Texture in Procreate: Add Life & Character to Your Illustrations

1. Intro: Okay, so how do you make your digital illustrations feel handmade and authentic? How do you add character and personality to your digital artwork? Well, that's what this class is all about. My name is Rich Armstrong. I'm a multi-hyphenate artist who loves digital art that feels handmade. I love character imperfections and warmth. My art starts with simple shapes, simple doodles and flat colors. And then I turn them into illustrations brimming with personality and character and life. How? With texture. And that's what I'm going to show you how to do in this class. During the class, I'll be using Procreate on my iPad and an Apple Pencil. But you can apply what you learn to other drawing and painting apps. If you've never used Procreate before, don't worry, you're not going to get left behind. Now, what exactly does this class cover? We're going to cover how to use the brushes that come with Procreate to create texture, grit, and grain. We cover how to use clipping masks, Alpha lock and the select tool for texturing. We go over using blend modes to quickly give your artwork depth, and I'll show you how to smudge and add noise to give your artwork more of a handmade feel. Of course, there will be a bunch of tips and tricks about texture, art, and working in Procreate. We'll be covering a ton of examples during the class, and at the end, I'll take you through three start to finish examples of my own. So if you want to add character and life into your illustrations, using texture, come take this class. 2. Start Here: Hey, welcome to this class. I'm pumped that you are here. It's all about texture in the digital world, and we're going to be working in Procreate. But sure, you can use this in photoshop or Adobe Fresco or any of the other drawing and painting apps that you use or that you have. Wow. It's gonna be awesome. But the first thing that I want to do is kind of define texture. Like, what does texture actually mean? So, for me, in a simplicity, texture means like an inconsistent, rough appearance, and perhaps we could describe it as blemished or distressed or analog or dirty, even handmade or authentic. There's tons of words that we could use to describe texture. And I think the biggest thing for me is that texture in the digital world on an iPad, in photoshop, it should mimic texture in the real world. Like, that's what we're used to. We're used to feeling things. We're used to looking at decay. We're used to looking at distressed things. Things that have texture in the real. World. And so that's what I want to bring into the digital world. I want to make things feel characterful. I want to make things feel like they belong in the real world. So that's going to be the point of this class. We're going to make things feel real. Feel like they have character and personality and, you know, texture and life in them. Okay. So what I've done is I've compiled a checklist full of tools and techniques and processes that we're going to be going through during this class. So as you go through each one of these techniques that I teach you, check it off. It'll feel really good to check something off and you'll be like, Whoa, there's actually quite a lot of different ways to go about adding texture to digital art. Yeah. Some of them are going to be basic. Some of them are going to be a little bit more complex. Now, in the rest of this lesson, I'm going to do some really, really basic procreate stuff. I'm going to show you how I creates a new document, how I creates a new template, what color profile I use, how big my document is. If you create whizz, just skip on to the next lesson. If you're like, Well, I really want to know this, then stick around. The first thing I'm going to do is switch my cap around so that you can actually see what's happening in the overhead camera. And now, procreate. I'm going to press on this little plus button, and I'm going to go for this button over here. But before I do that, I want to remember some numbers. I'm going to go for a screen size, but I don't want to use this P three color mode. So 2732 is my screen size and two oh four eight is the height. But I know that one pretty well, 2732, and then I'm going to press on this new template button. And 2732 by 20048. The DPI dots per inch, doesn't really matter in digital art. What matters is pixels. And here we've got a width and a height. You could change this to 72, you could change this to 300. It doesn't really matter. So I'm actually going to change mine to 72 to remind myself that this is actually a digital document. Now, color profile, I do not like display P three. Well, it is actually pretty cool on an iPad. But when I bring it into photoshop or export it, sometimes the color starts to act a little bit weird like washed out or just not as vibrant and I like vibrant saturated art. So this is the one that I'm going to use as SRGB IEC, etcetera etcetera. I do not like CMYK. RGB for me all the way. Seriously, like if I can do anything and everything in RGB, that's my preference. Even if I'm going to print it, I do it in RGB first, send it to my printer. It somehow deals with it in CMYK and it comes out beautifully. Other times, I need to convert later in the stage, sometimes I do need to work in CMYK, but definitely not my preference. So that's what I'm working with Time lap settings. You can have fun here. If you want to use time laps, canvas properties, you can change your background color and your background hidden, just means that you won't actually see a background color on your stage. Then name this screen size. It's going to prompt you for a space. I don't put a space, but let's just do that anyway and then create. It'll go straight into the document, but your template will exist at the bottom of this little pop up here. So you could drag that to the top, like so, and then you can also delete it like so. Once you've done this, you will have a canvas, or if you've already got something like this setup, or you don't mind using P three, then just tap on your template to create a new screen size template that you can then use. Okay. In the next lesson, we're going to start exploring brushes, and Who there's a lot to explore, but we'll cover that there. See you in the next lesson. 3. Textured Brushes: All right. So at the core of illustrating with texture our textured brushes, and now procreate makes it really easy to duplicate and tweak and manage the brushes inside of procreate. And it comes with a whole bunch of awesome textured brushes, which we can use as starting points or just as is, for texture and brushes inside of this class. So what I'm going to do in this particular lesson is show you how I tweak and duplicate and manage my brushes inside of procreate. So let's open up our brush panel here. And on the left hand side, we've got our brush sets, which are like groups for brushes, and inside of each brush set are a whole bunch of brushes. If it's got a nice little icon next to it, it means it's a default procreate brush set. And if it's got one of these paint brush icons next to it, it means it's either an imported brush set or it's a custom brush set that I've created. So what I'm going to do is create a new custom brush set. I'd like you to do the same and call it textured brushes. And we'll put all of the brushes that we find or that we create inside of this textured brushes brush set. I'll drag this down here just above sketching to make that easier. And now we go looking for textured brushes or brushes that we're like, Oh, that looks awesome, either as is or as a starting point to tweak and further create more textured brushes. I'm going to give you two examples here of how to do this. The first thing that I want to do is I want to try and find a brush that makes it feel like a fine liner, but I don't want it to be like silky smooth. I want there to be a little bit of texture in the linework. Let me have a look at inking. Inca could be pretty cool. I think there's probably a little bit too much texture there. Pandani. Yeah, that doesn't look right. Syrup could be interesting. I'm looking inside of inking because that's what I want to do. I could have a look inside of drawing. These all far too textured. I love Blackburn, but it's not really what I want right now. Let's go back to inking. That's not really a fine tip. What about a studio pen? Studio Pen could be pretty cool. This is like silky smooth, but it could be something that we're very close to what we're after. Let's duplicate this. Because we can then put this duplicated studio pen inside of our textured brushes folder or brush set. Just make sure that it actually goes in there. And then once it's in here, you see it's got this little icon, which means it's not a default brush. Fantastic. So tap on that, it opens up the brush studio. And inside this brush studio, there are many different things that we can do. It's crazy. I'm not going to cover all of them, certainly not. I'm not even going to try to cover many of them. Maybe just one or two. You can have a play with all of these different settings. But it open up on stroke path, and this is exactly where I think I can make this into a textured kind of line. So if I increase the spacing, you can see that, Oh, this is actually how a brush is made up. It's just a whole bunch of little dots. Yeah. And you can see the shape. It is actually a dot and the grain or texture on it. There's nothing there. So dot and then the spacing, if we increase that, becomes really interesting how a brush is made up, right? Yeah. If we decrease the spacing again all the way back down, it becomes this really nice silky, smooth brush. I'm then going to increase the jitter. And as I do that, you'll see that mm, there's a little bit of texture. Yeah, that's really cool. And that's exactly what I'm after. But now, you can see that as I press harder, the brush gets bigger, and as I press a little less hard, it gets smaller. I don't want this. This is not really accurate to a fine liner. So, Where do I change this? Well, under Apple pencil, There's as I change the pressure, the size is then affected a lot. The opacity is not, the flow is not, neither is the bleed. So I'm going to reduce the size to around 14%, 20% somewhere around there, and then I'll clear this. Yeah. And that feels a lot better. Okay. So I'll go to about this brush. I'll call it a Dedle brush De. So first brush is done. And if I increase the size a little bit. Yeah, that's great. Also, if you're like, Oh, yeah, 27% or 28% is great, maybe let's go for something like 20%. Just tap there and press plus. It then creates a kind of bookmark for us. So if we change the size again, we can just tap there and it snaps back to 20%, which is really, really cool. You can also change the capacity, which I hardly ever do. Okay. So we've got this really nice brush. We can draw, you know, all kinds of little things here. I could probably continue testing this, making sure that it is exactly what I want. But I'm pretty sure that it is exactly what I want right now, and we can always tweak it further in the future. Now, if you're like, Oh, I like this, but what if we'll check this out. You can tap on this doodle brush again. And where it says here, create a new reset point, this is like, Hey, this is the default brush that I want it to become now. So you go, bam, create a new reset point. There we go. If you go and change things again like that, and you press done, you're like, Oh, actually, I don't like that, you can go back, you can go to about this brush and reset bruh, reset, and it goes back to the reset point, which is really, really handy. Okay. So from here, I might be like, Oh, actually, I want a little bit more texted one. So let's duplicate that. We can then rename this to Doodle brush number two, and then go to stroke path, increase the jitter a little bit. Something like that, even more texted. Maybe we can put a grain on. So let's go for a grain. Here, you can import your own brushes, your own grains or use the procreate source library. And yeah, let's try something like this, paper macro or sketch paper. Mm. You can see how it's really, really textured now, and increase the rotation a little bit. Sometimes these things are very noticeable, sometimes they're far more subtle. There's a lot of different things that we can choose from here. Let's go to the path and reduce the jitter again. Increase little bit. Okay. You can see that it's slightly more texted. We haven't changed that much about this particular brush. So if we're happy with that, then we can go and create a new reset point. There we go. I got Doodle brush two, Doodle brush. Maybe we can call this number one. There we go. That's really example one. Now, example two is I'm after something that's going to give me a lot of texture, maybe for erasing or to use with masks and clipping masks further down the line, really something that's textured and that can almost maybe I can just stamp it or sponge it on and it creates a nice texture feel. Maybe like a bit of distress is the best way to describe it. Inking, nothing much like that. Drawing Maybe Blackburn could be something like that. Maybe copperhead too. Let's go under painting. I know I like stucco. Stucco could be the base or damp brush, similar to stucco. I'm going to go for stucco. Let's duplicate this one. Can see here it's already pretty texted, which means that it's a really nice brush to use, and let's move this to textured brushes here. I'll call it sponge. Okay. Now, right now, it still feels a lot like a brush. I want to make it a lot more textured. Such a weird word, right? Textured. I want it to feel distressed, a lot more bitty. So let's go to Apple pencil. Let's maybe decrease the flow for now, increase the bleed. Yeah, that begins to look a little bit interesting. Go to the grain, increase the rotation a little bit. The stroke path, it's increased the jitter. You see how much more grainy that is. Maybe that's the right word grainy. Sometimes you will struggle to explain what you're after. That doesn't really feel much like a brush anymore. It feels like sponge or something like that. Maybe increase the jitter a little bit more. Okay let's go to rendering. And here, I'm just kind of basing what I'm choosing on past experience. You really need to experiment with what you're after, what all of these things do. Decrease the flow, maybe, wet edges. Wet edges makes it, you know, a lot more contrast between black and white, burnt edges, doesn't really do much. Wet, no dynamics. No. Oh, that becomes really interesting here. What about some flow. Okay, increase the bleed a little bit more this like an interesting curve because if I start with no bleed, it's pretty bleedy If I increase it a little bit, it becomes less bleedy then as I continue more, it becomes more bleedy again. I just weird there's a sweet spot that I'm after about here, I think. I'll clear this. Let's see. Okay, I think that could be something I really like. Cool. So create new reset point D. So sponge, I'm going to change this to white just because we're working with black and white right now. Maybe it feels like there's I don't know, too much of a picture in there. Maybe it's because I'm working with this arrays tool. So let's go back to the sponge one and I think that was right. I'm not quite happy with it just yet. Let's go into here again. It feels a lot nicer here. Let's go back to rendering. I'm going to take away the wet edges. There's some more rotation that I can do here. The grain is rotated quite a. The shape. I'm going to change that rotation. Yeah. Let's see if that works. Changes back to Black. Okay. I think I'm after a little bit more contrast. Let's change this again. Let's go to rendering, increase the wet edges again. Let's get apple pencil, increase the bleed a little bit, increase the flow. All right. Let's see if that works. Yeah, that feels a lot. Increase the size a little bit. Okay. I really like that. That looks great. It's a really nice spongy brush. I wouldn't be drawing with it that much, but I would be adding a little bit or a few pockets of these texted areas like that. Then I can go into it and create a new reset point. D. So I've created three brushes, the doodle brush with a little bit of texture, the doodle brush with a little bit more texture, and then this sponge brush, which is really, really nice. So there we go. That's how I go about exploring, how I manage, how I tweak, how I duplicate, man. And you can just keep on adding to this over and over and over again. And you don't have to do this for like three or 4 hours straight as you're wanting to find a particular brush, go after it or spend, you know, ten to 20 minutes exploring onee brush, seeing what the settings do. And then meaning like, Yeah, I like that. That looks good. And then you create a new reset point, you duplicate it, and then you continue to explore and play and experiment with that particular brush. And then you might get to a point that you have five or ten brushes that you want to share with the world. There might be these awesome textured brushes that other people can use in their workflows. Or maybe you're like, I don't want to create any of my own brushes. I just want to use awesome texture brushes. How do I get it inside of procreate? Well, in the next lesson, I'll be covering importing and exporting brushes. I'll see you there. 4. Importing & Exporting Brushes: Okay, let's jump into importing and exporting brushes inside of procreate. So in the last lesson, we created these cool brushes. If you just hold down on the brush set and then release, you can then share. Once you've shared Shawn, something like that, you can send it to your computer with air drop or you can upload to Dropbox or some other cloud service really, really cool. And then once you have exported it, how do you get it back in, or if you've downloaded or purchased somebody else's brushes or brush set, how do you get them inside of Procreate? So let's open up our files app. And I've got this texture brush set. You should just be able to tap it and it imports into procreate. And then at the very top, You should then see the different brushes that you've imported. Really, really easy. Then from here, you can rename it. You can then start tweaking, duplicating that kind of stuff with your brushes. It's really easy. If that doesn't work, what you may need to do is open up your files app on the left and then just drag and drop into procreate. Here, you should see now two texture brush sets. I'll just delete that. All right. There we go. In the next lesson, I'm going to be covering filling with texture. I'll see there. 5. Filling With Texture: All right. Now let's talk about filling with texture. What I've got here is this really cool brush. It's inside of inking and it's called dry ink. Okay. I'm going to draw a quick little car There we go. I want to fill this area. Maybe let's do that. I want to fill this area. At the moment, there are a couple of different options. Maybe let's move you down here. The first option is to painstakingly color this in bit by bit. That's one option. The next option is to drag and drop this color over here, which you might be like, perfect. Amazing. Yeah, but it's not texted. I mean, look at the stroke or the line around it, and then the fill is just it's plain. It's like vector. It's just like there. No textured at all. Sir, how do we go about doing this? Well, in a quick way, right? That's what we're after. So inside of our layers panel, we've got layer one. I'm going to tap that, and tap on referencia, which makes this layer a reference layer. That means that on this layer, we can just drag and drop, and it uses the layer that is selected as the reference as the outline to use for when you were filling and selecting. I can put this at the bottom. Okay, but still, that doesn't really help us. Yeah, it doesn't. I'm going to tap on that and clear, but we have set ourselves up to use this layer as the reference. So now what I'm going to do is press on my selection tool. I'm then going to choose automatic and tap here, and that selects this whole area, which is great, but it doesn't select it super well. So I'm going to try again. This time, I'm going to hold down and drag to the right and increase the threshold all the way to 100% and then drag it back just slightly. So it selects this area as much as possible, and we'll see what happens now. Okay. So we've got this layer two selected, and you might be like, Whoa, what are all these lines? Your lines may not be as intense as mine. So if you tap on this wrench icon, go to your preferences, you can then change your selection mask visibility down or up. I'm going to keep mine quite high so you guys can see what's selected and what's not. Okay. I think I just didn't select anything now. Let's try this again. 99.9, that should be good. And then I'm going to press on my brush button and make sure I've got my dry ink selected. And here, I can now begin the coloring in process. You might be like, Yeah, but how is this different from that first version that you showed us? Well, now I can kind of color in a little less painstakingly. I can increase the brush size a little bit. It's almost like coloring in knowing that you're going to be cutting the piece of paper out. It's like you don't have to color within the lines because, well, it's already selected, and then you tap on your selection tool. Okay. Sum in a little bit. And that looks perfect. There we go. That is a very easy way of filling with texture. It's not the quickest. It's not like you're dragging and dropping. No, it's not. But it's pretty epic, and it still gives you that satisfying feeling or for me anyway of actually coloring in and illustrating drawing and illustration rather than just like cheating my way through it. In the next lesson, I'm going to be covering masks, and masks are really cool for texturing. I'll see you there. 6. Using Masks: In this lesson, I'm going to cover how to use masks for adding texture. So what is a mask? It's a gray scale layer that tells the layer directly beneath it what to hide and what to reveal. Black means hide and white means reveal. The mask layer starts off white, which means all of the content on the layer below is revealed. This is super cool because the content of the layer beneath remains intact. Masking is a non destructive process. So let's get into an example here. I've got this sheep artwork PNG that you can find in your class resources, and let's go into procreate, and I will import and let's go iCloud Drive, sheep artwork. There we go, and I'll zoom out a little bit. Now, what I want to do here is to make this little sheep guy into a circle, but using a really nice textured brush to do that. What I'm going to do is go to my layers panel, tap on this layer, and then tap on mask. You'll see that the layer mask appears above it. That means if I then use dry ink, for example, with a black brush selected or a black color selected, as I brush, it then era but non destructively erases. You can see if I tap that on and off the layer beneath it, which is really cool. I can also just hold that down and it switches to white, and then on layer mask, I can then basically restore it. Which is pretty cool, right? I can also hold down here or tap and fill there with white, which makes it all white. There we go. Ready to go again. I'll go back to a black color, which means I'm erasing. And the brush that I want, let's have a look if we've got any nice ones here. Sponge brush maybe, doodle brushes, probably not. What I'm going to go for, I'll go for painting again and I'll go for stucco. I'll duplicate that one. Let's put that into textured brushes. Tap on that, we'll just call it stucco again. All right. And here, make that a bit bigger. Okay. We can actually start changing this. Okay. You can also see outside of this area, there's some really nice green parts or flex that are still available or still visible. Just a really nice way to add life and character into an illustration. Because it's non destructive, you could even set this up as some kind of template or a preview that the illustrator is still working with, and you're just doing the textr so you could always update this layer or copy and paste this mask to another piece of artwork. It's really, really powerful. Okay. And here, if I do some strokes that aren't quite so heavy or hard, some really nice like textured brush strokes here and there. Okay. That's looking really nice and that is just with one stucco brush. What I'm going to try now is this sponge brush that I created earlier. Let me make it a little bit bigger. Remember, this is also based on the stucco brush. Okay. Okay. And if I wanted to try put a little bit more texture into here, could try that too. Because this is a mask and we're not actually painting or raising layer one. There we go. If I am happy with this at any stage, I can tap on this and merge down. Can I do that? Or tap on this one, or merge mask there. There we go. Or I could just go, pop with my fingers together, and now it's just one layer. But it's really nice to have the layer mask there. It always means that you can then update layer one. All right. That was layer masks with texture. In the next lesson, what I'm going to cover is creating imperfect shapes that kind of still retain their geometric integrity. Really important for things like triangles or circles, things like that. I'll see there. 7. Perfect Imperfections Needed: So this lesson isn't really about texture, but it is about making things feel imperfect. And sometimes we need perfect shapes, but we don't want them to be perfect. So I'm going to show you how I balance these two needs in this lesson. So one of the things that I do is I create happy suns. They are these like circular creatures that are suns, but I don't like them to be perfect circles. So how do I go about actually achieving this? Well, My brush, I've got doodle brush number two. I create a circle, which is clearly not circular. I'm not good at drawing circles. Then I hold down while I've still got my pencil held down on the screen of the finger, so creates a circle, then I can make it bigger or smaller. I let go, and then with my selection tool, I can then reposition it. This now is a perfect circle. I then go into my layers, press on the layer itself or the blend mode, and then I can decrease the opacity, and then create another layer. And now I trace this. And when I trace it, it's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be pretty close to being perfect. Here, I can then create a near perfect circle. Sometimes I can redo it or just erase bits and redo certain bits. And I put two little eyes and a happy mouth, and that is the base of my happy sun. I can then create all the rest of the rays going around. And then I either delete or hide that layer that I used to trace the layer on top. Pretty easy, right? Okay. Another example, I love creating rockets and rockets are pretty symmetrical. So what I do is I tap on this old car icon, go to Canvas, turn on drawing guide. Now, there's a lot of things you can do with the drawing guide. So I go for edit drawing guide, and then go to symmetry. And then my guides, I like them to be pink for some reason. Capacity up thickness up, and that is great. You could have it horizontal or quadrant or radial. But for a rocket, vertical is perfect. So press done. Then I draw that line and I hold it down. It becomes a straight line, and then I do the same thing like that. Now I have a triangle, and then I have my two rocket boosters, hold that down, hold that down and hold that down, and then two little wings. Here we go. And hold it down to make it like 90 degrees or not 90 degrees, zero degrees or 30 degrees, I think, or 45, et. Okay. There we go. You'll see that this has an assisted little word underneath layer three, and I can take off drawing assist. When I do that, there's no more drawing assist on the other side. If I tap it again, turn on drawing assist, then as I draw on one side, it draws on the other. I can take that off again and draw a circle here. And make that the little window in the middle. Then again, I reduce the opacity, and then create a new layer, and then I trace this. Just that it feels perfect but also not perfect at the same time. So something like that, I got some fire coming out of these guys. There we go. And I can hide that layer. And yeah. This works really well when I use texture when I'm coloring in. I've used a texture brush, when I use masking, clipping masks, a whole bunch of texturing tools and processes. So again, it just makes it feel authentic, handmade, it works really well with texture. In the next lesson, I'll cover using texture with color, which is probably one of my favorite things that I've discovered in recent years. I'll see you there. 8. Grainy Gradients: So there actually isn't an easy way to do gradients inside of procreate. Not like you can in photoshop or illustrator. So when I was faced with this problem, a few years ago, I discovered a hand way of doing gradients inside of procreate, and it has now become one of the recognizable elements in my style. So let me show you how cool this is and how textured it is. It's awesome. So I finished the outlines of my happy son from the the previous lessons example. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to set this as a reference. I'm going to create a layer beneath it. Then I'm going to go for one of my lovely colors, like a yellow, and I'll pop this in here and a threshold, 100% is pretty good. That means it goes all the way to this line and a little bit further, which is fantastic. Then I can start doing a little bit of gradienting. And with which brush? That is a good question. Let's go to sketching. And there's this thing called Bonobo chalk. I don't use Bonobo chalk, but I may have started with it when I started creating this really nice textured gradient film. I'm going to duplicate it and put it into textured brushes. Tap on that one. By chalk. There we go. Then I'll go for, you know, maybe kind of like a red color, almost like an orange color. Pump up the size a bit. Yeah, that's pretty good. And now I don't want to do that just yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a selection. So let's undo. I'm going to create a new layer, and then tap on this layer and select, which then selects this layer, and then I can go and start painting or drawing on layer six. All right. Maybe make this even bigger still. Yeah. That's great. So far, I'll go a lighter yellow at the top. Something like that. Yeah. Then at the bottom. Very, very cool, and then a little bit smaller. I'll think just for the cheeks over here. All right. And then I'll tap on the selection button. You'll see here how grainy this gradient is. It's beautiful. I love it. That's how you create a grainy gradient inside of procreate. Now on to learning about Alpha in the next video, of course. 9. Alpha Lock: What Alpha Lock does is keep areas in your illustration the same opacity. This means you can't paint where there is no paint, and if the paint is semi transparent, the new paint will be the same opacity. I'd like to see using Alpha lock as a fancy way to color within the lines, and we can do it without needing to create a selection, but it means we need to draw on the layer that has the Alpha lock. Let's get into it. So what I have here is my happy sun drawing from last time, and we've got our two layers. But now I want to replicate this. Okay, so instead of creating a new layer and selecting, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new layer. Let's go for pink in here, fantastic. And now I'm going to turn on Alpha lock for this layer. So I can go in Tapia and tap Alpha Lock, which is great. But if you need to do this a lot, what I find is quite easy is assigning it to a quick menu action. So I've set my quick menu up with this little button, Tapia, and I go, Bam. Alpha lock. And here you can see that Alpha lock. It's no longer on. So I'm going t Alpha lock. If you're like, Yo, I want to set one of those quick menu things up. How do I do that? Well, go to your wrench icon and then go to preferences, gesture controls. Then there's a whole bunch of things that you can set up here. But go to quick menu and I set mine up with a tap of that little square button. But you could change how that works for you and you press done. So now you press. There we go. And then here you've got quick menu one. I've got quick menu two and quick menu one. You can create new quick menu. And if you don't see an Alpha, you just hold down on one of the buttons and you then set an action for this little button. There we go. Alpha. Alpha is off, and now Alpha Lock is on. Great. We've got Bonobo chalk selected, I'm going to increase the size of that, and I'm going to go for a red color here, you can see that as I'm drawing, there is nothing outside here and there is no selection present, which is really cool. I find that this is really helpful. If you're more confident with your brushwork, I find that needing to use selections and multiple layers is probably most likely when I'm not so confident with what I'm doing or I need to play around or experiment. If I know exactly what I'm doing, then I just use an alpha lock on a layer. Okay. That looks pretty cool. A little bit of light of pink at the top here. Okay. Okay. That looks good, very nice and textured. Okay. Now, some little cheekis. Let's reduce the size here. That looks good. Okay. And it's all on this one layer. Fantastic. Now, when I'm not using Alphas, what I often use are clipping masks, which are amazing. So that's what we're going to cover in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 10. Clipping Masks: Okay, it's time for my favorite tool, the clipping mask. A clipping mask is very similar to an alpha lock, except that we can interact with the individual layers. When a layer has the clipping mask option turned on, it means you can only see content where its base layer is visible. The base layer is usually the layer directly beneath it, but you can turn several layers on top of each other into clipping masks, and they'll all use the same base layer to know what to show. If you draw, move or erase parts of the base layer, this will affect what's visible in the clipping mask layers above it. Let's jump into an example here. Okay, so I've got my Happy sun example here again, and this was the Alpha Lock version. This was the selection version, and now I'm going to show you a clipping mask version. I'm going to create a new layer here, I've still got layer two as the reference layer. Let's go for a blue color, fill that, you might be like, Yeah, suns aren't blue. Well, check this out. I'm going to create a new layer, and let's go for perhaps a yellow, and I'll tap on this and fill this layer, and now everything's yellow. But if I tap on this again and I select clipping mask, it's just going to show what is visible in the layer beneath it. Layer eight is now essentially our clipping mask base layer. If I turn that off, you don't see any yellow. If I turn that on, you see yellow. Now, this is a very handy way to be like, Oh, well, I'm going to select this as a clipping mask, and then let's go for a peach color. Then I will fill this layer. Peach could be cool. Yellow could be cool or maybe not peach. Maybe let's go for a red, let's fill this layer. It becomes a very quick way to prototype different colors and different effects. Okay, so I think I'm going to start with this one this time, and then going to create a new layer, make it a clipping mask. And now I get a bit irritated having to do that all the time. So I like to create a top clipping mask and then on this clipping mask, create a new layer. And because it sits in between, a clipping mask and another clipping mask, it automatically becomes a clipping mask. It says clipping mask and you also see this little arrow that makes it a clipping mask. If I don't want that to be a clipping mask anymore, that layer and the layer on top of it also don't become clipping masks. Let's make it a clipping mask and clipping mask. Let's go for Bonobo chalk again. I'll go for a red color, make this really big. Here, it's like, Oh, yeah. Let's do this again. You'll be familiar with this gradienting process. Now here, instead of working on the same layer, if I'm a little bit uncertain, this is a great way to experiment and play. I'm going to create a new layer, which is a clipping mask, and then going to select pink. Go for pink up here. Okay. What does that look like? Maybe we need to change that. I'm just going to hide it. I'm then going to create a new layer. Let's go for a lighter pink. Oh, that maybe looks a little bit too light. Hm. You see what I'm doing here. It's just very easy to play to experiment. Explore and experiment, create a new layer. Let's go for a peach color. Yeah, that one is much better. Reduce the size a bit. Okay. It also makes it a lot easier to erase. I'm going to hold down the array to and I'll have Bonobo chalk selected as my raised to. Here, I'm just erasing this particular layer, not worrying about all the other layers, which is very handy. Something like that, that looks good. Then I could use this layer or create another layer. Make this a little bit smaller. Let's go for this go for a little pink for the cheeks here. Okay. Let's go for another one, maybe peach color again. Depending on what I wanted, either of these would be pretty good. You see here, I have a ton of different layers, and short here, what I can do is just select them all and group them as one happy sun. But you can see that I've got a whole bunch of different experiments here. I've got these different colors, maybe, different pinks, peaches, and so it becomes really flexible. I can also move these layers really easily. So this, for me, when I don't know exactly what I'm doing becomes immensely valuable, and I use it all the time. When I do kind of know what I'm doing, and I'm like, Okay, this is exactly what I want to do, then I switch to using Alpha masks. It means I can just not an Alpha mask and alpha lock. It means that I can just use one layer and do all the coloring on that one layer and not have to worry about bulking up my layers and running out of layers to use. So clipping masks are awesome and powerful, but so are masks and selections and alpha locks. When and where you use each of these tools and how you combine them is up to you. For me, it normally depends on how confident I am with what I'm doing. If I'm experimenting or unsure of exactly what I'm doing or wanting, I'll use clipping masks. And if I'm using blend modes, I'll use clipping masks. But we have not covered blend modes yet. So that's what we'll be covering in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 11. Blend Modes: Now let's talk blend modes and how they work really well with clipping masks. So, what is a blend mode? A blend mode changes how the colors of a layer interact with the colors of the layers beneath it. Each blend mode applies a different algorithm to the color information of the layers, which can get you some pretty cool effects. The two blend modes I use the most are multiply and screen. I'd like to think of multiply as layering a sheet of colored plastic over another piece of paper. It's useful for creating shadows and dark areas mostly. The screen blend mode is used for creating lighter areas. It's like blending two lights together. Now, there are tons of blend modes to choose from. So I recommend playing around with them and seeing what you like for what particular artwork you're creating. When we're using clipping masks, we can change the blend modes of individual layers, much like we can change the opacity of an individual layer. And this means we can access some really nice color effects to go on top of our base layer. It also means we have access to a really nice color sheet, which I'll show you in this lesson. Let's dive into it. So there's this robot flat procreate document that you should find in your class resources. I'm going to tap that and open it up. And in here, you'll see that you've got some lines. Get your black bits, blue bits, red bits, and gray bits, and also the sky. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to work with the gray bit, especially, and I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to go for this gray color. And let's go for bonobo chalk. Let's see if it is actually the same gray color. No, it's not. I'm going to go for a lighter one. That is the same gray color. You might be like, what are you doing? It's a good question. So what I want to show you here is what multiply does. To access all your blend modes, you tap on this n, which stands for normal, and you can see all of your blend modes over here. Currently, it's on the normal blend mode, and if you scroll down, you can see what's happening here. Multiply, it's really nice effect, right? It makes everything beneath it a little bit darker. Pretty cool, and you can change your capacity. Okay. Okay. That looks really interesting. If I tap on this and select clipping mask, it now only applies to its base layer, which is this base gray layer. Now I'm still using the same gray color as this layer. If we go back to go to normal, you don't actually see any difference. If we go for lighten, that should change something, or if we go for screen, now you can start to see what I use it for. Let's go for multiply first, and I'll tap this, select clear, and then increase the brush size a little bit. And then do a bit of Brush, gradient brushwork. This is the cheek because I'm not selecting a different color gray, I'm using the same color gray. I've just used a multiply blend mode. I'll create a new layer clipping mask, change this to screen, and then do the same thing over here with a screen blend mode. There's a weird blur over there for some reason. Maybe it's because I changed my pencil angle. Maybe this is a little bit too light, so I'll adjust the opacity. Yeah. Something like that begins to look really nice. I'll do the same thing on the blue, clipping mask, and then I'll go for this blue. Right now, you can't really see anything because I haven't changed the blend mode. Let's change that to multiply. You can begin to see And then I'll create a new layer clipping mask and change that to screen. I could use a different color, but I'll use the same one just because we're cheating. I use the size a little bit. Okay. You see it just adds a lot of depth to our pieces now using these blend modes, and it's really quick. For red, let's try this out clipping mask. I'm going to change this to a multiply Over there, use the same red. This may not work as well. You may not be able to see it because red is tricky when it comes to multiply and lighten or screen. So I'm going to clear this and I'm actually going to up for a slightly darker in color. Here we go. Now here, if you didn't want it to come through onto the mouth, what you could do is use your selection tool, make sure it's an automatic and select that color. No, that color, not that layer. Go to the lines up here, this layer, and then select There we go. Then go back to this layer over here and do some drawing. We can always reduce the selection mask visibility if we need to. Okay. Something like that looks pretty good. It might be a little bit dark, now the beauty of having this as its own layer, and as a clipping mask is that we can then sect adjustment, go for huge saturation brightness, bump up the saturation a little bit, maybe bump up the brightness a bit. And, maybe you can't see it so well on this angle, but for me, it looks a bunch better. Then we'll go for a new clipping change to screen, and then I have two of these now. Interesting. I'll go for this color. Well, and pop this up here. Okay. Go back to this one over here. Make this a little bit redder. That is how I use blend modes. Again, there are so many to choose from here. Maybe I can quickly show you with the blue one. Just watch here how many different versions there are. A play and experiment with all of those. I'll for multiply for that one. What you can do here is you can start to use a mixture of techniques. What I sometimes like to do is select individual panels and then do a little bit of multiplication at the bottom and some screening at the top and do it for each of the single panels. Just so it makes it feel like a little bit more patchwork. Okay, so blend modes are fun and powerful and especially when you use texture and clipping masks. If you're new to blend modes, experiment and have fun with them, and then the next lesson, I'm going to cover adding dirt and black shadows to your illustrations. 12. Shadows & Dirt: Sometimes I like making my illustrations feel dirty or as if they've been processed by a photocopier or something like that. Other times, I like adding shadows, specifically black shadows, either at a semi transparent value or as a fully opaque black. Shadows add depth to illustrations, and doing it with texture is a lot of fun. So let's get into it. So what I've got here is my robot illustration from the previous lesson. And I want to start adding a little bit of grit and grime, some dirt on top of it. And I'll go for this gray layer and add a new layer on top of it clipping mask, so it's only going to be visible where there are gray bits. And I'm going to go for a black. Then I don't want to use Bonobo chalk, but maybe the sponge one that we created earlier, and maybe I can change stucco into something else. And I think that this dry ink brush would be pretty good too. I'm going to duplicate that. Take that into textured brushes. Let's give you an updated name, dry Ink. Should be perfect the way it is, let's go for stucco stucco rotate. And then under grain, I'm going to change to rotated. And yeah, I wonder what else we can do here to make it a little less like a brush and more like a grungy splat of sorts. Change the rotation of this guy. Yeah. That might be pretty cool. Mm hmm. Grain behavior, texture. That's not what I'm going for. Okay. What about some Apple pencil, Bleed. Okay. Yeah. That looks pretty good. Let's increase that. I'm really happy with that. That looks good. Stuck a rotate. All right. What I like to do here is literally just go crazy. This is really, really fun. I'm just going to work on the head for now, and then s the same brush to do some erasing. Increase the size a little bit, not press. Basically create my own texture here. Yeah. I like it. Okay, so that looks really, really cool, right? I think so. I think so anyway. So I'm going to create a new layer clipping mask and do the same thing with this dry ink. Perhaps I can just do it on one panel. You start to see how this works. Current brush, dry ink. Pressing really softly here. All right. I've got these nice little spots there. Really nice subtle texture. Then I'll create a new layer clipping mask, probably also with dry ink. I think that's pretty good. Change the size here. Here I'll add a little bit of shadow. Something like that, and beneath the mouth too, it might be protruding, and then I will decrease the opacity to actually make it look like a shadow. This will also be slightly textured, even though you can't really see it, but if you zoom in, you see it's a little bit bumpy. So, that adds a lot of, like, life, a lot of, you know, texture, grit, grain, makes it feel like this dude is an actual robot that's being, you know, recycled. Maybe it's a post apocalyptic dystopian world, and they've salvaged the parts and made this robot. Yeah. That's what I'm going for, you know? This technique for me is very therapeutic and a lot of fun. And it means I don't need to use or find ready made textures to do this with. But that is another way to add texture to your artwork. And so I'll cover this in the next lesson. I'll see there. 13. Make Your Own Textured Background: If you're working with big files or you don't want to create texture using brushes, you can use photos or scans of textures. What I want you to do now is to take a photo of something texted. Then I'll show you how to bring it into procreate. If you don't want to take your own texture photo, don't worry. I've provided a few for you to use. Let's jump into our files app here, and I've got texture photo number one. This is photo number two. It's just of my genes. And this is like a really subtle paper kind of a texture. So let's going to procreate and I'll go to my cog icon add insert a file. I drive texture photo number one. That's cool. I'll rotate it 45 degrees, and then fit to Canvas. Fantastic. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll start with texture, and then I'll create the artwork on top of that. Other times, I'll start with the artwork and then add texture on top of that or into it. In this case, I feel like it's going to be an abstract piece or more of an abstract piece, so I'm going to start with the texture first. So I've got my texture. Now you can actually just use this as is. So I'll create perhaps a little geometric kind of drawing. And let's go for maybe black, maybe green because it's quite different from the background elements. We've got a new layer, so I'll just start creating and I'll pop some color in there and what kind of brush is this? It's a marker brush. All right. Let's go for texture brushes. I'll go for my doodle brush number one. I'll add a couple more little circles in here. Pop that in there. Just holding down on the screen to make it a perfect circle. A here. I can say continue filling. There we go. This is the start of an abstract piece. I can then use a clipping mask or the other way around. I can bring a layer one above this and use this as a clipping mask. Okay. And you begin to see that this becomes really interesting. And with this layer one, I'm going to duplicate it and hide it. And we can remove the clipping mask feature. Now we've got this, the colors are pretty interesting, and what we could do is we could change this to something like multiply already and that becomes really cool on this green color. If I wanted to change the green color to a blue color, let's fill this layer becomes really cool, Darken Look at those greens in there, zoom in here. And, This all looks really interesting. Screen and color dodge look really cool too. Take off that. Wow. So you can see how texture starts to play a really cool role in some abstract artwork. Now, what we can do too is I will duplicate this and I'll change this to us go for normal for now, and I will hide this layer one. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to change the hue saturation brightness and just bring down the saturation, so it's black and white. And once I've done that, I'll go and s curves. This is basically increasing the contrast, so I'm going to decrease the blacks, so make the blacks blacker or the dark rays darker and the lights lighter. So I almost get this really posterized kind of effect between black and white. All right. So once I've done that, I can then use this multiply effect a lot better or the screen effect or the lighting effect, a lot better. You get these really nice textures. Super super cool. And this is an example of one kind of texture, and on top of this, what I could do if I wanted to make it pretty fun. Let's go for black as I could start adding in some legs, some arms, that kind of stuff. And as a creative exercise, this becomes very fun. Shape plus texture, doodled or drawn bits and pieces on top of that. All right. Let's put there, there. Hello. Stuff like that, and it becomes really fun. Now, let's get onto another example. On top here, I'm going to insert a file, and we'll go down to the bottom here. This texture photo number two. I'm going to rotate it and then fit to Canvas. Maybe even extend it a little bit. So all of that kind of texture comes through and I'll do the same kind of thing here, hue saturation brightness. It's already like a black gene or black denom, and then I will increase the the contrast. Where you decide to put these curves or how you decide to change this will then change your texture and how it looks in your artwork. That looks pretty cool. Then on top of this, maybe below this, I'll go for a clipping mask. I can then start to do some drawing with my razor. Okay. There we go. That becomes a really nice piece of texture to work with. All right. Then on top of this, we could then mask this perhaps we could use the Bonobo chalk with black to just make some of that texture go away. You begin working with brushes along with textures that you've brought in and you get these really nice, interesting textures. Now, the final one that I want to show you is adding this really subtle one of file. Let's go for texture photo three, rotate and fit to Canvas. I'm not quite sure if you can actually see what this looks like. Yeah, I think you can. It's pretty bobbly. Right now it doesn't really look like much, but if we put this multiply, in feels like there's paper on top of everything or that everything has been drawn on paper, which, again, it just makes it more authentic, feels like it's been handmade or hand printed or it's something from real life. So let's go for hue saturation brightness, drop the saturation, and then increase the curves or play with the curves. It's not too much. Otherwise, all the detail is gone, but maybe something like that. I'll just bring it back a little bit so you can see. Something like that looks pretty good. Now, you could save this particular image, and all of these particular layers you could hide. Let's group those and just hide that. You could save this as a standard texture piece of paper image. It's a lot better than the one that I brought in. But I'm just showing you how to work with the textures that you bring in. T. You could also put this one at the bottom or the group on top. Although some of these things would now not work so well, it doesn't feel like they've been printed on the paper. So I'll just undo that. You can see here because of that multiplication blend mode, it looks really, really nice on the paper texture. So adding your own textures can be super fun and a great excuse to get outside and into the real world and take photos or at least get off your chair, you know. But now, talking about the real world, let's talk about actual paper and actual printing, which we'll do in the next lesson. 14. Paper & Printing: Adding your own textures can be super fun and a great excuse to get outside and into the real world or at least off your chair. Now, if the purpose of your illustration is to actually print it on real paper, then things get really interesting because paper can be textured. Years ago, I made greeting cards. The artwork was super simple line drawings, printed on thick fleck paper, and it looked lovely. If you're printing your illustrations, consider the paper you're printing on. You can have flat colors and no texture in your artwork at all, but when you print on textured paper, it becomes textured. The life blossoms there. It makes a world of difference. All of a sudden, it comes to life. So sometimes you don't need to add fa texture to your digital illustrations because you're going to get that real texture with your paper. If you're not going to print or you're going to print on plain white, untextured paper, keep the effect of a nice texture in mind. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to use the noise effect to create an overall texture and to texture specific layers. I'll see there. 15. Create Texture With Noise: Another way to create texture is with noise, especially if you're wanting a subtle texture. This often gives your artwork this imperceptible, warm feeling. And when I'm creating digital marbling pieces, adding this noise can even make it feel like velvety. So that's what I'm going to show you how to do now. So in your class resources, you should have a marbling flat procreate file. So let's open this app. And if you're like, Whoa, how did you do that? Well, I have a whole class on digital marbling in procreate. You should check it out. Marbling is super fun, super therapeutic, relaxing. It's just really awesome. So now we have this one layer. I'm going to create a new layer and fill it with a white, and then I'm going to change this to a multiply blend mode. And we can change that a little bit later on. But for now, it's pretty good. White with a multiply blend mode just means nothing. But when we go to our adjustments and go for noise, we can now add a bunch of noise to the whole piece. And we just drag our finger across and the noise increases, and you'll see this flex or noise starting to be added. And it's just like this really nice subtle texture or effect. You could go overboard and then change the opacity on the layer. Let's try that. And you'll scale octaves turbulence. I don't normally play around with that too much, but you can if you want, and then tap over there. You can see there's quite a nice difference. If we change the opacity, we can then change how intense it is. Now, we've got this multiply blend mode, let's have a look at what darkened does, and maybe let's bring up the opacity again, or color burn. Color burn may be pretty cool. Let's have a look at that. Maybe reduce it a little bit. There's just like Zoom in here. It's slightly different to multiply. I think that looks pretty cool. It adds like velvety feel, adds a lot of texture and warmth, but it also makes some of the colors pop a little bit. So noise is pretty cool, right. I often use it in the last few steps when adding finishing touches to a piece. You know, to add that extra vibe to it. It gives it so much warmth and I often feel like touching it, like, Oh, yeah. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to cover smudging, which is not a normal thing in digital art, which is why I love using it. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Smudging: So you know when you're drawing on paper and you smudge your drawing by mistake or your writing. Well, that doesn't happen in digital. Right. Well, it can, actually, if you want to. But even if you didn't, when you're drawing on paper, smudging is still something people do on purpose, and we can use this technique to make our illustrations feel more handmade. So, let's get into smudging. So what I've got here is the marveling pieces from the last lesson, and I'm going to hide them for now, and I'm going to show you how to do some smudging. So let's go for a doodle brush or doodle brush number one, or maybe even dry ink. Just do some squiggles and then select our smudge tool. Over here, perhaps we can start with a stucco. I really like stucco when it comes to smudging. Looks pretty cool. Let's do some more squiggles here and there just to see what the smudging brushes look like. We could also go for let's go for drawing. Maybe a Blackburn, t's see what this windows. Well, I do make that a little bit smaller. It's really a smooth feel. Let's go for painting. Let's go for turpentine. Reduce the size again. Yeah, that's quite nice. Let's go for artistic, maybe something like whatever that says, Tara not such a fan of that one. Let's try old Bleach. That's pretty interesting. Cool. So you can really see how the different smudges start to work out really nicely. What I do like doing as well is being able to do some drawing and then use my finger to smudge instead of to draw. So how you set that up is you go to your cog icon or your range icon, then to your preferences, gesture controls. And then on smudge, you turn that on. Then I'm going to turn this one off. Let's see on general enable paint with finger. Yeah, that probably had an issue with that because that was turned on, and that would be like, Hey, this is actually going to do something else. I'll turn that off. It's got to smudge and turn that on. When I touch, I'm going to be smudging, which means I can do some drawing and then some smudging, which I find really cool. If we go and change this back to stucco, I can then draw and smudge, draw and smudge. This also means that if you're drawing and you by mistake, do some smudging, it's a little bit more lifelike and, you know, anti digital, which I really like kind of leads to happy accidents. So I made a good mess here. How I like to use this is in this digital marbling world. I'm going to create a new layer over here. I'm going to hide those smudges. And what I like to do is I like to hold down and select a color and then do a little bit of painting, and then Just smudge, a little bit of painting, smudge, a little bit of painting, and smudge that. You might be like, but I can't really see any differences, or you just start changing the color a little bit, do some smudging. All right. Over time, you add this like little Vanier to your artwork. And so maybe you can't see it too much now. But if you take that off, you begin to see, oh, it makes a big difference, although it's quite subtle. So that's how I like to use smudging in my work, especially with this digital marbling kind of technique and especially with abstract kind of work. So, I usually use smudges at the very end of my illustration process, or I embrace the happy accidents philosophy by setting my finger as the smudge tool. But if you did want to use it at the end of your illustration process, there are a few more things that you may want to consider adding at the end of your illustration process. So, we'll cover those in the next video. 17. Final Grit Grain: Okay. Okay, at some point, you need to decide that your artwork is finished. Something that only you can decide. What I'd like to do before I decide is completely 100% done is add some finishing touches. We've covered smudges or smudging in the previous lesson. And in this lesson, I'll cover adding final grit and grain so that it feels like it's been through some kind of analog process, maybe that's been photocopied or printed or I don't know, something like that. What I've got here is a piece from my Doodle verse series, and I wanted to add a little bit of grit and grain on top of everything just to feel like it's gone through that process. So I'm going to go for black. And then my brush, go for this sponge brush. And I've also got some really cool brushes inside of my rat brush set, and it is this grainy kind of a brush. So I can also use bonobo. So let's go back to texture brushes and use the sponge one for now. And you see it like on this white guy, for example, just want to add a little bit of texture. Okay. Just so that it feels like it's been through this process. So here and there, I'll just add a little bit of this process, especially at the edges looks really nice and it doesn't take away from the art work at all. You can see I've already done some in the b over here. So we'll continue in the black over there with a white brush. And it's just really subtle, you know. Okay at here. Places where there's a lot more detail, I can actually put a lot more of this grittin grain looks really nice. Not too much, but we can see that I just adds quite a lot to it. In my opinion anyway, I like texture. Now let's go all the way down here. I'll add a new layer, which is a clip layer or a clipping mask, I'll change this to white and then do the same thing here. Okay, so that just feels like it's further out stars, but also makes it feel like it's really nice and texted. This process pairs really well with smudging and adding noise, adding paper texture, and that sort of thing. They are all the things that you do at the end of your illustration or artwork. In the next video, I'll chat about your class project. I'll see there. 18. Class Project: Okay, now it's your turn to create an illustration with some texture. Maybe you have an existing illustration that you can apply texture to, or maybe you want to create some smaller illustrations to test texture out with, like playing an experiment. Whatever it is, I want to see it from small to big from experiment to finish clin pieces. I would love to see it. So, please share with me. If you're stuck and you can't think of anything to draw, there's a PDF with ideas of things to draw in the class resources. So, create a project and upload your illustrations. You can also post them on social media and tag me. I'm Rich Armstrong with an underscore before the ON G at the end. And at this point in the class, I would love you to leave a review of the class. It means a ton to me, and it helps other students know whether to take the class or not. In the next few videos, what I'm going to do is create some illustrations of my own. I will be using texture. You'll get to see the complete beginning to end process of drawing and planning, adding texture, finishing a piece off. Then to end this video off, here are some ideas of things to draw. All right. I'll see you in the next video for my first start to finish piece. 19. Example 1: Abstract Doodles: All right. So in this example, what I'm going to try to do is to create an abstract illustration. There's going to be some marbling, there's going to be a lot of grit and grain plus some doodled elements, and those doodled elements are going to be made with textured brushes. So, let's get to it. I want to create an A three size kind of artwork. I'm hopefully going to print it. So A three is good. And here, I'm going to create a black and white piece. I really like black and white, white paper, black frame or maybe a white frame, depending on what happens here. So I'm going to change my background color to white. And then I'll change my pen color to black. And then what I'm going to start with here is a bunch of really nice kind of paint. So turpentine and oil paint are normally pretty cool for that. So like so, I cover this in my marveling class, but I'm really going to apply texture to this and not just create a marveling piece, but use marbling in the actual creation of this piece. Then I go to adjustments and liquefy this guy. Should be good, a little bit of distortion, make it a little bit smaller. Get something like this going. Yeah. Okay, so that looks pretty cool. I like the look of that. Maybe I could add a little bit of white in here. So let's just add a little white there and there liquefied again. Yeah. All right. That looks pretty cool. Add a new layer here for a bit of grit and grain. I've got inside of my rat brush set. I've got this grain brush. I've also got the splatter brush. I'm going to try to use splatter brush. Here and there. Add some of this grainy texture. Feels like spray paint. That's the point. Then I'll add white. Feels really liked painting. It's looking good. Like settled gradients, grit, strains, that kind of stuff. Have a quick look at with it on and off. That's really good. A new layers for sketching or drawing. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to try a bunch of different brushes, see what it works. It's really cool. I don't really mind it being consistent. I'm just going to add a bunch of doodles, a bunch of different shapes, forms. Some of them are going to be abstract, some of them will be shoes or clouds or stuff like that. Let's go and evolve one, see what this looks like. Yeah. So I'll start at the back. So I'll start at the front. So a new layer for the back. Just put that behind. Yeah. You can feel how gritty this feels ready. This brush is really gritty. Try Eagle we what this feels like. I go for white too. Okay. Crown maybe, maybe a little bit of a mixture between street art, graffiti, doodling. One of my favorite things to do is draw a bird big fan of birds, so let's have a look at what Oberon maybe a bit smaller. Okay. These birds in various forms are pretty signature to what I like to draw. I guess they represent some kind of freedom or represent people seeking freedom in some way or another. I really like this Oberon brush. It's. There for white now. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I really like it. I don't think I've ever used it before or intentionally used it before. What I'm going to do is add it to my favorite brushes. I'm going to add it to my RD brush. There we go. All right. Let's go back to I was a drawing, Oberon. Clouds are another thing I just love to draw feels dreamy and also when they rain feels cool. Okay. Yeah, things are looking really nice here. I don't want to spend too long on these pieces. They can be fairly simple. So I guess I'm nearing the end now. So let's see if this makes any difference. That was pretty nice. Perhaps another one over here. One more. Sometimes I like to draw a new layer, sometimes not rarely. Depends on how confident I'm feeling. In this case, yeah, just feeling pretty confident. Then there's a nice six pencil that I'll try out to add a little bit of smaller details. I always like to put my name somewhere. I go. And here under sketching is a six B pencil, which is a really cool brush to use. Really nice and textured. Kind of feels like charcoal now. I guess I was going to say pencil cran, but it is a pencil. Maybe rainbirs or something like that. Maybe a bird here. Let's go for a white again, draw an eye or two. Eyes are also things that I love to draw. Maybe just three eyes. Should we good? Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool. What I'm going to do now is group it all, I'll duplicate that and then I'll flatten it. Then what I'll do is I'll create a new layer, drop in a white and then use a clipping mask, set it to multiply. Then let's go put some noise on here. It really does add quite a bit to it, especially the white bits, like a lot. And once you've done that, I'm going to merge them together, like so and then go to curves and just increase the contrast a little bit. All right. So Something like that. Then what I'm going to do is mask this, and then I'm going to use that really cool sponge technique that we had earlier just to roughen up the edges a little bit. I could feel like there's even more grit and grain going on. Btress maybe it's been through a printer or something like that. And then vice versa, I'm going to add a little bit of black and there, just like a little bit of gritting grain, final gritting grain. Yeah, good. I think I like that a lot. At this stage, I reckon I'm done. There we go. That is a really abstract piece that uses a lot of texture, a lot of the techniques that we've covered during the class. If you have any questions about this particular piece or this technique or the combinations of them, just drop a comment and I'll respond. All right. S in the next one. 20. Example 2: Happy Sun Rocket: What I'm going to do in this example is draw a rocket, but in my doodle verse style. It's got a lot of color. It's got a lot of grain actually in the gradients and color, and I've also explored the finishing touches with you in this class. I'm going to create a two four square as a base, and then increase the size a little bit. I go to Canvas and crop and resize. Settings. What is 2048 plus half of 2048. Let's do some quick mai, 2048 plus 1024, 30723072. Something like that. Cool. That looks good? Maybe I can reduce it a little bit. Something like that. What happens if it's 2048 plus 512, 256256. I really like just working in round numbers or in this case, it's all divisible by two, I think. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I like that. Great. Then I'd like to start these sketches with this blue color and a six B pencil. Six B pencil is over there, and I'll turn on my drawing guide. Turn on symmetry, increase the opacity and thickness, and go for pink. Just because I like pink. There's no real other reason for this. Something like this in the middle. Yeah, maybe they can be a happy sun in the middle. Something like that. These can be a bit bigger. I like that. Drop the opacity, turn on drawing a cyst for this one, make some perfect lines here so that I can trace it. Okay. Okay. Just try that one again. Okay. These ones don't have to be too perfect. I don't think, although maybe let's try. The mounts a little bit more perfect. Okay. And then I'll take off the drawing a cyst so I can do a circle here. And then pop it in the middle or select it my free hand selection tool and then pop that in the middle. Maybe a little bit below. Yeah. That looks good. I can turn the opacity on that one down. Then what I'll do here is go for this doodle brush number one, how big is that? Maybe a little bit, let's try 30. Yeah, that looks good. Go for black. I'll save that size. What I used to do before there were these little bookmarks is actually remember 30% or 27%, sometimes I'd write them down in the template files that I would use. Okay. So we can begin here or I can begin. I'm not going to use any snapping. I'm just going to try draw these perfect lines. So it feels authentic. So if I double tap it switches always does that, but sometimes I don't realize I'm double tapping, double tap just switches between your tools. It's a little bit frustrating if that happens and you don't know why. Okay. The line work for me always comes first in my doodle verse kind of style. There we go. I can fill in or color in once the line work is done. Okay. It's a little bit weird there. Let me try that again. A little bit weird again. Let me rub out with the same kind of style of brush and try that again. There we go. A bit era there. Okay, I'll draw a happy sun. There we go, and perhaps I'll draw. Perhaps I'll draw. Might be beneficial to actually create a circle for that or a reference circle. But let's try this free hand. Okay. Something like that looks pretty good. I'll also draw some fire. It's probably one of the main reasons I draw it because I like drawing a fire. It's not the best fire. Okay. And here, I'll draw some rivets because the wings need to be connected to the body somehow, and it's pretty fun drawing these kind rivets. I'll do the same thing here. Yeah. That looks good. I'm going to take off the planning. I'm going to take off the drawing guide. Now I set this as the reference layer and I can begin coloring here. For each particular color or section, I might actually use a different layer. Maybe before I can actually do a little bit of these panels. Panels are fun. Maybe I'll raise this one. Okay. Okay. The p over there. And finish off these rivets over here. Yeah. Maybe we can just add a couple more in here. Or maybe that wasn't necessary. Then one at the top. Maybe this one also needs a couple of rivets. Yeah, and we can maybe put some rivets in here. Guess this is how I illustrates yeah, let's start the coloring. Oh, no, before I start the coloring, let me finish this or finish that. Sure, I can actually add to the line work while I'm going, so I might do that. But I think that sets us up pretty nicely. Cool. Let's open up this color panel. It's my doodle verse color panel. I'll just pop in some gray here. I think that will be a different kind of gray. Let's go for a darker gray on the wings and over here. Then at the bottom, I'm going to add maybe not red, maybe lighter red. Something like that. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Then we'll add a little bit of black there. We'll add a little bit of blue there and for the sun, some yellow, and then for the flames down here, so maybe a bit of yellow and a bit of red. That's the basics, and I guess the background color can be black. Okay, we've got our rocket started here. I'm going to use an alpha mask or an alpha lock for this. Then let's go for Benbo Chek What size is this. Let's go for about that size. Just a little bit of gradient over here. Fantastic. Here I'll do pack again and do some gradient from the bottom. Then a bit of light at the bottom of the flames. The bottom of the tires to the bottom of the flames. Cool. Happy sun. I'll alpha lock you. You can see how it's getting pretty gritty and grainy here. I love it. I'm going to create a new layer and use a clipping mask here just to do the cheeks. It's a little bit smaller. Yeah, not really the right size. On the right color, I mean. All right. He looks cool. I'll the sky. Okay. That looks lovely, all of these red places. I'm going to alpha it. I don't know if you can quite see that, but there is some grit and gradient there, and then I'll create a new layer, make it a clipping mask and change it to screen blend mode, and also change the color to make it a little bit lighter. A bit here and there and I'll drop the opacity. Just to give it a bit of highlight. The the dark gray, I'm going to create a new layer, make it a clipping mask, turn it into multiply, and do some multiplying here. Really gives it some volume. I'll just select the same brush to do a bit of a raising. Okay. And I'll decrease the opacity a little bit, add a new layer, turn it into a clipping mask and turn it into screen blend mode and using the same brush, not raising add a little bit of highlights to these darker wings and darker areas. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Yeah. Then you can't really see what's happening here. Let's go for a clipping mask and I'll create a new one. Make this a multiply blend mode, make this one screen blend mode. Then with the darker color, maybe with a lighter color, but I think the darker color is good. And the lighter one now, just at the top of the rocket. Make this a little bit lighter. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Then I want to add some stars. Let's go for Doodle brush again, go for white and stars and moons They're really simple kind of shapes. Nothing too fancy here. And do you like drawing stars behind my shapes, though, makes it feel like this rocket is in motion or the sky is in motion. It's not just an artist doing accurate. Maybe not accurate. Super unrealistic view of the stars. The stars are never in the perfect place, right. Okay. Something like that looks pretty good. Little happy sun in its rocket. Then I'll create a new layer and go back to bo chalk. Let's make this a little bit bigger. Here, I'll add in a bit of background stars. I'll select the same brush, make it a little bit, do a little bit of. Just adds a little bit of grit and grain or introductory grit and grain to the background, so it's not so stark black. Then a new layer, and then this new layer, we'll go for that sponge brush that we made earlier. Yeah. You can raise some of these bits. Okay. Okay. So that's looking really good. And then I guess the last thing that I'd like to do is add some grittin grain on top. I'll go for black, and there's this sponge one that I have been using, but I'll show you another one. It's not the splatter one, it's this grain brush. It's pretty similar. Adds a last little bit of grittin grain. I'll erase some of it, so it's not so intense. Yeah. There is my final illustration. It has a lot of grit and grain. The gradients are grainy. The colors are grainy. There are finishing effects. Maybe we could do some smudging now. Let's give that a quick little go. Let's go for something like this. I'll do some smudging with a stucco brush. Let's see what that looks like. Maybe let's try screen blend mode. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Perhaps we can also put it on to the happy sun guy too. It's like shining. Yeah. It actually works really nicely. Over here, what I'd like to then do is mask this. Then let's go back to our textured brushes, use stucco rotate and Just put a bit of texture on top of the bright lights that we created. All right. So, this is a very different kind of style and technique to the last one, and the next one will also be slightly different. I hope you've enjoyed it. 21. Example 3: Mr. Lippy Lips: Okay, so this is the third and final example. I'll start to finish example that I'm going to show you. And it's the style that I came up with when I did my 100 day projects all around web characters. They're really fun, really simple, but full of texture. So, let's create one of these. I'm going to go for a two oh four eight square. So 2048 is 2048 pixels. There we go, and I'll go for my blue color again. Let's go for sketching six B pencil. Here I have this idea of creating this character that's just like a mouth. That's all he or she is maybe with a bunch of teeth too. Like that. Maybe also a ton of sorts. I don't know, teeth could be pretty cool, and then some eyes on top, like that, and some little shoes. Boots, Aarms probably not just lips teeth and eyes. Something like that. Just like really simple fun. You could use this on something like a greeting card or a poster, maybe on a website as a character, something like that. So let's reduce the opacity. And then there's going to be no outlines. There are no outlines in this style. So I'm actually going to draw with something like this, doodled brush, but going to then fill them in. Okay. So I'll go for this color. We can change that later if we want, or I can change it later if I want. I'll just pop that in there. And if we put this on top, we can always see the planning, and then I'll create some white teeth. And one of the reasons I use this beige color as the background is so that I can actually use white as a color, and I don't have to then hide the white or change the white background. Okay. Something like that. I will do the same on this side. Doesn't seem like the most visible teeth on the side. There we go. Pop that in there, pop that in there, and then put the lips on top of the teeth. Then, because that's white, I guess I can put some white eyes up here. There we go, and some eyebrows. I'll just make these black. But there was that really cool brush that I saved earlier. The bro Let's see if we can. What is happening here. Use that a little bit smaller. You see that nice bit of texture. It's a little bit inconsistent, fantastic. Then something like that. Okay. Legs now. Go for the same color for the legs here. Set. Let's go for Doodle brush number one. There we go. I'll fill these on top of this, I will create a little bit of black boots. Something like that. Fill these up. There we go. Now, it looks like a pretty cool character already, but now I want to add some texture. Let's do the legs first. I'll use a clipping mask. I'll go for a red color and make this multiply or I could actually use the same red color. I'll go for stucco. Maybe a little bit smaller. Maybe a little bit bigger now. That looks pretty cool. I'll add a little bit more clipping mask. Let's go for a bit of sponge here. I use black. That looks pretty cool. While we're on the sponge mode, I'll go clipping mask on the white layer a black here bit of black over here. Okay. Then I'll add a new layer in between the layer and the clipping mask layer or the base layer and the clipping mask layer. I'll choose this dry ink one and maybe change the opacity to around 30%. Then I'll give this guy some te shadows. Maybe that's a bit too. 20% looks pretty good. Then some on the eyes here too. Yeah, that. It's pretty cool. Maybe make it a little bit thicker so and then use a layer mask with a sponge to fade it out or texture it out. Maybe Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool. It gives a shadow like a nice little texture. All right. Let's add that in a little bit again. Yeah, that looks cool. I think what we could do here with this Oberon brush. Let's add to little nostrils or something like that. Yeah. Then a clipping mask here for multiply. Use the same one, and then go for texture brushes, go for stucco rotate. Let me increase the size here a little bit. Okay. Creates a new clipping mask layer, changes into a screen blend mode. At the top all out. Something like that. Let's go to the layer beneath it. That looks pretty good. I think this bottom layer could do with some desaturation desaturate that a little bit. Yeah, that looks pretty good. He is a very fun character even looks like a little bit paly maybe. Then the last thing I want to do here is clipping mask and let's go for the sponge black Give him a little bit of gritten grain here and there. Okay. So yeah. That's good. Now, the boots clipping mask there. Let's go for a little bit of white. Okay. Don't need to do too much there. I don't think. Then finally, like the bottom layer, a little bit of a shadow, I reckon. Here I'll probably use stucco or stucco rotate. Let's go for black. Something like that use the same brush to erase with. And then we can reduce the opacity. There we go. It's a really nice and textured. That is our character. Perhaps we can change the background color now to something like a blue or. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Then we can do a little bit of work on the background adding a little bit of texture. Stuck rotate sounds good and changes to a multiply layer. Okay. Yeah, something like that. Due the capacity. Maybe increase the capacity of this one. There you have our little character. He's really cool. Maybe we'll call him Lip or something like that. Okay, so that is example number three. I hope you've learned a lot from watching start to finish examples of the entire illustration process and three very different styles. All right. Thank you so much for watching. 22. Conclusion: All right. We've covered a lot in this class. Texture, texture, texture and more texture. But not everything needs to be texture. Not every style, not every illustration, not every part of an illustration. Sometimes all you need is some subtle texture. Other times, the more texture, the better. So what I suggest doing is trying texture, a lot of it, a little of it, have fun with it and combine and experiment with all the techniques we've covered in the class. And then use them with other styles and techniques that you've got in your tool belt. So, it is now the end of the class. I appreciate you watching it. So thank you. It means a lot to me. And I hope it means a lot to you, and I hope it's been fun and that you've learned a lot too. Just know that I love teaching, I love creating and that I'm extremely grateful for what I get to do and how I get to help you. I love you to leave a review of this class. Give me some feedback and help other students decide whether to take this class or not. If you'd like to stand in touch with me, my work, and the educational content I create. Sign up to my newsletter on rich armstrong.net and follow me on social media. I'm at Rich Armstrong with an underscore before the last ONG, Alright. By phenomena.