Hello, I'm an illustrator @ lady, don't panic.
You must have noticed that many illustrators prefer to create with procreate on the iPad, rather than computers, hand-painted boards and traditional tools such as PS / AI / Sai. In contrast, procreate is not the strongest, but it is more natural, convenient and intuitive. So today, I'm going to share 10 tips that novices must know to get started with procreate faster.
1. Interface: all layouts are planned around illustration
The entire interface layout of procreate is built according to the interactive logic of holding the pen with the right hand and auxiliary adjustment with the left hand. The brush selection, smearing and eraser around the touch pen are on the right hand side. The transparency and brush size can be quickly adjusted on the left hand side. The top menu provides tools such as adjustment, selection, distortion and filter. The overall interactive logic is very clear.
2. Interaction: use gestures to speed up the operation of illustration
Around the use of touch screen, gesture interaction is the fastest solution to replace the traditional shortcut key operation. By default, the system only opens some basic gestures, including undo and redo, to prevent novices from touching the situation by mistake. However, after being familiar with some basic operations, you can open more convenient gestures that meet the attack habits according to your own usage habits, and the efficiency can be increased.
3. Brush: a comprehensive and sufficient basic brush
Like PS, procreate has a large number of built-in brushes, and various brush effects are very comprehensive (it feels much more comprehensive than the brushes in PS). This makes it possible to use many built-in brushes to achieve quite good results in most cases, such as 6B pencil brush for sketching and icing brush under inking classification. If the built-in brushes can not meet the needs, you can also use the built-in brush studio to make your own brushes.
Of course, there is also a huge market for third-party brushes. One of the most commonly used non-native brushes in my daily drawing and illustration is called azimuth brush and the other is called sharp corner brush. I will share these brushes in my private class.
4. Composition: drawing guidelines for better constraining picture composition
The function of drawing guidance can be said to be a tool to consider the needs of illustration drawing to the greatest extent, which greatly helps the illustrator to accurately express the scene composition. Such large grids are especially suitable for 2.5D illustration production, while perspective grids can better restrict the perspective of the picture, and symmetry can make the regular symmetrical view scene accurate and symmetrical, which can basically draw half of the overall picture. Of course, more designers may use this function to make centrally symmetrical patterns:
5. Regularization: save the quick creation shape of the disabled party
In procreate, it is very fun to draw regular geometric figures by hand. You only need to roughly outline the outline. After drawing, the nib stops, and the software will automatically identify the approximate figure, and then help you optimize it into regular geometric figures. This method greatly reduces the time and efficiency of drawing elements, and the size can be adjusted by sliding in the process, Position and angle are indeed excellent efficiency tools within reach.
6. Structure: easy to manage layers and colors
Remember how you manage layers in PS? In procreate, the function of layer management is also the core of detailed illustration structure management. There are many similarities between its management logic and PS, and several of its functions may be the most commonly used functions when drawing illustrations.
It is worth mentioning that the function of color matching management is also very perfect. One of the particularly practical functions is to provide a fixed color palette, which is very convenient for illustration creation.
7. Thinning: adjust, select, transform
Among the four buttons in the upper left corner, the first "operation" button contains mostly miscellaneous functions related to setting, output and import, and the other three are "adjustment", "selection" and "transformation". These three functions may be several functional modules used frequently in the process of painting.
"Adjustment" includes color adjustment and gradient mapping. Common blur filter effects. Lower variegates are easier to use. Relatively speaking, fault art effects and halftones are more fancy, and we generally use less.
"Select" provides a series of image selection and editing functions, which can cover the selection and editing needs of most images and layers. It is a function that needs to be used flexibly according to different situations.
"Transformation" is mainly used for deformation, distortion and adjustment. These functions are well used, which can improve the efficiency of illustration and drawing. I will write a separate article on these functions later.
8. Linkage: export PSD and continue processing on the computer
In addition to exporting various picture formats, procreate can also export documents in PSD format to facilitate post editing and optimization processing in PS. this is very humanized. This linkage makes the processing space of illustration itself larger.
9. Video: especially suitable for shared output and playback
Procreate not only records the process of drawing illustration, but also can automatically generate time reduced playback video. It is especially suitable for sharing and displaying, and for duplicating its own drawing process.
10. The most important thing: start painting first
The most important thing is to let the tools serve you, not the other way around. You don't need to master all the operations. In fact, you can start painting. It's easy to forget when you learn more. On the contrary, those operations learned in the process of drawing step by step can form muscle memory faster.
Finally, if you are interested in my style, you can take a look at my last two articles:
If you want to learn this style from me, here's my live course 👉 https://pro.uisdc.com/detail/p_60e2ffbde4b0b2c421417893/6
