Transcripts
1. Watercolor Hand Lettering on Your iPad in Procreate: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator and teacher. Today I want to show you how to paint watercolor hand lettering on your iPad in Procreate. When you take this class, you'll get the watercolor brushes I made for Procreate and my watercolor texture paper as free downloads. I'll show you every step of my process, from planning out the composition to creating a realistic watercolor effect on each letter. You don't have to be good at hand lettering to use this process because I'll show you how to use downloaded fonts as a template for your lettering. If you love hand lettering though, you can use your own lettering as the template. First, we'll use a free hand watercolor process then add multiple colors and shades to the quote to add tons of variation. Next, we'll use a masking process to create a quote with multiple textiles and watercolor variation. I'll show you how to balance light and dark areas to create a real watercolor look. Next, I'll show you how to use shapes to decorate the outside of the quote. I'll give you tons of ideas for shapes you can use to fill the outer edge of the canvas. Once you learn the steps, you'll be able to apply them to a wide range of digital and printable products. You can use this technique to create greeting cards, art prints, or upload them to print on demand stories. Or you could use the process to create images for your website, social media, or digital downloads. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the Stylus. I'll be using my Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started.
2. Brushes & Inspiration: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads that you'll need for these projects. You can find the link to the downloads page in the About section of the class. If you're on the app, you won't see the About section so make sure you open Skillshare in a web browser like Safari or Chrome. Then once you click on the link, you'll see that you need to enter a password to get into that page and I'll show the password on screen now. Once you get into the page, you'll see the list of downloads here and you can click and hold on the first brush and either click "Open in a New Tab" to save it or open it immediately in Procreate or click "Open in Dropbox" if you'd like to save things in your Dropbox. I'm going to click "Open in a new tab" because I want to immediately open this in Procreate. When that new tab opens, you'll see the option open in Procreate or more. If you don't see open in Procreate, click "More" and then find it on that list, or click the word "More" here and find it on your list of apps. I'm going to click "Open in Procreate". That'll automatically open the program with whatever document you had opened last. If you click the "Brushes Tool'' and scroll down to the very bottom, you'll see in the imported section the brush will show up at the very top. What I like to do at this point is create a new brush set so that all of my brushes for this project are in the same section. I created a watercolor lettering set with all of the brushes that I'll be using today. If you want to do that, click "Plus" and then name your set. Then you can go down to the imported section, click and hold on that brush and then drag it up into the set. Once you do that with all of the brushes, then you can do the same thing with the paper. I'm going to go back to the Downloads page, click "Download the watercolor paper.'' That'll open up the page in a new tab and you can click and hold, then click "Save image.'' That'll save it to your Camera roll. If you have Dropbox on your iPad, it may automatically open when you save the image. In that case, the image will be saved to your Dropbox instead of your iPad. One thing I like to do before I start one of these lettering projects is create a Pinterest board with some inspiration. I've made a board that I'll share in the About section of the class if you want to check this out, or you could create your own with some lettering that you like. The nice thing about this is you can get an idea of the different options for blending your watercolors. This person combined a lot of different colors in each word, whereas this one has each word in a different color. Then you can see some people will create a watercolor effect and then add some text in black over it or use multiple shades of the same color. All of these are great options. It really just depends on what your personal style is. You can take some time to look through this if you'd like and try to get an idea of where you'd like to start. Of course we don't want to copy any of these people but it's a great chance to use these styles and colors as inspiration. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project.
3. Creating a Lettering Template: For all of these projects, I'll be working at the same size, if you click the plus symbol in Procreate, and click "Create Custom Size". I'll choose inches as the measurement, and I'll be working at 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. This really just depends on what the final use for your project is. If you're just going to share it on Instagram, something like three-by-three inches is fine. But if you might print this out or sell it or create an art print that you can sell on your site or print on-demand companies, then there may be a specific size that you need to work with. For these, I suggest just playing around and getting a feel for the process. But later on, you may want some specific sizing for your pieces. I'll click "Create", to open this document. Next I want to add my watercolor paper onto this page. I'll click the "Tool" symbol, click "Image", "Insert a photo", and then I'll find the watercolor paper, I just saved it, so it's at the very bottom of my photos here. Then I'll just use my fingers to make this larger. Then I'm going to go to that layer and click "Multiply". These blending modes let the layers blend with each other, and each one is just a different way of blending the layers together. I'm going set this one to multiply, and then reduce the opacity a little bit, so it's not quite so dark. For today I'm just going to work with that one watercolor paper layer. Next I want to slide that layer to the left, and click "Lock". I never want to paint on that layer, I want that to stay safe. I'm going to lock it so you don't accidentally paint something on it. Then I'm going to create a new layer. I want to add some text to this page. There are a lot of different ways to do this, I'll show you a few today. But if you're really into hand lettering, you may just want to go grab one of your calligraphy brushes and just start writing. That's a fine option for this, but you may not be happy with your handwriting or your lettering at this point. In that case, you may want to use a font as a template. If you want to do that, I'll show you the first option here, and this is a totally free option. I'm going to be using the app Pages, and also the app iFont. These are two free apps that you would need. I'll open Pages, click "Documents" to start a new document, and then click the plus symbol. Then I'm just going to type my quote here. My quote's going to say, "No, I'd rather paint." I'm going to select that whole word, and click the alignment tool here, to put it in the center. Then I want to change it to a nice text. I'll be using a font that I downloaded, if you want to use a font that you downloaded, I'll show you that process here. It's really easy once you have these two apps. Just open a browser and type fonts for commercial use. I like this first site that comes up, 1,001 Fonts, it's really easy to use, and it gives you a really nice previews of the fonts. The fact that these are okay for commercial use is really important. If you have the intention to ever sell or use these for anything related to a business, not just for personal use, then you definitely need to use fonts that are okay for commercial use to avoid infringing on someone else's copyright. If you scroll down this list, you can find a font that you like, and you can see there's 456 pages of fonts, so there are plenty of options to choose from. I'm just going to choose one here, this calligraphy font, and click "Download". Once that downloads, it'll open up, and you'll see the zip file here, and then you'll see "Download". If you click that one time, then you'll get the option open in, I'll click "Open in", then you should see copy to iFont here. If you don't see iFont scroll over and click "More", and then find iFont on your apps list. I'm going to click "Copy to" iFont, then there may be an issue with this app, because I usually have to do this twice, the first time it doesn't work. I don't get any option to download the app here, I just go back to that page, click "Open in" iFont, and then it works the second time. That may just be my browser, or it may be an issue with the app, I'm not sure. Then you'll see the option "Import to iFont", I'm going to click that one time, and then you'll see a little number 1 show up on your files. I'm going to click "Files", and then I can find that font on the list here. The option for this font is right here, "Precious Regular". I've downloaded a lot of fonts so I have a big list. But when you do this, you should only see one, if it's the first time you've tried this. You should see this say "Installed", here. If you don't, you can click the "Install" button. I haven't installed this font, I'll go ahead and click "Install". Then it'll say, "This website is trying to open Settings. Do you want to allow this?" Click "Allow", then it always says the name of the font here. Click "Install", and then enter your pass code for your iPad. Then you'll see the profile is not signed. I'll click "Install", and "Install". Then once you click "Done", that font is now on your iPad, and it should work in a lot of different apps, but it definitely works in pages. When you open your fonts on pages, that font will show up here. You can use the fonts that come with pages if you don't want to download a font, or you can go through that process and get your own font for free. Now that I have my quote typed out in the font that I like, I'm going to take a screenshot by clicking the "Home" button and the "Power" button at the same time. Then I can go back to Procreate, click the "Tool" symbol, click, "Insert a photo", and then choose that image in my photos. I'm just going to resize it a little bit here. I really wanted to fill up the page for this piece, I'm going to let it be really large on the page. I'm going to trace this font. I'm just going to use it as a template. I want to go ahead and get this in place where I want it. I'm going to click the "Selection" tool, click "Freehand", click the "Move" tool, and then just move this a little bit closer, because I don't want the fonts quite so spaced out.
4. Creating Variation: So that looks good. I'm going to click on the "N" symbol on that "Layer" and reduce the "Opacity" so I can just barely see it, and then I'm going to create a new "Layer" and set that layer to "Multiply". This is going to be my watercolor layer. Every watercolor layer will be set to "Multiply" and that helps it blend with the paper, which is also said to multiply. Now I'm going to grab my stylus or I'm using the Apple Pencil, but you could do this with any stylus. I like to do this in yellow because I can always change the color to green or red or a lot of different colors, but yellow is one that's really hard to get with the color changer on this app. I'm going to start with yellow here to just give me the flexibility to use any color. I'm on that new "Layer" set to multiply. I'm just going to go really slowly and carefully on a medium sized brush and then my watercolor lettering set. I'm going to be using the blunt edge controlled brash that you'll download and so I want to set this brush to a size that's perfect for the width of the letter. That looks like a good width, so I'm going to stick with that. One note here, as you're doing this, you don't want to pick up your pencil on a single piece. This n is separated from the a, h So I'm going to do the n in one stroke and I'm going to do the a, h, in another stroke. This gets a little tricky when you get to the larger words. It's not a huge deal if you overlap, but you can see if I drew a letter and then pick up my pen and I draw another letter, I get this overlapping area, which is really fine and you know you could always use your blending tool with one of these cloud brush or the spotty brush and just kind of work that area out. It's not a huge deal. But I do try to not pick up my brush when I do a single stroke. I'm just going to take my time here and go through and cover all these letters with my yellow Watercolor brush with the blended control over. You can see you can really go back and forth on a piece, so if you don't cover it well on the first stroke, just keep going back and forth over that area and your brush marks won't show as long as you don't pick up your pencil. Soon as you pick up the pencil, then you'll start showing a brush mark. You can see this piece here, the apostrophe wasn't set up well for this font, so I'm just going to move it over here. So feel free to make changes if you use a font as a template, really make it your own and just play around with the width and the spacing to set it up however you'd like. So now I have a little bit of water color on the whole section of lettering. I'm just going to swipe left on that lettering paper layer and click "Delete" because I don't need that anymore. Now I'll swipe left and "Duplicate" that layer because I want my yellow to be a little bit darker and then I'll merge those two layers together. So I'll just pinch those two layers and now I have one layer of watercolor in yellow. I'm going to swipe left and duplicate that again because I want to add some color variation. So I'm going to make the first one invisible. I'm on this second one here, I'm clicking "Adjustments" and then "Hue, Saturation, Brightness". Then when I make my yellow layer visible again, these two colors together make a green. Because I have multiply set here, it's just blending those two colors together. So his is where the fun part happens, grab your eraser brush and there's two different erasers here. One is a "Cloud Brush", that's going to erase really soft erasing. See, you can barely see where the two pieces, the two colors mean. The other option is the "Spotty Watercolor Eraser". So I'm going to make that one a little bit larger and you can see this one has a lot of texture to it. So you can get some nice watercolor texture with this one. Personally, I like to use these two brushes together. I might go through and do a little bit of the "Cloud Brush" just to get some soft color variation I'm going to do that on both layers, so when I erase yellow, I'm revealing the blue and when I erase the blue, I'm revealing the yellow. Now I've got a few different colors going on there. I'm going to grab the spotty eraser brush" and just add a little bit of texture so you can see when you use this it adds some really nice watercolor spotting. Now that I have my color variation setup, I want to add some light and dark variation too. I'm going to merge those two color layers together, swipe left, click, "Duplicate", and then merge those two layers together. Now I just have a slightly darker version of what I had before and I've got those two different colors blending in and out. Now I'm going to go back to my "Spotty Watercolor" eraser. Now that I've got the really dark tone in there, as I erase, I'm really revealing a lot of color variation. Just like when you paint with watercolors, the color changes based on how much pigment is in the brush. I'm going to go through here and try to keep it really random and just reveal these nice little lighter areas and you can always click two fingers to step back if you go a little bit too far. I may even "Duplicate" that layer again to go darker, so it's totally up to you here. You can go super dark with this, or you can keep it more of a light watercolor look, it's really your choice. So I'm not really happy with that green color. I'm going to click the "Adjustments" panel, "Hue, Saturation, Brightness" and then I'm going to scroll through and just find a color that I like better. So I like this one because it shows some peach and pink and an almost some red there all together. So I like that layer. I'll "Duplicate" that and make the first one invisible and try another color version. That's the great thing about this process, you're not stuck to one specific color. You can really take some time to play around and try a lot of different color options. I've got three options there; a purple, pink, a blue, green, and pink and peach. I could go through a lot of different colors here, but those are just the three that I decided on. That's just one really simple project to get you started.
5. Using the Over App: For this next piece, I'm starting my document in the exact same way, this is 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI, and I've already inserted my paper layer, just like we did in the last video, and I've locked that layer so I don't accidentally paint on that layer. So I want to use two different types of text here, and I want to use a little bit of overlapping and a few different colors in this piece. So I'm going to use a different app for getting the text, so this is an app recommended by one of the artists who watches my classes, her name is Stephanie Baker Thomas and she made a suggestion for this app called Over, which gives you a lot more flexibility for doing transparent backgrounds and moving the text around. So the pages app is also free, this app is free, the main difference is the pages option is a little bit easier. This one's a little bit more in terms of the amount of steps you have to take to get your final piece, but you have a lot more flexibility to have like transparent backgrounds and overlapping your texts and things like that. So really, just depends on what you're going for, I want to show you both options so that you can try either one. So to create a new document in this app, I'm going to click the plus symbol and then I'm going to use transparent as my background. That means when I type text here and then I save the image, I open it and Procreate, it's just going to be the text with no background. So that can be really nice for some lettering projects. It's going to ask you to choose a size when you first get started, and you can scroll around here to find out what ratio works best for you. I'm going to use one-to-one because my project is a square, so this will work well for me. I'll click the "Check" symbol to open that document, and then you'll see the option to add some things to the canvas. I'm going to add some text, and so I'll just start typing my quote here and then I can scroll over and find a text that works well. So for this project, I want to combine some block text with some more calligraphy base text or hand lettering text. So I'm going to do this word by word one at a time, so I have a lot of flexibility to move these around and change the sizes as I work with this quote. The first word of my quote is create. So I've got that typed in and I've chosen my file then I'm going to click the "Check" symbol to open that image. So you can see by default this is white and I want to change the color to black, so down here I'm going to click "Color," click "Black," I also want to make it bigger, so I'll click "Size." The nice thing about this app is it's just so easy to adjust your work. So I can adjust this now, but I may change my mind later and adjust it again, and that's fine. Then you can just click and drag to move it to a new place. So I'm going to repeat this same process with my whole quote. So I'm happy with that placement, I am going to play around with this placement and Procreate and do some overlapping, but this is a really good start. This gives me a great format to trace once I open this in Procreate. So you'll notice here that I use the same font that I used in pages because this program also allows you to import fonts. So if you want to download a font and import it into this program, it's pretty similar to the process we used before, just go to any font that you want to download that's free for commercial use. If you have the intention to sell, then I'm just going to click on the font, so I'll click this font here that's called Peter built, and click "Download," then it's going to open the zip file download page. I'll click "Download" once and then click open in, and I'm going to use this program called copy to iZip. Because when we use pages, we use the program ifont to unzip this file, whereas with Over, you need another program to unzip it for you. So I'm going to click copy to iZip, and then it'll say, do you want to extract all the files, and I'll click "Okay," and then we need to open this font in the Over apps. So I'm going to click on the folder here to open all of these files, and you're looking for the font file. So this is the Peterbuilt ttf file. So I'll click that one time and then it'll say, "Open in." So I want to open this in the Over app, so I'm just going to scroll over and find that app, copy to Over. Then you should get the message, "Installation Success." So now when I go to add new text, you'll find that font is right here at the very beginning of your font list. Now I'm ready to save this file, I'm going to click the "Check" symbol just to get out of that editing page, and then you'll see the little Share option here. So I'll click the Share option and click "Save to photos." Now, that's saving this transparent background with just the text. So now when I open my document and Procreate to click the tool symbol, click "Insert a photo," and then select that image that I just saved. It's this nice transparent image and I can see my watercolor paper through it. So that's one nice thing about this app versus the pages app, but as you can see, it's just a lot more steps to get your text onto the page with Over apps. So use whichever one works best for you.
6. Creating a Mask: I'm going to do this one slightly differently to show you a different process that I think can be a little bit easier than the one we used in the first process. But it really just depends on the text. For example, if I tried to take my blended controlled brush and trace this whole word without picking up my pencil or making a mistake. That can be a little tricky. Whereas with this process, you have a lot of freedom to draw and erase and overlap. You're really just going to create a mask that we'll use to pain are watercolor. This is a slightly different process. It really just depends on your personal style and how you like to work. What I'm going to do is go to this transparent layer and reduce the opacity a little bit. We have that lettering layer semi-transparent. I'm on a new layer with yellow selected as my color. It's really easy to see. You could also use pink or anything else that it's easy to see. I'm going to grab the reverse masking brush and you'll see that on the downloads list. The nice thing about this brush is it has a rough edge, like a watercolor brush. As you draw with this brush, you can get a really nice watercolor edge. Whereas if you look at this text, it has a really super clean edge, which just isn't realistic when it comes to watercolors. No one can paint this shape with watercolors without using a masking fluid or a stencil. I like to use this process because it adds a little bit of a waviness to your text and just makes it a little bit more believable as a watercolor letter rather than an actual font that we just downloaded. I'm just going to go through and trace each letter and then drag and drop the color. You can see as you zoom out, it's a little bit shaky, which makes it look more like a watercolor piece. You can use the clean font if you prefer that look. But for me personally, I like this rough, messy watercolor edge. I think it makes it look more like actual watercolor painting. I'm just going to take some time here to go through and do all of these letters and I'll speed up my camera while I do that. The nice thing about this process, unlike the first process that we use, is that if you make a mistake, you can really easily just come in and fix that. You could also grab the eraser with the same brush and come through and erase a section if you need to. With the watercolor brush, it's like one shoot and if you don't make it, you have to try again. Whereas with this brush, you can just work on your shapes for a long time and get them perfect, and then paint your watercolor over it. I like both options depending on what piece I'm doing. I'm happy with how that turned out. You can see what I was basically doing is messing up this text a little bit. When you pull a font directly from a program like over, it's just to clean to look like a watercolor. This just let me add a little bit of variation and a little bit of humanness to this piece. I'm making my black layer invisible. I don't really need that layer anymore. I want to overlap these a little bit. I'm actually going to separate the cursive text and the print text on the separate layers. To do that, I'll click the "Selection tool", click "Free hand" and then select the word that I want to move to a different layer. Drag down three fingers and click "Copy and Paste or Cut and Paste. " That cuts it out of this layer and puts it onto a new layer. I'm going to go back to that original layer and do the same thing with this word, whatever. I have my print layer and I have my cursive text on two different layers. I'm just going to play around with the sizing of the cursive text a little bit. I'm clicking the Move tool and be sure that magnetic is selected. If it's not, you're going to mess up the proportions of your text. Select magnetic and then you can play around with the sizing. If you want to differentiate those two colors, so it's easier to see the overlapping on that layer that says fire. I'm going to click one time, click "Select", and choose a different color. Click that layer again and click "Fill." That can make it a little bit easier to see what you're doing. I'll take a few minutes here just to adjust these and get the overlapping just as I want it to be.
7. Color and Texture: I'm happy with that. You can see that I just did a tiny bit of overlapping with the text, and now I can start working on my watercolor. I'm going to go to the fold pink layer, click one time and click "Select". Then I can make that layer invisible. I've selected everything that was covered by that text. Now I can click the plus symbol, set that layer to multiply since it's going to be a watercolor layer, and then grab my watercolor blend edge controlled brush. I'm going to paint with yellow here again because it's easy to change yellow to a different color, but it's not easy to change a different color to yellow. I've got my watercolor brush, I'm on a new layer set to multiply, and I've got yellow. I'm going to make my brush it's largest size, and then I can just totally cover the section. You can see how this could be a little bit easier than trying to paint with this brush. This brush is a little bit unruly, so it's not really easy to do lettering with it. But with this method, it's really easy to cover the whole area. Now I have a nice watercolor layer, I can duplicate that layer and merge those two together, and then start doing some erasing. I'll go ahead and click "Select" to remove my selection tool because I don't need that anymore. I'll just go through and do a little bit of erasing here with the spotty watercolor brush. I think I'm going to duplicate this layer again because I want the darkest spots to be a little bit darker. Basically, when you're duplicating layers, the question is, what do you want your darkest area to be? Because you can always make it lighter with these erasers, but you can't make it darker, so I always set it really dark and then just do a ton of erasing. That's a good start for that layer, I'll leave that as it is for now. Now I'm going to go to my whatever and fire layer. I want this to be the same color, so I'm just going to pinch to merge those together. I'll do the same process that I did with the last text. Select it, make it invisible, create a new layer, set to multiply, get my blend edge controlled brush, and then cover that text. Now I can remove that selection and that's a lot of yellow. I definitely want to add some orange and red to this since it has the word fire, I'm going with the fire theme. On that layer that I just painted, I'm going to swipe left and duplicate and then make it invisible. Go to Hue Saturation, Brightness, and choose a nice orange color. One nice thing you can do with this tool is once you get your color, you can also increase the saturation and brightness. Maybe I want a darker orange, maybe I want a highly saturated neon orange. I'm going to duplicate that layer, make the orange layer invisible, and get a red. I'm bumping up the saturation and bringing down the brightness. I'm getting a bright red here. Now I have a red layer, an orange layer, and a yellow layer. You really can't see the yellow layer at all right now. If I want to reveal that, I need to erase my red and orange a little bit. I think what I'll do is go to my orange layer and erase everything that's three quarters and above. I'm erasing everything but just a tiny bit on the bottom. I want that very bottom area to be my red area. If you pick up your brush and erase again, then you can get an even more dramatic color variation. Now I'll go to my red layer and when I erase this time, I'm revealing orange and yellow. You don't have to do this as a gradient effect like I'm. You could do it totally randomly. It's totally up to you here. I feel like my erasing is getting a little bit spotty, so I'm going to grab the cloud brush and just soften that up a little bit. It especially looks spotty with the darker colors, so if you feel like things are getting a little bit spotty, just go ahead and use that cloud brush to clean it up a little. You can see we got some nice overlapping with the two colors here. The great thing about this process is, if you don't like how this turned out, it's really easy to start over. I could just merge all of those layers together, swipe left and delete, or just make it invisible and I still have that masking layer. I can still go through, click "Select", create a new layer, set to multiply, and just start the process over. Your first few times you do this, you may not like how the watercolor effect looks, and that's a great time to just play around with a lot of different options. I'm going to do the same thing I did before and do a random erasing, so you can see the difference here. Now that I have more of a random color selection, I can merge those three together and then I can do some erasing on that new layer. You can decide here, do you like more of a gradient look or do you like more of a random watercolor look? If you do it this way, whether on separate layers, you can turn it on and off and make a decision that way. I do this with most of the pieces I create. I do three or four options and then compare them to each other and that's how I make my decision. Here's a gradient option and a random options. I like the gradient options, so I think I would stick with that. One last thing you can do is go to that layer and play around with some different color options just on that layer. You may want to go with more of a orange, pink, or peachy red. It's totally up to you here. It really just depends on your personal style. One last thing you can do is remove the watercolor paper layer. You don't have to have that watercolor paper. You can see what it looks like on and off and decide what works for you, but you could also just have watercolor paper on the lettering. If you want to do that option, go back to your layers that have the solid text. I've got that solid orange and solid pink, and you can merge those together or if you think you might want to keep those separate for using later, you can create duplicates of both of those and then merge them together. Now I have one layer that has both and then the separate layers. Just depends on if you think you'll use this text again later. I've got that layer there with both text images on it. I'm going to click that one time and click "Select" and then make it invisible. Now I'm going to go to my paper layer, drag down three fingers, and click, copy and paste. I'm copying that paper layer and pasting it onto a new layer. You can see it there. It's automatically set to normal and we just want to change it to multiply, and also reduce the opacity if you'd like. Now I'm going to make my original paper layer invisible. So now the only place I have papers on that text, now I can make my text visible again, then I may want to adjust the opacity of the paper more. But you can see now you're getting a nice watercolor paper texture on the text. That's another nice thing about using this masking process, is you have that freedom to go back and copy the paper, whereas that wouldn't work with the first option because the transparent layers don't select very well. So let's go ahead and call this piece finished.
8. Decorating Your Quote Part 1: For this last piece, I just want to show you a few different ways to decorate your text. Sometimes just having a quote in the center of the Canvas isn't really enough. You want to add a little bit more interests to the outside of the page. Here I have a nice quote, but it does look a little bit bear on the page. It says you're braver than you believe, stronger than new, seem smarter than you think by A. A Milne. I love this quote, and I want to add a little bit of decoration to make it seem a little bit more exciting than just the quote on the page. I'm going to go to the layer where I have that text and duplicate it, so I can save my original green color. But I actually just want to make this black and then let my decoration be the color. On that layer I'm going to click hue, saturation, brightness and bring the saturation all the way down. That's going to give me a nice gray, and then you can go as dark as you want here. You can go to pure black or you can go to a lighter black here. I'm going to stick with that. Now I'm going to create a new layer and be sure that layer is set to multiply like all of our watercolor layers. I want to use some simple oval shapes here to decorate the outside of this Canvas. I'm going to start with my blend edge controlled brush. Let's get a slightly smaller size here. I'll just add some little ovals. Maybe these are like abstract reads. I'll start with these bigger ones and then work down to smaller sizes, and then once I'm done with that, I'll add the watercolor variation to it. Okay, I'm happy with that layout. You can see I used the large pieces to create a direction inward, so that this whole piece is drawing your eye into the center. Then I just use the little pieces to fill in the interiors. I'm going to duplicate that layer and go to hue, saturation, brightness. Let's do a teal green on this one. Now I'll just go through and do my regular erasing to bring in some color variation. Now we have three nice colors working together. I'm going to pinch that together and now I've got all my color on the same layer. I'll swipe left and click duplicate, so now I've got a darker version. I'll merge those two together and now I just want to add in some light and dark variation. I'm going to get a smaller brush. This is my cloud brush that I'm using now and some of these I want to almost totally erase. It's just a outline of that shape and others. I'm just going to erase one little section, so it looks like the watercolor pooled in that area. But one important thing with this is I do try to touch everything. I tried to touch every single dot because if you don't touch one, it ends up looking a little bit flat and it'll stand out more than the other. I just go through and make sure every single dot has had at least a little bit of erasing on it and then some have a lot. I'm going to step back here because I really want to balance the lighter pieces. I'm going to go through and find some areas that have a lot of dark and just balance that out a little bit. I'll almost erase one, just to add a little bit of lightness to that specific area. I'm happy with that, but I don't really like the color. I'm going to go to hue, saturation, brightness. Now I can play around with a lot of different color options. I like this multicolored peach and pink. I could duplicate that to make it even darker. I can also go through with my spotted eraser brush, merge those two color layers together. You can see that the cloud brush is nice for making really smooth transitions. But the spotted brushes nice for making some watercolor texture. I usually do both and skip back and forth between the two depending on the piece. This one I started out erasing with the cloud brush and now I'm going through and adding a little bit of texture with the spotted brush. I'm going to do a few different color options for this one. We've got a pink layer. Now I'm going to duplicate that and go to a new layer and let's do a blue-green option, duplicate it again and let's do a blue option and then bump up the saturation and brightness to make that. Let's bump up the saturation and bring down the brightness. You can see how you can just play around with all of these and get a lot of different options. If you were selling with a print on demand company like Society6, you could offer this quote and a blue version, green version, and a pink version, so that your customers have a lot of different colors to choose from.
9. Decorating Your Quote Part 2: The nice thing about doing this on a separate layer is that if you're not crazy about how those ovals turned out, you can now just go to a new layer and start a totally different kind of decoration. I'm going to speed up my video here while I try a few different types of decoration on this piece. On this one, I've just done some leaf forms. Then I'm just going to come through with this brush and just make some dots. It makes a nice little watercolor splatter dot. I'm just going to use that to fill up the outside of the page here. Okay, so there are a few different options for what you could do for a piece like this. I've got some pink leaves and dots scattered throughout this one. Then I've just got some simple lines with some color variation. I think this one would be really nice when you really just want to highlight the quote. You don't want to distract from the quote at all. I got a nice multicolored option on those lines. Then we've got the ovals as well. That's just a few ways to decorate your quote, but I'm sure you'll think of a lot of other amazing ways. I'm going to go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating hand lettered pieces on your iPad. If you like this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad, like how to paint gouache using the free downloadable brushes I created. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads on my site. If you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my website. I would absolutely love to see the project that you create with the process you learned in this class. Please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare, or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching this class and I hope I see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
