PROCREATE 20 TOP TIPS - Beginner and advanced

Okay in today's tutorial I'm going to give you my top tips, I'm going to give you 20 of them. There are some things that if you're using this app you absolutely must do in my opinion. So the first thing, number one, when you first get your app Procreate or even if you've been using it for quite a while I really strongly recommend you go to the wrench settings, go to preferences, go to the edit pressure curve and make sure that you're creating a curve that looks something like that. Now by default it's going to set it to a straight line but trust me you'll see that when you press this in the normal setting you're going to have to press really hard compared to when you actually change the pressure curve so it's steeper at the beginning of that curve you're going to find this much better and it's going to respond much quicker. It basically means you have to apply less pressure, less force for it to start to generate forms therefore you can have a much lighter touch on your canvas and it's going to start making a mark, making your brush strokes much more easily. You don't want to be pressing on too hard especially if you have a screen protector. Number two, we go back to our wrench symbol, go back to our preferences and we're going to edit the gesture controls so go to your gestures, go to general and the way I've got it set is that I disable touch actions so anything you do with the fingers on the screen now is only going to be the gestures whether it's double tap fingers to undo or three fingers to redo, pinch and zoom. If you don't have it toggled here what you'll find is that you'll accidentally create marks and gestures with your fingers with your knuckles without realising it and it's such a nuisance. So just again go to your preferences, go to gesture controls, go to general, disable touch actions and you're fine to set up. Your finger will not accidentally create any marks, it's only the Apple Pencil that's going to operate on your canvas. Now one of the new features of the Apple Pencil 2 specifically, so if you have the Apple Pencil 1 you don't need to worry about this but if you do have the Apple Pencil 2 there is a tap function on the pencil. Now by default it alternates between the brush and the eraser and it's a complete nuisance in my experience. It seems like a really nice concept but I absolutely hate it. So if you want to disable that, go to your settings, go to the Apple Pencil and within this you can see you can choose what the double tap actually does. I've switched it off, I'm forever accidentally triggering it, I absolutely can't stand that function. Maybe for some people you hold it in a very specific way and you find that you're hardly ever doing that. I move it around naturally without realising and I'm forever triggering these things that I don't want and I'm erasing, I'm adding a brush stroke, accidentally erasing it, it's just a total nuisance. So I always leave it as off. I think it's a much better to only know that you're going to be adding things rather than accidentally erasing or any other function. Back within the Procreate app, again go back to our wrench symbol and within the preferences, so many of these are actually quite useful but if you're left-handed you'll find that you're drawing from this side and perhaps you want your sliders, really easy, toggle this between left and right, there you go. You may also find that you don't want it in the middle, you want it a little bit higher up, in which case you can just swipe in from the middle point if you can just catch it right like that and then you can move it up or you can move it down. It will stay there once you put it there so you'll get used to wherever it puts it but again gives you that bit more flexibility. Back on our wrench symbol for number five we've got the rapid undo delay. Now if you put this really low on the rapid undo delay it means that when you've done a load of marks and you want to undo all of them you hold two fingers down and it quickly starts, in fact immediately starts pretty much, undoing all of those and equally with the three fingers to put them back. Now it's easy actually to make a double contact with two fingers sometimes on the glass and it accidentally undoes things. In order to avoid that I recommend you put that a little bit higher, somewhere I would say above half a second. I put it somewhere around the 0.7 seconds so I'll demonstrate it now that I have to hold it a little bit longer. So I'm going to put the two fingers down now and it just gives you a little bit of a delay, stops you accidentally doing it quite as much and it's still not the end of the world to wait that a little bit longer. Just guarantees that you're only delaying or you're only deleting rather the things that you absolutely want to delete. But number six, really useful one. If you put this at a low percentage the mask visibility and you select something with the freehand setting would help. If you select something it has actually selected that and not selected everything else but you can barely see the difference. Now if you go back onto your preferences and you increase the mask visibility you can really see at this point where that comes in. Now you don't want to have it on 100% or anywhere close because you won't see anything else but you don't want it anywhere near the zero either otherwise you can't see exactly what you selected. So I would put it up somewhere higher, somewhere around the 20 to 30 percent. Feels about right, you can still see the background and if you leave it as that it's going to be much more useful. You can see what you're actually doing with that. Now the next one within preferences, we have a brush cursor. Now if you are adding color to an area and let's just select a brush for this. So if we go to the hard brush we have picked our size brush and we turn the opacity up and you're wanting to just fill in a certain area without the cursor, not got very much to gauge it with but you can see with the line exactly where it's going to fill it in. You can see the edge of your brush, it's got a little black line around it basically. Now if you're using a softer brush you'll see the edge of that brush. If I move into a section you'll see it more clearly. So you won't have a definite edge to that brush but you can see now with a solid black line or the black line rather from the cursor exactly where the edge of that now falls. Now if you change brush and go for a more textured brush you'll see even more clearly now. So again we'll change the size of the brush so you can see this better. We'll turn the saturation up but you should be able to see the outline of the actual brush shows you the texture and yeah it's just more useful. So like I say if you're using the soft brush where it doesn't have a definite edge to it and you can't easily see where the edge is, by using this you can actually be guaranteed to not go beyond the point where you want it to. It allows you to create a sharper edge even with a softer or a more textured brush. Okay top tip number eight. You might find that you're in the middle of the painting, you've been using a textured brush of some sort and you want to erase a section but your eraser tool is set to a completely different type of brush. Now one way of automatically putting that across is to go to your eraser tool, press and hold and then when you actually look it's now selected the brush that you were using within the brushes section. So you can apply positive marks with the brush and then you can also erase with the same texture. Well that's a little bit over the top but if you reduce the size of the opacity on the brush you'll see you'll erase with exactly the same kind of texture and it's going to preserve that consistent kind of look of whatever you're working on. Okay top tip number nine. If there's an area on a layer that you want to select there is an option of using the automatic tool but if you click on an area you might find that it doesn't quite select it exactly as you want with a tap. You might be looking it might just select it exactly as you want but another way of doing that is to tap and hold and then slide it to the right or slide it to the left and you might just be able to find the exact amount that you're looking to select. Gets a little bit awkward when you have something as textured and detailed as this but when you're using at the beginning perhaps you've got simpler shapes then it is a really useful threshold finder much better than just relying on the automatic tool to do it exactly for you. So you can slide it left and right and it will deselect for you. Okay top tip number 10. It's probably one that most of you will know but it's surprising how many people don't necessarily know. If you're wanting to get back to filling the full frame so you can see the full image all you need to do with two fingers is just pinch in quickly and it will fill the whole your canvas to fit the screen. So a lot of the time I might be zoomed into a section and I just want to quickly look back at the whole image and then it does that for you. Pinch back out and it'll put you back where you were exactly. So again two fingers pinching quickly lets you see the whole canvas. Pinch back out with those two fingers and it puts you back exactly where you were. Okay top tip number 11. A similar way to achieve what we just did then with the pinching in and pinching out is to use a reference on the actual screen at all times. So if you go to the canvas you can toggle the reference and it's automatically put the image that you're working on within that reference and you can just tuck it away in the top corner. If you want to zoom into it a little bit you can do this within this small box as well. So you might want to get an overview. It's almost like standing back from your canvas. If you were doing a real painting that's something you would do quite a lot. If you want to continue to get the overall effect as you're working and it updates it rather live as you're working. So if I just go to one of my airbrushes. Go to the hard brush you can see it nice and clearly. Make it nice and bright with the white and you can see here everything I'm doing here is now transferring onto there. We'll do that on the top layer so you can see even more clearly and you'll see it updates it live. So really great. Now if you were to put a photograph in there instead obviously that's another reason why it exists as a feature and you can tap and hold the colours within your reference image and then you can start using it straight away. Okay top tip number 12. If you've got an image here and like I was just showing you starting to use some of the colours then that's the best way to create a palette. So there is an example of a colour palette here that I used on my latest tutorial. Landscape tutorial. And typically the way that I would do that is to find a reference image and I would open it in Procreate. Perhaps as a full image or as a window here and I would pick out the colours that I think are the most important colours there. I would zoom in, isolate the colour that I feel is the most appropriate. I would go to my colour palette here and I would tap on there and you can start to construct your own colour palette. So putting in a reference image whether it's your own work or it's a photograph that you've taken or whether it's a photograph you found on the internet. Pull it up into Procreate, find the exact colours that you want, press and hold, put it in your colour palette and that's how you, that's how I would create a colour palette. That way you can be really sure rather than just making it up on the spot that your colours are going to work together as a colour scheme. Okay top tip number 13 which slightly contradicts kind of what I was saying but I do think it's important to have your colour set up to begin with but then when you're in the middle of a painting you can be too restricted by the colours that you've pre-selected. What I strongly advise is that you start to use the local colours that you've actually created. So it might be for example that you've got an area here and you want to continue some of the things that you've got here but you shouldn't automatically go back to your colour palette to find the colours that you might need. What I recommend is you find an appropriate colour that fits with what you've already got, press and hold and when you press and hold you can see the top half of the circle and you can move it around to exactly get the colour you want, find the colour you want, use your brush and you can continue working on it somewhere else. I've actually got the wrong layer selected there which is why it's creating that effect. We've got the layer set to a different thing but you can see you can start adding the colour you've just selected locally and it will use it in the appropriate way and it will blend in much better than keep dipping back to colours that you started with right at the beginning. Okay we're getting to the much more specific things now for the images that I like to produce but I think they're some for me of the much more useful tips that I can offer you at this stage. So number 14, when you are actually creating an image on your layers, one thing I really strongly recommend is that you play around with the layer properties to try and increase the richness, saturation, the kind of bold colours that you've actually selected and use the layers to help you push it up a notch. So initially I usually find that I'm quite hesitant with my colours and I'll show you an example in this painting of what I mean. So I've got some really quite bold colours and contrasts going on at the minute but when I started and I'll start reducing some of the layers so that you can see what I'm talking about. When I started, I started off with a drawing, I started to add some vague sense of where the colours were going but the next step, and I knew that this would work really well, is that I added a layer and I don't know whether you can see this very clearly, if I get rid of the other layers you can perhaps see it better now, but it is just a layer where I imported an image that had the general colours of what I was going for. So as it happens it was one of my previous tutorials that was of lightning and I imported that as a layer and I just completely blurred it out so it created a sense of colour and I knew it would add to what I was already working on and bring the richness of the colours up a notch. But that only works because I changed the layer properties so by default when I put it in it would have gone to, where is it, it would have gone to normal and you can see it would have done nothing particularly useful. The useful part comes in when you go to this little box here, scroll up and down and I chose the overlay option because it completely ramped up the colours that I was using for. It made me think much more boldly in terms of the kind of colours and the effect that I was going for and then I started to go from that point on. So then I started to add more details, more layers and we progressed from that point on. So I highly recommend wherever you're up to your painting dropping in another layer, blurring it out so it's just a colour reference. But yeah with that layer dropped in put it to something like an overlay on the settings and it really helps bring everything up a notch. So if I reduce it you'll see what it's like without it and there you can see what it's like with it. Now clearly I put that in fairly early on and then I continued with the detail knowing that the detail was being added on top of those rich colours so it's not quite right to remove it now. It never really looked like some of these areas as I was working with it. I did this quite early on knowing it would ramp up the colour scheme and then have continued to add the details. Okay top tip number 15 is actually quite similar to the last one. If you have a layer for example and you're quite happy with the effect what I recommend you do is you duplicate that layer in some cases and sometimes the addition of an additional layer pushes everything up a notch. It doesn't work in that example but it might be that you go to that background image and duplicate it and you might find that you really like the way that it changes some of your areas. Now I used one of these layers to get it to this point and although I quite like some of the things it's doing in some of these darker areas I feel like it's too much in others but that's not a problem. I could go to that layer and I could decide with my eraser if I go to an appropriate brush I go to the soft brush within the eraser settings go to my layer now this is going to affect the second layer now I might decide that I don't want it to impact on a certain area over here so I could delete it in some areas but I could choose to keep it in some other areas if I feel like it's really enriching the overall look of my painting. Okay top tip number 16 if you can't quite remember where the detail you've been creating is on your layers what you can do is you can go to your layers look at the little tick in the box press and hold it and it's going to isolate everything apart from what you have on that layer so now I can really see what's on that layers. I tend to use separate layers at each stages so if I'm not quite sure something's going to work I'll create another layer work on top and only when I'm satisfied that that layer is now really benefiting the layer below it then I'll pinch them down and merge them but if you're not quite sure what's on a particular layer you can do that to isolate the layer and then you press and hold and it brings it all back so we try that with a different layer press and hold isolated everything on that layer now and again press and hold and it undoes that. Now you don't need to have pre-selected the layer if you just go straight to the layer press and hold and you can see you can go between all the different layers in that way just like that again if you want to bring them back wherever you're up to wherever the tick is press and hold it brings everything back. Okay my top tip number 17 is that if you've done a sketch for a design and you put it into your canvas and you then you start wanting to add color to your design then so I'll go back to my initial stage with this undo all the top layers that I've created and I started with a pencil study like this for example when you put it in by default or you start with a normal canvas it will be on normal perhaps. Now I've done some strange things to that already so it doesn't quite give the overall impression but you can see some bits of what I transferred remain and it had a normal white background. Now normally what would happen if you start adding things to it you'd see that white background and you'd have to work on the actual layers on top and it would be a nuisance because any paint you apply over the top of the image you're not going to see your pencil drawing underneath it and anything underneath your drawing you wouldn't see so what I always do when I put a drawing as one of my layers is I go to the little n symbol here go all the way up to the top and put on multiply so when I started out I hadn't created any of these top layers I started out with my pencil drawing as you can still see here I created a layer underneath my pencil drawing and I knew when I was going to draw something underneath it so I'll find an appropriate color now that you'll still be able to see when I did something underneath the color's being applied but it's going underneath the actual drawing itself and it's not obscuring it so just to recap when you're adding a drawing change it from normal to multiply and then work on a layer underneath to start building up some of your colors you'll still be able to see the pencil lines and it will start adding color and the really great thing about that when you get to a certain point is that when you remove the pencil lines you'll be left with a much nicer more painterly look to your picture and obviously I've got lots of layers on top now and yeah the pencil lines that I originally created are not to be seen even though they serve their purpose at this point okay top tip number 18 very much related to the last one keep your drawing layer as a separate layer don't add colors don't paint on the same layer that you've actually added as your drawing layer it's really much better once you've added all your detail you can still see this pencil lines you'll spend ages trying to just refine blend them in if if you've been adding color to that layer keep it as a separate layer when it comes to the correct point you can just untick it and it completely disappears the influence that it's had is still there but the actual pencil lines are no longer needed so you can just untick it and it's also there in case you want to try it on a different canvas so you've not destroyed it you've still got it there preserved and you can do other things with it at a later point as well top tip number 19 if you're creating an image and you're not quite sure whether the overall effect is working then something i find really useful if you go to your wrench settings on your canvas and you can flip it horizontally and you can just look at the whole image but flipped over so you're looking at it a bit like you're looking at your own face in the mirror or suddenly then you see it as other people see it in a photograph you can just see it in a different way and sometimes it really shows you how you've been creating an emphasis and or a lean in your images a certain way and you might not like the way it looks when you invert it and you might feel that you need to balance it a little bit more and it reveals things to you what's working and what's not working really useful i do that quite a lot now you'll find that artists in the past used to use mirrors to create that effect so they actually hold a mirror up to their own work look in the mirror look in the reflected version of their work and they'll be able to see it afresh for a moment and you can't you can overdo that you really need to use this sparingly but at critical junctures in your painting if you just flip it horizontally you get an alternate view on it and it can be really enlightening really helpful now bear in mind if you are creating a video time lapse of your painting process then it is also going to flip it which can be quite jarring a little bit irritating when you play it back but i don't tend to worry about that too much so i find it quite useful okay top tip number 20 i'm including this one because it's relevant to what i'm creating here so for example i'm creating a an effect of light appearing in my scene so i'll create another layer to illustrate what i'm trying to show you here and i'll put it above everything else and what i'm trying to do in places is create a sense that there's almost like a lightning bolt that's going behind some of our forms and it's illuminating transparently through some of these textures and when i want it to be revealed i want it to seriously glow now there's different ways that you can do this but there's a really quicker way that you can do that now with the new settings you can go to the color of your choosing and you can get most of the way there if you use a soft brush for example and you put your opacity up you can achieve quite a nice effect if you go to your white reduce the size of the brush and you can get part way there manually and then you can start playing around with your gaussian blur and go back into it and you can start to build up this effect but without any of that i've just created a little detail there i can very simply now go to my adjustments go to my bloom i'm going to affect the whole layer and i can just slide it across and you can instantly see that it's really made it glow and really made it appear very neon like now it's not to say that that will do all of the work for you you still have to try and make it fit in with the surrounding things so you have to show how the light would then interact with your environment but it just saves a lot of hassle a lot of time to just use the bloom tool it'll really ramp up your glowing effects okay i hope my top tips have been useful in some way to you if you've liked this video make sure to press the bell notification when you subscribe to get notified about new videos check through my playlist i've got all sorts of tutorials landscapes other kind of elemental tutorials like water and fire and things like that if you're still struggling with procreate and all of the things that you can do with it well then there is a link at the top of the screen now for a full procreate app guide anyway hope this has been helpful i'll see you back here another time see you later