Procreate with a Holly Pixel’s tutorial

Text or other blocky elements entwined with background images is a look that’s often used in stickers and planners, and although it looks doable - it’s only combining a few elements together - I hadn’t even worked out how to use custom fonts on Procreate, let alone how to only show part of a rasterised text layer without just erasing. But now, after following along with a tutorial published by Holly Pixels (update from the future: no longer available), I’ve at least got somewhere on it.

In the tutorial, for Procreate for iPad, the first thing required is to gather two elements - a new font to use for your text and an image with some foliage on a transparent background.

I selected a font called ‘Louis George Cafe’ from Dafont [note, as with programs, so-called malicious fonts can be used to attack your computer and install malware, so take usual care with where you download them from]. Given this is only a hobby practice project, I can’t justify paid-for clipart, and, as most images with free-to-use licenses are JPEGs, rather than PNGs, my next task was to remove background from a JPEG image retrieved from Unsplash.

Having, got that done, if a bit messily, it was fairly easy to install the font into Procreate and create two layers, one with my foliage image underneath and with the top layer being my text – ‘Coffee now’.

The next steps involve using a layer mask, and here’s where the tutorial assumed a bit more knowledge than I had, as the only masks I knew of were ‘alpha lock’ and ‘clipping masks’, and I didn’t understand the reference to using black. So cue a bit of looking up on that.

Layer masks for Procreate are masks that act on the particular layer you attach them to (no surprise there I guess) and you can only use black, white and grey on them, which denotes areas where you hide or show elements from the layer:

• painting with black hides the material from the layer
• painting with white shows your layer
• painting with grey creates opacity on the layer according to the value of the grey

This means, if you are pixel perfect with your brush, all you need to do to create your artwork is create a layer mask for the text layer, paint in black in the correct place on that mask and your foliage will appear above your text.

However, there’s a clever way to make it so your black paint can only go in areas of foliage. First, you create your mask layer for the text, then go back to your foliage layer, auto select on the foliage, then, without clicking away from your selection, go back to your mask layer. Then you can only paint the black where the selection is active. No more painting in the lines. I fell down at this step a couple of times by making my selection before creating the layer mask - this pre-creates the mask with black and white areas according to what is selected, so could be useful, but wasn’t what was going to work here.

And with a little bit of background added, that’s the end of the tutorial…

I can see I could want to try this again for images with people. And hence the blog post; so I remember what to do!

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Extra shots

• More on masks in Procreate
  https://www.retrosupply.co/blogs/tutorials/masks-and-channels-in-procreate

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Credits

• Background source photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash