Artist's Guide to Procreate (iPad Tutorial)

[Music] hey everyone cynics here today I'm going to be sharing all of my current methods and tips on using procreate this is not sponsored or anything like that I'm just currently using procreate for a lot of the art I do and I know a lot of you have also picked up iPads and been dabbling around with it so it seems like a great time to make a video on it anyway there are definitely a lot of other great art programs out there for the iPad as well but I find that this one works well for me so I'm just gonna stick with it I do want to make a quick note of a couple important hardware things I'm using a 2nd gen iPad pro with a paper like screen protector I consider the last part very important not the brand or anything you don't have to use a paper like screen protector but any matte finish screen protector is highly recommended for getting the most out of your iPad otherwise you're just going to be slipping and sliding all around that glass surface with far less control alright let's get into this video the most important first step is understanding the basic setup and controls personally I always just open up new canvases at screen size because it seems efficient enough if you're heavy-handed or light-handed it's always good to mildly adjust the pen pressure curve to suit your tendencies that should be the first thing you do in any art program now I recommend acclimating yourself to the program by just using the HB pencil for a while some people like the 6b pencil but I think the HB is a little softer on the texture which makes it look a little better in my opinion we'll just be using that for the first chunk of this video exclusively it's the only real brush I use for drawing and it has a lot of versatility so while you're noodling around with that basic controls would be good to know a two-finger tap will of course undo anything a three finger tap will redo things you have undone and you can also clear the whole layer if you hold those three fingers down and wiggle them a bit the second most useful thing is that you can hold your finger down briefly to color pick things like zooming in and rotating should be intuitive and if you guys if I'll use smartphones and basically any touch device by now if you want to make a straight line you can just hold the pencil in place for a bit after you've started a line and it will snap to a straight line you can technically do that with curves and angles as well you can do a color fill by holding and dragging the current color from that top right color selector and that's pretty useful you can kind of move your finger back and forth to adjust the way it fills honestly there's a lot of hidden nonsense you can do with the controls but I think those are the main things that I personally use on a regular basis one additional control feature you might want to look into is the swipe controls Anthony Jones recently showed me these so credit to him but there is an option to turn on a small control menu whenever you put your finger on the screen it brings up a little radial selection menu and you can program the commands on it and swipe toward them to use them for instance you can set the top one to horizontal flip which is by the way very useful and now any time you just swipe up on the screen with one finger it flips the canvas now Anthony Jones just uses it like this but personally I found because of how I hold the stylus and everything that I was accidentally triggering it far too often luckily there is an option to make it so it only comes up when you're holding this little box icon below the brush size control and this is the ideal solution for myself so I have been getting a lot of use out of this feature and you can program it however you like let's go over layers for a moment if I'm just sketching I tend to treat every layer like a page in a sketchbook I believe the limit in procreate is something like 20 layers I'm not a very intensive layer person so I haven't actually reached that limit but some important things to know about layers if you click the layer you can change a lot of the settings for that layer the most value one probably being alpha lock or maybe clipping mask whatever depending on your methods now if you click that little letter next to the layer name that will let you change the blending mode and opacity of the layer it's usually set to end for Noir so if you need to change say your line art to a multiply layer that's the place to do it also you can swipe the layer toward the left and that's where you get the option to duplicate or delete a layer finally it's very valuable to know that you could hold a layer for a moment and then drag it to change the order of the layers and it's my personal favorite you can even squeeze them together to combine two or more into one layer alright alright enough about all of that let's just have some fun with the HB pencil it should feel pretty natural you can use the side of the pencil to build up a bit of tone and just have fun exploring a quick tip I recommend using an 80 to 90% black value for your color don't go for the full digital black that'll look a bit fake this is a pencil afterall we want it to feel like a pencil so in order for it to feel realistic anywhere between that 80 to 90 percent range is probably about right and by the way that will also be useful when you're colorizing the line work later and some more notes you're going to see me erasing for that I'm using the round brush we're also gonna get into smudging and I just have that set to the flat brush at the moment but any kind of more boring brush will be just fine for that for this first demonstration we're going to go above and beyond just sketching and start relying on the smudging tool to blur out ideas and rebuild them continually just trying to feel out a design and build up some value at the same time you could potentially make some finished looking value paintings just using this method I find the constant destruction in rebuilding to be a great entry level method into most of my views on design Theory relying on a bit of chaos to invoke your visual library and then bringing shapes forward with fun energetic lines it also encourages you to not get too attached to your drawings which is very important anyway this is starting to look like some octave dad nonsense but that's okay the next little tool that I think you'll get a lot of mileage out of is the liquify tool yeah that's right they have a liquify tool just like in Photoshop and it is delightful if proportions or perspective get a little bit off just liquefy things back into place it's very well integrated into pro-grade and really helps save a lot of time just click on the little magic wand effects thing at the top and find it in that drop down menu I think that's about enough of this silly looking guy you can see how easy it would be to just iterate around on a design forever blurring things out building them back up and playing with the overall shapes remember the process should be more fun than the product moving on for this next demonstration we're going to be using just a big soft round airbrush the point of this demo is to get you comfortable with the selection tools we'll try a quick environment so we can either drag and drop in a fill tone for the background but probably airbrush it a bit to add a subtle gradient now that third upper icon on the left the one that looks like an S is the selection control I'm going to freehand a selection for some distant mountains now you can either bring it back to that starting dot and add as many selections as you want or just kind of leave it unfinished and it will do its best to guess what you're going for once you have a selection you just got to airbrush it out with that large size airbrush keep it nice and subtle in the background now I can go through repeating this process a bunch building up contrast as we get closer and closer in space this is of course a very rough example so I do apologize for the composition I probably should have thought it out more but oh well we can add some figures with the selection tool even some highlight effects and we're pretty much done I'll draw in a couple quick lines and details just for fun but I don't want to over invest overall this is just a fun effective way to play around with compositions and thumbnails and ideally improve yourself at them actually this does leave us open to try one more thing procreate doesn't have gradient maps which I would have recommended but if we go to that second upper-left icon we can do a color balance adjusting the colors on the shadows mid-tones and highlights is a quick way to bring in some easy color to a grayscale image and get a little bit of that gradient map effect leaving us in a good spot to potentially start freely painting on top of these colors well I think that's about all for this example it's time to start exploring some other brushes and I have a fun bonus for you all I've made my own simple set of brushes which are kind of similar to what you've seen me use in Corel Painter and I'm going to of course be sharing those with all of you maybe you'll enjoy them maybe you won't but at least they're available to mess around with the link will be in the description below and please just Google how to install them I don't want to make a whole video on that but I'll be hosting them on my patreon page and don't worry you don't have to be a patreon supporter or anything to get them they will always be public and free to everyone I'm just hosting them there because it's a very reliable spot to put things let's just run through these real fast the HB pencil is of course the default HB pencil so skipping ahead to the scratch board brush that is just a flat edged brush with a size jitter trying to recreate the scratch board pen from Corel Painter that I usually use for just drawing in follow of that sort of hard edge stuff the thick and thin brush is also a recreation of the thick and thin pen from painter it's basically just the scratch board brush but with a little bit of opacity thrown in it's pretty good for making chaotic marker looking sketches when I da ting kind of how you would with a Copic marker next up is the dry brush light now this is a cheap knockoff attempt of my favorite Corel Painter brush the dry brush it stores a short amount of paint in each stroke and then turns itself into a blending brush until you pick it back up off the screen to reload it it's definitely not a perfect recreation but I've learned to make it work pretty well it's the quickest way to build up a lot of form in a single stroke with hard edges and soft edges all in one next is the round opacity which is supposed to be like a basic Photoshop style round brush with pressure set to opacity it's a pretty good all-purpose painting and drawing brush if you want it to be the glow brush is a course similar to the globe Russian painter although not quite as fancy it basically just color dodges it's still good for lighting effects the soft airbrush is of course what you saw previously I've been getting a lot of use out of that just for making big gradient shifts across a whole canvas and harmonizing things as well the try beam is just an attempt at a triangle-shaped brush for sketching it's a bit unwieldy but I'm trying to get a little better at it it can be good though to have that little bit of chaos the trifecta brush is a combination of the Tri beam and the dry brush I've been using it for a lot more detail-oriented stuff that I would use the dry brush for so it's kind of fun to make some little tight lines and then blend them out to one side it's a little bit crunchy err in the end and the dry brush just a little hint of that chaos so it's a little bit fun you might enjoy it once again these brushes are a little bit complicated there's also damp brush in there I don't know why that's in there but whatever I'll just leave it so that's all of it let's just try to put it all together now and make a quick painting I didn't plan anything out so I'll just start with some face doodles that's normal enough I'm gonna use the HB pencil and hope for the best I think this yeah I think this will somewhat work it looks like some sort of girl with weird clothing and some butterflies floating around I do want you to pay attention to some design Theory stuff though I'm purposely simplifying every butterfly into a big medium and small shape which is of course one of the pillars of good design this should make them all more graphically appealing just from that 2d standpoint same thing with the hair on the back of her head and any other random element that I can remember to include always implement shape hierarchy if you want a good drawing I'm also not afraid to liquify at any point to improve things or flip the canvas to check stuff incorporate those things into your regular workflow okay it's time for a base color layer I was thinking of having a blue background in general ambience so even though the local color skin wouldn't be blue I'm going to block it out with a nice blue color I've been doing this more and more often lately it tends to just give a nice effect and base for you to build skin tones on top of I highly stress the importance of being playful and experimental with your under painting elements this is the best stage to do it so once those skin areas are blocked out I'm going to alpha lock this layer now I can use a bit of airbrushing to add some proper color and Grady ations to the skin gray da ting your base colors is wonderful not only is it pretty and fun but it's gonna make things look less stiff and more realistic in the long run hue variation is so important in skin tones so getting it in early can really help now once that gradiation is done I can use that trifecta brush try to cut in some harder edges of highlights to really pop out some planes on the face I decided not to go too dramatic with the lighting it's going to be fairly even and boring which is probably a mistake but the face and pose were pretty Undine amick anyway so might as well make the whole thing boring that's what I call consistency no that's a terrible idea but after adding the hair in background tone I decided to just color ship the skin toward a much more unique blue tone but it was at this point that I was honestly starting to really worry about this image I wasn't feeling that happy with the lack of anything dynamic and my spirit was dying the only solution to not give up was to just go extreme with hot pink and cyan everything from here on is just a mess of those two super bright colors to keep me amused until the eventual dumps their death of this image once again though I'm trying to avoid just adding lines or making any tiny shapes and really focusing on design theory and shape appeal to at least make some chunky big triangular shapes so I've rushed through it and it's super sloppy but I'm just going to call this one done it was around one hour of effort altogether on this image one step that I completely overlooked in mentioning is that I did do a color balance on my lineart layer after doing the base colors I made all of the lines a little more brownish slightly warmish in order to mesh with the colors you've seen me do that in Corel Painter a thousand times and I want to emphasize that I do that in procreate as well anyway I didn't get a chance to show off my dry brush nonsense that much so that's no fun some of you may be familiar with the creature designs I've been doing on my Instagram lately these are often a mix of previous techniques I've talked about but also a bit more heavy on the dry brush such as in this one which was almost entirely done just building up things with the dry brush you really want to get into that sculptor mindset and visualize the 3d forms as something you're building up and carving into actually let's just do a quick example using the dry brush I'll spend about 15 minutes building up a blobby mutant potato I'll still use the pencil and airbrush just add a couple of moments along the way but mostly you're gonna be seeing a lot of dry brush sometimes including a nice punch of secondary light around the edge can really take the overall feeling of form to the next level but those flat highlights wouldn't work nearly as well if you didn't have the dry brush there carving out those little crevices and softly blending everything around the forum honestly if you feel like you're struggling with form stuff the best way to improve is to draw contour lines on everything just nonsense blobs add tons of contour lines anytime you're doing figure drawing real life stuff stuff from imagination contour lines on everything and you'll really start to feel more of a sense of form anytime you're drawing I love doing it personally I do it for fun on a lot of my creature designs and it just helps me stumble into new designs as well just having all those little cut lines contours around everything they give you new ideas so really do it do it a lie okay but enough mutant potato inge let's just wrap up this video if you have any super important questions about procreate I'm sure I've got plenty of stuff so feel free to ask in it's below and feel free to answer other people's questions if you know the answer this video got delayed many times because of scheduling nonsense but I'm happy to have something to finally share with you guys once again please enjoy the free brushes in the link below and I will do my best to start the next video right away I want to give a huge thank you to everyone for taking the time to watch this video and of course the biggest most special most loving thank you to all of my patreon supporters who truly do make these videos possible see everyone make sure to visit me at lightbox

Channel: Sinix Design

Views: 571,467

Rating: 4.98562 out of 5

Keywords: procreate, art, artist, tutorial, guide, lesson, concept art, design, design theory, painting, lineart, coloring, digital painting, tips, tricks, how to, commentary, review, paperlike, creature design, ipad, pro, speedpaint, lighting, form, blending, brushes, brushset, custom

Id: aGPnN0Yoldw

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019