You Can Draw This SKYLINE in PROCREATE

You can draw this in Procreate. This has been requested many many times and now we are finally going to draw a skyline in Procreate using the brushes that are already in the app. And once you're finished following the tutorial be sure to share your work on Instagram and tag me in the image. Not just in the description and maybe you will see your work in the next You Can Draw This video. Let's not delay any longer. Let's get started creating our skyline. The canvas is 3000 by 2000 pixels and I have created a color palette for you. So that way you can use the exact same colors I'm using in this video. All you need to do is follow the link in the description to download it for free. Let's pick a base color right away. We'll pick that first color in our color palette and we will drag it onto our canvas. And next we will add some more color for our sky. We will use the soft brush for that which you can find under airbrushing and we will pick that brighter blue first. Our brush is set to 40% opacity and the size is around 20% but you can play around with that. Let's add some lighter blue to our sky around here and since the brush is a bit transparent you can make multiple strokes slowly building up that bright blue. I want some brighter blue at the top of the sky and I want some pinks near the horizon so we'll pick this pink first and let's drop it in here making some horizontal strokes giving our sky a nice warm glow. And we can also pick that lighter pink that fourth color in the color palette and add some of that as well near that edge between that bright blue and that pink. And to soften it all we can go to the magic wand and use gaussian blur. Just drag your pen to the right on your screen and soften everything a little bit. We can go for something around 20%. Next we are going to drop in our water. Let's go back to the layer palette and click the plus to make a new layer. Now we'll go to the selection tool that's that s-shaped ribbon and use the rectangle selection tool. And I'll start at the bottom right here the left bottom and then drag it up all the way to the right and let's decide how big we want our water area to be. I think I want to go to somewhere a bit below halfway of the canvas. Let's say something like this and now we can fill this area the selection that we just made. Let's fill it with that first blue that we used and drag it into the selection. Now we'll go back to the layers click that layer and use alpha lock. Let's turn off the selection by clicking that s-shaped ribbon again. Now that we have set our layer to alpha lock we will only be able to paint on the pixels on that paint that's already there. So that's that rectangle that we just created. The rest of the layer is still transparent. You can see that by looking at that checkerboard pattern. We won't be able to paint there so let's still use that soft brush and let's add a little bit of that bright blue on this layer as well. Just a little bit at the top and we can also add some of that pink to give a little bit of a gradient to our water as well. And of course you can also use the gaussian blur here. Drag to the right and give it a soft transition. Just go for something around 20 percent and now I want to create a little thin line of land near our horizon. I'll make a layer between our sky layer and our water layer. So I'll click layer one first then click the plus to create a new layer. Now we can use the selection tool again set to rectangle and let's make a little patch of land. We'll go slightly above that horizon and let's fill it with this second color at the bottom. Well at well not the second not the bottom the second color of the second line and let's fill it and because it's below that water layer you will only see this tiny strip of land. And now let's get started on the buildings and don't worry we are keeping it very simple. I'm sure you can do it. Let's create a new layer first. We will have our layer below the water layer just like this strip of land. Let's click the plus and we are going to use the selection tool but this time we will go for freehand. That way we can create whatever shape we want. Now let's make our first building in the center of our piece. Click on the horizon first and then decide how long how tall you want your building to be. Let's go for something like that. You can go up diagonally a bit and to the side and then all the way down again. And you can go a bit below that horizon that's fine because we are below that water so you won't be able to see anything that sticks underneath. And now to get a better idea of that shape that we just created we can fill it with that second color. Let's drag it in to our selection and now we can see our first shape our first building. Now if we click and hold the selection tool we can get back to our freehand selection and continue making more buildings. We are making buildings in the middle plane right now so later we will also be making some buildings that are behind these buildings and we will be making some buildings that are in front of these buildings. So you can keep that in mind while creating them. Try to vary the height of the buildings and how broad they are. Try to vary the shapes a bit and you can keep filling the buildings or you can just go ahead and keep making these selections and then fill them all at the end whatever you prefer. And remember you can just go below that horizon that's really fine because that water that layer is on top of it. You can make some lower buildings maybe some at quite a different shape and I'm making the buildings on the outside I'm making those a bit lower than the one in the middle. I want that one in the middle to be our centerpiece our biggest building. Just make a nice variation. Now you can drag in the color into these selections to see what your buildings look like. I think we can create some more let's make one here maybe a small one on the right side. I'm really just playing around with the shapes and dragging the colors in. Now we have our buildings on the middle plane. Now let's make a new layer which is below this layer. So the buildings that we will be creating now are the buildings that are behind these buildings. Let's turn off these selections first and we'll click that s shape ribbon again to get started with some new selections. Keep in mind we are making buildings that are behind these these buildings and again vary the shapes and sizes of your buildings. Make them overlap a little bit and if you feel like well Flo these buildings that's way too simple for me I want to get challenged then you might like my Patreon page where I go more in depth and challenge you to yeah to dive into Procreate and into painting and to also make a city scene but I also share a lot of other Procreate video tutorials like portrait paintings animal paintings lots of stuff and we are growing to be the biggest Procreate community at Patreon actually so you'll find a lot of fun people there that all have the same passion for painting in Procreate. I'm filling all these shapes all our buildings by dragging in the color or dragging it into our shapes filling our skyline there but we want more we want more buildings so let's make another layer on top of these layers so on top of layer four which was that middle plane we'll make another layer and make some more selections some more buildings so let's get at it making some lower buildings here because these are in front of the other buildings of course you can make some bigger as well and we are going to use that third color in the color palette here and let's just fill these shapes so we get a better idea of what these buildings look like before we move to the left side I'm going to click and hold the selection tool again to get back making some more shapes let's fill these now we have a nice variety of buildings one thing I want to do though I'll turn off the selection tool I want to add a little bit extra to our biggest building and that's on layer four let's go there and I want to add to like I'm not even sure what they are on those tall buildings it's like a big antenna let's add something like that to make it look even bigger so let's make a selection and isn't that just why they do it on tall buildings make these kind of antenna like things to make them taller let's go up here make a thin looking peak the one next to it zoom in a little bit and drop in that middle color here there now our tower can go into the record books our next step is to add some city lights because a lot of people are living and working in the city and it's getting late but they still need to finish some stuff I guess so the lights are turned on let's make these lights on a new layer above our building layers we want our windows to be perfectly aligned so that's why we'll be using a drawing guide you can find that under the wrench just turn on drawing guide and go to edit drawing guide for this drawing guide I decided to go for a grid size of 30 pixels and I've lowered the opacity a little bit so the grid won't bother you that much so you can go for something around 30 percent whatever you prefer and be sure to turn on assisted drawing and then click done now let's pick a brush we are going to the painting brushes and use the flat brush and for our color we'll pick this fourth color here a nice bright yellow and the brush is set to 100 opacity and the size is set to around two percent now when you paint on this layer which has drawing assist turned on you can see that in the layer menu you can only paint perfectly straight horizontal or perfectly straight vertical lines so your lines will line up with the grid now let's zoom in a little bit to our big building and let's start drawing horizontal lines and try keeping an equal distance between the windows and the opacity of your brush stroke depends on how much pressure you put on your pen so you can vary that up a little bit and I'll just continue making these lights these windows these horizontal lines for all of your buildings and for the buildings that are a you can use less pressure so the lights are a little bit more faded since we will be repeating this step for every building let me just speed up the process just keep making these lines on all of the buildings and you can vary the opacity a bit so you can play around and make the lines on the buildings in front a bit more opaque and the ones on the buildings in the back a bit more transparent now that we have created all of these horizontal lines we want to refine it a little bit and we'll do that by erasing some parts and creating well the look as if these are square or rectangular windows so let's pick our eraser and I want it to be set to the same brush that we have been using for these windows and you can do that easily by clicking and holding the eraser and now it's set to our square brush and the eraser will listen to our grid as well so our eraser will only be able to erase in horizontal or vertical lines so let's start making some windows you can go all the way down and you can just vary it a little bit you can erase some windows so that there it'll be dark just play around with it a little bit and for windows that are further away you can also play around with your brush size a little bit and set it to one percent for example and since we'll be repeating this step over and over for all our windows let's just speed up the process and keep repeating these vertical strokes with your eraser and you can vary things up by erasing a window every once in a while as if the lights are turned off there now these look like lovely windows let's turn off the drawing guide by going to the wrench and turning off the drawing guide now the drawing guide is still active because if you go to your layers you will see that layer seven is still assisted but since we won't be painting on this layer anymore it doesn't really matter but if you would be painting on this layer then you would end up with only straight lines for our next step i would like to get started on our sky let's add a nice moon to our sky we'll go back to our sky layer and click the plus to create a new layer for our brush we will go to the monoline brush which you can find under calligraphy and for our color we'll pick this very bright blue now let's draw a circle let's set our brush size to around 17 but that doesn't really matter just draw a circle hold your pen in place and tap one finger on your screen to create a perfect circle now drag in the color to fill your shape when you fill a shape and your entire screen fills with that color be sure to adjust your fill threshold you can do that by filling your color and then dragging to the left i would like to create a well half of a moon so let's erase a part of our moon and i want to use the monoline brush as an eraser so i can click and hold the eraser again so now it's set to the monoline brush and let's draw a circle again the quick shape tool also works for the eraser hold your pen in place to create a perfect circle and you can use edit shape to drag it around let's do this and now if you want to erase the rest you can go ahead and use your eraser and start erasing everything or you can go to the selection tool i'm just using free hand and i'm going around this part that i want to remove close that then swipe with three fingers to erase it let's zoom out again i want to add a little bit of a glow to our moon so i'll duplicate the layer and then go to the bottom one and we'll use a gaussian blur so go to the magic wand click gaussian blur and then drag your pen to the right and let's go for something around 6.8 i also want to add some stars let's do that on a separate layer as well so click the plus to make a new layer and we will go to the luminance brushes and use the light pen and with the same color selected we will just drop in some stars i have the opacity of the brush set to 100 and the size is set to 50 and i just want to drop in a few stars and with the light pen the harder you press your pen on your screen the bigger the star will be just place some random stars i like it like this now let's paint in some clouds to our sky i will do that by using the soft brush the soft airbrush under airbrushing and let's pick this very dark color first i have the opacity set to 60 and the size is at 40 and let's start painting some clouds around here and i'm making some circular motions while i go to the right i think we can go a bit smaller with our brush let's go for around 26 so i'll make circular motions and i'll keep the underside of that cloud a bit horizontal a bit flat and i'm slowly building up that shape of the cloud since it's a little bit transparent you can make multiple strokes before it's really dark i'm making these long stretched horizontal clouds just below that moon you can see i'm making little circles for these dark clouds and some thinner ones here just slowly build up the shape of these clouds and i want some bigger ones at the top as well so i'll go back to around 40 you can just play around with the brush sizes let's add some bigger ones near the corners so it'll nicely frame our cityscape and the moon let's make a big one here on the left they'll go all the way to our building here i'm just making these circular motions and i'm also varying the pressure i put on my pen because if you use very light pressure you will get a more transparent stroke now let's make the brush a bit smaller now we'll go to 23 for some little wispy clouds little strands of cloud at the bottom here and i finally i want to add some dark clouds here at the bottom near that horizon so i'll make the brush bigger again 40 and since we are on a layer below that water layer you don't have to worry about that water just darkening up this area and on this side as well i feel like we can make our sky pop a little bit more so i want to get back use the soft brush get back to that sky layer and i want to add a little bit more of that bright pink let's add some more right here near that horizon give it a nice bright pink and i want to give that top part near the moon i want to give that a little boost with that blue so that's that second color in the color palette make sure i make my brush a little bit smaller around 16 and let's go over this area now it's time to make our reflection on the water and to make that reflection i want to use the moon and the city let me group those buildings so we can just select all these layers by swiping to the right and grouping these and let's well let's just merge the moon and i will swipe to the left duplicate our cityscape and let's duplicate the moon as well so swipe to the left duplicate and let's drag that city and that moon on top of that water layer and now let's just merge that moon and those buildings by pinching them together and we want to make a reflection so we'll need to flip it we'll go to the arrow to the move tool and then select flip vertical and don't tap double because then it'll just spin so click it once yes there we have it and while we have magnetics turned on drag it down onto the water till around here and then click the arrow again to get back and we want to lower the opacity of this layer because we don't want that to be well fully opaque let's go to around 35 and now we want to blur this layer the first blur i will apply is the gaussian blur let's go to adjustments use gaussian blur and slightly blur this layer let's go for around four and a half percent or maybe well five is also fine and now i want to apply a motion blur so we'll go to the adjustments again and go for motion blur and you can decide the direction of the motion blur by the way you drag your pencil and we want a vertical blur so if we drag our pen down we'll get a vertical blur and let's go for something around 25 percent this layer that we just created with the moon well with the reflection it could be that some of that is showing on the other layer since it's on top of all the others and we don't want that we only want it to show up on the water so what you could do is make well use layer clipping mask and clip it to that water layer all you have to do is click the layer and use clipping mask and now you're sure that whatever is on this layer will only show up on the water as a final tweak i want to darken the water area a little bit it's a bit bright right now so let's make a layer on top of all the others by clicking the plus and we will set this layer to multiply just click the n and set the layer blending mode to multiply what this does is whatever we paint on this layer it'll darken the layers underneath so if we use the soft brush now now let's set it to this blue we can use it to paint everything darker let's put it at around 30 and let's darken the edges here a little bit that way we'll really drag that focus towards our skyline and you can also use it on the sky darken the edges a bit for a dramatic effect and that's it you have created a city skyline i hope you have enjoyed following this tutorial and i'm looking forward to seeing your results if you want to watch more video tutorials then be sure to check out my other you can draw videos as well or just get started with these two over here have a great day