Let's Draw a Lion in Procreate: iPad Drawing Tutorial!

In today's video, I'm going to show you how you can draw this cute cartoon lion from start to finish using the iPad and Procreate. Now if you've watched my channel before, you might realize that I've already done a lion video tutorial. However, that video was done with a very children's book illustration style. This one, I'm going to be doing with a cartoon look. So this is going to show you how to approach creating the same subject matter using two completely different styles. Like always, it's all in real time too. No time lapse, no edit. So if you want to follow along, step by step, and draw with me, keep watching. Alright guys, so let's go ahead and draw a cute cartoon lion. Starting out, I'm using a 3000 x 3300 dpi canvas. It's an RGB canvas. For my brush, I'm going to start out sketching with my 9B pencil. It's part of my pencil pack available on Gumroad right now. And then for my color palette, once again, I've got this pre-made. So if you want to download this exact same color palette, follow along with the same colors I'm using in today's tutorial. You can do that for free if you go to my website, BJDell.com, underneath the YouTube reference materials page. You'll find this along with a video at the top of the page that walks you through how to install it if you're new to that. So let's go ahead and get started. Like I said, I'm just going to start sketching. And before I begin, the idea of this tutorial is, I've already done a lion tutorial on my YouTube page before. If you haven't seen that yet, check it out. It's done in a very children's illustration book kind of style. And for this, I wanted to do a really cartoony one. I work in basically two different styles, a children's book illustration style and then a cartoony one. So this kind of shows you how you can approach the same subject matter in two different styles. Go watch that video if you haven't already. So to begin, I'm just going to start out with a basic shape. We're just going to go ahead and do just kind of a oval circle here in the middle. This is going to be the head. And from here, I think I'm going to have kind of a three quarters perspective going on. So we'll kind of draw a curved line here to represent where that middle is. So we've got that three quarters perspective. And now down here at the bottom, I'm going to draw another oval. This is going to kind of be for the bottom half of the cheeks and jaw where that comes down. So this kind of gives a younger look to the character. I've talked about this before in some of my cartooning videos by having this extended head portion up here. And then coming down into this, it really gives that kind of cutesy feel to it. So now that we've got that, we can kind of block in here where the nose is going to be. Do another oval here for that. Like so. And then we'll kind of block in where the eyes are with some ovals here. We'll get those in there and then bring up a line here where that snout comes in behind that eye. Like so. From here then we can kind of start to flesh out the side of the face. Kind of bring this eye down here and under. I'm going to pull this nose just a little bit further out here and darken it up so you can see a little bit better. And then I'm going to draw some ovals down here for the mouth and then kind of darken those in as we go up and around. There we go. And add a little smile there to him. Give him a little chin down here and then we can kind of block in the eyes here. The iris, the pupil and the iris. There we go. Maybe have this one right in the center kind of looking at the viewer. Get those lined up the best we can here with the pupil and then the iris there. Looks good. Now I'm going to kind of bring around the mane. So if we start here in the middle and just kind of bring around a curve line there for this side and then also bring one up here for this side. From here then we can kind of bring this down so we got that brow coming into the eye now like so. And then we can continue this mane back and around and wrap it around to the rest of the head here. Just kind of like that so everything lines up there. Now we go ahead and do another kind of big oval here just around the entire face. We can kind of start to see where the mane is going to go. So if you've watched my videos before, I've talked about this quite a lot. I use really basic shapes to define where everything is going to go at. This is fundamental in trying to draw out of your head, not using a reference photo. Just mapping stuff out like this is really going to help you kind of visualize where everything needs to be. That's one thing a lot of people struggle with is trying to get what they see in their imagination kind of out and either onto the paper or in this case the iPad. That's really my number one suggestion is use some shapes like this. Just really basic shapes to kind of help you. You'll see I'm not tracing these shapes down here along the side. I'm just using this more as a guide to help me visualize everything. I'm going to erase this part right here. I don't really like how that comes together. Bring that down a little bit different there. Alright, so there's that. We've got to throw the ears in here now. So if we just do one here, this is going to kind of be tucked behind the side of the mane just because of that perspective we've got going on. Then draw in another oval over here to kind of help us visualize where this one goes. Curve line here kind of tucks that behind the hair or behind the mane. Makes it look like it's coming out of there. And there we go. From here, I always like to throw in some eyebrows on characters that don't really need them. We'll get those in there. And then for the body, we're just going to kind of bring this down. Pretty simple. Nothing too crazy. Let's bring it down here and then maybe another line here just to kind of give this centerpiece a different color. Alright, so I think that looks pretty good. That's our sketch. Next up, we'll move on to actually inking. So to begin inking, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to make a new layer. This is going to be our inks layer. We're going to draw on top of our layer one. Then we're going to tap the end to bring up the blend mode. I'm going to drop down the opacity of this to about 35%. You want to be able to see it, but we don't want it too dark. Now coming up to my color palette, I'm going to go ahead and switch over. Instead of outlining this with black, I've got this really dark brown here. That's what we're going to use to go ahead and ink this with, is that dark brown. And then for my brush, I'm going to come back up here to my brush library. For this, I'm going to use my standard Inker Streamline, which is part of my cartooning brush set, which once again, available on Gumroad right now. Link is in the description for that. So now that we've got that decided, we need to see now where is the light source coming from. I've talked about this a lot in videos. I use different line weights in my drawings, and the way line weights work is anything closer to the light source is going to have a thinner line, it's going to have a smaller line weight. Anything further away from the light source is going to have a little bit thicker, heavier line. So deciding where the light source on this one is, we'll put it coming in from this top right. That helps us decide our line weight. So everything this side, a little bit thinner line weight, everything on this side, a little bit thicker. So now that we've got that decided, we can go ahead and start. I think I'm going to begin down here with the nose. So I'm going to zoom in here so we can see this a little bit better. And this, I'm not really worrying about line weights here because this is going to be totally filled in with that brown color. I'm not worrying too much about line weights there. Now I'll just kind of start kind of bringing lines around here to get a little bit lighter line weights here. We're getting heavier here in the back. I always have thinner line weights in the center as well. Holding down, we'll lock that into a nice oval there. Do the same thing here. So you draw the oval, holding it down, not lifting up the pencil, we'll lock that in. Same thing here for the iris, just holding down, locks it in. We'll just continue to bring these lines around. You'll see here, these tapered lines like this, I basically start out pressing harder and just let up pressure as I come down. That gives that nice taper at the end. That's one of the benefits of that brush that I'm using. It gets a really nice taper to it. Does take some practice though to get comfortable with it. So if you start out and you're not getting the right taper and you have that same brush, guarantee you it's the same brush I'm using. It just takes some practice. I'll just kind of go around here and continue. Get these lines in there. That one I don't really like. I think I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer here. Sometimes for these ovals, I'll make a new layer. If I don't like it, then I can adjust it. That one of course, since I made the new layer, it's perfect and I don't have to adjust it. So I'm just going to pinch those together. I'm just going to continue around with these lines. Also if you're a viewer to my channel, a return viewer I should say, you'll notice that I have not done a video in quite a long time. If you follow me on Instagram, you might kind of have a clue why I am actually in the process of moving my studio, doing a complete remodel on our two and a half car garage, moving the studio into there for more room and I've got the current or previous studio totally torn apart right now. We're getting ready to move everything in. We're just waiting on contractors to come in and do the floor and of course, because the way everything works right now, they were later than what they're supposed to be. So everything being torn apart, I was kind of waiting to do a new video. I decided to go ahead and hop in and do one right now with everything torn apart. Very makeshift right now. It's not my usual studio set up by any means. So that's why it's been so long since I've had a video plus there's a lot of new things in the works, which I will be talking about soon. Got some new projects coming down the pipeline that I think you guys might find pretty interesting. So I'll be talking all about that in some upcoming videos here. It's going to be a new community I'm kind of building off of that, that you guys will be able to take part in as well and kind of shape one of the projects going forward. So I'm super excited about it. Working with some very cool people with this. If you've watched my videos before too, talking, I don't do commissions. It's not a commission thing that I'm working with people. It's an actual project that has a couple of moving parts in it and different people that I brought on to kind of bring it to life. So excited, can't talk too much about it right now, but it will be coming soon. So stay tuned for that. I'm just going to be excited to get this studio running and finished. It's been a few months now in the works and I just want it done. Now I'm starting to get some heavier lines back here, a little bit thinner up here. You can see these are a little bit thicker here just because of the way the light is going to hit those, but we're starting to get some heavier lines. To do this, basically I'm just pressing harder on this back section to get those heavier lines. I'm going to thicken this one up too because that's going to be a fairly thick line there because of the shadow that's going to have. And you'll see, I'm just going back and forth the eraser. I need to change over to my standard ink or streamline now. I've got streamline turned off. So just basically going around here, getting all these lines in, zoom in some more here so you can see a little bit better. Just kind of adding some overlapping tapers here as I bring up some of these lines around. And then if you go over here, you can just kind of erase to get those lines to match up. And you can also erase the ends too to get that nice taper in there. So far so good. Get this ear around here, a little bit lighter on this line weight because that's going to be kind of the closest to the light source. This one here, so I'll kind of add some zigzags from time to time too when I'm inking the hair there. Just bringing tapered lines around when I can. I don't like this line touching here to the ear, so I'll pull that up just a little bit. I don't want that too close, creates that tangent there where they touch and just doesn't look good from a design standpoint. All right, continuing down here, bring that into there. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to switch over to just my standard inker now. This I like to do really quick lines here. With this, you'll see I'm going to pull in some kind of tapered lines here. Doing really quick lines like this, I like to switch to the non-streamline version. Just gives you a little bit more organic feel to those strokes. We'll do the same thing down here. Just kind of pulling those off just like that. Then switching back now to the streamline, I've got to finish these up down here. All right, pull a couple more with that standard inker, a couple more of these tapered lines back here. Just where those things kind of overlap and then down here in the center too, we can do some of those down there. Overall, that looks pretty good. That's going to be, and I was zoomed out too far down here, I didn't get these all the way down to the bottom of the canvas. Let me do those again, as close as we can there. This one's kind of wonky, so let's just redo this whole one. All right, so there we go. Our inks are done. Now we can go ahead and move on to our color flats. To start our color flats, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to our layers menu. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer. I'm going to drag and drop this one down underneath our lines layer. We've got our lines here, we've got our color flats down here, and then I'm going to go ahead and turn off our sketch layer now. I want to come up to the lines layer, I want to tap that, and I want to set this as reference. This is going to allow us to drag and drop all of our colors down here on to our layer three. Using that is kind of the guide of where to put them. Now that we've got that, I'm going to go up here and choose my first color, this yellow. This is going to be the face here, so we can drag and drop this in. It's also going to be the back color here, and then the color for the ears as well. Next up, we've got the brown, which is going to be the color for the mane. Really simple there. One drop takes care of it, and we'll use that for the eyebrows here. Let's do the next color here, this body color for that center. We also need white for the eyes, so let me go ahead and add white in here. I didn't add white to the color palette, so we'll add white, and I also need a color for the irises there too, so I'm going to have to add that in. I totally forgot to do that, so we'll add this blue in for the iris, which I need to zoom in a little bit to get inside those lines there. We've got those. I also want to add in some kind of reflection dots to the eyes, so if I select white again, I like to do these on the actual reference layer, so going back up here, I'm just going to go ahead, and with the standard anchor, I'm going to make the size a little bit bigger. Just by tapping there, holding down, we can get a pretty good circle there. We'll do the same thing over here, and zooming out, you can see now we've got those reflections in there. It looks pretty good. All right, so that's it for color flats. Super quick, super easy. Color flats, honestly, the fastest part of this, except for, I forgot the ears. The insides, so pink there, and that's it. So now we're ready to go ahead and move on to our shadows and our highlights. So to start our shadows and highlights, first thing we need to do is make new layers. I want to come up here to, and as I'm doing shadows and highlights, you can see here as I just pulled up this layers, I put those pink colors into the wrong layer. I put those onto the lines, so I need to remove those and come back down here and do those on the color flats. So that's one thing that's good to pull up your layers here, because you can kind of see in that little thumbnail, if you were on the wrong layer, catch it sooner than later. It's a pain if you get down too far and notice. So now that we've got that done, I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer here. This is going to be our shadows layer. We're going to tap on this, and we're going to go ahead and set this as clipping mask. So with this set as clipping mask, basically what this does is allows us to color in shadows on this layer, and they only show up on parts that are colored in on the layer below it, layer three. So if I color out here, it's not going to show up. It's only going to show up if I'm inside here. So now that we've got that set, I'm going to come up here to my color palette again, and I'm going to go with this dark purple color we've got here. That's going to be our shadows. I'm also going to use the standard anchor just to kind of block this in, make this a little bit bigger. Like I said, light source coming this way, so shadows are going to kind of fall on this side. So I'm going to start to just kind of bring in some really thick, heavy shadows that are just kind of bunched up in here in pretty big areas. I'm going to fine tune this later when I get into it. I just want to cover as much space as I think I'm going to need for the shadows. And then, like I said, I can go back in and do some erasing and fine tuning and make it look a little bit better. The lines are going to be a little bit nicer, except I'm not using that streamline right now. I'm just using the regular anchor and it just allows us to have a really loose control over this to get everything filled in. And that's what I'm going for here. Getting behind the eye here, under here, this eye, behind these lines here. All right, so now that we've got all that filled in, really kind of loose and messy, we want to go ahead, come up here to our layers menu again. We're going to drop the opacity of this layer now. So we're going to bring the shadow down. We don't want it too dark, but we still want it to do its job. I think probably about 25% looks pretty good on this one. So we've got that set. We've got our shadows kind of laid in there. Now, like I said, I did it really sloppy, so I want to come in here and kind of fine tune. So I'm going to connect some of these lines real quick and then we're ready to start. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to move over to my eraser, my standard anchor streamline, and then coming in here, I'm just going to kind of fine tune those lines. When you zoom in here too, you might see some of these lines look a little wonky. So if you need to kind of fine tune your actual lines as well, this is a good time to do that. Just make sure as you hop back and forth between layers that you don't mess up and you remember what layer you're on. Now I can go back to my shadows here. I'm also going to switch my brush to the standard anchor. So this way, if I erase too far on something, I can switch back to that and get a nice line just by moving back and forth. See right there, I went further out, so now I can bring this line down, fill that back in. Same thing here. I'm just kind of building up those lines that I've already got in there. Those giant areas and just fine tuning them, getting the lines really nice and smooth, making sure that they match up with the lines of the outlines that I've done. It's just kind of a building process. So doing some removal, doing some addition until you get it to look exactly like you want it. I know lately that I've kind of been zoomed out on a lot of my stuff and I haven't done a lot of zooming and I had a couple of people reach out and say, Hey, can you do one video to where you zoom in quite a bit when you're doing the inking and the shadows and highlights? It kind of helps me understand more where everything goes, if I can see it a little bit closer. So for the people that reached out and said that, this video's for you guys. I know some people kind of get upset if you do too much zooming in and zooming out. So try to keep it at a bare minimum sometimes, but Hey, if people are reaching out and say that it helps them, I can kind of, I guess, alternate back and forth. Let me know what you prefer in the comments. Pull this over the top here a little bit, lines up a little bit better. There we go. Now this back here has got a lot of shadow, so you really can't see that it has shadow because there's so much shadow. So this is where I've talked about before. I like to go in and actually remove some of the shadow just by erasing here. So that way the viewer can actually see that there are two different values there next to each other. And it really kind of does the heavy lifting of showing that, yes, this is shadowed back here because there's different values there. And you can see how that's starting to kind of break up this really heavy shadow back here. The same thing here along this ear. Sometimes I will just pull away completely from the lines to give the shadow just a kind of more centered look to it. That's another technique you can use as well. Get this filled in, but not all the way. So we've still got some of that lighter pink in there. You'll see I'm just bringing those curves around. So it's got that nice flow to it. A nice smooth line moves from one direction to the other. Another thing I've mentioned before is if you feel like you're fighting against your hand or your arm and the way it moves, feel free to kind of twist the canvas around. If your arm doesn't want to move in the same way or the same flow that you're trying to get it to move to get a line perfect, flip the canvas around because sometimes your hand will move better this way than going this way. So if you can twist that canvas around, that's one of the great things about digital art is being able to have control over it like that. So feel free to use that to your advantage. Get the inside of that one done there. Then we'll get a little bit here underneath this one. All right, pull back and see how that looks. I think that looks pretty good. I think I'll remove a little bit here from the back just so once again we can see that that's got that different values there so it looks like the shadow. All right, looks pretty good. Next up, let's go ahead then from here and move on to the highlights. So for highlights, same kind of general idea. We're going to go ahead and make a new layer here. Once again, we're going to set this to clipping mask. So this is going to clip all the way down to here. If you've got multiple layers that are set to clipping mask, this one doesn't set to this one. It actually goes all the way down to the original clipping mask layer. So with that one set, we can go ahead and choose this yellow color I've got here. We'll use that for the highlights. Once again, light source coming in this way. So I'm going to start to kind of pull some highlights here along this right-hand side. You'll see I go a little bit less with highlights, a little bit more sparingly with highlights than what I do with shadows. I don't go as heavy with the highlights. That's just my personal preference as I like to have more of that shadow in there. We can also pull in some tapered lines here too and the fur there. Some down on this side here. Just jumping back and forth between the eraser and the brush just to get that look that I'm going for. Kind of want to, like I said, follow the stroke of that original outline there. That looks good there. Hit a couple more here towards the top. Let's get with these. You'll see I'll start out here and pull in. That way we've got that taper on the sides and you can do that because we're using that clipping mask. You're not going to go outside of those lines. All right. Looks good. Let's go ahead now and coming back up to our layers, we're going to go ahead and hit that N for blend mode again and we're going to drop the opacity of this, say, probably down to, I'll say about 47, 46, 47%. I think that looks pretty good. All right. I also want to add a highlight to the nose here. We're going to do that on the actual reference layer, the lines layer here. If we go ahead and just choose white here, I'm going to zoom in and we're just going to add a tapered line across this. We've got a nice highlight there. You can see that makes that pop a lot more. Looks better. And I also want to add some shadows here to the eyeballs. So I'm going to come back up here to my layers menu and I'm going to make a new layer. This one we don't necessarily have to set to clipping mask because we're already going to be in here. We're not going to go outside of that. And then for this, let's go ahead and use this blue color that we used for the iris there. I'm just going to do a tapered curve around the back here, once again, kind of following the flow of those lines from the outline. Raise our overlaps here and then I'm going to come up here to the layers menu and drop the opacity again. So in here, drop that down to about 50%. Looks pretty good. Do a couple of ovals here. Some extra shine there, the extra texture. Overlap here. See some overlapping here too in the shadows as I get closer. So I want to remove those and we'll go back to the blue of the eye and get the shadow in here. There we go. A couple of oval ones in here too and pull them back out. You can kind of see what we're left with there. Looks pretty good. I think the face itself in here looks maybe a little bit bland on this backside. So if we go ahead and go back to our brown, our regular color that we use for inking, and once again on that reference layer, I think I'm going to go ahead and add just kind of a bottom eyelid curve up and around here. Bring a little bit more into there. Maybe another one down here to add a little bit more in back here. A couple of dots here just for texture and then maybe some here on the snout too. Just like that. That just kind of adds a little bit more character to the design. Just going back in and adding small details like that. Especially if you see something looks a little bit plain. Even down here might look a little bit plain. So if we go to our standard inker now and with this size turned down, I can just kind of add in some little tapered lines here for some fur coming out there. This is just kind of haphazard just wherever. No real rhyme or reason to where that goes. Also do some here around the ears. You can do here across the face maybe a little bit inside there coming out and even across the chest here. Once again, just so it's got a little bit extra going on. It doesn't look so plain. I think I'm going to erase those dots as I did those just because we put the dots in there. Don't want to get those confused for the whisker parts. You can even add whiskers from here too if you wanted to. I know I'm just kind of going all over the place with this video and that might be why I'm out of practice not having done a video for a few weeks. I'm just all over the place adding stuff and not really having rhyme or reason to what I'm doing. But hey, this is raw. It's unedited. It's uncut. There's no time lapse or anything. That's what you get. Hopefully you're enjoying it and you're sticking with it. So there we go. We've got our design done. We've got it inked. We've got it added with the color flats. We've got shadows. We've got highlights. Let's go ahead and do a background now. So coming down here to the bottom layer, I'm going to make a new layer. Coming back up to the color palette, I'm going to go with this light green color. We'll drag and drop that in for the background so we've got that nice light green. From here then, let's go ahead and let's make another new layer. And I need to turn reference off now. Reference didn't really affect this too much. It's fine. We're good there. But for this next step, let's go ahead and turn reference off. Now on this layer above our background, I'm going to go ahead and grab this dark green color here. And we're just going to do some leaves here in the background. So I'm just going to do ovals and fill those in where I want these leaves to be. And we're just getting the basic shapes for these right now. So yeah, these don't really look like leaves. That's okay. This is just going to kind of block out where everything goes. And maybe another one down here. Once again, just kind of haphazard with this. No really, you know, rhyme or reason to it. All right. So now that we've got that, let's go ahead and go to our eraser. And we're going to use that standard anchor streamline again. I'm going to zoom in here so you can see. I'm just going to erase towards the center, starting here at the center and just erase a curved line around. Then I'm going to also start here at the center, kind of further out. I'm going to pull this in and then back out. So we've got that nice tapered point here at the center. And then starting here in the center then, I'm going to have a tapered line come just like that for the leaf. So you can see just starting out with those ovals, super quick and easy way to make some leaves. Same thing here, starting at the center, kind of further out, pulling the line as a curve, pulling that line again, and then doing a motion like that. So starting kind of in here and pulling back out further away to give that nice curve to it. Look at that leaf feel. And then a tapered curve like that. Once again here, starting further out, curve, the center, and then another curve here. Tapered here, down there, starting here at the center, pulling that curved line. Try that again. I kind of hit the edge of the thing there. Curve line pulled back out. Light press here, heavy press as I pull it down. And we kind of want this line to kind of flow with this. I want this to come out a little bit further. So if I come back in with my brush here, we can kind of fatten that line up if we want to. Or if we want to, we can erase and pull it back out further this way. It's totally up to you how you want to fix them if you don't like them. We just want that same flow from left to right. Pull that line there and line there. And there we go. So we've got that nice little background there. I think that looks pretty good. Finally, I just want to go ahead and sign this and I will be done. Get down here, add that ever so important signature at the bottom. And there we go. How to draw a cartoon lion. Like I said, the whole idea for this tutorial, just to kind of show you drawing the same subject matter. I already drew a lion in that children's book illustration style and how you can work in two different styles. Still kind of do the same subject, but have a totally different look to your work. So thanks so much for watching the video. I appreciate it. If you like today's video, if you got some value out of it, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Helps other people on YouTube see it if you do that. So just do me that small favor. Also, if you haven't yet, definitely subscribe to the channel and hit that bell for notifications so you can get alerted when I post new videos. Like I said, kind of makeshift studio right now. Hopefully the next video will be the studio makeover kind of tour video. So be on the lookout for that. Fingers crossed this floor gets done and I can get everything out there and wired and hooked up and moved. Just waiting so bad. I want it done. So, and definitely stay tuned too for those new announcements that I was talking about. If you guys take part in any of these challenges, if you do a design based on these tutorials, feel free to post it online. I want to see it. So if you're on Instagram or Twitter, tag me at BJ Dell, or if you're over on Facebook, I do have a group over there called keep creating a group for artists by artists. We'll go ahead and link that down in the description below. Place where you can give feedback, get feedback, meet new people. It's an awesome place to be and want you guys to be a part of it as well. So hop on over and join. And that's it for me for today. Once again, thanks for watching and until next time, keep creating.