Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Alex Gabriel

Procreate lets you sketch with a finger. I’m picking it up.

I’ve been trying out Procreate, the Photoshop-for-iPad drawing app. In Sunday’s post about wanting to draw better, I mentioned being tempted by the iPad Pro, which lets you draw with a handheld pencil; my current tablet doesn’t support that, but since Procreate also lets you sketch with a finger, I downloaded it this week and started picking up the basics.

The app is truly impressive. For £5.99, you get layers, transparency and the ability to zoom in and rotate the canvas without moving the iPad. I’ve been impressed by what I’ve been able to draw with a finger, and while I’m still yearning for an Apple Pencil—none of my sketches have been as precise or expressive as the ones I posted last weekend—I’m getting a lot out of it.

I’m mostly tracing from photos so far; while I want to get better at freehand sketching, my focus at the moment is getting used to the app. My favourite drawing tools so far are the artist’s crayon, oriental brush and calligraphy pen, though I want to keep experimenting. Further to Sunday’s post, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been able to do.

I’ve wanted for a while to write a post about the vicar from Broadchurch, played by science fiction’s Arthur Darvill. One of the reasons I still haven’t is that I want to illustrate it. This sketch of him in the pulpit started out as a doss—somehow I couldn’t stop myself drawing the outline of his stole, and after that the lectern followed, and so did everything else.

He doesn’t have a face partly because I like that style of drawing, but mostly because I suck at drawing faces. I’m quite pleased with how I managed his fingers, though, curled round the pulpit’s edge on one side and splayed flat on the other. It‘s hard to know where to stop with a sketch like this—I felt as if it needed a background, and so…

Like someone working on a comic book, I turned down the first layer’s opacity and inked over my own sketch lines. I don’t think this version has as much character as the first one, but it’s a lot neater. I almost want to add text—one of the character’s lines, or possibly a narrative box—but something deters me. I did the whole thing with the calligraphy pen.

The scene this is traced from didn’t have anything green behind him: the backdrop was based on the colour of his stole, which I wanted to reinstate somehow. I’m not an experienced inker, and a finger isn’t as accurate as a pen, so I’m not totally happy with how his surplice looks—the lines are all a bit messy. Still, I’m pleased with it overall.

In January I wrote a post about the cold, grey climate of England, with a photo I’d taken of a football in the morning frost on the back lawn. With spring here it looks a bit different, so I photographed it again the other day: this doodle is based on the new image. I did all of it with the artist’s crayon except the sky, which was made with the oriental brush.

It’s a rough-as-hell ten minute attempt, and there are a ton of problems, but I still quite like it. I’m intrigued by the crayon’s texture and how it captures light and shadow—I’d like to try doing a human face this way—and I think there’s an illustration style in there. If I did this again, I’d execute the round canvas better, but I enjoy the way it breaks up text.

The daffodil photo is another of mine, taken on an iPhone like both the football ones; the pictures to the right were my first attempts at finger-drawing in Procreate, and correspondingly I think they’re my least successful. The line drawing in the centre at least told me I was onto something; the filled-in one was an experiment I abandoned.

I’m noticing there are two styles I’ve fallen into—picture-book-esque illustration with the artist’s crayon and comicbookish inking with the calligraphy pen. I want to go further with both of those—I’m especially intrigued by the potential of the former—and also explore other approaches. Mainly though, I want to keep having this much fun.

Learning To Draw On An iPad was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Learning To Draw On An iPad

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles