Starting off with creating thumbnails is a great way to explore your initial ideas quickly to find the right foundation to build on. In this first lesson, I will show you how I sketch my thumbnails, going from idea to the first visual. The main focus here will be how to create thumbnails quickly (not spending more than 1 hour max per thumbnail), being playful and experimenting, keeping the canvas small, and trying out different angles and perspectives to see which thumbnail works best for your idea.

The goal of this lesson is to focus on adding more values to the chosen thumbnail from Lesson 1 before starting to add color to the scene. I'm going to work my way through the layers to get the value in the right place and finish the greyscale sketch before demonstrating how to quickly rough in color in the initial coloring stage. Finding the main overall color-theme will be important in this lesson. I will also show you how to create brushes using the default effects in Procreate that will help to save you time while you paint.

What is closest in a painting shows us the action and story that is happening, but it is the background that tells us where it is happening. Adding tons of detail to our scene is what's really going to make it convincing, so the main focus of this lesson will be adding in the background details and getting the city feeling like a city should. After that, I will be adding in lots of extra little details to the scene to create more visual interest, including windows, lights, smoke and layers of buildings with ventilation systems, signs, pipes and wires. I'll also show you how to make a custom brush from scratch to help you add details much more quickly.

The foreground is where the story and main focus will take place, so in this lesson, we'll "dress the set" just as they would on a movie set. Everything except the characters will be finished in this lesson. We'll continue working on the environment until it is fully detailed with food in the food stand and all of the lighting and shading is completed, while keeping in mind how the color and lighting will affect other elements in the scene. It's important to use reference for inspiration here, not just to make the food look right, but also to make the small food stand look more believable.

I very often paint my environments before adding characters so I can get a feel for the story I want to tell, who the characters should be, and what they should do. In this lesson, I'm going to be fine-tuning the characters, redesigning them and trying out different expressions to see what works best as we integrate them into the scene. Throughout the lesson, I'll be adding additional details and textures to the characters while keeping in mind what will eventually be animated in Lumafusion. The whole scene will be completed by the end of this lesson, bringing the thumbnail sketch from Lesson 1 to a finished piece.

It's finally time to breathe some life into our painting! In this lesson, we'll be moving from Procreate to Lumafusion, which we'll be using to animate our scene. I'm going to go over any last-minute tidying up before moving on to animation, show you how to export our layers from Procreate and create a nice parallax camera movement between them, set the foundation for the movement by building it up layer by layer, and begin animating various elements like the tram and the moving haze/smoke between buildings. This animation will be a 10-second long clip.

In our final lesson, we'll be continuing on from Lesson 6 to finish animating our scene. I will show you how to add the last layers and animate the remaining elements including the rotating fan, the sleeping chef, more smoke and steam, cooking flames, and rain. We will also do the final touches on the overall look before we render out the final scene.