Procreate Beginners Series_ Part Two _ Painting Tools

Welcome to part two of the Procreate beginner series. I'm Christiane, and in a few minutes, you'll expand your digital art skills, going deeper into using Procreate's colors, brushes, layers and effects. You'll also create a beautiful night scene. So grab your iPad and follow along. Let's open Procreate and hit the plus icon in the top right to create a new artwork. Select screen size canvas at the top of the list. And here we have our fresh new canvas. This time, let's start with color. Tap your active color in the top right. In part one of the beginner series, we introduce you to the color disc right here. Procreate also has other ways of picking colors, including classic, harmony and value. The end here, we have palettes, which is a little different because you can not only pick colors, but you can also save them for later. Let's use this to create a blue palette for our night scene artwork. Procreate comes with a bunch of palettes, but we're going to tap the plus icon and tap the first option here to create a new palette. We can tap the title and go to our keyboard and call our palette night. Done. You'll see a little blue tick here, which means the new palette is set to default. By tapping the three dots next to any other palette, we can also have the option to set any to default. When a palette is set to default, this means that if we go back to our color disc, we can see our blank new palette. So let's start. Now we want to create a blue palette. So we'll move our hue, the reticle in the outer ring to blue, right between the deep and the light blue. And in the inner circle, we can start selecting our shades. We'll be selecting five shades of blue from light to dark. Drag the reticle up from the center to find a nice pale blue and tap into the top left of our palette to save the color as a swatch. Now drag the shade down to just above the middle and let's nudge the hue ever so slightly right. Then tap the next square along in our palette to save that swatch. Nice. Drag the shade down to the middle and nudge the hue just a touch right again. By nudging into the slightly deeper blues as we go, we'll create some beautiful variation in our palette. Tap the third square along, bring the shade down and nudge the hue to the right. Save that swatch. Note that if you accidentally add a color to your palette like this, you can tap and hold that square and hit delete swatch. You can also tap and hold a swatch and move it around your palette. And let's go for a deeper blue and a little darker now to create our final swatch. And our palette is done. These colors are now saved for any time we want to use them. Even when we go into layers to select our background color, we can see our palette there. Tap the darkest blue. Now select a brush, tap the paint tool and under the inking set, select ink bleed. Tap your active color and I'll show you a little trick. You now know that you can move the reticle around the circle to select a shade or tap around. But if you double tap, your reticle will snap to a perfect white, black or solid color. Let's select pure white and make sure our brush size is somewhere in the middle here. Now we'll dive into a few more of my favorite Procreate features. How do we draw a straight line in Procreate? It's actually very easy. Draw any line and hold at the end and Quickshape will snap it into a perfect line. And as long as we keep holding, we can move that line around from its start point. When we're happy with our line, we can lift our pencil and it's done. Quickshape also allows us to draw clean curves and also shapes. Let's draw a circle. Draw and hold. And it's not quite a circle yet, but if you touch and hold with another finger, it will form a perfect circle. You can also draw triangles and squares in the same way. OK, let me show you another great feature. Now that we have some shapes, let's use Color Drop to fill them in. Tap and hold the active color and drag it into the circle to fill it. Color Drop fills an area of your artwork with your active color. But if there's a hole like this square here, the color will bleed out and fill the canvas. I'll show you another example of this. Let's scrub the canvas with three fingers to clear. Let's take the brush size right down and draw a circle. When we Color Drop, it fills the canvas again. Let's two-finger tap to undo that. This is because the line again has holes, just tiny, tiny little ones. But I'll show you a trick to fill them in. If I take the active color, drag it in and don't lift my finger, a blue line will appear at the top here. The Color Drop threshold. If I drag my finger to the left while keeping it on the canvas, I can find a point where the color doesn't bleed through. And this threshold will be saved for the next time we Color Drop. So why don't we just keep the threshold low? Well, if we boost the brush size, our circle now has a really jagged edge. If we Color Drop, we can see that it's not bleeding enough this time. So in this case, we want to drag the threshold up to fill those gaps. OK, let's create a night scene with our new skills. First, let's clear this and bring the brush size to around the middle and draw a circle in the top right. Touch with another finger to make a perfect circle. Even after creating a quick shape, you can continue to edit it by tapping Edit Shape. You can then alter the proportions, undo any steps, and by touching inside or outside the shape, move it around to where you're happy with it. Let's Color Drop and remember the threshold was saved from last time. Now we want to cut into this circle to create a crescent moon. I want to use the same Inkbleed brush for my eraser. So I'll show you a quick shortcut to keep your current brush when selecting the next tool. Instead of simply tapping my eraser, if I tap and hold the eraser now, we bring the Inkbleed brush with us to the eraser. This is a really handy shortcut. Let's use Quick Shape with the eraser now. Erase a little circle in the top right of your moon and keep holding to make it a quick shape and adjust it to create a nice crescent shape. Feel free to try a few times. We want to get a pretty crescent moon shape. Now cut into that shape and erase it away. Feel free to boost the brush size to make it a little quicker. Now let's draw some clouds. Tap the Layers icon and tap plus to create a new layer. Next, tap your active color. You'll see a small gray handle at the top. Drag from here to move your color companion to the bottom left of your canvas. This is super handy for quickly accessing colors. And if we tap into Palettes, we can see our night palette right there. Tap the fourth blue along and pinch your fingers slightly on the canvas to zoom out a little. Watch as I draw clouds from roughly the top center to the right center. Now color drop. Tap into Layers and let's tap and hold the cloud layer and drag it below our moon. Now tap the plus to add a new layer above the cloud. Select the third blue along and from roughly the top quarter to the bottom right, draw another cloud. Try not to follow exactly the same shape as the first cloud. Variation is nice. Remember, if you don't draw to the edge, color drop will fill the entire area. So if this happens to you, just make sure you close your line. Let's add another layer for our final cloud. Tap the second blue and draw from roughly halfway down to halfway along. And color drop. Now let's look at some more options you have with layers. Tap the moon layer to select it and tap again to reveal your layer options. Here we have a whole bunch of options. Right now, we'll only look at a few. For example, Rename lets you create a new label for your layer. Let's call this one moon. Tap the layer below and tap again to get our layer options. Tap Alphalock. Alphalock means that transparent parts of the layer will not be touched by new paint. So if we tap and hold to select that white again and paint, you can see that the paint blocks only to the area we've already painted. Let's two finger tap to undo that. Go into your paint tool and under the industrial set, grab the rusted decay brush. Set the brush size to fairly close to the top. Grab the lightest blue color from our palette and touch lightly to add some texture to the crest of the first cloud. Grab the third blue color and add some darker shade to the inner part of the cloud. Now we're starting to really get some dimension in our artwork. Let's select and Alphalock the next cloud. We painted this cloud using the third blue, so we'll use the second and the fourth blue in our palette to create light and shade. Paint lightly for the most part, but you can add a few heavier, more textural parts. And finally, select and Alphalock the third cloud. And just to be clear with our colors now, we're going to paint our highlights and shadows with the third and fifth blue shade. And if we tap Alphalock again, we can release it and grab that fourth blue and add a little bit of final texture to the sky. Beautiful. Now let's add some stars. Let's close our color companion for now. Tap and hold the moon to select white and tap the moon layer and add a new layer. Tap the paint tool and go to the luminance set. Now tap the glimmer brush and let's give it a whirl. Now that's probably too many stars. Let's do finger tap to undo that. Go back to our paint tool and tap the glimmer brush again to enter Brush Studio. Now, as this is the beginner series, we're about to have just a little taste of one of Procreate's most powerful features. Brush Studio is where every single brush in Procreate is created. It may look complicated, but it's simply a list of settings that make each brush unique. For example, under shape, you can see the shape of our glimmer brush. Let's go back to stroke path and we want less stars. So let's increase the spacing to maximum. You'll see it updated here in the preview. Tap done. Now add a smattering of stars. Feel free to try a few times. You can always go in and erase stars that are too close to the moon or the edge of the canvas. I wanted to show you Procreate's Brush Studio now, even if you're a beginner, because it can be really fun to learn about and powerful to experiment with. You never have to worry. On any brush you wish to edit, you can swipe left and duplicate it and really go all out, playing with the different settings and make the brush yours. You will see a little icon on the top right of any new brush you create, and you can always swipe left and reset any existing brush back to its original state. So jump in and get creative. So we've learned a lot about your painting tools on the top right here and use the sidebar. But now I'd like to introduce you to the editing tools here on the top left. From left to right, we have actions, adjustments, select and transform. We had a peek into actions when we shared our artwork in part one. Now let's have a look at the next one along, adjustments. Tap into adjustments and you'll see a menu of different effects you can apply to your artwork. Now we want to create a glow around our moon and stars. How do we do this? Let me show you. First, we want the moon and stars all on one layer. Tap the stars layer to reveal layer options and tap merge down. Now we want to create a copy of this layer to apply the blur effect. So swipe left and tap duplicate. Let's go back to adjustments. Tap Gaussian blur. At the top here, tap the arrow to make sure you have layer selected. Drag your finger right and left across the canvas to adjust the strength of the blur. You can see the percentage at the top. Let's give it a nice glow of around 15%. You can apply the blur by tapping any tool. Now I want to show you some cool effects to give some finishing touches to our night scene. Let's create a new layer at the top. Go to paint and under the painting set, select old brush. Make sure your active color is white and let's boost the size a little around the top third and create a few swirls around that moon. Now we've got something on our layer. Go to that layer and right next to our checkbox, tap the little letter n. This will reveal a menu where we can change the layers opacity and blend modes. Blend modes change the way the layer blends with the layers below. The n stands for the normal blend mode where the layer sits on top of the layers beneath with no effect. Most of the time, it's great to simply scroll through the blend modes to see what happens. But if you know how each blend mode works, you can know what to expect. In digital art, colors are numbers and blend modes use maths to calculate how the colors on this layer blend with the colors below. For example, subtract creates almost black because we are subtracting white from bright colors and add brightens because we are adding white to bright colors. And there are many interesting and complex effects in between. Let's try overlay, which in this artwork makes the colors below brighter and more vibrant. And at the top here is our layer opacity slider. We can use this to make our layer more transparent or see-through. Let's bring it down a little to 70%. Now let's keep painting on our overlay layer and add a few more swirls. Notice the beautiful glowing colors that are produced. We can also add a little blur to our swirls. Go to Adjustments, Gaussian Blur and give it a little blur around 5%. Beautiful. Tap any tool to apply the blur. Now there's just a few more features I'll show you in this lesson. In the Actions menu, go to Actions, Add, Add Text. Type Dream. Now double tap with your finger to select the text. Tap the double A icon in the top right of the keyboard and it'll bring up your text options. Here you can change your font, style, design and attributes. Let's change the font to Futura. And there are different styles, but let's stick with medium. Let's increase the size and reduce the kerning, which means the space between the letters down a little. Around 5% and tap Done. We can now use the Transform tool to move our text around. Tap Transform, the arrow icon here, and a bounding box will appear around your layer content. This bounding box allows you to change the size of your content by grabbing one of the corner nodes and dragging out. You can also move the content around by holding either inside or outside the bounding box and dragging around. Tap Transform when you're done. Adding text creates a new layer, which we can see here. Let's move that text layer down a layer list to below the first cloud so it's nested nicely in there. We can even tap the N and bring down the opacity of that cloud layer. As you can see, there are a lot of options with text in Procreate. We could return to editing our text from its layer options, but let's just hide it for now and bring the opacity of our cloud layer back up. There's one more action I'd like to show you. One of my favorite features of Procreate is the ability to go back and view your artwork come to life. Tap Actions, Video, and Timelapse Replay. Procreate records every stroke you make. So in any artwork you create, you can go back and see the complete journey to your final piece of art. Drag your finger across the canvas to scrub through the timelapse. You can even export a full-length video or a 30-second version of your timelapse to share with friends or on social media. Thank you for joining me in part two of the beginner series. We've covered a lot so far. Well done. We'll learn more about the editing tools in part three. So join me there.