Using A Procreate Sketchbook: How to Build a Collection of Work

1. Intro: Many artists dream of having a large portfolio of work that they can share or sell. It can seem really daunting when you're just starting out or learning a brand new medium. It doesn't have to be as scary as you think. Hi, I'm Brittany Bouyer, an artist, illustrator and surface pattern designer living and working in Chicago. I primarily use the Procreate app to create most of my work. I've been using Procreate every single day since 2019. Since then, I've created over 250 illustrations and patterns, completely transforming and streamlining my business. I sell my work in my online shop on places like Society 6 and Spoonflower and in small shops all over the country. I love using Procreate because it helps me keep everything all organized in one place. No more losing notes on loose pages or trying to remember what colors I mixed. Adding the Procreate app to my workflow has changed my life. Well, I too do sometimes create individual illustrations, I've also learned the value of using this platform to create collections of work. I can brainstorm, research, take notes, organize ideas, and create thumbnails all within the Procreate app. Working this way on my iPad has helped me build a large body of work within cohesive themes. My goal in this class is to challenge you to learn a new way to sketch. You do not have to be an illustrator that only draws digitally, in fact, this class is great for beginners or anyone who wants to expand their workflow to plan out larger bodies of work. I will show you how to create all your plans directly on your iPad and use them for many different mediums, like how you can project on a Canvas or use your iPad directly as a lightbox from your sketches. Anyone who wants to create a collection of work should totally join this class. I will walk you through the basics while challenging you to plan ahead so that you can keep up the momentum and finish each individual artwork. If you're ready to tackle your next collection, come join me and let's use the procreate app to create it from the very beginning. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] The class project will specifically be creating six different sketches for your next collection. For the class project, you will create one thumbnail sketchbook page and five individuals sketches from your new collection. Not only will you learn some of the foundational tools to use procreate along the way. But you will see how beneficial it can be to plan the details of your next body of work. Keep in mind, these sketches do not need to be refined, finished art. You should work at your own pace and truly develop your ideas for your collection to make the decision-making process much simpler. I would love to see your work at any stage, so make sure to share in the project gallery section of the class. Now, grab your iPad and a comfortable place on the couch, and let's get going. 3. Why Sketchbooks?: [MUSIC] I'm going to assume that we already know all the benefits of keeping a regular sketchbook. But let's talk about the benefits of a digital sketchbook. I think it has way better potential for easy cleanup and setup. Simply set up your iPad and go. You don't have to worry about the potential waste of paper, so great for the environment. It's simpler to create a mobile library of your ideas easily for you to view at anytime. You can create and assemble quick mood boards without using a printer, who likes to use those pesky things anyways [LAUGHTER]. It's super mobile, perfect to jot down ideas anytime, anywhere, and I specifically like to use it on an airplane. You can develop all your ideas for any project or collections, and it's a simple way to have everything all in one place. For example, if you get an email from a client or a customer, you can automatically use their photo as a reference for the work that you're creating for them. Let's go ahead and take a look at some artists that use the Procreate app to create sketches and add value to their workflow. Here you can see artist Jessica Elena using her Procreate app to create a sketch book like spread. Here you can see she's created a visual that looks just like a paper sketchbook, but instead she's used that as a template to create multiple images from one sketch. Now I will assume that she has that template for the sketchbook page saved to her Procreate app, and she's able to reference it anytime she wants to create a sketchbook spread like these two. Here you can see artist Dave Reed using the Procreate app as his sketchbook. On the left you can see he's used a lot of his sketches to gesture and create movement in some of his illustrations. On his sketch on the right, you can actually see where he started with different steps and different portions of the illustration and combined a fully finished piece in the center. I think one of the most beneficial ways of using Procreate is actually exactly what Dave Reed is doing here. He's starting the sketch on the same piece of paper and then fully developing the illustration in the center. You can always add more layers and develop it as you move forward. Our next artist is Iva Mikles. I truly love watching Iva develop her ideas directly in the Procreate app. I love how she incorporates notes, thumbnail sketches, color swatches, and then final illustration, so that when she's ready to work on her final piece, she has everything already planned out. On her left illustration, you can actually see where she plays with four different color ways. I love how she even adds elements around the border to make her sketches feel more lively. Our next artist is Mike Lowery. Mike has created travel illustrations in his sketchbook for years. I really like both of these illustrations here because the one on the left, you can tell that he's spent a little bit more time and wanted to make a true memory out of that. On the right, he took something very simple, like drawing his day and has turned it into a beautiful composition. Next up we have Claudia from maus haus. A lot of artists choose to use the Procreate app to sketch their work before they would do a finished painting or some printmaking. Procreate gives you the benefit of being able to quickly change colors and test out which one might be more visually appealing for you, or your brand, or anything that you want. I also want to mention that all the examples we've seen today from other artists are images that they've shared on their social media. Most of the time you do not see the works in progress on social media as simple lines and little sketches. I don't want you to be intimidated by these works of art that look like they had been fully formed. Keep in mind that we're creating a collection here and using Procreate to plan. I do not want you to think that you need to use this class to finish six pieces of work entirely. Next, let's talk about why we specifically want to use Procreate when we're building a collection of work. I've already mentioned that it's a huge benefit to be able to have everything when you're building a collection in one place. You never have to worry about misplacing your sketchbook or wondering where a certain color of paint is. It's all right here for you. Procreate helps you quickly create a mood with colors, with all of it's versatile ways to incorporate color from a variety of sources. You're able to quickly plan and layout many art pieces within the collection, pretty much at the same time. You can block out and test colors with just a few simple quick actions. Coming from someone who wasn't always the most organized, there's no way to lose your ideas if they're all in one simple place. You're able to select and slightly move any marks without having to start over. Who doesn't love the idea of unlimited sketchbook pages? Of course, you'll be able to export your work to assist you in any medium that you plan to finish your final work in. Now that we know just how beneficial it can be to keep your sketch book in Procreate, let's get started on the next lesson in creating your very first Canvas page. [MUSIC] 4. Creating a Canvas: [MUSIC] Now it's officially time to get ready to create our digital sketchbook. What we'll do here is create an entire new sketchbook within our Procreate app. I'm assuming that you may not have as many items as I do here if you're new to the program. But what you see here is called the gallery. It's basically a space that holds every single piece of artwork, sketch, idea, or canvas that you've created within the app. To get us organized from the very beginning, I'm going to walk you through how to create a new canvas or a new sheet of paper for a sketchbook in our case here. Come up here to the top right-hand corner and you'll see a little plus sign. If your interface is on light mode, this all might be white in the background and your buttons or words might be black. Touch the plus arrow. Over here you'll probably have a list of a few automatic canvas sizes. I like to work and create my own so that I know exactly what I'm working with for file size. I typically know that when I create a piece of work, I will also work within sizes that I know I want to print for art prints later on. You can see here I have some five-by-seven. Everything is in inches here because I'm based in the US, but I have an 11-by-14, all the sizes that I work with typically. There you can see I did a test one for us. What we'll do is we'll come up here to the little box on the top right corner,and we'll create our own canvas. Again, like I said, I like to work with inches because I know that typically I will print directly from my items. For this case, I won't be printing directly from the work that we're creating in this sketch book. But I do know that I like to work in a square. When I work in a square, I like to do a canvas size or like this blank sheet of paperwork creating, they're called canvases, of a size of sketch that I actually like to work in, and I typically work in an eight sketchbook. I'm going to tap where it says width. Make sure it's changed to inches over here on the bottom, and I will turn that to eight. Tap down to my height and do another eight inches. Again, if you would like to work in a different size, you're more than welcome to do that. I will also show you how to resize a canvas once you've created it should you change your mind later. The other thing I like to keep is I like to keep the DPI or the dots per inch at 300. This again is great to keep in mind if you plan on sharing it on social media, it doesn't need to be that big. But if you do plan on printing, maybe so that you can trace it for a painting later on, I would keep the DPI at 300 so that you can print it to large scale without losing any integrity. The cool thing here is you can actually see how many max layers you'll be able to use on this canvas based on the size. You'll see that if you would change that to an 8-by-14, it went down to 49 layers. It changes how much space you have. I'm assuming we're not going to be using 89 layers here, but it's good to know that we would have the option. Then before you close out, I like to change the canvas name from untitled canvas actually to the size of the canvas that it is. I'll put eight-by-eight sketchbook page. You don't need to change anything else. But if you're curious for color profile, I like to just keep it on the automatic RGB option that it comes to. Most of the things that I print going forward or digital and I can use the RGB color profile, so I leave it at that. Once you're ready, you can come back, double-check your dimensions are set, everything is good. I will hit the yellow "Create" button. Once you've created that custom canvas size for your sheet of paper today, it will automatically open up to that sheet here. Create as many custom canvas sizes as you'd like today. Then in the next lesson, we will organize it all and get us set up to start working. [MUSIC] 5. Staying Organized: [MUSIC] Welcome back. We are still in our blank sheet of canvas or blank paper that we have here that we created in the last lesson. What we'll do is we'll go back and hit the gallery up here in the top left and it will bring us back in. If you've created multiple pages, different canvas sizes, you might see a few blank ones here, but for this, what I want to do is go ahead and get set up basically like we're creating an entire sketchbook based on the work that we're going to create today. From here I want you to actually tap where it says Untitled Artwork. There we can type in, I like to just name it sketchbook page 1. Then for the sake of the class, I'm actually going to keep all of my sketchbook pages the exact same size. A cool trick that you can actually do is to take your finger and swipe to the left and a little few options pop up here. We can hit "Duplicate", and it will actually duplicate the exact same page. You can also see that they're named the same thing, but I'm going to change those in just a second. Because I know that I want to have six sheets of paper today or six pages in my sketchbook, I'm going to duplicate this so that I have six. Now what I will do is actually go through each one, tap on the name and just change that sketchbook page number so that I can keep myself organized and in order. I've got all six of my pages renamed. One of the coolest features of Procreate is that you can actually create folders or stacks as they call them. You can see how they're stacked here so that you can keep all of your projects and sections organized as you move forward because as you can see, it gets messy as you move on. Tap up here and hit "Select". Then this little window or these little circles popped up, they're like checkboxes. You just make sure that you tap on the circle and select each one that you want to create your stack. I'm referring to this as our sketchbook here and then tap stack at the top. Now you can see there's a nice stack of folders here, but we are still in this selection mode, so make sure you turn that off by hitting the X at the top corner. Tap on the name stack where you created your sketchbook. I'm going to name this my Skillshare sketchbook. Once you've renamed your stack, you can hit "Done". When you're ready to move forward, you can actually tap on the entire stack and then it opens it up in this nice preview here, which I really love, especially once we start building elements for our collection. Being able to spread them out here is really, really helpful. I know sometimes it can actually be frustrating when you're working in a physical sketchbook because you have to flip through the pages and everything when you're going through selecting colors and working on elements. This is one of my favorite features of working digitally. If you've come into your sketchbook and you actually see that the pages are numbered backwards like mine, I did do this on purpose so that I could show you. You can actually tap on the photo and move it around the canvas so that you can change and reorganize the pages. I'm just going to tap and drag them over so that they're actually in numeric order. I could just rename them, but I did want to show you how you can rearrange anything even within a stack or your main gallery. Now that we've got all of our blank canvases or our blank pages set up here in our Skillshare sketchbook stack, we can get ready to move to the next lesson. I will show you how to resize a canvas should you not want all of your pages to be exactly the same. I know sometimes we change our mind and it's important to know how to do that going forward. I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 6. Resizing Canvas: [MUSIC] Now that you've got your sketchbook all set up and organized, I want to show you how to change or resize a canvas page once you've already started. Because I know sometimes as you're working through a collection, you realize that you might want to have something be a different size or you want to change the proportions a little bit and instead of doing that directly on the sketch book page, you might actually want to change the size of the page. Let's click on one of your pages here at the end. I like to pinch and zoom on my page just so I can get it a little smaller and see. If you tap on the gear icon under your Actions, here under Canvas you can tap Crop and Resize. This first option is that you already know that you want to change the size before you have drawn on the page. The easiest way is to go to settings and you can actually do the same thing that you did when you were creating a canvas and change the size. You can actually tap on where you have the number. I still have mine selected as inches. Let's say I want to change this to an 11 by 14 inches. I'm still going to keep the DPI, but again, you have the option of changing it. Then if you tap over here, you haven't made anything permanent yet, but you can actually see your original size and then you can see the new canvas size. Here, I'm obviously deciding to make it a little bit bigger and there's no elements on my screen. You can hit Done if you're ready or Reset if you want to go back. Let me show you how to do that one more time. I'm going to change that to an 11 by 14. I see how the proportions are going to be. I think that's good. Let's hit Done. Cropping my canvas. Again, you might change your mind and you're, that might not quite work. If you use two fingers, you can tap and undue. For an example sake, I'm going to go up here to my layers panel and I'm actually going to test if I had something specific on my canvas. I'm actually going to do another layer so you can see how multiple things are selected. I wanted to add a couple of elements here so you can see what it's like to crop a canvas once you already have some content on it. Before you would crop, you'd need to go here to your layers. Any layer you don't want cropped off of the canvas, you need to make sure that those are selected. Tap one and then swipe on each layer that you want to select with it. Then you come over here to the transform tool. Both of my layers are selected. I come over here to the transform tool and I'm actually going to make sure that I uniformly change everything to this bottom right corner. Everything that I drew is still on my canvas here so that when I crop and resize, I'm not going to crop elements off. I want to make sure everything is still there. Turn off your transform tool then you can do the same thing that you did before where you come back, go to actions, canvas, crop and resize. If I go to my settings, I can type. Let's say I want to make this a five by five instead of an eight by eight. You can actually see here, those elements might be cropped off at this point, but you can actually drag the box over and zoom in and see if your elements were moved at all. I'm going to make it a little bigger just in case there's something on the edge and I can crop this way. If I was ready, I could hit Done or I can actually go back hit Reset and I don't even have to type anything in. I can actually move and crop this anyway I want and it's going to show you the height and the width only in pixels, which can be confusing if you're not familiar with the different size options. But there's also a way that you can drag and do all of that as well. I'm going to go back and do that five by five. Tap over here, make sure that all my elements are on and then hit Done. Now, just for the sake of showing you how things work, if I would've left all of my elements the same size as my canvas and then I would've gone to crop and resized that five by five, you can actually see that there is no way for me to get all of that on unless I went back to a larger size. You have to make sure that you select the elements you want to stay on the canvas before you would crop. Now that we've played with how to resize a canvas, we'll get ready to dive right into our sketchbook tools in the next lesson. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 7. Using Shortcuts: [MUSIC] We're back here and I want to show you a little bit about the shortcuts in my favorite sketchbook tool so that we can dive right in. If you're already familiar with how to use Procreate a little more thoroughly, you might be able to skip over this lesson, but I will show you my favorite tools specifically as it relates to sketching. I will not be diving into every single thing the app offers. I do have another class called Intro to Procreate, Creating Depth with Layers. Let's get started on using specific sketching tools and we'll go from there. First, I want to start with a few brushes. I'm using the Apple pencil 2 here just for reference and I have the latest version of the Procreate app. Do make sure that your app is updated so that some of these features I'm talking about are actually available to you for sketchbook specific projects that I'm working on. I recommend having one pencil, one pen, and one paintbrush so that we can actually use the paint to cover larger areas later when we start to color block all over our sketch. If you come over here to your brush libraries that are over on the right, you'll see that the first one is actually your writing tools. They're actually all the exact same tools, but these ones in the middle are used for smudging. The ones here are used as erasers, so they're all the exact same brushes that you have in each one, but they just have different purposes. Here is your layers panel. Again, I won't be diving fully into that, but as we move along, you'll see how I use it in my workflow and you will be doing that as well. Here is your color panel. There's lots of ways to choose color. We will dive into in a later lesson as we choose colors and how that will reflect our collection that we're building. To dive in directly with our drawing materials, I suggest using again the sketching pencil. I like to use the 6B pencil. A feature that they have recently added to the app is a recent folder up here. Any brush that you make a mark over here on your Canvas will actually go directly into that recents folder. Go down here to Sketching, choose the 6B pencil in order for it to go to your recents category, you need to make sure that you make a mark. For now we can just tap two fingers to undo that. If you want to redo, I'll show you this a few times. You tap three fingers to bring the mark back. Probably the most beneficial shortcut you'll use [MUSIC] throughout your whole time using the Procreate app. Now you can go to your recents category and you'll see that the 6B pencil, it's there. The next one that I suggest is coming down to Calligraphy. I like to use the script pencil because it has a nice fine point and it is also at a full opacity. You can see here some of these gradients, we don't want that for this specific purpose, make one mark with that, undo if you'd like. If you come down here to the painting category, I suggest using either the round brush or the flat brush. I typically use the flat brush. You can actually change the size of the brush over here on the left-hand side. If you're using the Apple Pencil 2, you might actually have a little gradient here. I'm pressing really lightly and if I push a little harder and bring my pen upstream, it gets more bold. If you do want to change the opacity at all, the second part over here on the left is how you lower the opacity overall. I'm pushing fully, but the opacity is down. I'm going to undo all of that, bring the opacity backup for my brush and then let's make sure that all of those are in the recent folder. Perfect, the ones I've used here. Let's start with the pencil. Again, choose any color I like to do a warmish color. I'll do a little bit lighter so that I can see it here on my layers preview. Let's do three separate flowers. We're just testing those brushes. The first flower doesn't matter where it is, just make it really simple. Then if you come back over here to the layers panel, tap the plus sign to create a new layer. Now I'm going to choose the script brush, the ink brush. The reason I'm having you do a new layer is because I think it's really important that anytime you want to have a new element, a new line, a new color, anything, you would get in the habit of creating it on a new layer. Because once you have something on a new layer, it allows you to combine things, but you can't necessarily always separate things. I think that this is always the best way to just get in the habit. Because I'm using a new pen or a new brush, I will come over here and I will try that one. Draw that in, same thing. Let's add a new layer because I'm going to switch to the paintbrush. That's very big. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to come over here and change that a little bit smaller. Great. If you come over to the Layers panel, you'll see we have three separate layers. Because this is just a small exercise, I'm not going to have you rename all the layers we'll do that as we move on to the next lessons but you can see that they are all separate. I'm going to grab this Layer 1, which is the layer with my pencil mark. If you've come up here to the Transform tool, which is the diagonal arrow and it's going to select everything that is on that Layer 1. When I have that selected, I can actually move it along anywhere on the Canvas. Really helpful when you're planning out anything on a Canvas. If you don't like that clicking that's happening, sometimes you need it, sometimes you don't, you want to move in more freely, you just turn all your magnetics where you're snapping off and you can move that a little bit more subtly. That is very beneficial. I typically use the uniform if I want to resize something, make it bigger or smaller and it keeps it in the intact shape that you had created in the beginning. We can actually do the same thing to all the layers if you want. The transform tool is grabbing everything that's on that layer and then allowing you to move that freely. We will take those three layers over here in the Layers panel and you can grab and pinch them to go. I'm putting them all on the same layer now. Let's say that we had actually used all three of those brushes and created these flowers all on the same layer. You realize that you don't want that to be the case. You want to be able to move them separately. The other tool that you'll use the most is called the Selection tool. A little window pops up down here and it gives you a lot of options. For our sake, most likely we will use the Freehand. Freehand actually lets you select anything you want. Let's say there were things attached here that I wanted to move. Once you have that selection closed, you can come back up to the Transform tool and it's actually going to move that selection even though it's on the same layer of these items, I can move them really close. If I move them really close, so let's say they're almost touching here and I turn that selection tool off, they're now all on the same layer still but just touching. Let's say that I wanted to do the same thing but I didn't really like how that was laid out. If I come back in here with that freehand tool, it's going to leave a weird mark here between where I've selected. That's why I always suggest people putting things on different layers. Because now you can see edge on both of these flowers. It would've been better if I just would've not had them on the same layer and then moved them over top of each other separately. Let's say I don't like any of that. Again, I can tap and hold my two fingers to go back and undo some actions or I can manually tap slower and redo and undo. The next thing I want to show you while we're in here exploring some of the tools is again, we are on that one layer. All three elements are there, I'm going to come back here and make sure that those are separate again. I undid that. Let's say I want to have this on a separate layer because I plan on changing that outline a different color in the future. I want to come over to the selection tool and again I'm using the freehand option. Let me show you this; the option to use a rectangle, if you're using these organic shapes can be difficult sometimes if you have a bunch of things close together, but ideally it does the same thing. Once it's selected here under the selection tool, I can take three fingers swipe downward and a copy and paste window comes up. I use this the most when I want to either duplicate an element, which sometimes they do, sometimes they don't because it can lose actually its original integrity. It might blur or pixelate the element a little bit, but typically all the sides sometimes at a later option that I actually don't want them to be on the same layer. I will cut and paste that. Now you can see that that selection has moved from Layer 1 and gone to its own layer. Now I can move that freely and if I stacked it over, it's not a problem because it's on a different layer. Now that we've explored a few of the basic tools that we'll be using today, we will really start working on our collection ideas and how to use and utilize Procreate in the best possible way. I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 8. Choosing Collection Theme: Let's talk about how to choose a theme for your collection. Choosing a theme can be one of the hardest parts about creating a collection of work. You might feel like there's a little bit more pressure because you're creating more than one piece. In this lesson, I will share some of my favorite ways to narrow down all of your ideas into one collection theme for the class. One of the first ways I like to narrow down my ideas is to check all the things that I admire. Looking at some artists that you've found on Instagram maybe by your saved posts or people that you follow, take a look at those and see if there's a theme among them. I'm sure many of you have a Pinterest account, so check on some of your favorite and most active boards. You might even be able to tell just from your homepage what a lot of your interests are. If you looked at some of those Instagram saved posts and your Pinterest boards, is there a general theme, maybe with color or subject matter that you could potentially research? Maybe you've really been admiring some artists, both old or modern-day. Taking some time to research their entire career can really give you some insight into how their work has evolved. Because you like their work now, maybe something that was created a few years ago could be inspiring to you now. Taking note of all these things can be really beneficial and you might even start to see a couple of themes. Take notes and add it to your canvas. Since we've talked a little bit about my inspiration from my collection, I want to show you exactly how I found a little bit of research. Here you can see two artists, one modern-day Olga Masevich and Alphonse Mucha. I chose these two as inspiration because I love the colors and the movement that Olga uses in her illustration. I have always been a big fan of the Art Nouveau movement and Alphonse Mucha. I want to incorporate a lot of floral illustrations and also a lot of the borders and stuff that you'd see in his work is also shown in mine. Now I know this might sound like a no-brainer, but sometimes we forget that we really need to follow our own interests in order to stay motivated while creating an entire collection. I really want you to take your time here and answer these questions. Think about some of your hobbies that are unrelated to your art interest. In general, what do you like to read about? Even if you're reading articles, magazines, or books, take note of those themes that you are generally drawn to. If you like to travel, where have you gone that has truly left lasting memories and what did you love about it most? Thinking about what you enjoy when you have a day off are some of the most insightful things you can imagine. Consider what you love about certain TV shows or movies and what it is that draws you to them. Is it the theme? Is it the characters? Is it the clothing? All of the above. What are some of your guilty pleasures? Do you really have an obsession with dark chocolate? That's me. Is there something right now that you're just really interested in? Are you suddenly interested in fashion? Are you following true crime podcasts? If there's something on your mind that you're curious about and that you can't wait to talk to somebody about, that might be a perfect theme. Here I'll show you how some of my own interests will make their way into my collection. My interest in women's empowerment and my obsession with wildflowers. I am currently in love with researching artists from the 1920s. I love French architecture and positive messaging. Again, this might seem like a no-brainer, but consider the things that you just simply like to draw. I'm going to assume that you're already an artist if you are here. What is something that you almost always want to include in every one of your artworks? What's your go-to doodle? Is there something that you feel really confident drawing without much stress? Is there a subject that you love to include in your work? It's really important to make sure that you include elements of your own style. Let's say you really like drawing parrots, but you want to work on a collection about women. Thinking about creating work that combines both of them while still being true to yourself in your unique style. Next up, I'll show you how I will include some of my signature style elements in a totally unrelated collection theme. As you can see, there are no female figures here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can't include them or create an entire new collection about it. As you can see here, there are absolutely no female forms and that is the entire theme of my collection. As I take notes in the following lessons, I'll try to figure out ways to incorporate the new theme elements, including some of my poppies, flowing flowers, leaves, vines, and all of my favorite things about Art Nouveau. Before we dive into this next slide, I want to put a little bit of a disclaimer here. I do not think you need to consider an audience when you're creating your work, even if you're planning on selling. I truly think artists make their most amazing work when they are following their own passion and their own interest, so considering an audience can sometimes be tricky. With that said, you might obviously need to make some money from your creative endeavors here. Doing a little study based on what your audience engages with can be really helpful. Again, I don't think it needs to be the entire driver of your theme here or your collection, but I do think it's good to consider. Are there any patterns you see within your audience? What do they typically engage with the most on social media? What are some of your bestsellers? What's the topic you and your audience discuss a lot? For example, if someone sends you DMs based on some things that you share personally in your stories, what is that about? If they are messaging you about something that's really interesting, then maybe there's a little spark there that could inspire you. Now what I can say about my own audience is that they almost always respond the best when I am truly authentic and share stories about why I was inspired to create something. Everyone is really kind because they are connecting to the work because I have shared my very own story related to it as well. I'm sharing this example because I actually have this design in quite a few color waves and this is by far the most popular on social media and as far as how many sales I've had. Since I know that these colors are the most popular option, I know that I should probably incorporate more of these warmer colors in this upcoming collection. I also know that the visual representation of a uterus anatomy was very highly appreciated and accepted by the women's community, that is my audience. I'm trying to figure out ways that I can incorporate more of that empowerment in the next collection. Now, I know I say a lot of things are my favorite, but this is definitely the best part about creating a new body of work. Doing research can inspire you in so many different ways. One of my favorite ways to research is to take time when I'm scrolling on Instagram and save posts into a collection folder. Again, I'm going to assume that all of you have a Pinterest account or access to Google Images. It's a great place to source inspiration based on some of the content you've already enjoyed. I personally love the new feature on Pinterest where you have created a board and if you scroll down, it will actually give you curated pins related to everything that was in that board. It is essentially unlimited. Take screenshots of advertisements that you see, take photos anywhere you go, even if you're walking down the street and you see a bus advertisement, take a picture of it. I have a feeling you will be overwhelmed [LAUGHTER] in a good way with all of your inspiration. I like to keep a folder in my photos app on my phone called Inspiration so that you can turn to it whenever you need. When I'm personally in this research phase, I like to go to Pinterest and I will click on a few things that I already know. For example, like mentioned earlier, I love Alphonse Mucha's work. I will search him in the search engine of Pinterest and then from there a lot of other art will come up that is more modern-day. Then that starts the rabbit hole. Well, the exciting rabbit hole, at least. From there, I'd moved on to some vintage photography, women's empowerment art, and so much more. The cool thing about all of this research is that not everything here is specifically related to one another. But that's the goal of our own collection theme is to take everything that inspires us and turn it into our own creation. If you're still not sure what theme you'd like to choose today, there is a theme idea list down in the project resource section of the class. Now we're getting one step closer to starting our collection. In the next lesson, we will take notes about our ideas. We'll brainstorm potential subjects to include. We will create repetitive elements throughout the collection and we will begin our thumbnail sketches and lay out each piece in this collection. I'm really excited to get started with you in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 9. Thumbnail Sketching: Now that you've got your theme selected for your collection of work, we can jump right into the brainstorming and planning part of your sketchbook. I want to come over here to my layers panel. I just want to delete these layers and then you can actually tap this one, and you can just clear. That way we still have one layer that we're working on. Before getting started, I always make sure that I check to see what layer I'm working on, if there's no funky stuff. We have a clear, empty page to begin. My collection of work is going to be all about women and female bodies. I've been really drawn to working on women's empowerment in my work lately, and how our bodies change as we get older and how we want to work on, accepting whichever stage of life we're in. While that can be a heavy subject or a theme, just any central theme where you can tie all the pieces together is what matters the most here because this is the next collection of work that I'm working on, I knew that this was a great way to share my process and encourage other people to create some work with this Procreate sketchbook this way too. Whenever I start my first page of my sketchbook planning, I have a few steps. The first step I like to do is to actually make some notes or to write elements. Come up here and just choose a color. I typically use a brown instead of a black. But you can select any color that you want to use as your base for starting your sketches. I'm going to come up to my brush library under the paintbrush here and choose my sketching pencil. I'm going to pinch and zoom, turn it to the right just as if I was writing on a piece of paper. I just want to test the size of this real quick. I think I want it to be just a little smaller. In this first writing part, I actually just want to write a few items about the theme. I want this to be a women's collection because I want to explain a little bit about this collection just so that when I'm sketching my thumbnails and moving forward, I can refer back to this and keep it in mind each time I make a decision. I'm really focusing on body, positivity, confidence. Just a few ideas of words that come to mind so that I can keep referring back to it. One little shortcut to tell you is if you're using the Apple Pencil tool, you can actually tap the pencil twice with your finger, and it will toggle between the eraser and the pencil option. That's a really nice shortcut. I'm going to take the pencil and draw another little line here. If I actually stop and hold and don't pick up my pencil, I can create a straight line. Then if you use your other hand and tap one finger, it will actually make it parallel to the edge and lock that in place there. That's a nice little thing if you're working later. Now this next section, I want to write just a list of overall ideas that come to mind of what I could include in the collection as far as elements go, anything that you can imagine. Again, if you're doing gardening, you might be thinking that you want it to be about actually planting the garden. Planting the garden could be you're planting things. It could be it's about the seeds, the roots, the dirt, just thinking of those elements that you want to maybe repeat over in your collection. I'm going to include a lot of wild flowers. Wildflowers tends to be a lot of things that I include in my work. Hopefully, you've got a list of about 10 or so items that you plan to repeat throughout the collection. When you start to draw, you can remember that those are the repetitive elements that will tie together an entire collection. Because we have all of our writing on this one layer, I'm actually going to tap the layer and I'm going to rename so that we have this nice and organized. I will name this Notes. Then because I didn't really realize how big I was writing, I'm actually going to take the transform tool, select everything that's on that layer. I'm going to make it just a little bit smaller. Now I have that uniform here so that I know that not changing or distorting. If I was using free form, it would distort the body of the text or the body of my handwriting. Am bringing that a little bit smaller and I'm going to move it up here to this corner. I have a lot of space to work on my thumbnails. If you're thinking you want to add a little bit more to your notes, you can obviously add as much as you'd like here. I actually I'm going to add another little section down here. The idea for this section is still about notes, but I really want to write some ideas of how I could interpret body positivity and confidence, and all of these words that I've listed for the women's collection. We're going to start a new layer because we're working on something totally different. I'm going to put thumbnail backgrounds. I'm going to abbreviate a little bit so that I can see the entire renaming title there. Now what I would do next is I might actually change this background color to something a little warmer because it hurts my eyes to stare at a really bright white screen like that. You can obviously bring that anywhere that you like. But I like to have a little bit of a warmer screen here. Knowing that we're on the thumbnail background layer, we'll come over here to the selection tool and use the rectangle. Under the rectangle, I'm going to try to draw something as close to a square as possible. I'm going to come over here and grab a pure white and actually drag it into that. Because our thumbnails, we know that our sketch with pages are all square unless you change yours, you can keep it to a proportion that you'd like. What I will do is actually duplicate that layer, drag it over and I'm going to turn my snapping on from the transform tool so that it keeps that in a nice little line for me. Then I'm actually thinking I'm going to pinch and grab those to bring those both together. Going to start a new layer. We don't have to rename that one just yet, but I'm thinking this time I might actually end up using a few rectangles, maybe an 11 by 14. I'm going to fill that, drop and fill the color into the selection. You can see how the selection is showing there and then I'm going to duplicate that layer as well. Grab the Transform tool, bring it over because I'm thinking maybe I'll have two that are 11 by 14 and then maybe two that are square. Then I'm going to combine those. We have all our thumbnail backgrounds and I'm going to move them up just a little bit, so I can add another one down here. This time I'm thinking maybe I will have maybe some smaller options. There's my fifth one and I'm thinking that maybe I might have a horizontal, just to give myself an option, and we'll drag the color over and fill that in. Now we have, you can see that there are all of my background thumbnails here, all on one layer, which is super helpful. For some reason, it's messing with my brain that the bottom ones are not aligned. I'm going to grab that Selection tool. I'm still using the rectangle just because I've been using actual rectangular shapes. Tap the Transform tool and then I'm going to turn that snapping off, so that I can drag this where I'm feeling it needs to be and then turn that off. There that looks much better and then I like to leave a little section down here in the corner for more of my color choices later on. Then I'm going to come back to my notes because I see that this text is actually so much bigger than the other ones. I'm just going to go around that and bring it a little smaller, so that I have more room for the colors later. Now we are ready to move on to the sketching our elements here. Starting a new layer. I am going to put sketch number 1. Just for now, I'm going to keep everything on separate layers, just so we get in the habit of doing so. For sketch 1, I want to come back and I want to use this Brush tool here and I'm going to use my 6B pencil. Then to select color that's already here, I want to show you this trick too. I'm thinking I want to use this brown color again. Instead of going back to the Color panel, I can actually drag my finger across here and choose any color that's already on my canvas. We can use this dark brown color. I'm going to start drawing my first idea here in my little thumbnail. If I look in my list of notes that I've written, I know that I'm thinking I want to have some arches, some flowers, some body size variety, and maybe some women or female forms. I'm wondering how composition-wise I would like that to go. These sketches are really simple and really just about how I want to lay out items. For example, here I'm thinking of one body shape that would be very cool. I'm thinking I want to put little bit of a big arc shape around. Maybe some variety here. This is really where you get to play with the overall view of something in a collection, because sometimes we go straight into designing one piece and then we often forget how we can make that relate to another item in the collection. Here I'm thinking I want this one to have a little bit of a vine around the arc. These really cool plants at our house right right and I'm thinking, maybe I'll draw outside of this line, and have an idea of the plant that I'm thinking of. Just going to write a little note up here. Then for this one, I typically have a few go-to flowers that I use in my work pretty often. I'm thinking that this one is going to have more lilies. I want them to be not super symmetrical down at the bottom. But there I can at least get a little bit of a gist of how I would want that to work. Then I'm thinking because I love Alphonse Luca, I would like to have some crown shape behind the woman. I would like her to have her hair up in this way. Again, we can go into as much detail as you'd like, but that gives me a little bit of an idea for the first square. I'm going to slowly move onto my other thumbnails and just keep referring back to my list here. What can be my repetitive elements? I think I really like these arches, so I think I'm going to go through and add them all on each one and just see how it looks, and see how I can add more female forms within them and then change the flowers around. Take some time and start to just play with those elements repeated in each one. Then you can narrow it down to how you would like that to look in a final piece of work. I just finished up my thumbnail sketches. I had originally planned on five, but now I've sketched out six for now. We'll see if I end up adding another page to my sketchbook stack that we created. If you're still working on your sketches, take your time. I will meet you in the next lesson, where we come back and we start planning our section over here all about colors and how to choose colors, and how to repeat them in a way that creates a cohesive collection. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Choosing Colors: [MUSIC] Welcome back to the next lesson where we will focus on creating and choosing colors to create a cohesive collection. I love to do this part while we're in the thumbnail stage of creating a collection, mostly because I feel like you need to see all of it together in one group while you're selecting colors. I'll show you exactly how I plan that in my collection planning. Let's go up to the top. Let's tap here at the thumbnail background layer and tap a new layer above that. The reason we're doing that is because we will actually end up sketching a few of our colors within our thumbnail so that we can actually see the cohesive color palette together on our sketches. Let's rename that layer our colors. I'm going to actually do this color as one because we're going to have two separate color elements going on here. Now, creating and planning colors and choosing colors can be one of the hardest parts because it is essentially infinite. Over here, if you tap the Colors panel, you'll actually be able to see over here under palettes that there are tons of palettes here. I have created some of these myself, some of them down here at the beginning. You will actually see some that should be automatically in yours. I might have deleted mine like these, they should look something like this. There are so many ways, again, to choose colors. I have a color palette that I know that I typically use for my work, which is usually this one. You can tap any of the ones that you see and set it as your default. Then when it's your default, it will actually come down here and show up in that little panel here when you click your colors in the first place. It's really easy to toggle back and forth between your colors that you're planning on using. The fun thing about color palettes are, again, it is infinite, but there's a lot of ways that you can create color palettes without necessarily having to do it manually. To do so manually though, I will show you we can add a new palette up here. To create a new palette, you simply hit ''Create New Palette''. You can tap there and rename at any point using your keyboard. I'm going to name this Test just to show you. I get untitled test. What this means is that I can actually go through here, come back to any selection. I like to use the disk because I get the whole color wheel. I can actually come down here and just tap when I choose colors that I really want. Simple and easy. If you do one, that u was an accident, you can actually tap and hold, and it will come up to let you delete the swatch. If you want to change one of the colors, so you can set to current color. One of the most fun ways that you can actually add a new color palette is you can actually use it from a camera. I love using this when I travel. If there's a beautiful scene, you can actually hold it up and it will manually move and choose colors from your current surroundings. One of the most fun ways you can add a new color palette is to come to the Plus sign, hit "New From Photos'', and you can choose a photo from your photo library. I'm going to come in here from some of these flat leaves that I've created over time, and insert one of those. As you can see, it created a color palette specifically from all the tones that were in that picture. Again, if you've been to an art museum, you've been to a show and you just saw something really beautiful and loved the colors, if you take a photo of it, you can import the photo here and it will come up with a selection of the most predominant colors. Really valuable tool here and actually really like the color palette. What I'm going to do here, again, you can lead into so many possibilities from color. A few things to consider are the mood of your work. Again, I will give you suggestions for the garden theme. It might be something about the seeds and the roots, so those might be more deeper Earth colors. If it's something more about like springtime garden and the foliage and the flowers that come from planting, you might have something more vibrant and bold. I am going for something a little more earthy and a little bit more Jewel tones. I'm going to come back to one of my favorites and then I also saved another one recently that was this, so going to set as my default. Come over here and I'm going to choose that paintbrush I had chosen earlier. I'm going to use the round brush this time because I know it's a bolder brush. I'm going to check the size here. I will probably just make some dots so you can choose a color palette, come over here to disk so you can see the one that you chose. You can come over here to the disk and just choose the colors from your color palette. Just press and make a little full-sized color of that, almost as if you're doing a little swatch sample down here on your own. I think it's really helpful to see the colors next to the artwork as well, because then you can actually see how it will be interpreted on each piece. You can use the ink brush here too, if that makes more sense. I'm really liking this variety of colors here, that was the same one. Then thinking that I might actually end up including some a nice Ruby tone in some of those. I'm going to add that too. You can see I've got a little bit of warmth added to all of those colors because I feel like they're very comforting. Because my theme is positivity and confidence and acceptance and about bodies, I feel like these are great colors to ground people and to make them actually feel comfort when they see these colors. If I want to add a few more, I can also dragging my colors around a little bit, pop it into the color palette, which I actually forgot to do that with the pink. I'm going to choose this lighter one and select it over here. I like to say, choose about five or six that you will use over all of them. I'm assuming I will use most of these 10 and brown colors with the green in all of them. Then my outliers are more of these bolder colors, these oranges, these blues and these greens. I'm also thinking I'm going to need more like a gold color. I'm going to pop that in my palette over here and then make sure I draw it here too. Now what we'll do, so we have that on one layer, we'll add a new layer. This will be what I like to call my color sketch. You'll probably want to change your brush. Actually, I didn't really like the opacity that was showing at the beginning of that brush, so I'm going to come back to this ink brush. I'm on my color sketch, got my ink brush selected. I might bring it down a little, since these are little sketches. We put that color sketch layer on top of the thumbnail photo or on top of the thumbnail shapes here so that they're going to show up like it was on paper and then they're under the sketch. I'm going to assume that I'm actually going to use this dark brown as any outlining or shape outline that I might do. I'm really happy I chose to do that first. I'm going to select this yellow here because I wrote here that I'm going to do some sunflowers. If I come in and I just almost color in underneath those sketches, I can get an idea if I like how that's planning out. Thinking maybe I'll have some color up here in the arcs a little bit. Then I'm thinking I might have some of this blue up in here as well. Really like the way that looks together. You're just going through all of your sketches and just seeing how the color would plan out. I think I would come in here with a little bit of green. If you don't like how all the color's going on top of each other, I could add a new layer here and come back and add all this green underneath of here if I wanted. If you want to be a little bit more organized and really test your color, you can keep adding as many colored layers as you like. I'm really liking the way that is. I think that I might end up taking this lighter brown and actually filling in how the background would look around those arcs. The cool thing about this sketch brush is once I have closed the shape, so there's no open-end, I can actually take the color drop and drop it over there so it fills in that entire background. I do really like how that works, so I might have to make that symmetrical on that side. Take some time and find the colors that will be repetitive throughout. I already know that I'm going to use the brown as my outline element. I'll probably use the greens in each one and then I'm going to add those outlier colors. Take a few minutes and really get your color sketches in here, and then we'll meet at the end of this lesson and I'll show you how to export so we can use this as a reference. [MUSIC] Once you've finished laying out your color thumbnails, you can see I've got a theme going here. I've got the repetition of the color in the background, I got the repeated color of the outlines. Then I've incorporated a lot of the green and then a contrasting warm color like the pink, the orange, the nice bright yellow here, or the nice sunflower yellow. I'm really liking the way that that's taking shape right now. In order to move on so that we can sketch some of our entire pages together and you are happy with the way that this is working in your colors or set up, I'll show you how to export. I want to export this because we'll be importing it into all of our other sketches so that we can use it for our reference, for our colors, our notes, and then all of our sketch compositions. Come over here to the Gear icon, we'll hit ''Share''. Then because we'll be importing this directly back into our files or our sketchbook, we will actually use the JPEG. All we're going to do is actually save that image to our image library. Now we're ready for the next lesson where we take everything a little step farther and start working on each individual sketchbook page. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 11. Sketching Together: Welcome back to the next lesson. In the last lesson, we took a moment to export that thumbnail into a JPEG, and now we're going to bring it into our next sketchbook page that we have set up for ourselves. I will start here and click on my sketchbook page 2. We'll come up here to the wrench icon. I think that's a wrench. Then we'll click the Add. I want to insert a photo, and I'll click right on that photo that we exported that has all of our thumbnails on it. You can automatically see that it actually has the Transform tool selected once you've added any photo, but what I like to do is come over here and you can actually see on the Layers panel that it's on its own layer. We won't need to keep it toggled on the whole time. We can actually turn that off and on whenever we need to by using a little checkbox over here, just to be able to refer to it whenever we are looking for our colors or we want to check the layout here, maybe be reminded of our notes, so we have that saved for whenever we need to reference it. Let's go ahead and add a new layer, and then I will actually show you another little trick that I like to use from sketches. Let's take that Layer 1 and turn that off. Actually, let's rename that first. We'll call that our reference. Then I want to come back to the gallery, so it'll bring you to your sketchbook that you've created. I want to tap on that sketchbook page thumbnail. We come over here to the Layers panel. Actually want to take this sketch layer that I have, so that if you click on and off, you can see which elements that is. I want to actually grab that layer, I'm going to hold it and drag it as I go back to my gallery, come here to my page 2, and I'm actually going to release the drop, and it will import that directly into this page. That's actually one of my favorite parts about this. One thing that we can do, so you can see here, it is one of your inserted images. I would actually like to start with one of these. Let's see what I want to start with. I'm thinking I'm going to start with maybe the lilies one up here in the corner. Let's take our Apple pencil, and I'm going to use the Selection tool and I'm actually going to draw freehand around those elements, and I'm going to cut and paste it. I'm going to turn off that inserted image, so I know the inserted image is the other sketches that we drew. From here, I'm going to rename this layer that only has that small sketch on it. I'm going to layer that Sketch 1. From here, I'm going to take it and it's going to be really distorted, most likely because it was a very small sketch, and I'm just bringing it up to a potential scale. Then back here, I'll take that Sketch 1, and if you click on the layer where it says N, you can actually lower the opacity, which is one of my favorite tools, I use it all the time. I like to bring it between 20 and 30 when I'm working on sketches. Tap back on that new layer. If you don't have a new Layer 2, you can just tap the icon there to give you a new layer. I'll rename this one to Sketch 2. Basically, our plan here is to just refine these sketches a little bit. I'll probably end up doing 1-2 more sketches here and then maybe even an ink layer, so that I can actually see everything coming to life. From Sketch 1, I'm going to use my pencil. I'm going to find one of those colors that I want to use for my sketch, and then I'm going to start with all of those outlined elements that I have here. Even if I wasn't going to outline my work, I'd still need to section off the way things look. One of the first things I'll do, I know that I want this to be centered. I'm going to come over here to the canvas layer under Actions, I'm going to turn my drawing guide on and I'm going to edit that drawing guide. I'm going to turn on the symmetry option, and make sure that that symmetry is vertical. That's because I want everything to be centered vertically. Click "Done". Now I'll have a nice reference point later on. Then I'm going to turn off the Drawing Assist, because I don't want it to copy my drawing on each side. I've got my pencil, I'm going to bring that up a little bigger, and now I want to start with this arc I have in the middle. That's basically my frame, and I will really start to bring all that together. Whenever you're drawing a circle or some element that you want straight, like the same line that I showed you earlier, you can actually not pick up your pencil and it creates a smooth ellipse, but if you want a perfect circle, you can actually tap your other finger and it will bring you to a perfect circle. I'm thinking I want it to be a little bigger, perfect. Then what I can do is because it's the only thing on that layer, I can actually go here and you can see it's slightly off-center. I'm going to turn on my Magnetics and my Snapping, and you'll see as I drag it over there's a nice yellow line there. Perfect enough for me. Then one of the things I like to do here, actually I will turn that Drawing Assist on. What happens with the Drawing Assist is it actually shows you what you're drawing will be like on both sides. If I draw on this side, it's going to automatically draw on that side. I'm drawing down and just creating this arc shape. I want to edit it a little bit here. Then I'm going to make sure that I still have the assisted on, and I'm going to erase. I want to make sure that I am erasing with a brush that I like. Let me go back to my recent script. I'm going to erase with that one. I want a nice clean erase. Then the reason I kept the Drawing Assist on was because I wanted it to erase on both sides. There. Now we have our first arc. I'm coming back, and I'm going to turn that Drawing Assist off because I don't want the assistance anymore at the moment. Now that we've got everything set up for this sketch, we can continue working on it and filling out the remaining details. I will meet you at the end of this lesson in just a few minutes. Now that I have gotten a second round of sketches ready, again, I like to do these sketches really quick. I actually don't need to do another sketch, but what I want to do next is actually do the color part together. Similar to what we did earlier, I will actually use a larger brush and I will color block underneath. So I'm going to turn this first sketch off, the one that we brought in. I will focus on working on the color next instead of doing another sketch layer. But you can just keep doing that as you build on. You can turn one of them off, you can lower this one and start refining another sketch if you like. For me, I'm going to add a layer between the two sketches that I have and I'm going to name this my color sketch. What I want to do in order to work on this and build color at the same time is we're going to use a reference photo. If you come over here to the Actions you can actually turn reference on, and then you can choose a couple of different options of how you would like to use your reference and you can actually make it a little bigger, a little smaller. I'm going to use the image and I'm going to come back here and use that same photo that we used here and I'm going to zoom in really close. Then I'm going to drag this over to the side. So I can see exactly how I had originally planned that. Let's see. When I did the colored background here, I knew that I wanted to play with a little bit of a texture, so let me come down here to my textures elements and see what I want to use. I'm going to use maybe some of the drawing. Here we go. Artistic crayon is one that I really like. I'm going to use this thin one. I might end up using a couple of color sketches for reference, but I want to, let's make that really big and I'm actually going to do that to the whole page. That will be a background texture and I'm going to turn it down really low. Or, what I can do is just make that a much lighter color and recolor it by dragging it over. Some like that a little bit more. I still want to bring the opacity down just a little. Now I'm going to add a new layer because I'm going to do another color sketch. I'll rename that. Now I know that I don't need to actually turn that down because those are the colors of the lines that I plan on using and then I want to come back here to my colors and I'm going to make sure that I'm selecting my script because it's a full color and that's how I want to lay this out. Let's come back to this green here and bring that down a little bit, and I'm thinking that I'm actually going to use this color, and I forgot that I had used the drawing assist on the vine, so I'm just going to turn it on so I can save myself a little time. I actually see what this will look like with the colors I had in mind. I think that I would use probably this lighter color and again, I'm keeping the drawing assist on because those elements here are symmetrical from where I had drawn them the first time. I'm just going to color those in and one of those of you a little bit lighter, then I can really see how everything looks together and if I'm ready to move on. That takes a lot of the decision-making away once we get finished with our collection. You can always change them but I feel once you've already made that decision at the beginning, it truly helps you. I'm thinking these leaves will also be the same green. Perfect. Again, I'm still keeping the drawing assist on because I used it again for the flowers, but this time I want the flowers to be a variety of this pink color. This really deep, rich ruby. Again, a grounding, earthy color, and then I want to also use that light pink so it's not too heavy. Good. Now I'm thinking in my original sketch, I had drawn a little bit of a halo up here, so I'm wondering if I'm going to turn the drawing assist off and then I'm just going to draw really quickly, again, trying to be loose because I'm just planning how I like to see the colors together. If I think how they're blocked off, makes sense, that it's balanced well. I'm just going to chip and drop that in. Then I'm thinking I'll take the darker color, fill in up here. I'm really liking this. As you can see when you zoom out, you can really envision the way that the work will come to life here. Now I'm even thinking that I might add some of this blue color, let's see, I'm going to make that a little bigger thinking this is one of the colors I use the most often so I'm wondering if it will most likely make an appearance here as well. I'm personally adding this so I can really see if the color is getting balance. To me there was a little bit too much of that textured background. I'm wondering if I can play a little bit. I also want to do this pink color again. I'm going to turn my drawing assist back on because I'm working on a symmetrical part here. I don't want to draw over the green. Probably could have just done a new layer to do that, but that's okay. I'm tapping and holding to just go ahead and quickly select a color that's already on the canvas and I'm thinking that I might do something a little bit here, just to add more details, bring up some of the pink color to the top. I forgot to turn the drawing assist off. So we go back turn it off. It can be something that will happen to you a lot. I'm going to turn that off, I'm going to tap and hold to select that pink color and bring some of that up here as well. We're using both. Overall. I'm pretty happy with the balance of color here. I might end up taking a little bit more. You can see that I totally went over this color, so I'm going to do that real quick and make sure I can still see the green because that's important that those leaves show up. I don't want them to get a hidden by the teal. I'm going to come back over here and make sure my drawing assist is off and I'm just going to draw in. Actually, let me undo this. I'm going to do this on a different layer so that it goes underneath everything. I'm bringing that between the background and all those other little elements I have. I'm just drawing, color filling quickly so I can just see if these things are going to pop the way that I want them to. Sometimes if your colors are a little bit too close, I don't think that it achieves the contrast that I want. I want a little bit of contrast, but not too much. Also, you don't want things to get lost if there are two similar together, like these greens. I might need to brighten that green a little. The best part about planning all this out is just that, once you have it planned, you can actually execute exactly the way you that envision from here on out. I really like the way this is. I think now I'm ready to move on to the next stages. What you can do next is you can close out this reference. Now that you've finished your first sketch book page and we've planned out our colors and we've done all of our work here on this page, you can take these exact same guidelines and move on to the next four or five pages in your collection because you already have the thumbnails and it will make things so much simpler to move forward. In the next lesson, we'll talk about exporting and how to use these sketches for your artwork in your collection no matter what medium you're using. I'll see you there. 12. Exporting Your Sketches: [MUSIC] Now that we're back, I want to show you exactly how to utilize these sketches in your sketchbook towards creating your final artwork. You can export these pages in lots of different ways for different purposes. One of my favorite ways to use it is to create on Procreate here, and I will actually show you exactly how I do that. First, you'll duplicate the file totally. Now that you have a duplicate page of the original sketch, you can come over here and you can use this the same exact way you've been using your original sketch that you brought in. You can come here, we can turn those layers off. We can come up here, turn that sketch layer all the way down low. Then you can go ahead and begin inking directly on top of this and building your artwork from the sketch that you've already created. It's the same thing as if you were using tracing paper or something from a sketchbook. It's great to just build on layer by layer from here. The next option you can do is directly from your iPad. I'm going to turn off my drawing guide first, but if you wanted to use it as a lightbox so you can make sure that your brightness is all the way up, you'll have to approve your settings to lock your screen. And then you can actually bring your sketch in your paper right on top of it and draw directly on top. One of the other options is to come over here to your Actions icon. You can choose the selection share. Now here's where it shows you all the different ways that you can export or share or transfer your file. If you're planning on using this and building anything in Illustrator, I suggest using a PNG and exporting your file as is the sketch here, and then also another file with the color turned on. Turning all of that back on so that you can see everything and use the color as references. You'd be sending yourself two files. If you wanted to work on, again, not using the colored sections here, but you wanted to export simply the outline or the sketch drawing, you could use the PDF or the JPEG and send it directly to your computer and print it out. If you're working on a painting, I would suggest you could even print it out if you have a large printer at home. Or if you have a local FedEx, staples, anything like that, then you can get it printed to the size you want to use. Then you can actually bring it over, tape it to your canvas or whichever area you're planning on painting, and then start from there and transfer your image. You could also send this directly to your computer. Again, whichever file type works for you, and you can project it from a projector directly onto your Canvas. Or maybe you're working on a MURAL, anything like that, this works great. Lots of options here. I know it can be overwhelming, but I'm sure you've already thought about how you want to use your sketches. I look forward to seeing exactly what you come up with when you submit your project in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 13. Sharing Your Work: [MUSIC] First you need to give yourself a huge round of applause, or a nice pat on the back, whichever works better for you because you have completed this entire class. You've made it to the end and you might still be working on some of your sketches, but I want you to know that this stuff does take time, it takes practice, and it takes the commitment. I know that with the first steps that we've set aside with that first thumbnail selection, you'll be able to move forward and work on each individual sketch. Once you've finished all those sketches, I really hope you'll take the time to upload it to the project gallery so you can share with all your fellow classmates and me. Because I obviously want to see what amazing ideas you're coming up with. If you share it on social media, make sure to message me and let me know, because I would just absolutely love to see what you've created. Thank you so much for choosing to take this class with me, and I hope you'll join me again next time.