One of the best parts of social media is giving creators a platform to showcase their work! I've seen so many amazing digital creations and the common denominator has been Procreate. Procreate is an iPad app as shared on its website as "the most powerful and intuitive digital illustration app available for iPad. Full disclosure here - this is not a sponsored post. The motivation to download this paid app ($13.99 CND) comes from other creators creating with the app and I was gifted an iTunes gift card from a colleague. Normally, for educational purposes, I am a believer in using apps that are free so cost isn't a barrier to access. Digital equity is a perspective that we need to examine when selecting digital technology to ensure we are not further marginalizing groups of educators or students. When creating, I like to use free apps (Google Keep or Apple Keynote) to develop my skills to showcase what is possible with tools. However, for the past little while, I felt like I reached a hump in my personal creation journey. The free tools weren't designed for digital drawing and it's reflective in their limitations. For example, the inability to create and manipulate layers, different drawing tools and manipulation tools like masking can be frustrating.
So this brings me to the purpose of this blog post. I am going to challenge myself and learn a new digital tool out in the open! I'm going to document that process here sharing my successes and failures! The only way to learn is to try, so here is my first attempt. Creating a new canvas is pretty intuitive with pressing the "+" sign in the top right corner. Once the canvas opens up, there are several menus that can be found around the parameter. Trying each one, I figured out what most of the options are and I am overwhelmed with the variety of brushes and ways to manipulate drawing. There are extra menus that appear when you tap on the adjustment and select tool. I'm not sure how to narrow down on which brushes to use and adding complexity to the choice is the variation you get with the same brush with different amounts of pressures and the angle at which the Apple pencil is used. One feature that I need to spend more time exploring and researching is the "S" icon on the top left toolbar.
Most of the features are pretty intuitive to use and I stuck with the technical pen as the main brush to experiment with. I recommend using one brush to get use to how the texture and gauge change with how you use the Apple pencil. I'm curious about separating/selecting different drawing on the same layer as I would have loved to be able to move portions of the drawing. I definitely need some more time and maybe some tutorials. To be continued...
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