Winter Watercolors on Your iPad in Procreate + 20 Free Procreate Brushes

1. Winter Watercolors on your iPad in Procreate + 20 Free Procreate Brushes: Hi everyone. I'm Lizzie, I'm an artist, illustrator and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create winter inspired watercolors on your iPad and procreate. When you take this class, you'll get all of my watercolor brushes and templates as free downloads. Plus my watercolor texture paper, glitter and gold papers, and some snowflake shapes to get you started. First, we'll take a look at a few different digital watercolor techniques. So you know how to create watercolor that work best for your personal style. Then will combine watercolors, snowflakes with a banner and a short winter inspired quote. Next, we'll create a watercolor briefs using a direct painting method. I'll show you all the Winter plan shapes that I like to use and cover some easy tips for turning any plant shape into a watercolor illustration for your wreath. Next, we'll use a masking method to create a winter plant field. Will combine leaves, berries and pine needles to bring a winter field to a quote, All you need to take this class as 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 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 will see a link to this page in the about section of the class. If you are on the app though, you will have to open Skillshare in a browser like Chrome or Safari to be able to see the link to get to this page. Once you get to the page, you will see that you need a password to get in and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you will see the list of downloads here and the first one is the brush set for Procreate. You can click and hold to get the Open in a new tab menu. I'm using Safari here, I have found this doesn't work as well in Chrome, so you may want to try Safari if you have trouble in Chrome. I'll click Open in a new tab. Once that new tab opens, you can click Open and Procreate, if you don't see that, click More and then find Procreate on the list. I'll click Open and Procreate, and then when you open your next blank document and open your brushes, you'll see on the very top, the winter water color set will be there and all of the brushes are included in that folder. Next, you can go back to the downloads page and download the papers. All of the papers and glitter and gold textures will have the same process. Click and hold, Open in a new tab. Then once that new tab opens, you can click and hold and you should see the Save Image menu. I'll click Save Image to save that to my photos. Before I get started with one of these compositions, I really like to take a look at some inspiration. I created this Pinterest board with a lot of different winter holiday ideas. So you could do some thing that's a simple leaf shape or some holly leaves and berries to get you started or you may be ready to dive into something little more complicated, like a wreath with a lot of different plant elements in it. We are also going to take a look at some various options for creating snow-flakes and some multi-colored effects. You could also do something with texts like this piece where you start out with a word and then decorate it with some plants. You may want to get started by just scanning through this Pinterest board and taking a look at some of the options, especially if you are not sure where to start. This is a great place to go and get some inspiration and then create a similar piece, but really make it your own. Let's go ahead and get started with our first project. 3. Paper and Selections: For this first project, I want to show you a few different methods for painting watercolors. You can really choose the style that works best with your personal aesthetic. First I'll create a new Canvas. Click the "Plus" symbol, create custom size, inches, and I'll use 10 by 10 inches here. I find that works well for most of my uses but you could use any size. Click "Create" to open the Canvas. Then I want to set down my watercolor paper. That's one of the papers on the downloads list from the first video. If you click the "Tool" symbol image, insert a photo. Then I'm going to find that paper that I just saved in my photos. Next, I'll just use the magnetics tools so that I don't distort the proportions of this paper. I'll just pinch out to make this larger. Then I can go to my Layers panel and I'm going to change the setting on this layer to multiply. That's going to allow my watercolor layers to blend really nicely with my paper layer. Next, I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm also going to set this layer to multiply. So all of my new watercolor layers that I create should be set to multiply. That's going to allow the paint and the paper to blend nicely together. If you don't like the darkness of this paper, you can go back to your paper layer and click the M to get all of the settings and then just reduce the opacity a little bit. You can see as I do that, the paper gets lighter and the texture becomes less apparent. If you just want it to be a little bit lighter, maybe go down to 50 percent and then you can see the water color a little bit better. Now we go back to my watercolor layer and I want to create a watercolor snowflake. Now you could paint this by hand or you could use a stencil or some form as a guide. That's what I like to do. I find it's a little bit easier to have a guide. In the winter watercolors brush set that you can download, you'll see a whole list of snowflakes that I created. You could use any of these as your format for your snowflake. You may also want to create your own snowflake form, and I covered how to do that in my winter holiday illustration class. If you want to learn how I made all these snowflakes and turn them into brushes, check out that class. I'm going to click on a snowflake that I like and then I'm making sure I'm on a new blank layer. This one doesn't have to be set to multiply. This is just my stencil Layer, and I'm just going to click one time to set down that snowflake. You can change the brush size over here on the left if it isn't the right size. Then you can use the Move tool and make sure magnetics is on here. If it was off, we could distort the proportions over snowflake. So just wanted to be sure magnetics is on. I'm just going to put this up here in the corner where I want my watercolor snowflake to be. Next I want to make a selection of this piece so I can turn it into watercolor. I'm going to select the snowflake by clicking on that layer and clicking Alpha lock. So Alpha lock puts this in this state. That means I can only edit where I've already painted. I've already painted on this black area. If I click alpha lock, then I can only select my black area. Now that it's in the Alpha lock state, I can click that layer again and click select. So I've done alpha lock and then select. Now that snowflake shape is selected, I'm going to make that snowflake invisible. It's still selected but I can't see it. Then I'm going to go to my layer that's set to multiply, that's my watercolor layer and choose a color that I like. I'll go with this medium blue color. Then I'm going to grab one of my watercolor brushes. So you can play around with these various brushes and find the one that works best for you. I tend to use the blunt edge controlled or the blunt edge rough brush. Those have a nice watercolor texture. So you can use the small brushes and just paint to cover that shape. But there's also a huge size of that brush. If you just want to do one big area, you can go with the huge brash. I'm going to click "Select," that D selects that area. You can see I have a nice base for my watercolor. I want to add a lot of variation to this. So I'm going to go back to my layers panel and duplicate that watercolor layer and make the first one invisible. I want this next layer that I just created to be a different color so that I can have a multi-colored snowflake. I'll click the "Adjustments" tool, click "Hue," "Saturation," "Brightness." Then just change this color slightly. Let's go with that blue green. Now, I'm going to duplicate my original watercolor layer again and make it visible and the other two invisible. Do the same thing, "Hue," "Saturation," "Brightness". Let's go with a purple blue on that one. Now, I have three different shades of blue, teal, purple blue, and maybe a medium icy blue. I'm going to make all of those visible and then go to each layer. With my eraser tool, I'm going to erase some selections so that I can reveal different colors. So I'll start with either the cloud brush or the spotty brush. You can see with the cloud brush when you erase. I'll make this a little bit bigger. You get a nice soft erasing. Whereas when you erase with the spiny brush, you get a rough texture. It really depends on what kind of look you're going for. If you want something really soft, stick with the cloud brush. If you want to get a little about watercolors, spotty texture, then stick with this spotty one. I tend to do a little bit of both to add a lot of extra variation. I'm going to go to each color layer and just erase a little bit on each color. I'm not doing this in any particular order. I'm just jumping around erasing colors, removing a little bit here and there, and then just looking to see what needs to be revealed. So let's see, here I have a really dark blue area. If I want that to be teal, then I need to go to both dark blue layers and erase, and then that turns teal. Next I want to bring a little bit more vibrancy to the snowflake. I'm going to just pinch with my fingers to merge all three layers together. Then I'll go to "Hue," "Saturation,""Brightness" and bump up the saturation until this is bright enough. So I like bright town like that. So I'm going to stick with that color. Click the "Move" tool, to set that. Then I can duplicate that again if I want to get a really dark watercolor look. Then erase even more if I want to add in more variation. So I'm going to pinch these two together. Get the eraser with the spotty brush this time, and just erase in some random areas. So you can see there are really no rules to this process. You can do multiple layers of color, erase on different layers, merge them all together, change the saturation. There is no specific way to do it. You really just have to play around and see what works best for you. Those are the few steps that I use, but I might do it a little bit differently each time just depending on the goal for the piece. So that's the first snowflake. 4. Pencil Selections: You can see that the edges of this piece are really sharp. This would be great for like a graphic design style piece that needs to be really clean and sleek. But let's say you want to do something that's a little bit more loose or a little bit more in the style of a hand painted snowflake. In that case, you would want to do a different method for the selection. I'm going to use that same snowflake that we created in the beginning, and I'm going to use the Symmetry tool to make this a little bit quicker. I'll create a new layer. I'll click the ''Tool symbol", click "Canvas." Turn on my drawing guide, click "Edit Drawing Guide," and then I need my Symmetry tool. I'm going to use the quadrant symmetry because of the way the snowflake is shaped. It's going to be easiest to do quadrant symmetry. Then I just want to be sure Assisted Drawing is on. That'll be off by default every time after the first time you open this tool. Just double-check and make sure Assisted Drawing is on and you've clicked "Quadrant" and then click "Done." Now we have to stay on that layer to use our Symmetry tool. But I'm going to go back to my snowflake layer and just put this snowflake in the very center. I'll use my Magnetic tool to change the size. If you want to make it a little bit bigger or smaller, you can do that. I'm just going to zoom in here and try to get this nicely positioned on this axis. I'm looking at this point, and this point, and just trying to line it up. It doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to make this a loose piece anyway. Now on my Assisted layer, I'm going to start doing a tracing. I'll just use the Narinder Pencil here and I threw that into the Winter Watercolor brush sets so you can find that there. I'll go to my snowflake layer and reduce the opacity a little bit. That's going to make it a lot easier for me to see my tracing. I'm on my assisted layer, I'm going to get black as my color to make it really easy to see. Then I'm just going to go through and just really loosely trace the snowflake. I'm keeping in mind that if I want this to look like an actual water color, then it needs to be loose. If you miss any spots, just make sure you go back and go over those again. Sometimes the Apple Pencil will skip and you'll miss a little area, so just go back and double-check that. I'll just continue tracing this whole snowflake and you can see my Symmetry tool is helping me out down here. There's a nice loose tracing of my snowflake. You can see if you compare this shape to this shape over here. This one is really hard and angular. This one is more soft and organic. We're already getting a more watercolor feeling with this method. I'm going to remove my solid snowflake, and on my Assisted layer where I drew the snowflake, I'm just going to move it up into this little area and then create a new layer for my watercolors. Since that's a watercolor layer, I'm going to set it to multiply so it blends with my paper. I'm going to go to my layer that has the actual pencil. I want to make a selection on that layer. But rather than using the regular Selection tool, I'm going to click "Selection" and click "Automatic." That's going to allow me to click in the middle of this area and get a nice clean selection. If you have trouble with this. Let's say for example, your threshold was really high up here, it would just select the entire paper. Obviously that's not what we want. What I would do in that case is click one time with your Selection tool on Automatic, and when it selects the whole paper, just click and drag until you get to a really low threshold. I'm looking up here, this percentage, let's get it to 5 percent. Then uncheck the Selection tool, turn it back on, click again, and then you should get just the snowflake. What I like to do is see how high I can go without selecting other things. You can see when I get to 18 percent, these other pieces start to be selected so that's too far. Let's stick with 12 percent for our selection. Now we've got that nice organic shape selected. I'm going to go to my Watercolor layer and get a brush. I'll use the Blunt Edge Control this time and get a nice blue shade. I'm double-checking then that set to multiply. I'll increase my brush size here and then just cover this with some watercolor. Once that's covered, you can make your pencil layer invisible and turn off the selection appear. Now we have one layer of color, and I'm going to do the same method I did last time. I'm creating a new layer, changing its color, duplicating it again, and changing the color of that layer. So I've got a few different colors going on here. You can also change the brightness or saturation at this point too. I want a slightly brighter blue. Now I've gotten three nice colors here. I'll just go through with my spotty eraser and cloud brush and reveal some different colors. Sometimes you may find that one color isn't really showing through enough. I like this green color, but it's not really very prominent. I'm going to duplicate it and merge those two layers together, make the other ones invisible and just bump up the saturation of that color. Then it becomes really bold. You can really play around with the various settings on each layer until you get it to the color that you really like. 5. Direct Painting and Glitter: You can see here we use the same snowflakes shape on these two, but we got two very different results. This one is very hard and angular, and this one is very soft and organic and even has some little watercolor rough edges that you would see in an actual watercolor painting. You may want to go a little more rough than this. This may not be enough for you. Sometimes it's nice to have a really organic, loose shape, so one more level of looseness would be using the same method that we used before. We've got that snowflake in the center. We're going to use our cemetery tool again on this new layer. I'll go to a new layer, turn on my drawing guide, Canvas, edit drawing guide, symmetry, quadrant and then I making sure that assisted drawing is on, click done. This is going to be my watercolor layer. I'm going to turn it to multiply. Then I'm just going to choose a color I like. Get the blunt edge controlled brush. Let's get a smaller size here. Then I'm going to go through and do really loose watercolor painting here. You can see this is probably the hardest one to do because you can't pick up your pencil. If you pick up your pencil at all, you're going to get some overlapping lines. That may not be a problem for you, but for me I like to do it in one solid swoop. If you accidentally pick up your pencil at all, you have to go back. That's just one thing to keep in mind. On the other hand, this method makes some really nice loose watercolors. I tend to like it for that reason. Now I'm going to make that stencil and visible, and I can move this snowflake down into this corner. Now you can see we've got a really nice loose watercolor look for this one. I'm going to do my same color process that I did with the previous two. There are three different types of snowflakes with three varying levels of looseness. We've got a really loose piece here with some raw edges. We've got a semi loose piece here that has a little bit of roughness on the edge and then we've got super sharp edges. You can decide what works best for your personal style here, one more type of snowflake that I really like to use with my winter watercolors is glitter. To do that, I'm going to make this snowflake visible and move it down into the corner here. Then I want to add my glitter paper to this document. I'll click image, insert a photo. I save these in a texture album, but you may just have this in your camera roll. I'm going to use this glitter paper that has really extreme contrast from dark to light, and then move it down there where my snowflake is. If that's hard to see, you can move your snowflake above your glitter paper and bring back the opacity on your snowflake layer just so you can really see it. Next, I'm going to click my snowflake layer, click select, click on my Glitter paper, and then click over here to clear out that Layers menu. Drag down three fingers and click Copy and Paste. I'm copying that shape off of one layer and pasting it to a new layer. Now I can make my solid snowflake invisible and my glitter paper invisible. Then I just have this nice, pretty bright snowflake here. You can go to hue saturation brightness and adjust the color. I might turn this into a blue color, or you could also just take down the saturation and work with silver. If you're not sure which one you want to do, you may want to duplicate that layer and do one with one color. Let's go with a tail and then make that one invisible and do one with a silver layer. Make sure that gold layers selected and then reduce the saturation to get silver. Now I've got two snowflakes with different glitter colors. I can compare those so the snowflakes I already have and see which color works best with my composition. 6. Arranging Elements: The next thing I want to do is use these in a composition. I'm going to scatter them around the page. First, I'm going to duplicate each one. So I just want to make sure all of my layers are merged together. I've got this snowflake on one layer, that one on another layer, and I'm just going to put these beside each other to help myself stay organized. I've got that first one on one layer and then I've got two glitter layers. I want to make duplicates of each of these so that when I scatter them around the page, I have a lot of different snowflakes to work with. I'll just go to each snowflake and swipe to the left and click "Duplicate". Now, I'll start with the first one. Click the Move tool and just find somewhere for that to go. I might rotate it a little bit. Put it on the edge here, and so I'm going to continue that process with all of the snowflakes. I'm trying to keep in mind variations. If I do one little one over here, I will do that as a bigger version on the opposite side of the canvas so they don't look similar. I've just randomly scattered these around trying to balance the shades and colors that are similar, and if you want to change the whole piece, you could start merging some of these together. Let's merge together all of the watercolor pieces only and then we can go to hue saturation brightness and maybe make these a lot more saturated or less saturated, brighter, darker. This is a great time to just play around with a lot of color and vibrancy options to get closest to what you want to achieve. Next thing, we're going to turn off my drawing guide because I don't want to see those lines anymore. I'll go to Canvas and just turn that off and then I have a nice clean page to work with. On a new layer, I want to create a little banner in the middle to hold some texts I want to add. I'm going to go to the winter watercolor brush set, and scroll down to the middle. You'll see there are three different banners here. If I get black, it's my color you can see the first one is a folded piece of paper. The second one is more of a ribbon, and then the third one is kind of a turned ribbon. That's the one I want to use, I'm going to delete these other two, and I'm just going to place this in the middle. I want to get it in a nice spot so that I have enough space for text above and below. I'm just going to organize this here and I'm going to create a new layer. Using the narinder pencil, I'm just going to sketch what I want my text to say. I've got my text there. Now, I want to get a little bit of watercolor down on that banner. So I'll create a new layer, set that to multiply and grab a color that I want to use and then get my blunt edge rough or blunt edge controlled. I think I'll do controlled for this one because I really want to stay within the lines of this banner. So I'm on a new layer set to multiply and I've got my blunt edge controlled brush. I'm just going to go through and just loosely paint this color in. You'll see sometimes this brush will make a brush stroke, and if you just rub over it a few times before you pick up your pencil, you can totally remove that brushstroke. Just circle over it a little bit to do some blending and it'll go away. I'm also going to do this same color on the side flaps here. I made a little mistake here, and I just want to erase that before I add any more watercolor, I'm going to use my reverse masking brush that's in this set. The reason I like that brush is because it makes a rough edge rather than a perfectly smooth edge. It's a little bit better for erasing watercolors than just a regular brush. Now, I'm going to come through the slightly darker color with this blunt edge controlled brush, and just add a little bit of a dark shade to that back flap of the ribbon. Now that I have my ribbon painted, I can remove my ribbon background or you can leave it. It's really up to you. Sometimes I like having that little pencil mark, but sometimes I'll remove it. I'm going to duplicate this layer and do a little bit of erasing on it. Next, I want to get a little bit of text for this upper and lower part, and you can do that with hand lettering or you can trace an existing font. I'm going to use a font, and I'll use the app called Over. This is a really easy app to use. It's free, and it makes it simple to add text into your procreate compositions. I'll click "Create". I'll choose transparent as my background color, and then I'll choose square as the size, and for text I'm going to choose two different fonts that I like. I did my first two lines, but I want to use a different kind of font in the middle. So I'll click "Text" again and type that other word. I've got my three lines of text in the two different fonts that I want to use. I'll click the "Check "symbol and then click the "Share" symbol on the top right corner, Save to photos, and this is saving it with the transparent background with white text. Go back to Procreate. Click the "Tool" Symbol, Image, Insert a Photo, go to My Recent Photos, and it's actually going to be invisible because it's a transparent background with white text. For me, I'm just going to click in that blank space and it's going to make the text appear here. That's a little bit confusing the first time you do it, but just think of it as a transparent background with white text on a white background. I'm using my magnetic tool to resize this, and put it in the right place here, and then I want to move the second part of the text down. Let's make this a different color so it's a little bit easier to see. I'm going to swipe right to Alpha lock that or you can click and click "Alpha Lock". Then I'll click "Select", and let's just choose black as our color. Click one time and click "Fill". Now, you can really see that text easily. I'm going to put that "Joy is" right at the top here, and then I want this other text to go down at the bottom. I'm going to get my selection tool, click "Freehand", and then select all the way around that text. Click the Move tool, and just move it down. Now I can see that text doesn't really fit well. So I'm going to click the "Move Tool" with Magnetic selected and make everything a little bit smaller. I want my words, you make it down here to really fit nicely within that space. I'm going to make everything smaller and then I can just scoop "Joy is" up. So I'll get my freehand selection tool again. Click the Move tool and just move that up, and now I can put this one in place using the same process. I'm going to turn off magnetic for this just because it's really hard to do a really specific placement when you have the magnetic setting on. I've got that one in place. I'm going to remove my sketch layers since it's becoming a little bit distracting, and then I want to just use this layer as a guide to add my watercolor. So I'm going to reduce the opacity of that text layer, create a new layer that's set to multiply, and then I'm going to get a nice blue color that works well with my snowflake. Let's use a blunt edge rough brush for this one, and I'm just going to go in and fill this text with watercolor. You could use any of the methods that we've covered so far. You could just make a selection and then paint watercolor right over it or you can just do what I'm doing, which is just by hand, go through and paint each letter. That's going to make the loosest, most hand-painted look. For me, that's what works best. I'm going to use the same process with this text that I used with the snowflakes. I'll create new layers and change the color of that layer, and do that a few times so I can get some multicolored effects. Now I'm going to bring back my text layer, and I'm going to just erase on my watercolor to show that text. I'm going to use the eraser with the reverse masking brush. I'm on this layer that contains my watercolor banner. Let's get a slightly smaller brush. I'll just go through and just really loosely follow this text. Now, I can make my text layer invisible, and there I have my nice text together. I do want to move down the word or move up the word wherever and the banner. So I need to select a few different layers to be able to move those all up together. First, I'll select my banner then I'll select the black outline and the text. Now, I've got three different layers selected. When I click the Move tool, I can just move all three of those up so they look better with the two top and bottom lines. You could keep going with this. You could add some more decoration, more snowflakes, adjust the colors, but I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. 7. Winter Plant Wreaths: For this next piece I want to combine a lot of different winter plants to create a really full bushy wreath. I'm going to start with the same canvas that we did last time. This is 10 by 10 inches. I've laid down my layer of watercolor paper and that's set to multiply at about 50 percent opacity. Then I've created a new layer that's set to multiply on a new layer, just a normal layer. I'm going to get black as my color. I want to start with little framework for my wreath. I'm going to get this circle template brush that comes with this brush set. I'm going to click it one time. If the size isn't right, you can adjust it over here on the left. I'm just going to put this in the middle of the canvas. Then I'm going to duplicate it, click the Move tool, make sure magnetics is selected and just pinch it. Pinching it is going to allow it to stay perfectly in the center of this canvas. I'm just going to leave a little bit of room for my texts in the center and then have a really full wreath on the outside. I'm going to bring that in a little bit more and that looks good to me. This is totally up to you. You can do something thinner or even thicker, really just depends on your personal style. I'm going to merge both of those pencil layers together so that my framework is all on the same layer. On a new layer, I'm going to get the nail under pencil and just do a little sketching here to remind myself how I want to set this wreath up. I know for example, I want to have some big vines that come down like this, and then some smaller ones that come up like this so that I have an asymmetrical balance. Then I want to have pieces coming off each side like this, and then from the bottom they'll come from the opposite direction. I like to do that in the beginning just to give myself a little bit of framework and organization to get me started. On a new layer set to multiply, I'm going to choose a color and I've just chosen a few greens that I like. But you could really do this in any color, it's totally up to you. I'm going to come in and I'm going to grab the blunt edge ref detail brush. The nice thing about this brush is you can get a really tiny thin line, or you can bump it up and get a thicker line. I like to use this for plant forms because it's really easy to draw the actual vine and then you can just bump it up a little to draw your leaves. Start with the base of my vine here, and then I'll increase the size of my brush a little. I'm just going to come through and add these little pine needle shapes. I'm trying to keep these really imperfect. I don't want these to be perfect, I want them to be really loose. I'm just flicking these off this side and letting it be really messy. I'm going to keep doing that with this color all around my wreath. Now that I've got these scattered around the page, I'm going to make sure that layers set to multiply and then create a new layer set to multiply with a different color. I'll grab my second color and I'm going to repeat the same process with a few different colors, so I just go around the canvas and just start adding in color a little bit at a time and trying to keep it really balanced. If I add some light green on this side of the wreath, then I'm going to go over to the other side of the wreath and add in even more. I'm just trying to stay within the boundaries of my circles that I created. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can always go outside of those a little bit. But I try to stay at least closely within those borders. I'll go ahead and speed this up while I add in a bunch of different colors here. Now that I've added in a ton of pine needles, I'm just going to go through with a red color and add a bunch of little dots. Those are going to be my berries. I'm going to spread these dots all around the page and then just add in some little brown stems. I'm just using that same fine detail brush that I use to create the pine needles. Now that I have my first layer laid down, I can go ahead and start adding some variation to this. I'm confident with all of my layers so I'm just going to merge those together, all of my watercolor layers, and then my actual frame is on a separate layer. I'll duplicate that layer and do the same thing I do with the snowflakes, where I make a slightly different shade and do that a third time. I like to do that just to add in a little bit of variation. It's totally optional you don't have to do that step. But I do find that it makes it a little bit more realistic when it comes to trying to compare this to an actual watercolor. You can get a little bit of color variation and lightness and darkness variation. You can get a lot closer to the real thing. I'm just going through and erasing all these little areas on each layer to bring out some of that color variation. I'm going to go ahead and remove my template just so I can really see what I'm doing here. I merged my three color layers together and maybe duplicate that again and merge those together that just gives me a little bit more vibrancy. You can see each time I duplicate it I get some really nice dark darks. One more thing you can do here that can help add a lot of variation is going in with a really small eraser and erasing individual pine needles. Because if you were actually painting this with a brush, you would get a ton of variation from needle to needle. We're ready to add some text into this piece. I'm going to create a new layer, and I've already created the text. I did it using the exact same process that we did in the first project. I went into over and I typed it and then I saved it. I'm just going to go to my photos and click on that image that I've already saved. I'm going to pinch this to put it in the middle of my canvas exactly where I want it to be in my wreath. Then I'm going to give this a watercolor. Look, right now it's just pure black and white. I really want it to look more like a watercolor painting. I'm going to reduce the opacity and create a new layer, then grab my reverse masking brash. What this brush does is it allows you to create a watercolor edge. You can see it has a rough edge like watercolor. It's going to allow us to create an area that we can then select and fill with watercolor. I'll take just a minute here to fill this whole piece really loosely. Now that I have that written with my reverse masking brash I can make the original invisible, and then I can use our selection process. I'll swipe to the right to Alpha log or you can click Alpha log. Click "Select". Now I have that area selected. I can make it invisible, create a new layer and set that layer to multiply, then make sure black is my color. I'm going to get the blunt edge rough watercolor brush, and just come through and fill all of this text with watercolor. Then I can remove the selection tool, and on that same layer, I'm going to come through with the eraser. You can use the cloud eraser or the spotted eraser. I'm also going to duplicate this layer just to make it a little bit darker and merge those two layers together. Then I'm just getting a really dark, dark and some lighter lights, it just gives a little bit more variation. There we go. We have some nice black and white watercolor in the center there, and you can keep going with this. You could add more color variation. We could duplicate the wreath. Then let's get a pink color here. Then we can go through and erase big areas and get more of a pink and red tone. It's totally up to you how far you want to go with this, you can call this done or you could keep adding more platforms, adding more variation and color. I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. 8. Masking Process: For this next piece, I want to combine a lot of different winter plant forms to create a word. I chose a short word here because this is a time-intensive piece. But you may want to go with something a little longer or use just one word in your quote with this style, and then the rest could be regular hand lettering or watercolor lettering. To get started, I need a little bit of a framework for my letters. I've already typed in over the word joy, and I just used a really simple font. You'll see if you use the over-app, there are a lot of really nice simple fonts in there. I'm wanted to click the magnetics tool and just use my two fingers to make this larger. I'm still working with a square Canvas because I think that tends to work well for most online uses. But you could certainly do this in a rectangular form as well. I just want to position this in the center. Then I'm going to just reduce the opacity, so I can really see what I'm doing here. With this piece, rather than directly painting the watercolor, we're going to use a masking method. There are three different masking brushes here. The first one is just regular reverse masking. I'm going to make that bigger, so you can really see it. It has a nice, bumpy watercolor edge. The next one is dry masking, this would be a dry brush with water color pigment on it or wet masking, this is more of a hazy look. Anything you paint with these brushes, you can then select it and then paint it with water color. This is really just a way of setting down your framework for what you want to be shown in watercolor. I'm going to start by creating some plant forms here. I like to start with a simple vine. I'm making sure I'm on a new layer here. Just going to create a really simple vine that goes all the way across my J. Then I'm going to bump up the size of my brush a little bit and just come down off of this little vine and have some really haphazard leaves. You can see I'm trying to add imperfections into these. I'm trying to give them a lot of variation and I'm really using my pencil pressure to have a thin bottom and a really thick ending. I'm just keeping an eye on that as I work and I'll go ahead and speed up my video while I finish this. I'm happy with that. I also want to add in some little red berries. I'm actually going to do that on a new layer because I want to be able to paint my red water color on one layer and green on the other. I don't want them to overlap. You can have them overlap, but for my purposes, I like to remove the green areas so I can really just have appear red. I'm going to go through and try to add a lot of variation with these dots. I'm thinking about, if I do a large one over here, I'm going to do with small one over here. I'm always thinking about that variation aspect as I work. Because I don't want there to be any green water color under my red watercolor, I need to now remove some of this green in all the areas where my red and green overlap. The easy way to do that is to go to your red layer and I'm going to erase this little piece over here, this little mistake. I'm on my red layer. I'm going to swipe right with two fingers to Alpha Lock or click Alpha Lock, and then click Select. Now, I have all of my red dots selected. Now, I'm going to go to my green layer and then click over here to clear out that layers' panel. Swipe down three fingers and click Cut. What I've just done is cut my red out of my green. You can see if you go through there's all these little circles where the red would have been. Now, when I add my red watercolor, it's not going to get muddied up with all the green watercolor. Next, I'm going to go ahead and do my watercolor for this ladder. I'll create a New Layer, click on Main Green, Alpha Lock it, Select, make it invisible, go to my New Layer, and make sure that layer is set to Multiply. Choose a nice green color, and then get my blunt edge rough brush. I'm just going to cover that with watercolor. Now, I'm going to do the exact same process for my red. My red is already alpha locked, so I only have to select it. You can tell if something's alpha locked because it'll have those little checkers. I'll create a New Layer, set that to Multiply, make my red invisible, get red as my color and blood edge rough as my brush, and then I can fill in all those little red dots. Now, I can click the selection tool to deselect. At this point, I like to hide my letters because I find they're a little bit distracting when it comes to adding in my color variation. I'm going to do the same process as usual, going through and altering these colors, adding a few different layers with a few different colors and then doing some erasing. There's my first letter. Now, I'm going to continue on to my second letter. 9. Color and Form Varition: For the second piece, I'm going to do some holly leaves. On a new layer, I'll grab any green color and get my reverse masking brush, and then I'll just go along with a little holly vine here, and then I'm just going to go around and add some little twigs where my leaves will be able to come from. Once I add all of those twigs, I'm going to add in my leaves. I do these with really sharp points, and I try to make each one a little bit different. Once I do my sharp point edges, then I just drag a color in there. Then I've got that really easy, solid color. I'll continue the same process all the way around my O. Now I'm going to do the same process I did with the last piece. I'm going to add in these berries with red. Now I'm going to go back to my green layer and just add in some little stems here with a small brush to show where these berries come from on the vine. Now I want to cut out the red shapes out of the green again. So Alpha Lock my red click it one time, click "Select", go to my green layer, click over here to clear out that Layers handle, drawing down three fingers and cut. Now I cut all of my red out of the green. Now I can do the same process I did before to add in my watercolors. You can see how doing a lighter green with some really bright red berries on this one, and then a darker green with some pinker berries on this one adds a lot of nice variation to this piece. I'm going to continue with this last letter, and for this one, I'm going to do, using the masking brush here. I'm going to do this Y-shape with a really thin vine then I'm going come through on both sides of this with really straight shapes just coming off of the edge, and then for each one of these, I'm going to give it a little leaf all the way down the edge, and you can see these are just tiny little specks. I'll do that all the way down this piece and then I'll add in my red berries too. I'll go ahead and speed up my camera while I do that. Now I've got that last plant form placed here, and I want to add a slightly different greens so that all three of these are different shade of green. I'm keeping that in mind when I choose my last colors, and I'll go ahead and do the same watercolor process on this piece. I toss an emerald color for this one because it contrasts really nicely with these other two pieces. We've got a bright green, a dark green, and more of an emerald. I think these look nice when you add a lot of variation. But you could also do an entire word just with one type of plant. Or you could add some text above and below, or do a wreath around this piece. Really the options are unlimited. Once you learn this process, you can really go crazy with creating these platforms in so many different ways. I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own Winter watercolors. 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 winter holiday illustrations using the free downloadable brushes I created. Check those out on my profile, if you want 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 final project that you create for this class. Please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group that I created for iPad artists, Illustrators, Letterers, and Digital Planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work. Check out the group, I'll put a link in the class description and there's also a link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please reach out to me. You can do that here on Skillshare by replying to my discussion or you could contact me through my site. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.