Ultimate Guide to Procreate
Since about the year 2001 digital painting is gone from a small, really tiny hobby into a mainstream profession that is done by illustrators and artists. For anyone that has an iPad and does a digital art on an iPad knows they are almost always recommended procreate. Procreate is literally the program I was recommended and I still use in primarily in the main program used by anyone using any sort of tablet.
What is Procreate?
Procreate was launched initially by Savage interactive in 2011. The major appeal to procreate is for people that used to use Adobe Photoshop, but it’s easier and simpler to kind of use it on your tablet because you can take the tablet anywhere with you. The reason I had switched over to procreate is I was able to lean back and relax in any chair I want in the library. I just gotta have this thing on my lap, beforehand. I have to be Kind of chained to my computer even my laptop. I’d have to lean forward and more or less be attentive to it, but with this, I could literally lean back have this in my hand very much like I’m holding a book and just draw it.
Is it gonna be an intro to procreate? If you’re brand new this is the perfect place to be. We’re gonna go over the basic interface and some ideas on how to use it so let’s get started. So what is procreate. Procreate is a digital painting app that is on the iPad on the App Store. Use stylus on your iPad and the Pad itself and that’s all that’s required. So how much is procreate? It varies in price but at the moment it is $1299, a one time payment and you can pretty much have it forever. When you go to Photoshop, Photoshop has a monthly payment of like $50.
Does procreate run on every iPad? Procreate runs on modern iPads after about 2017. The stylist is easily available anywhere you just get the Adobe pencil.
So where do you get it? Like I said earlier you get it in the App Store. You download it like the way you download any other app from the App Store so once you open the app, you’re gonna be presented with something called the gallery view. This is a hub for all of your projects that you’re working on. Right here it’s a bunch of different canvases that you can put in this large folder.
Let’s look at the interface. With the toolbar, the toolbar at the top contains option for the brushes, smuages eraser the layers and all the color picker stuff. The action menu which looks like a wrench icon. This has the canvas settings, the sharing and exporting tools and all the adjustments. You have the sidebar control controls, which lets you adjust brush size and opacity. And then you have the gestures, which is what procreate kind of has a touch option.
So for example, when you touch the screen with two fingers because this is a touchscreen, it will be the undo. You press three fingers to the screen and that’s gonna be your redo. You can pinch the screen by putting your fingers together and pinching down and it shrinks the scale and then you can pinch up as well. This workflow is a lot faster than working on a regular tablet on the computer.
Customizing your workplace. You can tailor all of the tools to pretty much what you like. You can create any canvas size you want on the fly. There’s an 8 x 10* canvas. 300 dpi for print ready stuff, or you can actually make a 19 x 20 × 1080 pixel canvas for digital illustration files.
Brushes and tools. So if you use any digital art program before the brushes it is the most important part. The brushes are like the backbone of the program. The app in general gives you 200 default brushes, each are really customizable.
There’s different categories of brushes that go from different types of pencils to different types of art brushes, textures, and different calligraphy pens,
Brush studio. The studio allows different artists to edit or create brushes from scratch. You pretty much use any brush you’d like. You can adjust settings like spacing, jitter, texture grain, and probably the most important thing which is the pressure sensitivity response. The possibilities are completely endless, and it is really up to you of how you make and do these.
You can also go out and buy the brushes that I provide over here on this link.
Importing custom brushes. So with procreate you can download brushes that other artists created and import them into your version of procreate and use them. This is a great service and it’s something that allows everybody to customize on top of customizations. A lot of different artists sell their brushes because they have different brushes that replicate traditional mediums like oil, painting, or charcoal or watercolor. Essential tools beyond brushes. The eraser tool, uses the exact same brush library.
You can select the texture or the pressure sensitivity. if you want to erase, then you have to select tool. This offers different ways to select objects that you need to do. There’s free hand, automatic, and rectangular selections for editable areas.
Transform tool. This allows you to scale or warp or distort any elements on your illustration. So in short procreate allows you to pretty much do anything you desire.
Layers and blending modes. Layers are the foundation of any digital artist file. Why layers even. matter is because they allow you to break down your artwork into different sets of levels and work on those levels in separate ways. So if you have a line on one layer you can go back and adjust that line only. You can have the colors on a different layer, and then another layer for shading. This allows you to repair any aspect of the drawing individually so you don’t mess up
the other portions of it. They call it a non-destructive workflow, which gives you the flexibility to edit whatever you want at anytime.
Management in procreate allows you to duplicate, merge or group any of the layers. Procreate also supports, alpha lock, clipping masks and blending modes. You can also change different attributes of each layer as in multiply, overlay, screen, dark darken, and any other ones you want. This is gonna be very much like the layers that you use in Photoshop.
Let’s talk about some of the advanced features that procreate has. This is I think the various specific place where procreate really shines. Animation assists procreate and also has a 20 animation tool which allows you to do little short animations, create a frame by frame animation and export as a GIF.
Perspective symmetry tools. Procreate also has perspectives, grids, isometric guidelines, symmetry and drawing modes. These tools are invaluable if you’re doing architecture or Mandela’s or even comic panels. Color dynamics lets you build custom pallets and import different swatches to use for your color harmony. Dynamic color options are available.
Procreate Features
Time lapse recording. This is probably my favorite tool. Every single canvas comes with an automatic time lapse recording. The reason that this is so amazing is because you can kind of rewind and put your whole drawing process on social media, and this is always running.
Using procreate for different art styles. Comic artist. Procreate has very interesting brushes that you can use for comic drawings. The layer features makes it great for sequential art.
There’s a lot of perspective grids in order to use for any indie comic creator.
Concept artist has high resolution canvases, and you have a lot of different brushes that you can customize. This is something that concept artists really crave. You can use it for detailed
environments or characters.
Calligraphy and letter artists. You have the Apple Pencil pressure sensitivity, combined with the brush engine that makes it one of the best for hand lettering.
Tattoo design designers. A lot of different artists can sketch directly on here and you can present it to clients as kind of a mock up sketch for their tattoos.
Tips and tricks. Even if you have a really small workflow, you can save time.
Number one:
Gesture shortcuts let’s you learn the basics like the two finger undo and the three finger redo, and the four finger tab for full screen made. Number two: quick shape. You draw a rough circle and hold it with your pencil, and it automatically snaps into a perfect circle. You can do the exact same thing with squares. Number three: reference companion procreate allows you to open up a reference window for photos while drawing. Number four: File organization. Easy stacks in the gallery. This groups in by projects that can even back this up on the cloud or dropbox.
Procreate versus competitors. I think procreate’s absolutely better than any competitors tried.Photoshop or procreate. Photoshop offers a giant ecosystem of a group of different tools, but procreate just seems simpler. Clip studio paint versus procreate. It’s great for comics and manga, but the subscription is not great. This is a one time payment only Krita. It’s a great open source alternative but the lettering is awful. Adobe fresco focuses on natural brushes, but still is not as great as procreate in my opinion.
Community and resources. The procreate community is huge. Tutorials is full of different free tutorials for procreate. I even have some. There’s different platforms like skill share, and you to me and it gives you a lot of in depth courses on it. Brush marketplace. Creative market gum Road or Etsy has thousands, if not, millions of procreate so you can download and use on your own time. This is going to help you with any project.
Artist to follow. There’s different creators in the space, including myself that you can follow and it’s awesome. Social media hashtags can connect you to millions across the world.
Conclusion
Conclusion. Procreate is one of the most creative tools I think I’ve ever used. It takes all the best parts about Photoshop, but makes it way more streamlined and way easier to use and it’s a one time payment that’s very low. I haven’t seen anything better as far as price, usability and it’s just amazing. For any artist who is doing mostly traditional, you can dabble in digital and get procreate, it’s perfect. It’s a gateway to another world.
