5 Tips for Designing with Procreate

Some basics, nifty tips for anyone working in Procreate. I know this kind of thing has been done to death, but I’ll try to call some actions that area little out of the norm.

Recently I started a new role at Clubhouse as a Visual Designer, which meant my job would be focusing more on illustrations and and more specifically blog illustrations. It’s not something I had really tackled too often before. Product illustrations is something I specialise in, but blog illustration was something different. Something that needed a different approach.

After doing some research around how others tackle the area, (Dropbox, Intercom, Slack to name a few) I felt a more free, hand drawn style would work best. This led me down the path of getting an iPad Pro and pencil (thanks Clubhouse 🥰), which led me down the path of getting Procreate, and I instantly fell in love with it. Up until now, my illustration style has always been very rigid, manipulating shapes in Illustrator, which never really felt like really illustrating for some reason. It always felt quite restricted, and the outcome always quite generic. Don’t get me wrong, I still use illustrator daily for different illustration styles, but for this particular hand drawn, more human approach, Procreate works much better.

Check out our Clubhouse Dribble page for more: https://dribbble.com/clubhouse

Learning Curve

So, obviously moving over from working with a mouse or a trackpad to drawing directly on an iPad is going to feel…different. The biggest thing for me was to trying to get used to actually drawing again. I used to draw a bit when I was younger, but more recently I’ve been using mainly illustrator and a mouse 🐭.

So getting your head back in the game of actually drawing is key. I found a great life drawing youtube channel, Croquis Cafe, that I used a little bit to get use to the freedom of a pencil again. Although I do admit I must have been getting some strange looks from my neighbours when they looked in and saw my television of a naked woman dancing around with a scarf and me drawing them.

Here’s some crappy examples of some of my life drawing exercises

Another thing that may cause a little bit of digital frustration is trying to get your head around another design tool. I must know about 10 different design tools already so adding another one felt like it may be the straw that broke the camels back. Luckily, this one’s pretty easy, but there are some quirks that you may need to get used to, I’ll expand on a few further down in this article.

Things to Consider when using Procreate

The way design trends have been leaning recently, brand styles have been leaning a lot more on this free style. Design teams like Dropbox, Mailchimp, Zendesk, yada,yada,yada, have really pushed the hand drawn illustration style as their primary illustration style, I’m guessing, all created with Procreate (I could be wrong). But sometimes it’s too easy to jump on a design trend and slap it to your identity thinking it’s the correct thing to do. For me, I think it’s worth taking a step back and thinking if this style suits your core values. Usually the final style is very rough and edgy. Is this what you want? If not applied correctly it could end up looking like you hired a 6 year old to do your illustrations.

Also, you need to remember that the output will be bitmap based, so no SVGs which may lead to some issues down the line. Thats why, at Clubhouse, we have chosen to only apply this style to our blog illustrations, which allows us to really get funky in the area, I like to think of the creative assets as more pieces of art as opposed to designs.

Ok, enough of be blabbering on about Procreate. If you’ve read this far, you probably have already or are about to make the leap and purchase the over priced iPad Pro that you’ll either fall in love with or end up using it as an over priced cup coaster. Anyways, here are some nice tips that I’ve spotted over the last while that im hoping will help turn that coaster into a critical part of your drawing process.

I’m not going to use this article for complete rookies, there are a lot of steps that you should learn to get over the basics that I’ll try gloss over here, but here are a few little ‘oh, well will ya look at that’ tips that hope help.

ONE: Use masks to create shading

So when I read some tutorials about how to do shading, I got pushed down the route of using the Alpha Lock to do the shading. Nope. Don’t use that. It totally restricts you as once its applied to the layer you can’t remove it. Use masks as it’ll give you control to manipulate the shading down the line too.

TWO: Use Alpha Lock for Filling Layers

One of the things that frustrated me on procreate was the lack of being able to fill a layer that had a lot of detail in it. Yes, you can use the fill feature by dragging the colour over a selected area, but I realised you can just fill the contents of a layer without it struggling with some of the smaller detail in the layer. Then, somehow, not sure how I realised it, I spotted a neat trick. If you turn Alpha Lock on on a layer, then go to Fill in the same dropdown, it fills the layer with your chosen colour. For me, this was a huge win, I really think they should call out this feature as primary action rather then hiding it where no one will ever find it!

THREE: Copying and Pasting

This is something that I literally just discovered while writing this. You’ll need to have your iPad connected to your Macbook through the same iCloud account, but if you copy something on your Macbook, and then go to paste in Procreate, it pastes your copied image from your Macbook into your artboard in Procreate! For me, this is going to be a huge plus! Go try it out!

FOUR: Turn on StreamLine

When I first started using procreate my lines were wobbly. I really struggled with getting a fine smooth line, until I read some blogs and realised you’ve got to turn on StreamLine on the brush to get better control on your lines. If you go to your chosen brushes settings, under Stroke, you’ll see StreamLine.. Knock that to 100% and you’re sorted. You’ll notice that the line is slightly locks into a smoother path when you draw!

FIVE: Brushes, get using them

When I first started, I had no idea what brush was the best to use for standard line drawing. Anything I used felt weird, but after a little bit of research, namely . reading up about how Gal Shir does his work, I settled on the Studio pen that you can find in the Inking section of your default brushes. I’d also recommend downloading the brushes from TrueGrit for some great textured brushes (they’ve got a great free set which I use a lot)

Don’t be afraid to share your work

Procreate has a great little feature which lets you share a time-lapse of you creating your work. Simply go to Settings, Video, Time-lapse Replay and you’ll see a quick replay of you knocking your work out, which is totally shareable! It’s a great way to see how you got to the end point and it’s always good to spam social networks with your amazeballs designs!

Here’s a timelapse of something I created a while back

And with that, I’m out. I’m pretty sure I missed out on lots of special features Procreate has to offer, I just wanted touch off some of the ones that I noticed! If you have any other features, please get in touch! It’s always good to share your advice!

If you would like to hit me up on the subject, or if you want to just shoot the breeze, feel free to contact me here:

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