Transcripts
1. Welcome to Procreate for Beginners!: Welcome to Procreate for absolute, total, complete and utter beginners. I'm Molly Suber Thorpe, and today I'm going to start at the very, very beginning to give you the most comprehensive beginner level introduction to the Procreate app that I possibly can. If you're anything like I was when I started using Procreate for the first time, you're probably both excited and intimidated by this really powerful tool. I know that the first time that I opened Procreate, I found the interface pretty daunting, and I say that as someone who came at the app from years of Photoshop experience. When I say that I know what it means to be a beginner with this app. I really mean it. By the end of this class, you're going to feel confident that you're using the app the same way that the pros do, and you aren't missing out on some powerful tools that you just didn't discover or didn't figure out yet. Maybe you're an illustrator or a lettering artist who's already very accomplished with your analog technique. Or maybe you're a new artist looking to expand your horizons for the first time. Maybe you've tried to cobble together a lot of shorter Procreate tutorials, and while lots of those are really great, it can be difficult to make sure that you're getting the complete picture. Today, we are starting at the very, very beginning, and I'm going to cover absolutely everything A to Z. I've also organized the lessons in such a way that you'll be able to skip around and come back to them in the future. There's a lot of information to cover, so let's just dive right in.
2. What iPad I’m Using: To get started, I'll share what iPad accessories and Procreate I'm using so that you can follow along and you're aware of what you're looking at as we go. I have a 12.9-inch, 4th generation iPad Pro. I also have the 2nd generation Apple Pencil. At the time of filming this, there have only been two generations of Apple Pencil, even though there have been four generations of iPad. You can distinguish the 1st and 2nd generation pencils because the 2nd generation magnetically snaps to the side of the iPad. If I come into Procreate, I can find out what version I'm using by tapping the Procreate logo. I can see here that I have Version 5X. It is perfectly okay if you have a future version of Procreate. If you have an older version, all you have to do is go into the app store and download the update. Today in class, I'm going to be wearing a screen protector glove. Mine is from this brand called SmudgeGuard. What this does is prevents the side of my hand from accidentally creating any strokes on the iPad screen, and it also helps my hand glide easily around the screen. In that sense, it doesn't create any smudges on the screen. It also lets me make, because I'm a lettering artist, really long flourished strokes without my hand sticking on the screen. I do not use a screen protector. This is a common question that I get. I prefer to use my glass screen paired with my glove. Now a lot of people do like screen protectors and for various reasons. I have gone really in-depth as to why I don't like them, but shared why others do and shared which ones people tend to like in a blog post. In fact, this blog post contains even more details about my iPad comparisons to iPad Pro and iPad Air, different details, and links to all of the items including my SmudgeGuard glove. Because I think that a written version of that, including the links, is probably easier for you to reference in the future, I've linked that blog post below so you can head over there and find links to absolutely everything with further descriptions.
3. The Gallery: Now, we'll cover a complete introduction of the Procreate gallery. Come over here to your Procreate app, and the very 1st screen that you come to is your gallery screen. If you're opening Procreate for the 1st time, obviously you aren't going to have as many files as I have. But you'll have some test or sample files here, that you can open and explore and play around with. To open a file, simply tap it. To return to the gallery, tap Gallery. To rename a file, tap the filename and type in the new name. Swipe left on a file to share, duplicate, or delete it. When you delete a file, it's gone forever. I always recommend duplicating files, if you're making substantial changes to an original design and you want to easily be able to revert to your initial design, saving a copy 1st, obviously makes that easier. Hitting Share is what allows me to export an image. Once I tap it, I'm able to select what type of image to share. Once I do that, it will prep the image for export, I can select Google Drive here to send it to my Google Drive. Just like how the Files app is called files and not iCloud, I don't know why it doesn't say send to iCloud. But you'll always know because of the Cloud icon here, that this is sending to iCloud. Hit Select up here in your gallery to select multiple images at one time. Once you select two or more images, you're able to click Stack, which puts them into a grouped folder. Once you have stacks, you can also use that selection option to select multiple stacks. If you select multiple stacks and then you hit Stack again, it merges those stacks into one stack or one folder. Unfortunately, at this time, Procreate doesn't allow for stacks within stacks. What you're really going to deal with is one big stack merged together if I hit Share, this is how I can share multiple images at one time. Remember swiping left lets you share an individual image, but share a lot of them at once by hitting Select and then Share. Duplicate again, multiple duplications at one time. Delete, obviously multiple deletions at one time. Preview is cool because it creates a little slideshow, so that you can quickly look through your images. The preview also works for stacks. If I preview a stack, I can go through all of my stack and even get to the next stack once I reach the end of this stack. This is a very cool way to quickly open up a thumbnail, without having to open the file itself. Up here, you have Import and Photo. This is a bit confusing because you might think, what if I want to bring a photograph into Procreate. Photo does not mean take a photo, photo means import a photo from your camera roll. In case you don't know, your camera roll is this icon on the iPad. It's where all photos go automatically when you take them or transfer them from, let's say your iPhone. Import is where you import any other file. If I click Import here, I'm personally taken to the last place that I imported from, which was my iCloud Drive. However, tap this top left icon and it opens up the side menu bar. This is where you can navigate to your various Cloud drives. I don't use Dropbox, so Dropbox doesn't appear here for me. But this is where I can go back and forth between my Google Drive and my iCloud Drive. I can even access files saved elsewhere on my iPad through On My iPad here. To move a file, press and hold it and then drag it around. If you hover over a stack and drop it, it will add it to that stack. If you hover over a stack and you don't drop it, it will open that stack and let you place your file anywhere you want within the stack. Notice that on individual unstacked files, the artwork dimensions are listed underneath the artwork title. Whereas for stacks underneath the title is the number of artwork in that stack, and you have to open the stack to quickly view the artwork dimensions.
4. New Canvas Menu: I'm dedicating a whole little lesson to the last item in the gallery screen, which is this plus sign, which is for making a new canvas, a new piece of artwork. Procreate comes with lots of preset canvas sizes and resolutions. You won't have the exact ones that I have because I've created lots of custom ones. That's the next video. If you select any of the pre-made or custom canvases or anything on this list, it will create a new file and open it automatically. Again returned to your gallery by just clicking gallery and your new file appears right here is the first image in your gallery. If you're just getting started with Procreate and overwhelmed by what to choose to follow along with this class, just tap the first option screen size. This size will vary based on what iPad you have. Remember, I have the 12.9 inch, so I have quite a large screen size file, but this again, automatically creates a file that is your exact screen dimensions.
5. Custom Canvas Dimensions: Now we're going to talk about making a custom file size. Up here in the top right, click the plus sign, and let's go over every single setting on this screen because I know that it can look a little bit daunting. Especially, if you're new to digital file creation. Of course, top two options here are dimensions. By default, when you create a new procreate file, the units are in pixels, which you can see in the lower left here. Pixels are a measurement of screen size, not of printed size. For this reason, if you're creating a file to use in print, then you should select any of the other measurement options. You can always shrink a file size more easily than you can enlarge them. I will explain the reason for that in a moment when we get to resolution. If you don't know exactly the size of your piece in advance, then it's best to create something larger than what you'll probably need. In other words, it's always better to design too large than too small. Let's say I know I'm designing artwork that I might print one day or I want it to be square so that it's easily shareable on Instagram. Then I might select inches because for me, that's very intuitive measurement and select something large like eight by eight inches. Here in width, I'll hit eight. Here in height, I'll hit eight. When I say that eight inches is large, I mean, that for myself I can't imagine printing the art I'm about to make larger than eight by eight inches.
6. Resolution and DPI: Next is DPI. Bear with me because I know this can be a bit confusing at first, but I promise you, when you hear the entire explanation, it's going to make a lot more sense. DPI stands for dots per inch, which literally equates to the concentration of ink dots that a printer distributes within one square inch. As such, DPI is a measurement used for printable graphics. Any file destined for print must be a minimum of 300 DPI, which is the industry standard minimum for printable files. Most printers print at a maximum of 300 dots per inch. Very few printers, aside from the most high-tech, expensive, professional, huge ones, can print more dots per inch than 300, at least as of today. Here's where you need to bear with me for a second. You may have seen the term PPI, which is very similar but not identical. I know it can be confusing still. I need to explain what PPI is because you're going to probably encounter it if you're starting to be a digital artist. PPI stands for pixels per inch, as opposed to DPI, which was dots per inch. It's the equivalent measurement of DPI but for on-screen resolution. It literally means the number of pixels distributed per square inch of the screen. In Procreate, however, in an effort to keep things simple, DPI and PPI are used interchangeably. While a pixel and a printed ink dot are not technically the exact same size as one another, they are pretty close. This is why procreate can get away with ditching the term PPI in favor of DPI for all their files sizes. You may have heard that graphics for digital files are displayed at 72 PPI. That was true for a very long time. However, with the invention of amazing Retina screens and the ever improving resolution of computer and mobile screens, the updated industry standard as of 2021 is generally agreed upon to be 150, not 72 anymore. Let me summarize. If you're designing for print, make sure your DPI here is at least 300. If you know for a fact that your design will always remain in the digital realm, then you can safely select 150. These are the simplest two rules of thumb that you should take away from this lesson. I always set my artwork at 300. I would rather overshoot the resolution that I need than underestimate it. Remember how I said it's easier to shrink an image than to enlarge it. Oftentimes I even make my resolution higher than that, I'll sometimes do 450, I'll sometimes even do 600, so that I know that I can enlarge my file later by quite a lot without running into issues. Choosing 600 means that I can literally double my file size later and still print it at a crisp resolution. When it comes to both PPI and DPI, remember two things, the higher the resolution number, the higher the quality of the artwork. In print, this means the higher the resolution number, the crisper the printed image will be, and the larger the dimensions at which it can be printed. You can always shrink an image and maintain its crispness, but you cannot enlarge an image and keep it as crisp as the original. Here's a real-world example. On my screen, I have a design that I created at eight-by-eight inches and 150 DPI. On my screen, at 100 percent magnification or roughly without zooming in and just having my canvas fill the screen, this looks just fine. I could post this on Instagram, I could post this on my website and no one would be the wiser that it's not print resolution. But you'll see that as soon as I start to zoom in, it gets pixelated really fast. This is because my screen renders this at 150 DPI, but by zooming in, the resolution of the art remains the same. Those 150 pixels are now spread out to fill more than one square inch, which leads to pixelation or blur. Here by contrast, I have an image at 300 dots per inch because I'm looking at it on a screen rather than a printed piece of artwork, at full size, it looks exactly the same as the 150 DPI image, my naked eye and the screen cannot distinguish. But now you'll see that when I zoom in, there is far less pixelation, it still looks really crisp. I can zoom in very far before any pixelation is visible. It means that I can zoom in further as I work and work on small details of the image before it gets pixelated before my own eyes. The larger and faster your iPad is, the more layers you can get out of a file. This has to do with the iPad speed and rendering ability.
7. Color: RGB vs CMYK: Next option is color profile. By default, Procreate will select the last used color profile that you selected. On your screen, you might see something different here right now, but this is the last one that I used, so that's what it's showing me here. Let's take a moment to explain the difference between RGB and CMYK. This is the onscreen color profile and it stands for red, green, and blue. These are the primary colors of light. RGB is the color mode that combines red, green, and blue light to create the entire spectrum of colors that you can see on a screen. Think of it this way. Your screen shows you images by projecting light from behind the screen up to your eyes. Color is created by combining light, and when it comes to light, the absence of all light is, of course, black, and the combination in equal parts of all light is white. Unless you know for a fact that your art is going to head to a printer, RGB, and the top option here, Display P3, are a perfect choice for you. However, if you know that your art is destined for print, we need to move over to CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you're wondering why K stands for black, it's because B is already used for blue. These four colors are the primary colors for printer ink. When these four colors are combined equally, they create pure black. When all ink is absent, then you get white, your paper color, of course. I could talk about color theory all day, but here's the summary. RGB is the digital or light color spectrum. CMYK is the print or ink color spectrum.
8. Time Lapse Video Settings: Procreate always allows you to create time-lapse videos of your art-making process. These look like sped-up videos of your screen from start to finish. They're really cool to look at when your art is done or shared with your followers online. You must set this up in the Canvas creation step. I usually keep mine on some of the highest settings, which are 4K and lossless. Remember, I have an iPad Pro and the amount of storage and memory on my iPad is pretty high. If iPad file storage is an issue for you, you may want to set this to a lower setting.
9. Canvas Properties: Now over to Canvas properties, there's not much here, but you can select a default background color, but I always leave mine to white because I can change it again later. Background hidden just means that your background will be transparent on your file, yet, I don't use that much, so I keep that turned off. Last but not least, I'll give my file a name right here. Remember, I can always rename it again in the gallery by tapping the file name, and I can hit Create.
10. Set Your Preferences: Let's now take a look at our canvas interface. I'm not actually going to go in the order that these are visually laid out. I'm going to introduce them in the order that you'll probably need to look at them as a beginner. We'll start with preferences by coming to "Settings", which is the wrench icon, then move immediately over to tab number five, "Preferences". First and foremost here you can adjust the color of your interface between light, which is, I think the default and dark depending on what is best suited to your eyes and workflow. I prefer the dark interface because it reduces my eye strain and it makes a white canvas pop out from the background better. If you're left-handed, turn on right-hand interface, you see this toolbar over here. This is meant to be used with your non-writing hand, so if you turn on right interface, then you can write with your left and use the toolbar with your right hand. The rest of these settings aren't that important right now, brush cursor turns on a little outline around your brush. I don't like that because I find it distracting and I think it's even off by default. Project canvas is what allows you to connect or project your iPad screen onto another screen or device. We're not going to get into that because it's not beginner level, but you should know that that is possible. If you don't have an Apple Pencil, this is where you would connect it with Procreate. You would connect a third-party stylus and then most likely have to come to edit pressure curve to make adjustments to the setting of that stylus so that it is as pressure sensitive and user-friendly as possible. I personally can't recommend the Apple Pencil highly enough though, it is already optimized for Procreate. It's the best tool that you can use with your iPad and for artwork. If you don't have it, this is where you connect your stylus, but you can't really do better than the pencil. Gesture controls is very important, but I'm going to cover that in its own video. I keep rapid undo delay completely disabled because I want to be able to undo lots of steps really quickly. Turning it up forces you to have a little stopgap in between your undo taps and a lot of people like that because it prevents them from undoing too many steps too quickly, but I actually prefer that. I keep my undo delay fully disabled and don't even think about selection mask visibility right now, that is a more advanced setting.
11. Color Palettes: With our basic preferences set, let's move on to the toolbar items starting with color palette. I can open it here. I can tap and drag the top part and move my color palette out like this in a condensed version. This is really helpful when I'm changing colors a lot and I want to be over here writing, change color over here, writing, change color, etc. To pop this window back into the toolbar, simply tap the X in the upper right corner. I'm going to use it this way because the compact version doesn't show you every single option. The color palette has five tabs at the bottom. The only two elements that appear in all five of these tabs are your recent color history up here. Those are the colors you've recently used. This palette below, that is customizable. Mine is called my classics. But I'll show you in a moment how you can adjust this. By default, it'll look a little different than mine. To add a new color to the lower palette, simply select your color and then tap in any of the blank areas in your palette. It appears right there. Move swatches by tapping and dragging. [inaudible] the swatch by pressing and holding it. The first tab is the color wheel. The outer ring controls the hue, which most people just call color. But in color theory, we call it hue. The center controls the saturation and brightness. Tab number 2 is a second color picker just in a different format. The sliders, what controls the hue, the saturation, and the brightness. But you can also drag your stylus around here to select your choice. You'll notice that as you do that, your new color selection appears on the right and your previous color appears on the left. That's helpful because if you're trying to choose a new color that matches the previous color you are using, you can now see them here, side-by-side. Tab number 3 is for making color harmonies. Color harmonies are a combination of colors that, according to color theory and the principles of the color wheel, create pleasing contrasts that are considered harmonious. Tapping on the colors subtitle here, I can select from five different types of color harmonies. You may have heard the most common color harmony term, complimentary. Compliments are always a pairing of two colors on opposite sides of the color wheel. I can tap any of the compliment colors and the other selector will move according to what the complement is. You can also adjust saturation with this slider below. You can come all the way up to tetradic, which is a four color harmony. Tab number 4 is a way of customizing color value based on three different metrics. If you're just making art and picking colors that you love as you draw, this tab really isn't necessary. I use this tab for importing very specific, precise color codes. For example, if a client tells me that their branding color is a certain hexadecimal code, I can tap here and enter that code so that I'm sure to get the precise color of their brand. I can also adjust the hue up here saturation and brightness based on numbers. Again, this is something you can manually input. Same for your RGB values. Finally, tab number 5 is for color palettes. We'll get into creating your own and importing your own later. But just know that as soon as you have more than one palette, you'll see this Set Default button. That means that if you tap that, it will change to default and when you come back to your disk or to classic here, that becomes the palette that's always shown down here for your most easy reference. You can always switch back and forth in your default pallets, but you can even select colors that are not in your default palette at anytime. Now here's a quick little hack. If you ever want to go to pure black, it can be hard to come down here and really look with your naked eye at what pure black is. All you have to do is double-tap anywhere approximately at the bottom of this wheel and it snaps. Did you see that? It snaps down to pure black. Same for white. If I tap anywhere in this region, double-tap, rather, it snaps to pure white. So pure black, pure white. Post-production more here. I realized that I completely forgot to mention where those two color swatches are in the upper right of the color palette. This is an easy way of saving two commonly used colors and you can toggle back and forth between them just by tapping them. Some Procreate brushes are also programmed with something called color dynamics, and that means that they can change colors as you write. In those cases, the secondary color, meaning the non-selected color of those two, is usually pulled upon to mix with the primary writing color.
12. Brushes!: Next up our brushes. Open your brush palette. I have a lot of brushes, so my library will look different from yours in so far as the list of brush sets here in the left side of my library, it's going to be a lot longer than yours, at least when you get started. Here are the basics. You tap a brush to select it. Tap and hold a brush to reorder it in your palette. Same goes on the left side, tap and hold a brush set to reorder it. Swipe left on any of the default Procreate brushes, the ones that come in Procreate to either duplicate it or share it, which means export. The duplicate function is useful for a couple of things. If you ever plan to change the settings on any of your brushes, then duplicating it first means that you retain the original. Your duplicate will then add this little icon in the top right. If you do ever make changes to the settings of any of the default Procreate brushes, you can swipe left and if you've made changes, then reset will be enabled, and you can tap Reset and the default brush settings will appear. It will delete any customizations that you made and take it back to the original. Another good use of the duplicate function is that if you find that you're using certain brushes a lot, you may want to create duplicates of them and then create a new brush folder over here for yourself. Let's call this, let's say, Top 10, I don't know. If you couldn't see that blue plus sign, by the way, you first had to swipe down in your library and it's going to appear. If you need to rename this, you'll just tap it once and hit Rename, and of course here you can also find the delete, share and duplicate options. Now back over here, I have the duplicate of this brush, which I can click drag and move over to that Top 10 folder. Now here it has vanished from this folder, so it doesn't create a copy. It actually moves the whole brush, and now it's in my top 10. Like I said, you can duplicate your favorite brushes and combine them all together into a single folder so that you can always quickly and easily navigate to that folder for your favorite brushes, rather than having to sift through all of your brush sets, which can get cumbersome when you have as many brush sets as I do. You'll probably quickly discover that if you ever tap a brush that is already selected, this thing called Brush Studio opens, which is where all of the programming and settings for a brush take place. This is a very powerful section of Procreate, but it's really a material for its own class. I won't be getting into brush design in this course. I'll just click Done to exit Brush Studio. Over here on your list of brush sets, you'll see some different gray icons on the far left side. The default brush sets that come with Procreate, each have their own unique icon. For example, Inking, Sketching, Drawing, you'll see that these icons are all different from each other. Now, I have a lot of custom brush sets that I have made or bought and then imported. For those brush sets, they are called the user brush sets, and they all have that Procreate swoosh logo next to them. This is an easy way for you to distinguish between brush sets that you made or added and brush sets that did come with the software.
13. Let’s Start Drawing: Now, we'll select a brush. Let's come to Procreate's default artistic brush set, and let's try out Old Beach. I can immediately begin drawing with it using whatever color I have in my palette. Then, of course, changing colors in the palette changes my brush color. If I tap and hold my color palette icon, I automatically switch back to the previous color that I was using. Pressing and holding again, takes me back to that initial color. I can zoom around my canvas by simply tapping with two fingers, and expanding them to zoom in, and moving them back together to zoom out, I can use my two fingers as well to change the canvas angle. This is probably the most used gesture control in all of Procreate. You should get very used to using it. To undo any brush stroke or any step whatsoever, tap the left-back arrow on the left side. To reduce steps, just tap the right arrow. Adjust the brush size by using the top slider over here in the sidebar. Adjust the brushes' opacity using this bottom slider. The last thing that you have to know about this sidebar is that by pressing with your finger and holding this center square, you can then move around your canvas. Instead of drawing, this actually selects the colors on your screen. Stopping here and lifting, you'll see my color palette changed to that background color, and now you see I've selected the main color, the primary color.
14. Brush Pressure Sensitivity: Nearly all Procreate brushes are pressure sensitive in some way, shape, or form. I want you to take some time now and just play. You don't have to create any art, this is about having fun and getting the lay of the land. Pick a color and a cool-looking brush or a few brushes, and play with them at different sizes and opacities, paying attention to how the brush changes when you press harder or lighter with your stylus. Some brushes change in size with added pressure, some brushes change in opacity based on pressure, and still others will change both. Also play with the tilt and/or angle of your stylus, because many brushes also adjust their size and opacity based on tilt. Here I am, for example, in Procreate's Artistic palette, and I've selected Wild Light. Holding my pencil perpendicular to the screen creates these large splotches, but by angling my stylus to create an acute angle against my screen, the shape and opacity of the brush both change dramatically. The default brushes that come with Procreate are really varied and robust. You'll have a lot of fun playing with them, and making some beautiful art with these brushes.
15. Eraser Tool: Let's now talk about the Eraser tool. It's pretty self-explanatory. It's menu contains all the same brushes that are in the brush menu palette. Because just as you can add paint strokes to your canvas in a variety of textures and opacities, you can erase paint in the exact same way. So you can see that if you play around with this, the erase tool can sometimes even be used as a way to add texture and transparency because you can also adjust the transparency of an eraser brush so it doesn't fully erase. So that's a cool effect to keep in mind as you make your art.
16. Smudge Tool: This hand icon is the smudge tool. You'll see that tapping it also reveals your entire brushes' palette. Now to be clear, this is truly the same brush library. Any change that you make to a brush here, will change the brush that you find over here, and in your erase. It's not like these are three copies of the same library, they are truly the same library. What this smudge tool does is it creates different blending effects. This tool is commonly used in illustration to blend different colors together to soften texture, to add blur, or to make a sharp or crisp stroke look a little bit more natural and soft. I like to use smudge brushes usually at a pretty low opacity so that I can go over them a number of times, and not have a very harsh effect.
17. Layers: Next, we'll move on to the layers palette. When you first create a new canvas, you will have these two layers. On the bottom is your background, which unless you changed it in your custom canvas settings, will be white. Your background color layer cannot be deleted or renamed. However, it can be turned off by tapping the checkmark on the right side. As soon as I do that, I can see that my white canvas background disappears and it becomes transparent, revealing the gridded artboard behind it. I can change the color of my background by making sure it's turned on and then tapping its thumbnail once. This reveals my color palette. By selecting a swatch, the background will change automatically. Above background color is layer 1, your first blank art layer. Apart from the background color, every new layer in Procreate begins as a transparent layer. When I turn this on and off, nothing happens visibly because there's no artwork on it yet. Add new layers by tapping the plus sign, swipe left to delete or duplicate a layer or lock the layer, which means that you cannot edit it. This is a great way to protect artwork that you don't want to accidentally draw on or delete. You can't even delete a locked layer until you unlock it. Reorder your layers by pressing and holding and dragging. Rename a layer by selecting it, then tapping once on the layer name and choosing Rename. We will cover the other options in this flyout menu a little bit later. Now I have some artwork here, and you can see if I open my layers palette that on the top layer, I've called it calligraphy. If I turn it off and on, the calligraphy turns on and off, and the second layer border turns on and off the border. To clear a layer, tap it once and select Clear, and that deletes the contents of that layer, we obviously didn't want to do that, without deleting the layer itself. If I create a new layer here and select, let's say, some bright color from my color palette, I can tap once and hit Fill. That fills the entire layer with a solid color. Tapping your layer and selecting Invert, flips all the colors on that layer to their complement, which if you recall, are colors on the opposite side of the color wheel. Sometimes this looks cool. Other times it looks like a photographic negative, just a little bit off. One very helpful use though for the invert function is that it turns pure black into pure white. So that calligraphy was black and now it's white and I had changed the background color to pink so that this pops out for you. This makes it quick and easy to change something that's black and white into its opposite. Now let's talk about merging and combining layers. Tapping a layer once and selecting Merge Down does exactly what it says. It combines the contents of the layer that you tapped with the contents of the layer right below it. I'm going to talk a lot more about workflow later, but for now, I will just say that it's often beneficial to leave layers unmerged, so I'm going to undo that, because it's best for allowing you to edit your artwork later. This time I'm going to tap on this, and instead of choosing Merge Down, I'll choose Combine Down. Now you can see that those two layers are still separated, but they are within one group or folder. I can tap that folder and name it, if I like. I can tap the arrow and collapse it. Once layers are grouped, you can turn on and off the visibility of the entire group at once or, still, each individual layer within the group. Groups are helpful for moving and rearranging multiple layers at the same time. I can just drag this layer below the other layer, if that's what I want to do. I frequently have files with 10 or more layers. To move just a handful of those layers to, say, the top of the list, can be annoying, so grouping them is one fast way that is better than moving layers one by one. To select multiple layers at the same time, select your first layer that you want to select and then swipe right on the other layers that you want to select. Now, these Delete and Group options will appear. I can either group those layers, and now they are in one folder together, or I could hypothetically delete them all at once. I don't want to do that, so to deselect, I'll just tap any one of the layers again.
18. Transform Tool: Procreate selection tools are very powerful. With them, you can do a lot more than the names indicate. Selection tools consist of two tools, the Lasso tool, which is this S-shaped icon, and the Transform tool, which is the cursor or arrow icon next to it. Together, these tools are a powerful way to copy, paste, cut, align, and even paint. Let me show you how. Now I am on an art layer, meaning any layer that has artwork on it, as opposed to being a new or blank or transparent layer. I'm going to tap the Transform tool, meaning that cursor icon. You can see that immediately the pixels of my artwork have been selected so that now I can easily drag them around the Canvas. I'll undo that by another gesture control, which is tapping once with two fingers and I can undo what I just did because if you notice that side toolbar disappears when you're in the selection screen. I can tap this green dot at the top center to rotate my selection. Using any of the nodes in the corner, I can adjust the size of my art. Using the yellow square in the bottom center, I can adjust the selection without adjusting what's inside of it. You can also enlarge and rotate your artwork using gesture controls by pinching the artwork, not outside the selection, inside the selection artwork. Just like you could zoom in before, now you're zooming and adjusting just the selected piece of art. Please note that pinching and zooming outside the selection is the way to zoom, just like you did before. So inside the selection, only adjusts the selection, outside of it is how you zoom in and out while something is selected. You can see that there are lots of options in the Transform toolbar at the bottom. Right now I'm on freeform, which as the name indicates, means that I can move and transform my artwork in any way that I would like. It doesn't snap to any guides or adhere to any ratios. As soon as I switched from freeform to uniform, I can see that I can still move my artwork in the same way as before. However, when I use those blue nodes around the edge to change the size, the ratio stays uniform. So it doesn't allow me to actually affect the width alone, it affects all the dimensions at one time. This way, your artwork will not get distorted. The other two options in the top toolbar here are less commonly used but still really helpful. Distort allows you to move only one blue node at a time. This is great for perspective, of course. Warp gives you even more freedom to adjust the artwork in a psychedelic way. Now I'm back to freeform and I'll walk you through the lower row of this toolbar, Flip Horizontal and Vertical, creates mirror images along the horizontal and vertical axes. Rotate 45 degrees is quite self-explanatory. Fit to screen will enlarge your artwork to fill the canvas, but proportionally without distorting it. Tapping "Bicubic" opens what's called the interpolation menu. This isn't exactly for beginners, but this controls how your pixels adjust when your art is resized. I do call this an advanced setting, but if you're interested, I just recommend that you leave it on the default for now. Reset will undo all the transformational changes that you have done since you originally selected it but will not de-select your selection. Now let's go back to this first item in the lower menu bar, Snapping. I want you to first turn on Magnetics and then tap anywhere outside of that menu to close it. Now when you move your artwork around the screen, you'll see that it snaps to various blue guidelines. Once you find a guideline, you want to snap your art to, you can start moving it more slowly and it will stay moving along that guide. This is a great way to align different pieces of artwork on different layers. For example, moving art from one layer so that it snaps exactly in line with art from another. Back in the Snapping menu, I will turn off Magnetics and turn on Snapping. With this setting, you can snap artwork to the exact center of your canvas, vertically, horizontally or both. You can also snap it to the corners and sides. To understand what distance and velocity control, it's best to play around with them yourself. I'm going to explain it, but you'll see that it makes a lot more sense once you do it. Distance controls the pixel distance between guides or objects that your art must move before it snaps to it. When you adjust the distance setting and move your art around the screen, you'll immediately understand the difference. A low distance number, like 10, means that there is now a guide every 10 pixels, which is pretty close together. Your art will move smoothly around the canvas. A higher distance, which is 50, the selection snaps a lot faster. Velocity controls the speed at which your content moves before it activates the snapping. The higher the velocity, the faster your selection snap. As I say, these two settings require some playing around. But if you're interested in the settings that I use, I usually have distance at around 20 and I have snapping velocity around five. I'll tap this icon once more to turn off my selection.
19. Selection Tool: Next up is the Lasso tool, this S-shaped one. This is for drawing your own selections rather than simply selecting all the pixels on a layer the way that tapping the cursor did. I believe that by default, the settings here will be on free hand and add just like I have. So let's start there. Now I can draw a selection on my screen in any shape that I want. I must have the gray dot at my starting point to enclose my selection. Now remember back when we were looking at preferences before, and there was this selection mask visibility and I told you we would get to that later. You see how when I close my selection, the rest of the screen outside the selection grayed out and dimmed. This is where you can set how dim you want that to be. I like mine somewhere in the middle because I like to be able to have my selection pop out, but I want to still be able to see the rest of the artwork behind it. Now because I have add turned on here on my toolbar, that means that I can just keep drawing selections and they will be added to my original selection. Now this means that if I switch over to remove, any shape that I draw will be removed from the selection. Tapping Invert flips the selected and de-selected areas. If you ever have to select most of the art on your canvas with the exception of, let's say, a very small amount, a good idea is to actually select that small amount that you don't want selected, then tap Invert so that what you've done is actually select all the Canvas minus that little bit that you initially selected. This is a really great shortcut. Tapping "Copy and Paste'' will create a brand new layer that contains only the pixels within your selection. Now if I come back here, I can see that I have a layer with just my selected word, not. Feather will adjust the edge of your selection. You see that right now my selection is very crisp. If I increase feather, the selections edge blurs. Now for my use right now, that's not that important. But let's say that you want to create a selection of a blurred spot, this is how you would do it. Save and load is how you can save specific selections for future use. As a beginner, it's unlikely you'll use this function much, but if you ever find yourself creating the exact same shape selection over and over, you may find this use invaluable. Now you see that the selected shape that I created there is saved here. So that if I deselect and I come back here and I want to re-select the exact same spot again, all I do is come to save and load, tap it and my selection is reloaded. Now, color fill is a neat one. As the name suggests, whatever color is selected in your palette will fill your selected area. As soon as I close this selection, it fills with my pink and because add is turned on, I can just keep adding to this colored selection and I can remove as well. This is obviously a cool way of painting solid color shapes. If you want to draw uniform shapes, you can have color fill and add turned on, and then select from freehand and move to rectangle or ellipse. Obviously, this would be a great tool for Geometric Illustrations. Automatic is a great way to select artwork and pixels of a single color just by tapping it and letting Procreate detect the edges. I've just tapped this one and you can see that Procreate was able to detect the full shape and select it for me. But if I zoom in, I can see that the edges of the selection aren't completely selected. You see how there's still a little rim of purple showing around there, this pertains to something called threshold. I'm going to undo that selection. Now I'm going to tap my shape again, but this time I'm not going to lift my pencil. Rather, I'm going to drag it to the right and left, which turns on the selection threshold. This is basically telling Procreate how close to the edge your selection should go. You can see that the farther to the left I go, the more of this rim shows, and the more to the right I go, the more of that rim is filled in right up to the edge. Now with threshold pretty high, I have my full color selected. Why is this helpful? Well, you might just want to change the color of that one selection. Now I could come into my layers palette. I could make a new layer and we choose a new color like bright yellow. Tap once fill layer. Now I've only filled the area that was selected. Let's do that part one more time. I'm on this art layer now. I'm going to use freehand to select this word. Now I'm going to come over to my layers palette and I don't know why I would really want to do this in real life. I don't care to have a selection this size, but let's say I did, I would come over here and tap a new layer and I can hit ''Fill''. Now that selected region is filled with my new color. Another way to use your selection tool is to delete large amounts of your canvas at once. For example, I have all this art now on a single layer and I want to remove the alphabet. I've come over to my Lasso tool and I'm just going to roughly select that alphabet area, open the layer, tap it once and hit ''Clear''. Now the region within that selection get's deleted.
20. Why Use Layers?: Why is it even important to use multiple layers in your art? Well, I use lots of layers and I'll show you the different ways and reasons. First off, I use separate layers for separate colors. For example, here I have a simple illustration where I have black on one layer and purple on another layer. This makes it really easy for me later to go in and change my colors without having to select individual colors and separate them. Another way that I use layers is for separating overlapping strokes. You can see here, for example, when overlapping elements are on their own layer, you can move each of those layers independently without having to go in with your selection tool and make tedious selections to separate elements. When I'm creating hand lettering work that has multiple lines of text, I also put each line on its own layer. This makes it very easy for me to adjust the centering and spacing of my lines of text without using the selection tool. Here, for example, I have this folder which contains all the calligraphy in this design and then each individual layer is a line of text. That way I can easily select one liter and slightly move it to the left, or right, or center it, or even recolor it completely. In fact, very often, I have layers that overlap each other. Let's find these to target them. You can see that even though these overlap visually, I would still be able to move one without impacting the other. If you want to learn how I create really flourished layout designs like this one, I've included some links in the resource section to other shorter video tutorials that I've made about that.
21. Actions Menu Items: Now let's just go through all the other items in the Actions menu, which are pretty intuitive, but you should just know that all of them are there. Here under Canvas, we have Crop and Resize, which just as it sounds, let's you do some basic cropping of your Canvas, either free form or via settings, inputting your own dimensions. You can even change the DPI here. However, I really would recommend that you try to set up your Canvases is initially at the DPI that you want so that you don't have to rely later on Procreate to enlarge a file for you. Shrinking it, as I said before, is really not so bad, but enlarging it can create permanent pixelation and blur especially if you enlarge it a lot so don't fool around with the DPI unless you really have a good reason that you have to. Animation Assist is for creating animations in Procreate. I won't be covering that in this lesson. However, I do have a little video tutorial about making animated lettering in Procreate and I've linked that in the resources below. I'll devote all lessons to the drawing guide and reference functions. So beyond that, we have these very simple, little flipping functions to flip or mirror your entire Canvas, should you want that. Canvas Information is helpful because it gives you insight into the exact dimensions of your artwork and it's DPI. It can also tell you how many layers you have, what the color profile is in case you don't remember if you made it RGB or CMYK. It also gives you some fun statistics over here to tell you how many strokes it took to draw the entire thing. This art I'm on, took more than 5,600 strokes and five hours and 25 minutes. It also tells you the total file size in megabytes, which is of course really helpful if you need to share this art. Lastly, here in Canvas Info, this about this artwork section is important because this is where you can come in and sign your work. If I ever share a Procreate file, I always do this first. You can actually sign your name right here. You can undo it that way and redo it again. Tap here and add your name. Tap the "Avatar" so that you can either take a photo of yourself on your camera or import from your photos. I keep a photo of myself on my camera roll for exactly this purpose. Now that my file is signed and everything, I can just click "Done" out of that. Here in the Share options, you can choose what file type to export your file as and share it, I often choose PSD if I'm sharing it to myself, to my computer because it creates really nice ordered layered files that I can work with there. Sharing Layers is a slightly more advanced section, this is what you would use if you're creating animations but you can also use it to create a layered, let's say a PDF using the layers as pages.
22. Let’s Make Some Sample Art: Now let's create a piece of sample artwork together to drive home the techniques we've learned so far. To learn some new techniques as we go and to use when we learned the next new set of techniques. I'll create a new canvas that's 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels with a dpi of 300. I'll go to my color profile and make sure it's RGB and then hit "Create". To start with, I don't want to pure white background, so I will tap the background color and change it to, let's say, a light violet. Now let's choose a red color from our color palette and in my brushes palette, I'll navigate to procreate's painting Brush Library and select the very first one, a round brush. I'll set the size to approximately 20 percent over here. Now we'll draw an approximate circle, and then without lifting my pencil, I'll wait for procreate to snap into a quick shape. You see up here where it says ellipse created. Now we can release my pencil and it changes to Edit Shape, which I can now tap and adjust. All I had to do was draw a rough circle and not lift my pencil and it snapped to this quick shape. I think I'll adjust this to be an ellipse like that, and then tap anywhere outside of the selection to proceed. To fill my ellipse with color, I'll tap and drag the color from my palate and drop it into the center of the ellipse. This drag and drop method is the easiest for re-coloring a solid color in your artwork or filling in empty spaces. You can even take a whole blank layer and fill it completely that way. Now create a new blank layer on top of your red ellipse layer. Let's choose some type of blue-green color. I think I'll draw a rectangular shape and again, I won't lift right away and a quick shape will be created. I'll go to Edit Shape and I think I'll choose to make this a perfect rectangle and then tap anywhere outside of it. Again, I'll fill this with my blue-green. Now without adding a new layer this time, I think I'm going to add a little circle here next to my rectangle. I'll quickly snap it and then I can either drag and drop or it can just fill it in here this way. Next, I've decided that I want to move my red ellipse. It's a good thing to put it on its own layer so that it can be moved independently. I just tap on my ellipse layer, then tap my transform cursor tool, and I can easily move the ellipse now around the screen. You can even rotate it a little bit. Now I want to move all the shapes together at one time, so I'm going to have to group them. I tap on my top layer and then swipe right on the ellipse to select it as well, and then tap Group. If I now select this entire folder and the transform icon, I can move both layers together around the screen. What if I want to center all of this artwork now exactly in the middle of my canvas. Well, I must make sure then that snapping is turned on. Here when I come to the Transform tool, the snapping menu appears and I make sure that snapping itself is turned on. Now it can slowly move this until the artwork snaps to these two yellow lines, both vertically and horizontally. When I release, I know that this is now snapped to the very middle of the canvas.
23. Recoloring Artwork: Now let's talk about changing colors, starting with changing the color of our rectangle. First in my layers palette, I want to make sure that I'm on my rectangle layer. Then in my color palette, I'll come and select a new color, let's say like a dark mustard yellow. We've learned two methods so far, for re-coloring solid colored shapes. One is simply to drag and drop the color swatch into your shape. That was an easy way to turn the rectangle yellow, but I'll undo that. Another method is to choose the "Selection tool" and then go to Automatic, Color Fill, and tap my shape. I don't dislike either of these methods; however, they won't work well for all kinds of color filling. For example, what if I want to change both the rectangle and the circle from green and yellow? Well, here I have only two shapes, so it's not that difficult to change them one at a time. But what if my layer had 50 disconnected shapes or paint strokes that I wanted to change to the same color. That would be very tedious to use either the drag and drop or the selection methods, so here are some other ways of recoloring. Let's say I want to turn all the artwork on this layer blue. After selecting blue from my color palette, I will tap the layer once and click "Select". Then tap the layer again and click "Fill Layer". What this did was select all the pixels on that layer and then fill in just those pixels. You can see that it didn't matter that I already had multiple colors on that layer, it just filled every pixel that was on the layer with the same color for my palette. I'll undo that for now because the next method I'm going to show you is my personal favorite, which is the most flexible and easy to undo later if you decide you don't like your change. In teaching it to you, I'll also be teaching you about another important function in the Procreate layers palette, namely clipping masks.
24. Clipping Masks: Clipping masks use the content of one layer, to control the visibility of another. That sounds daunting, but I promise you it's not. This is much easier demonstrated than explained. Create a new blank layer, tap it once and click Fill Layer. Now we have a solid blue layer which is hiding all the art that's underneath it, but I only want this blue to affect the art on the one layer that's directly beneath it, not my entire artwork. To make this blue layer impact only the layer below it, I'll tap it once, and click Clipping Mask. That clips it into the layer right below. You can see now that there is a little arrow on the layer to show me that it's been clipped. Now I can turn on and off my blue layer's visibility, and you'll see that the original colors of my art remain, but they're just being covered up now by this blue fill layer. This is why I prefer to use the clipping mask method, To recolor my art whenever possible. It's very easy this way for me to play with colors without permanently changing my original artwork. Unclip a mask simply by tapping it and turning off clipping mask. If you're ever absolutely, 100 percent certain, that you'll keep this color change, and you want to make it permanent, all you have to do is tap that clipping mask and click Merge Down. That combines your clipping mask with the art layer below it, making one flat layer. You can clip as many layers as you would like into a single art layer. This can be incredibly handy. I'm making now a new blank layer, tapping it once, and clipping it. This new clipped layer is actually clipped into Layer 2, my rectangle and circle layer. Please note that it is not clipped into the blue fill layer, all of the clipped layers clip together into the one primary layer that they're clipped into. Now choose a new color, let's say black. On my newest blank clipping layer mask, I'll paint some big strokes. Do you see immediately what's happened here? I'm drawing across my whole canvas, but the only strokes that are showing are within the pixels of Layer 2. I can still turn on and off the blue fill layer, and the original colors still appear. But now watch what happens when I unclip this new Layer 5, by tapping it, and turning off clipping mask. Immediately all the strokes that I drew a moment ago appear. In fact, they were there all along. It's just that anything outside of that rectangle and circle shape, was clipped out of sight. Let me reclip this now, turn it off, and show you how I did that in reverse. I'll create a new blank layer. Let me draw some shapes here on my screen. Now, I'll click this once, and hit Clipping Mask. Now my new artwork is just clipped inside of my rectangle shape layer, the primary layer. One very popular use of clipping masks is to add texture and images inside of shapes. For example, I can create a blank layer over the ellipse, then tap it to turn it into a clipping mask. Over here on Procreate's textures library, I'll select, say this Turkine brush. When I sweep now over this new blank layer, you can see that I'm only impacting the ellipse. I could even import an image, and place it inside of this ellipse, by coming up to Actions, Add, Insert a photo, because I'll select one from my camera roll. I just imported this polka dot pattern, and automatically it's selected as soon as it's imported. I'll just tap the selection tool, and it's officially placed into my document. Now you can see it appeared here as its own layer called Inserted Image. It automatically placed itself as a layer directly above the layer that I was on, when I imported it. I'm going to now make it a clipping mask. I'll tap it once, and choose Clipping Mask. Now you see, that it's just inside my ellipse. I can still transform it though. Even though it's clipped, I can come to my transform tool, and I can shrink it, and move it around inside the ellipse.
25. Alpha Lock: One setting that is very often confused with clipping masks is Alpha Lock, but it's actually quite different and has a lot of power in its own right. Alpha Lock is something that allows you to draw on only the pixels that already exist on any given layer, effectively locking the transparent or blank regions of the layer from being edited. Let's come back here to our simple artwork, and I'll tap on Layer 2 and turn on Alpha Lock. I can immediately see here in my own thumbnail that the icon itself changed so the background within it now shows like a transparency grid. Now if I color on this layer, you'll see that my strokes are only contained within the artwork. This is very similar to how it looked when we were using a clipping mask. So far the difference isn't obvious. But, here in our layers palette, can you see that the strokes that I just drew are actually on the artwork itself? There's no way now to remove them without hitting Undo. It is officially merged with the yellow and blue dot so that it's not something that you can easily move, delete, or change later. Alpha Lock is a very helpful tool for illustrators who want to draw things like shadows or vignettes in the edge of their artwork, but limit it just to certain shapes and stay within the lines. Here I am using in the airbrushing palette, this soft brush to create just some nice little shading in one of my shapes. Alpha Lock is another easy way that you can recolor artwork. Remember how before we clicked, Select and then Fill Layer? Well, if you're already on Alpha Lock and then you hit Fill Layer, you get the exact same effect because the fill is only affecting the pixels on that layer. Using a brush in conjunction with Alpha Lock layers is also a good way to let you color in very specific detailed shapes.
26. Blending Modes: Now, we're going to talk about blending modes, meaning the settings that dictate how layers overlap each other. I have all the clipping masks here turned off, so we're back to just looking at our original two shape layers for now. Since blending modes refer to how one layer overlaps another one, we need to be on one of the layers that has some artwork underneath it, such as our rectangle and circle layer that overlaps the ellipse. Blending modes are accessed by tapping on the right side of your layer on the letter which is by default and N. The N stands for normal because by default all layers are set to a normal blending mode, which really means no blending mode at all. The most used and common type of blending mode is, of course, opacity. So right here in this slider is where you can adjust the opacity of any given layer. Below the opacity slider is where you'll find many more interesting blending mode options. I urge you to experiment with these and have some fun based on the colors in your artwork and their saturation, and their value, you can get some really cool and unexpected results. One of the most common blending modes is at the very top, multiply. Multiply removes all white and creates an overlap that tends to darken the region where two different colors overlap. Screen is another popular one which does just the opposite of multiply. It removes the darkness with a black from images, creating lighter areas where images overlap, and soft light is a wonderful and popular one for creating a very surreal, translucent overlay effect. Like I say, have fun playing with these because you can get some really unexpected and fun results out of it. Now, you remember how I said that the multiply blending mode removes white out of a layer. Well, look at what happens when I turn back on that clipping mask that we previously added to our ellipse. This image has a white background. When I set this images' blending mode to multiply, the white vanishes and the black remains. Choosing screen does the reverse, leaving the white background, and removing the black dots so that the red shows through. Here, I've chosen soft light because I think it has a pretty cool effect, but I hope that you can see how blending modes aren't just for fun overlay look, they actually can be really helpful, especially when using pure black and pure white in your images to knock out one or the other, to use those images as if they are monotone.
27. Layer Masks: Layer masks are often confused with clipping masks, but they are in fact a completely different thing. You can even use layer masks, clipping masks, and alpha lock, all in conjunction. I can add a mask to a layer by tapping the layer and choosing mask. A new mask layer will appear on top of that layer and its thumbnail will be connected to the primary layer's thumbnail. You can only add one layer mask to a layer. Whereas if you recall, you can add countless clipping masks. A layer mask allows you to hide or show parts of the primary layer below it. In this case, the primary layer is layer 2. When you're in a Layer Mask and editing it, you can only be using black, white, or gray. An easy way to remember what the white and black do is that white reveals, black conceals. As soon as you tap on a layer mask, whatever color you had in your color palette changes to black. It then changes back to your previous color when you click back to a regular layer. That's cool because it means that in my Layer Mask, I don't have to be going into my color palette to select black manually. Now if I draw with black on this rectangle's layer mask, you can see that it hides the area that I'm painting, making it transparent so that the layers below it are now visible. To put that a different way, I drew a black mask over top of the rectangle, which hid that region of the rectangle so that what was below it can now show through. If I change my palette back to pure white, and remember I can do that by just quickly double tapping in the region near white, then I paint on the mask, the white will reveal that region of the rectangle again. I can also turn on and off the visibility of a layer mask. You can see that nothing was actually deleted and the rectangle remains intact. This is why layer masks are a great way to erase without actually erasing, hiding pixels on a layer that you can turn back on later if you need to, is often preferable to permanently erasing the pixels on that layer.
28. Copy and Paste: Now let's explore the power of copy and paste in Procreate. Just like the selection tools, the copy and paste functions can help you do a lot more than the names make them sound. For example, what if I want to separate the circle and the rectangle on this layer, putting them each on their own layers? Well, copy-paste is the way to do that. I'll come to my lasso tool and lasso around my circle. Then with three fingers, I'll swipe down to reveal my copy-paste options. Duplicate will create a new layer from the selection without cutting it out of the layer it's already on, so I would end up with a new layer that has just the circle on it, and a previous layer that has both the circle and the rectangle. What I want here is cut and paste. Now you can see that I have the circle on one layer and the rectangle on another, and my pasted selection appeared as its own layer, right on top of the layer that I was previously on. You can swipe down with three fingers again to explore even more copy-paste options. Whenever I copy the contents of a layer, I can choose where to paste it by navigating to the layer that I wanted to paste on top of, then swiping down again and hitting "Paste". Now you see this pasted right above my ellipse. If I now want to merge this pasted object with the object below it so they're on one layer, I simply tap once and say "Merge Down". You may have noticed that when you use the lasso tool, there is a copy-paste shortcut right here at the bottom. I find this really useful because it allows me to skip the step of swiping down and it goes straight into turning my selection into its own layer.
29. Adjustments: Now let's learn about adjustments. Adjustments are a way to make localized and universal changes to the look of a layer. The adjustments panel is located right here under the magic wand icon. You can see that there are a lot in here and they're really fun to play around with. So I recommend that on your own, you do create a piece of artwork that you can just have fun with and play around with lots of different adjustments to see how they each work. With the exception of just the last two, all these adjustments give you the option to apply them to either an entire layer or just a localized area of that layer that you paint on. If you tap one of the adjustments, you see the two options appear. You can choose between layer or pencil, which means that you would just draw that adjustment in manually. Let's start by demonstrating a very obvious one, which is blurs. We'll come here and choose Blur layer and now you see that it tells me I can slide to adjust. So I just put my pencil down and I slide across the screen. I have this illustration flattened onto its own layer. So what's happening right now is that I'm just blurring that layer. You can see that where I have this writing, it's not being affected because that writing is on his own layer. You see over here I have my art layer and my writing layer. But now what if I just wanted to blur a particular region of that layer? Well, I'll come over to adjustments, back to blur, and I'll choose pencil instead and now I can come in with whatever brush I have and draw in a blur. Then if I tap, I get this little menu asking me if I want to actually apply this or undo a step tapping preview lets you see how it looked before you made the adjustments so you can keep going or undo and basically make all your adjustments while this slider appears here and then you click ''Apply'' when you're done to finalize the adjustment. This is permanent. Essentially the only way for me to undo this now is to hit ''Undo''. If I don't undo for a long time and I come back to this tomorrow and I want it unblurred. I'd be out of luck unless I had first made a copy of this layer. It's pretty important to always create duplicate layers before you use adjustments, because that's the only way that you'll be able to revert to your original if you recreate the adjusting layer. Other very common adjustments are sharpening and adding noise. But here on the top four, you can adjust aspects of the color. So hue, saturation, brightness. Here I'm affecting the saturation of that entire layer. I can even change the overall hue of the layer and its brightness. Gradient map is a very fun one. Essentially, I'm going to apply it to the layer and what it lets you do is select from a combination of colors and some of them already come here in this library, and it applies them in a type of overlay to your entire design. So I can choose from some of their pre-made versions. Or I can tap this Plus sign and create my own gradient map. I can tap the color here and say that I want this design to range from oranges to whites, for example and now I get this cool negative effect. I can play with the sliders to adjust the quantity or the ratio of the colors in this gradient, I can even switch them, or I can tap and add another gradient. Curves is a really helpful one, especially for illustrators who do drawings that come up here to curves and I affect the whole layer. Here I can adjust the brightness of the highlights, the darkness of the darks. I can create a very high contrast image, or I can reverse these and create a very low contrast image. This is a great one for subtle adjustments in brightness and contrast. Now for the two adjustments down here, liquefy is one that has to be done on the whole layer. It has lots of options as you can see, and I suggest playing around with them yourself because it is very fun, but this is essentially like a warp tool a little bit. I can just put my pencil down and push and pull and tug my artwork like this. I can adjust the size of the brush at which I am doing this. I can have more precision in my liquefying. I can turn on twirling. Then if I press and tap, you see it spins and creates a swirl instead of just a drag line. I can have fun adjusting the edges with this crystal option, for example and reconstruct. Lets me undo adjustments that I just made. Have a lot of fun with this. This is an incredibly powerful, addictive and fun tool that you could probably spent hours playing with. The button descriptions are pretty intuitive, so I urge you to just come in here yourself with a piece of artwork and play around. Finally, cloning, which is an incredibly long awaited function that Procreate didn't have for a very long time. But if I come into clone, I get this little icon, the circle icon, and I can place it over something that I want to copy. I've had it here over the swans beak and now I can draw somewhere else on my canvas and it will copy the region that this floating circle is over. I can just keep moving this around and clone and this is of course, a great way to duplicate aspects of your art around a layer, rather than having to maybe go in and copy and paste and merge again to create duplicates.
30. Guides and Drawing Assist: Drawing guides are an extremely powerful function in Procreate. Not only can you create guidelines that will help you draw and align your work, but you can turn on something called Drawing Assist, which forces your drawings to adhere to the guidelines. Under settings in canvas, just turn on your drawing guides. This should turn on a basic square grid. But to really harness the guides power, you have to click on Edit drawing guide and adjust the settings. Here I can start by adjusting the actual color of the lines themselves, as well as their opacity and their thickness. Within this square 2D grid, I can even adjust the grid size with this slider, and using the green node at the bottom, I can slump the grid if I want to. To undo that, I just tap the blue dot in the center and hit Reset. In the perspective grid, all you have to do is tap anywhere to create your vanishing point. You can even have multiple vanishing points and you can move them to wherever you would like. Again, just tap one and delete it to reset. Symmetry grids are my personal favorite. This artwork that you're looking at in fact, has a border that I created with the vertical symmetry grids. Here in the symmetry options panel, you can select from vertical, horizontal, quadrant, and radial symmetry. This means just what it sounds like, that when you turn on, lets say, vertical symmetry, anything that you draw on one side of your screen will appear automatically on the other, so you only have to draw it once and you're drawing it really twice. For example, I only had to draw this leopard one time because as I drew it, it automatically drew itself across the vertical axis and appeared over here. To have a look at how we can adhere our art to any of these types of grids, let's use the symmetry guide as an example. So we'll have under symmetry, my options set to vertical. Rotational symmetry really has to do with the mirroring effect and whether the art actually goes directly across or directly across and over. I like it usually without rotational symmetry turned on, but that's something for you to play with. I have Assisted Drawing turned on and I'll explain that in just a moment here. Now I can see my guideline, but technically, I can actually turn off the drawing guide, but those settings for my canvas are still there. Still, I'm going to have it on now just so that we can have a look at it. Let me turn off my artwork and make a new blank layer. If I draw on this layer, absolutely nothing happens, even though we just set all of those guide settings. That's because we don't have Drawing Assist turned on, which is the setting that makes your strokes adhere to the guides. So I'll undo that and now I'll tap that new layer and turn on Drawing Assist right here. Now when I draw, the vertical symmetry works like a charm. When you adhere to these 2D grids, what you get are perfect vertical and horizontal lines. This is a great way to draw yourself, your own guides or borders or things like that. It's a great way to snap to the vertical and the horizontal axis. With that said, I will show you another cool little quick shape shortcut. When you're drawing a line in Procreate, just like with ink on paper, it can be hard to make it perfectly straight, but procreate does offer snapping, is one of the quick shape functions. If I actually draw a line and then don't lift at the end. You can see here it says line created, and now I still haven't lifted. I can adjust the length, the slant, and I can even like go and click, Edit shape and adjust it further. If you're looking to make perfectly straight lines in Procreate, your two options are snapping to lines like this or using your 2D grid with Drawing Assist turned on to make perfectly horizontal and vertical ones. I think it might be fun for me to play you a little time-lapse of the creation of this border, just so that you can get a sense of how cool it looks when you're drawing in symmetry. As with so many of my drawings, I start out sketching in pencil, in this case white pencil. I'm just using my vertical symmetry tool to sketch out a nice little border here, and then in a moment I'm going to go back over it again with a white pen.
31. Reference Window: Now I want to show you a cool feature that Procreate 5X added, namely the reference window. We'll come up to settings, the wrench icon, and turn it on under Canvas, Reference. You'll see that this little window pops up and it floats over your screen independent of your canvas. This little window allows you to view your whole canvas or any other image while you're working. By default, your own canvas appears in this reference window when you open it. You can zoom around in there the same way you zoom around on your full-sized canvas with two fingers. One of the common ways that artists use this reference window is to keep their entire artwork visible over here in the reference and then zoom-in in their art when they're creating it. Here I'm using some of my own chalk script brushes, and I'm just zoomed in doing my work over here and casting an eye over here to my Reference window to see what happens and how it looks as I'm painting these details. This is a great way to see how the work that you're doing when zoomed-in impacts your overall composition without having to zoom out. But the reference window does even more than this. If I tap down here on "Image", I can now Import an image from my camera roll. At the time of filming this, you can't yet import from the Cloud, but I'm sure that feature is coming someday soon. If I import any image from my camera roll, it will appear over here in the Reference window. Here I've imported a vintage exemplar from a really old book of lettering specimens. Let's say that I want to import this because I love the general shape of this B, and I wanted to use it for inspiration in my artwork. Now I can do that by having it floating over here while I work. I can move the whole window around the screen to stay out of my way.
32. Add Text: Incorporating digital fonts into your artwork is now really easy with Procreate. I want to create a digital font design here in the center of this border, so I'll come over to my Actions and say "Add text". Now let me just type something here. Now I'll minimize my keyboard, and I'll select this text and move it roughly into the region that I want it to be. But I don't like this font, I don't like the color, and I want to change other aspects of its layout. So let me tap that layer where the text appeared, and you can see that there's an A here in the thumbnail. That not only means that it's texts, but that it's still editable. I can tap it once and say "Edit Text". I'm going to start by selecting the text that I want to change, and I can make small changes up here like the justification. I can even change the font, but I want to have those options much bigger, so I'm opening the text formatting palette by clicking this button. Now, let me change this font to something that I like a lot better. I can tap in my color palette to change the color, and I think I'll make this all caps and I'll reduce the size. Kerning separates the letters, leading separates the lines themselves. Now if I think I'm happy with this, I can exit out of the formatting palette and use my transform tool to adjust its location. Here I'm snapping it to the vertical axis. Now to finish off this little design as this cute little Ex libris stamp, I want to draw some lines down here, and I want them to be green to match the border, so I'll use my eyedropper tool function by tapping the square and then selecting, let's say this green color. I'll make a new layer. I'll select one of my own favorite pens. Remember, I can draw straight lines if I want by holding and not releasing, but I think I want to make this look a little bit more organic. I'm going to slightly adjust the size of these and their distance apart by lassoing the lower one and moving it down slightly. To move both these elements at once, I can group the text and the lines together. I tap the higher layer, "Swipe right" on the lower and hit "Group". Now with the group itself selected, I can actually move this whole design around. Now what if you want to use a custom font of your own? Well, I imported this font because it's a font that I own, but it doesn't come with the iPad. The way to do that is to create some text and then go into your editing and your formatting palette and right here is the Import Font function.
33. Gesture Controls: Learning the procreate workflow would not be complete without discussion of gestures, which are all the shortcuts for using and navigating the app with your hands. We've already learned some of the big ones, like zooming in and out with two fingers, tapping with two fingers to undo, and swiping down with three fingers to bring up the copy paste options. What's cool is that procreate allows users to customize their own gesture controls, which is really helpful for setting up the most efficient workflow possible for you. But before we get into the customizations, here are some of the default gesture controls that come in procreate that you might find really convenient. If you've never adjusted your custom gesture settings, then all of these should work for you. Tapping with four fingers will hide these menus and put you in what's called full-screen mode. Pressing and holding with one finger for a moment, will also bring up the eyedropper tools. You can quickly select other colors. Remember that holding this button and using your pencil is an alternate method for doing the same thing. Scrubbing back and forth on a layer with three fingers will clear that layer. I was just on my pink layer, so I deleted the pink. Then if you have a lot of layers in your palette that you want to quickly merge together into one, you can pinch them together. Sometimes you have to pinch in turn at the same time, but just pinch, drag them together and let go, and now they are one single layer. When it comes to customizing your gestures, you'll find these under Settings and Preferences. Then go to gesture controls. I highly recommend that you have a look through this long list because you may come across a bunch of options that you didn't even know were possible, but that would help you a lot in your own workflow. Don't worry about messing something up by changing a lot of things because you can always come here to General and reset to defaults. Let's look at a couple of cool examples. I showed you that you can make a quick shape by drawing a rough shape and then holding your pencil down until procreate snaps it into a perfect shape. Well, in gesture controls, you can choose from a number of swipe and tap options to speed up that process. For example, here in quick shape, I can turn on touch, which now means that I can touch the screen with my finger after I draw something and it instantly turns into a quick shape. You can also adjust the eyedropper options like how to pull it up. If you turn off this top button, then that button on the side will no longer bring up the eyedropper, but you can then assign a different action to that button. For example, if you use assisted drawing with your guides a lot more than you use eyedropper tool, then you can come to Assisted Drawing and turn on this feature, so then now when you would tap that button on the side, it would turn on Assisted Drawing for you. Quick menu is possibly the most powerful gesture setting of all. If you turn on any of these options to invoke the quick menu, then you'll be able to access a lot of shortcuts all at once. Let me show you. I'm turning on the touch and hold option, which is my own preferred way to access this quick menu. Now is done, here in my Canvas, now, when I touch and hold with my finger, this fly out menu appears. Remember how a minute ago when I did touch and hold it evoked the eyedropper. Well, I just change that in gesture controls. Now I get this menu. Now I can access a bunch of shortcuts all at once. I created these shortcuts for myself, I customized this menu so I can, for example, toggle between two of my all-time favorite brushes, I can turn on drawing assist, or if I press and hold any of the buttons, I can assign a new action to it. If I tap this center button, I can create brand new quick menus or toggle between different quick menus that I've created. Each quick menu allows for six different functions, but you can have as many quick menus as you like. For example, you might prefer to have one quick menu when you're doing painting and another quick menu for your shortcuts when you're using animation. There's another important place on your iPad that you can go to adjust gesture controls. Those are your Apple pencil settings. These are independent to procreate, so we have to open our iPad Settings app. Then we'll navigate to the Apple pencil tab. Here, you can assign any one of three actions to occur when you double tap the barrel of your pencil like this. I keep mine on the first option, which is to switch between your current tool and your eraser. But you can turn these actions off altogether. A lot of people do turn them off because depending how you hold your pencil, some people will accidentally do the tapping and it does get pretty frustrating. But you can have it switched between your current tool and your previous one, or have it show the color palette. But now back here in procreate, you can see how convenient this is. I can be drawing, and then with just a double-tap, I've automatically switched over to the eraser. Double-tap again and double tap again. I can just quickly and easily go back and forth between the two. Seems like a small deal, but it's a big time-saver for me.
34. Install Brushes and Files: Now we're going to talk about installation. How to install custom Procreate brushes, and color palettes, and other types of files into this app. You probably remember at the beginning of this video, I showed you just how many brushes I have. That's because I make lots of brush packs, but I do also buy and import some from other people. This is one of the coolest and most powerful functions in Procreate. Even though Procreate does come with lots of really awesome brushes by default, I do encourage you to look around at other artists' brushes because they can add so much to the art experience. Procreate brushes come in two different file types. You have single, individual brushes, which have a file extension ".brush". Then you have brush sets or brush libraries, which have the file extension ".brushset". When you see a brush set, it means that that one single file contains more than one brush, oftentimes it's a lot more than one. For example, this is my calligraphy composition maker brush pack, it contains lots of brushes, dozens of them in fact. But if you were to get this and install it in Procreate, it would be one single brush set file, which you would import, and then all the brushes would appear organized into their own little folder here. Individual brushes and brush sets are installed in exactly the same way. Very often when you download brushes from an online marketplace or an individual product creator, they're going to come as a zipped folder. That's because you usually get additional files along with the brushes, such as PDF instructions, sample graphics, licensing details, etc. If that's the case and you find yourself with a zipped file, you'll first need to download it to a place where you can unzip it, and then make sure the relevant files are in the Cloud, where you can then access them via Procreate. Obviously, the most convenient method would be to save your zip file directly in the Cloud to begin with. I offer a bunch of free downloads with Procreate brushes, and practice sheets, and things like that for lettering artists. So I'm here on that page to use it as an example because I'm one of those product creators who provides zipped files. Let's download my lettering marker brush. Now it's already done, it's asking where I want to open it. I'll click "Open In" and then I'll say "Save to Files", which remember is my iCloud app. Here I can navigate to exactly where in my files I want to place it. I have a whole folder of brushes, I'll put it right there. Here I have my zipped file, and all I have to do is tap it once and files automatically unzips it for me. Once it's unzipped, the zipped file itself remains and you get a brand new folder with the same title. That folder contains the items that were in your zipped folder. You can see here that this file ends ".brush". Now, no matter what Cloud service you have, it's going to be very important that the icon to access that Cloud app appears here in your iPads bottom toolbar. First off, I want you to know that the iCloud icon is actually a blue folder and the app itself is called Files, which can understandably be a little bit confusing. I personally use both Google Drive and iCloud. Here in my toolbar, I have my drive and my iCloud or Files app icons. Now if the icon of your Cloud app is not yet in this bottom toolbar, we're going to have to add it before we install in Procreate. To add an app to your bottom toolbar, you're going to press and hold it, and say "Edit Home Screen". Your apps will begin to jiggle. You can then just simply drag and drop your app into the toolbar. I'll remove this one though for now. Then to make them stop jiggling, just tap anywhere. We have to be in a Procreate file to install brushes. You can't be in your gallery, so just make sure that you open any file before we get started with installation. Next, I will lightly swipe up from the bottom of my screen, not so much that I return to my home screen, and this toolbar will appear. Now I'm going to take my preferred Cloud app. I'm using iCloud since that's where I just saved my brush. I'm going to drag it up to the side of my screen. I can choose the left or the right side. Now I'm in split screen view and I can toggle the ratio of my split screen using the center toggle bar. My Files app opened to the last place that I was using it, namely in my brushes folder, but you can still use the navigation here to navigate to your preferred folder. Now in Procreate, I just open my brush palette. It used to be that you had to drag and drop a brush file over into your Brushes Library. But it's actually even easier now because files can detect a Procreate file and all you have to do is tap it now once, and that marker got instantly added into a folder called Imported. Had this been a brush set, I could have tapped it and it would have popped over here as its own brush library. It wouldn't be in the Imported folder, it would have its own folder. Now I can close my Files app by just dragging the center toggle all the way off to the side, and I can test out my new marker. Now these same steps work whether you're using iCloud, Google Drive, or Dropbox. You can use the same split-screen function with any of those three Cloud apps. These steps also work for color palettes. Procreate color palette files end with the file extension ".swatches". I just come over to my Procreate Palette Library, this last tab here, and I'll just scroll down to the bottom, because when I add a new swatch palette, it's going to add to the very bottom. Now all I do is just tap one of these swatch palettes. There you go. It appears right there. I can now drag this and move it anywhere in my library that I would like. Finally, the last type of file that you may need to import into Procreate are Procreate files themselves. These files end with the file extension ".procreate". Installation of these is the same as the brushes and swatches, except that you have to do it in the gallery, not within a file. You can either do it in your main gallery or within a stack. Here in my Cloud I have navigated to a folder where I have a Procreate file. Now I can just tap it or I could drag it; but I can just tap it, and it appears right here in my main gallery as the first file. If you ever have multiple files that you want to import into your gallery, you can also come over here and click "Select", choose all the ones you want, and then tap and drag them over.
35. Back Up Your Work!: Backing up your Procreate files is extremely important. It's not fun. There is unfortunately no automatic way to do it in the background, so you never have to think about it. It's a habit that you should really just get into from the start. The good news is that exporting backups is actually extremely easy and it utilizes the same techniques as importing files. So to backup Procreate files to your Cloud, we're going to enter again into split screen view. Here in my iCloud, I have a folder called backups and now in the Procreate gallery, I'm going to tap "Select" and I'm going to choose any of the files that I want to backup and simply drag them over to my backups folder. Of course, your file sizes, quantity, and Internet connection is going to affect how quickly this transfer happens. Now with these items on the Cloud, I can just let them sit there and should I ever lose my iPad, knock on wood, or something happens and I accidentally delete my files over here, I have the backup saved and I can just bring them back over and re-import them when I need them. Another method for backing up files or exporting them en masse to your own computer or someone else's computer is via AirDrop. I personally use this function all the time to transfer files between my iPad and my desktop iMac. To select multiple files, I will of course, still choose "Select" and then I can choose "Share". Here I select the file type that I want to backup. Personally, I choose PSD, which stands for Photoshop document, because I use Photoshop a lot on my machine, but you can back up Procreate files, which can only be used in Procreate, or some other image file like JPEG or PING. Just be aware that these other file types are flat, meaning that they won't retain the layers, so if you want to be safe and this is truly for backup purposes, choose either Procreate or PSD. Now again, depending on the quantity of files and their size, the preparation for export can take a little time. Now here, I could actually save these to files and it would be the same function that I just did when I used split screen view, although I prefer split screen because it's more visual, but if I want to just send these over to my iMac via Bluetooth, I'll just click "AirDrop" and I can select my iMac and then they send right over. This is a lot faster than relying on your Internet connection to do your upload, and since I back up my iMac automatically in the background every single night, this is personally the setup that works best for me. But backing up your files is really important so just find the method that's best for your workflow and remember to do it consistently.
36. Time Lapse Replay: Now that we've made this beautiful piece of artwork, let's review the entire process start to finish. We're going to do this via the time-lapse settings. Come over to your Actions, Video, Time-lapse Replay. While it's replaying, I can even zoom in and out, and I can use my finger to scrub back and forth through the video. I can even use my finger to pause. Remember that to adjust the size and resolution that the replays are filmed, you have to do that in the Canvas setup initially. Within the file itself, all you can now do is view the time-lapse, delete it, or export it. Right here, you can see that time-lapse recording is toggled on. If I toggle it off, this will purge it. This will actually delete it forever. So I don't want to do that and click purge. I'll just say don't purge for now. One reason to delete the time-lapse recording would be if you know that you'll never need it or you've already exported it and you want to shrink your file size, time-lapse replays actually take out quite a bit of space in a file size so you can dramatically reduce it by deleting the time-lapse recording. When I create Procreate files to share with others or sell or give away to my subscribers, I always delete the time-lapse recording first because the video data really does add a lot to the file size, making it cumbersome for some other people to download and install. You can also export your time-lapse video, and if it's really long, you'll have both of these options enabled here, full length in 30 seconds, so that you can have a truncated smaller file size version. Once you select this option, you can share it just like anything else.
37. Get Your Own Brushes: I really cannot emphasize enough how important it is that as you get further into your art and you explore Procreate more, you look at the work of other Procreate artists and you look into some of the brushes and other resources and tools out there. You can get a lot of tools and brushes for free online or for very affordable prices. I just really recommend that, because it can open a whole new world of artwork for you. It's a bit like walking into an art supply store and being overwhelmed by the number of paints and colored pencils. The options really are endless and they aren't limited to the brushes that come in Procreate, although those are a very good start. I've mentioned a couple of times now that I do create a lot of brush packs. Most of them are geared toward lettering artists and calligraphers. I do have some others like this mosaic kit that comes with patterns for making your own mosaics. However, lots of other artists make amazing ones. You'll find in the resources section a link to a page where I've compiled all my favorite brush packs. You can have a look and explore them yourself.
38. Tag me so I can see your work!: Thank you for following along this far in this class. I would love to see what you create with Procreate. If you would like to leave those images in the Projects section, I would love to take a look and I know that other students will feel inspired by them as well. Some ideas might be to illustrate a product around you, create a border using the symmetry guides, hand letter your favorite quote or phrase, or draw a portrait of your pet. I also always love to be tagged on Instagram, so if you share your work there, please tag me so that I can have a look at it, and please do check out the Resources section because you're going to find that article I mentioned, that I wrote about iPad tools and accessories, a website where I've compiled all of my favorite Procreate brush packs. You're going to find a lot of links to video tutorials that I've made which are much shorter and target or focused on much more specific little techniques, and you're going to find links to other classes that I have right here on Skillshare that also utilize Procreate. So please ask your questions in the Questions section. Leave your comments. Leave a review. Let me know what you think, and I'll see you back here next time.
39. Bonus: Quiet Time Lapses: I'm now just going to play some quiet time-lapse videos for you of some artwork that I've made. Just set the music in case you want to sit back and relax and watch, and maybe get some inspiration for your own work.
Molly Suber Thorpe, Calligrapher & Designer
