Sketchbook Pro (Mobile) WORKSHOP

[Jutter]

This workshop is for beginners also. I'll teach you how to make cool looking art using drawing-aids, special brushes, and basic shapes like ovals and triangles. Anyone with a bit of patience can learn this.
As I learn to preform more tricks, I'll add extra tutorials for those who wish to advance beyond the basics. And I hope others will eventually contribute with their own tutorials.
(To keep things tidy, I suggest keeping a specific tutorial within one single post, that you can always edit for additional information. Use spoilerboxes to keep the post compact. Artwork you make after following someone else's tutorial can be posted in the draw&paint thread).

TOOLS
Our weapon of choice will be Sketchbook Pro. [spoil:1t02lqqp]It's anyone-can-get-the-hang-of-it- easy to use, while incredibly powerfull (thus used and recommended by many professional artists!), relatively cheap and available on every rellevant platform. Owners of Android tables or I-pads will be cheapest off software-wise; at less than a tenner this slightly stripped down version costs but a fraction of the Windows/Apple-IOs version.[/spoil:1t02lqqp] It is the Android version I'll be using for my tutorials. That way I'll be using tools available to all versions.
I'll be fingerpainting all the way, because: a)I'll have to b)it'll prove that you don't need a stylus for this (though it helps).
  *mouse users: check out the "steady hand" feature... it's right next to the freehand icon. (Not a mobile feature) You'll be amazed at how well you can draw with a mouse all of a sudden. No you don't nessicarilly need a tablet. WOOT!* Like I said; this workshop is for everyone.

PS:
Erect a peanutgallery if you insist, but kindly post comments there to keep this place tidy. PM me for questions/requests. Thank you.

Check back for updates.  

[Jutter]

HOW TO USE SKETCHBOOK PRO

If you have the Android version, you'll get a quick tutorial at startup, so you know where to find what, and you can go back to that tutorial again by selecting the (i) icon -third from the left on the toolbar-, and then HELP.
I suspect the same goes for the I-Pad/I-Phone crowd, but the Apple/Windows desktop-users aren't so lucky.

For them I present this video. The mobile crowd might want to watch this also by the way, because it explains more about working with seperate layers, and locking transparancy! A trick you'll end up using A LOT!
[spoil:v0djaspq][youtube:v0djaspq]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDUWspKTvt0[/youtube:v0djaspq][/spoil:v0djaspq]
  *Whatever can be found in the tutorials mentioned above, won't be mentioned in this post*
[hrline:v0djaspq][/hrline:v0djaspq]

TIP: Android users can swap between different color-kits (a rough 30 colour pallete, COPIC colors, or the most flexible one shown in this screenshot). To do so, tap the little colored circle.


GENERAL DRAWING TIPS:
this is where I'll place general drawing tips as they come to mind
[spoil:v0djaspq]- Don't worry about what you can't draw (yet). Make the most of what you can draw.
-You can undo everything... even the undoing. Never worry about not getting it right on your first stroke.
-From rough to detailed. Get used to working in that order.
-Zoom in and out a lot. In to refine details. Out to keep track of the overall result.
-LAYERS LAYERS LAYERS! Split your work up in layers. Don't merge layers too soon. You might want to place something in between later.
-ROTATE! If you can't deliver nice strokes under the given angle... just rotate the canvas (the 9 and 0 keys for windows/mac see video-tutorial). Mobile users don't have this feature, BUT... you can rotate an entire layer, by choosing "transform Layer".
-MIRROR. You're eather a rightie or a leftie. Okay so maybe you're ambidextrous, but then your left brainhalf will still process things somewhat differently from the right half, and your eyes are cross-linked to those brainhalves, so flipping the whole thing over can really help. Swap your artwork around from time to time, to gain a fresh perspective on your picture.
-Utelize the available drawing-aids to save yourself time. For instance: don't waste time on erasing what you could've prevented by locking transparancy on the active layer.
-If you can draw stickfigures, you can also draw usable sillouettes by adjusting brush-size. Those can be a splendid basis for a more worthy sketch![/spoil:v0djaspq]

ADDING DEPTH
[spoil:v0djaspq]-The fancy shmancy way involves perspective, and parallel lines converging at the same point on the horizon. (There's always stuff like this, if you want to get REALLY technical). Even if you don't want to get your digital ruler out, this is still important to remember, because it's why...
-Size matters. Objects will appear smaller as they're seperated further from you.
-On a simillar note things will also appear closer together in the distance. If you're standing on a railtrack, the beams will appear to be closer together towards the horizon.
-Another quick and easy way to suggest depth is SHADING; what's further away will have a lighter shade, and what's close by a darker shade. So make every next layer darker/less pale than the one below it. You can adjust the opacity of every seperate layer to finetune things later.[/spoil:v0djaspq]

[Jutter]

LANDSCAPE PAINTING TUTORIAL WILL GO HERE
get yer Bob Ross on
The basic easy version will be very abstract with ovals for clouds, triangles for trees and mountains etc, but by working in shaded layers and airbrushing in some misty layers, we're still going to get some fancy looking cool effects in the end. I'll try and take you through an example step by step.

1) HAPPY CLOUDS
[spoil:1ua1vwcd]I'll be showing two methods. One for lone-clouds and one for cloudy layers.

Okay we start out in landscape mode. In this picture you can see what you need to select in order to paint the entire canvas in a nice shade of blue with a single tap.

Okay, so that bottom arrow only highlights the name of the color for reference. The cool thing about those japanese Copic markers, is that every color has it's own little codename. But back to our happy cloudy sky.
It's time to add an extra layer... you'll want to be able to manipulate sky and clouds seperately.
I drew some white ovals, using a narrow brush with full opacity (shoot, okay it was set to 0.89 as the screenshot shows). Filling the oval-clouds by tapping inside of them with the same tool you used for making the background (the bottom layer) blue.
Filling shapes often leaves an inner-edge that didn't get filled. Just take a modest brush, zoom in for precision and manually fill in those gaps. Make short seperate strokes, so you can undo mistakes without having to redo a lot. And there's always the hard eraser to clean up mistakes the oldfashioned way. Take your time.

Now if you don't want to do shading, stop right here, and just leave your blue backdrop with white ovals the way it is. I do encourage you though, to airbrush some brights across the lower part of each layer (low opacity!), to allow for misty transitions that create depth.

For those who want to add shading to shapes (in this case our oval clouds) read on.
First about locking transparancy, and what it does. Keep in mind that it's transparant layers you're drawing on. Locking those transparant areas makes it impossible to add further color to them. It's a neat trick that allows you to work quickly with bigger brushes, without making a mess. You can't colour outside 'the lines'.


I added a darker shade of blue (Copic new blue) to the backgound layer with airbrush, medium sized brush, lowest possible opacity. Even with something as simple as this you can make decissions about where the light is coming from. In this case I'm imagining it to be somewhere way up beyond the top-right corner (and well off in the distance of course because the lightsource is the sun duh). I make my airbrushed strokes from the top right to the bottom left, leaving the right (slightly more illuminated) half of the background lighter.
With transparancy locked on the top layer containing our white oval clouds, I  picked a warm shade of grey. Pick another one if it suits you better. I set the airbrush size and opacity about halfway. Added some grey touches to the clouds.
Notice how I only touched under and left. That's so it'll look like it's luminated by that lightsource in distant top right.
Afterwards I dropped the opacity of the cloud-layer to 70% to make them stick out less harshly. This also caused some of the background to bleed through, but I'll consider that, as Bob would've said "a happy accident" that adds a third color-shade to the clouds. Lifens things up a bit more.

If you don't like this symplistic look, you can always use lots of smaller circles and ovals to create more elaborate cloudshapes.
But if you want something realistic looking, you'll be delighted to see how the smeartool (set to small size and medium opacity) can transform the above picture into...
...THIS

that's by making little jiggly trokes along the edges of where I want coulours to do some cotton candy blending. You can even train in some highlights after that. Just pop in some modest dark touches with a firm pencil to 'lowlight' the brighter areas of a cloud, and inverse for the darker spots... nevermind how those applied patches of colcor initially look. Get that blend-tool out, and train those touches in there with some curly flair. (Be carefull where you start out though, you don't want to make a strategicly placed dark stroke disappear under a smear of white, when you were hoping to jog some grey streaks into a bright patch.)  
I'll probably post some more spectacular looking cloudscapes in the Draw&Paint thread later, as I'm still experimenting with the technique myself.
So there you have method one, at three levels of dificulty
1)Basic shapes. Plain colours. (maybe some mist added by airbrush)
2)Shading your shapes to give them more roundness (plasticity)
3)Make it look realistic using the smeartool.

Method 2: Layered clouds.
I used de PC version of Sketchbook Pro to create the second tutorial, but of course using tools available to all versions. I used a fineliner for my linedrawing, but you can use a pencil or a small brush if you prefer. Just max out the opacity.
You'll have to zoom in (ctrl+mousewheel) to read all the instructions.

For a simpler version you can leave out the airbrushing.
For a realistic look, again take your smearbrush (small size, medium opacity) and make playfully dancing strokes in the transitional areas to blend colours.[/spoil:1ua1vwcd]

[pr126]

I have Sketchbook Pro on My Nexus 7.
However, my drawing skills are less than zero. I simply cannot draw anything. Total failure.

I stick to what I know, photography.