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]