Understanding The Pressure Curve In Procreate

Hello everyone and welcome back to another video here on Ghost Paper. And for this mini tutorial session here, we're going to be taking a look at the pressure curve on Procreate and how to tweak it to your best needs, to your workflow and how you actually use it with the pressure that you usually apply when you're making your drawings. What I mean by that is that we all have different kinds of pressure that we apply when we're making our drawings. For me to better use an example here, I'm going to be using the two free brushes that I always list in the description box of my videos. This is also the case. So in this description box of this video, you'll see a link to my Gumroad link for this one and it's completely free. So we're going to be using the two examples. First, we're going to be using the one with tapering and pen pressure. And then we're going to be testing the one without pen pressure. And I'll show you guys a little hack as well. So starting with this one, I'm just going to set about 50% or so. You can see that if I apply a little bit of pressure and then lots of pressure, I can get some really nice results with this brush because I've really made it so that you can take full advantage of the pressure sensitivity on Procreate with the Apple Pencil. And as we know, or if you've been working with Procreate, the Apple Pencil is able to register minuscule changes in pressure and tilt with the Apple Pencil. Apple hasn't really set how many sensitivity levels the Apple Pencil first or second generation has. But in any case, as you use it, you definitely see that it's able to register quite a bit of pressure. So this is what I want to show you guys. First, we're going to be showing you where does the pressure controls live in Procreate. And secondly, how to tweak it the best way for your workflow. So this is a really good example, just showing you how much pressure you can apply with this brush. But let's just say that I'm just drawing a bit more of a straight lines here in different pressure controls. So starting really not a lot of pressure at the stroke, then applying more pressure towards the end, you see all the different results. But let's just say that I wanted something with a bit more control. Right now, the control is so wide that it's hard to actually achieve something similar within each stroke that I make here on the canvas. So that's what I want to show you first. Where does this option live? First, we have to go into the actions menu, and then make sure to go into the preferences. And then right above gesture controls, you see edit pressure curve. And this is the graph. This is the default settings for Procreate on the pressure curve. It's basically setting the minimum pressure at its lowest value and maximum pressure at its highest value. And if you ever have anything different here, you can create new Bezier points as well and control these, make very, very different graphs. But you can always hit reset, and those will always go back into default positions. And what are those default positions? As I've mentioned, lowest at its... Almost the lowest value and the highest value at its highest, meaning that once again, getting these controls are going to be as hard as possible because the values are set to minimum and maximum range. So one thing that I like to do right off the bat, I, for example, I like to lower this a little bit. And let's just say that I lower this about halfway. So now what I'm trying to say is that I don't need to apply as much pressure to get to the maximum amount. So I actually get more of a uniform effect because I don't need to apply as much pressure. And the beauty of that is that if I reduce the size of this brush, I can actually, for example, have a really nice effect, almost like if I was painting hair and hair details. Because now I've tweaked this brush so that it doesn't really get as wide as it can be because I am putting a cap on the pressure curve so that maximum size is always about halfway of this brush. I could also do the opposite and raise the minimum value to about halfway or even to the maximum. But by just doing halfway, you'll see that it will become quite hard to get a fine line because the minimum value has been capped to about halfway of its widest dimension. So once again, you're totally free to play with this curve because you can always just hit reset and you can always lower the maximum amount if you want to just work with some really nice fine lines that still maintain tapering and pen pressure. So another thing that I need to mention to you is that all of these values of pen pressure, they are linked to the properties of each brush. So I know this gets a little bit more complicated, but all that I'm trying to say is that on each brush, when you go into properties, you see brush behavior, you see the maximum size and minimum size, and that is represented here on the drawing pad every time you open the brush. So if I increase the maximum size, you see that I'm increasing the middle section here, which is the section with maximum pressure applied to this brush. If I increase the minimum size, it's increasing the tapered sections. So on this brush here, I've set it to a default level, which is maximum size to 100, minimum size to zero. And I'm leaving these values onto our pressure curve. So now you know that this value here represents 100 and this one represents zero. If I brush was set to zero and 400, this will represent 400 and this will represent zero. So I hope that this comparison now makes more sense. So finally, guys, I'm just going to delete this layer here and use the brush that doesn't have any tapering or pressure controls or anything. As you can see, it's always a straight studio pen kind of line. And this is one trick that I want to show you. Let's just say that you do want to have a little bit of pen pressure or tapering applied to this brush, but you don't really know how to go here and actually tweak these values because of course you can't turn them back on. But this brush specifically, I've made them different from each other. So one does have tapering and pen pressure and this top one doesn't have. And this is part of the free pack of brushes that I offer, but you can actually do a little bit of a hack here. So again, I'm going to set this about 36% on its size. And as you draw with your drawing hand, you keep your other hand on the size here. And as you draw, you can change the size of this brush. So you can start with something really low. And as you draw, you can increase it and then decrease it slowly as you draw. It is a little bit tricky as well, of course, to control like two hands as you're drawing, as you're trying to do something here. But just to show you, there is a bit of a hack that you can do, which is this one without having to go into the brush studio. And this top line here, this really interesting element is something that you can do by just kind of sliding, just tweaking the slide as you draw. And I'm not really sure what the usage of this could be, if this could be something for like maybe a nature scene or if this is some kind of an organism that you're drawing. But I'll leave your creativity to actually discover some usage for this one. So in any case, guys, just to recap, you can always access the pressure curve by going to the actions menu and preferences and clicking edit pressure curve. Make sure that after you play around with this, always make sure to reset because changes here will change every other brush, how you actually work with the other brushes. So it may cause some unexpected results. And finally, just know that if you kept the maximum size here, you'll have probably an easier way as you draw on Procreate. You don't have to actually apply a lot of pen pressure in order to get some really good results and you'll get more of an uniform line. So that about covers 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 for more news, tips and tricks, and speed paint videos. And that is all for you to become a better digital illustrator. Now, on the right side of the screen right here, there's more content for Procreate and other drawing apps for you guys to learn and spend some time since we're all doing this kind of a self-isolation thing, which is lasting for a while. But I just want to make sure that everyone's staying safe and that you're taking care of your loved ones. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys on the next one. Ciao!