PROCREATE LETTERING FOR BEGINNERS - IPAD TUTORIAL HOW-TO & BASICS

hello everyone in this video I'm going to be sharing a basic procreate tutorial for those getting started with the lettering our drawing on the iPad pro this video is going to show you the basics of getting started in a simple way so let's get right into it first things first we are starting with the iPad the Apple pencil and the procreate app this isn't actually the iPad pro although I do have one of those as well but this iPad was very inexpensive compared to the iPad pro and is one of the newer versions that do allow for using the Apple pencil I will leave the details of what model this is in the description box below if you are curious about that so you very first need to make sure that your Apple pencil is paired with the iPad so for my model I make sure that my bluetooth is on and plug my Apple pencil into this bottom area if it wasn't paired it should pop up and asked if I wanted to pair the Apple pencil with my iPad and then I can choose yes you can also go into your settings if you are needing to turn on your Bluetooth there so starting here we have an empty procreate app I don't use this iPad too often so that is why it's empty but if I were to have our pieces saved they would be right here so to start we are going to choose this plus sign at the top right and this is going to bring up your canvas size you can choose from some of the preset sizes or you can choose a custom size this might be nice if you're going to print something out and you wanted to make sure that it prints appropriately so for example if you're going to print an 8 by 10 art print you could choose your dimensions here so you can switch the dimensions to inches and then input the 8 by 10 and keep your dpi set to 600 this is a nice and high quality for printing and then you can also name your canvas sizes to use them later or you can just go back here and choose screen size so for this video I just chose screen size so here is where we are going to start lettering on the iPad we're going to start at the top right and I want to show you how to use some of these buttons to get you started the first one is where we get our brushes there are so many different options that already come with the procreate app so you can really make a lot of things without buying any other brushes I like the mono line that comes with it and then there is also a brush pen option you can see the difference between these is that when I push down harder on the brush pen stroke becomes thicker but with the monoline brush it stays the same thickness no matter how hard I pushed so not every single brush that you use is going to be pressure sensitive so keep that in mind when you're choosing what brush you want to use and what style of lettering or art that you are trying to create so next we have the airbrush which also has brush options but I honestly don't use this area often if ever and one more over we have the eraser so let's draw something on the iPad and then when we want to erase it this is what we can use however it's not just one size fits all when it comes to erasing your eraser is also a brush so let's say that you have some artwork where you are getting really detailed and you want to just take a tiny bit off the edge you can move this brush to something more precise and then over on the left you can turn down the size of your eraser brush at this point it's pretty small and I can erase just little detailed things however if you want to erase a lot at once this is going to be really tedious so what I like to do is use an airbrush as my eraser brush because these air brushes can get really big this way you can quickly erase everything and I will show you another quicker way to erase at the end when I teach you some shortcuts but let's move on with these top buttons the next one over is layers so if you are familiar with layers you will probably already know how to use these but if not let me show you a bit of what they are you can use this with your lettering because you can draw on each individual layer so let's say that you want to draw a shadow you can write your word and then you can duplicate your layer then you are going to have two layers of this same thing you can then turn one of these into a certain color and then you can come back to the back one and move it over and down a little bit to create this drop shadow effect you can make those little movements by just tapping on the part of the screen that you want it to move down to now you don't have to put the same thing on each layer this does also work if you're just moving things around and you don't want to cover certain things up and not be able to undo it but what I showed you is just a simple way that layers are often used in lettering so if you want to delete a layer you just open them up and then swipe to the left on your layer and delete there are some other things that you can do with layers but I won't get into those today since this is a more basic tutorial but just know that you can play around with some of those things that we have here so now I'm going to go back to the top bar and to the left hand side I'll press the wrench tool first and you can see that canvas is the one that we're under lots of these buttons are pretty self-explanatory but if we go over here to share this is how we can save our work as an individual piece you can share as a procreate file or a PSD I usually share as a PDF or a JPEG if you are sharing something as a PDF you can share multiple canvases at once from the home screen but right here we'll just save this one piece that you've created so moving on to our next button these are a bunch of different enhancements that you can use in your art or your lettering and let me give you an example of one of them I'm going to go back to my airbrush and draw out several different colors here using my color palette I can then go back to this third button and click on the second one down and I can adjust the levels to blur the effect of what I just put down you adjust the strength level by moving your pencil or your finger back and forth depending on how much you want the lines blurred this is another place where you may use a layer by creating this more fun effect as a background and then adding a layer over it to do some lettering so going back there are a few different effects here that you can use to create some unique things opacity is another one that you may use often if you are drawing something in a solid color you can adjust the opacity by choosing this and creating a see-through look again this might be something that would be especially helpful when using layers you can also change the opacity of what your writing or drawing from the beginning so right underneath the thing that adjusts the size of your brush you can use to adjust the opacity of your brush this is something that I don't use often I prefer to just draw it solid and then adjust later but it is an option I'm not sure if you can actually raise the opacity later once you've already drawn it so that's why I usually stick to drawing with full opacity first and then adjusting it later let's talk about color for a moment at the top right hand corner you will see a solid colored circle which is where we choose our color so by clicking into this you can see my color palettes here and creating a new color palette I actually have a video about how to create your own color palettes by using photos and pulling colors out of them and it's super simple and I'll leave a link below for that video if your interest but I'm going to use a palette that I already have saved and go back here so let's look at changing the color of things there are multiple ways that you can change the color of things the first thing to do is simply to change the color of your brush pen before you start lettering so now I have pink and as I let her that's going to be what's coming for my brush but if I've already done my lettering and I want to change the color there are a couple of things that I can do first I can just touch this color and kind of drag it down here and drop it down onto my lettering this can be a bit tricky and doesn't always work but it is very simple the second way that I can do this is by going back to my layers and using two fingers I'm going to swipe this over to the right now if you can see this there's a checkered background over my layer so now I'm going to change my brush color to the one that I want this piece to be and this is going to make it so that it's only going to put down color where I've already drawn so I can color all over my canvas but the parts that the coloring is going to show up on is when I color over my word color so what I like to do is again grab an airbrush because it goes a little bit faster and you can make it really big this goes really fast but you can also grab other colors and make some more effects this way you can also do this with different textured brushes so it doesn't have to be just an airbrush so if you want to take this to another level you can go back to the blur feature and slide it over to create blurred edges between your colors so here's the harsh edges and this way they are more blurred this is just one of the ways that you can use this fun effect another thing that you can do is create some fun elements by dropping in color so this is probably more helpful when doing illustrations but it can be fun for lettering as well so I have my words here and I can go choose another color and drag it over but instead of dropping it onto my word I'm going to drop it into the center area to fill it super super simple so moving on I'm going to show you how to arrange things that you've already drawn so when your lettering longer phrases you may find that it takes a bit of rearranging to get it just right so instead of rewriting things over and over we are just going to get it out there so that we can get our placement right at this point I don't usually worry about perfect letters once I do that I'm going to go back to this ribbon button at the top and then down here I like to do it freehand you can do automatic I just personally think that freehand works a little bit better for me so by having this clicked it's going to allow me to move some things so I'm basically putting a lasso around my word and then I'm going to press this arrow and now I've got a hold of it and I can move my word around this really helps if your spacing isn't quite right but you don't want to redo the entire thing the other thing that you can do is say I just don't like the size of this I can press this arrow button by itself and just grab the entire thing this also works if you want to just Center your piece as a whole so again we go back down here and it says freeform uniform distort or warp I like freeform but I do also like magnetic because it keeps the ratio of my size so if I go like this and pull it out it keeps the ratio the same and doesn't skew my words but if I turn this magnetic off then you can see that it's skewed and stretched so for lettering I do keep the magnetic on for the most part unless it's something that I'm probably going to trace back over and then I can kind of make this sizing correct that way so the next thing that I'm going to show you are some shortcuts there are a few shortcuts that can help you to do things more quickly first of all if you want to erase an action you've done you can go down here and press the back button and then you can press the forward button to redo it which is totally fine but if you don't want to do it that way you can do the same thing by using two fingers and you just tap so a two finger tap is going to delete your last move and you can do this multiple times to delete multiple moves but if you go too far and you want to get your move back then you can use three fingers so again that's two fingers to delete and three fingers back if you want to go faster because you have a lot to delete you can hold down your two fingers and same for bringing it back faster you can also hold down three fingers the next shortcut is if you want to erase everything you take three fingers and swipe it back and forth again that's three fingers hold it down on the screen and swipe back and forth the next thing that I want to show you is how to pick a color let's say that you had a photo and wanted to pick out a color you can do this by simply finding the color on your screen and touching it with the Apple pencil so here I'm adding a bunch of color but let's pretend this is a photo that has colors that I don't already know what they are we can then press this square button over here and it's going to give us this little viewfinder you can grab this and roll it around until you get on to the color that you want to pick and now my color is changed to orange this works really well if you're picking colors out of a photo or something that has a lot more color going on than just this like I said I will leave a link below for that video if you want to learn how to do that it's a really fun way to create really simple color palettes so the next thing that I want to show you is how to change the color of this display if you've just downloaded procreate I think it starts out with a black border and I get people asking me how to switch that to what I have so here is how you do it it's really simple you just go to the wrench tool then click on prefs then right here you can move over this toggle next to light interface and if that's off it will turn all of this darker the next one down you see is going to move the side toolbar from the left to the right so if you're constantly bumping into it with the way you letter then you can move it over here next I want to show you some tricks for Auto adjusting your letters or words so it used to be that there was no help when it came to drawing straight lines when I first used procreate I had to have such a steady hand because it showed every little jitter or bump but eventually they updated with a feature to help this and it's called streamline so as you can see it's pretty hard to write perfectly without streamlined granted I was trying to go pretty fast because I was filming this so it's probably not quite as hard as I'm making it look but it was pretty hard especially because I was somewhat new to brush lettering but now we can use the streamline feature by going up to our brush and then the second one down is called streamline the first example it was off but when I move it up you can see that there's almost what looks like a magnetic pole to help smooth out those lines now it also can do some extra that's maybe not quite as desirable so maybe keeping your streamline about like 50 to 70 percent is a better option but I want to show you the difference so I have it really high and oftentimes I do letter with it pretty high that you can play around with it and see what works for you in my opinion the goal is still to have your lettering look like your lettering but just have a bit of help smoothing out those jittery strokes in the same way that streamline can help there's also a feature that helps you get better ovals in circles so you can see in the first example me just regularly writing and there's nothing wrong with that but if you are someone who wants your ovals to be a bit more oval and your shapes to be more perfect then you can draw your line or your circle and keep holding it down this will kind of lock it into place in a more smooth out way in drawing my lines I'm trying to draw dramatic squiggles so that you can see the difference but you can see how it goes from one wiggly line to a locked-in straight line the same does work with these ovals and circles and once it locks in you can still do some adjusting of this size and angle but it will just keep that smoother looking shape for you now I personally don't use this very often I will sometimes use it for straight lines if I'm drawing something but not necessarily in lettering because I like the shapes of my letters to be more hand written and not a perfect oval so to me it changes my lettering a lot in a way that doesn't really look like my lettering so it's okay if you don't want to use this feature but I'm just showing you to do it but it can also be used for a lot of other things even like illustration or drawing frames and that kind of thing so I hope that this tutorial was really helpful for you I will put some timestamps below I will also put a link to a blog post where I have the same information if you want to come back and read the instructions instead of having to watch the whole video again I will link that below or you can find it at my blog at how to handle it or calm if you have any questions please leave them below and you can also find me on Instagram it's just at how to hand let her so again I hope that was helpful for you thank you so much for watching I have created a playlist just for you that I think might be helpful going forward after this video so stay tuned for those next videos I will see in my next one

Channel: How to Hand Letter

Views: 1,045,844

Keywords: procreate lettering for beginners, ipad tutorial, ipad pro tutorial, how to get started with procreate app, procreate for beginners, ipad lettering, ipad lettering for beginners, ipad lettering tutorial for beginners, procreate tips, ipad lettering in procreate, ipad pro lettering, apple pencil lettering, how to handletter, how to hand letter, handlettering for beginners, brush lettering for beginners, how to handletter procreate, how to hand letter procreate

Id: 8ItskTZWjHs

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019