Beginner's Guide to Procreate

hello everyone welcome to my youtube channel today I'm going to do an introduction and kind of a basic summary of how I use procreate now a lot of you have been asking me about procreate and I know many of you have also just gotten you iPads for Christmas and have probably either purchased procreate already or thinking of getting procreate for yourself and I just wanted to make this video to give you guys a quick rundown on all of the features that I use everyday and maybe give you guys a little bit of a comparison between Photoshop because I know that's the main competitor between buying a tablet like this or buying something like a Wacom or a Huey and tablet and then using that with Photoshop so let's get right into it it looks like we're already here at the first page that you see when you open up procreate the gallery and the gallery is a collection of all of your pieces for you guys you may not have nearly as many because I've been using procreate for about a year and a half now but it's it's a really good way to quickly get an idea of where you've been and how much you've progressed over time now in the gallery you can do a few things one thing that you can do once you have a few paintings is you can stack them and group them so you start off by hitting the select button here and then you can select a few paintings like this and then you can click the stack button and then now that's out of that and now you have a stack of different paintings and you can use those to kind of keep yourself organized one reason that I use it is because if you want to duplicate a piece in order to do something kind of crazy radical experimental on it but keep the other one in case you mess it up you can just swipe to the left and then click duplicate and then now you have an a completely identical piece you can make all the edits you want in this one and this one will remain the same way as it was before you duplicated it and once you've done this a few times it can get messy to see all these duplicates so this is where I use the stock feature a lot and the main thing that you can do from the gallery is create a new canvas so to do that you hit the plus icon here and then you can go to create custom size and then you can choose your custom canvas one thing to note is that the size that you make it will influence your maximum layers the bigger the canvas size the less layers that you can have and the more powerful your iPad the more layers you can have per your canvas size color so you have the option between p3 white color or srgb standard color now how this works is that our eyes can see a lot of colors the Internet can only show us a very small sample of those colors however the screens that we use to view the Internet can show us a lot of colors not as many as our eyes can see but way more than the Internet can show us so for example if you have the iPad pro it can show you P 3 wide color which is a bigger color gamut as we call it and it's bigger than what the Internet can show you but it's not as big as what you can see in real life so if you make a canvas with P 3 wide color it's going to look very vibrant to you as you're painting you're gonna have more colors to choose from if you make a canvas with srgb standard color you'll be able to use it anywhere and the colors won't change but if you use it with if you make one with P 3 wide color and let's say you want to post it to Instagram what's gonna happen is the colors will change and it will look less vibrant to you because the internet compresses everything to srgb so I like to keep it in srgb because I rarely print anything and I focus on my content being viewable on YouTube and Instagram so keep that in mind when you're creating your new canvases because it's easy to forget so now that we're done with the gallery let's actually dig into the inner workings of procreate so to do this I'm going to look at a painting that I'm actually in progress on working on I'm gonna duplicate it so I still have the other one as my backup and I'm going to use this one to show you guys a little bit of what procreate can do actually not just a little bit exactly of what procreate can do especially with a focus on what I use it for so here the gallery button is the same thing that you've seen before it just takes you back to the guy and if you're in a stock it'll take you out of this into the stock first and then you have to hit out again to get into pro create gallery and now this button right here with the wrench this is where your kind of file edit stuff is if you're used to using programs on a desktop computer so here is where you can add different photos and insert things into your canvas the one I use the most is insert a photo and what that will do is allow you to go into your camera roll and then you can pick and choose a photo to add this is a photo that I'm going to do in an art critique live stream in a few minutes hopefully but you can have that there and once you import a photo you can scale it up or down and you can place it be careful though don't place it somewhere like this because if you place it there procreate will crop it and you won't be able to get that information back so always place it somewhere where you can see that whole thing and then that's how you place an image and it's really nice because it's stored as a new layer and then let's go back into the little wrench menu onto the canvas option you can crop your canvas beware that if you do crop it your procreate records a video of what you're doing as you're working and it will stay the same canvas size as your first canvas size if you crop it the video will kind of look weird when you export it so be wary of if you want to crop and resize a lot your video isn't going to be very enjoyable to watch another thing here to note is the canvas information button this button is very useful it can give you a lot of information about your canvas one fun thing to notice The Strokes made it will tell you exactly how many strokes we have done in this painting so far and so I've done almost 8,000 why this is kind of interesting to notice is because in order to create the video that procreate does it takes a picture of your canvas every time you make a stroke so this for minute and 27 second video that procreate has created the speed paint time lapse if you will it's based off of almost 8000 strokes this tract time is how long the canvas has been open so it gives you a rough idea of how long it actually took you to create the painting it's usually very accurate in the beginning and the longer the drawing is it's usually less accurate because you know we always have it open we're looking at different stuff and things like that on the share button here are the different options for you to be able to share it outside so I use PSD for my patrons and then I use JPEG or PNG for Instagram this is really easy because you can also go ahead and let's see we want to export to PNG you can actually go ahead and export it to Google Drive or discord or Gmail and all those good things like that and on the video tab this is the time-lapse replay so it'll go ahead and show you the time-lapse if you click that first button the time-lapse recording is basically toggling on and off if you want that to be happening as you're painting it has absolutely no effect on the performance so just leave it on and that's poor time-lapse video just lets you save the video to your iPad or directly to an online source and then preferences are where all of your settings are so the one the things that I change the most are the pressure curve I don't really change that often anymore but this is the pressure curve I ended up getting used to for my kind of heavy-handed approach to painting I'm trying to use a lighter stroke but it's still kind of tricky for me to remember and then the gesture controls this is where you're going to set up your DoubleTap to undo where you set up using four fingers tap to get rid of the menu icons where you change your quick menu which we'll see later and all these different things you can really spend a lot of time here and customize it to your liking I'm going to skip these three icons for now and I'm actually going to get into the right-hand side and look at the three tools so procreate gives you three tools to work with you have the brush the smudge tool and the eraser and they all work as you would expect the brush tool allows you to paint media to the screen so this is my and you pencil eraser brush and you can see I can just paint like so with the brush tool I can take the smudging tool and then smudge it your decrease the size it's much alike that works pretty well very well and then you can take the eraser tool and you can choose a brush and erase works great the cool thing about all these tools is they all use the same brushes so if you have a brush that you paint with and you want to keep a very natural look to your drawing when you want to earase you can use the same brush to erase same with the blending tool if you want to blend with this let's say you have a particular brush that you are painting with and erasing with you want to keep the consistent look to your painting instead of blending and getting a super digitized perfect to blend to it you can use a rough brush to blend and it'll look like you're actually painting and using your brush to actually blend to your paint instead of this like perfect digital tool which is something that I really like and enjoy you can see the the blending really keeps this a nice texture to it because I'm using the same a similar rough brush to blend with now if you're interested more in these brushes that I have you can click to the top right here and I will there's a video there where I've talked about all of the brushes that I use mostly in my artwork along with a link to where you can download my brushes for free but one thing I will recap from that video is that in the brush menu you have the brush library and it's available in every single tool menu actually but I always use the brush menu to create new brushes so they're categorized into these default categories the imported one won't show up until you've imported a brush all you need to do to do that is to click the plus icon and hit import if you want to create a new category like the top one where I have created my portraits brush pack you scroll down you hit the plus icon and you can create a new brush category if you want to create a new brush you do it by either hitting plus and creating a new brush from scratch or how I like to do it you find a default brush that you like swipe to the left hit duplicate and now you see with that icon that that brush is now mine and it's something that I've created and I can mess with it and I never have to worry about losing everything if it's a reset and now to the layer menu the layer menu is pretty interesting there's a lot of things you can do here which makes it very powerful one thing is that you can merge all of your layers very easily by just compressing them like this you don't really have to look for any menus you just select them all with your hands and compress them to make new layers like you just saw me doing you just hit the plus icon to delete them you just swipe and delete if you want to duplicate them you swipe and duplicate or swipe to lock and if you're tired of doing repetitive actions you swipe to you so that you can select one and then you can swipe to the right and then group select those and once you've done that you can group them or delete them all at once you can also select on one thumbnail for the layer and then you have a host of options here like alpha lock mask which is an clipping mask which work just like in Photoshop invert reference merge down and combine down so for example here if I want to alpha lock my drawing I can make changes to it based on whatever the preset opacity is for whatever I paint it so far so let's say I want to take this black color and start changing some of the colors I can do that and it will only affect what of whatever I've drawn so far and not create new marks for the painting but I'll show you a better way than this if you want to actually convert a colored painting to something that's black and white in a few moments so another thing with the layers is that every with every canvas that you make there will be a default layer called the background color you can't really get rid of it all you can do is hide it and what it does is create the background color if you click on the thumbnail for it you can change the color to whatever you want when you hide it it basically makes everything look like the default black background for procreate which is this nice grid dark grey background and it's very helpful for I use this to be able to check how well how well my tones and gradients are flowing and it's really good for me to tell if the hair is looking well and is developed has developed layers for the kind of way that I approach hair which is by drawing a single color massing for it and then adding in layers afterwards so it is a very useful feature to be able to just look at this kind of naked PNG image one more thing that I forgot with layers is that you can click with two fingers and change the opacity oh but you can't do it if the layers empty so let's do it to one that has paint on it and then we can change the opacity like that and once you're done you can just click on the layers again and you're done so now let's get into the manipulation tools at the top left so the first one is adjustments you can change the opacity here like we've already showed you have Gaussian blur which is also something that I use pretty often what you can do with gosh and blur is actually I'll show you by duplicating this layer I will use the blur tool to blur the top layer now if I can zoom in I'll show you what this can look like so since this is only blending the top layer the bottom layer keeps its sharpness and you can get this interesting like animated painting effect a lot of artists like Kushina Velia you will see this effect used in his works and you'll see this effect in a lot of popular animes as well and you can recreate this in your own paintings it's very easy to do and I think most people know how to do it now but I'm just going to mention it in case you don't the other options that are available I don't really use motion blur and perspective blur or sharpen or noise liquify is an important one because what you can do with liquify is you can make little tiny adjustments with your painting that will be a lot more difficult to do if you were to try to piece it together by using the lasso tool so for example I can what I use with the liquify tool is basically I just push and pull I don't really go too crazy with anything else with all these different options you can have fun with them but I just like to push and pull and I just stay on the push I and change the size depending on what I want to change so for example I can let's say she's looking a little sad and I want to change her expression I can push and pull her smile and give her this really cute little pursed lip smiling expression and if I wanted to fix it I could use the reconstruct brush and just keep going at it and it would fix it back up just like that so another adjustment tool the last two that I actually use are the curves and the hue saturation and brightness so look looking at the hue saturation and brightness is how I transfer my pink sketches to black and white I'll actually make a video on this later about why I do this but if you want to know a good way to convert it back to being black and white first you take the saturation down and then you slowly bring the brightness down until you feel like you've reached a good dynamic level of darks and whites so here I think this is pretty good you don't want to push it all the way down you just want to leave it - as soon as it starts to look good to you that's where you want to keep it and so here this is where I would go if I wanted to move forward with the painting and I'll come back with black and white colored brushes and I would start to affect it and change it to my liking from here and so from here I can show you guys the curves tool and what that does is works just like Photoshop you can kind of use curves to affect the contrast of your painting so you can see here the effects are pretty subtle because this doesn't really have much value change in the face but you can see here I am having some sort of effect to the painting it helps more with something that's a lot more dense and rich but yeah you can kind of mess up and break your painting if you're not careful but you can always reset everything back to normal like that so talking about this bar to the left it has two sliders that control all of your tools so the top one changes your brush size like that and the bottom one changes the opacity so I've been on low opacity and I can bring it up and you can see I can paint much darker and the cool thing with this is that each tool memorizes its own slider settings so it's a good way to know that if if you have the Apple pencil too for example it's a good way to tell if after you've tapped you can look here to see if it was a successful DoubleTap and you can start to be really accurate with if you've changed to the right tool or not works pretty well the middle button here is something that I use very often because I like to flip the canvas left and right to kind of shake things up and get my brain to see things from a new perspective and check for portions and anatomy and different things like that usually when you flip the canvas left and right it will help you see mistakes and you can go back and forth to check and refine your work now let's get into the selection tools so this is the lasso tool which I use very very much basically all you do is use your pencil to select an area you tap on the little gray circle and then that area is selected one thing I don't like about procreate is I feel like this could be a little bit more clear I can barely tell the difference of what I've selected or haven't selected and I think that would be better if they could use something more similar to the marching ants and procreate in Photoshop so after you selected an area you can use the selection tool here and move things around and I often use this to change proportions and to move parts of the face when I'm in the beginning sketching phase then I'll get out of the action what I tend to do is I will use a smudge tool to kind of blend the area that I've messed up and then refine it later another thing you can do with the selection tool is you can use an automatic filter which selects based similar to the magic selection tool I think in Photoshop and you can click areas of tone and it will select those but I don't really do that kind of stuff here because it's a little it's not as advanced as Photoshop and I don't really want to rely on it there's other options like selecting with a rectangle you can select with an ellipse like that and you can create some really freeform shapes now they have the ability for you to feather so your selection as well another thing that I want to point out is that you can really work with your selections and make them super accurate so I can go in here and let's say I want to select her eye let's get out of the ellipse tool and select freehand so I can select your eye like that and then I can go over here and select her other eye and before I tap the gray circle I can click add or remove so I'm going to click add but let's say I want to get rid of her iris I can select again and before I top the gray circle I can click remove and that will remove the selection so now I have this unique selection that just doesn't have her iris it looks pretty scary but I can move that around and that can be very useful if you're trying to make some really find my new changes to your artwork so that pretty much concludes my procreate tutorial please feel free to leave any comments if you guys have anything that you would like to say whether it be things that I missed or things that you would like to see me cover in the future and if you are interested in more content like this if you enjoyed it please subscribe I will definitely be doing much more content like this in the future I have a long list of things that people have said that they would like me to cover that I am definitely going to be working on and I am very excited to get those to you guys so without all being said thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: e r g o j o s h

Views: 870,019

Keywords: digital art for beginners, how to do digital art, procreate for ipad, how to use procreate, procreate tutorial, digital art tutorial, ipad pro art, how to make art on the ipad pro, how to make art on ipad, ergo.josh, ergojosh, procreate app, procreate for ipad review, procreate for ipad pro

Id: rbSPSE5SHvE

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019