Procreate for Beginners: Create Stunning Digital Art on iPad

Editor: Kirandeep Kaur on Nov 18,2024

Digital art has never been easier, and Procreate is one of the favorite means for breathtaking art creation directly onto your iPad. You could be a beginner looking to get started with your initial digital art journey or someone refining your skills; so many features in Procreate let you bring your artistic visions into being. 
 

Let's start with a guide to Procreate for beginners and walk through the principal steps so that you can start creating your masterpiece's digital designs with confidence.

What is Procreate? Understanding Its Power for Digital Art

As a powerful digital art app designed for the iPad, Procreate lets you generate everything from sketches to entirely developed digital artwork. It has gained popularity among working artists because of its incredible versatility and user-friendly interface, also great for beginners to learn. What makes Procreate different from other traditional art material mimickers is that it can offer all of them plus loads of additional digital tools to upgrade your creative process.

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Getting Started with Procreate: First Steps

You need to familiarize yourself with Procreate's fundamental features before you can start creating artwork. The first time you open this application, the number of options may overwhelm you, but you can start simple and slowly work your way into the digital art world.

Creating Your First Canvas

After opening an application, you'll be given a completely blank canvas. All action will happen here. To create a new canvas, tap on the "+." Size can then be selected. Procreate has quite a few preset sizes, and you can create a size according to your own needs at any time. The beginner will try one of the predefined sizes, such as A4 or 1080 x 1080 pixels.

Knowing Your Way Around Tools

Have your canvas prepared and know the common tools: brush tool, color tool, layering system, and gestures to zoom and rotate the canvas. Knowing these skills will enable you to move around Procreate and start creating digital art freely.

Knowing Your Way Around Digital Art Tools in Procreate

Procreate is loaded with many digital art tools that cater to all manners of artistic needs, so understanding how each tool works is the secret to mastering digital art. For beginners, here are some of the most essential tools to get started:

The Brush Tool: Creating Art with Texture

There is nothing like that in any other drawing app: Procreate actually replicates real-world texture and brushes. The majority of your work, when you're just starting off with this drawing app, will be on experimenting with brushes to see which one will actually work best for your style. Procreate comes with an incredibly wide selection of brushes, and you can even create your own if you feel like doing something adventurous.

Color Tool: The right Palette

Color palette selection is the secret to beautiful art. Here, Procreate also gives you a color wheel, value sliders, and an option to create your own color palettes. You can even import pre-made palettes or use its super helpful color picker tool to grab colors from images.

Selection Tool: Isolate and Modify Elements

The selection tool allows you to grab portions of your art, drag them around, or change them. It's very handy for correcting or fine-tuning certain areas of your digital piece. So, it's best to get accustomed to using this tool since it is actually one of the most utilized parts of the editing tool in Procreate.

 

Color Tool The right Palette

Procreate Brushes: Adding Texture and Detail

One of the best things you can do in Procreate is access its stash of brushes. The app can also come with many brushes that mimic traditional mediums such as charcoal, ink, watercolor, etc. For an artist in training, experimenting with these brushes will prepare him more about what to anticipate from each brush. Each brush is different and has its opacity, flow, and texture, so learning how to tweak the settings for your style is important in achieving professional-looking artwork.

Beginner Techniques: Sketching and Linework

Start with simple brushes, such as the 6B Pencil for drawing and the Round Brush for clean lines. Gradually, you can switch to a watercolor or oil painting brush to create textures and blends.

Making Custom Brushes

You can also import and install custom brushes with this tool, which gives you even more alternative options to upgrade your work. Most artists share their custom brushes online so you can find excellent textures and tools to help you raise the creativity level of your art.

How to Master Techniques in Layering Procreate

A major thing for any beginner to learn how to work with in Procreate is layers. Think of them as transparent sheets layered on top of one another: you can draw on each layer alone, meaning there's much more flexibility, and editing is almost easier. 

They are also real time-savers because separating aspects of your artwork, like the background, initial sketch, and final details, is much easier. Keep reading to learn more about the layering techniques. 

The Basics of Layering

You should begin with a basic sketch layer. Then you would have coloring, shading, and texture layers. This way, you could change any part of your artwork without affecting anything else. For example, you can change the background color without affecting the sketch or the shading.

Layer Blending and Opacity Controls

Advanced features in Procreate include Layer Blending Modes and Opacity Controls, which make you even more creative when working with layers. Try using these to produce soft shadows, glowing lights, or textured surfaces.

Creative Procreate Ideas to Inspire Your Digital Art

As a beginner, exploring different styles and techniques might help get out the most from Procreate. Whether you're into illustration character design or abstract art, Procreate has it all. Here are some creative ideas to get you started with them:

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Portrait Drawing: Capturing Realistic Features

If you like portraiture, try a digital portrait. Start with the overall shape of the face and gradually build it up with shading, color, and details. Use the brushes in Procreate to layer texture into hair and skin, and play with the blending modes to create a more dynamic portrait.

How to Paint a Landscape: Bring Nature to Life

Procreate has great tools for watercolor brushes and blending in general, which are highly suitable for landscapes. You can start by roughing out the actual elements of the landscape while adding layers of color, or even just create layers over a soft gradient background or use the watercolor brush as a tool for blending.

If you're a graphic designer, Procreate allows you to draw sharp, clean lines or vector-style illustrations to develop your logos, characters, or other design elements using a variety of line weights and geometric shapes.

i-Pads: Drawing on iPads - Fine-tuning Your Digital Experience

Using the stylus dramatically enhances the experience with Procreate. It will make the process of drawing on your iPad ideal when equipped with the Apple Pencil, as it delivers precision and responsiveness that very much makes the drawing process feel natural. Thanks to the pressure sensitivity and the functionality of tilting, incredible linework, shading, and textures are achievable and almost comparable to using a traditional medium.

How to Keep Improving as a Procreate Artist

The more you work in Procreate, the more options you can look into to develop your skills and become proficient in digital art. Here are some tips to help you develop as a Procreate artist:

Practice regularly to improve your craft.

Like most art, to become good, you must practice. So, set aside daily or weekly time to hone your drawing and painting techniques. The more time that goes by, the more conversant you'll become with Procreate's various tools to create complex art.

Learn Something New from Tutorials

Procreate has one of the largest communities of artists who share wonderful tutorials, tips, and techniques. Whether you want to learn new brushes, master blending techniques, or achieve specific effects, look up a Procreate tutorial for beginners.

Do Some Imaginative Stuff

Don't be afraid to test many styles, from realism to abstracts. Trying different styles will allow you to expand your creative horizons and learn new techniques to add to your future projects.

Conclusion

Procreate is excellent for those who would love to create some fantastic digital artwork on the iPads. With its toolset of digital art, aside from brushstrokes and layering, a trip to the fabulous world of digital art is easy, and the beautiful masterpieces await you in their myriad forms. Be it an illustrator, portraitist, or graphic designer, with Procreate, the possibilities seem endless, and you can use your inventive ideas, practicing every day to perfect your skills and turn digital artwork into nearly incredible work.


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