Procreate turns an iPad into a studio that fits in a bag, and it is very good at what it does. The awkward part is the first session: you open a blank canvas, stare at a wall of brushes, and freeze. The good news is that most of the toolset can wait. Learn layers, three or four brushes, and a bit of colour thinking, and you can spend your time making paintings rather than tests. Here is how to start, with exercises to try as you go.
Start With a Canvas That Fits the Job
Tap the plus sign in the top right of the gallery and choose a size rather than accepting the default. For sketches and practice, a 2048 x 2048 pixel canvas is generous. For anything you might print later, work at roughly 3000 pixels on the long edge and keep it there.
Two settings deserve a minute of your attention. The first is layer count. Layers share your iPad's memory, so the bigger the canvas, the fewer you get: a modest canvas may allow dozens, a very large one may allow fewer than ten. If you run out, flatten the layers you have finished with and carry on. The second is colour profile. sRGB is the safe default for anything heading to a screen. The wider profiles are useful for print, but if you are unsure which you need, sRGB will not let you down.
If your palm leaves stray marks, open the wrench menu, go to Preferences, and turn off finger painting. You will still be able to pinch and zoom; you just won't draw with your hand by accident.
Layers: Your Most Useful Habit
A layer is a sheet of clear film. Paint sits on it, and the sheets below stay untouched. That single idea explains almost everything: your line work will not ruin your colour, and a shadow you dislike can be deleted without repainting the whole drawing.
Two layer tools do most of the heavy lifting for beginners:
- Alpha Lock. Tap the layer, then choose Alpha Lock. Every stroke is now confined to pixels that already exist, which makes shading inside a shape almost impossible to get wrong.
- Clipping Mask. Put a fresh layer above your base shape, tap it and choose Clipping Mask. Whatever you paint stays within the silhouette of the layer below. Fast shadows, no tidying edges.
A five-layer apple
Try this once and layers will stop feeling abstract.
- Background. Fill the canvas with a pale grey using a large brush.
- Silhouette. Paint the apple as one solid shape in a mid-tone red. No shading yet.
- Shadow. New layer, set to Clipping Mask, and block in the dark side with a cooler, deeper red.
- Highlight. Another clipping mask layer. One small bright spot where the light lands.
- Stem and detail. A final layer on top, no clipping mask, for anything that breaks the outline.
Name your layers as you build them. "Layer 14" tells you nothing at midnight, and a file full of unnamed layers is a file you will not want to revise.
A Starter Set of Brushes
Procreate ships with a huge library, and the temptation is to download more before you have used any. Resist that for now. Five brushes cover most beginner work:
- 6B Pencil under Sketching, for loose, forgiving thumbnails.
- Studio Pen under Inking, for clean and even lines when you want definition.
- Round Brush or Medium Hard Brush under Painting, for blocking in colour with visible edges.
- Soft Brush under Airbrushing, for gradients, glow and soft transitions.
- The Smudge tool with a rough brush, for blending two colours without turning them to mud.
Two settings change how a brush feels more than any download. StreamLine, found in a brush's stroke settings, smooths shaky lines; nudge it up if your curves wobble. Opacity and size sit in sliders on the left of the canvas, and you will use them constantly.
A useful rule: hard brushes build form, soft brushes suggest light. If your painting looks like it is behind frosted glass, you have been leaning on the airbrush.
Colour Theory You Will Actually Use
Value does the heavy lifting
Value is how light or dark something is, with colour set aside. To check yours, add a layer on top, fill it with black, and set the blend mode to Colour. Everything beneath turns to greyscale and your mistakes become obvious. If the shapes do not read without colour, no amount of colour will rescue them.
Choose a light temperature and stay with it
Warm light casts cool shadows. Cool light casts warm shadows. Pick one direction for a painting and keep it, even loosely. Consistency reads as confidence, and it costs you nothing but a decision made early.
Limit your palette
Three colours plus white will teach you more than thirty will. The Colour panel includes harmony options such as Complementary and Analogous, which generate sets for you. Analogous colours sit beside each other on the wheel, and they are the easiest route to a painting that feels calm and unified.
Value does the work. Colour gets the credit.
Practice Exercises That Build Skill Fast
Twenty focused minutes most days beats three hours on a Sunday. These four exercises are worth repeating rather than doing once:
- Greyscale study. Set a fifteen-minute timer and paint a photo using three values only: light, mid and dark. No colour at all. This trains your eye for shape, and it is the single fastest improvement you can make.
- Two-colour painting. Pick one warm colour, one cool colour and white. Paint a landscape with nothing else. The constraint forces you to think about temperature instead of guessing at hues.
- Same subject, five brushes. Draw a mug five times, swapping the brush each round. By the fifth you will know which brushes suit your hand and which ones fight it.
- Study a painting you love. Reproduce it roughly, without tracing. You will absorb more about composition than from an hour of watching tutorials. Keep it as a study, and be honest about its source if you ever post it.
Where to Go Next
Keep one canvas open as a scrapbook and fill it with whatever you are practising. Work from your own photographs when you can, because choosing a subject is a skill in itself, and it is easier to care about a place you have stood in.
Back your work up. Procreate saves a time-lapse of every canvas by default, which is genuinely useful for spotting where a painting went wrong, but time-lapse files are not a substitute for the working file. Export to Files or iCloud now and then rather than trusting a single iPad to last forever.
The best next step is not a new brush pack or a longer tutorial. It is finishing something small this week: a single object, one light source, a background. A rough finished painting will teach you more than ten careful starts ever will. Open a canvas, keep it simple, and put something down.
Photo: Lalmch / Pixabay
