We’re onto feathers in Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate, an online course from Domestika. Following Román García Mora’s instructions I’ve made this brush to help build feathery textures.
Procreate Feathers
Category: Computer
Fur Balls
Back to my animal illustration course and today we’re making our own Procreate brushes to represent animal hair. It’s the equivalent of using a fan brush or an old splayed brush in traditional watercolours.
Bag and Brush
Barbara’s mum and her friend used to go into town on the access bus on a Friday morning and she’d often come back with a brush. This bannister brush from Wilko’s was a bit of a bargain at £1.49.
I drew the brush and my camera bag in Procreate on the iPad, using Procreate’s Technical Pen.
PenTips PenPad
More PenTips goodies: glove, grip and, my favourite, the PenPad Shortcut Panel for Procreate on the iPad. I’ve used Procreate a lot and gone through dozens of tutorials but there are some shortcuts, such as ‘Cut’, that I have a mental block about. There they all are on the pad, so I don’t have to break my workflow by searching through sub-menus.
I’m still searching for my favourite virtual pen in Procreate. In Clip Studio Paint my go-to pen is usually the ‘Real G-Pen’ but in Procreate with dozens of virtual pens to choose from, I’m still undecided.
Perhaps drawing my chitted potatoes with a selection of pens from the Procreate ‘Inking’ section will help me narrow it down.
Pentips 2 Soft
I like the extra control that I get with the PenTips 2 ‘Soft’ rubber-like replacement tip for the Apple Pencil but I’ve now damaged two of the three that come in the pack.
Although most of the time when I’m drawing my touch is reasonably light, when it comes to adding colour or erasing it’s a different story. I find that it’s necessary to press on extra hard to squeeze a pool of virtual watercolour from a brush. If I’m using one of the subtler forms of the eraser I can find myself pressing hard to remove a stubborn line.
The PenTip can then stick to the glass and split at the end, revealing the metal core.
Procreate Butterfly
Saving half the work while drawing a butterfly; my latest Procreate drawing tutorial using symmetry in drawing assist. I’ve faded out the photograph of the peacock butterfly that I’m basing my drawing on so I’ve put in a reference image, floating in the top left hand corner, so that I can see the colours.
While I wouldn’t use symmetry drawing assist if I was out drawing with the iPad I am going to use it for a logo I’m designing which has to be strictly symmetric.
Procreate also includes ‘Animation Assist’, which turns layers into frames and gives you a timeline and onion skinning (showing a faint impression of your previous frames).
Not sure what happened to the unfortunate butterfly’s dislocated left wing, but you get the idea.
Colour Drop Procreate
In Procreate ‘Colour Drop’ is the equivalent of the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. It’s a ‘hidden’ tool activated by a drag and drop from the current colour swatch, which is always there in the top right-hand corner of the Procreate drawing screen.
Compared to pen on paper, I’m struggling to control my line when drawing on an iPad, even with a Paperlike screen protector (although after three or four months that has worn fairly smooth). For the lettering I tried Procreate’s method where you pause at the end of a line, curve or ellipse. Procreate works out what you were trying to draw and turns it into a smooth, editable vector version.
My unaided line is too wobbly, the vector version to smooth but I’m sure I’ll hit on a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ version which will be just right!
The Hidden side of Procreate
No, this isn’t a goose watching its favourite anserine TV soap . . .
I’ve learnt a lot from the online course Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate but some of the ‘hidden’ features of the program are a bit difficult to grasp when the course is in Spanish and you’re trying to take in both subtitles and – to me – unfamiliar names on the Spanish version of the various tools and menus, so today I booked a free ‘Introduction to Procreate’ session at the Apple Store in Trinity Light in Leeds and I was able to delve into the mysteries of Alpha lock, importing a reference image and the various options for blending.
Sidecar, Screen Mirroring
I’ve been struggling to use the mouse as a brush or an eraser in Photoshop on my iMac Retina with any accuracy but I’d forgotten how to set up Sidecar – the facility that enables you to use an iPad as a second screen for your Mac.
For screen mirroring, this is how it works:
- In Systems Preferences on the iMac go to ‘Displays’
- Click ‘Add Display’
- Select ‘iPad’ and ‘Mirror and extend’
At this stage the screen on my iMac transforms itself to fit the narrower proportions of the iPad and the whole set up works as I’d expect it to: I can use the Mac’s mouse pretty much as normal and I can use the Apple Pencil on the iPad for the brush or eraser in Photoshop.
Note: Mac and iPad are connected to the same wifi network. In the settings the iPad ‘Handoff’ is enabled.
Onions
Drawing some of our onions with the new Manga vector mapping pen in Adobe Fresco, using an Apple Pencil, iPad Pro and a sketchboard pro drawing board.
Growing through a dry summer and a heatwave, this year’s onions were smaller than the previous year’s – when we had a wetter summer – but they’ve kept better. One hazard last year was that the local foxes liked to pull up a few of the almost tennis ball-sized onions and stash them under the hedge. Thanks to damage by foxes and a wet spell before we lifted them, many of the onions went soft.
