Transcripts
1. Welcome to Class: [MUSIC] Anything can
start a great project. Even simple and sweet
drawing ideas like cookies can grow into colorful,
layered illustration work. If you like sketching
from observation, want to explore creative
concepts while drawing a meaningful self-expression
project such as print ready card or a
fun illustration to share with the world, this class is for you. Hi, I'm Yifat, a North Texas based artist, and industrial designer
by profession, and the self-taught illustrator. Starting off 30 years ago, I used traditional tools
such as watercolors, pencils, ink, and even
linocut printing. Now I bring the texture, playful approach to my
work with Procreate for my professional
illustration portfolio and print-on-demand
Society6 store. Whether the initial concept
is text or animals, even portraits, need supporting details to
tell their stories. In this class I show
you how to start with simple idea and
gradually build it, keep moving forward and
develop your drawing. This class is great
for beginners wanting to learn the basics of drawing in Procreate
with a bite-sized project, and for intermediate
students who want to learn how to take their illustration
to the next level, adding complexity and
creating cohesive designs. You will learn how to draw from observation in a
layered, playful style. Next, we add dimension, shading and
highlights and create a fun composition with
decorative elements. Finally, we design
a trendy card, implementing the
in-app Text Tool. Throughout the class,
you'll learn how to use Procreate for illustration. Explore its drawing tools, adjust layer blending modes, and learn pro
techniques that can be applied to any creative
future project. I can't wait to see what
you'll create in this class. Grab your pencils and
let's start drawing.
2. The Project: [MUSIC] In this class,
I'll walk you through a workflow that starts with a simple idea and
gradually build on it. In my experience, the key
to any creative practice is experimenting with your style and learning to flow
with your ideas. Your class project can be any small object that is
fun and inspiring to you. I'll be drawing cookies
because that is how I start my morning with a cup of coffee
and a couple of cookies. Look up items on your desk
or use a photo reference, or grab a couple of cookies
from your cupboard. You are welcome to draw cookies
along with me in class, stop a lesson when you feel that you need more
time to practice. Please share your project in the class gallery in
any level or skill, I'd love to see your
[MUSIC] illustrations and ideas and can't wait to
see what you created. Up next, we start drawing. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Brushwork Essentials: [MUSIC] The first thing
that I want to show you is how to set up your canvas. We're going to work
with a square and we're going to set up
our dimension for the file so that will be able to have a high resolution ready
for printing later on. I just want you to
have that option to print your illustration if
you'd like it at the end. These are my settings. They're guide for just
drawing on your iPad. If you later want to
choose to print your work, you'll have a file that
is print ready because 300 DPI is a high resolution and it's good enough
for printing. Now what we want to do is
draw a very simple outlines. If you're drawing cookies, you have various basic
shapes to begin with. If you're drawing
a different object like a plant or a small toy, just try to outline it
very, very roughly. Mark down whatever
stands out to you, whatever makes the object
that you're drawing identifiable as that
specific object. Those are the details that you want to bring
in in your drawings. Next, we want to
create a new layer and that's going to be
for our first color. I'm going to start with a rectangular cookie just
because it's simpler. I'm going to pick
a color that is roughly the same as the
color of the cookie. Now, I will recommend using the Oberon brush
for this exercise. I'm actually going
to switch between two brushes
throughout the class, and these are my go
to brushes lately. Just going to show
you how I work with them and hopefully it will
help you with your process. So the first one is the Oberon, it has this fun grainy texture. I want to make sure that I preserve the texture
when I draw. We do this by applying just the right right of
texture with the pencil. If I press hard with
my Apple pencil, I'll get a lot of color
and chunky texture. I'm actually choosing
to work very lightly with my pencil
and very loosely. Next thing that I want to do is start bringing in
some dimension. I'm going to head over to my brush menu and pick
the Blackburn brush. We're not going to
change our colors, we don't need to switch to a darker one because this
brush is more opaque. Keeping the same color when
we draw with a Blackburn, we get very defined
brushstrokes. Here we are adding
a second layer to our work with just using
two different brushes. Up next we're going to talk more about the process
of drawing from observation and develop further
our cookie illustration. I'll see you in the
next lesson. [MUSIC]
4. Draw Details: [MUSIC] I think it's a good
idea to start with picking a simple object to draw and
then just capture it very, very loosely and
gradually add dimension. Eventually, we create a texturized depiction of that object but in
a stylized way. So we're still drawing
from observation, we are relying on what we see, we don't really make
up a lot of things, but we do it in a
stylized way and this is what we're going
to learn in this class. I left out a small portion of my cookie that was uncolored. It just happened as I was
drawing very loosely. What I'm going to do now is pick the smudge tool and that's the little pointed-out finger at the top right of your
Procreate toolbox. What we want to make sure when
we use the smudge tool is not to completely erase
our texture work. It's a blending tool, and for this cookie, it helps it looks a
little bit more like gouache or
watercolor-painted cookie. I have the base layer
already and what I want to do now is
bring in more details. Make sure you use
your layers properly. When you add more details, do it in a new layer, you can always go back and
merge down layers if you feel that you've spread
yourself out too thinly. It's a good practice to
add layers because it gives you the flexibility
to make changes later on. If we take a closer
look at that cookie, it's the Lotus cookie. The details on the cookies
are actually lines, but I'm choosing to draw them differently because
I think drawing these swirling lines is just much more interesting
and fun detail than straight diagonal lines. At the end, my cookie
is still going to be similar to the
original cookies. It's going to come off
as the same cookie, even though I made slight
changes to the actual details, and that's okay to take that artistic freedom
when you illustrate, it's actually more fun this way. Now, for joining the details, I chose a darker color, not going crazy with my colors, but I chose a darker
brown for the details. What works really well for this other detail is that
it's drawn very loosely. It's a device to bringing more character and playfulness
to your illustration. Next I want to draw in the
lettering on the cookies. It's really fun to do
loose hand lettering. I'm going to pick a color
that is already there. Picking colors from your Canvas helps with creating a
very tight drawing. We're using the same colors, we're just creating accents
of those same colors throughout your drawing and that keeps it
cohesive and tight. I'm using the blackburn brush, and if we take a closer look, you can see that it looks like a brush with a
slightly dry bristles. It's a very fun brush to use. The last thing that
we want to do is add dimension and bring
those letters to live with shading in the darker brown and with highlights
in the lighter brown. The benefit of using
the digital Canvas is that is super flexible. You can move things around, can edit your illustration and transform it until
it feels just right. So if you want to
reposition any feature of your drawing and you draw
it on a separate layer, this is where the Select
tool comes in very handy. After selecting
you, we have a box around the object that
we selected and we can reposition that box
with the orange square and just make sure that the
books says just right around the object that
we want to reshape. We're going to add
more dimension to the details that are
framing the text. That's pretty much each,
those are the details that create this
fun little cookie. It's super simple and
very loosely drawn. What I want to do now is
organizing my layers in a group. I'm going to swipe right on the Layers and pick them
and highlight them in blue, and then I'm going to choose group to group them together. This is going to be super handy later on when we want to create a design and move all the layers of that object of
the cookie together. So it's really helpful to
group elements together. That's pretty much
it for this cookie, up next [MUSIC] we're
going to move on to the cookie with a jam. I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Create Variations: [MUSIC] Here's
something that I want you to pay attention to. When you're drawing two objects in the same illustration, you want them to be close enough in style to look
similar in some way. The way for us to do
that is to work with the same brushes throughout one illustration
work on one canvas. The second one is
to make sure that our colors work well together. I picked two cookies that
are similar in color. It's not like one is awfully colorful rainbow colors and the other is
super plain and drab. They're similar, they're both
different shades of brown. I'm going to work with my oranges and pick
their brown from there and make sure that I use
the same brushes for drawing the two
cookies on one canvas. That helps everything
look tight and similar even though my cookies
are very different. Take a few moments to
look at the object that you're drawing and see
what stands out to you. What are the details that are
fun that you want to draw? Take a few moments to look
at the objects and see, what are the details
that without them, that object would not be
identifiable as to what it is? For the second cookie,
for my round cookie, I'm going to use
the Blackburn brush for adding in dimension and
drawing in the details. I'm doing it very loosely so that each line is slightly
different than the other. This is a very loose style, but still keeps a very
tight resemblance to the original object. We can draw something pretty precisely but still
keep it very loose. Hope that makes sense. [MUSIC]
6. Add Character & Dimension: [MUSIC] Let's add
another layer to the cookie and
bringing more details. Let's switch on our
brush to the Oberon because the jam is soft
and it makes sense to go back to the Oberon brush because that's the same brush that I use for drawing
the cookie dough. Here's a trick and that's the added benefit of drawing
with digital brushes. Roughly drawing the arc, keep pressing with the pencil. Procreate will identify
it as a shape. It's an open shape, so it's not the full
circle, it's an arc. Then we can readjust its
position by dragging the pencil on the screen until the arc sits just where
we need it to be. In this case, it's at the
outline of the jam circle. That way I can create
crisper edges to this layer. Now I believe we need a bit stronger color and
more defined texture. Let's scale up the brush and pick a more
saturated shade of red to add more texture and create a deeper
color for the jelly. Now, it's a good idea to group
all the layers together. Later on when we want
to move things around, we'll have the
freedom to do it with identifying which group of layers belongs to which object. One last thing before
we move into shading is adding little bit of extra touch to the cookie
that will bring it to life. This cookie has bits
of darker areas. I guess it's part
of the flower mix. I think that's a fun element to add to this illustration, and I switch my brushes to
the more fine detailed brush, which is the Blackburn,
scaled it down. I'm using it to highlight the jelly and to bringing those darker flakes
in the cookie dough. That's pretty much it. That's all we need to make
this cookie look yummy. The last thing that
I want to do is add shading under the
cookie that will really help them pop out of the Canvas. When we bringing the shading
that is under an object, we want to make sure we
do it in a layer that is placed below all
the other layers. Under my cookie layers
I have a shading layer. We're drawing the shading
in our softer brush. I'm using a color that
is on the blue scale, but it's mostly gray. Up next we're going to
talk about how we can take this drawing and bring
it up to the next level. Create more layered and
personal illustration that is meaningful
to you. [MUSIC]
7. Tips for Blending Layers: [MUSIC] We drew in the
cookies and you have a great drawing that you
can export as a JPEG and upload it to your social media account
and show everybody how you created cookies that practically jump
out of your iPads. But what if we think about how can we make this
drawing your own? Now we're starting to
talk about illustration and adding some context
to the initial drawing. We want to think about
how we add character and complexity and
doing it with a style. We want to draw
with vivid colors and have a fun composition. While doing that,
you're going to learn to utilize
your digital tools. With time, you're going to find the tools that work best for you that you go back to
and find them very useful. Another thing that
we're going to be doing is learning how to adjust and work
with our layers. We've already learned to group them and now we're going to learn how to blend them in
together and of course, tweak the colors if we need to. Essentially what you'll be doing is experiment with your style. I'm teaching you a fun and playful illustration
style but you might want to experiment
with other brushes. You might want to experiment
with different ways that you want to draw and figure
out what your style is. The first thing that I
would like for you to play with is your
background color. Let's try to test
out a few colors and see which one speaks to us. Have you noticed
something when I was switching between
background colors? They were showing
through my cookies. My cookies are transparent
and that's not going to work well with the background
colors that I'm changing. They work well on white but
not on this muted brown. But don't you worry, we
can work around that and what we're going
to do now is fix it. I'll teach you how to
fix it and this is something that we actually do when we create illustrations
for t-shirt designs. They need to be opaque
so that they won't show the fabric underneath. We're going to add
another layer and place it above what we have drawn so far because we actually need to see
what we're doing. I'm going to pick
white because that's the color that I was working
with for the cookies. I'm going to add a white
layer above the cookies. The next thing that
we want to do is grab this a pack layer and place it within the group of
layers for that cookie. Now, sometimes it doesn't
really drop in the right place. What we're going to
do is switch things around a bit and
make sure that we place the new layer right
where we want it to be. We're going to do the same thing for the rectangular cookie. We can try to mark the outline and then drag and drop
the color in there. That didn't work out well. I guess we'll just have to draw it in the
old-fashioned way. That's okay. We actually really want the texture in as well. That's it, perfect. Now we can pick any color for our background and the
cookies stand out. They practically pop
out of the Canvas, exactly like we meant
for them to do when we painted them on the
white background. You can go ahead and
flatten your group of layers to create one
layer with one cookie in it or you can just pinch all the layers together
from one group and then again you have one
layer for each cookie. I personally would just
leave all the layer as is in case you want
to change the colors. You have much more
flexibility when the cookie is separated into different
layers for each element. But I just wanted to show
you how to do that in case you need to be more
economical with your layers. Now let's focus on the shading. The shading of the
cookie is drawn in a cool shade of gray and that doesn't
really blend well with the color that I
picked for my background. Here is what we're
going to be doing. We're going to hit
the "Shading Layer", press on the letter "N", that will bring out a menu for all the different blending modes for this particular layer. We first scroll down
towards the overlay and lighter colors will get the lighter shade
for that layer. That will just the
way it's going to blend in with the
layers underneath it. I would actually go above the normal blending mode
and try the darker colors. I would either work with the linear burn or
the color burn. It really depends on what effect you get for the shades of the cookies and how they blend well enough with your
background color. This is all going to make
even more sense in a minute when we add more elements
to this illustration. Let's just add a new
layer and draw a circle. I draw a circle, leave my pencil pressed on
the Canvas and Procreate will identify it as a quick shape and it will try to create
a circle or an ellipse. Now I want to pick a very
vibrant color and see how that works with my cookies
just to test things out. Now we can see how the blending
mode really plays well. As my color changed from
brown to purple and the shading of the
cookies really blends well with the colored
layer underneath. [MUSIC]
8. Make it Yours!: [MUSIC] Now you
have all the tools that you need in your hand. You really know
everything that you need to know to make
this illustration yours. You can add decorative elements that would really make
a personal statements. It can be adding a plate or adding stars or
botanical elements, anything that really speaks
to you and to your taste. You can create
different color options or different color variations and you can add typed in
quote or drawing letters. I'm actually going to go with
a very simple composition. I'm going to draw a plate. The plate that I'm drawing
is meaningful to me. It's really coming
from my memories from something that my
mom would have used. She's a very elegant
and artsy lady. This is where my choice of
elements is coming from. This plate that I'm
drawing is sentimental. In that sense, I can relate to this illustration and make it something that is
personal for me. I think it's also
really fun to explore different ways to decorate
and add to your cookies. I'm really enjoying drawing these very loose flowers that are a repeat element
on this plate, can also change the colors and create different variations. Let's not forget the
blending modes for the shading that we
can play with so that everything work well together as a complete
and cohesive design. [MUSIC] Up next, we're
going to see a way for us to add a meaningful quote
to our illustration. I'll see you in the next lesson.
9. Design a Card: [MUSIC] What if we want to take this illustration
to the next level? What can we do with it? We can share it with
friends and family, or we can even try to sell it as a card or a poster depending
on what you create. I think this can make
a very cute card. For that, I feel that I'm not really
connecting to the brown, I'm going to change
the background color to pink and take it from there. Next, the shading of the plate is not working
very well with the pink. It's much too dark and brown. We're going to head
over to that layer and change the blending mode. I actually like that the
shades are darker pink. It's much more vibrant
and relatable color now. I think we're ready
to add text now. I'm going to pick
white for my color. At this stage, you can hand draw your letters if you feel
comfortable with that. I actually want to show
you how you can use the in-app text box
to add stylized type. We're going to hit the "Wrench
Tool" and pick Add text. Here you can think of a fun
message or a nice quote. I'm just going to go
with something simple like make it a good day, because this is how I start my day with cookies and coffee. Like I've mentioned before, I'm just going to use two words because my space
is very limited. If we want to change the type of the font
that we're using, we hit the "Edit Text"
in the Layer menu. On the very right
corner of your screen, you'll see the letter A. Hit the letter "A", and here we can
change the font type, we can change the
size of the font, we can change the spacing
between the lines, we can change the spacing
between the letters. It doesn't really work for this font that I picked because it's cursive and if the letters are spaced
out, they just separate. It works better for some type, but not for this one. We want to make sure
we position our quote in a nice composition
with our main element. What we're going to do now
is highlight the text. I'm going to swipe right on
the layer and duplicate it, adjust the colors
for the new layer, make sure it's darker,
and procreate. It tells me that that
layer is rasterized. It means that we cannot
edit it as text anymore. It's transformed into regular
pixels. But that's okay. We don't need to
change it anymore. We just want to make
it darker because this is going to be
our shading layer. Next we're going to drag the
layer underneath our text, hit the "Adjustment
Tools" again, and pick Gaussian blur
to blur in that layer. Now we're doing this by
dragging our finger across the screen from left to right to determine
the amount of blur. We don't need too much blur, just about 10% is just right. The last thing that we want
to do is make sure that this new layer blends
in with our colors. We're going to hit the
"Layer Blending mode" again. Either linear burn or color burn will work well
for this shading layer. You can also adjust the
opacity of the layer. If we don't see the
shading well enough, it might be that we
need to readjust the colors of the
shading layer as well. Let's go ahead and
adjust the colors. We might need to lower the
brightness a little bit. We'll get a darker
shades under our quote. Last thing we want to do is make our illustration shareable. We're going to hit
the "Wrench Tool" and choose to save our work as either JPEG or PNG if you need
it in a higher resolution. But JPEG is quite
enough to create a card to share with your friends or post to
your social media account, and of course, to
upload your project to the class gallery
so that I'll be able to see what you create
in this class. [MUSIC]
10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations,
you've finished this class, and thank you for
joining me today. We covered all the art process of drawing from observation, styling our illustration
in a fun, whimsical way. I hope you picked
up a few tips and tricks for your own
illustration workflow and have a better
understanding of how to use procreate for illustration. If this class helped
you in any way, please leave a short review
at the end of class. I'd love to hear from you to get your feedback and I really appreciate hearing
back from you. Please take the time to share your class project in the
class project gallery. I'll see every project
coming in and I take the time to leave you
a few words in return. Please share what
you create in class, whether it's one cookie
or the two cookie, or if you finish the
complete current design, I'd love to see it. Follow me here on
Skillshare to learn when my next class
is ready for you. On Instagram, you can check up what I'm
doing or planning, or I usually post regularly
from my personal practice. You can check up what
I'm doing in real-time. That's on Instagram. One last thing that
I want to share before I bid you farewell is that this class is
moneyness series of short and sweet
illustration classes. Each one has a project
that is designed to teach you skills in
a short amount of time. You can take one or
you can take them all. Just want to put it
out there for you. I also have a texture
one-on-one class in procreate. You're welcome to check
that out as well. With that, we're done. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in my
next class. Bye for now.
Yifat Fishman, Artist & Illustrator
