Procreate Coloring Tutorial - 3 Different Ways! (Procreate Tips)

Hello everyone, welcome back to Ghost Paper. My name is Leo and for this mini tutorial session, I want to show you three different ways that you can do to fill layers in Procreate. So I've made a video previously that I was only showing the reference layer method on how to fill layers quickly on Procreate, but there are definitely other methods that we can do to achieve the same result. So today I want to show you three different methods. So without any further ado, let's get to the first one. So the very first one, I'm just going to use my studio brush, make a shape here as a circle, is the color drag. So the color drag is something really powerful and quick because it allows you to just quickly draw shapes and to be able to drag colors inside them and Procreate is able to detect the borders or the edges and be able to fill in those layers. So those, I would say the pros of using this tool, it's really the speed and it's really dynamic to just draw shapes and be able to fill them. But now the disadvantages of this tool, I'm just going to pick any other color here. I'm just going to make it a little smaller brush size. Now if I draw a shape right here on top of my pink shape and I make it into a circle and I want to use color drag, Procreate is not really able to detect, even though it's able to detect the edge, it's not able to paint this green on top of the pink even though we've made the pink circle before we made the green one. So it almost feels like the green would be on top of everything as we're making it as our second shape. But however, Procreate is not really able to put the fill of this green color onto all of the area of the green outline and that is because everything is in one layer. So I would say the color drag, it's only a disadvantage if you have your artwork all in one layer. So if you're using color drag, always make sure to break your layers into multiple layers as you go because you will run into this problem. So let's delete this layer and let me show you the second method that we have to fill layers and that is with the selection tool and the fill option on the layer. So let's just make any kind of mask here and now clicking on the layers panel, clicking on the layer itself, you can go fill layer and what Procreate is doing is that it's using our selection as a mask and then using this color to fill in that selection. What's really powerful here is that I'm just going to make another selection on top of the green one and now changing color to this really hot pink and going back into my single layer, I can click on a layer and click fill layer and it really obeys this process of before and after. So in other words, if we're making a pink shape on top of the green shape, if we are using fill, it will cover the entire area and that is all in one layer. So the advantage of using selection and fill layer is that you can have your artwork all in one layer and Procreate will not run into this problem that I was just showing you with color dragging. However, the disadvantage of selection is that it's really hard to make perfect shapes and there's really no to use the quick shape tool where you just draw a shape and you can hold it for a little bit of time and it will kind of snap into a circle, square or even a triangle. Procreate doesn't really have this feature at the moment for the selection. So it still is a really powerful tool if you're working with outlines and you're just making selections underneath your outlines and using the fill layer. Lastly, the last way to fill colors onto your artwork is with the reference layer. And for that, I'm just going to use our robot here as an example. It's an example where your outlines are all in one layer. That's where the reference layer works best. So when you have a piece of artwork, it could be a comic or like a manga comic artwork that is finalized with a black outline and everything is in one layer. So the way that the reference layer works here is that we have to click on our outline layer and then we click on reference and now we see reference just says here right underneath the layer name. So now, back into the layers panel here, any layers that I make above or below a reference layer will obey the feature of reference layer. And what is this feature? Basically, if I just now color drag onto parts of the body of a robot, Procreate is automatically detecting the boundary edges of a robot and filling those with a color, even though we are in a different layer. And that is the beauty of reference layer, is that you are able to quickly fill areas with color and you're also getting, as a bonus, you're getting masks. Masks that you're going to be able to then making a new layer here and just using the select on your just newly filled layer color, I'm just going to use a darker color here in my noise brush, then now you're able to paint shadows. So all of a sudden you have the ability to paint shadows onto your characters just because you have started to use reference layer and you have masks. So that is a really, really powerful tool and actually quite fast to get to the results that you want. So I could actually continue here making another layer and just choosing green and because we're still in reference layer, I can now drag this green onto the head of the robot and as you can see, it's really, really fast to get to these results. However, the downside of this tool, I'm just going to make a new layer and I'm going to choose any other color. I just need this dark purple here and I'm just going to use my studio pen. Basically, the reference layer does not understand brushes that you make by drawing. It's really not able to control the boundaries of the reference layer and only paint, for example, the inside of the robot. Reference layer only works with the color dragging and that is the only thing that I need to show you here just to make sure that when you're trying to use reference layer, if you're just painting, you're not going to get these results and you're going to be wondering if reference layer is actually working, really working or not. So I believe that about covers for this video. I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope it has some really good educational value on how to show you three different ways on how to fill colors onto your artwork. So again, just to sum it all up, you can do it by using color dragging, you can do it using the selection mode and using fill layers onto each of your layers and you can also use the reference layer which is a really powerful tool in Procreate. So please leave a like to this video, subscribe to the channel for more content and I'll see you guys on the next one. Ciao!