PROCREATE Beginners Guide to the Essentials

okay I thought I'd do a beginner's guide to procreate I've done a full app guide that goes into all of the details that I think are gonna be useful and there's a link for that if you want to go look at that in the description but if you're new to procreate and you just want to be able to get started you need to know the basics in order to do that and this is going to be the video for you having said that since I did the longer tutorial I have actually been some updates to the APIs or additional features which one go to also fit into this beginner's guide because I think some of the new features are actually pretty awesome and things that even the beginners are gonna want to know when you first purchase the app I think's around 10 dollars 10 pound in the UK which I'll I'll just say off the bat is is incredibly good value now that I know there are a lot of free apps out there maybe even some relatively decent good free drawing apps but with procreate you're getting practically a Photoshop program not with every single feature but increasingly it covers most of the main basis these days and for around that ten dollars 10 pound you will get updates all the times you pay once and then all the subsequent although the you know future updates that they're going to bring to the app are going to be contained within that first purchase so it's going to be free from that point on so a really wise investment I can't recommend this strongly enough I've been producing my own artwork over the last sort of 3-4 years now with procreate and it's it's the only program it's only app that I will turn to it to actually create I do prefer producing digital work now and paper and pencil I've totally transition to digital this is just an amazing way to work I think when you arrive in procreate you'll be confronted with something similar to this except that it won't have my paintings in there it will just beat the procreate and you probably have some default images that they give to you so you can see sort of sample our work and then obviously the first thing you're going to want to do is to create your own canvas now up in the top right area here there is a plus symbol you've also got photo import and selects now select means that you can do things manage the actual files that you perhaps have in here once you click on know me I'll give you options of sharing Duke ladylee preview etc we're not interested in that at the moment when you get here presumably you're looking to actually start creating you can import if you have files saved into your files system on the iPad or if you want to insert a photo click on here and it will insert something from your photos gallery I imagine really you're going to want to start creating a new canvas so when you first come into the default sizes that actually procreate provides you're gonna find some really useful proportioned selections here now typically unless you're going for a square I will go for an 84 once you click on the a4 and if you start drawing on it you'll find that you have to zoom in quite a lot for it to go pixelated so I think personally and most of my paintings that are created on procreate are actually in a4 or something similar yeah so this one's a 4 that's actually double so that's more like a 3 but within the a4 size setting you can see you get in plenty of detail you can zoom in quite a lot you're not losing clarity on the a4 you can really do full detailed pieces of work it's perfectly picking up so if you want to change the name of a file that you've actually created you just click on the nameless there you can see so it's in white writing click on it edit it change the name click back out and then it'll adopt the new name that you've given it so once you open a new canvas you'll have a blank page obviously and then presumably you're going to want to start drawing or painting or adding something to now the most important feature you'll need is the brush tool now initially you might be able to draw your finger now your notice when I do it here that nothing happens now I think this is a really important place to start if you have the iPad pro and the Apple pencil then you're going to want to do this if you don't have those things and you have an older iPad and you're using your finger or an older generation stylus rather than Apple pencil and you don't need to worry about this but for the majority of people who are using an Apple pencil you'll want to do this so you go into settings or you go to the wrench symbol rather you've got the Preferences on suggest your controls and then if you go into general the way that I disable any accidental marks either erasing or adding brush marks with my fingers is to tap this so if you just do disable touch actions now it will only perform gestures at this point so now with my fingers I can zoom in I can rotate there are other additional things I can do as well but it won't accidentally draw with it so if I just turn that back off again you'll see what could potentially happen otherwise now that's sometimes that's fine if you're busy drawing with your pencil and it's not a problem but it's easier if you can see with my knuckle now is easily torn and it could just be little dots little marks that you do all over your canvas and you really don't want that so like I say go and see gesture controls disable touch actions within the general settings and you could to go the only thing that will make any difference on the canvas now is your stylus your Apple pencil whilst we're on the subject of Apple pencil when you first start to use it the default settings for it I think are not quite well for me personally I didn't find them quite right I find that how to put a little bit too much pressure on with the Apple pencil and it didn't feel natural in the same way that a pencil or a pen would on paper so in order to fix that you can go on to the wrench symbol again or the spanner symbol and you go into what's called edit pressure curve now you can see the curve that I've got there if you look at it by default that's the way it's going to come but what happens then is if you if you draw lightly nothing happens you have to press on quite hard to make something happen it's almost it feels very strange it almost feels like it's not responding not working whereas as soon as you turn into a curve so the beginning pressure is quite steep when I press on lightly then you'll start to get more of a mark I'll do that again perhaps even make that steeper at the beginning so the light marks now respond it actually gives you a mark even when you're only pressing on lightly which is much more like paper and pencil so they're the two main things that I would recommend that everybody does initially they're a little bit more advanced settings if you like once you've done them I think that you never need to adjust them again that's it you're good to go so in terms of the other main things that you're gonna want to know about you're gonna want to know about brushes because they're gonna be the main tool presumably you're going to use to actually create things moving along here obviously that is the brush this is a smudge tool this is an eraser and this is how you control layers and this is your colors these are the most important sections I would say so to start with you going brushes scroll through here you by have the option of adding more later on as well but you're gonna have a quite a good list of different brush types all I can say is click on them try all the different brushes now within the settings of each of the brush types there's just foods that you can do to amend it I strongly recommend that you don't do that unless you really know what you're doing I generally will put something on default so if I'm on sketching I'm on 6b pencil I'm typically a girl going to leave it alone I'm going to puts it pretty much as it was by default because procreate are pretty sensible their default settings for everything and I think are pretty intelligently created so I think you'll be fine just sticking with the default only if later on you get more familiar with the app and you get more specific in terms of what you need and what you want then learn about the adjustments of it let's begin with if you just want to get started creating then just take the brush types stick to the default settings and you'll you'll not go far wrong with that at all so obviously now we can draw a pencil if you're pressing lightly get line marks you press on more now it can also control the width the opacity the strength saturation of the color that is something contained within the settings of each individual brush and that's fine but also you can set it here so you can change the precise with the slider and you can change the opacity so really important things those although having said that to a certain extent once you know you precise and your opacity you set it somewhere in the middle you press unlikely you're going to get lighter marks you press on more you got to get darker marks so actually the Apple pencil itself will cover a large range of the opacity anyway now if you've got less you've got something down there and you want to smudge it now again the smudge tools come with all the different settings that a brush tool would so it's exactly the same personally if I'm looking to smudge things I'm looking to blend them in more especially from using paint and so I tend to put it on something like a soft airbrush that's not so you can't do it with the other brushes but I think a soft airbrush is pretty cool and then you can just blend it in like this and if you turn the opacity down you can see it really does it in a much less away than the opacity up and it's much more extreme likewise the eraser does this Akal are the same so it control the size control the opacity press on lightly and it erases a little bit press on more it raises more if you set the opacity to fold press on lightly it almost the raises but only when you really press on fully does it properly arrays again just like with this modular brush you can choose your different brush types I tend to try and go for something that is most similar to the actual experience of using an eraser a rubber so uh something like this a medium airbrush would be kind of cool for that and perhaps for me the most important option or pair or one of the most importance is the actual layers now if I move on to one of my paintings and you can see the different layers that I've used so I mean by no means is this a huge amount of layers it's a good amount but some people use say like 100 light depends on the size of the canvas you use the larger the size of the actual canvas the fewer layer options you're gonna get they've used something sensible like an a4 you can get the option of adding loads of layers now the way that you are delay is to press the plus symbol at the top it creates a new layer and then you should be able to work inside let's push it down there initially when you're first creating layers it'll put it at the top so if I go back to my blank canvas and show you that and I'm creating layer you can see is posting it immediately above and a great another one and you can see here I mean I've got the newest iPad that comes with more gig more RAM so it does give you the the facility the ability to create loads and loads of layers I mean I'm gonna get bored now before it runs out of layer options depending on the settings depending on the iPad you're gonna have options to produce a lot of layers really useful if you're not confident about the additional elements you can to add and you need to kind of security of having gonna layer then later on if you decide that you've got two parts of a layer and I'll show you this now let's say there's something on layer 26 that I've created onto my brush and there's something on 25 that I've created and I like that element and I like that element and I'm confident I don't want to change either of those elements and I want to keep them then you can pinch them together and now they are on one layer they are merged we need to be confident at that point that you're not going to want to adjust it because once you've merged it it's gonna be more difficult to actually change now having said that when you first done something it is possible to undo and redo just like you might do in say Photoshop by the way do you do that it's double tap with your fingers that does your undo and three fingers will read it now depending if you've gone further along than you think you've realized that you've made a mistake whale your and you're probably not going to be able to do that you might have done additional things since you made the mistake and you don't want to undo them as well so that's why having all things on separate layers is quite useful within the layers there's all sorts of different things you can do I don't want to get too bogged down in this because this is something you can see in a full app guide by the one that I've mentioned and that is in the description but just to briefly give you a sense of it if you click on the layer you'll see there's all sorts of settings there if you click on the end the source lots of settings there there is an opacity slider which perhaps is going to be the most useful one and four in the beginners so if I click on something you'll see the difference you can see there it's full I click on the end and I'll turn it down I'll turn up and you can see the effect that that makes and obviously you've got the little tick in the box and if you on ticket well it makes it not visible and you tick it again it makes it visible if you slide to the left you can duplicate delete layer they're probably going to be the main things you need to know straight away and you tap on it and then you've got this selections but to begin with you're probably not going to need too many of those things the only thing perhaps you're going to need is the opacity the ability to merge the ability to create new layers I think with those options you're gonna get quite far initially now the next option up here is your colors now you can see I've got various different color palettes created you have different view views of looking at your colors so you've got down here and you've got the disc do you choose your actual hue your color then you can choose whether it's very dark black or very white very bleached out so you don't even notice the colors or very saturated version two so you can choose within the sense of the type of strength of color and then around the disc you can choose the actual colour itself now within the classic view you've got something quite similar you've got a slider for choosing the color and then within that box you can choose the colour as well and you've also got something called values which controls all the sliders here for the different elements of the colour and you've also got hexadecimal codes which you can type in and on my landscape tutorials for example I will provide those codes you can type them in press return and then it will create it up here we need to then once you've selected it let's go down here and it will put it there within your color palettes if you press and hold the colours you get the option to delete them if you've got the color up here you like then click here and it will add it if you've got an image already say in a lot of cases what I'll do is I'll find a photographic image that are like the color palette of already and once I've got that image within procreate you can go to the color that you really want to select it helps if you zoom in really find the color so let's say I want that color press and hold and then it will appear up there and it's there so click on there now and let's say I want to put it down here and it's put it in my color palette change their mind press and hold delete it's gone so this is something I use a lot there are other ways that you can do this if you press the little symbol here between the sliders a little box symbol and you move your colors along you can see in the top half of this ring shape it's showing you the color that you're now selecting and usefully it also shows you the previous color that you were using too so you can see well I hope you can see and the bottom half of the ring is your previous color in the top half of the Ring is the colors are now that it's going to select so for one that kind yellowy color or that more orangey color at the top and I'll do that I go and now it's put it there for me that can be quite useful if you know you want a similar color to what you've just had but a slightly lighter version or a darker version well you can see the orange on the bottom half of the ring that I had before and the new selection is going to be the top half and so now I've got a slightly darker version of the color that I was using before there's different ways of selecting colors all useful have the different applications personally a judge colors a lot by I am a traditional painter before I used to do digital work so I'm used to spotting colors mixing colors but if you're not sure how to do it and you can easily find a reference point at a photograph click press and hold and build up your color palette in that way really useful tip I think now another recent addition which wouldn't be covered in the main app guide that I've created because it's one of the update features is the ability to use shapes now if you've got if you've got an idea of the kind of shape that you want to create let's just say you want to draw a square and you're not going to be very good at drawing squares freehand it's not a problem now because all you need to do is have a go draw on the square when you've reached the end of it press and hold and you can see here it's kind of straightened all the lines for you now that's not to say it's going to be a perfect square but when you let go you'll notice that that top bars now will change to edit shape and you can change it it gives you the option of keeping it as a quadrilateral which means that you might want to pull it and make a strange shape from the corners or sides a rectangle in which it's it's it's perhaps stretched it so it's not a full square but it's at least made the size sort of parallel with each other you know you've got the option of a full square so really easy selection of a square there you can adjust it and make it a rectangle or you can pinch it from the corners and change it into a distorted version of that as well if you are happy with the square shape but you want to make it bigger or smaller than that's fine just click back off it now and then obviously you have the ability up here I say obviously I've not got to these features yet but you can change the proportions change the size of it that way so likewise if you want to create a circle press and hold ellipse created as it says initially you've got the option of changing it to a circle and it's done it for you now obviously the the width of the line there has changed slightly if you want it less of that then there are ways of doing that later with your brush type so for example if you knew you wanted an absolute even edge there's less changeability with a technical pencil doesn't matter as much depending on how much of press on doesn't really change anywhere near as much edit shape and now you've got a pretty damn good circle with an even line all the way around it so once you've got the shape and it might not be a shape it could be any kind of element on your canvas and you want to do something with it you want to move the position of it you want to distort it well that's what this I was just showing you that briefly anyway but that is what this tool does so you can just move simply move it around or you can I mean there's various different options here so you can flip it you don't notice what that's gonna do with a circle but you can flip it horizontally you can flip it vertically I can start to rotate it and you can make it fit a screen there is the option of this interpolation here which means that you can basically there are all sorts of different things that you can do to that I wouldn't worry about that initially that's something you can get to a later point but just to begin with I think you're gonna have plenty of things that you can do just with the basics of adjustment parts of that transform elements I should say so pinch it in from the sides make it more of an ellipse however you need to go okay in terms of the other tools that are actually along here you've got the selection tool there's all sorts of ways that you can use this generally we're going to do pretty well with the freehand version especially if it's an element that you can draw around with the Apple pencil so let's just say that I'm drawing that element I'm going to do it as a shape around here close that selection and now I can do anything with that so for example so I could move that part that selection around I could choose to go into my smudge tool and smudge that out and there one out so again you can see that it is permanently done obviously I don't want to do that's my painting so I'm gonna go back undo all of that another way that you can do selections within the selection tool there are different ways there are automatic versions can produce rectangles or ellipse few selections but if you have straightline you want to do it freehand but there are elements though straight lines will there's different ways you can do that so for example you're up to that point you want to do a straight line now from there to there we just click the next destination point and to be fair you can do that a lot without having to draw make contact with it if there's various different straight lines it's a really useful way of doing that you always have to double back complete the loop by clicking on the circle and then you can do anything with a selected area there if you want to it's like the opposite of that you can simply go and invert and now it's selected everything in the background but this area is masked off so if you wanted to change something with the smudge tool say for example it will only smudge what's in the background there and not what's selected in that it's not very clear that because I've done that on a separate layer so for go onto that layer you'll see it much more clearly now so it selects it and blurred everything outside of that selection area but not on the inside again I don't want to do any of that I'm gonna go back make sure that none of that has actually happened so my painting beleaguer now I'm just gonna go on this layer select it and I'm gonna show you what's in here so this is your adjustment its various different things you can do you can change your posture although you can change opacity to the layer there anyway but within that you can add blur so if you once you clicked on it and you slide it with your finger along you'll see that it's created motion or Gaussian blur you can create a motion blur again similar kind of fact you can move your finger around depending on the direction of the blur you want I don't want any blur so all them do that you've got a perspective blur again you can choose your blur point and then you can choose the degree to which you bloom it so lots of different options there you can change the color balance i'll something I do very often to be fair hue/saturation you can change the hue the saturation brightness all these could be really useful features especially if you've got one detail that you want to change doesn't really work well when you're changing the whole picture because presumably you've got the levels of things just right you're not going to want to change everything wholesale but if you've got one element that is on a separate layer that you want to adjust and that could be really useful again just experiment I don't tend to use things like sharpen of noise but there might be use cases out that you can think that's really useful personally that's not for me but that obviously depends what you wants you do now the next thing here is the spanner or the wrench tool I've got on pressure curve because I was looking at that before this is going to be a really useful feature or elements appropriate in which you want to do some things with your actual image so this is the point where you can add things so you can insert a photo or a file you can cut copy paste details wouldn't worry about any of that initially one new area that is useful is adding text however so it immediately creates a box you type something you're not going to be able to see that that's fine seco and edit text gives you all sorts of font options different style options different design elements to that you can sort of orientate it to the left or the right or Center it you can change it to capitals the reason you can't see that is because the current call it up I've got selected is a dark grade if I change that to white you can now see the text much more clearly click on the color again it goes back into the edit options so I'll show you here you can change the size the kerning you just have to try these again you can change it from capital to lowercase you can change your font types it's all different fonts bold version you have to experiment play around the back you can change the size of your box you can reposition it in terms of the layer type it is actually a text layer if you wanted to do something with that layer say for example rotate it flip it upside down or whatever and you go then it's not going to make much of a difference however if I start to distort it and then click back on here you'll notice now it doesn't have that little a symbol which means it isn't a text option anymore so I can no longer on that later I can no longer actually edit it it's now become an image file because the distorted it it's not the kind of format there is something you can edit it as a text you need to be careful with that well as long as you've not doing anything unusual with it you should be able to keep it as a text layer the reason the way you'll know that is it's got an A in the box there okay ignore the fact I've wrote X whatever I would have wrote there is what it would have actually shown so click on the keyboard I can show you that for example I call my layers you know say it says writing in there the main point is it should show that a symbol but as soon as you go on that layer and if you do something like distort it so it no longer is something it recognizes a as a simple text you can see it just said text layer rasterized if you're familiar with Photoshop you'll know what rasterizing layer is just means it says into an image so no longer has that a is now an image contained within that box just like the other layers so I think text is an amazing extra new addition I can see myself using that rather a lot so in terms of your canvas another new feature that I think is going to be crucial there's a lot of things you can do I'm not going to get too heavily POG down into those I'm just going to do the basic one so crop and resize perhaps going to be the most important ones you can change the size of your canvas you can actually extend it if you want when there are limits to that depending on the the the image size you've already selected it might limp restrict you but you can certainly change the proportions of it all I can say if you want to crop it it's something you couldn't do previously and it was a minor frustration you'd have to edit it in your images and your photos if you had a painting you're finished but you only wanted a selection of it you'd have to do that in some other way but now you can actually do that within this so let's just say you've crops that is cropping it is when you've got a selection of it I don't want to do that because it happens so I've just put it back but a very useful feature nevertheless one of the things you are going to want to do is share it in some capacity now you can choose your once your clicks on the show somewhere you can choose your file type let's just say I mean JPEGs are fine that they're lower file size but generally I prefer to save things either as a pro click file in my file system or if I want to share it save it as an image I should save it as a PNG but slightly bigger but it doesn't you know condense the file and then you can save it or send it to wherever you want but again you've got the option of Photoshop files Pro correct files that preserves all the layers if you want to flatten it down as an image you've got your other flatter versions having said that you also have the newer edition now of PDF files where it sends a image of all of your layers so if you opened it as a PDF you'd have various pages where it shows each individual layer if that's something you wanted and likewise it would create PNG images of all the different layers you've got well if something is interesting to you you've got the video option now if you've set it so that it has a time-lapse recording you can then go back watch your pacing evolve I haven't done this for that for that one it's an older piece of work anyway and it also takes up space on your iPad so you've got to be aware of that it is actually obviously saving all that data it is a video file which will store and take up space on your iPad and obviously you can export you get your preferences which I was searching upon briefly before you can change the interface here which might be something useful to you too if you're outdoors you can change the sliders so that they're on the other side if that's more convenient to you the other things might be useful but again you know it depends at what point you are at so if you wants to dig deeper then you can go into those things too but I'm just giving you the basics so you can get started and then you've got some help options as well you can learn what's new for example but pretty much covered most of those anyway anyway I intended this to be quite a short video and I've overrun by probably twice or three times the amount of time I intended to do this but there's just so much to this up I mean I've tried to condense it down to the essentials things that you probably really can't or want to use initially and I hope that's been useful if you want more detailed versions or explanations of the features and there is a fully detailed guide down in the description and also and just check around on on YouTube generally but I think if you're just looking to get started I think the things I've shown you here should enable you to do that if you've got any questions put them down in the comment section I'll either get around to them or got such a good community of my subscribers and people watching my videos that people tend to help each other out as well and see each other's questions so that's brilliant so anyway enjoy using procreate subscribe to my channel if you want to catch more videos like this and I shall see you again

Channel: James Julier Art Tutorials

Views: 699,375

Keywords: Getting started with Procreate, Procreate made easy, Procreate guide, Procreate for beginners, How to use procreate, Procreate basics, Learn how to use procreate, Procreate fundamentals, Procreate tips, Procreate lessons, How to get started procreate app, New to Procreate, Mini guide to Procreate, Basics of Procreate

Id: eK4AEdxLUiw

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019