Dive into Digital with Procreate Brushes

1. Introduction to the course: Hi and welcome to my studio. My name is slumbered ANCA or Bobby Graeme, and I live in Canberra, Australia. So at the beginning of this year, I started teaching artists hard to draw on the iPad using Procreate. And it was an absolutely wonderful experience which I wanted to share with you so that I can reach a broader audience. I started drawing digitally about five or six years ago. When I've learned for David Hockney, an artist who might Meyer was using his iPad to draw. And I thought, well, if he can do it, I can do it as well. So I tried first on a tool that he was using and then I've switched to something called Procreate, which is a Tasmanian designed art tool that is just absolutely wonderful to use. And I was really quite scared to use it initially, but I was working in the National Library of Australia and I decided, I'm just going to sit in these secret places in the building and I'm going to draw what I can see. Some kind of intuitively drew the stacks and the people and the reading rooms. And my colleagues is so the drunks thought they were wonderful and they encouraged me to do more with them. So turn them into a little book which are published two years ago. And since then, I've been drawing almost every day on Procreate. And as I said earlier this year, I was invited to teach a group of artists. So what I learned in that experience was that it's great to learn at the beginning, start at the beginning, and learn with the brushes, which is what this session is all about. What a procreate brushes. Where do you find them? How do you use them? When do you use them? And let's draw something simple with him. So that's the purpose of this class. Dive into digital with me and learn all about how to using, how to use Procreate brushes. 2. Your first Brush experience: Hi, So this is the first class in how to use Procreate brushes. Let's start right at the beginning. I'm using an iPad Pro 12.19 screen. And I'm using procreate version 5.2, and I'm using an Apple pencil. So this is the Procreate app and the first thing we're going to do is enter our gallery. So Procreate uses this term gallery for this opening screen. And I kind of like, do you think of it as an artist's studio because this is where I have my artworks, as you can see, lined up against a wall in what are called stacks. And I've got a couple of groups of artworks within each of these stacks. So let's have a look and see what that means. So in the very first one, I've got some plants. And as you can see, I've been drawing these Australian plants to get an understanding of how they work. I have then been using them to draw some more abstract plants, which I've got in this stack. But I also draw on location. And this was a recent trip that our teacher homestead, where I drew the buildings and I drew the people that were there. And I've just thrown in a portrait of myself as well. So these are the stacks within the gallery. And you can see that you can do a few things here so you can select. And when you select, you free to do quite a few things with these stack so you can move them around. You can delete them if you want to. And you can separate the artworks out of the stacks. You can also import files from somewhere else. And you can bring in a photo if you want to use a further later. But the thing that we're going to look at today is we're going to create a canvas. So we're going to tap on this plus sign up at the top and create a new canvas, which is what procreate calls the artworks that you draw on. So Procreate canvases come with inbuilt sizes. And the basic one is the screen size. Then we have a square and we have these others for care. A4, four by six photo, paper, comic and face bend. And I've added as Canvas, which I've named Instagram because I like to post to Instagram. So this is a size that works well. But for today's exercise where we tend to learn about brushes, I'm just going to tap on screen size and there's my first canvas. Now, the thing to remember about, or to know about Apple, uh, sorry, iPad procreate and the app. And the pencil is that they're all built to take advantage of the iPad functionality, which includes things like pinch, swipe, twist, et cetera. And we'll learn as we go along the way. So the Procreate developers have really taken advantage of all the functionality found in an iPad to develop this wonderful application called Procreate. So here we have our first Canvas. And as you can see, it can pinch it. I like to work with mine slightly smaller so that I can see the edge. And this has got some functionality. So let's have a look, see what's on this Canvas. So the first thing is the icons over here on the left. And we just going to leave those aside for the moment because those provide you with somewhat more complex functionality that we don't really want to use right now. The ones that we're going to look at are the brushes. We're going to look in another course at the layers. And we're going to look at the colors. So let's have a look at the brushes first because that's really what we're going to discuss today. So what we're gonna do is we're just going to tap on the brushes. And that's going to bring up a Dropbox with a whole heap of brushes already inbuilt. So procreate comes with a range of brushes. And whenever you see a little icon like this, those are what are called the native brushes, which come with the procreate app. So they start off with sketching and ago all the way down to water. And the ones that see above it in mind, our brush libraries that have added, and we'll talk about that later. But let's have a look at startup right up at the top, and have a look at sketching. So in the sketching library, there is a range of brushes that you can try it out. And we're not going to look through all of them now. But it's important to know that these pencil brushes exist for sketching. So whether you like a thicker brush, maybe like a PESTEL or an old PESTEL or thinner one like an HB pencil. You can find them all here. But what I'm going to select is I'm going to select the 6 B pencil, which is kinda one of my favorite brushes. And over here in the colors, I'm going to select black. The quickest way to get black anyway is to press on the disk and tap at the bottom, and you will automatically have black. And that little circle will indicate that black is selected. So black is selected, my brush icon is selected. Now, what about the size of the brushes? Over here on the left you'll see there's a slider which gives you the size of your brushes. So I have pushed that right up to the top so that I can do my first mark. And what we do there it is, It's just amazing when you make your first mark an iPad. And you can actually see the effects of this wonderful brush. Now, I don't like that. It's a bit too messy. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna get rid of it up. She say, how on earth do you do that? Well, I use two fingers and what's called a two-finger tap and I just did that to get rid of those. But I can bring them back. There's a little error here, which is your callback error. And I can bring those back so that I can still use them if I wanted to. So you can tap with two fingers to get rid of and you can bring back or remove with these areas here. But you have another functionality that you can use, which is the eraser, brushes eraser. Now the eraser is selected at this moment to dry ink, which is a brush that I was using earlier. But if you've got it sketches, you can select HB and it'll, sorry, six B. And I'll select that brush for you, which is the one that you were using as pressures. So let's see what happens now and look at that. You can rub it out. So if you wanted to do a more accurate rubbing out with even wanted to ship something, you could use your eraser to do that. So in a figure raises another brush. And it's very helpful to have that sometimes because you may want to do a very detailed erase. So you don't want to erase the whole drawing. We just want to erase a little portion of it. And so that's the eraser. Brushes. Select a brush erasers to raise or use two fingers to get rid of. And they would go. And that's gone up. Remember, you want to bring it back? And you can have your joint back. So that's the very first presses in the brushes. And in the next video, we're going to have a look at some more pressures in detail. 3. Create your own Brush Set: Procreate comes with a range of input brushes. Said, in the earlier video, we looked at the 6 B pencil, which is a lovely sketching pencil. But there's a whole lot more under here. Let's have a look at inking for example, dry ink is one that I use a lot of. And that's got a lovely quality to it. Some of the other ones that we might have a look at our painting. You could have something like this which has got a real lovely painterly quality to it. And in texture's nice pattern. Well, in abstracts, you might have something quite different like optic cons, which gives you this very unusual texture. And just moving down the list. Elements like crystals. And look at some vintage disco lights. One of my personal favorites, I just love these. And you remember using the pencil gives you quite a different quality to the brush as well. Okay, Nick, like this one. It's just clear that I would look at authentic. How lovely is that? So the lots here, and I suggest you work your way through them and play around with him. I've actually provided a sheet, which is a lesson plan. And in that lesson plan on applying all the properties of all the pressures. So please go ahead and play with them. It's only way you're going to find out how to use them. But what I'd like to do now is just talk about the essential brushes that you must really be using every day. And excuse me, I've watched a lot of artists. And I note that most of them use two brushes. So the two brushes that I use all the time, or the 6 B pencil and I use, which is found under sketching. And I use the dry ink, which is found on the inking. And I find that I can do almost anything that I want to, just these two pressures. But you might like to add more to your portfolio. One of the other ones that I like is a soft airbrush because I use it to add texture. And I also like and drawing, or is it artistic? I quite like this one terribly, which gives a nice texture as well. So what I suggest you do is you create your own brush library, like I've done here. And I've added the brushes that I use most of the time. So let's go ahead and do that. And what we're going to do is we're going to plus that. And it's called an untitled set. And we're going to name that's it. By saying rename and find my keyboard and press that. And I will name this dive sit. You can call your sit anything that you want, but just something that you know that you're going to be using. So what you want to do is you want to go and find the brushes that you'll be using all the tons I mentioned, I used the sketching brush. I use the inking brush in procreate. You can actually drag the brushes out of this original brush library and put them into U, Penn State. So that's what I'm going to do, backtracking into the outside. And then I pull it up to the top. A tip on dive sit on the other hand. And I dropped my brush in. My six B pencil is now in my data set. And it's just check That's been a pressing that and there it is indeed cell repeat that now for my inking. So I want to put my dry ink into my data estate, hold it with my finger, drag it out of the gun, find my dive seat, make sure that I've got it open and I drop it here. And that's how I make my own brush library. And this, you can move this, you can change the order as well. So you could actually push it lower down if you wanted to, or push it up to the top. So you've always got that derived state as your selected brush libraries that you don't have to troll through the other ones to find your favorite versions and copying them like that does not remove them. You've always got them in the original set. The other interesting thing to note is that Procreate has what they call a recent press shit. And that enables you to find the brushes that you've used recently if you've forgotten the ones you want. So for example, there's that nice discoverable one along with all the others that are demonstrated for this class. So that's a way of managing your brushes. You can order them alphabetically or whatever you want to. But I just find it useful to have my own brush shade right at the top of the list as is this one. And you can see just the ones that I use all the time are in there. So that's a good way of ordering your brushes. And in the next video, we're going to look at drawing something. 4. Practise with patterns: And I was in year 2 at school or had an art teacher called Miss Cotner, who taught us how to write using what we used to call real writing or cursive writing. So this is one of the exercises that I really like to give my pupils because it gives you some nice control over the of your pen. And it gets you using your iPad and procreate. So what we're gonna do is we're going to select the dry ink. We know how to do that. It's majorly in your diacetyl ready? We just came to leave the colorant black. The size of the pen is quite large. I'd like to turn my page a little bit like this because it helps me to write. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna do some nice rows of letters to remember what it was like when you learned how to draw that. So you may not remember, you may not have done cursive, but you can still get these patterns. And that's the point of this exercise is that you use your pen and you draw some nice patterns. So I remember when I was in MS. Cotton is class, she taught us to do these and she'd call them a overs and unders. So this was a precursor to an E and a C. No harm in learning how to write again is there. So if you wanna do this with me, it's actually a very relaxing exercise. We learned how to make these basic shapes again. And you get to control your pencil on your iPad using Procreate. It's a lovely discipline. So I'm just going to continue into these. I think these were the overs and unders, which was definitely a precursor to letter C. It's actually quite a hard thing to do how to do neatly without any lines. And these were under the bridge. And the one's a little bit earlier, but over the bridge. It's a good fun exercise. As you learned how to use the iPad. You could add a little bit of geometric patterning as well. I'm doing this quite quickly in a few 100 dirt more accurately. Please do so. But it really is very soothing and I have to repeat some accidentally move anymore of the patents. But here we get some more to fill the page. And if you're confident and if you like using the colors, this is when you might want to introduce some colors and start coloring in. So you could color in, select parts of the drawing certain colors. And then it forms a really nice pattern. So I am using these nice strong Red's to fill these gaps. And you can choose whatever you want to see what it looks like when I've got the whole roof finished. Very, very satisfying soothing exercise to do. Highly recommend it kind of brings you, takes you away from your ears any problems which is fill in these gaps. And let's do some more that the dead, Oops, not very neat. I'm going over the lines. Must Cotner wouldn't have been too happy with me. But you get the general idea. It's a fun thing to do. And before you know it, you'll have a lovely page of patents. And you'd have done your very first drawing in Procreate using just the basic pressures. Okay, Well let's call that a finished pattern. So my recommendation always tell students is to save everything that you do. And the way to do that is you press on this icon up at the top and you can see it says, This is the wrench icon. It says under share, share image. So you've got a selection, you can share it as a procreate or PSD PDF, JPEG or PNG or tiff. The easiest and the most common one for us is we're going to save it as a check pig, which means it's going to export. And you can choose where you want to save. So the way I choose mine is I just guessed save image. And what that means is showing you it's gone too. It's actually gone to my further open. And it should be saved here. So there it is. It's in my fetters. And then you can share that with friends, send it to others as well, and you always have a record of it. And what it means is that you don't have to necessarily keep it in your procreate image library where it will get the test. So give it a go and create your own pattern. And we'll come back shortly and we'll do another drawing. 5. Prepare your projects: For the class project, we're going to do a couple of very loose and easy drawings. And the first one is going to be a self portrait. So I've selected a screen size canvas, and I'm just going to twist it around so that it's portrait in shape. I've selected a black color, and I've selected my drying brush. I've got it up to full size. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to do a continuous line drawing. This is very easy and very relaxing. You could actually even do it with your eyes closed. But we're going to do to the eyes open today. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to give myself some hair just a little bit, and then I'm going to draw some eyes, a nose. I'm just going to make sure that I've got hooded eyes and hungry and give myself some pupils. Bit of a shade looking character that I am. Draw a mouth. And maybe just a little bit of a chin drawn. Yeah. Go back to draw another ear on that side. Draw a nice neck. Let me give myself a little bit more hair. Just kinda like that. Because a bit. So they look quite as mad. That and I'm gonna come down here and I'm going to sign my name. And that's gonna be it. So that's the one drawing. And what I'm going to ask you to do now is to save it without a background. So the way to do that is you tap on your layers and you uncheck your background layer. You can just vaguely see this a duck impression. So we can tap on the range, we can share that. And we're going to shave it as a PNG. And we're going to export it and save it as an image. And the reason I want to do that is because we will eventually in another class come back to this drawing and we will mostly use it as something else. So that's the first part of your project. The second part of your project is to create another campus. And we're going to select a square one this time. And what we're gonna do is we'll keep the same settings. So we've chosen black. We've got the dry ink brush. We've got our size up quite high. And what we can do is just draw a very basic, simple pattern. So I'm just going to draw something like this. And I'm gonna do for my page with that. And the reason why we drawing that is that we are eventually, when you get into a more advanced class, is we can create our own brush. And because you use this drawing as our brush image, and that means that we'll be able to use our own drawing as a textured brush for something else in the future. But for the moment, all I want you to do is one sort of continuous pattern like that. And again, we're going to switch off the background. We can split it a range brush again to select PNG, export it, and we're going to save it as an image. And then we'll just come back to the drawing. I'll just add background colors. You can see what it looks like. I've take you to the gallery and there's your pattern, is your image, There's your other pattern. We're going to select all three of us. And we came to stack them. And we're going to give that stack a name. And given a stack a name like that. And we'll call it Dan into digital. To digital. And they become, so you should be pretty pleased with what you've done. If you look back at nurse, you'll see your first few drawings. And there they all are. So I hope you've enjoyed that and please do share your drawings with us. Because that's the bass part to see what you and other people too. And that's a really good way of learning from others. Thanks for watching. 6. Brushed up and dusted off: So it come to the end of our brushes course. What do you think? Did you enjoy it? I hope so. I hope you'll press some comments and please post your projects. I'd love to see them and I'd love to be able to respond to any questions that you might have. So this first course was all about brushes. In the next course, we'll look at layers and what that means. And layers as much probably the building blocks of Procreate. If you think of the brushes as being the ballerinas of the app, then the laser differently, the foundations, and the course after that is going to be on colors. So once you've got the ballerinas lined up on the stage will be able to fill them with color. So I hope you'll enjoy me going forward as we progress to learn Procreate app. Sorry, the Procreate app. Yes, that's right. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks very much for watching this course and participating. And as I said, share any questions you might have with me and hopefully I can respond to them. Thanks again. I'm Bobby gram. Bye-bye.