Procreate Process

A start to finish walkthrough of an illustration.

Hello!

In this post, I’ll take you through my process from conception to finish for this little Father’s Day spot illustration. My process isn’t super set in stone — things shift from piece to piece in the rendering and coloring stages — but the bones of my process stays the same. At the foot of each step I’ll also make a brief note on the materials and digital brushes used. (I’ll make a post all about my favorite procreate brushes and how I use them at a later date!)

SCRIBBLE

The very first stage is the idea stage, and it’s often the most difficult part of the process for me. I rarely have a vision for a piece in my mind before I get going (sometimes I do, but it’s not often!), so I scribble! This takes form as either a sketch in my sketchbook, or, more often, as a tiny thumbnail. This Father’s Day piece happened to take form in my sketchbook, since it was a stand alone illustration I found it easier to just doodle around.

Materials: moleskine, red mechanical pencil

ROUGH SKETCH

After an idea begins to form, I grab my Ipad and rough it out in procreate. This usually looks pretty similar to my scribble stage, just larger.

Materials: procreate, round sketch brush (an edited version of a brush from Sara Faber)

CLEAN SKETCH

Next, I begin cleaning up the sketch and hashing out the finer details of the drawing. This step is crucial for me for one very importand reason: I LOVE linework. It’s mostly because I love the act of drawing, and I especially love drawing fine-tuned shapes with carefully executed lines (I’m a Virgo, after all). Depending on the complexity of the piece, I may do more than one clean sketch: one clean, and one even cleaner to really get a sense of all the nooks and crannies of a drawing. This will make the inking process more seamless and enjoyable.

Materials: Procreate, textured sketch brush (another edited version of a brush from Sara Faber)

INKING

My absolute favorite part of the process has always been, and will probably always be, INKING. There are few things more satisfying to me than making lovely shapes with flowing, carefully mapped out lines that in themselves, have their own lovely, flowing shape. After fully inking, I’ll typically duplicate the line layer and set the top copy on a 2-3% gaussian blur to give the drawing a richer, inky feel. *yummy*

Materials: Procreate, edited 2b Pencil brush from Sara Faber

COLOR + VALUE ROUGH

This stage can often come between the clean sketch and line-work, especially if the illustration is for a job, but in this case I did the line-work first. I went into detail on my color test process HERE, so I’ll keep it brief in this post. When working out the color for a piece, I’ll roughly block in color and shift the hues and values until I get something that I’m happy with. In the process, I’ll have a layer on top of the entire image filled with black and set to the blending mode: HUE. Toggling this layer on and off will allow me to flip flop between color and back and white, helping me keep the values of the piece in mind as I choose color.

Materials: procreate, default round brush

FLATS

Referencing my color sketch, I’ll then do my flat fills. This is the stage where things begin to vary. I used to do each and every element as it’s own layer, for example the daughter’s skin is a stand alone layer, her hair is a stand alone layer, her shirt is a stand alone layer… you get it. This is all well and good, but in procreate, layer economy is essential (I’ll touch on this topic in a separate post about procreate in the future). When I worked this way, I ended up using way too many layers, since each element had it’s own shadow layer, highlight layer, rendering layers, etc. What I tend to do these days (when possible), is to consolidate layers into clipping masks over major shapes.

For example: The daughter is filled completely with her skin tone first. Then, on clipping masks, I’ll add flat fills for the shirt, hair, pants, shoes etc. This will make rendering in the next step a little cleaner.

Flats without detail

Layer setup example including detail layers.

Materials for flats: Procreate, default hard round brush

DETAILS

This stage is pretty fun, because here we see it all come together. I try to keep it pretty simple, with just some skin tone shifts (like rosy cheeks and warmer hues in the extremities), maybe clothing patterns or color variations in accessories. If the color in the piece I’m working on is meant to be a bit more magical and complex, I’ll typically add gradients set to overlay for some rich shifts in hues, but it’s not the case in this particular piece.

Materials: Procreate, edited 2b pencil brush from Sara Faber, Soft noise brush from Dani Diez, Pastel brush from Vivien Mildenberger.

LIGHTING

In the final stage I add lighting. Regardless of the type of lighting, I always put shadow layers in multiply and turn down the opacity to where it looks best. Sometimes I’ll do more than one shadow layer, one for softer gradients and one for harsher-edged and deeper shadows. As far as the color of the shadow goes, I’ll typically pick a rich purple or blue, depending on what suits the colors best.

I’ll also usually add a highlight layer here. I usually pick a light pinkish-salmon color, sometimes yellow, and set the layer to soft light.

If the piece has stronger lighting that needs a bit of a glow effect, I’ll also use the vivid light or hard light blending mode and adjust as needed, but that wasn’t the case for this piece.

So here we have the final image!

I hope this process breakdown was useful to you!

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