Learn Procreate Fast | Beginner’s Guide to Digital Art on iPad

Hi, my name is Rahim Nelson. Welcome to my channel. I'm a visual artist and we're going to be going over some basics in Procreate. So I'm going to launch the app and then from there I can pick my canvas. I'm just going to go with the default for the purposes of the demo. I select that and it creates a new sheet of paper and it opens up. Two fingers lets you zoom in, expand, and then also shrink the image and you have a ton of different options from gallery settings. Then from there I can select my colors. You have a color wheel, hot, cool colors, pretty much all the colors of the rainbow are at your disposal. So I'm just showing you that you can have the color wheel. You also have these swatches that you can go through and then complimentary colors, warm and cool. The program enables you to do all those things. It's great because if you're going for a particular look and feel you can easily achieve that in the Procreate app. Different brushes. You can also make custom brushes. I'm trained as a cartoonist and an oil painter so I go back and forth between the two. Just showing you how you can zoom in and zoom out now. That is your slider to make the brush bigger or smaller. Very useful. And that is a slider for the transparency of your brush or your pencil. So I'm just going to put some paint down on the canvas. Very painterly, very loose. Just showing you how the program works. Mixing in another lighter blue and then another blue as well. Just filling up the page. This is an exercise I usually do with my students or anybody that's not familiar with digital painting. Those are the layers. I consider those like sheets of tracing paper that you put on top of each other. You can make copies easily and manipulate them from there. You have a lot of flexibility. So if you're familiar with Photoshop layers it's like that. If you're not just consider them pieces of tracing paper that you can put over each other. Putting down some warmer colors and as you can see I turn the slider down on the left side to create translucent paint. So you can see through to the layer that is beneath this one to see some warm and cool colors which is really great. I'm also trained in oils like I mentioned. So I'm utilizing some techniques like that in terms of layering. You can paint like a traditional painter in a sense with a lot more flexibility because of the layers. And I love just putting paint on canvas and creating abstracts and it's a great way to learn the program the ins and outs of how to use Procreate. And this is the blender tool so I'm able to push the paint around and it just gives you a great effect. All the brush tools you have in your library you can also use for blending. So if you can want to paint in oils you can do that and then switch to another brush you can blend it in a different way. You just get these really cool effects at the end of the day. Blending is probably one of my favorite tricks that you can do in Procreate because it feels so natural. If you tap gallery that automatically saves your painting and you can go back in and then create more work from there. There's also a time lapse feature which is automatic. You can go in the settings and change it if you like but every time you create a brushstroke or a line the program is recorded in the background. So this is great for social media like YouTube and Facebook. You can also export as a PSD Procreate file which is native to Procreate. PSD, PNG, a lot of different files. So you can save it to your library if you like. You can also email it to someone. I do this a lot with clients like I'll be working on something and I can send them an email or send them a text and they just get the file from there. All from within the program which just makes it a lot easier to get your work out in the world. So closing that out. You also have different select tools. You can take a piece of your painting and move it around. Manipulate it. A lot of different options for creating artwork. So I carved out a circle moving that around and you can see through to the other side the layer that's on the bottom. It's a pretty cool feature. And if I want to undo it's just the arrows left and right. Tap one of those and then I can undo everything. Or a two-finger tap as well for the gestures. So a lot of different options in terms of having flexibility with your workflow. That turns the layer on and off. You're just either leaving it checked or unchecked. And then that's the entire piece there. Gallery like I mentioned will bring you back to the main menu and automatically save your work. If you want to start a new piece you can do that. Same thing as before. Blank page. Going back into colors. Different swatches. And then I'm going to go through the different brush tools. Sketching is a lot of fun as well. It works just like how you think it would. If you hold your pencil on its side you can kind of create like a graphite charcoal kind of sketch. Which is really fun for drawing from life. I do this a lot with my students. And drawing from life is a great way to just keep your skills razor sharp. So being able to do that and procreate is a godsend. You just have a lot of options. You can create custom brushes. I typically use what's in the brush library or I'll go on Gumroad and download a few different brushes. Oil paints are definitely my favorites to use. And moving the slider like I mentioned will make your brush bigger or smaller. And if you press down hard you're able to utilize the pressure sensitivity of the apple pencil. So hope you enjoyed the video. I'll be doing more of these and I will see you on the next one.