okay to leave some white in there, too. And if a color is kind of really bright, like that yellow is just extremely kind of neon yellow, you just pick up a different color and color right on top of it. Like I said, I'm leaving little areas of white in there. I'm not completely coloring things in, and that'll keep things a little bit lively. And so when you're working in Procreate, don't be afraid to mess with the brushes. Always start with the copy of the brush, and then that way, if you don't like what your brush is doing, then you can just delete it and you still have your original one left. And so now we have this really great texture on this flower over here, and I'll switch to a more orange color. The middle. And I'm kind of trying to color this with going in the same direction as what I'm imagining the little lines on the flower. It has these little ridges going towards the inside, so I'm trying to color in with the way that those ridges go. In the same way, we'll color in the last daffodil. And if you're not getting the color that you like, you just keep tapping and eventually you'll get a different color in there. And then we'll work on our tulips and get them all ready to go. And so you can see this is fairly fast to get some of these colors in. Then we have a couple more. We can make those more of a pinky color. You can always decide if you want to do outlines if you want to do them with the lighter color or if you want to do them with a darker color. And then I'll pick color from there. And then we can work on one layer beneath it and work on some greens. Just kind of randomly. I usually just kind of randomly pick colors and go for it. Maybe some lighter colors on the top, and then some darker colors on the bottom. And a lot of times I'll do everything, and then I'll go back and tweak some colors. In the beginning, I just kind of slap everything on there and then look at how it's balanced and see if things need to be changed. And I'm doing kind of like a apory color on the top over here for the daffod they have this kind of section up on the top that's kind of a color. And it's always okay to just pick colors from your canvas that you've already colored into. Alright, so now we've got a pretty nice, lively background over here, and we can start working on how about our bunny for the next one. And so for the bunny, I have these colors kind of picked out over here. So this is kind of this kind of pinky gray color is what we'll use, what I was going to use for the main color for the bunny, and then I was going to use the lighter color for some details and some of the darker colors, and then some darker colors for the shadows. Always remember to get your I forgot my second new layer. I'm going to delete all this. Up and get my new layer on the top, start over. Well, add a little bit of a lighter color onto these paws in just a minute. And in general, I like to add kind of just, like, one overall color over here first and then go back in with my shading. And I'm adding just my here back over here. I thought it would be nice for the eyes to have a lighter hail around them. So you could do that. And even if you wanted to add a little bit of a darker color to it, you could you still wanted to go darker than that. Alright, have some outlines. One or two, you could even have your outlines on a separate layer if you wanted to do that, too, to give yourself a little bit more options. Go back to my original layer, and we'll just add a little bit of shading down here. I don't know if I want my nose to have a dark spot on it or not. Up to you if you want it. If you wanted to add, you could either add hairs with the darker color, or you could add if you wanted to add some kind of stray heirs. With the lighter color, you could do that, too. It's up to you if you wanted to add that kind of texture to it or not. I think I'm happy with the way that it is. And so you can see I haven't completely covered everything up over here. There's still some open spots left. And then we can work on our egg. I'm going to do our egg Ops on yet another layer on top. Alright. And then, so let's color our Easter egg. So we'll start with red color, and we'll kind of lighten the colors as we go to the bottom. So we'll start with this red. And as you can tell, this project comes together pretty nice and fast. Um Once you've gotten the color palette figured out, it's really just quite simple. And kind of the way that I was thinking about this egg was I was starting with, you know, going in color, like a rainbow order. I was starting with red and then pink and then orange, and then I was doing yellow in the middle with the contrasting kind of a purply red color in between. And so now let's grab our light color. Add that line in the middle. And then we'll grab our darker yellow and just color in this whole area. And then I like to have my text on a different layer. And I'm trying to make it so that I can just use one stroke to write my lines. And I have my, my eraser also set for the same brush as my pencil. All right. And then we'll just add the little highlights behind our letters with a lighter kind of creamy color. Alright. And we're just about done over here. We can I'm going to unlock my my uh sketch layer and put that out of the way. If you wanted to give your piece just some livelier outlines, you could also add light blue and I like to add it on top the darker colors. You don't have to make all the outlines light blue, but you could make some just for fun. So taking some looks in and assessing it every once in a while just to see what it looks like. So that looks pretty nice. And now it's ready. And now, if you do want to add a blue kind of area behind it, you can see there's a faint line. Oops. Make sure I'm in the right layer. If you wanted to add a blue background over here, you could, you don't have to be super precious with the edges since you're going on a layer underneath over here. And once you're done with this, you can use this as an Easter card or use it as you could take the Easter egg out, and you could just use it as a little spring artwork on your wall if you wanted to. You could also make it into a screensaver on your phone, which might be kind of fun. There you go. And that's our lovely little Easter bunny. Hopefully, that was a fun tutorial, and I'll see you in the next video for some final thoughts. 7. Bonus: Paper Texture: And as a small little bonus to make this look more, even more like it's been hand colored, I've scanned in some cold press watercolor paper, and what you can do is you can open this up in your depend you can make the texture as big as you want. You can open it up in your image. You bring it all the way to the top, and then you can play with the different modes. Usually, I like to go with just multiply, and then you can play with texture, and on top of the way that you can see it looking over here, what I oftentimes do is I still bring this down just a little bit more. And you can even mess with it over here. So this will bring This will give you more texture, and then what you can do is you can still lighten it up like that. And so now it looks like you've actually colored this on paper. So that's it without, and then that's what it looks like with the paper texture on the top. So make sure if you want to use that, you can also download that from the resources section underneath over here. 8. Final Thoughts: That was so much fun. Thanks so much for joining me in this mini class. So in this class, we learned how to tweak our existing brushes so that we can create that hand drawn color pencil look. We learned how to create new color palettes and Drew an adorable bunny. I can't wait to see your drawings. Once you're done, take a screenshot of it or save it onto your iPad and then upload it into the project gallery under this class. If you have a moment, I'd love it if you left a short review. It really helps me know how to improve my classes and also for future students to see the classes and get an understanding what they're like from your point of view. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the discussion section below over here. You can also post them at the same time when you post your images into the class Project Gallery. I reply and like all discussions and projects that are submitted to the class. If you post on social media, make sure to tag me at Mica Hokanen on BluSky or Mica Jaws on Instagram, and I'll be sure to like and comment on your posts. Thanks so much for joining me. I can't wait to see what you make. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.