by Matthew Russell - Posted 5 years ago
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Vigilantism Tutorials. We are back with another informative post. This time it is all about ProCreate. Not that procreate. If you don’t know how to reproduce, talk to your parents. This tutorial is about one of the best “go-to” apps for artwork.
Currently, only for IOS, there is talk on ProCreates discussion boards about a Kickstarter campaign to bring this amazing product to android but there are no current plans for anything like this.
If your brand new to ProCreate, you might want to take this quick guided tour. For reference, I will show you an inprogress hero that I have been doodling for a while. If you know who it is, this is used for Editorial purposes only.
The button at the top left will house all of your projects. Everything you have created will be there. To continue to work on a drawing, simply find the drawing and click on it.
To create a new drawing, there is a plus button at the top right. This will give you a dropdown menu with some pretty cool options.
Screen size is pretty self-explanatory. That is what we will be going with today. Everything else is special aspect ratios for your designs. You can create your own or go with a premade ratio.
Now that we have selected our digital paper, we can draw. ProCreate opens into the pen tool. Take your stylus or finger and begin to have fun.
If you have an Apple Pencil you will be able to utilize its pressure sensitivity. The harder you push the darker or bigger your line will be. Don’t push hard enough to break your iPad, that's an expensive mistake.
To undo your last stroke (pencil mark), double tap with 2 fingers. You will keep deleting everything by simply keep tapping with 2 fingers. To redo something, double tap with 3 fingers.
There is only 1 obvious customization on the top. This is the color picker. Just as a beginner, stick with the Disc or “color wheel”.
There are some other options like the “classic” (a sliding scale for RGB), “Value” (gives you a hexadecimal code), or predefined pallets.
On the left-hand side in the middle, you have 2 sliding scales. The first handles the thickness of your line and the bottom is the brush opacity. Underneath there is some undo buttons if you forget the double tap option.
If you go back up to the top and hold down the paintbrush you will get your brush library. There are so many to choose from. There are 2 columns. The first has things like sketching, inking, and so on. The second column images of the brush.
When you choose a new brush type from column A, it will change column B to showcase the different types of brushes available.
You can click the plus icon at the top and import new brushes if you desire but that is a lesson for another day.
This tool is the pointer finger tool, as my 6-year-old daughter calls it. Having 2 colors and mixing them with the smudge tool does not blend the colors. It layers them over the top of each other.
The brush tool features act identical to the brush tool. And is set up the same way with the 2 column picker.
This tool should be pretty self-explanatory. Almost every artist at this point wishes that with pen and paper, there was a good eraser tool. Well, now with pressure sensitivity and opacity options, erasing is the easiest thing in the world. Just don’t forget the 2 and 3 finger tap options.
The next option at the top is one of the greatest things known to man (from an artistic perspective); the layers options.
First introduced widely in Photoshop, back when it was Macromedia Photoshop, this revolutionized digital art. Here in ProCreate, it is no different.
Pick however many layers you want, reorder layers. Duplicate and even lock layers. God, I love this tool.
On the top left, next to the gallery button, is a wrench. There are more options than you could shake a stick at. When clicking the Action icon, you will see several options like Add, Canvas, Share, Video, Prefs, & help. Let's begin with Add.
Here you can insert a photo or file. This just means that you can pull from previous files stored on your iPad. Nothing too exciting here. Although I took a drawing I did from another app and added it here as another layer. You will see this in my next tutorial on how to draw the side profile face.
Not much going on here. You can flip the canvas, add guide rules, and flip around the canvas altogether.
This is all your saving and exporting options. The cool part is that you can export it as a .pdf if you want to open it up in PhotoShop. Not even Affinity does this. How cool!
Now when recording a video for Youtube, you can get a time-lapse recording of your drawing. By default, this is turned on. In order to save file space on my iPad, I turned it off and will keep it off unless I want to record a video with a certain picture.
Here you get to set all of your preset preferences with any file that you open up. I love this. In Photoshop, one of the first things I did was set up my own workspace. I love customizing a program and making it mine. Now you can too.
When I first opened up this program for the first time, I spent a lot of time with this option. I wanted to know everything about it on a buddies iPad that had the program. I know it isn’t that expensive, $9.99 but I am always on a budget.
The help option is pretty expansive and covers every topic you can think of, even some I didn’t think of.
By itself, each component of the “Actions” menu is not very powerful, but when you combine it, you can see all the work ethic and time that it took to make this such a great program. The devil is in the details, and this program is chalked full of small details.
Back to the top left. Just after the Action is the Adjustment option. With an icon resembling a magic wand, they got this right. This option proves that ProCreate can truly compete with PhotoShop.
All our favorite filters are here; Opacity, Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Sharpen...it’s all here.
Here we are moving onto the Freehand Selection. This is used to isolate elements of your art (preferably comic pages) for further refinement. The icon represents a stylized “S”. (No, it doesn’t mean hope.)
Back to the Photoshop comparison. Think of this as your Magic Wand Tool or Quick Selection Tool. Just remember that instead of getting everything selected in red when you are enabling Quick Mask mode, this will turn everything grey.
After listening to me ramble on, with this guided tour of ProCreate, you are ready to start to draw. Don’t forget to make a comic and submit your work to the Crypto Comics Marketplace. I can’t wait to read your story.
