PROCREATE TOP TIPS 12 MORE - Beginner to Advanced level

This video is made in partnership with Brush Galax. All right, I've already done 20 Procreate top tips and I've got an additional 12 now to show you. So give these a watch, if you find these useful then you might want to go back and watch the other 20 on my other video and there'll be a link for that in the description and at the end of the video as well. Okay tip number one, now when I'm doing my Procreate landscape tutorials the first thing that I need to do usually is create a color palette. Now sometimes it'll be really simple, I can just make it up, but more often than not I'll find some kind of photographic reference and I will take inspiration from those colors. And a really quick and easy way of doing that in fact is to go to your colors, go to your color palettes, which I'm on now, press the plus symbol and you can create from photos. Now if you've saved a reference image that you find really inspiring color-wise and it's already in your photo gallery, you can click on here, it will show you the pictures that you've got. All you need to do is click on one of them, this is one of my paintings that I've just clicked on, and it just creates all the colors that now you can use in your painting. So sometimes you can find a color palette, you can drag it across, let go in that space and you can see it's recreated pretty much the colors that are there. And that goes exactly the same for a photo, so if we find a photo, we want to drag it across, we can put that photo in there and it's grabbed those colors. Sometimes in a painting you just really want to add the pure color that you've been using, a pure white, a pure black or kind of like a pure gray. All you need to do is go nearby to the area where you imagine the white, the black or the pure color is going to be and double tap and it snaps automatically to the purest version in that region. So let's say we want the white, double tap there, it's gone straight to white. Double tap near the black, it's gone straight to the black. Double tap near the gray, it's gone straight to the gray. But really useful if you want solid black or you want solid white or the absolute most saturated version of that color, really useful. Okay, let's move away from colors. Let's just say that you want to have several different brush types that you're using throughout a painting and you want to toggle, change your brushes all the time without having to go to your brushes and scroll down and select and then select. It can be a little bit time consuming and there's a quick way of doing it if you know you're going to regularly swap your brushes. The way that I do it is if you go to the wrench symbol, go to preferences, go to your gesture controls and on the quick menu, what I've got it set to is touch. So that means whenever I press my finger on the screen, the quick menu will come up. Now what I've done for each one of these is I've changed it to a different brush type. So when you press and hold on that, it gives you all these different options that you can set your quick menu to. And like I say, I've gone within the select brush, I've then gone for sketching and I think I had it set to 6B. So once we've got this set up, what you can do, now it's set to touch is you can press the screen and you can toggle between the different brushes that you have here. Now, if you're capable of getting really memorised where those brushes are, instead of going tap and tap to the 6B, which was up to the right, or soft brush, which was down to the right, we can just swipe up or swipe down. So it's one gesture. So swipe up gets us the 6B and swipe down gets us the airbrush. Likewise, if we swipe up, we get the Leatherwood brush, swipe to the left, we get the Pandani, swipe to the bottom left, we get the other airbrush and swipe down, we get the HP pencil. And if you get memorised with these different brushes and where they are placed, then that could be a really useful way of quickly accessing them. Okay, the next step. Now let's just say that you've got a layer where you've got all sorts of things that you've experimented with and you don't like it. An easy way of getting rid of it is to use the three fingers and just swipe them across like this and it clears that entire layer. You can go into the layers and you could have done that with a few taps and press clear. It's just a quicker way of doing it and just a bit more efficient. Now just like we were quickly selecting between the different brushes we're using, if you're using a couple of different colours, say if you're using black and white in a piece and you just want to keep switching between the two, let's say we just use black in an area and you've used white previously, press and hold and now it selects the white. Press and hold the colour again and it goes back to the black. Now it's only useful if you've got two colours that you're toggling between but it can be a really useful feature if you're using like two main colours over a duration. Now tip number six, when you are using the sliders, sometimes it's easy to just whiz past the actual number you want and you just spend a bit of time just trying to carefully hover to the number you want. A quicker way of doing that or a more precise way of getting to the exact number is just slide what you're doing to the left and you can see now I'm still operating the slider, it's just going up more gradually so you have to cover a larger distance with the Apple Pencil before it actually changes that percentage. You can do that with your finger as well, so if you're moving the slider up and down and you just want to get to 10%, you can just slide across and you can go down to 9% and it takes a lot further distance to slide between those percentage numbers. It just really helps you get to the precise percentage that you want. Okay, top tip number seven, if I've got an area selected with the transform tool and I want to just nudge it one way or the other and I'm finding it difficult to do it too precisely, I've got it selected so I can just zoom in here, I can tap just to the side and it moves it ever so slightly, nudges it in the direction where I might want it to go and it's just a better way than perhaps trying to do that and it going up and down and all over the place gets a little tricky doing it that way so tapping it just that way just nudges it enough so you can get that perfect alignment. Okay, top tip number eight, let's say you've got an image where you don't want to merge down all the layers, you want them to be a separate layer so you can alter them independently but there is something you want to do to the whole scene. Now there's a few ways that you can do that, one of the ways that I think is really cool is slide it just slightly to the right and you can see it's now selecting all of those layers, don't have to do it with every single one and then if you do something, for example, like using the liquify tool and you push something around, it's going to affect all of those layers rather than just one small part of them, it's got all of them selected so everything now selected will have been pushed around so obviously that's an extreme example but let's just say you wanted to expand an area and you didn't want to do it that much, maybe you just wanted to make a bit more of the trees, maybe of the background as well, I don't know. It doesn't really work for this example but you can get the point that you can affect multiple layers with a certain effect or do something to them without having to merge them together which then means when you untick them or press one of them, it deselects it, you can still use all the layers independently without having to create them into one layer. Now another tip, now it's not one of the 12 but this video is affiliate link to Brush Galaxy and they offer a brush subscription service where you can unlock over 20,000 different premium Procreate brushes. Now you can go there and you can unlock a three months trial, there's tons of different categories from lettering, nature, pattern, all those kind of things, do go and check it out. There's a link for this down in the description and it will be pinned in the comments section as well. Any purchases there, any money spent there will really benefit the channel here as well. I've had a go at it, I really think it's a fantastic service so go and check it out and get experimenting with different brushes. Okay, top tip number nine and she's very similar to the last one. If you want to have the ability to affect the whole image without actually merging down the layers, you can just go to the wrench symbol, click the plus symbol, copy canvas and then sometimes you need to click out of it, go back into it and click paste. It will actually now, when you look back in your layers, you've got a whole version of that image that it has now copied and pasted the entire image. So it's taken all of those different layers at the same resolution and put them back in there and you can actually do something with that entire image now if you wanted. Sometimes I will do that and it can be really useful and you've still got all the separate layers in case you run into difficulties. Okay, top tip number 10. When you go to a layer where you've got a certain detail on there and it might be, it's not gonna make much sense for this now because we have a reflection and everything else, but let's just say that you wanted to select a tree. In fact, let's use the freehand selection. We select a tree and we want to potentially move it around. Now, one way of doing it is with the transform tool and you can place it somewhere else, but once you have deselected that now, it is still part of that same layer and you can't separate that tree that you moved. Once you tapped it in and you continue working, you'd have to backtrack all the way till you get to the point where it was separated again. So I'll move forward again. Let's just say that on my brushes, I've continued to add all these extra dark colors. Well, there's no way that I can retrieve that tree anymore because it was on the same layer and now it's lost forever. Better way to have done that would have been to three finger down and to cut and paste and that way, we can move it to the same place and you moved it there and then you go back to that layer, continue working as I was saying, and then you realize, I wanted to put that tree somewhere differently. Well, you have actually created on a different layer. So there it is. You can go on that layer, you can use the transform tool and you can move it somewhere differently again. Bear in mind if it's an element that you're going to want to potentially keep moving and experimenting in different areas, you're as well to cut and paste that specific image so it's on a different layer and then you can move it around. Okay, tip number 11. Now you're probably familiar with quick shape and you can use this in any brush. It's a bit strange with the Leatherwood brush. So we'll go down to, we'll go up to something more visible. So we'll use this 6B pencil. I'll zoom in. Let's just say you've created a circle. Press and hold. It will get you to a more precise looking ellipse in this case and you can go on to edit shape and you can change it to a circle. But a better way of doing that or a quicker way of doing that once you've created this is to snap and then with another finger, you see you've been able to turn it into a circle and you can keep pressing or unpressing to change between the oval and the circle and that works for all your different shapes. So if you've got a triangle, it'll give you a better version of what you've done. As soon as you press with the finger, it gives you an equilateral triangle and if you continue to rotate it, it actually rotates it in smaller increments of 15 degrees until you get the exact positioning of that shape as well. Now that obviously works for a straight line. Snap and hold. With the other finger pressed, you can actually move it through increments like that as well and you can shorten it or lengthen it in addition to that. So you might have been familiar with the quick shape tool but you can see it has some really extra functions that are super useful as well. Now, top tip number 12 is a little bit of a controversial one. It's a tip that I can see the usefulness of it but it's also a little bit of a way of pretending that you're a better artist than perhaps you are. It's not something that I 100% agree with. It's not something I employ myself but I know there's a ton of different people out there that are utilizing this technique and if you want to be one of them and you want to show a video, a time-lapse of your work at the end and you've been using an image in there to perhaps trace outlines and you don't want it in there because it's going to ruin your timeline video and it could just be because you don't think it looks as good to have certain layers in there. It's going to ruin the flow of it or if you're trying to conceal it, then a way of doing that is to go to your wrench symbol and where it says insert a photo, you can slide it and you can insert a private photo. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start another canvas just to show you this. So I've got an A4 canvas now. I can do the same thing again and go to insert a photo, insert a private photo and let's just pick the same image that I was using anyway. That's now in there and when we go to our layers, you can see it says private. So once you've got your private layer, if you work on a layer on top, everything you do with the layer on top, even though you've actually been tracing it, so arguably you've been cheating. I'm doing this extremely roughly. I'm not making use of the fact that, you know, it is a tracing layer. I just want to show you the fact that this is something that people do. So don't be fooled. This is perhaps an educational thing more than a top tip. Maybe you don't want to do this and I hope that you would give drawing and painting a genuine effort and a go without resorting to tracing because actually there's a lot to be learned through observation and doing your best to have a go at this. But the point is when you time-lapse replay, all it will show in those stages is the layer above the thing that you've traced. So I do see a lot of videos of people showing time-lapses in order to prove that their work hasn't involved tracing and cheating, whereas actually it doesn't prove very much because you can just have a hidden layer anyway. So don't be fooled. I don't say that in a mean-spirited way, but just be aware that not everything is as it appears on the internet. And when you look at people's work and you think there are just so many amazing artists out there, maybe a good proportion of them might be tracing and cheating a little bit. So don't be too disheartened. Stick with the basic principles of trying to get better through observation. I think that's a much better route for you to take as an artist. That's the route that I always take as an artist to rely upon my observational skills to keep fine-tuning, improving those skills. That's the most important thing, I think. Okay, I hope you've enjoyed these 12 more top tips. The original 20 are linked up in the top corner and there's a link for them down in the video description as well. Please do check out my other videos and all my tutorials. Make sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification to make sure you do get notified of any upcoming videos that I release. And I shall catch you back here soon. See you later.