Children's Book Illustration Style With Procreate & iPad: Let's Draw a Lion!

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute lion using the iPad, Procreate, and my new children's book illustration pack for Procreate. It's all in real time too, no time lapse, no edit. So if you want to draw along step by step with me, keep watching. All right, so let's go ahead and draw a lion. Starting out, I'm going to use one of my Instatexture canvases. These are part of my new children's book illustration pack for Procreate. You can get on Gumroad. And for this tutorial, we're going to use the watercolor RGB canvas. This one's the regular res 2250 by 2700. Probably going to have a lot of layers here. So having the smaller res gives us more available layers in Procreate. And if you missed the previous videos about this pack, it comes with 10 different Instatexture canvases. Starts out as a texture group up here. As soon as you open a new canvas, you've already got four layers used up. Because as soon as you draw down here below those layers, it instantly reveals textures, does some heavy lifting for you, makes a really interesting design, and adds a lot of character to your work. So those are available now. And it also comes with a set of brushes. So two for the price of one. And we're going to be using a lot of these brushes in today's tutorial as well. If you don't have this pack and want to hop over to Gumroad, grab it. Super cheap. It's only seven bucks. If you don't want to do that, if you just want to find other brushes to use in Procreate, feel free to do that. You just won't have the texture to go along with it. And the brushes are probably going to look different. So I've got the color palette pre-made. Once again, if you want to download this, follow along with the exact same colors that I'm using in today's tutorial. You can grab this for free over on my website bjdell.com underneath the YouTube reference materials page, I'll link that in the description below. There's also a video on that page that walks you through how to install that too, if you have problems. And if you don't have Procreate, if you don't have an iPad, you can still follow along with this and just grab a piece of paper and a pencil and some pens, markers, colored pencils, whatever you got, follow along. So let's get started. To begin with, I'm just going to go ahead and use black. I don't have this down in the color palette, but any color you go to, just the very bottom here is going to be black. And we're going to use that to sketch. To begin with, I'm going to use the illustration liner to do my sketch. And we need to make sure we're on the art goes here layer or below that texture group. So to begin with, I'm just going to start out with... I'm going to drop the opacity of this. I'm going to start out with just an oval here. Usually start out my sketches with some pretty basic shapes. And instead of doing just a straight up and down character looking at us, we do the cross lines here for the face. I think instead of doing that, we're going to have him kind of have his head kind of cocked to the side here. So we draw a line here to kind of give us an idea where the center is going to be. And then the middle here, going below the middle, I want to draw a line that comes outside of that circle or that oval. That's going to be where we kind of base our main off of. So now that we've got that, if we go ahead and just kind of follow this down here, we can extend these middle lines here. We'll just connect these kind of in a triangle for that bottom of the main here. And then for the top, kind of pull these up and across here at that center line and then back down here. Get a really nice big head here. Big main. And I'm going really sloppy now. So if you followed my tutorials before, you know, I'm super sketchy when I start stuff out. But that's OK. I really advise you to be super loose and organic when you're starting to get ideas. Worry about fixing everything later once you start going in and finalizing the design. The sketch stage should be loose. It should look pretty crappy. So it's going to look kind of rough for a little bit. Now that we've got that done, let's go ahead and add the ears in here. So we just add in a couple of ovals here. Then we can kind of split these with a line, kind of have those coming out of the fur of the main right there. We'll have our ears right there. Now we need to get the face in here. So to do this, what we want to do is kind of make a duplicate of this outer shape here in the center. So starting here, we'll just go ahead and pull up a line. We're just kind of replicating the flow of those lines on the outside here on the inside. Just connect this down to where that circle meets down there. Then use that line for the circle there at the top to kind of break that and bring it back together. So that looks pretty good there. Next up, using this line that we made here, we can use that for the nose. So if we draw that darker and then bring this down into kind of a triangle there. That will be our nose. From here, we can kind of bring the snout up into the forehead part there, just kind of with a curved line on each side. So it starts out wider here and gets narrower as it comes there into the center. And then we can bring the snout here kind of off the nose and outside of that circle just a tad bit. So it'll be... Actually, it'll follow the circle more than being outside. It'll be outside the center part of the face. You can bring that mouth in down there. I'm going to kind of extend this down a little bit further here. All right. So there we go. For the eyes, I think I want to keep these fairly simple. So if we just go ahead and let me just do some basic ovals here for the eyes. Maybe down a little bit closer and further down. I think that'll be pretty cute there. And that's going to be about it for the head. Then we can kind of fill these in. For the body, let's just keep this pretty plain and simple. So just a couple of curved lines there for the body coming down. Yeah, kind of funky line here for the tail. Bring the tail in there. And then maybe just having the body have a different colored belly right there. All right. And that's going to be pretty much it for the sketch of the lion itself. I do want to add a background to this, but we're just basically going to use color flats and a lot of these other brushes from that children's book illustration set. So we're not going to outline anything. We're going to use color flats and then go in and add some shadows and some highlights and a lot of different textures to kind of build up this design. So I don't really want to go in here and start kind of figuring out a background right now. We can do that here in a little bit since it's not going to be outlined. So let's go ahead and start working on the colors for the lion next. So to do this, let's go ahead and come up to our layers menu. And I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer. Now, usually if I'm outlining here and I'm adding inks, I'll draw on top of the lines layer here, the sketch layer. I'll drop the sketch opacity down here and then draw on top. But this is going to be a little bit different because we're adding color flats. And when I do that and I don't do outlines, I drag the color flats layer underneath. So the sketch layer is actually going to be on top this time. Now that we've got that done, I'm going to come up here to my color palette. I'm going to choose this yellow to start out with. Coming back to my brush library, I'm going to go ahead and choose the rough edge painter. And I'm going to tap this again. And I'm going to go ahead and turn streamline all the way up. So you get some nice smooth lines when we start blocking in these colors. So now that I've got that done, once again, I'm on this bottom layer. I'm just going to start adding in the colors here for the face. So we'll just bring the lines down and around. And I'm not worried too much about making sure that I trace exactly what I've got on that sketch layer because I'm going to go back in and I'm going to clean this up here in a second. So as long as I've got it in the general area, that's good enough. From here, we can go ahead and do the ears. We'll get those in there and drop that in. And that's going to be about it for that layer. Let's come back up here to our layers menu again, make a new layer. We're going to drag and drop this one behind. And as I started filling that in, hopefully you can kind of see that watercolor texture popping up now. For this, we're going to use the orange. Once again, this is the bottom layer now that we just made. And we'll just bring these lines down and around, connecting those and connecting these. Drag and drop. And there we go. From here, let me go ahead and turn off the sketch layer and turn off the Instatexture canvas. You can see now what this looks like before and after and just how much that actually adds to the design. Really starting to add some character in there as compared to just the basic color flats here. That's the beauty of the Instatexture canvases. All right. From here, let's turn back on the sketch layer. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer now. And I'm going to drag this on top of layer seven. Up here, the color palette. I'm going to choose this third color over this very kind of cream color. And for this, let's go ahead and do the bottom snout here for this. Bring those lines up. And these are going to be behind. This part here is going to be behind the nose. I'm not worried about making that perfect. I just want to connect them and fill those in. And then I'm going to go ahead and make another layer. I'm going to drag this below. And this is going to be that bottom lip here, bottom part of the mouth. This is being on a separate layer is going to help us when we go in and actually add the shadows and highlights here. All right. And then let's go ahead and layer seven here. Let's make a new layer. It's going to be for the inside of the ears. And I'm going to set this to clipping mask. So clipping mask is great because it allows us to draw on this separate layer, but it was only going to show up the color that we have selected on this layer with anything that's colored in on this layer. So since the orange is on a separate layer, we can color inside these ears here and it's not going to go outside this yellow. It's not going to touch that orange. So I can go ahead and draw this and you can see I'm coloring down here and it's not showing up because of that clipping mask setting. It's got the inside of the ears colored in. So that looks good. Coming back up to our layers menu. Now I'm going to come up to layer nine and make a new layer. This is going to be the nose and the eyes coming up to my colors. Then I'm going to go to brown selecting that. Then just go ahead and get our eyes in there. Bring our nose around, drag and drop to fill that in. So that looks good. Next up, we need to get this piece in here done. So once again, coming down here to layer seven, I'm going to make a new layer here. Since we had this one set as clipping mask already, as soon as we make a layer underneath that, it's automatically going to set this one as clipping mask too. So we're going to come back up to our colors palette, choose that cream color again. Once again, we're on that layer there and bring down the snout into the nose. Drag and drop to fill that in. And then from here, I'm just going to go ahead and turn off my sketch layer and see how everything looks. I think the lines look pretty good. This orange main part here on the right hand side, I might fix that here just a tad bit. Zoom in just a little bit here. Just want this to meet a little bit nicer there on the corner. And same thing up here. Just have these meet a little bit more of an angle there. All right. I think that's pretty good. So we're going to zoom back out now. I'm going to go ahead and turn back on my sketch layer and we'll go ahead and do the body next. So I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to drag this down underneath layer eight. This is the very bottom now. Coming back up to my color palette, I'm going to choose the yellow that we used for the face. We'll use that for the body as well. Get that in there. Connect these across. Drag and drop our color. Once again, coming back up to our color palette and go into the cream color. Go ahead and use that then for that belly part here. Now these are going to be pretty close to the same color. So if I drag and drop, it's going to color in everything. I can change the color drop threshold then to bring it down so it doesn't color in absolutely everything. From here, let's go ahead and do the tail next. So keep the tail on the same layer there. Let's go ahead and grab the brown color for the line for the tail. And then we'll come back up for the orange. And I think I'll go ahead and put this on the different layer. We'll put this on the same layer as the head here. Keep those oranges on the same layer. All right, so there we go. And that's going to be the basic color flats for the lion. Like I said, we're not going to worry about the background just yet. Turning off the sketch layer there, you can see what we're left with. So now it's time to jump in and actually add all the shadows and highlights and textures that are going to be so much fun. So to do this first, I think we're going to start actually where we're at right now. Let's just go ahead and work on the mane first, this layer eight. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer again. And from here, I'm going to go ahead and go back up to my color palette. And I'm going to choose this dark brown. We'll start to add in some textures into the mane. First texture, I think, let's go ahead and use these engraving lines. I think this will actually work pretty good. Once again, this new layer 15. And I'm just going to bring these down. First off, though, I've got to set this layer 15 as clipping mask. We want to keep it inside. You saw when I first made that line, it was up here in the white. Now it keeps it just in the orange. So I'm going to bring these lines down and kind of follow the way that the mane goes. And you're going to see some of these will probably overlap. And it'll kind of add in a little bit more textures as I'm going. Let me go ahead and start moving the canvas here around. This might be a little annoying at first to watch. But this actually, the brush is going to follow the way your canvas is and the way your stroke is. So if I move the canvas as I turn, I've got better control over the direction of the lines. Just kind of bring these around, turning everything as it curves. And so some of these overlaps, then they kind of add that extra texture. See, like right there, right there. And add in some more as we go back around and kind of fill in. It gives a kind of cool technique here. Pulling from the center there. All right. So I think that looks pretty good. From here, though, it's a little bit dark. I don't like them that dark. So let's go ahead and go up to our layers here. We're going to hit the N for the blend mode. We're going to drop down the opacity of that quite a bit. Down to about 20%. Looks pretty good. We just kind of want the effect of that kind of peeking through. Don't want it overtaking everything. So we've got that in. Let's go ahead and make another new layer and add another texture on top of there. So let's go back up to our brush menu here for the library. And let's go ahead and use the fur tapers. So one thing with the different brushes in here, some of these I've got labeled as grain scale. If it's labeled as grain scale, that means that the slider over here for size and procreate is not going to affect the size of the actual brush. The grain scale, once you click on the brush itself, go into the brush studio, you have to go to grain to then change the size of these tapers that show up. So if you see any of the brushes that say grain scale on it, that is why, because you need to have that set in the brush studio. So let's go ahead and set this layer then to clipping mask. Once again, to keep everything inside that orange. Just go ahead and add some of these fur textures here. Then we can go ahead and drop the opacity of this too by going to our layers menu, hitting N for blend mode again, and just dropping this. I want these to be a little bit darker than that first set of lines that we did. So I think I'm just going to go about 65%. Looks pretty good there. So we've got that done. That looks good. Next up, let's go ahead and add some of that texture here to the bridge of the nose as well. So if we go here, instead of doing clipping mask here, I'm just going to do it directly on this layer to save some layers. So the difference between clipping mask and alpha lock is you can do alpha lock on the same layer. So what this does though, is it does it on top of what you've got here. It's destructive. So if I wanted to go back in and change that blend mode here, it's going to change the blend mode of everything. So I can't adjust just these strokes that I'm going to do next, but I think that's okay because we'll have a little bit more control over these. So let's go ahead and how about we go to vertical hatchings here and let's go ahead and keep opacity down quite a bit. I'm going to zoom in this around because it's going to follow the direction of the canvas and the stroke. So there we go. We've got those kind of coming up there. And then we can do the same thing here on the snout, kind of add some there at the top of the snout. So if we set this one, once again, to alpha lock, you can kind of hit these around the top of the snout and then we'll get the belly down here too. So if we go up to the layers menu, go down to layer 14 here, we can just kind of hit some of those. They're really light in the belly. Just kind of brings that out a little bit more. So, all right, that looks good. See, we've got a couple of these extra strokes from the main here and the tail since those were on the same layer, but I think that's okay. We'll just leave those in there as well. So from here, I think that's pretty much it for the textures on the fur stuff that I want to do. And it will go to overboard and do it everywhere. So I think next up, we're going to start adding in some shadows and some highlights in here. So first off, I need to kind of decide where the light source is coming from. And I think on this one, I'll have it coming from the top right hand corner. So we'll have kind of highlights here on this side and then shadows over here on this side. So let's go ahead then and starting with the main, let's go ahead and see what layer we're on here. Let's go up to layer 16, which is that fur taper layer. I'm going to make another new layer here and we'll set this to clipping mask. I'm going to come up to my brush or my color palette here. Let's go ahead and use this yellow here for the highlights. And then for the brush, I'm not sure what I want to use. Let's try wet wash watercolor first. I'll try that one and see how that's going to look here. I think that looks okay. So we're going a little bit heavier here towards the front and then kind of lightening up pressure as we go in towards the inside there. I've got the opacity turned down quite a bit here. So I've got a little bit more control there. And then since this is on a separate layer, I can go ahead and drop the opacity of this to kind of have a little bit more control. So that's the beauty of alpha lock there. If I had the beauty of clipping mask, if I had this on alpha lock, I couldn't adjust the opacity because it would adjust the opacity of the orange main as well. So now that I've got that, let's go ahead and go in with this orangish color here and kind of add in some shadows along the back here. Don't want to go too heavy because the watercolor here, you can tell the actual canvas is adding in quite a bit of a darker shadows to that already. So let me go ahead then. And from here, I'm going to switch. I want to kind of bring in a shadow around the main. So it looks like it's kind of three-dimensional coming away from the face. And to do this, I think I'm going to use the sloppy shader highlighter first. Get this size kind of worked in here. Maybe about a 5% here. Drop the opacity down here to about 40. Once again, I want to do this real light because I don't want this to get too dark. Drop the size a little bit more here on the side and bring it up around here too. All right. And if it gets a little bit too heavy here, what you can do is come in here with the smudge tool. Come and do that sloppy shader highlighter there. We can kind of smudge it in to blend it a little bit more so it doesn't look like a heavy, hard drawn line there. And you just pull that around like that. And that looks good. Then I think I'm going to do the same thing here where the ears are. Just kind of darken in that part around there. And then go back in with the smudge. Kind of smudge that up a little bit there as well. And that looks good. So all right. Let's get the shadows and highlights on the ears next. So if we go to layer seven here. Up to you now what you want to do. I've got a lot of layers here, but I've also got an iPad Pro. If you're running out of layers, you can start using AlphaLock instead of using Clipping Mask. Totally up to you and how many layers you can get on this. I'm going to go ahead and I'll just use AlphaLock on this one since it's a fairly small area. I'm going to use the bright yellow here for the highlight. We'll do that on the ear. Once again, I'm using that sloppy shader highlighter. Kind of trace them around the edge of that ear to bring out that highlight. And going back in and just kind of smudging it just a tad bit to blend it. Just like that. Now, let's go ahead and since we're up here on the ears, let's do the inside of the ears now. So layer 11. This one, I'm going to use Clipping Mask for this, but if you want to use AlphaLock, it's up to you. This I want to be able to adjust the opacity on, so that's why I'm going to use Clipping Mask. And then for this, let's try this reddish orange here. I'm not sure if that's the one I want to use or not yet. So we'll just go ahead, sloppy shader again. Kind of pull in a shadow there inside that ear just to make it a little bit more three-dimensional. A little bit heavier there towards the top and then lighter as you come in towards the bottom. I'm going to come back up then to my layers menu, hit the N for blend mode, and just drop down the opacity a little bit because I don't want it too dark. Just gives me a little bit better control. All right, so there we go. We've got that. Looks good. Let's go ahead and work on the face here now. So layer seven, I'm going to go ahead now. I'm pretty much done here with the bridge, I think. Actually, no, let's do the bridge next before because I want to start to combine these. As I do a shadow down here, it's easier to match up the shadow if these are on the same layer, but I still want to add a little bit more into the bridge here, I think. So let's work on that first. So layer 13, the bridge. Once again, I'm going to make a new layer here. It's already set as clipping mask. And for the color here, let's go ahead and stick with that same reddish brown, I think, and then sloppy shader highlighter. Once again, just going to kind of bring in a little fade here from the nose up that bridge. Now that we've got that, adjust the opacity just a tad bit, and then we can go ahead and group these if you want to to save. So now those are on one, and we can also then group the face and the bridge. So those are on one. Let's add in the same effect here to the snout here and the bottom lip here. Starting with the bottom lip, I'm just going to go ahead and alpha lock it and do it on this one. I'm just going to bring in the shadow here. So it draws that out, makes it look a little bit more three-dimensional. It separates that bottom one from that top part of the snout. That's why we put these on a separate layer. So there we go. And then we'll do the same thing here for layer nine. Let's just go ahead. And this one's already alpha locked. Go ahead and bring in the shadow here. This one though, it's alpha locked, and it's already got those lines on it. So this one I am going to do on a new layer and set as clipping mask because I want a little bit more control over this here in a second. So we'll fade that in. Once again, a little heavier there at the beginning. We don't want too dark though because we don't want it to blend into the nose. So that's kind of the back and forth you've got to use with this is not getting too dark. That's where you lose that separation. We'll bring that around and in some more back here too. It's kind of building it up. Now that we've got that, we can come in here with the smudge tool. And that's why I wanted this on a separate one was to have control over that smudge. Because if it was all in the same right now, I would be smudging all those little fur strokes as well. I don't want to do that. All right. So that looks good. Got that kind of built up and out. Let's go ahead. Once again, I'm going to go in with this pink now and using that same sloppy shader highlighter. I'm pulling some pink there as well. Kind of soften that up a little bit. We'll pull some more here at the top too. Even though I've got these all on one now. As long as I stay in there in the center, it's going to look okay. All right. So that looks good. The same pink. I'm going to go ahead and do it on layer seven here, the face. Do some pink here around the cheeks. Just kind of brighten those up a little bit too. All right. That looks good. And then also here on the bottom part of the mouth. Or not the bottom part, but the side parts here. I'm going to come in one more time here with this orange-ish red or the reddish brown. We'll use the wet wash watercolor this time here. And I'm just going to hit along this bottom part here. All right. Just to build that up a little bit more there. That looks good. Now let's do the same thing here to the belly to make that pop a little bit more. So if I come down here to layer 14, we'll just build this up just a little bit. It's got a little bit of extra color in there. All right. There we go. Now moving down here, then we can go ahead and build up some color and some shadows here on that bottom body layer, layer 14. So with that same reddish orange, we do need to set this to alpha lock though. Get the shadow there. And then also here coming underneath the mane. And then coming back up here to our colors, switch in here to the yellow. Can knock in highlight here and do the watercolor first here. Went over the tail there. I didn't want to. So do the watercolor here first. Then I go back in with that sloppy shader and hit there a little bit more than going back in with the smudge tool to kind of blend it in a little bit there on the side. All right. So that looks good. Next up, let's see what else we need to do. Nose and the eyes. So let's go back up here to this cream color and we're going to use the rough edge painter here coming up to our brushes and then up here to the nose and eyes layer. It's the one right underneath the sketch layer. That's what we're going to draw directly on here. We can set that to alpha lock and kind of zoom in here a little bit. We'll get a couple of reflections here going on. So just a couple of ovals and then a reflection here across the nose. There we go. All right. That looks good. Next up, let's get a little bit of shadow here underneath where that main is. So if we go back down here, layer seven, make a new layer and we're going to go ahead and this one's already set to clipping mask. We're going to go up here to our colors menu and we're going to choose, let's go ahead and choose the brown this time. Coming back up here to our color, our brush library. I'm going to go ahead and use textured shader for this one and adjusting the opacity here. We'll just add in a little bit of a shadow coming down underneath that and then dropping the opacity a little bit there. And then same thing here on the side. Just pull a little bit over here and down. Once again, going back up to our smudge tool, I'm going to go to that textured one again. I'm just going to smudge that out a little bit. All right. And that looks good there. Next up, we've got to do the whiskers. I almost forgot about that. So if we go ahead and go to layer 12 again, that's the eyes and the nose layer. Going up here to the illustration liner, just go ahead and knock these in here real quick. Maybe. I've got that set as alpha lock. So we need to take alpha lock off. Now we can draw again. Get my opacity turned back up here. Just kind of get some funky whiskers going out of here. Instead of doing straight ones, just do them like this. So they're more fun. I think that looks good. Zooming in here then, I'll do these little kind of tapered lines where they're coming out of the snout there. And then from here, I kind of want to make those pop a little bit more and give a highlight to those. So if I come up here to my yellow or let's do the cream color here on the top line. Setting this back as alpha lock again. I'm just going to kind of hit the edges of these. They come up and around. Just the parts that overlap here with the orange, just so those are kind of more separated and have that highlight effect. That one was a little wonky. All right, there we go. So those look a little bit more three-dimensional now. We can do the same thing to the tail as well. So that was on layer 14. So we can bring the tail around and have some highlights there on the tail. Do one here in the center too. Okay, so there we go. The rest of the tail there, we need to finish that. So that's on layer eight with the orange. And I'm going to go back here to, let's see. Layer 15 was the lines there. So let's use that again using the engraving lines. Using our brown, let's go ahead and add some lines there on the tail. And then I want to add some highlights there as well. You can see this section of the watercolor insta texture canvas is a little bit darker. So that orange looks a little bit more reddish here. So we need to kind of lighten that up a tad. So I'm going to make a new layer here on top of the orange. And I'm going to switch my brush to the rough edge. Let's do sloppy shader. And we'll hit the edge of this. Kind of lighten that up. And then I'm also going to lighten the back just a tad bit. Because like I said, it's really, really almost like that reddish color. So there we go. And if we want to adjust the opacity of that, we can kind of drop it down a little bit so it's not super, super bright. And there we are. So I think that looks pretty good. The line itself is pretty well done here. The only other thing I can see is maybe a shadow here underneath that bottom lip. Pulling back out, noticing that. So if we go to layer seven, going into that red. And just using that sloppy shader again. Pulling a little bit of a shadow there underneath to make that pop a little bit more. And then going back in and blending just a tad bit there. I think that looks better. All right. So there we go. Let's go ahead now and actually get a background added into this guy to finish him off. So to do this, come up here to our layers menu. Pretty much done with the line. If you're sure that you're done, if you want to pinch everything together, you want to merge everything, feel free. Because we're still going to use a few more layers for this next part. So coming back down here to the bottom, I'm going to make a new layer. And I'm going to drag this down to the bottom underneath layer 14. Coming up here to the colors palette, I'm going to choose this first green color. So we're blocking in a pretty big area. Once again, use the rough edge painter for that. And let's do some type of ground thing here. We just do maybe like a little hill thing. That'll work. That drag and drop. So there we go. Got a background started. Back up to our layers. Let's make another new layer here. And let's add some grass or something back here. Let's drag this down underneath layer 21, which was our ground. And coming back up here, let's go to this darker green. And for this, we've got grass down here. Actually, let's use the ground texture here. And that's huge. Actually, I kind of like that. If we keep that and just drop it down, it almost looks like reeds popping up there in the back. I think that's kind of cool. That'll work. And then from here, let's go ahead and get a color in this background. So if we make a new layer here, drag this to the bottom. And back up to our colors palette. And this very bottom row, the only color there, we'll use that as our background color. Kind of greenish yellow. And then from here, I think we need something at the top. Maybe like some trees or leaves or something. So I do have leaves in this, so we can go ahead and use those. I've got tree leaves and plant leaves. So for this one, we'll use tree leaves. And to start out, let's go ahead and use the dark green first. And with the tree leaves, these, number one, will go the direction that your canvas is facing. And then also, the harder you press down, the bigger the leaf. The lighter you press down, the smaller the leaf. So you kind of have control over where these go and how they look. So I'm going to kind of zoom in here and start to build up these leaves around. I'm going to do a lot of kind of zooming and moving. So this might be bad for people that are prone to motion sickness, because this is going to kind of be all over the place here. But this, honestly, the technique that I'm using here is the easiest way to do this. And of course, if you were drawing in all these leaves by themselves, it would probably take you quite a bit. So even though this might seem a little annoying or a little trial and error, it's still going to save you more time than trying to do all this by hand. So we've got the leaves there in the top. And I think we can go ahead and add another thing of leaves on top of here. If we use the light green, these will appear more like they're in the foreground. And the darker ones will appear more like they're in the background. So that's a good trick to use. If you're trying to do a perspective and do an area closer to the viewer and further away, that's a good technique to use is to use a lighter color on top of a darker color like this. You can do that with mountains. You can do it with trees. There's a lot of different ways to get the same effect. I'm just trying to connect all these so the overlap looks good. They don't cut off any of the other ones. Again, I said kind of trial and error, just making sure that the effect you're looking for is what you achieve there. That one kind of cut off a little bit too much right there. So try to do that one again. There we go. More here on the side. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. So we've got the leaves up in the top. We've got the grass and those kind of reeds down in the background. And from here, we can start to add a little bit more textures and highlights and whatnot to these background elements. So if we start off here with the reeds, let's go ahead and do those first. So layer 22, I'm just going to go ahead and alpha lock these. And then using that yellow again, I'm going to come in here with, let's go ahead and use the, let's use the rough edge painter. Kind of pull down the yellow highlights down here on those edges. Since we've got this alpha locked, it's staying inside that color of the reeds. All right, now that we've got those, I can go ahead and go up to my smudge tool, rough edge painter again, and just kind of work in. I'm going to smudge these so they're not as bright and it doesn't look like they're as drawn. It'll look a little bit more painting, painterly style painted. The opacity is turned down quite a bit on this. So if I turn that up, it's going to smudge more. I wasn't getting the exact technique that I wanted. There we go. So you can see how those take on a really three-dimensional look there using this. All right, there we go. Maybe hit this bottom one too. I missed that one. Now we can come up here and do the same thing to the leaves. With this one though, I think I'm going to use the darker green instead. So we use that and I just hit these to kind of bring them out. Let's come to our leaf layer here. You'll see here, I'm just working on this backside. Once I've gotten a few in there, I'll kind of start to bring this out and around so you can see. Technically, I should have done the second layer of leaves on a separate layer because now it's wanting to blend in everything together. So if I pull out too far, it's going to bring that lighter green down there into the bottom and I don't want that. So these are going to have to stay more towards the top of the leaves. Let's kind of redo this here so I can change the starting point. Yes, these were just bringing up from the top here. If you can fade them down. But this gives it a three-dimensional feel. You can kind of see that the leaves are separate. Now they're not the exact blob that they were before. You can just build these up as you go around. And this works really well too with that watercolor. Underneath, it even adds more texture to it. And you can kind of see how well that all works out. So this will just be continued here across the rest of these. This, I'm not going to take a ton of time perfecting just because I think you kind of get the idea behind it. This is one of those areas too where I kind of like to keep these tutorials fairly short. I know they're longer than a lot of YouTube tutorials. But at the same time, I'm sure that each and every one of you has probably spent, you know, 10, 15, 20, maybe 30 or 40 hours on one design. So I'm obviously not able to do a 20 or 30 hour video making everything 100% perfect. I try to get everything as good as possible in the time that I think is enough that people will get the value out of it. Also not get bored and tune out. I don't want to make them unwatchable. But at the same time, I like to make sure that I don't use time lapses and you get to see the full process so you don't miss out on anything. So there we go. That's the leaves. I don't think it really needs anything on the back of them. And that's going to be it, I think. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a new layer here to sign it. Switch over to my illustration liner. Get this guy signed here at the bottom. All right. And there we go. A cute lion using my new children's book illustration pack. Hopefully you guys liked today's video. If you did, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. If you guys do take part in any of these tutorials, do a design based on them, and you post them online. If you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell. Really want to see what you guys are making with them. Also, if you're on Facebook, you can join the Keep Creating a Group for Artists by Artists group over there. So I will link that in the description below. It's a place where you can share your work based on these tutorials or really just anything you're currently making. We love to see what everybody's doing. So definitely hop on over and share your work and give feedback. Get feedback. Meet new people. It's an awesome place to be and want you to be a part of it as well. And that is it for today's video. Once again, thanks for watching and until next time, keep creating.