Let's Draw a Snowman: iPad & Procreate Tutorial

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute little snowman from start to finish using the iPad and Procreate. It's all in real time too, no time lapse, no edits. I'm going to teach you how to sketch, how to ink, how to do color flats, how to add shadows and highlights with clipping masks. It's all there step by step, so if you want to follow along and draw with me, keep watching. All right guys, so let's go ahead and draw a snowman. Starting out, I'm using a 4,000 by 4,300 dpi canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out sketching, so I'm going to use my HB pencil. It's part of my pencil pack, available now. And for my color palette, once again, I have this pre-made, so if you want to download this, follow along with the exact same colors I'm using in today's tutorial. You just go to my website, bjdell.com. Underneath the YouTube reference materials page, which I'll link it down in the description below too, you can find this color palette, which you can download for free. There's also a video up at the top of the page to walk you through how to get it into Procreate. So starting out, I'm going to use just black here to start out. It's not in the color palette here, but we'll use that to sketch. I'll switch over to my brush here, and we'll start out just with an oval here at the top for the snowman's head. I think I'm just going to do a two-piece snowman. Instead of doing the three, just do the two here. And next up, just working my way down here, go ahead and pull a couple of angled lines out here for the scarf. And then from here, pull out another oval down here for the body. I think to make this a little bit more interesting, we'll go ahead and have this kind of a three-quarters perspective. So I'll draw the center lines down here so you can kind of see how he's going to be sitting. And we'll draw the ends of the scarf coming out down here. And then for the arms, of course, this one's going to have to be kind of tucked back behind the scarf there. We'll have this one come out here. Since it's three-quarters, this glove or mitten here is going to be a little bit bigger than the one on this side. I'll draw a couple ovals here and kind of connect those for the mitten here. All right, so there we go. Let's go ahead and draw a curve line here for the top of the hat. Just have him wearing a stocking cap here. That coming around, and then kind of pull this up and around and curve it back in and have that ball on the end right there, just like that. Now for the face, I think I'm going to have this kind of come in and back out for the cheek here. It kind of has that younger look to him by having that cheek coming out and the forehead kind of being higher than the bottom of the head here. And then for the eyes, I think kind of have these set further apart here. So having one, actually let's do this further down here, one there and one here, a couple eyebrows there, and we're going to get the nose in here, this little carrot here coming out like that. And I don't really have room down here for coal, so how about if we just do like a little line for the mouth here. I think that'll be cute. So this is a really rough sketch. I've talked about this before. If you guys are new to the channel, I really start out with just a rough kind of suggestion of where everything goes. I worry more about getting everything perfect once I go in to actually do the outlines, which is what we're going to do next. So let's move on to that. So for the outlines, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here to my layers menu and I'm going to make a new layer. This is going to be our outline layer on top of our sketch layer. And then I'm going to hit the N to bring up the layer blend mode here. I'm going to drop down the opacity of the sketch layer. It's not as dark. And then I need to switch over my brush then. So to outline, I'm going to go up to my cartooning set. Once again, this is available on Gumroad. And I'm going to use my standard anchor streamline. This gives a really nice smooth line. Plus it has some really nice tapers on the end. That's pretty bold too. So we'll use that for my color on the outlines. I'm going to use this top left-hand color here, this kind of dark blue. We'll use that for the outlines. And then we need to decide where's the light source coming from. So I've talked about this in previous videos. Deciding where the light source comes from really helps you with your line weights and thinner lines are going to be closer to the light source as you move further away and have shadows. Those are where the heavier outlines are going to be. So I think, and I don't know why, just always seem to gravitate towards having the light source come in from this top right-hand corner. So we'll continue that theme here. And then I'm going to kind of zoom in here a little bit. So light source coming in here means thinner lines here, thicker as they come back here on this side. So now that we've got that kind of worked out, we can go ahead and start with our lines here, making sure that I've got the right brush size here. And like I said, thicker here, thinner as it comes up and around there. And then I'm just going to start to erase some of these overlaps. For my brush, I'm just using the standard Inker Streamline, same version of the brush that I'm using to ink with. Continue these lines down and around. Just erasing those overlaps as I go. Thicker there. And get this ball back in here for the end of the cap. Maybe a tapered line here for a little overlap. If I can erase this here, zoom in here so you can see a little bit better. Let's just redo this line completely. I'll just do a tapered line here. So we've got a little bit of an overlap there, kind of like where the fabric is bunched in on itself. There we go. And if you want even more of a taper, you can also just use your eraser to kind of taper those lines even more as you come back. So there we go. Let's go ahead now. And I think I'm going to make a new layer here. So making a new layer is going to allow me to kind of bring these lines around and not have to worry about overlapping because I can go back and erase anything that overlaps without having to worry about, like I did up here, hitting that other line that I've drawn. So I'm going to start drawing now on this new layer. And bring this in kind of heavy here around the back and then lighter here towards the front. And I didn't really overlap any of those, so don't really have to erase anything. But that's just kind of what I do just in case. Saves me some time later on if I've got to go back in there and do some erasing. So there's that. I'm going to bring this line down a little bit further here. Pull them back out here. Now I'm going to go ahead and work on the face, which I can go back to my previous layer here. So that way I can overlap here and then erase. It's again going back to the brush here. Bring that up and around. I'll make that line just one more time. Maybe smooth it out a little bit. There we go. And now these parts that I overlapped, I can erase really easy. And of course I just need to connect this back part where I didn't quite reach all the way to that line. All right, so there's that. We're good. Go ahead and do the eyes in here. Just draw a circle or an oval holding down. Then we'll lock it into a perfect circle. I can drag and drop my color in there. Once again, holding down with my other finger, holding down again for that perfect circle. Then I'm going to use my eraser and just erase a couple of highlights in here. Make that a little bit bigger on this side. And now I'm going to switch over just to my standard anchor here. I'm going to turn off that streamline version one just for these eyebrows. Find that making quick strokes like that works better when you don't have that streamline turned on. I'll just erase the ends of those. Okay, going back then to my streamline again. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here so we can see a little bit better and do the nose here. Kind of heavier down here on the bottom. The lighter there as it comes around to the top. Mouth here. Chin here underneath. A tapered line across there. And then do a few tapered lines here in the center of the nose just to kind of give that carrot feel here. There we go. Maybe erase that one a little bit. Too thick there. All right, so we've got the head done. Let's go ahead and move on to the scarf. Once again, switching back to my streamline. Bring the scarf down and around. It's getting kind of thicker here in the back and thinner as it comes down and around. A little thicker there in the front just because it's got the shadow kind of from the head there. There's that. Go ahead and do the scarf now. The ends of the scarf. Bring those up and around. Then we'll do the body. Once again, moving back here to my other layer so that I can erase. I can go over top here, you see, and then I can erase those overlaps. Went a little too far up with that one. Went back into my original layer there, so zoom in just a little bit farther so we can see it. There we go. All right, so we got the body in there. I also want to do some just ovals here for kind of the coal coming down the center. And having that line there in the center helps me kind of decide where those go and follow the perspective of this. Just going to erase some highlights here. All right, there we go. Go ahead and do the arms next. So just a couple lines here for the arms. I want to be just a tad bit thinner since it's towards the front here, towards the light source a little bit more. There we go. Then once again, this is where I talk about my sketching just being a loose kind of suggestion of where everything goes because, of course, this mitten is way up here now and I need to move it back. So I'm going to come up here to my selection tool. I'm just going to lasso that and grab my arrow to move that down just like that. All right, then coming up to layer three, then I'm going to use that for the mittens. Come in here, pull these around. Actually, I'm just going to have it flat here on the bottom, up into that, and then back down and around. Of course, we have to connect those. We got one mitten. Come over here and do the other one. There we go. Looks good. So there we go. We've got our basic outline done. I want to do a few extra things here. Let's add in some... Switching back to my standard anchor, let's add in some extra lines here around the scarf, kind of like it's overlapping. Draw some tapered lines in there like that. Some in there. A couple of little texture things back here for that ball. And then a couple of pricklies here around the hat, showing that it's kind of got that wool look to it. I did some of this on the previous videos I did for Christmas, if you guys watch those. There we go. And maybe a couple here on the scarf as well. All right, there we go. Okay, so that's our basic outline then. Let me go ahead and turn off the sketch layer. And then I'm going to pinch these together so we can merge those, so my lines now are all on one layer. So there is our outline. Next up, we're going to go ahead and color this guy in. So to start on our colors, what we're going to do is we're going to make a new layer here, and I'm going to drag and drop this below layer two. So now that this is down here, layer two, which is our lines layer, I'm going to go ahead and tap on this to bring up layers menu, and I'm going to set this to reference. So this is going to allow us to drag and drop our color flats onto layer three, using layer two as kind of that guide or reference of where everything goes to. So now that we've got that selected, we can go back to our layer three now, and we can pick our color palette again, open up our color wheel here. And the first color here, I'm going to use this kind of whitish blue. We'll just use that for the body and the face. We've got this pink color. Let's go ahead and use that for the hat. We've got this kind of peachish pink. Use that for that part of the hat and the gloves. Actually, no, let's use that for the scarf. Use that for the scarf, and then let's use that pink then for the gloves. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the background here now so we can see that we need some white in there. So I'm going to pick white here, use that for the ball, and then also use that for the highlights here inside the eyes. Get in a little bit closer so I can get these filled in without going outside of the lines. Then we also have the kind of reflections down here too on the coal, so we need to get those in there. All right, so it looks good. And then finally, we've got the orange for the carrot nose, and then I'll go ahead and turn the background back on now. And last but not least, we need the brown for the arms. I hit the line there. Make sure you don't hit the lines because then that screws up everything. So there we go. We've got it all filled in. Our color flats are done. Next up, let's go ahead and move on to the shadows and the highlights. So to do this, once again, we're going to come back up here to our layers menu. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer, and we're going to set this one to clipping mask. So we're going to tap this to bring up the layer menu and then hit clipping mask here. So this is going to allow us to color in our shadows and our highlights on a separate layer. It clips them to this layer here, which is our color flat, so we can't color outside of the lines. And since it's on another layer, it's non-destructive, so we can make changes to the opacity and we don't affect this layer down here. So I'm going to come back up here now to my colors, and I'm going to go to this blue right here. We're going to use that for our shadows. Now that I've got that selected, I'm going to come back to my standard anchor streamline. And like I said before, we've got the light source coming in from this way, so our shadows are going to fall on this backside. So I can start to kind of block in some shadows here, and this is not going to stay this blue color. So if you're watching this thinking, hey, this looks kind of weird, why would you go with that color for a shadow? We're going to drop the opacity of this later on. I just want to get a decent amount filled in here before we do that. So that is the idea behind using the blue. It's not going to stay that exact blue color. I've got that. I'm going to bring this down and around here. And you'll see I'm trying to kind of wrap this to that outline right there. I'm going to bring around kind of a swooping shadow here, just like that. That's going to be the shadow here on that folded over part of the hat. One thing I'm going to do now too is I'm going to come back up to my layers menu, and I'm going to turn off reference on this layer. So that's going to allow me to drag and drop colors onto this to fill it in. If I still had that reference turned on, it would just fill in that entire section, and we don't want that. Let me drag in some more shadows here. It's kind of following the curve of those outlines that I've done already. Down under the eye and back here underneath the mouth. Kind of follow the curve here of the head and then also the curve of the mouth here where they both meet at. Once I've got that, I can fill that in here. Bring another curve here like we did with the hat. Curve this one down to kind of follow the curve of the belly down here and the bottom. Then we'll curve that back and around there underneath the scarf. Then we just need to make sure that all these are connected here. Once we have all the lines connected, we can drag and drop that in, and it'll fill everything in at once. All right, there's that. Go ahead and fill in this glove back here, or the mitten. That should be good for right now. I'm going to come back in and do a little bit more with shadows here in a second, but first let's go ahead and adjust the opacity. Coming up here to the layers menu once again, I'm going to hit the N for blend mode, and I'm going to drop down the opacity. I think probably about 25, 28, somewhere around there. Looks pretty good. Make the decision based on whatever you think looks the best. I think that looks pretty decent there. Then I'm going to go ahead, like I said, and just add a couple more shadows in here. I'm going to pull in some more here around the eye on the right-hand side. A little shadow here underneath the carrot, down here on the bottom of that mitten, and some down here and around those pieces of coal coming down around the front. Okay, so one thing I've also talked about in my previous videos too is I don't like there to be a solid amount of shadow. Right here with this glove, it's completely shadowed. You can't really see that there is a shadow there because there's no two different values there. There's just that one solid value. If we come back in here now with the eraser and kind of erase some of that shadow, you can see it really allows the viewer to tell that there's a shadow there because there's two different values sitting next to each other now. Without those there, it just looks like one solid color and it makes it kind of hard to tell. So by erasing like this, you can get some of those values to pop a little bit more. Maybe even pull in a couple of tapered lines here on those. And then let's do the same thing up here, but I think with these, one thing I like to do sometimes too is erase along the edges so that the shadow then is just kind of a solid piece of its own there on the inside. And we can kind of do that here as well. Gives a kind of cool look there because it doesn't go and touch those lines. It just sits inside of the color flats. And then I'm gonna fill back in here. We can do the same thing here at the bottom of the head, bringing that around back up there. I'll let it touch here on the eyebrow, but I'll pull it down and around the eye just a tad bit. Bring it back a little bit there. If I use my eraser here and hold down for a circle, I can lock it in to get a little bit better around that eye. There we go. All right, so pulling back out there and that's what we're left with. I think that looks pretty cool. I like the overall feel of that. Now let's go ahead and go in here and start to add in some highlights. So same thing here. We're going to make a new layer and we're going to set this as clipping mask as well. Then we're going to come up to our colors panel and we're going to choose white for highlights. Once again, got the light source coming in from this way. So we'll bring in some highlights there. Just kind of erasing to fine tune them and get them a little thinner there. Bring that down and around the front like so. Maybe a little bit here on the glove or the mitten. Oval highlights there and then a little bit here on the front of that scarf. So that's it for the highlights there. Let's go ahead and go up to our layers menu then. Hit our blend mode and then drop the opacity down to about 60%. Looks good. And then from here, I want to do a secondary highlights layer so we can add some white to the actual snowman. The reason why I did two separate ones is because since this is almost a white for the body, it's not going to need as much of a drop in the opacity as this one. So we can't use the same highlight layer because we're going to need two different settings for opacity. So let me go ahead. I made a new layer here. We're going to set that to clipping mask as well. Then we can just go ahead and pull down some white here around the front. Same thing here around the belly here in the front. Do a couple of oval highlights there as well. And then we can drop the opacity of this, maybe just a tad bit. Nothing too crazy. Down to about 80. I think that looks pretty good. 80, 81. Looks pretty good there. And then I want to add one more highlight just on the top of the carrot here. Just get a thin one there, come across the top of the carrot. So, okay, that looks good. So that's our shadows. That's our highlights. Let's go ahead and add a background to this guy. So to do this, let's go ahead and go up to our layers menu. I'm going to come down to the very bottom here and I'm going to make a new layer. And then I'm going to go up to my colors panel again. And this first color right here, we'll go ahead and use that. Maybe just draw him like a kind of hill he's sitting on here, maybe. Do that and just fill that in. Bring it up a little bit more. All right, so that looks good. And then I'm going to go ahead and go down here and make another new layer. And this one up to my colors panel here, the second one over on the bottom row. Let's go ahead and use that, drop that in for the background color. And then once again, one more new layer. And I'm going to switch my brush. And I know it's not Christmas right now, but I did make a Christmas set of brushes back in November, December of last year. And these are totally free to download on Gumroad. I'll link them in the description below, but I've got all these different stamp brushes in here. And I'm going to go ahead and just use, let's do tree number three here. Feel free to do whatever you want if you want to pick a different one. And I'm just going to, oops, I need to, once again, make that new layer here and I need to switch over my color first. So this third one over here, I'm just going to stamp in some trees here, kind of along the edge there. And then I'm going to switch my color again to this darker one. And once again, I'm going to make one more new layer behind this one. So we've got these trees here, a new layer, and then the background layer on top or underneath there. Add in some more trees back here. There we go. I think that looks good. And then I think it looks a little bland right now in the background. So if you go down to our background layer right here, let's go ahead and go up to our colors palette and our colors panel and go to white. And then let's go ahead and let's just use airbrushing. Just use a soft airbrush here in the background. Just kind of lighten up that background a little bit in the center there as it comes out. So it's kind of got this glow around there. And then from there, I'm going to come back to my brush library and I'm going to go to, once again, my cartooning set and we'll just use standard anchor here. And then I'm just going to add some different snowflake dots around here. I've also got some snowflakes in that Christmas set. If you guys want to use actual snowflake shapes, you could do that too. Just kind of speed this up. I'm just going to use just these little dots for snowflakes. Once again, feel free to use whatever you would like to. Just varying my pressure on here to get different size snowflakes around there. So there's that. And then let's go ahead and add a little bit of shadow down here. So coming up to layer seven, then I'm going to make a new layer again. And coming up to my colors panel, I'm going to use that same color that we used for the shadows. And then I'm going to set this layer 11 to clipping mask and just draw kind of like an oval here coming from underneath him. Zoom in here so I've got a little bit more control. Let me switch this back to streamline. There we go. Drag and drop and fill that in. And then from here, once again, coming back up to my layers menu and dropping the opacity down to about 19. And then I'm also going to choose some white here. Just kind of add some white along the front here. Just have this kind of tapered in towards that edge there. You can also just add some little dots around here. You can also add in, if you want to, some blue here and kind of add in some little snow textures around here. Just like that. And then the last thing I want to do is I want to erase this here the way that I did the rest of the shadows and highlights there. So that kind of separates that shadow here from the ground too. So having that pull up like that is going to keep it a little separated. All right. So there we go. I'm going to go ahead, final thing, make a new layer here. Grab my outline color. Zoom in and assign this. And there we go. We've got a cute little snowman for the cold winter that we're having. All the snow everybody's getting right now. So hopefully you guys enjoyed today's tutorial. If you did, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and also hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. Also, if you guys do any of the tutorials, if you make any designs based on these and you share them online, definitely tag me. I want to see what you guys are working on and what you're able to come up with. So if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell. Or if you're on Facebook, I also have a group over there where you can post these designs or really just any artwork you're working on. It's called Keep Creating a Group for Artists by Artists. I'll link it down in the description below. A place where you can share designs, like I said, based on these or just anything that you are currently working on. I'm sure everybody would love to see it. You can give feedback. You can get feedback. You can meet new friends. It's an awesome place to be. I want you guys to be a part of it as well. So that's it for today's video. Once again, I appreciate you guys watching and until next time, keep creating.