Let's Draw a Puppy...Procreate Cartoon Tutorial: From Sketch to Finished Design!

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute little puppy dog from start to finish using the iPad and Procreate. Just like all my videos, it's in real time too. So no time lapse, no edits. You can follow along every step of the way from the sketch process to the inks to adding the color flats, the shadows, the highlights, a simple background to finish it out. It's all there. So if you want to follow along step by step and draw with me, keep watching. All right guys, let's go ahead and draw a cute little puppy today. Starting out, I'm using a 4,000 by 4,000 pixel 300 EPI canvas. It's an RGB canvas. For my brushes, I'm going to be using my cartooning pack for Procreate. Starting out with the sketch pencil for the sketch stage, moving over to the standard inker for the inking stage. And for my color palette, once again, I've got this pre-made. So if you want to download the exact same colors that I'm using in today's video to follow along, you can find that for free. If you go to my website, bjdell.com, underneath the YouTube reference materials page, which I'll also link it down here in the description below, you'll find that along with a video at the top that kind of walks you through how to download and install a Procreate palette. So starting out, I'm going to use black to begin sketching. Once again, sketch pencil from that cartooning pack. And I'm just going to start out with some basic shapes here. So pretty big oval here for the head, another oval down here for the body. I always recommend starting out with basic shapes like this. You can really kind of visualize and get out of your head what you're seeing and onto the canvas. So I'm going to start building up around the shape now. I'm just going to bring in kind of like a rounded corner rectangle here. And I'm going to go with kind of a three quarters perspective on this too. So if you want to pull in a line down the center here, you can do that. Kind of start to build out the body a little bit more here. Same technique from the top here. Pause, bring in some ovals here. Have this one be bigger. This one, we'll have it kind of tucked in behind here. Bringing up the leg there into the body. You'll see once again, I'm in the sketch stage. So I'm keeping this really, really loose. I'm not trying to make everything perfect. Just want to start to visualize where everything's at. Get these haunches back here with a couple of ovals again. Ovals for the paws down here. Once again, coming back in and just kind of darkening up and flushing that out a little bit more. Okay. Next up, let's go and get the eyes in here. So I want the eyes to be fairly large here. Give them a really kind of young cartoony puppy look. Get some ovals in there for those. Pupils in there and the irises around there. Get the nose in here. Just a triangle here for the nose. Just like that. Kind of bring this up and around the eye here. Snout in. I think a little work on the ear next. So starting here at this back portion, I'll pull in down a diagonal line here and back in towards the body. Back up here towards the head. Get the ear there and pull the head around here. And then I think we'll probably give them kind of some tufts of hair here coming out in the front. Pull some of those around here. Just like that. Looks pretty good. Now you'll see I've got that rounded corner rectangle here. I'm not actually going to follow this around. This is, once again, just a kind of idea where everything should fall. So I'm going to start to pull in the brow here back towards the eye. Kind of pull in a fold here. Bag there under the eye. And then as we bring down the snout here, let's down and back up. Same thing here. Down and back up. You'll see, once again, I'm not using those exact lines. It's more of just that suggestion of where everything goes. This is keeping everything kind of loose and I can make changes as I need to as I go along here. Just like that. Pull a tail here in the back. Finally, just throwing some eyebrows here at the top. And there we go. That's going to be our sketch. Like I said, pretty loose, pretty sketchy, and just messy. And that's the way I like my sketch stage, because that leads us into the inking stage, which is next. So to begin the inks, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer on top of the sketch. And then tapping the N for blend mode, I'm going to drop the sketch layers opacity down to about 20%. That drop down then going to ink on top here. So going back up my brush library, I'm going to switch over to that standard inker streamline. And like I've talked about in previous videos, I like to use a lot of different line weights in my designs. Line weights, the thicker the line is, that's where the shadows are furthest away from the light source. As you move towards the light source, you have thinner lines, lighter line weights. And on this design, I think we'll have the light source coming in from this top left. So over here, lighter line weights, thicker lines back here and down the side. So now that we've got that decided, we can go ahead and start. I think I'll just start here where the thinner ones are. Probably once again here, sketch being just a example of where things are, not the final. I'll start to add in some extra tufts of hair here as I come down into the ear. So once again, just adding extra lines that I don't necessarily have in there to begin with. And then thicker lines here as we go back in towards that back section. Again, thicker. You'll see I'm kind of making them lighter as they go in back towards the head and overlap the non-outlined portions. Pull this down here. I think as this eye kind of meets that line and it's kind of hid behind this part of the snout too, I'm going to go ahead and switch here to the center. Actually, I'm going to erase that line and do that after I do the center line here. So we'll get this nose in here. Fill that in. Fine tune the lines here at the bottom. Holding down then on my eraser, selects the same brush that I'm using to ink with, I'm just going to erase here. Just a little highlight there across the nose. Switching back here now. You'll see once again this is where I'm going to start to add in some extra lines. So I think I'm going to add in like a little bunch there on top of the nose so it's got that little kind of scrunch to it. Pull this down and I can add the eye in. Holding down here is going to kind of lock that in to a perfect oval. Heavier lines back here. Pull that down. It's going to be a heavier line here back and up. Same thing here. Get the mouth and the bottom lip down here. We'll pull that back ear in and have that super thick back there because that's going to be the furthest away then. You want to make that a little bit more pointy there at the end just because of this one over here. All right, so there we go. Let's go ahead and do this eye now. Let's again, the oval here kind of hold them down. Try that one more time. I'm down there to lock it in. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit closer so you can see. I'm going to do a taper here up and around to kind of match this over here. And we'll get the pupils in here. Just a little bit bigger. And the irises and this is going to be a lighter line here. Not as thick. There we go. Back to the eraser then. I'm going to erase some highlights here in the eyes where that light's reflecting in there. Get those in there. Back to the brush again. So the eyebrows here. I always like to have the bottoms of these be thicker. Once again, that heavier line weight kind of shows that have that weight to them. The shadows there at the bottom. So a thicker line at the bottom, lighter line there at the top that connects. Get those. I'm going to add in some dots here on the snout. Get those like that. All right, now for the paws and the arm or legs down here. Bring this down back up and in. Also add some kind of overlap here so it's got that wrinkle in it. Once again, this is just adding in those extra details that we didn't put in and wasted time doing on the sketch phase. We can add this stuff in later when we go back to kind of fine tune the design. That's what I like doing during the inking stage. That's when everything kind of comes together. So I just urge you don't take a ton of time on the sketch stage. Get the idea out. Get the basic shapes of everything and then use that as a guide for once you go back in. Let's pull down around here. It's getting thicker down here and back up here in the back. I'll try that one more time so it comes down a little bit better out of that main line here. Actually, let me just start the main line first. How about that? Pull that one in first. Pull this one around and then back into the body. There we go. It's a little bit easier to line it up like that and these are going to be thicker lines back here. Now when I say thicker and thinner, some people take that to the extreme and go absolutely crazy with it. You want it to be subtle. You don't want it to be the difference between this and this. You can see these lines are all close to the same size. They are different in size and weight but it still looks like it all belongs on the same design. Pull back out here and then that is what we're left with for our inks. Let's go ahead and come back up here to our layers menu and turn off the sketch so we can see our design here. I think that looks pretty good. We've got all the inks in there so now it's time to move on then to the actual coloring process. So for color flats what we're going to do is we're going to come back up here to our layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to drag and drop this under our lines layer. Then with our lines layer I'm going to set this as reference. So this allows us to drag and drop colors here onto layer three keeping them on a separate layer so it doesn't mess up or interfere with our lines. Back up to our color palette then we're going to choose this brown. I'll drag and drop this and as I do you'll see continue filling with recolor appears there. If we hit that button there a cursor comes up here. You see it fills in the side because that's where the cursor is at right now but if we move this it now fills in wherever it's at. So now with that set we can just tap on all of these other areas and everything will fill in nicely. Coming back up then to the color palette we've got white which you'll see that was still there so we need to kick that back drop those colors in again here and it's better if you go up instead of going here go ahead and hit your menu up here hit a brush hit the eraser and back to the brush that way it kind of resets that continue filling with recolor. Otherwise you're going to be filling in stuff that you didn't intend to. So we'll select the white and then let's go ahead and turn off the background color so we can actually see where we need to color this in at that there and then I've got the highlight on the nose that filled in turn the background back on now color will switch over to the blue for the iris here get those filled in and then finally got the darker brown here for the eyebrows and we can use that for the tail as well so there we go color flats are done you'll find color flats really go quite fast that's going to be the quickest part of a design so from here then we're ready to go ahead and start working on the shadows so to begin the shadows we're going to come up here to our layers menu again we're going to add a new layer we're going to tap this and set this as clipping mask now this is going to allow us to color in on this layer it's only going to show up on the areas that are colored in on our color flat so if we go out here it's not going to color in and the nice thing it's on a separate layer than our color flat so if we go in to make any changes if we erase it's not going to mess with those color flats it's going to be totally separate with that set then we're going to go back up to our colors palette and I've got this dark purple on the second row that's going to be our shadow color and like I said we've got the light source coming in this way so the shadows are going to be on this right hand side so I'll drag and drop this there we'll go here and the bottom lip back here and we'll stop at that paw there all right so the lines layer was set as reference which allowed us to drop all those in I'm going to turn off reference now on the lines layer because I want to draw by hand now and I want to drag and drop some of the bigger areas that I fill in by hand so back down to the shadows layer and to the brush now I'm going to zoom in here so we can see a little bit better I'm going to start to kind of block in some bigger areas here I'm just going to pull these down and around once I get to a part where I can connect all these lines then I can drag and drop that color in and it'll fill everything in now obviously this purple that's not the actual color we want to go with this is just going to be the shadow and purple on this is a little bit too dark so if we go back up to our layers now we can adjust this by dropping the opacity kind of like we did with those sketch lines to begin with so if we hit n for blend mode on our shadows we can drop these down until we're happy with the level that they're at so I say probably about 25% looks pretty good with that selected now I can start to just continue my shadows here building these up as I go along you'll see I'm just kind of following the shape of the initial curve of those ink lines to get areas connected I can just drag and drop to fill those in all right pull them back you can see what we have here let's go ahead and get underneath this eye plus of course we'll have kind of a shadow here from that ear coming in get these filled in probably bring this around the bottom here and back up connect those and drag and drop a little bit here underneath the nose and then also down here underneath the head shadow down in here just kind of bring this up and around the belly all right and then let's go and do the bottom of the paws here same thing here the back side and then the bottom it looks pretty good now this is also where I've talked about before big areas like this that are totally shadowed in it's hard to tell that they are shadowed because there's only one value there this isn't butted up against another color like these two are so here I like to go back in with the eraser and just pull away a little bit here on some of the edges so that you can tell that okay that is a shadow because I see that there are other colors there so it's just kind of this edge highlight that I pull back so that you can see that the shadows are there now that we've got that done let's go ahead and add a little bit of shadows here to the inside of the eye so if you go to this dark blue at the bottom here pulling the shadow around the bottom of the iris here I don't want this too dark so looks pretty good and then back up to the color palette I've got this blue here that we use for the irises we can pull around a bit of a kind of tapered line there for some shadows and some reflections in here too just some oval dots like that all right so that's it for those let's go ahead and work on highlights next so back up to the layers menu highlights are going to work the same as shadows new layer tapping that and setting it as clipping mask and then going back up to our color palette and switching to this yellow I've got here now you'll see with shadows I go a little bit heavier so with highlights I use them a little bit more sparingly light source coming in from here so we've got the highlights here on this left hand side once again just kind of following some of those lines that I laid down there during the ink stage that's how I decide where these go and kind of their positions some of these around zoom in here so you get a little bit better control over these lines it's one thing too as I draw you see I don't zoom in and out a whole lot on these videos I do when I'm doing my personal work but it gets a little bit hard to follow and annoying in the videos having too much zooming in and out my recommendation to you zoom in and out as much as you possibly can the better that something looks close up the better it's going to look far away as you zoom out so use the zoom in and out repeatedly over and over again during your it's going to make your designs look a lot better and the end product is going to be so much better if you rely on that technique so all right there we go let's go ahead and drop the opacity of this now so end for blend mode again dropping this down to yeah maybe about 30 35 percent something around there I think it looks pretty good so there we go that's pretty much going to be our finished design from here let's throw in a background real quick so coming back up to the layers menu let's go down to the bottom let's make a new layer I'm going to go ahead and go up to my color palette and choose this blue we'll just drag and drop that into the back now I don't want the full thing just colored in blue like this so let's change it up a little bit let's go up here to the arrow and let's go ahead and use distort here so the third one over we're just going to pull this in just so we get a shape that we kind of like something funky and not perfectly you know just a straight square or anything like that so we got this more kind of abstract design I think that looks kind of cool then back up to the layers menu now let's tap this and let's set this as alpha lock so alpha lock works a little bit like clipping masks whereas now if we draw it's only going to show up on that blue color but it's all in the same layer so any changes that we make any erasing that we do it's going to erase this blue as well so that's the difference between clipping mask and alpha lock clipping mask is non-destructive alpha lock is so with that still selected let's go back up here to our color palette and choose that darker blue at the bottom and I'm just gonna make a darker section down here about halfway down just filling this in we have that solid there drag and drop the color now you'll see it's going to fill in everything because our color drop threshold is high and these colors are close to the same so we hold down our apple pencil when we drag and drop that in and then slide it to the left it's going to drop that we just want to stop when we get to that point where it doesn't fill everything in it just keeps that area down here done so that filled in now let's go up to the adjustments menu again and let's go to gaussian blur and I'm going to slide this to the right about 60 70 percent you see now we've got this nice kind of gradient fade from dark to light there at the top finally I'm just gonna pop open my layers one more time and make a new layer and assign this guy and we will be done with today's video so there you go quick little video today how to draw this cute pupper appreciate you guys watching the video if you liked it if you enjoyed it make sure you give it a thumbs up also if you haven't yet subscribe to the channel and hit that bell for notifications you can get alerted when I post new videos also if you guys take part in any of these videos if you follow along with the tutorial I really suggest you posting your work online if you're on social media share it with your friends if you're on instagram or twitter post it there and tag me at BJ Dell I love to see what you guys come up with following along to these videos it's really nice looking through the feed and being able to catch up on all your work as well so don't miss out on that also for me I can be found online BJ Dell.com so that's it for today thanks again for watching and until next time keep creating