Transform Photos into Paintings in Procreate

Greetings everyone and welcome to the beta version of Procreate 4. I've been waiting a long time for this update and it brings some very cool new features to it. I just wanted to give you a quick demonstration of what you can do with the new smudge tool. Now the smudge tool has changed a lot since the previous version and in all honesty the previous version it wasn't really a smudge tool it just kind of force blended everything and created a big mess. But the new smudge tool is much improved and you can create some very cool effects with it. I'm just going to show you a very quick example of how we can use the smudge tool to make a photograph look like a painting. Let's dive into it. So let's start by going back to the gallery. So what we're going to do here is instead of clicking on the plus icon to create a new canvas we're going to start from an existing photo. So we're going to click photo and we're select any photo that looks kind of interesting. So let's say that we would want to make this one look like it was actually drawn. So as you can see this is a photograph of a pavement and there's a lot of cracks here and it has kind of a cool texture to it. Now let's just take a small portion of this image and let's not focus on the entire image because it's going to take a very long time to illustrate. So let's go to the smudge tool and select oil paint. Decrease the brush size and increase the opacity of it. Now the new smudge tool gives you the ability to drag pixels around and blend them with the existing colors on the photograph. So essentially what you can do is you can drag this pixel around kind of do this motion. Whatever kind of texture that you're looking for you can just kind of either do circles, do lines, do small iterations. You can dive really deep into it and decrease the brush size if you want a lot of detail. But let's, for the sake of this video, let's just increase the brush size and just do a sort of a side stroke texture. And now for the plants over here, the little grass thingy here, I'm going to decrease the brush size and I'm going to just kind of slowly try to get the edges of it approximately at the same place that it's on the picture. Increase the brush size again and go back to the smudging. Now I'm kind of doing a combination of strokes. I'm going both vertical and doing kind of circles and just trying to get the colors to blend in a way that it makes the colors flow into each other like it's part of nature. Because obviously when you blend these together you lose the detail that is already there. Unless of course you really want to go into every single pixel and you want to just kind of blend it very carefully. You can do that. Of course you can do that and you can smudge this little straw here away so that it looks like it was never there. Now one thing to keep in mind when you're doing this is you have to think about at what size is this photograph or is this image going to be viewed at. If you're going to be creating an image that is going to be printed out in this scale, you see that all of the fine little details that I was kind of making on these straws right here or these plant matter, it doesn't matter. You don't need to go into that much detail. But if you're going to be doing a very high res photograph, printing it out in like three meters or something like that, you're going to see that the details really start to matter at that scale. Now as you can see the painting is really starting to come into life right now. Now I've been really going quick. I haven't really been paying attention to the details of the image. Now I could go into much more detail on every single corner here and try to get the texture right and develop a technique which kind of makes this image come to life if you will. But for the sake of this video I'm just going to leave it at this and you can start to see the possibilities of using this much tool. You can take portrait photos and turn them into paintings. You can take landscape photos and turn them into paintings. You know your imagination really is the limiting factor right here. And this is such an awesome, awesome addition to the Procreate app. But for now this is it for this video. I really want to thank you for watching. If you have any suggestions for the next video, leave a comment down below and I'll be sure to read it and go into it in a future video. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to thumbs up this video if you liked it, if it helped you out. I would much appreciate it. Until then, see you in the next one.