Simply playing around with Procreate has been the best learning. I haven't intentionally watched any Procreate tutorials or gone to any sessions on it. What I have realized it has been wonderful to just to try, fail, learn and repeat. This has me thinking how often we have our students just play? With so many new digital tools, as part of the learning curve, do we have time to just try out the features, ask questions and try to collaboratively answer them? No curriculum, no agenda, just getting use to a new form of expression.
In my first experience with procreate (Link to part 1), I documented my first interaction with the tool. I tapped every button and tried to see what each did, not getting stuck on particular feature nor exploring too deeply. This gave me a good overview of what could be done and more importantly gave me areas that I needed to further investigate.
At first, I confused the select tool with the transform tool. In other apps, a cursor icon indicates a select tool that allow you to move things around, however, in Procreate there are two different types of manipulations possible. The cursor icon, which I found out is called the transform tool, allows you to expand, shrink, distort, flip, etc the drawing in addition to moving it. The 'S" shaped icon called the select tool allow you to select a section of your drawing to copy/paste, to fill with a colour, or to selectively mask it from other manipulations. This was a really helpful tool to be able to add depth/texture to your drawing without altering another part. Both of these tools could be used together where select tool (S) could be used to select a specific part of a drawing and then the transform (cursor) could be used to move it.
Despite trying not to watch tutorials, what happens when you follow lots of design Instagram accounts is that you see tend to see tips and tricks in your feed. One time-saving tip to fill in your drawing is to drag the colour swatch from the top right into your drawing.
Using these two tools let me create this drawing where duplicate letters were copied, pasted and moved. Base colours were dragged and dropped from the colour swatch. Using the selection tool, each word was selected by tapping each letter so that only the letters could be manipulated. This allowed me to use other brushes to added the lighter blue to each of the words. Each of the words were in separate layers which allow for specific manipulation of each word and allowed me to add texture to the background without altering the words.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about upgrading technology/tools. This friend was upgrading his sewing machine to one that had more features and this new machine was going to elevate his sewing projects. When hearing this, I felt something similar where using Procreate allowed me to elevate my skills. Often with upgrades, you don't really know what you are missing and what is possible until you really look and try. There is still lots to learn, but I am finding my way through this new app.
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