Paint cute portraits from photos ☺️ procreate tutorial & Procreate for beginners

So in today's video, I'm going to show you a straightforward method for painting illustrated portraits based on photos. Even if you struggle with drawing and sketching, I think this video is perfect for you. I'm also in that same boat, and I'm going to show you all the tricks I use to turn wonky sketches into charming characters. As usual, I'm painting in a watercolor style, and you can check the description below for a list of all the brushes I'm using for this. So the first thing we need to do is make a sketch. As I mentioned before, I'm not that great at sketching, so for this, I'm just focusing on using simple shapes to get all the details in there with a somewhat correct perspective. I do have the reference photo off to the side, but at this stage, I'm just following it very loosely. I'm also not worrying about proportions or even making the sketch look good. I just need something rough that I can work on refining next. Once the initial sketching is done, I sometimes use the selection tool to fix one or two really obvious mistakes. I don't want to get too carried away with this yet, but in this case, the mouth was too small and it was distracting me. Now, I definitely have a lot more refining that I need to do, but I think it's much easier to do that when the sketch has color. So I'm going to make a new layer above my sketch, set it to multiply, and use the abstract round to quickly color everything in based on what I see in my reference photo. After it's all colored in, I'll merge the color and the sketch onto one layer, and then I'll basically go crazy with the warp tool and the liquify tool, and I'll try to bend this colored sketch into something better looking and also closer to the vibe I get from the reference photo. The warping process ends up distorting pretty much all the small details, and that's why I sketched the eyes closed, even though I'm planning to paint them open later on. The closed eyes are really just a temporary placeholder that I'll use while I refine the sketch. And in this case, the warping and bending did take quite a while, but as you can see, it's definitely worth it, and I think the refined version is vastly better than the original. And after that, I'm going to lower the opacity of the refined sketch, I'll make a new layer above it, and I'll use that to draw a clean outline. I think it's really important to take your time with this step because the outline is the foundation of everything we're going to cover next. Now once our final drawing is finished, I'm going to turn the sketch back on, I'll turn the opacity back to 100, and I'm just going to move it here over to the corner so we can use it as a reference. And now to use the drawing itself, I'm going to change the transparency mode to multiply, then I'll lower the opacity so it's a little bit lighter, and I'm going to move it so it's above everything, even the paper texture, and then I'll make a blank layer down here, and I'll continue here and start painting all the various elements. And the first thing I recommend painting is basically a light tone from the illustration, but covering everything. So in this one I could use the jacket or the skin tone, but I generally prefer the skin tone if it's lighter. So I'm going to grab the abstract round brush, and my skin tone color, and I'm going to fill out everything. And it's okay if I go beyond the edges of my drawing here, because I can fix that later. After that, I'm going to grab the eraser brush, which is set to the fineliner pen, and I'm going to use it to go along and basically cut out the silhouette here of my character. After that, I'm going to basically do the same process for the hair and the shirt, just making sure they're on their own separate layers. Now this looks pretty good. If I open the layers panel, you can see each kind of element here is on its own layer by itself, and if I turn off the sketch, you can see there's a couple areas on the outside here where it doesn't line up perfectly. Don't worry about that at all, it's really easy to fix later on. And at this point, I like to move on and work on the face. So I'll make a new layer for that, and the first thing I'm going to do is the nose and the ears. So I'm going to choose a kind of pink tone. For the brush, I'll use the abstract round again, but at a smaller size, and I'll just fill in the nose like this, and then the ears. Then I'm going to change my brush to the water blender, and I'm going to use it to kind of blur the transition of this ear. Then I'll do it on the nose as well. And then where I've gone sort of beyond the edges of my sketch, I can just use the eraser to correct that. And in this case, these details look a little bit too bold and saturated, so I'm just going to lower the transparency of that layer to lighten it. There we go. After that, I'll make a new layer, and I'm just going to use the fineliner pen brush to do the rest of the details, but I'm going to avoid the eyes for now and handle them later on. Now for the eyes, I'm going to use the fineliner pen to make those as well, and I'm going to make sure they're on their own layer. And I'm actually going to draw the white part of the eye separate from the pupil. So for the white part, I'm just going to do a kind of almond shape like this. After that, I'll make another layer and do the pupil. And after that, I'm going to turn off the sketch. I'll duplicate both the kind of pupil and then the white part here, and I'm going to move it over to the other side. And then I'm going to zoom out and kind of play with the position of the different parts of the eye until it looks right. And I'm really just going by feeling here. I think the eyes are pretty important, and it's worth spending some time on this. And once the position of the eyes looks good, I'll make a layer above them. I'll paint one eyebrow just with the fineliner pen and making a bunch of dashes. And then I'll duplicate that layer as well, mirror it, and use it for the other eye. And now to simplify my layers a little bit, I'm going to merge all the different pieces of the eyes together here, including the eyebrows, just together onto one layer like that. Now, since my character here doesn't have any other accessories I need to paint, I can move on and start adding textures to the different elements. And I'm going to start with the texture on the hair. So I'm going to select the hair layer. I'll make a layer above it. And I'm going to use pure white and then a default Procreate brush called Little Pine in the drawing tab here. And I'm going to use it at a small size, basically to draw the grain direction of the hair. And when I looked at the photograph, basically it was kind of swept back. So I'm going to try to do my best to recreate that here. Now, after this kind of initial pass with white, I'm going to make another layer and do another pass using a dark color. Now, to make the darker texture easier to see, I'm going to change the transparency to multiply. And then I'm going to mess with the transparency of both the light and the dark texture and kind of refine it a little bit. And once I'm happy with how the texture looks, I'm going to merge all the texture layers together with the hair so they're on one layer. Now, there aren't really many other textures in this particular portrait, but I do think I want to add something interesting to the shirt. So just like before, I'm going to select the shirt layer. I'll make a blank layer above it. And then I'll choose a gray tone in this case and one of the charcoal brushes. I think I'll use the 2B compressed. And I'm just going to kind of scrub over this and give it an interesting light texture. And once I'm happy with that, I'll merge the texture together with the shirt, just like we did with the hair. And once all the textures are complete, I'm going to move on and work on the shading. And normally I do the shading here with the freehand selection tool, but I want to show you a different technique this time. So I want to do the shading on the face. So I'm going to select that layer that has the skin tone there. I'll make a blank layer above it. And I'm actually going to use a sort of grayish purple tone. I'll switch back to the watercolor brushes, and I'm going to use the abstract round. And I'm actually going to paint on my shadows like this. After that, I'm going to set this shadow layer to multiply. Then I'll lighten it and set it to a point where it looks right. And then I'll use the eraser brush set to the fineliner pen to clean up where it kind of overlaps. I also think I want to add a little bit of shading down here too. So I'll use my abstract round again. And all of these shadows have a hard edge. So in some cases where you want it to be a smooth shadow, you can just use the water blender brush and then kind of blend it in those areas. And if you accidentally go over the edge with the blending, you can always clean it up with the eraser again. And now for the shading on the shirt, I'm going to do it with my usual method using the freehand selection tool. So I'm going to select the shirt layer. I'll turn my sketch back on, and I'm just going to select certain areas. For example, here, where I want there to be a shadow, just select there. And I'll just darken it using the hue saturation and brightness. And I'll just brighten and darken this kind of all over the different panels on the shirt, just to bring out some kind of three dimensionality. And if I turn off the sketch, you can see the shading here turned out pretty simplistic, but I think it's good enough for this illustration style. Now for the shading on the hair, it's very simple. I'll do it a lot like how I did the shirt. I'll just select the hair layer, select a couple areas where I want it to be a little bit darker, and then I'll darken it like this. Now hair is one of those things that can be hard to get right. And up until this point, we've been treating the hair basically like a helmet that's just sitting on the head. And that does make it look a little bit plasticky. So I'm going to show you some tricks to make the hair look more natural. The first thing we need to fix is the texture of the edge. Hair is very rough and kind of frizzy, and it doesn't make sense that it has such a clean edge on the face. So I'm going to make sure the hair layer is selected. I'll go to my adjustments, liquify. I'm going to set it to crystals. You can copy these settings, and the size control is here. I'm just going to use it kind of at a medium size. And if I bring it along the edge, you can see it kind of ruffles that up. It makes it look much more natural, and this will be more apparent when we zoom out. I think that looks a lot better. We can also use it up here as well. Another thing you can do is add some kind of stray hairs and make it a little bit frizzy. So I'm going to choose a brown color, maybe somewhat lighter than the original hair color. And for the brush, I'm going to go down here to the drawing tab and use the little pine. It's nice and scratchy for this. Just use it at a small size. You can kind of scribble along the edge, especially in areas where a lot of different shapes are coming together. Just give it a little bit of frizz. Now the last thing I like to do to make the hair look a little bit lighter and thinner is to add splits. So for that, I'm going to grab the eraser brush set to the fineliner pen. I'll use it at kind of a small size, and I'm just going to do these really light and quick brush strokes down here. Just starting very light and then pressing harder as I kind of exit the hair. You can also do it here as well. And then along the hairline. And this is definitely a trick that you should do sparingly. If you do it too much, it can make the hair look kind of feathery or papery. And now once everything is pretty much finished here for the portrait, I'm going to turn off my sketch here. Then I'm going to merge everything for the portrait together onto one layer. And I'm going to use the eraser brush again set to the fineliner pen. And this is a good time to go along the edges and fix some of these errors. Now at this point, we could move on and add the background in the border, but I want to take the chance to kind of warp this a little bit and fix some of the proportions. So this is definitely up to you. You don't have to do it, but I'm going to use the warp tool. And I think I want to make her head or her face kind of a little bit more squished. There we go. And then I also think I want to give it a little bit of a skew as well. And this gives it a kind of confident swept back look. And I think it makes it more interesting. And now for the background, I want that to be on its own layer. I just want to make sure the layer is below the portrait. And for this one, I'm going to use a pretty light base tone and the abstract round. Just make sure you don't use it at too big of a size. So I'll use it somewhere in the middle here. And I'm just going to create a nice background wash using a variety of pressures. Now, because my background is pretty light, you can't really see this problem. But if I do a darker background here, you can see there's a little bit of transparency where basically the background is showing through the portrait. So to fix that, I need to create a kind of layer behind the portrait that sort of protects the colors from coming through. So that's really easy to do. So here's the portrait. I'm going to duplicate it and I'll turn off the duplicate for now and select the original hue, saturation and brightness. And I'm going to raise the brightness up to 100. And you can see this basically creates a white silhouette of our portrait. And now when I turn on the copy up here, it fits exactly on that white shape and prevents these kind of darker colors from kind of showing through. So there's still a little bit of transparency, but it's much reduced using this trick. Now, in this area, my portrait is going a little bit too far beyond the background. So I'm just going to select the portrait here and then use the eraser to kind of cut it back. But I still like it to overlap a little bit. I think it adds a kind of character. And now to finish it up, all we got to do is add the border. So I'll make a layer above everything. And you could do any kind of border that you want, but I like to do a kind of primitive kind of botanical motif. So I'm going to use the little pine brush and a couple of different shades of this kind of golden color. And just like that, our portrait is all done. My number one advice for painting like this is to have faith in the process. Even though I paint these often, I still feel a lot of uncertainty in the beginning stages. I think the key here is to just be okay with that and not allow it to be a reason to give up halfway. As always, if you think I've earned it, please give this video a like. And if you want to see more people-related painting tutorials like what we did today, I think you'll enjoy watching these two next.