How to draw a leopard in procreate - freestyle drawing session

How's it going? Today I'm just gonna do a freeform doodle session. I have no plans for drawing. I'm just gonna open up Procreate. Well, actually, first I'm gonna clean off my iPad because my kids got stuff all over it, and I'm gonna launch Procreate. I'm gonna start drawing and just talk you through my drawing process, how I start from nothing and create character design. So I've got Procreate open. Go 3000 by 3000, maybe I'll go 1080 by 1080. At 300 DPI. I've been drawing at 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI for a while now and it's making larger file sizes. So, I'm gonna shrink it to half here. I think this is gonna work fine for a doodle sesh. I like to draw in blue ink with the Crunchy Cow pen to get my sketches down. So, I just make a mark on the canvas. Sometimes you can just make doodles all over the place and some things will start to appear. I already see like a cat head, the sorts here. Now with eyes, you can overlap the eyes pretty much anyway. Experiment with like oval eyes, circular eyes, overlapping them. See what it does to your drawing. I'm gonna put the cat nose up here. It will do like a cross-eyed cat. And it's gonna have like big teeth. Sort of doesn't even look like a cat. Maybe if it, it might evolve into something else before I'm done. Sort of, it's too much like a bat ear. At this point, I'm already gonna move the sketch around, turn down the opacity on the layer, and create a new layer on top of it because it might turn into something else. So let's start with the eyes again. Whatever I feel confident about, I'm just gonna bring that over into the next layer. Let's see if we can do a square rectangle, vertical rectangular-shaped snout. And get some like straight lines versus the angular lines. So it's starting to look sort of like a, like a leopard. I'm always like squinting my eyes and making things blurry. If your drawing looks good through blurry vision, it's gonna look good when you open up your eyes and it's— everything is sharp. So I'm constantly trying to blur it to see it from a different angle, a different perspective, to see if it's gonna work out. So I'm seeing some sort of a leopard here, but I'm thinking to myself, like, do I feel this? Like, why am I drawing this? Like, what is the point of this? You sort of go through that valley of despair that I've always talked about. What I like to do is just keep working your pen around it and see if you can find things you like about it. Do I need to go full body on this animal? Yeah, maybe I do. Maybe that was what was holding me back. Leopards seem to like melt into the ground when they, when they lay down, and then they cross their paws over one another. I don't know if that's what a leopard nose looks like. And let's just test out some spots here. Let's add a little bit of volume to the back, snake-like body. All right, let's move on. Let's turn the opacity down on that layer, create a new layer above it. And let's start inking. I'm going to grab the black Crunchy Cow pen. I'm going to zoom in and be ready to tap that undo. You know what we could do? Something like the nose could be like unrealistically geometric versus this shape that wants to be pointy and geometric, but it's going to droop over too much. I'm noticing a little bit of pixelation. Usually I'm working at 3000 by 3000. This is a little bit different. So maybe here we could put one tooth peeks out and bends over the, like, the lip. And that would mean there'd probably be a little bit of a divot here. Maybe you could see some of the teeth down here. I'm always thinking about the details of these drawings, like what's like an interesting combination I can draw and create to make something look new or different than I've done before. I think the different combination of these elements, what you add up, what you choose to add up together is what defines your style. It's these little tiny choices I make, like the nose and the shading lines. And there are no rules. I don't care what anybody tells you about drawing. There are absolutely no rules. So combine everything as you want to. There's no rules. There's no tests. Nobody's judging this. So I'm going to go around this head like that. You know, sometimes I do look back at my drawings and I would say this is really misshapen. Let's see if I can correct that. Oh, that was on that same layer. Let's stick with this pointy cheeks here. I think there's something to that. And then let's exaggerate one eyebrow. And the other eyebrow will be lower. And then we'll see a little bit of bump in the head. This ear is okay. This ear is okay. I'm gonna reduce the size of the brush to do the interior line of the ear. Let's see if that's too many pieces of hair in the ear. Yeah, probably too many. Let's, let's simplify things. Now let's get the eyes down. I'm going to keep that same width here. And I'm going to drop it there for the eyes, increase the width a little bit.— sorry, for the upper cheeks, increase the width a little bit. Pupil, I'm going to draw the circle and hold it down. Draw the circle, hold it down. Then for the reflection, draw 2 circles in here, or you could just draw it all black and draw your reflections in white over top. Little details like reflections are a chance to create your own style. You can have reflections coming in from any way because there's really no rules. It's— people don't know what the lighting is around your object, so you're making it all up. Now let's do See how that eyebrow looks. Probably gonna be too, too much, too big. I mean, I don't even know if leopards have eyebrows. Let's get the body down before I get stuck in, stuck into too many of these details. Let's try to make the width the same as the upper body. They have these big, like, matty paws. They're almost like square. They can cover a lot of ground when they, when they touch the ground. See how that looks without the blue. Okay, I can live with this. I'm going to create the leopard spots on a different layer. I'm going to go dark brown. I'm not even going to pull up a reference. Usually I would pull up a reference here. But I'm going to see if I can pull this off without a reference. I'm going to go around and just drop in these circular dots all over the place. I'm going to create a layer under that, and I'm going to create the nose. One way to motivate yourself to move on in the drawing is to find one little detail like this, like the nose, and add full shading to it. See what— it makes you feel like you need to elevate the rest of the drawing to that level. I'm going to duplicate the original line layer we had and bring it all the way below that nose. And this looks like a good leopard color. I'm just going to drag it in here. This wasn't closed off somewhere right there. I'm just going to fill the whole thing in. I am going to change some of these colors. I think let's figure out, is this snout going to be yellow? Oh, so let's drop in the yellow first and we'll get some of this yellow on the paws too. Color in the gums. You can see the eyes weren't that great, so I'm gonna drop that in. See if there's something we can do with the eyes here. Let's see if we can make the top half of them lighter than the bottom half, see if that does anything. Okay, that works. Now let's see if we can add some shadow. Doesn't take much. So I'm gonna add shadows in a couple of ways. Sometimes I'm gonna grab a darker color and drop it at the bottom of that shape. And then I'm gonna create layers on top of that grab the black at a low opacity, and I'm going to double up the shadows. So I created a layer on top of this. I grabbed black. Sometimes you can just keep it full black until you have it in place and then turn down the opacity. I usually aim for around 20%, and then you can see you're getting a double shadow. This double layer just has a little bit of depth. Let's grab this white and go into the ears. Maybe I'll do another layer on top of it. See if we can add some texture to this. Texture or inner shadow. Let's try inner shadow first. I'm gonna set the alpha lock. Alpha lock means when you're on a layer, you can draw all the way through a layer and it won't get on the outside of that layer. It'll only stay within that color shape. And you get to alpha lock by just tapping on the thumbnail and making sure that check is on. All right, there's some shadow. Let's increase the saturation a little bit and see if we can add some texture in here. I don't know if that's going to do anything or not, probably not. Looks kind of cool. I'm going to turn off alpha lock, grab that same color, go over to the other ear and repeat that same process. I'm going to do inner shadows first. And grab that same texture brush, which is the Rectangle. Don't want to go too big with that and try to blend it in a little bit. I'm going to add some highlights to the snout. See if— I'm just going to mix up the brushes a little bit. Grab the sketching brush, is the 6B pencil. I think that works. I think that'll work for the paws too. I'm gonna go and throw just a shadow over the entire thing. Anywhere I think the shadow will fall, usually on the bottom of objects, I'm gonna draw in a black layer. Definitely on the teeth, on this mouth fold over, sorry, I don't know any proper anatomy terms and I don't feel like Googling it right now. Definitely on the paws. And contour your shadows to the shape of the object. Don't just draw it over everything. The shadow of the belly curves to the belly. The shadow of this leg will curve here. And there are no rules to this either. No one's going to break down your shadow strategy. With shadows, it's okay if they hang over the edge sometimes on the bottom. I'm going to run it over the edge there. Maybe I can run it over the edge here and here. Double up these shadows. Turn it down, probably go around 15% on these. Now we need some highlights. Create a layer on top of my base color layer. See if we can make it a little bit more dramatic. I don't go crazy with highlights, keep it pretty minimal. Now let's see, where would a leopard be sitting? Let's throw in some background elements here. I believe leopards live in the jungle, not the desert. I'm looking for an opportunity to draw something funny in here. I'm going to create a white layer on top of that background color because some of the whites— there we go. Let's see, is there anything funny? Anything funny about a leopard, or am I just going to draw this as it is? Let's keep drawing until maybe inspiration will hit us. Draw a darker tree fall. Hmm, see if a stroke around this character will look good. I usually don't need it. I've been adding strokes in around characters lately. Maybe we don't even need a background. We'll just do a bright color stroke around the character. It's looking pretty cool. I could probably remove some of this shadow. So I'm going to select this color and I'm going to— let's see, let's select this color layer, invert it, and now I'm going to select the shadow layer, which is right up here. And where I did the overlapping shadow before, I'm just going to remove that because it interferes with this stroke. So you basically go through the whole drawing right there because it's selected and protected. Gotta find this one dot on here. See that dot? Gotta find that culprit and clean that up. Guessing it's on the— there's part of it. All right, so the other part's got to be right there. Because I duplicated that layer, the dot on it, by accident. Let's go through, clean up the teeth. Clearly lost my nose at some point. Let's turn that on. Let's call it a day on that. There's our leopard drawing from absolutely nothing. I'm gonna go in and rework this a little bit. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments about Procreate, character designing, drawing, or any other creative business Thanks for watching.