10 Quick Procreate Tips & Tricks – My Fave Shortcuts to Increase Work Flow & Make Art Life Easier

Hi, guys. I’m Kris. Welcome to this week’s tutorial!

So today, we are gonna go into Procreate and I’m gonna show you a couple of my favorite Procreate tips and tricks that will hopefully help you out.

Tip Number One – Quick Hide Or Show Layers

So let’s dive right in with tip number one, quick hide or show layers. So sometimes you have a big project and you have a lot of layers. You know me, I have a ton of layers all the time and sometimes you just need to isolate that layer. So what you wanna do is open up your layers palette and you go to, let’s say for instance, your line layer and all you wanna do is see that.

So you would just go where the check mark is, hold, and it will isolate that layer for you. And so once you’re done, you don’t have to go and check all the boxes. You can just go to that check mark, hold, and they’ll all come back for you.

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Tip Number Two – Duplicating Multiple Layers

We still have to select the layers we wanted to duplicate and group them together, and then duplicate that group but now what you can do is just highlight the layers that you wanna duplicate, drag into your canvas and they will duplicate at the top of your layers palette.

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Tip Number Three – Making Snap Shapes

Sometimes you want that perfectly shaped circle or perfectly straight line, so here’s how you go about doing that. You might already know this one but just in case, let’s go over it. So if you wanna draw a straight line, you just draw a straight, hold, and it will be a straight line.

If you want it to be aligned vertically or horizontally, or even on an angle perfectly to your canvas, then you just hold down your finger and it will give you the snapping motion. So that’s really useful. And then you can edit your shape. You can make it an arc you wanted or back to a line. Okay, next, we’ll draw a circle. So you draw your circle, you hold and you have a little egg-shaped, a little ellipse. Hold down your finger, then you have a perfect circle.

 

Tip Number Four – Erasing With A Two-Finger Tap

So this one’s my absolute go-to. Of course, it’s erasing with a two-finger tap. So if you’ve made a mistake and simply wanna undo it, of course, you just do a little tap with two fingers. I always use my middle finger and fourth finger just because I’m holding my pen and I find that really easy. But did you know that you can erase multiple mistakes all with just two fingers? So let’s say we have a bunch of mistakes, you hold down your two fingers and boom, they’re gone. So you don’t have to do ta-da-da-da-da. But let me show you something else.

You can also go and adjust the timing of that rapid undo. So you can go to your wrench, go to preferences, rapid undo delay. I like mine at about 0.70, over half a second. If it’s quicker than that, let’s say it’s down to 10, when you hold it, it’s gonna go right away. So giving you that little bit of delay will help because just in case you accidentally were holding down your fingers too long, it’ll just give you a little bit more of a buffer.

 

Tip Number Five – Small Slider Adjustments

We are constantly changing a brush and opacity percentages and sometimes you want that exact number but have trouble getting to that just right away. So if you can see here, it goes pretty fast to get that perfectly accurate but if you bring your pen out to the side, it goes a whole lot slower so you can be way more accurate and precise and get that exact number.

 

Tip Number Six – Small Move Adjustments

So sometimes you need to move over just a touch and it can be difficult to slide it just a few pixels. So with your arrow, sometimes it’s hard just to move it exactly the right spot you want. So by going and just tapping in the direction, if you can see this, it just moves over by pixels, and you can go in any direction you want just by tapping. It will just move a teeniest, tiniest little hair over and sometimes you need that perfect little tweak.

 

Tip Number Seven – Clipping Masks

I know most of you watching this will already know and love this one as much as I do but if you haven’t discovered this gem yet and you have fear of commitment, then be prepared to fall in love with this one ’cause this is my everything.  You add a layer on top of your fill layer or whatever layer you’re working on, tap on it, tap on clipping mask, and that will restrict whatever you do on this top layer to the layer below. So say you wanna change this color and, I don’t know, let’s make it yellow, darker yellow.

I have my gouache. I’m just gonna paint over the top. So I like to do textures and paint effects and this is a really easy way to do it so that I don’t have to be super careful about going over the lines, and you can make multiple clipping masks and do highlights and different textures, and experiment with painting or patterns without actually having to commit to them. And just in case you didn’t like it or you needed to make changes to the color, you can go and do that after. So it just makes it really flexible if you’re wanting to make changes.

 

I can also go in and go to my magic wand, go to hue and saturation, find that layer, and I can change the color that way too. So it’s just a way of working non-destructively and if you haven’t made that choice yet, you don’t have your color palette completely decided on, this is the great way to do it ’cause you can go in and change that any time you want.

 

Tip Number Eight – The Liquefy Tool

I draw a lot of characters and faces and sometimes I get to the end and see that something is a little bit off, and the last thing I wanna do is  redraw anything. So I can just make small adjustments using my liquefy tool. Now, I will say I do use this with the end sometimes but I also use it at the beginning when I’m making my sketches and something’s a little off. It’s just a quick and easy way to make those little adjustments. So what I’m gonna do, all my layers are actually in a group, so I’m just gonna select that. You can also select your individual layers as well but for this example, I’ll just show you this.

You go to your magic wand, you go to liquefy, and honestly, the majority of the time, all I do use is push. You do have other options too. These are some of my kid’s favorite ones, of course, making things swirl and be all weird,  so we won’t do that. But usually, I just use the push tool and then, say, something is a little bit off, I can just adjust the size of my brush depending on the size of your picture. And let’s say this forehead was a little bit too far out, I can bring it in.

Maybe her nose needed, her bridge needed to be up a little bit more, her chin needed to be out, this needs to come in. All those little minor adjustments, you can take care of here. So it’s great for big things, it’s great for little tweaks. I especially love it just for those little final things. If you see something’s just a little off, you can fix it without having to start all over again.

 

Tip Number Nine – The Quick Menu

This is a genius little nifty shortcut that is customizable and super, super handy. So to turn this feature on, go to the wrench, go to preferences right here, go to gesture controls, quick menu, and you can select on how you’d like to use it. I use it through touch, and done. So what happens is, just when I touch once with one finger, I get this quick menu. Now there’s a bunch of things on here automatically. Some are super helpful, like flip horizontally. Of course, that’s really good when you’re drawing characters and faces, you do use that quite a bit. I can say flip again.

You can also customize it. So I can go to one of these and just hold on it, and then you can set an action with all these options. So there’s quite a few of them, so you can go… One of my favourite ones is go to select brush, and you can go and find your favourite brush and then put that in there. So just a quick, quick way, I’m just gonna grab anything here, just say it’s that one, so then you can already have that brush ready to go, just with a little tap of the finger.

 

Tip number 10 – Reference Canvas Tool

Sometimes it’s really nice to have an overview of your canvas, and other times you’re working from a reference photo, so this reference canvas tool is super useful. So go to your wrench, go to canvas, and reference, you just toggle that on and it gives you this nice little window that you can put anywhere you want and just move it around, and I’m just gonna put up here. And you can see that it shows your canvas, it does show real-time, so you can see if you make any changes, it does make it to that.

So this is great if you’re zoomed in doing detail but you kinda wanna see a whole big picture. You can also go on here and you can select colours too. So say you’re just wanting to do local colours from a different spot and use those again, and you’re again, you’re zoomed in, that’s a great way to do it. You can also go here and go to image and import an image, so that would be for your reference photo. So that’s another really useful tool.

 

Bonus Tip

And lastly, a bonus tip, make a favourite brush folder. So go into your brushes, and if you go to the top and you just hit that plus sign, you can just name it, faves, favourites, whatever you want. And then you can go into your brushes and just say this is your favourite brush, you can go swipe to the left and say duplicate ’cause I always like to leave the originals where they are, so I just take a duplicate and then I’m gonna go… I already have a faves folder there.

I have so many folders. And I’m gonna go to my faves folder and add it there, so then whenever I need to, I just go in and I have a whole collection of my favourite brushes. And now you don’t have to be searching for all your favourite brushes. It’s a total time saver and it’s really efficient.

 

Well, I hope you found a few of those Procreate tips useful, and if you did, hit that like button, subscribe and don’t forget to hit the bell icon so you could be notified of new tutorials just like this one in the future. Thank you so much for watching. I love you guys and I’ll see you in the next one.