Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Procreate: How to Create Art on an iPad®

Many traditional artists are making the crossover to digital art. Apps like Procreate offer vast opportunities to do so, and I am so grateful that they are. When I found Procreate my world opened up and I fell in love with the medium of digital art. Many of us have been trying to make the crossover on our own, but artists are visual people and when information is left out of a tutorial, it does us little good.This was to be the solution that we waited for. Unfortunately,,...........the book is not geared to the discipline of Fine Art at all. I've been excitedly waiting for this book since it's publication was first announced last Fall. And then the letdown upon release.Sadly, there is basically one token example for the traditionalist: a landscape with a small bridge. Is there a Fine Artist out there who actually didn't learn how to paint this scene in their first art class? I doubt it. The choice is an elementary nod to Traditional Artists, at best. The rest of the examples are graphic art. Graphic art is fine but it isn't the kind of work landscape, portrait or abstract artists do. It's static, even when animated. Fine Art breathes differently: uses color, line, subtle changes in hue, texture and movement. These are the heartsong of traditional art. The examples used are not tailored for us to follow along. There are few Digital Art books which address the issue of the traditional style of artwork. I know of only two and one is way out of date. What a shame that such a broad base of artists were ignored. I would no more execute the projects in this book than skip rope: Just as a graphic artist would not pursue mine. They would most likely find traditional art boring and not pertinent to their style or goals: hence, boring. None of the project choices are close to traditional art.The title of this book implied that the book was the definitive manual for Procreate. It is nowhere near that. It's a tool for graphic artists, and with a simple exception, address that style alone. It does not address the visual language that is so desperately wanted and necessary to a traditional artist in any medium. There's a huge untapped market for such a publication. Someone needs to meet that need with precision and technical finesse. Sadly, this book does not.

I bought the Kindle version which is very disappointing. Every page has overlapping words, and some of the images are all over the place making it very hard to decipher what is going on. You would think for a book about digital art they would have made the digital e-book readable!Other than that, the content is exactly what I was looking for - a concise guide to navigating Procreate for a beginner. I just wish I had bought a paperback copy!

Well look no further! I have only actually read 20 pages (flipped through more) and I have already learned so many things I have yet to learn watching all the classes, and videos online. Not to say you should only get this book. This goes over so many wonderful features of procreate, and is covered in a very comprehensive way. NO this will not turn you into a professional, that takes practice and patience. This will however build your confidence in using the program in a very effective way, and is a great resource that you can go back to over and over again.

I had high hopes for this book but the Kindle version is broken in it's current state. Text spacing and position are completely off making reading difficult. Several headings in the book were fed through optical character recognition which replaced letters with emojis. It's like they didn't open the Kindle version after converting. I'd honestly prefer the OCR version be dropped and replaced with the plain scanned version.Again, huge disappointment at the moment. This Kindle book costs too much money for the sloppy quality. If this issue is fixed in the future I will update my review as I am happy with the content but the quality is unacceptable.

I love the book. It’s exactly what I wanted and more. It’s a amazing book to own. The downloadable resources are on their resources page on the publishers website

Lavishly illustrated but cannot find how to download the tutorials from the book. This limits how I can learn from these artists.

This is a nice size book with nice thick perfect paper, like a coffee table book. Photos are gorgeous. I have been using Procreate for some time now so am not a beginner but the members of my Procreate group on Facebook were raving about it, so i had to get one. I was tempted to skip over the first chapter or so assuming i knew it all already but it was late and i was tired so went ahead and read it. I did learn some things i didn't know. The pace of the book is pretty rapid, so if you are not a "good learner" it might be a little fast but I think Procreate did just a good job of placing menu items, you probably will be fine. For a more experienced user, the style of the book involves lots of projects which look like fun. It is photo intensive which is surprising as that definitely makes a more expensive book. This book along with Youtube tutorials, the Procreate manual online, and Udemy courses should make you a master in no time.

This is one of those rare books with a format that simply doesn’t work with a Kindle. It’s too large. The book is packed with valuable information and you WILL end up buying the book. The Kindle version just doesn’t work, which is too bad because I really do buy 98% of my books as Kindle versions. This is a must have book, though.

My internet goes on and off and I couldn’t use the help section on software, so, I bought this book. Much better! It’s easy to understand and very useful. Everything my granddaughter was showing me is in this book!! She said it was excellent!! There you have it! Lol!

The usability of this product is not effected by it's damage, and the information is very good for a beginner learner of procreate. The wording is a tad dense, but ample visuals help illustrate the various tools available in the software. I would suggest this book to anyone who has a minimal grasp of how the program works, and is looking for a resource to learn more complex uses of the program.

It is a good assistance but as I said the learning is very steep. This is not a good book for someone in a hurry.

The first 70 or so pages are an excellent resource, but as with any printed tech manual, a few areas are outdated because the technology changed quickly. Still, it was an excellent resource, and I just overcame outdated portions by playing in Procreate or watching a YouTube video. The 2nd half of the book has projects to copy, not my style, but I read it and picked out about 5 total tips to use. It would have been better if the projects section had single tasks to try rather than extensive steps to make an exact copy of someone else’s art.

First of all, let me state that I’m NOT an artist so attempting digital art was certainly going to be a major challenge for me. I can’t sketch, draw or paint with traditional methods so, learning Procreate was ambitious. My goal is to create personalized cartoon spiral notebooks, and other items for my grandson, and beautiful greeting cards. I read up on and purchased the Procreate App and went to You Tube for guidance. Although I was unable to recreate what the you tuber did, I realized that if I had an easy step by step beginner’s book I probably could create some very elementary items for my grandsons. Well, drumrolls please... I can do quite a bit more. In the first 49 pages, I followed all of the practice exercises and had no difficulty navigating the tools after trial and error. I didn’t time myself but I believe the 49 pages took me maybe 2 hours to complete and understand the lessons. With the building blocks I learned in the first 49 pages, I went back to You Tube and understood everything the You Tuber demonstrated.Now that I understand the basic building blocks, there is still a great deal more to learn and I will continue practicing. I’m very encouraged and excited about the creativity I will now be able to use with greeting cards I make for my family and friends and crafting projects for my grandsons.

I carefully went through the tools even though I was anxious for the projects to see how it was to actually create something only to get the message that my iPad was not able to open the resources. I was pleased with the book until that happened. Now big disappointment!

I wanted this to be a great introduction to Procreate since I'm a first time user but the instructions are not always clear. With a video you can see everything happening that might not be apparent in the book or well described. Especially for someone totally new to the iPad and Procreate the book will assume you know some things. But if you don't know what they assume then you still have to go looking things up outside of the book. With videos you see where every menu, palette, icon, button, etc is and how the instructor is doing it on screen. Nothing is omitted. Plus with the books there are always gaps from the artwork in step 1 to step 2, 3 and so on. The artwork progresses but you didn't actually see how they got from 1 to 2. The artwork just advances and so you've missed something. A lot of how to art books are like that because they can only show so much. Since Procreate is a digital medium videos make much more sense to me.