Procreate illustration for beginners

Step 1

Get your iPad and the app ready

Procreate is an iPad-only app sold exclusively on the App Store with no subscription: you pay once. The current version needs iPadOS 16.3 or later; you can find your iPad model under Settings → General → About. Check the price for your region in the App Store before buying.

• •Apple Pencil: recommended; Procreate brushes respond to the stylus's pressure and tilt, and you don't need to connect the Pencil to the app separately, just pair it with your iPad;
• •language: Procreate's interface isn't available in Ukrainian, so this guide uses the English tool names you'll see in the app;
• •learning: Procreate has a free video series for newcomers, the Beginners Series, and the Procreate Handbook.

Step 2

Create a canvas and learn the gestures

In the gallery, tap + at the top right. For a first illustration, the Screen Size or Square preset works well; A4 and other formats are there for print, and a custom canvas lets you set the size, color profile and process video settings. Note that canvas size affects how many layers you can have.

• •two-finger tap: undo; hold to undo repeatedly;
• •three-finger tap: redo;
• •two-finger pinch: zoom, and pinch with a twist to rotate the canvas;
• •three-finger scrub: clear the layer.

💡 Start by just drawing lines and circles with different brushes to feel the pressure. It's a better warm-up than jumping straight into a character.

Step 3

Sketch and clean line art

Split the work into layers from the very first minute. On the first layer, rough out a sketch with a brush from the Sketching set: it's designed for quick studies and mimics pencils and pastels. Lower the sketch layer's opacity and create a new layer above it for line art; the Inking set is what you need here.

• •StreamLine in the brush settings (Brush Studio) smooths out wobbly lines; brushes in the Calligraphy set have it on by default;
• •QuickShape: draw a line or shape and keep your finger or stylus down; after a moment it snaps into a straight line, arc, ellipse, triangle or quadrilateral; a second finger on the screen turns an oval into a circle and a rectangle into a square;
• •draw long lines in a single stroke, and rotate the canvas to a comfortable angle instead of twisting your hand.

Step 4

Color without going outside the lines

Put color on a separate layer below the lines. The fastest way is Reference and ColorDrop: mark the line art layer as Reference in the layer menu, switch to your color layer and drag the active color (the circle at the top right) into an area. The fill spreads up to the lines, while lines and color stay on different layers.

• •if the fill leaks, drag and hold: ColorDrop Threshold appears, and you adjust it by moving your finger left or right;
• •Alpha Lock lets you paint only over pixels that already exist on a layer; turn it on with a two-finger swipe right on the layer;
• •Clipping Mask: a separate layer for shading or texture that shows only within the layer below it, so shadows are easy to edit or remove.

💡 Start with a limited palette: a few main colors and one darker shade of each for shadows. That makes a cohesive illustration easier to achieve.

Step 5

Finish, keep the process and share your work

For a new canvas, Procreate records a process video (Time-lapse) at 1080p by default. You can replay and export it along with the finished illustration, which is handy for social media and your portfolio. Under Procreate's terms, anything you create with the app's default brushes is your content to use however you like, commercially included.

• •ideas for a first illustration: your favorite mug, a houseplant, a simple mascot character;
• •second illustration: the same subject, but with a background and light from one side;
• •third: a small set of icons in one style, to practice consistency.

💡 Show your work in the community and ask for feedback on something specific: line, palette or composition. How to gather work into a portfolio is covered in Designer portfolio.