Shaded Lettering In Procreate

1. Intro: Hi there, creative friend. Welcome. I'm Sarah. I'm an artist and designer. And in this class, I'll show you how to create some fun shaded lettering using the Procreate app. We'll start by setting up some lettering guides and creating some rough sketches of our letters. Then we'll move on to inking and shadow with finally, we'll finish off with some texture and shadows. All you'll need for the class is in iPad, your stylus. I'll be using my Apple Pencil and the procreate app. Are you ready? Let's get started. 2. Class Project & Downloads: For your class project, create some shaded lettering with your name using the techniques demonstrated in class. And if you'd like to share your project, don't forget to upload it to the Project gallery. I'm excited to see what you will create. I'm going to quickly show you how to download the class resources. And something important to keep in mind is that you only to be on a web browser and not the Skillshare app to access the downloads. I'm using Chrome. So right below this video, you will see some tabs. Go to the Project and Resources tab. Now scroll down to UC download Resources and we'll tap on the shaded brush. Way at the very bottom, you will see your brush has downloaded. So tap on, Download, then open in and you will select Procreate. And your brush will automatically be imported into your brush library. And it's usually at the very top. Now we will do the same thing for our color palette. We will go back to our download Resources, and this time we'll tap on the swatches file. And we'll do the same thing. We will tap on, Download, open in, and select, Procreate. And for the color palettes, it usually puts it at the very bottom of your palette library. We can tap and hold on her palette and bring it all the way up to the very top. Now that you've got that, we're ready to begin 3. Lettering Guides: In this lesson, we will set some guiding lines and create a rough sketch of our lettering. So I will begin by creating a new canvas. I'll tap on the plus sign right here on the upper right-hand corner. And I will click on new canvas. And I will set my unit of measure 2 ". And I will make this canvas 11 " by 11 " at 300 DPI. For our color profile, we will keep it at RGB. And now we call, we will tap on create. Now that we have our new canvas, we can start by setting up some lettering Guides. And if you are new to lettering or want to see my process for lettering, I have a class where I show my process for creating a thick sans-serif and script lettering. And I will link that class right below this video if you'd like to have look. Now, I will go to my Layers panel. I will make sure I'm on a brand new clean layer. I can just grab my sketching pencil from my brush library. And I will make sure I just have a black color for my lettering Guides. Now I can start off by drawing my baseline, and that will be for all my letters will sit. Now, I will draw my cap height. That will be where all the letters touch on top and my x-height. And that will go in the middle. And since I am just going to be creating a thicker, send Sarah. All uppercase letters for this class. I don't need to worry about any lowercase letters so I can place my x-height is high as I want. If I want my Letters to cross up higher, like where the a would cross over the Hs. Or I can put it lower or right in the middle. It really is just up to you and the aesthetic you are going for. I will put mine slightly below the middle. That will be for all my crossing Letters. He'll cross. Now that I have my lettering Guides set, I can lower the opacity of this layer because I just want them to be this light gray guiding lines. I'll put them at 30% for the opacity. And I can just center up my lettering Guides will make sure my snapping and magnetics are turned on. Then I can just center my lettering Guides to the campus. And you will see these two yellow lines turned on when my Guides are right in the middle of the canvas. So that looks good. Now I can begin doing my rough sketch for my letters. I will create a brand new layer above my guiding line layer. And again, we will go with our sketching pencil and our color will just be this black color. Now I can just begin by writing a my name. And this is where we will get all our spacing correct and the letters like we want before we start inking our final project. So I'll just play with my Letters to I'm happy with the lock. I will make my a at the crossing. I wanted to go slightly over. And you can just play with whatever you want, but I want to add some interests. So I'm going to make this slightly skewed a little bit where the a crosses over. I will just continue with the rest of my letters. Again. I will just cross the a for to go over a bit on the sides. I'm going to scope my letters over just a bit so I can add in my H. And as you can see, I'm leaving space in between letters right here. Because I know I will be coming in with a thicker brush for my final piece and I want to make sure I have enough space in-between my letters. Now, I will just add in my age, again, I will go over the sides a bit just to add a little bit of interest to my letter, I think you'll look really neat once it's all shaded. If you see any letter now you want to adjust. This is where I would do that. And I want my S to be a little thicker. So I will grab my selection tool. I will select my S, and I will make sure my snapping and magnetics are off so it doesn't snap to anything. And I will tap down here where it says free form so I can freely adjust my letter so I'll just make it a bit thicker. I wanted to slightly come under my baseline appear and my top. That looks good. I'm gonna do the same for the are. I think I want it a little bit thicker. So I can just adjust that right now, since this is just the sketch layer, you don't have to worry about lines being pixelated or anything because we are going to be Inking over this. So that looks good. Now, I will turn off my sketch guidelines to see how my Letters. And I really like that. So I'm going to go with this, but feel free to make as many sketches as you'd like and play around with the Letters and see what style you'd like. So in the next lesson, we will begin working on building out our letter thicknesses 4. Letter Inking: In this next lesson, we will create thickness to our Letters and prep them for Shading. Now that we have our rough sketch, we can begin adding thickness to our Letters. I will go to my Layers panel and I will create a brand new layer above my sketch layer. I'm going to turn my lettering guides back on. And for my sketch rough layer, I will lower the opacity because I will be using these letters as Guides only. So again, I can just lower the opacity and I will put this layer down to about 30%. Now I will make sure I'm on the layer above my sketch layer. I'm going to grab this medium red color. That's gonna be the color of our Letters for this class. You can use any color you want. Just make sure you have a lighter color and a darker color. The darker color will be for our Shading. And if you can use any color you want, but for this class I'll be using this color palette. I'll make sure I have my lighter red color. This time, I'm going to grab my rectangular monoline brush. I have my brush set to 45, the size set to 45%. I want a thicker kind of letter. Now that I have that setup, I can go and start tracing over Letters with this a thicker brush. So I will just trace over my sketch layer like that. And I will do that to all of my letters. Now that I have all my Letters a thickened and sketched in, I will duplicate the layer to make them a little more not as transparent. I want to make sure they're more of a solid fill color. So I will duplicate that two more times. So I will have three layers. And I can just now merge them all down. So I will just tap on my layer and then tap down here where it says Merge Down. And we'll do the same thing to the next layer. And now we have one solid layer. Now that I have that, I want to clean up the edges as you can see up on here at the a and at the edge of the S and some of these letters, they have these odd kind of pieces sticking out. So I will just grab my eraser. And I'm going to make sure I have the monoline eraser selected and you can find that under the calligraphy tab. And you will just tap on mono line for your eraser. And now I can just go to wherever I want to adjust or erase something and I'm going to just straighten out the edges of the letters. And I'm just prepping all my letters. So we will be ready to ink, ink them and shade them. In our next lesson. I would just straighten out all the edges and make sure it's exactly how I want them. I can just fix everything. And that looks good. Now I can turn off my sketch layer and guiding lines and see if everything looks good and everything looks really good. So I think we're ready now to move on to our Shading 5. Letter Shading: In this lesson, we will add our Shading cut lines. And I want to show you an example of be doing. So. I did this one previously to show you as an example. So as you can see, we're going to really study are Letters and break them down and decide where we want to add our Shading. And we can find areas that will overlap, as in this one, we can see the a has a area that can overlap here at the top and on the sides. And the R as well. And we can just find parts of our letter. They can overlap. So we can begin planning where our Shading will be on our letters. So can see exactly how we want to do that here you can see the a goes on top. And here the H. It looks as if it's going underneath and then above, right here. Which really preference what you like. You can do a mixed match or you can do them all the same. On the a, it looks like it's coming the crossbar is coming on top and it looks like the top part of the a or just kind of like folded over. So as you can see, the S really doesn't have anything. So we will leave that as now that you have studied the Letters and kind of look at your name or phrase or word, did you have? And you can map out where you think would be the best place for your letters, where they overlap for there to be some shade. We can go back to our project. We know that we will have overlapping here at the top, right here, where the a crosses over. We're the our goals over on the corner right here, and on these two areas right here. And the age or cross at these two corners right here. We know that's where we will be adding shading to these letters. Now, I can turn off those and I will leave them if we need to reference them as Guides. If we get confused where we have Shading, we can always turn that layer back on. I'm gonna give my background a color. Right here at the very bottom. You'll see background color layer. We will tap on that. And I'm just going to pick the lightest shade of pink and my palette. Now I will create a brand new layer and that will be just above. Can bring that down. Just above my lettering, my inked lettering. This one right here. I'm going to grab my shader brush this time. And I'm going to get this dark red color because we're going to be now Shading in the letters we want there to be contrast. Now that we got that, we will begin cutting our letters. So we can turn this layer back on. We know we will have a cross right here where the a, right here at the top, pretty a kind of folds over. So I will lower my brush size because I don't want it to be too thick. That's pretty good. That's the size of the brush. We will make it 10%. And I will just cut that right there. Right now. We're just going to be cutting the letters. We won't start Shading, we're just going to add these lines first. So then we know exactly where we will be Shading our Letters. Alter the same thing. I'll have this cross a for the a crosses go above the a. But if you want it to overlap, we can cut it like this and that will be underneath. And if we wanted to go above, you can cut it this way. You can start seeing where it will overlap. So for this one, I will add my cut lines at the top because I top and bottom because I wanted to look like this. Crossed a. This part right here is going above the letter a. I can just That. Then for the R, turn this off so I can see exactly where to add this. I will add a line right here, cut line right here. And right here. I will just follow the curve of the are. You can just visualize how this will start looking at, will look like this part right here, will go under this part right here. So that looks good. And actually I think I'm gonna erase this right here and make this article on top. Then we'll shade this part and this part, which really up to you where you want your letters to intersect and which parts you want shaded. So just play around with it and kind of get an idea. And you can try many variations or kind of plan this out and see how it will look. These cut lines really help you visualize if you don't like something, you can always erase them. Since we're on a separate layer, it's easy to erase them and start over or create a brand new layer. That's looking good. I'm kind of seen how this is all going to look at the end. For the H. I wanted to kinda do the under overseeing. So we can see this part can go under. So I'll add cut lines to the sides. Because we want this H will be going above. And then for this one, it's gonna be going under. So that looks good. Now we can increase the size of our brush to about 17%. I'm just going to add a little more thickness here. The side. My cut lines are not too much, just a little more, a little bit more of a dramatic look, a little more of a shaded look. Don't worry, if you see your Shading goals over like this. The layers we will over the letter like that. We will be adding a clipping mask later on. So it's okay if we go outside of the letter a little bit. I'm just going to continue adding some thickness to my cut lines, like right here. I'm going to do that to all of my letters. Now that I added thickness to all my cut lines, I can create a clipping mass so we can start smudging everything out and adding some depth. So I will go to my layer panel and I'll make sure I'm all my shaded cut line layer that will tap on it and click on clipping mask. And that will just make sure nothing is going over outside of letters. Now that I created a clipping mask, I can begin smudging some of these lines to make them softer and look as if it's a kind of shaded line. Up here at the very top next to your brushes brush library. You'll see this like little finger, that is our smudge tool right here. And I'm going to just tap on that and make sure I have my shader selected. Because that's gonna be kinda the smudging effect it will give. And I want it to be the same as my brush. So again, we'll play with our brush size of the more, the higher you have it, the bigger the smudge will be. The smaller you have the size, the less this much will be. So we can just play with that and see what we like. That's pretty good. That's around 22%. And I'll just start pulling out my, my Shading. So you just keep going out and kind of blended in. And as you can see, if you go on top a lot, it'll blend more and more. So just play with it and see what you like. And I'll just keep smudging it out till I'm happy with how it looks. So I always want my darkest part to be where my letters will intersect each other. And as it goes further out, this matching will get lighter. So it creates dramatic shaded effect. So I'll just do that to all of my areas right here and I just kind of play with it and see what I like. That's looking good. So we're going to continue doing this and don't worry right now it looks a bit darker, but we will lower the opacity and add some texture. And it will really give it a nice effect. I will speed this up. And I'm just gonna do this to all of my shaded parts where I have all my cut lines drawn. Now that I finished smudging everything, I can lower the opacity a bit and dual bit more refining. So remember to just take your time on this part, add more texture or smudging more and just TO, it looks how you wanted to look at. It looks really nice. So I will go to my Layers panel and I'll make sure I go to my shaded layer, this one right here. And I'm going to just see how it looks if I lower the opacity a bit. So let's see. About 80% of you want a more dramatic effect. You can leave it higher. Or if you want a very subtle effect, you can bring down the opacity. I wanted. Have a bit more of a dramatic look, but not too overwhelming. So about 90%. I really like that. So I can always come in and add a bit more darkness to areas if I feel it needs some or smudge it out of bids. Great. Here, I just felt that needed a little bit more. That looks really good. I really liked that. And like I said, just take your time with it till you're really happy with it. And you feel that that's look, you're going for. When the next lesson, we will add some texture to our shaded lettering and add a shadow to our Letters 6. Texture & Shadows: In this next lesson, we'll add some texture and Shadows to our lettering. So I'm going to go to my Layers panel and I will create a brand new layer above the clipping mask layer. Now, we'll make sure our dark red is still selected. And this time, I will grab the texture crayon brush. We will be adding some texture to the part that is shaded. So I'll make sure the brush is a pretty small because we don't want too much texture to go everywhere. We just want to add a little bit of texture to add some dimension and interests to our letters. I'm just going to see what size will be good. Let's see, let's try to 2% for our brush size. And then I'll just come in here. And as you can see, it's just lightly adding some texture to this shaded part and it gives some interests instead of it being so smoothed out. So I'll just continue doing that to all the areas that we have. Shaded. You can add as much texture or as little texture as you'd like. I will just continue doing that to all of my shaded Letters. Okay, Now that we added texture to everything, if we feel that something needs to be smoothed out, we can always go to this little finger, pointing finger. If we need a smudge, anything out, like maybe right here, we can just merge it out a bit of it went a little too intense. And if that looks good, I think now we can play with the opacity. It is a bit dark, but I'm really loving all the texture that is on the letters. So we will go to our Layers panel. Sure, we are on the textured layer. And I'm going to zoom in right here so we can see how it looks. And I'm going to lower the opacity just a bit. Like I previously said. The lower the opacity, the legs, the less dramatic it is. And the higher up the opacity is, the more texture you will see. So let's see. I'm going to lower the texture to around 80%. Now I can zoom out and see if that's good and we can just play with that until we're happy. That looks really good. I think we're ready for our final step and we're going to add a little bit of shadow underneath these Letters to give them some depth. So now I will go back to my Layers panel, and I will go to the layer that was our original lettering without any effects on it. And I'm going to just duplicate that layer so we can swipe left and tap on Duplicate. Now I will grab layer that's underneath the original layer. Now I will tap on the layer and I will tap on alpha lock. We're going to turn this completely black and it's just gonna be kinda a shadow layer. So then we'll play with the opacity. So now that we have that, we will select our black color from our color palettes. And we can just tap again on that layer and tap on Fill layer. Underneath our original lettering. You will see we have a black colored layer. I will make sure I'm on my black lettering layer. I am going to just slightly move it to the side about 45 degrees, just to add some shadow. You can go as much as you want. If you want the shadows to be more or very little bit. If you wanted to barely have like a hairline shadow, I kinda give like to give it somewhere in-between. Something like that. Now I can deselect it. Now also Fun part for we will lower the opacity and it will really start creating that 3D effect. So again, we will go to our Layers panel. Now we will just lower the opacity. And as you can see, the lighter we go, the more three-dimensional it starts to look. So I think I like it around 17%. And as you can see, that is really just play around with how much, how dark you want your shadows to be. If you want it a little darker, you can go higher up. Or if you want it super, super faint, you can go really low just to add a little bit of an effect. It's totally up to you. So go ahead and put it on 17%. And that is it. There you have your shaded Lettering. In the next lesson, I will show you how to crop down our canvas size and save our Final File 7. Save & Export Final File : Now we will crop our canvas size and save our Final File. So up here on the left top corner of your Canvas, you're going to tap on this little wrench icon. It's your actions panel. You will tab for you see it says canvas. Now click on crop, re-size. This is where we can resize our Canvas to fit nicely with our lettering. I'm just going to bring down the satellite crop marks till I am happy with how the lettering looks on the canvas. I'm not going to go too far and down like this. I'm just going to give it a little bit of space around my Letters. That looks good. Once you're happy with it, you're going to click on Done. And as you can see, we have a very nice finished file we can share as a web graphic on our social media or maybe print it out. You can really do whatever you'd like with this. Now we can save our Final File. We will go back to our Actions panel. And this time we'll click on Share. And here are your options for sharing. You can save as a PSD, JPEG, PNG, PSD. I'm going to save it as a JPEG. So I will tap on JPEG. And now I will tap where it says Save Image. Now our Final File has been saved to our photo gallery, or we can share our beautiful hand lettered Projects 8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking time and joining the class. I hope it was helpful and that you have fun creating some shaded lettering. I would love senior project, so don't forget to post it in the project gallery. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. You can post your question under the discussion tab, and you can find that right below this video. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.