The Power of Procreate: Easy Tweaks to Transform Your Floral Illustrations

1. Welcome!: Do you love drawing florals and want to give digital illustrations a go? Then Procreate is just the tool for you. With Procreate, you can take one base illustration and transform it entirely with a little imagination and a few easy tricks. Hi, I'm Kanchan. I'm an artist, illustrator, and art educator from Singapore. In 2020, I started my Instagram account @petiteprocrastinator to share methods, tricks, and my various experiments with watercolor and Procreate. Since then, I've been able to grow my following, develop my style, and see my art on various products. Drawing on Procreate is so easy and the undo option makes it extremely forgiving and a great way to practice your sketches. But what I love the most about Procreate is how much I can get out of just one illustration. I have a portfolio of sketches and I re-use them to make patterns, posters, and greeting cards. This class will give you a basic understanding of how Procreate works and the most efficient steps for creating and editing many different versions from the same sketch. We'll start by choosing and breaking down the reference image. You will learn how to observe the buds, folds, and details of a flower and how to build up your sketch in layers. Then we'll go on to explore the four ways to modify your work. A simple color drop method, changing the color of your lineup, using different watercolor brushes for texture and transparency, and a slightly stylized coloring technique. This class is perfect for beginners. By the end of it, you will have four different versions of the same sketch, a beautiful inspirational poster, and a workflow that you can use for making patterns, cards, prints, anything that you can dream of, so let's get all the three. 2. Class Orientation: For the class project, we will be building up in steps throughout the class. I will encourage you to watch each lesson and create your illustrations as you learn. First, we learn how to draw and detail your illustration. Then we will go on to learn the most basic color drop method to change the look of your illustration. Next, we will learn how to change the color of your line ad. Then I'll show you how to use the default watercolor brushes that come with Procreate. Finally, we will learn slightly stylized shading and coloring technique. Then we will put all these illustrations together to create an inspiration poster. You will export the JPEG format of this and upload it to the projects gallery. However, I do encourage you to share the illustrations from each lesson in the project gallery for feedback along the way. Throughout the class, I will be referring to this image, which I liked it to the class resources as well. I have a lesson dedicated to choosing an observing your references. I recommend you watch that lesson and learn how to hone your observation skills and choose the reference image that truly inspires you. Let's jump right in. 3. Procreate Basics: [MUSIC] Let's start by looking at a few helpful Procreate features. Now, I'm not going to touch up on every feature of Procreate, but just a few that we will be using extensively during the class. We will start by making a canvas in Procreate and exploring the various tools that we will be using throughout the class. If you are familiar with Procreate, then feel free to skip this lesson. Let's start by opening up Procreate app. Once we are here, we'll just click on the plus icon on top to create a new canvas. Procreate comes with a lot of default canvas options, you can choose one of these. I actually end up choosing, most of the times the Comic CMYK 6'' by 9.5'', but I'll still show you how to create your own custom canvas. Click on the plus icon again. Here you can specify the size of your canvas in millimeters, centimeters, inches, and pixels. I usually keep it at inches, because I get a better idea of how big the illustration will look. Usually I will keep it at 7'' height and 5'' width, because this is the usual size of a greeting card and I get a good idea of how the illustration will look on the greeting card. The same size of this illustration can be reused for patterns even graphics for t-shirts, so this size works well for me. The DPI is 300, which is the minimum DPI for a good quality print. You can increase the DPI, but if you increase the DPI the file will be bigger and the layers will be lesser. We can always go up to 400 and see how it changes. If it's a 400 DPI you will get 91 layers in this; 300 DPI is pretty good for our patterns as well as greeting cards and posters, so I will keep it at 300. You can choose your DPI as well. The next one is color profile. The difference between RGB and CMYK, is RGB is usually better for display and CMYK is better for print. So if you have your canvas in RGB and then you use the same illustration for print, you will see some change in colors which were not expected. Since most of my illustrations are for printing on cards and t-shirts, etc, I usually keep it on CMYK so that I don't get any surprises when I'm printing them. The colors in CMYK tend to be slightly dull as compared to RGB; RGB colors are slightly more brighter. In CMYK, I'll select the generic CMYK profile and click on create. Now we are in the canvas and you have a few options on the top panel. Let's ignore the ones which are on the left side, we'll see the ones which are on the right first. The first one is the brush library. A lot of these default brushes will be available for you when you open your brush library, and we will be using a few of these. It can get a bit overwhelming to see so many different brushes and not knowing which one to use. What we will do is select a few that I think are important for this class and put them into our own brush library. Let's see how we can do that. Just swipe right on top and you will see a blue plus icon here. Click on that and you can create your own brush set. I'll just write here, skillshare. This is a brush set that we've created and we'll move our favorite brushes into this brush set so you can have easy access to it. The first one is an inking. There is the studio pen here. What I'm going to do is swipe a little on the left and duplicate it. The duplicated brushes appear with an icon on top, so you make sure that you are moving the duplicated version and then you can customize it, and we don't change the original brush. So just click on this and move it to the skillshare brush library, wait for it to blink, and then just drop it here. The other brushes which we will be using is in calligraphy. One is the monoline, so I'll just duplicate this again, and make sure you're moving duplicated one to the skillshare brush set, which is a tongue twister, and move it here. Then again, we go back to calligraphy, and the other brush that I really like using is the shale brush for the coloring and shading. I'm going to duplicate this one as well and then click on this and move it to my brush set. These are three of my favorites that I use most often. In the watercolor lesson, we will be using the watercolor brushes. Those are here, and I don't really play along with these brushes much, so I'm not going to duplicate them. I'll use them directly from this brush set. The next step is the smudge tool. The smudge tool is also similar to the brush library that we saw and the one that we created would be duplicated here as well. It's basically just for smudging. So if you have, suppose selected a brush from your brush library. In skillshare I have selected my shale brush, and I'll just increase the size and maybe a color to a slightly lighter one. This is my color and I have another darker tone here. The smudge tool I have again chosen the same shale brush, and when I do a smudge you can see that it's smudging everything together just like we wanted. You can reduce the size as well and change it and reduce the opacity as well if you want and change this. You can use different types. If I wanted to go to the watercolor and choose one of these for smudging, then you can use this as well. You can see how it works. It works pretty much like the brush, but you need to have some color on the canvas for it to smudge. Then the next one we have is the eraser tool. It has the same brush set. Right now I'm in my watercolor eraser and you can barely see anything because it's erasing with the watercolor brush. The most that I use most of the times for erasing is the monoline. The monoline clean erases everything that you have created. The fourth one here is the layers. We will learn more about layers as we go on in different lessons. For now, you just need to know how to create a new layer by clicking on the plus icon here. Then when you swipe, you get some more options to lock, duplicate and delete. Lock option is good to keep your drawing safe so that you don't draw on that layer by mistake. Duplicate and delete you might already know what it means. Then when you click on this layer, you see lots of more options like rename, select, copy, and we'll use a few of these options during the classes as well, so you'll get more familiar with it. The last layer is always the background color, and you can't delete this last layer if you see you can't do anything to it. When you click on it, you can change the background color. I like starting my canvas with a white background, but you can choose any background to it and it will change the color. The last one here is the color palette. The color palette has a few options down below; the disc, classic, harmony, value, and the palette itself. The disc is just a disc where you can move around and select the color that you want. You can select the color and the different values like this. In the classic view, you can just move it around like this and then change the color from this. The harmony, I don't use very much but you can even pick your color from here. Then we have the values. This if you already know the hexadecimal value for your color, you can put it directly here and it will give you the color. This I use sometimes when I know the color of my websites, color theme then you can just input it here. The last one is the palette itself, which I use the most. You can create your own custom color palette by clicking on the plus icon here or create a new palette from a camera file or a photo. Usually, I'll create it from a photo. Most of these, as you can see pallets from my image are the imported ones from photograph. If you click on the three dots, you can set as default, share, duplicate, delete. Let me delete this one because I don't really use this palette. You might have a few default pallets which have come along with Procreate. I don't like to have them here because I don't really use them, so I deleted them. But what I do most often is create a basic palette and keep my white and black here because I think they get used the most when I'm drawing, I like to have the black and the white handy with me. A lot of other options are there in Procreate, I'm not going to touch upon on all of it. You will learn as you go along and you get more comfortable. In the next lesson, we will start with some mindful drawing exercises to practice the brushes that we will be using throughout the class. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 4. Practice Exercises: [MUSIC] If you're new to drawing on the iPad, then this is the lesson for you. In this lesson we are going to move on to some drawing exercises to practice the brushes that we will be using throughout the class. If you're comfortable drawing on the iPad, then feel free to skip this lesson and go to the next one. But I highly recommend you check this out because the end result of these exercises can be quite fun. I have two exercises for you to start getting comfortable drawing on the iPad. The first one is going to be an abstract art and the second one would be a slightly more Symmetrical Art. For the Abstract Art, we will be using both the brushes, studio pen as well as mono line and the color you can choose whatever you want. I'll just go with the basic black. The difference between studio pen and mono line is that mono line is not pressure sensitive, whereas studio pen is pressure sensitive. I'll show you what I mean. When I select mono line and I'm drawing a straight line, you can see if I change the pressure of the brush, it doesn't change the thickness of the lines. If I wanted to change the thickness, I just need to change the size of the brush from this panel and then draw it again and it changes the thickness. However, if I choose the studio pen, the studio pen is more pressure sensitive. If I draw lightly, it will be finer and if I press harder it will be thicker like this. It gives more realistic feel of drawing with the marker. As you can see, it changes with the pressure. I think generally the mono line is a slightly easier pen to start with for a beginner. Since studio pen is slightly more pressure sensitive, it can get a bit tricky to handle it. But for these exercises, I highly recommend you try both of them and see which one you're comfortable with. Let me just clear this layer where I had sampled the brushes clear. Let's start with the first exercise. For the first one I'm using mono line. One thing to note is that you can change the properties of the brush by clicking on the brush. There are a bunch of properties here, but the ones that you should know of is the stabilization and streamline. If I draw something here, and if I change the streamline to maximum, you can see it smoothens out all the lines that I had created. If you reduce it, it will be true to what I had created. I usually like to keep my streamline on a slightly higher side because drawing on the iPad slightly different than drawing on paper. If you are a beginner, I would recommend you keep it slightly higher as well. But play around with this value and see what you're comfortable with. Just draw some simple shapes on the page. If you want, you can draw a heart which is like this and maybe another heart here. I'll draw some squiggly lines on the background like this. It can be anything just to go with the flow wherever you want to make. The idea is just dividing this canvas into different paths and filling up those paths with patterns. I'll give you some examples of the patterns that you can use. For example, in this, I am going to fill it up with parallel lines to this shape. Maybe I change this shape as well to slightly more squiggly line. It is it and change this. Now I just follow this line to create parallel lines. Try to be as accurate as you want. Try to get comfortable with drawing. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's just about having fun and getting that feel of drawing on an iPad and getting comfortable with this process before you move on to the next lesson. This is a great way to start. I did a lot of this in the beginning when I was new to drawing on the portrait. Because if you jump right into drawing some art, you might feel a little overwhelmed. You are not getting it right because it may feel really different from drawing on the paper. These exercises will really help you get comfortable with this. Then this maybe I want to fill this area up with some petal shapes. I'm just going to draw these petal shapes. Again, as I said, you don't have to be perfect. Just have fun and fill up these spaces. Try to be accurate. Try to be clean with your lines. If you want, you can zoom in and it's good practice. Just go ahead and have fun, draw something that you like and share this art on the gallery so we can all see what kind of art you have made because it can turn out to be really beautiful and feel free to change the color of the brushes. Well, sometimes it can look really amazing with the different colors that you use in every pattern. I'm done with these shapes, which is of petals of leaves and I'm going to fill this area up with some lines. In this exercise, I'm going to pick up my pen. I'm going to try to follow this without picking up my pen at all. It's a great exercise too. Try to make it as smooth as you can and see if we can get it parallel. This is also a very good exercise. Then I'm going to fill this area up as well. I may make some use like this. Again, try not to pick up your pen and see where you go with this. I'm just giving you some ideas of the patterns that you can try for practicing. You don't have to stick to this. You can draw whatever you want. Ultimately it will be a beautiful looking art. I'm going to finish this all up and I'll see you on the other side. I guess you've got the idea of what you need to do to practice and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of art you create. All right. This is what I have ended up creating. I'm sure you have something which looks really different because this exercise is such that the end result can be so different depending upon your mood and the time of the day. Anyway. If you're not the abstract art kind of a person then you'll prefer something more symmetrical. I have another exercise for you. What we're going to do is just turn off this layer and then click on the plus icon to start a new layer. I'm going to go on to the wrench icon, click on Canvas, Drawing guide, Turn on, Edit drawing guide, then Symmetry. In the symmetry, click on Options and click on Radial option. Maybe we select a red color for the lines so that is visible in the video. Click on Done. In radial symmetry, whatever I draw in one area gets copied in all the areas and it creates a beautiful pattern, a beautiful Mandela like this. If you are into a more symmetrical art and you want to try this, you can definitely give it a go. This is a great way of practicing these skills as well. There are no rules, just draw whatever you want and have fun with it. [MUSIC]. I've come up with this beautiful radial Mandela and I'm really eager to see what you have made. Please post in the class projects section. After this mindful drawing exercises, I hope you're more comfortable drawing on the iPad. In the next lesson, we will talk a little bit about choosing and observing your reference images [MUSIC]. 5. Breaking Down a Reference: In this lesson, let's choose a reference image. First, we are going to go over some points to keep in mind when we're choosing our reference image. I have added the reference image that I will be using throughout this class in the class resources section, so you can have a look at that. But I highly recommend to make the class more engaging, you choose a reference image that truly inspires you using the tips that I shared here. When you're choosing a reference image, they're two concepts to keep in mind. First, you should see two or more colors in the reference image. For example, in this cosmos, I can see two colors in the reference image, the pink and the lovely yellow of the center, and the second concept is of textures. You should be able to see at least two or more textures in the reference image. Textures can be difficult concept to grasp as [inaudible], but it translates into the different paths that you see. In this cosmos I can see your lovely texture of the petals and the beautiful texture to the centers. Well, so I think this cosmos makes a really good subject for you to start. Let me show you another example. Here I have the gazania or the African daisy. Again, in this gazania, I see at least two or more colors. I can see the red of the petals, I can see the lovely yellow of the center and even the petal has some shading at the end of the petals, which is connected to the center. As I said earlier, the next concept is of textures, so in this reference image, I can see two textures, the textures of the petal and the lovely texture of the center as well with the beautiful details. Again, this is a very good example of a reference image that you can think of using for the class. Let me show you an example of a flower which may not be a very good reference. Now I have this tulip here which has a beautiful color, and I love the veins which are in this petal. But I think this is not a good subject for you to pick up because I can see only one color, the pink, which is dominant color, and I can see only one texture, which is the texture of the petal. Therefore it is not a very good reference image to pick up for your class. Now with these two concepts, I hope you are able to pick up a reference image that suits your style and inspires you. Now let's observe the reference image. When I'm looking at this reference image, I'm seeing the beautiful turns of the petals here. I can see a bit of the underside of the petal which I like to capture in my drawing and the beautiful details on the center. When I translate it into my drawing, these are the things that I'm capturing the center, the turns and folds as well as the highlights and shadows in my drawing and coloring feeds. I'm looking at this gazania and I can see this beautiful tone of the petal here, the beautiful band of the petal here as well, and the underside of the petal that you can see a little bit here as well, and lovely details of the center. These are the observations that I'm translating even into my drawing when I'm in the drawing and coloring phase. Don't worry about the drawing. It might look complicated now, but we will go into more details and depths in the lessons coming up. With those concepts in mind, this is the reference image that I have chosen of a beautiful Japanese anemone. It has three colors, the pink of the petal, lovely yellow of the stem ends, and the green center, and it has lovely three textures as well. The textures of the petal, the lovely texture of the stamens and the details, as well as the texture and details of the center. This is the reference that I will be using throughout the class. But again, I recommend you choose your own image and hone your observation skills by using the learnings from this lesson. Great, I hope that these tips have helped you choose a reference image that truly inspires you. Share it in the project gallery so we can all see what you're making. 6. Drawing and Detailing: [MUSIC] Now that we understand procreate basics, we've practiced drawing on the iPad, and we've chosen the perfect reference image. Let's start drawing. I'm back in this Canvas which we had started earlier. What I'm going to do is go back to the gallery, and I'm going to create a new Canvas again. Now I have a fresh new Canvas and we can start drawing. But before we start drawing, I want to share the concept of closing out shapes and the importance of closing out shapes. For example, I have this new layer here and I will draw a little shape of a petal, but I have not closed it on top. When I go to the selection tab here by clicking on the selection tab and I try to select the petal, you can see the entire Canvas gets selected and that's not what we want. We want only the petal to be selected because it helps us in the coloring phase. Let's go ahead and turn this off, and I I try to close this out. Now, I'll go ahead and click on the Selection Tab again and try to select the petal, and I can select it. This is a very important concept in the coloring phase, and you will see what I mean in the coming lessons. Now that we have this concept in our mind, let's turn this layer clear and let's start drawing. Before that, we need to import our reference image. I assume you have selected your favorite reference image that you'll be using for this class, and you have saved it in your photo library. What we can do is click on the "Wrench," click on "Add," and click on "Insert a photo," and select that beautiful reference image that you had selected. Now let's go to the last step. Click on this "N" here and reduce the opacity of this layer. We just need this as a reference in the background and we shouldn't interfere with that drawing, so we'll reduce the opacity a bit. Then we are going to swipe on this layer and lock it so we don't draw on this by mistake and then click on this "plus icon," and create a new layer where we're going to start drawing. For drawing, I usually use my basic black, but you can use any color. I'll show you how to change the color of your line art in the next lesson. Go ahead and choose any color you want, I'm going to choose the black, and for the brush, I generally prefer using mono-line for the outline and then a studio pen for more details, but you can just use it interchangeably. I'll use the mono-line and I'm going to reduce the size of the mono-line to just one person. Now I'll zoom in. As I mentioned before, we need to close these shapes. It's easier for you you start from the center and then go outside while you close out your shapes. I'm going to start with the center and just draw an outline, not much details here. We need to make sure this is selectable, so go to "Selection Tab," and select. Yes, this is selectable, so it's perfect. Now let's go on to the statements. The statements can be nicely detailed like this. You can create each and every individual statements. I feel the more details you add to your illustrations it gives the wow factor, but it totally depends upon your style, how you want to have your illustration. Go ahead and make these details of your flower as well. If you see these stamens, you try to add them to your drawing. Great. I have my center as well as my stamens. Now let's see how we can select it. Go to the "Selection Tab" and select outside of the stamens and then select the center as well. I'm going to select this area as well and do an inward. You can see all the stamens were closed, and by doing an inward now we're able to select only the stamens, and this is exactly what we want again, so make sure you are able to close out all your shapes and they are selectable. Now moving on to the petals, I'm going to start drawing the outline of the petals in the same layer. Just follow the reference image. Feel free to move your Canvas around. In this area, I'll just increase the opacity of reference layer and show you. Here I can see a bit of an underside of this petal and I want to capture that in my drawing. I'm going to go ahead and do that. I'll come back to my layer, lock it. I'll just add these little details here. Great. Let's continue with the drawing. I can see some underside of the petal here as well, so I'm going to capture that in my drawing phase. Great. We're done with the petals. Let's see if all these petals are selectable. Great. I think they're all selectable even the underside of the petal is selectable. With this, we're done with the outline, now we're going to start adding the details. What we're going to do is go back to the layers and lock this layer. I'm going to add a new layer to this. For adding the details, I want to increase the opacity of this layer so it can be more clear, so I'll just increase it a bit and I'll lock the layer again for the reference. Now I'm on my layer 3 where I will be adding the details. You can choose to change the pen to studio pen or continue with the mono-line, then I'm going to reduce the size of this to about eight percent, and I'll start adding the details. Basically, the details is just following the wings of the petals that you can see. I'm not sure if this petal is very clear, but here you can see clearly there are some dark lines and I want to capture that in my drawing. I'll just turn this around and I'm going to capture these dark lines in my drawing to show the curve of the petal and add some details. You don't have to be too specific about the lines, but just give a little bit of detail to show the curve of the petal. Then even in this, I can see a little bit of a line. I'll just follow that to show that this petal is going upwards, like a cup. Double-tap to undo if you've done a mistake. I'll just do the same for the other petals as well. Just follow the wings which I can see, and get my details. Let me turn off this layer and see how it looks. I think it looks perfect. I like the look of this and then I'm going to start adding the details to the center as well. You can see the center has these lovely tiny details and I want to capture that. Again, you don't have to be too specific. You can just go ahead and add these little details to add the depth to this drawing. We're done with this as well. Let's see if I turn off how their drawing looks. It's perfect. I feel like this area requires some more details of the stamens, I think we missed that out, so we can add those as well, just these little lines. Can you let me turn it out and see. Perfect. This is exactly what we want our join to look like. Now, I'll just log the detailing layer as well. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to start coloring this. Great. We just finished the sketching and detailing of our reference. In the next lesson, we will change the look of this illustration by adding some color to it. I'll see you there. [MUSIC]. 7. Adding Color: Now it's time to color your illustrations by using the most basic color drop method. The most important part is to keep these colors on separate layers because it has some quick updates and modifications in future. Right now we have the drawing ready and the detailing done, let's start coloring. Before we start coloring, let's import the palette if you haven't already done that. Click on the "Palettes" and click on "Plus" icon and "New" from photos, and then select that reference image that you have. You'll see a bunch of colors were imported, but I think it's a good idea to keep your palette minimal. What you can do is sample off of your colors and see which one you'd like to use. I'll create a new palette of my own, so create new palette and move the colors that you like. I'm going to move a light color and a dark color. I'm going to also move one yellow for the center, and one dark and light color for the center. Then if you wish, you can delete this. You don't need so many of the odd colors. I'm going to just keep it minimal to these five colors. Let's start coloring, but let me just rename this first so that we don't get confused about which layer it is. Rename it to Outline, and rename this to Details. Then log both the list Outline as well as the Details layer. Then click on the "Plus" icon, create a new layer where we are going to start coloring. I'm going to rename this as well the Colored layer. Go back to our Outline layer and click on this and click on "Reference". When this outline is the reference, any color you add in the color layer will be dropped within the boundaries of the outline that you have created since that is the reference. Now coming back to your colored layer, click on the color that you want to drop. I want to drop this color, the lighter shade, and just drag it and drop it here. You see when I drag and drop the details are lost so what you can do is just click on this layer, colored layer and move it right down below the reference layer. Now let's do the same for the rest of the petals, just drag and drop. Great. For the backside of the petal, I want to use something darker, so I'm going to use this darker shade and I'll drag and drop to these small areas. Now we've colored all our petals, now let's move on to the details of the stamens. What we will do is put that in a different layer, so just lock this and create a new layer and rename this to Stamens. Coming back to the Stamens. One option is to select, click on "Automatic" and "Colorful", ensure that you have selected your yellow color and click on each and every stamen to just fill it up because dragging and dropping to these would be quite tricky, they're so small. But even this can feel a bit time consuming depending upon the amount of details that you have. The other option is just go to the selection tab and select everything which you don't want to be colored instead of the smaller details, and even select the outline that you don't want to be colored. I'm going to even select these little lines. Now you've selected everything which is not yellow and just do an inward. You see the blue is only the stamens which has selected once you do an inward. Go back to your Stamens layer, click on that and do a fill layer. You see all the stamens are now filled and you have that colored area. Let us do the same for the center, I'll use a brighter green. Go to your list, create a new layer, ensure you've locked the Stamens layers so that you don't draw on it by mistake. In this new layer, rename it to center, and just drag and drop the color so you have the center colored as well. This was the most easy drag and drop method to color your illustrations. In the next lesson, we are going to change the look of this illustration by changing the line at color. I'll see you there. 8. Changing the Outline Color: In this lesson, we will change the look of this illustration by changing the color of the lineup. I will show you two different methods to do this, and they are very quick and easy, but it really changes the look of the illustration. What we're going to do before we start changing the color of the line art is, I'm going to group all these layers together which we had colored, just swipe them right, and group them, and maybe you rename this group to colored and I'm going to turn off this layer. The next one is changing the color of your line art, so it gives a really beautiful look to your illustration, I'll show you what I mean. For example, if I have a darker background, something like this, or yellow, and I want this illustration to be in a white color or maybe an off-white color. What we can do is create a new layer on top of the Outline layer, and click on this layer to make a clipping mask. Then change the color to whatever you want, I'll choose off-side and if you want you can choose a white as well. Then go back to your Layers tab, click on this clipping mask layer and do fill layer. You see it gives a nice different view to it and we can change the same for the details as well, so click create a new layer on top of the Details layer, click on this new layer, clipping mask, click on the layer again and do fill layer. Now it has given a nice new look to your illustration, and there's a second way to do the same thing. If I removed all this clipping mask, go back to the layer, remove the clipping mask, what you can do is create a new layer again, select the Details layer, click on "Select, and click on the new layer and do a fill layer. Same thing for the outline, click on the outline layer, click on select, then go back to the last step, create a new layer on top, click on this layer, new layer and do a fill layer. It gives you the same result in the different steps, so either you can use a clipping mask technique or the select layer technique to change the look of your illustration. Now we've learned two methods, and let's see how we can combine these two methods to form different illustration looks. What we can do is, let me just combine these two white layers and group them together. Move it on top, rename this to White. I'll just turn it off and turn it on so you can see a different view of your illustration. Let's combine these two and see what it looks like. You can see it has a really beautiful different look by just turning on and off fill layer. If you want to change the background color, you can go ahead and change it to green and see it changes completely. Now, keeping these two concepts in mind, let me show you one more technique of changing the look of your illustration. I'm going to turn off the Colored layer. You'll see that if I change the background color in this case, even the flower color changes because it is basically see-through, there is no color in this. You can use the same drag and drop technique on your outline to change the color of your illustration itself. If I want the illustration to be completely yellow color, so just click on a new layer, and go to the selection tab, select outside, then do an invert, so it selected the entire illustration, and in this new layer, I'm going to just go ahead and do fill layer with the White. I'm going to move it down to the reference layer so that you can see the lines. Let me turn off the White, so this is how your reference will look like. Now your drawing would look like, and you can move it around a bit, and change the color or look of your illustration again to give this little distorted view, and I'll just double tap to undo because I don't want that. When you change the color of your background now, the color of your illustration doesn't change. This is how you can combine these two methods to make very different looks to your illustration. Now, if I want to change the color of this flower to something like a pink, I can just go to the last step where I had dropped the color, click on this layer, click on "Select", and then go ahead and change the color, fill layer to pink and your entire flower changes. These are really easy techniques to change the look of your flower. Now if I change the outline to white, it gives a completely different look to this flower now. I hope you've understood now how you can use these simple techniques to form many different looks to your illustration. Now, I'll see you in the next lesson where we will start exploring the watercolor brushes that come by default in Procreate. 9. Using Watercolor Brushes: [MUSIC] In the last two lessons, we saw how to lay a foundational color and how to change the color of your line art. In this lesson, we're going to start exploring the watercolor brushes that come by default with procreate. Now, let's start exploring the watercolor brushes. I'm going to go to my list. I move this colored layer to the colored group. I'm going to turn off all the layers. I will change the background color back to white. Go to your brush library and go to the watercolor water brushes. You have these four brushes which are used for the watercolor loop. These beautiful flexes, splashes give a nice watercolor effect to your illustration. Let's start coloring. Turn on the details as well as the outline. For the coloring, we need a new layer, so I'll use this new layer that I have created. But before we start coloring, just go to the selection tab. Select the patterns that you want to color. That's because these watercolor brushes tend to be quite thick and we want to keep them within the boundary of the flower, petals that we have. We're going to select all these individual petals and go back to the new layer that you have created. I'm going to use the wash brush to add the first-layer, but I want to see the reference to see which areas are darker and which are lighter. Click on the "Wrench", click on "Canvas", and click on "Reference". References has three options the Canvas, which will show you what you are currently working on, the image and the face. We're going to use the image type and import the image that we are using. I'll just move this on the side just as a reference. You can even sample the colors directly from this but I don't like to do that because I want to keep my palette limited and I don't want too many colors. But when you sample, you keep adding new colors. But you can go ahead and just click on this and change the color. I'll go back to my previous color. I'll make sure I'm on the wash brush and I'm looking at the areas that are dark. I will reduce the size of the wash brush and all these darker areas. I'm going to add the first layer there. I'll just drop my color to all the darker areas. I'll change the color to a darker shade for this petal because this petal is quite dark. If you long tap on the color, it changes back to the previous color. Just follow the reference image. A slightly darker color here so I'll decide that color. Great. This gives you the base. What I'm going to do next is go to the Water Bleed brush. I'm going to start adding some details here with the Water Bleed brush. Reduce the size of the Water Bleed brush. Swipe it to add these little wings to our petals. Follow the same lines that you had drawn earlier for the detailing please. Change the size of the brush as you need and continue this with the rest of the petals. Great. If you want the petals to be darker, just change to a darker color and change your brush to a wet glaze, and reduce the size of it and just drop the user darker shades to the petal. I'm looking at the reference that petal is darker so I'm just going to try to refer to that. Just to add some darker shades everywhere if you had missed it in the first layer. Great. This is the petal as for the center as well as the stem, these are too small. You can use any brush for those areas. What I'm going to do is create a new layer, then go to selection tab. Like we did previously for the color drop method, I'll select everything which is not the stemming first, even the lines, and then invert it. So only the stemming are selected. Then do it inward. Now only the stemming are selected go to the new layer. You can lock the petals layer. Select a yellow color. I'm using the wet place brush and adding the color. Let's do the same thing for the center as well. Now you see the details are not visible so just move the colored list below the details layer. Just group them together and name this group as watercolor. Move this down below the details layer. The details and more visible. Let's add some fun splashes so go to your water library and select the mad splashes. You can change the opacity and the size and just splash it around. Try out the water flicks as well and drop some flicks to give a nice effect. If you press harder, it will be bigger splashes, if you touch lightly, they will be smaller. This is how the watercolor effect will look like, but this works as long as your background is white. Watercolor brushes are transparent, so if I change my background to something darker, for example, you see since the watercolor brushes that transparent, you'll see the background through it and it may look good in some cases, but if you don't want this and you want the original look of the watercolor brushes with the white background. What we'll do is let's turn off the watercolor layer and change the background color to something white against that you can see. Then I go back to my drawing layer and I do a select and I click on outside of the drawing layer. Now everything which is not the flowers selected and I do an inward so only the flower will be selected. Then I go back to my list step, start a new layer. In this layer, I'll click on this layer and do a fill layer. This has created a white background for us to use. I'm going to turn on the watercolor layer again. I'm going to move this, the white layer into the watercolor group below the watercolor. When I change the background to something dark, you will see that the watercolor effect is still maintained since we have a white background to it, even though the brushes are transparent, the darker background is not making a very big difference to the illustration. Great. I hope you had fun using these watercolor brushes. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will start exploring a slightly more stylized shading and coloring technique. [MUSIC] 10. Stylized Coloring Technique: So far we've seen how to lay a foundational color to our illustration, change the color of the line art, and we played around with the watercolor brushes. In this lesson, we will explore a slightly more advanced shading and coloring technique to add the highlights, shadows, and small details. Now let's start coloring this with a slightly advanced shading technique. We're going to reuse the base layer that we created in the first color drop method. What I will do now is turn off this watercolor layer, change the background back to white, and I'm going to turn on the color layer this time. I just want to see how the colored base looks like. I'll make a duplicate of this group and turn off the original colored one and rename this to shading. The idea is that we have the base layer created and we just add more details on this layer to give it more realistic shading look. I'll turn on the reference again, go back to your wrench Canvas and reference. I have my reference on the site for me to refer to. Now I'm going to go to my shading group and create a new layer inside this, on which I will add more details. The brush that I select for this is go back to your Skillshare Brush Library, and select the shale brush. The color that I choose is something light. In fact, I want to make it lighter than this because, you can see in the reference it's pretty light. I go to the classic view and I'll just move this to a lighter shade. Now, I'm going to add with my shale brush wherever I see these light tones, I'm just going to add these lines in the same direction. Sorry, missed one step. You don't want the color to go outside. You saw that I'm going to add color, but it's going outside and I don't want that to happen. The best way to do that is go to your color layer and click on "Select." Now, go back to the new layer that you had created. This way now we are coloring only on the petals. Now, just reduce the size of the brush a bit and add the details in the same direction as you see the veins in your reference. I'm just going to go ahead and do this for this petal. I'm just dropping the color right now. I see some light colors here and I'm just dropping this color. In the next step, we are going to smudge it. I'll just drop it wherever I see the lighter tones. Next is go to a smudge tool, and make sure you're on your same shale brush. I'll select this shale brush again. In the smudge tool, reduce the sizes slightly bit. I'm going to smudge all this lighter tones with the darker color. When you do a smudge, you'll see that some of the value is reduced. If you want, we can go back and add that value back. We'll do that. I'm just smudging it first. If you feel it's too much, you can just add the darker tones this way into the lighter ones, and if you want the light to be smudged with the darker then you can move your brush from the lighter tone to the darker tone. This way you can smudge it. If you want, you can reduce the tones a bit more. I want it slightly right here. Then smudge it again. Let's continue with the rest of the petals as well. Here I see some really darker tones. What I'm going to do is move it to a darker shade in my palette, and add that with my shale brush to this area where I see dark. I'm just dropping the color like we did last petal. Then I'm going to reduce this to a lighter tone, so tap and hold, it'll go to the previous color and then drop it here. Make sure your petal layer is still selected so that you don't accidentally color outside the layer. Now go to the Smudge tool, and again, just follow this veins to smudge this color into the petal. I'll continue this for the rest of the petals in the same style, and I'll see you after that. Now you have this new look to your illustration, with slightly more stylized shading technique. I'm going to turn off this selection and I'll close my reference as well. I'm going to lock this layer now. Let me show you how we can change the look of this. If you want, you can change the Colored layer. I create a new layer on top of this, clipping mask, and I do a fill layer with some other color. For example, maybe yellow, and I fill layer with the yellow. You see you have this new slightly different look to it. You can change the same even with the shading layers. If I select on this one and create a new layer on top, the new layer is clipping mask for the shading layer. I reduce the color to something like this, and I do a fill layer for this. You change the look of this illustration by changing the base layer color as well as the shading layers. You can get infinite number of combinations like this and totally change the look of your illustration by just adding a clipping mask on top. So far, you've learned four different ways of altering your illustration. In the next lesson, we are going to put them together in our class project to form a beautiful inspirational poster. I'll see you there. 11. Final Composition: So far we've learned four different ways of altering the look of your illustration. In this lesson, we're going to put all these different looks together to form a beautiful inspirational poster, and then we will be adding a motivational text to it. You've come a long way and you've created four different styles. If you have chosen just to create a few styles of the four that I've taught, that's perfectly fine. For this class project, we will use whatever you have created and put them together into an inspirational poster. This is my original canvas. What we'll do now is go back to the gallery and duplicate my original canvas just to be safe. Then go back to this new duplicated canvas. What we'll do now is merge these layers together. Let's go to the shading layer and unlock anything that you have. I'll delete this Layer 11 which we had just created for our style experience. I'm going to duplicate the shading group. I'll tell you why. Let's duplicate this first. I'll click on this and do a flattened. Now I have a yellow version ready with me. Then for the next version, I'm going to remove these layers and I want the pink version with me. I'll remove these layers and I'll do a flatten again. Now I have a yellow version as well as a pink version with me. Then I'm going to go to the colored original base layer that we've created, and I'm going to merge this as well. I'll just unlock everything and delete this layer and go to the colored one and flatten it. I have three different styles now. Same way for watercolor, I'm going to flatten it, just unlock this also, and flatten it. We don't want the reference layer anymore, so unlock it and delete it. Depending upon the look you want for each of this, if you want all of them to have the lovely details as well as the outline, then we can duplicate these and merge it with the original one. Let's see how it looks. If you want this look without the outline you can have one look like that and this way. But I like the outline, so I'm going to duplicate it three or four times, for example, 1, 2, 3, 4, and the white one as well. I'll just swipe and duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, and even the detail, duplicate four times. Then unlock all of them. I'm going to merge these two together. I'll just say merge down. Click on this outline and see merge down. Then I'm going to merge this with a detail layer as well, merge down, and do the same for the rest of the colored ones as well. I will merge outline, and then the detail layer with my pink version, same with the colored one, and finally the watercolor version. Now you have a yellow, a pink, a simple illustrated, and a white, and we also have this white outline that we had created. If I do this, it has a totally different look. What I'll do is merge this as well, flatten the white one, and maybe we give another look to our illustration for the pink one, like this. I'm going to merge this white outline with my pink. I have now four different looks and we're going to use all these looks to create our final poster. Keep them here as it is. Go back to the gallery and I create a new canvas. This time I'll create A4 size canvas, which is usually around 8 by 12, so the width would be eight and the height is 12 inches. Keep the DPI at 300. But then go to your color profile and change it to CMYK generic and create. This is your around A4 size poster. You have a pretty good idea of how it looks after it's printed. What I'll do now is just move my illustrations that I had merged together into my poster. I will turn off the background because I just want the illustrations and not the background, and go to the Wrench, Share, PNG, and save it to your Save Image, save it to your photo gallery. Do the same with the rest of them as well. All of them are in our gallery now, so we're going to go back to this A4 size canvas that we had, and import them, so add, insert a photo. This same way, we will get the rest of them, insert a photo, insert. We have all of these here, all the inserted photo layers. We're going to just move them around to make a beautiful composition and then add a text to it. What I have in mind is I'll have all the flowers at the bottom of my poster and I'll have the text on top, and I might add a few flourishes here and there. Let's see. Click on the arrow. I'll turn off everything else first. I just have this white outline. Click on the arrow and reduce the size of this. You should reduce the size and not increase the original size, it will get pixelated. Just move this around. Another thing to notice, if you move this illustration outside the boundary and you deselect it, you're going to cut off all the illustration that has gone outside of the boundary. If you want to do that, you can, but just make sure you double tap and go to the original and duplicate this so that you don't have to import it again, then come here and just move it around a little. I'm just going to reduce the size and move it. Maybe do the same with the yellow version. It's totally upon you how you want your composition to look like. I wanted it to be like this. You can add more flowers, you can add more leaves, however you want it to be. I want this class to be at the bottom of the illustration and I'll write the text here. The text that I want to write is every flower blooms in its own time. I'm going to go ahead and click on the wrench and add text. I want to write blooms using a brush, so I'm going to go ahead and select a brush which is a studio pen, and maybe slightly pink color. I'll add a new layer on top of the text layer and I'll just write blooms. Then I'm going to add more text for the rest of the code, so add text. I'll move it here. Maybe I change the font sizes. If you select on this, select the entire text, and you can change the font here. As you can see there a lot of fonts that you can select. I'll select this, I like this font, and that's it. This is my final poster. If you want to print this poster and share it with us, you can just go ahead like this, Share, JPEG, and save the image to your photo gallery. Now you have a beautiful inspirational poster. Please share it in the Projects Gallery to inspire us all. 12. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations. After the end of this class, you will have four different versions of altering the look of your illustration and a beautiful inspirational poster. You can even use these illustrations to make patterns, cards, graphics for T-Shirts and upload them on print on demand sites like Redbubble or society seeks to have your own custom merchandise. If there's just one thing that I hope you take away from this class is the importance of planning your illustrations in layers. When you plan your illustration, both the drawing as well as the coloring in different layers, it gives you the freedom to change the look of your illustration with a few easy twigs. Finally, do share your illustrations and your class project in the project gallery, so we can all have a look at it. I strongly believe in a supportive community, so I will definitely share my review and feedback with you, and I will be really happy to receive your feedback for this class as well. Follow me on Skillshare as well as Instagram for any future class updates.