Transcripts
1. Introduction and Welcome: Hi, I'm tariff and Lee. I'm an artist and art instructor living in the wilds of main. Welcome to another Skillshare class. You may be familiar with my artwork, but you may not know that. I have also been in IT for a number of years. I've done technical support and training. I have taught people who've never touched a mouse how to use a computer to do their job. In today's class, I want to help you with Procreate. I have really come to love the Procreate app on the iPad as the main way that I now do art. And I know that a lot of people that I talked to about Procreate and about Procreate classes, worry or fear that they don't exactly understand how to navigate procreate, and how to do things within the actual app versus how to make art in the app. So my class is designed to help you understand how to navigate and how to use Procreate. That when you do take a class on Skillshare about how to make art in procreate. You won't be lost. You'll understand what the instructor is talking about when they're, today's class is going to focus on organizing the gallery and everything that is involved in that, which would include creating and deleting files, duplicating files, naming files, and then combining files together into what Procreate call stacks. I'll teach you three different ways to create stacks and to move files in and out of them. And then I'll teach you how to make a cover sheets for your stacks so that you can have a gallery that is free of visual clutter. If like me, he worked glasses and you have a hard time with eyesight. Sometimes the little tiny titles under the Procreate files can be really hard to read. And so these label files are going to allow you to have a larger font so that you can really see what you've got at a glance without having to strain your eyes. So let's get started.
2. Who This Class is For + Class Project: All right, the supplies you'll need for this class, or just an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and Procreate, 5 point, whatever. Right now, Procore is at 5.2, which is the newer version just released recently. Your class project is to upload a screenshot of your organized gallery. And you can just upload one or you can do a side-by-side before and after, like I've done here. And I'm going to show you how to upload the class project in just a second. It may seem kind of silly to upload a screenshot as a project. But I think that when we're making the commitment to get organized and our lives, we need to have some kind of accountability. And so uploading your class project will help you to reach that goal. I hope of having that organized gallery and learning the skills in the class. I wanted to take just a second and talk about who this class is for. This class is for absolute beginners who struggle taking classes on procreate and how to make art in procreate, because they may not have a solid understanding or confidence in how the app itself works, like where things are located in all the mechanics behind the use of the app itself. You may not feel that you have strong technical skills. And so you may be intimidated by classes about Procreate are, or you may feel yourself getting lost during a Procreate art class because you're not exactly sure where everything is to be found. I'm hoping to demystify, Procreate itself for you so that you can then go on and take all of these great Procreate classes that we have here on Skillshare. And feel confident that you can keep up with what the instructor is teaching you. Because the areas in the app where you're being led to go are now familiar and makes sense. One of the things I noticed people struggling with is how to upload a project. So first I'm going to show you how to do a screenshot because that's the project for this class. You're just going to tap the power button and the volume button simultaneously and you'll see that white flash. And that down at the bottom, you'll see that screenshot in the lower left-hand corner. When you go to the upper left and click Done, you can choose to save it to your camera roll. To upload a project in the app, obviously launched the app and navigate to the class that you're taking. For the purposes of this example, I'm going to choose a class that I've already taught because I can't upload a project of the class we're in because I haven't published it yet. So I'm going to my jewelry class and I'll just click on that. And it will launch that class in the Skillshare app. And now I need to go to the Projects tab, which is right here in the middle and down at the bottom here, underneath one of my students projects, there's a link that says tap here to upload a project. So you're going to collect, click on that. And it's going to launch a browser window for you. And now over on the right side you'll click on the green button to create a project. It's on the projects and resources tab. So we'll click that. And now that's going to launch the uploader project window. So I'm going to click cover image, which is the image that's going to display everywhere. And I'm going to choose a picture that I took of those earrings, give my project a title, and then I could just click Publish now. But there's an area down below here where I usually add other pictures. Like if I've done multiple color ways of a particular project, I'll just put this same picture in here for now. So you can see you just click on whole picture icon and you can type words in there and don't want anyone to see the picture. Or you can click on Make project private, and then click Publish in the upper right-hand corner. And now your project is going to display right there on any class that you upload 14. And it will also display on your profile down at the bottom here, I have to click Load More. And then it will open up. And there is the project. All right, so that's how you upload a project and the Skillshare app.
3. Creating Files and Saving Templates: All right, Here's Procreate gallery. The first thing I want to show you is how to change your interface. So we're going to tap and the wrench. And we're going to either have the light interface or the dark interface. I really need the dark interface because of my eyesight, but you might prefer the light interface. So I wanted you to see what the gallery looks like. With that enabled. I think it might be the default. So if you also have a hard time with the glare on the screen, you can just come up here to the wrench and click off light interface, and that will give you the dark interface. Also, you can move your toolbars to the right-hand side if you want or have them on the left. I have them on the right, so I'm not going to be obscuring the screen. At this time. Procreate does not have a multi-tiered, nested file structure like most programs or operating systems would have. So I have here an image and it's just sitting there alone. This is actually a Procreate document with many layers. Or you can have stacks of images like this. Stacks of Procreate files, stacks of images. They're all pretty much the same thing. But you can't have a stack within a stack. And I really feel like that's a drawback because sometimes we have subcategories of items that we would like to have b and nested within one another. I filmed the whole class and then I realized that I didn't teach you how to create a file. So let's learn how to do that now. All right, To create a file, you're going to go to the upper right-hand corner and click on the plus sign. And you may not have this list of all of these different saved canvases. These are basically like templates. They have a 10 by 10 t-shirt template here. So I'll show you how to do that in a minute. But first, you're going to go up to new canvas and you're going to click this little black icon here. And this is going to open up the Canvas dimensions window. You can change your unit of measure here. And I'm going to pick, I'll just do 10 inches by 10 inches again. See it? Because it was on pixels in the beginning. It thinks that I want the height to be 2800 inches, which is too large. I won't say change that to 10 inches at 300 dots per inch, which is a good size for professional. And anything that you might need to do with, with a graphic. Then I get 70 maximum layers, which is a pretty good number. I can name this Canvas right now. And I'll just name this t-shirt. And then I'm going to create it. And it just automatically launches that file. So I go back to my gallery. So we've created a file there. Another way to create a file would be to duplicate an existing file by swiping to the left and just clicking Duplicate to lead a file by sliding to the left and deleting. If you are going to use a particular size over and over. For example, if you were going to share a lot of things to your Instagram stories like right here, I have a 1080 by 1920 pixel size canvas that will just launch and I can create. So if you have a particular size that you know you're going to be using. Let's say you want a landscape version. So that would be 1920 by 1080 P, right? At 300 DPI, and that gives me 319 layers. Now, once I go up here, I can call this 10 or 1920 by 1080 and create. Now I'll exit my file, go into my gallery again, hit the plus sign to invoke the new Canvas menu. And down here at the bottom is my template that I just made. If I didn't give that document a name, it wouldn't say that they're so for a swipe, I can edit it. And this one is eight by 10, which is what most of my art prints on my website are. So I use that one a lot. And then if I wanted to delete, say this one, I can swipe left and delete it and I'll delete that one. All right, so that is how you can save commonly used templates over here for you to easily access. And in terms of these other letters and numbers here like p3 and sRGB, those are color profiles, and that's really beyond the scope of this class. So that is creating new Canvas templates. And now anytime I need a certain size, I could just come in here and touch one of those and it will give me the size. And if I want to work this way, I can turn my paper around and get toward, all right, Coming up next, we're going to learn how to name and share your files.
4. Naming and Sharing Files: At the time when I films as the rest of this class, Procreate had not yet released the new update which is now available. And procreate 5.2, which has a lot of really great updates. But my favorite update pertaining to this class is that you can now name your artworks from within the artwork, open up an artwork, and then you go to the Wrench to Canvas and then Canvas information. And right here you can put a title where it says Untitled Artwork. So this one is the mouse, I think sleepy mouse. And you can put a picture of yourself there if you want or your logo, if you have one, and you just navigate to your photos, I'm not gonna do that right now, but I will put her family are here and then you could either sign or some, we'll have like a series of characters they do at tells you what you created at when you modify it, it. So that's really excellent. And now when I get out of my gallery, they're sleepy mouse. So I'm thrilled that this is a possibility. Now, your gallery might look different than mine if you don't have artworks yet. If you haven't created anything yourself yet, that's totally fine. Procreate comes preloaded with artworks and you can use those in order to learn how to name files and stacks. First things first, we're going to learn how to name files from the gallery. I already showed you how to name files from within the file, which is a new feature in Procreate. But the old way was always just to do this, you would click on the name underneath the little thumbnail, and it brings up a keyboard and you can type in a name for your file and then hit Done. If you're just making artwork for yourself, that might not be that important to name your files, but if you're sharing your artwork, it's a good idea to get into the habit of naming it. So that when you go to the wrench click Share and then choose a file format, you'll see the name there and that will be what it's named no matter where you put the file, the way I just clicked, cancel and that's why it said export unsuccessful. All right, let's actually learn how to share files. So I have a file here and her work that I did recently for my website. So you're gonna go to the wrench or if you're in England, the spanner and choose Share. And you haven't number of different file formats you can choose. You can do a Procreate file, a PSD file like that's a Photoshop file, a PDF JPEG, PNG, and tiff. Most of you are going to use jpegs because that's what you would normally use for the web. You can also share files with layers down below. That's a little bit beyond the scope of this class. Just know that you can always share a PSD file and it will have the layers with it as long as you haven't flattened them. So I'm going to choose JPEG, but, oops, look at this. I forgot to name my file. So I'll just click Okay here. And I'm gonna go back to Canvas and Canvas information about this artwork. Click on untitled artwork and give this a title so that if I send it to someone or when I bring it over to my computer, I know what this image is. And I'll go ahead and just put my name in here. I'm not sure yet how Procreate might display this information in a finished file, like if it ends up in the details on a computer or not. So sign it. And then I'll hit. Okay. And then I'm going to go back to the share button and click on Choose JPEG, and it's going to export it. And now I can choose where I want to export it to. You can pick any of these things that are here. If you have an all Apple environment and you use AirDrop, that's fine. But if you're on a PC and you have a Gmail account, you can use the Google Drive and export it directly to there in order to get it onto your computer. But I'm just going to, oh, by the way, printing from Procreate doesn't really work unless you have a apple enabled printer. I just chose to save it to my camera roll. And now I'm going to go to my gallery, which is essentially my camera roll. And there is my picture in the lower right. So that's how you share a file. And I can teach you how to print and another class if you're interested in that, please leave a comment in the discussion.
5. Working With Stacks: Okay, so what are stacks? Think of stacks as piles of papers. Piles of papers on your desk is not always the most efficient way to store and organize and locate your papers, but this is what we have to work with right now and hopefully procreate will allow us to nest stacks within stacks in a future update just like we can nest file folders within folders, computers. Okay, so we're back to my gallery and you can see here that I have all kinds of stuff. You'll see individual files like this photo here, which is just a photo I imported from my gallery. But then I have Procreate files also with layers. And then I also have stacks. Alright, so here's a stack and you can see it's full of files. So a stack is really just like a file folder on your computer, but it can only contain files. In other words, it can't contain other stacks. So let's learn how to make a stack. So the first way to create a stack is to simply take any one artwork that's not already in the stack and drag it on top of another one. And I want to keep them together in a stack. So I'm going to just drag one click and hold until it. Do you see how it kind of bounces? I'm going to hold it and the other one underneath it turned blue, and now they're stacked. You can tell a stack because you can see how it's kind of offset like this. The papers are kind of not completely level on the sides. And so that's how you can tell us a stack. Plus when you make a stack, it just calls it stack. So the next thing to do after you've made your stack is to give it a name. So I've got my punch needle templates in here. So obviously named as punch needle embroidery. And now that's named, and I always know where to go to place my punch needle embroidery ideas. I'm setting up a portfolio. So I want to add some of my related works to a stack that I'm going to show in a portfolio. So I've got this collage. I did this, the illustration. This is a painting, this is a live edge resin ocean. So I want to combine these items into a stack. So another way to create a stack rather than simply dragging one item over another, is to go up here and tap on Select. And then I'm just going to tap all the works that I want to go into this particular stack. And then I can click Stack right here. And that's going to stack all of those items together. And now I can close that and I can rename that stack. And I'm going to call this one portfolio. The nice thing about a portfolio is that you can, you can put what you want to share in to a stack. And then you can pinch out on that. And it will then create a slideshow so that you can just slide through those artworks within that stack. So that can be very helpful on them. To close it, you just pinch. Okay, to recap, we've made stacks by dragging one artwork on top of another artwork. We have made them by using the select function in the upper right and then selecting artworks who want to stack and clicking unstack. And now what if you want to take an artwork that's not in the stack and put it into an existing stack. Locate the artwork, Click on it until it bounces, hover over the stack you want to place it in and then carefully drag your file over and let go. Now you have your artwork in one stack. You may not want that particular file to be the top one in your stack. So if you want to change that around, all you have to do is drag things around inside the stack. Whichever one is furthest to the left is going to be the cover image for your stack. You might notice that when I change that, Let's go back and put this guy in front again. See how you can see that other artwork poking out. But previously when I put this one, see how this one is just bigger than that one. It's a different dimension. It covers what's underneath it. And that can be beneficial sometimes. Visually, it can sometimes look cluttered. For example, over here, I have a little stack going and the image that's on the top is transparent. And so it almost looks like what I've got here are a couple of birds with a lobster on top of them and it can be confusing. So you may want to arrange your artworks with a particular artwork on top so that it represents what's underneath and you know what's there. And then another thing that you can do to make that more obvious is to put a label file on top and I'll talk about that in another lesson. So how do you take things out of a stack? You can select. And then take those out by just grabbing them and pulling them out. What that did though is it grabbed and pull them out as individual files and it did not grab and pull them out as a stack. Why? Because again, Procreate doesn't allow you to have a stack with a stack. And I want to raise stack these items here. And then I want to combine them with this stack over here. It does kind of shift things around when you when I brought those three files out, how to disperse things to make room for those three files to sit. And so now it's in a different order than it was in before. And that can also get confusing. So I'm going to drag this stack and I'm going to hold it until that stack kinda flashes blue. And then I'm going to let go of it. And now my items are inside of deaths. Yeah. You really have to touch it right on the word if you're not using the pencil. Okay. That's alright. And then the other thing I like to do is I like to have the things that I use the most closer to the top and the things that I am not using as often, a little bit closer to the bottom. Right now what I'm gonna do is speed this up and I'm going to get, I'm going to get all the rest of my artworks into stacks. That makes sense to me, rename them and get ready to put labels on them. All I have to do to reorganize the order of my stacks is to drag and drop them. And you just want to be careful that you don't accidentally hesitate too long because it'll open up that stack and drop those items inside. Right? This is looking good. Joined me in the next video and we will learn how to make label files.
6. Labels and Gallery Organization: So now we're going to talk about labels. Labels are just a thing that I came up with to organize my visual space. I'm, I'm a very visual person, but there are times when seeing all the artworks and then having to read this tiny little type can be very difficult for me. I have that I cited worn glasses forever and I like to sometimes have a label. So he's he my old label files are here really all they are Is a file within the stack. Was no background, but I'll turn the background on just so you can see it. That has black banner and then text over top of it. And I turn the background color off so that all of this will be transparent. And then only have to do is put that I want to save it as anything. I just close it and I put it in the beginning. So if I put this here and I go back to the gallery, you don't see the label anymore. You only see this beautiful pattern. So if I pull that to the front, now that transparent, this part is transparent so I can see what's in there. And I, I find that helpful with certain things because especially with patterns I may not be able to tell just by looking at that little bone now, whether it's a half-drop pattern or what kind of pattern it is. So I did like that method in the beginning. And I, to be honest, I do still like it for some things, but there are some things that I don't want to show up. For example, this is my client's folder and I'm not going to I don't want that visible. Things that I'm not as more of an archive. These blackout poems are old lettering projects from way back in the day before I knew what I was doing. I just want them to be down at the bottom. And I've created a completely opaque square to go on top of that. And if so, all you really need to do to create a label very simply is to just create a file and it can be any size, but I tried to keep it small so that it's not using up a lot of data on my iPad. So I'm just making a 1024 by 1024 square at 72 dpi. And I'm going to put that right here. And then you can do anything you want. There's literally the sky's the limit. You could label this in any way. You use texts, you could just use a picture or you could, you don't even have to do anything. You could even draw a folder icon and put that on top, which I have actually done. So I'll show you how I make the full cover labels. So the first thing is to just decide what you want your back ground color to be in because I'm using the dark mode, I would like my background color to be black. It's just much easier for me on my eyes. And I'm with white selected because I've decided I want white to be actually don't need that. I want white to be the color of my text. I'm going to go to the Wrench icon to add, and I'm going to click on Add Text. And I believe I was in the portraits folder, so I'm going to just do portraits. I also, I also sometimes I'm really into all caps font. Don't come at me. I'm not trying to scream at people. And then in order to well, first of all, it would be helpful if I spelled it correctly. I want to change the font and I could do that here, but I really like to go and click the little a and come over here. So I have everything I need right in front of me. And I recently discovered that Arial Rounded MT Bold over here has a, an outline. You can do an outline version. And then I can come here and I can drag this to be bigger. Now you can see how it's wrapping. So you just want to grab your little handles and make this bigger. If I did this outside of the screen, it would stretch my pixels. But this is allowing me to make this as big as it's going to get by enlarging the font. And so at the moment it's kinda like up at the top. I mean, however you like to do things, you could put it at the top. You could even go so far as to say something like let's add text again and we're going to say, Pat. People. You know, I don't know. It doesn't really matter and I'll show you what I meant. See how it's just pulling the pixels apart. Doesn't matter not doing this for print. So I don't really care. And then I don't have to do anything else to it. I can just close it. It's in the first theoria, the first slot in my folder and now are in my stack. And now when I go out of their portraits, pepsin people is right on top. Another. Okay, so I've got my jelly plate prints here. And way down here is my old label for that. And I could do some different things to this, so I could come here and let's grab those two together. And I can turn it on its side and I can move that to the middle. I'm kinda make it more like a banner. I just need to go to 0. And there you have it. I feel like I'm really vibing on having this fill my entire screen. What I mean is I just want the black part to be a full cover. And I'm just going to go ahead and delete this text here and start a new text layer because I'm having trouble straightening in and make my color way. And then edit that text. Selected the background. And this is going to be jelly clique printmaking. I loved the jelly plate there. And then once you, once you get one style of label that you like, duplicate that style while the text is still editable. So it's still editable on this one. So now I can do this. And I can drag this one out. And I can put it right down here. And I can rename this. And it's hex animations. All right, I got all my stuff organized and then I realized that when IT landscape mode, it shifts. So I'm going to turn my iPad. And hopefully you can see most of that. So I've got my my most eat my my eight most used stacks at the top. And I don't feel the need to put a label on those because I'm in and out of there all the time. And what I'm really trying to do is just minimize the visual clutter. All right, I'm just going to speed this up and I'm going to duplicate some of these labeled files and put labels on some of the remaining stacks and get everything organized the way that I like. And then I'm going to come back and show you what it looks like when I'm finished. There's so many different ways to organize. I'll organize some based on what class I took or what tutorial I did. I'll organize some based on what the contents are like, color palettes and templates that I've made or that I've gotten from classes that I've taken. And then I'm just rearranging things a little bit to see how they look based on my iPad being landscape or portrait. Here you can see me choosing a more dulled down version of a color for the font so that it's even less harsh on the eyes as you're looking at your gallery. You could change the background color as well. And look at that. I have a nice organized gallery.
7. Conclusion and thanks for watching: All right, thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope that you learned something. I hope that you were able to get yourself organized. I know that's something that most of us struggle with. And if there's something that I missed that you have a question about, go ahead and post it in the discussion below this class. And I can answer it for you there so everyone can see the answer. And don't forget to upload your project. I showed you how to do that in a previous video. And if you want to go ahead and click follow so that you can get notified when I upload more classes like this, I have a lot more classes planned and I can't wait to get them edited and ready to go. So thanks again and I hope to see you soon. Bye bye.
Tara Finlay, ✅Left-Brain Artist and Instructor
