Procreate Organisation Tips: 3 Steps to Organise Your Files

1. Intro: Is your Procreate gallery a bit of a mess? Do you feel overwhelmed every time you open the app and see a mess of canvases all over the place? If so, I've been there and I've made this class just for you. Hi, I'm Chelsea. I'm a surface pattern designer and illustrator, and I've been using Procreate almost every day for about six years now. In this bite sized class, I'm going to share three organization tips that helped me get my procreate files under control so that my gallery of almost 2000 designs went from looking like this to this, if you're ready to get organized and take control of your own appropriate gallery, I hope to see you in class. 2. Class Project: Believe that the best way to learn is by doing. So your project for this class is to follow along with the action step at the end of each lesson to create your first organized stack. And then you can either take a screenshot of your stack and upload that to the Project Gallery, or you can upload an image of your cover image template to the Project Gallery instead. You get to pick which option you would prefer to share. 3. Stacks: Before we get started, I just wanted to clarify a couple of terms that I'll be using a lot throughout the class. If I say Canvas or file, I'm referring to any individual procreate document. I often use Canvas and file interchangeably. And when I say stack, I'm referring to a group of individual files that have been stacked together in a group. The best way to keep your procreate files organized within your gallery is to group them in stacks. And a stack is basically just another name for a group or folder. You can choose to group your work in whatever way makes the most sense for you. For example, you might want to group by project or collection, like I have here for each of my Skillshare classes, or you might want to create a stack for a certain file type, like I have this stack here where I keep all of my workbooks and resources that I download from other people's classes. Or maybe you would prefer to group your files by date, where you create a new stack, say, every month or quarter, and then keep all of your work from that time in that one stack. It's totally up to you how you want to go about grouping your work. I'm going to demonstrate with this Easter collection that I've been working on recently. To create a new stack, all you need to do is click Select at the top here, tap on the files that you want to include so that they have the little blue tick, and then click Stack. That will put all of those canvases into a stack for you, and then you just click on the little X to close out of Selection Mode. Click on that stack to be taken into the group where you can see all of those individual files. If you want to remove a file from the stack, you can either click and drag to remove a single canvas, or if you want to remove multiple canvases at once, you can click Select. Click on the files you want to remove and drag them up to the top left corner. Hover over the name until it flashes, and then you can just drop them back out in the gallery. You can also add other canvases into an existing stack in the exact same way by either clicking and dragging on a single canvas, or if you want to move multiple canvases at once, just click Select, click on the canvases you want to move, and then drag them on top of the stack until it flashes blue and opens. Then you can drop them into that stack. You can also rearrange the order of the stack in the same way that you do in the main gallery by just clicking and dragging to reorder the canvases. Action step. Pick three canvases from your gallery and add them into a stack. 4. File Names: Another step towards keeping your files super organized is to name your canvases. Now, I personally don't care about coming up with cute or creative names. The only thing that really matters is that the name for the file is unique. To rename a canvas, you just click on the name and then type to rename it. For my example, I'm going to use a simple naming convention of Easter 2025 number. You can also rename a stack. If you come back out to the gallery and click where it says stack, you can just type to rename that stack. I'll call mine Easter 2025. Action step. Rename the canvases in your new stack so that they have unique names. An optional action step is to rename your stack, as well. 5. Cover Images: Final thing that I like to do to organize my gallery is to add a cover image to my stacks so that I can see at a glance what is in each stack. Now, this one's certainly an optional step. So if you're not interested, please feel free to skip ahead to the next video. But I find that having a nice simple cover image helps me to minimize the visual noise and overwhelm each time I open my Procreate gallery. I like to keep my covers uniform and basic. So I've created this simple cover page template that I just keep up in the top of my gallery for easy access. Then whenever I need a new cover, I can just swipe to the left and duplicate it and then edit it for the new stack. If you like the idea of adding a cover image and want to create your own template, all you need to do is create a new canvas. Now, it doesn't need to be big. We don't want to take up too much storage space. So I've created mine at 6 " by 6 " at 150 DPI and click Create. I also turn off the Time laps recording to help save more space by clicking on the wrench tool, video, and then toggling off time laps recording and clicking to purge. Now you can create the base for your template. You can make yours look however you want. I'm just going to add a background color by coming up to layers, clicking on Background, and then selecting a color. And then I'll add some white text on top by setting the color picket to white and then clicking on the rent tool. Click on add and then add text. Type cover image template and then double or triple click and drag over the text to highlight it all. That bit can be a little bit finicky. And then just click on the top left corner here to change the font to something that I like. And then I'll just drag up the sides a little bit to whatever I think looks good. Click done, and then I'll just use the arrow tool to move it into the center of the canvas. But remember here that you can make your template look however you like. When you're happy with it, come back out to the gallery, click where it says untitled artwork and rename it to cover Image template. And now, whenever you want to create a new cover, you can just swipe to the left and click Duplicate. Open one of the copies. Open the layers penel Books. I don't need that extra layer there, so I'll just delete that. And then click on the text layer to bring out the flyout menu. Click Edit Text, and then do that little triple tap to highlight all the words again, and type in whatever you want to call your new stack. So for mine, I'm going to call it Easter 2025. You can adjust the sizing and position if you need to because each title is obviously going to look a little bit different depending on the length of the words and how many words you've got. And then I'll just make my background color this peachy color this time, and that's my new cover done. So edit yours till you're happy, and then come back out to the gallery, rename the canvas to match what you've called your new stack. Click Done, and then click and drag to add it into the stack. Make sure that you reposition it so that it's at the very top because whatever is in that top left corner is what's going to show as the cover image when we go back out to the gallery view. So your optional action step is to create your own cover image template and then add a cover image to your stack. 6. Final Thoughts: So that's it. Three simple steps that you can take to organize your own Procreate gallery. Now that you've practiced with one stack, you can decide how you're going to tackle the rest of your Procreate gallery. Obviously, the more work that you already have in your Procreate gallery, the longer the process is going to take. But if you get in the habit of organizing as you go from now on, I'm sure you'll than yourself in the future. If you enjoy this class, please consider leaving a quick review before you go and don't forget to upload your screenshot or cover image template into the Project Gallery. Thanks so much for joining me, and I hope to see you in the next class.