How To Draw A Watercolor Fox • Procreate Tutorial

drawing this cute fox 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 brand new canvas that we can draw in for reference these are the dimensions of my canvas but make sure you find something that works for your own project requirements if you're not exactly sure how to pick it in this size well i have a video in which i teach you exactly that so i will link it in description below if you want to check it out and the only reason i am using these dimension is because i am drawing in one of my pre-textured file that comes with my big brush bundle you can see here it has some sort of a slight paper texture to it this file is not essential but if you want to check it out it is also linked in description below but again if you don't have it that's okay i'm going to give you tips to kind of mimic some sort of texture without the bundle so that being said we're going to simply start with a sketch and for that you can create a new layer that you're going to rename sketch and you can sketch using really any color you want we're not going to see a sketch and a final result so it doesn't matter at all i like sketching which is a basic neutral gray and in terms of brushes in this video i'm always going to be suggesting two different brushes one is going to be a free brush that comes with procreate and i'm going to give you tips on how to get the best results from it it is going to probably get you 80 to 85 of the way there i'm also going to be suggesting brushes from my big brush bundle so we're going to be using the watercolor brushes obviously and these brushes are really going to help you save a lot of time you're not going to have to manually create the texture i'm going to show you how to do it but with these brushes you don't have to do that so you're going to save some time and you're going to get more professional results that being said again they are not essential especially for the sketch because we're not going to see it in the final result like i was telling you so you can either use the hp pencil from the sketching panel that comes with perk procreate or if you have my big brush bundle go ahead and pick the coloring pencil that comes with the watercolor brushes so we're simply going to start by roughly mapping out the different shapes the main shapes of the fox so in that case we're going to have two circles for the body and a bigger circle for the head so you can go ahead and draw a really rough circle it doesn't need to be perfect as you can see here and then another one that is the same size for the top of the body now the head can be any size you want i'm gonna go with a head that is slightly bigger than the body circles and you're going to align that one with the top of the body so you're going to get something like this now at any point if your sketch is not where you want it to be you can use the arrow tool at the top making sure that the settings the magnetic option is deactivated and making sure that the uniform option at the bottom is selected and then you can just move around and resize your basic shapes so once you have your basic circles like this here you can go ahead and actually connect the body so just connecting the two circles like this for the top or the back i should say and then connecting the front like this so super easy super simple you might also want to draw a very simple horizontal line for the ground and that's going to help you draw a little oval for the hind leg as well as two holes for the front legs and again as you can see here i'm being super loose here we just want to roughly map out where everything is going to be and later we're going to clean up the sketch you can also map out which shape you want for the head so in my case i'm going with a flatter bottom for the head so just kind of stretching here i'm sorry speaking of head we can see my hair here this is kind of embarrassing sorry about that and then you can have kind of a more bell shape for the head so you would just connect this bottom that you've just drawn to the sides of the circle you can also draw a tail here so just kind of an s curve and don't be afraid at any point in this sketch you don't need a perfect line so don't be afraid you don't need to erase at all at this step you can just draw over your line or undo and try again seriously don't bother with the eraser now and once you have the tail you can go over and mark the face line so one vertical line in a horizontal line to create this kind of plus sign which is going to help you then place the nose on the middle there as well as the eyes along the horizontal line so these are just helping you map out the orientation of the face i guess and then the last little thing we have to sketch in our rough sketch are the ears so you can have big ears small ears as long as they're pointy you're gonna be fine i like to go with very big ears i just think they're super cute and oh i said last thing but i was lying you can also kind of um shape the legs a little bit better while adding little nubs at the bottom to show the pause and the beauty of sketching your characters with basic shape like this is you can always use the selection tool sending it to freehand making sure that the color fill option is deactivated and then draw around one part of your character going back to the error tool and then you can move a specific portion of the body or a certain body part around and change your character and customizing it that way so for example here i might make the head bigger which is going to make the character cuter the bigger the head is in general well within reason of course the cue the character is going to be so feel free to experiment with the selection tool and the arrow tool um on your rough sketch like this to customize your character and once you're happy make sure that it is in the middle of the frame and then we're going to go ahead and clean up the sketch and for that you might want to create a new layer renaming it this new layer to clean sketch or you could also draw on the base sketch layer with a darker color that is a personal preference i like to create a new layer for the clean sketch and then lower the opacity of the original sketch until i can just barely see it now on this clean sketch layer you're going to either keep the same color or create or i'm sorry pick a darker color again personal preference and all you're going to do is you're going to decide which line you're going to use so you're going to do this thing that i like to call going to pick your line so here there's really no right or or wrong you just go over and all the rough sketch lines that you did again seeing my head so embarrassing i'm sorry guys i need to fix my setup um but yeah no right or wrong answer here all you're doing is you're just going over and you're cleaning up your sketch so here take all the time you need this is a very important step especially if you're a bit more new to illustration and drawing in general the more time you spend on figuring out what you want to draw at the sketching phase the less time or the quicker is going to be for you to do the illustration in general because once you start adding the colors then it becomes much longer to correct a mistake and you're going to see later in the tutorial i actually made a mistake that i didn't notice while drawing but i'm going to tell you about that so around the face area when i started adding colors i made a mistake there so anyway we'll see but yeah take all the time you need at this stage to really figure out where you want everything to be the different curves you want and we're going to move on and then start adding the colors really soon and here you might want to hide the base sketch layer i personally like to keep it because you can see the structure of the character so i'm just merging my two layers together by squishing them with two fingers like this but again personal preference and we're going to click on a little n which is going to allow you to change the blending mode of this layer and we're going to set it to multiply which is the one at the top now here you're going to use the arrow tool to flip your illustration horizontally and that's going to allow you to see your sketch kind of a in a new with a new eye so this way you're going to be able to see if you have if anything comes to you as not looking right so you know when you draw and sometimes you leave your piece of paper on the table for a few hours a few days and you come back to it and you're like oh that doesn't look quite right well flipping it kind of gives you the same new eye new look on your illustration so it's a really good thing to do really quickly before adding the colors [Music] so once you're ready and where you're happy with your sketch we're going to start adding the colors so for that create a new layer put it below the sketch layer and rename it to color or fox both are totally fine and for this you can use really any color of your choice and i encourage you to pick your own that being said you can always just use my hex code of the same color if you want to do the exact same thing as i am doing so we're gonna go with this bright kind of burnt orange for the fox now in terms of brushes you can go in the airbrushing panel so just a free brush that comes with procreate here pick the hot brush and you can lower the opacity with this slider here so you can put it somewhere around you know 40 percent it doesn't need to be super precise and that's going to give you this overlapping effect which is really really important for the future steps you're not going to get any of the paper texture obviously but again i'm going to show you ways where you can still get some variation in color later in the process that being said if you have the watercolor brushes go ahead and pick the dark edges watercolor and here what we're going to do is we're going to try to draw in one line or without lifting the pencil i should say every single element i guess so color zones without lifting the pencil so here for example the head we're trying to draw it in one then every ear is going to be in one as well and the reason for that is whenever you lift the pencil we have brushes that have transparency to them either because we lower the opacity manually or because they are watercolor brushes so whenever you lift a pencil whenever you're going to put it back on your canvas it's going to kind of reset the stroke and that's when you're going to get the overlapping effect so for now we want to try avoiding having overlapping effect with bits like within these solid shapes but later we're going to use them to add some shadows and more color variations so we just want to control that that being said if you're not able to fill in your shapes without lifting the pencil that's totally fine don't agonize over it just go ahead and it's okay if you have overlapping effects that are not necessarily intentional we're going to just blend them in later but your goal would be to get something kind of like this and then staying with the same hue so you're not moving to a different type of color you're just going to desaturate your hue to make it more of a brown as opposed to an orange or you can pick whatever brown honestly doesn't really matter and you're going to use that to color in the kind of inside of the ear not the fluffy part the the other part as well as the legs and the paws and we're also going to add a little bit of cream under the head so sticking with the same kind of hue just making it way lighter this time to get a cream color you're going to go ahead and just draw really quickly on the belly part i guess or the neck part below the head so that we see that it's a different body part so something a little bit like this once that is done you can go ahead and lower the opacity of your sketch until you can just barely see it so you have a better idea of what you're working with and you can see kind of the overlaps a little bit better and we're going to start building on the color to add color variation and shadows so you can go back to the orange that you use for the base of the fox and for your brush you can pick in the brushing panel the medium brush here and lower opacity again you know the number doesn't need to be precise around 30 40 something there or if you have the watercolor brushes go ahead and pick the basic watercolor this time so here you can draw the light source that can be really helpful so you would just create a new layer so that we don't have to erase it later and draw where you want the light source to be roughly in my case i'm going to put it in the top right and then you can draw some sun rays that are going to help you map out your lights and your shadows on your characters so again if you're new to illustration or if you're struggling with shading a little bit it can be really tricky that can be super super helpful so going back on your fox or color layer depending on how you decided to call it now you can go and just lay your your colors add shadows and random color variation and all you have to do really is look at the sun rays see if they hit a body part for example the head and see if this body part is attached to another one so that would cast a shadow for example the head casts the shadow on the body then the body casts the shadow on the tail and so forth so just go over your character and depending on where the light source is adjust your shadows if you have a same light source as i am you can just copy what i'm doing but i highly highly encourage you to try and figure it out for yourself because this is how you're going to learn this tag you need to improve um it's by trying stuff on your own so don't be afraid if it doesn't work that's totally okay it's all about experimenting so you're also going to be drawing shadows where the light would not reach so here for example the side of the the face it's not because there's a body part that's casting a shadow it's just because the light doesn't reach there so you can also experiment with that but here the goal is not to be really realistic it's more to be believable and we're also going to be adding random splotches of color here to add kind of a watercolor effect so once you're done with your shadows you can just draw some random shapes kind of like this and later we're going to blend everything so honestly don't stress here just kind of roughly do it and once you're done with your basic orange you're going to go back to your brown which should still be in the history to add some shadows in the brown parts of your fox as well and while you're working on that let's talk a little bit more about the giveaway so the price for this video is going to be a big brush bundle so i'm going to pick one winner i'm going to announce it on my instagram story on the date that i'm going to write on the screen right here and the way to enter is really easy if you've watched my videos before you know that at one point in the video there's going to be a secret password if you're new on the channel don't worry it's just later at one point in the video i don't know when i haven't done it yet but i'm gonna write a secret word on the screen or a secret prompt and all you have to do is write this word or this prompt both on youtube in the comments for this video as well as on instagram on the post that has this fox image so i will link everything you need to know in the description of this video below but make sure that you comment on both youtube and instagram otherwise i can't count your participation and it's going to be a random draw i'm just going to pick a name randomly and then announce the winner on my story and the rules are all in the video description below if you want to check them out they're not more complicated than what i said it's mostly just legal stuff because i don't want to get sued that's not fun i just want to give you brushes that's it so with that out of the way let's keep drawing and make sure that you keep watching so that you don't miss the secret password so at this point you can delete your layer which had the light source information on there and we're going to start blending all the weird blobs that we're drawing so for that you can use the smudge tool sending it to the soft brush in the airbrushing panel or if you have the watercolor brushes set your paint brush so not the smudge tool the paint brush to the water blender which is the last brush here at the bottom and here you really just have to go over your shapes and blend them so it's really easy but it's super super important especially if you're using the free brushes you need to take all the time you need in order to blend everything in a way that you like otherwise your edges are going to look really strange it's not going to look like watercolor so you do want to keep some edges hard though for example you can see i kind of have the thighs or i guess the hips the legs a hard line like in the middle of my fox body because this is kind of where the leg ends so i wouldn't want to blend that otherwise i kind of lose the different body shapes but you do want to blend the shadows together so that they don't look so digital and weird if you're using the free brushes here you might want to create some randomness within your shadows so that it's not a perfect gradient so you just want to do some random shapes while you're blending once that is done you can use the selection tool here at the top sending it to freehand again making sure that the color fill option is deactivated and selecting a circular shape towards the top of your character on the side where your light source was and then you can feather the selection somewhere around 30 now we're going to create a light by using the hue saturation brightness tool in the adjustment panel here at the top applying that to the entire layer and then lifting up the brightness so you can see here it kind of creates a soft gradient of light on the top of your character so that's a really nice way again of just simply creating more color variation and more not texture but yeah color variation on your character and we're going to use the same technique so using the selection tool this time towards the bottom of your character and again feathering the selection around you know 20 30 doesn't need to be super precise going back to the hue saturation brightness and this time we're going to lower the brightness and maybe play with the saturation here the shape of the selection and the numbers that you use for the brightness and saturations are totally up to you we want to create some randomness in the color that's pretty much it speaking of which you can use the section tool technique as many times as you want with some crazy shapes like i just did here feathering your selection around 20 to add some really crazy randomness so not only creating light and shadow you can just go around this time and play with the hue slightly to create some some effect of pigments like watercolor pigments blending together and yeah adding more texture so especially if you're using the free brushes that come with procreate you're gonna have to do this step two three maybe four times in order to add some color variation otherwise your shape is going to look a little bit flat and definitely not watercolory [Music] great so we're going to start adding the details but before that we're going to clean up a shape a little bit because we did fairly quickly so for that make sure that you hide the sketch so you can really see what you're working with and then on the color layer you're going to set your eraser tool to well you have a few options here a lot of people ask me what shape i use i either use the 6b pencil that comes with procreate in the sketching panel or the eraser shape that comes with my illustration bundle that being said for the eraser seriously it doesn't matter so for this we're just going to go ahead and pick the 6b pencil and we're going to go over and erase some of the weirdness that happened like the bleeding that happened when we bled no no where we bled when we blended the different colors together so here especially if you are using the watercolor brushes like the dark edges watercolor you don't want to just go over your entire character and erase all the edges otherwise you're going to lose the dark edges which is a big part of these brushes and a big part of the watercolor effect so you just want to erase where there's like a serious problem or serious bleeding happening and otherwise just leave it as is it doesn't matter it doesn't need to be perfectly crisp quite the opposite actually since we're working with watercolor watercolor tends to be super flowy well since we're pretending to work with watercolor watercolor is really flowy so it's okay if you have shapes that are a little bit more organic as opposed to super perfect like you would try to achieve usually with digital art so just go over clean what really really needs to be cleaned otherwise leave some imperfections that is totally okay so once you're happy with your shape go ahead and create a new layer above the color layer and rename it to details here we're going to take a darker version of our main orange color or whichever other color that you used for your character so just making it darker manually again here the exact color doesn't need to be super precise we just want something darker so that we can see the lines that we're going to draw and in terms of brushes you can use the 6b pencil that come with the sketching panel if you have the watercolor brushes though go ahead and pick the coloring pencil and here again there's no right or wrong way of doing this you can draw full on outlines around the entire character if you want or you can just go ahead and kind of make the different body parts clearer more defined especially when there's an overlap that is not otherwise signified you can go ahead and use the details layer to draw these edges so take all the time you need experiment here i like to draw lines that are not super smooth so i draw kind of sketch sketch kind of lines but if you want to have a more precise line you could definitely do that as well and i like to have lines that show that it's fur so you know i have a few shorter strokes as opposed to one continuous line uh for the top like the front part of the fox to show that you know it's fluffy and soft and here we're going to later lower the opacity of this layer so that it blends a little bit better so if your color looks too dark don't worry about it later we'll move to lower opacity so it's better if it looks darker at this stage then lighter and with that said it is time for the secret password so if you've watched this finer video please go ahead and comment with your favorite fall drink i think mine would probably be either a hot black tea or some sort of hot chocolate something like that but yeah just leave a comment with your favorite kind of fall drink and if you want to enter the giveaway make sure that you also comment on instagram now if you're new on the channel you might be like what what's what's going on with the secret password well it's really cool because it gives me a lot of insight into how to edit and paste my videos better which helps me create better tutorials for you guys but it's also really cool because you guys know me you know you see my face in the beginning of the video you hear my voice throughout the video but i don't know who you guys are and whenever you leave a comment i get to see either your name or your face or sometimes both and it's just really great to see the wonderful creative community that we're building here on this channel so just leave a comment with your favorite fall drink both on youtube and instagram if you want to enter the giveaway and then we'll keep going so once you're happy with your general outlines or details line whatever you want to call them you can go back to your layer like i was telling you play with the opacity so that you get something that blends in a little bit better i like to put it somewhere around 80 but it's going to depend on the colors that you personally used and we're going to create a new layer above everything for the facial features so that we don't have to worry about the opacity so you can just create a new layer renaming it to face and then you can pick whichever color you want to use i'm gonna go with a super dark uh brownish color not quite black i don't know i rarely use pure blacks i just like to have a little bit more of a hue in my blocks it just looks less muddy and more interesting overall so again just a little pro tip for you and here all you have to do is go over the facial features with this black color so the eyes the nose and the mouth you can also add a little highlights so just picking white or cream and just going over both the nose and eyes so maybe hiding the sketch layer might be helpful here otherwise your white is probably not going to come out super clear but yeah i like to add just a little dot on the nose and then little dots on the eyes like this now we're approaching the part where i made a mistake like i was telling you earlier in the video so you can also add a little cheeks i guess so just picking a salmon pink color and then drawing ovals for the cheeks and my mistake here is i feel like i've drawn the face kind of too high on the head and i decided to cancel the cheeks for this illustration i think that was that was a wrong move so me editing version of me is not happy with drawing version of me but you know what that happens and that's fine so you might want to draw little cheeks i would highly encourage you to do so so just picking salmon pink color and drawing that on your face later you can also draw a little or i should say erase little dots on the color layer of the fox so just going back to the eraser and the color layer or the fox layer depending on how you decided to call it and that's just erasing little dots like this groups of three little ovals i think it just adds some texture it's really cute and you can also use the eraser tool that you have set right now to maybe clean up the details on the face or add a little bit more texture make it feel more like fur maybe adding a really extra highlight on the top of the head as well so any kind of extra cleanup that you might need to do you do it at this point and once that is done we're going to move on to creating the background [Music] so before creating the background we're actually going to group all our layers for the fox just so that our file is more organized so for that you can just swipe your layers towards the right to select them and then click or tap on the group option here at the top which you can then collapse by tapping on the little error i guess and you can also rename your entire group to fox it's just going to make it easier to navigate in your file once that is done you can create a new layer put it below the fox group and rename this one to bg i just think it's shorter than writing background i guess i'm lazy and then you can pick a yellow yeah a sunflower kind of yellow for the background or in the other color that you might like and you can use either the soft brush from the airbrushing panel so again the brushes that come with procreate lowering capacity once more around you know 30 40 somewhere in that range or if you have the watery color brushes we're going to pick the color shifting blotches and we're going to make whichever brush you're using really really big so here we don't have to worry necessarily about drawing behind the fox because we're going to erase later so all you want to do is go ahead and put your texture now the great thing about the color shifting blotches as as you can see there's some color variation within the brushes so you don't have to change the color it's just going to automatically do it but if you're using the soft brush you might want to repeat this step with a slightly different yellow or more orange yellow and just kind of add some randomness and then blend it with the smudge tool so that would be a great way to do it otherwise you could use the selection tool and creating a um like a free hand selection that you would feather and change in the hue saturation brightness so that's a way to add some color variation if you're using the free brush and if you're not super happy with the color of your background you can just use the hue saturation brightness tool on the entire layer without any selection to change the hue and the colors and saturation and everything until you're really happy with your background and once you're happy with the color you can just use the eraser tool to go over and erase where the color shouldn't be and here i kind of like to do it that way so just erasing manually because i like the blending i like to see the background kind of show through some parts of the fox i think it makes illusion illustration sorry i've been speaking for way too long i can't enunciate anymore um yeah i just like to do it manually because i feel like i have a better grip or better control over which parts i'm erasing obviously so i erase mostly where it should be white so for example the face the belly and the tail but i don't necessarily worry about erasing super precisely on the other spot so like the orange or brown spots because i like the blending of the background and the fox i just think it makes the illustration feel a little bit more coherent and just more interesting and more organic so a little approach for you here and once you're done we're going to add a shadow so just using the same color as for the background making it slightly darker decreasing the size of your brush and then just adding a shadow below your fox it really doesn't need to be precise quite the opposite actually we're using fake watercolor so we want everything to be super organic and flowy and once that is done we're going to add some floating leaves or windy leaves can leaves be windy i guess not so we're going to create a new layer above the fox group this time and we're going to rename it to leaves and here the leaves can really be any color of your choice i decided to go with green leaves just because i feel like it adds a bit more color to the piece either fall leaves should actually be you know orange but anyway or not about realism here so it doesn't matter i guess and you can go back to the brush you use for the base of your fox so either the hard brush from the airbrushing panel or the dark edges watercolor from the watercolor brushes so the big brush and you can draw really any kind of leaves that you want but make sure that they're not all in the same angle not all the same size we want to feel like they're stuck in the wind or just falling from the trees so they're going to be you know moving around and rotating you can draw a different kind of leaves so you can draw oak leaves like i'm drawing like here and you just want to make sure that they are there because they're going to add a touch of color and more movement because otherwise our fox is just like sitting there it's kind of a static piece so they're there to add movement and color but you don't want them to be super precise because otherwise they're going to become the star of the illustration and we want to make sure that the focus of the piece here really is the fox so just draw some random little shapes i even yeah you can see i'm just drawing some random dots as well so it's really not necessarily about the shape of the leaves but it is important to add a little bit more color and you can also use the 6p pencil or the coloring pencil with the same color that you use for the base of your leaves to go in and add a little bit more crispness and detail again not too crazy but for example you can see here i like to draw the middle line of the leaf as well as some veins just to make them a little bit more interesting without making them crazy precise so you can experiment here there's really no rule and take all the time you need to get some leaf shape that you like but make sure you stick around until the end because i'm going to show you a quick way of recoloring some of the leaves so that they're not the exact same green green hue you probably guessed it the easy way to recolor your leave is to use the selection tool and this time just select some of the leaves so you draw a selection around some leaves some dots and close your selection you're not going to feather it this time because otherwise you're going to create a gradient and that's not what we want and we're going to go back to our hue saturation and brightness tool to the entire layer and then you can just play with the settings at the bottom to change the color slightly of some of the leaves so that it's a bit more interesting as opposed to just having like you know like i was telling you just a bunch of layers already exact same color that just doesn't make sense so you can repeat this step as many times as you want to recolor some leaves some dots super simple super easy but it really makes a big difference in the end if the leaves are slightly different from each other and if you enjoyed this video and want to learn how to draw more cute things i highly recommend you check out this playlist in which i'm going to teach you how to draw a bunch more cute things this is my selection of my favorite tutorials my cutest tutorials here on my channel but before you leave make sure to give this video a like and subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss any of the weekly videos then click on the link right here and i'll meet you there

Channel: Genevieve's Design Studio

Views: 175,523

Keywords: procreate drawing, procreate, how to draw, art channel, watercolour, tutoriel, Procreate art, procreate tutorial, procreate drawing tutorial, procreate watercolor, ipad pro 2021, digital painting, genevieve's design studio, drawing, learn to draw, como dibujar, art, learn how to draw, digital art, illustration, ipad pro, draw, step by step drawing, ipad pro art, draw with me, learn to draw a fox, how to draw a fox, you can draw this fox, cute fox drawing, kawaii, draw so cute

Id: McfufwneXvI

Length: 31min 59sec (1919 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021