Sparkling Symmetry: Creating Snowflake Mandalas in Procreate

1. Introduction: Welcome to sparkling symmetry creating snowflake mandalas in Procreate. My name is Laurie Russell and I'm so glad that you're here. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator. I love finding fun and creative new ways to use procreate. In this class, we're going to be using the drawing guide and procreate, and particularly the radial symmetry feature, to create our own unique snowflakes. This class will cover some basic set up tips and an overview of the drawing guide with a focus on the symmetry feature, as well as some ideas for doodling elements that can form the pieces of your snowflakes. I'll walk you through how to set up a template and procreate that will make creating these beautiful snowflakes super fast and easy. Then we'll create one together step by step. Finally, we'll add dimension and sparkle to our snowflakes with shadows and digital glitter. This technique can be used to create mandalas as well. If you'd like some more information on how I combine mindfulness and creativity, make sure to check out my other class, mindful doodles in procreate. Make sure to watch the next video about how to access all of the class resources. I can't wait to see the beautiful snowflakes that you're going to make. 2. Resources: When you follow the link for the course resources. This is a page you're going to see right up here at the top is a link to Dropbox where you can get the free glitter brush and the color palette that we're going to use in the sample piece. Below that is a link and some information about the inspiration board that I've set up for us on pins. This has a wide variety of snowflake images. These are not all created digitally or in procreate, but they are a great way to get some ideas and some inspiration. You can take ideas from the shapes, the different elements and pieces of these snowflakes, and even some of the colors to create your own unique snowflakes. Clicking this link will take you directly to the Pinter board where you can see all of the different snowflake images that I've saved for you. You can see there's quite a variety here. Some of them are pretty basic and some of them are more complex shapes. I wanted to give you a variety depending on how comfortable you are with your drawing skills Below the pinchers board, you'll see one more piece of our resources here. These are some snowflake template pieces that I've put together for our course. These are optional, but if you'd like to get your hands on these, you can just fill out this form here and they'll be sent to you right away. This snowflake template pack includes a couple pages of doodle elements to give you some ideas if you're feeling stuck. Some different types of bases for your lines, which will cover in our snowflake tutorial. And five different actual snowflake templates that you can use, modify, and trace to create your own unique snowflakes. Normally, I would not recommend directly copying or tracing anyone else's artwork. But I know as you're learning this technique, you may want to focus on that and not want to feel stuck in how you're creating your artwork. You do for this course, have permission to use these templates for your artwork. When you get the folder which has all these in them, you will get them in both Jpeg and PDF format. And then we'll be able to import these right into procreate and use them. In the next video, we're going to learn about our class project. 3. Project: Your project for this class is to create a digital snowflake in procreate, using the Mandla techniques that you're going to learn. And then to share it with us in the projects area. You can start with one of these optional templates. You can follow along with the sample project that I'm going to do. Or just create your own unique design. Just like no two snowflakes are the same, no two projects in this class will be the same either. That's the beauty of this art style. Your snowflake design should utilize the radial symmetry method that you're going to learn. It should incorporate color through the use of the background and possibly clipping masks to change the color of the snowflake itself. It should incorporate digital glitter using clipping masks and blend modes. Here are some of my tips for this project. Make sure you follow the steps in the sharing your art video to export your project and share it with us in the projects area of the class. Here's a pro tip skill share doesn't allow for multiple projects within one class. But if you'd like to share more than one snowflake, you can simply update your project and add additional images. 4. Setup: Let's talk about how to set up your canvas for Mandalas and snowflakes in procreate. Later on, we're going to be learning how to set up an entire template for our snowflakes. But just as an overall best practice, you want to make sure that you're using a square canvas that's going to work best for the radial symmetry that we're going to be using. You also want to use a color palette that has some contrasting colors. You can have a dark background and a light snowflake, or a light background and a dark snowflake. That way you'll be able to see your snowflake against the background. You also want to make sure that you keep your layers organized. I like to name them as I go or as you'll see later when we set up our template, we're going to pre name many of these layers. You won't have to do that every time. Another good tip is to use additional layers to experiment or play around with different designs. If you're not sure what your design is going to look like and you think it's going to interact adding an additional layer, make sure you turn on Drawing Assist. We'll give you the freedom to play around with these shapes without interacting with the layer below it. Then if you don't like it, you can try something else. Let's move on to the next video where we're going to talk about the drawing guide and how to get all of this set up. 5. Drawing Guide: Let's go ahead and create a new canvas with square dimensions. We're going to explore and talk about the drawing guide. This is a very powerful tool in procreate, it can make creating mandos and other symmetrical artwork really quick and easy to access the drawing guide. Come over here to the wrench. This is your Actions menu. Make sure that you're on the canvas. Tap. The first thing to do is to turn the drawing guide on right here. Now you'll see this grid show up for what we're going to do. We need a different type of grid, so we're going to choose Edit Drawing Guide. Now we have a lot more options down here. Some of the basic things we can change are the thickness of these lines, the opacity or how transparent they are. The size of the grid, no matter which type of grid we're on, whether drawing assist is turned on, this is a basic two D grid can be really helpful for things like lettering or anything where you're going to have a lot of strap and perpendicular lines isometric. You may have seen this type of drawing. This is the grid that you would use for that, which is a whole another type of lesson. You also have a perspective grid where you can create a vanishing point. This is great for drawing things like roads and horizons, but what we're going to use is this one called symmetry. It defaults to just basic side to side symmetry, as if you had a piece of paper and you just folded it in half. In order to update this, we are going to go to options. There's basic vertical symmetry. You can change it to horizontal, where your paper is folded. The other way, quadrant symmetry, where it's going to reflect in all four corners. Let me just show you that real quick. But the one we want to use is radial symmetry. Now I like to have my drawing guide not too visible. I'm going to turn down the thickness and neopacity. I'm going to use a contrasting color, so I can see my black lines. I like to use something in this pink range, but you can choose whatever color you want. Going to make it a little bit thicker and darker just for this video so it shows up, but normally I keep it a lot lighter. Once you've got this looking how you want, go ahead and choose Done. Now, when we draw, it's going to be reflected in all of these sections. If we draw in between the lines, it's going to be reflected across these diagonals. If we draw on the lines, it's going to be reflected across those lines like that in order to get our snowflakes, our mandalas, anything like that to be perfectly symmetrical all the way around. We have a couple of different options. I'm going to two finger tap to undo these. The first option we have is to draw our shapes whatever we want. This is super rough, I just want to give you an idea. Then we can duplicate this layer and rotate it. Come into the layers panel. I would swipe to the left, hit duplicate, come into the transform tool and rotate 45 degrees. That's going to give us a perfectly symmetrical mandala or snowflake. The other option that we have, just going to hide these for now from the layers panel. I'm going to tap drawing assist to make sure that's turned on. If we come back to our wrench canvas and edit drawing guide under options here for symmetry, we can turn on rotational symmetry. This will change how the symmetry works on our page. Now if we draw between the lines, they're all going to be reflected the same way instead of being reflected across these lines. If we draw on the lines, it's going to be the same. Sometimes this works better. But what you're going to see is you're going to run into issues with how long the lines are. You see that right here, we're running off the page because the diagonal lines are longer than the straight lines. It's just something to keep in mind as you're drawing generally you want to do your drawing on the straight lines so that you're not going off the page. The other thing is, you're not going to have completely symmetrical shapes across the lines themselves, unless you're really, really good. If I wanted to have this perfect diamond shape on the lines here, I can get pretty close by aiming to the middle of these, but it's not going to be exactly symmetrical like it was with this rotational symmetry turned off. It really just depends what elements you're going to use and how you like to draw. Again, if you're going to be doing something a little more loose and free hand, I think the rotational symmetry works really well. If you really want to have everything perfectly symmetrical, then I recommend keeping this rotational symmetry turned off. Make sure you have drawing, assist on your layer turned on drawing what you want that's going to be symmetrical around these lines. And then just duplicating the layer and rotating at 45 degrees, that's going to give you the most perfect symmetry that you're going to see. In the next lesson, we are going to do some exercises with these radial patterns. 6. Exercise: Now it's your turn to play around with the radial symmetry tool. Let's go into the wrench canvas. Make sure drawing guide is turned on and choose Edit Drawing Guide under Symmetry options, make sure that you've chosen radial and play around with whether rotational symmetry is on or off. You can keep adding new layers. Make sure that drawing assist is turned on. For this exercise, choose one basic shape, a circle, a diamond, a heart, a star triangle, anything like that. I'd like you to play around with how that looks and how it works with the rotational symmetry turned on and off. I'd like you to experiment and get a feel for the tool for which shapes work well with and without that feature turned on. Here's a pro tip, although I do encourage you to use the monoline brush when you're first learning the technique. Don't be afraid to experiment with other brushes as well. Try out some brushes with different textures and see what effects you get. As you're working through these exercises, make sure to play around with different settings and brushes to see what effects you like best. Go ahead and try three or four different varieties with and without the rotational symmetry turned on. Again, that's in the edit drawing guide symmetry options right here. Play around with this until you get comfortable with whether you like this on or off for different shapes and different styles. There's no need to share this in the project area. This is just for you to practice and get a feel for the tool. In the next lesson, we're going to practice some basic doodling shapes for mandalas that also work really well for snowflakes. 7. Doodling: In this lesson, we are going to cover some basic doodles and shapes that you can use for mandalas that also work really well for snowflakes. You can use the elements that I provided with the free resources to mix and match. You can also come up with your own shapes. Let's create a new canvas that's a square under the Actions menu. That's your wrench. Go to Canvas and tap Reference. Now we can import an image, then you can go ahead and grab one of those elements, pages from the resources or any other reference photo that you have. I like to use the reference image because it's just nice to have it in a separate box that you can adjust and resize. Here's a protyp. The elements and shapes that you use to make your snowflake can be more traditional, or more modern and unique. Really, you're only limited by your imagination. Don't be afraid to experiment and try out some different things. This is one page of the elements that I've provided. Again, these are not exhaustive by any means. You can definitely come up with a lot more variations. But I just wanted to give you something to start with. If you were feeling completely stuck basically, you can just practice using some of these and brainstorm some other ones that you would like for mandalas. A lot of times what you will see is some a petal shape. I don't have my symmetry turned on here. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's go back to our drawing guide and turn that on. Choose Edit Symmetry. And I'm just going to use regular vertical symmetry for this. Make this a little brighter so you guys can see it. Okay, for mandalas, like I said, you often see different petal shapes, something like this or a little bit of a kind of a scoop at the top. There's a lot of variations of that thing. Then these can be filled with other shapes or dots, colors. There's a lot of things that you can do with that. But with snowflakes, a lot of times what we see is more singular shapes attached to a line as if they were forming the crystals of the snowflake. What I provided here is some from the sample templates that you'll see. Some of these pieces, things like lines that curve out, you have to play around with this connection point to make it a little bit more smooth. You don't get this dip right here and you can play around with the angle of that. The straight ones are a lot easier, of course, to get those then all of these can have things attached to the end of them as well. They can have circles. Quick shape works for this as well. They could have stars. These could have diamonds. I like using diamonds a lot in snowflakes. It really reminds me of crystals. You can fill things in. You can see here that sometimes shapes can have strokes on or around them. You could have an inner stroke like this. You could increase your brush size and do something like that. Taking basic shapes and lines and seeing how they look on some vertical symmetry like this will give you a really good idea of how they might look put together on a snowflake. Let's create a new layer. Turn on drawing a cyst. Let's just practice recreating one of these lines. This line, I'm going to use smaller brush here. This has the center line, it has two crossing diagonals. If you hold onto this, you can adjust this before you let go. Then we have one of these rays that is shooting out with two of these criss crosses at the end. We've got a set of these. I like to try and keep these perpendicular to each other. Okay. So the next one is similar to this, but we've just added some of these stars on the end. So you can see you can take some of these and combine them as well. We basically would be adding these crisscrosses. That's really messy. And then putting a little tip on these to make more of a star shape. Then this last one is building a six pointed star. I would build from the top and bottom and then the sides. You can play around with how those angles work. This one needs to be maybe a little bit further out, something like that. Now, now we've been able to replicate one of our references. You can go ahead and practice any of these or any other references that you found, maybe on pins or other snowflakes that you've seen. Once you get a bunch of these put together, you can duplicate the layer. Go ahead and hide one of them for now. Then take your transform tool, make sure that you have snapping and magnetics turned on. Then you can just slide one of these over and it will stay pretty parallel. Then you can turn this other one back on and just clear that layer and start again and work off the symmetry line. That's how I got three of these to be all nice. And even on one page you can come up with your own additional elements as well. In the next lesson, we're briefly going to talk about how to take the principles of creating mandalas and use those to create snowflakes. 8. Snowflake Shapes: Now that we've played around with the drawing guide and we understand how to use the radial and rotational symmetry features, may be wondering what really is the difference between creating a mandola and a snowflake. I would say some of the main differences are the level of detail, here's a mandala that I made doing my mindful doodling. And of course you can make these as simple or as detailed as you'd like, but generally you're going to see a lot more detail in mandalas, more so than you will in a snowflake. Another main distinction is that you're going to see more of this spherical overall shape in the mandalas. In snowflakes, you're really going to see more distinct lines that are going to be highlighted. Usually it's six, but in procreate it's a lot easier for us to work in the symmetry tool with eight. So that's what we're going to create in a mandala. We usually start with some spherical piece in the center and build out from there. In snowflakes, we're going to usually start with a base of the lines and then build on top of those. Just like a real snowflake builds its crystals out. Similar tools and methods, and even some elements can be used for both mandalas and snowflakes. But the actual method that we use to create and build them is slightly different. In the next lesson, we're going to put together our snowflake templates. 9. Snowflake Template: Creating these snowflakes is really fun. But the process of getting them all set up can be a little tedious to do over and over. Getting your layer set up, just right editing your drawing guide. So it's just the way you want it. This is where a template comes in really handy. In this lesson, we're going to build a procreate template together that you can reuse over and over. And it will make creating your snowflakes super quick and easy. Here's what the finished file looks like. We're basically just going to be building these layers. Let's create this together from scratch. Let's create a new canvas with square dimensions. Now we need to turn on the drawing guide. Come up to the wrench to canvas. Turn on the drawing guide and choose Edit. We want to have radial symmetry come to symmetry and options and turn on radio, you can decide whether you have rotational symmetry turned on or off. If you've done the exercises and you find that you usually like to use rotational symmetry, then turn it on. If you find that you only use the rotational symmetry occasionally, then I would leave it off in your template. Go ahead and adjust the opacity, the thickness, and the color of your lines. Once you have it looking how you like, go ahead and hit done. Now, we're going to come to the layers panel. You can see that this says Assisted on it. We're going to tap on it and rename this to snowflake. Now we need to add a new layer and drop this underneath our snowflake. This is where we are going to put some background color, rather than changing the actual background color of our canvas. I'd like to do this on a separate layer so that I can add other textures and things to it later. Let's go ahead and rename this background color drop. I'm shortening the word a little bit so it'll all fit in there. We're going to add a layer above this tap on the layer and choose clipping mask. We're going to rename this one background texture. And I'm going to change the blend mode on this to overlay because the texture brushes I have. That's the blend mode that works best. We're going to add one more new layer between the texture and our snowflake. If you still have the texture layer highlighted, you can just now this layer, all we're going to do is just rename it. This is just going to remind us that we're going to create a shadow of our snowflake later on in order to fit all these characters on. This is what I've named it, Shadow, colon, DUP for duplicate, slash be okay for black and slash blur. Once we get into the step by step tutorial, you'll understand what this is. But it's basically just reminding us to create a shadow of our snowflake. Later on, let's come up to our snowflake layer. Swipe to the left and duplicate it. Make sure that it still says assisted on it. We're going to rename this 12 gradient. Now this is going to be an optional layer. If you just color your snowflake one color, you won't necessarily use this one, but it's nice to have there as an option. Let's go ahead and tap on this layer and make it a clipping mask. We are going to duplicate this gradient layer, it should still say assisted and be a clipping mask. We're going to change this blend mode here to add and rename this to Glitter One, I'm going to add three layers of glitter because that's tends to be what I use for my snowflakes. Depending on how many layers of glitter you think you're going to use, you can adjust your template accordingly. I'm going to just duplicate this a couple more times and rename these. That's it. Now our snowflake template is ready to go. Let's go back to our gallery and tap on untitled artwork and you can rename this. Now anytime you want to make a new snowflake, you can just swipe left on this and duplicate and start from there. In the next lesson, we're going to walk through how to create your very own snowflake. 10. Snowflakes!: In this lesson, we are going to walk through step by step how to create your very own snowflake. Go ahead and swipe left to duplicate the template that you made in the last lesson and rename the file and open it up. I recommend using a mono line brush for your snowflake design, and there's one included along with the glitter brush in your resources. I have three preset thicknesses that I generally work with. This one is 10% 34.79, but you can set these at anything you want. Work with the middle thickness for this one. Now to create your snowflake, you're going to start by creating your lines in your template. Make sure that you're on your layer labeled snowflake and you're going to start putting your lines down. This can be a little tricky with the symmetry feature. You can see the lines are getting a little bit thick at the end there. If you don't want to mess with this. I do have several different options for line bases that are included in that optional resource set. You can just go to add, Insert a Photo and grab one of those. That will just import right in there. We can go ahead and stretch this out a little bit. That fills a little more of our canvas and just make sure that it's centered. I'm going to turn magnetics off, but keep snapping on. Now we see both of these gold lines. That's what we want. Then we can turn snapping back off. Now I have my lines done already. You can do them manually or you can use one of those presets. There's five different ones included, There's three different thicknesses of lines, and there's some mixed thickness lines as well. Now, in order to add our snowflake elements on top of this, I recommend doing those on additional layers and then merging them at the end. Let's add a layer underneath this. Click on the layer that says Shadow and add a new layer. Let's make sure that drawing a cyst is turned on. How big is this brush? It's a little bit thick. I'm going to use a thinner brush for this one, something in between these 15 looks pretty good. Now if you want to use one of the templates, we can go ahead and add that as a layer as well. Go underneath your layer that you're working on and add a new one. Then we're just going to import that the same way. Now I have these templates purposefully, pretty light. But if you want to make it even lighter, you can tap on this n here and turn the opacity down some more. Let's go back to the layer that we're going to work on. Now. We can start adding some of these elements. Now here's one little protyp. You can see that this is going to be filled in. If you do want to do that, you are going to need to close off these shapes. If we try to do this, now that color is going to spill out, We need to make sure that we're crossing over and completely connecting these. If you need to see where you might have holes, you can isolate this layer temporarily by pushing and holding on this check mark. Then we can fill those in, push and hold on this check mark again, and that'll bring the rest of your layers back. Now when we zoomed in like this, we can see that this lines layer is not quite the same shade as the rest of this. Doesn't matter right now because we are going to be changing the color of our snowflake later. But if you wanted it to all be the same, you can tap on this layer swipe to the right with two fingers to turn on alpha lock. Just choose a fill layer. Now everything is matching. All right, let's continue with our design. You can take some creative liberties as well. Quick shapes. Works. Put a finger down to get a perfect circle, and then you can fill that in. Okay, that is looking pretty good now because I wanted to have these perfectly symmetrical within themselves. That's why I did not have the rotational symmetry turned on. Right now what I'm going to do is go ahead and swipe left and duplicate this layer. Come to transform and rotate at 45 degrees. Now I've got my perfectly symmetrical snowflake. Once you are happy with your design, we can go ahead and either delete or turn off our template layer. We're going to merge these three together, or however many it is. Now our snowflake is all on one layer. The next thing we're going to do is add some dimension to our snowflake. We're going to add some color and texture to the background and some color to the snowflake itself, it contrasts. Let's go ahead and turn Alpha, Lock back on our snowflake. Come to our color palette. Let's choose a medium blue, this second one from the corner down here. And choose fill layer. Now we can come to the layer that says background color drop and choose either a dark blue or maybe one of those yellows. I'm going to go with this dark blue here and just drop that on the page. Now you can already see that we have some contrast with our snowflake, but it looks pretty flat. We're going to fix that. Come to our background texture layer and you can either insert a picture of a texture or if you have a texture brush that you'd like to use, you can do that. Overlay usually works pretty well for those. There's a paper texture on there, but you could use just a solid color as well. Now we are going to do what this reminder layer is telling us to. We're going to create the shadow of our snowflake. This got renamed when we merged. That's why it doesn't say snowflake anymore. Let's go ahead and swipe left to duplicate this tap on the bottom one we've already duplicated. Now we're going to turn this black. Come up to the magic wand, that's your adjustments. Menu hue saturation and brightness. And we're going to take the brightness all the way down. Now this has turned to black. Now we just need to offset it a little bit and use our gaugin blur. Tap your transform tool, make sure you do have snapping turned off by this point. I'm just going to tap outside of this bottom left corner a few times to nudge that shadow a little bit away. Now we'll come back to the magic wand and go down to gaugin blur. And just slide across the screen until you get a nice looking shadow. Usually three to 5% is pretty good. Now, at this point, we can go ahead and turn our drawing guide off in our canvas just so we don't have those lines showing up anymore. In the next lesson, we are going to make our snowflakes sparkle. 11. Sparkle!: Our snow flakes already look pretty good. But we are going to step them up a notch. Remember this gradient layer, I said was optional? Here's how you'd use it, if you want to, you can choose some other colors using your monoline brush. And just add them in in a really wherever you'd like. I might add a little bit of yellow to the middle of this. This is why I like to keep assisted turned on this layer. Makes this really quick and easy and it keeps everything nice. And even now we're going to, on this gradient layer, come to our magic wand and use the gauge and blur on this. You can slide it as far as you need to to get a really nice gradient effect. Now, in order to add the glitter, we already built in this add blend mode to our template. That's what we need for the glitter brush that's included in the resources. If you have glitter brushes from other creators, theirs may function differently. Just make sure that you check on that. For this brush, you want to make sure that you're using a darkened version of whatever color glitter you want, and that you do it all in one stroke. The more you layer the glitter with this brush, the brighter it's going to become, is going to get closer to white. For example, if we used a dark form of this tal, I put this on here and keep layering it, it's ultimately just going to end up being white. We really want to do it with a light hand and each color on a separate layer. I'm just barely touching my ipad right now. I'm going to switch to another layer and grab a dark blue. Then on this last layer, I'm going to choose this teal and then drop it down into a darker shade. Now we've got a really nice digital glitter look on our snowflake. In the next lesson, we'll walk through how you can share your beautiful snowflake art. 12. Sharing Your Art: Once you've made some beautiful snow flakes, you'll want to share them. As a side note, your class project is to make a sparkling snowflake and share it with us in the project area of skillshare. But you can use these same techniques to make your regular mandalas or other doodle art sparkle too. In order to share your artwork, all you need to do is come up to the wrench, that's your Actions menu. Come over to share, and you're going to want to save it probably as a PNG or a Jpeg. Just a note, the PNG's are generally going to be a larger file size. This one's coming in at 6.6 megabytes. A Jpeg version is coming in at 1.3 If you're going to be e mailing it or using it on social, it's probably going to be best to save it as a Jpeg, but a PNG is going to be a bit of a higher quality version of your artwork. 13. Thank You: I hope that was helpful. I love showing people how to combine creativity and technology. If you enjoyed the class, I would really appreciate it if you took just a couple minutes to leave me a teacher review here on Skillshare. This just helps future students know what to expect from me and from this class. Thank you so much. I cannot wait to see the beautiful snowflakes that you're going to make using this technique. So make sure that you export it and share it with us in the project area of this class. I hope to see you in a future class.