Draw a Folk Art Bee With Me in Procreate

Draw a Folk Art Bee With Me in Procreate

The other day I was playing around with my iPad and I started sketching this cute folk art bee in Procreate. I thought it would be a fun Procreate tutorial for you to see how I made it, and then encourage you to take it further with your own style and ideas.

Side note, I am using the Silicon tip from last week’s video. And, it is wearing down a bit. I don’t know if I press too hard, or what. I may look for another brand to try. Overall I love using it vs a screen protector so I want to find a really good one.

Tools Used in This Procreate Tutorial

This tutorial uses the following:

• An iPad. I am currently using the Gen 3 12.9 inch iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil 2
• Procreate App – We are using 5.2 at the time of filming
• The Technical Pencil from the Sketch Brushes that come default with Procreate
• The Colo Mono Procreate Brush from my Colorado Brush Set

A lot of this tutorial is just watching, so use it as inspiration to see how you might create a fun folk art piece using the Symmetry features in Procreate.

Watch Draw a Folk Art Bee With Me in Procreate

Step 1 – Setting Up Procreate Canvas

1. Symmetry is a lot of fun with Procreate and can make things you draw feel more uniform. I’ll be using the symmetry feature a little different from my Boho Floral Line Art in that I won’t be using the Quadrant setting. If you want to see that video head over there.
2. Create a 4000 x 4000-pixel canvas at 300 DPI for printing. If you want to do smaller you can. To see how I create a new canvas, be sure to watch my Intertwining Florals and Text tutorial
3. Next, tap on Canvas, then Drawing Guide – turn it on
4. Tap on Edit Drawing Guide
5. On this pop up we’ll choose Symmetry and tap on Options to make sure Vertical is turned on and Assisted Drawing is turned on.
6. This way what we draw on the left will repeat on the right.

Step 2 – Drawing the Circle

1. On a new layer, I’ll begin drawing my circle out. If you don’t want to use the symmetry feature here, simply tap the layer and tap that. You can always tap it back on. 
2. Next, draw a circle to use as a guide for drawing my florals. I want to stay inside of this line, but won’t be including the actual circle line in my art.
3. To draw a perfect circle draw the circle and hold, then tap with the left finger to get the perfect circle. Now, place the circle in the center of the screen. 

Step 3- Drawing the Bee

1. I’m going to start by drawing the bee in the center with my sketch brush. Sketching helps me make sure I’m happy with the placement of everything. 
2. I’ll draw out the body then the head, next I’ll draw the wings. I find that when I’m drawing curved shapes that meet in the center of the symmetry vertical line it can look wonky. So when I need to do my clean line art after I may turn off symmetry while drawing those portions.
3. Just a reminder that if you haven’t seen my videos before, I like to use two weights of lines for my art. One thicker for the main lines and a thinner one for details. So when I go to apply line art I will add those, but for now, I’ll simply sketch everything with the same line art size.

Step 4 – Fill In the Florals

1. I’m going to start drawing my florals. I like to stick to a few styles so it feels more uniform. You can have a lot of fun with this.
2. Begin by drawing out petals and leaves.
3. As you need to, create these little teardrop shapes to fill in areas. I also like to draw circles or dots, even tiny flowers to help fill in the empty spots.
4. When I reach the center where the vertical symmetry line is I want to make sure everything works okay and looks right. This can be a more tricky part of drawing these. Feel free to turn off symmetry and simply draw as normal here.
5. One of the things I have been doing lately is merging all my sketch layers together and recoloring the lines as a light blue to make it a little easier to line art over them. On this one, I made a new layer above, filled with blue, then clipped it to the sketch and merged. There are other ways you can do this.

Step 5 – Apply Line Art

Here you can merge all of your layers and reduce the opacity so you can draw pretty line art over the top. As I mentioned before, I do use two different line weights here. What weight you use is your personal preference. It looks like I used a 7 for the thick lines on this canvas size and then smaller for the thinner.

Step 6 – Color

1. I’ll color in my artwork by merging my line art layers together. Tap on the layer to turn off Drawing Assist.
2. Next, tap the line art layer and choose Reference to fill with colors. 
3. Drag your colors to each area on new layers. I always put my colors on their own layers.

This type of art reminds me of coloring, it’s freeing and doesn’t feel hard. 

I hope you took something valuable away from this video today. I know it wasn’t a ton of teaching, but it can be fun to watch and learn, too!

Until next time!

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