Procreate illustration

What it is

A finger swipe undoes a mistake, three fingers redo it, and a long press on a brush turns it into an eraser of that exact texture: the gesture system inside Procreate is what separates it from every other drawing app, and it is the real reason illustrators stay loyal once they adapt. The app costs €13.99 once, no subscription, and runs only on iPad, which keeps the conversation about the gestures and built-in shortcuts rather than the price.

Where general tablet painting treats the screen as a stand-in for canvas, Procreate leans into tricks that have no analogue equivalent at all. QuickShape lets you draw a wobbly circle, hold at the end, and watch it snap to a perfect ellipse you can still nudge by its handles. ColorDrop fills a closed shape by dragging a colour swatch straight off the palette into it, and a threshold slider stops the paint bleeding past gappy line work. Drawing Assist locks your strokes to a perspective grid, so a one-point street scene stays honest without a ruler. These are the features worth chasing, not another lesson in stacking layers.

The Apple Pencil 2 pairs by snapping to the iPad's side, and a double-tap on its barrel swaps tool and eraser mid-stroke, which feels strange for a day and indispensable after. Tilt the pencil and a charcoal or pastel brush shades broad like the side of a stick. The honest limits are real: layer counts drop as canvas resolution climbs, so a 300 DPI A3 file might cap near 30 layers on an older iPad, and large brushes can lag on anything before the M-series chips. Plan canvas size first and you sidestep both.

How it works

Pick a project before you pick a brush. A single illustrated postcard or a character bust gives every gesture a reason to exist, which beats poking at a blank canvas wondering what the tools do. Set your canvas at the start: 2480 by 3508 pixels at 300 DPI covers an A4 print, while 2048 square suits an Instagram post and leaves you far more layers to play with.

Drill the gestures until they are muscle memory. Two fingers tap to undo, three to redo, a four-finger tap hides the interface for a clean view. Pinch to zoom, and pinch then hold to snap back to fit. Touch and hold any colour, then drag it onto a shape to flood it with ColorDrop, raising or lowering the fill threshold first if the outline has gaps. Draw a line or shape and pause at the end to trigger QuickShape, then tap the edit bar at the top to convert it to a clean arc or polygon.

Build a small brush set rather than hoarding hundreds. The 6B Pencil for sketching, the Studio Pen for inking, and the Soft Brush for shading will carry most early work, and you can tune any of them in the brush studio by lowering opacity jitter or raising taper. Save a recoloured copy of a brush you like so the original stays intact. When a piece is done, export it as a PNG with a transparent background or let the app spit out its automatic time-lapse video to study your own pacing.

Benefits

An Entire Studio in One App Infinite Undo and Total Flexibility Hundreds of Realistic Brushes No Mess and No Material Waste Records a Time-Lapse of Your Work Powerful Enough for Professional Use

What you need

Here's what to gather before you start. The essentials are marked.

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The Procreate app: a one-off purchase, iPad-only

A compatible iPad: the platform the app runs on

An Apple Pencil: for pressure-sensitive, natural drawing

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Pencil

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An understanding of layers: the core of the digital workflow

A few starter brushes: a pencil, an inker, and a painter

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Artist paint brush set

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Beginner tutorials: to learn the gestures and tools

A screen protector: an optional matte one mimics paper texture

FAQs

Do I need an iPad, or will another tablet work?

You specifically need an iPad, since Procreate is an iPad-only app and does not run on Android tablets, Windows, or other devices. You also need an Apple Pencil for proper pressure-sensitive drawing. This is the main barrier, since the hardware costs several hundred euros. If you have an Android tablet or a computer, you would use different software instead, but Procreate itself is tied to the iPad ecosystem.

Is it hard to learn if I only know drawing on paper?

There is a learning curve to the digital workflow, but Procreate is famously beginner-friendly. The drawing itself feels natural thanks to the pressure-sensitive Apple Pencil, which behaves much like a real pencil or brush. The main new concept is working in layers, plus a few gestures for undo and zoom. A couple of beginner tutorials cover the essentials quickly, and the infinite undo makes it safe to experiment as you learn.

Why does everyone say to use layers?

Because layers are what make digital art so flexible. Keeping your sketch, line art, and colours on separate transparent layers means you can edit, erase, or rework one element without affecting the others, recolour something instantly, or fix a line without redrawing the whole piece. Painting everything onto a single layer throws away this huge advantage. Building the layer habit from the start is the most important thing for getting the most out of the app.

Is it really a one-off price?

Yes, the Procreate app itself is sold for a single low one-off payment with no subscription, which is unusual for creative software and a big reason for its popularity. The significant cost is the hardware, a compatible iPad and an Apple Pencil, which together run to several hundred euros. So the app is cheap, but the setup as a whole is a real investment, best suited to those who already own or want an iPad.