Art with Flo (Flo)

Flo’s corner of YouTube is the calmest place on the internet — a digital-art channel where the loudest sound is a stylus on glass. Art with Flo, run by a Dutch artist since 2017, has become one of the platform’s most beloved Procreate teachers: hundreds of follow-along tutorials, a “You Can Draw This” promise that actually delivers, and a community of beginners who arrived intimidated and stayed because she made it fun.

The pitch is disarmingly simple. Flo makes step-by-step digital art tutorials in Procreate — the iPad drawing app that turned a tablet into a sketchbook for millions — and guides viewers through every stage of a finished piece: the cozy girl-and-her-cat illustration, the dreamy island landscape, the messy expressive blossom tree, the seasonal pumpkins and snowmen. You watch, you draw along, and an hour later you have something beautiful. “You will be learning while doing!” runs her channel mantra, and the comments sections read like a support group for people who finally finished a painting.

What separates Flo from the crowded field of art tutorial channels is the deliberate beginner-first design. Many art channels are secretly made for people who can already draw; Flo’s are genuinely built for someone opening Procreate for the first time. She shows her entire process — every brush, every layer, every undo — and narrates decisions out loud so viewers learn the thinking, not just the steps. Her ethos is explicit: no secrets. She’ll tell you exactly which brush she used and why, and she encourages viewers to ask her anything.

The audience found her because the format is frictionless. YouTube Shorts and TikTok carry bite-sized versions of the tutorials — a jellyfish blooming in watercolor brushes, a spooky house for Halloween — that function as trailers for the full-length versions. The long-form videos are unhurried and ASMR-adjacent: soft narration, visible progress, the quiet satisfaction of a canvas filling up. In a recommendations feed optimized for outrage, a channel built on calm is its own kind of disruption.

Behind the free content sits a real small-business ecosystem, the kind of creator economy case study people write about. Her Patreon hosts more than 250 exclusive Procreate tutorials, with a new one arriving every week and tiers that unlock the entire back catalog; her site artwithflo.com sells brush packs and courses; and freefromflo.com gives away free brushes to lower the barrier even further. It’s the classic tutorial-creator model executed unusually well: give away the joy, sell the depth.

The community piece matters as much as the content. Flo shows up across platforms — Instagram as @floortjesart, TikTok and Facebook as @artwithflo — and she’s become a peer among the Procreate teaching world: she appeared as a guest on The Sketch Wave podcast’s Halloween episode alongside JoelCreate and James Julier, trading favorite tutorials and debating when a piece is actually finished. Codecondo’s roundup of the best Procreate channels singled her out for a catalog that teaches viewers to recreate specific, beautiful pieces — with the wise caveat every art teacher gives: steal like an artist, then make it your own.

The deeper reason the channel works is cultural. The iPad democratized illustration the way the camera phone democratized photography — suddenly everyone had the tool, but nobody had the on-ramp. Art with Flo is the on-ramp. Her underlying message, repeated in nearly every video, is that anyone can learn to draw if they stay focused, stay patient, and practice — and then she proves it, in real time, by taking you from blank canvas to finished piece before your coffee cools.

There’s also something quietly radical about the sincerity. No drama, no clickbait face, no manufactured urgency. The thumbnails promise a cozy painting and the video delivers a cozy painting. In an attention economy that rewards the loudest voice in the room, Flo built one of art YouTube’s most loyal audiences by being the gentlest — proof that warmth, clarity, and genuine teaching still compound.

Why people watch: to learn, to relax, and to finish something. Every tutorial ends the same way — with a viewer holding up a painting they didn’t think they could make. That feeling is the product, and Flo manufactures it on a schedule.

And the catalog keeps compounding. Seasonal tutorials — pumpkins in October, snowmen in December — give the channel a ritual rhythm, the art-teacher equivalent of a holiday special, and each one converts a new wave of iPad owners who unwrapped their device that week. Flo didn’t chase the algorithm; she built a library, and the library became the channel’s gravity. Years in, Art with Flo remains what it was at the start: the friendliest door into digital art on the internet, held open by someone who genuinely loves watching people walk through it.