Procreate - most fun I've ever had with finger painting

Traditional inks coloured with fingerpainting, I haven't had this much fun with digital painting since I can't even remember when...

Ever since my wife and I got ourself an iPad, I've been itching to actually use it for something - anything, really, other than just as a glorified surf board. I wanted to try some drawing applications, and after searching for a while decided to give Procreate a try, since it seemed to get some nice reviews. The price was not too bad, even for something I might end up disliking, and the ability to export the work done in Procreate as actual, layered photoshop document sealed the deal for me.

Now, actual digital painting has always been beyond my grasp, so naturally I first wanted to try the program for something I would otherwise do in photoshop, like colouring my inked illustrations. aSince I still haven't dared to upgrade my venerable Mac Mini to Yosemite and hence can't fully utilize iCloud for syncing, I opened one of my inks via dropbox, and made that into a new document in Procreate. And much as I would do in photoshop, I then changed the layer containing the outlines to multiply, and then made a new layer for the colours. After that, it was just selecting right kind of shapes and sizes for the brushes, and swipe, swipe away with my fingers.

From the start, everything felt surpsisingly intuitive. Sure, there were things I had to check from the manual, such as making selections and locking -essentially masking - layers, but the main function of the program, drawing itself, felt very intuitive from the start. Zooming in, rotating, colouring and texturizing, then zooming out to get the big picture and zooming in again -that's how a paint program should function, and for the most part Procreate functions really well. Also the ease of use is staggering. If I want to make some adjustments, I can do that while laying on the bed or on the couch. also the feel and working style are more natural, more like traditional drawing, than with a Vacom and photoshop.

Eventually, I ended liking Procreate so much that I purchased a high-end, pressure-sensitive stylus, Adonit Jot Touch Pro, to actually do some drawing with Procreate. I still have some kinks to smooth out with that, to get the flow and feel of regular freehand drawing, but I'm on my way getting there.

More info on Procreate can be found here: