Review: Drawing on iPad
I’ve had my iPad Pro for about a year now, so I’d thought I would share my experience of drawing on it with the Procreate app and the Apple Pencil (2nd generation). First off, I didn’t necessarily upgrade my iPad in order to begin drawing on it. My iPad was about 8 years old and it was getting pretty slow to use for credit card transactions and bookkeeping. Many of my illustrator friends use iPad Pro and Procreate for sketching, so I thought I would go for the pro model and bundle it with my need for business transactions along with digital sketching.
The Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro deliver a very authentic drawing experience. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the experience was better than I anticipated. Stroking the tip of the pencil across the screen has a natural feel to it with no lag or offset. It responds well to the amount of pressure used, although pressing too hard will cause temporary screen distortion. Overall, I think most users will find the experience of drawing tactile and satisfying. In fact, I often find myself with a craving to get the iPad out and draw.
Procreate is a fine drawing app. It can be quite powerful if you are willing to put the time into learning all the tools and processes the app offers. For me, I keep it simple, using just a few brushes to draw with, the cut and paste feature and resizing tool. My work does not really require much else, but it is nice to know the tools are available if needed. Those tools may become more necessary in the future, when I find myself traveling and away from the full-power of my desktop.
The app itself is laid out well. Quick adjustments like brush size, opacity, color and undo are available on the main screen. While fine tuning individual brushes can be made deeper inside the main brush menu. This helps you get the stroke just right for your particular style of drawing. Procreate offers a wide variety of brushes out of the box, while also offering the ability to build custom brushes. My needs have been met with just a couple tweaks to the standard brush settings.
My biggest complaint with Procreate comes immediately after changing brushes. Frequently, the brush fails to work right after a switch. You set the tip on the screen and begin to draw or erase but it will not respond. You have to lift the tip off the screen and place it back down to get it working again. This glitch has been there since the beginning and has continued through the app updates. I have searched for solutions online, but have not found any yet. It does not do this every single time you switch brushes, but it does it more often than not, which interrupts the flow of drawing.
The sketches you see in this blog post were all created in Procreate. It can be difficult to see the difference between a traditional pencil sketch that was scanned into the computer versus a Procreate sketch. When I complete a sketch in Procreate, I will use the share feature to airdrop the image to my iMac where I will continue working on it in Corel Painter. This process is obviously much faster than scanning a pencil sketch and cleaning it up to prep it for digital paint.
So far I have not taken anything to final art within Procreate, but I am working on developing that process. It will be useful when I’m traveling. For now, it is faster to finish my sketches on my Cintiq using Corel Painter and personal custom brushes. On a final note, Procreate will record your drawings which you can export and edit within any video editing software. The videos look great and are a fun way to share your work.