Procreate Watercolor Painting: How to Paint Characters, Watercolor Flowers, Leaves, and more!

1. Welcome: Do you love watercolor and love digital art, but struggle to combine the two mediums? Or are you completely new to procreate and looking to up your skills? If you've ever felt frustrated by your painting ability, I get it. I've been there. But with time, dedicated practice, and right information, you can create the paintings you've always dreamed of. Hi, my name is Gabrielle. I'm a portrait artist, procreate brush maker. And I've somehow been teaching online now for ten years because I love it that much. In today's class, we are going to be painting the watercolor illustrations in procreate. You'll learn how to paint a watercolor splash, how to create a simple floral bouquet, and how to color a digital watercolor character, all in the procreate app. This class is suited for all levels. I'll break down what I'm doing step by step while sharing digital watercolor techniques with a simplified approach. When you join this course and grab the class bonuses, you'll get access to some of my very favorite custom made watercolor brushes. I love making procreate brushes. When I make my custom sets, my end goal is high quality and no flove for you. You'll be able to use these brushes not only for your personal projects, but also for any commercial painting projects to come. Additionally, you'll receive a super realistic ready made watercolor canvas character pose references and a floral reference pack. I went out and picked a bunch of flowers and stems for this class and photographed them all for you. So you can enjoy having a database of 55 gorgeous flowers and leaves that you can easily grab for references in your pieces. What I think you'll really like is that they all have transparent backgrounds. So you can easily explore compositional ideas and build beautiful floral bouquets. By the end of class, you'll have three brand new watercolor illustrations. Watercolor isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Now is a great time to learn how to create painterly illustrations for your own enjoyment or even to make some additional income with your watercolor. And procreate is great because there's no mess and it's super portable, since you can bring your ipad pretty much anywhere. Digital watercolor and procreate is so much fun. So I can't wait to share this joy of painting with you. So let's get started. I can't wait to see you in class. 2. Materials and Accessing Bonuses: For this class, you're going to need an ipad or ipad Pro, your Apple pencil and the procreate app. You'll also want to download the class bonus, unless you just want to use the built in brushes already in procreate. If you're using procreates, built in watercolor brushes, be sure to at least grab the watercolor texture here to get that next level of realism. But if you want my go to watercolor brushes and all the class bonuses head to artwork by Gabriele.com forward slash watercolor. Now let me walk you through the process of downloading and importing all the class bonuses. First, just go to your Safari app and go to artwork by Gabriele.com forward slash watercolor. From here, just press click this link to get started. Now you'll just want to enter your first name and email and then you can grab your resources. This will sign you up for my email newsletter, but like it says, I promise I will not spam you. I will only provide you with value and content that hopefully helps you on your art journey. Grab your resources, then you'll be directed to a thank you page where you can grab the bonuses. Just click on that. Then here on the bonuses page, you can download everything if you think that it will all be useful for you. And that download in your files will be called Watercolor class bonus or you can download individual things if you want to. This is just here for your convenience, but it's all the same stuff that's in the download. All but down here you have procrit brushes, the textures, character files, and some flower references. For now let's just download all it says. Do you want to download Watercolor class bonus zip? I'm going to press download and it's going to start downloading right here. And you can watch the progress. Now it is a large download. I think it's 513 megabytes or so. That's why I have those options for you to just download individual things if you want to. But it's also worth noting that this might take a couple minutes. Just give it a few minutes and let it fully download. All right, now the download is completed, so I'm just going to tap this right here. And you're just going to want to press this watercolor class bonus. Now from your downloads you can find it here, but also if you need to, you can always just go to recess and find it right at the top usually. But here in my downloads, I'm just going to tap that once and it's going to unzip that file. We just have to wait a couple seconds, then I'm going to tap this blue folder now. Now here are all the files included for class. All right, let's start by importing probably our main asset in these bonuses. And that would be the watercolor brush set. I'm going to tap on that. It will just automatically import into procreate. Let's see, I'm going to press this plus sign. Let me just press one of these canvases and it should be loaded right at the top of my brushes, which it is. All right, let's get the next file. Let me get the bonus glitter brush set. Tap on that. It automatically imports for me, there it is, bonus glitter. Let me go back to files now. Another essential part of this is this watercolor paper texture. I'm going to tap on that one and it's going to automatically import for me at this time it'll be back in the gallery view. So let me go back to gallery, here it is here, watercolor paper. Now this is just a pre made canvas I've made for you where when you paint on this layer or any of the ones below the textures, you're going to get a really nice water color effect. It's going to be super realistic, which you'll see a little bit later in class. All right, back to files, this watercolor texture here. At the very end of our projects, we're going to use this texture to put on top of our paintings. For now, let's just save this one to our camera roll. Click this button here and press Save Image. Now if I go to my camera roll there it is ready for me to use. Okay, back to files. Now I'm going to press done and we're back to the main files. We've got the brush sets in there and the textures. Let's check out these character folders and flowers folders starting with characters. Here, I've just provided you with some references if you'd like to draw characters. I find that this is super helpful when you're sketching out an idea. And you want to hone in on where exactly the features would be based on the angle. You just pull up this reference, put it right into your canvas and you're ready to go. And this is a really handy reference to have where I like to store it is in my camera roll. I just press this little arrow here again. Then I press Save Ming. It saves to my camera. Roll me go back Pristun. Now this is the same reference, just flip flop for your conveniencesun. Now this one here is my character line art. If you find that you want to paint along with me when that project comes up and you don't have a character sketch ready, feel welcome to use mine, use it for personal use, but you're totally welcome to paint along with me With that one. What we'll do is just tap that, it imports. You might say, where's the character? Well, this is just our watercolor page. Let's go back to gallery. And there it is there, ready for us to paint on. Right here. Back to files. Now this is just really easy quick links. If you want to learn how to sketch your own characters with me, and you can press these here, learn how to sketch and learn how to color. All right, let's go back and see the flower references here. I have some bouquet compositions for you. Later in class, we'll talk about this and you can use these just as general guides. Heading back here, I have the photo references, those 55 images with transparent backgrounds. And they're a little large so they're taking some time to load. But if I click on one, you can see just these beautiful images that have no background. You can use them to compose your bouquets and plan them out before you paint them. I hope that will be useful to you. All right, there is our little rundown of all the assets included in class. I hope you like them. Let's jump right in. 3. A Note on Settings: Really quickly. I just want to show you how I like to keep my settings and procreate. Just so if you see me do any gestures or anything, you know exactly why it's happening here. I'm going to click the wrench actions, Go to press, and then go ahead and go to gesture controls if you want to match up with mine. I'm just going to click through each of these. And you can see how I have mind set up so that when you see me doing certain things, pressing certain buttons, you'll know exactly why it's happening and why it's responding the way it is. Here we go. This is an important one. I'll touch and hold to pick up color. I have my delay really low down. That's one you might want to match up with. This is another one too. There's a little side button on the side here. And when I press it, it brings up the Quick menu. This is another one. When I have three fingers wiped down, it brings up this other menu that you can cut, copy, paste, that sort of thing. All right, one more thing I want to know here. Under pressure and smoothing, I have a light touch. When I draw, I don't want to kill my hand. If I draw for too long, my hand starts to hurt. What helps me is I arc this upwards and that helps me be able to draw as a lighter touch and not have it really wear off my hand. If you have a lighter touch to go ahead and maybe experiment with arcing that up. If you are heavy handed, maybe you might want to experiment with arcing it downward. If you aren't heavy handed and you don't have a light touch either, go ahead and just keep it the way it is. All right, with that out of the way, let's move on to the next video. 4. Watercolor Splash: All right. Got your ipad. Time for our first project. A simple watercolor splash. Now you might think, is that just to warm up, It could be, but you can really use watercolor splashes for so many different things. You can sell them as clip art. You can put them on backgrounds. You can use them in background of your future art pieces. They're so useful. Let's just make its own little project. Let's jump in. All right, so here in procreate now, you can see that I have my canvas already imported. And if you don't know how to do that, just go ahead back to the materials lesson and you'll know exactly what to do. Now if I open up my layers, you can see that I have the textures on top and these three layers at the bottom that just say paint on this layer. Now you can add as many layers as proqueate will let you right under these texture layers. And you're going to be good to go. Anytime you want to add something new, just go ahead and add a layer. I'm going to grab a color here and I'm going to try this like bluish green color here. And I'm going to go and use the rainbow wash brush. And I'm going to have it as big as it will go, and just start making some little splotches, some little splashes of color. Think about if you were sitting there with real water color, how you would just play around for a little bit. And that's what we're going to do. As you change your pressure with this brush, the color will shift, which is just built into the back end of the brush. I'm just going to make a few of these splashes, almost like I'm experimenting with real water color. And I'm going to put them each on their own layer. If you find your colors are looking a little muddy, go ahead and shift to a more saturated color. You can see how my color that I've picked is really bright. Pick a more saturated color like that. Because then the brush will really do its thing and work to its full potential. And that rainbow wash, like the name says right now, I'm going to try a little circle. That's a nice element in different kind of watercolor pieces. You could put text on this, you could put, you know, a single word on it and then put it on a product, you know, that sort of thing. And just be thinking about ideas on how you can use these two. I'm just going to try another one here. Let me try and shift the color. Actually, I'm still going to keep it nice and saturated, but I'm going to shift it over here to orange. It's pretty cool right now. I'm just going to look through here and see which one I want to continue on with. Honestly, any of these you could upload to different sites and sell them as clip art. But I want to expand on one of these a bit more. I think I'm liking this circle one, a circle is just so useful. So I'm going to delete these here. And I want to play around more with this simple circle. I'm just going to add a bunch of layers on top here. And then I'm going to click back to my circle here. Because first I want to go and adjust the hue saturation brightness. I'm going to go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, because I just want to play around with these colors. I think I want something a little bit different to start out with as my base. I have always loved the hue saturation brightness sliders. They are so cool. I think I like this better. Like pinky purple, bluish vibe. Just values a little bit the brightness slider. I think that's cool. Let's go with that. All right, I'm going to select the layer above now and work on that layer. Let me pick something more in this color harmony. I think what I want to do is darken up the bottom here. I'm going to pick this blue color. I'm going to change my brush to watercolor blooms three. I just want to darken up this edge here. I'm just going to paint that around the edge. As you can see, it went over the edge of my circle. But that's super easy to fix, so I'm just going to go to layers and then tap on that layer press clipping mask. And that's going to make everything on that layer only clip to the circle that I've already drawn. Clipping masks can be a little confusing if you're new to the idea of them. But basically anything above a layer that you clip to it is just going to stick to that layer below it. It's not going to go outside that circle. Now, you can always turn these on and turn them back off. Then from here I'm going to tap the on this layer and just roll through a couple of these blend modes. Blend modes are so much fun to play around with. You can get so many beautiful fun effects. Definitely just experiment, Look around and see what strikes you as cool. Usually there's a couple that are just like, really neat. I think I like multiply. I think that gives me the depth that I wanted. And I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit to make it a bit more subtle. All right, so if I tap back to my initial shape and add a layer, it's going to make it automatically a clipping mask. We can just do that because I want to continue to clip some shapes to this circle. Going back to my brushes, let me go ahead and try, let's try splotches. And I'm going to grab this blue color, Just add some splotches on top, almost like I've flicked a little bit of a different color on top. Sometimes with real water color, you can just dab on a different color and it gives these exciting effects. That's what I'm going for here with the selection tool here. I'm going to change it to freehand and then I can circle it a little better. You grab the arrow, move it around, make it bigger, make it smaller. Digital painting is so much fun and there's so many things you can adjust and change to make them exactly how you want them. I think that looks cool. Then going back to my shape, again, I'm just going to add a layer on top and let me grab this blue color. I think I want to try this. Hard edged wash, large brush, bring that size down a little. I just want to darken the very edge a little bit more. You know, sometimes when you make a water color in real life and you come back to it like an hour or two later, the edges are like really dark. I love that about water color. I'm trying to get that in digital water color too. And then I'm going to grab my smudge tool in this smudger, one brush, and just draw that into the center. It flicking it up into the center like this, I feel like that gives that effect that I'm going for there where it looks like it dried and some of that wet paint pulled up on the edges. Now, let me scroll through some blend modes. Overlay? Yeah, I think overlay looks good. I'm just going to add a layer on top. I'm thinking, I just want to add like a little something cool and different. So let me try a really bright saturated pink. So I'm using the salt crystal brush right now. I just want a couple elements to make this pop more. So I'm just going to play around with putting these down. And I like this big one, but I want to maybe add a smaller one too. All right, now I'm going to change the blend mode here again. These are pretty cool. So cool. I kind of like this blue though, too. These are really fun to make and it's like really relaxing too. So if you ever are like stressed, just make some water color blobs. That's just fun. I think I like color burns. Let me bring the opacity down a little bit and I just want to move it around maybe. Hmm, I kind of like it right there. Rotate it kind of experimenting here just to see the different options, but kind of figure out, okay, what looks best. All right, let me add another layer on top, and I'm going to grab some white. And this is a cool feature of procreate. You can expand your color sphere here and then if you double tap in the vicinity of white, it'll bring you automatically to white. So that's a little tip if you don't know that one. So I'm going to grab the salt brush. And I don't know if you've ever played around with salt, with real water color, but it is so fun to see the effects you can get. So I'm just going to play around with the sizes here that you could get really fine salt by making it super small or make it bigger and get really big salt crystals. Play the opacity two. This is just a font textural element to add to this just another layer of texture. Scroll through these blend modes here, different levels of intensity of how white it gets. I think I like normal though. All right, now I want to add one more little finishing touch. And I want it to be a splatter that goes on the outside of this circle. I want to branch out from the circle, I'm going to grab a purple color. And then let me grab the splatter brush actually, and then go into layers. You just want to use a layer on top of the clipping mask. So I'm going to grab from one of these ones I already have. And I'm going to experiment with adding a little splatter around the edges of this. Almost like you tapped your watercolor brush on the paper. I like this one, but I think I just want to change how this one falls. So let me just select it and then I'm going to swipe with three fingers down and press cut. And I'm just going to try it again. I like that a little better. I think this one down here got a little big though. So I'm just going to adjust that size. Just free hand selecting that one droplet. I'm going to take the arrow tool and just make it a little smaller. Actually, I think I'm just going to erase it out. I think that's better. Yeah, move this one around a little bit. All right. I'm liking that. That's it. Super simple and really fun and abstract and creative to do. I would encourage you to make a couple of watercolor splashes and see what you can come up with. Like I was saying in the beginning, the cool thing about watercolor splashes is you can use it for a ton of projects. So I actually recently got Canva and I was having so much fun, so I made a birthday invitation. I tried out making business cards and icons. And you can use them for so many things if you just look around at different types of things other people are making, you can make those same things with your watercolor splashes. And like I said, you can make money from them too. So you can make things in Canva salmon ez make things in Photoshop salmon with your splashes. So I'd encourage you to play around with that and if you'd want to see how you can make some additional income from your simple watercolor splashes. 5. Florals: Warm-Up Strokes: If you know me, you know I love painting portraits, but I also secretly love painting flowers. So today I want to share with you a couple things I've learned over the years. While I've explored my own flower painting obsession, start what we're going to do now is do a little bit of a warm up when you're making flowers and stems and all of that petals. And you use the same lines and shapes and you need to get very familiar. Your hand, your arm, your wrist, all that needs to get familiar with making those shapes. We're going to try and build a little bit of muscle memory here. We're going to practice a little bit and get us warmed up for lines and shapes. Let's begin by grabbing one of the round brushes here. Let's see, let's go ahead and grab chunky round. And then since we're doing some leaves and stems, I want to practice that first. Let's pick up a green color. It's probably good, a little more green. Okay, so the first line I want us to practice making is just a really thin stroke, as evenly as we can. So here we go, just really thin. All right, now once you're feeling comfortable with that, let's try and do another stroke, but this time making it all thick. So you're going to press down harder. For these, those first ones we're pressing down really light. Touch with our hand. These ones we're pressing down a lot harder. Okay, let's try it again. Thin, Press down really soft. Barely touch, I mean, you're touching it really lightly. And then let's try a bit harder. All right. Now the next step is going to be to try and do this going really light, and then gradually building up to more pressure and thicker. Okay, so this is where it becomes a bit more challenging. But I'm up for the challenge. Let me duplicate a few more of these. So we're going to go light, light, light press, press down hard and light again. This is the stroke you'll want to learn how to make because we use it all the time in painting florals harder, harder, harder, harder, lighter, lighter, lighter later. Okay? Basically you just want to find this nice little smooth build up to getting that thicker stroke and then that smooth build up to bringing it back down to thin and tapering off. All right, let's give that a couple more tries because we really want to get this down and feel comfortable making these marks. You can make them shorter like this. How? Because really when you're doing like leaves in these things, instead of a real long stroke like this, what you're going to want to learn how to do is a nice tighter stroke where it looks like a leaf. Let us take a break from this and try a couple other strokes that I want you to get comfortable with. Okay? A couple other strokes you want to know are S curves and C curves. And if you've been in my other classes, we've talked about this, but you see them all the time in nature and portraits and leaves. You see them and flowers just everywhere. You're going to see S curves and sea curves. We're going to want to practice those curve curve. Get comfortable with going thick to thin and thin to thick and that sort of thing. Don't worry about making this pretty, just worry about getting the work in. Getting in that practice that you need to just feel comfortable doing this. You can also think of them like a shapes. What I'm doing is I'm pressing hard, lifting off. Pressing hard, lifting off. I'm trying to make it nice and gradual and smooth, but it's not always perfect all the time. I'll make a funky one too, It just takes a little bit of practice. But one of the nice things about digital art, there's so many benefits of digital art, but one of them is that nice undo button. If it looks a little off and looks a little weird, go ahead and tap two fingers. It's, don't worry, you make a mark. And it just looks bad because we can always fix it. S curves and C curves. You'll get these curves in the hair. That's another place, you'll see them all the time, but you'll also get it in the tight little coils of a petal, of a bloom as it's opening up. You'll get these curves. Then of course, you'll also get these in certain types of leaves. Okay. Now that this is done, I feel comfortable with this. Let me go ahead and show you how I approach as. 6. Florals: Simple Leaves: Okay, so this is how I approach painting a simple leaf with digital war color and real war color too. What I like to do is take that thin line that we did earlier and just do a shorter version of that. I'm going to press really lightly and just do a short version of that really thin light line. There we go. Okay. Now from here, what we're going to do is a bit more challenging, but again, we're up for that challenge. What we're going to do is press down hard, hard, hard, hard. And then quickly, but not too quickly. Bring up that pressure, lighten up on that pressure you're doing, and bring it to a tip, okay? So let's try that. Pressing hard and bring it to a tip, bring it to a point by pressing a little bit lighter as you lighten up on that pressure. Okay? And then we're going to do the same thing on the other side, but we're going to leave a little gap in between. A little like triangular looking gap. Okay? Instead of starting right here at the stem, move it to about right here, okay? We're going to use that same pressing down hard, hard, lifting up motion. But we're just going to scoot it over here and do it there other direction. All right. That's okay. Let's try it again. We're going to do another line and you can curve it like that because that's how the natural way leaves flow. Curve it and then we're going to do and thick and bring it up to a bit thinner. That one's nice. It has a nice little flow and curve to it. I like that. Let's keep trying. All right? I feel like I'm getting somewhere with that one. I like this negative space. And we're just going to do a bunch of leaves like this, okay? For me, I don't find it comfortable to draw a leaf that direction. That's a little strange to me, although that actually looks pretty good. But the point I'm trying to make is with digital art, because you can just select anything really easily, scoot it around whatever way you want, Flip the horizontal, flip it vertical, whatever you want. The point I'm trying to say is with digital art, what I want you to do is do the stroke in whichever way is most comfortable for you. If you find that stroke in this direction is just more comfortable, do it that way. If you need a leaf that goes this way though, just flip it. No big deal. I'm leaking these. So it's a little strange, I just don't paint them as well. That way I'm going to go with the way that I naturally paint best. Now if you really wanted to build up a collection of different like items you can grab from for a floral bouquet, you could always just do these on their own layer. If you want to be a step ahead, you can do these on their own layer and then we can add them to a floral bouquet later. But if you just want to practice and get yourself familiar, do that again one more time. Doing a nice light arc. Confident with a nice pace. And then pressing down hard, lightning up as you come to this tip, leaving some negative space and doing it again. And see there's an S curve, there is that S curve that we were thinking about. Okay? That is how I approach doing a really simple leaf. And I promise you if you practice this over and over and over again, if it's not feeling comfortable now, it will definitely feel more comfortable when you do more of these. I challenge you to do 100 of these and then see if you've improved from the first one. I think you will. 7. Florals: Simple Roses: Let's keep going with our practice here. Now we're going to do a flower, something that can be like the focal point of our floral bouquet. What you'll notice about blooms is in the center. It's going to be darker and usually more saturated in color. As it expands and opens up, it becomes these more pastel, lighter tints around the edges. You'll also notice that as far as the shape is concerned, you'll find tighter shapes in here, more detailed shapes, and then as you come out from the bloom, you'll get these larger shapes. Putting it in terms of what we just learned with our exercises, You'll use tight C curves in the centers, and then as you come out, you'll use medium sized C curves and then really big C curves on the outside. So let me get a nice dark pink color, nice saturated pink color. Okay, I'm actually going to bring my brush down a little bit, try and get some of these tight little shapes. Really tight little C, you see that is a tight little curve. Now from here you're going to want to overlap them into each other so that they weave together almost. Instead of going like that, you're going to want to instead overlap the two shapes. There's the first C curve, and then let's do another one here. You see what I mean? Another one there, the intertwined a little bit. Okay, So this is our very center. Then we're going to do slightly larger C curves now. Okay, Now what I might want to do is push up my brush a little bit. I like that, but I want to get a little bit more negative space in there. So let me go back. Okay, I like that because it has a nice little bit of negative space in there. Negative space is really the hidden treasure of watercolor painting, leaving that white of the paper showing through. I find that when you let that happen, it makes it really magical looking. I really want to embrace that negative space. Okay? Now what I want to do is instead of this darker color, I'm going to push it a little bit lighter. So I'm just going to push it a little bit lighter, just a little bit more of a tenth. And then we're going to do the same thing, only keep working bigger and bigger. I think it actually needs to go lighter. Let me make it more that color. Okay? So just continuing to work around Overlapping, leaving that negative space. Okay? Now that I have a nice center, I want to make it even lighter. And again, push my brush up even more and continue making some bigger pills. And at this point, this is when you can start using that, pressing down hard, lighting up your touch to get this taper. Okay? So that's good. I probably could have got a little bit more negative space in there. I think that would be nice, but not a huge deal. But if you do want to fake some negative space, I do have a brush for that. I made this brush called Sharp Edged Eraser to help us with that. Actually, I just picked it up on the, we're going to pick it up on the eraser, grab eraser. Then back here, we go to volume two. There we go. Go ahead and pick up that eraser and you can fake this a little bit. You're going to add that negative space back in if you want to. All right. Let me keep rolling with this one. Back to the paint brush and I'm going to grab the chunky round again. I think I'm going to go a step lighter again. I'm going to grab this pink, expand it. We're really, really light now. Make it larger you can. It's more comfortable to do a stroke in a certain direction. I'm all for tilting that page. Do that if you're like me and you make a stroke better a certain direction, all right? So I'm making really big ones. That one's not good. But then sometimes you can add like a little thing like that just to fill in that space a little bit. You just have to feel it out. Feel it out, okay. Does it look balanced? I think this all looks pretty balanced, with the exception of this one right here. I don't know if you notice that too, but this one doesn't quite balance with the rest of it. What you can do is erase it out, select it out, whatever you want. Let's see. Stroke down with three fingers. I'm just going to press cut. Get rid of it. Try again. All right. I think that one goes into there a little bit better. I like that stroke but it needs to like tilt. Let me try that. Yeah, I think that's a bit better. I wanted to go into these ones. I like all of this. The only thing I don't like is this right here. I'm going to try and grab just a little smudge tool. Let me see if I can just go like that. I think it just needs one more mark. Maybe let me grab my chunky round again. Just add one more. That's cool. Then I can just tilt it any direction I want. You can also duplicate this, say where you are making a bouquet. We can go ahead and duplicate this. Change the color, change the size, change the rotation of it. And you have yourself another just quick flower, There's the size and rotation. And then we can also go here to hue saturation brightness. Maybe we make it more saturated. Change the hue a little bit. You can recycle these elements that you paint once, and then you can use them over and over again. To recap, I want you to get familiar doing nice thin strokes, thick strokes, then thin to thick, thin to thick. Then I want you to get familiar with some leaves, then also get familiar with doing the little flowers. Okay, go ahead and get warmed up with some of these ideas. Once you put in a little bit of work, you're going to really improve quickly. Once you're ready, let's get started and make a little bouquet together. 8. Florals: Building Compositions: Something that can be a little challenging is how to arrange elements for a floral bouquet into a beautiful, visually appealing composition. I want to share a couple basic principles that I use that help me in arranging water colored bouquets. I have 55 beautiful photos ready for you to use that will hopefully inspire you and also make for good references should you need them in your paintings. These photos have the backgrounds removed, which makes them really easy to play around with as you experiment with compositions. Now I'll demonstrate how I would play around with floral composition. As I walk you through some principles of design, you'll want to keep in mind when arranging your pieces. Let's start with focal point. Focal point is the central element in your composition. I don't mean the very center of your page. What I actually mean is just the area that draws your viewer's attention first and creates a sense of interest. In watercolor floral compositions, your focal point will typically be the most prominent flower or group of flowers. This will usually be the flower that's unique in both color and size. Here my focal point is this big on which you'll see by the end, ends up larger than all the other flowers and leaves, and also has a unique color all its own. Now let's talk about balance. Balance is really important in creating visually appealing compositions. It involves placing the elements in such a way so that the composition feels stable and not like it could topple over. You can achieve balance by using elements of varying size and shape to ensure that one side of the composition doesn't feel heavier than the other. Here, I'm finding balance by adding some elements on both sides of the piece. For example, here I have these leaves on both sides, but they're offset from each other as to not be overly symmetrical, but their visual weight creates a sense of balance. These flowers here work in a similar way. I have two of them, one on each side, but again, not in an overly symmetrical way, since I've changed up the size and I've also shifted one higher and one lower. If I were to paint this composition, I would likely make the flowers slightly different hues to make them a bit less similar. Now let's talk unity. Unity in a floral composition means creating a sense of cohesion among the various elements. One easy way to achieve unity is through using a harmonious color palette. And I have a class all about color if you're interested in learning more about that. Another way would be to maintain a consistent style when painting all your flowers and leaves. If you're really simple, keep all of them simple. If you're really detailed with the way you paint, make all of them really detailed. You can also repeat certain shapes and motifs to tie the whole composition together. All of these things will work together to help create unity in your piece. Another important thing you'll want to note about composition is avoiding tangents. Tangents are unintentional overlaps between objects in your piece, especially edges that just barely touch. Tangents can disrupt the flow or clarity of your composition because they can confuse the eye on the depth of the objects in your painting. A tangent and a floral composition could be, for example, two leaves just barely touching edges. For whatever reason, this can sometimes be visually uncomfortable to look out. Let's look at this still life example. See how in the example on the left, the edges are just touching. This is a little visually uncomfortable to look at. It isn't a very interesting composition either, since we get no idea of what's in front and what's behind. Here on the right though, I think this one's looking better. Now, the apple and the bottle have enough visual breathing room between them in the bottle. And the bowl overlap enough to where it feels comfortable. Pay attention to space in your elements and avoid tangents. If they become visually uncomfortable, try to place enough negative space between objects or overlap them intentionally. Another general principle to keep in mind when painting floral bouquets is the rule of odds. This rule suggests that an odd number of objects, three or five or seven, tend to be more visually appealing than an even number of objects. When arranging your floral elements, consider using an odd number of flowers to create a natural asymmetry and balance that will capture your viewer's eye. Here we see the basic backbone of this composition. We see the rule of odds play out here with three main floral elements. Then we have all these supporting actors around the main stars of the show which help balance the composition out. I hope this helps you a bit in composing your piece, but if you'd like a little more guidance, check out this extra little bonus. In class, I've made a few floral compositions with some fo flowers that you can use as guides in your paintings. Go ahead and grab those if you haven't already. 9. Florals: Create a Flower Bouquet: Now I'm going to show you how to paint a floral bouquet. My goal with this illustration is not to be photo realistic, but it's more about capturing the essence and feeling of flowers. That's what I'm going to be going for with this painting. Getting started here I have a fresh canvas and I'm going to use that chunky round brush again, just like we did before. I'm going to build up a rose. I'm going to start with a saturated color here. I'm going to start with those tight centers in the center of the rows, you're going to get those tight curves. I'm just overlapping those little tiny shapes into each other. Now I'm pressing down harder to get a bigger shape. I think that's a nice center. I'm going to move it lighter in value. Now we're going to go and make bigger C curves. Now again, using more pressure to get that thicker part of it. Here the petals will be tighter, smaller shapes, and more saturated color. As the petals begin to open up, you'll get bigger C curves that are lighter in value. I'm going to use a lighter pink color now I'm going to make larger curves. Don't forget to leave a little bit of that negative space, some of them can touch. It's good to have a nice variety, You want to leave some negative space and then have some touch as well. I'm just working around here. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. Now, a bit lighter in value. Again, right at the edge of the color sphere here. Now these will be my lightest petals. Make it a little smaller. If the mark doesn't work, try it again. You can use different pressure that you put down on your pen to get that thicker stroke versus that thin taper. I'm adding some smaller marks here, kind of balancing this out a little bit. I think that one got a little close. I like that. So I'm going to duplicate it. Actually grab this arrow, I'm going to tilt it and move it over here. And I think I'll make it smaller too, just like before. This is just a super easy way to recycle your flowers. I want to just move this hue a little bit, so it's not super identical. And I'm thinking maybe a little more orangy now. Let me just select both of these and move them back to the center. Let me just make this one a little bit bigger. Just reorganizing my layers here. I think I'm going to bring this flower down here. Since it's smaller sometimes, that mentally just helps me organize things in my mind. I'm just going to make it a little bit bigger though. Tilt it, All right. I'm just going to pick up this pink color here. I think I want to add a little petal there that makes it a little different from the other one too. Just adding a couple more petals. All right. I'm going to add a new layer and I'm just going to add a third rost again, starting with those tighter shapes and then getting larger. Okay. I'm going to push lighter, a little bit lighter and I'm going to make some larger C curves, nice thick ones, then even l, the very outside ones. If you're, you're having a difficult time painting these roses, I promise you if you do 102030 of these, you will get better and better. It just takes a little bit of time and practice. All right? And that's like that rule of odds at play. I've got three of them here. I think that's a good place to branch off from. Let me add a layer on top. I think maybe adding just one more flower that's different than these. I'm just going to do a little loop because I'm trying to think about maybe something like a peony. Just a really simple flower to make this a little bit different. Break up the rose thing, I'm going to get a little bit of a darker color. Just darken up the very base here. I'm just thinking about capturing a very general essence of a flower like a peony. Now these two got a little bit close, I think I might move it and so it up a little bit, I think that's better. Make some smaller lines, then sometimes they have little stamen that come out. I'll add some of those in for a little textural variety. Then let me just change up the hue, saturation and brightness a bit. I'm thinking a bit more purple and a bit lighter in value then I'll just rotate it a little more too. I think this looks better compositionally. All right, I think we're ready to add some leaves now. I'm going to add a new layer and I think I'm going to try something fun, like purply colored leaves, just like before. I'm going to use a really thin line to start really lightly just doing a curved line, you can darken up the very base of it two if you want. Then using that thick to tapered off stroke. It might take a couple times and that's fine, leaving that negative space in the middle. Let me just try that again. Make two leaves. Let me just pull that off so it doesn't get too close to the edge there of the rose. I think that's good. Now, I'm going to add a little grouping of leaves in this little section. A nice then stroke. There we go. You can add a little curve to them. Don't make them all like exactly the same. It's nice to have some that are a little straighter and some that have a little curve to them. Then over here, just a curved line, thick, thick, then leaving that negative space. Or you could say pressure lighter pressure. Pressure, lighter pressure. Now I'm going to lighten my color here and add a little bit of color variety to the leaves. Now I'm going to add a new layer because I want to do another grouping, but I want to change it up a little bit. I'm going to do a stem with five leaves coming off. I'm going to do a nice big curved line, nice and thin. Then I'm going to put five different leaves on this one. Let me flip it horizontally. Since I make shapes better this direction, I'm going to start on the top one and just do that same thing as we did before, only do it at the top. Then do a little line and do another one over here. Just back and forth until I get five on here. And then I'll do one more right here. And if you need a reference for these, I have a bunch in the references in your bonus, but it's basically the same technique as the other leaves. We were doing only a longer stem with five different leaves coming off. Now I like that, but compositionally, it's branching off a little too far from everything else. I grab that and just tuck it in a little bit more. I like that. All right, so I think I want to add one more leaf coming out here. So I want to add a layer for some variety. I'm going to keep that purple color and just add it right in there. Let me just grab the arrow and tuck it in a little bit, maybe make it a little smaller. Okay? All right. Now let's add a little berry just for a little bit of interest here. Add a layer on top. And I'm going to pick like a pinky purple color. Then I'm thinking right around here. Let's do another little curved line. There we go. And then just some simple little ovals. Let me change the color real quick. I like the pinker color better. I think a little line with just an oval shape for the berry. Just really simple. Don't overcomplicate it too much, even though it can be easy to do. I'm going to push this color darker and a little bit more purple and bring the size down just to get how berries have that little, teeny piece at the top here. We're just going to darken that up. Darken up some of the edges here. Let me duplicate that too. Just press flip horizontal. And now I'm like, okay, where does this look nice? I'm trying to find that balance. You know, this is another thing that's nice about digital art. You can do this sort of thing really easily. Let me move this one round a little bit, see if I can fit these berries in. There we go. I think that provides some balance too. Now I'm going to add one more layer on top. And just for a little textural variety, I'm going to try out a little splatter brush. Let's try these water spots. Maybe I'll make the color a bit more saturated. Just a light little spot. And try that again. Make them a little bit bigger. There we go. Yeah, I think that looks nice. And it's just another way to round out this whole composition, I think. All right, now let's have a little bit of fun with some color. I like how this looks, And now I'm going to go back to my gallery view. I'm going to duplicate this painting and select the duplicate. Now going into my layers, I'm just going to pinch all of those together, They're all on one layer. And then go to adjustments, hue saturation, brightness, and start pushing those sliders around. This is one of my favorite parts. I love seeing the different color varieties you can get. That just opens up more opportunities for other ways you can use this little floral bouquet. Say you wanted to make something around fall time, like maybe a fall invitation. You could push it to like yellowy, orange, fall colors, autumn time colors. It could easily work for that. Or say you have a themed party where everything is blue. You could change everything. Shift everything to blue. Definitely experiment with this and see what you can come up with, because it is really so much fun to play around with flowers For the composition of this piece, I actually used a previous piece I made before just to lay out some of these shapes and things in the design of it all. But you can follow along with me and follow the same sort of composition. But like I said, I have a bunch of compositional things you can try out in the references for the class or you can come up with your own unique composition. I would love to see anything you make, definitely be sure to share with us. 10. Character: Sketching Your Design: Time for our final project, let's paint some characters. Sketching your character is really its own separate class. If you'd like to, Paul's here, visit the character class and come back. I support you. I'll include a couple useful resources in this class though, like these reference sheets. And my absolute favorite sketching brush. If you want to learn how to sketch your very own characters though, check out this course. If you just want to relax and paint, however, I'll have the line art available in your class bonuses. Feel welcome to download that and color along with me. What I did in creating this sketch was I just made a bunch of messy rough sketches. I just went to town with my willow charcoal streamlined brush and even had it really big, It's just started sketching. And then once I found one I really liked, I honed in on its more. I pulled from my reference sheet and tried to grab the most similar pose to the one that she was in. Then I just continued to use it as a guide to help me hone in on this character a little bit more. How I like to do my sketches is I like to work in layers and procreate. I start with it really, really loose and then once I'm liking the direction it's going, I'll go ahead and lower the opacity of that layer. Add a new layer on top and refine. And then I'll work some more, Add a bit more detail, lower the opacity. Again, add a new layer on top and continue to refine. That's the process I have for these character sketches and procreate. I'll usually do that for anywhere from two or three or four layers here. What I've done is I decided to frame her in with some flowers. There are lots of different ways you can frame in your character. You can use circles, You can leave nothing behind her. You can use flowers, You can use squares. There's all sorts of things you can do. You can have fun and experiment with that. Now what I like to do is put that line art that I made underneath all of my watercolor texture layers. So with that procreate camas I've provided, she'll be right underneath of all of those texture layers. So if you're doing your own liner, just slip it right under there. And then what I like to do as well, and what I would encourage you to do is mess around with the hue, saturation, brightness, sliders, changing up the color of your liner just brings so much life and fun and color to your piece. You can always go back and change it later if you want to. But for now, I'm going to make it this purple color. All right? I'm going to tap on the paint, on this layer layer, and we're going to get rolling. 11. Character: Applying Base Colors: To begin, I'm going to make sure I have a layer below my line art selected. And then to start, I'm just going to pick this general color from the florish palette. Florish palette is just built into procreate. Then I'm going to use the freehand selection tool to select her face and body. Then with the wash gradient brush, I'm just going to put a quick wash on there. It's not perfect, but it's just something to get us started from here. I'm just going to shift the color a little bit and make it a little darker and also a little more saturated and pinker. Now I'm just smoothing that out with the wash gradient brush. And I'm going to switch to mop brush, actually then I'm going to lower it down and color it in that's just too dark. Let me undo that. And I'm going to pick up the skin color and use that instead. Make it smaller. There we go. And then just behind the arm, a little cast shadow. With these illustrations, I keep it really simple, super simple cast shadows. Now, I'm going to try for blush and that is way too dark, so I need to make it much redder. That's better. Then I'm going to use the smudge tool with smudger one and just smooth it out. Super simple, Not overly complicated. Now I'm going to take my brush again and just fill in this area. That's just the mop brush I'm using. I'm just going to outline here around her body just to give a little bit more depth, to make it a little bit darker. It's a little too dark. I'm being really subtle with this. I'm not doing any over the top shading, Super simple to match the style of my sketch. Not everything has to be totally rendered with this simple drawing. You can keep the coloring simple too. I'm going to color in those ears and they would be a little bit pinker. I'm just going to erase out at the scleros, AKA the whites of the eyes because we don't need that to be the skin color. Now I'm going to add a layer. And let's go for her hair here. I love drawing pink hair, so I'm going to try that. That's turning up more purple. So you want to pick up a color that's lighter than you think because with all the blend modes on the textures, everything is going to go a little bit darker than you do expect. So I'm just filling in each section at a time. And I'm not worried about staying totally in the lines because with water color, things tend to spread. And I kind of am embracing that idea as I put down my marks. I'm going to switch to the watercolor script brush now and just fill that in. I like how it looks more watery. Now, something like this little negative space you might want to keep because that is something that watercolor does. Just make some quick strokes here. This isn't as clean as my other approaches to coloring characters because I want to embrace that watercolor look like I mentioned. I'm thinking I'll try the mop brush and just fill in the rest of this. Let me make it a little bit lighter. Now, I'm going to fill in the background with this pink color, the skin, the hair, the background, the flowers, the shirt. Put them all on their own layer, even the eye color and lip color. Because then you can go back in with the hue saturation, brightness sliders and edit them really easily. But if they're all in the same layer, it's not as easy to edit. So definitely have all those separate things on their own layer. It's so fun to see the different color combinations you can get. The blue is cool. I do notice that some of that paint, because of the layers, some of the blue paint is showing through her skin. So I'm going to grab my eraser tool and just erase out some of that color. I'll raise it out here too. Okay. So on a new layer now, I'm just going to fill in these colors. And you can see I'm keeping it loose. I'm not worried about going completely inside the lines. And I'm still using that mop brush, but I'm definitely letting the water color be free and not worried about going tightly inside the lines. I'm going to shift my color now and paint these smaller flowers Now, you could even do a different layer for these leaves. I'm going to keep them on the same layer just for simplicity. But you could do a different layer for this color too. Then you can have completely everything editable, your flowers, even your tinier flowers. You can make your big flowers on one layer, tiny flowers on the next layer, and leaves on another. But for the sake of simplicity and decision making, I'm going to keep it all on one layer. It's a balance to see, okay, do I want to have the flexibility to change things later or do I want to be decisive? And I like being a little more decisive. I'm going to keep those all on one layer. I'm actually going to duplicate the hair layer a few times here because I wanted to be a bit more opaque. Do it one more time then. I'm just going to pinch those together. Now they're just a little less transparent. I'm just going to erase this part out. This part two on the ear. I'll clean this up a little bit too. Now, I'm going to add a new layer and color in her little shirt here. So there's definitely an analogous color scheme happening here. An analogous color scheme is really a safe color scheme. Colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel or in rainbow order. I'm using blues, going into purples, going into pinks, and those are naturally harmonious. I do think an analogous color scheme is a nice one to start with, especially if you're unfamiliar with color or the direction you want to go with your colors. It's like an easy win. I'm going to add a new layer and just darken up below her nose here, right here around her eyes too. This is just to act as a little bit of a cast shadow. And I'm just going to lower the opacity bit so it doesn't get too intense. I think I'll actually up the saturation and brightness. I think I'll tweak the hue to. Now on the line art layer, I'm actually noticing that these little details on her nose are just a little too much. I'm going to erase those. Sometimes simple is best. Okay. Now, back on the hair layer, I'm going to take the smudger, one brush with the smudge tool and just push that around a little bit. It is getting a little too tight in there, so I just want to push around the color and make it look more smooth and like a wash. Let me click to the background for that one. With that smudge tool, you could even flick the color into the other one, almost like it seeped into the other color with the water color. Try it this way. Yeah, that's a little more subtle. Now, back on my line art layer, I just want to play with this color one more time. I'm going to go to the hue saturation brightness sliders, and push that hue around. All right? I'm liking that, that's the base colors down. I'm liking this. So I'm going to go back to my gallery view and duplicate my painting because I like to have lots of backups. And if you do too, just work on a duplicate and we're going to work on some details now. 12. Character: Adding Details: Okay, Now wrapping this piece up, I'm going to go back to the background layer and just make sure one more time that none of that blue is coming through. I feel like a little bit of it is, so I'm just going to use my eraser and the willow charcoal brush to erase that out. Now, adding a layer on top of the skin, I'm just going to grab the wash gradient brush and push the color a little bit more rosy, peachy colored, and just darken up the blush a little. I think that would give her more of a cute vibe. I'm just going to try and make it a little bit smaller. Then I'm going to use the smudge tool and the smudger one brush to just soften up that edge. I'm going to make this side a little darker too. That's a little too dark. There we go. Then I'm just going to use the eraser. And with my eraser, I have the willow charcoal brush on to just erase out those parts. I don't need lower the opacity a bit. I think that's good. Sometimes it's cool to roll through these blend modes, but I think in this case, normal looks the best, so we'll just stick with that. Something that bothers me is this little piece of the texture showing through. I'm going to go to my texture layer and find where that is. I can do that by just clicking these on and off. It's this top one. I'm going to select that and grab my smudge tool and just smudge that away. I like that better. There's so many fine details already on her face. I don't want to clutter it with unnecessary texture there. I'm just going to take that off by smudging it. I think I'll do the same here just to smooth that texture out on her skin. I'm just doing this really lightly. I'm not doing it with a hard pressure at all. It's just super light. Yeah, I like how that softens it a bit. Now, I'm going to select her hair color and push it a little bit lighter. I'm going to grab, let's try the mop brush. And I'll bring it a bit smaller because I want to fill in her eyebrows with some color. If I'm doing like a wild hair color, I'll typically tame the color on the eyebrows a little bit, not make it quite as saturated. Now, back on the eyes, I do want to add a hint of some pupils. I'm going to grab this color just start darkening around here. I definitely like to sneak up on the pupils because if you go too dark, your character can look hypnotized. And if you've been in my other classes, you've heard me say that before. But if you just go too dark from the start, they can look a little strange. I like to definitely sneak up on putting that pupil in. What can also help soften up the pupils is just putting a soft shadow there. Going with the shape of the eye. Now I think we're ready for some highlights now. Highlights are what can bring your piece to the next level. The mop brush will probably be fine. I'm just going to make it smaller, just a simple hang on, I got to put it above my liner. I'm going to do a real little oval shape if I can get my brush up big enough. A little oval like shape here for a simple highlight. This can give the eyes that wet look. I keep my nose highlights with just a super simple little line. And then you can play around with how you want to do it on the lips. There's a bunch of different ways you can do lip highlights. There's a bunch of different ways you can do all of these little highlights. And you can have a lot of fun with style here, but I just keep mine super simple. A little oval like shape. Again, I think I might smudge the edge of this side. I'm going to take my smudge tool and just pull that around. Let me try and do two little dots here too. I think that might be cute here. Just really simple. I'm not getting carried away with it. And I'm also not over rendering her. I'm not trying to make this some realistic painting, it's just a simple little character sketch. So I'm going to keep those highlights simple too. And then what I like to do is kind of around the rim of some things, I like to put the white highlights too and just kind of outline a little bit. So right here around the edge of her jaw, I like to just make that a little bit lighter. And I think that it, I don't know, I just think it looks kind of cool, stylistically. And then sometimes I'll do the same around like the edges of the eyes. And something about that contrast is kind of cool to look at. I think even here in between the eyelashes, you could do some white and nothing too over the top. Just kind of light and subtle to make the eyes in that contrast pop even more. And then some highlights down here might be cool. Then you always have to back it up. You always have to zoom and say, okay, did I take it too far? Because it's really easy to do with the little highlights. Okay, I do think that's a little too much for this one, but definitely play around and see if it works for your character drawing. Another little highlight you can do is around like the wing of the nostril here, and then also at the inner corners of the eyes here. Even over here in my motto, when in doubt, smudge it out. Getting that's not really my motto, but I do love this much tool. Okay, now I'm going to select this darker color here and go back to my line art layer. Just add a hint at the upper lid here. Then I'm going to try and darken up the nostril a little bit, the bottom of the lip here and see if that helps bring a little more definition then something I like to play around with on characters. Lips are adding a little bit of teeth or leaving them out. I'm going to try and see if I like the look of that see here. And it's just so subtle. It's just a little, teeny bit. I don't think I love it, so I'm thinking I'm going to take that out. Sometimes it works. So it's worth trying. And it's not like I lost any time I lost about, I don't know, 6 seconds there. I think I like that better with a closed mouth. So I'm just going to put a little dark line right in the middle to show that those lips are closed. Now I'm looking at this and I'm backing it up and I'm wondering, is her jaw too big? I'm covering up the bottom of her jaw here to see. Would it help if I shortened it and brought it up a little bit? So this is an annoying little tweak, but I think it does need to come up. I'm going to go to my line art layer, which I already have one, and I'm going to go to adjustments liquefy. And I'm just going to pull this size up a bit and I have selected, and I'm just going to pull it up a little bit and see if that helps. The look, I'm not doing anything wild here. I'm just really subtly adjusting and tweaking her facial structure a little bit. Then what I usually do is just say, okay, we, did that help? Or did it look better before? I think that does look better. She looks a little more youthful and kind of cute, which I like. I feel like it matches well with her colors here and her expression or rosy cheeks. And I think it works. Okay. So now I think it's time for me to add a little highlight to her head because I want her hair to look a bit more glossy. So I'm going to go on the hair layer and go to the selection tool and just freehand select a little shape here. And I'm placing the selection where the head would move from top of head to side of head. Right at that edge is where I'm putting the highlight. And I'm also considering the way the hair flows, so I'm doing some little shapes to indicate that there's hair here. Then I'm going to go to adjustments, hue saturation, brightness. And pull that brightness up a little bit. I think it actually works. Now I'm going to grab the smudge tool and the smudger one brush and just smudge the edges of some of these and see how that looks. Maybe here make it a little bit bigger. I think that lost the effectiveness of it. Let me go back and just make it more subtle. There we go. Now I'm just going to do that a little bit on the other side here. Again, thinking all the way around the head, right at that turn, almost where the top part of the head turns to side, that's generally where you're going to put it. Something to note real quick about using the watercolor paper is if you color pick and you pick up a color from your painting and you have the textures on, you're not going to be picking up the true color that is beneath it on your character. See how I just picked up that color and it's pretty dark. If I turn off all of these textures, now I can pick up that true color. You see how it's a lighter pink than it would have been if the textures had been on. Because if you pick it up and the textures are on, the color is going to be darker because it'll be affected by the textures picking up the true pink color here of the hair. I'll just turn those back on. Let me go back and just fill in some of these spots that I think need to be fixed a little bit. I'm wondering if maybe a darker color would look good around her ear. Like a little shadow? No, take that off a little bit later. That's better. A little bit more subtle then you want to darken up some little pockets around the neck here. Had a couple accent strokes in here to show the curve of the hair. Now I'm going to go to the eye layer and add a layer on top. Because what I think that could be cool is just adding a bit of pink in there. Sometimes it's fun to add some different colors in the eyes that you wouldn't expect, especially on characters. And I'm just going to take that smudge tool with smudger one and just soften it up and make it more subtle. I think that's cool, it makes them look a little bit more glowy, lower the opacity a little bit. I'll go into the flowers layer. I want to see if I should tweak the color a little bit. That's good. And now I'm going to go to the background because I want to play around with a little bit of texture. So I'm going to alpha lock the layer so that everything I put on only sticks to that background layer. And then let me try out, I'm going to try the salt crystal brush. Don't like that? Let me try lighter color. I just want a little something. I'm gonna take that out. It's kind of cool. Let me try salt blooms. Yeah, let me get a splatter to go. I think that's kind of cool. Now, going to my line art, I'm going to tap it and press mask. And what I'm going to do is grab the eraser. Then just go over my line art to remove it. The layer mask will do it in a non destructive way. So that if I ever want this line art to come back, I can just remove the layer mask or just come back and draw it back in with white paint. Then if I turn my layer mask on and off, you can see that I can either bring that line art back or get rid of it again. That's a nice way to work non destructively if you want to. Now, back on my background color, I just want to experiment with that color one more time and see what I can get. I like that purple. The green is cool. I like that too. This is where I become very indecisive. I kind of like the orange. Digital art and watercolor painting in procreate is so fun. I love real watercolor painting too. But don't you just love all the mediums? I know I do. So I'm going to duplicate it and make another version because I'm having fun. And then I'm thinking maybe the shirt color should change. Go with the green better. This is cool. Now I have three different versions. If you create a bunch of different versions too, I'd love to see them. Because I just love color and see all the different directions you can go with a character. I had a ton of fun and I hope you did too. If you did, please share your work with us. I would love to see. All right, now let's have a little bit of fun with some glitter. 13. Bonus: Adding Glitter: Okay, so I could not make it through this class without throwing some glitter on it. So let's have some fun with some little glitter details if you want. I have four different brushes for you to try out and you can use these for your future projects. To come to in my glitter brush sets, I'm going to grab one of my favorites, which is this necklace brush. It reminds me of a necklace, but you can use it for all sorts of different things. What I'm thinking is maybe like a little beaded detail around the edge of the circle. I'm going to give that a try, then I'm going to try green. Actually be a little darker and bigger. It's interesting. You can add these glittery accents in all sorts of ways into the background, into the character or your illustration itself. This is where you can just have fun, do this on a duplicate. The painting is already done. Just have some fun. Now, I'm going to try this circle shape. I want to go like this and then tap my finger to have procreate correct it. Then I'm going to press circle up here. And press circle. And then I'm just going to drag it around and place it a little better. I'm going to grab my eraser tool and just see race out where I don't need it. I'm not even sure if I like this yet, but I'm just having fun. I'm experimenting. Just see racing over these flowers here. That's interesting. I don't think it's quite right. I think maybe the color needs to be changed. Maybe it needs to go a bit lighter. I don't really know yet, but I'm playing around and I'm having fun. Try out something like this and see if it works for your illustration. All right, let's try something else now. I'm going to grab the gilded brush, and I'm going to grab something that's going to give us a more gold color. I'm just going to put these little gilded gold streaks in her hair. You can put it around her eyes. You can put it anywhere you can. Have a lot of fun with this little brush, just adding it to the edges of things and seeing what you can do. Let's try it again around the outside rim of this circle, it's kind of cool. These glitter brushes work especially well if you have a darker colored painting. So my colors here are pretty pastell, but if you have like a nice dark painting, these will really glow and be really pretty. The greens, cool. I think that's fun, and it goes better with my pastel colors since I lightened it a bit. All right, now I'm going to add a new layer. And then with this embossed brush, I just wonder what it would look like if I colored in like the very center of these flowers. It's cool, It almost has like a little three D effect. That I think is fun. You could even outline like this if you're feeling wild. Then here in the eyes you could act like it's eye shadow. Just some shimmery eye shadow. Now here in the hair, I've picked up that pink color and I'm just adding some quick little glittery streaks in her hair. Can do the same thing on the flowers, Not being super orderly about it, just putting it up there. Now on this one I'm adding a new layer and at this time I'm trying a pink outline of that circle there with this embols brush and procreate makes it so easy because if you just hold your line at the end, it'll realize that you're trying to correct it a little bit. And it'll prompt you to either make it a circle or an E lips if it senses that it was a circular shape. So by using that embossed brush again, you can really have a ton of fun with these. You can add little details to the eyes, in the hair, in the makeup around the borders like I've shown, there's just a lot of different options you can explore. Definitely, have a little fun, relax and just paint if it looks good, keep it if it doesn't take it out. I'm also going to include this brush called Fine Glitter. I like this one just to add a little bit of sparkly gold here on my watercolor splash. I have the fine glitter brush, and I'm just putting that right on the edge here at the bottom. That's a little small. So I'm just going to use my arrow and size it up. I can see more of those gold flecks. Then I'm just going to bring it down and change the blend mode to hard light. Then I'm just going to put it on a clipping mask so that it clips directly to my shape. I'm just going to size it up a bit more. I think that looks cool. It adds a little textural golden accent. You can have fun on the edges of flowers too. I remember my mom had this little emballsing kit when I was younger, and I thought it was the coolest thing to be able to do this in digital watercolor. Now, without any mess or any embolsing tools is just a lot of fun, play around and experiment. 14. Saving and Sharing Your Work: All right, now let's talk about how we can save our pieces and back up. What I like to do is save it a couple different ways. Just go to actions Share. Then the first way I like to save it is just as a simple Jpeg. I will just save this right to my camera roll right here. Save image, and that's going to save to my camera roll on my ipad. Now what I like to do from there is send it over via e mail, or I can send it straight to Dropbox if I want to just have a backup of it. Another way I'll often save is by saving, adapt, procreate file. If I want to have a backup of that, I honestly typically don't, because usually what I personally do is save a PSD file. Saving a PSD file is going to back up all those layers for you, but you're going to be able to use it in Photoshop. If you don't use Photoshop, just ignore this one. Maybe go with the procreate version of the file instead, and this will just save a backup of all your layers. Another way you might want to save your file is with a PNG file. This is a lossless file save type, meaning you won't lose any equality, but it takes up more space. That's why I often just go with the Jpeg. Another reason why you might want to use PNG though is for transparency with this type of piece that we just made. Because we made it like digital watercolor, it's not going to really work well for that transparent save here. If we take off this background color, we're going to see things start looking a little strange. What we could do instead, there's a few workarounds for this. If you want to get that transparent background here, let's go ahead and turn all of these layers back on. I'm going to send this file over to my computer and hop into Cava. Now over in Canva, I'm just going to create a new design and I'm going to pick custom size. And I'm just going to make that the same size as my procreate file, which was 5,000 by 3,500 Now I'm just going to drag in drop my file right on there and I'm going to go to Edit Photo and press Background Remover. And I don't know how this thing works, but it is really good. It's so much easier than Photoshop or even procreate. If you are interested in removing the backgrounds out of a lot of images, I'd highly recommend Cama for it. Then you could use this on your website. Use it as an element in different types of projects where you'd want to layer things. It's just really nice to have that background removed back in procreate. What I want you to do is duplicate your watercolor splash because we're going to be merging some layers in that file. You never want to do it on your original because you always want to have those layers as a backup. We're going to do it on a duplicate. You can always use this just as is and use it as one flattened layer by saving it as a J peg to your camera role. But I'm going to show you one more way you can get that transparent background without using Campa. Let me go to my layers first. Let me just delete these ones I'm not using. Then what I want to do is just pinch these together. Depending on the blend modes you've used. Sometimes some weird things can happen and you might have to rearrange some things. But what I've found sometimes will work is if you just put a layer on top of your stack, that's a normal layer and it's not any other blend mode and you merge it with a normal layer on top. It won't do as many of those funky effects. Give that a go if it's not working. But I'm just going to delete that for now and pinch these together. What I want is I want that nice texture on top, but I don't want this anymore. I want to get rid of this texture in the background. Let's see if we can get some clipping masks to work. I'm going to tap this texture layer and press clipping mask. I'm going to do the same to these. It still has some of that nice texture, but a little bit of that canvas texture was lost. What I did was I merged my watercolor layer for you, and you can add that back on top. Let's go here to the wrench. Go to add inserted photo. I'm going to grab this merged watercolor texture right here. I'm going to make the blend mode on this one multiply. Let's see if this will work. That added just a little bit of that textins, if you want to give that a go to bring back some of that texture, give that a try. And you can grab that merged watercolor file in your bonuses for this class. And then you can just remove the background. There you go, you've got this nice transparent background here. Go to the wrench icon and then PNG. Save the image. Now we should be able to add this to anything and have that transparent background. Let's give it a go. I'm going to go to gallery. I'm going to add to the plus sign. We just get a new canvas. Let's change the color to something else to test it out. Maybe this color. Then go to the wrench. Insert a photo, we're going to grab that transparent PNG that we just made. There we go. Looks good. It's got that transparent background, has a nice texture on top. And we can use this on our website. We can use this for clip art. We can use it, sell it. We can use it for ourselves. There's just lots of uses for this. You can save your floral illustration just as an illustration, a flattened Jpeg, or you can use transparent backgrounds to have more uses for them for online. Let's check out how we can do that. Now with the florals, we can do similar to what we just did with the watercolor splash right here. We're going to press Clipping mask here. Clipping mask one more time. Then we're going to turn this part of background color off actions share PNG, Save that. Then let's see again. Let's go to a new one. Pick one of these. Pick a nice big canvas wrench icon. Add, Insert a photo. Insert my PNG. There it is. You can use this again on your website. You can sell it. There's just so many ways you can use watercolor florals. You can put them on invitations, business cards, any way you see on line people using flowers for art and things like that. You can do that too and you can sell that. What I'm going to do, if you want to get that extra layer of watercolor again, you can add back the watercolor texture actions inserted photo. I'm going to grab the merged watercolor file, then I'm going to put it on multiply and then clipping mask again, it's just that little extra layer of water color. If you want, you know, I'd love to see what you create on Skill Share. Head to the Projects and Resources tab and click Submit Project. Then from there I add your project title, a project description, images. I just want you to feel welcome to share anything and everything about your creative process here. I'd love to see it. I'm sure other students will too. Also, if you have an Instagram or something like that, feel welcome to tag me at Artwork by Gabrielle so I can check out your work. I cannot wait to see the beautiful creations that you make. 15. What's Next: Thank you so much for joining us class. I'm so glad you're here and I'd love to see what you make. So share your art with the class. Whether it be a work in progress, your experiments, or your finished piece, share whatever you want. And if you'd like a critique from me or have questions, be sure to let me know when your project upload and check out what everyone else is making too. The project gallery is such a fun and inspiring place, so check out what your fellow creatives are making as well. Thank you again for watching this course. I so hope you enjoyed it. If you did, I would be so thankful for review. I love reading your reviews and it really helps my class gain more momentum on the platform. I hope you enjoyed using the watercolor brushes and resources provided in class. I always love to give you some fun bonuses that I hope will be useful in your art. You can use any of the brushes, textures, and photo references provided in this class to create both personal and commercial art projects in the future. So have fun, and if you liked painting with these watercolor brushes, you might enjoy some of my other custom procreate brush sets. I actually have three watercolor sets that are available now too. Back in the day I first learned how to draw and paint with traditional mediums, always had a great appreciation for the real thing. When I create my custom procreate brushes, I bring out the raw materials. Often the grain and shape sources used in my brushes originate from real materials, which I think really helps me create brushes with a realistic feel. If you're interested in grabbing some of my full sets, please visit artwork by Gabrielle.com slash rushes from Mompo. If you had fun in this course, you might also enjoy these character illustration drawing female portraits in procreate. This class has been watched by over 25,000 students. If you've always wanted to learn how to sketch your own female characters, then this is the class for because it delivers results. In this course, I break down the process of drawing faces step by step. So you can go into drawing characters confidently and armed with the skills you'll need to design beautiful characters. I've heard many times from students, I never knew I could draw like this. And I'm sure the same will be true for you. After that course, jump into digital illustration, coloring female characters in procreate. In this course, you'll learn how to easily color and light your characters to bring them to life. If you enjoyed this class, then I think you'll really like this one too. Please consider also joining my other courses on skill share. I have classes on the foundations of drawing and color, portrait art and more. And I hope to see you there. I'm also on both Youtube and Instagram, so if you want to hang out, you can find me at artwork by Gabrielle And be sure to follow here on Skill Share to stay up to date on all my latest class releases and giveaways to thank you so much again for joining this class. I cannot wait to see the beautiful art you make until next time. Happy creating.