Digital Shading for Beginners - Illustrate in Procreate

Throughout this class you‘ll learn how to approach shading in the digital medium. Having this skillset will help you to create on trend digital illustrations and will help you to keep up with the latest illustration styles.

Learning how to shade your illustrations properly with a variety of tools and strategies is crutial.

This class is for anyone who is at his early stage of his illustration journey, and haven’t already figured out these techniques for himself, but of course, if you are already an established creator, you can learn something new as well.

We are going to be working on the iPad pro and Procreate today, so it is recommended to have these supplies and to be familiar with the program, but if you are not, don’t worry, I will be commenting on the whole process step by step.

The techniques presented can be also applied in other digital programs, for example Photoshop but you need to adjust the steps to that program for yourself.

By learning how to shade digitally you will be able to create better illustrations, they will not be flat anymore, will learn how to use color with purpose, the importance of textures and the possibilities that lie within combining texture and color. You will also see how to hack your illustrations when you need to adjust the light AFTER you have finished the work itself.

Basically, you can use the skills you learn today to create a huge variety of things. We will explore the full process of shading in three different ways. We will take a look on these three strategies separately and then combine them in the final artwork, that will also be your project for the class.

First we will explore color, we will create a super simple illustration of a fox and discuss color choices for shading.

Then we will focus on texture and illustrate a jug. We will use a textured brush with a neutral color to create the shading.

And last but not least we will draw a human character and use transparent layers to create shading.

In the final part we will take a look on a bit more complex illustration and complete it together step by step and apply all these three strategies to create a whimsical illustration.

I will be providing you all the sketches, all you need to do is to download them to your iPad and follow my step by step instructions.

By the end of the class you will have 3 little illustrations on which you practiced and one full illustration, which you can really be proud of! And of course you will be packed with skills to continue creating on trend illustrations.

Alright, are you ready take your digital illustrations to the next level?

Let’s get into it!