How to Draw an Axolotl: Procreate/ iPad Drawing Tutorial!

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute cartoon axolotl using the iPad in Procreate. Just like all my videos, it's in real time, so you'll see every step along the way, from the sketch process to adding inks, shadows, and highlights. Also, if you follow along with this tutorial, make sure you post your design online. If you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me, at BJ Dell, and you can have your chance of seeing your artwork featured in one of my upcoming videos, like the ones you see here on screen, that follow along with my last tutorial, which was the cartoon panda. But today, it's all about the axolotl, so let's get drawing. All right, guys, let's go ahead and draw a cute cartoon axolotl. Starting out, I'm using a 3000 by 3300 DPI canvas. It's an RGB canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out using my cartoon sketch pencil that's part of my cartooning set for Procreate. Later on, we're going to switch over to the Streamline. And then, 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 tutorial, you can find this for free on my website, if you go to BJDell.com, underneath the YouTube reference materials page. There's a link to that, along with a video at the top that kind of walks you through how to install a palette in Procreate, if you've never done it before. So let's go ahead and get started. So like I always talk about to begin with, I'm going to use black to sketch. I just start out with simple shapes. And I want to get an idea out of my head and just onto the canvas, or in this case, the iPad screen here. Just start out with simple shapes, and this one, we're going to start out with the head of our character here. So I'm just going to start out with kind of an oval here, kind of have it a little bit more pointy here at the top to give it some shape. And that's going to be the overall shape of the head. I think with this, we're going to have a three-quarters view. So if I go ahead and do a center line here, just kind of curved, you can see he'll be in a three-quarters perspective, and that center line kind of helps us see that. Now, if we continue the center line down, that will help us kind of decide how the body is going to be shaped and where that goes. So then we can also start just a kind of lima bean shape down here for the body. We've got that in there. From here, let's go ahead and throw an arm in. Just do one kind of coming down here off to the side for the left, and that coming back up. We'll have a thumb there and fingers back here. For this arm over here, we'll have this one kind of outstretched, I think. So once again, kind of lima bean shape. Now, you'll see here with the perspective that we've got going on the three-quarters, anything that falls on the left-hand side of the center line, it's going to be a little bit bigger than anything that falls on the right just because of that perspective we've got going on. So that's going to be true for the arm here and the fingers as we go around. It's also going to be true for the legs once we get down here. So as I pull a leg down here, we'll have these kind of short and stubby. I have one on the left, and then the one here on the right is going to be a little bit smaller than that one on the left. Have a tail coming back here just like that. And this, once again, with these sketch stages, I keep them really kind of rough and messy. We're not going for a finished look here by any means. We're not going for an exact outline. We're just getting our shapes in here so we know where we want everything to sit at. Now, we've got kind of like those flaps that go around the head here, so we'll get those in here. Once again, the ones that fall on this left-hand side are going to be a little bit bigger than the ones that fall on the right. So these are going to be a little bit smaller over here because of that perspective we've got going on. Then we can move on to the center here of the face with the eyes and the facial features. So just kind of a big oval here for an eye, oval here once again, the right one being smaller. And now I can kind of go in here and start to blot these in a little bit more. We're going to have the top of the eye here a little bit thicker as far as the line goes. Kind of represents the eyelash area there, gives some weight to the top. And then we can bring in the irises here and then the pupils inside there. Once again, this left one being bigger than that right. A couple of eyelashes up here just to get some extra expression out of him. I've talked about before, I like to add eyelashes in even if, you know, in this case the animal doesn't have them in real life, it really helps you drive home some expressions. And then speaking of expressions, we'll just get a mouth in here and just like that. And that's going to be our basic sketch. So we're pretty much done with that. From here then, this is where we start to tidy things up and we go over to the inking part. So to do this, we're going to come up here to our layers menu, I'm going to make a new layer on top of layer one, this is going to be our inks layer. And then layer one here, I'm going to hit N for blend mode, I'm going to drop the opacity of this down to about 30%. We want to be able to see it, we don't want it to be too dark though as we draw over top on layer two. Now with layer two selected, I'm going to switch my brush here, we're going to go over to that standard inker streamline, still in the same cartooning set here. And then colors, I'm going to switch over, instead of doing black for the outlines, I've got this kind of dark maroon color, we're going to go ahead and use that for our colors for the outline. Now before I start doing outlines, I've talked about this before, I like to use different line weights in my art, and a thicker line weight represents where the shadows are going to be, a thinner line weight represents where the highlights are, closer to the light source, and deciding where the light source is coming from before you start to ink will kind of help you decide where to put those different line weights. So I think for this one we're going to have the light source coming in here from this top right hand corner. And when I talk about different line weights, it's going to be really subtle. Some people take this to the extreme and think thick and thin, and that's not the case, it's a lot more subtle than that, and once we start here, you'll be able to see. Now we need to decide where we're going to start at, so I think here, with this big oval, this is a pretty big shape to make one consistent line, one single line. So what I like to do here in cases like this, I like to break it up, so if we go ahead and put a chin down here, that means then we can drag this line around here, and it doesn't have to connect to itself, it just has to stop at the line's edge of the chin. So if we go ahead and just do a tapered line here, which I'll show you too for my brush size, I've got this set at an 8% on a 3000 pixel canvas, I've got that just kind of set as default, that's the size I like for outlining. So we've got that set in there, now I'm going to drag that line around, however here I would have to be careful to start at the edge of this, and then when I stop, I need to not go over that or else I'm going to have to erase, and I'm going to have to make sure I don't hit that line. So this is where I like to use multiple layers for outlines, just because I can go over lines I've already done, and then I can erase easier. So we're going to make a new layer now, coming back up here, and then once again, we've got the light source coming in here, so a lighter line weight up here, a little bit thicker down here, and it's going to thicken up around the back. So we'll start out with a little bit harder of a pressure, lighten up, and then get thicker as we come back down and around. If you want to try it a few times to get exactly what you're going for, get that exact shape, it might not work the first time, that's one thing that's good with digital art, is you have the ability to undo and redo. So you can see I started those lines inside there, just to get them going in the right direction and have that right pressure that I wanted. So now, I can switch over to my eraser here, if I hold down on eraser, it's automatically going to select the same eraser that I'm using in my brush to ink with, and then I'm just going to clean that up there. Alright, so we've got that done, next up, let's go ahead and work on these areas around here, these little flaps. So with this, I'm going to go ahead and, once again, using that same brush, I'm going to start to add in some extra little details here. The sketch stage, like I said, just laid out the ideas, here's where you can add in some stuff. So I think here, starting out at the bottom, I'm going to add in some little creases. So if I add a tapered line in there, and then as I pull this up and around, once again, getting thicker there to the back, you can see how that works. And I'll just continue that process here as I go around and finish out those lines, just like that. I'll do that one more time, it was a little bit shaky there at the end. If you start to kind of slow up your stroke, you're going to have a little bit more of a shake in there, that's why I like just a really constant kind of speed going around, keeps the lines nice and smooth, which that streamline also does too, just because of the settings. So we'll continue this here, once again, a little bit thinner here, and I might go over the edge here so I don't have to worry about stopping, that's why I slowed up. So if we go back then to that chin line, we can do this again here and just go down and around, and then we can erase, and we don't have to worry about stopping that line before it gets to the other one. So we'll just continue this process around, just erasing those overlaps as we go, until we're down to the final one. All right, looking good. Let's go ahead now, and we might as well just stay up here with the head and start to work on the eyes. Now with this, I'm going to up the size of this to 20%. Like I said, I want this thicker at the top, and rather than drawing a line here, drawing a line at the top, and then kind of coloring it in, we can just do one solid stroke here with a thicker brush size, or a bigger brush size. So I want a tapered line here, a tapered line here. So we'll start out with thin pressure, press harder then as we go up, and then thin out the pressure again. And this usually takes a few times to do, just to make sure it goes in the right position where exactly you're planning it on. I think I want this one to come down on curve a little bit more, so you'll see I'll do that a second time there, and then same thing over here, pull that around and back over. Looks good. I'm not going to connect these, we are going to fill this in separately with a different color. We're not going to be able to drag and drop our color because the eye is open, but we'll do that here a little bit later once we start doing colors. So then I'm going to go ahead and let's do a new, actually instead of a new layer, let's just go back then to this layer, and we'll do the iris here, a little bit thinner line here, hold them down to kind of lock it in. And then if it's not perfect, you can always go ahead and select that, the selection tool, using free hand down here, and then the arrow, you can always kind of reposition this exactly where you want so it lines up. Once again, one of the beautiful things about digital art. Then going over here, we can do the same thing, a little bit thinner of a line here, just because it is on the inside, holding down locks it in to that oval that we're going for. And then I'm going to go back to that previous layer and erase just that little overlap right there. There's a little bit of an edge. Okay, going back to our other layer now, back to our brush, go ahead and get the pupil in here, just hold them down, lock it in, same thing over here, hold them down to lock it in. And I think I'm going to drop my brush size before I do this one, I'm a little too thick now to have the control that I want, so I'm going to go back to that 8% there, just allows me to have a little bit tighter control over that. There we go, so we've got the left eye, the right eye there, then if we want to, we can also pull down some extra tapered lines here at the bottom, just to kind of show that connecting a little bit more once we go to do the white of the inside of the eye there, you can have some lines there. All right, so for the eyebrows up here, I'm just going to pull down a little bit thicker of a tapered line there, and then lighter at the top, it's going to give that some weight there at the bottom and kind of show some shadow area there, just because of the thicker line, and then once again, lighter here at the top as we come around. I'm going to clean that one up there with the eraser just a little bit, okay looks good. Back to our brush then, do the mouth here, want a little bit of a thinner line, and this I'm not going to have the mouth as one solid line coming across, I'm going to have it break right around there, which once again is going to allow it to look a little bit better than just a solid line coming straight across that might not have the control that you want, and then just having that come down into the taper and not connect, it still looks like it's going to. This one I'm going to start here from the small taper though, I have a little bit better control coming up to where that lets off. Just going to do just a little squiggly down here for the chin, we'll pull back out, and that's going to be pretty much the head, we could also add in some little dots here for some little textures or freckles across his face, just a little stuff like that kind of adds to the character of the design. Alright now, down to the body and the arms, I'll kind of zoom in here a little bit better so we can see it, and once again back here, a little bit thicker of a line, I'm going to come down though, you're going to see, I'm coming down into the finger here and then I'm going to stop, I'm not going to bring this around with that line, I'm going to bring a tapered line across here to connect these fingers, I'll have another finger here, another finger here then, coming up then into the thumb, and up into the arm, and then we'll do a little taper there for kind of where that armpit is, alright, next up let's move on to the leg down here, pull the leg down and up, just like that, and then a tapered line here we'll bring up into the belly, like so, this leg is going to be tucked behind so we're going to have that kind of as an extra line not in there and connected to the whole thing that's going to be behind. Then now drawing the tail, once again, I'll probably hit those areas that I just drew so I'm going to come up here to my layers and come back down to that other layer so that way I can start inside these lines and not have to worry about hitting those ones I've already done because then I can just come in here with the eraser and erase those overlaps, makes it super easy, don't have to worry about hitting anything that I've already drawn, coming back then to the brush again, I'm just going to do another area in there in the center, we'll have that be a different color so the tail isn't one solid color, then erasing those overlaps again. You see stuff like that, just stuff that I do as I'm drawing the outlines here, the sketch I didn't really worry about adding that in, just something looking at it thinking okay we want to break that up a little bit, same thing here with the belly, we'll break this up a little bit and kind of have a little swoosh like that, we'll color that in a lighter color and you'll see though, I went over now, I'm back to that chin layer so now I'm having to erase and be careful not to hit that chin that I already did, you see how that's a lot more trouble and doing those secondary layers really help, alright back to my brush then, we'll do the arm over here and much like this I'm going to use that same technique over here so in the center, I'm just going to pull that tapered line first, as I pull this around, we'll use that to base off where the fingers go, just like that, then I'm going to use the eraser here and just pull this one a little bit thinner here and not have it connect with that other one, have it more towards the center there, alright and then pulling back out, you can see, there we go, that's basically our finished ink design so from here, we're ready to go in and start adding the colors, after that adding shadows and adding highlights, so to begin adding colors, we're going to come up here to our layers menu, since we've got those two line layers, I want to pinch those together so now they are all on one and then I'm going to turn off the sketch layer so all we have now on the screen is just our inks, with that done, I'm going to go ahead and tap our ink layer and I'm going to set this as reference, we'll say reference right underneath it, then I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to drag this under layer two, so reference is on top, layer three is going to be our color flats layer, with layer two, our line layer set to reference now, we can go ahead and drag and drop in our colors, on this layer three, it's a separate layer from our lines and it keeps everything between those two layers, any changes we make here won't affect the layer there, but it uses that layer as a guide of where to put the colors, so we're going to come up here to our color palette then, I'm going to choose the light pink color, I'm going to drag and drop that for the main color of the head and the body here, you'll see as I start dropping, you'll see continue filling with recolor comes up there, if you tap on this, it's going to bring up the cursor right here and then you can just tap on the areas where you want colored in that color and you don't have to drag and drop every time, now that we're done with that, we'll lock it in, going back to the brush there, I'm going to switch the color here to the darker pink now, drag that in, continue filling with recolor, we'll drag the cursor over and then just fill these areas in with the darker color and that's going to be it for the color flats on that layer, the eyes and then the belly, I'm going to do that on a separate layer here, actually no, let's do the belly on the same layer, so if we choose white here, we'll drag and drop that, but then the white of the eyes here and then we're going to use blue in here, this will be on a separate layer, so to do this, let's go ahead and make a new layer, I'm going to go ahead and turn off reference now, actually, let's leave reference on for a second, let's grab the blue first and we'll drag and drop that in there, so that uses reference for there, but we can't use reference for the white here on the inside because this line is open here, so we have to do those separate, so to do this, then once again, turn off reference on layer 2, once that's turned off then, we can go back down to our layer 4, we can switch our color back to our white and then I'm going to zoom in here so we can see just a little bit better and we go around the edges, really, I guess more skilled part of this is getting these to connect, so once we start to drag this around, this white basically needs to continue that line, so it looks like those connect, I think that's pretty good there, do the same thing over here, making sure everything connects around so that way we can drag and drop the color in and since we are on a separate layer, if you get it too far down, you can always use the eraser and go in and erase, just because it's not going to erase that pink, it's a totally separate layer, alright now that we've got that, I want to also add in some highlights here in the eyes and we're going to do that actually on our lines layer here, so we want it to be above the colors, we want it to also be above the lines because we want it to come over these, so I'm just going to draw some circles in here for some highlights, like so, again kind of keeping in mind that light source is coming in from that top right hand corner, I want these kind of to line up in a believable way here, there we go, looks good and that's pretty much it for our color flats, so you can see that goes pretty quick, color flats do not take a lot of time, once we move into the actual shadows and the highlights, that's when it's going to take a little bit longer, so let's do that next, so to begin the shadows and the highlights, we're going to come back up to our layers menu, I'm going to go ahead and work on the body first, we'll have the shadows and the eyes on a different layer here, so if we select layer 3, which is our colors, we're going to go ahead and make a new layer on top, I'm going to tap this and I'm going to set it as clipping mask, so what this is going to do is it's going to basically allow us to color in on this layer and it's only going to show up on the areas that are colored in on layer 3, switching our color palette then to the second row, first color on there, the only color on there, that's what we're going to use for our shadows, and then like I said light source coming in this way, so shadows are going to fall on this left hand side, now that we've got that kind of decided here, we can go ahead and zoom in just a little bit, a little bit more control, and pull in some shadows here underneath the eyebrows, kind of follow this line around and follow around this eye, have the shadow come here across the top of the head, that's going to work it's way back down and around here, pull up along the chin and then along the mouth here, pull up here and then down underneath the eye, I'm basically just following the kind of direction of the outlines that I've already done, so everything kind of has that flow of those lines that we've already established in the inking section, once we've got this done then, hopefully everything is connected, if it is we can drag and drop our color in there, you're going to see it's going to fill in really nice, now that's going to be obviously a little too dark, so we want to go up here to our layers menu then, going into the blend mode like we did with the sketch, we're going to drop down the opacity here and I think probably 30% looks pretty good, don't want it too dark, don't want it too light, I think that does a good job, kind of bringing home the different color for the shadows there, pulling some shadows here around this eye here underneath the eyebrow, just like that, we'll continue the shadows back here around, once we connect then, we can drag and drop to fill those in, you can see those curves kind of follow that outline there, kind of follows the curve of the head as well, just continuing this process down as we go, that looks good, pull some under here too at the bottom, even though we've got the light source there, there will be a little bit of a shadow here at the bottom, just erasing the areas that we go over, a little bit under the mouth here, alright, that looks good, keeping here with the head, let's go ahead and make another layer then, on top of the eyes here, going to tap that, add a new layer, tap that new layer, clipping mask is going to clip to the whites and the blues of the eye, zooming in here a little bit so you can see better, we're just going to bring in the shadow around here, just like that, and we'll probably pull in here around the blue as well, a little bit of a different color there, just following the curve of those lines, got to drop the opacity here, so back up to the layers menu and for blend mode, drop this down, this is probably going to have to be pulled down a little bit further, we don't want it too dark on that white, so, probably about a 20, 25 in between there, that looks pretty good, clean this one up just a tad bit here, ok, and then maybe just put some oval dots in here as well, alright, looking good, pull it down a little bit further here, we'll go to the bottom and start to work on the body here, so I'm going to pull shadow here, we need to switch layers though, back to our layer 5 that's clipped to here, see as I did that, nothing came up because we were clipped to the eye layer, so that kind of shows you the importance of how clipping masks work, so layer 5 here, shadow underneath the chin, around here to the back, pull in shadow here along this arm, pull this one down a little bit further so you can see it a little bit better, just a little bit here, not too much because it's not going to be a huge shadow because the light source is coming in here, but because there is an overlap, it will be ever so tiny, you're going to have more of a shadow down here underneath, like that, that one in there, pretty big shadow here on this leg, a little bit of shadow down here at the bottom of that arm, my fingers, okay and then finally the tail back here, I'm going to make the brush just a tad bit bigger, since this is bigger back here, we'll be able to fill in areas a little bit quicker here, and there we go, pull them back out so we can see and I think that looks pretty good, got an extra shadow there, pencil messed up there, alright, random lines, okay so those are the shadows, I think that looks good, then from here we can move on to the highlights which are basically going to follow that same flow of steps that we used for the shadows, so to begin the highlights then, back up to our layers menu, here we can do a couple of things, if you want to test it and see if the colors are going to look right with the same opacity, you can, so if we go up here to the colors palette, we can choose white, with that layer selected then, we can go in and drop in a highlight and I think that looks pretty good, so here's the problem that you might have and it might be different over here with this lighter pink, you can see you can't see that highlight as well, this one's okay, so I think this might be the case, we're going to do a different layer for highlights, just because we need to have separate control over that opacity, it's going to look different on that lighter color, so let's make a new layer and we'll set this to clipping mask as well and then pulling in here a little bit tighter so we can see, I'm going to pull in a highlight around the front here, let's drop the size back down to where we were at that eight, pulling a highlight around the front and then going back up to our layers menu and end for blend mode, dropping down that opacity, so we have more control down to, I think 54 looks pretty good there, we're just erasing our parts here that we went over and then we can continue here, now if this would be too dark, because you see the pink of the head is a lot lighter than the pink of these flaps, so if this would be too dark, you could do it on two separate layers, that way you could set one highlight layer to one percentage and another highlight layer to another percentage, it's totally up to you if you want to do that, if you think that's too dark for you or if you are using that in the future and you have that problem, that's a way to fix it, do a couple highlights there, I'm going to get a highlight here across the top of the eyebrow there, go ahead and add some highlights here, edges of those fingers there, you'll see I go a lot heavier with shadows and when I do highlights, I don't use as many highlights, they're used a little bit more sparingly, there we go, here, you can even add in some circle or oval highlights here to these as well, just to add in a little bit extra features and details, all right, that looks good and maybe pull one here across the front of the belly, down to the bottom, pulling back then you can see what we're left with, last thing I'm going to add a little bit of a shadow here to that eyebrow, it looks kind of plain just being one solid color, so we go back to our shadows and back to our layer five here, I'm going to pull in a color there and then kind of do some tapered lines there, might even do a taper here too, just so they both have them, zoom in so we can see a little bit better, there we go, all right, pull them back out, that's what we're left with, I think that's a pretty solid design, I think we're pretty well done with the character itself, last thing I really want to do then is just kind of add in a quick background, so if we come up here to our layers menu, we're going to make a new layer and bring it down here to the bottom, color palette, I'm going to switch to this kind of seafoam green color that I've got here and then we'll just draw a circle in the back or oval and holding down here we'll lock it into a circle, drag and drop the color in there and then I think from here, maybe just having some other circles or ovals here, kind of like bubbles coming up, we can make these different sizes, holding down with the apple pencil and then down with our finger, once again locks them into those perfect circles and then just doing different various sizes of these so they don't all look exactly the same here, do that and then if we go ahead and select the white here on our color palette, you can go ahead and add in kind of like some oval highlights here on these where that light source is coming in, just make these look a bit more detailed and not as flat just with that single color there, add in those if you wanted to kind of knock out some of the circle too, you could do that, totally up to you, then last but not least, I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to sign this by selecting my regular inking color, my streamline and signing down here at the bottom and that's it, so there we go, let me pinch it so we get it up there, so there we go, a procreate tutorial of how to draw a cartoon axolotl, hopefully you guys enjoyed today's video, if you did, do me a favor, make sure you give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and make sure you hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos, like I said at the front of the video too, if you guys take part in any of these tutorials, if you do a drawing based on one by following along, definitely post it online, I want to see it, if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell and then in upcoming videos, you have your chance of seeing your artwork featured in one of my new tutorials going forward, just like the ones that were featured in today's video, that's it for me, I can also be found online at BJDell.com, so until next time, keep creating!