Learn Procreate: Beginners Guide to Getting Started Quickly | Melissa De Nobrega | Skillshare
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Learn Procreate: Beginners Guide to Getting Started Quickly

teacher avatar Melissa De Nobrega, Digital Painter

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Intro

      1:36

    • 2.

      Gallery and Creating a Canvas

      4:09

    • 3.

      Colour Tool

      3:58

    • 4.

      Using Layers

      5:24

    • 5.

      Brush, Smudge, and Erase

      3:42

    • 6.

      Transform Tool

      1:45

    • 7.

      Selection Tool and Making Adjustments

      5:36

    • 8.

      Pressure and Gesture Settings

      7:54

    • 9.

      Your Project

      1:18

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About This Class

Procreate is a powerful art-making program, but for newbies it can be difficult to navigate or understand how some of the features work. In this class I’m going to reduce the learning curve for beginners by showcasing crucial gesture controls, demonstrating various tools, and offering customization tips.

Beginners will learn processes and tools they can use on a regular basis, including how to:

  • Set up canvases and organize their work
  • Create custom palettes and use the colour picker
  • Create, group, merge, and manipulate layers
  • Use the brush, smudge, and erase tools
  • Use selection, transformation and adjustment tools
  • Adjust global settings, such as gesture and pressure settings, for a better art-making experience

My goal is to get you to a point where you're confidently using the program. I highly encourage that as you watch the class, you keep your iPad handy so that you can explore the tools with me as I showcase them.

No prior experience with Procreate is required.

I’ve provided you with a demo sketch (download it in the resources section) so that you can start trying out the tools for yourself. In addition to the sketch, you’ll need the following equipment: iPad, Apple Pencil, and Procreate.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Melissa De Nobrega

Digital Painter

Teacher

Hey! I’m Melissa and I create classes to help artists get better at digital painting. I focus on teaching traditional techniques like inking and sketching, but using software like Procreate and Photoshop.

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Class Intro: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Melissa, and I'm a digital artist. My tool of choice nowadays is Procreate, but that wasn't always the case. When I first started using the program, I used to get really frustrated really quickly, and I believe the reason for that is because I didn't actually take the time to learn all the tools and the features that were available to me. So the goal of this class is to save you the headache. Like me, you probably just want to start making artwork. I want to quickly walk you through the main tools that you're going to need to do that. One of the main things that I want to show you is setting up your pressure settings and your gesture controls so that you can customize your art making experience. Aside from those, I'm also going to teach you how to set up your canvas and organize your work. You'll learn how to create custom color palettes, use the color picker, create, group, merge, and manipulate layers. We'll talk about the brush tool, the smudge tool, and the eraser tool, and then we'll also cover selection, transformation, and adjustment tool. My goal is to get you using the program quickly and confidently. So for the class project, I've supplied you with a little sketch. You can use the tools that we learn in class to actually start messing around with a piece of artwork. The only tools you'll need will be your iPad, your Apple pencil, and the Procreate app downloaded and installed. Since I said, we'll get started quickly, I think we should just get started. 2. Gallery and Creating a Canvas: When you open up Procreate for the first time, you'll land on the gallery page. Here you can see all of the artwork that you've created before, and you can also organize your files or you can create new files. If you wanted to take a look at some of the previous files that you've made, you can use the pinching gesture. I can just expand one of the pieces that I've already done. From here I can actually just swipe back and forth to view other pieces. Now, if I tap anywhere on the screen, I will bring up the actual close button which I can use to exit out, or I can pinch and make it go away. The next gesture control here in the gallery is actually just a swipe. If I swipe left on any of my artwork, I can bring up specific commands for just that piece. I can share it, which is essentially exporting it. I can export different file types. I can duplicate my artwork or I can delete it. Now you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting a piece because if you hit delete, Procreate will prompt you and say, Hey, do you really want to do this? Because once it's gone, it's gone. I'll hit Cancel. Up here in the controls, if I hit Select, I can now select multiple pieces. For example, all of the fish artwork here, I can actually stack and stacking creates a group. You can see I've created a group now. I can tap in there and access all of these pieces. It's a great way to keep your library clean. To create a new piece of artwork, we can either import a file. If I hit Import, then I can browse my download folder wherever I can import a photo, or I can hit the plus to create a new canvas. Procreate will already have presets here for you. If you don't see anything that you like, you can hit this little icon here. This will allow you to create a new canvas and it'll add it to that preset library. Here you can enter your dimensions. I'm going to switch to inches. Let's say I want a nice square, 10 by 10 at 300 DPI. I'll keep it at 300. If I ever choose to print this, it prints out nice and crisp. It has a high resolution, and I've got my maximum layer size set to 112. Now I can adjust this. This is Procreate telling me that it's going to cut me at 112 so that I don't experience any performance issues. As you play around with these dimensions, you'll see that your layer size will change. Over here, l've got my color profile and I can set my color profile if there's something specific that I know that I need to work in. I can set that here or I can keep either RGB or a CMYK. RGB is usually for digital artwork that's pretty much going to remain digital. CMYK is a printing color space. For time-lapse settings, basically, what Procreate does is anytime you create a stroke on a canvas, it records that stroke and it creates basically a speed painting video for you that you can watch at any point. It's really cool. I recommend you just leave this as it is. For canvas properties, you can set the background color for this presets. You can change it if you always want it to be black or you can turn the background onto hidden, which means that it'll just be transparent. Up here we can rename our canvas, so we will just call this one. What did I do? 10 by 10? We'll just call it 10, and hit Create.This is the canvas that I just created. If I go back to gallery and I hit the Plus, I can see that 10 has been added here. Now, if I made a mistake or I want to delete it, I can just swipe left. Swiping left will always bring up these options. I can edit it and go back to this interface or I can delete it. If I tap on it, I'll just create a new piece. 3. Colour Tool: This is our Canvas. The first thing that I want to point out is that on our right-hand side, we basically have all of our tools for creation, and on the left-hand side we've got settings and tools for adjustments. The very first thing I'm going to cover is this little bubble over here, and this is our color picker. If you look down here, you basically have these different options for color pickers and then you have pallets. I actually like to use the disk. Basically you use this first slider to select your hue, and then on the inside of the bubble, you would adjust the saturation and the brightness levels. Now you can actually use that pinching gesture to expand the inner circles so that you can get a closer look at the colors that you're picking. Over here is going to be the actual color that you've selected. Something else to note in this little color bubble is that if you double-tap in certain places, procreate will snap to a perfect color. If I double tap somewhere in the white area, I'll get pure white, if I double tap somewhere in the gray area, I'll get that 50 percent gray. This is a perfect mid gray. Down here as black, and then I can do the same on the other side to get these bright yellows, very saturated yellows and this darker one. I can pinch that back down. Over here we've got pallets. Procreate is auto loaded with these palettes that they had created. I created these two and I'll show you how to create your own. Basically you would go up here and you would hit the plus, and you can create a new palette from your camera, from a file, from a photo. I'm just going to create one of myself here. If I tap on untitled, I can rename it, so we'll call this one the 10 palette. Now I've got it selected with that little blue check mark. That palette shows up now when I'm in any of these other views, I have access to it here, but right now it's empty because I didn't add anything. The way that you would add a color to your new palette is actually just by tapping, is very hard to see, it might be easier if I give it a white background. There are these little lines here, so there are a bunch of different squares that I can fill. If I tap, then I'll fill it with my active color. Remember this is my active color, and I can add the yellow, I can add a purple. This is where harmony picker is very handy. I can easily just add some colors that I know work together. Now to delete a color, all I would have to do is long press until the option to delete shows up. This says delete a swatch, and then that gets rid of it. I can move a swatch if I hold it and then just move it around, I can drop it in there. The last thing to know about this color picker is that I can actually pull it out of this interface. Right now, if I want to draw, as soon as I make a mark on my Canvas, it disappears. What I can do is I can grab it by this little bar and drag it out, so now it stays with me as I paint. I can actually have any of these active, or I can have my palette active, which is really handy because now I can just tap on a color and I can start painting right away with that color. 4. Using Layers: Next, let's talk about layers. I can access my layers by tapping on this little square icon up here. Now, I can see that when I start a new file, I will always have a Background color and Layer 1. I can't delete either of these, and I can't draw on the Background color. I can however, change the Background color to any color that I want at any point in time. On Layer 1, this is the active layer, the one that's highlighted in this blue color. This is the one that will actually draw on. I'm going to make a couple of shapes here, just so we have something to work with. I'll press the "Plus" icon to get a new layer. What I'm doing to draw these shapes is I'm drawing my wiggly shapes here, and Procreate as long as I don't lift my pencil, will snap the lines and make a nicer shape for me. As long as, again, I don't lift my pencil, I can rotate it and I can change the size of that shape. I can grab the active color and I can drop it in to fill it. Now, you might see these little lines here that aren't filled in. That's just because my paint brush has a texture so it doesn't fill perfectly, but I can just draw over those. I'll create one more shape. I've got three different shapes, three different layers. I've got a couple of different options. If I tap on this N, this brings up my layer options so I can change the opacity of that layer. You can see it's getting more transparent, and I can change the layer's blend mode. If you're familiar with photo editing, or Photoshop's blend modes, then you'll know exactly what these are because they are exactly the same. Something to note about these blend modes is that they are mathematical calculations. If I pick Linear Light, Procreate is looking at the colors that I have in this layer and the ones underneath it, and it's doing some sort of mathematical calculation to create these new colors for me. That becomes an issue later on when I try to merge my layers. I'll show you what I mean. I'll take all three layers and I'm going to pinch them together. You can see that changed the look that I originally had with that blend mode applied. When I merge my layers, the blend modes, they don't always work perfectly. That's something to bear in mind. I'm going to undo. Undo is right over here. I'm going to tap that. Now I have my layers just as they were a moment ago. Instead of merging layers, I find merging layers very handy. But in this case, if I can't merge because I've got a blend mode, what I can do is I can select multiple layers, so I'm going to drag right to select, and I get these options up here. I'm going to group them instead. Now, at least I can keep my layers panel tidy and keep similar layers together, or related layers together. But it's not quite the same as merging. If I want to take something out of this group, all I have to do is long press and drag. I can move it within the group or I can just take it out entirely, and now it's no longer a part of that group. If I use the check-mark box beside that N icon, I can hide a layer from view. I can also hide a group from view. If I tap on the thumbnail, then I get a bunch of different options here for this specific layer. Same thing happens if I were to tap on the group thumbnail. I don't get a lot of options for the group. I can rename it or I can flatten it. Flatten it is the same as merging. Again, if you've got that blend mode in there, flattening probably won't work for you. We've got a couple of different things we can do. Rename, select copy, we can fill the layer. Filling the layer fills it with the active color. I'll hit "Undo". I can clear it. That's going to erase all of the artwork on there. I'll "Undo". I've got different masking options. I can Invert my colors. I've got Reference and then Combine Down. Combine Down is just going to group it. It added it to my group. But again, if I want to take something out of the group, I can pull it out. Or I can also just add it back in. I created a sub group. That's not what I wanted. Because I didn't want that sub group, I can actually swipe to the left and I can delete it. If I swipe to the left on any other layer, I can Lock, Duplicate, or Delete. Locking a layer means that I can draw on that layer anymore. If this is my active layer, and I try to draw on it, see nothing happens, and then Procreate will prompt me and say, hey, you locked that one so what are you trying to do? I can unlock it from here, open up, or just cancel. 5. Brush, Smudge, and Erase: Now, we'll move into our three little brushes over here. We've got our paintbrush, our smudge brush, and our eraser tool. These three use the exact same brush library. To access the brush library you would basically tap twice. You would select the tool to use it, you tap again and that opens up the brush library. If you're using Procreate for the first time or you haven't loaded any new brushes, then you'll see all of these options down here; sketching, drawing, painting. There are tons of different brushes here that Procreate comes with. If you find a brush that you like but maybe you think it could be a little bit better for you, you can tap on it and that will open up brush studio. You can play with any of these different settings and make the brush your own. To save it, you would just hit "Done" and then that would save your edits. When I pull it down, I get this plus option. It's not normally there until I pull the list down. I can tap it and I can create a new set of brushes. I can name them. I'll call them Ten again. The way that you get brushes in here is by either creating new brushes, so you would hit the plus icon and now you can create your own brush from scratch, or I can go into a different set. Let's say I went into the drawing set and I really liked the Oberon brush. What I could do is I could swipe over, I can duplicate it, and then I can drag it into my new set here. If I go into Ten, I've got it here. The reason why I duplicated it was so that I didn't just drag it out of one library into the next. Here I can select my brush. Now like I said, these three tools they use the exact same brush libraries, so I can paint with that Oberon brush. On the left side, I can adjust the size of my brush so I can make it bigger or I can make it smaller, and I can adjust the opacity. This is the opacity slider. I can turn down the transparency essentially. The paint brush and the eraser work exactly the same way. Over here you adjust the size, over here you adjust the opacity. For the smudge brush you can adjust the size, but when you're adjusting the opacity you're actually adjusting the strength of the smudge brush. I've got the smudge brush active. You'll see it's quite smudgy. I can just start smudging right away. If I turn this all the way down, you'll see it actually becomes a lot harder to smudge to the same degree. I have to go over and over the same spot. That's because I turned down the strength using the opacity slider. It's still called opacity for the smudge brush but really it's the strength of the smudge brush. Now, one other little tip here is that when you're painting, I'm going to change to this big soft brush. Let's just change the color. I'm painting with this big soft brush. If I want to smudge with this brush or erase with this brush without having to go through the library and find it, all I have to do is long press, and I'm going to smudge with the current brush. I don't know if you saw that. Let me long press here, erase with current brush. Now I'm erasing with that brush. I open it up, there it is. 6. Transform Tool: Now we'll talk about the adjustment tools over here. The very first one I'm going to cover is the transform tool. With transform, I can move my artwork around the canvas and I can also distort it and scale it down different sizes. I've got some pretty obvious options down here, I can flip my drawing, I can rotate it, and I can also reset it. On uniform, I can scale my drawing, but the aspect ratio is locked. That means that it's always going to stay that same, size isn't the right word, but I can scale it and I don't have to worry about the fish being distorted in any way. If I change to free form over here, now I can squish and I can actually stretch the drawing. You can see the aspect ratio is no longer locked, and I can really start distorting my drawing. Again, I can hit "Reset" if I'm not happy with what I did. I've also got this option here to distort. Now this is going to change the perspective. If I grab that corner and pull in, you can see the fish start to change that perspective. Then lastly, I've got warp. This is like the puppet warp, and I can pull these different points on this little graph here, and this helps me distort that fish. These two, distort and warp, are messing around with the perspective, and freeform and uniform are for moving it around the canvas and scaling the size. 7. Selection Tool and Making Adjustments: Next we have our selection tool over here. It's that kind of like a ribbon icon. To select, I can use automatic or freehand. I typically use free hands. Under freehand, I can actually just draw my selection. Let's just say I want the body of the fish and I can do things like copy and paste. This will copy and paste from my selection. You can see I just have that body there. That's from selection. I'm going to delete that. What I can also do a select if I don't want to freehand anything, I can choose automatic. With automatic, Procreate is going to help me create that selection and I'll start here with the body. Anything in blue is what I've selected. You can see up here I've got the threshold that I manipulate. By moving my pencil to the right, I increase that threshold, which is telling Procreate to pick up more pixels, select more. You can see if I go down, that I start to lose some of that selection and I lose more and more especially in that tail, whole pieces disappear. I can turn that up. See now it's way too high if selected, basically everything here. We'll start there and I can select. That's too much, I need to dial it down because I just want these little fins here. Now that I have my selection, something that I can do is I can create a new layer and I can drag my color in. This is how I would create a base color for one of my sketches. You can see if I take that selection off now, I can move this underneath my goldfish and I've got the start of something good. If I hide my sketch, you can see that I'm missing pieces in here, which doesn't really look very good. But again, what I can do, I don't even need my sketch turned on actually, I could just free hand, grab some of that stuff, and I can even paint in here. You can select and you can do different things. You can paint, you can fill in color, you could erase. A selection is just a way of selecting certain parts of your artwork. You can see that's nice and dark now because I filled that in. If I go back to my selection tool, I have these different options here where I can use rectangles to create different selections and I've add on right now, which means that every time I draw a piece it's going to add to the selection. I hit Add. I can press Add again. You can see all of those diagonal lines. I hope you can see it in the camera. All of those diagonal lines are the things that are not selected. Those diagonal lines disappear as I add more and more. Let's say I make a mistake, I select way too much. I add that to my selection, what I can do, let's zoom in on that. You can see that this white part is added to my selection. To cut that out now, all I would have to do is turn on remove and, now I can take that out. I'll hit Remove. I can cut away that piece of the selection that I had made. Let's try that again. Let's just free hand. I'm going to turn on Color Fill so that it colors it automatically for me. Color Fill is going to add the active color onto that layer. I'll just keep hitting add as I fill that in. Let's fill in some of that tail and maybe somewhere in here. Now when I take my selection away, I was working off of a different layer. I can merge this one down. Now my base layer has that color. It's filled in for the most part. I'm done with selection, I can move on to adjustments. In adjustments, I have different things that I can do to my layers. I've got these like color adjustments, I've got blurring. I got things like reducing noise or sharpening my drawing, and then I've got these other cool ones like Liquefy, which I tend to use a lot and clone. Just as an example, with hue and saturation, I'm working on that base layer. I can adjust that hue, so I can change the hue entirely. Make it more orange goldfish, there's the saturation, maybe a bit lighter. Then when I'm happy with that, I can just tap off or I could just move on to my paintbrush. You can see that made that adjustment take effect. 8. Pressure and Gesture Settings: The last one that we have up here is the little wrench icon. These are actions. I also call them the settings. You can think of this part up here is your menu, and then down here you've got your sub menu. Under add, I can add a bunch of things to this file. I can add a new file, I can add a photo in. I can actually copy what's on here and I can paste it into a different Canvas. Under Canvas, I have options like cropping and resizing. If I hit that, I can change the dimensions of my artwork entirely. I can turn on different assistive tools, drawing guide, animation assist. I can turn on reference so this is really handy. I use this one all the time. I'd like to keep a thumbnail view of my artwork while I paint or you can also just import an actual image in so you can keep that image up there while you sketch. You can also flip your Canvas or you can get Canvas information. Canvas information has some interesting things in there like statistics. It'll tell you how many strokes you made and how much track down you've actually spent in this file. Two hours and 37 minutes, I was using this particular file as a practice run. I'll show you in a second. But you can share things as well. This is where sharing is exporting. You can export your different, your procreate file or a PSD or any other file type here. You can also export specific layers. Under video, this is where you find your time-lapse replay. This is like every single stroke and every single action that you made in here, procreate has recorded and created that feed speed painting video. If I tap on here, I'll actually start to play it. Like I said, I was using this file as a practice run first as a painting and trying to figure out how can I best teach you guys how to use the program. Up here you can see it running. I can actually scrub through so I can move it along. I can go backwards and forwards and so here you can see the painting happening. Then a bunch of different practice things and selections and stuff like that. That's the time-lapse replay. When you're done, you can just hit done of course, you can also export that one if you wanted to share it. Under preferences, this is where you find some really interesting and what I think crucial stuff even for beginners. Pressure smoothing and gesture controls are like the place to be in my opinion. [LAUGHTER] Pressure smoothing, I'm going to skip right here. What this is, see, I've changed mine already. The default, let's just reset it. Default is a straight line, so this is how procreate is going to render while you're making artwork. Me personally, I have a very light touch. When I'm drawing, I sketch very lightly and I don't press too hard. If I have to press really hard for extended periods of time, it tends to actually hurt my hand and I get cramped up really easily. For me, what I do with pressure and smoothing is actually, so this is specifically, this is smoothing and this is the pressure area. I actually move this up, so I add a little dot here and I move it up. That tells procreate to be more sensitive to the light touches. When this is up here, I actually don't have to press so hard to get the maximum opacity and the maximum thickness of that brush. Let me change to the pencil for example. With a pencil I can make some very light marks. When I'm pressing really hard, you see the thickness changes, it gets a bit thicker and the pink gets darker. For me, I don't have to press as hard to get there. If you'd like to press hard, then you might actually want to turn this down. That means that you actually have to press really hard to get that max. Like you have to press quite hard to get that max. Obviously for me that's not good. But for the longest time, I didn't do anything with this pressure setting and I left it as is. I was very frustrated for a very long time trying to paint in procreate because I felt like it wasn't responding well to the way that I paint. I would recommend that you play around with this. You can get really particular here because you can actually add multiple dots. You can actually start to make and fine tune the way that it, the way that procreate responds to your hand, and the way that you use pressure to draw. Experiment with that. Again if you move it up, you're making it more sensitive. If you're moving it down, then you're making it less sensitive. Up here, these are some really great accessibility options. If your hands are a little bit shaky or you have a permanent tremor, you can up with a stabilization which will assist you in drawing those straight, smooth lines. It's the same thing with motion filtering. These are different ways of stabilizing your stroke. Here under gesture controls, I think gesture controls is great. It's like a library of all of the gestures that you can use in procreate. We'll not all of them, but most of them. It's really handy when you forget what gestures are set. For example, for clear layer, I've got it set to a four-fingered tap. That means that if I wanted to clear the layer, the base layer, all I have to do is tap with four fingers. The whole thing is clear. I can tap with two to undo. I know that one and we can see what else we've set up here. For smudge, I've got it set to the little square with the Apple Pencil. Now what that means is that over here you will find that little square. If I'm drawing, I hold down that square. It changes to the smudge brush. As long as I have it held down, I will smudge and when I let go, I will draw. That's what that little square icon means. When you see it in gesture controls, square and touch, square and Apple Pencil. A touch is a finger touch, the Apple Pencil is obviously with the Apple Pencil. Another one that is amazing is the Eyedropper. I use this one all the time and no doubt you will use this one as well. It sets a touch and hold. Now what I did is I reduce the delay so it might look a little bit different than yours. When I'm painting, I will touch and hold. You can see underneath is the color that is currently active. On top is what I'm going to switch it to so I can move around my Canvas and I can select these different colors. Find one that I'm happy with. If I pick that orange, I let go. My active color is now that orange. This is how I usually sample different colors. Like I said, I reduce that delay. I'll show you what it looks like if it turn it all the way up, it just means that you're waiting longer until it activates. You would have to hold and then see it took a little bit longer to actually activate. 9. Your Project: For your class project, what I've done is I have uploaded a sketch of the goldfish. What I want you to do is download it from the resources section if you haven't already and import it into Procreate. I gave you a sketch because I didn't want you to feel like you had to take a bunch of time to create your own sketch and try to color it in. You're more than welcome to do that, but I wanted you to just start making a mess. Don't be precious about that sketch that I've shared with you. If you feel a little bit lost and you're looking at the sketch, and you're like, I'm not really too sure what I should do. You can check out my sample project. In the project gallery, I uploaded a sample project, and I walked you through some of the steps that I took to actually create that full painting. Please also don't forget that there is a discussion area. The discussion area is a tool that you can use to connect with your fellow students in addition to connecting with me. If you find a tool or a setting that you absolutely love, maybe I didn't even talk about it in the class, then please share it in the discussion area because your fellow beginners can absolutely learn with you and from you. That's all for your class project. Don't forget to post it when you're done. That way, we can see what each other is up to and encourage each other along the way. [MUSIC]