Procreate 4.3 Tutorial – Drawing Guide Tool

Welcome back to my series of tutorial on the Procreate digital drawing app. I have gone through the main overall features of the app. Click here for the list of tutorials on Procreate. I will now start going into more specific parts of the app that I briefly mentioned in the previous post due to the complexity of the feature. In this post, I will be showing you how to use the drawing guide tool. This tool is good for drawing with straight lines, accurate perspectives and symmetry.

Turning on the drawing guide

Tap on the actions icon on the main menu at the top. Then select the Canvas icon. You will see 2 options: Drawing Guide and Edit Drawing Guide. There is a switch at the side of the Drawing Guide option, this is to turn drawing guide on and off. When the drawing guide option is turned off, you won’t be seeing any guidelines and the Edit Drawing Guide will be greyed out and inactive. However, if you have Assisted Drawing on, your lines will still be affected by the Drawing Guide settings. I will explain what Assisted Drawing is later in this post.  Tap on the Edit Drawing Guide and the interface will show up.

The photo below shows you where you can find the Drawing Guide and Edit Drawing Guide options.

The photo below shows you the Drawing Guide interface. There may be changes depending on the type of Drawing Guide you choose.

Types of drawing guide

There are 4 types of drawing guides available in the Procreate app, each serves a different function. Different guidelines will show up to help with your drawing needs. You can adjust the thickness and opacity of the guidelines using the sliders. You can also change the colour of the guidelines using the rainbow slider on the top of your screen.

The four types of drawing guides are 2D Grid, Isometric, Perspective and Symmetry. I will go through what each of then does and how to edit them.

2D Grid

This a very standard box grid. You can change the size of the grid by adjusting the Grid Size slider or manually inputting a number by tapping on the box containing a number to the right of the slider.

At the center of the grid you will see a blue dot, drag it around to move your grid around the canvas. You will also notice that there’s a green dot somewhere above the blue dot, drag the green dot around to rotate the grid.

Isometric

Similar to the 2D Grid, there is also a blue and a green dot for moving around and rotating the grid.

Perspective

For Perspective grides, you won’t be able to change the gride size due to the nature of the guidelines. You can move the guidelines around with the blue dot. To rotate the guidelines, you will see a lighter blue dot along the dark blue line going across the entire screen, you can rotate the guidelines by dragging the light blue dot around. The dark blue line that goes across the screen is the horizon line. When you want to draw in perspective, knowing where the horizon line is is very important.

When you first use the perspective, there is only one point perspective, the blue dot in the centre being the focal point. However, the Procreate app can support up to 3 point perspectives. To add another focal point, simply tap on the canvas and another dot will appear. Now guidelines will appear to support the 2 point perspective. Do the same thing for 3 point perspectives. To delete a focal point/ perspective, tap on the point you want to delete and an option to delete will appear above it.

Symmetry

For symmetry guides, there are 4 different types you can choose from vertical symmetry, horizontal symmetry, quadrant symmetry and radial symmetry. Here’s where you can find the 4 options:

Same as before, the blue dot is used to move the guidelines around and the green dot is used to rotate the guidelines.

There is also an option for you to choose between mirrored symmetry or rotational symmetry. Below is an example of the difference between the 2 types of symmetry.

Assisted Drawing

For each of the 4 different types of drawing guides, you have the option to turn on assisted drawing. When you draw lines with the assisted drawing turned on, your lines will follow the angle of the guidelines and straight lines will be produced no matter how shaky your hand is. This is very useful in drawing things with straight lines, such as buildings.

instead of having assisted drawing on your whole canvas, you can set it so that only selected layers has assisted drawing on. To do this, tap on the layers icon and select the layer you want to have assisted drawing on, Tap on the layer again and a list of options will show up at the side. You will see an option called Drawing Assist, tap on that to turn it on. Now when you make new layers, they will not be affected by the assisted drawing’s functions. ‘Assisted’ will show up just below the layers name so you don’t need to worry about forgetting which layers have assisted drawing on.

Below are screenshots of me trying to draw horizontal straight lines with and without drawing assist:

Personally, I don’t use these tools as I don’t need too many perspectives or straight lines in my artwork since I mainly do portraits. However, if you like to draw the outdoors and buildings and such, these tools will help you tremendously in your workflow. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and has learnt something new from this post.

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Try out the Apple Pencil to bring your creative process to the next level on the Procreate App!

These artist gloves for digital painting are a must for me when I paint on the iPad, when I don’t wear the gloves, sometimes the Procreate app sense my palm resting on the screen as 2 fingers tapping and holding and start undoing! Or sometimes it starts colour picking. I’ve tried the different palm support options but I still get the problem sometimes.  If you’re having these kinds of problems as well, the gloves may be your solution, it makes you feel and look more professional too!

You may also be interested in:

• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Introduction
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Gallery Interface 
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Gestures and Customisation 
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Colour Interface 
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Layers Interface
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Brush, Smudge and Erase Tools
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Selection Tools
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Transform Tools
• Procreate 4.2 Tutorial – Adjustment Tools
• Procreate 4.3 – New features and updates
• Procreate 4.3 Tutorial — Action Tools