Digital Colour

grebe

A juvenile great-crested grebe, drawn on the iPad with shadow areas and colour added on separate layers, which are set to ‘multiply’. Latest exercise in my Introduction to Procreate course.

Slightly Foxed

fox

This fox turned out to be a bit too wide so I squashed it horizontally in Photoshop. I’ll soon be on to the lesson in Introduction to Procreate that tells me how to do this within the program.

Drawing Assist

Procreate drawing

Theoretically you could cut the time you spend drawing portrait in Procreate by half by activating ’Drawing assist’ mode, in this case everything that I drew on the right half of the screen was mirrored on the left. In reality faces are rarely perfectly symmetrical so you’d keep turning off drawing assist to add any asymmetrical features.

As this is practice on my Introduction to Procreate course, I stayed in ‘Drawing assist’ for the whole drawing.

Terrier in Tone

tonal drawing

This started as a Staffordshire bull terrier but I kept adding more and more shaggy hair. I’m trying out Román García Mora’s suggestions for tonal drawing on an iPad, using his palette of four greys plus black and white in his Introduction to Procreate course.

Colour Drop Procreate

Procreate drawing

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.

geometric sketches
Drawing isometric shapes isn’t going to be my strong point.

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

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.

Sketchbook to Procreate

Starting off in Procreate

Rather than re-draw the Canada goose from my sketchbook, today I went to Procreate’s ‘Action’ menu and chose ‘Take a photo’ and used the rear camera of the iPad. I scaled up the photo to get the drawing I was after to fill the canvas.

goose drawing in Procreate

Now that I’m more familiar with the process of putting together a drawing, following Román García Mora’s suggestions for an ‘illuminated drawing’, the next stage is to get more of the natural variation of watercolour washes into the illustration.

Procreate: Naturalist Illustration

goose sketch
‘Pencil’ sketch, drawn on Procreate using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro using Román’s ‘Graffito’ (‘graffiti’) brush.

Wet weather even for the ducks and geese this morning so I’m trying the process of drawing an animal in Procreate on an iPad Pro as suggested by Román García Mora in his Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course on Domēstika.

His favourite style is what he calls ‘illuminated drawing’ in the tradition of 18th and 19th century natural history illustration where a line drawing of the animal was printed and the colour added by hand in watercolour, so you get the definition of an ink drawing and the luminosity of watercolour.

Drawing on a new layer in Procreat with Román’s ‘Entinado’ brush, using the pencil sketch as a guide. ‘Entinado’ means ‘stubborn’, perhaps referring to the regular quality of the line.
line drawing of goose
Line drawing.
Shadow layer (greyish light blue) and colour added with four of Román’s Procreate brushes.