How to Add a Canvas or Paper Texture to your paintings in ProCreate

Adding a Canvas Overlay In Procreate

     There are a lot of advantages to digital painting, but sometimes the resulting paintings can lack a texture. I notice this a lot in my digital pencil drawings. To remedy this, I like to add a paper texture to my drawings.

Drawing Paper Overlay

     Since I like to paint and draw digitally in a realistic style, I also like to add that extra texture of a drawing paper or canvas to my art. All my digital pencil drawings have an added overlay, and only some of my digital paintings will have the canvas overlay.

     The border collie drawing to the left has a rough paper texture added, which I think lends to a more authentic look.

Contemplation with  canvas overlay

     This is my snow leopard painting, "Contemplation" with a canvas overlay. Now I don't always add the canvas overlay to my digital paintings for a couple reasons, mostly if the painting is going to already be printed on a canvas wrap, the canvas overlay can actually muddy the colors. A canvas overlay is great though if the painting is going to be printed on paper,  it gives that oil painting feel. I have actually had people think that my paintings and drawings were done in traditional methods, especially with the overlays. I am always honest though with how my art is made, so when I upload to the printer of my choice, I always state that it is a digital painting or drawing.









     So here is how I add the canvas or paper overlay.
First, you need the canvas or paper texture of your choice. You can go on google and find paper textures under public domain websites or you can purchase the texture off sites like Shutterstock or Getty Images. I actually have found that another art program that I use, Art Rage has some awesome textures so I will open Art Rage on my iPad, click create new painting.You can then choose paper or canvas and how rough or smooth you want the texture.

     Next, I will save the Art Rage canvas as a new painting and export to my camera roll. You can then import this canvas texture into your Procreate painting as a new layer. In the image to the right, you can see the canvas as the top layer. I have it invisible right there, but when clicked on it will cover the painting.

     Now with the texture layer selected, go to the blend modes for that layer. You just tap the N next to the layer to bring up blend modes. Default mode for the layer will be Normal, but you want to go down to Multiply. This will allow your painting to show through the canvas or paper layer, but still allow the texture to show.






















































     Here you can see the close up of the canvas texture on my painting. It adds that much more of a finished or polished look to it. You can  use this method with many types of textures, not just paper and canvas. There are many cool effects that can be created using this method and the blend modes in digital painting. Try out all the different blend modes and see what you can create.


I hope you enjoyed this quick and dirty digital painting tip!


--Becky Herrera
www.beckysdigitalart.com
www.pixelpaintcreations.blogspot.com

My Art Studio

     While most artists have a dedicated art studio or at least a dedicated portion of a room devoted to their art, I don't. Another reason I love digital art. When I used to work traditionally, I used to take over the kitchen table with all my colored pencils. I had a whole closet dedicated to art supplies like pencils, papers and a portfolio to store completed works. Living in smaller apartments, and wanting to go even smaller, this storage and accumulation of art supplies is not appealing. In fact, I would go weeks without drawing or painting because I hated lugging the supplies out and putting them away when done.
   
     Well now my art studio is small and portable and can be set up and put away in less than 3 minutes. It only takes up one laptop bag to store everything I need. The ultimate in portability! Another major plus is I never run out of supplies which is huge when there are no art store nearby.

     So what do I use and where do I set up? I mostly set up at either the kitchen table or my computer desk, but the key is being able to put everything away so quickly so it is out of the way when I am done.

     My main device, and where most of the work occurs is my iPad Air 2. I got it last year in June so it is a little less than a year old. I really want a, iPad Pro, but will wait until I get a little more use out of this one. I have the iPad in a slim case so it fits nicely in my purse or laptop bag. This allows me to paint and draw anywhere.

     My main program that I use on my iPad is Procreate. I use it 95% of the time, even though I have several other art programs loaded as well. Procreate is very intuitive unlike Photoshop. It is also a steal at only $5.99. in the app store. I will do a more in depth review on it as well as other art programs in the future.
   
     As for styluses, I've tried many. I have settled for a "dumb" stylus over the bluetooth ones as I've never really liked any of those. The one I use is a Wacom Bamboo stylus. You can replace the nibs when they are worn and it is very solidly built. It has a great feel that I haven't found in any other stylus. It is $14.99 on Amazon. It also comes in different colors but I just have the basic black one. I also have a Sensu Brush, but I don't use it nearly as much as the bamboo stylus.

     Last but not least, I use a Macbook Air 13 inch laptop. I came from a huge 17 inch PC laptop that was really a desktop replacement and not very portable. This new laptop is great. It is small but still has a decent sized screen. Since it is a Mac it works more naturally with all my other idevices. I love the amazing battery life and it does everything I need it to. I use the Mac to do final color corrections to my paintings. I use a program called Photoscape that is $30.00 in the Mac app store. I also use it to show my reference photos so I can zoom in to the details when needed. I store all my completed paintings on the Mac and on an external drive. I recommend the 13 inch Macbook Air to the smaller 11 inch one because of the SD card slot that the 13 incher has. I use a jetbook lite SD card to expand the storage of my Macbook by an extra 256 gigs, which is awesome, especially in the more limited harddrive space of these smaller laptops. This macbook starts up blazingly quick due to the SSD drive. It starts up as fast as my iPad. This machine completes my art flow as I will upload my completed paintings to my various online stores, color correct as needed and add any final touches that may be necessary.

     All in all, this is my art studio. It works great, is extremely portable, and I never run out of supplies. I still have all my traditional art supplies stored in that closet, but maybe I will one day free up that space by getting rid of the supplies I no longer use.

     What are your digital art studio setups? Feel free to comment below!

--Becky Herrera
www.beckysdigitalart.com
www.pixelpaintcreations.blogspot.com

What To Do when Your Back Up Isn't A Backup?

     Well I had a little minor catastrophe yesterday. Since I’ve had issues with computers in the past and losing valuable data, I’ve learned one thing. Backup and do often and in several places. Don’t rely on one back up either. This I found to be true yesterday. 

     It all started with me actually wanting to do my weekly backup. Relying heavily on my iPad and computer, I back up regularly. I do a weekly backup of my iPad on iTunes  as well as have the iCloud backup feature turned on. Since iOS 9 though, iCloud backup isn’t reliable so I don’t hold too much comfort in it. Yesterday at the time of catastrophe, the last iCloud backup I had was 4/19/16. So my main back up method of my iPad, where my art is contained, is iTunes. Imagine my horror when I plug in to do my backup and I get several errors, a trigger on my antivirus and a message saying that my iPad couldn’t be backed up because of incompatible data. What?! I try again, same error. I try to restore from a previous backup from a week ago and here is the clincher. That backup was corrupted as were the last three before that. 

     Well after a little freak out session, I took my computer and iPad to my brother who does computer work for a living. He took a look. Apparently my iPad had a windows virus on it and was trying to infect my computer. Considering I have a Mac and not a PC it didn’t infect my computer but it did corrupt backups and prevented any new backups from being made. Because Apple loves keeping things a secret, it is very difficult accessing certain parts of the iPad, at least with out jailbreaking it. We tried restoring from the iCloud backup I did have. It restored, but with the stinking virus on it. 

     Now I was irritated but not too worried as I had backups of most important stuff, except one thing I neglected. This is where my heart dropped in my stomach. I hadn’t backed up the actual art work that I was working on in my art app, ProCreate. I had the png files but not the open layers files. My snow leopard painting that I’m almost finished with wast there. I had to save it! So with the restored but virus ladened iPad I exported the .procreate files for the 4 pieces I was working on. The .procreate files are like .psd aka photoshop files that keep layers intact. In fact you can export .psd files instead from ProCreate if you wanted to. I uploaded them to my iCloud Drive which is one of my many cloud backups. They were safe. The next thing my brother recommended was to wipe the iPad and start new. That means no restore from a previous back up. The thing I dreaded came to be. Reluctantly I made sure everything I wanted to keep was safe and we hit the nuke button. 

     I set up the iPad as new, and got my settings back in order. I then downloaded my most used apps aka ProCreate and a few others. I imported some of my photos and imported my brush settings and .procreate files back to ProCreate. YAY! They opened up and work. I didn’t lose any artwork!. I actually really didn’t lose anything this time around. I probably will find something gone eventually, but the stuff I need now is safe.

     What’s the lesson here. Don’t rely on one back up method and have several different backups of valuable documents.

Yay! She is saved!

So what is my back up methods?

     First, I have my full backups. I backup to iTunes once a week and try to back up to iCloud nightly. Sometimes that works, sometimes not, so I don’t rely on iCloud backup to heavily. I also will backup to iTunes if I have a major project that I progressed on so I don’t lose anything. The bad thing about these types of backups, like iTunes and Time Machine  is that they can fail and you can’t recover individual files from them if needed. It is an all or nothing approach. 

     To remedy this disadvantage, I make copies of valuable files in three different locations locally and 3 different locations that are cloud based. The things I back up are all my finished art files, my ebooks, photos, and music. They reside on an external hard drive, a flash or thumb drive, and an sd external storage drive. These are all kept in sync with a program called D sync. 

     I also have these same files in the cloud as well. I use my iCloud drive which is different than an iCloud backup. You can send individual files to iCloud Drive and pull them down as well. I also use dropbox for a few things like my Procreate brushes. I only have the free version of Dropbox so not a lot of storage. I also use a program called sugar sync which is ok and keeps certain folders on my computer in sync with the cloud. The final program I use is Crashplan. It makes a copy of files and folders I choose both locally on an external drive as well as in the cloud on their servers. 

     Some data specific backups that I use are Amazon for my ebooks iTunes Match for my music and iPhoto for my pictures, mind you I have local backups of all these files as well. 

     So you see, I might have backup overkill here, but after losing data in the past I’d rather be prepared than not. This is especially true now that my business relies on the data on my computer. and iPad.

     There are advantages of being a digital artist. Being able to change things on the fly, experimenting and not committing to a certain style eat. One disadvantage, is that our digital creations are just pixels until printed out, and they can easily be destroyed all with a simple computer crash.

     The general recommendation for backups is to have at least 2 local or onsite backups and one cloud based. I have more but then I am paranoid like that. One big tip for other digital artists out there, while you may be backing up your completed works, don’t forget to back up those in progress works complete with the layers. Backup the .psd files in photoshop or the .procreate files in Procreate. and don’t rely on one method for all your backup needs.

Hope this helps!

—Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com

Weekly Promotional Painting

Friday Promotional Painting!

Horse Portrait Close Up

     Every Friday I offer one of my paintings as a limited time promotion.  The promotion is for an 11x14 inch gallery wrapped canvas for only $50! This is approximately 50% off the regular price which makes it such a great deal. Each painting is only offered once this way and is limited to only 5 prints. The sale ends on Sunday at midnight.

This weeks promotional painting is my "Horse Portrait Close Up." This is one of my earlier digital works but I still really like it. I was actually still using custom brushes back then and created one to create the fur texture of this bay colored horse. This painting was created on an iPad 4 using the apps Procreate and Sketchbook Pro. It would look great in a living room or office or maybe the tack room of a ranch. This would also make a great gift for any horse lover as well.

Thanks for looking and stay tuned for future sales and promotions!

--Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com