How to Use the Freehand Selection Tool in Procreate - Procreate Tips

Hello everyone and welcome back to Ghost Paper. My name is Leo and I'm the creator behind this channel and welcome back to another mini tutorial session video. In this one we're going to actually talk about the free hand selection tool and the power that the free hand selection tool actually has. So I'm sure that you're familiar with this tool but I'm not really sure if you know all of the options that this tool has so we're going to get into those. But just before that if you want to learn a little bit more about digital illustration and how to become a digital illustrator especially using the medium of the iPad and tools such as Procreate make sure to hit the subscribe button down below and also make sure to hit the bell notification icon so you don't miss anything. So now without any further ado let's get with the video. So the selection tool first of all we know that the selection tool lives right here right next to the move tool and the adjustments tool. However the selection tool has four different modes and in one of my previous tutorial videos we've covered the automatic selection tool and how we can actually use it the best way. So now let's talk about the free hand selection tool. For that I'm going to use as an example this is one of my last illustrations here done on this channel but I feel like this leaf right here is one of the best examples I can give using this tool. Basically let's just say that we want to select for now we want to select half of this leaf and we want to create like a two-color leaf for example. If you're like a little bit familiar with this tool you can try to use the free hand selection you go and you try to draw around this element but as you can see right here I'm going to zoom in so you see this a little better let's just say we want half of this half of this leaf. You see that I wasn't able to really capture as close as I wanted to the black outlines as well as maybe at some points here I went inside of the illustration inside of the pink or the black areas and that's not really a good mask for me to be able to paint a color or to change the color here to a two-colored leaf. So what's the best way to actually use this tool? So basically for the first off when you click here with the tip of your pencil onto the canvas you create this little circle which represents the beginning of your selection. Now you don't have to actually have the tip of your pen onto the canvas and continuously and continuously draw the shape that you want you can actually just click like this and now we've made a straight line and there you go because this area is very straight using straight line mode actually picking is the best for that area. But now for this curved section here now I can go and I can try to draw that curve as best as I can and now for the next section I'm just going to raise my pencil and I'll click or tap onto the area that I want and I can continue right here and I'm going to draw again this section right here it's curved section and then straight area straight area and now curved again I'm just going to draw here and straight and let's just say as I was just saying like we want to paint half of this leaf so I'm going to go about here and then we're going to go and close this selection. Now as you can see the area that we want to that we want to affect is here without this cross hatching effect and all the areas that are not masked have this cross hatching effect and also by the way if we go here into the actions menu and into preferences with this slider here called selection mask visibility we can tweak the how much you actually see the areas that are not affected. I'm leaving this high as I can because I want to make sure that the video captures it and another thing here as a bonus tip for this video is that for any slider here in Procreate you can tweak it normally just like that but you can also drag it down and you can actually tweak the slider over this area and you see that you're actually doing by increments so you're actually doing with way more precision by actually sliding down your finger onto this area more or less here of your iPad and then tweaking the slider you see the slider is still moving but for now for this video we're going to leave this number as a really high number as we want to create that contrast that I want to the video to capture that contrast. So I'm just going to go back into our selection that we have right here and now because I just clicked on preferences I actually I went outside of the selection mode so let's just say that I've actually wanted to take out of this part because we just want to color half of the sleeve but I don't have the options anymore right here but if you hold if you press and hold the selection menu you actually get an undo back into the selection mode so now we can just draw or in fact it's better if I just pick because it's a straight line and then I'm going to draw around and now that I have this area right here and this is one selection or my second selection which means that it came after that first one that I did I have now the option to select add or remove in this case I want to remove this selection and now I have just half of my leaf and now if I click with my painting tool I can paint this area and now I'm just going to step outside and take a look at my illustration as you can see there were some areas that weren't still covered so this is the beauty of this mode is that it does allow you to go back into the mode and use undo controls so here I just use undo to go back before I actually use my brush strokes I'm going to again click and hold and now I can zoom in which this tool also allows you to actually zoom in you don't have to worry about that while you're selecting and we're going to make a better selection for this edge right here and I'm going to close it and once you close it appropriate understands that this is an additive mask so you're adding to your selection but if you don't close your mask you do have to choose between those two options so right here I'm just going to do another selection a little bit better I'm not going to close and I'm going to click remove as I don't want this area to be painted so now I believe I created a better mask for this section so now if we go back again onto the painting mode here with the brush you see that I've did a way better job here with this edge so overall the free the freehand tool actually allows you to get really really good results as long as you know how to actually work with the tool so that's it for this video guys I hope you guys enjoyed this one and I hope you had some good educational value on how to use the freehand selection tool if you did find this video informative and if it helped you in any way shape or form please leave a like to this video subscribe to the channel for more tools more mini tutorials and speed paint videos and I'll see you guys on the next one ciao