How to draw NFT's in Procreate - DRAW AND EXPORT

today i'm going to be showing you how to draw nfts in prograde and how to export your files so they're ready to be generated into thousands of nft characters let's get started so let's break down this crunchy cow this is thousand by three thousand at 300 dpi one thing to keep in mind is when you are drawing your nft there is going to be a mask around the outside when you upload these to twitter or to open c you're going to have this area where this anything drawn in this area it just won't be visible so draw just a rough circle in procreate to make sure you have an idea of where not to draw don't draw on these edges and you can just turn down the opacity on that so you know where not to draw the next thing you're going to do is paste in and you can use crunchy cows as an example of where to put the head exactly the head's going to go right in the center and you're going to have to make a decision of whether this character is looking directly at you or if it's a three-quarter turn so let me go ahead and create a brand new file so you can see me working from scratch this should be already be set at 3000 by 300 dpi there we go i have my blank screen i'm going to create a few layers i'm going to create my mask my circle mask what i do is draw a circle and just hold it down [Music] until you get a perfect circle and that was a poor attempt at drawing a perfect circle so i'm going to start here wait till it snaps for some reason it's not snapping mostly because i'm recording a tutorial and procreate hates me so let's just draw a circle here doesn't need to be perfect i'm not gonna draw in these areas i'd like to give a little bit of space at the top a little bit of space at the sides so this rectangle or this square right here is where my head is going to fall then there's going to you're going to have a neck and a body if you want just drop paste in the crunchy cows file and you can trace a template over top of it to make it easier i'm going to turn on the opacity on that these are this is basically my target of where i'm going to draw now depending on what kind of character you have you need to think is this character going to be looking straight at you or is there going to be a three-quarter head turn on it crunchy cows i went with a three-quarter head turn let me show it to you i went with the head turn because the cows you know they have these long snouts or whatever you want to call them and i thought i could do funnier things with the mouths showing teeth on the side so it's up to you it depends on the if if your character is a human straight on works pretty well if it's a an animal to the side might be better if it has a snout or a funny nose i like things turned a little bit to the side i think there's more character to it if you're an artist you may want to skip forward to the next part where i export the files because for now i'm just going to go through and show you how i set up the file and how i draw my characters and talk through a little bit of the errors that i made with crunchy cows that you can avoid so this is my master file this is where i drew the crunchy cows this is where i worked out all of their bells and whistles no pun intended and this is uh this is the framework that i use so i didn't i don't need to worry about the duplication of all of these parts yet i just want to make sure that a the character design looks good it has a ton of personality people can connect to it all the items look funny or valuable and then after i get that down then i can worry about duplicating them so for now i would go through and draw just one character design and then create layers on top of that to draw different items so let me show you different hooves different necklaces i have clothing i have different noses so for crunchy cows i didn't know what the characters would look like so i spent a lot of time in one file i spent a lot of time designing the one character and i'm not gonna make this an art tutorial or anything but once i had the character drawn well first of all let me just do a rough sketch of this character once i had the placement then i drew the the character over top of it and worked in one file thinking only about one character before duplicating everything just to make sure that that character looked good and i could get all the items down so if this is the base for my main character i spent a lot of time until it looked just like let me show it to you something like this now once you have your character down like this then you can go through and create a pair of sunglasses or earrings or i did horns hair hats uh eyebrow rings noses and the nose ring i believe they go with the noses yeah i put nose rings with the nose and then different mouths let me show you how the mouths break down because that can that was a little tricky with crunchy cows so i don't have many mouths in this file i can jump over to other files to show you but i did the base of the head with the snout like this the head that's all one part and then each mouth is different here now i had a problem with the overlapping of the lips over this area so i had to do some parts that were that had white lips and then blended into the color of the characters so spend a lot of time make sure that the overlapping isn't an issue i would also if i could go back and do this differently i would have broken my character down i would have done something like this and made sure that the necklaces didn't overlap with the clothing the hooves were in the right place uh the necklace like the necklaces were bumped up so it didn't interfere because i have some um clothing like this so the necklace would be up here i did i had to regenerate my files many many times because there were just overlapping issues and i think one way to avoid that is to break your character down and to make sure that you know these sunglasses don't come over here where there would be nose smoke coming out because you're going to have this overlapping problem and when you go to generate your characters you're gonna see that maybe the smoke goes through the glasses in a weird way or maybe the smoke goes under the glasses so you're gonna have to regenerate and that's gonna take you a ton of time to do i've spent weeks and weeks regenerating because i didn't plan this out well enough so let me jump back to my file here so i'm just going to draw a base of my character and what i'm going to do is i'll i'll use this to export out the files see here i'm going to draw the necklace a little bit smaller than the clothing and you're going to want to think about all right does the hair go over the eyes does is there hair on the side of the cow is there a hat do the hats go over this hair some of my hats were over the side and then there was hair sticking up here which wouldn't really work so take some time plan out your character think about the the layering of each files and you can look back at some of my tick tocks and there are tons of screenshots of the layers and the orders that work best and maybe i will um post some some images in the comments here or a link to some images in the comments where you can see the layering that i used for crunchy cows in the nft generator so i'm going to go through this now and just design this character and i'm going to make a necklace a nose a mouth eyes eyebrows hair and hats i'm not going to go through and i'll put some clothing and maybe a hoof with a piece of pizza that's going to be my underlying drawing and then we're going to export that out for the nft generator when you start drawing your character you're going to want to do a body part per layer so i'm first going to draw the base of this character the body without clothing that's going to be my main part here so you also have to be careful with the eyebrows because you don't um because sometimes eyebrows will be like this and then um you're going to want to have like one set eyebrow unless you're going to do eyebrows as its own layer and export out these files on top of it which is totally possible i i sort of went with just a regular one shape of the head let me show you so you'll notice that all of the eyebrows were sort of set and if i wanted to i couldn't really export out something with uh a raised eyebrow here let me show you if i wanted to do that i would need to create something like that and export that out but i thought that would complicate things so i i kept things a little bit more simple and i just did basic eyebrows i recommend doing this it will it'll probably keep things easier for you so you know you won't need to manage the eyebrows because it's going to be tough to get this these raised eyebrows with maybe a mad eyebrow like that so i found sort of a middle ground with my expression and then i didn't do any raised eyebrows so this is what my drawing is going to look like i'm going to go back into the other file and do that pretty quickly so [Music] all right so i have the base of my cow designed one thing you're going to keep in mind is we're going to change the color of this base so you can either fill it in now with color or just keep this as lines i'm going to go ahead and keep it as lines for right now until i draw some of the other shapes and black lines on top of it and then we'll come back and we'll worry about color in a minute i think the eyes of your nfts are the most important thing that's where a lot of the personality is going to be so i spend a lot of time on eyes with crunchy cows you know i wanted a look of i wanted the eyes to be different i didn't want them to just be uh like perfect cartoon cow eyes i want them to be almost like human eyes i always do these like weird dot dotted shaded things so i do all the pupils with the eyes all the eye whites and the eyelids are with the eyes if you want to have blinking eyes then you're going to did i just draw these on the same layer i'm an idiot all right let me go back and redraw these because i drew these on the same layer as the base so i'm wasting your time right now let's go back and draw those really quick all right there's nine this isn't going to be the most perfect cow in the world but you will get the idea let's give him some sus eyes let's give him some uh you can change the eyelid color i went with like some grays whoop that happens to me probably 200 times a day yeah so i'm just dragging and dropping in procreate for to color things in so these eyes are going to export out as one layer and now i'm seeing some flaws in my design under here i want to expand that a little bit now let's do now i have a little white piece right here not sure what that is let's turn off all this stuff let's erase that because that you don't want any remnants around here you want these to be pretty clean all right now that you get the concept with the eyes on one layer i'm going to fly through this real quick i'm going to do the nose with color i'm going to do the mouth with color i'm going to do the clothing the food the necklace the hair blah blah blah you get the point i'll be right back [Music] [Music] all right see this is what i mentioned before that the white of the mouth overlaps or the the black lines of the mouth overlap so i need to correct this so my solve on crunchy cows was just to create a white color here thinking that they all had sort of had white beards or white under the mouth and let me just fill that all in here you could leave the top it's not an ideal solution your character might be a little bit more simple but this is what i thought would work best it ended up did did working i haven't had anybody comment that it is a bad way to go i'm just gonna make one yellow tooth here i'm gonna add some circles to the to the nose at this point i think it's safe to color in the cow so i'm gonna maybe pick a [Music] like a maybe like a brown cow and fill it in so what you can do later is export out that body part that whole the whole cow and in photoshop you're just going to tint the hue and you can you can actually do that in procreate too just change the hue we'll duplicate the layer change the hue and then all of a sudden we have a purple cowl and i'm actually going to stick with this purple cow because i think it looks pretty cool all right now i'm going to throw in some eyebrows [Music] what else do we need some clothing i mean this cow looks to me like a disco cow so maybe a nice big open flowing shirt and you can even show some some cow chest hair let's color that in all right we have let's stick with the disco theme let's throw a little afro on here make it all black but let's put a little curls so one problem i had with crunchy cats too is the hair is separated into two parts you have the top and then you have the sides here when you layer things on top of each other they're gonna lay lay in awkwardly with the hair over here so you know say you have uh sunglasses or if there's food in the mouth and it's overlapping here my solve for that was to just go like this the hair actually doesn't go behind the character it's it's always going to end at the edge of this character so this this hair is never gonna when it's generated there's never gonna be a bad image of this hair because it's not gonna overlap the character in any way and anything over top of it will just be you know over top of it it's not um it's not gonna get in the way so you can do some some funny funky things by if you just make the edge of your hair the edge of the neck of your character so i'm gonna go through throw a few more items on this and then we'll clean up the file and we'll be ready to export [Music] one thing i should probably say as i'm drawing this is you want all of your shadows and your highlights to be on the same layer don't create multiple layers for shadows and highlights because those are gonna have to be generated and they're gonna have to match what's underneath those layers so you're gonna want to bake them into each layer i'd like to talk about problems and errors that i've made so they can help you out a little bit one thing with crunchy cows is when i first drew them i did all the hooves right here in front of the cow holding food and then when i exported them i realized let me show you oh the pizza is overlapping the necklace so that was a major problem i had to go through hundreds if not thousands of files and separate each hoof bump it over to the side maybe remove a hoof and then bump the food over so if you're gonna have something in front of your character make sure it doesn't overlap the clothing too much or the necklace or the bottom of the face all right this file is looking pretty good what i what i would do at this point is export this file out to multiple procreate files so this can get a little complicated let me show you the crunchy cow breakdown and then we'll come into this file and we'll talk about this one all right so with crunchy cows i designed my main character like we just did let me clean up this junk [Music] so this was my main character i had all my pieces in here i did start to draw multiple shapes in here but then what i did is i broke out this file i i will just i'll go into here and i will just duplicate this file over and over for as many items that you have and then within each file i will keep the base of the character as the bottom layer i'll turn down the opacity on that and this is my template for which i i draw all the other items over top of it so this was the mouth file see how i drew the mouth in full opacity and i have tons of different mouths in here but i have the template of the character at the bottom so i know no matter what that these shapes are going to line up with this character and all i have to do is export this procreate file or open it in photoshop and then i can export out all of these mouths rather than having one procreate file of body shapes necklaces earrings eyes noses this is just my mouth file so you can see i have crunchy cows eyebrows crunchy cows eyewear crunchy cows mouths crunchy cows nose clothing food let me show you the food just so you get an idea of what i messed up that you should avoid so we have grass tacos this grass taco was a problem because it was in the way of the clothing so i had to go in and bump that over i actually had to do that on thousands of files because i didn't do it i didn't set it up properly here spaghetti this was another major problem look how it covers up the necklace covers up the necklace and it covers up the clothing so i had to split these hands and move them out to here one thing i haven't talked about yet is the backgrounds backgrounds can be a totally different file they don't need a template i have mine turned off in here i'm going to turn on so you can see it if you want you could do multiple backgrounds in here to make sure they align with your character but for the most part backgrounds in nft profile pictures are either simple flat colors or simple textures and you can do that in a totally different file and then you can export each one of those layers all right let's jump back into the file i designed and let's talk about how that we would break this apart so when i drew crunchy cows i did start drawing multiple items in my one file before i went in duplicated that file and then deleted layers that i didn't need so this one file would become my food file or this another file would become my mouth file and my nose file so once i have all of these done the process of exporting these is pretty simple so all these layers need to get exported the way i did with crunchy cows is i would send my procreate file to as a psd to my computer and i would open it in photoshop and do file export layers to photoshop files and then open up those photoshop files and export them as 300 dpi pngs in procreate you can just go to export png files and i'm gonna save these three images and then i'm gonna hop over into my photos wherever my photos are and see that these png images exported now the background is still there you can see that and these are only only the layers that were turned on were exported so i one thing to keep in mind you do want to export all of your layers at 3 000 by 3 000 so keep all this elf around them but make sure you turn off the background layers so they export with transparency so i'm going to go back in i'm going to pick some layers that i want i'm going to turn off my background i'm going to turn off my template turn on the smoke turn on a nose ring turn on the bird and we'll go back to the wrench and we'll go down to export png files save the five images go over to your photos there's all the images exported with the transparency directly from procreate let's talk a little bit about naming your files so what i would do is go over to openc and uh pick any collection you want to look at scroll down and go to properties now you're going to want to look at how all of these collections name all their files so they're very simple categories background clothing color eyebrows eyes food everything you see in this in in blue font here is the very simple category of items what you see in this dark font here is the custom name of your file you don't want any dashes in your name you want clean spaces you want capitalization um sometimes it's hard to do with thousands of files it's it's going to be hard to get it perfect but try to try to have clean names and then these rarities these are set in the metadata when you export from nftgenerator.art or if you export this from say you know another generator you find online you're going to set these rarities you're going to choose these rarities yourself and then they will populate on openc as your items are sold or as you upload them you keep hearing me talk about why it's important to keep this alpha this transparent channel around the character or your character parts when you export it let me show you exactly why when you go to generate your characters you really don't want to export out your files as these separate parts constrain to these proportions right here other because then if you're going to generate these in code if you're going to use a generator that generator is going to have to figure out the coordinates of each position and i would i mean you should definitely avoid that it's that's going to be a huge pain my brain wouldn't be able to handle that many numbers in figuring out exactly where everything goes so what i like to do is just keep everything as 3000 by 3000 so when you stack them on top of each other it's just going to be stacking [Music] sizes that are the exact same so there's going to be no guessing this is going to drop right on top of it and you're not going to have any problems with alignment the eyes are going to line up perfectly with the nose and et cetera et cetera let me show let me illustrate this to you by inserting a a nose image here so i exported out some files before i'm going to paste in a 3000 by 3000 image of a nose and it's going to drop right in place i don't have to make sure that's in focus i don't have to guess where this nose goes so highly recommend that you export out all of your images at 3 000 by 300 dpi or 300 ppi whatever you want to call it i for some reason can never remember that and that will get your images aligned perfectly whether you generate an nft generator or use code i hope that tutorial was helpful now you're going to have characters with all the parts that can be generated into thousands of random characters you can use things like nft dash generator dot art sometimes the url doesn't work so you're going to need to go to google and just search for nft generator that is going to be a easy user interface that somebody built and sent to me i used it to create crunchy cows i love it because i need a clean interface i don't want to do things in code my brain doesn't work that way but you can definitely have these coded if you're not a coder there's tons of people out there that will do these i believe they use json to code these i'm no expert in the code so definitely do your research uh if you get a chance please like and subscribe this video just so that will let me know that you want to see more of these videos and also let me know in the comments if this was helpful or not pick me apart so i can learn and i can make more helpful content for you and thanks again for watching [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: Ryan Maloney

Views: 476,961

Keywords: youtube artist, how to draw a graphic novel, drawing in procreate, procreate tutorial, procreate tips, art tips, drawing with apple pen, how to draw digitally

Id: CQcMqe0k1Ig

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021