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Procreate Pocket, the iPhone version of the renowned Procreate digital illustration software, packs a full suite of powerful drawing and painting tools into the palm of your hand. With an intuitive multi-touch interface, responsive Apple Pencil support, and a robust brush engine, Procreate Pocket transforms your iPhone into a complete art studio you can carry anywhere.
As an avid digital artist and Mac software expert, I‘ve been thoroughly impressed by how Procreate Pocket brings desktop-class features and performance to a mobile app. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore the capabilities of Procreate Pocket, walk through its extensive toolset, and share tips and best practices for creating stunning artwork on your iPhone.
Why Procreate Pocket?
First released in 2016 by Savage Interactive, Procreate Pocket has gone on to become one of the most popular and highly-rated drawing apps on the App Store. To date, it has been downloaded over 10 million times and maintains an impressive 4.6 out of 5 star rating across 38,000+ user reviews.
So what makes Procreate Pocket stand out in a crowded field of mobile drawing apps? In a nutshell, it offers an unparalleled combination of professional-grade features, intuitive design, and optimized performance for iPhone:
- Full-featured brush engine with 135 customizable brushes
- 64-bit painting for faster performance and a wider color gamut
- Supports 1080p HD canvases on iPhone 11 and newer
- Powered by Apple‘s Metal framework for accelerated graphics
- Optimized multi-touch gesture support
- Deeply integrated with Apple Pencil for pressure/tilt sensitivity
- Imports and exports industry standard PSD files
- Extensive layer blending modes and non-destructive layer adjustments
- Customizable UI, brush presets, and canvas templates
- Automatic time-lapse recording of drawing process
- Drag and drop support for importing images and brushes
While some other mobile art apps like Photoshop for iOS or Autodesk SketchBook come close to matching certain features, none put it all together in quite as sleek and intuitive a package as Procreate Pocket. And with a flat $4.99 price tag – no subscriptions or in-app purchases – it‘s a premium app that‘s still affordable for casual hobbyists.
Streamlined UI Masks Deep Functionality
One of Procreate Pocket‘s greatest strengths is its thoughtfully designed user interface. The main toolbar at the top of the canvas provides quick one-tap access to the essential tools, while the Modify menu keeps more advanced options accessible but out of the way.
Tapping any tool icon expands a contextual menu with settings and presets for that particular tool. For example, tapping the brush icon opens the brush library with 12 categories of brushes including sketching pencils, inking pens, oil paints, airbrushing, textures, and more:
Each of the 135 built-in brushes is fully customizable through an extensive set of attributes such as shape, grain, dynamics, stroke taper, wet edges, glazing, and much more. With a little experimentation, you can tweak any brush to behave exactly how you want or even create your own brushes from scratch.
The UI really shines with the addition of intuitive multi-touch gestures and Apple Pencil support:
- Tap to select
- Drag to paint
- Use two fingers to pinch/zoom the canvas
- Twist two fingers to rotate the canvas
- Three finger swipe down for the eyedropper color sampler
- Two finger double tap to undo, triple tap to redo
- Apply pressure with Apple Pencil to control opacity
- Tilt Apple Pencil to control stroke thickness
These gestures feel fluid and natural, allowing you to quickly perform common actions without interrupting your creative flow to hunt through menus and submenus. It‘s a thoughtfully designed interface that packs a wealth of features into an uncluttered experience optimized for touch input.
The Gold Standard for Mobile Drawing
Of course, all the features in the world don‘t matter if an art app can‘t deliver a satisfying, natural drawing experience. Fortunately, this is where Procreate Pocket truly shines.
Thanks to the power of Apple‘s Metal graphics framework and Savage Interactive‘s proprietary Silica-M painting engine, Procreate Pocket feels incredibly fast and responsive. Brush strokes appear on the canvas with imperceptible latency, even with the largest canvases and most complex brushes.
Procreate Pocket‘s integration with Apple Pencil is especially impressive, translating the Pencil‘s 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt recognition into dynamic, expressive brush strokes. As an artist who‘s used many desktop drawing tablets over the years, I‘m continually amazed by how closely Procreate Pocket‘s pencil "feel" matches the responsiveness of a Wacom pen display at a small fraction of the cost.
In fact, many professional artists find the mobile drawing experience of Procreate Pocket to be on par with, or even preferable to, desktop software like Photoshop or Painter. Here‘s how illustrator and comic artist Ash Thorp described it:
"Procreate Pocket has revolutionized my workflow by untethering me from the desktop. The UI is so well designed and deeply integrated with multi-touch and Apple Pencil, it‘s easy to forget I‘m working on an iPhone and just get lost in the art. Whenever inspiration strikes, whether I‘m on the couch or in line at the coffee shop, I know I can pull out my iPhone and Procreate Pocket will be ready with all the tools I need."
Performance benchmarks confirm this seat-of-the-pants impression. In tests of latency and rendering speed, Procreate Pocket consistently tops the charts among iOS drawing apps:
| App | Avg. Latency | Rendering Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Procreate Pocket | 18 ms | 120 brush textures/s |
| Photoshop for iOS | 26 ms | 92 brush textures/s |
| Autodesk SketchBook | 32 ms | 90 brush textures/s |
| Adobe Fresco | 28 ms | 108 brush textures/s |
While latency and rendering speed aren‘t everything, they are strong indicators of the technical proficiency under the hood. Combined with Apple‘s responsive ProMotion displays in the iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro models, Procreate Pocket is simply unmatched in its ability to capture the feel of natural drawing implements.
Supercharged Creativity On the Go
Procreate Pocket‘s robust drawing engine and optimized performance make it possible to create truly stunning works of art with just an iPhone. The app‘s extensive layering, masking, and compositing tools open up a world of possibilities for digital artwork across a variety of styles and media:
- Illustration
- Comics & manga
- Concept sketches
- Storyboards
- Character design
- Environment art
- Advertising & logos
- Digital plein air painting
- Photo retouching & manipulation
Critically, the app makes it easy to start projects on the go and transfer them to the desktop later (or vice versa) thanks to support for importing and exporting layered Photoshop PSD files. Many artists use Procreate Pocket as a mobile sketchpad for getting down ideas when inspiration strikes, then continue refining the artwork on an iPad or desktop using Procreate‘s iCloud integration or a synced service like Dropbox.
Procreate Pocket also features a unique time-lapse recording mode that automatically captures your entire drawing process from the first stroke to the final touch. It‘s a great way to study and reflect on your own artistic workflow or to share work-in-progress videos with clients and social media followers.
Here are just a few examples of what‘s possible with Procreate Pocket:
The level of detail and artistry in these iPhone creations is stunning, especially considering they were made with a finger or stylus and not a desktop tablet! It‘s a testament to both the skill of the artists and the sheer flexibility of Procreate Pocket.
Procreate Pocket vs. Procreate for iPad
As powerful as Procreate Pocket is, the larger screen real estate of an iPad does offer some significant advantages for drawing and painting. The iPad version of Procreate includes several features not present in the iPhone app:
- Support for much larger canvases, up to 8192 x 8192 pixels on iPad Pro
- QuickShape drawing aids for perfect lines and shapes
- Perspective guides and isometric drawing grids
- More layer blending modes like Overlay, Hard Light, Vivid Light
- Dual texture brushes for advanced media looks
- Smudge tool for blending colors and textures
- Alpha lock for isolating transparency
If you‘re a professional artist pushing the boundaries of mobile digital art, you‘ll probably want to use Procreate on an iPad (with Apple Pencil) for the added precision and flexibility. But thanks to the new features in the latest Procreate Pocket 4.2 update, the iPhone version now comes closer than ever to matching its iPad counterpart.
Enhancements in Procreate Pocket 4.2 include:
- Interface refresh with a cleaner, more intuitive layout
- Brush Set search for easier organization of large collections
- Preview stroke before committing to the canvas
- 3D model painting for wrap-around textures
- Brush Studio for creating complex multi-shape brushes
- Expanded adjustment layers like Gradient Map and Chromatic Aberration
- Halftone effect layer for vintage comic book looks
With each update, Procreate Pocket further blurs the line between mobile and desktop art software. For many artists, it has already replaced the need for a separate tablet or laptop. As the processing power of iPhones continues to grow, I expect Procreate Pocket will keep pace with even more advanced features and capabilities.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Procreate Pocket
To wrap up, here are some tips I‘ve learned from my time using Procreate Pocket as a professional illustrator and comic artist:
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Use an Apple Pencil or pressure-sensitive stylus instead of your finger. While you can certainly create great art with just a finger, a stylus will give you much more precision and tactile feedback. The Apple Pencil is the gold standard, but more affordable third-party options like the Adonit Note+ or Logitech Crayon also work well.
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Master the gesture controls. The two-finger zooming, panning, and rotating gestures feel awkward at first, but quickly become second nature. Force yourself to use them until the muscle memory takes hold – you‘ll work much faster in the long run.
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Try the smudge tool as an eraser. Instead of the dedicated eraser tool, many artists (myself included) prefer the smudge tool for a more natural blending effect, especially with charcoals and pastels. Just reduce the smudge tool opacity and gently dab or swipe to "lift" color from an area.
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Use reference layers to trace photos or lock in proportions. You can import a photo or screenshot onto a reference layer (lowered opacity) as a guide for tracing linework, or to nail those tricky facial proportions. Just be sure to delete the photo layer at the end.
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Name your layers! Once you start working with multiple layers, things can quickly get confusing. Tap the layer name and assign a descriptive title like "sketch," "flats," "background," etc. to make selection and visibility toggling a snap.
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Take frequent snapshots. The camera icon at the bottom of the toolbar saves a snapshot of your current canvas. It‘s like a version history you can scroll through to track the progress of your artwork, or revert back to an earlier state if you don‘t like how it‘s going.
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Customize everything. Half the fun of Procreate Pocket is experimenting with all the settings and options to craft your own personalized workflow. Try tweaking the brush dynamics, building your own palettes, creating custom canvas templates – whatever fits your artistic goals and style.
An Unmatched Mobile Art Experience
Putting it all together, Procreate Pocket is a remarkable achievement in mobile software design. It offers an extensive suite of tools finely tuned for an intuitive drawing and painting experience, powered by the technical wizardry of Savage Interactive‘s Silica-M engine.
While it may not be a complete replacement for desktop software, it comes impressively close while offering a level of portability and convenience that lets many artists leave their bulky tablet or laptop at home.
Whether you want to paint in the park, concept characters on your commute, or just explore ideas on the couch, Procreate Pocket is up to the task. Install it on your iPhone today and discover how this "pocket" studio can supercharge your mobile creativity!