Procreate's 10 Best Features - 2019 (draw lines and shapes, paint bucket tool, gradients and more)

today I'm talking about procreates 10 best features so if you're new to the app or just want to get the most out of it check out these tips this is a remake of a video I did on this channel a little over two years ago when I was just getting used to procreate where I shared some of the things that really helped me get comfortable with the program now why am i redoing that a lot has changed in procreate over the last two years for example back then I had to use brushes to get shapes now they're automatically in the program so I thought it was worth revisiting since about half of those tips have either changed or just out of date or aren't the best way to do it anymore so with that said let's roll a lot of programs have something called a fill tool often referred to as the Paint Bucket tool what that does is if you have a large area and you want to fill it with paint quickly the fastest way to do it is to grab that tool and fill it on in now at first it doesn't look like procreate has this tool but it actually does all you need to do is if you have an enclosed shape is take your color swatch in the upper right hand corner and just drag it in and drop your color and you've completely filled it in procreate refers to this is the color drop tool I'm gonna shrink my brush size down a little bit and draw another one and I'm not quite gonna close that circle in as you can see I've left a little space here now if I drag that color out and I drop it in what happens it fills everything because there was a hole there now sometimes when you have a tiny little hole like that one there is a way to plug it now check out what happens if I take this color I drag it in but I don't pick up my pencil there's a blue line along the top right here it says color drop threshold set to about 50% if I move my pencil down while holding it on the canvas basically what its gonna do is it's gonna tighten up that fill tool so it's gonna be able to ignore some of those tiny little holes so sometimes you want that color threshold up sometimes you want it down so if that's the case why don't you keep it down all the time we'll let me show you have a new layer here a new brush here so what happens when I have something with a fuzzy edge attached to it check out what happens when I drag my color in there and when I do it leaves this let me zoom in this little white halo effect you can see you along the edge sometimes you want to knock that out so the best way to do that is let me do that really quick is I'm gonna drag that color in I'm gonna hold my pencil down and this time I'm gonna drag that color threshold up and the higher up I get that color threshold the more of that white halo around the inside of that line that's gonna get rid of tip number two is reference layers now we already know how to use the color drop where I can just drag any color into my line art and fill it in and color it in that way but what if you want your color to be on a different layer than the lines that you're using well that's where a feature coat reference layers comes in it is really cool let me undo that color let me open my layers so my ink layers are on layer two in this case and so I want layer two to be a reference for all of my other layers let me show you how it works it's easier to demonstrate so I'm going to tap on that layer brings up a list of options I'm going to go ahead and tap on reference now I'm gonna tap on layer one that's where I'm gonna stick all my colors so now when I grab his skin tone and I drop it in there it's dropping that color on a different layer and I can go ahead and drag and drop all of my colors in and get those in there and now you'll see when I open my layers if I toggle off that top layer you can see I'm turning off my inks but I am keeping that bottom color in check that's really nice so now I can go ahead and I can create another layer and if I want to add some highlights or something to that I can go in I can select a different color grab a nice ink brush and now on this other layer I can go in here underneath it and do that so that lets me keep my colors on all sorts of different layers and add layers underneath my ink lines really nicely procreate also has selection features and copy and paste features so say I want to select my line art I'm going to make sure that I am on the right layer to begin with and then this tool up here this little line tool this is my selection tool which will allow me to select something just using my pencil there's different ways to do it there's automatic selection freehand selection just gonna use freehand for now because what I want to do is I want to duplicate this line art that I have here the fastest way to do that is to take three fingers and swipe down on your canvas and that's gonna bring up this menu now you can change that menu and change that three-finger swipe into something different but by default this is our copy and paste menu I can cut copy copy all in fact I could just go straight to copy and paste and it'll just drag that and stick it on it's very own layer right here and from there I can grab my arrow tool and move around my new selection that I just pasted in now like I said that is the default if you want to change it at any time there's this wrench in the upper left-hand corner in there there is a selection called preferences and down here there is gestures control and here you can do a lot of different customization and really setting up your own workflow next up is gradients there is no gradient tool in procreate so you kind of have to hack it a little bit I use gradient brushes which come in really handy so if I go ahead and tap on my brush I have an entire section dedicated towards gradients I've called these Brad gradients and I've made them myself so if I tap on one of those you'll see how it works I can go anywhere and I could just tap on the canvas and create my gradient and then if I want to I can increase the size of that move that off to the side and now that gradient is almost covering the entire canvas now this is a little bit of hack and I wouldn't be surprised if in a future update procreate finds a way to add gradients in in fact I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the very next up they do they have been adding in a lot of features as they go but right now this is my work around if you want my brushes you might already have them I sent them out in my last email newsletter last week they're totally free the email newsletter is free in fact if you subscribe you'll get those right away in the first email I send out as one of the freebies all right how many is that only four hold on quick intermission I hope you're enjoying these tips I have a full procreate course over on udemy if you're looking to master procreate and really dive into the details don't pay full price I have a discount code it's down below in the description anyway that's all I have on to the rest of the tips next up is a feature called alpha lock so what is alpha Watkyn and how does it work well let's take a look at it we've got a nice orange going on here and say we want to add some texture to it so I go to my color I grab a deeper shade of red then I go to a brush find something with a nice texture to it and then I come in here and I add some texture to the edge of my orange now as you can see a lot of that texture is bleeding off the edge what if we just want to color in the shape that already exists that's where alpha lock comes in so I'm going to tap with two fingers a couple times to undo all that gonna go to my layers gonna make sure I'm on the layer that I want to color in if I tap on it one of my options here is alpha lock I'm gonna set that go back out on my brush and now when I paint all of my paint is just going to fall inside the shape that I already have on my canvas next up is adjusting the eyedropper tool at this point you probably already figured out that if you long press for awhile you'll get this nice eyedropper tool which lets you select different colors on the fly pretty handy but you'll also find that if you're drawing really small short details sometimes that eyedropper appears before you want it to appear well good news there's a way to change all that and it's in this wrench icon up here so let's go ahead and tap that and then we're gonna make sure we're on preferences and we're going to go down to gesture controls now all of these have settings and the one we're looking for is eyedropper so I'm gonna go ahead and tap on that and down here we have a delay if I want that eyedropper to appear later I slide up that delay now it's gonna appear after one point three two seconds or I can drag it down and it'll appear right away if you want the eyedropper to appear more I like to set it I don't know right around there and now when I tap and hold it appears pretty quickly for me so how do I draw a straight line in procreate it's actually really easy in fact if you draw any line and hold your pencil at the end it's gonna snap into what is called a quick line now there's a lot of stuff we can do with a quick line now that it's here say we wanted a perfectly straight line if I take a finger and place it on the canvas it's gonna snap at different angles so as I move my pencil down now we've got a perfectly horizontal line and I can move it different increments and snap it into place and at any time I can lift my finger and I can freeform that line as well you also notice up here after I let go it says edit shape so if I tap on that it's gonna give me something kind of like vector tools that lets me grab each end point and move that line around also very very handy and like all tools we can adjust how quickly that line appears if that line is appearing too quickly for you you can always go to your wrench you can go to preferences you can go down to gesture controls and there is a section here called quick shape and here we have our delay very similar to the delay on the eyedropper we can set that to whatever we want next up our shapes how do I draw a square how do I draw a rectangle how do I draw a circle a triangle well it works the same way is a line in fact instead of just drawing a straight line and letting it snap into place what we're gonna do is we're going to draw a circle and we're gonna let that snap into place and now I can change the size of it now like anything else putting a finger on there creates a perfect circle for me as well and if I let go there is an option to edit the shape so it's very similar to what we just did with a lot so if I click on that it lets me take any of these points and move them around and modify that ellipse so let me undo all that and get rid of my lines here and of course this works with any kind of geometry in any kind of shape I want to try and go I can let my triangle snap into place it can also edit that and grab my different sides and move those different sides around if you want a square it's the same exact thing I can draw my square and if I want it to be a perfect square again one finger on the canvas and now it is snapped to a perfect square and I can move it anywhere I want it to be it's kind of cool because you could do some really wonky lines you know I could do something like this and it's going to snap into place and it's also gonna be editable so if I want to close that shape when I'm done I could just take one of the endpoints move it where I want it and move any point around anywhere where I need it to be now there is one caveat once I leave this it's no longer a vector shape I no longer am going to be able to edit these so once I tap on that or once I tap off of that this is just paint I can't go back and edit this shape now procreate has a ton of gesture controls and one of them is being able to merge layers you could always tap on a layer and go down here and say merge down which will merge it with the layer below it but there's a faster way to do this and that's just taking two fingers and squeezing down on your layers and combining them that way so while we're here I should talk about canvas size by hitting this plus button you've probably already noticed that you can create your new canvas I have a lot of different sizes it prepopulates this with your previous sizes that you've created or you could just create custom and from here if you need something to be specific to inches centimeters millimeters you can do that same thing with your DPI and also this is an opportunity to name your canvas before you get going one thing that's new to procreate that's worth pointing out is you can adjust the size of a canvas after you've created it now a lot of people who do landscape art will often find that they're creating something and they want their landscape to go off the canvas a little bit more or they got the perfect thing going on and they want to crop it in now you can do that like most of the settings that is up here in this wrench so if I tap on the wrench and then I go to this canvas setting I have an option for crop and resize and that lets me basically crop and resize it's pretty simple and it's also gonna tell you that as you increase the size of your canvas it's going to tell you how many layers you get so that's something you should be aware of too when you're resizing thing and then when you're done you just click done crops your canvas takes a second and you're good to go if you enjoyed these please like subscribe to this channel and don't forget my procreate course there is a discount down below that is all I have for today thank you guys for watching and I'll see you and dates [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 637,309

Keywords: procreate, masks, ipad, drawing, digital art, procreat, top 10, tips, hand gestures, straight lines, circles, squares, triangles, eyedropper, quickline, quick shape, line tool, gradients, gradients in procreate, canvas size, resize in procreate

Id: jhSjvEzsOqw

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019