Guide
Creating digital art – an overview of 6 apps for your tablet
by Michelle Brändle
Michelle's iPad creative course: painting digital Christmas greetings
18.12.2025
Translation: machine translated
Pictures: Michelle Brändle
Most people can create pictures with artificial intelligence. But I think self-painting is better - and much more fun. I'll show you how to do it easily.
In my iPad creative course series, I show you how to paint your own pictures using digital art programmes. In this instalment, I'm focusing on a cute Christmas illustration. You can personalise it and send it to your loved ones by smartphone or print it out and send it by post.
If you want to look back at the basics of digital art, you can find my past articles here:
In the following, I will show you a cat motif as a step-by-step guide using the programme «Procreate» on my iPad. The picture can also be drawn with other painting programmes.
«Merry Purrmas» for cat lovers
Cat motifs always work. And a bad pun even more so.
For the cuddly ball of fur, I start with the basic shapes on an A4 canvas in portrait format. The pencil tool in the painting programme is ideal for this. With Procreate, I use the «6B pencil».
Now I create a layer on top and reduce the opacity of the base layer to 50 per cent. Then - also using the 6B pencil - I add the more precise details. I work on them until I like them.
After that, I can hide the base layer completely and reduce the opacity of the new pencil layer. The final outer lines of the illustration are now applied to a third layer. My favourite brush for this in Procreate is «Mercury».
For the colours, I create a fourth layer below the outer lines. Now I define the outer lines as a «reference layer». This option is available in almost all art programmes. It defines the black lines as the border. I can then drag the colours - I am on layer 4 - from the colour palette directly into the desired fields. I have coloured in the illustration in no time at all. I make the background green in this step.
For more structure, shading is a must. So that I don't paint over the edge, I place the shading layer over the colour layer and define it as «Clipping mask». This way it is bound to the underlying layer and only colours there. Now I choose a coarse brush in a darker colour than the base coat - here I use the brush «Oberon».
Finally, the cat gets a bright decoration. To do this, I paint thick dots all over the furry friend on a separate layer using green, red and yellow. The easiest way to do this is with a large round brush.
I then duplicate the layer. The resulting copy is given the desired glow effect with the filter «Gaussian blur». If this is not enough, duplicate this layer again.
If you like, write your Christmas greetings on the very last layer and your self-painted Christmas card is ready. You can customise the name and greeting for each person individually and save the result as an image file.
Header image: Michelle Brändle
In my world, Super Mario chases Stormtroopers with a unicorn and Harley Quinn mixes cocktails for Eddie and Peter at the beach bar. Wherever I can live out my creativity, my fingers tingle. Or maybe it's because nothing flows through my veins but chocolate, glitter and coffee.
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