Nikolai Lockertsen

The compact app adds new art opportunities to a commute

You paint in Procreate a lot. When did that start and why?

I commute two hours on the bus each day. Before the iPad I painted watercolour on my bus rides, but at work I painted in Photoshop. I dreamed of a smaller portable digital device. Brushes was a good painting app and I had a lot of fun with it, but it had limits. I sent several mails to the Brushes guys with ideas for improvements, but there was never a response. When I stumbled upon Procreate it was love at first sight. I had the freedom to create brushes from scratch and it felt much more like Photoshop. When I first wrote to the Procreate team, they answered within a couple of hours.

What’s the best thing about Procreate 2.1?

The update opens up Procreate to several new pro and amateur arenas. It has much better colour management. You can dial specific RGB values now and you can flood fill, which is a long-wanted feature. Both to fill in open areas, but also to change parts of your painting to a different colour theme and brightness. It’s very powerful. A colour ring is included as well. You can build and manage new colour swatches in a better way. These are really important improvements.

What’s the best tablet and stylus for Procreate?

Procreate is only for iPad. I have a third-gen iPad and I recommend that or newer – with iPad 2 and iPad mini you get fewer layers and can’t go to the highest res. I have used the Sensu Brush for most of my iPad art, which has no pressure sensitivity, but the rubber nib is very good. You can apply speed sensitivity to any Procreate brush – a good substitute for pressure sensitivity. But the new Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus is best for pressure sensitivity.