Procreate - The Introduction for beginners

now if you just got an ipad or you're considering getting an ipad and you want to use an app in order to create art then procreate is one of the apps that i would seriously consider as an option so in this video i'm going to give you a rundown and introduction to this app and enable you to get started using it as quickly as possible so i've been using the app procreate on my ipad since about 2013 so it's seven plus years at this point in time it's the only app that i actually use for painting and drawing now i've tested lots of other apps but this in my opinion is the best value just the most comprehensive and user-friendly app for creating paintings and drawings now it isn't a free app but having said that it costs around ten dollars so it's 9.99 or if you're in the uk for example like me it's nine pounds 99 so you pay once and then you've got the app for life and it keeps improving over the years i mean it's significantly different now than it was several years ago so procreate works on all the current ipads for sale any ipads within the last few years are going to work with procreate absolutely fine now it's tailor-made to be used with the apple pencil i have an ipad pro therefore it is compatible with the apple pencil too if you have an older ipad or a more basic version of the ipad it might be the apple pencil one but it's compatible with but either way it's going to interface with this app absolutely great having said that you can use your finger you can use all of the controls using a finger but you're not really going to get the best out experience out of this app unless you're actually using the apple pencil there's not any other kind of stylus that can operate with the new ipads in the same way that the apple pencil can this is much more precise it is an absolute must in my estimation my opinion if you're going to use this app so with the apple pencil you will get pressure sensitivity you will get that absolute precision so that the brush mark follows the precise nib of the pencil in a way that you'll never get with the the finger because you can't actually see underneath your finger as you're painting and drawing so when you first purchase the app you're going to be confronted with something a little bit like this except it'll have a few selected pieces of word that procreate i've put in the gallery just for you to have a little bit of a look at and experiment with canvases that are already there so presumably the first thing you're going to want to do is start to create canvases of your own so whatever you do create will be stored here it's in the gallery section so when you come in and out of a painting this is where you will return to this is what's called the gallery but in order to start creating then you're going to have to go up into this section here now you can either import a file if you know you have a procreate file do you want to continue working with but presumably if you're new to this app the first thing you're going to need to do is important photograph so you can click on photo it'll open your photo gallery and you can choose and it will open it exactly at the resolution that that photograph is stored natively in your photos but the better way to do it i would recommend is to actually create your own canvas size so you go into this plus symbol now i have various different untitled canvases that i have created myself but generally you're going to have some select things here to choose from now i would say for the vast majority of starter projects that if you go for the a4 option that is an option that's already there you click on that it's going to open a canvas size that is actually perfectly big enough for the majority of your projects so if you're using a brush for example and you turn it down to its lowest size and then you zoom in it will pixelate when you've zoomed in but most of the time you're going to look at an a4 canvas more zoomed out so this ipad screen is almost an a4 size you can see it's not going to be low resolution of that size and even if you printed it out bigger it's still going to look pretty decent even at a larger size you do have the option of a preset square and you do have a really high 4k resolution option as well um i would typically just stick with the a4 for the majority having said that if you want to create your own custom canvas you've got something really unique that you want to create then you can do that just by tapping on this symbol at the top here and then you can choose the exact proportion so if you know the centimeters you know the pixels or the inches then you can put that in there precisely it will create a canvas according to your exact requirements so once you're inside your app you're going to need to know how to navigate around the interface now in terms of the way that you can do that you can obviously use your apple pencil and you can use your finger too but beyond that there's some things that i would recommend that you do to begin with just to set it up exactly how it's going to suit you best now you'll notice along this side for example there are some sliders and they control the size of whatever brush or whatever tool that you're going to use you can see the actual size of the dot changing within that visual representation and then you've also got the opacity so you'll notice it fading in and out depending on what percentage you slide it up and down to now this whole section is a permanent feature now if you think because you're left-handed you'd prefer it to have it over here it's pretty simple to shift it you need to go to this section up here go on the little wrench symbol go into preferences here and you have a toggle here that switches it between right hand interface which is set to now and if you deselect that then it puts it on the left side too that's the first thing that i would recommend changing the second thing that i would recommend changing if you have an apple pencil is you can go to your preferences go to your gesture controls within these sections here choose general at the bottom go across here you've got disable touch actions toggle that press done and then when you come into this section now like i was showing you before where you could control it with your finger now you'll see that it doesn't do that the only way that i can make things happen on the screen now or the only way that i can use the tools is with the actual the apple pencil itself that's really important otherwise you'll accidentally do marks on the screen inadvertently without meaning to another gesture control is to use your hand instead of the stylus instead of the apple pencil and you can undo and redo whatever you've just created now you can do that on this bar here on this slider so you can see here you've got a backwards arrow and then you've got a forward arrow and it'll undo and redo but if you don't want to be using the little gestures on here because they are quite small and sometimes if you work in the middle of something it's quicker to just use gestural things instead now if you use two of your fingers and just tap you'll see that it's undone and if you use three fingers and tap it re-does it now if you've got several gestures that you want to go backwards on and undo you can tap with two fingers and hold and you can see it starts to go through them you'll see it more clearly if i've got lots of things like this two fingers hold down and you can see it's deleted all the way along three fingers and hold and it redoes them all in sequence if you want to clear the entire canvas or the the area that you've been working on you can use three fingers and just scrub it across and you can see it's erased the entire screen obviously you can rotate your canvas you can pinch in and out but yet the apple pencil is pressure sensitive the amount of pressure that you have to apply in order to get the the stroke to change its properties is changeable within your settings so we'll go back to this range symbol it's a spanner in the uk and you go back to your preferences you go to this section here which is edit pressure curve now by default it should be set to something like this i would recommend it around this point on the line you just make a steeper pitch so that it goes up more sharply what that basically does is when you go back out of it if you press lightly it starts to make marks much more easily you don't have to press on quite as much in order to begin making those initial marks and gestures by default it's set to that straight line and i fail and i've noticed that a lot of people don't like the way that it feels you have to press on quite hard so i would strongly recommend that you do that as one of the first things you do okay so we've gone into some quite specific things there but fundamentally you're going to need to know how to use all the tools in order to create so you've got some basic things here at the top fundamental categories so you've got the first one which is brushes this one which is smudging this one which is erasing this one which is layers and this one which is colours we've already dealt with the slider and then on this side we've got to transform tool we have a selection tool we have an adjustments tool and then we have this wrench symbol if we go back to here which is actions and then we can tap on this and it'll take us back to the gallery at any given point back into the canvas so the first symbol probably the most important area of this app is the actual brushes there's tons of choices of different styles of brushes now if you want to just check them out select through them you can have a look at them sometimes they'll be a few at the bottom that are not visible initially so you just have to scroll up and down to have a look at them all within the brush if you tap on it there's all sorts of different things that you can change to change the properties of it and then there's a visualizer here to test out exactly what that looks like now if you're new to the app i i don't recommend you get too involved in that give yourself some time to get familiar with the basics and then later on down the line if you want to start experimenting with creating brushes with changing the settings then feel free to do that but initially you don't really need to do that if you're looking to do some drawing then quite simply you can go to the sketching section you can choose a hb pencil which is just typically liked like most ordinary pencils now it's quite a big canvas in a4 so that biggest of the hb lines is still quite narrow quite thin it's different if you go into a 6b pencil for example you're going to get a stronger bigger line and again all the pressure sense sensitivity works with these different brushes you can change the opacity you can put it on really low you can change the size again like that you might have different inking brushes different kind of painting brushes and then you get all sorts of strange weird and wonderful brushes that you can use straight away because they're already in the app you can add more kinds of brushes if you found some elsewhere but you won't need them initially because there's tons here so once you've found a particular brush that you want to have a go experimenting with so in this example we've got an oriental brush you can find the brush size and the opacity that you want to play around with and then the next thing you might well you will want to consider if you're doing something creative is you're going to consider the different colors now by clicking on the color wheel here you'll come into one of these sections at the bottom now because i've been playing around with my color palettes it's gone straight to that remembers what i was doing but generally initially it's gonna probably put you somewhere like here now there's a couple of options different ways of viewing it i prefer this round interface but you have a classic option to view your color palette as well now select your colors you have the middle option here this gives you narrows it down to the exact precise color you're going to be able to use here's the general hue you can rotate it if you want a red and then you can narrow it down to whether it's a very white version of the red or a very black version or a very deeply saturated version whatever it is within that version of red if you want to type a green you can go to the type of green that you want then you can choose a dark green or a light green or a much more desaturated gray version of green or a deeply saturated version of green as well once you've chosen the color that you want to use then you can go back onto your canvas and then start to use it if there's certain colors that are appearing here and you want to select them let's say that two colors are mixed together and you want to use more of that color or you've imported a photograph and then you want to use selections of that image then you can press and hold with a finger and you'll notice this disc appears and you can notice the top half of it is showing you what you're about to select as your new color so we'll go for a selection of the green there let go and then it's put it in that area and then you can start using that precise version of green so we'll test that another color i'll just go to somewhere else on my color wheel and you can see that then you can change that color and when you get colors that mix together perhaps you can zoom in find an area where they've mixed and you might like that color press and hold and then let go and then we've got a version of that colour appearing up there and then you can use it so here's a painting i've done previously for example and now if i wanted to change the detail in the background and i wanted it to be similar to the color that's there i can press and hold that color and then i can continue using that color and you can see it's not going to be a difficult process to select that exact color now you'll probably want to create your own palette after a certain point in which case you'll go to the palette section along here within the colors you can tap on the plus symbol create new palette it'll give you a blank palette and you'll know that you're using that one next because it's in blue here for as default you can go back to your disk ignore these i've just been using those as my most recent colors but you can see that it is blank now once you've selected the color you actually want to use let's say it's one of these blues you can just tap into the first square and then you can start to use that color select another color tap into one of the next square you can put it in any of the squares in fact you can rearrange them if you know you've got some elements that you want to be quite distinct over here you can keep them separate from these elements over here now if you want to rearrange and press and hold move it if you press and hold again you've got the option of deleting it next tool along we have a smudge tool now again you can change this to be any kind of property that you like so just like the choice of brushes you have all the same brush options within the smudge i like to use the smudge tool as a soft brush i often will paint using a soft brush too you can control the size of your tool the opacity therefore the strength of the smudging that you're going to do we'll go into a different image so i can show you exactly what it might look like when i'm switching something so we're going to another one of my tutorial images go into the top layer if i wanted to smudge an element so i'll go back onto the smudge tool i'll smudge it up here and you can see that it's smearing and smudging that top layer again you can control the size so it'll do a bigger area you can control the strength by going low if you need to and it only does it to a smaller extent and so on now the same with the eraser tool tap on it you've got lots of options of different types of brushes so you can use textured eraser tools whatever if you've been using a certain type of brush for example i'm using the oriental brush here and i want to use the same kind of brush but as an eraser because i've just been using it here if i press and hold on the eraser and then tap on it again you'll see that it now is using the same kind of brush as an eraser so it'll fit in it'll blend in really well with the brush that i've been using the next option along is layers now layers are really important so i just showed you there i was removing elements that was on my top layer but you can see i've got three separate layers here as well as a background image so when you first start out this is what it's going to look like to have a pale background you might want to change it to a grayed out version a little softer to look at you then have the first layer that you can start drawing on so once you've drawn a few details on that first layer you might want to go back to your layers and create another layer and then you can choose some other element maybe you want to try out different things and you could remove the first layer and still keep the additional second layer or you can remove the second layer like that another thing you can do is that you can rearrange the layers if you press and hold and drag it you'll now see that it's put them in a different order and that can really fundamentally change the overall image i tend to keep creating new layers whenever i'm adding a new element a new property to my artwork just in case it goes wrong and therefore if i want to i can slide it and i can delete that layer and it doesn't damage the overall image it's easier to fix so go over to this side and the first thing we've got is the transform tool now if you've got a certain detail on a certain layer and you want to do something to it make sure you're on that layer otherwise it will start doing strange things things you don't mean to select the element or the layer that an element is on go to the transform tool you'll see that it puts it in a box and then first thing you could do is move that element around you can change the scale if you select it from a corner for example you can change the scale i'm doing two fingers to go back to as it was reselect it you can change it in all sorts of different ways if we're going free form you can see it isn't locked to the proportions and you can stretch and do all sorts of strange things you can rotate it really useful ways of transforming you can flip horizontal or vertically lots of experimenting to be done using the transform tool incredibly useful again so i'm not going to get too much into all of these details i do have longer tutorials if you need to next you have a selection tool now i've just merged all my layers together so that i can show you this more clearly if we go into our selection tool and we're on freehand we can actually draw a section we'll draw a round section and then we can actually move it so you'll see that there's lined out areas that means it's the areas i haven't selected i have selected this clear area now i can go to something like this and i can move an element around two fingers back puts it immediately back i can select a different area i could go to my eraser tool and perhaps i could just erase elements within that selection that area instead of the whole thing there's so many different things that you can do with that really useful worth exploring the next section is an adjustment so let's combine things so if i've selected an area go to my adjustments i can then experiment through all of these but some of the really important ones might be the hue saturation and brightness will affect the whole layer and we could turn it to black and white in that section by reducing the saturation make it more saturated or we could make it brighter or darker or we could make it a completely different color we don't like any of those things two fingers tap backwards and we go back to our original image so many different things that you can experiment with within the adjustments i've just touched on just a couple of things there you really need to experiment and dig deep you're probably not going to need that kind of a tool until you're a little bit further on and you've had a play around and you've got something that you want to adjust and then you start time to start digging deeper into those things just so you understand what's there just to run through a few of the extra things that perhaps you're going to need to know that are really useful and when you are drawing for example lines and shapes so if you're drawing a line and you're doing your best but you still struggle to actually get it as a straight line if you press and hold you'll just notice that it snapped to a precise straight line so i'll just two fingers backwards to show that again and i'll do more of a wobble so you can see when i get to the inner line i press and hold and it snaps to a perfect straight line and i'll do it at one last time and i won't let go of the apple pencil and you'll notice i'll be able to move it around i can move it in so it's shorter or it's longer i can change the angle of it and get it to exactly what i need it to be in addition to that you can draw us an ellipse a circle press and hold and you see it's snapped to a better version of it but if it's still not quite right you can go into this function here that automatically pops up edit shape and then you can pinch it either from the line in which case it won't distort it it'll just rotate and change the size but if you do pinch it from one of these little blue dots you'll notice that it actually changes the actual ellipse itself into a more pinched version or makes it more into a circle now if i do that again and hold it and edit shape you'll notice that as well as the ellipse it gave me the option of a circle if i click on the circle it snaps to a perfect circle as well now that function works for every kind of shape pretty much all the basic shapes so if i click here and do a triangle hold it you'll notice it's done that and like that i can change the properties of that exact triangle so we'll try a square or a rectangle it gives me an approximation of what it thinks i was going for but it can be more precise as well if you want to flood areas with colours and you're working all on the same layer anyway then you can go to your different colours select the colour you want to use drag from this colour box or this colour area up here drop it into the selection you can see that you can drop different colors into different areas they're clearly defined by the lines that i've just created so it will do a really good job of picking those out and you can do that with a black color as well another area that you might want to have a little bit of a play around with is within the adjustments you've got a tool here called liquify you've got all sorts of ways of changing it but if you go to for example the push change the size of your brush and then play around with the pressure too and you can actually just start to distort things around it's a really useful really cool tool have a play around with that and if you know well for this example we're using shapes so it doesn't work quite as well but if you're using something and you just want to change the properties a little bit you want to make it smaller you can go to this pinched version and it will start to just as you can see start to bring it further and further towards the center of that circle if you expand it does the opposite so it takes that and it increases the size starting with the center of the circle increases it so if you do a larger circle and do it in the middle of that area you can see it increases everything within it really cool option but there's all sorts of settings and even within the adjustments there's all sorts of different things you could do but it is one of the major ones that you might really be interested in having a play with if you do have an image and for example you're doing a major painting so you're doing a landscape for example and you want to have a reference image in there and go to the wrench symbol you can go to the canvas part of it and you've got the option of creating a reference now if you toggle it it'll create a reference for you and then it automatically uses whatever you've created at the moment and puts it within that but you can change it you can go to images and then you can import an image from your photo gallery and once it's here you can press and select the colors from that and you can start to use that as your color palette instead of putting it in this section also if you wanted to put like i've got here and create another layer on top you could go to this little symbol here the end symbol and perhaps reduce the size the opacity of it with this slider and then on the layer above you could actually use it for tracing over the top of it mapping in all the important details and then later on you could untick box and you'd be left with whatever you've traced over the top now i don't think it's a great technique if you're actually trying to show that you can draw and paint something but it might just be occasion where it's really useful to use that as a tracing technique if you want to change the properties again you can go to the wrench symbol on the canvas you've got crop and resize it'll shrink it down so you can then if you need to and you're thinking well i like the picture but i'm thinking i want to add more to it at some place you can drag from wherever you think and you think well i want that up in the corner so i'll do more there um or you can shift that around as well and then click done and you can see it's now repositioned it here and then you can continue now i don't really want to do that so two fingers back and it's taking me right back so once you've created your image and you want to perhaps look at it there is a video option you can look at a time lapse replay it has preserved it from my tutorial but you can see here and you can slide it along with your finger you can see the image being produced as you produced it and you can go backwards and forwards really useful way of doing it or you can actually share it so you can go back on that back on here and you can export the time-lapse video and you click on that and either do it as a really condensed 30 seconds or the full length version i'm not going to do either of those but a really cool feature there's so much to this app i'm not going to get into everything within this introduction tutorial if you want to know more in depth there's loads more details to be learned about to experiment with check out the links in my description for further detailed guides of this app i really do go into every single aspect of it if you check those videos the last thing you probably need to know about if you've created something and you want to share it the world is you go onto the wrench symbol and then handily it's called share you can share it as a jpeg probably the best format to most of the time share things but if you want it to be absolutely uncondensed so it doesn't lose any of the detail you might choose one of the other file options if you want to preserve the layers so you can continue working on another device or on a computer share it as either the procreate for another ipad or a psd if you want to work on the computer and photoshop for example okay so that's just a brief rundown check out the links in my description for way more detail than i've gone through in this video but this hopefully has been useful to get you to the starting point when you can begin creating i do lots of tutorials lots of guides check out my playlist on my channel subscribe and i'll catch you back here soon hopefully see you later

Channel: James Julier Art Tutorials

Views: 55,106

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, procreate intro, introduction to Procreate, procreate essentials, simple procreate guide, procreate starter tutorial

Id: SKVSadZFVak

Length: 24min 55sec (1495 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020