Procreate Cartoon Tutorial: From Sketch to Finished Design!

in today's video i'm going to show you how to draw this cartoon fish using the ipad and procreate it's all in real time too so you can see every step along the way from the sketch process to inking to doing color flats and then highlights and shadows so if you want to follow along step by step and draw with me keep watching [Music] all right guys so let's go ahead and draw a cartoon fish starting out i'm using a 3000 by 300 dpi canvas for my brush i'm going to be using my cartooning set which is available on gumroad right now i'll leave it down in the description below starting out sketch process we're just going to use the cartoon sketch pencil to begin with and for my color palette once again i've got this pre-made so if you want to download the exact same colors that i'm using in today's tutorial you can do that just head over to my website bjdell.com underneath the youtube reference materials page which i'll link it down in the description below you'll find this like i said download it for free there's also a video at the top of the page that helps walk you through the install process if you've never installed a pallet in procreate before so that being said let's go ahead and hop into it so starting out i'm just gonna start sketching this fish and i think rather than having like a circle fish i'm gonna have this one a little bit more kind of rectangle so it's got a little bit more of a different design to it give it a little bit more character i'm just going to start out with the the basic shape then of the fish here and then we'll have this kind of come down we'll bring this down into the tail right down here it's kind of wider body here at the top at the head and then bringing it down and narrows them down here and we'll kind of work in the tail down here you'll see i'm just using kind of basic shapes to block everything out right now and everything's really sketchy right now i've talked about this before i like to keep the sketch phase just exactly what it is sketch phase i don't try to make everything perfect i don't try to define everything right at the beginning so if this is the first video you've watched of mine it might look bad now but i guarantee you by the end it will look better and then as i go around just kind of building up the shapes around the base shapes that i have the base shapes just are there to kind of help me visualize everything and i kind of start to fine tune everything from there but like i said just still keeping it kind of rough and sketchy all right so now let's get an eye in here so i'm going to do a kind of big oval here for this eye and i think we'll kind of have the head come down here and around it's going to be kind of a three-quarters perspective so we'll have this eye in here just kind of tucked back behind so you can see this full eye here and then the way the head comes down here kind of hides this eye back here get these pupils in here it's kind of small let me make this one a little bit smaller here it's really kind of bdi here kind of like that looks cool and then for the mouth i don't know if i want to do kind of like a smile here coming down or how about if we do like a severe like big bottom lip here kind of like a underbite or overbite underbite coming out here i think that might be kind of cool having that coming out past and that way we can pull some teeth in here i think that looks kind of cool there so this just kind of fleshing out ideas so keeping it loose like this allows me to kind of like i say go back in with that smile do i like that do i like this better and just kind of allows me to be really fluid in the design phase i think here under the eyes maybe doing some kind of bags here under the eyes let me kind of wrap those around here too and to do this the technique that i'm using i just did a video last week about it drawing from the shoulder if you guys haven't watched that video definitely check that one out on my channel drawing from the shoulder really allows you to kind of keep a very loose and fluid drawing style outline the whole thing in the video so definitely check that out i think it'll help a lot of people really a lot of times you want to draw from the wrist starting out just because that's how we write and being able to draw from the shoulder number one it's going to alleviate some wrist pain and number two it just helps you get these really quick fluid lines and it's going to allow you to create a lot faster too so there we go we got the basic design of the fish i'm going to grab the arrow here and kind of shrink this down just a tad bit i want to go a little bit more in depth with this one and do some background stuff on this today so i think if we probably come down here maybe we put in some seaweed kind of here floating in the the ocean kind of adds a little bit more to this design that there may be some of the coral things here coming up those corals i don't know the pink things just drawing some of those there just to add lay this out a little bit extra i'm gonna grab this selection tool here and just kind of shrink this one down a little bit i like the shape of it but just overall it's getting a little bit too close there shrinking that down there all right i think overall that looks pretty good there i think i might kind of adjust this eye and move it just a tad bit here so that that bottom eyelid here kind of lines up with that one a little bit better and i think that looks good so that's going to be the sketch now it's time to kind of finalize everything make it a little bit more presentable less sketchy and we'll do that in the inking process so to do the inks what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our layers menu let's tap on that and i'm going to make a new layer here so this is going to be our inks layer layer 1 is our sketch layer and i'm going to hit the n for the blend mode to bring this up and drop the opacity here down to about 35 36 37 whatever we just don't want it too dark we want to be able to draw on top of it and not have too much of it showing through to where it takes away and distracts us so now that we've got that set i'm going to go up here and switch my brush once again still with that cartooning set i'm going to come over here to my standard anchor streamline that's what we're going to be using to ink and now we need to decide where is our light source coming from so i've talked about this in previous videos before defining where the light source comes from really helps you to determine line weights of the design so anything closer to the light source is going to have a thinner line anything further away is going to have a thicker line is going to be where the shadows are those thin lines are where the highlights are going to be not only does this do some of the heavy lifting for you but it also kind of keeps you on track when you move over to that highlighting and shadowing phase you don't have to constantly remember okay where is my light source coming from when you see those thicker lines you just kind of automatically remember so on this one i think we'll have the light source come in from this top left hand corner so that means anything around here gonna have thinner lines anything down and over here to the right gonna have thicker lines so now that we've determined that let's go ahead and start i think i'm gonna come back here and begin down here at this bottom part of the tail so thicker lines down here coming up and around make my brush here just a tad bit bigger so thicker lines to thinner as we come down and around one more time to kind of show you that so it's going to be a little bit thinner here so one more time and with this number one ipad has pressure sensitivity if you've got the apple pencil the brushes are built around the pressure sensitivity as well so the thicker lines a result of pressing harder thinner lines you just don't press as hard pretty pretty easy so now i'm going to go ahead and come down here and do this line here once again kind of thicker down there kind of connect these and then bring around the tail here like so up here lighter line and kind of thickening up there as it comes around then we can do some thinner lines here inside as we kind of pull those down for that top fin and we'll do the same down here as well pull these and kind of change in the direction as we go on these all right now i need to do these fins here need to do the eyes as you can see though i've already got the lines here and lines here so we're going to have some overlapping i can erase these and then try to match these up but a lot easier way to do this is if we go up here to our layers menu and we make a new layer and we draw on that we can erase any of the overlapping lines on the alternate layer so on this new layer then this blank choosing my brush again we'll go ahead and get the fan in here and kind of connect that control the thinner lines here on the inside kind of coming down and around just like that same thing over here pulling that one up and around thinner lines on the inside like so and then for the eyes once again overlapping here you'll see i'm going to hold down to kind of lock that in and you can see i kind of want that eye i guess a little bit bigger i think that looks a little bit better so once again not sticking to that sketch 100 i'm making changes as i need to as i see fit and i'm not locked into it so once i've got that set i kind of want a little bit thinner there there we go now i can erase going up here to my eraser i can erase the overlaps there now you can come back down here and erase the overlaps down here just by switching the layers there all right let me go back to my brush here still on that standard anchor stream line let's go and do this lip next once again still staying on this new layer here so that way i can overlap down here and not have to worry about it pull this down and up i'm kind of heavier here thinner up here one more time just until i get the right feel that i want for that line it's one thing really urge you to do is do a lot of undoing and redoing lines if you're not happy with them just so you can get the right line that's one of the great things about digital art so definitely use that to your advantage now that i've got that i'm going to come back to my layer 2 and just do the erasing to clean up those overlaps there everything's all lined up and good to go now i can go ahead and pinch those together or i can also go up to the top layer there and just hit merge down now everything here is on the same layer back to my brush now get these teeth in here just like that then we'll go ahead and do the kind of eyelids or those bags under the eyes here just like that a little thicker one there kind of pull some smaller ones there in the back do a circle in here holding down my pencil and then holding down again with my other finger locks in a perfect circle i can get the pupil in there i can do the same thing then over here on this one once again you'll see changed the spacing of this it was down lower but i think it looks better up there based on where i've got this one so once again not stuck and holding on to that sketch exactly just kind of changing things as i need to tapered line there for that eyebrow i think that looks good and then from here inside i'm gonna go ahead and switch here to just the standard anchor version not the streamline version of this brush and then i can go back in here and just kind of add in some extra small details for adding in these i really like using the non-streamlined version just get a little bit more kind of organic quick flick strokes here and it just kind of helps the the overall feel of those lines add in a couple dots here around the back all right back to the streamline then i'm going to go ahead and get the seaweed in here just like this didn't really like that one line there in the middle and then get these little guys here as well you'll see that streamline really kind of helps me keep some smooth lines going on here i can still kind of get that funky feeling going around with the shape but it just kind of locks in what i'm going for kind of smooths it out a little bit so there we go just a couple of little details in here coming around and then i think i need another line in here all right so let's go ahead then and turn off our sketch layer coming back up to our layers menu sketch layer off and that's what we're looking at for the actual design of the fish or the character itself i think that looks pretty good so from here we're ready to move on to our color flats so to do color flats what we're going to do is come back up to our layer menu and i'm gonna make a new layer and i'm gonna drag and drop this underneath layer two so layer one was our sketch layer twos are lines and then layer three is gonna be our color flats now i wanna come up here and tap on layer two our lines layer and i wanna set these as reference so this is gonna allow us when we click on layer three we're gonna be able to drag and drop all of our colors into layer three it's not gonna affect layer two it's not gonna be destructive and they're going to be on two separate layers which is going to help us when we go in to actually do our shadows and highlights here in a second so with that selected now let's go ahead and come back up to our color palette here and the first thing we've got is our yellow that's going to be our main color or fish so we can just drag and drop this in and that's going in on that layer three and you'll see it's using that as the reference for where the color goes so there we go now we can move on to orange so coming back up to our color palette and going to orange and instead of dragging dropping this every single time what i'm going to do watch as i drop this in you'll see continue filling with recolor up there appears tapping on that then is gonna bring up this little cursor you can see right here and if we drag this over you're gonna see that we can then tap on all these areas and it saves us a ton of time coloring in we would have to drag and drop every single one of these separately but just a super quick time saver there go ahead and i think i got a little dot there i need to erase all right so back to our color flats here next up let's go ahead and come up to our color panel again here our color palette and let's go with this blue that's going to be the eyes here there we go and then once again i'm going to come back up to my layers menu i'm going to go ahead and put the whites of the eyes on a different layer here so i'm going to get the white of the teeth in first so i'll drag those in first but now i want to go ahead and make a new layer for the eyes this is going to make doing shadows on these a lot easier here in a little bit so now the white of the eyes is on different layer everything else color flat wise is down here on layer four or layer three so let's tap layer three again coming back up to our color palette here and i've got this green color here for the seaweed so we'll drag and drop that in there you'll see i just had a three there so i usually do that real quick the drag and drop color switch into pink here i'll do the same thing i usually don't use recolor if it's just a couple it's not really worth hitting that recolor so use it as you see fit so there we go we've got that done color flats are finished now it's time to move on to the shadows and highlights so to do shadows and highlights once again we're going to come back up here to our layers menu and i'm going to make a new layer here it's going to be layer 5. and color palette here i'm gonna come up and select this brown color now i'm also gonna come back up here to my layers menu and i'm gonna turn off reference here on layer two so i'm gonna fill in a pretty big section here with a shadow and i'm gonna drag and drop the color if we've got reference on it's gonna drag and drop just like we did before and i don't want that so now layer five is gonna be our shadows layer the brush here i'm going to go ahead and keep with the standard anchor streamline for right now and i'm just going to kind of follow around some of these lines here just like this i'm going to kind of pull another line here down for that lip there i just want to make sure that all this connects here you're going to see this is going to go outside of the lines here so i want to show you what not having clipping mask turned on does and that's what it does it goes all the way outside of the lines there and then once i get this all connected i'll be able to drag and drop the color in here once again i've got that light source coming in from that top left hand corner so that's why i've got more shadows back here and down underneath here now that all this is done you can drag and drop and it's filling in everything so something's not connected along the way so i'm just going to go back one more time and make sure that all those parts connect now it should drag and drop and fill in so there we go something was open somewhere along the line so now let's go ahead and add this and make this a clipping mask now and you can see let me move this over as soon as i do this you're going to be able to see all this is going to snap basically to that bottom layer there so all those parts that we went outside the lines that's what clipping mask does that's a good example there to show you exactly the benefits of using clipping mask we didn't have to worry about being too sloppy around there we could just do it exactly how we wanted to and then worry about it later go ahead and add a little bit of shadow here on that back of that tooth there and then maybe a little bit here kind of down here underneath on that so that's the majority of the shadows up here let's go ahead and add some in down here now on the seaweed get these in here and then it's going to be time to do some adjustments on the opacity get over here to the pink area again where i have shadows being casted by the fish itself and then also some back here just because of where the light source is coming from so this is going to be pretty kind of heavy back here shadows but i still want some area in here that's the pink all right so now that we've got that all filled in let's go ahead and come up here to our layers menu again and we're going to hit the n for blend mode and drop down the opacity of this so hitting that and dropping this down i would say probably about 30 percent looks pretty good right there so now you can see it doesn't look brown anymore it has a nice shadow effect to it now all this back here super shadowed we don't want that we want to have some difference between the two values so we want the viewer to be able to see that oh yeah that is a shadow back there and if we have this all one color you really can't see that plus we got the light source coming in here so we're going to have a little bit of kind of a highlight here and we can kind of add in some fake ones around here too to break it up so using our eraser now we need to go ahead and use the streamline again here we can just start to kind of remove some of the shadows back here you can see that kind of brightens that up you can see it a little bit better that that is two different colors we can kind of remove some here just to once again give two different values sitting right next to each other so we can tell that oh yeah that is shadowed in because i can see there's there's a very obvious difference between those two colors so just doing some funky lines like this maybe pulling another one down here just a tapered line down here i'm going to zoom in and pull around here for these tapered lines the way that the line goes here i find a lot easier to zoom in and basically my the flow of my drawing from my shoulder will work a little bit better zoomed in and twisted if you feel kind of weird and your hands in the wrong position feel free to zoom in kind of pull around the canvas once again one of the great things about doing digital art it's like right here again kind of at an angle so if i do this instead it just makes it easier to get that line that i'm going for these lines down here the way that these work i can hit these pretty comfortably just by not zooming in or twisting so those i can and leave alone but if you do have problems if you feel like you're in an awkward position definitely use the tools that you got at your disposal do a couple circle things down there to kind of break things up a little bit too all right so i think that's pretty good for removing stuff around there let's go ahead now and let's do some shadows on the eyes that's why we did these on a separate layer here was to make this process a little bit easier so coming up to the layers menu once again i'm going to hit that layer there i'm going to make a new layer and we'll set that to clipping mask and we're going to draw the shadows here on that layer so back up to our color palette and i've got this blue color right here we'll use that for the shadows here and you're going to see i'm just basically going to try to follow around just the same way that that eye curves that's how i want the the curve of the shadow to go as well just kind of following it around like that and then we can go ahead and put some other ovals here to add a little bit more detail there of course this is pretty dark right now so i'm going to go ahead and drop the opacity so coming back up here to the layers menu hitting that n for blend mode once again and then just dropping this down to maybe about 50 percent looks pretty good there that's good so there we go with the eraser too we can always go in here and kind of remove some ovals so that's got a little bit more detail to it just the way that that comes down and around so that looks good uh let's see let's go ahead and add in a little bit of shadows here to the inside part there of the iris so if we go back up here and choose bottom row here this darker blue color back to our layers menu and we'll go back to that brown shadow layer here and then we can just kind of pull in a shadow here around that eye so it's not going to be super dark we just want a little bit of a different color there but i do want kind of a highlight in there too so to do this we're just going to come back up here to layer 2 which is our lines layer and we'll just select white so if we go back to our color palette and select white we're just going to draw just a just a circle here and then another kind of dot there in the center so we got some reflection there going on too got a little bit of a highlight there brings it out a little bit more i think that looks pretty pretty good there all right so now let's go ahead and move on and do some highlights so same principle same technique here we're gonna go back down to layer five shadows layer make a new layer once again we want to set this as clipping mask and then back up to our color palette here and i've got this kind of brightish uh yellow whitish color here so we'll grab that and then we'll just kind of follow around here where those highlights would be where that light source is coming in there probably have a little bit of one here pull that down right there maybe do a an oval one here so we got a little bit of a shine or a glow there to that we can also do one here on the top of the mouth kind of coming down get one there i can even pull this around a little bit more and then go back in with the eraser and do some of those oval removals there that'll look kind of cool let me do another one here and here like so and let's see where else do we want to go to we can put one here at the top of this back one fin there that looks pretty good and then maybe along the tops of seaweed here coming down just at the tops of those a little bit and then maybe just one here coming down there and then another one here all right so now let's go ahead and then adjust the opacity of this to drop it down a little bit so once again coming back up to layers menu and for blend mode and dropping that down maybe do about 45 i think that looks pretty good there all right and that's what we're left with as far as the shadows and the highlights go looks good now we can go ahead and just kind of finish out this background now so to do the background let's go ahead and come up here to our layers menu i'm going to go down underneath the color flats layer and let's make a new layer and then back up to the color palette i've got this kind of bright blue on the bottom row here let's drag and drop that in there and then from here let's come back up here to the color palette let's use this darker blue color here now with that selected i'm just going to go ahead switch my brush back to standard anchor and just come down here and fill in just a pretty big rectangle here of this color i don't know if i'll be able to drag and drop the color in here just because these blues are so close it might want to fill in everything or not enough but there we go that's good all right so now that we've got that i want to kind of get a gradient going on with this and to do that we're going to go up to our adjustments uh menu here tap that and then go to gaussian blur here on that menu with that selected we just need to slide our apple pencil to the right on the screen you're going to see it gives that gradient so we've got a darker color down here which fades to that lighter color there i think that looks really good but looks a little plain so let's kind of finish it out with some bubbles floating around there so back up to our layers menu one last time here making a new layer and back up to our color palette we're going to go ahead and select white here and i'm just going to go around and just kind of make some circles here holding down dragging and dropping color in there we'll make different size ones so big ones small ones really no rhyme or reason as to where these are going i'm just kind of alternating between the sizes of them so we'll get a few in here we just even tap for some really small ones we can even adjust our brush size too if we just want to tap instead of drawing the circles out and once again depending on how hard we tap on the screen that pressure sensitivity comes in again so we can do different size ones just by the tapping here i think i kind of want to put some over top too of the fish and the background so if we grab this layer now and let's drag it all the way to the top here this way we can kind of have it in the foreground and it's going to go over top of these so once again just put them wherever you want as many or as few as you think you need then once we have that done we can come back up here to the layers menu hitting that blend mode we can drop down the opacity of this so we can actually see through those and it gives a little bit more of a three-dimensional feel now to make them pop a little bit more last thing coming back up here with our eraser we can go ahead and just kind of erase some reflections in here you do some kind of tapered curves like that you can do dots however you want to do it to make it look a little bit more detailed a little bit more reflective in there totally up to you my friend let's get those around there and that'll be it so last thing i need to do is just switch over here to black and making a new layer i just need to sign this thing and i will be done i don't have a lot of room here in the corners usually i like to sign in the corners but this one i'm gonna have to kind of zoom in pretty far down here to make this work oh my goodness not a lot of space all right so there we go there is the finished cartoon fish hopefully you guys enjoyed today's tutorial if you did definitely make sure you give it a thumbs up share it with a friend too if they're new to procreate or you think somebody else might get some value out of today's video definitely pass it along and if you haven't subscribed yet to the channel make sure you do that and hit the bell for notifications so you can get alerted when i post new videos also if you go ahead and take part in any of these tutorials if you follow along and then you post your work online which i encourage you to do if you're on instagram or twitter tag me at bj dell so i can check out what you're doing also if you're on facebook i've got a group over there called keep creating a group for artist by artist place where you can share your work based on these tutorials or just any artwork that you are currently creating great place to be and want to check out your work you can get feedback get feedback meet new friends it's awesome and want you guys to be a part of it as well so that's it for today's video once again thank you guys so much for watching and until next time keep creating you

Channel: Let's Draw with BeeJayDeL

Views: 17,391

Keywords: beejaydel, step by step procreate drawing, step by step procreate tutorial, how to make gradients in procreate, gaussian blur, gaussian blur procreate, how to add shadows procreate, how to add highlights procreate, how to add shadows and highlights in procreate, procreate inking, procreate inking brushes, procreate inking tutorial, procreate recolor, procreate for beginners, procreate drawing, how to draw a fish, how to draw cartoon fish easy, cartoon tutorial

Id: Xs3xK6eGxgs

Length: 36min 2sec (2162 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021