When I first made the move from the inner suburbs of Sydney to the tidy coastal town of Bulli, I knew I was signing up for 3 hours or commuting every day as I worked full time in the city. I sold the idea to myself as 'optimum work time’ to focus on my freelance jobs and to explore any personal work I wanted to get stuck into. I usually complete the majority of my illustrations on photoshop using my Wacom Cintiq and MacBook pro, so in order to make this more compact and suitable for on-the-go travel, I looked into purchasing an ipad, apple pencil and procreate.
The total cost of my new on-the-go setup was around $650
iPad 6th Gen 9.7" WiFi 128GB Gold - $519 AUD
Apple Pencil 1st Generation - $138 AUD
(Both purchased from Officeworks)
and the one off cost of the Procreate App which was $9.99 USD.
Although it seemed a little steep, I figured that all the additional work I could get done on my commute using this setup deemed it a worthwhile investment for myself!
Adjusting to using Procreate was a little challenging at first. Seeing as there are about 100 ways to create different styles and kinds of illustration in photoshop with unlimited layers, Procreate gives a more stripped back, refined interface where you simply select your brushes and colours and work within a limited layer setup and follow the intuitive drawing tools and shortcuts the program offers.
The first project I worked on with just my Ipad & Procreate was this wedding invitation for the lovely Megan and Joshua.
When working on commissions and briefs, I like to have a thumbnail sketch of how the whole design will work, then I’ll illustrate elements on separate files nice and large (a4-a3 in size) and then bring them all together on the master design document to build up my composition. This is essentially the approach I took with their invitations, and I really loved how easily I could pull it all together form the comfort of my lap!
Thankfully Procreate allows you to export your files via airdrop as a variety of different file types including PSD so I exported the final the design as a PSD and finished off adding the text in Photoshop, exported it as a PDF and off it went to print!
The more I played around with Procreate, the more I found myself rediscovering the joy of drawing again. I don’t know about you but I’ve always been a bit funny with sketchbooks, being too scared to make a bad mark or ruin a page or ‘flow’. With my ipad I love the ability to whip it out (providing I’ve remembered to charge it!) and enjoy the endless ability to create whatever I want wherever I want!
The above illustrations were from my backyard as an observation sketch using Procreate’s pen liner brushes which I then decided to colour in using some new custom brushes I purchased from Bardot Brush (Highly recommend as they’ve got great water colour washes and textures for building up organic gritty details!).
Eventually I found myself opening up Procreate and losing several hours in sketch-land where I would recreate little nooks and compositions around my home as I got more and more comfortable with how the brushes flowed and little tricks like flipping and rotating elements, playing with layer opacity and clipping masks and most of all just really enjoying the process!
What I really love about Procreate is how much its allowed me to free up my drawing style. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very much a stickler for detail BUT now I can also turn that side of my brain down a notch and appreciate the full spectrum of colour available at my fingertips to to explore a more impressionist style of mark making.
Recently I’ve found myself sketching landscapes and my favourite places I like to visit, which a year ago would have probably taken me a month to plan an attack on how to create, but now can be done from the comfort of my lap on my couch, or on a blanket in the grass, or recently balanced on my knees off the side of a houseboat.
I received a lot of positive feedback when I started to share this new ‘free’ style with people which gave me the encouragement I needed to turn them into prints! I hope to keep adding to this new category of art which I’ve setup in my shop under the LANDSCAPES category and one day hope to fill it up with all my favourite places and destinations I love best!
You can shop the first three prints below and keep your eye on my instagram and newsletters for more to come!
