Procreate

Description

Savage Interactive released Procreate on the original iPad App Store in 2011 years before the Apple Pencil existed. The team built it on the bet that drawing on a tablet would eventually become natural and when Apple released the iPad Pro and the first-generation Apple Pencil in 2015 Procreate was already a mature application waiting for the hardware that would make the potential fully accessible. Today it is the dominant professional illustration application on iPad — the tool that concept artists, illustrators, comic creators and tattoo designers reach for when they work away from a desktop.

The commercial model of the application is quite simple on purpose: only one-time purchase, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Updates, including significant feature additions, are shipped free to existing users. That model has not changed since launch, making Procreate unusual amongst professional creative software that has largely shifted towards subscription pricing.

KEY FEATURES

Brush Engine

Procreate’s brush engine drives a library of more than 200 default brushes that cover watercolour washes, oil paint textures, pencil grain, ink, charcoal and technical line tools. Each brush has dozens of parameters, including shape, grain source images, spacing, streamline, taper, pressure response curves, wetness for paint mixing, and blending behavior. Brush Studio allows users to edit any existing brush, or create new ones using custom shape and grain textures. Imported brushes from the Procreate community help to add to the library, and the .brush file format helps to share custom brushes between users.

Layer System

Procreate supports layer-based compositing with blend modes, opacity control and layer groups that contain several layers under a single folder. Clipping masks limit what is contained in a layer to the shape of the layer below it. Reference layers enable paint to react to the content of a given reference layer anywhere in the layer stack, making it possible to create complex coloring workflows in which line art on one layer drives fills on different color layers. The number of layers is limited by the resolution of the canvas and the amount of RAM in the computer — at relatively low resolution smaller canvases can have more layers than large high resolution documents.

Animation Assist

Animation Assist transforms a Procreate canvas into a frame-by-frame animation workspace. Each layer or layer group makes a frame. Onion skinning reveals the translucent ghost frames of previous and following frames to help guide the movement between poses. Frame duration is variable per frame, which is set separately. Completed animations export as a GIF, MP4, or animated PNG file.

Time-Lapse Recording

Procreate saves all strokes on a canvas from the start of a session and a compressed time-lapse video of the entire drawing process. The recording exports as a video at any point; the entire work from blank canvas to finished piece. Artists use time-lapse exports for social media process videos and client documentation.

Selection and Transform Tools

Selection tools like freehand, automatic, rectangle and ellipse mode. Automatic selection fills regions defined by color edges, much like the magic wand. Selected areas are moved, scaled, rotated, distorted and warped using transform handles. Liquify is used to apply mesh based distortion to selected or full canvas content to warp and push shapes without the boundaries of selection.

Color Tools

Color selection includes the use of a color wheel, traditional hue/saturation/brightness sliders, a harmony tool which creates complementary color sets, and a palettes system for organizing custom color sets. Color Drop is to fill an area bounded by dragging a color swatch from the color picker onto the canvas. Threshold adjustment is a way to control how far Color Drop will expand before it stops at the edges of boundaries.

Text Tool

The text tool is used to insert editable text using any font installed on the iPad, including imported custom fonts. Text styling controls include font, size, kerning, tracking, leading and alignment. Text is converted to a rasterized layer or editable. Imported fonts install via iOS Files app or directly via Procreate import flow.

Apple Pencil Integration

Procreate uses all pressure and tilt information sent by Apple Pencil, mapping pressure to brush size, opacity, or both at the same time depending on brush settings. Tilt affects the angle of effective brushes that simulate physical media — pencil and charcoal brushes lay down wider strokes when tilted as a physical pencil would. Apple Pencil Pro’s squeeze gesture and barrel roll (on supported hardware) assign to customizable actions