How to draw NFT's in Procreate - DRAW AND EXPORT

Today I'm going to be showing you how to draw NFTs in Procreate and how to export your files so they're ready to be generated into thousands of NFT characters. Let's get started. So let's break down this Crunchy Cow. This is 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. One thing to keep in mind is when you are drawing your NFT, there is going to be a mask around the outside when you upload these to Twitter or to OpenSea, you're going to have this area where this— anything drawn in this area, it just won't be visible. So draw just a rough circle in Procreate to make sure you have an idea of where not to draw. Don't draw on these edges, and you can just turn down the opacity on that so you know where not to draw. The next thing you're going to do is paste in and you can use Crunchy Cows as an example of where to put the head exactly. The head's going to go right in the center, and you're going to have to make a decision of whether this character is looking directly at you or if it's a 3/4 turn. So let me go ahead and create a brand new file so you can see me working from scratch. This should be already be set at 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI. There we go. I have my blank screen. I'm gonna create a few layers. I'm gonna create my mask, my circle mask. What I do is draw a circle and just hold it down until you get a perfect circle. And that was a poor attempt at drawing a perfect circle. So I'm gonna start here, wait till it snaps. For some reason it's not snapping, mostly because I'm recording a tutorial and Procreate hates me. So let's just draw a circle here. Doesn't need to be perfect. I'm not going to draw in these areas. I'd like to give a little bit of space at the top, a little bit of space at the sides. So this rectangle or this square right here is where my head is going to fall. Then there's going to— you're going to have a neck and a body. If you want, just drop— paste in the Crunchy Cows file and you can trace a template over top of it to make it easier. I'm going to turn down the opacity on that. These are— this is basically my target of where I'm going to draw. Now, depending on what kind of character you have, you need to think, is this character going to be looking straight at you, or is there going to be a 3/4 head turn on it? Crunchy Cows, I went with a 3/4 head turn. Let me show it to you. I went with the head turn because the cows, you know, they have these long snouts or whatever you want to call them, and I thought I could do funnier things with the mouths showing teeth on the side. So it's up to you, it depends on the If your character's a human, straight on works pretty well. If it's an animal, to the side might be better if it has a snout or a funny nose. I like things turned a little bit to the side. I think there's more character to it. If you're an artist, you may want to skip forward to the next part where I export the files, because for now I'm just going to go through and show you how I set up the file and how I draw my characters and talk through a little bit of the errors that I made with CrunchyCows that you can avoid. So, this is my master file. This is where I drew the Crunchy Cows. This is where I worked out all of their bells and whistles, no pun intended, and this is the framework that I use. So, I don't need to worry about the duplication of all of these parts yet. I just want to make sure that A, the character design looks good, it has a ton of personality, people can connect to it, all the items look funny or valuable. And then after I get that down, then I can worry about duplicating them. So for now, I would go through and draw just one character design and then create layers on top of that to draw different items. So let me show you, I have different hooves, different necklaces, I have clothing, I have different noses. So for Crunchy Cows, I didn't know what the characters would look like, so I spent a lot of time in one file. I spent a lot of time designing the one character, and I'm not going to make this an art tutorial or anything, but, um, once I had the character drawn— well, first of all, let me just do a rough sketch of this character. Once I had the placement, then I drew the, the character over top of it and worked in one file thinking only about one character before duplicating everything just to make sure that that character looked good and I could get all the items down. So if this is the base for my main character, I spent a lot of time until it looked just like— let me show it to you. Something like this. Now, once you have your character down like this, then you can go through and create a pair of sunglasses or earrings, or I did horns, hair, hats, eyebrow rings, noses, and the nose ring. I believe they go with the noses. Yeah, I put nose rings with the nose, and then different mouths. Let me show you how the mouths break down because that can— that was a little tricky with CrunchyCows. So I don't have many mouths in this file. I can jump over to other files to show you, but I did the base of the head with the snout like this, the head, that's all one part. And then each mouth is different here. Now I had a problem with the overlapping of the lips over this area. So I had to do some parts that were, that had white lips. And then blended into the color of the characters. So spend a lot of time, make sure that overlapping isn't an issue. I would also, if I could go back and do this differently, I would have broken my character down. I would have done something like this and made sure that the necklaces didn't overlap with the clothing, the hooves were in the right place. The necklace, like the necklaces were bumped up so it didn't interfere because I have some clothing like this. So the necklace would be up here. I had to regenerate my files many, many times because there were just overlapping issues. And I think one way to avoid that is to break your character down and to make sure that, you know, these sunglasses don't come over here where there'd be nose smoke coming out because you're going to have this overlapping problem. And when you go to generate your characters, you're going to see that maybe the smoke goes through the glasses in a weird way, or maybe the smoke goes under the glasses. So, uh, you're gonna have to regenerate, and that's going to take you a ton of time to do. I've spent weeks and weeks regenerating because I didn't plan this out well enough. So let me jump back to my file here. So I'm just going to draw a base of my character. And what I'm going to do is I'll use this to export out the files. See here, I'm going to draw the necklace a little bit smaller than the clothing. And you're going to want to think about, all right, does the hair go over the eyes? Does— is there hair on the side of the cow? Is there a hat? Do the hats go over this hair? Some of my hats were over to the side and then there was hair sticking up here, which wouldn't really work. So take some time, plan out your character, think about the, the, the layering of each files. And you can look back at some of my TikToks and there are tons of screenshots of the layers and the orders that work best. And maybe I will post some, some images in the comments here or a link to some images in the comments where you can see the layering that I used for Crunchy Cows in the NFT generator. So I'm gonna go through this now and just design this character, and I'm gonna make a necklace, a nose, a mouth, eyes, eyebrows, hair, and hats. I'm not gonna go through and, and I'll put some clothing and maybe a hoof with a piece of pizza. That's gonna be my underlying drawing, and then we're gonna export that out for, uh, the NFT generator. When you start drawing your character, you're going to want to do a body part per layer. So I'm first going to draw the base of this character, the body without clothing. That's going to be my main part here. So you also have to be careful with the eyebrows because you don't 'Cause sometimes eyebrows will be like this, and then you're gonna wanna have like one set eyebrow unless you're gonna do eyebrows as its own layer and export out these files on top of it, which is totally possible. I sort of went with just a regular one shape of the head. Let me show you. So you'll notice that all of the eyebrows were sort of set, and if I wanted to, I couldn't really export out something with a raised eyebrow here. Let me show you. If I wanted to do that, I would need to create something like that. And export that out, but I thought that would complicate things. So I kept things a little bit more simple and I just did basic eyebrows. I recommend doing this. It will, it'll probably keep things easier for you. So, you know, you won't need to manage the eyebrows because it's going to be tough to get this, these raised eyebrows with maybe a mad eyebrow like that. So I found sort of a middle ground with my expression. And then I didn't do any raised eyebrows. So this is what my drawing is going to look like. I'm going to go back into the other file and do that pretty quickly. All right. So I have the base of my cow designed. One thing you're going to keep in mind is we're going to change the color of this base. So you can either fill it in now with color or just keep this as lines. I'm going to go ahead and keep it as lines for right now until I draw some of the other shapes in black lines on top of it., and then we'll come back and we'll worry about color in a minute. I think the eyes of your NFTs are the most important thing. That's where a lot of the personality is going to be, so I spend a lot of time on eyes. With Crunchy Cows, you know, I wanted a look of— I wanted the eyes to be different. I didn't want them to just be, uh, like perfect cartoon cow eyes. I wanted them to be almost like human eyes. I always do these like weird dot, dotted shaded things. So I do all the pupils with the eyes, all the eye whites and the eyelids are with the eyes. If you want to have blinking eyes, then you're going to— did I just draw these on the same layer? I'm an idiot. All right. Let me go back and redraw these because I drew these on the same layer as the base. So I'm wasting your time right now. Let's go back and draw those really quick. All right, there's an eye. This isn't going to be the most perfect cow in the world, but you will get the idea. Let's give him some sus eyes. Let's give him some You can change the eyelid color. I went with like some grays. Whoop, that happens to me probably 200 times a day. Yeah, so I'm just dragging and dropping in Procreate for to color things in. So these eyes are going to export out as one layer. And now I'm seeing some flaws in my design under here. I want to expand that a little bit. Now let's do— now I have a little white piece right here. Not sure what that is. Let's turn off all this stuff. Let's erase that because that— you don't want any remnants around here. You want these to be pretty clean. All right, now that you get the concept with the eyes on one layer, I'm going to fly through this real quick. I'm going to do the nose with color. I'm going to do the mouth with color. I'm going to do the clothing, the food, the necklace, the hair, blah, blah, blah. You get the point. I'll be right back. All right, see, this is what I mentioned before, that the white of the mouth overlaps, or the, the black lines of the mouth overlap. So I need to correct this. So my solve on Crunchy Cows was just to create a white color here, thinking that they all sort of had white beards or white under the mouth. And let me just fill that all in here. You could leave the top. It's not an ideal solution. Your character might be a little bit more simple, but this is what I thought would work best. It ended up did, did working. I haven't had anybody comment that it is a bad way to go. I'm just going to make one yellow tooth here. I'm going to add some circles to the, to the nose. At this point, I think it's safe to color in the cow. So I'm going to maybe pick a, maybe like a brown cow and fill it in. So what you can do later is export out that body part, that whole, the whole cow. And in Photoshop you're just going to tint the hue and you can actually do that in Procreate too. Just change the hue, we'll duplicate the layer, change the hue, and then all of a sudden we have a purple cow and I'm actually going to stick with this purple cow because I think it looks pretty cool. All right, now I'm going to throw in some eyebrows. Boop, boop. What else do we need? Some clothing. I mean, this cow looks to me like a disco cow, so maybe a nice big open flowing shirt, and you could even show some, some cow chest hair. Let's color that in. All right, we have— let's stick with the disco theme. Let's throw a little afro on here. All black, but let's put a little Curls. So one problem I had with Crunchy Cats 2 is the hair is separated into two parts. You have the top and then you have the sides here. When you layer things on top of each other, they're going to lay, lay in awkwardly with the hair over here. So, you know, say you have sunglasses, or if there's food in the mouth and it's overlapping here, My solve for that was to just go like this. The hair actually doesn't go behind the character. It's, it's always going to end at the edge of this character. So this, this hair is never going to— when it's generated, there's never going to be a bad image of this hair because it's not going to overlap the character in any way. And anything over top of it will just be, you know, over top of it. It's not, um, it's not going to get in the way. So you can do some, some funny funky things by if you just make the edge of your hair the edge of the neck of your character. So I'm going to go through, throw a few more items on this, and then we'll clean up the file and we'll be ready to export. One thing I should probably say as I'm drawing this is you want all of your shadows and your highlights to be on the same layer. Don't create multiple layers for shadows and highlights because those are going to have to be generated and they're going to have to match what's underneath those layers. So you're going to want to bake them into each layer. I like to talk about problems and errors that I've made so they can help you out a little bit. One thing with Crunchy Cows is when I first drew them, I did all the hooves right here in front of the cow holding food. And then when I exported them, I realized— let me show you— oh, the pizza is overlapping the necklace. So that was a major problem. I had to go through hundreds if not thousands of files and separate each hoof, bump it over to the side, maybe remove a hoof, and then bump the foot over. So if you're going to have something in front of your character, make sure it doesn't overlap the clothing too much, or the necklace, or the bottom of the face. All right, this file is looking pretty good. And what I, what I would do at this point is export this file out to multiple Procreate files. So this can get a little complicated. Let me show you the Crunchy Cow breakdown, and then we'll come into this file and we'll talk about this one. All right, so with Crunchy Cows, I designed my main character like we just did. Let me clean up this junk. So this is my main character. I had all my pieces in here. I did start to draw multiple shapes in here, but then what I did is I broke out this file. I will just— I'll go into here and I will just duplicate this file over and over for as many items that you have. And then within each file, I will keep the base of the character as the bottom layer. I'll turn down the opacity on that, and this is my template for which I I draw all the other items over top of it. So this was the mouth file. See how I drew the mouth in full opacity and I have tons of different mouths in here, but I have the template of the character at the bottom. So I know no matter what, that these shapes are going to line up with this character. And all I have to do is export this Procreate file or open it in Photoshop, and then I can export out all of these mouths. Rather than having one Procreate file of body shapes, necklaces, earrings, eyes, noses. This is just my mouth file. So you can see I have Crunchy Cow's eyebrows, Crunchy Cow's eyewear, Crunchy Cow's mouth, Crunchy Cow's nose, clothing, food. Let me show you the food just so you get an idea of what I messed up that you should avoid. So we have grass tacos. This grass taco was a problem because it was in the way of the clothing. So I had to go in and bump that over. I actually had to do that on thousands of files because I didn't do it. I didn't set it up properly here. Spaghetti. This was another major problem. Look at how it covers up the necklace, covers up the necklace, and it covers up the clothing. So I had to split these hands and move them out to here. One thing I haven't talked about yet is the backgrounds. Backgrounds can be a totally different file. They don't need a template. I have mine turned off in here. I'm going to turn it on so you can see it. If you want, you can do multiple backgrounds in here to make sure they align with your character, but for the most part, backgrounds in, in NFT profile pictures are either simple flat colors or simple textures, and you can do that in a totally different file, and then you can export each one of those layers. All right, let's jump back into the file I designed. And let's talk about how that we would break this apart. So when I drew Crunchy Cows, I did start drawing multiple items in my one file before I went in, duplicated that file, and then deleted layers that I didn't need. So this one file would become my food file, or this another file would become my mouth file and my nose file. So once I have all of these done, the process of exporting these is pretty simple. So all of these layers need to get exported. The way I did with Crunchy Cows is I would send my Procreate file to, as a PSD, to my computer, and I would open it in Photoshop and do File, Export Layers to Photoshop Files, and then open up those Photoshop files and export them as 300 DPI PNGs. In Procreate, you can just go to Export PNG Files. And I'm going to save these 3 images, and then I'm going to hop over into my photos, wherever my photos are, and see that these PNG images exported. Now the background is still there, you can see that, and these are only, only the layers that were turned on were exported. So I— one thing to keep in mind, you do want to export all of your layers at 3000 by 3000, so keep all this alpha around them, but make sure you turn off the background layer so they export with transparency. So I'm going to go back in. I'm going to pick some layers that I want. I'm going to turn off my background. I'm going to turn off my template. Turn on the smoke. Turn on a nose ring. Turn on a bird. And, um, we'll go back to the wrench and we'll go down to export PNG files, save the 5 images, go over to your photos. There's all the images exported with the transparency directly from Procreate. Let's talk a little bit about naming your files. So what I would do is go over to OpenSea and, uh, pick any collection you want to look at. Scroll down and go to properties. Now you're going to want to look at how all of these collections name all their files. So they're very simple categories: background, clothing, color, eyebrows, eyes, food. Everything you see in this in, in blue font here is the very simple category of items. What you see in this dark font here is the custom name of your file. You don't want any dashes in your name. You want clean spaces. You want capitalization. Sometimes it's hard to do with thousands of files. It's, it's going to be hard to get it perfect, but try to, try to have clean names. And then these rarities, these are set in the metadata when you export from nftgenerator.art, or if you export this from, say, you know, another generator you find online. You're going to set these rarities, you're going to choose these rarities yourself, and then they will populate on OpenSea as your items are sold or as you upload them. You keep hearing me talk about why it's important to keep this alpha, this transparent channel around the character or your character parts when you export it. Let me show you exactly why. When you go to generate your characters you really don't want to export out your files as these separate parts constrained to these proportions right here. Because then if you're going to generate these in code, if you're going to use a generator, that generator is going to have to figure out the coordinates of each position. And I would— I mean, you should definitely avoid that. That's, that's going to be a huge pain. My brain wouldn't be able to handle that many numbers in figuring out exactly where everything goes. So what I like to do is just keep everything as 3000 by 3000. So when you stack them on top of each other, it's just going to be stacking sizes that are the exact same. So there's going to be no guessing. This is going to drop right on top of it. And you're not going to have any problems with alignment. The eyes are going to line up perfectly with the nose and et cetera, et cetera. Let me show it. Let me illustrate this to you. By inserting a, uh, a nose image here. So I exported out some files before. I'm going to paste in a 3000 by 3000 image of a nose, and it's going to drop right in place. I don't have to— let me make sure that's in focus— I don't have to guess where this nose goes. So highly recommend that you export out all of your images at 3000 by 3000 at 300 DPI or 300, uh, PPI, whatever you want to call it. I, for some reason, can never remember that. And that will get your images aligned perfectly, whether you generate an NFT generator or use code. I hope that tutorial was helpful. Now you're going to have characters with all the parts that can be generated into thousands of random characters. You can use things like nft-generator.art. Sometimes the URL doesn't work, so you're going to need to go to Google and and just search for NFT generator. That is gonna be an easy user interface that somebody built and sent to me. I used it to create Crunchy Cows. I love it because I need a clean interface. I don't wanna do things in code. My brain doesn't work that way. But you can definitely have these coded. If you're not a coder, there's tons of people out there that will do these. I believe they use JSON to code these. I'm no expert in the code, so definitely do your research. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe this video just so that will let me know that you wanna see more of these videos. And also let me know in the comments if this was helpful or not. Uh, pick me apart so I can learn and I can make more helpful content for you. And thanks again for watching.