How to Add Shading in Procreate Using Clipping Masks

Hey guys, this is Luma Llama, and in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you how to add shading in Procreate using clipping masks. Now the first thing you're going to want to do is create a shape, and for those of you who don't know, if you create a basic shape and then hold down the pencil afterwards, it'll kind of auto-create this smoother shape for you, and then if you hold down a finger, it will create a perfect shape. And then I'm going to go ahead and just fill in a color by dragging the color swatch into the center of the shape. Now what you're going to do is create a new layer above your shape, and you're going to click on the layer and turn it into a clipping mask. And what this does is now whatever you paint on this layer, it will stay within the boundaries of the layer beneath it. So you've got to figure out where your lighting direction is coming from, so for me it's going to be coming from the top right. Now go ahead and select your favorite texture brush. I'm going to select my Luma Llama Pebbles brush, available at lumallama.com, and the reason to use a texture brush for this is so that you can get more interesting surface qualities to your shapes. Now for the shadow color, I'm going to go ahead and select a darker and more saturated version of my base color, and I like to shift the hue a little bit, so in this case I'm going to shift it a little bit more red, just to kind of make it stand apart from the mid-tones. And you want to make sure here not to choose black or anything too desaturated, because your painting's not going to have a lot of life in the shadows. And now on this clipping mask layer, go ahead and paint in your shadow on the opposite side of your lighting direction, and you want to make it a bit darker toward the very outside edges, and then fade it off as you get toward the center of your object. And now for the light side, you're going to go ahead and create a new layer, also turn it into a clipping mask, and now for the light side, let's go ahead and select our original color, and then I'm going to make it a little bit more yellow, and I'm going to make it pretty bright, a lot closer to white, and now you're going to go ahead and do exactly what you did on the shadow side, but on the light side. And then what I like to do is create a little bit of bounce light on the shadow side using this color, just on the very edge. It just gives it that extra little bit of realism, I think. So to emphasize this lighting side, we're going to go ahead and create a new layer, also a clipping mask, and select white, and now you can add just a little bit extra on the very outside edge of the light side. And depending on what kind of surface quality you're going for, you can create an extra little highlight on the ball. So we're going to create a new layer, clipping mask, also white, and then you can just create a little highlight on the surface. Now for the shadow under the ball, I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer, and put it underneath everything, and I'm going to select a slightly blue, darker color this time, and using our pebbles brush, we'll go ahead and paint in a soft shadow, and then I'm going to go ahead and lower the opacity of it quite a bit, and kind of squish it down to fit in the perspective. Now you're going to want a little bit of contact shadow where the ball meets the ground, otherwise it kind of looks like the ball's floating here. So I'll create a new layer, and I'll select a color similar to the ball, maybe a little darker, and now we're going to paint in a little contact shadow. And then on the underside of the ball, we'll want to darken that just a little bit to make it fit in and make it not seem like it's floating. Now if you're going for a little more realism than this, what you can do is create a little bit of bounce light on the floor. So if the lighting is coming and hitting this bright orange ball, then the light from that is going to scatter and kind of spread across the ground, especially if it's a white ground. So what I'll do is I'll select a kind of bright orange color here, and I'm just going to paint in a soft bounce light area and lower the opacity pretty low. And I'm going to go ahead and do this on top of all my shadow layers. And now to create a reflection of this ball in the ground, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate the ball, and I'm going to place the duplicate underneath everything. And then go ahead and flip it vertically, and I'm going to place it where the reflection would go. And I'm going to blur it just a little bit using Gaussian Blur and lower the opacity. And then what I like to do is select the texture brush that we used earlier to paint, but use it as an eraser. And we're going to erase most of the reflection, but keep it a little more visible toward where the contact point is with the ball. And there we go. That's how I approach shading in Procreate. You can grab these texture brushes from lumalama.com, and make sure to subscribe on YouTube and check me out on Instagram as well. Thanks for watching!