So this is a drawing of the barn cat at
Mobius Meadows Farmstead in Vermont, Robby. what's different for me is I did it entirely in Procreate on the iPad instead of in Sketchbook pro which is my usual ink/drawing app on iPad and desktop. I used ink for the detail a light grey layer to fill in the interior of the drawing so I could use a white pencil brush to add highlights and a darker grey background with some charcoal for shadows.
The drawing took about 12 hours to do altogether, about normal. I am pretty happy with most of it. But how was it working with Procreate?
In total, working with the now app was pretty nice. Its the first time, including photoshop, krita, you name the software - that I have found inking and drawing tools as good or better then Sketchbook Pro. The interface is not hard to learn at all even though I still have questions about how to do colour fills and it took me a few tries to export the finished work to Drop Box. In fact, pretty much all the issues I had were not Procreate related. I had to redraw the entire head after getting terrible results that were pixelated. This was because the canvas size was not what I wanted. I used a reference photo imported from the Photo app and that app for some reason always brings in my references at half the size a made them at.
Things I appreciated over Sketchbook were the interface and the easier way to control brushes. The streamline brush feature really took out the wobble from drawing on an iPad on the couch but kept the natural looking pen line I love. I haven't tried colour yet on it but i will. I don't think it has dodge and burn tools like photoshop or affinity photo en lieu of using layer modes for those functions, as Sketchbook does. I usually do colour work as grey scale layers and then colour each layer using hue and saturation so dodge and burn works really well for me to get details into those drawings. Something I will need to get used to.
A big reason I made the leap from free Sketchbook to 16$ (CAD) Procreate was the addition of text to the latest version. Sketchbook has text but it's TERRIBLE to use and I usually have to go into Affinity Photo to add the title and my name, but not this time. Sketchbook seems to have OK palm rejection while this program has a much better result in that regard. I did have to erase some stray lines from my hand now and then but not nearly as much as in previous drawings.
A small problem is the fact there is no desktop version yet, or maybe never. I do like working on my 24" screen with my Wacom tablet for larger and long term projects. It's just more comfortable and I have more options to go into other programs - though that problem is pretty small with Affinity have both Photo and Designer on the iPad now, there is very little missing from my desktop lineup of drawing options. One thing I might do is put a screen protector back on the iPad to give the pencil more of a 'real paper" feel. Right now it glides to quickly over the surface.
In resume: it's a hit and something I see myself using more and more. Though is anyone has a couple thousand dollars to spare, I think using it on an iPad Pro with a TB of storage would be pretty sweet!
(Thanks
Mike for singing the praises of Procreate until i broke down and bought it!)
