This site’s digital-artist tutorials so far cover presenting your work (portfolio) and working in 3D (Blender). The most common way people actually start making digital art is neither — it’s drawing and painting in 2D, and for a huge number of artists that begins with Procreate on an iPad. It’s affordable, approachable, and powerful enough for professional illustration. Procreate Beginners Series: Part One — The Fundamentals, the app maker’s own guide, walks through the essentials in a way built for someone who has never opened it.
Brushes, layers, and color — the three pillars
Almost everything in Procreate rests on three fundamentals. Brushes are the heart of the app — an enormous, customizable library that can mimic pencil, ink, paint, or invent textures that don’t exist physically. Layers let you build an image in stackable, independently editable pieces (sketch on one, color on another, highlights on a third), the single most important habit for working non-destructively. And color, chosen and managed through Procreate’s palettes and pickers, ties it together. Getting comfortable moving between these three is the whole foundation of digital painting.
Gestures are the speed
What makes Procreate feel fast once it clicks is its gesture system — two-finger tap to undo, three-finger swipe to clear or copy, pinch to zoom, and customizable shortcuts that keep your hands on the canvas instead of hunting through menus. Beginners who learn the core gestures early work dramatically faster than those who don’t, because the interface gets out of the way. The tutorial spends real time here for good reason: fluency with gestures is the difference between fighting the app and flowing with it.
Where to go next
Once brushes, layers, and gestures feel natural, digital painting opens up fast: building an illustration from rough sketch to finished color, using layer masks and blend modes, and developing a personal brush setup. From there it connects to the rest of this site’s digital-artist coverage — a finished piece to put in the portfolio you built in our portfolio tutorial, or a texture and concept workflow that feeds into 3D work in Blender. Start by making one simple drawing all the way to “done”; completing something teaches more than any single feature.