How To Draw Cartoon Faces + Adding Texture To Illustrations Cute Art Procreate Tutorial -

Hello beautiful people! It's Genevieve and my goal here on this channel is to teach you all about illustration and design. So if you're new make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the weekly videos and so that you can join our wonderful drawing community. In this video we are going to learn how to draw really fun cartoon faces that are super easy but really cute. So grab your drawing tools and let's get started! So this video is great for both beginners and intermediate artists. If you're a beginner don't worry I'm going to show everything step by step so you can definitely follow along. It might just take you a little bit more time and you might have to pause here and there in the video. If you're an intermediate I'm going to be showing you some tips on how to improve your workflow and just little things that you can do to bring your art to the next level in general. So the first step is to create a new canvas in which we can draw obviously. And the dimensions here are totally up to you, it depends on your project. Here are the dimensions that I'm using and it's literally just the size of the screen. And we're going to start with the sketch which might be both the most fun part but also maybe a little bit more of the hardest part. So make sure you give yourself time here and don't be too hard on yourself. So creating a new layer, renaming it a sketch and then picking whichever color you like to sketch with. I personally like going in with grey. And guys in this video I'm always going to be recommending two different brushes for every single step. So one brush is going to be just a regular free brush that comes with Procreate and is going to allow you to get really cool results. And I'm also going to be recommending a brush that can allow you to maybe get a little bit more of a professional result or save some time. Basically just get your art to the next level. And these brushes are the brushes that I created and that I use every single day when I draw you know in my job children's book illustration. So I really really love them. But again there's no pressure. They are not essential to completing this tutorial. If you want to check them out however they will be linked in the description below along with a special promo code as usual for the YouTube people. So if you have my illustration bundle just pick the sketching brush. Otherwise go in the sketching panel and use the HP pencil that comes with Procreate. So we're going to start really simply by drawing a circle. Here my brush was way too big. But if you're drawing in Procreate one really neat tip is if you draw a circle hold your pencil and then tap with your secondary finger it creates like a perfect circle. So that's definitely something that you can use to your advantage. And you can really play with any shape you want for your head. You could go with a square, a rectangle, a triangle, whatever. Here I'm just going with a circle and then I'm refining the edges a little bit to make it less circle. But yeah so you could really start with whichever shape you want. Once you have your main shape go ahead and draw this kind of plus sign in the center of your face. So a vertical line and then a horizontal line. The horizontal line is going to be for the eyes. And in general the lower the eyes are on the face and the bigger they are the younger your character is going to be. But that's not really the point of this video. I'm going to actually do another one about showing age into cartoon faces. But for now just remember this rule of thumb which is if you take the width of one eye you can usually place it between the two eyes and then on either sides of the eye. So you're gonna have the width of five eyes across the head. The nose is super simple. It's just this little curvy shape here and you can put it pretty much anywhere that you want around the center of your plus shape. And same for the mouth. I quite like to put it off center. I just think it's cuter. But that depends on the emotion you want to show as well. Same for the eyebrows. It depends on the emotion. You might want to put them higher or lower closer to the eyes or with different angles. Here I'm just keeping them fairly neutral. And at this point you might want to make your brush a little bigger and kind of go over some of your sketch line. So I recommend you don't necessarily worry about erasing that much. You just start by drawing very lightly with super thin lines and then you go back in and kind of find the one line that you like. And we're really going to build on the sketch step by step. So the next step is to add the irises. I personally like to go with super big circles. I just think it's really cute and kind of center them in the eye themselves. And here this is optional but I also like to quickly fill in the shape of the iris just so I have a better idea of how everything looks. Because it's kind of hard to get a good feel for the eyes if the irises are like blank in the sketch. I also like to map out just very quickly two ovals or ellipses for the cheeks. And then fleshing out the cheeks a little bit more in the profile line. So kind of the outside of the head of the character. Just so that it looks a little bit more like I want it to. But again the size and the shape of the head is totally up to you. You can experiment with different things. For the ears I just go with this c shape here and then draw kind of an inverted five inside if that makes sense. So yeah I mean there's really nothing super complicated here. You can see the sketch that I'm working on is super rough, super quick, nothing too precise here. That is definitely not the point. But feel free to pause the video at this point and work on your sketch a little bit more because we're now going to move on and start to add the hair. So obviously for the hair there is an infinite amount of hairstyles you can draw. So seriously here just play. Have fun with it. I personally find it's helpful at this stage to think of the hair more like a helmet. You know like little lego characters. They have separate hair pieces that you just kind of stick on the head. I like to think of my hair when I'm drawing cartoon characters a little bit like this. I think it's way less overwhelming thinking them as just this solid shape that is draped over the head as opposed to a bunch of individual little hair strands that can be kind of difficult to match. So when you're drawing cartoon hair don't be afraid to go and find references for hairstyles that you like. So you could just type hairstyle on google and then try to think of how these hairstyles would look like if they were made out of a towel instead of just a bunch of separate hair strands. If you think of it that way it's going to be way easier to draw on your cartoon character. If you want your face to be a little bit more feminine go ahead and add some little eyelashes. I like to just draw two little pointy shapes just like this. And before we move on to the color I have one little pro tip for you. If you click on the arrow tool here you can flip your sketch layer and that really helps to kind of see if something is out of place. So in my case I'm happy with it but you might notice that one eye is way up high and the other one is too low or something like that. So that's a really nice way to kind of double check your sketch before moving into the color. So once you have a rough sketch that you're happy with go ahead and change the blending mode to multiply. That is optional but it's going to help. And you can also lower the opacity until you can just barely see your sketch. You're then going to create a new layer put it below the sketch but we're not going to rename it just yet because we're going to do a few things merge some layers and we would lose the name anyway. So now we're going to draw the face and for that you can pick something that resembles skin color but don't don't worry too much about it because we're going to tweak it a bit later. And now if you have the illustration brush you can use the base round brush. Otherwise you can go and use the hard brush that comes in the airbrushing panel. And if you follow my watercolor tutorials make sure that you bring the opacity back up to 100%. And all we're doing here is really just drawing the outline of the head. Well I should say the face because you want to also kind of exclude the hair so you're drawing the hairline as well. And make sure that you're being precise because this shape is going to be the base for pretty much everything. And once you have your outline making sure that it is fully closed you're just going to fill it in either using autofill if you're using procreate or just the paint bucket in photoshop for example. Once you have your basic shape go ahead and create a new layer set it as a clipping mask so if you double tap on the layer you're going to have the clipping mask option and you're going to pick a slightly lighter version of your skin color. For the brush if you have the illustration brushes use the basic texture it is by far my favorite brush it's just so cool. Otherwise you can go in the sketching panel and pick the 6B brush or 6B pencil I should say it's definitely also going to work. And you're just going to roughly fill in your shape so you're going to see that the base color that we used in the previous step is going to shine through or show through some of the texture of this brush and that way you get to have some really cool undertone in your skin. And I have a really important pro tip for you guys at this step. When you're filling in a shape instead of drawing this little zigzag type of motion try to go and draw more of a like a spiral type of motion. This is really going to make a big difference and that's something that I personally learned by drawing with you know real life pencil on real life paper. You can see here if I'm drawing in a zigzag motion there's kind of a lot of gaps and it's really uneven but if you're drawing really tight little spirals you get something that is much more blended but still has a lot of texture. So I'm going to just undo this and kind of start over and yeah draw big tight little spiral curls whatever all over the face very quickly. And once you have your texture you can go back and tweak the color of the shape layer so the bottom layer just select it and in the adjustment panel select hue saturation brightness apply it to the entire layer and then you can play with all the settings. I'm personally just going to lower the brightness up the saturation just so that I can see the contrast a little bit more between the texture and the base and I'm also going to change the hue a little bit to make it just a bit more pink so that my character looks more alive. When you're happy with your colors just merge your layers by squeezing them together and then you can rename this newly created layer to face. And we're pretty much going to be doing the exact same steps for the hair so creating a new layer not renaming it just yet and then you're going to pick whichever color you want the hair to be but I mean you can always change it a bit later like you see so it doesn't matter that much at this point. I'm gonna go with a purple because why not? If you have the illustration brushes go with the base square one it's just easier to draw angles with this one otherwise you can just stick with the hard brush from the airbrushing panel and just like for the face all you're going to do now is draw the outline of your hair. And guys if you've watched this far in the video please go ahead and comment the word cartoon. I know it sounds crazy but it really gives me some interesting insight into how to paste my videos better which in turn helps me create better tutorials for you guys. And it's also really cool because you guys know me but I don't know you so whenever you comment something I get to see your username sometimes even your name and your picture which is just so cool because I get to see the really wonderful drawing community that we are building here on this channel which is just so great. So go ahead and comment the word cartoon and we'll keep going. So once you have your outlines for the hair just like for the face we're going to fill it in with color and then you might want to use the eraser to kind of tweak the shape a little bit in some areas and just make sure that everything looks super nice and just as you want. And here I noticed I forgot this little like stray hair piece at the top which is something that I draw on most of my characters. I just think it's so cute. I encourage you experimenting with little features like this that you kind of carry through most of your illustrations because that's really what style is all about you know finding a little something that you draw on different characters and just bring it back. You're also going to draw the eyebrows on this layer so again outline then fill them in. And just like for the face again the next step is going to be to add texture. So I'm gonna speed this up because there's really no point in you watching me how to add the texture again but basically what you do you create a new layer you apply it as a clipping mask then you change your color to a slightly lighter version of your base and then with a textured brush or the basic texture or the 6B pencil you just go over your entire shape adding some texture. Here you want to make sure that you kind of follow the direction of the hair so that you can really use this texture to your full advantage no you can use this texture to its full potential or to your advantage whichever you want. So yeah just following the direction of the hair here is going to just be you know a little pro tip again. And just like for the skin we're going to go back and change the color of the hair or the base shape of the hair a little bit so hue saturation brightness apply to the entire layer. I like to change the hue here. So the skin I kind of made it a little bit more pink but here I'm really changing the hue so that there is a lot of dimension in the hair and so that the base color looks fairly different like quite different from the top color. And once you have something that you like go ahead merge your layers and rename the new layer to hair. And this next step is probably one of my favorite steps in this whole tutorial pretty much equal to the very last step of the tutorial. So anyway it is to create a new layer this one we're going to apply as a clipping mask on the face layer and we're going to rename it to cheek or cheeks and we're going to pick a pinker and darker version of our base skin color. So yeah you just go back in your history pick your skin color and make it just a bit more dark and a bit more red. And with the same brush that you use for your texture so with the basic texture or the 6B pencil we're just going to add a little bit more of a like skin flush tint on some areas. So I like to do it on the top of the ear then I draw and color in the nose and then go in and move to adding some really roughly sketched drawn colored in cheeks. So here you're using the same technique as you use to add the texture on both the skin and the hair but you're using it in more of a localized area as opposed to just covering the entire shape. And I really like to kind of draw above the nose as well this really lighter lighter than the cheeks of course but just this really nice kind of arch above the nose it just makes the character feel so cute. And here the goal is really just to kind of build on the texture and add a little bit more color variation on your character but don't worry too much about the edges if you have something weird like that you can always use the smudge tool set it in it to stucco stucco whatever in the uh painting brushes that come with procreate and just kind of refine the blending of your edges. You don't want to blend in the center because you're going to lose the nice texture that you worked so hard on including but yeah you can lend the edges in so that everything looks a bit more smooth. Great so now we're going to add the eyes it's about time. So go ahead and create a new layer rename it to eyes and we're going to do this in a few steps. So on this eye layer we're just going to color in the white section so the eyeball but you can see I'm not using a pure white I'm more going with a cream color that way we can add more light in the eye later and for that I'm just going to use the base round brush if you're using the free procreate brushes just go back to the hard brush in the airbrushing panel and just like for the face and the eye you're just going to outline your eyes and then fill them in with autofill color fill I never remember exactly what it is called but you're going to fill them in once you have your basic shape go ahead and create a new layer right on top of the eye layer and you're going to rename it to iris and so we're kind of separating the eyes and the iris just so we can play with the color of the iris later that's just a pro tip again and for now I'm literally just going with the same color of the hair because I don't quite know yet so you can definitely do that as well and then we're going to tweak the color and get something that we like so just like for everything outlining the shape and then filling it in nothing complicated here so speaking of tweaking the color you know the drill by now you go in the adjustment panel at the top hue saturation brightness to the entire layer and then you can play with all the little settings until you find an eye color that you like and you're going to see I'm going to speed this up because I struggled but this is a really nice technique to use because you kind of end up finding color combinations that you would not necessarily have expected if you just went in saying okay I want brown eyes or something like that so I think you know it's really cool to experiment and just play around and see if something catches your eye no pun intended and then go with that you can also add some lighting effect on your eye I like to create again a new layer clipping mask renaming this one to shadow and changing the blending mode to linear burn I think yes linear burn and you're probably going to want to lower the opacity but you can always tweak that later I put it at like around 50% for now and then with a grayish blue it's fairly pale color you can just kind of color with your same texture brush you can color kind of half of your eyeball so this has a lot of dimension to your character it's kind of not super realistic but it's kind of in a way showing what the eyelid would like the shadow the eyelid would cast on the eye which again not realistic but still I think it looks really cool and adds just a bit more details in and you can also create a new layer renaming it to lights this one is not a clipping mask but you do want to change the blending mode of this one to add and do we lower the opacity not yet and for this we're going with almost a white and you can really add any little shape here that you want in your eye I'm going with just this circle or oval and it just adds so much more life to your character and you can play with the opacity if you want but I was fine with what I had and you might want to group all of your eye layers so to do that just swipe them towards the right and then use the group option at the top and you can rename your group to eye collapse it using this little like arrow on the side and just makes your file a bit more organized you're then going to create a new layer renaming it to face details and here I made a mistake the layer should actually be above the hair so I'm going to fix that later but I'm just telling you now so you don't have to make the same mistake as I am making and you're going to use either the outline brush if you have the illustration brush set or the 6b brush if you don't have the illustration brush set and you're going to pick kind of a dark spot of your skin color and make it even darker and here with a fairly small brush all we're going to do is kind of draw little lines where there's an overlap in your different face draw features so we're not really going in with full-on outlines everywhere but we do want to add a little bit more detail and dimension in the piece and we also want to draw a few elements that we hadn't drawn before like the nose the mouth and this little reverse curvy five shape in the ear so since this is a tutorial I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here but if you are drawing a piece that is zoomed in on the face you definitely want to pause the video and go in full details here and what I mean by that is you're going to outline or add a line whenever kind of a facial feature overlaps another one to really make sure that you separate them super well but you also might want to use this facial detail layer to kind of add a more texture and a little bit more grit so a good example of that is what I'm going to show you on the ear just now if you zoom in and just kind of add a little cross hatches that can be a really cool look in your piece so that's something you could do for example on the bottom of the face maybe around the eyes maybe even on the cheeks and the ears just adding little cross hatches everywhere can add a lot of texture you can also draw the eyelashes and kind of the eyelids on this layer I like to go ahead and create a new layer in my eye eye group so an eyelash layer just on top of everything that way if I end up moving the eye group the eyelashes are gonna you know follow which is really helpful and with the same brush or the outline brush or the 6b brush and just a darker brown or even a black if you want you're going to outline the eyes and I like to not outline the entire eye and just kind of outline the outside if that makes any sense and then if you have eyelashes you can also draw this little pointy thing on one side it just looks cute and I don't know about you but this is so exciting to me like seeing the character come together just like this is just so nice so at this point you can also go ahead and hide your sketch layer because we have everything mapped out in color now we just don't don't need it anymore and basically what we're going to do is we're going to create a layer above the hair and rename it to hair details and kind of just like we did for the face we're going to go in and add some lines to show well first wherever there is an overlap between the hair and something else and this is also where we're going to show little hair strands so without going crazy and drawing a bunch of them we're going to go and you know a handful of them just to show that is not just a towel that is actually hair so here I'm really going fairly quickly and loose and kind of drawing sketchier lines instead of just one line that covers an entire section of the hair I just draw a bunch of shorter lines again play with more texture and show the feel of hair and I'm kind of outlining the top part of the hair well the top part the place where the hair overlaps with the face but then I'm also going in and like I was saying just adding some little strands to show that the hair is not just this flat thing and just like for the face here I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time because I feel like this tutorial is definitely already long enough like that but this is definitely a step where you can pause the video again and go in and add some little cross hatches and little details and really go crazy and have a super precise piece if if needed be of course if if your character is just in the background of your illustration and you can barely see it don't even bother about adding details just don't but if it is zoomed in on the face of your character or the character is the main focus definitely don't be afraid to spend more time on this stage and experiment with different sections with cross hatches different sections without cross hatches and just you know play around and experiment that is part of drawing it's part of finding your style you might also need to go in with the eraser and just clean up some lines a little bit but yeah nothing more complicated than this you're just going to play with texture and don't be afraid of having lines that look a bit crazy that's going to really look good in the end when everything comes together also don't forget the eyebrows so for the eyebrows I like to just kind of outline the bottom leave the top part open and then just add a few little strands to kind of show that again they're not just like flat plastic eyebrows they actually have a little bit of a movement to them okay so we're going to start adding a little bit more texture lights and shadows so to do that go ahead and create a new layer above the cheek layer apply it as a clipping mask and change the blending mode to add this layer we're going to rename it to uh face lights or face highlights however you want it and with a super light beige color you're going to add some lights on your face so here that is up to you what I like to do is add two little shapes on the cheeks and then kind of outline the top of the nose maybe add a little bit of a like reflection or glow on the top of the ear and if I'm feeling really crazy I'm also going to line one side of the face but again not all the time only if I'm feeling crazy that day so again this is another step where you definitely want to experiment and see what you like you can see here I kind of started by outlining the bottom of the face as well which sometimes look good but I didn't like it here so I just did undo a bunch of times and then I tried with this ear and yeah I kind of like that so experiment here you can also experiment with the opacity I quite like to kind of lower the opacity I'm going to show you here right at the point where it shifts from being really white to showing some sort of transparency but again I'm being very precise here you can just experiment and see what you like and by now you probably see me coming because you're an expert now we're going to do the same thing on the hair so creating a new layer applying it as a clipping mask and changing the blending mode to add and we're going to rename this layer to hair light instead of face light obviously and with the same pale beige color we're going to add some highlights on the hair so just like for the hair detail layer here your goal is to just show that the hair is hair so you're going to draw some crazy strands I mean you see here I'm literally going in with a spiral I just you just want to experiment you might also want to add some like big sections like this to show that there's like a very glossy highlight on your hair but seriously experiment go crazy don't be to do stuff that might seem a little bit insane just play with it and it also might be helpful to go ahead and before kind of drawing all your hair texture play with opacity a little bit so kind of drawing a little bit of the lines a little bit of texture and then lowering capacity finding something you like and then going back in and kind of finishing adding your highlights and at this point we really only have a few steps left but they're probably the most important and also the easiest to do so definitely go ahead and make sure you watch until the end we're going to start by kind of grouping all of our layers together it's just neater so again you just swipe your layers towards the right and then tap group and then inside the group but on top of the face details layer you're going to create a new layer that you're going to rename to shadows and this layer again super important super easy so for the shadow you can go back to the same color you used in the eye because we're going to tweak it later again just want to have the basic color that we use and speaking of basic i'm going to use the basic texture you could use the shader as well or again if you don't have the illustration brushes just stick with the 6b brush and you're going to change the blending mode of this shadow layer to linear burn and maybe lower the opacity somewhere around you know 30 percent for now but i can see i'm already going in and tweaking it and adding to 50 so you can always go back and tweak the opacity and the color and basically here all we're doing is adding shadows guys i've been doing this working on this tutorial for probably six hours by now and i think i'm getting a bit delirious so sorry but um yeah the shadows it's basically again whenever you have a piece i was gonna say a piece of furniture wow a facial feature that overlaps another or the face overlapping the hair you just kind of want to add a little bit more dimension and show a bit of a like depth feel in your piece in general so i'm just going here kind of in the bottom of the face on the bottom part of the hair which is kind of behind the head face whatever below the ear and the top part where the hair meets the top of the but i mean you can experiment and that's also going to depend here i'm just drawing a random face that's floating on the white background but the shadows are obviously going to depend on the lighting source if you're drawing a full illustration so keep that in mind but this is definitely a very important step to kind of add more again dimension in your piece and pull everything together so it is a more coherent piece in the end and just like when we did the cheeks 20 000 years ago don't worry too much about the edges here because you can always use the smudge tool set to stucco brush by the way just as a reminder and go in and blend the edges a little bit so that it looks better and in anything that you're drawing it is always a good idea to try and kind of keep a good balance between sharp edges in your shadows and in your lights and also smooth edges so just keep that in mind and experiment with that and like for everything in this tutorial you can always go back and just kind of tweak the color here i thought that mine was a little bit too cold so i just went in and tweaked everything a little bit so that i could have something that blended better with the general vibe of the piece and the skin tone speaking of vibe of the piece one little pro tip that i have for you when you're drawing an illustration it's really cool to kind of add a secondary color to it and a way to do that very easily and quickly is to create a new layer on top of everything and call it like extra color or something like that it doesn't really matter that much and changing the blending mode of this layer to soft light you're going to pick a color that is super bright and quite crazy so in my case here i'm just going to go with a bright blue and you want it to be saturated so you want it to be you know colorful and with the same texture brush you're just going to add this color on some elements of your piece to make it a bit more dynamic so what i like to do is to kind of think that maybe there's something blue on the ground that is reflecting on my character so all the surface of the character that are pointing downwards i kind of add some blue there so the bottom of the face the bottom of the eyes the bottom of the hair below the nose the bottom of the ears everything that is pointing downwards and then you can go in with you smudge tool and blend it in because we don't really want any dark dark any sharp edges here we just want to add this kind of secondary color to make the piece feel more interesting and just a bit more professional so you can see it's nothing too complicated but if i go ahead and hide the layer you're going to see it adds a big difference and just makes the piece feel more interesting again i know i keep using that word but it's really what it is another cool thing that you can do is to add kind of freckles it's not necessarily freckles but just kind of a little bit more texture again so to do that create a new layer rename it to freckles or at least try to i always struggle renaming my layers because my handwriting on the ipad is not the best and you can change the blending mode to either linear burn or linear light you can experiment with both linear burn is going to make your color darker linear light is going to make it lighter and if you have the illustration brushes you can just use the freckle brush it's going to just be faster otherwise you can draw the freckles individually and for the color i literally went with the same blue that i use for the hair but i'm going to tweak that later and you can place this layer wherever you want between the other layers that you're using i'm personally putting it above the face lights but not as a clipping mask and you can see i'm already going in and changing the hue i think in general whenever i draw characters for books i kind of have one layer in which the freckles is pretty much the same color as the eyes or as the hair and then i have another layer in which the freckles are pretty much the same color as regular freckles so more of a brown skin tone so you can see here i have the purple freckles and then i'm creating a new layer just like i was saying um renaming it to freckles 2 or at least trying to rename it to freckles 2 and this 1d blending mode i'm going to use a linear burn i think but again this is totally something that you want to experiment with and kind of see what works with your skin tone your hair color and play but i just think in general adding freckles um especially just random colors that kind of might also like spill out of the face you can see here on the right side they're not even on the skin anymore they're just spilling out so they're not necessarily freckles like i was saying they're just added texture that makes your character so much more interesting and the skin just more interesting as well in general and it's always the simple details that make a big difference in the end and there we go guys we did it this was how to draw a cartoon face in procreate i really hope you enjoyed this video and if you did consider giving it a thumbs up because it really does help the channel and i would love to see the characters that you guys create so make sure to share them with me either on facebook instagram or twitter and before you leave don't forget to subscribe because i put out new videos just like this one every single week i'll see you soon