When it comes to designing your products choosing the best art program can be dependent on both your work and your lifestyle. A lot of us travel or don’t enjoy sitting at a desk to design using hefty programs like Illustrator or Photoshop.
In the age of portability, Procreate has become a very popular and commonly used art program used by tons of creatives, myself included. Despite being a fairly light weight program it’s a powerful tool for artists on the go. I personally like to to use it when doing all of my preliminary designing and sketching before I bring things into Illustrator to vectorize and it’s now my go-to despite owning the Adobe Suite. It’s honestly so convenient to be able to sketch with my iPad while I sit on my balcony, soaking in some much needed sunshine with my cat Grey.
Despite it’s ease of use, there are few small little things about Procreate that can be confusing to sort out when it comes to designing a products such as enamel pins that has factory minimum sizes. This is is something that’s fairly easy to do while working in vector format in Illustrator and can also be easily converted to pixels in Photoshop.
However, in Procreate brushes are measured in percentages and not pixels. This can present a bit of a challenge when trying to sort out what the minimum size allowed for things such as color fill and cutouts are.
Here at Alchemy, we took some of that guesswork out for you and translated those minimums to percentages and have made a template for Procreate to help our fellow artist out! The template can be found here and includes a premade sized canvas along with a pack of brushes all set to the minimum size usable for certain specs. So go nab it!
How to use the Template & export file to PSD:
When you open the template, the file will be at a pre set canvas size and DPI, do not change this or crop it down as it could cause issues with the measurements being accurate.
As you work on your design, try and use up as much of the space on the canvas as possible. We like the files nice, big, and chunky. At this point in the process, don’t worry about using the brush pack as that is just for checking designs when at size. For now, stick to a nice full opacity hard edged brush like the Studio pen.
As you work, try and keep things organized like we mentioned in the A Beginners Guide to File Types and File Organization blog post. Keep all your key components on individual layers like the below example.
Organizing your art like this makes it easier for us when we are translating your art to vector format and also makes it easier for you to go back and edit area that may need some fixing after we check our minimum specs. Layers are life, embrace them!
After you have your design drawn out, it’s time to check and make sure all your fill areas and cutout areas will work while your design is at size. The first thing we need to do is export a copy of our art as a flat image (do not merge the layers).
Wrench Icon → Share → PNG (in the share image section) → Save Image
Next up, we need to create a new canvas in procreate so that we can scale our art to size. In order to do this we need to go back to the main procreate screen, hit the little ‘+’ sign and then hit the little black icon with a ‘+’ to the right of ‘New Canvas’. This should open up a new screen where we can input all of our important information.
In the dialog that pops up, click on the measurements and change them to reflect the size you want your physical pin to be. For my design, I was aiming for 1.75” so that is what I set my width and height to. Set yours to whatever size pin you are aiming for. Next, make sure your DPI is 300, this is very important. Your DPI needs to match the template DPI exactly or else the measurement checks will be off when we import the art back into the template.
After your canvas is made, import the flat png we saved of our pin design and scale it to fit tightly within the canvas.
Wrench Icon → Add → Insert Photo → Select the PNG → Scale if needed
We want the design to take up as much space as it can before it gets cut off, like the example below:
Now that we have our pin scaled to size, we need to import it back into our template.
Wrench Icon → Add → Copy (this will copy your active layer, which should be the artwork)
Go back to the Procreate main screen and open up your original art file in the Alchemy Template again, then paste in the newly sized pin version.
Wrench Icon → Add → Paste
(Make sure not to mess with the size and paste it as is on it’s own layer. I like to place mine near the info key with the little circles)
Now that we have a copy of our pin to scale, we can use the brush pack included with the template to check all our specs! All of the brushes are custom made and set from the get go at the minimum size required for each element. Do not resize the brushes as these are just meant for checking art and not designing the art.
Create a new layer, choose the brush you need and a bright color not in your artwork, and then tap it on your canvas to make a circle. The circle should be the same size or near the same size as the circles in the key on the template. You can then take that circle that you drew and drag it around to the different areas in your art to make sure that the spaces are large enough.
In my case, I had to check if the cut-outs I wanted were possible (left image) along with some of my more narrow color fill spaces (right image).
After checking the cutout areas I was able to see that they were way too small and it was better to just fill them in with metal instead. As for the enamel fill, most of my areas were fine but there was a small spot on the hand that is borderline being too thin for fill. Now knowing this, I can better gauge how to adjust the artwork on the larger file to fix these spots.
Make the changes needed to the larger layered artwork, and keep checking until you are good!
NOTE: If your art is more complex with a lot of colors, you can always start checking specs usng just the linework (metal layer) and then go in and add your colors after.
You are almost done! After you’ve made all your edits, got your layers sorted ( remember, don’t merge), you are now good to export your file as a PSD.
Wrench Icon → Share → PSD → Save to Files / Airdrop / Drive
Exporting as a PSD can be a little wonky on Procreate depending on where you are exporting the file to.
If you try and export it directly to email, 9 out of 10 times it’s going to be a hot mess. PSD files tend to be on the larger size, and when trying to export directly to email a lot of times it gets auto converted to a JPEG or the file gets severely compressed to fit within the size limit.
The best thing to do is to export the file to your device itself, or something like google drive. If you have a mac you can also choose to airdrop it directly to your computer. Then send an email and manually attach the file. If the file is too large you can use a free file sharing service such as WeTransfer.com and shoot us the link to the download.
By doing this, you prevent the file from forcefully being compressed or converted and all your layers should be intact and good to go for vectoring!
Now you’re all set and ready to go! We hope this helps you out even just a little. I look forward to seeing everybody's designs!