My sister loves mushrooms.  Recently, I have been doing sketches to amuse her from photos we have taken.  I saw your class while I was working on this one and stopped about 2/3 of the way through the sketch to follow your process.  Lo and behold, I realized that I have intuitively settled on a similar process!

 1) Choose a paper texture and search for brushes I like.  Often the brushes give me a path forward as to how I want the piece to look.  

2) Create under paintings for background and foreground.

3) Add details and refine.  For me, this often involves a search for more brushes that will do something specific or special, like when you looked for a brush that would render just the right kind of spots.  This is where I may employ a few leaf or grass stamps or brushes with shapes that render curly/rough/spiky marks.

4) Use Procreate “enhancements” as desired.  I was blown away by how easily you darkened your piece in places through using the Soft Light screen.  I was also taken by your demo of using Alpha Lock to check and adjust each layer at the end.  I hadn’t thought of that.  My process was more cumbersome, so I’m stealing that!  :) 

I’m including a few mushroom sketches that I did prior to finding your class.  I’m including two that show a pencil sketch to the finished painting because one of the things that has started to develop more fully for me through Procreate is my pencil sketching!  I am loving developing a pencil drawing a lot, although for most of the other examples, I did a quicker rough drawing of where things would be placed, as you did.  I tend to like to get right to the painting and to make adjustments there, rather than in the drawing.  However, this may change because I enjoyed the pencil stage so much in the piece that looks like a praying mushroom.

I love the ideas that you have put forward and feel as though I have discovered a “right path” for myself.  I started teaching myself Procreate in April, it’s been a steep learning curve, and I am grateful to you for sharing yourself in a natural and unstudied way. I have learned how to create some slick, polished, commercial-looking works but really love melding traditional process and decision-making with the new tools.  It’s an exciting adventure!