Through the Forest: Should You Use Procreate?
Are you looking for the best platform to create your art? Well, here is my experience with Procreate to hopefully help you with your decision.
Through the Forest was the second digital art I created. I decided to move away from Photoshop for iPad for this one because of the difficulties with the pen delays, etc... You can learn more about that experience in my previous blog. After watching a few artists on YouTube use Procreate, I decided to give it a try.
Through the Forest was the only painting I created in Procreate from head to toe and I have my reasons so here are the pros and cons.
Pros
Firstly, I'll say, I actually really love Procreate because it's...
Easy to use
Many shortcuts to make drawing simpler
Special brushes
Easily change colors
1 time fee, no subscription
Not glitchy
Let's get into these special brushes. There's an app that you can download called Procreate Tools and you can download all these brushes that enhance your art and also makes drawing and painting a bit easier. Take Through the Forest for instance, the bark detail on the trees, the leaves, the detail in the pond, the grass, the flowers, the strands in the hair, these are all brushes. This alone had me sold. I don't regret the $12.99 I spent on the app at all.
Even though I don't do my painting from beginning to end, in Procreate, I use it to put the finishing touches on, as you can see in the video below for my Sunkissed Beauty painting.
It's also easy to change colors. Suppose I wanted to change the color of the shirt to blue. I can just drag the color to the shirt then BOOM, everything are turns to blue shirt. This is a new discovery for me. Frankly, I discovered it by accident and I was so excited when I did. Game changer.
Cons
So why isn't Procreate my go-to app all around?
Maxes out at a little above 8,000 pixels per project
The more pixels you use, the less layers you're able to use
If you're not looking to create anything with a lot of pixels (especially when doing print on demand) or don't need a lot of layers then this may not bother you but I like to use a lot of pixels, somewhere between 7,000 - 10,0000 usually. I generally use about 10 layers at the minimum per project. So this is pretty inconvenient.
What I do now is, create the whole painting in Adobe Fresco at a high quality then I go to Procreate for the enhancements. Using Sunkissed Beauty as an example, I detailed her hair. Added shine and sparkle, eye lashes, eye brows and cleaned up anything that needed to be and added to the shading and makeup. Then BAM, Sunkissed Beauty was a baddie!
This should give you a better idea of what you can do with procreate and see if it is worth it for you. It has too many great features to miss out but if you need a high resolution piece, you may want to start in another app first.
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