Digital color texturing on the iPad Pro using Procreate

Read digitalEPIGRAPHY's Procreate review here.

As the Survey considered the digital environment it would use for initial field documentation, Procreate (@Procreate) emerged from the relatively large pool of available iOS solutions. Its clean user interface and powerful layer and brush management tools proved to be the best suited for digital penciling.

In order to be able to work on the iPad Pro, the original 1200 dpi template files needed to be temporarily downscaled since all creative iOS apps limit their maximum canvas size to 16k by 4k pixels. iPad specific brushes needed to be created to mimic the versatility of a regular pencil, and a new layer system specific to fieldwork had to be invented.

Incorporating the iPad Pro into the Survey’s digital practices not only provided a satisfying solution to the crucial initial step of catapulting the Chicago House method into the digital age but opened a whole new era of experimentation.

We at digitalEPIGRAPHY have been enjoying using Procreate since purchasing the first iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil back in 2015. Five years have passed, and we can still say it with a lot of confidence that Procreate might very well be THE reason for you to purchase the iPad Pro for your digital field documentation needs.

We’ve tried all the best art and design apps available on Apple’s powerful tablet and Procreate is the one we keep coming back to. It has a fantastic and intuitive interface that is hidden when your focus is on the drawing but has a surprisingly large array of features when needed. And of course, most importantly, the drawing process itself is just excellent.

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