Let's Draw a Holiday Gnome: iPad & Procreate Tutorial + Free Holiday Brushes!

It's that time of year again, the holidays, which can only mean one thing. Santa Claus? No. Menorahs? No. Gifts? No, no, and no. This time of the year means gnomes. These little guys are absolutely everywhere. They get more and more popular every year, so I thought, why not draw one today using the iPad and Procreate? Gnomes are the topic of today's video, and as always, it's all in real time too. No time lapse, no edit. So, if you wanna follow along step-by-step with me and draw a gnome, keep watching. All right, guys, so let's go ahead and draw a holiday gnome. Starting out, I'm using a little different canvas size today. Usually, I use a square. Today, though, because we've got the long hat on the gnome, I wanna double the height of my canvas, so I'm using a 2,000 by 4,000 pixel canvas. It's a RGB canvas, and for my color palette, once again, I've got this pre-made, so if you wanna follow along the exact same colors that I'm using in today's tutorial, you can download this for free from my website. You just go to bjdell.com underneath my YouTube reference materials page. You'll find this along with the video at the top that kinda walks you through how to install it into Procreate. And for my brush, I'm gonna be using my cartooning pack for Procreate. It's available on Gumroad. To start out sketching, we're just gonna use the cartoon sketch pencil to begin with, so let's go ahead and get started. I'm just basically gonna start out with some simple shapes on the first sketch, and then we'll probably go back on the second sketch then to kinda clean things up. So just an oval right here. This is gonna be the nose of the gnome, and then we'll do another oval down here, kinda map out where that beard's gonna go, and then the rest of this empty space is gonna be for that hat, so I'm just gonna kinda pull a triangle up here for the hat, coming back down towards the beard, and then we'll pull another triangle off here for where that hat kinda folds and comes back, and then another oval right there for that end little pom-pom, a fluff, and then down here, just a couple ovals off to the side for where the feet are gonna go, and that's gonna be the basic sketch. These gnomes are pretty simple, but this is even more basic than what we really wanna do, so we're gonna fine-tune this, and we're gonna do a sketch on top of this. Sometimes I will use this in my work if I wanna start out with something just to kinda get the flow of everything. I'll go back in, add a new layer on top of this first layer, and then I'm gonna go ahead and hit the N for blend mode on the bottom layer. We're just gonna drop down the opacity of this. Wanna see it, but not too dark. Now we're gonna start sketching then on this top layer, starting out with that nose again. You'll see I'm just going in here a little bit darker this time, and then with this beard, you're gonna see I'm gonna start to kinda bring some whiskers out here, and the flow of the beard is gonna kinda take shape. Just using that basic shape that I had initially just as my guideline to help me kinda see where everything's gonna go. I'm gonna stay pretty close to that, but it doesn't have to be exact by any means. Do a couple lines here where that beard meets the nose there. Here we'll go ahead and pull these feet around. Just doing a couple curve lines coming in there from the center, pulling out towards the edges of the canvas. Couple of tapered lines there for the top of that foot. Kinda some overlaps, and then pulling it back up into the leg. We're not gonna see the arms or hands or anything like that, so we're gonna leave that alone. That's one of the kinda characteristics for a lot of these gnomes in the style. Here then, let's go ahead and work on the hat, and I'm just gonna, once again, just add some kinda details in here. So we'll add some overlapping parts, just some more kinda twists and turns as this thing comes up, just to make it a little bit more interesting and not so basic. Let me pull this down more at an angle here. Just kinda some overlaps and twists there. That little fluff right there. Then bring up this side, just sorta like that. So there we go. That's gonna be the sketch that we're gonna base our inks off of. So now that we've got that done, let's go ahead and come back up here to our layers menu, and I'm gonna go ahead and just slide this bottom one to the left and delete that. And now for this one, we're going to tap that end button again to bring up the blend mode, drop the opacity of this one down, and then go up here, make a new layer, and this is gonna be our inking layer. So for this then, I'm gonna go ahead and switch my brush over, coming up here to my brush library, still inside that cartooning pack. I'm gonna go ahead and use my standard Inker Streamline brush right here. And then I wanna decide where the light source is coming in from. This is gonna help me with line weights. Anything closer to the light source is gonna have thinner lines. Anything further away is gonna have thicker, darker lines. So I think I'll have the light source coming in here from this top right-hand corner. So thin lines here, thicker down here in the back. And we'll go ahead and start just with the nose here. Get this done. Just holding down, kinda locks it in to that perfect oval there. And then we'll start back here. Now you'll see, I'm gonna zoom in so you can see how I get these really nice tapered lines. And I'm gonna pull in some lighter lines here at the top, and I'm gonna go heavier down here at the bottom, just because that's where the shadow's gonna come in from the actual line of where those meet up. Some tapered lines there. Just kinda cleaning up where those attach there. And then thicker down here. And just kind of repeating this process as I go back and forth. Moving as I go so I can see where I'm going. Then if I go overlapping there, I can use my eraser, just using that same Streamline eraser, and just kinda clean up some of those overlaps there. Just pulling around as I go. Kinda heavier one down here at the bottom. Back up there towards the top. And with these tapered lines, if you wanna get it sharper, if you just go back in with the eraser, you can kinda pull on the edges of these so you get an even thinner taper. And to get that taper, it's really just pressure sensitivity. So you'll kinda have to train your hand as far as when you should apply pressure, when you should let up. And as you're letting up pressure, you kinda pull your hand off of the screen. Just gonna keep bringing these lines around. And to really dial these in, I really kinda suggest zooming in quite a bit as you do this. So you can get in really nice and close and make sure that those lines are looking pretty sharp. Making sure you kinda pull back as you go, just to make sure that everything looks good overall. You don't wanna get in too close and kinda miss the overall view of the canvas and the view of the design. You'll see as I'm going through, I'm twisting the screen, or twisting the canvas, so I can kinda get a better flow of the lines as they go. All right, there we go, looks good. Let's go ahead then and we'll do these kinda lines, tapered lines here for where the beard kinda meets that nose. You've got those overlapping kinda tufts. Just alternating the line thickness there, the line weight. You'll see I'm starting out with a smaller taper here at the start of the line, and then kinda making it thicker as it goes back in to the nose. All right, let's get these feet done. So see here, I'm gonna start with the taper, pull this down and around and back up towards the inside there. Just following that back up and around. We'll do the same thing over here. Starting here with the taper, line in, overlap here. This is kinda bunched up there, just gives it a little bit more character. Connecting that there. I think I wanna kinda put a little bit of a soul in here. So if we zoom in, just kinda pull this around and up towards the front there. We'll do the same thing over here. You'll see too, as I double tap to undo, feel free as you're doing your designs, don't live with your first line. If you don't like it, feel free to go back in there and erase and redo it. That's what digital art is really good for. So pulling some extra lines here just for some extra detail inside of the beard. Once again, just using those tapers as we go. Just like that. I think we'll add some more details here in a bit, but I'm gonna switch brushes probably to do that. So let's keep and stay with the brush we've got right now. We can come back and redo some detail as we go. Now let's go into the hat. Once again, we're gonna have the thicker lines over here. So we're going in a little bit heavier with our brush then, with our pressure that we're applying on the canvas. A little bit lighter here to where we've got the light source coming in up here. Once again, here too, one thing I talk about quite a bit is that really my sketch is just a suggestion of where the lines go. I'm not worried about making sure everything lines up perfectly with every single sketch line on there. So feel free just to kind of wing it when you're going in to do the inks. It doesn't have to be perfect by any means. And it really kind of takes away from the kind of organic feel of your inks when you try to 100% trace everything. And we'll just get these tufts around here for this fluff ball, just like that. Some overlapping ones there. Going back in with the eraser and just kind of clean it up. All right, so that's pretty much the design. Now, like I said, I want to come back in here and do a few more detail lines. So I'm gonna switch over to my standard anchor now. So this doesn't have the streamline turned on and I'm just gonna come in here and just do some quick, adjusting the size here, some quick little flicks here just for some more, just kind of textures and details on that beard. And just kind of haphazard with this. There's no real rhyme or reason where I'm putting these. We can even kind of make them look a little bit more scraggly on the ends here. Just kind of follow this line up and out to do this. Like he's got some dead ends coming off of there. I won't do every single one of those parts coming out, but just a few here and there. Just kind of, once again, add those extra details. And then with the hat and the feet here kind of being fuzzy, we can go in, zoom in so you can see this a little bit better. Go in with some really quick flicks to kind of show there's like, almost like the wool texture on here. We have some rough fabric. We can do that on the feet and we can do it on the hat as well. Once again here, just haphazard, just random wherever you feel like doing them. I wouldn't get them too much, trying to cover every single ounces of area in here, but just doing some here and there. Can add that feeling that this is kind of that rough wool sitting on top of there. Once again with this, just a quick kind of flick of the wrist and letting up pressure as you come to the end of that stroke. Little lines like this, I've talked about before, I usually draw straight from my shoulder, but with these, it really is just a quick wrist flip just to make those. And then maybe put some dots here just on the nose for some texture, making our brush a little bit bigger. All right, I think that looks pretty good. So that's gonna be our final ink design. Now we're ready to go in and start adding colors. So to begin with the colors, what we're gonna do, we're gonna come up here to the layers menu. I'm gonna go ahead and just delete the sketch layers. Now we're just left with the inks and I'm gonna make a new layer. I'm gonna drag and drop this underneath layer two. And of course for the beard, the beard's gonna be white and there's gonna be some other areas in here that are gonna be white. So to know that we actually have that colored in, I'm gonna go ahead and do the background color first. So coming up here to my color palette, very bottom row here, this light blue, just go ahead and drag and drop that onto our canvas. So now the whole canvas is that blue. We're not gonna change the background color itself. We're just gonna make a new layer to do that. Now that we've got that done, let's go ahead and make another new layer by hitting that plus button. And this is gonna be the first layer for our color flats. Layer two, which is our inks. We're gonna go up here, tap on this one and we're gonna set this to reference. So this is going to allow us to drag and drop all of our color flats onto a separate layer. Using that as kind of the guide as far as where they all go. Now coming down to layer three then, that one we just created. I'm gonna come back up to my color palette. I'm gonna choose the red here on the top layer. And then we're just gonna drag the red here. We've got the hat and we've got the feet. Wanna make sure we don't hit the lines cause that's what happened there. And I think for the bottom of the shoes, I think I'm almost gonna make those like footsie pajamas. So we're gonna make those probably white. Now, usually I would switch colors here and keep going around. I think though for this, we're gonna keep all the different colors on different color flats, which is going to make it easier to go in and do our shadows and highlights later. We don't have to worry about going over top. So it's gonna be a little bit different than usual. I'm gonna come back up here to my layers menu. I'm gonna make another new layer. I'm gonna come back up to my colors palette and I'm gonna choose the nose color here, the furthest one on the top. Just drag and drop that. And that's the only thing that's gonna be that color. So we're gonna come back up then. Next up, we're gonna use white. So if we go to the color palette and choose white, like I said, though, I wanna make a new layer for this white. So I'm gonna come back up to my layers menu and I'm gonna go ahead and hit plus to make a new layer. And there we go. Drag and drop all of these in, like so. And there's our color flats, super easy. Instead of doing them all in one layer though, we use three separate ones since we were using three separate colors here. So this is gonna make, like I said, the shadows and highlights easier and that's what we're gonna work on next. So let's go ahead and start from the bottom here. Let's go ahead and do the hat and the feet. So with that selected, I'm gonna go ahead and hit the plus button. This is gonna, once again, make a new layer and we're gonna go ahead and tap this and we're gonna set this as clipping mask. So what this allows us to do is we can color in on this layer and it's only gonna show up on the layer that it's clipped to, which is our red. So when we do this, it's not gonna show up on the nose, it's not gonna show up on the beard and it's not gonna show up on the background either. So now that we've got that selected, we're gonna come up here to our color palette once again and we're gonna choose the dark red here, second row down. And like I said before, we decided the light source was coming in from this direction. So that means shadows are gonna kind of fall towards this left side and towards the bottom here. So with that decided then, I'm gonna come back up to my layers menu and then turn off reference on layer two. I wanna be able to drag and drop some of these colors as I fill in large areas. If we leave that turned on, it's just gonna fill in just like we did with the color flats. So we wanna make sure we're on that clipping mask layer here above the red and then we can kind of just jump in here. So let me zoom in a little bit. Like I said, light source coming in from here. So if I kind of pull this around here and then connect here in the back. So I've got a complete line going around here and I can drag and drop the color in. Since we turned off reference, it'll fill in just what we want it to. It's not gonna fill in everything. Kind of fix this, maybe do a couple of overlaps there or maybe just one. It's kind of showing how that works there. It looks like the fabric. Gonna continue to pull some shadows here in this overlap. So light source coming in here. So we're gonna have kind of shadow down here, under there. And I think that looks pretty good. All right. So we've got the hat done. Let's go down here to the feet. Since this is the furthest away from the light source, I'm just gonna fill in the entire thing. And then I'm gonna come back in now with my eraser, that standard anchor streamline and just pull away a little bit of the shadows. I've talked about this before, even though you're not necessarily gonna have a highlight here, I think it's beneficial just so the viewer can see that this is a shadowed in area. If that was one completely dark color, it doesn't have a different value sitting next to it. So you're not really gonna be able to tell that that's shaded in just because it's all one solid color. So just removing some of that that we did kind of shows the viewer, yeah, that is shadowed in. And then we can continue then over here, adding in some shadows there. Now we still will add shadows here to the bottom of the feet, but remember those are on a different layer. So we can't do that on this layer. I think I'm gonna pull just a little bit of a shadow here along the bottom of this. All right, looks good. So the red's done. Now we're gonna go back up to our layers menu. Let's go ahead and do the nose next. This probably easiest one, just one oval there. So touching that and tapping on it, selects it. We'll hit the plus button again for a new layer. We're gonna tap this one and we're gonna set this once again to clipping mask. So this is going to mask onto that one. And we've got this darker color here for the nose, second row furthest to the right there. And then we'll just kind of pull around an oval here that kind of tapers there at the ends where it comes back into the nose. I'm just doing it a few times to make sure that that lines up like I want it to. We'll see where that meets. It kind of makes a nice taper on its own. And I think I might just pull it down and around a little bit further here at the bottom. Just give it even more of a shadow there on the bottom of my eraser then and go back in and kind of fine tune it just to get it exactly where I want it. Okay, that's the nose, super easy. Now onto the white areas. So back up to the layers menu, tapping on the white layer color flats. Once again, making a new layer, setting this one to clipping mask as well. And then we're going to go back up to our color palettes. You see, this is kind of the same process. You just repeat it over and over again using those multiple layers. And then underneath the white, we've got that light blue. That's what we're going to use then for our shadows for the white. Kind of pull a line there. Pull this down to where it kind of meets there on that taper. And then we did before, I'm just going to kind of fill in this large area and then we'll go back in and do some erasing. Dragging and dropping the color in. And there we go. Now let's go ahead here. Before we do the erasing, let's add in just some more shadows here kind of where these overlap. Some shadows there. Right, or the left-hand side of these lines. Pull those tapered shadows up. And that looks pretty good. Now, once again, with the eraser, we're going to go back in and just do some erasing here along the edges. So once again, we can see, yes, there are shadows here because we have those two different values next to each other. And we can tell that there are shadows. If you don't like the taper, once again, erasing. Go back in with your brush and just go back in over what you erased. Add the color back in. Just kind of fine tune. Back to the eraser now, just continuing the process here. Twisting the canvas as I go just so I can get a nice fluid line there. And you'll find as you start to twist the canvas, move it around, your arm and your shoulder and your wrist, they're all going to work better when everything's facing a certain way. You'll be able to tell that pretty quick. And once you get in that kind of groove, you can start whipping around the canvas pretty quick to make it the most comfortable on your drawing style. All right, so that's done. We've got this up here to do. Zoom in here. Once again, on this back left-hand side and the bottom, that's where those are going to be. And we can add just a couple more in there to add some more texture and make it look a little bit more detailed. And then finally, the feet down here, adding that into the bottom as it comes up there to the top. All right. So that's pretty much it for the shadows. Let's go ahead and do some highlights next. So let's go back up to our layers menu and clicking on the red hat. Let's go ahead and make a new layer. And you're going to see, this is automatically going to set to clipping mask because it puts it on top of here. This layer is already on top, so it is in between now and it just brings that over. So that's kind of a little time-saver, I guess, if you go to the one you already have made, if you want to make a new clipping mask layer, it's going to automatically set it there. Now let's go to our color palette again. We're going to choose white now. That's going to be for our highlights. Once again, we're on the red and our light source coming in from this top right. So I'm going to go on this top edge here and just kind of bring around a highlight there. And then on that side, and then back up to the layers menu, I'm going to tap that at the end for the blend mode, just like we did with our sketch layers when we were adjusting those. We're going to drop the opacity of this down. We don't want it actually white. We just kind of want it to be somewhat dropped down opacity wise, so that we can see through it and you get a little bit better of a closer color to your red. Got that there. Just going to continue that down here and then we'll hit the top of the shoe here, her foot, just like that. Pretty easy. Now, obviously we can't add highlights white to the white of the beard and stuff. So let's just do the nose. That'll be the final highlight here. So once again, making a new layer automatically sets that clipping mask. Then I'll just do an oval here on the nose, do a big one and then kind of a small one here to the side. Once again, back to the layers menu, hitting that end for the blend mode, just kind of dropping down the opacity of that a little bit. Don't want it super white, but still want to be able to see it. Okay. So there we go. That's pretty much our design. Let's go ahead and add a background into this real quick. So to do this, once again, back up to our layers menu, let's come down to our layer two first and let's go ahead and make a new layer. So this is on top of the blue and let's just do kind of like a snow hill here in the back, nothing too fancy or crazy. So just kind of a curved line there that we then fill in and drag and drop. Got a blue line right there too. What layer is that? Is that the, yes, the shadows layer for the blue. Let me get that out of there. Okay. So we're on this white layer here. Let's go ahead and add some shadows there and some snowfall to it. So with that layer selected, we're not going to worry about making a clipping mask layer because we're not going to go outside of this. We're going to stay pretty close to the bottom. So back up to our color palette then, let's choose this light blue here and just bring in kind of like a shadow down here that he's throwing off, just like that. And then we can go ahead selecting our different brush. Let's go back. Actually, we're still on the standard anchor. Let's just use that. Coming in a little bit closer, just tapping some dots around here. So kind of looks like the snow's textured there. And just pressing down harder gives you a bigger dot. Pressing lighter gives you a smaller one. So there we go. The background here, the blue looks a little plain. So what I want to do here is add a gradient to that. So if we go back up to our layers menu and go to the layer two, that is the blue. We'll click on that and then come back up to our color palette. We're going to choose this dark blue here and starting at about, say about above that line right there where it curves in, we'll just make a big kind of rectangle color here, dragging and dropping that in. Maybe if everything's connected. I think I've got my threshold turned up too high. So color drop threshold, if you're dragging and dropping and it's coloring and everything, since these blues are kind of close, you'll see that line there at the top. If we drag that from the left to the right, you can see how that's affected. So I'll put it there so it doesn't fill in everything. And then bring this down just a little bit further because I had another line there. All right, so now that we've got that, let's come up to our adjustments menu here and then we're going to go to a Gaussian blur right there. Tap that and then just slide this to the right. And you're going to see now we've got a gradient there in the background. So it fades from that dark blue to the light blue there at the bottom. Looks a little bit nicer. It's just not one solid flat color there. So adds a little bit more depth to the design. And then finally, let's go ahead and add some snowflakes in there. So for that, I've got a Christmas pack of brushes from last year. This set came with one, two, three, four, five trees and five snowflakes. This is available for procreate for free on Gumroad. So that's linked down in the description below if you guys want to check that out and download it. There's all kinds of different snowflakes here. I'm just going to use one. You can alternate between them, but to save time, I'll just use one. And then I'm just going to go ahead and tap, switching this to white, of course. I'm just going to tap here, changing the size as I go by some bigger ones, some smaller ones. Once again, just kind of mixing it up so it doesn't look too planned out. We just kind of want to alternate those sizes and just throw them wherever. Like I said, if you don't want to use the same one, you can use different ones and go back and forth, but just to save time, we'll do it this way for the video. All right, I think it looks pretty good. And then finally, I'm just going to come back up to my layers. I'm going to sign this real quick. Zooming in down here. And I don't want to be on a snowflake because I'm not going to be able to sign with a snowflake. So I want my anchor here and just sign this down here. And we will be done with today's tutorial. A holiday gnome that you see probably absolutely everywhere right now. Like I said, they just get bigger and bigger every year. So hopefully you enjoyed today's video. If you did, do me a favor, give it a thumbs up. It really helps me out. It makes me happy seeing that thumbs up. So thank you so much. Also, if you haven't yet, subscribe to the channel and hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. Also, if you follow along with these tutorials and do a design based on one, I definitely want to see it. So if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell so I can see what you have been working on using the videos. As for me, I can be found online, BJDell.com. So until next time, keep creating.