Realistic Paper Cut Illustrations in Procreate

1. Introduction: Do you love the ease and convenience of making digital art, but miss the tactile qualities of crafting with scissors and paper? Why does it have to be one versus the other? What if I told you both of these pieces were made on an iPad? Get ready to make digital art that will have people doing double-takes as I teach you how to make realistic paper-cut illustrations in Procreate. Maybe you're looking for a new visual style to invigorate your work. Or maybe you've tried doing a paper-cut effect digitally before, but the results were always digital. Well, you are going to love this class. I'll teach you how to digitally cut shapes from paper, colorize them, and manipulate layers to create realistic-looking highlights and shadows. I'll also teach you advanced techniques like creating folds and adding other details that will make your paper-cut art look next level. Hi. I'm Lisa Bardot. I help people find their creativity through drawing on the iPad. I am an illustration artist, teacher, and all-around creative person. You may know me from my YouTube channel where I teach people about drawing, illustration, and of course, all things Procreate. Over the next several lessons you'll follow along with me to create this beautiful paper-cut bouquet, starting with the sketch, all the way through advanced details. Then you'll learn how to take an existing illustration and convert it into paper-cut as we craft this gorgeous mid-century house. By the end of this class, you'll have the skills to transform any of your existing artwork into an astonishing paper-cut piece. You'll be able to create your own paper-cut illustrations from scratch. You don't have to worry about a huge mess of paper scraps on your floor, because for this class we're going to be using the popular drawing and painting app Procreate. Procreate is used by artists of all skill levels, thanks to its amazing capabilities and ease of use. I've been using Procreate for about eight years and I've been able to learn and experiment with so many different visual styles and I love sharing my knowledge with others. All students of this class will get free access to my paper-cut paper pack, a set of 14 high-resolution paper scans that I've optimized for making digital paper-cut art. For this technique, you won't be needing any specialty brushes beyond the ones that come with Procreate. You should have a basic understanding of the Procreate Interface, but I will be explaining every step along the way so that you can learn no matter your current skill level. This class is great for both beginners and advanced artist who want to liven up their work with a handmade look and feel. Are you ready? Put down the scissors, pick up the iPad, and let's create some mind-blowing artwork that will leave people both confused and amazed that it's digital. Let's make some realistic paper-cut illustrations in Procreate. 2. Class Project: Your first project will be to create a paper cut illustration from scratch. Together we're going to be making this beautiful paper cut bouquet starting from the sketch all the way through the advanced details. The second project will be this gorgeous mid-century-style house. We're actually going to take a existing illustration and convert it into paper cut. Then on your own, taking everything that you've learned, I want you to create your own paper cut illustration. You can either start from scratch with a sketch or you can take some of your existing artwork and transform it into a paper cut piece. Be sure to post your projects down below in the Project section. I cannot wait to see them. Let's get started. 3. Supplies & Free Download: Before we begin, let's get you set up with everything you're going to need for this class. To follow along in this class, you're going to need, of course, an iPad running Procreate 5x or later. If you tap Procreate here in the upper left, you can check what version you're using. I'm actually using version 5.2.2. If some of the features look a little bit different in mine, you might be running an older version, but as long as you have 5x or later, you should be good to go. I also recommend working with an Apple pencil. This is going to let you be a little bit more precise than if you're like say using your fingers. But I always recommend working in Procreate using an Apple pencil because you're going to have much better experience and have a lot more control. You are also going to need my paper cut paper pack, which as a student of this class, you get for free. So make sure to download that before you begin. The link to download the paper cut pack is bardotbrush.com/product/paper. I've put a link to that in the class description. The password you'll need to access that page is papercutmagic. Right now, I'm going to show you where you want to store those files so that you'll have easy access as you're working on your paper cut art. After you download, open up your ''Files'' app and go to the ''Download'' section and you should see the paper cut paper pack here. Now, we want to store this on our iPad for easy access to it as we're working on our art so we're going to actually move it here to where it says ''On My iPad''. To do that, just drag it out and then we're going to go here where it says ''On My iPad'' and then just drop it in and you'll see I've got the paper cut pack there. Now, for this method, we are not going to be using any special custom brushes. We're actually going to be using all brushes that are built-in with Procreate. But we are going to create our own custom brush set of some of those brushes. I'll go ahead and walk you through doing that now. Now go ahead and open any Procreate file that you have. This is another one of my paper cut pieces and we're going to go into the brushes. Here at the top, you can see I have a brush set called paper cut art and it's just three brushes that I used to do my paper cut art. I'll walk you through how to make your own custom brush set like that. First of all, you want to go into your brushes and scroll all the way to the top of your brush set and pull down until you see this little blue rectangle with a plus sign in it. Go ahead and tap that and we are going to call this set paper cut art. The first brush that we're going to get is in the inking set and this brush is called studio pen. So what we're going to do is we're just going to duplicate that brush and put a copy of it into our custom brush set. To do that, you're going to swipe to the left and choose duplicate, and you'll see Studio Pen 1, and then to move it, we're just going to tap, hold, and then go back to our paper cut set, tap on it, and then just drop it in. The next brush that we're going to use can be found in the airbrushing set and it's called soft brush. Again, we're going to swipe to the left, duplicate, and then we're going to drag it out, go back to our paper cut art set, and drop it in. Then the other brush that I like to put in there is in the inking set and it is called marker. So we're going to duplicate that and we're going to put it into our paper cut art set. Marker is a brush that I use to give my paper cuts just a little bit more texture. It's actually what I used on the edge of this and it looks a little bit more torn. We'll get into that a little bit later. But these are the three brushes that I use and you'll see how we put those into action once we get started. 4. Technique Overview - Part 1: In this section, I'm going to give you a full overview of the digital paper cut technique. Follow along and learn the basics before we jump into doing a full paper cut illustration. Let's go. I'm going to walk you through all of the basics of creating this paper cut technique. So let's start with a new canvas. We're going to tap the plus sign in the upper right, and the canvas size I'm using today is 3800 by 2800 pixels. The first thing we'll do is draw a shape. I'm going to go into my colors and I'm going to choose black and then I'm going to go over to my brushes and of course we're going to go to that paper cut art brush set that we created earlier, and I'm going to choose the studio pen. I'm just going to draw a shape. This is going to be the shape of whatever your paper cutout is going to be. We'll just do some practice shapes as we get started learning about this. So maybe I'll start over here with a leaf shape like that. I'm going to draw the outline, make sure it's a closed shape and then I can use color drop to fill it in, which means I just drag this little circle from the upper right and drop it in and it fills in. Then over here I'm going to draw just like a long rectangle and I'll fill that in with color drop as well and one thing I want to point out, I'm going to zoom in on this one is when you're cutting things out of paper, usually, you end up with really sharp corners because when you cut naturally, that's just how it goes unless you intentionally cut a rounded corner. So angular shapes are going to look a little bit more realistic, but they're a little bit hard to draw. If you're just trying to draw a really sharp corner, it's not that easy. So we actually use the eraser tool to get those nice sharp corners. I want to erase with the same brush that I'm using so I'm going to go over to my eraser tool here. I'm going to tap and hold it and that will select the same brush that I was using as my brush, which was studio pen as my eraser. Then I'm just going to erase away one of the edges and you can see now I've got these nice sharp corners instead of the rounded corners like I have on this side so I'll just erase that sideway. The eraser is really great for getting your shapes to be a little more angular. If I wanted to sharpen this leaf up, I could just erase one of the edges like that and now I have these nice sharp corners. Why don't we draw maybe one more shape? I'll do a blobby, irregular shape kind of like that and I'll fill that in. Now we've got three shapes and we are ready to start creating some paper. The first thing we'll do is we'll add a background texture so we will be importing some of those paper cut paper textures that we downloaded earlier. To do that, we're going to go up to the "Actions'' menu which is this little wrench. We're going to go to "Add" and then we're going to choose "Insert a File", not "Insert a photo", but "Insert a File" and that should open up the on my iPad section of your files. If it doesn't, just go to ''Browse'' and you can find it and just tap on my iPad and now I just need to navigate to the paper cut pack right here and open that up. Now I have all my different paper textures ready to create some paper cut art. In this folder, we've got a bunch of different paper textures which are scans of real paper, really high resolution, and you can see that they're all in grayscale, which sounds boring, but this actually makes it a lot easier when we go to colorize them. Why don't we start with embossed linen? I think that's a really fun texture and that will import to my screen. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit and I just want to enlarge this, so it just covers the entire canvas so I'm just going to enlarge it a little bit. These are pretty high res files so you can actually enlarge it quite a bit, but however big you want the texture of the paper to be, that's how much you should enlarge it. Then I'm going to go to my layers here, and I'm actually going to drag this to the bottom. So just tap, hold and drag, and now we've got this paper texture as our background texture and like I said before, it's gray, it's pretty boring so why don't we go ahead and add some color, and this is a lot easier than you think to do. All we have to do is use color drop. So let's go into the colors here, and I think I'll pick just a nice blue, nice bright blue, and then I'm just going to drop onto that layer and it's going to fill it in with color while keeping all the nice paper texture. You can experiment and see what different colors look like and things like that so maybe I'll undo that and I want to go a little bit warmer with my blue, maybe lighter. I don't know. We'll try that. I think that looks really nice too. I try to stay away from really, really saturated colors when I'm doing this but it's always good to experiment and see how different colors look. Okay, so now we're going to cut these shapes out of paper as well. We're going to start by importing another one of our paper textures so let's go up to the "Actions" menu, "Insert a file", and we'll pick another one of these. Maybe we'll do tiny fibers down here. I like to make sure it covers the entire canvas, but really it just needs to cover wherever your shapes are. But just to be safe, I like to make it really big. Now in order to cut these shapes out of this paper, we're going to use what's called a layer mask. So let's go to our layers and I'm actually going to move the paper texture above the black shapes layer. So now we've got our background on the bottom, the black shapes, and then our new paper texture. What we're going to do to make a mask, we're going to tap on the black shapes layer, tap it again to pull up this menu, and we're going to tap "Select", and that's going to select those shapes. Then we're going to go to our paper layer. We're going to tap it again and we're going to choose ''Mask''. As you can see, we've cut those shapes out of that gray paper and then if you look at the layers, you can see now we have a mask which essentially just hides the rest of the paper texture and just shows us these white shapes that are in the mask. So now we've got our paper out. 5. Technique Overview - Part 2: It's time to add some lighting effects. That means we need some highlights and we need some shadows. Wouldn't you know it, we already made a layer for our shadows, which is this black layer. Before we get into doing the shadows, we're going to add just a really nice subtle highlight. Let me go ahead and deselect by tapping this selection icon. Then to create the highlight, all we're going to do is duplicate this black shape layer. We're going to swipe to left and choose "Duplicate". Now, we have two black shape layers. We're going to turn the top layer to white. This is just a quick way to do this. This is how I do it. I take my two fingers and I swipe to the right, and that'll turn on Alpha lock. You'll see a checkerboard pattern behind it. You can also tap it and you'll see Alpha lock is checked. Then I go to my colors and I select white. To do that, I double-tap close to white and it will snap to a pure white value. Then I can just tap the Layer and tap Fill Layer. Because Alpha lock is on, it's only going to fill in those shapes. That's a quick way to change that from black to white. As I mentioned, this is going to be our highlight. For paper, that is going to be just a little white edge along the edge of the paper. I know paper is flat but it actually has some thickness to it. Having this little highlight to denote that thickness will help make it look more realistic. The first thing you'll want to do is to determine the direction of the light. For my piece, I'm going to imagine that the light is coming in from the upper left. It's coming in this way. The highlights are going to hit this edge of these pieces of paper. To show the highlight, what we're going to do is we want to make sure the layer with the white is selected, and then we're going to go to the Transform tool here. It's a little arrow. I just want to move it one pixel that way so it's barely there. The easiest way to do that instead of trying to very carefully get it where you want it to be, is to use the nudging feature. All you have to do is tap somewhere outside of this box, whatever direction you want it to go. If I tap here just one time, now, you can see I've got that little bit of a white edge. I can zoom in and now, you can see the edge of the paper there. That's all we need to do with that. Now, we get to do the fun part which is manipulating the shadows. Let's go back to our Layers panel and we're going to select the layer with the black shapes. The first thing we're going to do is to offset them from our paper. I'm going to go back to the Transform tool and I'm going to move it in the opposite direction of whichever way I put the highlights. Again, our light is coming from this way, that means the shadows are going to move this way. It's opposite of this highlight edge. I'm just going to move them. You don't need to move them very far, just a little bit. Now, we've got a boring, blocky, unrealistic-looking shadow. It's now time to make them look a little more realistic. To do that, we're going to start by using the Liquify tool. That can be found in the Adjustments menu, which is this little magic wand icon. We're going to tap Liquify. We want to make sure that we're using the Push adjustment. We're going to set the size. Mine is about 38 percent. This can change depending on how zoomed in you are. Then the pressure is about halfway, it's like a 48 percent for me. Let me zoom in on this leaf to start. What we're trying to do here is we're pushing this shadow back towards the shape of the paper. My purpose is to make this shadow look a little bit more irregular, not so perfectly the same shape as my paper shape. I'm just going to push that in a little bit. Some parts stick out a little bit more. Maybe down here at the corner, I can pull that side down, which will actually make the paper shape looks like it's curling away from the background. Let's do that a little bit more exaggerated over here on this rectangle. I'm going to just push the shadow mostly back towards the shape, there. But maybe here on this corner, I'm going to pull the shadow down a little bit, like that. Maybe I'll do the same on this side here. It's hard to see yet because we're not done manipulating the shadow, but this pulling the shadow out is going to make these edges appear like they're folding out. Maybe I'll exaggerate this one a little bit more to really show you the effect. We still have one more step, so we're not quite there yet. Let me go down here to this irregular shape, and I'm just going to push parts of it back in. Wherever the shadows are really small, that's going to make it look like it's the papers really close to the background. Maybe here, this part, maybe it sticks away from the background a little bit. It's a little hard to explain, but you get a feel for it the more you do this. Now, I've got my shadows pushed a little bit closer. Already, you're starting to see, it looks a little bit more realistic, but we're not done yet. The next thing we're going to do is a lot of fun, blurring. I'm going to go up to my Adjustments menu again and I'm going to choose "Gaussian Blur". The first thing we'll do is we'll blur these shapes overall. To do that, you see where it says Slide to Adjust, that's what we're going to do, you're going to slide your pencil across the screen. You don't need a lot, two or three percent. I think I'll do three percent. That just blurs the edges of these shapes just a little bit. Now, we're going to do some selective blurring to really sell this effect. To do that, all we have to do is tap this little triangle and switch over towards this pencil. This lets us selectively paint in how blurry we want different areas to be. First of all, we're going to switch our brush. You can choose whatever brush you want to paint in these blur adjustments. For us, we're going to use that soft brush that we put into our brush set. The other thing you want to do is to turn the opacity down, that's this slider here. I like to turn it down to about halfway. That's going to let us build up the blur in intensity so we can really get in there and customize how blurry we want things to be. Then my size is down pretty small, I'm at about 15 percent. Basically, anywhere where the shadows pull away from the paper, we want those shadows to fall off. The further away something is from the background, the softer the shadows are going to be. Let's start with this leaf shape. Here, the shadow sticks out a little bit. Basically, I'm going to make my brush size a little bit smaller. I'm just going to add a bunch of strokes so that the shadow near the end of that shape gets soft and falls off. Here, it's sharp and then it falls off and it's nice and soft. Let's go do this rectangle here. This might be a little bit easier to see. I'm just going to do a bunch of strokes. I'll do more strokes the closer I get to the edge of that shadow, corner of it. It's really nice and soft. Let me do this one over here. This one is pretty big. I'm going to make my brush size a little bit bigger. I'm going to blur this whole shape just a little bit, and then I'll make my brush size smaller. Then here at the edge of it, the corner of it, I'm going to make that even blurrier. The more I layer strokes, the blurry it will get because I have the opacity of this brush turned down. If I zoom out now, it's really starting to look very realistic because this is what shadows would naturally do on paper. Here, I don't really need to blur out much of anything. If you want, you can, but let me try it here. Anywhere where the shadow sticks out a little bit, you can add a little bit of blurriness to it. But on really small shadows like this, it's not always necessary. But I think actually, it looks pretty good. Wow, such a difference, just doing the blurring. Those are the basic steps to creating the paper cut effect. Of course, there's a lot more cool stuff that we can do with it and I'm excited to show you some more. 6. Technique Overview - Part 3: The first thing I want to do is show you how to colorize the paper shapes. We did it for the background already, so now let's do it for these paper shapes. I want each of these shapes to be a different color. I'm going to go up to my layers and I'm going to tap on the layer that has that colored paper. It's the one that's attached to the mask. Make sure you're not selecting the mask, make sure you select the actual paper layer. Since I don't want everything on this layer to be the same color, all I have to do is select the shape I want to change the color of, and then color that. To do that, I'm going to go to the selection tool here. Let's start with this leaf. I'm just going to trace around it. Then make sure you close your selection by tapping this little gray dot here. Now, I can just choose whatever color I want. Maybe I'll do green since it's a leaf shape and I'll drop that in. You can undo and try different colors if you want. I might redo that. If you don't close your shape, so if I just did that, didn't press that little circle and then I filled this color in and I'm like, I don't like that undo. Now my selections gone away and so I have to redo it. Make sure that you close your selection before you start experimenting with color. I like the color of that leaf. I think we'll do this as maybe, I don't know, an orange, something like that. I think that looks good. Then I will select this weird blobby shape and let's make that like a pink. Perfect. Now we have some colored pieces of paper. Another way that you can manipulate these shadows is by adjusting the opacity of your shadow layer. If you tap this little N on the layer with the black shapes, you can adjust the opacity and that's going to make the shadows seem less intense. I actually like to keep it all the way up. But if the shadows are looking a little intense for you, you can always reduce the opacity to soften them a little bit. Then the last thing I want to show you is how to create a folded paper look. Let's zoom into this little leaf here. I want to make it look like I folded this leaf in half down the middle. To do that, we're going to go up to our layers and we're going to select the layer with the mask and then create a new layer. We have like a new layer right above the mask layer. We're going to be using a clipping mask to do this technique. We're going to tap it, and then we're going to choose "Clipping Mask". You'll see this little light arrow pointing down. This just means that whatever I draw on this new layer will only show up if it's within the shape of the layer below. So this mask. Let's go to our colors and we're going to choose black. Then we'll go to our brushes and we'll choose "Studio Pen". Essentially, what we're going to do is we're going to do half of this in shadow. I will draw a line on one-half of this leaf. Then I want to make sure I close my shape so I'll draw around it like that. Make sure it's a closed shape and then we can use color drop to fill it in. Now, we're going to blur this line just a little bit. We're going to go up to the "Adjustments" menu, "Gaussian Blur", and I'm going to blur it may be two or three percent just like before. If you were to blur it more, your fold will look a lot rounder. As if you maybe folded the paper around a pencil and it's really like a rounded fold. But it'll look more sharp increase the smaller it is or the less blurred it is, I should say. I'm going to just do three percent. Now, we're going to erase part of this to make it look more realistic. We're going to go to the eraser and I'm going to choose the soft brush as my eraser brush. I'm also going to reduce the opacity of that so I can build up how much I want to erase away if that makes sense. Maybe I'll make the brush size a little smaller. No, that's too big. Then what we're going to do is we're going to erase most of this away, but we're going to try and avoid this line. I'm just erasing this side, focusing on here. I'm doing a bunch of different strokes to build up so I don't erase too much too fast. There you can start to see now, it looks like the paper is folded. We've got this gradient shadow going on this side of the leaf. Super cool. Because we put the shadow on this side and we know the light is coming from this direction, the paper looks like it's folded downward, so like a valley. But if we wanted to make it look like it was a mountain like this, all we would have to do is put the shadow on the other side. I can actually just select my transform tool and flip it around. Maybe I have to resize it a little bit if I put it there. Now, it looks like the paper is folded the other way. It looks like it's folded in this mountain way. That's how you can add extra shadows to your shapes to make them appear folded. Now you've learned all the basic techniques to get you started making paper cut art in Procreate. Next, I'm going to take you through creating a full paper cut illustration from scratch. I'll have plenty more tips to share with you along the way. 7. Making Paper Cut Art From Scratch: Welcome to Section 2 of this class and your first project. Together, we'll draw these fun bouquets of flowers. We'll start with a sketch and go through each step of the paper cut process. At the end, I'll show you some advanced techniques for adding details and dimension to your piece. Let's get started. 8. Bouquet: Sketching & Layer Contents: Let's begin by creating a new canvas. I'm going to tap the plus sign. This time, I'm going to create a vertically oriented piece. The size I'm going to be using is 2800 by 3500 pixels. Our illustration is going to be a beautiful vase of flowers. Actually, a pitcher of flowers because I like to put my flowers in pitchers at my house, instead of vases. Let's begin with a sketch. I'm going to go over to my brushes. For my sketch, I'm going to be using brushes from my Pencil Box. I have a great brush called sketching pencil that I use for all my sketches, but use whatever sketching brush you want to use. For my color, I just like to go with a gray. Let's draw the pitcher first. I'm going to start with just a trapezoid shape for the pitcher, like that. Then I'll add a triangle on this side for the spout of the pitcher. Then I will also add the handle. I want to draw a little design motif on the pitcher. I'm just going to draw a couple guide lines that go like that. Then a few more guide lines, I think I'll do five guide lines. I want to do a cute mid-century inspired little diamond leaf shapes. I'm going to just draw those using the guides I made, like that. I've got the pitcher all sketched out. Now, it's time to start drawing the flowers. I like to lay them out with big shapes first. I'm just going to draw some circles, like that. I'm going to do three flowers. There's my three flowers. I think I'll scooch this one over a little bit. Make it bigger. Here we go. Then I'll draw the centers of the flowers, more circles inside. I'm going to zoom in now. Then I will draw some petal shapes coming out of those circles. I'm just doing some very simple flower shapes for these, but you can do other shapes if you want. But I like these daisy shapes. They're very happy, cute. Then I think maybe for this one, maybe I'll make the center a little bigger, and do more rounded petals, like that. We've got our flower shapes. I want to make sure I draw in the stems. It's obviously very rough, and I've got things overlapping in lines. It doesn't matter. We just want to get what the shapes are going to look like. Then I'm going to add some leafy stems going behind the flowers. I think I'll have one going up this way, and I'll have one coming out this way. Maybe one going up that way. Then I'll draw a few leaf shapes going down , joining in there. Maybe not. I'll do this guy over here, and then this one over here as well. I'm just alternating sides here. Good. That's looking pretty good. I'm just going to move it, center it in the middle. There is my sketch. Now, it's time to start creating the actual shapes that we're going to cut out of paper. But before we do that, we want to determine how we're going to split things up. Because anywhere where something overlaps, something else like this flower petal is over this leaf, those cannot be on the same layer. They have to be on separate layers. We want to think about, as we look at our illustration, what can be on the same layers, and what needs to be on its own layers. I first like to think about what is going to be on the bottom-most layer. If you're stacking papers on top of each other, what's going to be on the bottom? I think that what's going to be on the back is going to be the stems because they're behind the pitcher and behind the flowers. Also, these leaves. Since the leaves and the stems are not touching each other, I can actually put those all on one layer. I'm just going to jot some notes down here. You don't have to do this, but it might be helpful as you're making your plan. I'm going to do leaves and stems. Now, I can look at what might be on top of that, which would be the pitcher and the flower petals. None of the flowers are touching, so they can all be on the same layer. The pitcher is not touching the flowers, so that can be on the same layer as well. Petals and the pitcher. The last things that are left are the centers of the flower, and these little design motifs. Again, they aren't touching each other, so those can all be on the same layer too. We'll do centers and the motif. Now, we have a good plan of how many layers we're going to need, and what's going to be going on those layers. Now, we can move on to drawing our shapes. 9. Bouquet: Making Shapes: Let's go up to our Layers panel and I'm going to first reduce the opacity of our sketch. I'm going to go to about 17 percent, and then I'm going to create a new layer. I'm actually going to put the new layer on the bottom. I like to keep my sketch on top so that it's always visible. Then I'm going to go over to my brushes and I'm going to go to my Paper Cut Art Brush set and then choose studio pen. When I'm drawing the shapes, I like to start with the layer that's on the bottom then work my way up. That's going to be leaves and the stems. Let's start there. I'm going to draw the stems. There you go. It doesn't really matter what they look like down there because that's going to be covered up by the pitcher. There's my stems and then for the leaves, I'm just going to draw a line like that, and one right there. Then I'm going to go and draw my leaf shapes. If you remember from the last section, I told you that looks better if there are pointed edges like on these leaves. So what I'm going do is I'm going to erase part of these leaves away to make them nice and pointy. I'm drawing them a little bit bigger than they need to be, so that way when I go to erase part of them, it's the size I want it to be. I'm just taking care to make sure that nothing is touching. This is all going to be one paper shape, and then all the leaves and the stems are going to be all one paper shape themselves. Let's do the rest of the leaves here then one more at the top, and then we'll come back over here and do this leaf, stem thing over here, and a couple more down here. Now I'm going to use my eraser and just make these leaf shapes a little pointier. Again, I go to my eraser and make sure I'm using studio pen, and I'm just going to erase part of it away, like that. You can see how that makes the leaf shape a little smaller. Sometimes you get these little angles here, which I really like because maybe you didn't cut it as straight and looks a little irregular. I think the irregularities make these types of illustrations look even more convincing. Just going through and sharpening up the rest of these leaves here. That's everything that's going to be on this layer. Again, you can see the individual shapes don't touch each other, which is exactly what we want. Let's move on to the next layer, which is going to be the petals and the pitcher. Now, because we're working in all black, it gets a little hard to see what you're doing sometimes. I like to reduce the opacity of the previous layer, so that way it's a little bit easier to work. Let's do that. I'm going to go to my layers, tap this little N, and just reduce the opacity of that layer. Now, it will make a little bit easier to see what I'm doing on this new layer. Let's go ahead and create a new layer by tapping the plus sign. Here we go, we got a new layer right above our leaf stem layer. For this layer, we said we were going to do the petals, so we'll go ahead and start drawing those. I'm just going to outline the whole shape and then fill it in with color drop. Here it's okay if things overlap. In fact, when things overlap that are on different layers, it looks really awesome, so don't worry about that. If it's on another layer, it can overlap. There we go. I'll just fill that in with color drop and then move on to my next flower. Again, I'm just outlining the outline of my petal shapes all the way around, and then I will fill that in. Then I'll do my last little flower shape down here, big round petals. Then I'm going to fill that in, awesome. The other thing that's going to be on this layer, of course, is the pitcher. Let's go and do that next. First, I will draw a trapezoid shape. I'm making it a little bit bigger than it needs to be so that I can sharpen the edges. I'll actually go ahead and add a little triangle bit here for the spout. Fill that in. Then before I do the handle, I'm going to erase parts of it away to make it nice and pointy. I'm just going to erase the top edge of that as well as the bottom edge. That should make all my corners nice and pointy. Maybe I'll do this side too. It makes it a little narrower. Now I can add my pitcher handle and fill that in, good. There's my pitcher shape. The last thing to do would be to add the centers of the flower and little motifs on the pitcher. Now we can really get a feel for how difficult it would be if I wanted to draw the centers of these over these black shapes since I'm using only black. I'm going to go ahead and reduce the opacity of that layer, and then create one more new layer. Then just draw the shapes and like that. Then down here, I want these to also be nice pointy shapes, so I'm making them a little bit bigger than they need to be. Then I'll erase them away to make them pointy. If you have a lot of shapes that you need to fill with color drop, you can use a really cool feature called recolor. To do it, you just fill one of them with color drop, and then top right here where it says continue filling with recolor. Then you'll see these little crosshairs and then you make sure that the crosshairs are within one of your shapes. Might look like that after you press the button, but you just need to move them to inside one of your shapes. Then you can just tap, tap, tap to fill the rest of them in. So if you have a lot of things to fill in that's really handy. Now I'm going to get my eraser and just make these pointier and a little smaller, like that. Just making them as small as I desire them to be. Cool. I think that looks pretty good. Let me zoom out. Now we're all done with making our shapes, but before we get into working with the paper, we want to make any adjustments necessary to the shape or positioning of our paper shapes. If you want to move anything around, now is the time to do it. Once you get into manipulating all those layers and making the shadows and all that, it gets really hard to move anything around or change the shape of it. If you need to do it, do it right now. Like for example, my pitcher is probably over this too far this way, so I'm just going to select it and move it over a little bit like that. I can have it a little bit more centered. Let me turn off my sketch so it's a little bit easier to see. These little motif patterns probably also need to get moved. I'll go to that layer, select them, skid them over a bit. If you need to move anything around, do it right now. I think this flower probably could move that way a little bit this way, so I'm going to select the layer with the centers in the flower, and just select the flower, move it over, maybe to right there. We'll rotate it a little bit, and then I will also move that stem over. I'll just select it and scooch it over. I think that looks a little bit better, a little more centered and this space is filled in a little bit more. Move anything around that you need to, and then we will move on to creating things out of paper. 10. Bouquet: Cutting the Paper: The first thing that I'm going to do is turn the opacity back up on all my layers. I'll just tap on them, turn the opacity up. One's already done. This one. There we go. Now we're all back to just pure black. Now we're ready to start working with paper. The first thing we're going to do is add our background texture. Let's go up to the Actions menu. We're going to choose Insert a file. For the background, if you can use the one called Canvas, which is a really fun texture. I'm just going to rotate that and make it fill the entire canvas like that. Then I'm going to go to my layers. I'm going to move it to the bottom-most layer because it's going to be the background. Then I think for this piece, I want to have the background actually be white. I want to make this piece of paper look like it's white. White doesn't always work the best when you're doing color drop. Like if I were to color drop white onto it, it deteriorates the texture a little bit. I actually like to just use a curves adjustment to lighten the whole thing. If I go up to my Adjustments menu, I'm going to go to curves. If you've never used curves before, basically, the way they work is it adjusts the different values of your layer. This adjusts the darkest values. This adjusts the lightest values. If you move this up, it makes the dark parts lighter. If you move this down. It makes the light parts darker. Crash course in curves. But I'm just going to move this up a little bit to make the shadows a little bit lighter. Then I'm also going to move the center of it up to just brighten it up as a whole. Now you can see it still looks like it has all that texture. But it looks like a bright white piece of paper instead. Curves is really handy. Doing white paper can be a little bit tricky because you have to balance making it bright enough versus keeping all the texture. White light is a little bit tricky, but there's a little tip for you. Now we get to start cutting all our shapes out of paper. I like to do this in the assembly line fashion, meaning I'll do like one thing for everything and then the next thing for everything. Let's just start by getting all of our papers loaded up. I'll start with the stems and leaves layer. I'm going to go over to my Actions menu, insert a file, and I'm going to choose the craft paper for that one. I'll make it fill the whole area. Then I'm going to tap the next layer, which is the pitcher and the petals. I'm going to insert a file. This time I'll do the dimples. You can do whatever paper textures you want, and you'll find out which ones you really like best. I like to mix and match. Let me enlarge that. It takes up the whole canvas. Then let's do the last one, which is the last shapes that are there. I'm going to tap that, go to Actions, insert a file. For this one, why don't we do tiny fibers, and I'll make it cover the whole thing. Now we've got all of our papers loaded up. Now we're going to cut the shapes out of those papers. To do that again, we're going to tap, tap, select on the layer with the black shapes. Then we're going to tap the paper and choose Mask. Then we'll repeat that for the next one. Tapping the black shapes, tap, select, tap the paper, tap it and choose Mask. Then tap, tap, select, tap, tap Mask. There we go. It goes a little bit faster when you have a rhythm to it. Now we've got all of our shapes cut out of the paper, and they're all gray and boring. Now it's time to colorize. 11. Bouquet: Colorizing the Paper: Let's start at the bottom. I always start at the bottom and work my way up. Again, to colorize, I'm going to select the paper texture, not the mask. Make sure you select the one with the paper. For this one, I think I want my stems to be different color than my leaves, so I'm going to start by selecting all the leaves. I'm just going to draw a selection around just the leaves but not the stems. Tap the little gray circle to close that selection and then we can add another part to it. Select around those leaves, and then these leaves here. Now we just have selections around the leaves and I can grab like a nice green color. Maybe something like that and drop it in. I think I want it to be a little bit darker, be a little cooler. There, that looks nice. I'll do that for all the leaves. You could do a different shades of green if you want. But now I'm going to do the stems in a lighter green. Instead of re-selecting the stems, I can just invert this selection and we'll call it the stem. I'm going to tap and hold the little selection icon here until this bar pops up and then I'll tap Invert and now everything else is selected so I can color in the stems. I think I'm going to do a warmer green, like a light limy green. That's a little bit too light. Maybe a little darker than that. I think that looks really good. We've colorized that entire layer. Now, we're going to move on to the next layer, which is the petals and the pitcher. Again, we're going to select the paper layer, that's tied to that shape. Let's start with the pitcher. I'm going to draw a selection around the pitcher, close it by tapping this little dot which is very helpful when you're experimenting with colors. I'm going to do like a nice deep cobalt. Maybe that's a little bit too dark, so maybe I'll go a little lighter. I think that one looks really pretty. Nice and bright, but still really deep. Then let's do our flowers up here. I'm just going to make a new selection. We'll do this one. I'm going to make them all different colors. Let's do this one as like an orange. That looks really nice. We'll do this one. We'll do that one, that's like a pink, like that. It's really nice and bright. Then we'll do this one as like a yellow. I think that looks really good. Almost done coloring. We're just going to do these last bits down here. I'm going to go to that layer, make sure we're selecting the paper. Then I'm going to select, and I'm going to color these different colors, but I'll make the selections all right now, so tap, tap, tap. Because these selections aren't touching each other, I can fill them in individually. Maybe I'll do like an orange for that one. Actually, let me be like a yellowy orange or maybe yellow. Experimenting. Well, that's pretty. We'll do maybe that one as a yellow as well. Then this one we'll do is like an orange. Too light. Make it a little bit darker. Good. I think that looks really good. Finally, we're going to do these little guys down here. I'm going to do these as maybe like a nice, a lighter blue, little too saturated. I'm going to desaturate that a little bit. A teeny bit more lighter. Good. I think that looks really nice. If you find it later on after you exit the colorization process and you want to adjust the color, if I decide this vase or the pitcher looks too purplish, I want it to be a little bluish. Here's a way that you can adjust it. You just go to that paper layer, pull out a selection around it just like we did before. Then you can go up to the Adjustments menu; Hue, Saturation, Brightness. You can change the hue, you can adjust the color, you can adjust how saturated it is, you can even make it a little brighter. But I wouldn't go too crazy with that because that will mess with the texture. I'm just going to go maybe a little less purple and tiny bit more saturated. Cool. I think that looks good. Now, we are all colored. We are ready to start adding some highlights and shadows. 12. Bouquet: Manipulating Shadows: Let's go to our layers panel and we're going to start with the highlights. Remember to do that, we're going to duplicate the black layer. Let's just do that all at once. Swipe to the left, duplicate. Swipe to the left, duplicate. Swipe to the left, duplicate. Now we've duplicated each of the black shape layers, and we're going to turn each of these white. Let's turn on Alpha lock on each of them with a two-finger swipe to the right on all three. So now we've got all three with Alpha Lock turned on. I'm going to select white in my color picker. Double-tap close to white and it'll snap to white and then I'm going to double-tap on each of them and choose Fill layer and it'll turn it white. Tap, Fill Layer. Tap, Fill Layer. Now we've got our highlights set up. Now we just have to nudge them a little bit. We're going to select all three of those white layers at once. To select multiple layers, you just swipe to the right on each of them. Now you can see I have three layers selected. I will go to the Transform tool and then I think I'll do my light coming from the same direction that I did before, so coming from this way. That means I need to nudge it, the highlight that way. There we go. Just one little tap will nudge it one pixel that way. You can see, especially here, you can see that little white edge, which is just like a little bit of something subtle to make it more realistic. Now we get to work on our shadows. Let's go to our layers and we are going to select all the black layers now. Tap on one, swipe to the right, swipe to the right. We've got the three black layers selected. Let's go to the Transform tool and we are going to move it down just a little bit, not too much, but we're doing it in the opposite of the direction that we did the highlight. The light is coming this way, that means the shadows need to go that way. Highlight goes towards the light. Shadows go the same direction the light is going. Now we're ready to start doing our shadow manipulations, which means doing the liquefy and the blur. We're going to use one layer at a time. We're going to start with our bottom-most layer. I'll make sure to just select that one. Then I'm going to go up to the Adjustments menu, Liquefy. This layer is just the leaves and the stems. All I'm going to do is start just pushing some of these back towards the paper a little bit. I think on these leaves it might look cool if the leaves look like they're curling away from the background paper. So I might leave some of these shadows elongated. Maybe not all of them, but maybe some of them. I'll just go through and push it back a little bit. You want it to look a little irregular, not perfect. Just push some of these in. Let's go over here and do these. Just push them a little closer. Maybe here, I'll draw these ones out a little bit. Push that one closer. Maybe this one I'll let that one come out, maybe I'll do that one quite a ways. Why not? We'll try it out. See how it goes. Maybe this one too. Cool. I think that'll look good. Don't forget these little stems here. You have got to make sure we hit up all of the pieces. Cool. Almost done. All right, so I think that looks pretty good. Next, I'm going to go ahead and blur this. So we'll go to the Adjustments menu and we're going to choose Gaussian Blur. And I'm going to blur it to about two or three percent. Two or three percent. Then I will zoom in, switch this over to the pencil adjustment and I just want to make sure that I have the right brush selected, so I'm going to tap in there and I don't, so I'm going to choose soft brush. It did remember my opacity settings, so that's good. Then I'm going to come in here and just blur the edge of that one. See that one looks really good. I like that. Well, it looks awesome. Let's see where else we need a little bit. This one for sure, anywhere where the shadows are bigger and they come away from the paper background. You want to blur those out a little bit just like that. Maybe this one a little bit. Definitely these over here. So I'm just layering on strokes, concentrating it on the end of the shadow. It's almost like a gradient of blur. It's less blurry and then a blurs out a lot. So the shadows just fall off. This looks good. And then we'll do this one as well. Awesome. That is looking really, really good. I think I might liquefy this, I missed it. If ever you need to readjust, you can always go back and forth between Liquefy and Blur. I'm going to go back to Liquefy and then just push that one in a little bit and if there's anywhere else that needed it, I can do that as well but I think overall, it's looking pretty good. I think this one looks great. I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next layer, which is the petals and the pitcher. Let's go to our Layers menu and I'm going to tap on the black shapes layer, the petals and the pitcher. Of course, we're going to start by doing liquefy. I'm going to go to the Adjustments menu, Liquefy. I'll start with the petals. For the petals, maybe some of the ends of the petals will have those shadows that fall off. It looks like it's curved up and curled away. Anywhere where there's like a long like shape that maybe it didn't get pressed down as hard when you are gluing it to the paper, I imagine what I might have done if I was making these out of paper. Like I might press down into center of the flower and those shadows would be not very apparent, but maybe these didn't get pushed down as much, so they kind of stick out. Maybe I'll do a big one right there. Like that, maybe that one will pull out a little bit more. That looks pretty good. Let's make sure we do our other petals as well. Pull them in closer towards the center of the flower. Maybe some of them can be pulled in close but some of them can be sticking out. Cool. That looks pretty good. Let's do our last flower here. Pull all those shadows in. Awesome. The other thing that's on this layer is the pitcher. For the pitcher, I mostly going to keep my shadows pretty close. But maybe here on the corners, we can pull some out. The paper didn't get pressed down quite as much. Pulling all those shadows in a little bit more. Maybe here, we'll pull this one out so it looks like that didn't get press down as hard. Then maybe these corners we could make them sticking out a little bit. I'm just going to mostly pull the shadows in right on the corner, maybe leave them sticking down a little bit. I really like this, how the shadows getting wavy. It makes it almost look like the paper is a little wavy, which is totally fine. I really like that. We will pull that one down. Overall, that's pretty good. Now let's go ahead and blur these shadows. I'm going to go up to the Adjustments menu, Gaussian Blur and blur to about three percent. Then we're going to switch over to the pencil adjustment. Let's zoom in and just selectively blur some of these shadows with a few brushstrokes. We've still got our soft brush selected, of course. Pull that one out a little bit. This one here. Well, not quite that much. We'll do this guy over here and do that one a little bit. You don't have to blur them all out to the max. I vary it a little bit. Let's do this one. This one not too much. It doesn't really need a lot. Overall, I think the petals are looking really good. Let's do the pitcher. That looks really awesome. Do just a little bit right here. Good. This one we want to fade off quite a bit or maybe not quite that much. There's a balance. You don't want to go crazy with it. We'll do this one here. Maybe then even these little bits a little bit. Overall, that's looking pretty good. If you find that you maybe over blurred an area, you can always erase a part of the adjustment away by switching over to the eraser tool. Just make sure you have the same brush selected and you can reduce the amount of blur. I'm just erasing the adjustment. Then I might even liquefy that a little bit more and push that in a bit. You can always go back and adjust things if you think the shadows are little bit too intense, but overall, I think that looks really good. We have one last layer to do and that is the centers of the flowers and these little designs. Let's go to that layer, which is right here. We'll go to our Liquefy and I'll start with these. Since these have these little pointy edges, it might be nice to have some of those shadows stick out and maybe even pull one out up there. Let's vary how it looks for each of them. Maybe that one sticks out a little bit more like that. Looks pretty good. Then let's go over to the centers of the flowers. I probably will get these pretty close, these really nice round shape. You probably pressed it down pretty well and it's pretty much stuck on the paper, so there's nothing peeling up away. For the most part, they're just going to be really small shadows. That's still slightly irregular. Will look a little better than perfect. There that looks really good. I always get to look at it from far away to see how it's looking. This one looks a little too regular, so I'm just going to make it look a little more irregular, just a little bit. Cool. That's looking good. Last thing we need to do is blur those shadows. Let's go to Gaussian Blur. Set it to three percent, head up to the Pencil Adjustment. I'm not going to do any blurs to the centers, but I will blur some of these little edges down here. The ones that stick out a little bit. Maybe that one too. Nothing's happening because I'm on the eraser tool, so let me switch to the brush. We'll try that again. There we go. I was like, why does it seem to be blurring? There we go. That looks pretty good. Let's exit out of there. There we have our completed paper cut illustration. It looks really awesome. Definitely, some of these shadows that fall off make it look really realistic. I really enjoy it. You can, of course, go back and judge it a little bit if you want to adjust a shadow. This one I think could use maybe it looks like it's peeling up, so I'm going to go back to that layer and just go to Liquefy and just move it out a little bit. I think that will look nice if it's really peeling up. Then I'm going to go to Blur, switch it over to the pencil adjustment, and then let that just nicely fall off like that. You can also slide up and down the screen like this to adjust how blurry it gets once you've added the pencil adjustment. This is too blurry. I will just find out where you think it looks the best. Probably there. I really like the way that looks. Now you've learned the basic technique to create a full paper cut illustration from scratch. What I want to show you now is how adding a little bit more shadows and other things can make this really pop and really give it more interest. 13. Bouquet: Advanced - Folds & Details: I'm going to exit back to the gallery view, and I'm actually just going to duplicate this file before we go ahead and add more stuff to it. Mostly, this is so you get to see like the before and after. We're going to just swipe to the left and choose Duplicate. Now, we're going to open up the second version. The first thing I want to do is to add in some folds. I think especially on the petals, you might imagine the petals are rounded or maybe they could be folded in the middle, the leaves could also be folded. Why don't we go ahead and add some of those in? Let's start with the petals. Let's go up to the layers. Before we continue, it's getting a little intense here in our layers. Some organization might be an order if you're finding it hard to navigate through those. I'm going to just basically take each of the different paper layers and combine them into a group. I'm going to select multiple layers by tapping one and then swiping to the right. Now, I have the mask, the paper, the highlights and the shadows all selected. I'm going to tap Group. Now, I can just close that just to keep things organized. Then I'll do that for the other petals and pitcher. We'll select all of those and then tap Group. Then the same with the stems and leaves group. Now it's just a little bit more organized and we have our three layers of paper in different groups. Let's go ahead and add some awesome folds to these petal shapes. Let's go ahead and open up the layer with the petals. I'm going to tap the Mask and then I'm going to tap Plus sign to create a new layer. We're going to use a clipping mask like I mentioned in our previous lessons to do these folded details. I'm going to tap the Layer and tap Clipping Mask. Then I'm going to switch my color to black. I'm going to switch my brush to studio pen. I want the petals to look like they're folded this way. Here's my little piece of paper. I want them to be folded this way and not this way. Because the light is coming from this direction, we want the shadow that I'm going to add to be on that side of the petal. It's going to be opposite where the shadow is. Let me go ahead and get started with that. I'm just going to draw a black line over half of it and color it in that. As I'm deciding what side of the petal to do it on, I'm looking for opposite the shadow or just wherever you can see the white highlight, that's where you want this fold shadow to be. I'm just going to go around to all the petals and just color that in like that. Here this one's opposite the shadow, so it would be on this side of the petal. This one would be on this side. This one would be on this side. It's okay if it's not perfect, we're going to be erasing a lot of it away This one would be here. Then this one would be here. Then I'm going to go ahead and do that for the other flowers as well before we get into the blurring and the erasing. Again, it's going to be this side here. I'm just looking for where the highlight is or opposite the shadow right there. This side would be here, here, and right there. Then this one would be also on this side. These meld together here, but that's okay. They're both on the same side. Then finally I'm going to do the same for this last flower. I'm just coloring in half of it. This one is also on this side. This one's on this side. Then one more here on this side. Awesome. We've done all the petals, and now we're going to add our blurring effect. First of all, we're going to blur it overall. We're going to go into adjustments, Gaussian blur. Then we're just going to slide that over. The more you slide it over, I said the more rounded the fold will look. Normally for a fold, I might do two or three percent, but maybe I'll go a little bit up just to make it look a little more rounded and I'll do four percent. You don't need a lot, once you start getting into higher numbers, it just totally blast the whole thing out, so you don't want that. But I think four could look nice. Let's start there. Now, I'm going to go to my eraser tool, make sure that the soft brush is selected. I'm going to start doing my erasing. Starting with a pretty small brush because these are small areas. I'm just going to erase part of it away, leaving this edge mostly intact. Then I'll do the same for all the other ones. I'm mostly focusing my erasing opposite this center edge. You can start to see how that looks like. It was folded and unfolded and then glued down to the paper. Do right here. Then one more right there. The more you erase away, the flatter the paper is going to look. But here, I didn't erase as much of it away. It looks darker, so it looks it's more folded. It's just up to you how you want it to look. Sometimes it's good to do it a little bit different for each of them. Let's get into this one and I'll start erasing that away. Again, trying to stay away from that edge. Do the next one here. The shadows are really subtle, but even that little bit of shadow makes a big difference in giving it some shape and dimension. I'm almost done with that flower. This looks good. I really like that. Just gives it a little bit of extra dimension. Then this one, I'm doing the same way. Overall, I think that looks really good. Now, I think this one maybe might have been on the wrong side, because it looks like it's like a mountain fold, not a valley. So maybe I can rotate it. I don't know why it did like that, that's weird. But it looks like I'm able to rotate it. There we go. That looks a little better. Now our flowers have some really nice folds in them. I also want to add some folds to the leaves. Let me head over to that group. I'm going to close this group, open up the leaf stem group, tap the mask layer, and then tap the plus sign. Then I'm going to make sure I have my studio pen selected, and I'm going to add some folds to these. I want them to fold in the same valley shape. Again, I'm making the fold shadow opposite of the shadow. Same side as the highlight. As you can see, I didn't yet turn on the clipping mask. But that's okay. You don't have to. You can turn it on afterwards if you want. In fact, I can go in right now to my layers. I can tap the layer and I can choose clipping mask, then you can see what it looks like with and without, so there you go. Here where the leaf meets the stem, we're going to be erasing most of that away, so don't worry about what it looks like too much. Let's see. The highlight I think is on this side. This one's a little tricky. It might look funny, but it's all right. They don't have to be perfect. The highlight is here, so we'll add shadow there and this side. This one you can barely see, but we'll do it anyways. Then finally, this last set of leaves. Opposite the shadow. Sometimes, you really got to think about it. There we go. That one would be here, here and here. I've got all our leaf shadows drawn, now it's time to blur it and erase it. Let's go to the Adjustments menu, Gaussian Blur. I want these shadows to look a little crisp. These are a little more soft folds and not creased, super sharp folds. Let's do two percent for this one. Then I'm going to go over to my eraser and make sure it's set to the soft brush and start erasing. Make the brush size a little smaller. There we go. Maybe a little bit bigger. Then here where the fold shadow meets the stem because this is flat, I'm just going to erase some of that away. It almost looks like you pinched that, but you didn't quite fold the stem part. Then I'll erase down there a little bit. Cool. I think that's looking really nice. Some you can erase less than others so it looks a little darker, a little more folded. Mix it up a little bit. Then our last set of leaves over here. I think I did this one on the wrong side. I was to do opposite the shadow, and I did on the same side as the shadow, so it looks like this. We'll try and I'll fix that afterwards, maybe. Luckily, it's easy enough to do. Let me go ahead and switch this one around. I'll just select it and then rotate it. I don't know why it looks all weird like that, but whatever. Cool, there we go. That looks better. I'll just erase a little bit away right there. There, that's much better. Awesome. Just doing those a little bit of extra shadows, taking the extra time to do that, I think, adds a really cool element of realism and interest to this illustration. The other thing I think would be cool to do is to add some hand-drawn details to these flower centers. So let's do that as well. This is another fun thing that's a cool way to add some more interest to your illustrations. Let's go ahead and open up the Layers. We're going to go to the layer with the flower centers. I'm going to tap the mask, tap the plus sign, and then tap that new layer and set it to be a clipping mask. We're not adding shadows here, but we are adding some hand-drawn details, as if you'd taken a colored pencil and drawn on the paper before you cut it out. I think the brushes that work really well for this are brushes that were designed to emulate real art media like pencils, crayons, things like that. I actually have a free set of brushes that you can try out for this called Kids Make Art. This is a set of brushes that are designed to emulate all your favorite art supplies from when you're a kid, like crayons and colored pencils and markers and things like that. You can find this brush set at bardotbrush.com/free. I'm going to be using the colored pencil brush. I think I'm going to do orange details on there. Let me just try a color. If I zoom in, I can just draw, I don't think that's dark enough. Little redder. A little bit more saturated. That looks good. I'm just going to draw some little irregular circles. They don't have to be perfect. Maybe vary up the size to different sizes. This is like those little seed things there in the center of a flower. This isn't any real flower in particular. Because I used a clipping mask, I can draw over the edge and it's not going to go over the rest of my image. That looks cool. Let's do this one, maybe a little less red. Looks good. Maybe a little, cool. Then we'll add some circles to that one. I think this looks better when you zoom it out. You can add whatever designs you want to these. You can go crazy. Whatever you want to do. I'm just going to do a bunch of circles. Awesome. Then this last one, I think I'll do more of a red orange, something darker than what I have. A little bit darker. Looks good. I'm just quickly drawing some circles on that. I think the more haphazardly you do it, the more natural it looks. But that's just me. Okay. Let me zoom that out. Overall, I think this looks really awesome. I want to show you real quick, what a before and after looks like between version 1 versus doing the more advanced stuff. So let's exit back out to the gallery. This is a really cool tip. You can do a quick preview on any of your documents by just doing this spreading motion like that, and that'll open the file so that you see it without opening it and going into Procreate. Then you can just tap on this side of the screen to go between the next one in your gallery. There's the before, and there's the after. They're both really awesome, but I really love the extra element of texture and textileness that you get from adding in all these little folded details and the little hand-drawn details as well. Congratulations. You just finished your first paper cut project. Next, I want to show you some of my paper cut pieces that I've made, and go through the layer breakdown so you can see how each piece was constructed. 14. More Examples with Layer Breakdowns: I want to show you a few more pieces that I did and show you how I broke down the layers within those pieces to give you an idea of the process that I go through when I'm creating a paper-cut piece. Here is a really cool plant illustration that I did and one of the things I really like about this piece, first of all, is I use the marker brush to do my shapes instead of studio pen. It gives you this nice, almost like torn edge when you're creating your paper cut. That is an option as well. I used it on, I believe, the whole piece. All of the shapes have this really cool torn edge to them. The other really cool thing about this piece is the paper that I used on the leaves. That is actually a paper called, let me see if I can isolate it out. Almost. Okay. It's a paper called finger paints, and this is literally one that my daughter brought home some artwork from preschool, and I really love the texture. I threw to to my scanner and scanned it in and, and I made it into a file that you can add color to it and make your own really cool it's got these cool paint strokes and stuff, but it's made for my daughter's preschool art. Have fun converting that into your own art. Let me show you the layer breakdown. Close that up. I've got my background of course, and then I've got the stems are one group. The pot is another group and this is another paper. It's a polka-dotted paper that you can use that's a part of that pack. Then I have these leaves. Did I skip one? These leaves as well. These are underneath and then these ones are on top. Four-layer groups. Some pieces require more, but I think four layer groups is a really nice, manageable amount to do. But once you get into the groove, you can do stuff that's more complicated and stuff like that. It's just a matter of planning out what's going to go on to what layer. Here's another piece that I really love. I did these three trees and mostly because I wanted to try out this crinkled paper that I crinkled up and scanned, which is what I use for the trees. Let me show you what the layers look like for that, it's actually only just three layer groups. The first one is the tree shapes, like the actual circular tree shapes. Then we have the bark part, the trunks. Then we have the little leaf details. Then all these little leaves I did the folded technique on all of them, which was a little tedious but totally worth it. I think it looks really nice. I really love the way this kind of crinkled paper looks. That's one of the papers that's included in the paper pack. Here is another paper cut piece that's this little bird on a flower. I'll show you the layer breakdown of that. Starting at the bottom, we've got the leaves and the backside of the flower. For the leaves, I did both some kind of hand-drawn pencil lines, and then I also did the folding. You can see that in my layers here I've got the pencil lines on one clipping mask and then the fold shadows on a clipping mask above that. That's how you can do that. Then I've got my flower center, the stem, and the bird's beak, and then I've got the front of the flower and the bird's body. Then finally, I have a little wing. Then on the top, I've just got another little pencil addition. Here's a little fox that I created from scratch. I started with a sketch and then create it into a paper-cut piece. I'll show you my layers for this one. Starting down here, I've got the back legs and ear. Then I've got the white part of his chest and chin. Then here is the body shape. The whole body is just one shape. This one took a little bit of brainpower, I was trying to figure out how to do it because I know I have a leg that would technically be in front of the body but also attached to the body. But I didn't want to cut it out into its own piece of paper because then it would have a winery there. In the end, I decided to keep it all as one piece and just hand-draw some lines to show that the arm keeps going the way keeps going there and some like a little bit of shadow, so that's how I attacked that. Then we've also got the white part of its tail as a separate layer. Then I also did some little fur marks and fun things and I could have done these black parts as another piece of paper, black paper, but I decided just to hand draw them and then actually like how that looks, it's a little bit more interesting. I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the paper-cut pieces that I made from scratch. Next, I'm going to walk you through the steps of converting an existing illustration into a digital paper cut. 15. Converting an Existing Illustration to Paper Cut Art: So now that you've seen how to create a paper-cut illustration from scratch, I'm going to show you how you can take some of your existing artwork and convert it into paper-cut. This is great if maybe you have a piece that just seemed to be missing a little something, you weren't too jazzed about it, or maybe you just want to breathe new life into some of your old artwork. For this class, I'm going to provide you with an illustration so that you can follow along, but please take what you learn and transform some of your own artwork. Of course, be sure to share, I cannot wait to see what you make. So that you can follow along with me, I'm going to give you an illustration that I drew and we can turn it into a paper-cut art together. Once you download this image using the link below, you can open up your files app and it should appear in your downloads folder. We're just going to tap, hold it, and we're going to choose "Share" and we're going to choose to "Save Image". That's going to save the image to our camera roll so we can access it in just a moment. Let's go ahead and open up Procreate. I'm going to start by just creating a new canvas. I'm going to tap the plus sign and I think I will do a horizontal orientated canvas. So 3800 by 2800 pixels is what I'll use for this one. Then I'm going to go up here to the wrench icon and choose "Add", and then insert a photo because we saved it to our camera roll. There it is, I'll import it, and there it is. This is a little illustration. I really wanted to draw this Palm Springs house and I drew this and it was fine, it wasn't anything that I had posted because I was like, it's cute, but it's not refined. I don't know. I just didn't love it that much, but when I started making these paper-cut illustrations, I turned it into a paper-cut illustration and I fell in love with it like, oh my gosh, I couldn't stop looking at it. If ever you're like, oh, this is cool, but it's missing something, this could be a technique that you could try out and see how you feel about the piece after that. 16. House: Planning Layers & Making Shapes: Before we get started, we want to analyze this piece and think about what's going to go on each layer and what things we can combine onto the same layer. Just like before, I'm going to go ahead and just jot down some notes as we figure this all out. What's going to be the further most back? What's going to be on the bottom layer? I think that the tree trunks are in the back, so we'll put the trunks, and these windows would be behind the building shapes, so we'll do the windows. This light could probably also be on that layer too, so the light. You don't always have to write it out. But I think as we're figuring this out, it's easy to write it down just to help you out. Let's see what might be next. The palm fronds would be on the next layer above that so we'll just call those the palms. We could also do the building, the house itself, since it doesn't touch the palms. We can do the house. We'll just call it the house. What else could we do? That might be all because everything else on here touches the house shape. So we'll just do the palms and the house on that layer. Then the next layer would be the door, so the door. We could probably also do those breeze way blocks. We'll just call it the blocks. You know the blocks they have on those houses in Palm Springs that are decorative. That's probably it for that layer. The final layer, I think, is going to be these plants. So the light cactus and the plants. I wrote plants, but you get the point. Now after analyzing this, we have determined that we're going to need four layer groups. So four "pieces of paper" plus the background. Then there are some other things too that I don't think we need to cut out of paper like the details on the little cactus. Like these lines here don't need to be cut out of paper. We could probably draw those in with colored pencil. This little line to attach the light to the top of the house and the door. We could draw all those things in with a colored pencil and I think that will add a nice little element to it. I think we'll go with four layers and we'll get started with drawing our shapes. Let's go ahead and go to our layers. I'm just going to reduce the opacity of this a little bit. Then I'm going to tap the "Plus" sign and we can start drawing our shapes. We're going to start with the bottom-most layer, which is the tree trunks, the windows, and the light. I'm going to go to my brushes, go to my Paper Cut Art brush set, and then choose the Studio Pen. Let's start with the trunks. For these, actually, I could just increase the brush size a little bit and just draw the line like that. If I wanted something a little more tapered, I could draw more lightly and then more heavily like that, which I think I'll do. Maybe I'll thicken it a little bit down here and then I'll do the same one like that. Cool. I think that looks good for the trunks. The other thing that's here is the windows. I'm just going to draw a shape. It touches here. I'm just going to erase away so that they don't touch each other. I'm just going to draw a shape that covers up the windows because this is going to be behind. Imagine if the pink paper, you cut out squares and that becomes a windows. I just need it to be bigger than that. If that makes sense. Then this little light here we'll draw that. Cool. Perfect. There we go. That's going to be our bottom-most layer. To help me see things a little clearly, I am going to reduce the opacity of that layer and then move on to the next layer. So I'll create a new layer and this one going to have the palms and the house. I'll start with the palms. I think I'll do them like that. You don't have to follow the drawing exactly. Put a little more pizzazz in them if you want. I think that I want to make the ends of these palm tree shapes point here, more sharp. So I'm going to thicken them up a little bit and then I'm going to erase parts of them away like that. Then I'm going to grab my eraser with studio pen and just erase little bits of them like that just to make them a little more pointy, a little more interesting. There we go. I think that looks a lot better. Then I'll do the other ones in pretty much the same way. I'm just going to draw them like that. Maybe I'll add another bit right there. Then I will erase the corners to make them sharp and pointy. There we go. Sometimes you need to erase from both sides to get the shape you want. That's fine. There we go. Now for this palm shape, I think erasing both sides really helps. It's a process. Sometimes it takes a little bit of extra time. Cool. That one looks really nice and let's do the last one here. Again, I'm just going to draw these banana-like shapes like that. It's okay that this overlaps a part of that tree trunk. No problem because they're on different layers. So that's okay. Let me go ahead and start erasing parts of these away. If it's hard to control, you can always make your brush size a little smaller. We're almost done with these palm trees. Cool. I think those look really nice. What else is on this layer? The house. For the house, let's see, I'm going to draw a big rectangle, like that, a little bit bigger than I need it to be so that I can chop the ends off and make it look a little more sharp. Actually, I'm going to do the rest and then erase this edge. I'm just going to draw this part in a little bigger than it needs to be, like that, and this one too. Now, I can just erase the whole edge. Good. Then I didn't have to match that up perfectly. That looks good. Now, I have another one here and one here. Now, I can draw the roof line, which is going to be a big rectangle. I'm going to go a little longer than it needs to be so I can erase that side to make it point here. There's one edge. Erase that, so it looks like that, and I'll do the other side. Then erase that as well. Cool. That's the building, except we need to cut out some shapes to do the little windows. Now, I can't really see, so I'm just going to reduce the opacity of this just a little bit so I can see what I'm trying to do here. I need to cut out these little windows. I'm going to get my eraser with the studio pen, and I'll do it this way. I'm going to erase away a rectangle, and I'll just erase all of that. Then I'll go back and draw it in, so I have those nice crisp corners. It's the opposite of what we've been doing where we erase to get nice crisp corners. Now, I'm going to grab my brush and I'm going to draw in the edges. See, those are my nice crisp corner. I'll do it there and then across the top. Now, I just draw these lines in, like that. Now, we have a window. I think that's all that's on that layer. Now, you can see what the actual shape looks like. I got a little something there. Whatever, it's fine. That's what that looks like. Now, we're ready to do the door and the blocks. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer. I'm going to create another layer, and let's start drawing in the next stuff. Let's start with the door, that's easy. I'm just going to draw the door, going all the way down, a little further than I need it to go. Fill it in and erase part of it away. Should I make a little taller here? You got to have some stuff to erase so make sure it looks a little bit bigger than you need it to be. Keep going sideways. I'm trying to get a straight line. There's a feature called Quick Line which gives you perfectly straight lines, which you could do, but I like it to be a little hand-drawn and not perfect. I like to find a balance between too perfect and near too wonky. I think that's fine. Then here, with the door. It doesn't have to line up perfectly with the bottom of your house shape because remember, the two pieces of paper that are sitting on top of each other so if they don't line up perfectly, that's okay. What else is on here? This little breeze block thing. For this, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to draw in the edges of the shape, like that. I think I'm going to also draw the bottom. I don't have it in here, but I think I'm going to draw bottom edge, maybe. Now, I'm going to erase part of that away. It's okay if you have to erase a little bit more. I'm just erasing to get those nice sharp edges. Well, it's not perfect but there we go. That's fine. Then I will just add lines for these sections of block, like that, so they go like that, and goes across like that. Then we have these divided into sections. You can imagine, if this part was made out of paper, you definitely have to get an X-Acto knife, maybe even a ruler to make things line up, but it's okay. See, these don't line up, but I think that's okay. A little bit of irregularity is fine. Cool. Then I'm going to add the circular detail, like that. Look up like breeze block patterns. I think that's what they're called, but you see them a lot on mid-century houses. Palm Springs has a lot of them and there's lots of different designs. This is just a simple design. Then here I should have kept going down. We'll keep it going down there, and this will be a little half-circle. Cool. Yeah, have fun with it, look up some other patterns if you want, and one more. Cool. There's our breeze blocks and our door, and I think that's all that's on that layer. Let's go ahead and reduce the opacity of that. We will move on to our last layer which is the cactus and the plants. I'm going to reduce the opacity even more. It's getting a little hard to see in my sketch, but I think I see it. These little cactuses, I'm going to move them actually down here in front of the breeze blocks, so overlapping it a little bit, like that. They're just like oblong oval shapes. This one looks a little too big. I'm just going to shrink it down. Because again, you want to get all your shapes exactly how you want them to be. Maybe this one just needs to get a little bigger. Cool. That one looks a little tiny. We'll just resize it. There we go. Then we also have these little aloe plants or something like that. For these, I'm just going to do flicking motion out, like that. That was really tall, that's all right. Cool, I think that looks good. If I'm doing this flicking motion, I get these nice tapered ends, but I can always go back and erase a little bit away. I like how it overlaps the edge of the house here, sticks out the side. This one maybe goes in front of the door a little bit. Cool. If you want these to be really sharp and pointy, you could come in with your eraser and just sharpen them a little bit. That's up to you whether you want to do that or not. We'll do just a little bit, because I don't know if you've ever been impaled by one of these aloe point ends? I have. They're really sharp and they're really are quite painful. I got hurt pretty badly by one, one time. I used to photograph weddings and it was at a wedding, photographing all the bridesmaids and I accidentally backed up into one of these and I hurt my arm pretty bad. We got all of our plants. I think that's everything. We've done all of our shapes. We're now in four different layers. 17. House: Cutting & Colorizing Paper: Let's turn off our background layer for now. Let's go ahead and turn the opacity back up on all our layers. We can start bringing in some paper files. Cool. Let's start with our background layer. I'm going to tap the bottom layer. I'm going to go up to my Actions menu, Add, Insert a file. Let's get back to the paper cut pack. For the background, I think for this one I'm also going to do a white background. Let's do the embossed linen. I'm just going to zoom it on out like that. Now it's covering the whole canvas and I am going to move it to the bottom. Now I'm going to turn it to white. If you remember to do that, we want to go up to the Adjustments menu and go to Curves. We're just going to move this little node up higher. Then we're going to grab this line and just move that higher as well until it's as bright as we want it to be while still retaining that texture. I think that looks pretty good. Now we can start working on our different layers in the papers. I'm going to tap this layer with the tree trunks and the windows. Let's go ahead and go to Actions menu, Add, Insert a file. Maybe it will do flecked for these. I don't always have a right or reason for what paper textures I choose for any given part. But sometimes it matters like sometimes the texture goes with whatever you're trying to do so let's go ahead and do that one. Now we're doing the house with the palm trees. For that one, they're made of stucco. Maybe we'll do something like dimples which has this nice texture to it, which is like stucco so we'll try that one for that. Now we have our blocks and our door. Let's go ahead and insert a file and we'll do a different one. How about parchment? That one has a really nice texture too, so enlarge it. Then finally our plants. Let's go ahead and choose one for that. Well, let's do heathered. Cool. That looks good. Now we've got all our paper textures loaded up, so it's time to start cutting the shapes out of the paper. If you remember, we're going to do this in assembly-line fashion. We're going to do each of the steps for all the layers and then move on to the next step. Let's start by making masks. We're going to start with the bottom layer, I'm going to tap it. I'm going to choose Select. Then I'm going to go to the paper layer, tap it, and choose Mask. There you see, we've got our mask. We'll do the same thing for all the different layers. Tap the black shape layer, Select, Oops, tap the paper layer and choose Mask. Do the next one, tap, tap Select, tap the paper, and choose Mask. Then the last one we're going to tap it, select it, and then do the same for the paper, Mask. Now we've got all of our shapes cut out of paper, but of course, it's all boring and gray, so we need to colorize it. I want to colorize it using the original illustration as a reference. We do have it here in our layers which we could turn on and use the little eyedropper and sample colors. But an easier way to do that is with what's called a reference image. To do that, we're going to go up to the Actions menu. Then we're going to go to the Canvas section. And we're going to toggle on right here where it says Reference. Then we're going to get a little thumbnail of what's on our Canvas right now. But we're actually going to use the original art as our reference, so we're going to tap here it says Image, and then choose Import image. We're going to choose that illustration. If you tap it all those little info bars will go away. Now we've got this that we can use as a reference. We can sample it using the eyedropper. It's very, very handy. Let's go ahead and start colorizing everything. I'm going to go to my layers and I'm going to start with the bottom-most layer, which is the tree trunks, the windows, and this little yellow or this little light. Remember we're going to select the paper layer, not the mask. Make sure you have the paper layer selected. I can even start with these tree trunks. I'm going to go to my selection tool and just draw a selection around the tree trunks. I'm going to make sure not to get those windows. I know they're pretty close to one another. Then make sure to tap this little dot to close your selection. Looks like I missed. Let's do that one more time. Draw a selection around it. There we go. Now we can color in our tree trunks. I'm just going to start by sampling this color from my original image. I think I'm actually going to make it a little saturated. We'll drag that in. I think that looks great. I'm going to move on to this window here. I'm just going to make a selection around the window like that. Then I'll select, you can actually zoom in on this. I'm going to select the blue, and I'll just drag that in and see how it looks. I think I'm going to make it a little tiny bit darker. Cool, I like that. Then finally we have this little light, which I'm going to do in a yellow. I'm going to select it and I'll sample this yellow, and then drag that in. I think that looks great. That's everything on that layer. We're going to move on to the next layer, which is the house and little palm trees or the palm fronds. I'm going to select the paper layer. I will draw a selection around the palms. Then I can go to my artwork over here and get that color green. Then just drag it in. I think that looks great. I'm going to do the house next. Just draw a selection around the house shape, sample this pink, and drag it in. This actually looks a little, I don't know how too gray. Sometimes that happens when you're working with lighter colors. Just the way the colors flood into the textured paper. If it's not looking exactly like you want, you can go ahead and adjust it a couple of different ways. You can go up to the Adjustments menu and you can do hue saturation brightness to make it maybe a little more saturated, that'll take out some of the muddy tones. We can also make it a little brighter like that. That more closely matches what we've got going on in the original art, so never be afraid to adjust the colors if you need to. That's everything on that layer. Let's move on to the next one. This is the one with the door and the breeze blocks. I'm going to select the paper. I'm going to draw a selection and we'll start with the door, around the door. I'll select the pink of the door and just drag it in. That looks great. Now I'm also going to do these little breeze blocks and these are a white color. I'm actually not going to color drop. I'm going to use the curves adjustment to make them the color I want them to be. I'm going to go up here to Adjustments and I'm going to go to Curves. I am going to raise up this last little node here on the left a little bit and then I'm going to drag the actual line itself up a little bit because I want it to look white, but I also want it to have some texture. If you're losing too much of the texture, maybe drag this one back down a little bit. This will make your darkest tones dark. I think that looks a little bit better, will give it a little bit more contrast. That looks good. That's everything on that layer. The last thing to do would be these plants. I'm going to go up to the little layer with the plants, tap on the Paper layer. I'll select our little barrel cactuses here. I will zoom in and get this green color and drag that in, that looks good. Then I will select our little aloe plants. Again, I'm just going to get a darker green instead of sampling that and make it a little cooler, maybe a little darker. Cool. That looks good to me. We're all done coloring it, which means we don't really need our reference image anymore. I am going to go ahead and just turn that off for now. Just tap it and then hit the little X. 18. House: Highlights & Shadows: We've got this all colorized, so let's go ahead and start adding our highlights and shadows. We'll start with the highlights. We need to duplicate all of the black layers and turn them white. Let's just do that. I'm going to swipe to the left and just duplicate all the black layers. There's three and four. I duplicated them all and then on the top of those layers, we're going to change this to white. To do that, we're going to turn on Alpha Lock, which is a two-finger swipe to the right and you'll see that checkerboard pattern appear. The top of those two locked layers does now have Alpha Lock on and we're going to turn them white so let's go ahead to our color picker. Double-tap close to white to choose white. Then we're going to tap the layer and choose Fill layer. We'll do that to all of those Alpha-locked layers, so we have four in all. Now we're going to nudge our highlight. Well, actually this time why don't we do the light coming from this direction just to change things up. I'm going to select all of those layers. Swipe to the right, I have all four of the white layer selected. Go up to the Transform tool and then we'll just tap this direction and you can barely see it. But if I zoom in, you can see the little white edge right there. Now we get to move our shadows the other way. We'll go back to our layers, select all the black layers, and we will move them the opposite way. Go to the Transform tool and then just offset them just a little bit like that. Great. Now we get to start manipulating the shadows and blurring them out and doing all that fun stuff. Let's get started with the bottom-most layer, which is the tree trunks and the windows and stuff. I'm going to select that layer and go up to the Adjustments menu and choose Liquefy. We're starting with the tree trunk. I'm going to do is just push those shadows back a little bit. I'll make my brush size a little longer, just push them back and almost haphazardly. They don't all have to get really close, but you want to just make it not perfect. It's what I'm going for here. Then that one layer is going to be pretty easy. I'm going to blur out anything in particular that overall looks really good. Other things on this layer are the windows, but those don't show so we don't have to do that and we just have to do this little light. We'll just leave a little bit of shadow there. Great. Now let's go up to the Adjustments menu, Gaussian Blur, blur that to about three percent. I don't know that I necessarily need to selectively blur anything on this layer. I'm just going to leave it as is and move on to the next layer. This one is the palms and house. I'll select that. Go to Liquefy and let's start with the palms. Like the flowers, I'm going to put the center, like the center of the palms pretty close and maybe leave some of these out like they are right now, but maybe I'll move some of them a little closer just so they're not all doing the exact same thing. But I want some of them to have shadows that are elongated, so I'll leave a few of them down. So go ahead and do that for all of these palms. Have some shadows out and some shadows in just your brush size if you need to. Now that looks good and then we'll do the last one here and we'll have that one out. Maybe that one in a little bit. Just don't want them all to be super perfect. I think that looks pretty good and the other thing on this layer is the house. This one just go in and just selectively push parts of the shadow away. Maybe this one can be out a little bit. We can have the edge, like the corner out a little bit if we want. But for the most part, I'm just going to push those shadows in a little bit and you have to do the insides. Don't want to make it disappear completely and I think that is everything. That's it for that layer. Do not forget the windows here that you might be fine to have the shadows come out here a little bit, so that would mean that the pink is lifted up, almost occurring in the shadows a little bit and around the corners leaving it out. I think that looks pretty cool. I think that's all done now. That's looking really good. We're ready to blur that layer. I'm going to go to the Adjustments menu, Gaussian Blur and we'll set that to about three percent, just like we did on the previous layer and then we'll switch over to our pencil adjustments and then I'm just going to double-check, make sure we're on the right brush. I'm going to be on soft brush opacity down. Let's start blurring some of these shadows that stick out and go smaller with my brush size. Just blur them right on the ends a little bit, especially like here where the shadows really large. The end almost fades out completely. I like going around a piece and just like painting in these nice little blurs. It just makes me really happy and it's really soothing. I love artwork that feels soothing to create. Here we go, maybe here. That looks nice. I'm focused on the ends of these shadows here. That looks good. The house, maybe here we can blur it just a little bit. Be on this edge a tiny bit down here, just a little corner maybe. I'm going to do this corner here and then a tiny bit in these little corners where the shadow sticks out a bit , maybe right there. We don't need a ton. It already looks pretty good just with that basic blurring on. I think that looks really nice on that layer. Let's go ahead and move on to the next layer. That would be the door and the little block. Liquify. Here, let me make my brush a little bit bigger. We'll leave the corner out just a little bit. But for the most part, I'm just pushing these back in a regular way. But I think this block piece would look best if it feels like you really smashed it down when you glued it on, so not too many big shadows on this one. Here, I think that looks pretty good. Let's do the bottom a little bit more there and then the door. Push that over. I really like this, how it looks like. It's going like that. I think that's cool once I blur it out. Maybe I'll have that one coming down just a little bit like that. Cool. Let's go ahead and blur it and go to Gaussian Blur, blur it to three percent, then go to my pencil adjustment and start working on selectively blurring stuff, which I don't really need to do any of it. I think that overall looks pretty good. In fact, here it almost looks too blurry, so I think I'm going to go back and just do it for two percent to keep those shadows nice and sharp. Then if I want to, I can like just selectively blur parts of it. Those little corners here, little edge right there. Right there definitely. Where was it? This corner, get that a little bit there. All right. That's looking really good. What else is on this layer? I think that's it. Let's do our last layer which is the plants. Liquify. I'm going to push this back a little bit. Maybe we'll have that one sticking out a little more. Round shapes don't really lend themselves to a lot of those fun, like shadows that fall off, but we'll have a little bit. But these nice, long, skinny shapes will be fun to do some of those nice shadows where it looks like it's popping off the page. Down here at the bottom and then make those close and then here I'm going to have the edges of the shadow come away with that. Keep the top of it close and then just the very end of it coming away. Same thing here and we'll have one going further away. The further away it is from the shape, the further away the shadow is, the more curled up it's going to look. So if I wanted it to look like it's curling up, I can go even further away. I think that looks good. I think that's all that is on that layer. Let's go to the Gaussian Blur. We'll blur that. I think I'm going to do these also to two percent and I want to make them too blurry because I'm going to go in and selectively blur with the pencil adjustment. Here is where I really want the ends of these to fall off and get soft. Now that looks cool. The further away the shadow is from the shape, the more blurry you would expect that to be. These ends are almost barely visible. I blurred them out so much. Look at that, it's just so full of texture. I love it. Here, I'm going to blur that just a little bit, but you don't really need to do much. Overall, that looks super awesome. 19. House: Pencil Details: We've completed all of our shadow work. The last thing I want to do is just to add some details because if you remember our original, we've got some lines on the plants and we've got a little rod there for the light and some door details. Let's go ahead and add those now. Maybe for this one, I'll just make a layer above all of the other layers to do all of my detail work. We'll see if that works out. I'm going to start with these plants. For the plants, maybe I'll actually even just choose this dark green. I'll turn off my original illustration and then I'm going to switch to my kids make art brush shot, again, this is a free set that has lots of really fun, natural media. I'm going to use the colored pencil brush and just going to draw, actually make that color a little darker, a little cooler. I'm just going to draw some lines going out like that. I didn't use a clipping mask. I'm just being careful not to go over the edge like that because then it would look unrealistic. If that were to happen in real life, it would hit the edge of this and then go like that or something like that. But I didn't even want to bother with that. There we go. I'll do this one. Give these shapes a little bit of contouring too. It's like this barrel cacti. Then here I just want some lines in the middle. I'll just sample this color just as a starting off point, and then I'll go lighter, little more lime. Cool, I like that. Then just draw some lines. Do that. I'm going to do this one as well. Actually, now that I'm lighting this color down, I think it might be too subtle, so I'm actually just going to select those lines and play around with them using the hue saturation brightness adjustment. Maybe I'll show you what they look like if they were darker. Actually, I like that better. I think I like them being darker, maybe a little cooler or more saturated. Just play around with that. I think that looks great. Then maybe we'll add some lines to these palms. I'm going to sample that color, will go a little darker. For these, maybe that's not quite dark enough. I'm just drawing some lines there. These are totally optional. I think it's fun to add these little extra details. I'm not going to do any of those special folds on this piece. I don't think it really needs it anywhere, but I do need to add the door details. I'm just referencing what that looks like. I'm going to start with this color and then get a darker, more saturated version of it. Just draw a line down the center. Then I think for the door handles, I'll try gray as if it's like silver or something. Two little handles. Then while I'm using my gray, I want to draw a line here. I would imagine this line would be drawn on the background paper, and if I try to fake it, it might not look convincing. I'm just going to create a layer right above the background layer. That'll look as if I'm drawing underneath those pieces of paper. I can just draw like a little rod for my light. The other thing I might want to do is maybe some shine marks on the windows. I'm going to make a layer above that, should be right here. Below the house, like the house pea shape. Let me get white. That way if I draw under here, it looks like I'm drawing on the blue paper and not over everything else. I'm going to go a little bit larger with my brush size and just maybe add some little shine marks. It makes it look like they're shiny windows. There is our completed paper cut mid-century palm springs house illustration. This just goes to show you what it's like to take an existing illustration and turn it into a paper cat illustration. This is something that I like. I'm absolutely in love with. I keep wanting to stare at it because I think it just messes with my brain, because my brain thinks, I can pick up these little pieces of paper even though they're completely digital. Just to compare the before and after is pretty fun too. Like that is, it's fine. It's cute, but that makes me feel something. It's really fun. I'm going to show you a couple other pieces that I changed from just flat illustration into paper cut. Let me go and show you those. 20. More Examples of Converted Paper Cut: In this video, I want to show you a few more examples of some pieces that I've taken that were just flat illustrations and converted into paper cut art. This is an illustration of a bowl of Ramen that I drew with one of my brush, that's the Multi-Tonal Markers. I really love it as it is, but I really wanted to challenge myself with this one and see it. Because there's so many things layered on top of each other, I wanted to see if I could turn it into paper cut art. Let me just see all my layers. There are a lot of layers for this one. Let me go and turn it off, and you can see what that looks like. It's got this really fun art and crafts feel, and a lot of different. This one took a lot of trial and error to figure out, how to layer things on top of each other. It was a challenge, but it was a fun challenge. This one is an illustration of beets that I did with my Multi-Tonal Markers. That's the before, and here is the after. This one, I really love how it turned out. I did the folding technique with the leaves that are on the beets. I also really exaggerated some of the shadows. I really pulled them away pretty far. I just love the dimensional quality that this one has. It makes me very happy. I like this one a lot. Just to show you my layer groupings, I believe they only use about four different layer groups for this one. Well, I'll show you. There's one of the groups, there's another one of the groups, and then finally the beets. This is a fun little illustration of some art supplies that I did. I did a really cool technique with blend modes to get these overlapping colors. But I also wanted to see if I could turn it into a paper cut piece. That's what I did. Here's all my layers. This one was also a lot of layers because there were a lot of overlapping things. But here is the finished version. Really love how this one came out, especially since it's one of art supplies and things that you work with with your hands. It's really fun to do it as a paper cut piece. I added some pencil details with these little lines, these little lines here. I love how this one turned out too. This is another favorite piece of mine. I drew this poodle using my artist pastels set. It has a lot of texture, and it's really fun. But I thought it would look cool as a paper cut technique, mostly because it's fairly simple and I knew I wouldn't have to do a ton of different layers to create this. Let's look at what that looks like. There's the before, and there is the paper cut version. This is actually one of the early ones that I did, and one of the first ones I did where I really fell in love with this technique. I think, it's just so pretty. The other one is great too, but this just makes my heart sing. I love it. You can see all the different layers that I did. It wasn't too many. I have, well, I guess, five different groups. Because we have the dog body, we have the little eye, this side of the bow and this side of the bow, white hair, but I think it was worth it. This is another piece that I created a long time ago. I probably made this piece back in 2019. It was actually for a tutorial that he did about doing this mid-century style illustration, which I have a tutorial about if you want to check it out. But there's a lot of things that overlap, and a lot of stuff on top of other stuff. This one was definitely a challenge.I did end up with quite a few layers. [LAUGHTER] Here is the final result. This one I really got to have fun with making these pieces stick up a little bit. It was a lot of work, but I think it was a lot of fun. This is a fun one. This was another one that I made from an illustration I did a long time ago. This is the original illustration. Just a simple little pickle. I've probably drawn this pickle a lot of times, but I just decided to change it into a paper cut piece. This is the result. I have the main pickle shape as one layer. Then I have the bold, darker green stripes. Then I have all these little tiny pieces as another layer. I could have put these dark and light green areas. I could have put them on the same layer because they're not touching each other. But I separated them out, just because they were so close together that it made it really hard to manipulate, so I've put them on their own layers. This one, I actually went ahead and animated it, which was really fun. Let me show you that. I'll just hit Play. Here's the animated version of that. All I did is, I basically merge all the layers. Then duplicated it, and just turned it a little bit, so it goes back and forth. I have some tutorials on animation if you're interested in that. But animation is super fun. It can add an extra element of interest to your paper cut illustrations. I really like this one. 21. On Your Own: Now you've learned how to both create a digital paper cut piece from scratch and how to also take some of your existing artwork and convert it into paper cut. Now I want you to go out on your own and create your own paper cut piece. You can design something from scratch or you can take one of your old pieces and convert it. But whenever you do, have fun, don't forget to go through and analyze and think about what layers everything is going to be on, and have fun manipulating the shadows and adding little details. Of course, be sure to share your project. I cannot wait to see what you guys create. 22. Conclusion: Congratulations on making it to the end of the class. I hope you are so excited about the new skills that you've learned, and you're ready to go out and do paper cut everything. I remember when I first started doing digital paper cut and how invigorating it was. It really lit a fire under me creatively and made me feel something for my digital art that I hadn't felt in a while, and it made me just want to create more. I really hope that it does that for you as well. Please be sure to share your artwork, I cannot wait to see it. I hope you enjoy making paper cut art. Thanks and happy art-making.