I really loved experimenting with this piece; I tried shading in a slightly different way, by colour matching, referencing and lowering the opacity, but I decided to keep it a little harsh and not use any blur effect. I like how this gives the illustration a comic-like influence. Having learned another tip on clipping masks, I applied my knowledge and gave the primary colour layered texture to the image, adding some depth to the fairly simple illustration. I'm really happy with how this turned out, even though I didn't include all facial features. My only improvement for next time is to keep everything in separate layers, so any alterations asked for by the customer are simple to do.

I decided to create an instagram account to feature my art, and I wanted my first post to be my first illustration. I thought it would be fun to redraw my first attempt and I was amazed at my improvement over just a few months. I utterly adore this piece, I'm really proud of my shading and I love how much tidier my line work is. Again (as always), I could improve the hair texture... but I love how smooth and cartoonish the final result is.

My friend, Emily McChrystal (soulnotespoetry on ig) wrote a poem that I absolutely adored; one of the verses can be seen in this illustration. To show my appreciation, I drew Emily's girlfriend as the sun, with the poem Emily had written on show. Illustrating people has become a lot more efficient with the streamline tool, but I am yet to get used to shading; here, I used quite dramatic block colours, then lowered the opacity and blurred it using the gaussian tool. Again, I could definitely work on the hair texture, but I didn't want to overload this piece. I took my time on the lettering; I experimented with placement, size and complimentary doodles, finally settling on the spacing you see here. I wanted a square dimension so nothing would be cut off from an instagram preview, but I'm worried it still seems a little crammed. I may come back to this in the future with a different placement in mind.

My first commission! I was asked to do this for my friend as a tease for somebody they were entertaining. It turned out so cute! Between this illustration and the last, I found the 'streamline' function on Procreate. What a game changer! This really accentuated the gorgeous curves on their body, I'm so pleased with the final result! I sent different colour variants for my friend to choose from, I settled on this one, as it sings all things GIRL POWER!

An online friend posted a selfie captioned with Harry Styles lyrics; I thought she looked so so pretty and I ADORED her hair so I thought I'd do a little illustration to show my appreciation. As always, I traced the basic features. This time, I added text too; I found it tricky to navigate but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. If I were to try this piece again, I would attempt to add more texture to the hair.

I initially traced a screenshot from the show, eventually reshaping the eyes and some facial features. This was inspired by comics and cartoons as I believe this suits my beginner-style of procreate artistry. There was an area of the image that was deep in shadow, around the gun and hands, which I struggled to draw - one of my friends recreated the hold position of the hands to make it easier for me to draw. I was more careful this time to create more layers, keeping separate base colour, shading and outlines to ease restyling and corrections. The quality of this drawing is not as clear as I would have liked, I think I used to dimensions of the screenshot which were apparently quite small, impacting the final size of my drawing.

I traced and repositioned the letters to create TRASH from THRASHER. Outlining in white, then following with red, orange and filling with yellow. At this point, I wanted my orange to be brighter, so I refilled the orange shading in a lighter, more saturated tone. To ensure my outline was bold enough, I went over the red and white outline again. Should this be used as a reference, I would make the outline bolder still, as the red line seems quite thin here.

This expressive video was a cultural reset. I had to take my favourite moment and capture it forever. This was the first time I really tried to use Procreate; it took trial and error and YouTube tutorials, but I'm quite happy with the end result. I could probably refine the eyes and tongue, but I'm proud of my patch shading considering it was a first attempt. I think to improve, I'll work on more faces and shadows, working with all colours (such as green and purple) and not just skin tones.