TOP 12 PROCREATE Techniques and Tips!

Okay so I've been teaching Procreate for nearly 10 years at this point on YouTube and along the way I've learned quite a lot of tips and techniques that I think will be really useful for other people too. I've done tips and technique videos before but every now and again I feel like there's a collection more things that I really need to explain to people so here we are let's not waste any more time let's get straight to it. Now one of the things that I get messaged about regularly is the fact that the brush size doesn't seem to correlate between what people are doing themselves follow my tutorials and what they're watching. Now one of the things that I suggest to people is you go to the dynamic brush scaling and you toggle it on and it probably is like that by default but it might not be and the difference that makes if you turn it the brush to like one percent you zoom out it doesn't matter whether you zoom in or zoom out the brush is always going to appear the same size. If you toggle it off well it might appear one size at a certain place and it's you might not realize that actually you're affecting it by zooming in and out you obviously become aware of it when you zoom out like this and it makes a drastic difference compared to like this and really it's super important that you do toggle that on back to the wrench symbol go to the dynamic brush scaling and toggle it on and then it's going to stay consistent no matter where you are no matter how much you've zoomed in or not and that's my first top tip which is essential for anyone following my tutorials and probably any of the other tutorials that you see on YouTube as well. Now my next tip technique is about using brushes and experimenting with them now there's plenty of channels that require to go and download different brushes and I'm not criticizing that in anyone but I prefer to use the default brushes that come free with the app because people then ready to get started on the tutorial without any more complication or faffing but it might appear at first glance that some of these brushes are a bit limited certainly if you go to airbrushing or you go to charcoals you might not find the kind of texture that you really are looking for now all of my tutorials use the default brushes so I'm used to experimenting with what is there to try and get the most out of it and create interesting and different effects so when you go to a brush slide and reset this is how it will appear by default if you tap on it you have all the different settings within that brush now some of them I will never use and I don't really feel a need for but one thing that I always refer to in my tutorials is the stroke path and spacing so often I will turn it up so that the little grain or the particles of that brush become more expanded and spaced out so I'll show you at the default settings it's quite bunched together for example go in and space it say 60% and you get a completely different effect from that same brush I tend to use this brush for example I use it more condensed together if I want to represent foliage in the background there might be some of that more distant but all the leaves are kind of clustered together and you get a general effect but then we open it out as we start to represent some textures or even leaves another really good brush to show this off because of the artistic leatherwood brush and I'll reset it it appears by default like this when you tap on it and space it you get a completely different look an example of where I've used the leatherwood brush would be this image for example more spaced apart and then something like the motion blur just helps create this kind of effect in the waterfalls so this tree for example was made using a combination between the vintage rad brush the organic rainforest brush another brush that's hidden within organic is the snowgum brush by default it's quite clustered together as you can see and it also changes color so tap on it again increase the spacing and go to the color dynamics and we'll turn the hue jitter down to none and then we'll just move it and you get a completely different kind of effect what obviously leaves it doesn't change in color so on the original it's set by default to change color so you get more purples here we just get the same color on the drawing evolve brush it doesn't seem like it but when we go to the stroke path spacing put it more up towards like 50% it actually creates textures that can be really useful for distant foliage and clusters texture and actually really fascinating and really useful brush too so don't feel you need to go download a ton of different brushes be creative be experimental with the brushes that are here see what you can get them to do they're actually a lot more versatile than you might think at first glance now another really useful way of drawing is to not actually use the brushes at all and use the smudge instead now after drawing with the positive brush and creating grass in many tutorials i've found that now actually the better way to do it or sometimes the better way to do it is to use the smudge so within smudge for example we can go to something like studio pen within inking choose your appropriate size 100 opacity in this example and you can actually use it to push things around so you can use a lighter area push it around or you can go to darker areas and you can push that around and it's really useful because you can just take the localized colors that you may have already placed down and you can just push them around and come up with really easy way of creating grass as an example so you don't always have to use a brush sometimes you've already used other textures other brushes to lay down a texture you can then just use the smudge and you know it's just great layering up those kind of textures so a really quick tip don't feel restricted by the brushes if it's not quite working for you and you've laid down different textures already experiment with the smudge you never know it might just bring your drawing to life now the next tip is that maybe you've used the brush maybe you use the smudge and something isn't quite looking right you don't want to start again from scratch sometimes if you go to the adjustments the liquify and use the push find an appropriate size set your pressure you can actually go around and you can change the shape of whatever it is you happen to be drawing you can push things around you need to be careful you don't want to do it too much because it can look a little bit artificial you can see you can actually fundamentally change all sorts of aspects of your drawing maybe you just feel like it dips in there a little bit too much to a smaller size fill it out it's a little bit like performing kind of plastic surgery on your drawing is this little bump that you don't like and you want to get rid of it or you want to push an area make it a bit bigger then it's amazing what you can do you don't need to use the brushes you can use the liquify push to really amend your image as well likewise still within liquify you can go to something like expand to an appropriate size and you can use it more subtly and you can go and make more of certain features too now you need to be careful with both these because you can easily get an obviously distorted look but use it carefully i'll put up to 100 you could take the whole top section and expand it out more if you wanted to so it's not just a case of using the brush or the smudge to really create things actually using the adjustments liquify can be really useful as well now the next tip is to use brushes and the smudge to help you create a more painterly look for example we can go to smudge put it on something like the painting jagged brush we can just go in there and we can push it around find those sharp edges whenever you've created an image and i suppose you could put do this with a photograph as well i'm more interested personally in manipulating your own drawings and paintings you can see using this kind of smudge with a painterly brush you can turn something that was more realistic into something that is much more painterly and kind of expressive you can see this whole section has changed it's dynamic and you can do that i've got this as a flattened image so i'm not destroying anything that i've already created be careful with it it's a way of just changing the quality sometimes you might be really happy with things a lot more crisp other times you just want to experiment and just see what it would be like it was a more painterly impression the turpentine brush is a really great one as well because it just pushes that color around really well it gives you brush marks really useful so within smudge painting brushes you can turn whatever image you've created no matter how realistic it may start with how photographic or whatever effect it could be more simple even more blocky but by using the smudge with those painting brushes you can really give that more authentic and painterly look now my next top tip and technique is to use noise to create extra kind of texture within an area so i've already used it within this image and therefore it's created some of those extra little particles within the foliage and it's just meant that i haven't had to physically pinpoint every little detail and it's really helped now i can do it again i can go to layer 8 where the foliage is in the foreground for example slide and duplicate it take the top version go to adjustments noise do it on the slider i know it's going to be like a bleached out version of this it's going to appear lighter but then you change the scale find something that's appropriate for the size of the image and it looks too much but then that's when we go to the top version tap on the end and we can dial it back zoom in so you can see its influence and you can see it just ramps up the individual particles that's already had it done to it anyway so it does and if it's too crisp well then on that whole layer you can go to the adjustments the gaussian blur and you can soften that effect in a little bit deselect now you can see the influence of the top one it's just pushed it added more noise more texture into that foliage area one of my favorite examples where i've used this you can see the original layer 7 had a lot of that highlighted foliage but then i duplicated it top version use the noise and you can see it just multiplies that texture massively so there it was originally then we use the noise to just really make the foliage much more dense many more little particles and really help the effect so use the adjustment noise to your advantage now another thing you can do with something like foliage and i'll just duplicate it here to demonstrate it is go to something like the adjustments the perspective blur and put that in the center of whatever it is that you're creating and then you can just slide it across and it retains the focal the focus rather in the center but on the edges on the peripheral so you can see it's focused there but on the edges it blurs it out and it creates a really strong kind of dynamic look that focuses your attention in the center that can give a sense of movement perhaps when otherwise the image might look quite still a recent tutorial where i've used this with these palm trees where we got the perspective blur so we just put the perspective blur in the center of the tree and then moved it across and it created that dramatic kind of motion at the outer edges of the foliage i really thought that was a great technique for creating that effect and you could use it on any image for example i've got a flattened version of this at the top we can go to the adjustments the perspective blur put it where you want it to be perhaps the sharpest will go right for the center of the tree slide it across and you need to use it a bit more subtly but you can see how it's really blurred out the outer edges and when you slide it across and it can really give a dynamic look when you put it back to zero sometimes it can look a little bit stagnant and lacking the life use it subtly and it can really have a huge benefit to your drawings and painting another creative example of using blur is to create depth of field so i've got a replicated version of the whole image we'll go to the selection use something like a rectangle i'm going to select the bottom area we go to the adjustments the gaussian blur and blur it in and you can see it's blurred out that area in the foreground created a sense that all the camera focus is there in the background but you've blurred out these really close areas and it creates that depth of field look again you can see it's been used in this image and i've used it in this little bottom area here and it just creates that depth of field really good at creating a sense of distance and very much really close foreground the next tip kind of runs in connection with the previous one so we go to the selection rectangle draw a rectangle then you can go to feather and it stops it being an abrupt end and it literally kind of feathers it in it blends it through then you can go to the adjustments the gaussian blur use it subtly five percent deselect and it blends it so gradually that you won't notice where it stops and it's a better way of using the blur to create that depth of field now most people familiar with my tutorials will be familiar with this as a technique but to add a layer change the blend mode by tapping it would normally be an n you tap on it and you can just scroll down to the add that means that anything you add onto that layer with a brush at this point so airbrushing say soft brush go for a really rich color a little low opacity and you can really extend glow using this technique you could say for example take more sun rays expand them out really just create really dramatic effects using the add blend mode it's especially useful for creating glow and sun effects in any scene we can come into this image create a new layer put the blend mode on add choose a suitable warm color we can just bring more light through turn it up create more light in a particular area it's just really useful it bleaches back so many of the colors that are already there anyway you can make whole areas just glow and much more illuminated that way like say if you've been following my tutorials much you'll be very familiar with that one anyway but it is super useful so i had to mention it it is one of my favorite techniques now another really useful technique within transform is the warp all the other ones are really useful too but i find this one really interesting so i've got a shape here go to the transform let's just turn it into a square first of all we've got a rectangle why not turn it into a square and we're going to go on to warp advanced mesh and then we can really start playing around with it and we can turn something that would have now it doesn't take away the actual texture it's not destroying anything you've created it's amazing really i think it's just great for taking something you've already created i'm not going to get a perfect sphere here without using a template a stencil you get the idea you can completely change it let's just get rid of that background so it's not distracting you can see our sphere now at this point now the next thing that i do use an awful lot is clipping mask i never used to use the tools within procreate i used to be quite purist i thought well i'm a traditional painter and raw therefore if i couldn't do it on a canvas i'm not going to use it but i've got past that i've been using procreate for about 12 years at this point i've been teaching it for about 10 years nearly on youtube i found now that the tools are super useful so it's just silly to ignore them it's better to try and use them so here's another one i use a lot so create a new layer tap on the new layer and put on clipping mask links it to that layer now we can go in simply with like a dark color for example put on the soft brush create shadows it won't do it anywhere other than the layer you've already created let's go for a light color first color maybe even go for secondary light at the edge and then we can go to the blend mode we can experiment with different blend modes find one that doesn't destroy your underlying texture makes it more translucent with multiple tips here experiment with the blend modes as well as the other tools overlay really works you've just made it much more 3d turned a square texture really flat into a more dynamic three-dimensional sphere now if you're like me and you like to work outside sometimes in addition to dogs perhaps being an interference sometimes the glare from the sun can really just distract from the user interface well you can go to something like the wrench and change to a light interface and you can just see the menus you can see the user interface much more clearly and actually it's a much better way of working outside it doesn't necessarily make the image that you're drawing clearer but at least the user interface is clearer and easier to see again apologies about the dogs they don't really care what i'm trying to do here okay so those are all of my tips if you're really interested in tips that dig into some of the tools and the basic settings well there's a 20 top tips for procreate that i created that's got over a million views that's been a really useful one for many people i'll put the link for it up here if you some of the tree images that i've been showing you during this video well they come from a course that i've created you might really enjoy following along digging deep into some of those rules and how you paint trees in a dynamic and really realistic way i'm going to pin a link to the waiting list in the comment area get yourself a really big discount from that course the course has already gone live then i'll change that link in the comment to a different link that will take you straight to the course but otherwise get on the waiting list you'll save yourself quite a bit thanks as ever you want to support this channel giving the video a thumbs up hit and subscribe and patreon is also down in the description area there's a link for it there thanks so much for watching i shall see you back here soon next time for another tutorial