Your Procreate paintings will look amazing on your iPad. But how will you share all the wonderful art you’re going to make? You have endless options.
Things you can do with your iPad art
Paper: Love having your drawings in a sketchbook? No problem. You can print any of your Procreate files on paper and any copy shop can spiral-bind your work into a book. You could print your copies yourself with any sort of desktop printer but that might be an injustice to your creations — a better and more affordable route is to go to a service bureau for individual projects. If you’d like to make multiple copies of your art, suitable for framing, you can get gallery-quality giclee prints.
Publish: You could decide to publish a zine, illustrated book, graphic novel or line of greeting cards with your Procreate files. Create the final mechanical in Procreate or output PSD files of the images and finish the project in Photoshop or InDesign. Then have them printed at a copy shop or book printing service, like Blurb.
Another cool option is to make something that feels a lot more analog, like screenprinting or Risographs (sort of like a hybrid of screenprinting and photocopying).
Textiles: You could design t-shirts and print them at Zazzle. Or make a repeat design and resources like Spoonflower will print them on fabric.
Products: There are many services on the Internet that will print your Procreate designs on anything from coffee cups to bumper stickers which you could then sell in your own Etsy store.
Metal: One of the outstanding features of art on the iPad is you are looking at colored light under glass and some of that magic inevitably diminishes when translated into ink on paper. However printing on aluminum restores that reflective effect and can be done affordably at places like Bay Photo and Whitewall. They also print on canvas, acrylic, even wood.
Commercial illustration: These days, most top professional illustrators create work on the iPad. Like many of the SBS fakulty, I have drawn many book and magazine illustrations using this amazing tool. (You’ll see a lot of it in my upcoming book How To Draw Without Talent, out later this year from Penguin/Random House.)
Formatting: Procreate gives you the option to easily output your files in many formats, each of which have different pros, cons and applications. If you are only planning to share your images online, 72 px JPEGs are fine. If you want to make prints though, you’ll use 300 px TIFF, PDF or PSD files. Your printer will tell you what they need.
And if you are making screen prints or risographs, you might want to separate your colors on separate layers and output them as a layered PDF file. It’s a snap with Procreate. (For more professional input on file preparation, check out this forum.)
I’m sure you’re going to fall in love with drawing in Procreate. Share that love with the rest of the world — output it!
Want to know more about this amazing new medium? Check out our new course, Be an iPad Artist, launching September 16, 2019. See you there!
