A recent patch in Procreate (one of the major drawing apps on the iPad) fixed one of, if not my biggest gripe with the app– the eyedrop tool was too fickle in how it triggered. Now it’s mapped to a separate button that triggers when held down. YES. This thing was the biggest dealbreaker for a long time, and I can’t believe that it being fixed was what finally made the app not only usable, but pretty freaking awesome for me.
As you can tell, art happened!
I had attempted to do “native” (as in, done 100% in Procreate) pieces in the past but would hit a fatal roadblock, specifically in regards to coloring, because I am heavily dependent on eyedrop sampling for when I blend. It always ended with me having to export to Blastoise to finish in Painter (which presented an annoying, but not fatal issue, in that he would “break” my colors because he deemed the iPad color palette inferior and I’d have to go through all the color layers and tweak them to get them back to where they should be. It’s NOT an issue with my monitor, the colors are changed enough for me to know it’s not my monitor being improperly calibrated).
Exporting to Blastoise is okay, and expected for super-high-detail work where I specifically want to take advantage of Painter’s brushes, but I want to be able to do more casual material 100% on the iPad. For one thing, with my iPad I can do this from bed, which is much more comfortable than a crappy sinking office chair. Also, I am not super-confined to having my canvas oriented in one direction, I can spin it non-destructively so I can better work specific places.
I’ve gotten pretty used to the way Procreate handles and I’m really happy with the two things I’ve made so far (Hikaru’s FFXIV incarnation and Numair with Dragonite & Dratini), and they didn’t take me very long to do, so THEORETICALLY this should facilitate a lot more casual art posts.
Also, another awesome part about Procreate? Native support for video exporting! It basically does all the work for me in terms of generating a process/speedpaint video (shows the completed image first, then fades to the start of a timelapse) that I can instantly plop on YouTube! How it manages to track everything I do without lagging me horribly, I don’t know because capturing this shit on Blastoise isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world (I have to basically redo my OBS settings every time to make sure everything gets included) but having this available on the iPad is pretty freaking sweet, and I’m definitely going to export video for all the casual art I do going forward.
In fact, here’s the capture of the above-two pieces:
I COULD throw them into iMovie and drop music in, but I’m just too lazy for that nonsense.
The one feature I want to see in Procreate is better support for importing PSD files. You can KINDA do it now, but it’s super-clunky and only a handful of dimensions are supported, making it useless to me. I want better PSD importing so I can truly pingpong between Blastoise and my iPad, because right now it’s kind of a one-way thing.
