Procreate for Designers: Everything You Need to Get Started

If you've ever opened Procreate and thought, "Okay, this is cool, but kind of a lot. " Or like it's speaking a different language, you're not alone. Especially if you're used to more structured tools where things live in menus and panels, Procreate can feel loose, fast, and a little unpredictable at first. My goal in this course is to help that new language start making sense. Hey, I'm Nathan Brown. I'm an illustrator, a painter, an educator, and I've been working with both traditional and digital tools for a long time. I use Procreate every day for sketches, finished illustrations, client work, and personal projects. And over the years, I've learned what actually matters when you're starting out and what just adds noise. This course is designed to help you learn Procreate the right way. Not every way, not the perfect way, just a clear practical path that actually makes sense. You'll learn how to sketch, paint, choose colors, work with layers, add texture, and bring everything together into finished illustrations, all inside Procreate. But more importantly, you'll learn why things work the way they do, so you're not just copying steps, you're building real confidence. And we'll learn through hands-on demos and real projects, so by the end of the course, you'll have polished illustrations you can confidently add to your portfolio. — This course is made for creatives and designers who want to add Procreate to their toolkit. You don't need any previous Procreate experience. You don't need to be good at drawing. And if you're already familiar with more traditional design tools, you'll get to apply those same skills in a new way that unlocks a more intuitive, hands-on approach to illustration. And one last thing, don't worry about perfection here. This course is about experimenting, getting comfortable, and building momentum. Procreate is an incredibly powerful tool, and once it clicks, it's a lot of fun. So, take a breath, grab your iPad, and let's get started. All right, you're here. Welcome to the course. Before we start creating full

illustrations, I want to make sure we're all set up the same way. A few minutes of setup now will save you any frustration later on. So, in this video, we're going to get Procreate ready, make sure you've got the exercise files, and make sure your workspace looks like mine. So, when I click something, you can follow along easily. Now, if you haven't already, go ahead and download the exercise files using the link on this page. Once they're downloaded, you may need to unzip them depending on your device. Inside, you'll find the projects files that we'll use throughout the course. Now, it's not mandatory to use my files. You can absolutely follow along with your own ideas, but having them ready will make things smoother as we move forward. Now, for this course, you'll need an iPad that supports Procreate and an Apple Pencil. I do recommend the Apple Pencil because the pressure sensitivity is what makes drawing and painting feel natural. Now, make sure you're running the latest version of Procreate. If you don't have it yet, you can grab it from the App Store and install it before continuing. Now, once that's done, go ahead and open Procreate, and you should land in the gallery view. The gallery is where all of your artwork lives, so you can think of it like your home base. From here, you can create new canvases, organize files into stacks, duplicate work, or export finished pieces. And when you open a canvas, you'll see your main workspace, your canvas in the center, tools across the top, brushes on the side, layers panel, and color panel. Don't worry about memorizing everything right now. The goal here is just to get you comfortable with where things live. Now, to make sure that we're starting from the same place, I recommend not modifying any default brushes just yet. If you've previously adjusted brushes or changed gesture controls, you may want to reset those to default, so that when I demonstrate something, it behaves the same way for you. And don't worry. Later in the course, we'll absolutely explore customizing brushes and preferences, but for now, consistency will help. Oh, and a quick note before we move on. This course is designed to be hands-on, so I encourage you to pause the video, try things, experiment, and even rewatch sections if something doesn't click right away. You'll get more out of this by doing and not just watching. And don't stress if things feel awkward at first. Every new tool has that learning curve, so give yourself permission to experiment. All right, now that we're set up and ready to go, let's jump into something fun and start creating our first simple illustration inside Procreate. All right, now let's dive in to the

Procreate interface. But before we do, I want you to keep this in mind as we're going through it, because whenever I'm drawing on traditional paper, um you know, on a tabletop, I like to have on the surface with me um all the tools that I need. So, whether it's pencils, erasers, uh brush, uh paints, paper towels, whatever it is, cuz the last thing that I want to do is have to get up, walk across the room to get something, or start digging through a drawer looking for something, because it interrupts my workflow. And I really think that's what the designers of Procreate had in mind when putting together this interface, because everything is right at hand, or it's very quick to access. And that's great. So, let's go ahead, and let's jump in. All right, let's start out here with our blank canvas. And I'm going to start over on the far right up top here, we have our color picker. Now, we're going to just be taking a quick overview of all the menu items and all the tools, just so that you're familiar with where they are. Now, don't worry if you don't quite understand what everything does, because as we go through the course, we're going to be taking a look at each tool and each menu more extensively. All right, so starting off, we've got our color picker, which you may be familiar with how this looks if you've ever used Photoshop or Illustrator. And that goes for layers as well, which is our next menu item. And this is a very simple layers panel, but it does all the things that you would want it to do. I'm going to create a layer for us to work on, and I'm going to select the brush tool here. You'll see the brush library. And I'm going to make squiggly line here. And then the uh smudge tool does exactly what you might expect. It smudges our paint. And the eraser tool simply erases. Okay? Now, moving over here to the far left, we have the transform tool, so that we can transform anything that we put down. We've got a selection tool, so that we can select portions of our drawing and move them around and do whatever we need to do to edit. We also have the adjustments panel, which has lots of different effects and adjustments that we can make to our creations, which will be again, we'll be going over more in depth later in the course. We've got our actions menu, which includes things like canvas adjustments, share, video capture, and preferences and things like that, which again, we'll be going over more extensively. Now, there's a uh link here to the gallery, which is going to take us back outside of our canvas. Over here on the left of the screen, we have our brush size, and opacity. And then we've got a undo and redo arrows, those icons there. And then this little square here, I'll show you if you just simply tap that, it brings up a quick menu, and this is for like new layers, flip vertically, uh clear layer, merge down, just some different tools that you may want to have like a quick access to. Now, you can tap quick menu, and you can create your own quick menus to do like maybe you have some custom tasks that you want to have quick access to. I also want you to be aware how to access the copy and paste menu with three fingers, you just swipe down, and you have cut, copy, copy all, duplicate, cut and paste, and then uh an X here to close that out. Okay, now that's a quick overview of all of the tools that surround our canvas. Again, that's like laying our pencils and brushes and paints out around our paper. Now, there is another thing that I want to show you about the interface, and this was really the game-changer for me when it came to digital art, because I had tried in the past to work with like tablets and monitors, and just different tools to create digital art, but this right here, it's a very simple thing, but it really is what sold me on the iPad and Procreate. That is gestures. So, let's take a quick look at how you can use gestures, just a few simple ones that really will transform the way you work. Okay, so we have our squiggly line, and I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to delete that. And I'm going to make a new one here for us. And I want to show you can just tap two fingers to undo, or three fingers to redo. Take two fingers to pinch to zoom out, and zoom back in. Take the same two fingers, and you can rotate. And for some reason, this is just like reaching in to the screen and handling the art. Being able to use my hands to access what I'm creating, it that's really the game-changing element for me. It just it feels like it's more um intuitive, like there's less of a barrier between me and the artwork, and I think that you are going to see that more and more as you work through this course. So, I want you to try these out. Just the real simple basic gestures. Let's try it again. So, squiggly line, two fingers, undo, three fingers, redo, and then pinch to zoom, to rotate. Okay, and one other quick one while we're at it, drawing a line and then holding it will straighten the line. So, we can do that with shapes as well, where we just hold our, uh, pencil tip down, and it will straighten those shapes for us. And we'll be using this again later in the course. All right, let's start out by just making something fun right

off the bat. And we'll do this with just a simple drawing, a simple subject to give us an idea of just how Procreate feels, kind of how some of the most basic tools work, and where they're located, and it'll give us something fun to focus on in doing that. So, the first thing I want you to do is head over to randomprojectgenerator. com, and we've got some projects over here on the side. If you scroll down to Procreate sea creature. I'm going to tap on that. Now, we're going to let the random project generator decide on a subject matter for us within the basic idea or concept of sea creature. So, I'm going to generate my project. It looks like I'll be doing an octopus as my subject. You've been asked to create a quick illustration of a sea creature. Your subject is an octopus, and the goal is to explore brushes, layers, and colors while having fun, of course. Not to make a perfect drawing. We're going to keep it simple. It's going to be playful and unique to your own style. All right, so let's jump over to Procreate and let's see how to do that. Okay, over in Procreate, the first thing that we're going to do is tap the plus icon up in the, uh, upper right-hand corner, and we're going to choose screen size. It's the first option under new canvas, and that's going to give us a canvas that is the same resolution as our screen, which is a really good option for just doing some simple sketching. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate this canvas because I feel like an octopus is going to fit better in a vertical composition versus a landscape. So, I did that by just taking two fingers and just rotating the canvas. Okay, the first thing I want to do is select a brush. We're going to need a good sketching brush. Now, I'm in the pencil section of the Procreate library, and I'm going to go with this Scopus pencil, which is just a really good pencil that I like for doing some basic sketching. I'm going to switch over to the color circle over here, the icon in the upper right, and I want to make sure that my color is set to black or really dark gray. Okay, so we're going to start out with some basic shapes. But, before we do that, if you want to go ahead and just make some squiggly lines and just kind of test out the look and feel of just drawing some random bits in Procreate here. Just to give you a sense of how the Apple Pencil, just drawing on a screen, just how it feels overall. Okay, so to clear this layer, we're going to select the layers icon in the upper right, and I'm going to tap on the layer thumbnail, and I'm going to choose clear. Okay, now I recommend that you start your sea creature with the most basic shapes possible. So, for my octopus, I think I'm going to begin with a circle, and then I'm going to attach a rectangle below his head here. Use [snorts] this to make up his head and maybe what might be considered a body and attach all of his legs to. And I think his eyes might be right in here. He's just got a really nice alien look at the moment. Now, if we want to take what we are drawing and move it around or resize it, we can tap the arrow icon up here in the top left. Now, we have the transform menu and our drawing is selected. Now, we can use this to move the drawing around, or we can scale it down a little bit. And I think I want to scale my octopus head down so that I have some room to put the legs. So, choosing the brush again, now we're free to draw. So, I think I'm going to maybe try to put leg up here. So, he's got eight legs, so make sure I've got room for all of them. So, there's two. So, maybe there's another one comes down. And [snorts] another one maybe that comes down further. So, now we've got 1 2 3 4. So, I want to make sure maybe this one just comes out like this. And then this maybe it could be shorter. So, [snorts] you can see that this is just a really rough really simple sketch that we're going to build on. Now, another thing to point out here is if we have a line that we don't want, it's just a two-finger tap to undo that, and then a three-finger tap if we want to redo. Okay, so I'm going to remove that line and go back. See if I can squeeze another leg maybe right here. Maybe that one's further back. And let's see, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Maybe there's another leg back here that's just kind of going back behind. Maybe. Something like that. Okay, I'm going to add a little bit of shape to these lines. They're just kind of guidelines for me. I'm going to move him, scale him down one more time. And I'm going to let this be my rough drawing. So, I'm going to use this drawing as a guide to maybe create a little bit more of a refined version that we can then paint. So, if I add a new layer, I'm going to go to the layers icon again. I'm going to tap this plus in the top right. We create a new layer. But, before I begin to draw on that one, I'm going to turn the opacity of this first one down. I'm going to tap this letter N here to bring down this menu, and I'm going to just turn the opacity down to maybe 50%. All right, going back to my layer two. And in fact, we can even call this, if I tap on the name here and choose rename, we'll call this rough. And we'll do the same thing here. Layer two, we'll call it refined. So, now we can use this layer to go in and refine our drawing. Now, you just saw me zoom in, and I do that with two fingers by just expanding, contracting the canvas there, two fingers. And now I'll begin my more refined sketch. I also like to rotate the canvas a little bit when I'm doing a more refined sketch. Make my sketch lines. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect. Don't forget that. We really have a tendency to try and make things perfect like this. It's I think it's just like as being artists and designers, like we just want to make everything perfect. This is just an exercise for us to get to know Procreate before we take a deeper dive. So, don't worry too much. We just want to have fun. I can remember my first attempts at digital painting were just, uh, it's a horror story. — But, it just takes time. You have to be patient with yourself. And as you go through this course, you're going to see all kinds of improvement. And all of this is going to begin to feel like second nature. So, as I go further here, I think that, um, I might want to leave my rough sketch layer visible in this final little drawing because I think it adds a little bit of extra life to the piece. Okay, so he's going to have these little suction cup things here, too. So, I'm going to add those. Just where I think his tentacles might be like turning outward cuz they're going to be on the bottom. And then for this one, we'll put him on the outside. So, that looks like his tentacles are twisting and turning. Okay, maybe we want to add See about some eyes here. — My eyes are a little lopsided there, but that's okay. One is a little bigger than the other. That's fine. Maybe he's got kind of shape to his head here. Okay, I'm going to go with this for my sketch, and next up we'll take a look at adding some color.

All right, so how do we add color to our simple sketch that we just created? Well, let's start by adding a new layer for our color so that we can keep our color and line work separate. So, I'm going to add a new layer with that plus icon again. This time, I am going to tap on this layer, and then I'm going to drag it down below all the others. Okay, so it the color layer is going to be beneath the sketch, so our sketch will remain visible. Now, I'm going to select a I think this octopus might be orange. So, I'm going to go with just a light orange color. That's maybe kind of a middle tone, so if we wanted to do maybe some shadows or some highlights, we'll have some room to do that. Okay, so for our brush, our paint brush, let's go with something real simple. We're going to go over to the paints section here within our brush library, and I'm going to choose this very first one, Dellia. I'm going to make sure that the size is up, that maybe around 20%. Okay, this is just a really simple, uh nice brush that doesn't have a ton of texture. It also can be sized down to a really fine point, which will come in handy on the tips of the tentacles. I'll just begin to fill in some color my octopus. Okay, I'm not going to worry too much about uh being perfect. I'm not going to try to stay um inside the lines everywhere. I'm just going to be kind of loose with this color. Now, if we get way outside the lines, we can always come back with the eraser. And one quick tip is to tap and hold on the eraser, and the eraser will switch to the current brush that we're painting with. Now, the eraser tool and the smudge tool, they use the exact same brush engine as the brush tool, so you can use any brush as an eraser or paint brush or smudge tool. So, I'm going to come back with the eraser and clean up my lines just a little bit here. Size my eraser down there. I'm using these two sliders over here on the left. This is controlling the brush size, and opacity. So, right now it's set to 100% opacity, and my brush size is down around 20%. Okay, maybe just a little bit more clean up. Okay, so if we're thinking about the light source in this image, maybe the light is coming from this direction. Maybe it's coming down uh from the top. So, if that's the case and the tentacles are rounded, let's see if we can add a little bit of dimension to the octopus with a darker color. Maybe we'll go a little bit more red to give us a nice color that we can use for some shadow. I'm also going to size my brush down, so maybe his tentacles turn under. A few areas here. Like that, and maybe because of that light there would also be a highlight. So, I'm going to select the original color again by just You can use the brush tip or you can use your finger, and just tap and hold, and you can see the little circle that pops up that allows us to pick a new or pick the color that we're touching here. So, let's get the orange that we used in the beginning for the octopus. Now, the reason I did that is because I want to choose a lighter version of it. So, maybe it will go up a little bit, and maybe a little more towards yellow. So, this should work as a good highlight color for us. So, maybe there's a highlight there. And then just all the places that I think the light may be hitting. Okay, and while we're at it, we can take a look at the smudge tool here, and I'm going to tap it and hold so that it switches to the same brush that we've been using. Now, I can kind of smooth You can use it to smooth a little bit of this color, but we don't want to do over smooth or over smudge because it tends to make things look a little blurry. So, we don't want to overdo it. So, maybe just a couple of quick smudges there for that color. Now, let's go over Oh, maybe we want to add a little bit of a highlight to some of those um suction cups on his tentacle tentacles. So, we'd go on ahead with another lighter version. Maybe not as light as our highlight color. And let's see. I'm going to go ahead and add these to a new layer just in case I want to change their color or make a separate edit. So, it's good tip is to is anything that you want to be able to control separately, you want to put on another layer so to make it easier for you to do that. Okay, so now I've got all my suction cups. And then my That's my uh technical term for octopus anatomy. I'm going to color in his eyes here as well. And let's go ahead and do another layer above everything else, and switch to a real light color. And we'll use this to maybe add like this little specular highlight in the eyes. Okay, last up, let's add a background color. Let's get another new layer. We're going to tap and hold and drag this one down to the bottom, and let's choose a nice blue color for our background. We'll get maybe this sort of aqua blue. And do we want to use the same brush or maybe grab a different one? I'm going to leave it up to you, whatever however you want to do it. Let's get maybe make peace. Let's see what that one looks like. That looks like it might have a nice kind of watery texture. Let's try one more, maybe this one, Abalone. Okay, yeah, that's going to work. I'm going to size it down a little bit though, and I'm just going to make some diagonal brush strokes here for my background. And I want to size it down a little bit, same as we did before, make it fit a little bit better in the composition. Okay, as a final step, let's go ahead and add one more new layer, and let's tap and drag that all the way to the top above everything else, and let's go back to our other paint brush that we were using here, and let's get a really light yellow, almost white, and this is going to be like our final brightest highlight, almost [snorts] like a rim light around the edge of the octopus. So, we'll start here with the head. Maybe a bit there on top of the eye. And there's something to be some here, maybe a little bit of light there. Okay, I think we can call this one done, but before we move on, I want to show you how you can save this image so you can then refer back to it at the end of the course, and you can see how far you've come with your Procreate knowledge and skills. So, to do that, let's choose the wrench icon in the top left corner again. This time, we're going to go to share, and here you can choose the native Procreate file format, um which will retain the layers, um PSD format, which Procreate can also open. That's a Photoshop format. That format will also retain the layers. We can do PDF, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF. A lot of times, I choose JPEG if I want to save a lower resolution, lower file size flattened image. So, if I choose JPEG, I can then export it. Um I can print it. I can save to files or my photo library. Hey, just a quick pause for a second. If this is helpful so far, go ahead and tap the like button and subscribe so you don't miss any future tutorials. And if you're enjoying this sample, just know this is only a small portion of the full Procreate Essentials course. In the full course, we go much deeper into brushes, layers, color, workflow, projects, all of it step by step. There's a link in the description if you want to check that out. All right, let's jump back in. All right, now it's your turn. But

remember, this first project is all about just getting in, getting your feet wet, and having some fun right away. So, let's get started by taking a look at the project guide that you can download in the course resources. Okay, we'll be using the random project generator at randomprojectgenerator. com. And we're going to use this for two prompts during the course, but this first is for the mini project that focuses on a sea creature illustration. Now, the requirements is to generate your prompt. We're going to use at least two layers, one for line, one for color, but it's okay if you use more. And we're going to apply the color using brush tools and the color picker. You'll also likely use the eraser and maybe even the smudge tool. So, you want to keep it fun and experimental. Again, this is just warm-up, so don't worry about perfection. We're just going to just focus on getting comfortable with the look and feel of Procreate. So, your deliverables are to export your finished artwork as a JPEG. You're going to upload to the class project assignment section of this website, and you can share your work on social media. Be sure to tag Bring Your Own Laptop. You can find them on Instagram at the link here. And you are also welcome to post to the Facebook group or LinkedIn group, which is linked as well. Okay, remember to take your time, enjoy yourself, and I think you'll be surprised just how comfortable Procreate feels even when you're just starting out. All right, in this section we're going to be taking a look at the Procreate

gallery. Now, think of this gallery as like your home base where all of your projects live. It's like walking into your studio and seeing your completed works along with some works in progress and maybe all of the associated bits like sketches and thumbnails that you're keeping with those projects. So, let's go ahead and let's jump in, take a look. Okay, the first thing that we're going to see is all of the current projects that I have that are either completed or maybe works in progress, just everything that I have still within Procreate. So, now one thing that we can do that's really cool from the gallery is to preview what is inside of the canvas. So, in order to do that, we could just take two fingers and just expand on the thumbnail. Now, this gives us the ability to swipe back and forth, almost like you're flipping pages of a sketchbook. So, this is just going through everything in the gallery. And in order to close it out, all we have to do is pinch our fingers together, and that closes out the preview. Now, you'll also see that I have several projects here that look like stacks of different canvases, and you can kind of preview what is in the stack by hovering the tip of the pen over the screen without actually touching it. And if we go in If we tap, we can see what's inside. This is like project folders, like keeping all of your work within a folder. So, in order to create these, let's first create a couple of new canvases. So, I'm going to tap this plus icon up here in the top. And I'm going to choose a new canvas, and then it immediately opens up. Now, all of our new canvases will be placed in the upper left-hand corner. Now, in order to create these stacks, and we do this by tapping and holding, and we can drag the uh canvas around. Now, you can do it with your finger or the tip of the pencil. And if we hover over uh another canvas and drop it, it's going to create that stack. So, now within the stack, if we create another new canvas, it's going to place it within that stack. Now, one good tip here is to begin to name your canvases, files. Now, this is one thing that um I'm not particularly good at. In fact, sometimes I have maybe like 10 different canvases um and I have to open them up or preview them to see what's in there. Now, this is like a habit that you should make early on. Like, if it's a canvas full of sketches, title it sketches. If it's thumbnails, title it thumbnails. Don't wait until you have uh 20 different canvases and then you have to like click in and out to see um to see what's within them. Go ahead and try to uh name your files as you work. So, [snorts] let's just call this one sketches. Spell it right. Sketches. And maybe this one would be I don't know. rough draft And this one might be final. Now, in order to open up and change the name of the file, all I'm doing is just tapping the name, and then you can uh change the name. And you can do the same thing with the stack itself. So, maybe we would call this uh new painting. Now, let's talk about file management, and we'll jump into this project here. So, here's another example where I didn't name this one. So, this is my sketch, and this is my painting. So, one thing that you might want to do that I highly recommend is to make copies of your work before making like a big um change to the project or a change to the painting. So, for example, I typically will have a file that contains my sketch, and I might have one or two files that contains like a version of the painting. So, maybe for example, if this were the final painting, but I decided, "Oh, maybe I want to make like a color change within this. " Like, try some variations on the color. So, one thing I can do is just swipe to the left, and I can choose share, duplicate, or delete. Now, obviously, we can delete the file um from here, but be aware that once you delete within Procreate, there's no undo for that. So, make certain that you [clears throat] really want to delete a canvas before you actually do that. So, I'm going to choose duplicate here, and it's going to duplicate. Now, one thing that does happen here from time to time is when it duplicates the the painting, sometimes it will put it outside the stack. It doesn't always do that, but sometimes it does. So, in order to fix that, all we have to do is drag that one in. I'll place it right there in the first position or the first spot, and I'll name this one lion variation. I spell it right? Lion variation. Yeah, okay. So, that would maybe be a different version of the painting, maybe where I changed the colors or just try something different. Okay, while we're here, let's go ahead and take a look at our menu options in the upper right here. So, we've already seen that the plus icon is where we go to create a new canvas. And we also have select, import, and photo. So, select will give us the option to select multiple canvases. So, we can select them, we can take and drag them. We can drag them outside of the current stack. Or we can select again, we can delete from here as well. So, we would have preview and share and duplicate. So, this time we want to delete these. Now, the photo button here is to import photos from your photo library, and then import would be to import files from either your iPad or maybe iCloud or Dropbox or a USB drive. Now, I've got some files here. These are Procreate files, and I'll choose one, and it imports it, and then again places it into the upper left corner.

All right, now let's take a look at working with canvases. Now, it's a good way to think of canvases as going to the art store and picking out the right paper or the right canvas in the correct size. Now, when you're starting a project, you want to take this into consideration because the last thing that you want to do is be working on a project that is in the incorrect size. For example, if you were doing a t-shirt design in the size of a postcard, the final outcome wouldn't be the right size, therefore you would have to scale it up, which is always a bad idea for digital art. Now, the way that we create a new canvas is from the gallery, we're going to click the plus icon in the upper right here, and it's going to give us the new canvas panel that opens up. Now, there's several sizes here that come with Procreate by default, but what we want to focus on is creating a new canvas. Now, you do that by tapping the little plus little stacked box icon here in the upper right. And we've got the custom canvas window that opens up and gives us a lot of options to work with here. Now, the first thing that I want you to notice is the maximum layers here. Now, if we have a canvas that is 4,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels at 300 DPI. That gives us a maximum of 48 layers. Now, if we change a setting to something higher like 6,000 pixels, now we're taken down to 30 layers. Now, another thing that beginners might overlook is the DPI setting. And typically, I will work at 300 DPI. I never really go below that because 300 DPI is considered to be the standard for high-resolution files, the standard for print. So, even if my project is not intended to be printed, I will still work at 300 DPI just because you never know in the future when you might want to print something or you might need a higher resolution version of what you're working on. Okay, so we have some other options over here on the left. We've got color profile. And it selects sRGB IEC 6 by default, and that's usually where I leave it. There's also some other options here like CMYK, which is really for pigment or for printing. RGB is for light, meaning like monitors and screens. Now, CMYK, there's lots of different options here, and if you're working with a printer, they may have a specific setting that they want you to use, but typically, I will always work in RGB and then convert to CMYK later because CMYK will limit the colors that you can use. It will limit some of the looks and effects of uh layer styles and layer settings that you can use. So, typically, I always work with an RGB. Now, we do have some time-lapse settings because Procreate will record a time-lapse of what you are creating, and these settings are for whether you want it to be recorded in 1080p, 2K, 4K, uh low quality, studio quality, etc. Now, canvas properties are just involving the background color. Do you want the background color by default to be uh midtone gray or white or black? I typically always leave this as white and background is visible. Now, if we switch back over to dimensions to create the settings for our custom canvas, I oftentimes work by default with a 4,000 by 5,000 pixel canvas at 300 DPI. That gives me a maximum of 48 layers. Now, if you're used to Photoshop, that might seem like not enough um or might seem intimidating, but I really I don't ever run out of layers because I'm not often working with more than 48 because it would quickly become um overwhelming or confusing to me. So, I try to work strategically. I try to keep layers at a minimum um just as a good method of practice. Now, we can name this canvas by just tapping on the untitled canvas, and we can call it um my canvas. And again, 4,000 by 5,000 pixels, 300 DPI, maximum of 48 layers, and working in RGB. So, we'll tap create. So, now when we go back out to the gallery and we tap the plus icon down here at the bottom, we have my canvas now as an option that we can always choose from. So, switching over to that canvas, if we choose the actions menu, which again is the wrench icon in the upper left, and we go down to canvas information, we can see a similar window that pops up that gives us some information about this canvas. So, here we've got dimensions. Now, we have the 4,000 by 5,000 pixels, but you can see that the physical width and height is 13 by 16 inches, which is really that's pretty large, and that's a good general size because I try to relate it to maybe um the equivalent paper size, which would maybe be 12 by 16 or 9 by 12. That gives me a large enough painting surface that if I did want to print it, I could print it at a nice size. Now, we've got some layer information here. We've got the maximum layers again. We've got the amount of layers that we've used and what layers are available. If we go to color profile, we can see our current working sRGB profile. Again, video settings, and statistics just provides us with some interesting information like total strokes made, tracked time on this piece, and total file size, which is always handy to know. Now, as a small project, I recommend that you go through these settings yourself and that you create your own custom canvas in a size that you feel like that you will often use for sketches and general painting. Just a size that you feel like something that you might often use. Now, don't feel like you have to memorize all of these settings. As long as you are comfortable with creating your own custom canvases and then where to find all of these options in case you need them, you'll be good to go.

All right, now that we've got our canvas set up, let's talk about some tools that can help us in making sketching and planning a little bit easier. So, the drawing guides and drawing assist are like invisible helpers on the canvas that can help us to keep proportions and spacing and perspective, all of that in check within our composition. So, to start out, let's take a look at how to turn on the drawing guide. So, if we click over on our actions menu, which is the wrench icon, and we turn on drawing guide, and then right below that, edit drawing guide. So, what we have to start out with is a simple 2D grid. Now, you're probably most used to using a grid maybe to help you with composition. So, this grid is completely adjustable in that we can change the opacity of our grid lines here down below. We can change the thickness, and we can change the grid size. Now, we can also change the color from this uh rainbow-colored line up here at the top. So, I'm going to choose a blue. Now, also notice here on the bottom right, there is an option for assisted drawing. So, go ahead and tap to turn that on. Now, the grid is also editable from these dots that we see here. There's a green one and a blue one. The green one will rotate the grid. The blue one will move the grid around on the canvas. Now, if we tap, we can reset those. And now we're going to click done and go back to our regular canvas here. So, now when viewing the layers, we can see that layer one has a label underneath that says assisted. And what that means is that when we draw on this layer, everything that we draw will stay locked to those lines. So, no matter what kind of line we're making, it's just going to lock in to those grid lines. So, we can turn off the assisted option here on this layer by tapping the layer thumbnail and then unchecking drawing assist. So, now we're just using the grid as a visual aid. So, we can draw like we normally would without any lines being locked to the grid. So, let's go back to edit drawing guide, and this time, let's take a look at isometric. Now, go ahead and scale the grid up just a little bit here. I'm going to turn on assisted drawing. I'm going to tap done. So, now we have layer one with a grid, and it's labeled assisted. So, the isometric grid is exactly like it sounds. It helps you in drawing isometric shapes. Maybe your project requires you to draw a room or a series of boxes or something that just requires perfectly drawn shapes. Okay, now let's take a look at our next option under edit drawing guide. Now, we have perspective. So, this one is really interesting because typically, if you're familiar with like traditional drawing or painting where you are maybe you have a landscape or a scene and you want to keep everything in perfect perspective, the perspective grid can be kind of complicated and difficult to create in a traditional setting. But with Procreate, this is extremely easy to just tap anywhere to create your horizon line. Now, we have a single one-point perspective with the lines going to the vanishing point. Now, if we want to add a two-point perspective, we can just tap to create our second point. Now, we can raise our horizon line up and down in the scene. We can drag the vanishing points off of the canvas, and we could even create a three-point perspective. We're down on the ground, we're looking up at some tall buildings or something like that. This would really go a long way in helping us draw a more complicated scene and everything remain in perspective. So, assistant drawing is already on for us. Now, we have our perspective grid. We're on layer one. It's labeled assisted. So, now everything we draw here is going to stay in perfect perspective for us. Now, this is a simple set of lines to create these tall rectangles. But without the aid of this perspective grid, this would be pretty complicated to draw and to keep it in perfect perspective like this. Okay, back over to edit drawing guide. Now, let's take a look at symmetry. Now, this one contains a lot of really fun options and gives you the ability to create some really amazing things. Taking a look first, we have vertical symmetry, which is just this vertical line in the center of the canvas. So, I'm going to go ahead and tap done on that. And again, we have layer one that's assisted. Now, anything we draw here I'm drawing in the left, it's going to get repeated on the right. So, now it makes it really simple to draw a symmetrical object. Now, going back to edit drawing guide, under options here on the bottom right, it's the same for horizontal symmetry. And we can also choose quadrant. Notice that rotational symmetry is off. So, let's take a look at that. Now, our canvas is divided into quarters, and wherever I draw on the canvas, it gets mirrored into those other quadrants. So, you can see if I just jump around here, it's going to mirror whatever I'm drawing into the other spaces. Now, if we go back to edit drawing guide, and this time we turn rotational symmetry on, now what I'm drawing, instead of being mirrored, it's being copied in the exact same angle and the exact same place within the other quadrants. This is a really fun and powerful tool to just kind of unleash your creativity and create some really amazing patterns. As just a quick project, let's try and see if we can create a simple arrow that we can then reuse in a project. Okay. So, I'm going to clear this layer. I'm going to go back to edit drawing guide, and for symmetry, I'm going to choose vertical again. Let's make sure that rotational symmetry is turned back off. Now, I'm going to start with a simple diagonal line, and I'm going to hold it so that it straightens out. I'm going to draw a line back towards the center, and hold it until it straightens out. Move it up a little bit. Now, a vertical line. I'll hold that as well. I need one more line back to the center that I'll hold straight. Now, we should have a solid arrow shape. Going to choose a yellow color, and I'm going to drag that color to fill the shape. Okay, now I'm going to turn off assisted drawing by tapping the thumbnail again and deselecting drawing assist. And I'm going to turn off my grid by going to the actions menu and turn off drawing guide. Now, I have this arrow to resize, and I can move around in a project to use to point out this really tiny bug.

All right, now once again, it is your turn. For this project, we want to draw a simple arrow using symmetry tools. So, we're going to create an arrow of whatever color, style that you like using the symmetry tool and drawing assist. You want to keep it simple and have your arrow point to something fun on the canvas. Now, don't worry too much about this. This project is just to familiarize yourself with drawing assist in Procreate. So, just have some creative fun with this one, and be sure to upload and share your design.

All right, if you've made it this far, nice work. You've already taken a solid step toward feeling more confident inside Procreate, and that momentum matters. — If this helps you, go ahead and like the video and subscribe for more tutorials like this. I'd also like to hear from you. What part of Procreate feels most confusing right now? Is it brushes, layers, color? Let me know in the comments. And remember, this was just a sample of the full Procreate Essentials course. In the full version, we dive deeper into structured projects, full demos, and complete illustrations you can add to your portfolio. If you're ready to keep building your skills, check out the full course. The link is in the description. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you soon.