Working with Procreate 🎨
A guide to help you introduce Procreate into your workflow, to add some sketchtastic styles to your brand identity. 👩‍🎨
So, I felt it’s time to write another article about Procreate. Some more tips about how to use it most effectively to bring it into your workflow. But this time I’m not going to show you some nifty little beginner hacks like my last article. This time I want to focus on how a higher level, more around how to really make Procreate more impactful in your work flow.
Having worked with Procreate for over a year now, I’ll first explain how I have worked it into my workflow. When I begin at Clubhouse, I didn’t have Procreate, but I knew I wanted to learn it. I felt our Clubhouse Blog would be the perfect place to push a more artistic approach, for one off pieces, but still tipping the hat to our brand style by only using our brand colours. It was also the perfect place for me to become familiar with Procreate as a tool. You can check out all our blog illustrations here, I’ve also saved each article as a timelapse here, and you can see the actual working blog here.
Ok, enough of that. Next, I’m going to call out a few healthy approaches that I’ve introduced that speed up my workflow, as well as helped introduce some consistency and diversity into my illustration styles.
2. Don’t be afraid to mix mediums.
Just because you’re working in Procreate, doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate any other tools into your work flow. Live a little, don’t be afraid to introduce type and photography to your work. Procreate isn’t just a drawing tool. You can be as creative as you want with it. At first, I unknowingly limited myself to only drawing directly on the iPad, but then I realised it’s actually really easy to copy and paste elements over from my mac (copy on mac, paste in Procreate), which opened up a whole new dimension to it all.
Go try it out. You can paste over photography, manipulate the layer styles, or simply trace the photograph to give you exact precision. Same with type, I wouldn’t bother with the type tool in Procreate because it’s so limited. You’re best off using Photoshop (or any design tool for that matter) and paste it over, you can make some pretty cool posters and the likes. What I’m trying to say is don’t limit yourself.
Here are a couple of timelapse videos where I incorporate photography:
Another thing that I tend to see with Procreate, is that people tend to only use Procreate for art. Again, this is something that I began using Procreate for. But then as I became more familiar with it, I’ve realised it can be a really powerful tool for our product illustrations too. So much so that you’re seeing the hand drawn illustration style become more and more frequent across branding styles, with the likes of Intercom and Zendesk. Funny I should say this… but I’m actually in the middle of the exploration phase of an illustration overhaul at Clubhouse 👀, and guess what? Yeap, you guessed it, we’re strongly considering using Procreate as the sole provider for creating our product icons and illustration. You can see a little case study of one of the styles we’re exploring here. Still a WIP, but it’s getting there, and I’ve found Procreate great for it, so don’t nail yourself down to only using Procreate for drawing portraits of yourself.
Here is a little sample of it to date:
Open up and be creative. 👯‍♂️
2. Control your layers and groups.
First things first on this, one of the things I really dislike about Procreate is the limited layers available. I’m not really sure as to how they work it out, but generally I only have about 44 layers to work with in each artboard, which means I’m working against a clock in terms of when my options becoming very limited. So what I’ve found you have to do is to know when to keep working within one layer, and when a to create a new layer. Be sure not to create layers willy nilly, or else you’ll hit a wall very quick. Then you’re left having to go back to merge layers which gets messy very quickly. Decision making on what to carry on on one layer vs creating a new layer is actually very important, so choose carefully.
Another important thing in terms of controling your artboard, is to make sure you group the relevant elements. So if you’re creating a man for instance, when you’re finished him, group him, and only work within that group. That way, you’ll be able to move him around easily without it compromising any other elements on your artboard. Trust me, all this may sound obvious, but if you’re importing into Photoshop to adjust anything, having your layers grouped is so important.
3. Be consistent.
I suppose this should be the case with anything you design, but for Procreate, consistency comes from creating ground rules at the start of every piece. Be consistent with your stroke weights, your opacities, your shading techniques, your colour palette, your brushes etc. Actually, Procreate doesn’t do you any favours in terms of being consistent for some areas. Would be pretty cool to be able to create specific sets of brushes, brush weights, colours, opacity %’s that came as a set to create consistency. Procreate, make it happen 🙏.
Overall though, if you’re hoping to span the style across multiple workflows, I’ve learned that consistency is key to building a scaleable system, and the only way to do so is making sure you adhere to your rules all the way along. Maybe certain areas will change over time, which is fine, design systems evolve, but evolve it for a reason and take note as you do so.
If you are using Procreate just to make one off pieces of art, your consistency should happen at the one-off artboard level. Make sure you keep control of your stroke weights, and colours and shading techniques. For instance, if you are using a specific brush and opacitity for your shading, don’t deviate from it. It’s key to a solid output.
4. Practice.
This is obvious. The only way you’re going to develop your skills within Procreate is by practicing. Don’t wait for the next project to come up so you can use it. Give yourself daily projects. Thing’s that you can throw away if it’s crap. The output isn’t necessarily the important thing. It is said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. I strongly believe that. I don’t believe talent comes into play. You need to put in the ground work to really understand something and the only way you’re going to do that is by being commitment. Never settle.
For instance, here is a small project I’ve create just for the sole purpose of practicing. All throw away. No meaning. You should try something similar yourself. Get stuck into something, you’ll be surprised how enjoyable it is!
And with that, I’m out. This is all so very subjective. It’s up to you as to how and why you would use Procreate, I just wanted to call out a few areas that I felt helped me inject the tool into my work flow and ways to speed things up.
Come join the new Slack for Illustrators!
We’ve set up a new slack channel specifically for the illustrators of the world! Sign up here:
https://join.slack.com/t/illustrators-talk/shared_invite/zt-f3ynx78z-328oIARU6RqVnilrbouTng
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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