IPAD AIR PAINTING TEST REVIEW AND TUTORIAL

Okay welcome to my latest iPad painting tutorial. Today's tutorial is going to be slightly different. I've got the latest 2020 iPad Air so I'm going to be putting it to the test along, or rather at the same time, as producing one of my normal painting tutorials. Normally I'd use the iPad Pro so I'm just going to see how it compares when I'm actually producing one of my paintings on it as well. So if you're familiar with my tutorials you know I'm using the app Procreate and if you want to follow along use all the same settings that I'm using. I've got an A4 canvas, I'm going to be using the soft and the medium brush within the airbrushing setting and I've selected a range of colours here within Procreate. Now I will put a link in the description to my Patreon page and there is free information there. First of all there's the hexadecimal codes that you can just type in, press enter, the colour will appear up there and you just drag it down into the colour palette area but there'll also be a colour file there that's for free as well and you can just download that and it should appear in your colour palette section, usually at the bottom area there. Okay so the very first thing I'm going to do on my first layer is I'm going to go to my colours and I'm just going to get rid of the white background, there's not going to be any white left over. I may decide that I want to add a stronger white colour here so that I can add some real highlights but the first thing we're going to do is select this yellow colour and I'm going to drag it from the colour into the area and it will just fill that layer. Okay so we're going to use another layer, I like to keep things on different layers just so if it goes wrong or we need to adjust a certain part then it's still separated and we can do just that. So we're going to move along to our next colour which is here, we're going to go to our brushes, make sure we're within the airbrushing, then we're going to go to the soft brush, now because it's a new iPad and I haven't set it up yet I'm going to transfer or move the sliders to the other area. So you can see if you go within the wrench symbol, go to preferences, you can select or you can toggle between right and left interface so I prefer to have them there, all my tools are together then, I just think it works better that way. Maybe if you're left-handed it would seem differently. So we're on the soft airbrush, go into the size of the brush and I'm going to put it at around 15% and we'll keep it on 100% opacity there. What I'm going to do is about halfway we're just going to slide our brush across and then we can just fill in the bottom portion of this landscape and then I'm going to go to my adjustments, go to my gaussian blur, I need to affect the whole layer and I'm going to slide it across so that it blends it together and I'm going to put it maybe at around 25% there. Okay we'll create another layer, we'll go backwards here to this third colour in, back to our brush, we'll keep the settings everything the same so again it's at 15% size and 100% opacity. We're going to move down a little bit now so we did that just above the halfway line and we're going to do this a little bit lower but again we've just filled it all in and again we'll go to our adjustments, our gaussian blur, we need to affect the whole layer and we'll just blend it in a little bit. Create another layer, go back to our colours and we'll go to the fourth colour along this time and we're going to repeat the process. Same brush settings, move it a little bit further down and we'll just apply it in that bottom section. We may adjust these but I'm just going to repeat the process for now and if we need to move them around then we can do later on. So again to the gaussian blur, the whole layer, blur it across again so I'm roughly going around the 25% and that's more than adequate. So I'm going to create another layer, I'm going to move back to our colours and I'm going to use this second colour in from the left and on our brushes we're going to reduce the size of the brush to around 10% and I'm going to put the opacity at about 40% and I'm going to start bringing this colour in at the top of our canvas. I'm just going to create a bank of what will be sections of cloud here at the top. I don't care if it's a little bit textured which is why it's on the 40% opacity rather than 100% so I can keep it quite loose, quite feathered in in certain areas. I'm then going to reduce the size of the brush to around 6% and I'm going to do another bank of cloud now bringing it in a little lower, something like this. Now if I decide that I've gone too far down to my canvas it isn't going to be a problem because I can just make adjustments with the transform tool and I can just, if I put it on the freeform, I can pinch it in from the top and it narrows that section of cloud. So I can have it closing up in certain areas, maybe we'll have it a bit more closed up at this side. I will go back in and add some finer tuning details onto that as well but for now that will get the general effect. I'm going to create another layer, there's going to be lots of layers here. We're going to go back to our colours and we'll go for the first colour which is the darker colour which is more of a blue. Go onto our colour disk, you can see exactly where it's positioned, it's squarely within the blue but it is quite a greyed out version of it but it's going to seem pretty blue compared to the other colours anyway and I think I'll reduce the size of the brush to or put it at around 6% and maybe just turn the opacity down to 30%. It is going to be quite strong so I want to bring it in gradually. So use circular motions, I do recommend that you lift the pencil off every now and again rather than doing it as one continuous thing because then if you backtrack you take a lot of gestures with you. So maybe just keep it as small circles and I want you to work almost to the edge but I want to preserve some of that pink colour so I don't want you going right up to the very edge. You might want to turn the size of the brush down in fact just a little bit so we'll turn it down to 4%. It really helps to get a little bit closer to the edge and be a bit more careful and we'll do something similar on this layer as well. Again it helps now that we've reduced the size of the brush we can get a little bit closer to the edge in narrower sections. What I'm going to do now that I've placed some of that blue in is go back to that previous layer, go back to the pink I was using, reduce the size of the brush to about 3%. Again we are on a reduced opacity so it's still at around the 30% and I'm just going to start adding some bits around the edge so it's not completely flat. I want it to be almost like, well more broken texture on the very edge and you'll be able to hear from the tapping of the apple pencil the way that I'm actually using my gestures. So I'm just creating more of a textured edge to that, I think it looks more like it's just wisping off on the very edge. I can also apply that to bits here to close it up in areas now likewise if there's an area that perhaps I want to bring out a sense that there's light breaking through a little bit more I can go to my eraser, check what brush I'm actually using on my eraser, I'll probably go to the soft brush again within airbrushing, reduce the size of the brush down a little bit to 3% and the opacity down to around 50% but I can use this just to remove carefully bits of the pink that I want to create gaps. Go back to my brush, continue adding some of these wispy areas. If I want to add more but I don't want them to be as noticeable I can reduce the opacity to around 10% and I can just keep applying in some of these lower areas but they're not going to be quite as apparent, they're going to be a bit more subtle and I'm pressing a little bit more lightly as well. So you don't want them to be too uniform, you want to keep them quite random. Now so far I have to say the iPad Air is pretty much the same experience that you'd expect from the iPad Pro. There are some scrolling issues, I find that sometimes it looks a little bit more jaggedy, it's a really subtle thing for the eye but because we've got the 60 frames per second rather than the 120 that it means that something's a little less smooth. Now it doesn't really make a difference in terms of the ability to create but it is something that your eye does notice and yeah it you know it does feel a little bit like I've gone back in time and was using some of the iPads previously that didn't have the ProMotion. It's amazing how you do get used to these things but yeah it isn't detrimental to the creative process, it doesn't really stop you being creative but it is noticeable nevertheless. Okay so we're going to go back to the very first layer and I did say that I wasn't quite sure whether this yellow was going to be bright enough and I feel like I want to add more light into a certain area so I'm going to just move the colour that is there more around so it gets closer to the white and I'm going to add another colour underneath. I'm going to use that colour, put the brush a little bit bigger at around six percent, put it at around the twenty percent opacity and I'm just going to start bringing that in. Remember we're now on the first layer, the yellow layer, and I'm going to start bringing some of that whiteness into these areas. In fact I might turn the size of the brush down a little bit to four percent and the opacity up to around thirty percent just so we can really intensify the brightness of it and we'll add some into the gap there as well a little bit. Now one thing that doesn't look quite right when you do that is the edge of the cloud because we've got quite a dull colour next to a very bright colour so what you probably need to do in that case is go back to our first colours. Now they are quite dull but these are about the right brightness so we'll go to that second colour along and we'll just use now that colour just to go around the very edge just so it blends in the brightest colour that we've just added with the edge of the cloud a little bit better so it looks like it's transitioning from the very white now to the warmer but darker colours and we can keep working on those. So I'm going to whack the opacity up to fifty percent, turn the size of the brush down to three percent and just really work into these white areas now. Now if we don't feel like it's showing up enough it's probably because we have another layer slightly over the top so we'll move upwards we'll go on to layer two and we'll keep working this white colour onto layer two as well we'll bring it down just a little bit likewise when we change colours we can always go back to our yellow by bringing that down we're eating into some of these warmer darker colours and we're bringing some of this light effects making it appear like it's highlighting maybe some just textural things in the sky some bits of cloud it's stopping it being completely flat and a bit more white here as well. Okay we're going to go to the top of our layers and we're going to add another layer and this time we're going to go back to my colours instead of these two colours we're going to use these two colours so we're going to go for the pink colour again and I'm just going to decide where I'm going to put a lower section of clouds. So I'm going to put the opacity at four percent and rather the size of the brush at four percent and the opacity down to forty percent and I'm going to have a gap where we've got mainly just the light coming through and then we're going to have another bank of clouds coming into this section so we'll have it sweeping all the way across breaking perhaps as it goes but all the way across it goes anyway maybe turn the size of the brush down to three percent maybe have some sections that break away go over the bits that you feel you want to just intensify make them a bit darker I'm going to increase the size of the brush to six percent and I'm going to now add another lower section to our cloud as well we can take this a little bit further down as well I'm going to add more elements in this area so it doesn't really matter but we may also take it a bit further down in fact we'll turn the size of the brush up and we'll just fill in that area maybe even turn the opacity way up as well so just whack it up to about seventy percent like that something else we need to do like we did last time is work on the edges so we need to reduce the size of our brush now again to around three percent maybe turn the opacity down to around forty percent and we're just going to work on the edges add some finer textured detail along that edge maybe work into those little banks of clouds that separate but maybe they have some blobs as they start to break up and disintegrate you can add as many banks of clouds as you want I do want to preserve a central area there with more light coming through but I can add more detail to it as well fill in this area have it really fragmented okay I do feel like what would be beneficial is to go back through my layers and actually increase the impact that some of these lower layers are having now if I go onto this layer four and I just toggle it on and off you can barely see it at all so that tells me now that using that layer I need to go to my transform tool and I need to just bring it up a little bit more and that way it's going to have a bit more of an impact there than it did before so you can see without me moving it and now I'll bring it up a little bit and it's having more of an impact in this area so I feel that works a little bit better now moving back to my colours I'm going to use the other colour here that I'm not using yet which is the again it is almost heading towards the blue but it's not really it just appears that way next to the pinky colour that it's next to you can see it's actually it's got a hint more blue in it but it's still very much in the red area but it is greyed out so it gives it a cooler look we'll go to our layers we'll go to the top layer and we'll create another layer above that and this time we're going to work into our cloud so again we're at quite a small brush size so maybe about three percent and we're about 40 opacity and we can just use this to bring out some of the detail of the cloud bring it forward a little bit especially at the bottom section of each of these bank clouds maybe as it gets towards the top it's getting more of the light hitting it and so it breaks up the darkness perhaps but certainly the bottom edge of each of these banks of clouds you'd expect to have more of a solid dark shadowed area and I'm just going to continue adding some more texture into this bottom section I can start by pressing on lightly so I don't want to add too much into this area just in this bit but then as it gets further down I'll press on a bit more add a bit more of it so it gets more of that darker colour creeping in so I'm pressing lightly having it quite broken for this top section maybe I'll increase the size of the brush to five percent so when we get down here it's going to have more of an impact and I can just really start to fill it in in this bottom section because we're going to start adding more landscape features here anyway now in theory the responsiveness of the apple pencil should be a little slower on this compared to the ipad pro again the 60 frames per second compared to the 120 frames per second means that as you draw a line the actual following of it shouldn't be as quick on this version compared to the ipad pro but it's not again something that's that noticeable at all unlike the the kind of the way that it animates things I really don't notice any lag any more lag when I'm actually drawing on the screen compared to the ipad pro so that's not something you need to worry about okay I'll come back to the sky perhaps a little later but I'm going to add another layer I'm going to move to our other colours now so I'm going to use this first colour and we'll turn the size of the brush down to around three percent we're still on the soft air brush I'll turn the opacity up to around 80 percent roughly 80 percent anyway I don't want it quite on 100 opacity just gives a bit more texture when you reduce the opacity a little bit and I'm going to place in a horizon line to begin with now you won't see this particular line because it's going to be covered by other details but it is important that you do set one in fact it's a little bit high that so I'm going to reduce it down a little bit lower not too much but just a little bit lower down you'll notice by when I held the apple pencil at the end it snapped to a straight line really great function for creating horizons and things like that so from this line now I'm going to start create or start to create some distant trees in fact that opacity is too much I'm going to turn it down to around 50 percent I'm just going to create some circular motions from the very far distance it's a combination between trees and maybe rolling hills we don't really need to clearly define exactly what they are you're not going to notice individual tree shapes because when you get lots of trees all clumped together it's kind of difficult to distinguish them from the actual landscape and the hills itself anyway you notice I'm still using this circular motion all the way across so create another layer and we're going to move along our colors to the next color here we're going to also change our brush to a medium brush and we're going to turn the size of the brush down to around two percent and we're going to put the opacity back again it's around fifty percent so we're going to start creating some trees and features that perhaps are a little bit more individual stand out and have a more distinct shape perhaps than the background had but we're going to start creating things that do stick out a little bit now it is important you do them a little bit lower down in certain areas so that you do see obviously the background layer you don't want to do it the same height otherwise there's no point having done the background layer it's okay if it touches in areas but as a general we want to keep some of that and preserve some of the background layer so we create a sense of distance so again I'm keeping on the whole some kind of circular motion but you can vary it a little bit as well some trees that maybe stick up a little bit more pointed some that perhaps are tall enough to go above everything else because as we come closer generally we're going to get some things that will go a little bit taller as well so maybe the trees that are in the very far distance are actually on a hillside that appears a little bit higher which is why we can see them as we get closer they're more likely to be on the ground but perhaps they're also a little bit taller so as a general rule they'll be a little bit lower but you do get some features perhaps that stick up a little bit further if that makes sense okay we'll create yet another layer we'll go to our colors pick the third color along this time this color is going to really stand out we'll keep the other settings the same but these details these trees are really going to stand out so you just need to be aware that they should be a bit taller as well so we can have some really nice big bushy shaped silhouettes of trees again we're not getting bogged down in the detail with these we're just creating overall impressions of things allow some of the gaps to remain we want to see those background layers in certain areas so we're just being quite expressionistic we've been impressionistic rather so we don't want to completely get bogged down in the detail you notice i'm not zooming in more about creating the impression so again quite impressionistic but the overall effect even though we're being quite loose should be quite convincing as an illusion nevertheless so again we'll have one or two trees that really just stick out and is more prominent so think about the overall shape perhaps you can just get the suggestion that's branches or a trunk cutting through move along add another shape perhaps another tall tree here again some kind of suggestion of trunk then once you get a middle section you can just create some darker blobs surrounding it which is going to be just more texture for the tree itself and perhaps another nice big tree section that sticks up a little further this way as well we do have a last dark color and we'll create another layer and we're going to do something pretty similar perhaps there's just a hedge nearby that has some things that stick up in certain areas don't need to add too much of that color i'm going to create another layer i told you there's going to be a lot of layers here and yeah we're using quite a lot so we're going to go along to our last colors now we're going to go to this first color which you can see is very much within the green but it is very very dark so we're going to use this dark color just to fill in the bottom section so i'm going to put the size of the brush up to about five percent and we'll have it at around seventy percent opacity and we'll just fill in this bottom section i have to say when i'm filling in large areas like this and sometimes i can see the actual color lagging behind the apple pencil just a little bit although i said it's not that noticeable for the largest part i did just notice it then a little bit in a way that i'm not perhaps used to with the ipad pro but again i don't think that's such a big deal i can't imagine it's going to be the kind of thing that would interfere with the creative process for anyone you can see it's doubled over there a little bit that isn't a problem i'm going to turn the opacity down and i'm just going to go back over the whole of that area fill it in i'm happy with some of the gaps and the textures to remain like that we're going to use quite a lot of greens over the top of that anyway but i do think i want a really solid line there on the kind of horizon point so i'm going to reduce the size of the brush to around three percent two percent opacity up to around eighty percent and i'm just going to pick my horizon point take it all the way across hold and let it snap and there you go we've got a really solid horizon line to work from at this point so again i'm going to go back working below that horizon line just to tidy up some of that area and i feel that's going to work a little bit better so we've created that on a whole new layer so if we wanted to anyway we could always use the adjustments or the transform tool rather and we could slide it around if we felt we needed to looking at my other colors i have a paler green here again it's not really a lot different but you can see it's just shifted a little bit and we'll stick with the eighty percent opacity and we'll keep the small size to around two or three percent in fact we'll take it even smaller to the lower end of two percent and i'm just going to bring it across and just start to add a bit more variety of the types of green that actually cuts across there it's a subtle detail but i think it's better and we'll go back to that green there and perhaps just break it up a little bit more there as well so create more texture contrast between the lighter and the darker versions create another layer we'll go to the next two greens we're going to use the dark color first and we're going to bring it just a little bit down so we're not right at the top edge we're going to continue adding this kind of texture as we get closer to us or the viewer assuming there's someone stood here looking at the scene we're adding just a little bit of this darkness as it comes closer to us so we've got pretty large stripes that cut straight across really again we'll go to our lighter color as well which is this fourth color along perhaps turn the size of the brush up just a little bit so it's around three percent and we'll just add some of this lighter color starting to cut into there as well it's much more of a vivid green starting to appear which i think is needed one of the things about perspective and distance with color is that you get your more vibrant colors closer to you and cooler colors generally in the distance so your greens are getting darker and cooler in the distance and they're getting warmer more vibrant to you as they get closer to you i think we may as well just stay on the same layer for this last section we'll go to this very dark color i'm not bothering changing the adjustments on the brush i'm just going to add suggestions of texture reduce the canvas size just a little bit so i can work right up to the edge and we'll go to our more vivid green here as well whoops go to the green we'll add just a hint of that in there as well now again i'm only really about creating the impression now if you wanted to go to a more textured brush to almost create the effects of grass then you could do that but in terms of creating the general effect i'm happy to keep it quite rough so alternate between those two colors perhaps i just need a slight darker lines cutting in there a bit more as well not too dark though remember on 80 opacity so i'm pressing on very lightly if you feel like you're a bit heavy-handed you could always turn it down and then it doesn't matter if you press on a little bit more anyway so we're going to create another layer and i'm going to move along or rather keep it on this dark color that we've just been using we'll have the size of the brush at two percent the lower end of two percent and we'll have the opacity at forty percent and i'm just going to start adding a couple of focal points into our scene so i'm going to move to just a little bit below the horizon line i'm going to start building a tree into our scene so i'm going to put the trunk first i'm going to imagine it coming up to around here and then we're just going to start constructing some branches that are going to be mainly obscured anyway but it helps if you put them in there to begin with and you know what the structure of the tree is going to be underneath everything so we'll just get some branches doesn't need to be much more than about that and then the broken texture again we're still on the medium airbrush i'm just going to start adding sort of tapping broken textures around ends of some of these branches so you create clusters of individual blobs so you can hear me i'm using lots of little tapping motions allow some areas to get really condensed so it gets really dark but then also leave certain areas where it's quite sparse you can see through the tree gaps as well now it is a little bit time consuming to do it this way you may find that there are certain brushes do the job for you but i do like to do things like this quite manually i do take satisfaction in having produced all of the effects on a particular painting so however best that you feel that you can achieve the look however it makes you most satisfied with it then feel free to do that but i just like to do it manually now for certain areas you just want to darken up have a bigger cluster increase the size of your brush start to fill in some of those gaps reduce it back down again add some finer details maybe add some details at the base of the tree as well i'm going to move just a little bit further down so it means that whatever i'm drawing now is going to be a little bit closer create some bushes perhaps a little bit further down again i'm going to create some more shrubs some more bushes going to create another tree here as well and very much in the style of bob ross where i suppose we're creating a little friend for that tree aren't we i'm just going to go along that horizon line just darken up that top edge i feel like it needs to be a little bit more clearly defined and set apart it could be that there's some hedges in the distance maybe some walls to separate it out and i'm also going to take our lighter color back here so we'll go for this color and i'm just going to use that to almost create like a low-lying mist as well that separates the two in fact if i turn the opacity down a little bit more i'll be i think it'd be a good idea just to bring that color just a little bit into our scene a bit more just to kind of soften the two together a little bit more maybe there's a bit of an early morning mist that is just covering some of these areas up to around five six percent and we'll just bring that effect in a little bit more soften that area just soften the base of those trees especially this one pushes it back a little bit further go back into some of these areas it doesn't really matter about swapping layers at this point turn the size of the brush down and the opacity up and really just want to create a slight more sense of mixing of those different types of greens together just to break it up a little bit just so it doesn't look quite as flat i think at this point i'm going to create another layer i'm going to go to my brushes i'm going to go back to soft brush have the size of the brush at around three percent opacity down to around thirty percent and i just want to create some areas here perhaps there's wispy bits of cloud that cut in front of some of these other clouds like that you can also go back into other areas and just tighten up some of the details that we've got here really sharpen up bits of the clouds so i've just turned the size of the brush down to around two percent and just really work if that's too much but generally just work into areas sharpen up some of the edges of those clouds make a finer detail and this is the kind of thing that normally i would love to spend hours just sharpening up those details fine tuning the little elements that can make a piece of work really fantastic now you could go back through your layers to make sure that you're only working on perhaps the cloud layers for example wherever they are now they're further back on the here those layers or you could just work on your top layer at this point you've got the fundamentals there so it doesn't really matter if you go off and work on your top layer and you just keep working over the top of it it doesn't really matter at this point in a painting it's easy to get lost anyway when you have that many layers it's easy to get confused to exactly what's on each layer so there does come a point at which you just got to be brave perhaps choose a layer that you're working on and just work on top of that so i'm just turning the size up and down to respond to the particular cloud areas that i'm working on just sharpening up some of the details i'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on this now i'm just showing you the kind of things that i would probably go go on to actually do like i say the purpose of this tutorial is to just get you to the point where you understand how to construct the basic image and then the fine tuning is something that you can do for your heart's content i am just adding a little bit of lighter color between the gaps so that general sunlight is coming down further into the scene as well so i'm using these warm colors anyway i hope that's been useful overall my impressions of the ipad air is that it's pretty good to be honest fundamentals of using an app like procreate don't really change between different ipads it's pretty much the same experience apart from some slight animation issues when you're actually moving things around but it's very subtle a difference the fundamental interface with the apple pencil and the screen compared to the ipad pro is pretty much identical so you should be able to add just as many layers to this as you would be able to on the ipad pro from a couple of years ago the 2018 one because it's got four gigs of ram just like that one so you're going to get plenty out of the ipad air anyway do check out my other tutorials there's playlists in the description to this video there is a link to my facebook my instagram and of course the colors that i mentioned before as well thanks for watching catch you back here soon