Wildflowers in Procreate

1. Wildflowers on Your iPad in Procreate: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to paint colorful wildflower arrangements on your iPad and procreate. I created a gallery of over 300 vintage wildflower illustrations. So you'll have no shortage of platforms to use as inspiration. When you watch this class, you get all of the brushes and color palettes I use in the class as free downloads. Including my saturation booster brushes, which allow you to use the pressure of your stylus to create varied brushstrokes on the canvas. First, we'll study a single platform so you can start adding new flower and leaf forms to your drawing wheel house. If you're like me, sometimes you get stacked drawing the same plants over and over and you need some inspiration to start incorporating some new shapes into your work. This process will help you get familiar with new flowers and leaves. So you can start creating varied compositions with a variety of wild flowers and plants. Next, we'll combine multiple platforms in a middle-out composition style. We'll look at how to choose platforms that work well together, and how to select colors that compliment each other to create a bold and cohesive composition. Plus we'll create a bold floral arrangement, combining flower forms and several angles and shapes. You can practice drawing and painting plants from the side, back and top angles. If you tend to always draw flowers from the front, this is a great way to mix up your drawings with some interesting angles. These bold floral compositions are perfect for print-on-demand sites, gifts, or just sharing online. There are also great for printing out as art prints or turning into greeting cards. All you need to take this class is your iPad and the stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. So let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page in the project section on Skillshare. The project section doesn't show up on the app though. So go to skill share in a web browser to find this link. Once you click on the link, you'll see that you need a password to get into that page. I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you'll see that there is a list of downloads under the image. The first one is the procreate brush set. I'll just click on that. I'm using Chrome here. So if you have trouble in a different browser, you can try Chrome. Then I'll tap "Download", open in and then scroll over and click more and find procreate on that list. Once procreate opens, you can tap on any document. You should see that brush set at the very top of the list. Back on the downloads page, you'll see the second item is the wildflower color palettes document. I'll tap on that and tap "Download". Same process, open and procreate. Then we have to go back to the gallery to see this document. If you're inside of stack, you'll have to go out of that stack to see the important document. Here it is. You'll see if you open the layers panel that there are several groups and each group is a set of colors. Then within each group, if you tapped a little arrow to open it up, each dot is on a different layer. I did that. If you want to make some little adjustments to these sets, you can easily do that. Let's say in this second set, I don't really like that green. I'm going to find that in the "Layers " menu, make sure it's selected and blue. Tap adjustments over here, hue, Saturation, brightness. Then I can just play around and get a totally different color. Maybe you want more of a turquoise green. That's a little bit brighter, more or less saturated. You can customize these pallets really easily. Then you could just save those to your color palette. I'll tap colors, pallets, create a new pallet, and that becomes my default palette on the disk. Then I can just tap and hold each of these and then tap on my color palette to save those. You may want to take some time to play around with these palettes before you get started. I find it's a lot easier if you have some colors to start with, rather than trying to think of colors while you're building your composition and drawing. I really recommend going ahead and creating a palette that you really like, or creating a few different palettes that you like. You can see I have a few different wildflower palettes. Throughout the class, I'll be using those, but they're all colors that I took from this document. Let's say you like these pallets just as they are when you open the document, I've gone ahead and saved these as procreate palettes, so you don't have to do that. If you go back to the downloads page, you'll see wildflower palette one and palette two. You can just tap on each of those download and then open and procreate. Then when you go to your color palettes by tapping the color wheel and having pallets, you'll see the palette here. Now that we have a plan for colors and we have a few color palettes ready, let's go ahead and get started with our first composition. 3. Inspiration Images: For this first project, we're going to focus on a single plant, so we can get to know a flower's petals and leaf shapes. The goal of this project is for you to learn how to draw a new plant shape, so that in the future you can incorporate this into your work without needing a reference image. Let's start by finding a plant form that fits your personal style. Here on the downloads and resources page, you'll see the last item is the Pinterest inspiration board. I'm just going to click to open that up. You'll see that there are two different sections on this board. The main section which contains single plants and then an arrangement section which contains multiple plants that are arranged in a single composition. I'll go back to the main board here with single plant images, because for this first project, I really just want to focus on getting to know a single plant. You don't have to find something complex here. This is really just about getting to know the flower shape and the leaf shape and how thick the stem is and understanding the anatomy of a specific plant. Of course here you want to look for something that fits your personal style, something you think you might want to incorporate into your work in the future. There are hundreds of plants to choose from here, so you can really take your time and just think about, do you want to do something pointy and that has a lot of movement to it. I really like this plant because it has some rounded edges, some pointed flowers so there's a lot of nice variation here, or maybe you want to focus on some berries, maybe you have trouble incorporating berries into your compositions. You could choose something like this to get to know the shapes of the branches and how the various hang off the branch. I'm going to choose this image, I really like this flower because it's not the traditional flower shape. It has the flowers integrated into the stem rather than at the top. It has some interesting leaf shapes that I never really draw. I'm looking for a challenge here, something that's outside of what I normally draw so I can add something new to my drawing wheelhouse. The first thing I'll do is just click on that image and that we'll open the image on Flickr. As you can see, it tells you a little bit about where the image came from. You can zoom into the image and see the name of the plant. You can see the album that it's in if you click on the album down here, that will show you a whole list of plants that are related to that plant in some way. You might find some interesting information if you're into the background of the plants. Back on the page for the original image, I just want to download this. I'm going to click the Download button. I usually choose original here just so I can get the largest possible image. I'll tap original, tap and hold on that image and then tap add to photos. If you're using a different browser, this might be a little different. If you have some trouble, you can always just on this Flickr page, zoom in and take a screenshot by pressing the home button and the power button at the same time. The only downside of that is you'll have to crop that image in the photos app, so it's a lot easier to just save it as it is. Now I have this image in my photos app. One thing I like to do is add these to an album. You might go through and find ten different plants that you like and add them all to albums. To do that you just click the share button, add to album. You can create a new album or I already have a wildflowers album so I'll just add it to that. 4. Sketching the Layout: So now that I have my plant form ready to use, I can go ahead and open Procreate. I'll click the plus symbol to create a new canvas, and then of course, you can work at any size you'd like here. I like to work at ten by ten inches at 300dpi, because I find that works well for most of my uses. But if you are going to print this out as a card or some other use, you might choose a different size here. I'll tap create. And so this first layer is just going to be a sketch. So, I'll grab black as my color and I'll open the wild flowers fresh set and get the sketching pencil at the very top, and then I need to see my image over here on the left. So, I'm just going to slowly pull up from the bottom and we want to see that photos app over here on the left to just drag it over. If you don't see the photos app on the bottom that's because it's not one of your recently opened apps. So, just go open it and then come back to Procreate and then it'll show up down there. So, I'm not going to try to perfectly sketch this exactly as it is here. It really wouldn't fit well on a square because this is a rectangular canvas and this is a square, so I'm going to really change the layout here, but I am going to stick to the basic shape of this plant. So, I like to start by just using lines and circles to figure out just the basic layout. So, I've got two branches, three, and I think I'm going to add a couple more because it just seems a little bit bare right now, especially for this square canvas. So, feel free to add things in that aren't there. Because the goal of this is to get to know the plant itself, not to perfectly depict the original image. All of these images that are on the list are over a 100 years-old, which means they're in the public domain. They can be used as reference images, they can be printed out and sold. But of course you don't just want to copy this original artist because that piece has already been created. So, the goal of this is to learn this plant shape and create a beautiful composition that's really your own, it's not someone else work. So, this is just a basic layout of how I want this to look. I'm trying to get it in the center of the canvas. I'm trying to have a few flowers spaced around and you can see I'm not trying to even get any detail in here right now. I'm just getting a layout that will fit nicely on this canvas. Next, I'm going to create a new layer and make that first sketch layer semi-transparent by just clicking the N symbol and reducing the opacity. On that new sketch layer I'm using the same color and brush and now I'm just going to add a little bit more detail. So, I'm using that framework that I originally used and just trying to add in some of the curves that I see on this stem and also starting to incorporate the thickness of the stem. So, I'm just doing a basic sketch of how thick I want this to be, and I'm also going to come through and start thinking about these leaves. And I zoom in and out a lot because I want to make sure I'm getting a good overall picture and not just staying really close in because if you're always really close, sometimes you zoom out and realize the sizing was totally off. So, just make sure you're stepping back a lot and double-checking how you're laying this piece out. So, you'll notice on this plant that there are these little bunches of leaves, and all the leaves come from this one central point. Whereas normally when I draw leaves, I would draw one, two, three down the stem like this, so this is already showing me a different way to create some leaves on a stem. So, I'm just going to take some time here to sketch in most of these leaves, not all of them because as I'm painting, I'll be free handing some leaves in any way. So, I'm really just trying to get the sizing right, get the overall layout down so that when I start painting, I can really just fill in the shapes. You can see I'm trying to keep this really chaotic, because that's really how things look in nature. You're not gonna see pairs of leaves that looked just like the ones above them. So, I'm really trying to keep that chaotic feel and that variation that you see in nature, from the sizes of the leaves to the angles to which direction they're pointing and just so we get a lot of movement and variation on these lines. One goal I always have with a project like this is, try not to make any two areas the same. So, if you make one leaf in one direction, how can you make the next leaf in a totally different direction or size or something just to show that they're totally different. And you're not just following a template of one leaf after another that are the same. So, I'm happy with the overall layout of these leaves. I want to do my flowers on a different layer in a different color so that they really stand out. So, I'm just going to grab a bright pink color and start sketching these flowers in. So, I'll zoom in closely to one of these so I can get this angle right. And so we've got some petals that we see fully and others that we just see a curved side and then some that we see maybe just a partial leaf. So, this is a great opportunity to start practicing your perspective and not copying the image exactly we are getting an idea of how these angles communicate to the viewer that this plant is sideways. I'm also going to try to do some of these sideways flowers. So, I'm really just showing a few of the petals. So, I really liked this sideways flower and I want to incorporate one more of those, but I don't want to do it right beside the other one because then I'm creating some redundancy. So, I'm going to look for a space that would be interesting to have one of these sideways flowers. Just going to add it in here. And this is also really good practice. So, I don't have a reference image for this sideways flower. So, I'm just having to eyeball it and use the other one to get a little bit of help. But now I have to use my mind rather than my eyes a little bit so that's a really good practice when you're learning to draw a new shape. I feel like that a little bit too big. So, I'm going tap my selection tool, circle it, tap the Move tool and just size it down a tiny bit and I feel like that fits a lot better in the composition. So, I'll just keep going with these flowers. You can see at this point I'm really deviating from my original image. I don't even really need it anymore and it drains battery, so I'm just going to move that over so it's out of my way. And I do that for two reasons, not just because of the battery, but because when you stop using your reference image, you'll start making more of your own decisions. So, I think for these types of projects or reference images are great for getting you started, taking you from, I don't know what to draw to you have something to draw. But there comes a point where you need to let go of the reference image and start using your own colors and ideas. So, I try to get rid of that as soon as possible because it's sometimes just sort of distracting. So, at this point I'm going to go back and forth between leaves and flowers and step back a lot and look for balance. So, I want to be sure that I'm balancing the shapes, I have enough flowers and they're not all on one side of the canvas or I don't have some leaves that are way bigger than others that just look unrealistic. So, take just a few minutes to just do that basic refining before I start painting. You can see when things start getting really busy here with the multiple shapes that it's really helpful to have the flowers on a separate color because it gets confusing when you have all these different overlapping shapes and lines. 5. Creating Painted Variation: I'm happy with this overall layout. I'm just going to reduce the opacity of both of those sketch layers, and then I can make my first sketch layer invisible. Because that was really just sticks and circles, so I really don't need that anymore. At this point, I'd like to start thinking a little bit about color. I'm going to start by choosing a darker background color. Then on a new layer, I'm going to start looking for a couple of colors that are going to work nicely on this background color. I might start with a green. I'm going to be using the wet wash saturation boosters subtle, mostly for this composition. But you may also want to try the others that some have a more extreme saturation change. One thing to think about as you're using the saturation booster brushes, is that if you choose a color that's already saturated, it's not going to be able to saturate it more. What I mean by saturation is a gray is totally unsaturated. It doesn't have any color, but a bright yellow, for example, is totally saturated. It is saturated with color. If we choose this yellow here, and we're using the saturation booster brush, it's not going to change at all. Because this color's already totally saturated. Whereas if I choose a yellow that's not very saturated, so I'm just going down the color wheel on the yellow section, I can really get some differences in color and shade. Because I'm going from desaturated to totally saturated. That's one thing to think about as you're using these brushes. If you have some trouble with getting the saturation to show, just go a little bit deeper on the color wheel. Almost to a gray or a muddy color, and then that muddy color's going to be your lightest pressure, and your heaviest pressure's going to be a brighter color. You might take some time to play around with these brushes a little, and then start thinking about your colors. On a new layer, I'm going to grab first the color that I want to be the color of my leaves. I've got this avocado green, and I want that to be the color of my leaves. But it's already a little bit saturated, so I'm going to go deeper into the saturation zone. Then I'm getting a little bit more variation as I draw those leaves. I'm happy with how that variation looks. Now I want to find a flower color that's going to look nice with that. I might start by choosing a pink that I like, and then go deeper into the desaturated zone. I really like how that looks, so I'm getting a lot of variation, and it looks nice with the blue and the green together. That's just something I'm thinking about as I'm working on this is how to all three of these colors work together. Not that you can't change your colors later on, but you want to start with something that looks at least cohesive and works well together. I'll go ahead and delete that layer, and then I'll create a new layer. I'll tap on it and tap rename, and let's call that the leaf layer. Another new layer and let's call that the flower layer. I just want to be sure as I'm painting, as I'm skipping around, I'm keeping my layers organized, and I'm not accidentally painting a leaf on the flower layer. Because that's going to take away my ability to change colors later. I'm really working hard to keep those separated. Let's start with the leaf layer. I've got that green that I wanted to start with. I'm just going to choose a spot on the Canvas. I typically like to start out with light pressure, and then slowly add in a little more variation. You can see the subtle variation we've got here. We could also use these dry wash saturation boosters. What that does is it gives you a little bit more texture and transparency. They both look great, but they're totally different fields. You may want to have that more textural feel at the dry version, or you may want to stick with the wet version like I'm doing here. Play around with that and see what works for your style. I'm using this saturation booster extreme right now with the wet wash brush. I'm just going to take my time going through my leaf sketch, and trying to make every single leaf a little bit different. I don't want to have a brown streak in the middle of every single one. I want them all to have their own unique light and shadow versions. You can see how this becomes a painting process, because it's like you're dipping your paintbrush in a color, and then mixing it with a little bit of white and coming through and adding some highlights. Mixing it with a little more green and adding some shadow. You can get a lot of interesting colors by just picking that slightly desaturated color, and then coming in and adding a little highlights and little shadows all around. If you don't have the Apple pencil or some stylists that allows for pressure sensitive brushes, you really could do the same process. You would just paint one color and then come and paint over it with another color. It's not impossible to do this without an Apple pencil or pressure sensitive stylist. But of course you can see it's a lot easier. One thing I like to do when I overlap leaves is try to make it really clear where the overlapping is. You can do that by adding a highly saturated area like that, and then as you zoom out, you can really see where that overlap point is. Which leaf is supposed to be on top of the other, or let's add another leaf in here. You could go the opposite way and make the bottom leaf darker. I'm just going to take some time here to make really light stroke to darken that up a little. Then I can come through and make a really bright entire leave, so you can go with an entire leaf, or just a section of the leaf. You may have to adjust the size of the brush from time to time, especially if I'm trying to get these really pointy shapes. Sometimes I'll go down to really small size, and then other times I'll go back to my medium size. Again, I'm zooming out often, because I really want to be sure that I'm not doing anything that's a little bit strange. That leaf looks really bright compared to the others. What I'm going to do is go and add a little bit of that brightness to the others. The brightness is more spread out, and it's not just one intense shape right there. I can also add in a little bit of dark to that leaf as well, just to even out the dark and light throughout the composition. You'll notice that these brushes, it's definitely easier to use them as you use them more and more. Each time I use them I get a new little tip or realization. If you just get started and you feel like nothing is looking the way you want to. Just keep going, because you'll get a sense for how to adjust the size of the brush, the saturation level, the pressure on your hand. It'll get easier and easier just like painting with a paintbrush does. I'm just going to continue this exact process throughout this whole composition, getting all my leaves taken care of. Thinking about variation and overlapping, and even adding in some leaves as I go. I may not stick 100 percent to my sketch, and that's fine. In fact, that's where your personal style comes in. You're making design choices as you're working, and you're not worrying so much about that reference image anymore. It was really just a way to get you started. One thing you'll notice as I do this is I try not to pick up my stylus very often, only when I create a new leaves. The reason for that is you can keep this nice texture as long as you don't pick up your stylist. But as soon as you pick up your stylist, you're starting a new layer, and so you'll lose a little bit of that texture and eventually it just becomes totally solid. I prefer to keep some of that texture, but of course that's just my personal style. You could go over these three or four times and have a nice solid layer with a lot of color variation. 6. Flowers and Composition Options: So I'm happy with how these leaves look, so I'm ready to start working on the flowers. So I'll go to that flower layer and get my new color, and just double-check that with the leaves and making sure I'm getting plenty of variation between the dark and light. That looks good, and I'll just start by, just like I did for the leaves, sketching in these big blue shapes, and then I think I'll add a little bit more detail to the bottom parts of the flowers and maybe some type of stem or something that holds them all together. And again on those overlapping areas I'm trying to use that dark to light variation to just show where the petals overlap with each other. I want to have some flowers that are behind the leaves, so I'm going to make a new layer below my leaf layer, and let's call those under flowers. That's just giving me a little bit more variation. I'm always looking for ways to add in variation with these pieces because anything that's redundant gives it a kind of a tight field. Whereas these have a really nice loose feel that I'm trying to keep. You can also see how the stroke is kind of showing the direction of the petals. So I'm trying to make these light and dark streaks in the direction that the petals are curving, so then when you zoom out you can look at it and see how these petals curve over. I'm going to get a darker color and go into these flowers and just add a little, let's go even darker. A little circular center to each flower. Of course, I could do this in a different color. I could have a bright yellow, I could have a black. Just play around with this and see what works for your style, I'm making sure that I'm doing these black dots on the right layer. So I've got those under flowers and then the other ones that are over the leaves. So I'm trying to keep this circles on the correct layer. At this point, I'm going to remove my sketch layers so I can really see what this looks like. At this point we could keep going. You could add in more flowers, more leaves. You could put in another plant. You could try different colors with the circles in the center of the flower, so take your time here, play around with this. I'm going to go ahead and call this piece done and move on. The one last thing I want to add is some texture on the background. So I'm going to create a new layer below all of my painted elements. Tap and hold to get that color down there, that background color. And I'm just going to choose a slightly lighter or slightly darker color because I just want to get a little bit of texture in the background. You'll see there are several different brushes that you can use for your backgrounds. We've got the wet brush strokes, super dry texture, subtle dry and large streaky gouache, so let's start with the streaky gouache. Depending on your pressure, this will put down more or less texture. That has an interesting sort of washed look that you might like or we could go with the subtle dry strokes, which has more of a dry brush effect. Super dry, that's going to leave a lot of texture, and then the wet brush strokes. I kind of like this one, I think it works nicely with the style of this composition so I'm going to stick with that one. The only other thing I need to do is connect my flowers to the stems. So on the leaf layer, I'm going to grab that same green that I was using for my leaves, and that same brush which is the wet gouache saturation booster, and I'm just going to do one that's over all of the flowers. So this is a new layer that's above everything, because what I want to do is add just these little, I don't know what these are called. Whatever holds the flower onto the stem. For my few flowers that I can kind of see the sides of, I'm going to do that, and I may just be able to do a tiny bit that's peeking out and that's fine. I'm happy with how that turned out so I'll go ahead and call this piece finished, but I do want to show you a couple more compositions with this exact same drawing style. So with this composition again, I started out with sticks and circles, and then I just added in some more detailed flowers and leaves, and again, I'm using that different color for my sketch. Instead of starting with the background color, I just went with the white background to start out with and then added in the background later. Next I just went through on all the flowers and added these little highlights, and then on the leaves I added this vein. So you can feel free to add a little bit more detail on the leaves and flowers if that fits your style. For this composition, rather than copying the layout of the reference image, I put them in a circular fashion so I just wrapped the shape around a circle to create a writhe, and you can see that I am just doing a loose sketch followed by a slightly more detailed sketch where I tried to add in a lot of variation to the leaves, a lot of overlapping, trying not to have any two leaves or any two flowers look the same, and then I add a really bold contrasting color set of red and green. And you can see, I changed my mind a lot, so I'll try some things or I'll try a background color and then change it. You may find as you're creating these, that you change your mind a lot and that's totally fine. That's a normal part of the design process. Then I just added in a little bit of lettering in the center, and I also incorporated just some little dots that look like white flowers, so you don't have to stick with just one single plant. You can certainly start incorporating other plants as well. 7. Designing Multi Plant Compositions: Next we're going to create a composition with multiple platform. So we can start playing around with combining shapes and color to create a lot of contrast and variation on the Canvas. Let's start by finding a few different platforms that will work well together. I'm going to start out here on the Pinterest board, and I'm looking for a shape that's really chunky, that would look nice in the very center of a composition. It could be a big flower like this, it could be a set of large flowers like this. This would be a great option because it has this nice full area in the center. As long as it's not something that's too sparse, it will be perfect for this project. This would also be great, just some big chunky thing in the center. I'm just looking for something that would be a great centerpiece. I really like this one. I like how it comes from the middle out, so we could easily have some other plans coming out from the sides. I'm going to use that one, and I'll just take a screenshot here, just going to zoom in, screenshot that. I also want to find some other plans that'll look nice with this plant. So I'm looking for something totally different, maybe some berries or some tiny little leaves. We're trying to compile a set of plans that will look nice together. I really like these berries. I like the way that they hang off the page. So I'm going to use these. One last thing I need is just some leaves to use as a filler. So I'll just scan through here and find a leaf shape that I like. I really like these long thin leaves. I'm just going to click on that image and take a screenshot just of the leaves. Because I know I want to do something long and then, so my first leaves were really big and chunky. These are creating some contrasts with some thinness. The berries are creating even more contrast with the rounded shape. I'm just trying to find a few plants that'll work well together. But really, when it comes to these wild flower compositions, there's not really much you can do to go wrong. You just need to find a few plants that are different and put them all together in a nice way. So don't worry so much about choosing the perfect image. Just grab a few and see what you can do with them. Once you get used to that process, it'll just get easier and easier. Back in procreate, I have my Canvas that's 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI. I'm going to do the same thing to get my photos up over here on the left, and then pull up that image that I saved. On the first layer, I've got my sketching pencil, with black as my color, and I'm just going to start sketching out these basic shapes. Once I've got the basic layout of my main flower, I'm going to scroll over and look at my berries and just add those in. Then I want to think about my leaf shape. How do I want that to compliment all the other shapes? I'm going to put these on a stem rather than having them on this little bushy area at the bottom, and just let those peek out from behind the main leaves. I'm working with three plants here, but if you feel like that's too easy for you, try four or five. With these wild flower compositions, you can really go crazy with how much detail you put into these. So I'm going to reduce the opacity of that rough sketch, and on the new layer, I'm going to do a slightly more refined sketch, especially thinking about the shapes of those flowers and trying to get those curves and angles in. So I've got my first plan taken care of, so I'm going to create a new layer, get a different color, and start sketching my second plant. You can see with these, I'm not trying to be perfectly spaced. I'm trying to have that big amounts of variation. There's some leaves here, here and here, but there's nothing down here. If I wanted to add a little bit more balance, I could just stick a little leaf in here. You can see I'm constantly re-evaluating the composition and thinking, is something off balance. Have I done anything that's created some weird tension. If there's leaves all on one side and nothing on the other side, it just feels a little heavy on that side. So I'm just trying to remember to think about the balance, think about movement, and also, as I'm looking at these berries, I don't like the big chunky berries as much, so I might make them a little bit smaller than my original plan and change the layout of that plant a little bit. It gave me a good idea for getting started. This is a great example of the best way to use these reference images is not to copy that composition, but to get an idea of what are some new platforms that you can start incorporating into your work? I think a lot of times when we draw, we think we need to have a perfect finished composition, but really the goal should be for most pieces to just practice and learn and figure out what you want to start considering your personal style. So don't worry so much about having perfect finished compositions when you first start doing this, the goal is more to start learning about yourself as an artist and what colors you like, what shape you like, and what are your weaknesses? Where do you tend to do over and over that you don't like about your work and how could you adjust that by just learning some new shapes or studying some real platforms? So you can see I started with that rounded shape with those sparse berries, but I just feel like this composition needed something else. So I changed these into a teardrop shape and I'm putting a lot more than there were in this original drawing. One thing to always remember when you're creating these is to not finish your drawing on a stem because that means there's no berries right here, which is strange. It's good to finish the drawing with the berry or the leaf just peeking out a little bit, so that the viewer feels that this is going all the way back into the center, like all these other pieces are, rather than just sticking out of that one little flower. I'm always trying to go back in and add maybe a little half berry peeking out from a flower. The same thing with the leaves. I'll make sure there's just a little bit of a leaf peeking out from behind the flower. 8. Creating Color and Shade Variation: I'm happy with how this looks. I'm just going to remove that reference photo. Now on a new layer, I'm going to start working on building up the color. Just like I did last time, I'm going to try to keep everything on a separate layer. I really don't want to get in a situation where I can't adjust colors because I've accidentally combined colors on a layer. I'm just thinking about that as I work. I'm going to choose a kind of a blue green for these main leaves, and I tend to paint the largest areas first and the smallest areas last. That's just my habit but you certainly don't have to do that. I do think it's helpful to start with the biggest colors first and then work your way down to smaller elements but that's just my personal style. I'm just playing around with color at this point. I just want to make sure before I get started, that I'm choosing a color that I really like, and it has a lot of nice variation with those saturation booster Russia's. So we could go with the regular saturation booster or the extreme version. I'm just going to go with the wet gouache saturation booster settle, for this composition. I'm just making sure I'm on a new layer and let's call that big leaves. I'm just going to go through and try to get a lot of nice variation throughout all of these leaves and also like we did for the flowers in the last composition, I'm trying to use the stroke to show the curve of the leaf. I wouldn't do my strokes this way because that's the opposite direction of my leaf curve. My leaf curve is like this. So I'm trying to keep that curve throughout this whole shape. I'm going to move my painting layers over my sketch layers so it's just a little bit easier to see my sketch as I work. With these more complex compositions, I think it is a little bit easier to just leave your sketch on full opacity and leave it above everything. That way as you work, you can see the whole composition without losing sight of where each piece is. But that's just how I work. Of course, you can do this however you'd like. I'm going to grab a peach color for my flowers and I'm making sure that looks nice with my leaf color. Let's rename this new layer flowers and then I can start working on those petals. I'm trying to make sure there's no white space in between the petals and the leaves. So, a little space like that, I'm going to make sure it come through here. Even if I have to change the shape of the petal to do it. I just don't like to have that little bit of white in-between. The color reads as a painting error. One thing I want to do with these flowers is actually use a few different colors or few different shades rather. I'm going to start with this more muted peach and then after I do a few of these, I'm going to switch to a more vibrant peach. That way my flowers have just a little bit of variation to them. I'm going to grab that brighter peach. You can see that this creates some nice contrast between these flowers. I'm going to do the same thing with a slightly lighter color to get even more variation in here. I like how this variation looks, but I wish there was a little bit more differentiation between each petal. So one thing I'm going to do is tap and hold the sample of that color. That's going to get me a slightly darker color and I can even go through and get an even darker color and just add that in, or you can get a more saturated colors. You can ahead and play around here with getting a shade that's just slightly different than your original, and that can help you just sort of add a little bit of variation to these petals. Maybe add some interesting strokes that give it some more movement. Just like everything with this, I'm trying not to add the same kind of stroke to too many places. I want to have a lot of variation. If I put a little bit of that dark color on the tip here, I'm going to put it on the edge over here, and then I'll do the same thing over here on these other flowers. But I might go with a lighter shade on those so that we're adding some different types of variation to each flower. You can see the style is a little bit messy and loose. There really aren't a lot of rules. You just have to can go through what works for your style. So this is what works for my style, but certainly try some other things just to see if maybe something else works better for you. Maybe you want to do various specific highlights and shadows on every single petal, that's fine too. You can see unlike the first process, with this one, I'm really going through with a lot of different shades rather than just sticking with the first shade that we put down. Both are great options. It really just depends on what you want to achieve and how much variation you want to add into the composition. I'm going to create a new layer below these two painting layers and get a brown color so you just have something that is connecting these flowers to the base. This is just this little stem. The peak's out and I've made that little black dot here so I know where the center of this is supposed to be. I can make my leaves and my flowers come from that same place. I also want to add a little more visual interest to these leaves. I think I'm going to add a little vein that goes down the center of each one. I've got this on a new layer above my leaves. We'll call that the veins layer, so that if I want to change the color of that later, I still can. At this point I'm going to go ahead and start reducing the opacity of my sketch. So I'm relying on my sketch less and less as I work. So at this point I still want to see it, but I don't want it to be so distracting that it's changing how I see the composition. I need to put something in the center of these flowers. Grab black is my color and create a new layer above the flower layer. I'm just going to put a really simple dot there. Doesn't have to be anything too fancy. I'm happy with those so let's create a new layer below everything else and start working on the berries and the leaves. 9. Creating Details and Making Adjustments: So for the berries, I know I need to have these little long stems that the berries hang off of, so I'll do those first. Then I'll create a new layer below that, I'll call that "Berries", and we'll call the Berry Stem layer above it. For the berries, I'm going to try to choose a color that works well with these colors, but also has a little bit of contrast, so I think I'm going to go with a blue. I think that works well with these three colors. But of course, because we're printing this on a different layer, we can always change our minds later, so don't worry so much about choosing the perfect color the first time. I don't want these berries to just be floating out in the middle of nowhere, so I'm going to go ahead and reduce the opacity of that berry sketch, and on my berry stem layer, I am going to just do some little attachment, so the berries come straight out of that stem. So just a little triangle shape here. I'm really happy I went with the smaller berries, because it creates a nice contrast between these really big flowers and the little tiny berries. So thinking about contrast all the time is important. If I had made this berry a similar size to the petal, or close to the petal size, it just wouldn't have quite the amount of contrast as this big size difference does. Let's create a new layer below everything, and start thinking about these leaves. So I got these little green leaves in the background, and I'm looking for a nice color that's going to combine well with the blue, the peach, the green, so I think that looks nice. Making sure that's on a brand new layer, let's call those little leaves. Just like we did the leaves for the last one, I'm trying to get in some variation with each stroke. You can see how I'm being sure to let some little areas peek out from behind these other plants, because I don't want this to look like it ends right here. I want it to come all the way into the center, so I'm just sketching in some little leaves there. Now that I have all my basic plan shapes down on the page, I'm going to make my sketch layers invisible, so I can really see what this composition's going to look like without all of the line work. I can see that I need a little more variation on my leaves, so let's create a new layer called "Veins" above this Leaf layer, and get a slightly lighter color, go even lighter. Just have this little interesting vein to draw a little more attention to these leaves. One thing I'm noticing is that this entire composition is a little high on the page. So I'm going to tap on the first layer, then swipe on all the other layers to select everything. Tap the "Move tool", then just shift this down. This point I'm just working on big picture stuff. I'm looking for how this looks on the page, which elements are standing out too much or not enough. Let's go ahead and add in a background color. Again, I'm going to sample that background color, get a slightly lighter or darker color, get the wet brush strokes, and just give a little bit of texture to the background. So that just gives me an idea of what this is going to look like finished and what else it needs to feel even more finished. I think I could add a little reflection on the berries. So I'll create a new layer above it called "Reflection", above the Berries. I might just change to the sketching pencil because I just want a little highlight, it doesn't have to have a ton of variation on it, it's just a tiny little stroke. I'm happy with how this looks, but I do want to make some radical changes, but I don't want to make them to this document, because I want to keep this as it is, and then have another one that's more of an experimental version. I'm going to go back to my gallery, tap "Select", tap on that composition and tap "Duplicate". Now something that I want to have is a little bit more of these berries. It looks like I forgot some of my reflections, so let's just add those in. Because this is an experimental document, I can do whatever I want with this, so I'm going to combine all of the Berry layers onto one layer. So that's the blue, the white reflections and the brown stem and I'm just going to pinch those, and that's all the Berries. I'm going to do the same thing with the leaves and the veins of the leaves. So now that's all on one layer. We could do the same thing with some other layers, but I'm just going to stick with that for now, so I can play around with duplicating these berries. On this Berry layer, I'm going to tap "the Selection tool", circle one of these chunks of berries, drag three fingers down, copy and paste. So now I just have a duplicate of that Berry layer and I want it to poke out over here. Let's do flip horizontal, so it looks a little bit different. We just have a little bit of layering going on here, so I like that. I'm going to grab the eraser and zoom in and see if there are any areas that need to be removed, like that berry just looks a little odd right there, so I'm just going to remove that. Now I'm going to do the same process with some of these leaves. Selection tool, circle around it, three fingers down, copy and paste, do a little bit of overlapping, then grab my eraser and remove anything that is out of place. I'm going to repeat this process around the canvas and just see what I can come up with in terms of a more interesting composition. Another thing we can play around with, is changing the color of elements. So I'm on my flowers layer here, I'll tap "the Adjustments menu, "Hue, Saturation, Brightness", and what if we went with more of a pink or blue flowers? More saturated or less saturated. This is a great time to just play around with ideas and try some new things. There's no harm in trying something out on this experimental document because you can always go back to your original, if you decide you just don't like how this looks, you can always go back to that first document. So that's the color combination that I like. A little bit better than the original and I wouldn't have discovered that if I hadn't made that new document and felt I could just make any changes without ruining my original. I want to show you a couple more options for this composition style. For this composition, I've started with a central flower, and then added a lot of different flower types around the circle. So you don't have to choose just a couple of flowers or a couple of leaves, you can bring a lot of different options into this one composition. So you can see here I combined some chunky leaves, three different types of flowers, some berries, a couple of different types of leaves, and really just created a mixture of all of these plants. Then I just take some time to shift everything and add some details, and play around with color. Also, you don't have to come from the center of the canvas, you could come from one of the corners and just build the flower out from the corner of the canvas. So with this, I started with the simple platforms and added a little bit of variation to these flowers and leaves. You can see how I kept the detail really simple in this one, I didn't add a ton of different types of flowers, I just added these little light berries in there to compliment the flower shapes. So let's go ahead and move on to our next project. 10. Designing a Floral Arrangement: For this last project, we're going to create a floral arrangement combining a lot of different flowers in a single composition, so this is a great chance to practice drawing various angles of flowers, so you're not always drawing the front of a flower, you're also capturing some side angles and even the backside of a flower. Let's start by finding a floral arrangement as our inspiration. Back on the Pinterest board, if you tap on the arrangements section, you'll see I have compiled a lot of different arranged flowers that work well together. But of course, you could combine two different arrangements, you could grab some flowers from three or four different arrangements. Also, some of these are just straight up and down and you can just angle them so they're in more of a bouquet format, if you'd like. Or, you can just draw them exactly as they are, whatever works for your style. I like these compositions that are kind of in the center of the page and coming out. Those are really nice options or you could do something with some more thin plants that are all kind of layered on top of each other. You might like one that has all of the same plants over and over, just bunched and angled in different directions. I'm going to go with this one. I like how you can see some sides, some various angles and then it has some interesting leaves as well. I'll tap on that one. Download the original, tap and hold, add to photos. I've got the same size canvas, 10 by 10 inches at 300 DPI, and then I've got my reference photo nearby. This is where it's really helpful to just start with circles. Because I need to be able to place these circles before I can really do anything, so I'm just eyeballing it. This doesn't have to be perfect, you just want to get an overall shape of this bouquet. I'm happy with that layout. I'll create a new layer, make that first sketch layer semi-transparent and then start drawing the actual flower shapes. These flowers are all similar, but I want to do something a little different, so I'm just using this layout as an idea. I'm just going to choose whatever flower shapes I want here. Of course, you can stick to the original if that's easier in the beginning. But eventually, you'll get to the point where you think you could do it a little better than the original, or just more in your style than the original. I'm just going to be playing around with some various options here. Maybe some more wide pedals on some. This one's more of a daisy style. This one's almost a rose or a carnation. Whatever works for your style here, stick with the original image or just go crazy and try some different shapes. The ultimate goal of this process is for you to feel confident drawing some new shapes that you haven't drawn before. So if you feel ready to go ahead and start trying your own, just go for it. You can always go back to the original if things don't go well or you lose confidence halfway through, that's fine. I'm really not sticking to the original at all. I just liked how these were laid out, so I stuck to that for general idea. But now, I'm just doing whatever I want because, I just want there to be more variation than you see over here. I'm trying to get some of those back angles and side angles of flowers, so that not every single one is just facing the front. I think it's a little boring if you do that in every single composition. I'm happy with how that's laid out. I'm going to go ahead and start playing around with color. Let's start with a background color. I like this deep blue color, so I'm going to stick with that. I will create a new layer. For these flower shapes, I'm just going to start blocking these in with some big solid shapes. Again, I'm going to move my flowers below my sketch so it's really easy to see the sketch. I think I'll just do each color once or twice, so that I get a lot of color variation here. I think, I failed to put this new color on a new layer, but it's not too late because these aren't overlapping. I'm just going to grab my selection tool, select these two peach flowers by circling them, drag three fingers down, cut and paste. Now, we have peach flowers and red flower layer. Now, I'll create a new layer with a new color. Let's go with a bold pink on this one. I'm going to go ahead and remove that reference image. You can see I'm not really sticking with it at all, so there's no need to have it keep draining my battery. New layer, new color. I like this deep, purple color. I'm trying to get some overlapping here, so this has a lot of movement and you can really feel the depth. Now, I need some stems, so I'll create a new layer below everything else. Let's call that stems, and choose a bright color for that. I need another stems layer above the flowers, so I can do my little flower holding part here. I also want to add in some leaves, because I feel like it's just a little bit bare here. You could go back to the Pinterest board and find some leaf shapes, or you can just go for it. I'm just going to go for it. Some of these will be peeking out from behind the flowers, and then others will come straight out of the stem. I'm going to make my sketch semi-transparent so I can just barely see it. Now, I can start really adding some variation onto my flowers and leaves. Let's go back to this red flowers layer. I'm going get a slightly lighter color and just start adding in some overlapping with those petals. Some strokes to show a little bit of movement throughout the flower. Sometimes I'll get a color that's kind of in-between the highlight and the original color, and just blend over it so that we don't have such a stark contrast between the highlights and the mid tones. I'm going to keep going with this process, adding a little bit of highlight and variation to every single flower. I'm just using my sketch to help me know where to put these highlights. I'm going go ahead and make my sketch layer invisible so you can really see what this looks like. I'm going to grab a dark gray color. Let's go darker than that. Maybe a little darker and just create the centers of some of these flowers. They don't all have to have this big center. I think my leaves could use a little bit more variation too, so I'm going to go in there with a slightly lighter green and just put some highlights down. I put this on the stems too, because it just draws the viewer's eye into something to have a little bit of highlight on it. So I'm just dropping a little bit of highlight on each stem too. 11. Layout Options and Printing: The last thing I always do is just go through and add highlights. I just look for areas that aren't quite drawing enough attention, or when you look at the canvas, somethings just look invisible or drowned out. We just seem to bring those to the forefront a little bit so that we have more balance across the canvas. You can take your time with that, do that for as long as you'd like, but I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. I do want to show you one more option for this type of composition. For this composition, I started with these main flowers and then just added in some berries and leaves. I'm very loosely following the original image, but I am taking some inspiration for the composition from that original. You can see I'm really trying to get a lot of variation in the leaves and capture some curved edges, some sharp edges so that we really have a lot of movement. Then I just added in some extra berries because I felt like it needed a little bit more, and these aren't in the original, but I think they really add a lot to give the piece some variation. One last thing you may want to do with these is print them out onto paper. I've printed these exactly as they were in procreate. I didn't make any changes to the image. You can see usually there'll be a tiny bit of difference between the screen and the actual print. You may want to adjust the darkness and the saturation on this image before you send it to a printer, unless you're okay with there being just a tiny bit more lightness. I'm happy with how these prints turned out, but if I wanted to do it again and get a slightly different result, I could just reduce the darkness, maybe make it a little darker, a little more saturated, and you get a lot closer to that original image. These look beautiful as art prints. This would be a great gift. Or you can also turn it into a greeting card and just fold it in half and then you have that space inside for writing. I hope you'll consider printing some of these out and also trying some different compositions. I created this piece by taking this piece and duplicating the image, changing the background color, and then just moving these elements around the canvas. This exact composition moved around the canvas, duplicated a few times, and you can get a really interesting layout that way. Play around with these. You don't have to stick with exactly what you drew in procreate. You can certainly go crazy with color and moving these around into various positions. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own wildflower compositions. If you liked 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 create folk art style illustrations, how to set up and fill your society six shop using only your iPad and how to create landscape paintings 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 for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more resources like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would love to see your wildflower composition. Please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, designers, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversation, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work. Check up the group through the link on my website. 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 and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.