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How To Make Artwork Look Better in Procreate

How To Make Artwork Look Better in Procreate

Here is a quick read on how you could make your artwork look even better. We will go over some finishing touches you can do to your drawing that you might like and start using in your illustrations.

These are some of the styles you can go with, or you can find additional styles you might like and procreate brushes the artists used to make them.

Black outlines

You are probably making art with black outlines if you are just starting.

That can have a great look but let me give you some tips to improve your linework.

Try making your lines thicker on the parts closer to the viewer and thinner as your object moves away from the viewpoint.

How To Make Artwork Using Procreate

This will add more depth to your drawing.

Another thing you could try is if you are drawing your outlines thick, try making your brush very small and see how it turns out; you might like the result that way.

Artwork Brushes In Procreate

Colouring the line layer

If you are looking to get rid of the black outlines of your illustrations, I will show you how you can do that in Procreate. 

First of all, make sure you have your lines on a separate layer.

You can even use multiple layers for your outlines; this will later help you colour them if they are too close to each other.

Using this method can make your drawing look even more appealing.

As I mentioned earlier, lines must be on separate layers.

Now what you want to do is select the colour you have and make it darker. Using the alpha lock on the line layer, go over it with the darker colour. 

Let's use this simple drawing as an example, where on the left side, we have a drawing with black outlines, and on the right, we coloured the lines using this method. 


A Picture Containing Graphical User Interface

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A tip that can help you do this even faster. Plan ahead which lines will have the same colour and draw them on separate layers. When you alpha locks the line layer, you can use the fill layer option to change the colour of all the lines.

Layers In Procreate
Image 3

Drawing without any lines

Another style you might be interested in is not having lines at all. You will use shading instead to separate parts of the drawing. For this kind of drawing, it's good practice to have different parts and different colours on separate layers. That will help you a lot once you get to the shading part.

Another great tool to help you is the freehand selection tool. 

I used the freehand selection tool to add shading with the soft brush in this example.

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Line layer set to multiply

In case you are instead used to starting with a line layer first, I will give you another example of that. In this example, the line layer was drawn with a dark red opacity reduced to 30 %, and then I set the layer to multiply.

Related:  8 Tips for Creating a Stunning Letterhead Design

This way, the colours underneath are shown through the lines. If you want to, you can even erase some parts of the lines where you don't want to have them at all. This is one of my favourite methods to draw in Procreate. 

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It looks similar to drawing without any lines, but it makes the process more accessible, and you can choose to keep the lines where you want to have them and erase where you don't.

This is a shortlist of methods I like to use, but you can find more examples with the link above.

Have fun exploring different styles, and we hope this article on how to make artwork helped you find one you like.

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Stuart Crawford

Stuart Crawford is an award-winning creative director and brand strategist with over 15 years of experience building memorable and influential brands. As Creative Director at Inkbot Design, a leading branding agency, Stuart oversees all creative projects and ensures each client receives a customised brand strategy and visual identity.

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