# Botanical Illustration: Draw a Flower Flat Lay with iPad Procreate - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/botanical-illustration-draw-a-flower-flat-lay-with-ipad-procreate/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # Botanical Illustration: Draw a Flower Flat Lay with iPad Procreate Updated September 2026 Esther Nariyoshi · Published Illustrator based in the US All levels · 76 min Twelve fast floral sketches teach real Procreate technique, but the payoff depends entirely on already knowing the app. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbotanical-illustration-draw-a-flower-flat-lay-with-ipad-procreate%2F1899856689) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Esther Nariyoshi's flower flat lay class is built around volume rather than depth: twelve separate floral or leaf motifs, each drawn and finished in its own file, then assembled into one composition at the end. That structure is the course's biggest strength and its biggest limitation at once. Because every motif gets its own short pass, the pacing never stalls, but any single technique gets touched once or twice and then the class moves on. ## What the course actually walks through The opening lessons cover source gathering (Pinterest, botanical gardens, reference books) and a brush and canvas setup that recurs for the rest of the class: one file per motif, a shared color palette layer, and a habit of separating stems, main leaves, and overlapping leaves onto different layers so texture work on one element never bleeds into another. From there the class builds a small set of repeatable moves. Blending modes get used less as a coloring choice and more as a fast harmony test, cycling through multiply, screen, color dodge, and linear burn on the same base color to see which relationship looks best before committing to paint. Clipping masks appear constantly, most usefully in the shading demonstration where a textured gouache-style brush lays sandy shadow onto a leaf, then a shaped eraser cuts a clean line back through the middle of that shadow to fake a crisp edge and a light source. Volume gets added to flat shapes with a simple two-layer trick: a lighter front face and a darker offset shape behind it, a move repeated across several motifs including the centerpiece flower. The centerpiece lesson is the most developed single demonstration, walking through a guide-based method for drawing tightly packed petals: a small circle and orbit act as a scaffold, petals get stacked outward from it in two passes, first a rough directional pass, then a cleaner traced pass once the angles are settled. It is the closest the class comes to a fully resolved illustration technique rather than a quick exercise. ## Where it falls short The course explicitly assumes familiarity with Procreate's interface. Brush settings, layer panels, alpha lock, and the reference-layer trick for separating outline from fill are all used with only brief explanation, and total beginners to the app will lose the thread quickly. The class also leans heavily on time-lapsed sections, openly acknowledged by the instructor, which means several motifs are demonstrated at a pace too fast to actually follow stroke by stroke, only to be reviewed afterward at a summary level. The final assembly lesson, where the twelve exported PNGs get scaled, arranged, and color-adjusted into one flat lay, is comparatively thin given how much setup earlier lessons put into making that step easy. It covers exporting with transparency and batch importing but skips real detail on composition decisions beyond spacing motifs to avoid an obvious repeat pattern. At 76 minutes across seventeen lessons, this plays best as a technique sampler rather than a single deep skill build. Viewers who already have basic Procreate fluency and want a fast way to expand their library of floral shapes, shading tricks, and layer habits will get real value from it. Viewers hoping for a slow, fully explained single flower illustration should look elsewhere, since depth here is deliberately traded for breadth across twelve quick motifs. The standout The clipping-mask shading workflow, where a multiply-blended texture layer is masked to a leaf shape then eroded with a shaped eraser along the midline to fake a natural shadow, is the one technique worth the whole runtime. ## What you will learn - · Building layered floral motifs from simple guide shapes to finished, colored elements - · Using blending modes (multiply, screen, color dodge, linear burn) to shortcut color harmony without repicking colors - · Setting up clipping masks for non-destructive shading and highlight layers - · Adjusting brush streamline and pressure curve settings to control line smoothness and thick/thin variation - · Exporting individual PNG motifs with transparency and assembling them into one flat-lay composition - · Adding volume and dimension to flat shapes using darker back-layers and highlight lines Best for: Illustrators who already know Procreate's interface and want a volume of quick, varied floral-motif exercises to build a personal shape vocabulary. Skip it if: Complete Procreate beginners, since interface basics like brush menus and layer panels are assumed rather than explained. Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbotanical-illustration-draw-a-flower-flat-lay-with-ipad-procreate%2F1899856689)