Retro Illustration: Make Your Own Paper Doll in Procreate

1. Introduction: Are you interested in vintage fashion or fashion design in general, and enjoy designing your characters outfits as much as I do, then creating a paper doll is a wonderful method to experiment with different styles, showcase your beautiful designs, and create a unique and fun artwork in the process. Hi everyone, I'm Julia, also known as Unovin, and I'm an illustrator from Germany. I have a huge passion for everything vintage, whether it be clothing, accessories or furniture pieces, and love to incorporate that into my art. Fashion is definitely a very important part of my art. I love coming up with outfits, or creating posters around vintage pieces. I also really enjoy illustrating with bold colors and lots of texture. Even though I work digitally, it's very important to me that my illustrations still have an analog fields with them, which is why I love emulating traditional techniques like screen printing or litho printing. Since you can make paper dolls for so many different themes, styles, or even make custom ones for persons or brands, they are highly versatile and some of my most well liked illustrations. Paper dolls, also can bring back so many memories for you and perhaps you grew up playing with them like I did. Illustrating a paper doll is also a great way to get more comfortable when it comes to drawing clothing or experimenting with different styles. They have been cherished for generations, inspiring creativity, imagination, and allow for fashion and design. I thought it would be really fun and useful to teach you how to make your own paper doll illustration. In this class, we will dive into the world of paper dolls from the origins a simple cutout figures to the digital versions of today. I will give you a step by step guide on creating your own digital paper doll in procreate. We will explore ways to find inspiration, choose a strong theme, and create our own mood-board based on fashion decade. We will learn how to sketch our doll and design outfits with the help of procreate symmetry tool and learn how to choose a great color palette that will make our illustration stand out. I will show you techniques to bring a retro and analog fields with illustrations by using textures and printing effects. Throughout the class., I will also share my best tips and tricks for drawing, coloring, and texturizing and procreate. It will be simpler to follow this class if you have some experience with procreate, however, it is not required. I'll walk you through every step of the process. Whether you are a beginner or working professional, this class is for you. Let's begin and let me show you what exactly the class project will be 2. Class Project: For the class project, you will create your own retro inspired paper doll illustration in Procreate based on the vintage style era you choose following my step-by-step guide. All you need for the class is an iPad with the Procreate installed and an Apple pencil. I'm personally using the 11 inch iPad Pro. This one is the third generation with 128 GB of storage. With that I use the Apple pencil, this one is the second-generation. Regarding Procreate, I'm currently using Version 5.3.2. Please make sure you are using this or any more recent version that may be available now. As you're taking this class so you aren't missing any of the features that I will be using. For the main project, this is all you need. I also put together some resources and downloads that we will be using throughout the class. If you have any problems downloading the files, you can also find a link at the bottom of the class project section. Just make sure that if you are on the iPad, you go on the Skillshare website and not through the app. You can download them all now, but I will also explain how to do it in more detail once we need them. Now it's time for you to get your surprise. Maybe grab a tea or a coffee, and I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Finding Inspiration : Before we look at different fashion errors and gather inspiration for our paper doll, let's first take a brief look at some vintage paper dolls and notice some of the key features. Here we can see a paper doll from the 1930s and from the 1940s, which features some nice outfits. We can notice, and of course, the name gives it away, that paper dolls were made of paper, which made them a very inexpensive toy for children back in the day. Here you can also really see the paper texture from the skin. Another interesting part that we can see is that the clothes have these small rectangles attached to them. These are called folding tabs and I used to put the outfit on the doll after you cut it out by following them around the doll's body. Now, let's make a jump and look at paper dolls from '60s. This one is featuring Twinkie and it got an fashion icon of the '60s. He has one of Brigitte Bardot's featuring outfits that she could wear or also want to share. I think one of the reasons why paper dolls are still popular today is because you can explore different styles and personalities with them. Just be super creative entry with what you create. Now, for the last paper dolls, I chose these from the '70s featuring Barbie, which was super popular doors back in the day. While looking at these, I think it's important to note that unfortunately, paper dolls in the past often only showed a very specific and realistic type of Curlin body. When it comes to creating your own paper doll, I encourage you to create whatever you want and have fun and not feel obligated to stick to any of these depictions. Now that we have an idea of how paper dolls looked like, it's time to get inspired and think about our own theme. Since we want to create a retro-inspired doll, let's first decide on a decade to focus on. If you don't know what decade to pick, that's no problem at all. I may Pinterest boards for a fashion of the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. To get you inspired, you can find them when you search for my username, which is Junoregenart or you can also use the link I provided in the class project description. Though here you can see the boards for the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. I tried to include a variety of things so from clothing options to hairstyles to accessories, like the handbags or the shoes to let clothing for different occasions, outerwear, and here we have beach wear for example, thing goes for the other boards. You can see how much they change. Here we have a lot more bold colors, lots of like oranges and pinks and get just very fun outfits. Can get you inspired same for '70s here we have a lot more earthy tones and they're very fun silhouettes and accessories as well. Same goes of course, from the '80s, which are like totally different. A lot of neon and very, bold colors and very interesting silhouettes. There's a lot of emphasis on the shoulders, which I really quite like. You can just have a look at that and maybe figure out if there's like a pattern you like or a color combination that you are drawn to for a decade, I hope that gets you inspired. I also love to look through old-fashioned magazines. If you don't own any, that's completely fine. A great source, archive.org, which has an online magazine rack there. You can browse all magazines and even download them for free. I like to use the search bar and simply type in keywords that are related to what I'm looking for. For example, let's search for Vogue and it will show us all the Vogue magazines from the archives. They have a lot of new ones as well, but what I am mostly interested in is the vintage ones. You can browse through there and get inspired. For example, let's look at this Vogue magazine from 1965, I really liked the rainbow dress and you can just look through it like you would with a physical magazine. It's really interesting to see what magazines looked like back then. You can also scroll through it faster with the bar at the bottom and get inspired by the advertisements and editorials of the past. Another way to get inspired is looking through books about fashion, and they also look beautiful as coffee books in my opinion. This is the first one, and it's called 20th-century fashion, which features the last 100 years of fashion by showing over 400 advertisements. What's really nice about this book is that it is in German, English, and French and it goes all the way 1900-1999. I love looking at these advertisements because they really show what was popular during different periods of time and they also include a timeline in the book which tells you interesting facts about each year and how it influenced fashion. The second book I can highly recommend is Vintage Details of Fashion Sourcebook. This is a collection of more than 600 fashion details from outfits of the 20th century. I think it was mostly meant for people who are sewing or are designing, but I think it is great for illustrators as well because it really shows great details that can make your design stand out. It is divided into different parts like sleeves, colors, or pockets, and it's just really beautifully photographed and you can learn so much about the wake of slip back then and create really authentic designs for your art. I personally really love '60s style-wise so I had to look through that part and what I really liked was the oranges and also the greens and how they look together like here, for example, I really like the contrast of the green and the orange. I decided that I will be creating a '60s paper doll but now it's your turn. Have a look at the boards or any other form of inspirations and notice what things you are drawn to and decide on a decade you want your paper doll to focus on. There's no need to spend a huge amount of time on the doll. Just have a brief look through stuff and see what you and then the next step we will define our theme more and start looking for actual references 4. Defining Your Theme: Hopefully you've found a decade that you're interested in, and are excited to start gathering reference images. Before we do that, I recommend defining your doll's theme a bit more. Doing that will make your paper doll feel more cohesive, and it will help you to not get overwhelmed when it comes to searching for reference images, and then designing the outfits. Things you can ask yourself to find a more precise theme can be, who is my dog? Should it be a person that is well-known for a style? Or maybe I want to create myself as a paper doll, or I just do an invented person. What season do I want to design for? For example, a summer paper doll is way different than a winter paper doll. But it can also be fun to do one outfit for each season. What occasion or occasions do I want the outfits to be for? Do you want to create more casual looks, or something more special like for a party or maybe for the job that the paper doll would be doing? Is there a motive or pattern that I want to focus on? For example, shapes like flowers or stars can be really fun. For patterns like polka dots or stripes. As a last question, is there a color combination that I want to focus on? It could be really fun to maybe create a neon doll or just go monochromatic. I really like the idea of a spring paper doll that focuses on flowers as a motive. I think that would really go well with the orange, and green combinations that I saw on Pinterest in the 60 sport. I also think that I will create more everyday outfits. Maybe something that I would personally wear, maybe to a picnic or just to meet a friend to go into town with. But now it's your turn. Take a few more minutes to think about your paper doll's theme, and answer these questions. Then we will start creating our mood board. 5. Making a Mood Board: Now that we have a decade and a more defined theme, we can make our paper doll mood board. It will be a visual representation of the overall aesthetic and style you want to create for your illustration and it's a great tool when exploring the look and feel of a specific decade. We have a broad image of what the decade we chose looked like fashion wise, but now it's time to narrow it down and choose actual references and styles we would like to use for our paper doll. As a first step, lets collect the variety of images to put on our board. You can use photographs, illustrations, magazine ads, or even pieces of clothing and accessories from the era. Feel free to use my Pinterest boards as a starting point. I also created a couple of mood boards using them. If you want to choose one of them and a theme that I created, you can download them in the resource section. For that, you simply go to the resource section again and click on the PDF on the right. I created eight boards and total with different themes featuring some of the images I found on Pinterest as well as color palettes to get you inspired. Creating a mood board is a little time-consuming, but you can learn a lot and it is really fun. But I made these as options if you want to go straight into sketching. If you want them as JPEGs, you can also scroll to the bottom and click the link to the OneDrive folder, which contains all the resources and you can just download them there as well. But now let's have a look on how to make a mood board yourself. For my paper doll, I will go to my 60s board and I am just looking what I think would fit with my theme or what I would love to use as inspiration or as a reference for my designs. For example, I really like this one. I will just wait until these buttons go away then take a screenshot and save it for my mood board. I saw this earlier and really liked the flower on the shoe. Definitely going to screenshot this one. No worries if the quality isn't that great since it's just for a mood board. I also really like this one. I'm not sure if I want to create this exact dress, but I really like this detail with the scallops. I'm also going to screenshot this one and just continue searching for stuff that stands out to me and that I think would go nice together with things I have already screenshotted. I think this one would make a great bag. It's very cute and I would totally wear this too if I had it. It can also be great to take screenshots of something like this. To get a feel for the look of the paper doll, so you don't only have to do clothing, of course. I will also screenshot this one to get a nice idea of the makeup that I want to put on my doll. Textures and patterns are also important in creating the overall look and feel of a mood board. Look for images that show the types of fabrics, prints, or patterns that remind you of the decade or that you really want to create when making the paper doll. For example, I really like this knit texture here and especially paired with this more thicker fabric of the pinafore dress. Go ahead and pause the lesson and finish collecting your screenshots. I would recommend finding around 15-20 images and as soon as you're done with that, we'll start creating our mood board and procreate. Now that we have a collection of our screenshots on our iPad, it's time to jump into procreate and make our mood board. I really like to use this A4 canvas. Then I just rotate it like this, so it's facing this way. I start by adding all the images to my Canvas. What I do is go to the actions settings up here and press "Insert a photo" and I put all the reference images into an album and now I will start inserting them one by one. Now that the first image is imported, I will go to the select tool, which is here in the upper corner and I make sure that the rectangle is selected. I zoom in a little bit and already crop my image, so we are only left with what's important for our board. I just select the area like this and then let go and then I press "Copy and Paste". As you can see now, under layers, we have our crop image and we can delete the previous version by swiping left and pressing "Delete." Now we do this for each image and while we do this, because it can take a little bit of time, we can already start thinking about which images might go well together or start thinking about outfits that could work or maybe a specific image that we want as a focal point. We just continue like before. We select "Crop" and copy paste, and then we delete the previous version. I also don't really worry about the placement yet. I'd like to add all the images first and get an overview of what I chose. Now we are done with this step and we can start to sort the images and make a nice composition. Actually, what I like to do first is turn off all the layers so I'm not too overwhelmed by all the images that are here. Then I will first start with the title of our mood board. For that, I go to actions, add and press "Add Text." Since my paper doll will be 1960s inspired and is inspired by what I would like to wear, I am just going to call it 1960s Juno paper doll for now. Let's make the text bold. Then I will just place it in the corner like this. Then what I like to do is lock this layer by swiping left and pressing "Lock." That basically means you can't edit this layer until you unlock it. It will not distract you. Then I like to go through all my images and choose one that stood out to me. Which for me is this dress because I love the shape and details and would like to design a similar one. Now I will select the image and just start by placing it in the middle and then I will continue like this. For example, I think boots would look really good with the dress, so I'm adding them next to it. In terms of composition, you can really just do it however you want it. You can be more messy or really organize them neatly. The only thing I would pay attention to is to not overlap your images in a way that hides the design like this, for example. Go ahead and continue adding your references to the canvas and come up with a composition that works for you. If you want to move multiple images at once, you can select them by swiping right on each of them, and then press "Select" and just move them like this. As you can see, our mood board is really starting to take shape. The floral spring theme I chose to focus on is getting reflected in the images I chose. I'm starting to get really excited to design my doll and outfits based on them. Now that we're happy with our composition and references, I'd like to add a color palette to my mood board that represents the decade. Let's do that on the upper right corner. For that, I first create a new layer and draw a circle with the technical pen and by pressing on the screen like this, it will automatically create a perfect circle for me. Then I just drag and drop black for now and place it inside the circle. Now what I do is duplicate this layer and drag the new layer to the side. Now it's time to select some colors that I like from our mood board and for that, I use the color picker. All you have to do is press down on the Canvas with one finger. As you can see, it gives you a swatch of the color you are pressing down on. Let's start with this nice green of this dress. I will just drag and drop the color on a circle and then I adjust the color and edit it a little bit, so it's more bright and more what I am looking for. Now, I want an orange as well. I will pick a color from the dress here that I like and maybe just make it a little bit lighter. Then I want a nice deep yellow similar to this one on the flower bag. I'm just going to make this a lot brighter as well. I think a neutral color would go well. Let's just pick from the hair for now and then adjust the color until I'm satisfied. As a last color, I would really like a soft pink. I first watch a pink from this bag here and then just edit it until I'm happy. This is my final color palette for the mood board. With that, you now have a mood board that represents the fashion and the aesthetic of the decade you're exploring. Now let's save the mood board as a JPEG. We are ready for the next lesson, where we will set up our Canvas for the paper doll and add our mood board as a reference. 6. Setting up Your Canvas: Now that we have done a lot of research, it's time to set up our Canvas so we can start sketching. Press the plus button and New Canvas. We are going with a Canvas that is 2,000 by 2,000 pixels. We should set the DPI to 300, and that will give us 258 layers on my iPad, but it might vary depending on what iPad you have. Then for the color profile, you can pick any of the RGB options or the display option like me. This is great for posting to the Internet or social media, but if you want to print your artwork, I do recommend to go higher, so at least 3,000 pixels. Now our Canvas is ready and we need brushes to use. Procreate gives us a lot of cool options for brushes, but I also made a brush pack for you, which has a couple of Procreate brushes that I like as well as some that I made by myself or that I edited. I will show you how to download that one. All you need to do is scroll down at the Resources and you can either download it on the bottom here, or you can go to the Resources on the right and just click the Paper Doll brushset, and then you just download it. You press here. It will open a zip file. Here you can see the Paper Doll brushset. You just press it and it will automatically import the brush set into the Procreate app. Now the only thing we need to start sketching is our mood board. Go ahead and go to Settings. Under, Canvas, you can find a Reference option and we want to turn that switch on. Now we can add our mood board by pressing image, "Import image", and choose our board. Just like that, you now have this handy reference tab that you can zoom in on. You can also adjust the size by dragging the bottom-left corner, and you can freely drag around the reference tab as well. Now that we are all set up, we are ready to start sketching in the next lesson. 7. (Optional) Sketching The Doll: Now we'll start sketching our doll. You can skip this step if you want to start designing the outfit straight away, and for that, you can again either download it directly from the resources section or down below using the link and then save the image. Then we open our Canvas in Procreate and add the doll template. If you did that, you can jump to the next lesson now. For those who want to sketch their own doll, I will explain how I do that in more detail now in this lesson. First of all, let's remove the reference for now. If you need it, you can always turn it back on like this. For sketching, I like to use the Procreate pencil from the brush set, which is just a slightly edited version of the default brush. Now when it comes to sketching the doll, there really is no right or wrong way to approach this. I will just explain the way that I personally approach it and try to give you some tips and things to pay attention to. First of all, the paper doll we are creating will be symmetrical. What that means is that both sides of the doll will be exactly the same. You can see this very well when we look at my finished paper doll here. This symmetry will make our sketching and designing process a lot easier, and I will explain how to use the symmetry tool in Procreate in the next step to make this a really convenient process. But for our initial sketch, just keep in mind to keep the doll as symmetrical as you can. I like to start by thinking of the body as shapes. An oval for the head and rectangular for the neck. Then moving onto the shoulder and torso, and I also add this line in the center to help me pay attention to the symmetry. Then I move on to the hips, which I want to be a little wider than the waist. Now for the legs, I also start with a straight line and Procreate will automatically straighten the line when you hold your pen down for a little bit, which is very handy for me as I have pretty shaky hands. Then I continue with the arms. I decided to position them at an angle so the hands are behind the back of the doll since I do not really have any long-sleeved designs in mind, I prefer to just having the arms straight down like the legs and then I add some shape to the leg and add where I think the feet will go, and then also add some more shape to the arms. Then I will select the image and just drag it a little bit more to the middle then I go to layers and I make this first sketch of my guide for the second sketch by turning down the opacity like this to around 25% and adding a new layer. Now, I try to refine the sketch, so trying to get the shapes and proportions more right. You can also use references for help. There are great classes here on Skillshare, for example, anatomy or for proportion. But generally, I just say practice, practice, and don't be afraid to make mistakes. It's all part of the learning process and my dolls are definitely not perfect, but they also don't have to be just try to have fun with it. Now, for the second sketch, I like to refine one side first and then when I'm done with that, I go to layers and actually duplicate this layer and then go to select, press, "Flip Horizontal" and make sure I have magnetics on, and then drag the layer until we have a full body. I think that really helps to spot more things I want to change or refine, and now I just merge these layers together. I really like this technique of creating sketch over sketch because you can start pretty rough and then make each sketch cleaner and more refined, and it can also help you to spot mistakes. For example, the head I drew in the first sketch, now it looks very off and I can fix it in the next sketch. Yeah, it's basically just a lot of drawing and erasing until I'm happy with it. For the head, let's turn off the guide layer and create a new layer. Again, I just start with a basic oval shape for now, and then I also add the hairline and like a rough cross to see where the eyes and the nose will go. Then I merge the layers and delete the initial sketch because I now want to use my second sketch as a guide, so I'm setting the opacity down to 25% again and create a layer for the third and final refinement. For this sketch, I really try to keep my lines clean and create a final outline before using the symmetry tool in the next step to make the sketch completely symmetrical. I also add a top and bottom for the doll, making sure it will not interfere with any of the designs I will be using, so I won't draw any straps for the top, for example. I also just roughly sketch in where the eyes, nose, and mouth will go. Before the next lesson, sketch your doll and refine it until you are happy. In next chapter, I will explain how the symmetry tool works and how it makes the process really easy. 8. Symmetry Tool: If you have skipped the doll part, please don't skip now as the symmetry tool will be very important for the clothing as well and I want to show you how to use it in detail with the final refinement of our doll sketch. First, let's turn on the symmetry tool by going to Actions, Canvas and turning our drawing guide on and then we want to go to Edit Drawing Guide and it will give you the options for 2D grid, isometric, perspective, and symmetry. Let's press on symmetry and it gives us this guideline down the center and now for the settings, I like the opacity of the line around 40% and the thickness around 50 and they are also more options for different kinds of guides, but we want to stick with the vertical option. On the top here you can also choose the color for the guideline, but I will just stick to black because it's the most visible. So now we're done with that and we can create a new layer and when you press on this layer, it will open the Options tab and we want to turn on the Drawing Assist here. As you can see, what we draw is now being mirrored on the other side of the guideline, so for example, we can create a perfect heart like this. Now before making our final doll sketch, go to the sketch layer and select it and make sure the center of the doll is aligned with the symmetry guideline and then we can turn down the opacity of this layer to around 25% and create a new layer with the drawing assist turned on for the final sketch and as a brush, I now like to use the stable procreate pen, which makes your lines a lot smoother. Now I make the final outline of my doll and thanks to the symmetry tool, I only have to draw 50 percent of the doll while getting a perfectly symmetrical sketch. Now, I am also sketching a face for my doll and again, here you can just do whatever you like, since my doll is '60s inspired, I do want to give her a nice cat eyeliner and pronounced bottom lashes as well as some eye shadow and I also always like to do this round cheeks. If you want to add a feature that is not supposed to be symmetrical, you can just go to your layer and turn off the drawing assist like this, so for example, I want to give my doll and freckles, which I don't want it to be symmetrical, so now I can just draw them in like this. Now that I'm done with the outline, I turn off the other sketch and make sure all my lines are nice and clean and have a final look and I actually think her neck could be a little bit longer, so I am merging my layers, selecting my doll and with the free hand selected, I draw an outline around the head and then press the arrow on the top and now I can freely move the head up just a little bit. Now as a final step, I just do some final adjustments until I'm happy. So now it's your turn to finalize your sketch with the symmetry tool, in the next lesson, we will then design our outfits, which is my favorite part, so I'm looking forward to showing you how I do that. 9. Designing Clothing: In this lesson, we are designing all the clothing for our paper doll and getting everything ready for the coloring process. I will guide you through my process of coming up with outfits and creating a pleasing composition. First of all, I want my doll a little bit smaller, so there is more space for the cloths. With uniform selected, I'm going to re-size her and then I turn on snapping to position her perfectly in the middle. Then we turn down the opacity to around 50%. Turn off drawing assist and name our layout sketch. Then let's create a new layer. Turn on Drawing Assist so we can continue to get a symmetrical sketch. For the brush, I will use the procreate pencil again. Now, all we have to do is go to actions, canvas and turn our reference back on. What I like to do is sketch my outfits on the doll directly so they fit perfectly. Generally, I'd recommend starting with the outfit that I want my doll to wear in the finished illustration, I just really loved this dress from the mood board. I want to start with that. Now, I want to recreate the shape and the belt detail of the dress because I really like it. I first start with everything that's symmetrical. I do want to change the neck line though, because I do prefer the one on the other dress, but maybe a bit more rounded and with a little scalloped edge. Now, I also want to add some pockets to create a more interesting dress. Since my theme is '60s and flower inspired, I think I will put some on the pockets. Then as a last step, I add all the details that aren't symmetrical with the drawing assistant turned off. Then when I'm happy, I rename my layers so I don't get confused later. Now I continue with her hair and I think I also want to add a barrette. I sketch that in without a Drawing Assist, so it sits on her head more naturally. Now for shoes, I think high boots would be great since the dress is quite short to create a nice silhouette. Now let's have a look. Let us turn off the doll sketch for a second and look at everything. I think it's all looking good. Of course, don't forget to rename your layers. Now I am ready with the output of my doll. You can pause the video here and do the same thing and sketch your doll's outfit. Next, we will continue to design the other pieces of clothing. I like to continue with the outfits that will take up most room. Long pants, voluminous skirts, coats or dresses, because that way it will be easier to get a nice composition and figure out where each piece will go. For my doll, I think the biggest pieces will be the coat and the dresses. I want to start there. First, let's create a group for the outfit on the doll by swiping right on each layer and then renaming it. Then we can turn that layer off and create a new one for the coat. Now, I do love the shape, but I think the pattern is a little too busy. I will change that when it comes to coloring. But again, I'm first figuring out the shape. For example, this coat is rather boxy. I try to recreate that, especially on the shoulders. For the sleeves. I think it would be nice to have them in pockets actually to create more interests. I'm sketching that in and then just adjusting the silhouette until I'm happy and adding the color as well. Then sketching in these cute floral buttons that go perfectly with my theme. A tip I have is to draw one flower duplicate it, press Select, and turn on magnetics and drag the layer down. Then I am merging these two layers and repeat the process. Then I do that until I have enough flowers and merge everything together. As the last step, we need to add our falling tabs so we get that authentic paper doll look. I create a new layer and rename it. Of course, turn on drawing assist. I draw in the tabs. I put them in places that would help the clothes to stay attached. Mostly where the outline of the doll and the outline of the clothing are touching like here on the shoulders or also on sleeves. I also wanted to one down here. I make the tabs a little bit longer so they would fall around the doll. Then when I'm done with that, I group up the layers together and rename it again. Then what I like to do is duplicate this layer and flatten one of them like this. Now I have the group that I will keep on the doll for later. When we want to add color and the flat coat in one layer, which I will use to map out where to put it on my canvas. I select it, turn off snapping and put it in the corner for now where I think it looks good. Next, I want to do a skirt with tights and shoes attached. I'm using my mood board as a guide while paying attention to creating authentic shapes. My skirt is going to be a line because that's what I mostly saw when looking at references. When I'm done, I'm doing the same thing as before. I add the folding tabs, rename my layer, create a group, and then duplicate that group and flattened one of them. Then what I like to do is create a group that contains all the outfits I am leaving on the doll so it's nice and organized. I'm going to call that clothes on doll and turn it off. Then I move my flat layer to a freespace on my canvas and I'm ready to start the next piece. I am moving on like that and create more outfits for my paper doll. I pay attention to the shapes and silhouettes and tried to always include some details like colors, buttons, or stitching. I also think about texture already. For example, the spinner for, I want to roughly sketch in that I want to replicate this material when coloring it. You can also invent completely new clothes, of course. For example, I really want to create a more fitted dresses well. I am combining things I like from the references, like a little color and scallop sleeves, as well as a small belt around the waist. Now that I have the biggest pieces done, I like to think of their final position a bit more. I am trying to find a good place for them on the Canvas instead of just placing them all to the side. You can also turn on the outfit on the doll to make sure that nothing overlaps. Then I continue with smaller pieces of clothing like tops, shorts, or shoes. It can also be fun to add graphics or patterns to your pieces when it works with the decade, for example, for my '60s inspired doll, I really want to add a lot of florals to my pieces. For this top and skirt, I roughly sketch in some dots that I relate to turn into polka dots on coloring. Patterns and different fabrics are a great way to add interests to your designs. Experiments and look at your references to how about stripes, polka dots, or pled of a fabric. How about a fluffy sweater or a [inaudible] row instead of jeans. You can also duplicate pieces and later give them different colors. For example, I really liked the boots I put on the doll. I will find them, duplicate the layer and drag it to the top. Then I add the folding tabs and I have a second pair just like that. Now the Canvas is getting filled more and more and the pieces are getting smaller. Accessories are a great way to fill the gaps. Let's start with a bag for the gap on top and add another pair of shoes. It's also really fun to add different hairstyles as well. To give you a character, even more variety, you can add hair accessories to like headscarves, a headband, or acute hep maybe. From now on, I start moving on to sketching directly in the empty spaces. I really want to add this cute flower bag. You can get a symmetrical flower easily by creating a circle and duplicating it. Then select it, make sure magnetics are turned on and drag the circle up. Then repeat the process and drag the circle to the side like this, then merge the last two circles together and duplicate them as well. Now select them and press flip horizontal and drag them to the side. Now you can merge them to duplicate them again and press Flip Vertical and drag them down. Just like that, you'll get a perfect flower. Then I just erase what I don't need. Place the flower in the center and at the handles of the bag with the drawing assist. Now for the rest of the accessories, I will also draw them in the center and then move them to do I want filled. I also still have a good amount of space on the left, so I'm going to draw another top. If you are left with very small gaps, you can also add shapes that work with your design or with your theme, like stars or flowers, sparkles, or maybe even confetti. Just be creative and experiment. Great other things to add are bags, jewelry, hats, or sunglasses, since they don't take up a lot of space. It can also be fun to add some more personality to your doll. For example, I think my dog would enjoy drawing as well. Why not add a note book to fill some space? Other fun things to add could be instruments, a camera, umbrella, hair brush, makeup, or even items that could be inside the bag. If there's a part that you really don't know how to fill, it's also a great trick to just add some text to your paper doll. I often don't really know what to put right under my doll. I really like to add my texts there. For that, you just go to Actions, Add and press, Add Text. I'm just going to write 1960s paper doll. I also want the text to be bold, so I'm going to edit the text. I can also adjust the size and a few other things. I will just see what works with the space I have, adjusting the pieces of clothing as well until it looks nice. Then I filled the last gap that stand out to me with more flowers. With that, I'm pretty much done with my sketch. Now as last thing, I like to Zoom out and look at my composition again and readjust until I'm really happy with where I am. Then when you're happy, you can merge all the layers together that are not on the doll. With that, we are done and ready for coloring. Take your time with sketching and figuring out a composition until you're happy with everything. Then in the next lesson, we will start coloring our illustration 10. Adding Colours and Details: Now we come to the part where we add color to our illustration and really make the clothing pieces pop. I will explain the steps I take in detail and give you some tips on how to make coloring with Procreate really easy and actually relaxing experience. First, let's rename our layer and turn the opacity down to 40 percent. Now, let's start with coloring the doll sketch. Again, I am also turning down the opacity to around 25 percent and I also turn off the outfits layer as I don t need it right now. Then I create a new layer and drag it to the bottom. Then I also add my mood board again. Based on the colors I put on the mood board, I did create a larger palette in Procreate with more variations. You can find it in the resources section as well if you want to use it. Let's first start with the skin. Don't forget to turn on the drawing assist and my favorite brush to use for coloring is the technical pen as it gives you nice clean lines. You can use the normal one or the more stable technical pen if you want a more weighted line like me. Now, just like we did with the sketch, I outline the body carefully and I always close my lines so there are no gaps, so can easily fill them using Procreate's color drop feature. Now for everything that goes on the body, I want to set my new layer to clipping mask, which makes sure that what I draw is only visible on the body and the color in her top and shorts. Again, making sure that my outlines don't have any gaps, so I can just drop in the color. Now, any other color I add, I want to put on a new layer so we can adjust it easily if we decide to change it later and it will automatically set it to a clipping mask as well. I continue to add skin and clothing details and then I move on to the face. For the face and hair, I do like to take my time. Again, I work on a new layer for every new color. Since the 60s had quite bold colors and make up especially when it came to the Mod style. I like to add a colorful lip and also add freckles and for these, I like to set the mode to multiply so they can be seen well on the skin and on the nose. I also want to add about eye shadow and then Let's keep on adjusting the face until I'm happy. After that, I will put all my layers into a group and name it accordingly. Now we can move on to the outfit on the doll. We have the boots, hair, and the dress. I'd like to start with the hair. Again, I am turning down the opacity and create a new layer for the outline and coloring process underneath the sketch layer. Now, it's basically the same as with the dog. I draw my outline, fill it with color drop and add a new layer for each new color I want to draw with. Like here I am moving on with the beret and some details for the hair so it appears less flat. Then I want to add the hair and had to group as well and name it so everything stays organized and I also delete the sketch layer because we don't need it anymore. Now, let's move on to the dress. I really wanted to have this nice green color, so I am starting with that and because I want the blouse and the color underneath the dress to be white, I adjust the background color from white to something with a little more contrast. Let's go with this light pink. Now, when it comes to the sleeves and pieces of your design in general, it can be fun to play with the opacity to add interest. Here I'm turning it down slightly to around 75 percent and I really like the look of that. Then I continue to add more details to the dress. I'm drawing the pockets and I am adding these little orange and yellow flowers to them for a nice contrast. Now, for the belt loop, I like to use the multiply setting again, just as we did with the freckles before. I first draw them, set it to multiply and then change the color to exactly the same as the dress. As you can see, you get this nice effect where the green parts that overlap become darker. Now we finish up the belt, create a group for the dress layers and then the only thing missing on doll are the boots so I draw them in the same way as the other pieces. Then I create a group that contains the three pieces and call it my outfit on doll and with that, we are ready to move on to the extra outfits. We can turn off the outfit on Doll layer now and turn on the cloths on Doll layer. Now, I like to just go piece by piece. Let's start with the coat. First, I merged the folding tab and coat layer and adjust the opacity and create my layer for coloring. Of course, with drawing assist is always the steps are now exactly the same as before. We create the outlines and add details using our reference as a starting point. I also pay attention to whether piece of clothing will be on my canvas and choose the colors accordingly. For example, I make the coat green as well as it won't be close to the green dress we just did, because they won't be next to each other in my illustration. Now, one of the brushes I put in the brush pack is really fun. If you want to add a fairy texture to your clothing. It's called salt grass and looks like this. It is great for giving that effect. I adjust the size and draw in my third detail on the sleeve. Then I turn on Alpha Lock and fill the layer with white selected. Then I erase parts that I don't like. Just like that, you have this cute and interesting detail. For the floral patterns I do the same technique as we did for the flower bag sketch. I created using circles and mirroring them and then I multiply my flower. I just noticed I forgot to use Drawing Assist for detail. I'm just doing that first. Add some stitching detail to the bottom as well and then we can add the following tabs to our code and then it's all of our code layers. After that, we put our layers into regroup again, name it, and move the group to the right place. With that, we can move on to our next piece. From now on, it's just repeating the same steps. One thing that I leave for the letter is adding patterns. I like to focus on solid colors and details like stitching or buttons first. Then when I have all my pieces colored, I go back in and add more details like stripes or polka dots, where I think the piece needs more variety. I really liked the coloring part because you can see your illustration starting to take shape and since the step for each piece are pretty much the same, it can be very relaxing for me and I like to put on some music and just a fun with picking colors. Now, while I continue to work on my pieces, you can start coloring yours as well. I will speed my process up by a lot now. Let's have a small recap while we're in the middle of coloring. Use a limited color palette. Always remember that less is more. You can always add more color if you need it, but it's pretty hard to take some away afterwards. Remember to close your outlines and use the color drop feature. This just makes your whole process a lot easier and a lot more convenient. Start with solid colors and then move on to details, leaving things like patterns until the end, experiment and have fun, play with the opacity, multiply two color combinations, contrasts, et cetera. Just don't be afraid to try out things. Sometimes when you think you make mistakes, it actually turns out to be like a really cool detail or something very interesting to look at. Remember to organize your layers. I know it's annoying and to be honest, I don't always do it, but when I do it, I'm always glad that I did because it just makes managing a lot of layers so much less stressful. Now that we are almost done with the coloring process, I like to take a step back and decide where I want to add more detail. As we decided while sketching, I really want to add polka dots to my skirt and top combo, and I actually made a brush for that. Choose the decimals brush, find your layer and add a clipping mask. Now you can choose whatever color you like. I usually go with a lighter or darker version. Let's try out a darker orange first. I like to paint a larger area than just the skirt so I can adjust the size and position of it afterwards like this. I'm not entirely happy with the color. I'm turning on Alpha Lock on my layers and fill it with different hues. Then for the top, since it's supposed to be a set, I simply duplicate the pattern layer and drag it onto my top and position it until I am happy and merge the layers. Now, I think my yellow bodycon dress looks a little bland. I actually think a flower could look nice. I'm just going to duplicate the flower layers I made for my bag. Drag them down to the dress like this and position and resize the flower and adjust the color. Then if you remember the shirt under the pinafore I really want to give it that rip texture and for that, I like to use the drawing guide, but in another setting, so let's go to Edit Drawing Guide and choose 2D grid and I adjusted grid size until I like the amount of space between each line. This drawing assist makes you only draw horizontal or vertical lines like this. I just draw vertical lines along the guide to create the stripes. Then I turn off the Drawing Guide and adjust the opacity. Now, I also added some other pattern brushes from Procreate to the brush pack, like the rosette or honey eater, which can also help to add a nice look to your piece. Similar to the reference, it creates this nice textured effect for the dress. I like to use that on a skirt as well like this. I continue to add some more patterns to my pieces using some of the brushes in the pec. Like here with the beats brush and a green top. I'll draw that brush for the green dress on my doll until I'm happy with how everything looks and then I am done with the coloring process. Go ahead and finish up coloring your doll and adding all your final details and patterns. Then we come to the last step of our illustration, which is adding more texture to the pieces, as well as giving our digital illustration a retro and analog field by adding printing effects and defects and adding a paper texture that I created 11. Adding Textures: In my opinion, textures I would really bring your illustration to the next level. It can add so much interest, dimension and character and with retro textures and effects, it can create a feeling of nostalgia and warmth, that digital illustration of the legs. In this lesson, I want to show you three ways to add retro feel to your paper doll. The first way is using texture brushes. In the brush pack I created for this class, I added some of my favorite Procreate texture brushes that I want to add to some of my pieces. Let's start with the first texture brush which is burnt tree, and make a clipping mask. Depending on how much pressure I apply, it will give me more or less texture. Just experiment with that. Then I like to adjust the opacity and position of the texture and erase or add to fill gaps or get rid of spaces that have too much of it like this. Now, let's try out the second texture brush, which is heavy metal. This has more subtle texture. It almost gives it a watercolor effect that looks a little bit like swayed, in my opinion. The third texture I chose for the pack is rusted decay. I really like this texture because it has a leathery field. It's great for clothing or accessories. Now I just continue to add some of the textures to my pieces. Just give it a try and add some to your illustration as well. For my doll, I really like the leathery textures. Perfect. Now, let's look at another way to add a retro feel to your illustrations. This is my favorite way to really achieve that analog and printed feeling. Let's have a look at these old matchbook labels so you can see what I mean. When you are looking a little more closer at this, you can see how the colors sometimes overlap or how there are some white gaps where the colors weren't properly aligned. This really gives it an organic and quite lovely look in my opinion and we can actually recreate it very easily in Procreate. Let me demonstrate it on my doll. I go to the body layer and duplicate it, then I turn on Alpha lock on the bottom layer and fill it with white. This will now act as our background. Now, I want to set the other layer to multiply. Now this layer interacts with the pink background. Now we select our background layer and we just move it a little bit into one direction and as you can see, it creates this printing effect similar to the one we saw on the matchbox. Let me show you the process again. For the dress on my doll, we do the same steps. I duplicate the dress layer, turn on Alpha lock and fill it with white. Then I set the upper layer to multiply and move the white layer slightly like this and we get this really nice effect. You can also do the same for details like the flowers or the pockets, which creates this very nice look. Now, I do this for a lot of my pieces and just go in order. From the bottom to the top, one thing to note is that I usually don't do this effect on dark pieces often because the darker the color you use the multiply effect on, the less it will actually give you an effect because the color itself is really dark and it won't react much with the color underneath. The same goes for white layers. The multiply tool actually gets rid of any white so there is no point in doing it. Now I just continue with this technique until I am happy with how everything is looking. You can also try this out on your doll by following the same steps and then I will show you my final tricks to achieve even more of that vintage feel. Remember how I spoke about the paper texture on the paper doll references. Adding a paper texture will give your paper doll this great analog look. For this class. I created a paper overlay that you can download in the resources section. For that is simply downloaded like the other resources and it will automatically get imported into Procreate like this. Now, we select all the layers like this and drag them onto our paper doll Canvas and put it on the top of our layers. Then we select the following layer modes. For texture, we set it to color burn. For ink fade, we set it to screen, and for paper, we set it to multiply. Now this of course, is a little much so I adjust the opacities. For this, I'd go somewhere around 30 percent and as you can see, just like that, we now have this nice paper overlay for our paper doll. Then I put my paper layers into one group as well. I like to add some more printing defects. For that, I made three more brushes for you to use. They are right here at the bottom. A fine speckle, ink splitter, and scuffing brush. I like to add this on top of all my drawing layers and with white selected, I start adding it to my illustration like this. I just go with trial and error here. Just looking where I like it and creating these little defects that make everything feel more analog. Same goes for the splatter and discovering brush. You can get this nice and subtle effects with it. Then I rename that layer as well and now I also like to add some of those defects to my background layer. I created layer and pick a color that's a little more dark than my background and I just add some of the defects. Adjust your opacity and you get this nice background texture. With that, we are completely done with our paper doll illustration. Go ahead and add the paper overlay and have some fun with the printing effects. In the last lesson, I will show you how to share your illustration on Skillshare and on social media. I'm so excited to see what you have created 12. Final Thoughts: I really hope you had fun creating your own paper doll illustration and gained a few more skills when it comes to drawing and procreate and designing your clothing. I would love for you to share your doll in the class project section. You can upload your final illustration, but I would also love to see the process, like the mood board you created or the sketch you did. It would also be amazing if you would tag me on Instagram @junoregen if you decide to post your paper doll there so that I can share it with my followers. It would also mean a lot if you could give my class overview. Let me know what part is your favorite or a specific thing you learned during the class. Thank you so much for taking my class. It has been so much fun showing you how I create my paper dolls and I hope to see you soon.