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- Turning a photograph into a cartoon
is easier than you think and I'm going to show you
exactly how you can do it no matter your skill level.
Hey, hello wonderful 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, creative community.
And with that said, grab your drawing tools
and let's get started.
(upbeat music)
Now I've been getting so many requests to make this video
probably every day in my Instagram DMS, to be honest.
So today is the day we're doing it.
But I do wanna mention
that I know it's not an original idea.
There are already other creators
that made similar videos on YouTube,
but I did go the extra mile
and found a bunch of Procreate tips and tricks
that I'm going to show you
so you can improve your digital art workflow.
So it's not just about tracing,
I'm going to give you a bunch of hacks as well.
And we're going to start by just creating a new canvas.
Now, if you're not exactly sure how to bake a canvas size,
that depends on your own project requirements.
And I have a whole video in which I teach you
everything you need to know in order to make a decision.
But one thing I'm going to say for this video
is you wanna make sure that it's big enough
to allow you to fully zoom in.
So I'm personally gonna go ahead
and create a custom canvas size.
So just clicking on this little plus stack right here,
and I'm gonna go with 3,000 per 3000.
I would recommend using that as the smallest size you go for
again, just so you can zoom in fully.
And I want mine to be a square.
If you want to, for example, post it on Instagram,
square is the best way to go.
So 3000 per 3000, I'm just gonna click on create,
and then that's going to open up your new canvas.
And the first thing we're going to do
since we're tracing a picture is well to import a picture.
So for that, just go in the wrench icon menu here
at the top, inside the add sub menu
and tap on insert a photo
which is going to open up your photo album.
Now you're going to pick whichever photo you want to use.
I know mine is right here, so I'm just gonna tap on that.
And then you can zoom in and make sure you're focusing
on one specific part of the picture.
You could draw the entire person if you want.
I'm gonna just focus on the top of myself.
Otherwise this video is gonna be way too long,
but seriously, it's the same technique,
no matter what you're drawing, to be honest.
And if you have an animal in there as well,
that's totally fine.
I'm going to show you how to handle that.
So once your image is where you want it to be
and zoomed in properly,
you can just exit the error tool by clicking on it again.
So that's great.
Now we have the reference, but it's a little bit intense.
It's going to be really hard to see what we draw
on top of it.
So we're going to lower capacity of the picture.
So for that, all you have to do
is go in your layer panel right here
and tap on the end right next to the check mark
and lower capacity until you can
just barely see your picture.
You wanna be able to see the different little elements,
but you want it to be pretty pale.
Now we're also going to lock the picture
so we don't end up drawing on it.
So for that, you can just swipe your layer
towards the left with one finger and tap unlock.
Now we cannot draw on it.
It's just going to stay the same.
And we're simply going to start with creating a line art.
So for that, we're going to create a new layer.
Now we're going to start by simply drawing the outlines
of your character.
And I do have some tips for that,
but first we're going to need to create a new layer.
So just go ahead and in the layer panel,
tap on the plus and create a new layer.
Now we're going to rename this layer to line art.
So just tapping on the layer, clicking on rename,
and then renaming it to line art.
And if you're a bit confused about what layers are
essentially think of them
as transparent pieces of paper stacked together.
So the layer that is at the top of the list
is going to be the piece of paper
that is at the top of the pile.
And then the layer that is at the bottom of the list
is going to be the layer or the paper, sorry,
at the bottom of the pile.
So for your line art, honestly,
you can pick whatever color you want.
You could go with pure black
or I like to use a charcoal gray actually,
but later in the video, probably towards the end, honestly,
I'm going to show you how to recolor your outlines
really simply.
So for now, don't really worry.
Just make sure that you have a color
that you're going to see well
over the different parts of your illustration.
So something really dark is probably your best bet.
Now in this video, the brushes really don't matter.
As long as you're comfortable with the brush,
the technique is the same.
So just pick whatever you know you like,
if it's brushes made by a different creator,
that's totally fine.
If it's free brushes that come with Procreate,
that's totally fine as well.
I'm personally always going to give you two options.
One brush that comes with Procreate and is totally free.
And then another brush that comes
from my brand new Inking, Stippling and Texture bundle.
So in terms of free brushes, if you go in the inking panel
that comes with Procreate, the technical pen
could work really, really well.
I personally would suggest the studio pen.
It's just a little bit thicker and has a bit more fluidity
in it, if that makes any sense.
If you do have my bundle, which by the way
will be linked below so you can check it out.
And there's always a special promo code
for the YouTube people.
You could go in the inking panel.
Well, the inking pack from that bundle
and pick the ultra smooth tracing.
So really nothing crazy here,
just starting by tracing the outlines,
but you wanna make sure
that you test the size of your brush first.
So the exact number you're going to use
is going to depend on the size of your canvas.
So there's no point for me to tell you, use this size brush.
It really depends on the brush, the size of your canvas.
So just do a few tests.
And once you see a brush size that seem to work,
just go with that.
Now, in terms of creating the line art,
you can start wherever you want.
I personally like to start with the facial features
because they're usually the most precise
and the most important.
So all you have to do is really just go ahead
and trace the most important lines that you see
in your picture below.
Now a few key things here to remember,
you're drawing a cartoon.
So feel free to change stuff a little bit,
you can see, I went ahead with my eye line
and made it slightly higher to have slightly bigger eyes.
So you can always customize your cartoon
to change a few things that you didn't like
from the base picture.
But honestly, the main thing you need to remember,
especially with the facial features is that less is more
when drawing your line art.
So for example, with the eyes,
I personally like to keep the bottom part open or half open
instead of fully closing it like this.
I feel like in terms of the liner at the end,
it looks way less creepy if you have fewer lines
for the facial features.
Another example of that is you probably can see,
I have kind of a little bag here under my eye,
if I was to draw this line,
I would look old and super tired.
So trying to draw the fewest lines possible in your face
to yes, show the facial features and make it look like you
or whoever else you're drawing,
but really trying to keep it as simple as possible.
Otherwise your person might look very tired or very old
or any kind of expression or emotion
that you don't want them to display.
So we're quickly going to go over the face together
so I can show you which elements I would outline
and which ones I would just leave out.
So it's not too creepy.
So the eye first, while we already went over it,
either leaving the entire bottom open or just one side.
Nose, super important, you might be tempted to go ahead
and say, okay, I'm drawing the nose like this
with the bridge and everything.
You can see, not the best look.
So what I would recommend is to draw
probably just the nostrils first
and seeing how that looks.
Already we can see there's a nose,
but we might want a few more details
like thickening the nostrils,
maybe showing the side of the nose here.
But honestly, probably not much more than that.
Obviously, if your character is seen as from the side,
you would draw the entire nose.
But if your character is seen three quarters
or from the front,
I would recommend just keeping the bridge of the nose,
totally open.
Similar thing for the mouth.
You might want to just draw the middle line of the mouth.
So where the lips open and then the line of the bottom lip,
but leave the top lip open.
So what that would look like is this middle line right here.
And if your mouth is slightly open,
don't draw that it's going to look really creepy
real quickly.
So just kind of draw a line the middle and call it a day.
So the middle line, making sure that you draw the corners
of the mouth real well
and then just giving an idea of the bottom lip real quick.
And that's pretty much it.
Now you can see if I went ahead and also draw the top lip,
it just look very weird so leave it out.
We're going to color it later and it's to be good enough.
Similarly to this kind of line at the bottom of the eye,
you might want to avoid drawing too many expression lines,
cause it just looks like wrinkle.
So you can just leave them out or draw a smaller version
of them if they're really important,
like here I have two and they're pretty intense.
I'm just going to draw one tiny one like this.
For the eyebrows obviously go ahead
and just fully draw them.
Honestly, that's what I would recommend.
But you could experiment with just showing a few strokes
instead of the outline.
I think the outline's probably the best, the best way to go.
And once you've drawn the facial features,
it's probably going to look a little bit creepy,
even if you left out a bunch of lines,
but don't worry about it.
When we draw the rest of the line art,
it's going to come together and look much more normal.
And the rest of the line art is way easier because you don't
have to worry about figuring out which lines to draw
and which ones to leave out.
You can pretty much just draw everything from now on,
but I do have a few tips to give you
just to make sure that your line art
is the best it could be.
The main tip being the bigger
or the most important the element is,
the thicker the outline is going to be,
or the liner is going to be.
And then the smaller, or the more detailed an element is
the thinner the outline is going to be.
So for example, the jawline here is going to be pretty thick
because it's literally the end of the head.
So it's a very significant element,
But the lines between the fingers in contrast
would be a bit thinner.
So you can see just like this.
Now I know that's a bit more advanced,
but I just wanna make sure that you out that tip
because it can really help with the eligibility
of your line art in general.
And that goes for anything that you're drawing.
Now I'm quickly going to go ahead and draw the line art
for the character, leaving the hair out
as well as Mr. Rabbit right here,
cause I do have some tips to give you for hair and animals.
So feel free to pause the video here to draw your line art
and we're going to meet to draw the hair
and any fluffy friends that you might have
in your picture as well.
Great, so drawing the hair can be a little bit intimidating
that's for sure, because there's just so much going on.
Especially if you look at all my weird curls.
Now, what I do recommend is that you start
by just drawing the outline of the hair
and then filling that in with a few strokes
instead of trying to draw the actual hair in the picture,
just kind of taking a loose cartoonish approach to it.
So just starting with the outline again,
and that's pretty simple, it should be pretty defined.
And once you have the outline, honestly, all you have to do
is go back in and show the general shape and movement
of the hair.
So instead of drawing all the strands, like I was saying,
it would be a case of saying, okay,
right now the hair falls in kind of here, goes here.
I'm not gonna draw this big mess here.
I'm just gonna have the hair draw or fall, sorry,
pretty smoothly like this.
And that's going to be the main shape
then going back in and adding a few more strokes again,
just to show the general movement,
it really doesn't need to be precise or anything.
I'm gonna go with more waves than actual spirals
like I have at the bottom, cause spirals are harder to draw,
but if you do have curly hair
and you want to draw your curly hair,
I have a full tutorial on drawing curly hair.
So I will link that in the description below.
It could be very helpful,
but honestly for this, just remember,
you want to show the general shape and general movement,
but it doesn't need to be precise at all.
So I'm gonna get back to this later and keep filling it in.
But before I let you go to draw the line art of your hair,
I do want to talk about the top part of the hair here,
what it connects with the face.
I would recommend leaving that open.
So just kind of drawing
again the direction of the strengths,
drawing a few of those kinda showing the part
if you have a part like this, and then later with the color,
we're going to have the definition between the hair
and the face, obviously.
So just go ahead and draw your hair.
I'm going to do the same.
And once we're done, we are going to meet up
either for the animal or if you don't have an animal
in your picture, once you're done with the hair,
you should be done with your line art,
which means you can skip to the next chapter in the video,
which is going to be all about adding colors.
And I have a bunch of tips to give you
to make that super, super quick and easy.
Now, if you have an animal in your illustration,
drawing, the fur is pretty easy honestly,
you're mostly going to focus on the outlines again.
So not going in the shape and drawing the fur like this,
but instead of drawing very smooth line art like that,
you're going to draw in a bunch of strokes.
Now, if you have gaps in your strokes like this,
it's going to be harder to color it later.
So just try to either draw kind of triangles
or make sure that your strokes, you connect them in between.
If you are using my inking pack from my new bundle,
I do recommend switching from the ultra smooth tracing
to the brush pen.
And the reason for that is super simple.
It's just that the ultra smooth tracing like the name says
smooths your line to make the curves really nice
and smooth and easy.
So there's stabilization within the brush,
but that's not really what we want for fur.
So just switching to the brush pen,
which is much more sensitive to your strokes
and is not going to smooth them out nearly as much.
Well that's way too big,
but that brush is going to be way less smooth.
So that's not as good for clean outlines,
but for fur that's optimal.
So that would be my suggestion.
Otherwise, if you're working with free brushes
you can stick with the studio pen
and it's going to work just fine.
So here just draw your line art for the animal as well.
And once you're done, we're going to add the colors.
So once you have your line art,
we're going to just add the colors really quickly.
But before that, make sure that you hide the base layer,
your reference layer with the image,
just to make sure that everything was outlined.
And once everything looks just right,
you can go ahead and duplicate your image layers
or your reference layer by swiping it towards the left
with one finger and then tapping on duplicate.
And once it's duplicated, you can go ahead and unlock it.
So again, just swiping it towards the left
and then tapping unlock and activate this one
so we can see it and put it above the line art
and increasing the opacity up to 100%.
Now we're going to put it at the top so we can use it
as a little reference to pick the colors.
So we are going to just use the air tool here
and then we can resize the image and put it
where it's not going to be bothering anyone.
And now we can simply use it to color pick colors
by just holding the fingers on one section of color.
Now you're gonna notice though,
if you do that over your face
and you're trying to pick your skin color,
you're going to move around your face
and the color is going to change a lot,
even within just a tiny section of the face.
Now, one tip I have for you if you do want to use
your picture as a reference to color pick the colors,
go in the adjustment panel here at the top
and selecting Gaussian blur.
And then by swiping your finger towards the right,
you're going to be able to add some blur.
I know it looks crazy right now, but if we add blur,
essentially it mixes all the colors together,
which means once you go ahead and color pick one,
it's going to give you an average of your face.
So that way, you know, okay, if I color pick
somewhere on my face, that's the color you can use.
Now using Procreate, there are so many different ways
you can color your character.
I'm going to give you tips on how to do this
the most efficient way possible.
So what I would recommend is creating a new layer,
putting it below the line art,
just keeping your colors and your line art separate
is good practice because if you make a mistake
on your colors and you painted them on the line art,
then you're going to have to tweak the line art as well.
And we already worked so hard on it.
So separating them is going to be the way to go
and renaming this new layer to color.
Now make sure it is below the line art.
Otherwise, we're going to have colors over the lines
and that's not what we want.
And in Procreate, there's a really neat feature
that is called reference.
So if we go ahead and on the line art layer,
tap on it to open up the menu,
we're going to be able to select the reference right here.
So what reference does is you can think of it
as a coloring book.
Now Procreate knows that everything we're going to draw
on the other layers has to stay within the lines
of the reference.
So if we go ahead and take our color
and drop it onto a section like the arm here,
you can see, even if it's on the separate layers,
it stays within the line.
So that's super, super neat.
Now, a few things you need to keep in mind though.
Procreate is not smart to the point of knowing
like, okay, this is the arm.
This is the body.
I'm going to only color the arm and not the body.
It's going to work with the outlines you drew.
So if the outline is not fully closed,
then your color is going to fill in bigger sections
than you might want.
Now there are a few things you might be able to do
to help with that.
One of them being adjusting the threshold
when you drop your color.
So you can see if you don't lift your pencil,
you're going to have the option to then move it
towards the left or the right to fill in more or less
of the shape.
And if you have multiple sections,
once you drop your color on the one,
you can click here on continue filling with recolor
and it's going to show you this little cross right here,
which if you move it, it's going to allow you to,
with the same color, fill in a bunch of different shapes.
Now you might still have the threshold issue.
To adjust it when you are using the recolor tool,
all you have to do is adjust the flood here.
So instead of moving your pencil from left to right,
just adjusting the flood within the different shapes.
For the face, you're probably going to have
a lot of weird kind of connections
like in the hair and everything.
For now don't worry about it, just color the face.
And I'm going to show you how to recolor the hair later.
And if you tap on a section that you did not want to color
with that color, you can just undo by tapping on your screen
with two fingers.
And it's going to go back to the previous section.
And once you're done recoloring all you have to do
is tap on the little magic one icon here,
and it's going to exit this recolor function.
So feel free to pause the video here,
to take all the time you need to fill in as many shapes
as you want using this strategy.
And once you're done,
I'm going to show you how you can quickly fill in
the missing parts.
So once you've done the best you can
using the reference tool and the color drop option,
go ahead and deactivate reference on your line art.
That's super important.
And then going back on your color layer,
all you have to do is pick a nice brush
that you have control over and that is pretty big.
That could be if you're working with free brushes
in the airbrushing panel, the hard brush,
or if you have the inking pack from my new bundle,
you can pick the base round brush
and then all you have to do.
You probably guessed it
is just quickly fill in the other shapes manually.
It shouldn't take too long since you already have
a lot of work done, but that way you're going to be able
to have a little bit more control and freedom
in your line arts instead of having to close all the shapes
fully and then exclusively using the reference tool.
And for now the hairline, honestly just quickly draw it
one big line, and I'm going to show you
how we're going to make it look good in just a few steps.
So for now, just don't worry about it,
just draw the hair color and call it a day.
And with that, it is time for the secret password,
but we're going to do it real quick in this video.
So if you watched this far,
just leave a comment with the word cartoon,
and then we're going to keep going.
I'm going to show you how to refine your hair line.
So still on your color layer,
if you have a crazy looking hairline like me at this stage,
that's totally okay.
You're going to go ahead and use the smudge tool,
which is this little finger icon here at the top.
And you're going to pick the stucco brush
from the painting panel.
And with the smudge tool,
you're going to be able to drag your skin color
onto the hair, to create a nice transition as your hairline,
as opposed to that very clean line we had before.
And before we move on to shading,
you might want to add some extra colors.
So for that, I recommend working on a separate layer again,
just so you don't mess up the base colors that you have.
So renaming this new layer to extra colors,
making sure that it is below the line art,
but above the colors and this extra color layer,
you might actually want to apply it as a clipping mask.
Now, what a clipping mask does is everything we draw
on this extra color layer now
is going to stay within the base colors.
So you don't have to worry about going outside of the line
and in terms of extra color what I mean by that is,
for example, if your animal is multiple colors,
but you did not have line art
limitating the different colors of the animal,
you can just go in and draw those sections in
on this extra color layer, the lips,
maybe some light on the cheeks,
maybe color variation within the hair.
So I'm going to give you a few examples.
We're going to do that real quick,
but you're going to see it's really going to make
a big difference at the end
if you refine the color sections a little bit.
So I'm going to start with the skin here
because most people are going to want to do
a bit of color variation within the skin,
at least drawing lips.
So you can just color pick the color you use for your skin,
not from the picture really, from the illustration
and then making it slightly darker.
You could, if you want, make it a bit pinker,
just be careful with that
and you're going to see why in a second.
So with the same brush that you use to fill in
the bigger sections, you can go in and fill in
the bottom lip.
Now you can see it's almost the same color,
but already it looks very intense.
So you don't want to use a color that is too different
from your base skin for the lips,
because otherwise it's going to look almost clownish.
Although, obviously if you want to have some lipstick,
you could go with a bold color,
but you can see already pretty similar to the skin,
but it's not the best look.
So what you might want to do,
if you don't want to have crazy frog kind of lips
is using an eraser, sending it to a super, super soft brush
like in the airbrushing panel, the soft brush
and keeping the bottom lip really nice and clean,
but erasing the top of the top lip
so that it blends with the skin.
I know that might sound strange, but you can see
it's a much better look than when it was fully outlined.
Now with that same skin color,
you can go ahead and add, like I was saying,
kind of blush on the cheeks
just to make your character look less dead.
And for that, you have a few different options you can use.
If you want to have a super soft illustration
without any textures, you can go in the airbrushing panel,
picking the soft brush.
If you do wanna have textures,
you have a few options as well, in terms of free brushes,
you could go in the sketching panel,
picking the 6B pencil and making it super big.
Or if you have my new bundle in the inking pack,
you can pick the low ink marker.
So yeah, which is with the same color.
You can quickly brush over your character
focusing on the cheeks, but maybe going on top of the bridge
of the nose as well a little bit,
super quick, nothing complicated,
but you can see it is just so much better already.
One more area where you might want to add color variation
is the hair, especially if you have longer hair.
So what I personally like to do is,
well, this is what I have in my own hair,
but lighting up the bottom and then darken out the roots.
So just color picking the base color, I'm making it lighter
and I'm actually going to stick with my textured brush,
but it's the same thing you did for the face.
You could go with a smoother brush if you want,
just painting very quickly, very loosely
over the bottom part of the hair.
So going to do the same thing, but with the roots.
So making them darker and here just a quick note,
this is really not about light and shadow.
It's really just about adding color variation
within the shape.
We're going to do the shading in the next step.
And if you do have an animal,
I highly recommend you add color variation in them as well.
So my bunny here, Mr. Rabbit, he has a white belly.
So I'm just going to color pick the base color
and then go with a cream version of it.
And in terms of brushes here,
if you're working with the free brushes,
again, you can stay with a soft brush or the 6B pencil.
If you have my inking panel,
you might want to use the dry marker here,
because it does look a little bit like fur
if you use it in short strokes,
I'll just show you so you can use that here.
So yeah, just adding color variation on your animal,
if you do have one,
and if not, we're going to move on to the next stage,
which is shading.
Shading is going to be pretty simple.
You have a few options you can use for your brush again,
you could stick with the soft brush.
If you want to have soft shadows or the 6B pencil
if you want to have textured shadows,
if you do have my bundle,
you can go back to the low ink marker.
This is the one I'm going to use
to have slightly textured shadows.
And we're going to create the shadows on a separate layer
for the same reason as the extra colors,
so that we can quickly change them as needed.
So just create a new layer above the extra colors,
but below the line art, and then rename, whoops,
renaming it to shadows.
We're also going to apply it as a clipping mask
so that it stays within the base color.
In here you might be tempted to color pick
for example, the skin color and then make it darker
and paint your shadows that way.
But that is a little bit time consuming
because you're going to have to color pick the color
for all the different areas of your character.
And if you have some color or gradient,
it's going to be quite hard to do.
So, what I recommend to do for your shadows
is opening your layer panel
and then tapping on the little N right here,
which is going to open up what is called blending modes.
Now, if you're new to digital art,
and you're curious about how blending modes work,
I have a full on video in which I explain
the details about them
but for now, just consider that a blending mode
is something that you can apply on a layer,
and that is going to make that layer react
and blend differently with the other ones below it.
So what I mean by that
is you're going to see really quickly.
If we set our blending mode here to linear burn
and then lower capacity around 50%,
whichever color I used to draw on this layer,
I'm gonna pick this kind of grayish purple
is going to become darker, but blend and adapt
with the color below it.
So that's a really quick way to add shadows
because you only have to pick one color
and then you can paint all of your shadows
with that one color.
And you can really use any color of your choice here
to paint your shadows depending on the vibe you want.
I usually like to draw my shadows using a grayish purple.
That's what I like.
The only thing I would recommend though
is not to go with a neutral gray
because then your shadows can look a little bit muddy.
So any color that has a bit of a tin to it
is going to work well, not making it too light or too dark,
pretty much middle of the way is good for that.
Now you can place your shadows wherever you want,
but if you want to use your original image as a reference,
what you can do is again duplicating the lower one
that we had at the bottom and used first,
unlocking it, activating it, bringing it at the top,
bringing the opacity back up to 100%,
making it smaller and at the very top.
So you can use it as a reference.
And right now you might be wondering
why aren't you using the appropriate panel,
which is by the way, if you go in the wrench icon menu here,
in the canvas sub menu, you can click on reference,
which is going to let you import a picture,
and then you can put it at the top.
Well, that's what I use in most of my videos,
but I do have a tip for you here
that we would not be able to use
if we were going with a reference panel.
If you do select your reference image layer here,
you can then go in the adjustment panel here at the top,
selecting hue saturation and brightness.
If you lower the saturation, it's going to turn your image
to black and white, and that's going to really help you
clearly see where your shadows are on your piece.
So that's why I'm not using the reference.
And I'm actually using the image within the canvas.
So that's just easier to see where the shadows are.
And then you can simply go on your shadow layer,
with one color, one brush,
and paint all your different shadows.
So once more, feel free to pause the video here
to paint your shadows.
And we're going to meet once we have the shading completed
well, half completed because the next step
is going to be to add some highlights,
which is really going to make the piece pop.
So once you have your shadows,
we're going to use a very similar technique
to add some highlights.
So just creating a new layer above the shadows,
but below the line art renaming in this one to lights,
applying it as a clipping mask again.
So it stays within the base color shape.
And for this one, we're going to use the blending mode add.
We're also going to lower the capacity quite a lot
for now, maybe around 40%.
But once we have our lights and our shadows painted,
we're going to go back and play with capacity
of all the different layers.
So for your lights, you can really use any bright color
of your choice.
I like to go with a bright yellow, orange color
just to make it look like it's sunlight
or something like that.
And with the same brush,
but probably much smaller this time,
you're going to paint your lights.
Now you could go ahead and actually look at the lights
in the volumes and try to paint that,
that could totally work, that's one vibe.
I really like to add my lights in more of a cartoonish way.
And the way I do that is I just look
at the general direction of my shadows.
So you can see here, my shadows are on this side,
which means my light source is here.
And instead of yeah, drawing the volumes,
I draw just tiny lines that outline my outlines.
So for example, here on my hair,
that could just mean outlining a little bit like this,
and you can see that it's a really, really quick technique.
It's super easy because you don't have to worry
about the volumes or anything.
You just outline the lines that are facing the light source,
but it's also going to make your cartoon look
much more like a cartoon and a little bit less
like just a traced image.
So you can just do that and outline all of your outline.
You can also add some extra shiny parts,
for example, on the cheeks,
again, just to reinforce the cartoon vibe,
but it's such a simple step
and it makes such a big difference,
especially when we add the background,
you're going to see that outlining your outlines with light
really does add a whole lot of contrast to your piece.
So feel free to pause your video here,
to draw all of your highlights,
and when you're done with your lights,
I'm going to show you how to change the color
of your outlines, just to make them blend better
with your piece and make it all
a little bit more professional looking.
So once you're done with your highlights,
you can go ahead and hide the reference image, of course.
And if you want, you don't have to do that.
You can keep your outlines all the same color,
but if you want, we can recolor them.
And there's a really quick way to do that.
Selecting your line art layer,
if you want, you can duplicate it just to make sure
and have a safety copy
then hiding one of them.
And on the one that is displayed, you can activate
what is called alpha lock.
So to do that, you can take two fingers
and swipe your layer towards the right,
or you can tap on the layer and activate alpha lock
from the menu.
And with alpha lock activated now everything we draw
on the line art layer is going to stay within the line art
which means if we just quickly brush over,
we can recolor the line art real quick.
Well, right now, this looks crazy.
But what I like to do with my line art
is just have darker versions of the different colors.
So for example, for the hair,
instead of having a charcoal, gray,
I would color pick the darker part of the hair,
make that even darker, and then use that color
to recolor my outlines.
Now for the hair, it really doesn't make
that big of a difference, but I'm gonna show you real quick,
what it would do with the skin.
So quite a bit darker, It just makes your outline blend
so much better with the piece.
So you can quickly do that in probably what,
a minute or two.
So just going over all your outlines,
that's a little bit too light actually,
but you get the idea and trust me, the result
is going to look so much more professional
than with just straight up charcoal or black outlines.
Now, the last thing we have to do here
is to add a background, maybe an outline in a drop shadow,
if you want to.
And I have a few tips for all of those things.
So for the background, you can obviously go straight
with a color that you know you want to use,
but that might be a little bit difficult
to match with the vibe of your piece.
So if you want to have a coherent color palette,
you can pick probably the most intense color
in your illustration.
If you have a shirt, it would be probably the shirt.
In my case, the shirt is black.
So I'm gonna go with the next one.
The brown is pretty permanent compared to the other ones.
And with that selected, you can go in the harmony panel
at the bottom of your color panel
and it's going to automatically suggest you colors
that would work well with the one you have selected.
And you have a few different options you could go here.
Complementary is going to give you the opposite,
but you could go with different variations,
but all of those options are going to work,
which means you're going to have a nice color palette.
I know I want to go with a blue.
So I'm going to go with this one right here.
And you can always go back to your classic panel
and change, not the hue, so not the color of the color,
but you can change the brightness of it to make it brighter
and the saturation to make it more colorful, I guess.
And then you can set that as your background color.
Sometimes it doesn't show in the history for some reason
which is quite annoying, which in that case,
all you have to do honestly, is create a new layer,
renaming it to background, and then drop your color on that.
Now you might notice it's not exactly what you want
at this stage, so you can always just tweak it.
I'm gonna make mine quite a lot brighter.
If you want you can also add a white outline
to make this look a little bit like a sticker.
So you can just create a new layer,
make sure it's below your color, your character,
but above your background color.
And honestly, at this stage,
you can delete all the lower reference we have,
make your file a little bit more organized.
And on this new layer, though, we created,
but we're going to first rename it to outlines,
We can just pick pure are white as well as a big brush,
like in the airbrushing panel.
So the free brush with Procreate, the hard brush,
or if you have the inking pack from my bundle,
you could pick the base run brush and all you have to do
is make it fairly big and just follow the outline
of your character with your pencil.
So if you trace that and you have a big brush,
it's going to automatically create an outline.
And you can do that very, very quickly,
it really doesn't have to be perfect.
And once you have your outline,
if you do want to add a drop shadow,
it's really super quick.
All you have to do is duplicate your color layer
And then picking the one that is at the bottom,
that's very important.
You're going to take this one, put it below the outlines
and look very closely here.
We're going to fill this color layer with just one color.
And to do that we're just going to hold two fingers
on the layer, which is as you're going to see,
going to select only the color.
And then if we go back in the layer panel
with the selection activated,
you can then click on the color layer
to open up the layer menu,
which is going to let you select fill layer.
And you're going to see it's going to fill
the entire section with one color.
So once that is done, what you can do,
if you want to see everything better
and make sure you fill in everything,
you can hide your color layer here, double check,
and you can set that color instead of white
to the color you use for your shadows in your character
or something similar, which in my case was a grayish purple
kind of like this.
And then you can drag your color to fill in the white
as much as possible.
So will probably bring in the threshold to 100%.
Reactivating your color.
I know right now it looks like we have nothing,
but if we use the air tool, we're going to be able
to move the shadow and create a drop shadow.
Now it doesn't look super good right now.
So we're also going to use the blending mode linear burn
and also playing with the opacity of it
until we have a drop shadow that we like.
And one last little thing you can do if you have my bundle
is to add some textures, either in the background
or over everything.
So for that, you could just create a new layer
depending on where you want it to be.
I'm gonna have mine just on the background.
So I'm going to create it below my shadow,
but above the background,
which by the way, this one you can,
this layer you can rename to drop shadow.
If you feel like it.
Renaming this one to textures,
You can use any color of your choice, mostly focusing
on if you want to have a lighter or a darker texture.
In my case, I'm gonna go with a lighter texture.
So I'm just gonna pick a very, very light gray,
and then going in the texture in grid pack
from the bundle, picking any of those textures.
I'm gonna go, hmm.
I'm actually gonna go with fine paper,
it's very subtle, but it's really nice.
And you can just paint over the base.
Now I said subtle, you can see it's very, very subtle
and you can also play with the different blending modes here
to kind of make it pop more.
If I use add, you can see that the paper texture
is much more intense and you can experiment
with multiple textures.
If you paint one and you realize
that's not the one you wanna use,
you can just tap on your layer, click on clear,
and then just pick a different texture from the bundle.
I really like the speckle one.
So you can just kind of experiment, try different textures.
See if there's one that you like,
play with the different blending modes,
but that's obviously totally optional.
You could just keep your background as is.
Now if you enjoy this video and want to learn
how to create more illustrations in Procreate
I highly recommend you check out this playlist
in which I'm going to teach you exactly that.
But before you leave, make sure to give this video a like
and subscribe to the channel
so you don't miss any of the weekly videos,
I post every Tuesday and Saturday,
then click on the link right here and I'll meet you there.
(gentle music)
