How to maintain image quality in Procreate

(A quick guide!)

Procreate is well known for its ability to create beautiful textures, and realistic brush strokes, meaning it is a wonderful tool for digital designers.

However, one common concern for designers starting their journey in Procreate is whether they’ll be able to maintain the quality of their pattern or illustration throughout the design process.

I have great news for Procreate lovers or those wondering whether to start learning to use this software: It is TOTALLY possible to design a high quality repeating pattern or illustration from start to finish in Procreate and use it for licensing or print on demand! There's just a few things you need to be aware of...

The difference between raster and vector

One thing it's important to understand when starting out in Procreate is the difference between raster and vector software.

Procreate is a raster program, meaning the images created in it are made up of pixels.

Pixels are the tiny dots that make up an image. The more dots you have per inch, the higher resolution it is (or the most crisp it looks!). When you scale up an image in a raster program the dots per inch become fewer and fewer as the image gets bigger meaning it loses its quality.

This is in contrast to a vector program (such as Adobe Illustrator) where the images are not made of pixels but each line of the image is calculated from points on a grid. When you scale up, the lines are recalculated relative to the size so it never loses its quality at any size.

This might sound like a huge disadvantage for Procreate, but it actually shouldn’t be a problem if you know how to deal with it (it hasn’t been a problem for me yet!) and the benefits of designing in Procreate far outweigh this disadvantage in my opinion.

I think there are two main things to be aware of in order to prouduce high resolution images in Procreate:

• Firslty you need to set up your canvas correctly at the start of your project.

  
  

• Secondly, it's important not to move or scale your images once you have drawn them.

I'll go into both these points in more detail below...

Setting up your canvas correctly

One of the most important stages when you create a new design in Procreate is the very start when you are setting up your canvas. Once you have chosen a size and started designing you can’t go back so it’s really important to get this one right!

There are two main things to consider when setting up your canvas: canvas size and dpi (dots per inch).

Sometimes you will know exactly what your finished product will be so you can set your canvas up according to that size (for example if you were designing a greetings card) but other times you might not know what the art is going to be used for in the future.

When you are unsure of the purpose of your art, try and create your canvas at the biggest size you think you’ll need, bearing in mind the bigger you go the fewer layers you can work with (as the size and dpi increase the layers available to you decrease)

It’s all about balance.

This can be very tricky when you first get started, so as a point of reference for you, when I am creating repeat patterns I always create a canvas at 12x12 inches. For fabric designs a repeat tile of this size is nearly always big enough.

I’d always recommend a dpi of 300 (unless explicitly told otherwise) as this will ensure a high quality print.

You can see below the menu screen when you come to create a custom canvas in Procreate. You can choose the width, height and DPI, and Procreate will automatically tell you how many layers you'll have available to use at that size and resolution.

For wallpaper you may want to create a larger canvas as the final product is going to be on a bigger scale. Just remember to ensure you leave yourself enough layers to work with.

Even if I am creating something that’s small I often create a canvas twice as big, just so I have the option for using the artwork for something bigger in the future.

(If you are uploading your patterns to Spoonflower you may know that Spoonflower asks for a DPI of 150. If you're interested in knowing more about this, I wrote a note about it right at the end of this blog post under the heading 'A note on Spoonflower's preferred DPI')

Moving and scaling motifs

The other big thing to be aware of in Procreate is that you cannot scale or rotate your motifs without them losing quality. Scaling up an image you have drawn will decrease its DPI meaning it will lose its quality and crispness.

As much as you can you should draw your images where you’d like them to remain.

To ensure I do not move images around too much when I am creating patterns, I create multiple sketch layers so that by the time I am ready to ink my final layer, I know exactly where everything is going to be placed, and what size it will be meaning I just need to draw it once!

Below you can see a typical workflow for me when I am creating patterns.

I nearly always use a template and I will initially fill it with rough shapes to determine where my motifs will be placed.

In the seocnd layer, I'll sketch these motifs in more detail.

If it's a simple pattern like this one, I might then go straight onto inking the design, but the placement is already decided so there should be no need to move or scale the elements.

So there you have it, a couple of important considerations for creating patterns or illustrations in Procreate that will maintain super high quality!

If you have any questions, or other top tips on maintaining quality in Procreate, do leave me a note in the comments section below!