The Power of Bold Lines: Create Simplified & Playful Art

1. Introduction: Imagine that. You could create bold and striking artwork with just a few simple strokes. How does that sound? In this class, we'll dive into the power of bold black lines. Whether you want to loosen up, develop your unique style, or just want to have fun. This class will help you explore exactly that with the power of strong confident lines. Hi, I'm ta. I'm an artist and educator from Germany, and I've helped thousands of students improve their art and build confidence in their creative pie. In this class, we're going to explore the magic of boat lines, a fantastic method for simplifying without losing impact. Boat lines help us focus on what's essential, make us think before placing each stroke. And as a bonus, they look super cool, too. Together, we'll create four different projects that will train your eye, help you make bolder artistic choices, and bring you closer to a style that feels natural and personal to you. I'll even show you a great procreate trick for creating seamless repeat pattern. To take this class, you'll need an iPad, an Apple pencil and basic knowledge of Procreate. I've also prepared some helpful resources to get you started. But don't worry if you prefer to draw traditionally or using any other digital tools. You can absolutely follow along as well. So are you ready to simplify your art, explore both lines, and take another step towards your unique artistic style? Then let's get started. I will see you in class. 2. Class Project: This class includes four different projects, and you're welcome to upload as many as you like. Whether you try just one or all of them, sharing your work is a great way to document your progress and get feedback from me and your fellow students. To upload your project, simply head over to the Projects and Resources tab and hit the submit Project button. Here you can give your project a title, share your thoughts or experiences with us, and of course, you can upload images. Please note, only landscape format images can be uploaded as a class cover. If you upload a portrait mode image, Skillshare will crop its top and bottom. That's no problem though. Here, below the project description box, you can find the add more content section. Just tap the photo icon and you can upload as many images as you like. Don't forget to upload the cropped cover image once more so we can see it in all its glory. I'd love to see what you create. Don't be shy. Let's fill the project gallery with awesome artwork. In our next lesson, we'll have a quick chat about the resources that come with my class. I'll see you there. 3. Resources: The class comes with two resources, which we can find on the skillchat.com website in the project and Resources tab. Below the text box, we find the resource, which is a zip file. All we have to do now is just tap this little box here. And we're going to be asked if we want to load it. Yes, we do. And as soon as this little arrow has bounced, we know the download is complete. If you tap the arrow, you find the file up here in the Downloads folder. So tap this file, which will take you to the Downloads folder. And as you can see, I've loaded a lot of stuff here. So all we need to do is tap this folder again to unzip the file, and then we see the folder here and we open it, and here you can find the goodies that come with my class. We have the brush set and we have the boat line watches. All we need to do now is just tap each file, and it's going to be imported into Procreate. Let's go back. And tap the other file, which is also going to be imported right away. That's the whole magic. When you try to find your brush set and your color palette now, all you need to do is go to the brush library and scroll to the very top. And here you can find all the newly added brush sets. Opposite to that, in the palettes folder, you need to scroll all the way down to the bottom to find your file down there. Let's now have a look at what the goodies include. First, we check out the brush set, the bolt lines brush set. It comes with a sketcher, which acts as a pencil. Then we have a nice liner mono, which is basically just a regular mono line brush, and then you can find my mono liners, which I am very proud of. These are the brushes that mimic either a chisel or a very thick marker, probably permanent marker, and they come with different ends. We have one with a little bit of a straight end. Let's try this out. As you can see, the end is quite straight. As if you would use the chisel and let me show you here, the white side of the chisel and draw a straight line. The next one we have is the monoliner soft end. Here you can see the end is a little bit more rounded, which I personally prefer. Then we have then round end with a very rounded end and this one mimics a regular thick permanent marker tip. All the mono liners come with a little bit of a streamline and they draw really nice and flowy lines, which I really, really like to use. There's just one thing which I don't like and I couldn't find a way to get rid of that is sometimes due to the limitations in procreate, we won't be able with the mono liners to make very sharp ends and corners. That's the reason why I added the nice liner mono in case you don't like these kind of bumps here. You just go and make it nicer and turn it the way you want. I also use the nice Lina mono as my eraser. This way, I can also clean up the ends. Let's now have a look at the colors. I've added in my color palette. I've added two blue tones. And a lighter value, then we have a nice bright red. Then we have green and a light version of that one. We have a yellow and a lighter hue. We have an orange. And of course, that can't be missed in my color palette. That's a pink shade and a lighter version, and two purple values here. I really love these colors together, especially with the contrasting black. I really think that looks fantastic together. You're welcome to choose the same colors as I do. But if you have your own color palette or your own drawing style, please always go with what you like best. That's it for the class resources. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we talk a little bit more about bold lines in art history. I will see you there. Oh 4. Bold Lines in Art History: Before we start drawing, let's talk about bold lines for a moment. Lines are one of the most basic yet powerful tools in art. They connect two points, define the shape of an object, and can create movement and rhythm. Fun fact, the word to outline literally means to describe something visually using lines. Prove that you don't even need color or shading to make an image work. But what makes boat lines so special? Well, first of all, they take up quite some space. They demand our attention. They make us think before we place each stroke because every line really counts. And most importantly, they help us to focus on what truly matters in an image. No unnecessary details, just the essentials. Artists have used boat lines for thousands of years. Think of the earliest known cave paintings, simple yet powerful depictions of animals and human figures created with strong deliberate strokes. They weren't just decorations. They were a way to communicate, to tell a story, to capture movement, and life in its purest form. The same applies to ancient Egyptian murals, Greek vase paintings, Aztec or Mayan gluves, Mori tattoos and Japanese ukiyoi prints. Across cultures and centuries, bold lines have been used to create art that is both striking and timeless. Fast forward to modern times and artists like Roy Lichtenstein, James Rizzi, and Keith Herring, they have taken bold lines to a whole new level. They proved that with just a few well placed strokes, you can create something iconic, full of life, and instantly recognizable. That's exactly what we're going to explore in this class. After a quick warm up, we'll dive into different ways to simplify motifs and develop our own unique style using bold lines. Sounds good. Then let's jump into the next lesson. I will see you there. 5. Warm-Up: All right. So let's get started with a little warm up exercise. This is something I do quite often for a lot of good reasons. First of all, it helps me to just get ready to draw. It warms up my muscles. It makes my hand loose. It also focuses my brain in the right direction. But it also helps me to let go and just get my creative juices flowing. It's very therapeutic and mindful as well. So I really wanted to show you. We want to open a new canvas for that. We can do that with a plus sign here, top there in the corner. I like to go with a four by five Canvas because in case I want to share it on Instagram or so, this is the right format. I have mind set to 2000 by 2,500 pixel. If you do not have that canvas yet, you can just easily create your own by tapping the plus button. In my case, it is 2000 by 2,500 pixels. My DPI usually is at 300 and of course, then you can also give your canvas a new name. Since I have mine already, I tap cancel here, and I just tap this one to start this new canvas. All right. For this exercise, you can just pick any color. I like to start with a medium blackish tone here, down there, doesn't really matter. As long as it's dark, I like a lot of contrast to start with as a brush, I'm going to pick my mono liner soft end. That's the favorite of mine for this exercise. And let's play a little bit with the brush size. Yeah, we can go with let's see what is it? With 16%. That should be fine. All right. And for this very therapeutic and mindful exercise, I just want you to fill the canvas with lines or simple shapes. It could be a spiral, it could be waves, it could be just straight lines or dots, it's up to you. You can copy what I am doing. But of course, you can also let your own creativity shine. Yeah, go with whatever speaks to you. You also don't have to start with a black. Just pick any color you like. It's just I might want to build up with a few additional contrasting colors. So Again, what we want to do is we want to fill the canvas, and I want you to look out for two important things. Make sure you spread your shapes evenly. We don't want have clusters here or there. We want the lines spreading out evenly, and I also want you to make sure that the spacing between your lines and shapes in stays the same. It looks equal. That's the only thing you need to look out for. Other than that, you can completely let go and just draw whatever comes to your mind or not even your mind, but just your hand. Let your hand move the way it once. I'm just going to start with kind of a maze shape and a spiral, and I want to draw a circle in the center. And then from that, I build up my illustration. I just make sure the spacing here is kind of the same between my lines. I draw these kind of waves or horizontal lines. Or maybe just something like that. Some shakes don't even have names for me, so I'm just going to go and draw whatever comes to my mind. And this is such a mdful exercise for me. It helps me to create ideas, to just let go of whatever stress fills my brain. And I am just having such a wonderful time. I feel how much I calm down during this process. Crescent shapes here. And the beauty of this exercise is it doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be beautiful, although you got to see it will be. The purpose is just to make you happy, let go and get ready for our next illustration exercise. So we need a little bit more here. And why don't we add something like this here? It can be kind of a maze. It can be just lines. You just go with whatever floats out of your hand. I like to add some corners, as well as round shapes. It makes it very interesting to look at and it just brings me peace peace of mind. That's actually what I want to achieve with that exercise. And I felt quite often when I don't know what to draw and I just do this exercise, I feel all of a sudden I get so many ideas just because I don't have to think, just because I am completely letting go of whatever stress is in myself, and that really is a very freeing and happy making exercise. So we just need to fill this kind of corner here. Just go there, and up and make some changes and just fill in some variations of whatever you think is missing, whatever you think should be there. And here we go. So this canvas is perfectly filled. Some lines are a little bit wonky, but that's absolutely okay. We don't want to go anywhere with this exercise. This is nothing that you need to share. This is nothing where we need to make money with. It's just an exercise to let go. But if you ask me, I think it looks great. I just love to look at that. I just love to look at these shapes and I find them so interesting and it makes my eye wonder. That's how I came up with the idea to show you how to turn this kind of pattern into a seamless repeat, which we're going to do at the end of this class. You could go ahead and fill this canvas even more by adding a new layer, for example, and just pick a contrasting color. Let's go with this really bright yellow tone here, and you could just cover some lines here with a outline in a contrasting color. Just to make your hand flow even more. You get used to the brush, how it responds to your movements. You can add a line here in between. You could give this dot here an outline. Here again, if we want to go that way, the only thing we need to look out for is a little bit of a balance to make sure that we spread this yellow evenly on the canvas. I guess something is missing here. Why don't we wrap this.in an outline and we could go this way as well, this little angular spiral. And I guess I want this wavy line here to have a little bit of a yellow as well. That's another exercise. That's another possibility, how you can just let your hand go. I'm pretty sure you can think of a gazillion of more possibilities. What you could also do to enhance this even further is you could add in between lines in a contrasting colors like here with this red. Just go and add some red dots in between. Just some red lines here and there. Maybe a dot, maybe a curve. We could add some more. Why don't we go here. Here you can build up your pattern, your fantasy variations. Here you can just build them up the way you want them to look, the way it just makes you happy. We could continue this process as long as we would like, but I guess you understood, and I hope you also felt this kind of I don't know, satisfaction when filling a canvas without any pressure, any stress to meet a certain goal. So this is very freeing for me and I just love this process. This is my go to warm up exercise when I want to start drawing and also when I don't know what to draw. And this always always gives me a bunch of new ideas, a new direction. I discover a new movement or I discover a new curve or way how I hold my Apple pencil, whatever it is, it's every time I swear to you. Now I can wait to move on with the class. We will take a deeper look at how to simplify our drawing motifs. Simplifying is one of the core skills for any illustrator, especially if you want to create a stylized look rather than a realistic one. I'll show you the techniques I use in my own work. Let's jump into the next lesson. I will see you there. 6. How to Simplify: Drawing in this bold style where lines take up quite a lot of space on this canvas here brings some challenges. How can we make our motive adible and ensure the viewer can instantly recognize what's depicted? Which details are essential, which can be tweaked or exaggerated, and what can be left out entirely. Let's start with a very simple object like a car. When I want to draw something simplified, my first thought is always, what do I think of first when I think of a car? What's a car's essence, if you will. Let me pick a black u first and the sketcher. Then I want to lay down my answer. My answer is, and it can be a different one for you, by the way, a car has two wheels. It has a hood. A windshield, a roof, a rear window, a trunk, and a bottom. That's a car? Yes, it's simplified. And yes, it looks like it was drawn by a preschooler. This is not how I want my car to look like. And here we are faced with another big problem in an artist's work. By drawing from memory only, our brain often refers back to a symbol to the symbol of a motif we stored when we were a child. I have a whole class addressing this, by the way. It's called Improve drawing for good in case you want to check that out and work on your drawing basics. But back to our problem here, A motif looks too childish. It is simplified. Yes. It's readable. Yes, but it's not really stylish or quirky. Let me show you how I solve the problem of simplifying with style. Firstly, I would find a reference photo of a motif. Usually, I use Google images. Since I want to draw a car in a side view, I'm going to fill that in too. All right. And then I'm just going to scroll through what I see to find my reference. How about this one? So let's pull up Procreate again and arrange the screen side by side. Now, let me sketch out what I see. I see that the front of the car kind of is a little bit more slanted. And there is the bumper zingy, I don't know what it's called in English. And then there are lights as well. So the hood is kind of a little bit rounded, and there's the windshield and there's kind of like this part here and the hood. And there's a line in between the windows. Then we have oh, I'm running out of space. Let's Let's move the car a little bit away. Okay. So and I also see that the window is a little bit rounded over here. Okay, kind of on the same level. And then the trunk is also a little bit slanted downwards and rounded as well. Here's here's a light. And here's the other thing, which is also a little bit slanted. And then there's still some part underneath. Very interesting. Alright. And for the tires, we have like it's open. We can see the entire tire and then go over here. It's as well the same as here. The tire is completely visible. Then here we have some parts underneath this metal thing here, which you probably know how it's called, and I don't. All right. So here we have the tires and the tire has the thing in the center, and there's some holes, and there's even something more in the center center. The same for the tire here, here with some holes all around and something little up. All right. And then we have a door here and a handle to open the door like this. Then we have this line going across the entire car. Like this. Okay, if we look closely, we see that there's another tire behind covered from the front tire and another one here as well. If we look even more closely, we see that there are seats inside and we can also see through the window and see the windows on the other side. Okay. I'm done with my reference and I can get rid of the second screen now, we have more space here in Procreate. Here's my car drawn from reference. Looking at my sketch now, it's clear right away. There are way too many details. This is not how I can draw it with both lines. Of course, there's way too much. My second step is now to check and see which detail can be left out. Let me add a layer on top. And turn down the opacity of this one a little bit. Then I first want to go with just the outline because this is what I focus on drawing when I draw with both lines. I focus on the outline and I need the outline to show what I want to depict right away. Let's go with the outline first. I think we only need this one, this one, this one, this one, and then we need the wheels and the bottom and the wheels, and here, there and back. Okay, I need to make the decision if I want to have a line here between the tires and the car, and if I want to see windows or not. I guess I want to have my line closed here. I think I also want to have lights. Do we want to add windows? I don't know yet. Let's see. Let's turn of the sketch underneath. Does it look like a car? Yes, it looks like a car, but it's still kind of boring. It does not have any style yet. So in my next step, I want to go and exaggerate the lines I have here. Maybe I want to tweak some angles and maybe I want to distort or check if this angle has to be that way or if it can be in a different way. Just simplify this is all we need to be able to read. This is a car. It has two tires and it has this main part. But now I want to depict that a little bit more with style. Again, let's turn down the opacity now. And add a new layer on top. What I really like is this angled line here. This is really cool. I want to exaggerate that maybe let's try if we go down with the hood a little bit. Then for the windshield in the front, why don't we go really high up, draw the roof, and then go down again and maybe we make the trunk a little bit smaller. How about this angle here? And then we close the shape and we draw some tires that are not really round to give it a little bit more character. Let's turn off the sketch underneath. Oh, yeah. This is definitely a car. It's getting somewhere. I just don't like the downward lines here, so let's try one more time. Let's go turn down the opacity of this sketch. What I really like is this high roof situation here. And maybe it can slope down a little bit, and then we go this way and have a little bit more round shape here and another angle there to just add more personality. And maybe the bottom doesn't have to be completely flat. Maybe it's a little bit rounded to just bring a little bit more organic in it, and then we have the hood also facing down this way maybe. And let's go with our tires completely visible and maybe not even touching the car. And I guess something like the lights here, and I want to show that they're on with these kind of lines in the back and in the front. That looks great. I just think it needs a window. And another one here maybe. Or how about we just draw one window? No, that doesn't look good, too. So let's go this way. We draw one big one and another one here. Do we need the circles in the center? No, we don't actually, I don't like the tires, like, being detached from the cars. So let's try one more time. Add another layer, turn down the opacity from this one. And then we try again. So I think the overall shape of going down here was kind of fun. Maybe the curve should be a little bit smaller. You can have a round angle. And maybe here we can go with a with a complete curve. And then we go this way. And we have the lights here and the light there. And the car the tires like this. That's, this is what I do until I reach a result that I like. I think this was the sketch I like the most so far by looking at the nails here. I guess I want to go from there once more. I like the shape. How about we completely forget about perspective and draw two lines two circles, right next to each other to show two lamps in the front. And no lamp in the back. And then we have the tires like this, like di wonky, and maybe a circle in the center. Do I like that? I'm not sure. What about we draw the tires a little bit smaller like this and a little bit even more pointy. Oh, yes. I think this is a car I really like. That's kind of cool. And the extra twist with having no perspective but perspective by having the two lamps right next to each other that can totally add to the attire feel and character of your car. All right. So let's check and see how that looks with bold lines. So I want to add a layer on top, turn down the opacity again, and then I move over to my mono liner soft end. And I'm going to go, let's see. Yeah, let's go with a very bold line to just make sure the shape itself works. And yeah, we can stick to our place. And now I just want to follow the line here. I would probably change this one here. That's a cool car, reduced to the minimum, but it has a lot of personality. So to recap, as an artist, you are facing the pitfall of drawing either too detailed or too childlike, especially when drawing in this style with bold lines. The solution is to first think of the key features of your motif. Then draw from reference, and afterwards, gradually simplifying, tweaking and exaggerating or distorting until we like the result and it suits our style. I want you to practice that now with a very simple object. It could be a house, a flower, a cup, a television, or whatever else comes to your mind. Follow the steps we've just covered in this lesson. Focus on the key features, draw from reference, leaving out unnecessary details. Tweak, exaggerate, and distort. Let me close with one last thought. When you see a very simple looking artwork where everything just makes sense, the artist has probably put a lot of work and thought into it. And when it looks like you could draw this in 5 minutes, you know now how much prep work the artist had done to get there. And of course, the more you practice these things, the better you get at it and the faster you will end up being. With that, let's move on to the next lesson where we will practice a stylish simplification with a variety of animals. I'll meet you there. 7. Animal Collection - Sketch: All right. Welcome back. In this lesson now, we want to practice simplifying and focusing on the essence of our motif even further. I showed you a very systematic method of simplifying in the previous lesson, which is usually important for a reduction step by step, and also for finding the balance between details and simplicity. But sometimes it's also helpful to just let go and draw intuitively without a lot of thinking or planning. This is where coincidence kicks in often, and the coolest things might happen. That's what we want to do in this lesson. We want to fill a canvas with a lot of different animals. I work you through the entire progress and share all my thoughts and decisions with you. But for this exercise, I first want you to ditch a few things. Yeah. In this exercise, we don't need a perspective. No perspective allowed. We just need a very simple, simple front view perspective. Nothing else. The second thing we don't need for this exercise at all is perfections. We don't want to be perfect, we want our drawings to look stylish. That's all we need. The third thing we need to get rid of is drawing too realistic. We don't need any reality. We want it to look stylish and simplified and cool and fun. It's possible we might leave even important body features out as long as we can still recognize our motif. It might sound scary at first, but trust me, it will give you so much freedom. With each new animal, I want you to focus on one or two key factors that make clear what it is, and then you just draw it. We have an empty canvas here. It's again a four by five canvas, 2000 by 2,500 pixel and we just want to fill it, make sure we space the animals evenly, and we're going to do that with the sketcher brush. I want to start here in the top. I want to start and draw a dog. My dogs usually have floppy ears, a pointy snout, then here, one leg, another leg, and here we have a tail and back claws. Here we go. That's a dog. My eyes usually are side by side because we don't need any perspective and no reality either. Let's move on. How about how about we draw a snake? A snake, for me, usually has a head up. Then it goes down. It has a little bump here and it has a tail. Tota. And then back to the head. The head is usually a little bit bigger like this, a little bit more round. Tota. That's a snake. It's clear two eye snakes to each other, side by side. How about we draw a mouse? So when I think of a mouse, I see ears, like big round ears and a pointy nose and a long long tail. So let's try. So All right. Mm. We have a dog. Why don't we draw a cat, too? So we start with a head. A cat, of course, has a long tail and two pointy ears. Alright, let's go. So, we have a dog, we have a cat, and similar to that, we could also draw a fox. How about we draw a fox like this? So a fox has this bushy tail and kind of a point, a pointy face. Let's draw a bird. Let's draw a flying bird. I like to draw birds when they fly that have the wings kind of stretched. And since we don't want to focus on perspective, we can just draw it one to the top and one to the bottom. Let me show you. Oh, how about something cool? How about we draw a giraffe? Let's draw a giraffe. Because later on, I want to draw a landscape with you, and then we need a giraffe and we can practice that already. Okay, so it has horns. A giraffe has horns. And then it has kind of, like, a roundish, but then pointy getting face like this maybe two eyes. And obviously, a giraffe has a very long neck and one leg, another tummy, another leg this way and done. Here we go. Perfect. Giraffe. If you want, you could even draw some ears or so, but I think that's too much detail. I'm not going to draw ears to my animals in general. If I can see what it is, I don't need any ears. Crocodile is super fun to draw as well. It has this long snout, of course, of course, then this kind of nose singi situation here, then it's pretty flat here. It has a leg, one front leg like this, maybe. Tummy, another leg. Like this. Then it has a very long tail. This is curved upwards and goes back onto the back. And here we have the head with one eye. No. Maybe we draw it a little bit bigger. No, I want to have two eyes side by side to have it stylisher Tata. Boom, this is for sure a crocodile. Let's draw a little chick. Here's some space. We can draw a chick like this, basically an oval, a tummy, like this. And then we go into the big right away. A. And maybe a wing here, something like this. Tata. Finished. We could give it two feet. Oh, how about we draw penguin, a penguin. Alright. So let's think about a penguin. My penguins has a beak of course, then a head. It goes down in a very plump body shape like this, maybe. W. And then it has a wing here and a wing here. Tara. That's a perfect penguin. Let's clean up the lines that I know what I drew later on. Maybe like this. This is how a pinguin looks like to me, a fish. A fish is super simple. As a fish can be just like this. How about we draw a shark? A shark. A shark, of course, has this fin here. Of course, then it has a tail, maybe like this. Kind of like this. Then it has a tummy and another fin down here. Then it has it has kind of like a dangerous open mouth and boom, it's head, like this. How about we draw an octopus. Octopus is also very funny. It's basically just this oval shape here and it has a lot of long tentacles. Data. That's your octopus. Super simple. I actually wanted to draw. I wanted to draw an elephant. So let's make sure we make some space here for the elephant. H for my elephant, I need this kind of head here, then a trunk. Then one bold leg, a tummy, another bold leg. Then we go up again like this. And then we have an ear here, a huge one. And, of course, two eyes. How simple is that? Super simple, but everyone can see this is an elephant. How about we draw a hippo? Let's draw a hippo. Alright. So, a hippo has this long round snout, of course, and a pretty plum belly as well, like body as well, and two very short legs. So right. Tata. Here we go. A very cute hippo is done. I guess our canvas is pretty much filled now with funny animals. I think they look super cute and stylish. In our next step, we want to do the linework with our great brushes, and we will do that in our next video. I'll see you there. 8. Animal Collection - Inking & Coloring: All right, time to focus on our line work now, and this is going to be such a cute poster later on. You'll see. So first, let's make sure we are happy with all the placement of our animals. I think I want to do some more adjustments. I think we have a very nice balance of animals here. They look super cute and stylish, and I'm pretty sure this is getting a really cool poster. What we need to do next is we want to draw the lines, and I want you to try to be as fluid, as organic as possible. If the lines are wonky, no worries. If the lines are not perfect, no worries. I want you to practice a loose and free stroke. We need to turn down the opacity of our sketch, then we don't get too distracted, and then we're going to add a new layer. For this exercise, why don't we just use the monolinertrat end? Okay. Let's check and see how big we are with our lines. We are at maybe 14%. And I guess I want to make sure I stay there. So I tap this little plus. So this brush size is saved now. And whenever I move it around, I can still go back to the initial brush size, which is really handy. Let's start with our dog. As we said, we want to practice fluid lines. So we go this way down, up meep and done. When I look at my canvas, I think this line might be a little bit too thick. So I I think I'm going to go a little bit smaller, about 10%. Let's hit the plus button right away. Three finger swipe to erase, and then I'm going to try it again. So fluid lines p down tummy up, tail. And back. And the eyes can be here. Maybe I want the eyes to be like, really horizontal. Let's try it like this. Yes, I like that much better. Okay. That's my little doggie. Let's move on with our little chick here. So we have a wing. We have a beak, and we have a tummy. Maybe one more try. Yep. Tata, one leg here, one leg there, one eye here. I think I need to go around with another brush because the eyes are too jagged. I don't like that. I want them to be, like, really perfectly round. Alright. Flowy lines, remember? So we're gonna go this way. Tata and one eye here, one eye there. Next is out bird. So I'm going to go this way. Here's the tail. Here's the beak and back. And here we have its eyes. Tata So little kitty cat. Here we go up for the ear, here, up for the tail. Leg Tata Done. One eye here, one eye there. Okay, foxy. U, pointy, up again. No, I don't like that. I don't want a line between the body. Oops. I don't want a line between the body and the head, so I want to draw it differently. Let's do it again. Here, down, here we have the leg, tummy up, bushy tail. Let's try that once more. I think I'm not happy with his Popo with his bottom. I think it must be straight up here with no curve. So let's do it again. So up down 21 leg. Tammy. Here we go up again. And this time, I'm not gonna close it. Tata and tada Here are fox is done. Maybe maybe I'm not super satisfied with the with the tail. But that doesn't matter we can fix it quickly. So, this is much better. Okay, Fox done. Let's go to our. Let's go. Let's go and draw our hippo. I really like the hippo. I'm going to think about where I start because that's where I have the lines meet. Let's start here. So here's his head, and here's his back, one leg, another leg. And here's the slouch. Tata Eyes and Nast travels. Ta. Very cute. Alright, I stylish crocodile. Let's have it start here on the back. Here's the head, the nose, one leg, another leg, and the pointy tail. And here we have the eyes and a nostril. Do we even need a nostril? No, we don't. The mousy here, let's go with this huge ear. Tara A, A and the tail. Mouse done. Let's go and draw the octopus. One, two, three, four. Now, let's do it again. I don't want the ends to meet. A giraffe or super cool giraffe with its horns. And here are the yes. All right. And here's our little fish, two yes. And here's the elephant. I notice the more I let just go and draw our flowy lines without thinking, it's like magic. It just makes that cool coincidences happen, and they make it look so much better. Here we have our fun penguin. So where do we start? Maybe we start here. So Tada guint and the tummy. Of course. Here we go. And Shaki is the last one. So the belly fin and mouth and the back fin and done. Shark, done as well. Let's turn up the sketch underneath. And we have such a cool animal collection. So the next step is to color our animals in. And another way of avoiding to seem to be too realistic, we're going to draw them in in very unusual colors. So what's forbidden in this exercise is that the animal has their usual color, which means the crocodile can't be green, the giraffe can't be yellow, and so on. So let's just have fun coloring them in, and I'm going to do it by adding another layer and then drag and drop this layer underneath our linework layer. And on this layer, I just pick and choose random colors and draw my animals in. You know what? I call it octopus, but I meant jellyfish. How silly. Of course I mean a jellyfish. Okay. That's it for now. Our animal collection poster comes together nicely. The only thing that's missing for me is the background seems to be a bit boring. By just having a white background, it's not that interesting. And in our next lesson, we're going to fill the background with more bowed lines, and we're going to try out different ways to do that. I will see you there. 9. Animal Collection - Background: In this lesson, we want to check out how we can enhance our background that it looks super cool and stylish as well. But first of all, I think I want to fix the eyes of our animals with my nice liner mono brush. I'm going to go pick that a black and make sure I'm on the linework layer, which I am. Now I want to pick the eraser and just make sure I'm going to draw nice and round shaped eyes here. Oh, that's much better. It's also super fun to play around whether you want the eyes more closely together or further apart, and how that changed the overall look of your animal. That's really cool. And here we go. All right. Back to our mono liners trait and brush, and we're still here in our saved brush size at 10%. So we have multiple options to draw a background. And before we get started with our background, I want to add a new layer and have my background on a separate layer that when I erase, when I'm not happy with it, I won't damage the animals anymore. So we have a lot of different options when it is about to give the background a pattern or the negative space, the white space, a pattern. I like to fill it with just simple black bold lines, which can be lines from top to bottom, from left to right. It could be dots, it basically can be any pattern you like. You could even go. You could even go ahead and draw what we did for our warm up, something like random lines and shapes to fill in all three areas following the shape of the animals and just basically fill whatever white space we have. That can look really cool, although it sometimes also gets a little bit distractive. Just imagine the whole canvas is filled with these lines. I'm just doing it roughly now to show you what I mean. And it can also make it a little bit too crowded maybe or also too distracting. I think it is better if we have something like a more calm background. So I think I want to go with just straight lines from top to bottom, and then we check how that looks. But again, you go with your own taste, you do whatever you like best, and that is in general, for me, sometimes the most time consuming part when I try out different background pattern options. So I want to go with lines from top down and to help me with kind of more or less equally straight lines, I want to enable the drawing assist, which we can find here under the wrench tool Canvas drawing guide. It gives us just a nice grid here, and that's all I need for now. What I'm going to do to fill the white space with a pattern. I'm just going to follow the lines here. And I don't really care if the lines get wonky. I just try to be more or less evenly spaced out and fill lines in all the white spaces that are here. You might want to go with a different pattern that's totally up to you. Remember, you are the artist. You are the decision maker about your artwork. And my style is not necessarily yours. That's also very important. You could even think about if you would want to go over the edge of your canvas. I think in this one, I do not want to do that. But also, that's totally up to you. And when drawing in this style, you see me a lot of having going back and forth, erasing, adding another layer, turn off the opacity of this one, and then try another pattern until I find something really that really speaks to me that I really want to keep. So this is usually even more time consuming than drawing the motifs themselves. One thing I want to mention is, I always leave a gap where I get too close to the outline of the animal because I think that kind of points even more, puts the motif even more into the focus. What you see me doing here is sometimes when there's a big gap between the end of a line and where it should continue further down, just to make sure that I'm kind of in the same axis, I follow this line in the air, and then I know where I need to start my line further down. And here we go. Our illustration is done. I think it looks super cute and super fun. I would print it out and put it on a wall. It's really cute. It's even good enough to upload it to a print on demand service. So what we practiced in this lesson is not only creating a super fun and colorful illustration. We also practiced our intuitive drawing, our focusing on a few main key factors that we need to picture a certain motif. Simplified the shapes and we stayed super quirky and stylish. This is a great exercise for any artist. It brings you back to the roots and it enhances your style portfolio. We also checked out a few background options, and that is something we go into even further in our next exercise. When we draw a cute landscape together in the same style, I will see you there. 10. Project Landscape: And welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to focus on a landscape composition. This is going to show you that we can still create some depth and dimension, even though we still draw with bold lines and stay super simplified. As a motif, I thought we're going to draw some savannah scene with a cue giraffe as a main motif with a Nkacia tree, and maybe the Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. We want to open up Google Images one more time, and Google four giraffe and acacia. These are the main trees we see in a savanna, and I really like how they look with their very white crown and the slim stem and this kind of triangle here underneath. This is something I really want to depict in our illustration. So we have the tree and next to it, we have the giraffe. What's missing in this image for me is in the background, the background is a little bit too plain. That's why I would want to add the Mount Kilimanjaro there. Let's look at this for a second because then we're going to pull it out of the screen. The reason why I don't want to keep my reference photos nearby is that it makes me copy too much. I always try to focus on the image to memorize some of the key factors I want to depict in my illustration and then just get rid of it and draw from my memory. This way, I avoid getting too detailed and too realistic. Let's get going and start with our first composition layout, super rough. I want the giraffe to be my main focus, so I'm going to put it here right in the center, like this. This is just a rough layout of how my composition is supposed to look like. My horizon line it's going to divide the canvas in one third on the top and two thirds on the bottom roughly like this. This is my horizon line. Then I want the Kilimanjaro to be here, maybe even going out of the picture a little bit. I wanted to have a snowy top. Then here in further back, there we have this acacia tree. And because it's a little bit and because it's a little bit, empty down here, we want to add some plants. Maybe there's a bush here. And maybe there's another plant here with some huge leaves. So this is a rough layout of our composition. Because we're using the bolt lines, we can't get into too much detail and we don't want to draw too many single items there because that would overcrowd the canvas and it would be hard to read for the viewer. So this is why it is enough. We have the focal point, basically in the center. We have the tree, we have a mountain, and we have two bushes. Five different items spread out on the canvas, and that's totally enough. Let's refine the sketch put a layer on top and turn down this opacity from the first layer and then refine what we see here. Maybe like this. Could look cool, could also be too much. We will see. Now we have this bush here. Then we're going to have jirouf here. Oh, super cute. When depicting depth in illustration, that means you put an item in front of something else. But with our bold lines here, that can cause some problems just because we don't want to have too many lines meeting in one spot. Then it can be difficult to understand where which item starts and it can be too crowded. What I already see is that my horizon line from the initial sketch meets the head of our giraffe and that's too closely together. I'm going to put down our horizon line a little bit to have some space between the giraffe's head and our horizon line. Next, we need to make sure that we still have a bit of the mountain peeking out behind the giraffe, but that not all the lines are meeting here on the giraffe. Later on, when we ink out our illustration, we want to leave some space between the giraffe's head and here this mountain line to not have all the lines too crowded too closely together. And then I see another problem. The tree here seems to be way too big. It is kind of at the same height as our mountaintop, and that looks just boring. So I want the tree to just go up until here, maybe, and also only maybe a little bit until here. Maybe we want to start with a crown. And then in the center, I want to draw the sir. All right. I think it. That's it. The giraffe is our focal point. We have a tree, we have a mountain, and we have two plants in the foreground. Yes, you're right, there is a lot of free space, but we will fill that with background pattern later on. I just think it's too close to the giraffe, and I just want to fix some of those curves here. L. Yeah, that's much better. Okay. So I think in our next step, we can start inking out. And I want you to make sure to practice what we've learned to just go with flowy lines, don't think too much. Just drop and follow the lines of your sketch. So we want to turn down the opacity of this one. I think we don't need the first sketch any longer. So I just tap the check mark here to make it invisible. And then I want to add another layer on top, and I'm going to pick a new brush this time. I think I want to go with a mono line or soft end. And let's see what's the size. No, that's way too thick. So let's go with 10% again. Okay. Okay, great. It looks super cute. I'm I'm in love with my giraffe already. I see that I've drawn the line through the tree, and I guess that's absolutely not what I want. To fix that, I'm going to add a new layer and I will just draw the tree. We see the horizon line here goes right through the stem of our tree, and now since it's on a different layer, we can erase it pretty easily. I want to have some space in between. I'm going to just erase the end and I try to mimic the end of my mono liner with the soft ends. Let me go back to this layer with a tree. And here I also want to draw the mountain, the Kilimanjaro. Now we see we can erase quite a lot without damaging our wonderful giraffe. And then we only need the plant here. All right. That looks good. I really like what I see. In our next step, we're going to block out the colors, and we can do a little bit of a housekeeping. We don't need two linework layers, and since we did all the erasing already, we can pinch these two together to merge them into one. We also don't need the sketch any longer, so we can turn that off. Now I want to add another layer underneath our linework layer again. Here we're going to block in all our colors. I want this illustration to be super colorful. So I don't want to have any white spaces beside the snowy mountaintop. I also don't want it to be realistic a little bit, but not too much. I still want the plants to be greenish, and I want the ground to be yellow, but I also want the sky, I think, to be orange to kind of mimic a sunset. And I'm pretty sure I want my giraffe in pink. So I think from its outline, from its shape and pattern, we can clearly see this is a giraffe, so it doesn't matter which color we give it. So. Alright, let's go. Oh, yes. Oh, I love it. I'm already in love. I still don't know how it looks when it's done, but I already love it. Okay, let's go further down. The mountain, I think, I want the mountain to be blue. Spec and we can still see these are two different items. They don't interfere. It's not too crowded. But because of the color difference, we can clearly see this is a giraffe and the mountain is behind. I like the stem a lot. It's so quirky. It's fun. It's super cool. You could not plan this. That's Okay, I guess this one, since we have a light green up here, I want some light green down there to just create a balanced color distribution. And this one, I think I want in a darker green. So now we need the giraffe, and I kept the best part for last. It looks gorgeous already. It's just, you know, it's a little bit boring because we have so many plain areas. In our next step, we're going to add some more black lines to create texture, to create interest, and to have it just overall fancy and super cool looking. Let's start with the mountain. I guess I want to draw just some lines here. I also want to draw some loops down here in the mountain to just indicate that it's not just a flat surface, but it's bumpy. Yes, very cool. In our tree, I think I want to follow the loops here. I already notice how much more interest it creates. I guess in the sky, I just want to have some lines. Overall, I try to keep the spacing similar In the sky, I drew the lines in this direction to kind of indicate the clouds. You know, the clouds are not facing this way. Clouds are usually white as well. So I think it only makes sense to have a sky with horizontal lines. But you might see that differently. That is totally up to you. Great. Oh, man, I really love that. So it's only left here to finish our plans. So let's try to see if that looks good. If we draw the leaves veins or if we just keep one line here, just one main vein. Hmm. Not sure. How about we draw something like this? We want to be playful and have fantasy shapes. I guess I like that. This is a problem here. So maybe like this. I like it a lot. What I would probably do in my next step is to take my time and clean up some lines and fill up some gaps. But overall, I think this has turned out really, really, really well. All right. Let's wrap this lesson up. We've learned that we can still create depth, even though we have to stay super simplified, even though we cannot draw a lot of details, we still are able to depict that things are in the background or in the foreground. Let's move on to our next project, which is going to be the last one where I will show you a fun way of how to make a seamless repeat pattern with these boat lines. I will see you there. And 11. Let's Make a Pattern: And welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to show you as promised, how to make a great pattern with our boldline style. And first off, we want to start with a custom template for out pattern, which you can use for any other pattern in the future. We're going to use a cool function in Procreate itself to make pattern creating super easy. Let's get started. I want to open a new canvas and I'm going to go with my four by five canvas again. Just to show you a pattern doesn't necessarily have to be square all the time. And to create our Custom template, we need to fill the whole canvas with any color. It doesn't really matter. Let's go with light blue and just drop it onto the canvas. The Canvas is completely filled. What we're going to do now is we save certain sections of this canvas and I'm going to show you how to do that. First of all, we need to start with the arrow tool, tap one corner node, and now we want to shrink our canvas by half. To have it really precise, we want to type in the numbers 10, zero, zero in my case, and now it's just half the size of our canvas. Of course, you could go and just track it with snapping enabled. Let me show you that. You could just grab the corner node and pull it until the yellow lines appear. But there sometimes can be a little bit tricky, then we move it too fast or we move it too far and it's not going to work. It's not going to have the precise length and height. That's why I prefer using the type in method. Okay, we can move on to the next step. We want to help procreate memorize certain areas of our canvas. In fact, it's the quadrants. We want them to remember. We're going to go to our Layers panel, tab layer one, which is this light blue rectangle here. And we tap Select. Now you see those gray lines all around just not within our rectangle. Now we want to go to the save and load function here in Procreate. By tapping that, there's another pop up menu opening up, and now we just want to tap the plus bottom. We can see here selection one. That's this area of the canvas being saved. It's just a little bit sad. We can't rename this yet. We can only delete it but not rename it. We need to make sure that we remember selection one is always the top left quadrant of our canvas. And now we want to go on moving our rectangle to each quadrant and save this section. Let's go ahead, tap the arrow, move it to the other center, making sure we have snapping enabled and the yellow line appears. Then we go to the layers panel, we tap Select again. We go to save and load, and we hit the Plus button. Now we have selection two saved, which is this quadrant of our Canvas. Deselect, move the rectangle down, go to the layers panel, tab select, save and load, plus button, and now we have selection three. Again, deselect, move the rectangle to our last quadrant. Layers panel, select Save and load, and plus. Selection four is safe now. If you always go in the same order in this case, clockwise all around the quadrants, you will always know that selection one is this quadrant, two, this, three, this and four, that, and that's easy. That's all we need to know. With that, our custom template is ready. Let's go back to the gallery and give it a name. Because this is a template, we want to duplicate it before we use it any further that we don't damage the original, we select our custom pattern template and then we hit Duplicate, tap the X, and now our duplicate needs a different name. Okay. Let's open it up. All we need to do now is on a separate layer, we want to create our nice bold line pattern. But for that, I think the light blue here is a very nice background color. I'm going to just pull it up because I like the color. This time, I'm not going to work with black lines, but with white lines instead just to show you the effect, which is really cool. On a new layer, Tata, new layer added with my monolina round and brush this time selected. I just want to fill the canvas with just some random shapes and forms and lines as we did in our first project. Let's go ahead and do that. While you're filling your canvas, it's really important that you don't touch the edges or go beyond the edges. Oh Okay, my canvas is filled now and if you know about pattern making, then you know we would have to shift the canvas around to have the outside edges meet in the center. In the traditional way, we would duplicate our white lines and move it around on the canvas, which can be tricky because sometimes we don't have it snapped properly and then the ends would not meet perfectly. This is what we created our custom template for. Let me show you how we go about it. First of all, let's open the layers panel and swipe both layers to the right to create a group. Now we want to select the group so that we move not only one layer, but all the layers that are in this group around. And for this technique, it is very important that we have this layer here, layer one, which fills the entire canvas because if you don't have any pixels reaching all the borders of your canvas, Procreate won't copy everything like the entire canvas, but just to the extent of the pixels that are the farest to the sides. Let's go on with our custom pattern template. First of all, I want you to go to the selection tool to this ribbon here, tap it. Tap safe and load, and now we tap on the bottom here, selection one. You can't see anything yet. There's nothing really visible. But as soon as we tap our move tool here, we see that only our selection one is having this bounding box. This is what we are working with now. I want you to tap down here on the bottom, flip horizontal and flip vertical. That's it. Now we can deselect this. We can see it's already looking weird. But bear with me. It's going to make sense in a second. Let's go back to the selection tool. Go to save and load, selection two. Move tool, flip horizontal, flip vertical. Great. Deselect. Selection tool. Save and load, selection three. Move tool, flip horizontal flip vertical. Deselect. Again, selection tool, save and load, selection four, finally. Move tool, flip horizontal flip vertical. We shifted our white lines around so that we have what earlier was the outside here in the inside. This is what we can fill now to have no visible gaps in our pattern. Super simple. Let's open the layers panel and go back to our white layer. All we need to do is now watch out that we don't go beyond these edges anymore. Very important, since we didn't draw any figure, we don't really see that our pattern right now is upside down. What we're going to do is we are on layer two, we go to the move tool and you can either use flip horizontal and vertical again, or you could also tap rotate four times to have it rotate 180 degrees. Now we can fill the center cross here, which looks a bit empty. I want to make sure I'm erasing these obvious shapes that mark the cross lines. I want to go over and beyond the center. Okay. So our center is filled. Of course, we could have put more effort in it, but I just want to show you the process I'm using usually. Now we want to check if this is working. Let's open the layers panel and swipe layer two. It's the layer with our white lines to the left and then tap duplicate. Put this one out of the group, and then we add three more duplicates. One, two until we have four in total. Three. And four. All right. Now we're going to just shrink these layers and see how our pattern looks. I just want to make this layer here invisible and then I'm going to start with the top layer, go to the move tool and make sure snapping is still enabled, then I'm just shrinking it by half until it snaps into place. We can always see that with the yellow lines, go on with the next layer, the second from the top and shrink until we have the white lines. Oops. Here we go. And the third layer from the top, we pull that down in that direction, and the last layer, we pull that down in that direction. Tada. Oh, this is so fun. And look, it works perfectly. All the ends are meeting perfectly well, and it looks really cool. Quirky, hand drawn, and a little bit wonky, and that gives it so much character and style. Really cool. Now, let me show you real quick, another trick how you can change the colors of your pattern. Obviously you could just change the color of layer one with a light blue, but I like to keep my layers. I like to just add layers on top. Since we only have these few layers, there's no problem in adding more layers. First, we can pinch these together that we have the smaller version of our white lines on one layer. Then I would just add another layer on top. And fill it with, I don't know. Let's go with pink tada. Then do not have any physical changes on our white lines, I would just add another layer on top and turn it into a clipping mask. Then you can just fill it with any color. How about we go purple here? And that's it. A super simple way to recolor your pattern for print on demand services that you're able to offer a variety of different color combinations. That's it for this lesson. You know now how to make a custom pattern template in Procreate that helps you to create your pattern seamlessly without shifting and moving all these layers around. Now join me in the next video where I'm going to show you other works I made with this bold line technique. I will see you there. 12. More Possibilities with Bold Lines: And, as promised, here are a few examples of my work with bold lines just to give you an idea of all the possibilities this particular style offers. Maybe they'll even spark some creative ideas in you. Let's start with this piece, which I call zebras and a dino. I especially love the shape of both the zebra and the dino. They are instantly recognizable yet extremely simplified. The zig zag stripes on the zebras add just enough texture so the plain background doesn't feel empty at all. I also added a very subtle shading effect by using a slightly darker line on the shadow side of each animal, which adds a bit more depth and interest. Next up is woman with green hair. Here I wanted to explore a highly simplified approach to drawing a portrait. I really like the quirky arm shape and of course, her eyes. In this piece, I played with negative space. Everything is filled with color or linework, except for the letters, which makes them stand out clearly. I had a lot of fun experimenting with these crazy arm shapes and the shirts patterns. I also use different line weights which you might want to try out yourself. This crocodile friend was my entry for draw this in your style challenge by the wonderful Carlin Creates on Instagram. My goal was to see if boat lines could still tell a story, and I think the answer is yes. These three pieces were created as spicy Valentine's cards. I divided the canvas into two areas, one for the motif, and one for the lettering. I added a background pattern only to the letters, so the main motif would still stand out while keeping the text equally interesting. Now here we have the snowy mountains. I wanted to experiment with whether we can still perceive soft rounded shapes as mountains, even though they aren't pointy, triangular, or in their natural color. According to my husband, the answer is yes, but I'll let you decide for yourself. This piece was pure color therapy for me. It's definitely pop art inspired but still has my unique style. So many colors and lovely shapes, it still makes me happy every time I look at it. Next, I created a Picasso inspired portrait as part of a class project. My goal was to use as much color and pattern as possible while distorting the facial features, yet keeping them recognizable. Balancing the colors, patterns and the simplification process itself took quite some time. This spring inspired pattern was an exercise in creating simplified flower shapes that don't follow the tubical circle center plus six petals formula. I came up with two different flower designs that I still love. I highly recommend trying out the simplification method from this class. You'll discover new shapes and ways of drawing that will really enhance your style. If you know me, you know I love a good character collection. In this last piece, I stacked a bunch of different cats. My goal was to keep them visually similar while still giving each one its own personality. Now it's your turn. Go and try it out for yourself. Remember, the pieces in this lesson reflect my style. Yours will be something completely different. Don't copy, let your own creativity shine. Now it's time to join me in the final lesson where we'll wrap up the class. I'll see you there. 13. Wrap-Up: The Congratulations. You made it through the class and I hope you've had as much fun as I did. By now, you've learned how to simplify your artwork using bold lines, focus on what really matters in an image, and maybe even discovered a new direction for your artistic style. Now it's your turn to upload your class project. Whether it's just one piece or all of them, I'd love to see what you created. Sharing your work is a great way to get feedback and connect with other students. If you enjoyed this class, I'd really appreciate a quick review. It helps me a lot and also let others know what to expect. If you want to see more from me, make sure you follow me here and on social media for updates, new classes, and more creative fun. Thanks for joining me. We'll see each other in my next class. Happy creating.