Paint This! Blue Sea Horse in Procreate Tutorial! Easy Guide

Hello everyone, in today's video, we'll be painting a beautiful seahorse in Procreate. I'll walk you through each step and share my favorite techniques to bring this magical sea creature to life. Whether you're just starting out or already comfortable with painting with digital Procreate, this tutorial is designed to help you grow and refine your skills. So grab your iPad, cozy up with your favorite blanket, grab yourself a drink, and let's get started. You'll find all the brushes and canvases I'm using in the description below, along with the free sketch and the color palettes I used. For this painting, I'm working on the Make Texture Canvas, but feel free to use whatever canvas inspires you the most. You can see I have already imported the sketch here, and create a new layer and put it at the bottom layer of the sketch, under the Watercolor Texture Canvas effect. And if you downloaded the color palettes, it'll be available in this order, making it easier for you to follow along. So make sure we have that layer selected of the bottom layer, and we're going to start with the light blue sky tone color. Starting with our wet-on-dry brush, keeping the opacity and size at 100%. And we're going to start with the light, mid, and then dark tones to the back. These gentle transitions will help create movement, depth, and personality to the seahorse. So we'll start from the nose, and down to this belly, and down to the tail. And don't worry about the grooves, we will add them later on, that are on the edges. And then we're going to create a new layer now, and we're going to move on with using this bright sky blue tone color. Putting it on top of the light tone colors like this, adding a bit more small details of the grooves to the face, along the body, and down to the tail. Now we're going to pick this cobalt dark blue tone color, create a new layer, and again starting from the top, adding small details of the grooves as we go along. All the way down to the body, and down to the tail. And if you're enjoying these tutorials, hit that like button, subscribe to our channel, where you'll be notified when new videos are released. And I'm sure you have noticed, but seahorses actually have tiny little fins in the back, that look like little wings. They can't fly, but it's whimsical, fairy-like charm that almost belongs in a dream. So we'll paint this around the edges of that same cobalt blue tone color, just like this, and add the lighter tone color in the middle, giving a bit of a transparent look. Go back to the light tone color, and we're going to fill it in the middle like this. Now we're going to combine all the three tone colors together, by using our two fingers, and pinching them just like this. And from there, we're going to start blending, by using the moving blender, keeping the size to around 25%, and zoom in a little bit, and focusing on the two tone colors, so light to mid, and mid to dark, just like this. And we're going to blend all the way to the bottom, except the tail, because we're going to reduce the size a bit, to around 10%, and focusing on blending the tone colors of those wings, and down all the way to the bottom of the tail. And from there, we're going to create a new layer, and we're going to pick this dark turquoise tone color, and use the wet-on-dry brush, keeping the opacity to around 60%, and 100% size. And now we're going to focus on creating these grooves, with the darker tone color, which gives that unique, distinct look of the seahorse's bony plates. This is a great opportunity to create texture and depth, by adding darker tones in the folds and the shadows area, giving that beautiful contrast that makes the seahorse feel more three-dimensional, as it sways left and right in the currents of the right of the canvas. Now these grooves run all the way from the head to the tip of the tail, forming a beautiful pattern along the seahorse's body. It's a subtle touch, but makes a whole lot of difference. For me, it's something meditative, and repeating shapes and patterns and strokes. In our modern world, we tend to overthink too much, but this simply allows us to be more present. So by doing art, you're gifting yourself a present, which is allowing it to be more present. So when you get into the area of detail, you can reduce the size to be a bit more accurate, working on the grooves like this. And we're going to continue on painting the patterns in the body of the mid section of the seahorse. Focusing on patterns like this, especially with creatures with seahorses, help us connect natural rhythm in the real world. Patterns like this give a sense of movement in your artwork, and the viewer's eyes create visual interest, even in the simplest forms. And we're going to add some of that turquoise tone colors in the neck and the eyes. Now we're going to create a new layer, and pick this darker tone color of the turquoise, giving it about 65% opacity and size to around 30%. And we're going to add a bit more depth by focusing on adding some more of those darker tones in the grooves, focusing on the bottom right corner, giving a nice contrast from the top of the groove. These darker shades nestled between the ridges help define the shape even more, even making the highlights even brighter and making it feel a bit more alive. And we're going to increase the opacity to around 76%, even darker areas, but reduce the size a bit when we go into the bottom areas of the tail. Now the middle part of the seahorse, we're going to reduce the opacity to around 60%, keep it a bit more lighter tone when we add the grooves of the contrast on the bottom right, just like this. And we're going to do that all the way along to the body. Now we're going to create a new layer and pick this aqua blue tone color. And from our line and wash watercolor brush set, pick the embossing tool, keeping the size and 100% opacity. And it's going to have a nice glowing effect, and we're going to put this along the entire body and the face of the seahorse, almost like tiger stripes across the face and the body. As light passes through its reflection of different parts of the body, it will create a natural glowing effect. And I wanted the seahorse to have a more translucent quality and delicate to its nature. So just follow along, making almost like tiger stripes along the face and the body like this. Skipping some lines, leaving some areas open all the way across the body like this. Just try your best to fill in the areas between the grooves, flowing throughout the body. And now we're going to pick this bright Tiffany blue tone color. And to support the tones that we put in before, we're going to put it right beside each other like this, giving a natural glowing effect from mid to dark and then light tones of this Tiffany blue tone color. This will create a natural illusion of the soft glows, almost like the light passes through them. And to even exaggerate a little bit more, we're going to put those glowing effects on the body tip of the grooves. And now we're going to create a new layer and put it underneath the embossing tool effect layer that we had. Picking this darker blue tone color and we're going to use a rough hard edge brush, keeping the opacity to around 50%. And we're going to create this natural effect of the watercolor effect, that dried effect look. I like to put it between the areas along the lines where we put the glowing effect of the embossing tool. Just like this. And putting more of the dry effect closer to the darker shaded area of the mid tones and the dark tones. Now we're going to be adding some small details. So we're going to create a new layer and pick this darker tone color of the turquoise blue. And we're going to pick the fine line brush, keeping the opacity to around 50% and size to around 25%. And painting the eyes like this. Focusing on the edges and adding some small details of the wrinkles on the neck. And we're going to put some small details of the eyes to give a nice reflection of the light and the dark. Now going back to the unique wings of the seahorse. We're going to keep the opacity to around 65% and drawing in the lines like this. Giving a bit more structure with flexible fins in the back. Now go back to using that bright Tiffany blue tone color and we're going to put it right beside the tone that we just put on to give that nice whimsical fairy look. So we're going to create some light reflections. So we're going to create a new layer, pick a white tone color, use the gouache brush, keeping the size to around 8% and the opacity to around 50%. And we're going to put some light reflections in the eye and the top of the head and the nose piece like this. And between the grooves like this. Brightening up and giving a nice contrast from the dark into the light. Now we can focus on reducing the opacity of the sketch. And once we reduce it, you can see that under the seahorse's face and the belly, it's going to be very translucent. But I want to add some more harder edges. So we're going to pick that darker tone color of that blue, use the hard edge brush, keeping the size to about 15%, 100% opacity. And starting from one direction, going upwards like this, creating more of the hard edges along the belly and under the chin, which is a great technique to add more of that watercolor dried effect look. Sometimes when you're working with lighter tone colors, the harder edge effect will be very faint. So we want to add more detail like this using the hard edge effect. Now we're going to add some tiny spots scattered across the seahorse's body. So we're going to create a new layer and pick that darker tone color of the turquoise. Go to our line and wash realistic watercolor brush set and pick the wet splash. Keeping the opacity to around 50% and size to around 5%. And we're going to start in the center and along the lines of the body, going up and down filling some of the spots, giving a nice camouflage look in a sandy ocean floor of the seaweeds. I want to give that floating effect of the seahorse. So we're going to cast a shadow, a small one at the bottom. So we're going to layers tab, pick the most bottom layer and we're going to create a new layer and we're going to drag it just like this and pick this darker blue tone color, keeping the opacity to around 35% and use the wet on dry brush and create a small shadow like this. And go back to the wet splash brush and we're going to keep the size to around 20% and opacity to around 65% and we're going to put it along the lines just like this beside the seahorse. Almost like the bubbles are floating around. We can increase the opacity and size a little bit putting more, a bit of a variation of the tones in the size. And there you have it, a beautiful whimsical seahorse created in Procreate. If you enjoyed this tutorial, I have tons of other videos for you to follow along. So click on the next video and I'll see you there.