Sketchbook Pro on iPad

"BABY DORA" Walkthrough.

With this walkthrough I want to share the steps I followed to nish this piece as well as my "tricks and tips" used on it.

I don't use to sketch in the rst steps, I prefer to work "alla prima" to set the colors and shapes composition from the very beginning. But in this case, I just had fun with the amazing Sketchbook's ne art pencils (downloadable for free in app) and started sketching in blue. Then, add a new layer and make a second sketch. I use the 9B with small size, black color and about 30% opacity. This gives me a nice pencil look, with strokes from grey to completely black.

Then, I add a grey background and start placing the white areas, since it will be very important in the look of this painting. I must say that I don't use 100% white in my paintings, but this one is an exception, since I want to represent that "clean and pure" look a puppy has.

It's very useful in this stage to squint your eyes so you can "compare the amount of white" in different areas (which is basically working the painting's values and, the squint thing will help to avoid color and focus just in values)

Then, I drop very roughly every single hue I see, trying to build my color palette inpainting, so the only thing I need to do later is use the color picker (instead of browsing the color wheel... Well, at least that's the idea :P) As you can see, I only paint, rough zones, forgetting the details, cause I just want to have a nice base to work with.

You can see there's a lot of difference between the three steps above and the last one. I just redened the kitty silhouette AND, the most important: added shadows, so now the kitty is "placed" instead of oating.

For the fur, basically I start by selecting the existing colors and make strokes with this brush (see image) trying to respect the original fur direction. Also play with the opacity and size to obtain a more or less dense style. Many people use to paint animals with strong color shapes, giving them a "cowish" look. To avoid this when painting fur, try to go a bit further with a

color into the other one and then, select this last and do the same to the rst. This will add a more realistic mixed (fur) color look.

What makes Sketchbook so versatil is the chance to customize your brushes to achieve many different textures. As an example, we have this wool thread here.

I just made a main stroke, then add shadows and added some extra strokes with the pencil. Where is this woolthread brush? The 9th brush, which is very useful for painting hair, could give me the effect I wanted just by tweaking a bit its sliders. Originally this brush add some extra lines to your stroke, so, what if we set its angle to 45 degrees? It will add a nice effect, but still not what we want. You'll need to play with the space to make it more believable.

But we need to do a couple more things with this thread to help the realistic look. Turning on the "block transparent pixels" box, will allows us to paint only on the thread, so if we pick the pink and, using the color wheel slider: -set it a bit darker -a bit more saturated -add a bit of purple Doing this, we can add believable shadow part with the ne art pencil, as well as adding strokes in the areas where the thread is more evident.

Final touches. It's easier to add texture once the overall color is stablished. As you can see in the pics below, it's posible to get so different fabric textures just by playing with the sliders. Believe me, all this custom brushes thing will come by itself when needed. The best way to learn how to use them is having the need of using them, in other words: painting (and having fun in the process ;) ).

Thanks for reading and I hope it was helpful!

Luis Peso.