Hi, I'm Lisa Bardot and today we're going to learn all about how to use and manipulate masks in Procreate. In this video, you'll learn the three types of masks in Procreate, the differences, and when it's appropriate to use each one. If you're new to Procreate, I'd highly recommend checking out my Intro to Procreate tutorial. We all know masks are used to cover things. If you've ever painted a room you might be familiar with masking tape. Basically, it's tape used to cover something so you don't get paint on it. Masks in Procreate work this same way but are so much more functional and versatile. Masks are a non-destructive way to hide or modify the contents of a layer. In procreate masks come in three flavors - Alpha Lock, Clipping Masks, and Layer Masks. Choosing which of these methods to use at any given point depends on several factors. Are you worried about your layer count? Do you need to use blend modes? Is it important that you can make non-destructive modifications? I promise all of this will make sense by the end of this video. Here on my canvas, I've drawn a leaf shape I'd like to add some details to it, but I don't like how here the lines extend past the edges of the shape. If this were a real painting I'd have to very meticulously paint up to the edge being careful not to go over. But we're working digitally and things are much easier. Let's use Alpha Lock to draw those line details. You can enable Alpha Lock from the layer menu or by swiping right with two fingers. You can tell Alpha Lock is on if you see a checkerboard pattern on the layer preview. With Alpha Lock enabled, anywhere you haven't already drawn on that layer becomes your mask. It means that you can only draw or make changes to the pixels, you've already drawn on. There are some downsides to using Alpha Lock, however. The more you use layers the more you're able to follow a non-destructive drawing workflow. All "non-destructive" means is that I'm able to avoid making changes to my drawing that are irreversible. I've added these lines now, but I can't easily go back and edit the texture or color of just the leaf. Alpha lock is really quick and easy to use but it would be much better if these two elements were on independent layers. Enter Clipping Masks. Let's draw a new leaf. This time, to add our detail, let's create a new layer. Tap on that layer and tap Clipping Mask. Notice the little arrow pointing down to the left of the layer preview. Now, just like before, I can only draw in the parts of the canvas that contain my shape. But this time those details are on a new layer. This new layer is using the layer below as a reference to make the mask. This gives me a lot more control. I can erase change the opacity, make adjustments, enable a blend mode, and more. I can even go back to the reference layer - the leaf shape - and edit it as well. I can also keep adding more clipping masks one above the other and they'll always be mapped to that first reference layer. Clipping Masks are awesome. But the downside to Clipping Masks is that you are adding to your layer count, which might present a problem down the line if you're running out of layers. Finally we come to Layer Masks. There are a lot of ways to use Layer Masks and I'll go over as many as I can. To create a Layer Mask, make a new layer, tap it, and choose "Mask". You'll see your original layer, this is where you put your artwork, and above it, a layer filled with white called, "Layer Mask" The Layer Mask lets you hide or show parts of the artwork layer. In the artwork layer, let's draw a leaf. Now, let's edit the Mask layer. Tap the Layer Mask. When you are editing the mask you can only use black, white, or shades of grey. I've heard a few cute phrases to help folks remember how editing masks works, but here's mine: White is a window, black blocks. Right now the entire mask is white. You can imagine white being clear like a window to what is on the artwork layer. If we paint on the mask with black, you'll see that black "blocks" or hides, what is on the artwork layer. You can always go back with white and paint it back in. If you paint with a shade of grey, the mask will be semi-transparent. Now this is a lot of technical information so I think the best way to learn is by putting this all into practice. I'm gonna walk you through the process of a drawing so that you can see all the ways we can use and manipulate Masks. This year I started, "Making Art Everyday", a year-long series of prompts, tutorials, and motivation to help people establish a daily art making practice. I've been sending out daily prompts once a week, and this week we're drawing house plants. So I thought it would be fun to show you how I draw a fiddle leaf fig tree. Over here at Safari I've got makingarteveryday.com loaded up. This page has all the prompts for the week with a Google image search linked to each one for easy access to reference photos. I'm observing all these images, but I'm gonna pull one up and just leave it on the screen so I can just refer to it as I'm making my own tree. We're gonna start this drawing out with just a basic sketch. Sketch out the pot, add in the branches, and then we're gonna start adding the leaves. These fig trees have really cool leaves. They're kind of like pear-shaped and a little like wavy and wonky. So I'm just going to go ahead and draw a bunch of leaf shapes all over the branches and I want to be sure that some of the leaves overlap some are kind of facing forward. They're a little more foreshortened. That's going to lead to kind of a more realistic look while still keeping it fun and stylized. I'm pretty happy with this sketch so next I'm going to reduce the opacity of that layer and then I'm going to turn on the multiply blend mode. This is going to help me be able to see my sketch lines a little bit better. I'm going to create a new layer and place that layer below the sketch layer. For this drawing, we're gonna use brushes from my Gouache Paintbox set. I'm going for more of a painterly look with some fun texture. So this one will be perfect for that. I'm gonna start with the pot. To make the pot shape, I'm going to use my Gouache Thick brush and I'm just going to fill in the entire shape of that pot. Now I'm gonna create a new layer and I'm gonna make that layer a Clipping Mask I'm gonna grab a lighter color and then the Dry Round brush and just kind of add some curved lines to give it a little bit of contouring and a bit of texture. I'm just playing with kind of lighter and darker tones until it looks how I want it to look. Then I'm going to grab a darker colors that I can color the inside of the pot. And then I will create a new layer to make the lip, the top lip of the pot. I'm gonna use the Gouache Thick brush again and then draw kind of a line around that to make that light colored lip. I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock on that layer just so I can add a little bit of texture to that. Pot looks pretty good, but it looks a little wonky on this side so I'm gonna go back to the original pot shape layer and then just erase away some of the edges. Kind of play with that a little until I get it looking how I want it to look. And that's kind of the beauty of working with Clipping Masks -- you can go back and edit things still. You're not committed to a certain shape or thing that you did. And we've got to add some dirt in the pot of course because it would die without some dirt. So we'll just add that in a the layer in between The lip and the pot. Now, we're ready to start drawing the branches. So we're gonna do that on a new layer. I'm using the Gouache Thick brush again because it has some really nice thick and thins so I'll start up thin near the top of the branch and then go thicker as I draw it towards the bottom. Now we want the trunk to look like it's actually in the pot, so we're gonna erase the bottom of that and then I'm actually going to select that lip layer, so that way I can exactly erase the right amount of that branch or trunk. Now I'd like to add some texture to my tree. So I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock. I'm going to select the Dry Round brush and then just add in a little bit of texture using some lighter and darker colors. All right, we're ready to add the leaves so let's create a new layer. I'm gonna choose my green and then the Gouache Thick brush and then I'm gonna go in and just outline and color in each of the leaf shapes. I'm not going for perfection here, I kind of like it to be a little irregular especially so you can see the brush marks of that gouache brush. But the most important part right now is to make sure that none of my leaves overlap. We're actually going to put any of the overlap on a new layer. So let's go ahead and finish up this layer. And that looks pretty good I'm ready to add my second layer. So I'm going to create a new layer underneath the previous layer and I'm going to reduce the opacity of that first leaf layer. And I'm doing this just so I can see a little bit better as I'm adding in these these new shapes. So go ahead and color in all the leaves on that layer. Again, we don't want anything to overlap. Cool that's all done now, we're going to go ahead and add in the veins of our leaves. Create a new layer and choose a lighter green. The brush I'm going to use here is the Dry Detail brush. It's a really great textured brush, perfect for line work. And we'll just start adding all those little veins on all the leaves. The next thing I want to do is add some shadows so that these leaves look like they're underneath the other leaves. Now I want to use the multiply blend mode to do this because it does shadows really well, but clipping masks isn't going to work because it's not directly above the leaf layer. So what I'm going to do here is create a Layer Mask Select the leaf layer, create a new layer, and then turn that one into a mask. and as you can see it makes a mask out of the shape of the leaf layer because that's what was selected when I created that mask. Turn off the Select tool and then we can turn on the multiply blend mode on that layer. Then I'm going to grab the Gouache Dry brush and draw my shadows. And then if we turn back the opacity up on the top leaf layer, now we can kind of see, you know, how those shadows are falling. And because we're doing this on a separate layer with a mask, we can go back and edit those shadows if we need to. All right, I'm going to create a new layer above the top leaf layer, and then I'm going to add in all the veins for those. And now I'm finally ready to turn off my sketch. And I can see this is coming along, but I want to give this a little bit more definition. So I'm gonna choose my leaf layer. I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock and choose kind of a darker green and I can go in and kind of just darken the centers of those leaves. I'm using the Super Dry gouache brush, which is going to give some really nice subtle texture. I'm gonna do the same on the bottom layer as well. And again, if I had drawn those veins directly on the same layer as the leaf I wouldn't be able to do this. So that's why working with separate layers and using masks is awesome. I'm just gonna go in and adjust my shading a little bit. Looking pretty good, but It's still a little flat. So I'm gonna add another little detail. I'm gonna do this on the leaf layer itself. I'm choosing a darker green and then my Dry Detail brush and I'm just going to go in and add, kind of, some little wavy lines all along the edges of each leaf. Also, make sure to darken the underside of those leaves that are kind of like, turned up, turned up, turned over, folded up. These little wavy lines, to me... this is kind of a stylistic choice, but I like these little wavy lines because the edges of The fiddle leaf fig tree leaves are kind of wavy. So that's why I'm putting those in. It gives the impression of a wavy edge. So I'm going to go in and finish up doing those all over. Then of course, we've got to go to the bottom leaves layer and jazz those up a bit, too. All right, looking good, looking good. Um, okay, so there's something kind of weird happening here. There's like, a leaf grown out of a leaf. Like maybe I didn't plan very well with my, like, layers so I'm gonna use a Layer Mask to erase part of that leaf. This is a non-destructive way to erase. If I mess it up I can always go back. I'm gonna select the tree layer, and since I have that selected it's only gonna erase where the tree branch is. And then I'll erase the other little details too. I'll just erase those. I'm not big deal. Okay. The next thing I'm gonna do is just add some little, like, little leaf buds... I don't know what they're called, but the fiddle leaf fig has these little, kind of stickin'... sticking out things. so we're gonna go ahead and draw those on I'll have to turn off Alpha Lock to do that and... Oh, okay. We accidentally messed up. We gotta delete that. So I'll find where it is. Just erase that Cool, cool, looks good. The last thing I want to do, because the the plot is looking a little flat to me, so I'm going to add some shadows and I want to do it using the multiply blend mode so that everything will go dark in the same way So I'm going to select the pot shape layer and use that to create a Layer Mask I'll turn on multiply blend mode on that layer and then I'll go ahead and add some dark colors and kind of make some shadows there. Cool I think this looks pretty great. I'm pretty proud of my fig tree. So I hope you learned a lot about masks from this tutorial. I know a lot of people are a little confused about them -- not quite sure how to use them. So, hopefully this gives you some new tools to use, helps your drawing workflow, and just helps you be more creative! You can purchase the brushes used in this tutorial at www.bardotbrush.com. If you're posting your work to Instagram. I would love to see it. Use hashtag #bardotbrush. Thanks and happy art making! 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