Video credits: Art and Design via YouTube
James, my husband, gave me an early Christmas present which is an iPad 9.7 inch which supports the Apple Pen and included with the gift is an Apple pen of course to my delight. So on the very first day that I had been navigating it, I immediately downloaded applications which are essential to my likes and one of them is the app called Procreate.
Does that name ring a bell to you? Perhaps some of you are familiar with it but to those who are not yet aware of the said software, I am here to shed a light and provide an overview of what Procreate ‘s basic features.
Imgae credits: ipadcalligraphy
Welcome to ProCreate
Are you an art enthusiast? A calligrapher? Or would you consider yourself as someone who just finds doodling entertaining or even looks for time to sketch or even write letterings?
Procreate is an application created for all of those mentioned above. This application allows an end user to create digital art straight from the mobile device, save a timelapse of the created piece and share to different social media platforms and other sites.
Image credits: lizkohlerbrown
Procreate themselves refer to this app as a multi‑award winning creative application gives you the power to create beautiful sketches, inspiring paintings, and stunning illustrations wherever you are. With Procreate, the world is your studio.
Here is yet another message of Apple to their customers referring to Procreate according to 9to5mac:
“Procreate lets you generate high-caliber artwork at a blistering pace using robust layers system, stunning filters, and thousands of importable brushes. A must-have for serious artists and enthusiasts alike.”
However, Procreate is not a free software, but it isn’t subscription base too so for just Php 499, the app can be your next tool to creativity.
Procreate Screen Sections and Functions
What I definitely love about Procreate is its minimalist interface. Upon launching it, a page of pre-created gallery shows up if you have just launched it for the first time. However, if you have the application for quite a while, all of your created pieces will be displayed here, in the future, I will be sharing some of the tips too but for now, let's go to the basic.
Launch Page
Image credits: 9to5mac
This allows the user to see the entire section and also provides a means of creating a new canvas.
On the top right-hand side of the screen is Select, Import, Photo and a Plus sign (+). Also, note that clicking on any of the displayed art pieces will direct you to the artwork so you can continue working on it.
Select
Click this to multi-select any of the canvasses, immediately after tapping, another set of options appear such as Stack, Preview, Share, Duplicate and Delete.
I believe the options are quite straightforward and very easy to understand what they will perform accordingly. If you want to close this option, just tap the exit or back X button.
Import and Photo
Image credits: addictivetips
Obviously, this allows every user to get images and other picture media files into the application. Import is for projects while Photo is for media files, there's a recent section and a browse option to manually select any preferred media.
Click on the cancel button to return to the previous page or click on any media to import!
Plus (+)
Image credits: hollyshoppe
Specifically for creating a new canvas. A canvas is basically like what painters work on, this term is also used for digital software like Procreate.
So in this section, the user can either select whichever size of canvas he or she wants to start working on or a custom size can be picked too for more freedom of workspace. If the custom size is selected, the user has to enter the width and height in pixels, millimeters, centimeters or inches, the DPI or dots per inch, the color space and the title or the name of the canvas. Click create to proceed.
Inside Procreate Canvas
Image credits: appusermag
If you are an art enthusiast or even consider yourself an artist, this page here is where you want to be at. This is inside the newly created canvas where all the basic things needed to start creating your work is found.
This page has the Gallery, the Actions, Adjustments, Selection, Move, Brushes, Smudge, Eraser, Layer and Color Palette. Let's look into each section today starting with the Actions because the Gallery is just an option to go back to the gallery.
Actions
Image credits: macstories
This has a lot of amazing options such as adding files, photos or taking photos, you can also cut, copy canvas, crop and resize as well as open the drawing guide. Flipping horizontally or vertically the canvas is also available here.
Exporting of the creation is also available in this section. The file can be exported as a Procreate project file, a PSD, pdf, jpeg, png, and tiff.
One amazing feature that Procreate has is the ability for it to keep a timelapse of your work, it saves the video and pauses when you are not working until done. Also, you can replay the time-lapse video and even live broadcast! Exporting it is also great so you can share it to your social media platforms.
Adjustments
Image credits: getmessyartjournal
This is where you can apply certain effects like opacity, different types of blur, liquify, sharpen, adding noise, adjusting the hue, brightness and saturation, curves and balance and even recolor certain parts of the artwork.
If you are familiar with Adobe Photoshop, you'll find this very easy to understand.
Selection and Move Tool
It is amazing how on Procreate, selecting a specific area and moving it to any other section or part of the canvas is possible. I was really amazed at this and I use it in a lot of ways like if I want some letters to be closer to each other, or perhaps I need to enlarge or make a part smaller, this can be possible with the tools mentioned.
Similar to Adobe Photoshop, this can be used too to duplicate such selected area. It makes lettering easier because of course, we can duplicate the same letters.
Brush Library
Image credits: amarylliscreations
What's an artist software without brushes? Of course, this comes as well with a lot of brush options, from Sketching, Inking, Calligraphy, painting, Airbrushing and a lot more. The list is endless and the good news is that any user can also add his or her custom brushes too!
But more importantly, the brush properties can also be manipulated. There are almost endless setting that can be changed inside the specific brush selected. From the stroke, tip, shape, grain, dynamics and etc.
Smudge and Eraser
These two have the same options with the Brush library but they differ in terms of the usage. Smudge will blend the colors within a specific layer while the erase tool will totally delete any portion which has been brushed off with the eraser tool.
Layers
Image credits: digitalartsonline
Depending on the selected canvas size, the number of layers matters as well. There's an indication of the number of layers during the first step which is to create a canvas size.
Inside the Layers page, a user has different ways to manipulate each layer too such as merging several layers into one single group, setting the opacity, clearing a page, filling it, lock, duplicate or even delete a layer.
Color Palettes
The ultimate way of maximizing an art is to add colors to it. This section gives the variety of colors from the basic color wheel to the classic one where you can set the hue and saturation slider, to the value and the palette of course.
Video credits: Procreate via YouTube
Now that I have given you the basics, it is time to make use of its full potential. If you have an iPad Pro or even the iPad 9.7 which supports the Apple Pen, you should download this application.
