
Draw from life with Procreate on the iPad, mastering dynamic gesture sketches and proportion for moving subjects. Complete four exercises and three public projects, including portrait and full-figure studies.
Learn how to use Procreate's native brushes for sketching portraits, test inking and wash textures like dry ink and Salamanca, and mix color to develop your go-to drawing workflow.
Explore essential Procreate tools for cafe sketching on iPad, including brushes, layers, color picker, swatches, selection, and undo/redo, to maintain clean linework and flexible composition.
Prepare to draw in public with intention, allot an hour or two, and keep a light setup with a charged iPad and sketchbook; expect rough sketches and improvement through warm-up.
Practice four daily drawing exercises—continuous line, searching line, contour drawing, and tonal drawing—to develop an expressive style for cafe portrait sketches, usable as warmups or standalone sessions.
Learn what to look for in portrait sketches, focusing on the distances between eyes, nose, mouth, and ears to capture expression with loose, expressive marks.
discover the number one tip for drawing correct proportions: always compare each feature to adjacent parts, using the mapping line exercise to develop instinctive proportions in faces and figures.
Capture features quickly, prioritizing the eyes, nose, and mouth to capture a moving subject. If needed, finish from memory or reference a person in a similar pose, then move on.
Learn to set up and sketch in a cafe or coffee shop, selecting seating by wall, near a window, or behind shelves, bring a laptop to appear busy, expecting interruptions.
Begin cafe drawing sessions with quick gesture sketches on the iPad to warm up, using loose lines to capture the overall pose while drawing from life.
practice quick gesture warmups to master figure proportions and movement in cafe scenes, then focus on standing or seated figures with loose gestural lines and subtle shading.
Master cafe portrait drawing by laying down tonal values first, then adding simple lines to create cohesive features. Emphasize profile angles, shadow shapes, and correct proportions for likeness from life.
Watch real-time cafe portrait sketches in Procreate, focusing on loose gestural line work and quick head-and-shoulders drawings, with optional color and paint as an additional practice.
Real-time full-figure drawing of a standing subject, with memory recall after movement. Focus on observation, improvised continuation, and optional color washes for depth.
Learn real-time portrait sketching in Procreate by using light linework to capture facial proportions—eyes, nose, mouth—and the distances between them for confident, simple cafe portraits on iPad.
Grab your iPad and draw people from life in a cafe setting, share your work in the course Q&A for feedback, and apply photo reference to your practice.
Use the iPad and Procreate app to make dynamic gesture drawings, sketches of people, and quick portraits. And learn how to draw people from life.
If you love drawing on the iPad and if you want to improve your drawing skills, but you also long to be able to draw dynamic and expressive sketches, like gesture drawings of the figure, then this class is for you. You will learn exactly how to sketch people on your iPad. You will learn how to draw people in a busy environment like a cafe.
This one simple practice of sketching people in a coffee shop, in a park, at the corner pub, or in any public space, is THE ONE drawing practice that completely changed my drawing style.
I went from drawing very rigid and uninteresting figures, to being able to draw confidently and expressively no matter what the subject was.
This drawing practice is for animators, figure drawing students, illustrators and ANYONE who loves to draw and sketch.
The scariest part of drawing people is making them look realistic.
The scariest part of drawing from life, in public is the pressure of wanting to draw perfectly.
This class outlines exactly how to approach drawing people in real life, in real time. It gives you a set of sketching techniques and exercises, in Procreate, that will show you exactly how to tackle drawing people, even people that are moving.
During the lessons you will learn:
4 powerful drawing drills that will ramp up your skills and help you to draw loose and expressive
1 simple tip to draw the figure or the face in proportion forever more (without sighting or measuring)
How to draw people who are constantly moving or talking
How to make gesture drawings in a digital medium
Plus you'll also learn the difference between WHAT to draw and HOW to draw when it comes to drawing the face or the figure. I’ll also show you how to approach drawing in a public space, what to expect and how to navigate the challenges.
Throughout the class, I’ll be supporting you to make your own cafe drawings by setting you 3 projects that each progressively build towards drawing a portrait sketch:
Projet 1: Quick Warm Ups
Project 2: Drawing Full Figures
Project 3: Drawing a Portrait
You don’t need to be super skilled at drawing to take this class, and you don’t need to know how to draw the figure or make a portrait. This is a fun and easy exploration of loose sketching in a digital medium that anyone can do.