How To Draw A Holiday Polar Bear • Procreate Tutorial • Draw With Me

drawing a polar bear is easier than you think and i'm going to show you exactly how you can do it no matter your skill level hello 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 [Music] so as usual we are going to start by creating a new canvas so that we have somewhere to draw for reference these are the dimensions of the canvas that i will be using it is literally just the size of the ipad screen since this is demo but make sure you pick something that works for your own project requirements if you're not exactly sure how to pick a canvas size i have a video in which i teach you everything you need to know in order to make your decision so i will link that in the description below now i often get questions on how to have this little reference image on the top left if you want to include it in your illustration as well or if you want to have it on your screen as well all you have to do is click on the wrench icon menu in the canvas section you gotta have the reference option which is going to allow you to import the picture so you can do that and then place it wherever you want it on your screen i have my illustration that you can use as a reference it is link in description below along with the color palette they're both totally free so you can just download it if you want that being said if you want to get even better practice i recommend you try and pick your own colors and try without the reference on the side so once we have everything ready we're going to start by creating a rough shape for the background and then we're going to move on to the sketch so start by creating a new layer we're going to make it to background shape and here you could fill in the entire background if you want or just draw kind of an organic shape like i'm going to do i feel like an organic shape works really well if you want to use this illustration on top of a greeting card or something like that so for the shape i'm going to go with this icy blue here but you could go with any shape or any color sorry of your choice and in this video i'm always going to be suggesting two different kind of brush one is going to be a brush that comes with procreate that is totally free and it's going to allow you to follow along just fine and the other brush is going to be a brush from my ultimate illustration bundle now these brush are not essential you don't need to buy anything to follow along this video that's totally okay but if you want to get them they're going to allow you to save some time and get more professional results overall so that you know that's that's cool if you want to check them out there will be link in description below there's always a special promo code for the youtube people for the background you have a few options you could use in the sketching panel the 6b pencil which is a nice brush that has a little bit of a grit to it or if you want to have a super plain like flat base you could use the heart brush in the air brushing panel making sure that you lift the opacity back up to 100 if you watch my watercolor videos if you have the illustration bundle you could pick either the base round brush or the outline brush again depending on if you want a flat or slightly textured outline and here all you have to do i'm going to go with the outline brush by the way is just roughly draw your shapes i'm going to go with kind of an egg shape on the side and here i say roughly but you do want to make sure that you like the shape that you're drawing so if when you're drawing the outline and then you fill it in you realize that you're not super happy with the shape take the time you need to tweak it so you're happy with it if you're not happy with the base it's going to be tough to like the final illustration so take all the time you need to make this simple shape nice and then we're going to add some snow so when you're happy with your shape we're going to go ahead and activate alpha lock in order to add the snow only in the shape so to do that you can either swipe this layer with two fingers towards the right like this or if you tap on the layer you're going to be able to manually activate alpha lock from the menu so now everything we draw on this layer is going to stay within the background shape so we're going to pick pure white and if you're working with procreate you have a few snow options where you have one brush for the snow so it is located in the element panel which is right at the bottom well pretty much at the bottom and it's called driven snow so you can see here you can just quickly brush over and it draws snow now it is a little bit dense so i went ahead and created a like a version of it that just has less snow it's the same brush but just less snowflake i called it simple snow if you want to download it it will be like a description below as well it is totally free both options work really well it's just i like having a little fewer snowflakes and if you're not working with procreate you can also just manually draw the snow in the background it should not be too long you just draw some little dots [Music] awesome so with that done we are going to start making a super super rough sketch so for that create a new layer above the background shape layer rename it to sketch and here we're really just going to be placing the basic shapes so for that the color doesn't matter because we're not going to see this rough sketch in the final result i like to sketch which is great but you can pick whatever you want and same thing with the brush it doesn't really matter because we're not going to see it in the final result so if you're working with procreate the free brushes you can go and pick the hp pencil in the sketching panel or if you have the illustration bundle go ahead and pick the sketching brush so here again we're just going to start with the super basic shape so starting with the horizontal line for the ground and then we're going to draw the body which is going to be a big long oval like this and the head is going to be just a circle on top of the oval once you have that you can go ahead and split the body in two halves so something like that which is going to allow you then to draw two more ovals for the legs so these ovals are going to be vertical and they're going to be pretty much you know the same size and you can also draw a little bit of a triangle in front of the ovals for the feet and then just going back in and straightening the lines so that the legs are not just like two ovals or a little bit straighter so just kind of adding that straightness here as well as maybe a little bit of a tail at the back so just a little circle like that and with the legs roughly mapped out we're gonna be ready to roughly map out the arms as well so here we're just seeing one of the arms and i always like to start with a circle for the shoulder and then a bean shape for the arm and then depending on the character sometimes just using the bean shame for the hand as well but here you can see i'm kind of adding a little bit of a rounded rectangle for the hand now we're also going to draw a little bit of present here such as a rectangle and i kind of lied to you we're gonna see the other arm a little bit just kind of poking below the gift so something a little bit like this and if you want feel free to add a bow on top of the present as well and just like for the legs it might be a good idea here to straighten up the sides of the body so it's not as narrow around the neck area and we're also going to thicken the bottom part of the face so right now we just have a circle but we're going to extend the two bottom sides to make it a little bit more like a bell shape we're also going to draw a plus sign on the face or on the head i should say to indicate the direction it's facing in so something a little bit like this and if you want you can reinforce the beam shape of the head so just drawing some sort of an indent around the horizontal lines something a little bit like this with the plus sign you're going to be able to easily place the eyes and the nose something a little bit like that and then adding a cute little mouth you could add it in the middle if you want i like to have it on the side i don't know it's just part of my style i guess if you want here you can go ahead and draw a center hat otherwise you can just go ahead and draw little ears on top of the head so for the santa hat all you have to do is draw kind of the first like a rounded curved rectangle i don't know what i'm saying anymore for the like the white part of the hat and then draw a very flat hat that is kind of falling behind the head with a super pointy end and then a little pom-pom so just a circle so again here this shape you don't have to necessarily draw a hat if you want you could have a beanie or you could have just straight up the ears so experiment here and find what you like depending on how festive you want this little bear to be and believe it or not this was the hardest part of the tutorial now all we have to do is clean up our sketch and add some color shading a little bit but it should not be too hard so we are going to start by cleaning up our sketch and for that we're going to create a new layer above the sketch layer rename it to clean sketch and i personally like to lower the opacity of my base sketch layer until i can just barely see it but you could go ahead and on your clean sketch layer just draw away a darker color than you did for the sketch and that would work as well i'm mostly going to stick with the same gray since i went ahead and lowered opacity and here to get a fresher look on our sketch we're going to flip it horizontally so just selecting your sketch layer again and using the error tool you're going to be able to click flip horizontal now this is going to again like i was saying giving you a fresher look which is going to allow you to see your mistakes before cleaning the sketch so if anything needs some adjustment here some tweaking you're going to see it a little bit better before adding the colors it's just easier to correct any mistake at this stage because later you can always tweak your colors but it's just just a little bit more complicated so all we have to do on the skin sketch is just well cleaning the sketch so all the lines that we've drawn we're gonna try and go ahead and just pick the right one so you're going to try and find which line you want to use and just sketch over that one basically and here you can see it's still not perfect so all we want is to have a better idea of what we're going to draw but not necessarily having it be super super clean like it's not a line art we're not going to see this clean sketch and the final result either but we want to know what we are working with so here take all the time you need to find your lines and then we're going to add the color and with that it is time for the secret password so if you've watched this funny video please go ahead and leave a comment saying what you think is in the little present box that our polar bear is holding right now so if you're new on channel you might be like what's what's that secret password thing well we've been doing this for months now it's kind of becoming a staples of the channel it does a lot of really cool thing one of them is it gives me a lot of insight into how to edit and paste my videos better which helps me to create better tutorials for you guys and that's what we all want after all and it's also really cool because you guys know me you see my face in the intro you hear my voice throughout the entire video but i have no idea who you guys are and whenever you leave a comment i get to see sometimes your name sometimes your face and it's just really cool to see who's part of the creative community that we're building here on this channel it's also fun because i know some people really look forward to knowing what the secret password is going to be in the video so it's kind of like this little thing that we have here hidden in the community so anyway just leave a comment with what you think is in the present and then we're going to keep going by either hiding the base sketch layer if you want to just work with the clean sketch or keeping both which is what i like to do because i like to see the construction plan i think it's it's helpful so you could go ahead and play with the opacity of the base sketch until it's really really just barely there and then merge the two layers by squishing them with two fingers like this and right before we add the colors don't forget to flip your sketch back so it's facing the right again [Music] so we're going to start for the color which is basic silhouettes so super simple just drawing the outline and then filling it in and we're going to do that on separate layers so that we can tweak them that being said first you might want to set your sketch to the blending mode multiply and lower the opacity until probably 50 or something like that that way the sketch is not going to be too much in the way but using multiply is going to allow us to still see it on dark colors once that is done go ahead and create a new layer put it below the sketch and rename it to bear so here you could have any color bear you want honestly i'm going to go with a polar bear so a cream color and if you're using procreate you can go ahead and select your background blue then in the harmony panel in the color selection tool you're going to have the option to select complementary so it's on the top left right below colors and complementary is going to give you a cream color that works really well with your background blue so you can go ahead and pick that and make sure that your color palette looks good so you can do that or you can just manually pick a cream that's totally okay as well or you can pick the one that is on the top left in the color palette so any color that you choose is fine here and once you have your color all we're going to do is we're going to pick a solid brush for that you could go in the air brushing panel and picking the hard brush or if you have the illustration bundle go ahead and pick the base round brush and like i was saying all we're doing here is we're drawing the outline and then we're going to fill it in to create a silhouette so at this stage everything that is going to be this white cream color we're going to outline to fill in and here take all the time you need to create really really nice outlines you don't want it to be choppy you want it to be flowy and nice so if you need to undo and redo your curves that's totally okay make sure you take really as much time as needed to make this nice because otherwise if your silhouettes are not really good looking it's going to be really hard to make the final illustration look polished and good so again just take all the time you need here go ahead and outline everything that is polar bear related and then we're going to keep going we're going to add the sweater and the other colors as well [Music] so when you're happy with your outlines you can simply fill them in so to do that in procreate you can just go on the top right corner and then drag the color onto the shape now if it fills the entire canvas it's just because there's a hole in your outline so just patch the hole and then try again it should be okay so once you have your bear go ahead and create a new layer and rename this one to clothes so above the bear below the sketch cell and for that you can pick again any color of your choice for the clothes i'm going to go with a nice bright red and here same thing we're just going to be outlining the sweater and the hat and any other clothing elements that you might have on your character and here i'm going to stop talking i'm going to let you focus on your clothes outline speed up the video a little bit and we're gonna meet up for the gift now staying on the same layer once you're done with your red we're actually going to go ahead and pick white for the burn the hat as well as the pom-pom so here just pure white i know you rarely use that but here i think it's good because otherwise if we go with like a gray or something like that it's gonna look really really weird with the bear so we're gonna make an exception here and use per white and now we're not going to be able to have highlights on the brim of the hat but well we'll be fine we'll figure it out and here honestly it might be helpful to hide the sketch layer just so you make sure that you really connect the base of the hat with the head shape since the colors are so similar i find that if we have the sketch layer on as well it's just really confusing so you can just hide it temporarily and we're going to add it back in the next step now if at this stage everything looks super flat don't worry when we add the shadows it's going to make everything pop for now though we are going to create a new layer above the clothes but below the sketch for the gift so here the gift could really be any color of your choice here since i'm going with more of a christmassy theme i'm going to go with a green gift to go along with the red so same thing here just outlining your shape and then filling it in at this stage you might also want to add the bow details on the gift so again still on the same gift layer you can go back and picking pure white or any other color you want the pose to be and same thing just outlining your shapes and then filling them in to have your silhouette and before moving on to the details it might be helpful as well to zoom out deactivate your sketch layer and make sure that all your silhouettes are touching each other and that everything looks good [Music] so once you're happy with your silhouettes we're going to start adding the details and outlines so that we actually have some sort of a bear and not just a big blob like this so for that go ahead and create a new layer above the gift layer but below the sketch rename it to details and we're going to start with just one color for the outline so you can pick whatever color your choice later i'm going to show you how to recolor them now if you want to have just like black outlines everywhere you can also definitely do that now i like to have darker versions of my base color so here for example in the palette you can see all the colors on the right have a darker version of them so for now i'm going to go and draw everything with the dark version of the red so if you're using your own color you would just go in the history or color pick the color and make it darker now here in terms of brushes you can use you can go in the sketching panel and pick the 6b pencil it has a really nice grit to it otherwise if you have the illustration bundle pick the outline brush and here again super simple step like i was telling you the hardest part of the tutorial we've done already it was just drawing the sketch so now all we have to do is go over a sketch over our silhouettes and adding the outlines and any other kind of detail that we might have now the trick here is we want to make sure that these lines are really really nice and smooth so in general when you're drawing details in that line i really recommend you try and avoid erasing so if you're drawing a line that you don't like just undo in procreate's really easy to undo you just tap on the screen with two fingers and if you want to redo you tap on the screen with three fingers so it takes two seconds to do but that way instead of erasing and trying a little section your line again if you just undo you're going to get lines that are smoother overall and believe it or not when you get used to it it's going to be much much faster than trying to erase and redo an erase in retail so just go over all your lines find the outlines add any detail as needed once more i'm going to stop talking to let you focus but i'm going to have my video running in the background so they can have a reference but yeah super simple really relaxing here's a great time to grab a cup of tea maybe a little bit chocolate and just really relax do once you're happy with the way your outlines are looking you can go ahead and activate alpha lock on the details layer so you can also hide the sketch it might be helpful but to activate half a lock you can just swipe the layer with two fingers towards the right or you can just tap on it and then activate alpha lock in the menu now everything we draw on this details layer is going to stay within the outlines that we already have there so it's going to be super easy to go and just select your base color for example for the polar bear make it darker and just color the outlines that way so again it's an easy step it's quite quick i'm going to stop talking let you focus once more all you have to do is recolor everything that is touching the bear with a darker version of your bear color and once your outlines are touching the bear are now dark cream you can go and do the same for the gifts so you could just pick whatever color you use for the gif make it slightly darker and then just recolor the outlines in that area we're also going to be recoloring the facial features because right now it looks a little bit scary with the red eyes so just picking a black or a charcoal whatever you want and going over the facial features now here for the nose if you want you can add a little bit of a highlight so picking pure white and well just drawing a highlight like this so just kind of a little line i think it's super cute and before we move on to shading if you want to add any pattern on the wrapping paper on your gift that would be a good time to do it so just creating a new layer above your gift renaming it to pattern or something like that and here i mean it depends on the pattern i like to apply mine as a clipping mask so that it stays within the shape of the gift and then using the blending mode multiply so that i just get a darker version of my green so you can see it's just green but darker so if you wanted to have for example like snowman or something like that you would just use the regular blending mode and then paint in white but here i'm just going to be drawing some christmas trees so i want a darker version of my green so for my christmas trees all i'm doing is drawing the basic placement of all the trees so just vertical lines first and then on top of the vertical lines i draw two triangles like this and that creates a simple nice little tree and once you're pretty much done with your pattern feel free to go back and erase any line that might be over the bow or anywhere that it shouldn't be and also feel free to go back and experiment with different blending modes and opacity until you get a pattern that you really like the blending of [Music] okay so this shading is going to really bring this piece to life because right now there's so much white it looks super flat so for the shading what i like to do is create just a scrap layer above everything we don't need to rename it because it's just going to be kind of a guide and then drawing my light source so for that just kind of a basic circle using the paint brush another eraser just a circle then with a bunch of rays that kind of cover the character now you can place your light source wherever you want it to be but having it like that is going to really help you know where to put your shadows especially if you're newer to illustration so once you have that we're going to create a new layer on which we're actually going to draw the shadows so this layer i like to put it above the details layer you could put it below if you want but i like to have it above so that i can also shade my outlines otherwise sometimes they start blending in a little bit weirdly so just creating a new layer and for that one we're going to use the blending mode linear burn and we're going to set the opacity around 50 for now that being said we're going to change it later so you don't need to be super precise you can pick whatever color you want for shading just try avoiding using a neutral gray or black as you can see it creates really muddy shadow it doesn't look super good instead try using a gray that has a little bit of color in it so i like using a gray that has a bit of purple it could be a bit of blue you know you can really experiment with that and you can see it just just has more life in it so play around with the color here until you get something that you like and then we're going to start mapping the cast shadows so to create cast shadows it's quite simple first we're going to select a brush that has a little bit of texture so you can stick with the 6b pencil or if you have the illustration bundle you can change to either the basic texture or the shader both work really really well it's just a question of personal preference recently i've been really loving the basic texture so that's the one i'm going to be using and then all you have to do is start from your light source and follow the rays until you hit a body part like for example here i'm hitting the arm and i can see that okay the arm is going to cast a shadow on the body behind it so you're just going to follow all the different body parts just like following the array seeing when it hits a body part and then adding a shadow behind it if you're new to illustration i know shading is usually quite scary it's very intimidating so if you're new and you don't feel quite confident don't hesitate to have the same light source as me and just copy the shadows that i am doing you're still going to be learning that being said if you're feeling confident today or if you want to try something new i highly recommend you to try and slightly change the position of the light source and see how it affects the placement of the shadow that way you're going to learn how to shade yourself which is really super good skill to have great so now we have our cast shadows which really helps but our character still looks super flat and the reason for that is cast shadow is only one type of shadow there are so many more and we're going to work now on what is called form shadow so you can see if we follow the ray at one point since our character is curving away the light is not going to be reaching that far so we're also going to be creating form shadows to help show that their character is 3d and not flat so the form shadows are mostly going to be on the well they're going to be on the opposite side of your light source so in my case they're going to be on the left side of my character and as you can notice here the form shadows tend to be kind of a gradient so they're really softer cast shadows have hard edges in general form shadows have soft edges so for now you're just going to roughly place them again on the side opposite to your light source and don't worry about really creating a nice gradient for now because in the next step we're going to blend them in so once more take all the time you need i'm going to stop talking and let you focus and we're going to meet in the next step so we can blend the shadows together great so now that we have our basic shadows placed we can go back and tweak them so we can tweak the opacity of the layer but we can also go back and blend them in a little bit better because right now the edges are kind of rough so using the smudge tool you can set it either to the soft brush in the airbrushing panel if you want really soft transition i like to use the stucco brush in the painting panel because it has a little bit of texture and i feel like that just works with my brushes a little bit better so at this stage all you have to do is go back and blend in the edges of your form shadows making sure that you don't blend the cast shadows too much so you want to have some contrast within the shadows you want to have some softness as well as some harder edges awesome now here if at this point you're not super happy with the tint or the hue of your collar that's totally okay you can go in the adjustment panel here at the top selecting hue saturation and brightness for the entire layer and that's going to allow you to change the color a little bit so you can play with the hue slider which is going to change what we usually call the color so is it like a blue shadow or is it an orange shadow you can play with that there you can play with the saturation as well which is going to change how intensely colored it is so is it bright vibrant color or is it kind of muted and you can also go back and play with the opacity of the shadow layer itself until you get you know the intensity of a shadow you like once that is done we're going to create a drop shadow as well so just going and creating a new layer putting it below the bear but above the background shape renaming it to drop shadow and we're going to once more use the blending mode linear burn so that it matches the shadow we have on the bear and you can see i haven't done it yet but i'm going to do it in just a second and now all you have to do once you have your drop shadow layer is to draw kind of an oval below your bear so that it doesn't look like it's floating in the mid air anymore so something a little bit like this now that we have our shadows we're going to add some highlights to really bring this piece to life and make it pop so much more so for that i like to create a new layer and this time put it below the details because if we have shadows and highlights on the details it becomes way too much so this one below the details we're going to use the blending mode add which is really really strong so if you want you could go ahead and lower the opacity for now i think i'm going to give it um leave it 100 since we're working on white and in terms of the color you can use i like to go with a super bright yellow orange color it looks like the sun i like it but you could go with any other bright color of your choice and here you're going to stick with either this xp pencil or going back if you have the illustration bundle to the outline brush now if you want here you can also reactivate your light source sketch and just following the rays and every time the array hits a body part or an object or something like that you would do what i called outlining the outline and here we can barely see it on the bear barely see it on the bare hand it's funny sorry i'm getting tired i think um but yeah so you're just hiding in a highlight on the edge of your shape and which is really not a realistic way of you know highlighting stuff but i think it's a really easy way of doing it and it really helps making the different individual parts of illustration pop and adds a lot of contrast really quickly and really nicely so this is my style of highlighting and hiding lights if you have a different style of course please by all means go ahead and do it now but basically we're just gonna add some lights right now and right now leaving it 100 i realize is a little bit too intense so you can always go back at the end and play with the opacity of your effects layer so the lights and the shadows until you get something that you like in terms of blending and in terms of bringing the piece a three-dimensional feel without it looking super crazy intense and if you enjoyed this video and want to learn how to draw more holiday themed illustration i highly recommend you check out this playlist in which i'm going to teach you exactly that but before we 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

Channel: Genevieve's Design Studio

Views: 13,801

Keywords: easy procreate tutorial, procreate, how to draw, digital art tutorial, cute art tutorial, cute art, easy ipad art tutorial, easy cute drawings, art channel, procreate tutorial, procreate drawing, drawing, genevieve's design studio, digital art, drawing tutorial, animal drawing, animal drawing tutorial, cute, art, learn to draw, como dibujar, how to draw animals, cartoon drawing, draw, procreate 5.2, illustration, holiday art, how to draw a polar bear, christmas cards, christmas

Id: FTEF_G6kMt0

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021