Hi! I would like to share my opinion and experience, and also answer some questions here about my digital drawing with Procreate! This amazing software helped me to sketch or paint digitally in my last projects. While my heart will always be tied to traditional art supplies, I love the possibilities Procreate provides. I love being able to experiment with new brushes and paint in a way that can feel so realistic yet digital! So here are the Pros and Cons, according to my point of view!
What is Procreate?
Procreate is a creative application on iPad for drawing, painting, and lettering. This is an amazing tool for digital artists. It is currently the best app for illustrations available on the AppStore.
It was hard for me to leave my hand-drawing and try digital drawing, but I needed to try at least because it would be really helpful for my architectural boards. I was not happy with my illustrations first, but I knew that was because I did not try enough. After a few try, I started to like it really much. Beside, I started to combine hand-drawing and digital drawing with Procreate, I loved the results!
As you can only find it on the App Store, it is only available on the iPad. Once paired with an Apple Pencil, the drawing feels very natural. There is no free trial version, so I bought it for $9.99, but once you pay for the app it’s yours forever, which was a good deal according to my opinion.
Procreate PROS
– Layers/Import/Export/Format
Blend modes, opacity slider, layer masks and groups, duplicating, deleting, merging, hiding, naming and re-arranging. All so easy!
You can make your artworks in layers and also choose the canvas size and shape. You are capable of saving your digital drawing with Procreate in an incredibly high resolution – which is amazing – and then share it in different format as PSD, TIFF, PNG, PDF, and JPEG files, which means you can export your half-made work and continue working on your computer easily.
– Brushes
There are a lot of brushes which include sets of pencils, all divided in 20 categories (sketching, inking, airbrushing..), and most of them are REALLY cool! You can also create your own brushes directly on your device, or buy additional ones made by other people (just like in Photoshop or Illustrator). By using different textures and playing with the settings, you can get unique brushes of your own.
– Pressure sensitive
Of course you can use procreate with your fingers, but the best way to experiment is with the Apple Pencil. It is the size of a regular pencil and it’s well balanced. So there isn’t any difficulty for holding it and using it as a regular pen. Take the “2B Pencil” brush, for example, you can hold it normally and make light, or dark thick lines depending on the pressure you apply. And when you tilt the pencil and hold it the way you would on paper to shade something, the brush reacts like a real pencil and creates a flat shading stroke.
– Easy and Smooth Shortcuts
The shortcuts are so helpful in order to make everything faster! For example, tap with 2 fingers to “undo”. Also, drag and drop a color to fill. Draw a line and hold, and it straightens automatically. Twist with 2 fingers to rotate. Pinch with 2 fingers for zooming in and out.. and so much more!
– Time-lapse Recording
I also really love the fact that it saves my working process as a time-lapse. As I like to share a lot of process videos on my Instagram, this feature was just amazing for me!
– Procreate Everywhere!
It is really, really, REALLY cool to be able to work everywhere, on the restaurant, on the plane, on your bed.. without a lot of tools needed. Just the iPad with Procreate and the Pencil, and your creativity!
Procreate CONS
– Not vectorial
Procreate is a raster-based program (like Photoshop). Raster is made up of tiny pixels. When you zoom in you can see them, they are like little dots. Photographies and paintings are best for working with raster-based programs.
But for some of my artworks, I prefer to vector them because it looks cleaner and I can easily scale it without loss of quality. So I usually save my Procreate file and bring it into Illustrator to vectorize.
– Adjustments
You can not adjust your color settings for the whole artwork with all the layers, but only to individual layers.
– Apple Pencil
Ok, this is not something related to the app itself but I keep losing the Apple Pencil between the blankets or the pillows of the couch! I still need to learn to put it at a right place to not lose it. 🙂
I was not sure in the beginning if it was worth it but now that I made many illustrations with it I’m glad I gave it a try. Procreate is worth its $9.99 price and is great for simple sketching, doodling, lettering and for some creative illustrative artworks. It is easy to learn, specially if you already know how to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. As with every new software, you need some time to adapt it for your needs and learn shortcuts. There are an infinite possibility of the things you can do with Procreate. If you like digital art, then go for it! It’s easy to use and has a large range of features. As an illustrator and designer, I work with Procreate often and I hope that these informations will help you have an idea of this App.
If there is anything else you’d like to know about it feel free to ask me.
I share a lot of illustrations using Procreate on my Instagram, and if you still have time, check out my latest post!