Coloring a Sketch in Procreate...Let's Draw a Toucan!

In today's video I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute cartoon toucan from start to finish using the iPad and Procreate. Just like all my videos too, it's in real time so you can follow along every step of the way from the sketch, to adding the inks, to dropping in color flats, then adding highlights and shadows, and then finally finishing it all off with a background. Also if you follow along with any of my tutorials, I really urge you to post your work to your social media, so if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell for your chance to see your artwork featured in one of my upcoming videos, just like all the work you see here that was based on the axolotl tutorial that I did a few weeks ago, some really great artwork. But my last video was all about making wooden pins using Procreate and the Glowforge, and I said I would give away all the pins featured in that video, so the winner of the wooden pins is Rob Jones. Congrats Rob, thanks for leaving a comment, I'll go ahead and get a hold of you on Instagram to get your shipping information, but for today it's all about the toucan, so let's jump into it. Alright guys, so let's go ahead and draw a cartoon toucan. Starting out I'm using a 3000x3300 dpi canvas, it's an RGB canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out sketching with my cartoon sketch pencil, it's part of my cartooning pack, it's available for Procreate on Gumroad, I'm going to switch over then to the standard inker. Once I go to ink it, 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 that for free on my website, if you go to BJDell.com underneath the YouTube reference materials page, which I'll also link it down in the description below, you can find that, along with the video at the top of the page, 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, I've got this kind of darkish blue that I'm going to sketch with, I was kind of messing around earlier and seeing what stands out on camera a little bit more than just black, and this might make it a little bit more interesting to see. So I'm thinking with the toucan, I kind of want an angular design, and I kind of want it to be a profile as well, so I'm going to start out kind of positioning him over here to allow room for kind of that overextended beak over on this side. So as I start out all my designs, just really basic shapes to kind of picture where everything's going to go. So the circle here is just basically going to be roughly where the head is, and then from there I can go ahead and kind of get this beak in here. So if we just draw an angled line here coming up to a straight line across, kind of start to form this beak, and we can bring this up and back towards the head. Once again with my sketches, just really loose, kind of curved bottom here. With the sketch stage, I just like to go in, like I said, keep it really loose. The inking stage is where we're going to go back in and kind of fine-tune things. So if this is one of the first videos of mine you've watched, you can kind of see the difference between the sketch and the finish stage and why it's important to keep it loose. So we've got that. Let's go ahead and kind of get the eye in here where it needs to go. So we'll get a big oval or circle in here, and then another one inside for the pupil there, and then another oval around the outside for that iris. All right, so we've got that. Let's go ahead then and kind of see where this body is going to come. So I've got the oval here, the circle for the head. I'm going to go ahead and make another oval down here, kind of for where the body is going to be. And then from there, let's go ahead and do a couple of diagonal lines here so it's almost like an hourglass. Let's see, they'll kind of come across each other there and then back out. Like I said, I want this to be angular, so this is going to kind of help me see that. Then I'm going to start to curve around where this circle connects the two. You'll see now as things start to take shape, you can really go ahead and use those basic shapes to begin with and kind of connect them to get the feel of the design that you're going for. From here then, I'm just going to pull his head kind of up, and then like I said, you kind of want this angled, so I'm going to pull this back further than that circle initially was. So we've got that nice kind of extended back part there to his head, which then we can lead up into some feathers back here. Let's draw some kind of triangles, really basic, once again, angular. The kind of key for this, do the same thing down here, pulling the tail feathers just at angles, just like that. We need to get his wing in here, so pull down a curved line here and then another curved line to meet that, just like that. Then the face here, we'll kind of have this colored a different color, so we want to kind of outline this to block in where that's going to go, like that. We can probably do a color down there for the belly too, if we bring the belly down and around. The belly we kind of have, or the body more so, kind of in a three-quarters view here, so he's kind of tilted his head there to the side. We throw in an eyebrow up here. Use my eraser and kind of get in some highlights there just so we can kind of see what that eye is going to look like. Coming back to the pencil then, I'm going to darken in the beak now to kind of match up the rest of the design, just like that. Front's going to be colored in, the color of the body there, get that in there. Then finally moving down here, the feet, I think we'll have them sitting on a branch, so we start to just draw in some curved lines like this, overlapping, those will be the feet, or the toes, and then we can have the branch kind of coming in here underneath those toes. Once again, keeping with the angular theme, just pull the branch up here, like so. Once again, just really rough, we'll kind of fine-tune things as we go forward. And I think overall, that's pretty good for the sketch, probably do some extra details here under the eyes, maybe pull some bags here around the eyes, but overall, that's going to be the sketch. Like I said, quick, simple, rough, next step, inking is where we start to fine-tune things, so let's go ahead and start that now. Coming up here to the layers menu, I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer here, it's going to be our inks layer, and then I'm going to grab the blend mode on layer one, we'll drop this down to about 30%. Again, we want to be able to see it, but we don't want it to be too dark, to where it takes away our focus from what we're laying down. And then coming up here to the color palette, I'm going to switch over to black for the outline, and then for my brush, I'm going to switch over to that standard inker streamline, and then we can begin. So here is where I usually decide where's the light source coming from, using different line weights to do the inks means anything further away from the light source with shadows is going to have a little bit thicker line, closer to the light source is going to have a thinner line. Since I've got these highlights here in the eyes, obviously we'll probably have the light source coming in from this direction here, so up here is going to be where the highlights are, thinner lines as we move down, thicker lines. And you'll see there's not a huge difference between thick and thin. You don't want to go super hard like this for the thick, and then this for the thin, it's too much of a difference, but you can kind of see once we get started here. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom in just a little bit so I can see here, and I think we'll begin, let's go ahead and start here at the top and pull this down and around, we'll try to do one motion down and around for the top of the head here. So we'll start to bring this around, and for my brush I have this set at 9%, that's where I keep it at for a 3000 pixel canvas. So I'm going to start to pull this line around, go a little bit lighter there, just like that. Actually, I'm going to pull it further back here in the back, kind of at an angle here and can't see super, super well. Alright, so we've got that, let's go ahead, moving down here, we can start on this wing since this overlaps here, pull this down and around. Start here underneath the beak next, pull this down and around, kind of connecting there where that would meet across. In here for the different colored chest, belly, this line's going to be a little bit thinner since it's on the inside, any of the inside lines I like to keep thinner than those outlines. Let's go ahead and move on to the beak next since we have some overlaps here with the eyes and stuff. So we'll start here at the back, once again a thicker line back there, and you'll see I just did the outline instead of going in here because I want that to be a thinner line once again. So we'll go ahead now and connect those with the thinner line, trying to get them to match up there. If you come close and just want to do some erasing or some, oops, I'm going to hold down my eraser so it sets it to the same brush that I'm using, if you want to do some erase maybe that will work here. Holding down that should set it now, there we go, to that same brush that I was drawing with. So we can go ahead and fine tune this so it matches up a little bit better. Once again, I like to, in my videos, kind of keep zoomed out and not do a lot of zooming in and out constantly, but if you're following along with this, if you're drawing just anything yourself at home, I really suggest just zooming in and out as much as possible. If it looks good close up, it's going to look good further away too, so you can get in and make sure your lines are really tight and nice just by using that zoom in and out feature as much as possible. All right, next up let's do the eyes. So here I'm going to start with a kind of thinner line, get thick here in the back, and then thin again here towards the front. Doing that kind of shows you where the heaviness of those upper eyelashes or eyelid too would be, so that's usually how I like to do my eyes. And then we can go ahead here and go in with the pupil, holding down to lock it into a perfect circle, drag and drop, and then the iris here, we'll get in here a little bit tighter so we can see, get that in there. I'm going to try this on a separate layer here, so let me make a new layer just so I have a little bit more control over this, and go ahead and do that, and then with the arrow here, I can kind of pull this around and rearrange it to get it exactly where I want it. Move it and shift it down smaller if I need to, and get it locked in there, get my brush or whatever up there to lock it in. Now with that eraser selected, I can go in here, I'm going to pinch these layers together now so they're back on the same layer, so all my lines are still there, and with the eraser then, I'm just going to go ahead and do the highlights here, there we go. You might hear in the background, I've got a cricket in my studio and I cannot find it, so maybe I should have drawn a cricket, I don't know, I've been looking for the last few days and I don't know where he's at, so if you hear that in the background, that's what it is. All right, so next up, the outline here for the inside, once again, lighter line here as we go around, it's not an outline, so we want that to be thinner. Go ahead here and use the eraser where the eyebrows come in here, erase where it's going to overlap at to save us some hassle later on, and we'll pull this line back, just like that. Next up, let's go ahead and get these back here, feathers, and this, I'm just going to keep on going with kind of one stroke there, don't really have to lift up the pencil, same thing down here, we can just kind of keep a steady flow if we get it to look right, so they all kind of pinch back into that same spot, just like that. This one I'm going to do one more time because I've got a little bit too much there as far as where they meet, I don't want it to be exact to where it was really bunching up that black. All right, next up, let's go ahead and do the toes of the feet here, pull these around, just like that, and then we can go ahead and do the branch here, thicker line down there at the bottom because that's going to be a little bit heavier of a shadow, of course it being underneath everything, we can kind of continue that over here, and a little bit thinner line there than at the top, usually for branches too, I like kind of a shaky line just so you kind of have that natural organic feel to it, and then we'll just do some tapered lines here for the texture of that bark, just like that, all right, and from here, I think that's pretty much it for the lines, I'm going to add in just a couple of tapered lines here for the feathers, just like that, and I think we're good, so let me turn off the sketch then, you can see what we're left with for the outlines, pretty clean, and we are ready then to move on to the next step, which is adding the color flats. So to do the color flats here, let's go ahead and come up here to our layers menu again, I'm going to make a new layer, I'm going to drag and drop this underneath layer two, layer two is our lines, we're going to go ahead and tap that, and then we're going to set it as reference. So what this allows us to do, is it allows us to drop in all of our colors on layer three without being on the same layer as our lines, which makes it easier to do shadows and highlights in the next step, and it keeps them separate, so if we need to make any changes, we're not affecting the lines layer, all right, so now that we've got that on layer three, back up to our color palette, and I've got this third color in, this really dark gray, that's going to be the body color, so we'll drag and drop this in, as we do, continue filling with recolor comes up there, we want to tap that, you'll see we have this cursor, it filled in everything because it's on the background right now, so we're going to drag this over to one of the areas it needs filled in, and just continue tapping all of these areas that are going to be the darker gray color. Now that we've done that, hit a menu item up here to lock it in, we'll go back up, and I've got this lighter gray color, we'll use that for the eyebrow, back up, this kind of cream color, we'll use that for that face area, and then also the body there, the belly, back up again, orange for the beak, continue filling with recolor, drag that there, and then also here for the feet. Now for the feet, I also want to add just some kind of lines across there, texture lines, I didn't do that initially because if we did and it was connected, we would have to drag and drop that color probably 15, 20 times, so now what we can do to save ourselves time, we can go back to black here for our color, we're selecting there, and we can go back to our lines layer with our streamline brush, now we can zoom in here and we can do these texture lines, and it saves us a ton of time from having to drag and drop all the colors in, so 1, 2, 3, 4, we'd have to do that 3 times there and 3 times there, so a huge time saver overall, pulling back out then, we need to switch back to our color flats, always remember that because otherwise if you switch from lines and back and forth, you might color in on the lines layer and you don't want to do that, it sucks to have to go back and do everything over, so we're going to go back to the dark color for the body here, we want that on the front there, the beak, next up we've got white, we're going to do that for inside there of the eye, then we've got this yellow for the iris, which you see there I just hit the line, which we don't want, we're going to do that, it fills in this because obviously it's open, so we're going to have to recolor that white in by hand, so if we go back to our white now, we can just go ahead and just draw the oval of that highlight in, if you get too big, you can go back to the yellow there, kind of pull it back a little bit so it lines up, and there we go, then finally back up to the color palette, we've got brown, we can drag and drop that, not hitting the lines, and that will be the branch there, okay, so once again, color flats, super fast, super easy, that's the quickest area of this process, or the quickest step of this process is color flats, but doing it like this makes it a lot easier once we move on to the next step, which is adding the shadows and the highlights, so let's do that now, the layers open, we're going to go ahead and make a new layer, and we want to tap this, and we want to set this to clipping mask, so what this is going to do, this is going to allow us to color in on this layer, it's only going to show up with what's colored in on this layer three, so if we go out here into this white, it's not going to show up, it's going to keep everything nice and tidy and where we need it, that way you can get kind of sloppy if you want to, so layer two then here, we're going to turn off reference now, because we want to be able to kind of fill in areas and drag and drop, if we leave reference on, it's going to fill in everything just like it did during that, that we did before, I did say I wanted to add in some kind of bags and circles here under the eyes, so let's do that real quick before we do this, so back to black, and layer two here, the lines layer, I'm just going to kind of pull some kind of wrinkles here underneath, I'm going to zoom in real far here, just so I've got total control over where these go, I think that looks pretty good, if you want to tighten up your tapers too, you can always go in with the eraser and kind of pull back a little bit, total control there, I think that looks pretty good, alright, so now shadows and highlights, back to layer four, and for the shadows, we're going to start out here using, I've got this kind of dark purplish blue, that's going to be our shadow color, once again, we've got the light source coming in from this top right, so shadows just following the lines that we did are going to be down in this area here, so we can kind of start out here with the beak, we pull in here, of course there's going to be a pretty big shadow underneath, so that top part sits in there, sits on top, overlaps, pull that in there, you'll see as I'm doing this, as far as my curves go, I'm just kind of following the curve of the lines that I had to begin with, so laying those down and just following them then in this step, kind of shows you what flow you want to those, once we've got those lines connected then we can drag and drop, like I said, that's why we turned off the reference, because I wanted to be able to do that, so we'll start to pull these shadows down here, under this beak here, and then back up here, just kind of following that taper once again, and then once again with that, using the eraser to kind of clean it up, get a shadow here underneath that eyebrow there, back here, shadow here, follow this shadow here down and around the belly, again, just using the flow of those outlines that we've already done, and if you're looking at this thinking, hey, why is that so dark, why is that such a weird color against all those other colors, it looks that way now, but we're going to change it here in just a second, we're going to drop the opacity, it's going to let those colors underneath kind of show through, so back up to layers, we can tap the N for blend mode, and we can drag this down to, maybe about 24, 25%, 26% maybe, it's up to you, tapping to kind of lock it in, and there you can see, we've got our shadows now, kind of shining through, or allowing the bottom color flats to shine through there, add a little shadow here on the bottom there of the eyebrow, and continue down here to kind of add shadows to this bottom portion of the limb, just going on the bottoms of those lines, a little more in here on this back side, same thing here, and this is why that clipping mask is great, because I can go all the way out here, and I'm not showing up on the background, so that's why we do that, do inside here on the iris, pulling the shadow there, and I think that looks pretty good, so that's it for the shadows then, let's go ahead now and work on the highlights, so same technique here, we're going to make a new layer on top of our other one, we're going to set this as clipping mask, and you'll see now, we've got two arrows, this one doesn't necessarily clip to this one, it clips down to the parent, which is the layer three, so any amount of these you have stacked on top of each other, it's all going to reference down to that layer three, now, color palette, we've got this kind of lime green bright color here, we're going to use that for highlights, kind of make this pop a little bit more, so going to start up here, once again, just following that, the flow of those lines, pull around here on the head, down to the body, and kind of taper that in, we don't have one there, and then it'll kind of come back out here, we'll have this one tapered a little bit more here, so it starts there in the corner, and kind of comes out, comes out there, so it's not a perfect line going straight across, pulling a little bit here on the eyebrow, and then I think I'm ready to go ahead and drop the opacity so we can see what we're looking with here, so back up to layers, and for blend mode, drop this down to, once again, it's up to you, what looks best, this one I'm going a little bit brighter, I'm thinking about 30% compared to the shadows, that's also why we didn't do the highlights and the shadows on the exact same layer, you can see here with the highlights I went 30%, shadows I only went with 24, so when you have them on one, the shadows might look good at 1%, but the highlights might not, so when you have them on two separate ones, allows you to kind of fine tune what they look like and how they show up on the design of the canvas, continue in here, kind of add in some highlights, do some ovals there on the beak, and then pulling down here, hit this side of the wing here, top of the branch there, and then also just some little small areas here, obviously he's going to be casting a shadow himself, so these aren't going to have a lot of highlights, just a little bit of what's peeking through there, and then I want to move back here to the color palette, grab some blue, and we're just going to bring in some blue around the eye, the white part there, just to make that pop a little bit more, and just like that, pull them back out then, you can kind of see what we have there, so I think that looks pretty good, so that's going to be pretty much the design as far as shadows and highlights go with the bird itself, the lines are done, the color flats, but still a little lacking, so let's go ahead and do a quick background here, so back up to the layers menu, I'm going to come down all the way to the bottom and make a new layer behind this guy, and then back up to my color palette, this bottom row is what we're going to use here, so I've got green, the first green here, bright green, and you're going to see, I'm going to do this super quick, it's going to be super messy, but that's okay, that's what we're going for, so I'm just going to make some kind of leaf designs here, so just really big, and you can see here too, I've got some, showing through here, I didn't do white on the color flats layer for the inside eye, so I've got to do that real quick, it's a telltale sign, when you start adding in a background and you start seeing the color show through the design, you miss some areas. So back down to layer 6, we've got the first big green leaf in there, I'm going to do another one here, and once I have the stuff connected then, I can just kind of go in and drag and drop, get this filled in here with the green, and then we'll just kind of continue this process here, just kind of a tapered line there, and then back out, and we'll fill in the rest of this with that green as well, alright. So we've got that, don't really want it to be super plain like this, with one, so we're going to go back in here to our layers now, we're going to go underneath that one we just did, and we're going to make another new layer, then I'm going to come back up here to the color palette, and I'm going to get this darker green, and then I'm going to do the same thing with these behind, once I have them connected then, I can drag and drop the color, and we're just going to go ahead, there's a new season of American Horror Stories on Hulu, I've got my iPad on airplane mode, but yeah, stuff still pops up, I don't know, whatever, and we're just going to continue this process to kind of fill in the gaps here, want it to be somewhat symmetrical there, one more time, pencil tip's starting to come off a little bit, there we go, I might use the eraser just to kind of clean that one up, make it a little bit more pointy there at the top, alright, and then let's get one more back here, there we go, and drag and drop that one in there, alright, and a new episode of Welcome to Raxxon is on Hulu as well, so there you go, if you're looking for something to watch. Alright, so we've got those, next up, I'm going to go ahead and let's see, coming into layer six here, again, the brighter layer that we did first, we're going to grab some white here, and we're just going to hit the sides of these where the highlights would be, once again, it's kind of messy, but you'll understand why here shortly, so we get some white, and then back up here, I've got this really kind of dark, Resident Aliens on peacock, man, tell you what, this darker green there, we're going to come down underneath where the shadows would be here, and once again, like I said, it can be sloppy, it's all going to come together here in a second, do that, pulling some more here on that bottom side, alright, I think that looks pretty good, back up to layers then, I'm going to go ahead and pinch these together, so these are going to be all on one layer, now this next step is totally up to you, if you want to do it, I'm going to switch over to a different brush set, if you want to try to find another brush that you can use as well if you don't have this one, but I will leave a link to this, it's another one of my custom sets, it's my texture pack here, and I'm going to go over to, let's do plants, because obviously these are plants, so we're going to use plant, I'm going to come back up to my layers menu, the layer that we're on here, we're going to go ahead and tap that, and I'm going to set it as alpha lock, so what alpha lock does is it allows us to color in on this without going outside of the lines, kind of like clipping mask, however alpha lock is all on the same layer, so we're not on a separate layer, anything we do is going to be destructive because it's going to be on this layer that we're using, so we can't go back and change something later, it's going to be kind of locked in, unless we undo all the way, so once again, got the plant, I want this turned up all the way, just going to bring in just a little bit there, and then coming up here to the color palette, I'm going to use yellow, and I'm going to bring in some yellow, kind of fade this down in to this one, so we've got a texture there, it's going to disappear a little bit here, because what we're going to do now is we're going to come up here to the layers menu, we're going to tap this again to turn off alpha lock, and then we want to come up here to our adjustments menu, and we want to go to gaussian blur, and we're going to slide this to the right, so it blurs that a little bit there in the background, so you can still see we've got the texture there, you can still see it, but using gaussian blur, it really kind of gives a depth of field to the design, so the toucan, obviously he's in the foreground, and then the background is further away, and it's got that shallow depth of field that kind of gives that nice blur there. Let's go ahead and add in another layer here to finish it out in the back, so if we go down here to the bottom, make a new layer, go up to our colors palette again, we'll use that blue that we used in the eyes, and we'll just drag and drop this in here, and then back up to the colors palette using white, and then let's see, for this, let's just go ahead and use, let's try the soft fabric once again in this texture pack, just going to kind of add in some clouds here in the back, and just going over this really light, as far as my touch goes with the apple pencil there, and then back up to adjustments and gaussian blur, we can slide this to kind of blur that a little bit too, I kind of did it fairly blurry as I laid it down, there we go, that is pretty much it, last thing I'm going to do then is got to sign this, so I'm going to go back to my cartooning set, my standard inker streamline, get this guy signed here at the bottom, and we will be done for today's video, so there you go, how to draw a cartoon toucan, hopefully you enjoyed today's video, if you did, do me a favor, make sure you give it a thumbs up, also if you have not yet, make sure you subscribe to the channel, and 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 follow along and make a design of your own, make sure you post it online, if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell, so I can check them out, I love seeing what you guys come up with by following along to my videos here on YouTube, so thanks so much for when you guys do share them, I appreciate it, and if you missed it, I can also be found online at BJDell.com, so that's it for today's video, until next time, keep creating.