7 Things You Should Know Before Starting Your Next Illustration in Procreate

Hi everyone, welcome back to another video here on Ghost Paper. The studio still is under construction and I really can't wait to show you guys what the final result will be once I'm finally done with this, but in the meantime I really wanted to make a video about the seven things that you should not miss when making a new illustration file in Procreate. What are these seven things to get the most out of your productivity and the things that will help you the most when setting up a new file in Procreate. My name is Lei when you're watching Ghost Paper, so now let's get to it. All right, now that we're here on Procreate, the first thing and actually the most important thing is for you to make sure that you are using the best quality canvas as possible whenever you're creating your illustrations here on Procreate. So once you click on the plus icon here and create a canvas, create a new illustration for this iPad, for example for the 12.9 iPad Pro second generation, I can create a screen size canvas which is about 2732 by 2048 pixels. So this is a really good size because it allows me to create, for example, illustrations that are compatible with Dribbble, but the thing is is that this is not the highest quality canvas that I can create when I'm making my illustrations. So this is what I really wanted to show you guys. There's this little icon here on the top right which allows us to create a custom canvas. So here on the custom canvas creation menu, what I'm actually going to use is already actually punched in here, but I'll just do it again, which is a 4000 pixels width by 5000 pixels height. So what that does at 300 dpi, it's giving me for this iPad model, it gives me about 22 layers to work with, which in my case, it's not a bad amount of layers. It's actually pretty good to do what I need to do, and I can keep merging as I go and still keep it as editable as possible so that I can create things with clipping masks and layer masks, and I don't really need more than 20 layers. If I were, for example, to use here 5000 pixels, I would then start lowering the number from 20 layers to now 17, and if I were to use, say, 6000 pixels, all of a sudden I only have about 13 layers. So that is, in my case here, in my opinion, a little bit too low, a little bit too little on the amount of layers for me to work with. So I find this the sweet spot in terms of creating new canvas for my illustrations. And I'll tell you one more thing. By creating a canvas of 4000 by 5000 pixels, what that allows me is that this is the famous 4 to 5 Instagram ratio. So it allows me to create the extended ratio for Instagram. It allows me to then be able to go here into the preferences, and on the canvas section, I can go crop and resize, and I can, for example here, punch 4000 pixels and make this into a square. And I can also go back to that situation. So let me just quickly go back into the gallery here, make a new file, custom, and this time we're going to make 5000 by 4000 pixels, and now making a horizontal canvas. And now what I can do with this one is that if I go into the, again, the preferences menu and go into crop and resize, but now if I check resample canvas, I just want to show you that if I put the minimum size for dribble, for example, which is 800 pixels wide, I am just a little bit short about 40 pixels on the height so that I can do something that is proportional. On more of the highest resolution, you could go 2732. And once again, this number would have to be 2048 pixels height for it to be dribble compatible in a sense of the ratio that they're asking you to deliver their files for. So by creating a file that is either 4000 by 5000 pixels or creating 5000 by 4000 pixels, you're creating something that is compatible to Instagram for the famous 4 to 5 ratio. You are also creating something that is very close to be compatible with dribble, and you can still crop your illustration into a square. So to me, this first item here is really, really important when making our illustrations this big. And the reason for that is that you can then create your illustrations and apply them on some other selling websites, such as RedBubble, Society6, Teespring, and many other websites that accept your designs so that you can sell your merch online. So if you create illustrations and designs that are already pretty big and at high end resolution, you will have much less of a headache when you want to upload those designs onto those websites, because otherwise you will have to actually redo a lot of your work to be able to post onto these websites. The next item on the list here is for you to make sure that whenever you're starting your illustrations here on Procreate, that you're using high quality brushes from the get-go. So if you're using brushes that are actually giving you some really hard, kind of a strange edges, or using brushes that are not really high quality, I actually recommend you to take a look at these two brushes that I've created. There is a link in the description of this video. These brushes are completely free on my Gumroad page, and you have two options with these brushes. You have a no tapering kind of studio pen, so a very kind of uniform line, and you also have the option of having a brush sensitive pen, which I've created with, and it really respects, you're able to scale that brush with canvases that are a little bigger. You're still able to increase the brush size and create some really interesting designs with that. So make sure to check the link that is in the description of this video, because that's where these two brushes live, and once again, they are completely free. The next item on the list here is something that I've mentioned on a previous video, but I really use the power of grids whenever I'm making my illustrations, and I do find that this is really, really helpful if you want to create balanced illustrations on your canvas. So what I mean by that is just turning on the 2D grid here, you can see that I'm trying to leave some breathing room that is symmetrical on both sides, as well as top and bottom. It doesn't happen all of the time, but it's really, really important for you to actually use grids whenever you're trying to work your layout or your composition on your illustration, and this is something Procreate is giving you for free. You can go just on the actions menu and then head into a drawing guide, make sure that's checked on, and you can also edit your drawing guide. You can choose a different color for your grids, you can choose the thickness and opacity of that grid, and you can even tweak the grid size or the cell size for your grid. So if you want something a little bit more sparse, so kind of a bigger grid cell, you can do that, and you can also have something that goes super fine for a more detailed illustration. I also have another link, which I'll leave in the description box of this video, which is some custom grids that I've created, which also may help you because it has rule of thirds, it has golden ratio, and many other types of grids that you can use on your illustrations. Next up is making sure that you're using gestures to get the most out of your Procreate productivity. And when I'm talking about gestures, I'm not just saying the famous two-finger tap or three-finger tap in order to undo or redo things, or even the three-finger swipe in order to cut and paste, copy and paste, and do all of the cut and copy applications. What I'm really talking about is by holding your finger onto the canvas and evoking the quick menu. And with the quick menu, what I can do, I can just click and hold, and then click and hold and go into paint and erase mode. I can click and tap and hold here and go into creating a new layer, tap and hold and merge down the new layer. I can also just tap and hold, flip things horizontally, and many other things. So first off, how do we activate the quick menu? Well, first we have to go into the actions menu, then make sure to go into preferences and select gesture controls. Once you're here, we have to go on to the quick menu subsection, and you have to choose one of the activation methods for you to evoke quick menu. So in my case here, I do like to use the touch and hold feature because I have some other activation methods here for other features. And I'll also leave in the description box of this video a link with a video that I talk about how to set up your gesture controls for maximum productivity, and I go through all of these subsections right here. So in my case, once again, in order to activate quick menu, I go with touch and hold, and for the time that it takes for you to activate touch and hold, I've actually set it for 0.15 of a second, so super, super fast. And the reason for that is what you probably just saw here with my demonstration, is that I get really, really fast with my quick menu. I don't want it to be super laggy or taking a very long delay for it to be activated. I want something really fast so that it enhances my productivity when I'm working on Procreate. Next up, since I've been talking about creating larger canvases, which in contrast gives you a little less amount of layers, so one thing that's really important for you to keep in mind is layer management. So now that you're using more higher resolution files, which is really going to help you when you're trying to post on different social media networks and also trying to sell your art online, it is important for you to merge as you go. So for example, here on this plant illustration, I have a few clipping masks and I have shadows and highlights. I have even a layer mask that adds a little bit of visual interest to these leaves, but I also have in this plant pot and stems here, I actually have a ton of layers that were part of just basically clipping masks, adding shadows, highlights, and those sorts of things. If you know if this is not some kind of a freelance work and this is some kind of work that you're doing for yourself or once again you're posting on social media or making into something for you to maybe sell a t-shirt, for example, you know that you can probably merge this whole section here or you can also make a duplicate of this file if this is still some freelance work and just save it in your records. You'll have that in your gallery mode, you have the previous file with all of the layers in case you still need to do any changes and those are going to be quite tricky if everything is merged into one layer. But just to give you guys an idea, if I were to click on or tap into the actions menu and I think I do have to go into canvas and I go into on to canvas information, I can see for this file here which is just about the screen size of the iPad, I have my maximum amount of layers which is 91, I have 15 layers used and I have about 76 layers available. So in this case, I actually have quite a bit or quite a lot of layers still available. But if that wasn't the case, all I had to do is I go into the layers panel, click on the group that I need to merge as I keep working and I just have to select flatten. So that flattens that whole set of layers into one layer. So now if I go back into the actions menu, canvas information, now I go into layers and now I have only used seven layers with that same kind of visual effect. So I've saved quite a bit of layers here and I can keep working and that tip really goes for higher resolution canvases. Once again, having about 20 layers to work with, you do have to consider layer management. The next one is a tip about color, but not only to use your color palettes, but actually to use the floating color picker which is a new feature on Procreate 5 and actually helps a lot by keeping your palettes always here on the right side and be able to work on your illustration on the left. Used to be that actually, at least I have done this multiple times, which was to have color swatches here on the top left section of my illustration, those color swatches that I drew myself and filled with the colors of the chosen palette that I've selected for this illustration. But now having the floating color picker, it solves all of the problems and you can even reposition this anywhere you want on your canvas and it becomes super easy for you to just select a color, make sure that you have your layer selected and just drop that color onto the section that you want to recolor. Super easy, very practical and it's a great tool for you to have just the floating color picker because it really enhances your productivity by just having your palettes really open with less clicks so that you don't have to just go here every time and find your colors on the color selection mode. The next step is quite simple, but when starting a new illustration, make sure that instead of using a background color of white, you can just use somewhere between the gray tones and this is going to do two things for you. First, it's going to save battery life because by having a gray background, the iPad is going to be emitting less bright colors off its screen and that actually saves battery life. And the second thing is going to help you with color. As you can see in this example, these colors are looking really nice against the gray, but if I were to just change the background color to a white background, all of a sudden, these colors, they actually appear a little bit more washed out. Now, watch what happens if I go all the way to the black values. Once again, all of a sudden, these colors, they actually appear now more vibrant and colorful. So for choosing color for your illustration, it's actually best to start with mid green because that's not going to influence your choice of colors. And now for the last tip for this video, if you have illustrations where you like to apply some kind of a textural quality to it, if you would like to apply, for example, paper, a kind of a paper look to it or a this is the best way. Here on the right side, I have a paper texture that I found on Unsplash, which is a Creative Commons Xero website, and I'm just going to hit copy on this texture. Now, back on my illustration here, I'm just going to hit the actions menu and then I'm going to tap on add and then paste. And this is going to paste my image that I've copied onto my canvas. And as you can see, it has pasted the image, but I'm still missing a little bit here on the sides. So I'm just going to rest my pencil here onto the table and with one finger, I'm going to make sure that I have the arrow pressed on the top of the UI. And oops, let me do this again. And here you go. The trick here is that once you press with one finger on the arrow, you can then pinch and zoom on your canvas without actually affecting the scale of the paper. Let me just show you what happens if I don't have the arrow pressed. If I start pinching, I'm actually scaling up the layer. Now that I've zoomed out, this is actually exactly what I want. I want it to scale so that it could cover these sides of my illustration. Now, I'm just going to tap on the arrow to apply these changes. And now onto the layer section, I'm just going to click on the blend modes and I'm probably going to choose overlay because it really gives that kind of a nice texture quality and kind of affects the colors, but it doesn't really affect, it doesn't really darkens it too much, which what multiply would do, or it doesn't really brightens it too much such as color dodge or screen. So I'm just going to go back into overlay and now I'm just going to close my browser, open or kind of zoom in a little bit more so we can see what's happening here. And now just toggling on and off, I'm just going to take down the opacity a little bit. And if I still find that it's a little bit too bright, I can go into the adjustments menu and go into curves. And now I'm just going to lower things a bit and raise the blacks a little bit here as well. And here we go. I'm just going to apply that. And here's my texture, my paper texture applied on top of everything. So really the trick here is that before you start anything, grab the textures that you want to work with your illustration, such as paper textures, watercolor textures, and start testing them out as you work on your illustration, because those will probably affect the colors and generate results that will be unseen until the very end. If you leave this step here until the very end, once you actually apply these textures, colors are probably going to change a little bit. So it's good for you to actually start applying these layers as the topmost layers and see what's actually happening and keep tweaking the colors as you go. So that's it for this video, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed. And if you did, a like would be super appreciated, as well as make sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell notification icon so you don't miss any tips and tricks, reviews, and speedpaint videos. And that is all for you to become a better digital illustrator. Now, make sure to click on the video on the right side of the page right here, as you will watch something that's probably catered to you so that you can expand your knowledge in Procreate. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. Tchau!