PROCREATE - Top 10 Features for Beginners

Today I want to show you what is my personal list of the 10 best tips and tricks for Procreate for beginners. And we're starting right now. Okay now, so this video is really geared towards beginners and enthusiasts of Procreate, just users who are just starting to use this amazing application that allows them to create beautiful digital illustrations. However, this may also work for intermediate and even advanced users who haven't really covered all of the bases, all of the foundation of the application and may be missing a feature or two. But also if this is your first time here on this channel and you want to learn a little bit more about digital illustration, if you want to know how you can use your iPad to make really cool illustrations and all sorts of cool things as well, 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 today's video. All right, now that we're here on Procreate, the first thing that I want to show you is a tip about UI and backgrounds. So what I actually want to show is that once you create a new file here on Procreate, you're usually greeted with a dark UI and a white canvas, a white background. And what I want to show you is that actually you can click on the background color layer and you can change the background color to any color as you wish from the get-go. And you can actually go starting with grays and you can start with a white background, anything that you want. And the reason for that, it's actually a two-fold reason. The first one is that by starting with a darker background here for your illustration, you're actually saving battery life by emitting less lumens from the screen of your iPad. And the second reason is that I'm just going to bring this back to a white background as the start of a new Procreate file. But let me turn on these colors that I've prepared here for you. And as you can see, we have a really bright palette, but look at what happens when I change the background color to a darker tone. So all of a sudden, if I change this to a darker gray, the colors are actually popping out way more. So say you're actually illustrating something that actually has these colors, and all of a sudden you may find your drawing that it's actually overly contrasted or overly vibrant. So it's actually good to start when your background is the mid-range of grays, I would say, because then you can actually balance your colors a little better, and at the same time, save some battery life. And lastly, in terms of UI here, what a lot of people don't know is that if you click on the wheel icon right here and go into preferences, you have the option of going with a light interface. And what that does is actually, as you can see, it turns all of your UI into a lighter interface. So in fact, if you're back here on your background layer and you're drawing something that looks very bright, it actually goes really well with the white interface or the light interface and vice versa. If you're drawing something that looks like a cave, it's a very dark lit scene, just go back here into preferences and turn off the light interface so that you have a UI that actually encompasses whatever you're drawing in a better way, like the mood of your illustration. As well as like working with a light or dark interface might be a matter of preference, it does have some kind of a technicality behind it that you may find it easier when you're working on your art. Now for the second tip that I want to show you guys is one of the tools that I use the most here on Procreate, if not the tool that I actually do use the most whenever I'm creating artwork for this channel, and that is the quick shape tool. So you can actually imagine you're drawing a line but actually went around something like this that looks a little curvy, but if you hold the tip of your pen onto the canvas of your iPad, it actually becomes a line that you're able to position anywhere that you want on the canvas. And if you hold one finger onto the canvas, you then enable the ability to set this line onto 50 degrees increments, and it might become also very very handy for you if you're actually drawing something onto a 45 degree angle or you want something at a 90 degree angle sharp, you can actually achieve that by just holding one finger onto the canvas. Plus, you're still given this option here, once you finish a quick shape, you're given this option here called edit shape, and you're also then able to again reposition your line whatever you want on the canvas. Next, let's just say that you want to draw a circle. In the older days of Procreate, you would actually have to get a brush that had a circle pattern for you already pre-made, or you would have to create a circle by drawing quadrants and then copying and pasting quadrants until you had something that resembled a circle a little better. But right now, all that you have to do with a quick shape tool is that you draw something that resembles a circle. Again, leave the tip of the pen onto the canvas and you're given it auto-completes the circle per se. And even though it's not a perfect circle right now, you're then given again the option here on quick shape that you can keep it as an ellipse and fix it the way that you actually want. If you want something thinner, if you want something that's a little bit more bold, or you can just click here on circle and right away you have that perfect circle shape still with the ability that you can still tweak it again, convert it to a circle again. But just bear in mind that once you leave this section, either by clicking on the arrow or clicking again on the brush icon, you leave this menu of the quick shape, then you lose the ability to edit this shape again. And finally, you can also draw some other shapes such as squares with a quick shape tool. Just go here, click on square, they can become rectangles, they can be polylines so that you actually have more of an ability to tweak these shapes. And one interesting thing that I want to show you guys, it actually follows up next with the quick shape tool. And that is the fill tool with threshold. So now that we have these three elements right here, say that I've drew all these elements, but I actually want to fill them with color. And a lot of people again don't know and they start filling up color on these elements like this. It's a tedious process that even though you can have the biggest size brush here on Procreate, that doesn't seem to be taking you too far in terms of saving time. So instead of painting like this, you actually can just click and drag a color onto the shape itself and it will paint. Finally, one last thing here, back to that square drawing that we had on the bottom right corner of the picture. I actually just drew a new one here on the center, just a little bit bigger so you can see. Imagine you have a shape, but it's not fully closed. As you can see, there's a little gap here on the top left corner. So look at what happens when I do the same thing that I did with a circle. Once I drop a color into that shape, because that shape isn't closed, Procreate isn't able to understand that you actually want to paint just on the inside of this blue square. But what you can do, you can drop that color in, but keep holding the pen onto the canvas and you're given now a threshold here at the top of the app. And by just sliding it, you're able to tell Procreate to look for a color threshold and therefore be able to fill just on the inside of the square. So the next tip that I have for you guys is what I call erasing artwork with the same brush as painting. And what I mean by that is that say that you are actually illustrating something that looks like this blue circle here on the center of the screen, and you're doing some of the shadows onto the circle. You're creating that volume onto the circle, you're drawing some shadows. But let's just say that you actually drew these very harsh shadows and we're using here the noise brush at maximum size and maximum opacity, but you've gone a little bit too far and you actually want to take that down or you want to soften that effect. Well, if you just went here with your eraser brush and you started to work on this thing to actually try to soften the effect, we're using a completely different brush here. Therefore, the effects or the results are never going to look that good in that case, because we're using a very artistic brush to actually paint those shadows. So all that you have to do, I'm just going to back up here a little bit, is that go back to the brush that you're using, which is again the noise brush with the size that you want and the opacity that you want. But now we're going to go into the eraser brush and we're going to click and hold. So what that does is that it copies the settings from your paintbrush onto the eraser brush. So now on the eraser brush, we have the same noise brush with the size and opacity we want. So now if I use that, now I'm able to actually achieve the effect that I want and smooth out that shadow. The next step is actually layer management. Sometimes you're creating something that actually starts to have a lot of layers in the layers control panel and you want to be able to merge things. And you can do it in many ways. You can actually click on the top layer here and you can select merge down, and that's going to start merging your layers one by one from whatever layer you click to, to the one right underneath it. But that might be a tedious process, say like if you have 20 to 50 even more layers. So the best way that you can do, you can actually use the pinch mode and pinch the number of layers that you want to merge them into one layer. So let's just say I want to merge the first top two layers. I just pinch here on the first top two and there you go. I've actually merged only the top two layers. Now if I go back here a couple of times on the merge tool and I still got all my layers. If I want to completely merge everything, I just pinch from the layer that I want until let's just say all the way to the bottom and everything becomes one layer. For the next one that I want to show you guys is how to use hand gestures to speed up the process of your illustration. One of the ones that I use the most to speed up my process is the three finger swipe and that goes for copying and pasting things. Say this is let's just say one of the eyes on the character and I want to copy again. So instead of going here and sliding this to the left, going duplicate, then using the arrow tool to be able to move this to the side, I can actually do something way simpler which all I have to do I'm just going to delete this layer. Say I'm in the layer that I want, I just go with a three finger swipe and I'm giving these options. I can cut, copy, copy everything, cut and paste, and copy and paste. So in this case I'm going to select copy and paste and there you go. I already have my duplicate and if I go into the layers panel I have my new layer already there. But also just remember in order to have that option of the three finger swipe, you have to go here into the tools again, go into preferences and click on gesture controls and once you're here make sure to go into copy and paste and also make sure that this option three finger swipe is selected. Otherwise you're not going to have that ability. You can also choose instead of the three finger swipe to be able to tap this little corner icon that we have right here which is going to allow you to achieve the same thing. I've made a decision to not have this option selected because I want to use this guy, this little icon right here to actually bring up my color wheel. The next tip that I want to show you guys is the quick menu which is something that I also actually use quite a bit when I'm doing my illustrations and how you actually activate that is with the press and hold. Then you're given the ability to have a few options here. In fact you have about six options and you can customize those options as well. So first and foremost in order to have that option available, you have to go back into gesture controls in your preferences and make sure that option is available by going to the quick menu and making sure that touch and hold is enabled and then actually you can set a delay for that touch and hold. I have set mine to about 0.15 seconds of a second, 0.15 of a second so that the touch and hold is actually quite fast which allows me to do, let me just demonstrate, I can click and hold and go select paint, I go click and hold select erase, click and hold select new layer, click and hold and go eyedropper and everything is super super fast because I've set my delay to a really low value. Now in order to customize these options you have to go back into your quick menu and then you press and hold onto one of the options you actually want to switch to and you're able to then choose a variety of options here to whatever you want to be your new set action. Next up is one of the things that I also use the most when I'm doing my illustrations is to use the guides and how to actually use them you have to go back into the tools menu, go into canvas and enable drawing guide. Drawing guide is an amazing tool which allows you to check the proportions and dimensions of whatever you're trying to do and especially if you're working with quick shape, if you're creating solids of any kind of elements you can check your composition, rule of thirds, golden ratio, all these things you can actually use canvas, you can use the drawing canvas for that. So right now my drawing, my canvas, my drawing guides are a little bit muted and you can go back into the tools and go into edit drawing guide and you can set not only the color of your drawing guide but you can also set the opacity and thickness of your lines so right away I'm just kind of increasing it so you guys can see this a little bit better but also just going back here into your edit drawing guide you can increase the grid size that you want. I do like to work with something a little bit smaller which allows me to have a bit a better sense of whatever I'm trying to create and finally you can use the drawing guides to help whenever you're illustrating something on Procreate. The last thing I want to touch upon the drawing guides is that by going back into edit drawing guide you can also do an isometric drawing guide, a perspective one where you set the points for your perspective drawing and you can also use the very very powerful symmetry tool that comes in with a few options such as a vertical line, a horizontal line, a quadrant and radial and I've even made a special video just covering this tool itself, the symmetry tool. You guys should definitely check that out and I'll put that into this section of the video right now. You guys should definitely check that out. Next up is using the select option as a masking feature in Procreate. So again seeing this graphic right here, how was I able to actually paint these shadows on this sphere or the circle and not actually cross the borders of that circle? So let's just recreate this element so you know what I'm actually talking about. So let's go back here into an empty layer, draw a shape, it's a circle. We're going to use some of the things we've learned in this video already. We're going to quickly fill this circle and now I want to start drawing the shadows to the circle. So I'm going to use a darker color, create a new layer and I'm going to start drawing those shadows. Oops that's the wrong brush, so here we go. So if I'm drawing these shadows right here, you see that I'm actually going past the circle and even if I wanted to be very very careful, it would be almost impossible to achieve that without having a perfect mask. So the best way to achieve this effect is to go into the layer that you had started first, your blue circle, click and select and then you choose this option right here, select, and you'll see that you have this like crosshatch here kind of telling you what's the alpha and what are the boundaries of that mask. So now with your new layer, whatever you do onto a new layer will respect those boundaries. So now you're able to actually paint and draw whatever you want and that's going to follow the shape that you have clicked as select. Lastly guys as tip number 10, one of the things that I do use quite the most is at the very beginning of Procreate and that is when you're creating a new canvas, you can set the canvas to a screen size or even a clipboard or something that you copy from like an image on Safari for instance that you actually want to draw some notes but you have the ability to choose from some of the pre-made layouts here by Procreate but also to go and create your custom canvas and you can choose by pixels, you can change the millimeters or centimeters or even inches and just going back here to pixels, if you set a desirable size, say that you're always doing stuff for Instagram and you want to create like a squarish canvas and you set your dimensions to 1024 by 1024 and then you can also name that canvas and you can keep that canvas saved into your layouts. So by the time you go back here and you want to create a new canvas, in my case here I already have a ghost paper square that is a 1048 but that is actually 2048 by 2048 kind of working double the size of 1024 in order to have a little bit more resolution because I actually want to do some of my artworks. I want to post them on Instagram but also have the ability to resize and crop them for dribble for example and you can do that for like many custom and other sizes. So you can start with the right kind of canvas instead of having to start something with a screen size for example and then here and then after realizing they have to change, they have to go here back into the tools and I believe there is an option for resizing canvases and once you do that you have to account like whatever you have started. So in any case, it's really good to know that you can do those things right away from the beginning. So that's it for this video guys. I hope you guys enjoyed and I hope you had some really great educational value for you to learn a little bit more about Procreate as I share my top 10 list of features for this app. Also if you have any questions, make sure to put those questions in the comment section down below and I will try my best to answer every single one of you. Please make sure to drop a like to this video and subscribe to the channel if you're new. Also on the right side here of the video there is a couple recommended videos. One is my latest upload and the other one is a video that YouTube is recommending for you to watch. Make sure to check those out as well and I'll see you guys on the next one. Tchau!