Let's Draw a Robot in Procreate: iPad Drawing Tutorial!

In today's new video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cartoon robot from start to finish using the iPad and Procreate. It's all in real time too, no time lapse, no edits. You can follow along every step of the way from the sketch process to adding inks, color flats, shadows, highlights. We're even going to add a really cool glow to the eyes using a couple of extra layers and then adding gaussian blur and bloom from the adjustments menu to make them pop. And then we're going to finally finish it off with a background. Like I said, all in real time, so if you want to follow along step by step and draw with me, keep watching. Okay, so let's go ahead and draw a cartoon robot. Starting out, I'm using a 3000 by 3000 300 dpi RGB canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out sketching, so I'm going to use my 9B pencil that's part of my pencil pack available for Procreate and for my color palette. Once again, I've got this pre-made, so if you want to download this, follow along with the exact same colors that I'm using in today's tutorial. You can go to my website, download it for free. If you head to bjdell.com underneath the YouTube reference materials page, which I will link it down in description below, you can find this along with a video at the top of the page that walks you through how to install a palette in Procreate if you're new to that. So, all that out of the way, let's get started. I'm going to use this kind of dark bluish green black color for my sketch. That's also going to be the same color that we use for the inks. So, just like most of my other videos, I'm going to start out just using some really basic shapes here, starting with the head. I'm just going to have this rectangle here, kind of with curves on the sides and the corners. This is going to be the head. I'm just going really loose and sketchy. I'm going to make this a lot nicer in the next stage. From here, I kind of want to decide perspective. I don't think I want to have a straight on perspective, so if we go ahead and add kind of a center line here, we can have a three-quarters perspective. So, the eyes here on the left-hand side, these are going to be bigger. This one here on the left is going to be bigger than the one on the right, just because of the perspective we're going with. We've got that in there. Do kind of curve shape here at the top for the head. It's like an extra piece of metal up there. That looks pretty good. We have a chin down here. This is going to kind of come into here, and then do a mouth here. Yeah, that looks pretty good. From here then, let's move on to the body. So, I'm just going to do just an oval shape down here for the body. I have this kind of connected there to the head with the neck there. I have one arm here, and then another arm here. These round ovals here, it's going to kind of be these shoulder parts where the arm is going to come out of. I'll kind of block this off a little bit here at the bottom. Not really going to have much room for legs down here, so just maybe make him a floating robot. So, he's got this kind of round shape here at the bottom, kind of floats in the air there. Here then, let's get the arms coming out. Add in the hands here, just some basic rectangles here. Fingers, thumb coming out there. Do the same thing over here. Once again, just really sketchy, just kind of getting the shape of where everything goes, the position. I don't worry about cleaning it up. Once we go to the ink stage, we add in kind of a bottom lip here, and then just a little design there for the chin, and I think that looks pretty good. So, that's going to be our sketch. From here then, we're going to be able to move on to our inks. So, to do our inks, we're going to come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer. It's going to be our inks layer, and then I'm going to tap the N for the blend mode on our sketch. I'm going to drop this down to about 35% just so we can see it, but it's not too dark because we want to be able to draw on top of it without being too distracted by what's underneath. So, now that we've got that, I'm going to go ahead and switch my brush. I'm going to come up here to the library and switch over to my cartooning set, and for this, I'm going to use my standard inker streamline to do my inks, and at this point, I always decide where's the light source coming from. I like to use different line weights in my designs, and anything closer to the light source is going to have a thinner line. That's where the highlights are. As you move away, anything further away from the light source is going to have a thicker line, and that's where the shadows are going to be. So, I think here, we'll have the light source coming in from this top right-hand corner. It's kind of thinner lines here, thicker lines here as we come back down and around. So, now that we've got that decided, we can go ahead and kind of jump in and start inking. I'm going to start down here with the chin because this kind of breaks up the head. So, if I didn't have the chin here, this would just be one big line coming here across. It's going to be kind of difficult to do that big of a line and get the right line weights, but with having this break here in the middle, it's going to help us. So, I'm just going to do kind of a tapered line here for the chin, and now I can bring around the head here. To do this though, I don't want to overlap here on the same layer. So, I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer. So, coming up to my layers here, making a new layer will allow me to overlap here, but I can go back in and erase after the fact just because it's on two separate layers. So, I'm going to switch back over to the brush now, and I'm just going to kind of pull up and around. Once again, kind of thicker here, lighter as it comes back up here, and then thicker back here. You see, even though I use different line weights, it's not super crazy. It's not going from one extreme to the other. It's just a little bit of a difference. I know a lot of people hear that and they want to go in super heavy and just do massive thick lines, and that's really not what I go for. When I do the lines here in the center too, I want these to be a little bit thinner. I usually keep the interior lines not as thick as the outside lines. So, we'll get those in there. I'll go ahead and do the mouth here. Some tapered lines there. We'll do one thin line here to kind of break it up so he's got kind of like that top row, bottom row of teeth there. A tapered line there, and that little part there for the chin. Now, I'm going to go ahead and come in here and kind of make these look a little bit more three-dimensional, but once again, I don't want to draw and have to erase on the same layer. So, I'm going to come back down to that original chin layer. I'm going to draw on that layer to do the inside parts of these eyes. So, once again, just using a thinner line here, kind of bringing that around, and right there as well. That one I'm going to change just a little bit, bring it down a little bit further. I want these to kind of have that same perspective, and if they are off a little bit, you can kind of tell that it looks wonky as far as the perspective goes. So, I think that one looks a little bit better. Now, I can come back in here with my eraser, and once again, with the eraser, I'm just using the same eraser that I'm using for the drawing, just that standard anchor streamline. Now, pulling back out, you can kind of see what we're left with there. Let's do this top part here. So, once again, still on this other layer, I can kind of overlap this. Once again, thicker coming into thinner there towards that light source, and then I'm just going to pull down a separate line there. So, it's kind of like a two different piece helmet there on top of them. Now that we've got that done, if we want to add in just some extra dots for textures around here, maybe even pull in some cross hatching here at the top, just for some extra details. These little dots, just pressing harder and lighter and kind of filling them in. Make the brush a little bit bigger here to do that. Just like that. All right. So, we've got that done. Let's go ahead and work on the body now. Coming back down here and zooming in so we can see it a little bit better. I can go ahead and combine these now. So, they're all on one. Start here with the body as it curves around here. I want to switch back over here to my streamlined version of the brush now. Pulling the body around here and connecting, and then any overlaps there and you just kind of come in and erase. One thing I've talked about in my videos too, I try not to zoom in and out too much just because I know it gets pretty distracting. But as you're following along at home, feel free to do lots of zooming in. I always say that if your lines look really sharp and really good when you're zoomed in and close up, they're going to look even better once you zoom back out. So, definitely use that to your advantage, the zooming in and out. If you don't see me doing it that much, I am only doing that because it's a video. Usually in my own personal work, I'm in and out and all over the place like crazy. So, definitely use it if you can. Break this up with another line here so it's kind of like a layered there. A little ball here at the bottom just like that. I think here in the center too, let's throw in kind of like a door here. So, that's maybe where all of his electronics are contained inside. Erase here so we can have some hinges. Little stuff like this, if I don't draw it initially, I might just come back in later and think, okay, this needs added here and here. I knew I kind of wanted a heart here in the center because I did pick out the color for that. So, we'll just draw a heart there. I think that's always fun, gives kind of that humanity to the robot. Alright, now we're going to do these overlaps. So, I'm going to use that same technique of making a new layer. So, coming back up to my layers, make a new one here. This can be the overlap for the shoulders here. It's a little bit bigger here. It's getting bigger here in the back, kind of thinner towards the front there. If the lines don't match up, just come in here and erase so they line up. Nice arm here, maybe a line there to kind of break it up. The hand in here and then maybe some extra lines here to break up everything on the hand, just so it's got a little bit more detail to it. I think I'll do the same thing here on the shoulder. I have another line there coming. And now I can go back into my layers menu. I can grab that bottom layer and then erase that overlap there. Once again, since these are on two separate layers, I can do that without worrying about hitting that line that I did for the shoulder. Makes it super easy, makes your job so much less stressful. We'll do the other arm here now. So, zooming in just a tad bit so you can see it better. The shoulder here, that part coming down and the hand. I think I'm going to pull it back just a little bit. The idea here is we want to make sure that the left hand and the right hand both look the same as far as size-wise goes. You don't want one super big and one super small, unless the perspective kind of leads towards that. But this, they're going to be about the same size. It's going to be a little bit smaller just because of the back, but it's not going to be crazy difference in the two. This one even still, honestly, might be a little bit too big. So, I can grab this and kind of shrink it down a little bit. If I go to my selection tool and lasso this, hitting the arrow then, I can shrink that down if I want to bring it in a little bit. Matches up a little bit better to the other one. Beautiful thing about digital art. All right, so there's that. Let's go ahead and turn off our sketch layer now. I'm going to go ahead and merge these. You can either pinch or you grab this top layer, you can tap that, and you can hit merge down. So now, all of our lines are on one single layer and we're good. From here, if I want to grab my brush again, just kind of add in some more kind of details. I can kind of split this one off if I want to. Add in some of those dots here. Some up here on the shoulder too. Just whatever you want to do to make it your own and make it pop a little bit more. I think that's pretty good. So, that's it. That's our finished design as far as the inks go. So, from here, we're ready to move on to the color flats. So, to do the color flats, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer and I'm going to drag and drop this one down underneath the lines layer. So, we've got the lines here. We've got this new layer here. This is going to be our color flats layer. Before we start on the color flats though, I'm going to come up here to my layer two and I'm going to go ahead and set this as a reference. So, the lines layer is now set as reference which allows us to drag and drop the color flats layer here onto that separate layer. It's non-destructive. It's going to make shadows and highlights that much easier once we get to them. So, now that we've got that done, I'm going to come up here to my colors palette. I've got this first gray color here. That's going to be the colors of the base robot. So, as I drag and drop this, when I first do it, watch as I drag and drop. You're going to see a menu selection come up here. It's going to say continue coloring, continue filling with recolor. We're going to tap that. You're going to see it brings up this little arrow here, this little cursor. If we drag this around, it's going to fill in whatever we touch on. This makes it super easy and fast to color in because once we want to move on to the next point, we just go ahead and tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. You can see this color is in super quick. If we had to go up here and drag every single time, it's going to take a lot of time to get all this filled in. We're going to be dragging and dropping a lot and filling in with recolor is just a super fast way to get it done. Just make sure you're not hitting your lines when you're doing it. Get inside here, that cross hatching. Now that we've got that done, let's go ahead and go up here to our color palette again. Let's get this darker gray. We're going to use that here for the rest of the areas that we don't have filled in on the robot body. Once again, just making sure we don't hit those lines. There we go. Next up, we've got green. I'm going to fill that in with the eyes. You'll see usually for those two fill-ins like that, I'll just drag and drop real quick. I won't even worry about doing the filling in with recolor because it's about the same time difference between the two. Then finally, we've got the red for the heart and you'll see when I switched over color too, because I had that continue filling with recolor in, it changed that last one that I was on. Now I've got to come back in. I'm just going to fill that in by hand. There we go. Color flats are done. I think honestly in the procreate process, color flats are the quickest of all the different stages. Now that we've got those done, we can go ahead and move on to adding in our shadows and our highlights. To do our shadows first, let's come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer. This is going to be our shadows layer. Then I'm going to tap this and I'm going to set this one as clipping mask. Clipping mask allows us to color in our shadows on this layer. It's only going to show up if the layer underneath it is colored in. If we're coloring over here, nothing's going to show up because we didn't have that colored in on the layer that this is clipped to. The shadows are only going to show up on these areas that contain color. Now that we've got that, I'm going to go up to my color palette again. I've got this darker gray right here. That's going to be my shadow color. I did see once again that recolor up there kind of shifted when I changed, so I need to fill that in real quick. On our shadow layer with our shadow color selected, once again still using that standard anchor streamline, we've got the light source coming in from this top right-hand corner, so our shadows are going to kind of fall back here in this general direction. I'm going to go ahead and turn off reference now so I can fill in some big areas and then drag and drop color based on what I've got done. Otherwise it's just going to fill in everything, so with that connected now I can drag and drop and fill that in. You're going to see as I start to kind of bring in these shadows around, they kind of trace and follow the flow of the lines that I've already got in there from the inking stage. So as I bring this up and around here, see it follows that curve of the way that the inks are already going, and once I get certain areas like this all connected here and I've got a large area done, then I can just drag and drop that color in instead of going in and just scribbling all that in there. So dragging and dropping that now, you see it makes it super easy, super quick, and then I can kind of come in here and start to clean up some of these shadows so they follow those curves even better. All right, so now that I've got a pretty big area filled in, I'm going to go ahead and adjust the opacity now. So if I come up here to my layers menu, hit the N for blend mode, just like we did with the sketch layer and dropping down the opacity of that, and grab this, I think probably about 35 percent looks pretty good right there, and then now I'm just going to kind of continue to add in my shadows to my design. It's again just kind of following along with the curves that I've got laid in there from the ink stage. If you have problems with shadows, honestly just watch a lot of my videos. It will kind of get easier for you with time, and as you follow along and practice, it's going to start to make sense of why I'm choosing to add the shadows where I am. I've also recommended in previous videos too, you can always just grab a flashlight and use that and shine against different objects in your home to kind of get the feel of why light hits a surface in a certain way. It's a tongue twister, and once you get the hang of that, then like I said, it's going to come easy to you, kind of second nature. You're not even really going to think about it too much. So there we go. We've got that done. One thing though I don't like back here is this is a really big shadowed section. So you can tell it's a shadow here because these two different values are next to each other, but when you get back here, it kind of gets lost because there's so much of a shadow there. So in cases like this, I really like to use the eraser. Once again, I'm just going to use that standard ink or streamline, and I'm just going to kind of pull away here from the edges. Make this a little bit bigger. Once again, following along with that curve of the design, just kind of pulling that away a little bit so that the shadow doesn't go clear to the edge, and then you can kind of come back in, fine tune again with the brush. If you don't like how far you've taken it out, or if it comes out not far enough, you can go back in and kind of fix it like that. So by pulling this away, then we've got those two different values sitting next to each other here, and then also back here. So it just looks a little better. Same thing here. I'm going to come up and erase that. So we've got just a little bit of a shadow like that. You see, it just looks a little bit better there. Has a little bit more, I guess, detail and fun to it. It's not just a bland shadow going edge to edge. So I just like that little kind of technique there. Use it sometimes in my designs, not always, but especially metallic objects like this. I think it works pretty well for those. So there we go. We've got shadows done. Let's go ahead and add highlights next. So back up to the layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer here. Once again, same thing with the shadows. I'm going to tap that, and I'm going to set that as clipping mask. I'm going to come up here to my color palette. I'm going to choose white, and then we'll just hit, once again, with that light source coming in here from that top right-hand corner. I'm just going to come around here and hit the sides of where the light would be coming in from. Get that there. Pull in a little bit here on the fingers, tops of the hands there, front there. Just like that. I don't use too much. Get a couple of oval ones here on the bottom part of that mouth there. Then maybe an oval one here at the top too. Get one filled in there. And then I think I want to go ahead and remove, just like we did here. I don't want the highlights coming to the edge either. So I'll just remove those a little bit. Another thing I really recommend to you is, as you zoom and as you move around the screen, your arm is going to move in a certain way naturally. If you're trying to get a line to go a certain way, you might not be able to do it because it's not comfortable for your arm. So definitely, once you get the hang of how your arm moves naturally, turn your screen, turn the canvas just like that so that you can remove lines or draw lines and it comes naturally. You don't feel like you're fighting against the way that your hand wants to move or your arm wants to move. So there we go. We got the highlights in there. Let's go ahead, drop the opacity of these. So once again, back up to the layers menu and for blend mode, dropping this down to about 50% or so. There we go. Now, inks are done. Color flats are done. Shadows and highlights are done. The only thing here is, number one, shadows may be not done yet. I'm going to come back up to my shadow color. I don't have any shadows at all here in the mouth section, so I do want to add those in real quick. It just looks a little bland, having nothing in there as far as shadows or highlights. All right, so there we go. But looking at it, the eyes look just a little bit bland. They don't have that robotic feel. I think there should be a glow to them. So we're going to go ahead and do that and then we're going to move on to the background afterwards. So let's go ahead and work on those eyes. To do this, let's come back up to our layers menu and layer two, the lines layer. I'm going to go ahead and set this as reference again because we're going to drag and drop. I want to use that as the reference. With that set, I'm going to come down to layer three. I'm going to make a new layer. It automatically sets the clipping mask because it comes in underneath that, just automatically sets it. With that layer made and selected, we're going to come back up here to our color palette and I'm going to select green, the same color for the eyes. So we've got the base color flats of the green here. We're going to add another green layer here. So I'm going to drag and drop that green. Now we're going to come up here to the adjustments menu and I'm going to go ahead and select gaussian blur and select layer and then sliding the pencil to the right. I think probably do about maybe 30, 34, 35 percent looks pretty good. We've got a little bit of a blur now extending past the edges. I know it's not super bright so you can't see it just yet but we're going to add another step on top of this. So now that we've got that set, let's go ahead and tap our layers again and then we're going to use this layer again here. So we're going to slide it to the left and we want to duplicate it. With that done now and that top version of that selected, we're going to come back up here to our adjustments layer and then we're going to go ahead and select bloom and layer. Sliding to the right now you're going to see, hey look at that, we've got a nice glow going on now. Kind of have that white in the center, fades out so we've got that glow on the outside. I do on that layer, I want to grab my eraser and I do want to erase that part here on the inside. I don't want that to be too green. It's going to still have that glow and we want it to have that glow but I do still want to have some gray there. All right so now that we've got that, let's do the same thing to the other eye. So new layer again, drag and drop the color, going up to our adjustments layer. First we need to do the gaussian blur and layer. Once again, this eye perspective wise it's smaller than the one on the left so our blur is not going to be as big here. I think I want to keep the blur maybe about 19-20 percent. So with that selected then, same thing here. We're going to duplicate this one so sliding it to the left, hitting duplicate, that layer selected, back up to the adjustments layer, bloom once again, layer, sliding that to the right. I kind of want it to get to match up so this one's going to be about 60 some percent there and then using my eraser again just to come inside that section there just to keep that gray in there. All right so there we go. Our design as far as the character goes is finished. I think it looks good. I like the glow for the eyes. You can tell it just makes a world of difference. So I'm going to go ahead and just for right now, let's go ahead and combine these just so we can do a comparison and you see the difference that that makes. Just a world of difference. So just adding little details like that can really affect the design and you see just how great that looks compared. So there we go. We're done with the eyes. From here, let's go ahead and finish this off with a background. So to do the background, let's go ahead and come up to our layers menu. We're going to come down here to the very bottom layer and I'm going to make a new layer. From here, I'm going to go ahead coming up to my color palette. I've got this kind of light purple here. Let's just kind of make a funky design here in the background to kind of finish off the design here. Coming back up to my layers menu, I want to turn off reference here so I can drag and drop the color here. We have that turned on. It would just fill in everything there in the background. So we'll drag and drop that in there. From here then, let's go back up to our layers menu and I want to tap on this purple and I want to set this as alpha lock now. So alpha lock works a lot like clipping mask. However, it's all on one layer. So clipping mask being two separate layers, it's non-destructive. So if you draw on those clipping mask layers, you can change the opacity, you can erase, you can add, and it doesn't affect that bottom layer. Alpha lock still stays inside what you have colored here, but any changes you make affects the entire layer. It is destructive. So if you adjust opacity or erase, it's going to affect what you've already got. But that's okay with this because it's going to be simple. So that's set as alpha lock. I'm going to come up here to my colors palette and select this darker purple here and I'm just going to switch over to my standard inker now just so I can fill in a pretty big portion of this. It's going to be a solid here. With that set, we're going to kind of turn this into a gradient. So if we come up here to adjustments and go to Gaussian blur again, layer, since this is alpha locked, as we slide this blur, this one of course came outside the eyes because it was all clipping mask to the overall design. This though, since it's alpha locked, only blurs inside. It doesn't go outside of that shape that we already drew. So we'll kind of make this kind of a galaxy look then. With that done, let's go ahead and switch our color here to white. Let's make a new layer here and then I'm just going to come in and just add some stars here in the background just by pressing. Harder and lighter in certain areas makes bigger or smaller ones as I go around. Just really random, no rhyme or reason to this. I don't want to like make a pattern or anything. I just want it to have a nice flow to it. So with that then, let's go ahead and come up here to our adjustments layer and let's go ahead and use bloom on this one. And then we can slide this to the right and kind of make these have that glow effect there in the background. So they kind of look like those stars. So there we go. There's our finished design. Just a really quick and easy background using that same bloom that we use for the eyes. You can see just how much that adds to everything. Final thing that I need to do then is just grab my regular color here that I did the inks with and sign the design and I will be done. All right, so there we go. A cartoon robot from start to finish kind of using some different techniques using that gaussian blur and the bloom for the eyes. Then using that same bloom for the background. Hopefully you guys enjoyed today's video. If you did, make sure you give it a thumbs up. It only takes a second to do that and it helps other people see it on YouTube as well. Also, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, make sure you do that and turn on the bell to alert you when I post new videos. Also, if you guys take part in any of these tutorials, you do a design based on them and you post it online, which I urge you to do. If you're on Instagram or Twitter, definitely tag me I want to check out what you're making and want to see what you're able to do with these videos. Or if you're on Facebook, I also have a group over there called Keep Creating a Group for Artists by Artists, which I will link down in the description below. A place where you can share your art based on these tutorials or really just anything you're currently working on. A great place to meet new friends, give feedback, get feedback. It's a great place. I want you guys to be a part of it as well, so definitely hop on over and join. And when you do join, there's two questions you have to answer. Just make sure you answer those questions. That's all I ask. So that's it for today's video. Thanks for watching and until next time, keep creating.