The Spectacle of Teenage Friendship is Haunting Europe

hot Procreate tips in your area, linden sleet, feet

In today’s issue, we have a few warm-up cartoons, the next installment of Foghorn, Procreate tips and tricks, and, as usual, more contentious cartoons behind the paywall.

1. CRAP CARTOONS

---

FOGHORN CONT.

⚠️UPDATE: read the fully edited first chapter HERE⚠️

Here’s the first installment, the second installment and the third installment. And for those angels who have been following, a quick recap.

Another year, another comic about a sad woman stand-in protagonist surrounded by books.

---

3. HOW I PROCREATE

One of the things I like about Procreate is the amount of customization it give you with gesture controls (wish there was as much with the rest of the UI, but oh well). It can be a game-changer, if you do this to work with your own brushes, along with a pressure curve to fit your hand (especially if you have wrist/hand pain—adjusting it so that you don’t have to press as hard is one of the main reasons I’m working digitally these days).

if you use stabilization, it’s ok, but remember that you are unworthy of respect

Initially, I had a simple set-up: draw with the pen and erase with the finger. If you’re mostly using one brush, you can pretty much work with one hand and pet a cat with the other. I used this approach for years, and it was good for sketching pages that I’d ink on paper later, since I never had to switch between brushes, and because my process is very chaotic and nonlinear—I like to add a bit here, remove a bit there, it’s almost like playing with plasticine.

With Foghorn I started getting annoyed with this method, because I had more than one brush (rapido for lines, roller for fills, brushy one for panel borders and close-ups, plus a couple of screentones), and you can accidentally erase stuff with your finger, which is much more annoying when you’re doing your finals digitally. So I decided to switch to the quick menu for the finger. Pressing and swiping opens up this menu, if you quickly swipe up you get an eraser, swipe down for paint, and to the sides are some commonly used brushes. There’s a latency issue which means you can’t swipe too quickly—it’s annoying, but you can get used to it.

Additional Procreate tips:

• press and hold on the brush/eraser button and you will turn on that tool with the brush you’re currently using. So, if you’re drawing with a certain brush of a certain size, and you want to erase something with the exact same brush, you can press and hold the eraser and it will set that up without having to go into the brush menu

• you can actually set up several quick menus. When your menu is up on the screen, press the middle panel and it will let you make another one. Can be useful if you have several projects with different brushes/etc

  

• in the brush size or opacity panel, if you tap on the slider at one position or another, you can make a marker that allows you to snap to your favorite positions—a very useful feature, that one

• you can merge layers by pinching them together with two fingers, instead of selecting each one

  

• if you swipe right on a layer with two fingers, it turns on alpha lock—honestly, I find it easier to just tap on the layer and turn it on in the menu

• and if your Procreate crashes as much as mine does, you can add a widget, which allows you to open the last file you were working on instead of going through your folders

You can find more gestures on their website. These are just the ones that I found to be actually useful, a lot of them are a bit questionable. Also, Procreate Dreams is out, and it seems a bit rough around the edges, but overall promising and adequately priced (no subscription). I’ve yet to properly dive in, but when I do, I intend to follow Alex Grigg’s tutorial. He’s probably the most helpful and the least irritating tutorial-maker you will find on youtube, and he’s an actual artist, unlike most of them.

PS. I put together a lot of practical and theoretical thoughts and tips in the previous letter, which you can find here.

---

4. CONTENTIOUS CARTOONS

Ok, more crap cartoons, the kind your discord moderator doesn’t want you to see.