Transform Your Art: Using Procreate Masks to Try-On Creative Backgrounds

1. Introduction: Are you an artist? Ever finished the subject of your artwork and love it? But what you don't love is that blank, white, void of space around it. The indecision, the fear, the possibilities? What if there was a crystal ball to see how options look before you commit them to your art? Bring back the excitement of possibilities and transform your art using masks in Procreate to try on creative backgrounds. Hi. I'm Jill. A lifelong and self-taught artists working primarily in watercolor. As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of sketchbook work and trying out ideas before diving in full force. My path through the fear of adding backgrounds, naturally utilize this with the help of a digital crystal ball, Procreate. But I don't do digital art. I hear you. This class uses Procreate as a tool to composite and modify artworks and thumbnails done physically. By taking advantage of non-destructive editing to play with your ideas, you'll see more satisfying results back in your real art faster and with less anxiety. Art work without fear, who knew. Sharing this process on my Instagram last summer, I received so much interests that I knew I had to share it with you in a class. Don't have Procreate or an iPad? This process will work with any app or software that has layers and masking. This class is perfect for any level artists using 2D media. By the end of the class, you'll learn how thumbnails help you sort through ideas and come up with more creative and unique solutions that photographing and editing an accurate capture of your artwork provides more helpful mock-ups. How to create layer a clipping masks and procreate and when to use each, how to fully utilize layers and layer effects to see possible combinations of ideas and allow you to proceed with confidence. If you've got ideas you wanted to try, but that white paper and inner critic told you they were too risky. I'll see you in the first lesson to show you how daring doesn't have to mean scary. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: The best processes are the ones who can instantly apply to your own work. Using an in-progress painting of your own, you'll explore options for adding paint using thumbnails. You could choose to explore background like I do here, additional elements or whatever you'd like using this process. If you don't have a work in progress right now, feel free to use the image provided of the painting I'll be using, just to go through the steps in the class. Referencing your work in progress, brainstorm ideas using thumbnails in whatever media you choose to work in, photograph your thumbnails and work in progress. Edit the files and import them into Procreate. You can also use Photoshop if you don't have Procreate or an iPad. Using a layer mask, we'll isolate our subject, revealing any layers below. Explore how each potential background changes the painting by hiding, adjusting opacity or using layer effects to create new ideas. Use a clipping mask to add additional edits on top and help plan out your next steps. Export your creation and use it as a reference to recreate the magic on your actual artwork. It's also great to remember that the process is not here to enable perfectionism. But rather to help you brew ideas and help you find a way forward that you're competent in and satisfied with. Be sure to share any of your steps and of course, your final product. In the project gallery, I'd love to see what you guys create and how you'll use this project in your own art practice. If you're ready to get started, let's dive into the first lesson. 3. Creating Analog Options: In this lesson, we're going to be going over creating our options in analog format with your thumbnails, so you're using whatever media that you're using for your work in progress. I have a watercolor painting, so I will be doing some watercolor thumbnails, exploring some various backgrounds. This is a really important step in terms of expanding your creativity because I encourage you to use whatever ideas come into your head, good, bad, just get them down there, and that way it gives you some material to work with once you get into Procreate. The process tends to get easier the more you do it and also becomes more creative and your solutions become more authentic to your own artistic tastes, the more you start to refine what you like and what you don't like. Without any further delay, let's get started. This is my demo project here. I'm going to be keeping this nearby, so that I can reference any of the colors that I might want to play-off of or include in my thumbnails. I'm just going to have this just off screen. Here I have my sketchbook, which has cotton watercolor paper on it. I have a 9 by 12 part of it, and I'm going to create my thumbnail sections. You can do these as small or as large as you want. You could do a full sheet. You could do the same full size of the painting for every thumbnail if you really wanted to. I'm going to be doing quadrant approach to the sheet of paper. The templates that I frequently use I have one of my business cards that I use are small ones and coasters and some cardboard cutouts. This won't fit on four times, so we're going to use this coaster and equates to being equivalent to a three by four, which is closer to an 8 by 10 proportion, but this is just fine for these background markups. I'm just tracing these because like I said, these thumbnails aren't going anywhere. These are going to stay in sketchbook. I'm just going to take a photo and edit it to capture each color. I don't care if the paint goes outside of this pencil line. You can always use masking tape or painter's tape to tape them off so you get a nice crisp edge if you have a preference for keeping your sketchbook looking little cleaner or you just like that look. You can do whichever. I have four thumbnails here. I've rather large brushes because we're working backgrounds, so I wanted to get them in quickly really utilize maybe some paint granulation techniques. The first one I'm going to do, I'm go to pull off some previous experience of mine with a background I didn't use in another painting. Here I'm sealing the comfort zone because I know what it's going to look like. I know what to expect out of it. I like to start with something I'm comfortable unless I have a very clear idea of what I want. Looking at these colors, there's a lot of red and orange. Maybe I'll work with compliment. Compliments would be green and blue. I have some cobalt teal here that I'm just going to put some splotches down. Then I want to play that up with maybe some green. I have some cascade green here from Daniel Smith, which does really well in wet on wet. Then clean my brush, and then I might also add a little lavender just because I really like that color and it'll be a more analogous color to use against the red and stuff. This looks very tight for being the background. What I have planned is to loosen it up. That's my first swatch. Let's see, my second swatch. Maybe I'll play something a little more realistic. What I'm doing is just mimicking what a background behind it would look like. Like I said, the more accurate your thumbnails are to what you'd like to do, the more accurate your markup will be in portraying what you want to achieve. But like I said, don't feel like you have to get it perfect in the markup because it is just an idea generator. We'll just see how that goes. Remember these are thumbnails, so I may not even need to be tied to putting this behind my painting. It could be like, Oh, I liked this transition or maybe just the colors or you're just looking for ideas. I'm just going to lift out from here and then we'll move on to the next one. Here we go. Let's say maybe we'll do something a bit more another abstract-ish one. A lot of times my backgrounds also reflect just what I'm feeling at the time. Colors highlight. If it's the beginning of spring and there might be some brighter colors if we're getting into winter, that might be some dark or more dramatic colors. All of that plays into my choices. As you explore more, you'll get more ideas. Ideas might be slow to come at first, but get more creative the more you explore. Then move on to the last one. I want to try something. If I get to the point where maybe I want to do for thumbnails and I'm getting to the point where I'm on the fourth one, I may have it really done anything super bold. I usually like to try and make this one the most dramatic or off-brand just to see what happens. I'm just giving this a quick pre-wet. I want to go dark. I don't want it to be fully dark behind these because these are supposed to be somewhat light. I do want to make sure I have some points in the background that are lighter. Remember to be bold. Try any idea, because no one has to see these unless you want them to, because nothing here is final product. Remember you have all the freedom in the world. If you get stuck trying alternatives, try switching your color and either your brush or your brushstroke or your application method. Maybe if you did one wet on wet, maybe the next one is wet on dry, or maybe the next one you do with a really squiggly brush instead of a round brush to give you more loose things. Just see how things change. I think we're done here. These are my four thumbnails. You could see the progression I went from. This is a background that I played within a previous set of thumbnails I didn't end up using in that final paintings. I wanted to play with a version of that. Then I went with something maybe a little more realistic. The way to up leaves and foliage might look at a distance, maybe a little blurred. Then we did another abstract one. It's a little bit similar to that, but then with some different colors plopped in. Little lavender or a little like a coral red, which might look like smaller tulips in the background. You can let your imagination play with it. We'll see how that looks behind it. Then something really bold at the end. I wanted to go really dark and make them dramatic. We kept a little light source behind them and then brought some warmer colors out to some darkness and so coolness underneath. Meaning it'll make it look like it's in front of a street lamp or a nice garden lantern. That might be a cool effect. We're going to take these and once they're dry, I'm going to move on into the next lesson. Did you create some great options in your thumbnails? I hope you at least tried some new ideas and stretch the boundaries of your comfort zonal level. In the next lesson, we're going to capture our art and thumbnails using a camera. 4. Start with a Photo: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to capture our work in progress and our thumbnails using a camera. While this process shouldn't take too long, it is important to balance efficiency with accuracy because that way our result will give us a better, predictable outcome, once we get into procreate and start compositing. We will need to start with taking a picture of our work in progress. What we want to do is make sure it is evenly lit. I am facing a window that's letting in some cloudy light. I have some nice even not direct light illuminating my full painting. It's not brighter on the top or the bottom. My painting is not worked in any way, so my light is nice and even. What I want to do is take a photo and I'm actually going to use this phone's telephoto option because what it's going to do is allow me to not get so much warp to the perspective. If I were to use the regular wide-angle lens here and make it fill the frame, I'm going to start to get some fish-eye warping and it's not going to give me an accurate depiction of my subject. What I'm going to do is use the telephoto option and make sure my subject just fills the frame. It's okay if you need to crop some out. I also want to make sure that the phone is pretty level. I have the grid lines that show up on my phone, so that helps me with the square object to line it up. I want to make sure it's level. It's filling the page as much as possible without any distortion and then I always like to take a couple of photos. Double-check that you're focused on the right area, and just have a couple options. But that is how you would capture a photo of your work in progress. The same principles apply to photographing your thumbnails. You would like to make sure that the page is evenly lit and you want to make sure that your camera is far enough away that it doesn't cause distortion. What we're going to do is once again, on the whatever telephoto setting your camera may have, or the most distant blends, we're going to make sure that our thumbnail mostly fills the screen. I'm not going to able to get quite as close because this is fairly small and the camera will be so close it will still cause distortion. I'm just going to get till it fills most of the screen. Then once again, checking my focus and taking a couple images. You want to make sure you take a couple of images in case your hand shakes. You also want to make sure that your phone is level when taking your photos as well, to reduce any sort of warping and just make sure you capture each of your thumbnails. Now feel free to review the images that you just took to find the best one of each one. But other than that, once you have all of your photos, we're ready to move on to editing. [MUSIC] Capture pictures, be sure that they are at least evenly lit. Because then the next step, this will make editing smoother and quicker. Once you're ready, let's move on to the next lesson. But we're going to edit these photos to reflect our ideas as accurately as possible. [MUSIC] 5. Editing for Success: [MUSIC] I'm sure you've all edited photos on your phone before, but let's review a few quick edits we can do to turn our photos into clear and accurate images. We're going to balance accuracy with quickness in order to create a reliable mockup of our ideas. We're going to start with editing our work in progress. You can see here I have this image pulled up within my photo editing app. I have an iPhone, so we're in that general layout and set up. But you could edit this in Photoshop with whatever photo editing app you like. So you see here I have it pulled up, so I'm going to go into edit. The first thing I always do when editing any photograph is to crop it to just the artwork. We're going to go into crop. If I see any glaring issues having to strain it, I will do that first. Just a little bit underneath one degree here and then bring in your crop bars so that is just inside. I can tell I did clip a little bit of it. Just bringing it just inside the masking tape there. Then just doing that with each one. I don't like to use the corners because I find with my finger I cannot be quite as accurate. Although this doesn't have to be exact, I'd like to get as close as I can. You can see here we have our cropping done. I'm going to go into edit. But before I start changing anything, I'm just double-checking the image to make sure there isn't any little bits of masking tape showing, although it won't be a huge issue, because what's going to happen is once we get into Procreate, we're just going to remove the background completely. Not a big deal, but I do want to make sure there isn't any on the tulips or anywhere near the subject itself. When editing your work in progress, what you're basically doing is just making sure that the subject is accurate and clear. We don't really care too much about the background because like I said, we're going to remove it. I always start with auto just to see that does help us a little bit. Then I'm going to also go to exposure and I'd like to bring it until I lose something, and then I bring it back down to where I find I'm not losing information anymore. What I mean by not losing information is it means that some of the highlights maybe have blown out, so you can see if I jack this all the way up some of the actual tulips turn to white, which is not accurate. So I bring it down so that it's lit. At the same time, I do have my actual work in progress next to me. I can tell if maybe I'm being dishonest or overly ambitious to how well maybe the brightness was. But I can tell because it's just right next to me that this is great. This is fine. I do not think this needs any contrast adjustments. I think this looks good. If anything, sometimes I actually decrease the contrast on a photograph of my paintings because I find the camera actually amplifies it to a not accurate degree. Then continuing down, the vibrance and saturation look good. The one thing I'm going to do is looking at my work in progress is I actually want to make it just a touch. I'm playing with making this cooler or going to tint and making it more purple. I do know it needs a little more purple because my tulips are more on the pink side than on the orangey red side. I think I will play with a little in both of those sliders, and that looks good. So that's all the edits that I'm going to do for this. You don't want to over edit this image because that won't give you a good mockup. Because your painting is your painting. By changing the edit on this photo, it's not changing your painting, so you want to make sure you're working with the most accurate version that you can while you're editing. So let's move on to editing the thumbnails. Here we have my first photo. What I'm going to do first is crop it. So I'm going to just bring in each of the sides so that it's just inside the pencil line. This is why I didn't worry about painting outside the lines. Then I'm going to go into adjust. I always like to try auto to see if it helps me out. This one does not help me out. We're going to have to do everything manually. We're going to exposure, which is usually where I start. Where I start is I just bring it up or down until I start to lose information. So you can see right about here in the upper left-hand corner, my highlights are blowing out. So I'll bring it back to where I don t think I'm losing any information. Then I'll go on to the next step. I feel like going positive with the brilliance here is evening now a lot of my tones because this is a very delicate thumbnail. Then same thing. If you're not sure what each of these does, you'll start to get a knack for it, but you can go back and forth to each extreme and just see if it's helping you out and then fine tune it. I don't think actually I'm going to be doing anything in highlights. I don't think this helps me out too much with the shadows. I normally on a painting bring down the contrast because it tends to look too over corrected by the phone. But here I'm actually going to, because it's a design against white, I am going to bring it up a little bit just to make it stand out a bit more so it's photographs with a little flap. Our brightness here, sometimes I will bring this up if I find that exposure wasn't quite doing it. I'll bring it up a little bit because that doesn't clip out as much. I don't think I need to do anything with black point on this particular photo. I will bring up the saturation a little bit because it lost some in the photographing. You can play with, if you like, brilliance or vibrance or saturation more. What I do need to do is make this a little warmer, this is photographed a little cool. That looks good. Then you can play with, if it needs to lean towards green or purple in the tint. I can do a little bit of green. That one is good. So I'll hit Done. You can also see against whites and then you can get a better idea if it's done or not. I'll just do one more and then we'll go through everything. So editing the cropping first. Because then it'll show you all the other distracting information. Now this one is pretty close. What I'm going to do first actually is edit the first thing that I see that bothers me or I need adjustment, and that's the warmth. It definitely needs to come up. I definitely think this needs to go more towards green. Then I think maybe between exposure, that actually looks pretty good right there. I might play with the brightness and see, a little bit of brightness. Right there, that was a much quicker edit because it was photographed a little bit closer to what it looks like. I'm going to go through the other two thumbnails and I will catch up with you at the end. [MUSIC] Editing should be fairly quick and painless, but if you find yourself unable to come out with a clear image, I do recommend going back to the photography lesson and emphasizing trying to get a clear and evenly lit photo. Because more likely than not, the lighting is at fault. If you're ready to move on, let's go onto the next lesson where we're going to import all of our images into Procreate. [MUSIC] 6. Importing into Procreate: [MUSIC] A change in workspace is always exciting and it's amazing how fast the project will come together once our files are in Procreate. Once you have your edited files of not only your painting, but also of your thumbnails on your device that you edited them on, whether it was your phone or your computer or your iPad just makes you those files get to your iPad or wherever you're using a program, whether it's Procreate or Photoshop, make sure they get to the device. You need them on of course. I have all my files in here in my photos app. My next step is to open, Procreate. Then instead of clicking New, we're going to click Photo. We're going to open our photo of our painting. Our next step is to go to the wrench and click, Insert a photo. slowly we will add each of our thumbnails. You can see it's a little bit smaller than my canvas just because of the way I cropped it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pinch the whole canvas, the whole board to be smaller than my view. On uniform with the arrow selected, I'm going to pull the corners just past, I'm going to use our pencil just past the edges so that just overlaps everything and then just click on that to set it. [MUSIC] Now as you go, you can go up to your layer file and rename it. I'm going to name this TB for thumbnail or for thumb [LAUGHTER] one. Then going back to the wrench, we're just going to repeat inserting our photos. [MUSIC] You can see here because I had the pen up, it wanted me to write the description. Just by putting the pen back and hitting the keyboard, I can bring that up. Because I like this much better, it tends to not come out when I write it. [MUSIC] Once you have all of your thumbnails imported, you can see them all here in the Layers panel. What I'm going to do is just drag my original painting up and I'm actually going to rename that painting original. We're just going to leave it like that. The next step is going to be to add some sort of sort mask so that we can visualize these behind the things. We're going do that in the next lesson. [MUSIC] Now that all of our pieces are in Procreate, we can use its tools to create a composited image that's flexible, fun, and 100 percent stress-free. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to use a layer mask to isolate our subjects. [MUSIC] 7. Layer Masks: [MUSIC] One of the most fun ingredients of using any composition software like Procreate is learning how to use a layer mask. What a layer mask does, is just tell the program what parts of the selected layer you would like to see and which parts you would like it to hide, not erase, but it's much easier to show you. So let's get started. Picking up where we left off from the last lesson, we are going to now create a way so you can see all of your thumbnails underneath your painting. If you really want to be picky, you can reorder these because that's just the way we will see them and this keeps your numbers in line. So with your painting, original painting layer selected. If you are nervous about accidentally modifying that layer, what you can do is scroll over, hit "Duplicate", then maybe drag one of these duplicates down towards the bottom, and not only make it not visible, but also lock it so that's not touched. We're going to back up to this one here and we're going to click "Mask". What that does is creates a layer mask. Now, initially your layer mask is all white, and layer masks work in gray-scale so anything that is white, is visible in this layer, it's applied to. If you apply black, say with your, so let's have a round brush selected. We'll just make it large, and I have black selected from a basic palette here. If you mark it, you can see everything underneath from this one. If I turn this layer off, you would see that one, so you see where I'm going with this. What you need to do now is basically paint around your subject. Now, you can do that with a larger brush far farther away. Just getting close. You can see the best part is you can undo. We're getting close. Then slowly start making this smaller. You can change up whatever brush you like, whether you like using a flat brush, round brush, whichever. I tend to think this one does a pretty good job, and I like the nice crisp edges because I want a nice crisp outline to my front subject. You can make by pinching outwards, you can make and drag around, make this larger. So I'm just going to go ahead and do this, and I'll catch up with you once it's all outlined. [MUSIC] Now you can see that I am rotating my canvas and that's just so I get a nice smooth natural movement of my wrist. Because there's always a chance I'll put my hand down on the iPad, and I know they do make gloves to prevent your hand from moving things around, but this just makes it easier, and I can just get a nice, controlled line of my brush. [MUSIC] Another thing I do want to note, especially if you're working with watercolor, is if your original sketch, it was very loose. This one was actually was very loose for me. You can see the stem isn't completely straight, there's some stray marks here. Even if I cut this out of my layer mask here, if I were to put in this light background, that green would not go away. I cannot actually delete it in real life, it would actually be there. Now, if you were doing this with one of the darker backgrounds, you could paint over it so you could, in a sense practice what it would look like without it being there. But just to remember that, just because you can delete it in digital, you cannot always delete it in your physical art. [MUSIC] Also, don't forget to get any small areas. If you have a very complicated picture, this might take a minute but sometimes this step really is very important and getting it where you want it to be because it could actually change how you feel about how something blends with the background. So you want to make sure you get the mask in nice and tight, but not too tight, where you're deceiving yourself with what the actual result will look like. Like I said, with like that green spot I had over here, I cannot actually magic that away in real life. You see, I've got all my little spots and it looks like I'm about done. Now, a good way to test, especially since this one here is very light, is to throw in, say, let's change the background color to black and then hide all those layers. You can see right here everything I missed. Just makes sure we're on our layer mask still with our black paint. Let's clean this up just a bit. Now this may not change how you feel about when you're popping in backgrounds, but it might. So say you missed an entire area, you would be able to see that by checking this. That's pretty good for this. Like I said, this is a rough and tumble way to check out backgrounds. We're going to go ahead and to start turning on our backgrounds. You can see that's how the layer mask works. The layer mask, it hides part of the layer it's applied to and lets you see the layers below it. In the next lesson, we're going to go over how to now change up your layers so you can really explore your options. [MUSIC] Probably not as hard as you were thinking, right? Just make sure when adding or subtracting areas to the layer mask that the actual layer mask layer is selected and not your original image layer. Once our subject is isolated, let's play with our layers in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 8. Layer Properties: [MUSIC] Playing with the possibilities of your thumbnails is the fun part. Not only can you explore the different possibilities from each of your individual imported thumbnails, but you can also find new variations by turning layers on and off, changing opacity or changing the layer properties. Now that we have our layer mask, that is hiding a good portion of our whitespace so we can see our layers below, let's flip through our thumbnails and just get a sense for what we like and play with some of the layer properties to explore them a bit more. Right here, you're going to see that I'm going to keep the layers panel open. What I want to do is pinch and drag so that my Canvas is on the side. If you're holding yours in a portrait, I recommend doing it in landscapes. You can have both of these visible the same time. Initially you can see our Thumbnail 1 that really delicate one is behind it now. I'm just going to flip through. I don't love this one actually right off the bat. I feel like it does not match with the strength of the color in there, which you wouldn't know maybe until you saw it. Let's go to the next one. That's really pretty, that's more realistic. As I mentioned when I was doing the thumbnail looks like you're just focused in on a flowers in the foreground and you can see some foliage in the background. This one, same thing. I think it would need a bit more work, but it has that same perspective. I actually really like this one. This one is that, I think I said, that it reminds me of like if there was a garden lantern or something behind it. But I'm also getting little ideas and glimmers of inspiration that maybe I want to do like the sun rising in the background or setting. That could be a really cool idea. Let's play with this one a bit more and see what other fun edits we can make before we go and jump back into analog. Because there's much more you can do to stretch your inspiration. For example if I didn't like any of these, I could always turn on a previous one and change the layer style. By clicking the little n there, it opens up my layer cell which is automatically or defaultly set to normal. You can set it to multiply, which mean a glazes over whatever is visible below it. Adds the colors without any of the whites and none of the lighter colors really show up. Some of your colors themselves will glaze over as a hue. Darken, just adds the colors that are darker than the layer below. As you can see I'm just getting colors in that layer area and then you can just scroll through and see what each of these do. There are definitions what each one does online. We're back to normal and then these are the lighter ones which really aren't doing anything. That one's cool. Overlay sometimes a cool and just check out what it does. Do some of the light ones. None of these are really giving me anything different. That one's cool colors, but the composition of it doesn't really work there with it being inverted. Subtract and divide exclusion, these ones here tend to give you some really interesting, really bold ideas because a lot of people paint later and these tend to flip it. You get really dark effects. Let's change the hue, which is interesting, not in love with that saturation. You can see how this changes that. I didn't love any of those really. We'll go back to normal and just turn that off. You can do the same thing for each one of these. Just play with that; that's cool. I'll multiply here. Just looks there's a background that has that color. You can see how this would create new ideas as you flip through. It's interesting color, a lot more analogous. That's not bad either. But we're going to turn that off. This one I think, is going to not do too much for me here. No. Turn that one off and turn that one off, and actually will just reset these back to normal. In that same thing, you can play with the opacity. Just drag that. Remember, I do want to just have this as the base ones, so we turn this visibility off of the other one. That's without, and you can see, I like some of that. Let's do that and some multiply. Just to suggest a little bit there. Although I'm always curious to see what overlay does and nothing much. Multiply this. This is my idea at the moment and as you can see, it doesn't necessarily look a finished painting. Even if I got this to replicate itself at full-scale, like I mentioned in thumbnail thing, this is not the same size as this. When I go to replicate this, some of the granulation patterns may be different. This is always taken with a grain of salt. It's a guide. In the next lesson, what we're going to do is explore how to use this one step further to plan our path forward. [MUSIC] Was there a thumbnail that suited your tastes perfectly, or did you find some new magic hidden in the layers? The best part about working digitally is that we can try out every idea to see which one we like best. In the next lesson we'll learn about another mask in Procreate that lets us add paint and foresee our next steps after adding the background [MUSIC] 9. Adjusting & Adding Paint: [MUSIC] Even if we find the background we love, we might still see that our subject isn't maybe 100 percent harmonious with it. In this lesson, we're going to add some paint in order to foresee what our next steps would be once that background is added, do we need to add paint to the whole page? Do we need to add paint to just our subject? We'll also touch on how to use a clipping mask in order to make it easier to just add paint to that subject layer. We're going to select our top layer and click the add layer button. Now we're going to explore adding a clipping mask to this. We say we like our background, we might make some tweaks to it later, but we're going to turn Layer 8 here, into a clipping mask. What a clipping mask does that is different than a layer mask because you remember, a layer mask either hit or shows parts of the layer it's applied to. What a clipping mask does is restricts what you're adding in this layer so layer eight. Let's rename that to Added Paint. Anything I add to the Added Paint layer is only going to show up on my subject. If I alter my layer mask, it may show more of this, which we'll see. [MUSIC] What I'm sensing here is that my subject looks flat on this background. It looks like it's backlit, which does not really look like lighting I have on my subject. Because we're working on adding shadows, since I really can't add highlights and watercolor, this works great. What I'm going to do is actually decrease the opacity and what I'm also going to do in under paint file is change this apply mode to Multiply. Hit the N and then scroll up so that it says Multiply, because I'm working in watercolor, and any color I add is more of a glaze than a layer on top. If you're working in oil paint or acrylic or gouache, you might be able just to keep it on normal because you can add, say, a white on top and it will show up versus in watercolor. I can't do that. Multiply gives me more realistic sense of what I can and can't add. Actually looking at my color, this is like a soft lavender color. What this is going to do is give me some nice dusky shadows and you can see I'll just do a big. That's how my clipping mask works. As you will undo that and do it in a full opacity. You can see it only shows up on the tulips. Then working on my tulip here, I would want to maybe see if adding some shadows. You remember this is like a thumbnail sketch. You are doing this for experimentation, you're not trying to get it to be exact. Just like the other thing though, there's a fine line between too loose or too tight. If it's too tight, it's going to take you too long, and you might actually lose motivation to finish the painting. Too loose and you may not get the right show of what you will get. There's that balance which you'll find. Here for each flower, I'm just adding where I think the light will come through. Now, my knowledge of where to paint just comes from my experience painting these multiple times. You may need to play around a bit more reference, some more photos, to see how and where to estimate this as you would with a regular painting. As you can see, I'm leaving this not shadow because the light would stream through just that one tulip versus any of these areas where there are multiple tulip petals that the light would be coming through; I'm going to darken. Same here. I don't like that. That's the thing. It's when you're working digitally to flush stuff out, you can see where your brushstrokes will need to go before you go and add them. Before you dive back in and then overdo it by adding in too many places, you get to try it out here. We're going to increase. As you can see, increasing opacity right now in this area isn't doing anything. If I change this back to normal because if I change this back to normal, it has reached full opacity. That's the color I picked. That's as bright or dark is it's going to go. Now, if I wanted to make that even darker, what I would need to do just like to multiply, is go to this and select a darker color, and then go back. You can see now it shows up. I just want a larger one. I Just want to create a bit more depth. That was a little too much. Make it smaller. With each time I make it darker, not that this pertains to the procreate process, but I'm just doing additions in smaller and smaller areas. That's where I border on the how much makes a big impact. Getting an idea of that crisp contrast is important. But getting it in exactly the right spot, not so important. That's why I'm being a little bit, not sloppy, but loose with my marks. But at the same time I want to go the extra mile and add that extra contrast. If you want to see where you are now and take a step back from your painting, pull open your layers and just click it off. You can see that's the difference. If you're like, wow, I got a little too carried away, you can simply erase things. Or if the best part and the worst part of our extra layers is you could always duplicate. Here you can see that I actually created another clipping mask and it basically doubled up what I did. If you think you need to go darker, you could really quickly see that. Or you can see if you want to do half. Maybe some of these do need that, but some of them do not. Actually we are just going to delete that and we're going to erase, so get brown brush and bring that nice and down, nice and soft there. Little bit here. I want this to be lighter because the light will be passing over the tulip. I think that's pretty good. I want to lighten up the top of this. Say I wanted to explore my idea of making this more a sunrise. Underneath my painting, I'll create a new layer. Let's rename this Added Paint Background. There we go. I don't need to add any mass or anything. It's just going to show up in there. But we are going to change it to Multiply because it would work on the lower layers where I want to start. What we're going to do; let's see. Let's go with a bright orange. I want to go with bright, because as you can see, if I paint across, it's going to show up as if it was like a watercolor paint. Make this a little larger. At this point, unless I want to work very blocky I do want to think there should be a watercolor brush here. We'll just check that so we can add in our marks. Trying make this look like a sunrise or sunset. But I think it doesn't really need stuff in the sky. Now that I'm trying this out, maybe what it needs is a dark green. Make this larger. No that's a weird tangent. Once again, you can work things out. There, cut that out there. Maybe there's something. That's too big. Let's make a brush smaller. You can see this is how you can also adjust your composition. Say we did pine trees, you could finesse this however you would like to whatever degree makes you comfortable to move forward. Then once again, like I said, sometimes it needs the contrast to really look like if it works or not. Adding the extra contrast. Maybe splitting up the backgrounds so that there's some more. That's a little too much. Let's back that up. There we go. You can play with whatever shapes look good to you. You could see that's how it would look in the back. Let's just use this smudge tool. Make it nice and soft. It's like I'm on a Bob Ross show. I think that's a really cool composition. I think that's what I want to move forward with. You can see in this particular lesson, what we did was we used the clipping mask to add paint on top. We also use the layer below to address any adjustments to our background image. [MUSIC] Already knowing some of the steps ahead once we apply paint to paper is very helpful, and being more confident with the choices we've made. Not only do we know what our background may look like with our subject, we've also already gotten a few steps ahead of ourselves in knowing how we need to harmonize our subject with that background. In the next lesson, we're going to export our finished image to use it as a reference in creating this plan on our work in progress. [MUSIC] 10. Export and Apply: [MUSIC] Now that we know what we'd like to do with our work in progress. We're going to learn how to export that image from Procreate in case you'd like to share it, or in case you would like to print it out for working in your studio. Then if you have a work in progress, now's the time to execute your plan. Now that I have an idea that I want to move forward with on this on this unfinished work in progress painting, for example, there's really nothing more I'm going to do with it digitally. But if I want to reference it and don't want to have to have my iPad open, running its battery down with Procreate running. What I will do is go to the wrench and hit "Share" and for example, I will throw it out as a JPEG. If I wanted to do more work on this or say you wanted to make art this way. You can also export it as a PSD, etc. You can export it any number of ways. So I'm going to export as a JPEG. I'm just going to save it to my camera roll. Now you can save any of your options. Say you wanted to look at them or send them to someone else. Say you're doing a commission and you want to have them overlook some ideas, if you give them that much freedom. You can export each one of these and just say, "Hey, which one do you like?" I'm thinking all of these are great. Which one do you like? You can export any number combination of layers. You can export with and without example being there. But this is the one I want do, so I've got the exported, and now I can jump into my own practice and adding this to the painting for real. [MUSIC] I ended up covering the edges of my working progress with some masking fluid in order to be able to do more fluid strokes once I put in the background and not worry about being too careful. [MUSIC] The best part about having that mockup is I can just sit back and enjoy putting paint on paper. I know that this background is going to work with my subject. At the same time, don't be afraid to alter that plan that you made once you start working. The mockup is a guide, not a rulebook. Don't forget that if you did some tilting in the thumbnails to recreate that in your work in progress. You can also choose to add paint that you maybe added later on in Procreate now in the actual background wash. here you can see I'm adding those dark colors that I added on an additional layer while my background wash is still wet. That way the colors are very soft and the edges blend very well with the background. [MUSIC] Isolate and only view the added paint layer in Procreate in order to stay focused while adding shadows to your subject. [MUSIC] As you work on adding paint to your subject on your actual work in progress, keep in mind you may find areas that evolve and require you to lighten some areas of paint in order to make the composition work. [MUSIC] Now that you know how to export your image from Procreate, definitely be sure to share that within the project gallery. I'd love to see what you guys kind of came up with for ideas and how your finished project looks. Then if you have a finished work in progress to actually apply it to in real life, I would love to see how your digital mockup translated into your media in real life. Now it's time to move on to our final lesson, which is our wrap-up and conclusion. [MUSIC] 11. Conclusion: [MUSIC] It's always fun for me to see how just little thumbnails and playing around with creative ideas turns into more authentic creative choices in my work. I know this process has definitely helped me come up with more creative ideas in my own work. I really hope that you find a place for it in your art practice, however that looks. In this class we use the process to come up with background ideas, but also in ways to modify the work in progress we already have to fit with those ideas, to know that there isn't a right or a wrong, those things are always flexible. This is a great process and a great space to try out ideas without that anxiety of things not working. Remember this Procreate process is a tool to help you work through ideas. You don't have to see it as something you have to get right. There is no right or wrong within this process. At any point during the class if you have any questions, please post them in the discussion forum below. I love helping you guys out and nerdy now about this process. So I will be definitely there for you if you have any questions or get stuck. Along the way please share any steps or your final project posting in the project gallery. I'd love to see what you guys do with the process and how it fits into your work. If you enjoyed the class or would like to leave me some feedback, please consider leaving me a review here on Skillshare. If you want to know when I release new things here on Skillshare, follow me on the platform. You can see there is a little Follow button under my little profile pic. If you want to know what I'm doing outside of Skillshare, you can either follow me on Instagram or Facebook just @jillgustavisart and/or go to my website which is jillgustavis.com and sign up for my studio insider mailing list. This is just an e-mail newsletter. It goes out about once a month with any opportunities that I have, any new classes I have published, whether that's in-person or online. That's usually what I share along with little studio insight and such. But as always, thank you so much for taking the class and I really hope that this process helps you become more creative in whatever way your art practice needs. [MUSIC]