Last month I shared about some adventures in Procreate from the perspective of a Photoshop user. I have a few more insights to add and some conclusions that surprised me!

Reference photo from photographer Engin Akyurt. Brush comparison in Procreate. Re-shading the same sketch with different brushes is a great way to see their qualities!

My original goal was to recreate the feel of Photoshop in Procreate, but I also found that I liked Procreate for different uses. With the above study, I tested out two brushes that I liked after a lengthy narrowing-down process. The left example was made with a gouache style brush with the hopes of finding something like the Kyle gouache brushes for Photoshop. The right example was made with a brush from the Jingsketch Basics pack that I had used and was a little intimidated by at first, but had noticed potential. I stuck with it and enjoyed using it so much that I decided to pursue this smooth, art deco flavor with an additional study!

The Edge Control brush is one that could only work well in Procreate. The brush dynamics that make it so fluid and have a controlled, but organic taper from the hard edge to the soft edge would not work in Photoshop. Procreate excels at line-based brushes, so it's no mystery that comic artista love it. It is also useful for the contour control needed for modern/art deco styles and calligraphy.

Above are the brush settings for Procreate and wow-eee are there a bunch of toggles. The number of brush features on the left side seems to be about the same as Photoshop, but within each feature, there are a greater number of settings. Finding a pre-made brush you like and messing around with the settings a little is more approachable than building a brush from scratch.

A painting study in Procreate using Jingsketch's Edge Control brush.

Here is the second attempt with the Edge Control brush to see if I could make a more polished illustration with it. The plane-defining nature of the brush called for a graphic approach and informed the direction of the composition. The shading style for this elk gave some freedom to exaggerate shapes while also being systematic in a way that feels natural for how I like to build shadows and highlights.

In conclusion, Procreate and Photoshop have the same basic structure, but have unique strengths depending on the use. For my purposes, Procreate is amazing for sketching and encourages me to experiment more. I can't sit in bed or at a cafe with my massive iMac and do photoshop sketches, but I can take the iPad anywhere and fill my time with drawing when I might otherwise melt my brain with social media. While Photoshop is also available for iPad, the interface for Procreate is well-suited for a small device. Photoshop has better tools for the complex illustrations I make for my book covers and posters, such as vector shapes, photo-editing tools, and typography options. I went in thinking I could recreate my same Photoshop techniques in Procreate and came out with a completely different approach for illustrating!

As a side-note and public service announcement, another tool has become available for protecting artists and their copyrighted images against AI plagiarism. It is called Nightshade, which is made by the same team that made Glaze. Nightshade deters the unethical scraping of copyrighted images by making very small changes to the pixels of your images. AI training models will go on to ascribe the wrong description to the “Nightshaded” images because of those changed pixels, weakening the model. Hopefully, this will help AI developers understand the importance of training on copyrighted data through consent.

Download Glaze And Nightshade!

Procreate continues to impress as an alternative to Photoshop. Recently, they released Procreate Dreams for animating and more professionals are starting to use this powerful software for art-making. I have been sketching here and there with Procreate, but last December gave me time for an in-depth exploration. On my Instagram, you can see a short review of brushes I tried. In this list, I will share more about specific settings I found helpful to get closer to my Photoshop brush preferences. This information is most useful to artists transitioning to Procreate from Photoshop or want to add Procreate to their workflow.

How I "Photoshopped" My Procreate Brushes:

Adjust Your Pressure Curve
Under Actions (Tool Icon)>Prefs>Edit Pressure Curve, you will find a graph that will adjust when you click and drag it. Mine looks like a hill while the default is a straight line. I have a light touch, so the "Aggressive" pressure setting that curves upward feels more natural. In Default, the light touches I make create super faint strokes and I get a cramp from having to press harder than what is natural for me.

Try Out Custom Brushes By Like-Minded Artists
By trying out a bunch of brushes made by artists whose painting techniques were similar to me, I found better brushes and learned more about what brush settings could "fix" brushes I didn't like. Gumroad has great free and affordably priced brushes by amazing illustrators and artists.

Turn on the Azimuth Setting For Brush Tilt
In Photoshop, I have a favorite gouache brush from Kyle Webster's gouache brushes with a rectangle shape that rotates with the tilt of my pen. I found a similar brush from Jingsketch called Flat Square, but its shape was static as I rotated my pen, making it hard to use the thick vs thin edge of the brush at different angles. In Brush Settings (click the brush in Brush Library)> Shape you can toggle on the Azimuth setting and shazam, you have your brush tilt just like Photoshop.

A painting study in Procreate. I mainly used Jingsketch's Basic Brushes.

Embrace the Refined Under-Drawing
One painting tip I have for Procreate is related to the size of the work area on an Ipad. An Ipad is a dramatically smaller area than what you may be used to when working in Photoshop and on top of that, your hand will be covering some of your Procreate canvas. For me, this means I zoom in more when finessing details in Procreate and do not see proportion or value issues as easily as when using a large monitor for Photoshop. A workaround for this is making a more refined drawing before proceeding to shading in Procreate. Luckily, the stroke control in Procreate make line drawing much easier than Photoshop (at least, when compared to the Graphics Tablet), so a tighter sketch in Procreate can be accomplished quickly.

I have a few more insights into Procreate for next month and the start of a new set of book covers. I'm looking forward to see how I can use the strengths of Procreate to improve my personal work and illustration freelance!