Hooray! I created my own leaf stamp, but that was a struggle. I could not get the eyelets to match up with the next leaf, so I started from scratch and found I needed that center stem guide for sure, but everything else I could smooth into place, revising afterwards, and ready for the two-tone nouveau.

Notice the overlapping areas– that is created by drawing in the shape and then erasing the parts “behind” that would not be visible in real life.

Four of those I arranged on my canvas in ProCreate, adding in the class stamps of lotus flower, heron, and bluebird in a layer on top of the leaves. If you look closely, you’ll see how I erased an outline around each shape so it would pop out. I also erased the leaf area behind the shapes so the blue background areas [also separate layers] would show through.

On another canvas, I’d created a “ginkgo” brush which I can use to fill in a background, like this:

We were to fill in the areas around the large leaves we’d designed with another leaf pattern. I decided  I would fill the areas in with the “ginkgo” brush. Since it’s fairly large, I can now see a line in a few areas of the ginkgo pattern, which I’ll need to revise later.

Since the background covers the whole canvas, it took a bit of work to erase the “brushed ginkgo” behind the merged drawing layers and then revise some of the leaves and spirals. But it worked.

I also added in “dots’ to fill in blank areas — just tap the canvas with the brush.

Finally, I merged the drawing areas, created an alpha lock, and used a darker green to add the “spotted effect” with the “paint spot” brush from class.

I then played around with the hue of the blue background layer and chose the burgundy result:

I can see now that I should have planned it out as a repeat pattern. Can’t you just see this as wallpaper?

I’ll be playing around with these techniques for a while, continuing my learning from the Art Nouveau class at Skillshare, using the app Procreate.

Techniques in this lesson:

• two-tones: light olive green for the leaves, flowers, and bird layers and a dark blue [with lighter blue texture added] layer
• create a stamp [large leaves]
• create a brush [ginkgo/spirals in background]
• create overlapping elements using erase strategy
• add “dots” for fill/interest
• create / add textures
• adjust hue for different colors — changed blue to burgundy