Tag: Procreate

Procreate Butterfly

Procreate drawing

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.

butterfly drawn in Procreate

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.

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.