Procreate Tips For Beginners

hello my name is Tyler and today I will be showing you my top 15 tips for beginners to procreate now I'm going to be speaking from a tattoo artists perspective so a lot of the things that I will be referencing has to do with making a tattoo stencil but even if you aren't a tattoo artist and you're just using procreate for your artistic expression all these tips will get you off on a good start when you're a beginner to procreate so let's get right into it so the iPad that I am using is the twelve point nine inch 2018 iPad pro I do have a review on this iPad so I will link it above so you can go watch that after this video so let's go ahead and launch procreate I do have the latest version I believe it's procreate five and the first tip that I will start off with has to do with your opening screen all these are my previous projects and what I'm going to show you how to do is it's called stacks now it stacks is is basically a file system so I can take this project and stack it on top of this project and it creates a stack now you can rename the stack by just clicking on the name and you can just say YouTube video stack now once you have it renamed you just click on it and both of those projects that you stack together are both here this is really useful especially for me as a tattoo artist I'm able to you know have files for clients and that way if I'm building a sleeve or something like that I have all the artwork that I need for that specific client in that stack so it's much easier to keep everything organized that way tip number two has to do with selecting your canvas size to start a new project you go up to this little plus icon up here and I'll give you all these different options for different size canvases the canvas closest to a actual piece of paper size is this a4 option you can go all crazy no matter what you're doing you know if you're drawing for like a billboard or something like that you're able to type in custom sizes for your canvases but for just drawing for tattoo stencils I'll just use a4 that's the closest to an actual piece of paper and there is your new project so tip number three has to do with where your brush size and opacity selector is on this side or this side so how you do that as you go up to this little wrench icon up by the gallery tab go over to preferences and then you are able to select right-hand interface so when you select that it goes over the right side when you deselect it it comes back over to the left side I like it over on the left side because I am right-handed and when drawing I could be drawing you know doing this kind of stuff and easily I could select a bigger brush or a lighter opacity without having to go over here now this is just personal preference you can play with it see which way you like it better but as a righty I like this bar over on the left hand side tip number four is utilizing layers the layers tab are these two squares up in the right hand corner next to the color selector if you click on that this little menu pops down and you are able to add as many layers as you want now how I like to utilize layers is you know I'll sketch on one layer that is an awesome sketch I'll add another layer and then on this layer I'll refine my sketch a little bit and then on the final layer I will make my actual outline so then you can hide these two layers and you have your actual outline how you hide your layers are these little checkboxes in the corners you can also change the opacity of the layer by double tapping the actual layer that you want with two fingers just once and this adjustment pops up at the top and you're able to slide it back and forth and now both of those layers are at Alette or opacity so you're able to see what you drew on top of it now a couple little shortcuts in layers besides the opacity swipe if you want to get rid of a layer all you have to do is slide to the left and this little menu pops up you could either lock that layer so you can't accidentally draw on it you could duplicate this layer Slane you have two of the same or you can delete the layer all these are super useful during the artistic process and if you accidentally deleted a layer that you didn't want to delete all you have to do is take two fingers and tap the canvas and that is undo so then that layer that you just recently deleted came back if you want it to undo the last delete all you have to do is tap the canvas again with two fingers and that one also came back now to redo what you just did the shortcut for that is to take three fingers and tap the canvas like that so then it riedle eated that layer and if you want to read elite that one you redo again and it deleted both so undo is a two finger tap and redo is a three finger tap all right speaking of layers tip number five is importing a photo onto a layer you just go up to this wrench icon next to gallery make sure that the add tab is selected and then you go to insert photo go to all photos and let's select this skull so once you import the photo the photo will be selected you'll be able to tell by this little selector icon being blue and when that selector icon is blue like that and there's a little ants dancing around the photo you are able to pinch and make it bigger or smaller as much as you want now this isn't actually moving the canvas this is just moving the photo and making that bigger or smaller if you want to move the canvas while the photo is selected or while anything is selected it for that matter you hold down the selection icon and you're able to actually move the actual canvas while this is still selected by holding down that cursor icon by letting it go you're just moving the photo so say you want to cut away some of the image that you just imported tip number six is this selection tool right next to the cursor I really don't know what these tools are called so forgive me if you do know but it's the tool that looks like an S so once that is selected you have a couple options down here you can have an automatic selection freehand selection rectangle and an ellipse so for this I'm just going to select the freehand because I use the automatic it's going to cut some of the details out that I want to keep this actually did a pretty decent job but it still cut some of the skull out here so I'm just going to undo that I'm going to use the freehand selection and all you do once that is selected you just go around your image and select the area that you want to keep so once you've selected your image you finish that selection by tapping this little circle right here once you tap that circle you'll see all these zebra marks everywhere and then the image that you select it will not have any of those zebra marks through it so once it looks like that you click this invert button down here in this menu so now instead of the outside being selected just your image is selected and once you see the zebra marks over your image you go over here to the cursor tool once that is selected you're able to move away the selection that you didn't want so now you're just left with your skull now this is already a pretty good exposure for a tattoo reference but tip number seven is how to change your contrast and brightness in your image so you have a flat image where there's no super darks or highlights in it you're gonna want to go up here to this magic wand looking icon in the adjustments menu and you have one of two choices you can either go to curves or the hue saturation and brightness menu I'm gonna show you both of them we'll start out with a hue saturation and brightness menu once you click that this menu will set up down here the hue and saturation isn't gonna change anything in a black and gray photo if you do have a color photo all you have to do to change its black and white is go into the hue saturation and brightness menu and you bring saturation all the way to nothing and it'll go from color to black and gray now you can mess with the brightness right here and this is just changing the brightness of the entire image it's not targeting shadows or highlights at all it's just changing the entire image it's already like the exposure of this we're just gonna go back to the adjustments menu and we'll go down to curves curves is a more targeted exposure adjustment so that what this is doing it will target your highlights over here if you keep it over to the top menu and you bring it this way it'll bring them brighter you can bring down your blacks or your mid-tones however you like to do it so you can mess with this as much as you want usually what I like to do is bring the blacks down and then bring the highlights up a little bit to get a more contrast the image and get rid of this menu just click this again so I think that's a good exposure for a tattoo reference you have your black as blacks you have your mid-tones and your have your highlights so mission accomplished so tip number eight is picking your brushes so if I'm not using a reference photo for my stencil I obviously have to draw the entire tattoo from scratch so what I'll use for sketching is I'll go up here to this little paintbrush icon and it'll drop down all of my brushes you can download a bunch of brushes online you could buy me there's free ones but there are also ones that come with the app and they're pretty cool but mostly I stick to two different brushes the first one is under the sketching tab right here and I'll just use the 6b pencil once you click on the brush it'll bring up this menu to where you're able to mess with the actual brush and all of its components you can test it out what it looks like or you just click done and you're able to sketch and when it comes to finalize my design and make the actual stencil I'll go down into this inking tab and I'll select the technical pen now what I like to do with the technical pen is use this streamline feature to make my line smoother so you see how it's correcting my path a little bit to make those lines smoother if I don't use that streamline feature they're not as smooth and they're a little bit jagged so that's nice when you're you're able to get sharp edges and everything but when you're using a streamline you're able to get smooth lines so most of the time I'll have streamline all the way on so when I go to make the final stencil the sketch is on one layer I'll add another layer and this is empty and I'll be able to go right over top of it to make my actual stencil so anytime I'm doing this I'm always going back and forth from shutting the actual sketch off and on so I can make sure that my actual outline is what I want same thing if I'm using a reference I'm always going back and forth making sure that my line drawing that I'm used for my actual stencil is correct and what I want now streamline is a really big help to get your line smooth but if you want to make a perfect circle or a perfect square or a perfect arch there is another feature that I use often so say you want a perfect circle you could draw your circle hold it in and it will make an ellipse you're able to change the ellipse as much as you want you can move it and change it but it's all centered around one point so if you want to make that ellipse into a perfect circle all you have to do is take your other finger while you're still holding this down and push it on the canvas and it'll change it into a perfect circle that you're able to move just like the ellipse so once you let those go this menu will pop up and you're able to edit the shape so then all these different anchors will show up on the shape that you just made and you're able to change it from either an ellipse or a circle so it doesn't just do it with the circle it'll do it with a triangle you hold it and it'll turn into this oblong shape and then you can also hold it and I'll turn into a perfect triangle same with a square but not only does it make those perfect shapes it'll make a perfect arch for you so you can make the arch and it's smooth but you see how I hold it in and it'll go from that arch that was not completely perfect to that arch which is then to the app a perfect arch now just like the shape you can edit this arch once you hold it in you go to edit shape and there's all these different anchors so you can pull them and do whatever you want with it it is definitely really helpful when you're trying to make your stencils as perfect as possible and I use that feature a lot now when I'm using the technical pen to make my stencil picking my brush size is really important over here on this slider you can go anywhere from 1% to 100% which for every brush is different on the technical pen 100% isn't really that big but I do find that the percentage over here relates pretty decently to different sizes of needle groupings so for either like a three liner or a five liner I'll usually keep that around 4% right there so you can see that's a thin line if I'm using like a nine liner I'll usually bring this up to 10% so then that's a much thicker line anything past that obviously you can either bring your brush size up or you can you know sculpt and make your line weights different by you know by putting parallel lines and you're able to fill in that gap so that's how you make really thick oh that's another good tip say you're making a circle and then you want to fill that completely with the color and don't feel like sitting here just coloring it in all you have to do is with the color any color that you want so you want to do it with blue you just grab this right here drag and drop and it will fill that space while you're drawing obviously you're gonna make mistakes unless you are perfect which I am not so tip number nine is to change from pencil to eraser by double tapping the pen now this only works with the second generation Apple pencil I don't know the shortcut for the older version but if you're using the second version double tap will change from eraser to pencil now you can change this functionality in the menu system and it can be a bunch of different things but I just keep it from pencil to eraser because it's the easiest tip number ten is the copy and paste gesture so say we have this reference photo and we want to copy and paste part of it first I would recommend duplicating any images that you're going to mess with and you're not exactly sure what you're going to do then that way that image is down here in a separate layer you just hide it so then that way say you messed this one up beyond belief you can just delete that and you have the original image right there still not messed with so we're gonna duplicate this hide the bottom layer we're going to go over to this selection tool over here have the freehand option selected and say we were thinking of making the teeth bigger you go over here you can select outside of it it doesn't have to be completely exact so once you have it all selected complete the selection by pressing that little circle and once it's selected like that you take three fingers and swipe down and it'll come up with the copy cut paste menu so say we just want to copy this we just go copy and paste and that will automatically paste it on a new layer so now you just have your teeth tip number eleven is how to use the symmetry option so say you want to do something that's completely symmetrical and you can't do it just freehand all you have to do is go up here to this little wrench icon make sure it is on the canvass tab you have to go to the drawing guide and make sure that that's turned on and it'll automatically turn on a grid so you go over to edit drawing guide down here in this menu you click on symmetry and once you click on symmetry it will add this line in the middle of your canvass now you have two anchor points on this line there's one where you can swing it back and forth and there's also or you can move it around depending on exactly what you want to do you know you can put that wherever you want or whatever orientation you want to do now there's a couple different options within symmetry click down here and the options tab you can do a couple different things down in here you can change it from vertical to horizontal to a quadrant where there's four and you can do radial which then adds another for symmetry lines so say we want to do the radial symmetry you click done up here now these guidelines you can shut off on your canvas you can click off the drawing guide and it'll still be the symmetry option I do like to keep the drawing guide on just so I know my parameters of where I'm drawing so in this way if you want you know draw a min dollar or whatever you can do that within this option so this is super helpful usually I don't use the radial one at all I'll usually just use the vertical one but if you go to start a new layer this new layer is not going to do the symmetry if you start a new layer and you want it to still be symmetry like this layer previous all you have to do is click on the layer and click it one more time to go over to drawing assist and you have to select that so in that way you see below the layer it says assisted so these two layers right here will draw symmetry so layer three I'll do that and so will layer two but if I start a new layer here layer four I'm only drawing on one side it's not showing up on the other and if you want to shut that off all you have to do is select that same layer click it twice and this menu pops up and unselect drawing assist and now layer three it's free of drawing assists I'm moving on to tip number 12 say you have a bunch of layers open and you've drawn on all these layers and you want them to be all one layer all you have to do is grab the first and last one that you want squeeze them together and it turns into one layer now if you do want to you know merge the layers but not actually fully merge them tip number 13 is using groups so instead of actually merging them together you can keep them separate but within one group now say you want layer four and five group together you click on five and then go to combine down you always have to do that on the highest layer so if you were to do that to four it would turn four and three into a group so once you have this group made you can always pull as many layers into that group as you want so say you want number three in there you just layer it in there so if you want to hide this group you go over to the group selection and click the checkmark so then all of these are now hidden you can unhide them and this can be really helpful in a lot of different situations you can rename the group so if you have a really big project going on and you have multiple groups you can know what group is what yes instead of merging them I recommend using groups until you're sure that you want to completely merge all of the different layers so tip number 14 is exporting your artwork so say you want to send this to a client or if you're working with your buddy on a project all you have to do is go up to this wrench icon go over to share you either share the whole procreate file you do a PSD PDF JPEG PNG and a tiff file so depending within for what reason you have all these different export options so say you want to do a JPEG goes to export and then you have all your different options of what you want to do you can print from here you can send it you know through airdrop messages mail procreate you can do all these different things and you're able to edit all the other preferences also if you want to add some more so that is super helpful my last tip which is tip number 15 is how to export a time-lapse of what you just did procreate is always recording every project that you do no matter if you click record or not so all you have to do to export the actual time-lapse is go to the wrench icon go over to video and you can replay your time-lapse here or you can export it here let's look at the time-lapse that we created and there it is so if you want to go faster through it you can just drag your finger back and forth and you're able to you know scrub through the footage and if you want to export it you just go the video tab once again and then go to export time-lapse now we didn't have a long enough time period that we were drawing in here with if you have a really long time lapse you will have the option of a 30 second time lapse or the full length and whatever one you want you just click it and it exports it and then it saves it into your photos or you can also share it if you can't print it but it will save it for you and you can put it on social media you can put it in videos whatever you want to do but I really do like that feature that it is always recording just in case you do want to share it it's a nice little touch now make sure when you are recording the time-lapse if you're doing it on purpose that you're drawing in the orientation that you want the time-lapse to be in so if you want the time-lapse to be in a YouTube video your best bet is to have this landscape layout if you're doing it for Instagram or something like that and you need it in the portrait mode make sure that you are drawing in this orientation so yeah guys those are my tips and tricks for beginners whoa I don't like getting a new app or new software can be really challenging especially when it's a big program like procreate trying to figure out something simple can be really difficult to do so I hope that these tips helped you if you do have any questions comment them down below you can always message me on Instagram the link to my Instagram is down in the description of this video I think I'm gonna do some more appropriate tutorials because I am stuck in the house and these are just pretty easy videos to make so if you have anything that you have questions about on how to do in procreate comment down below let me know and I will make a video about it yeah I hope this helped have a good day

Channel: That Tattoo Guy

Views: 709,600

Rating: 4.9539242 out of 5

Keywords: tattoo, tattoos, tattooing, tattoo artist, tattoo shop, seventh trumpet tattoos, seventh trumpet, art, draw, paint, creative, how to tattoo, how to line, how to shade, how to use procreate, procreate tips, procreate tutorial, how to draw in procreate, tutorial, how to, drawing, how to draw, digital art, iPad Pro, 2018 12.9 inch iPad Pro, how to draw on iPad Pro

Id: 2cWxD8YZ4b8

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020