For Christmas, we bought a new iPad and our first Apple Pencil. I asked my brother, a professional illustrator, to recommend a drawing program and he suggested Procreate. I'm so glad he did. I've been having a blast.

Playing around with Procreate is convincing me that you don't need a full desktop app to make great artwork. This is a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I'm still very interested in learning desktop apps like Inkscape better (check out my drawing of my dog), but it's a lot of fun to sketch and play and I love the portability of an iPad.

I can't recommend enough Procreate's the four-part Beginner Series. Here are the mountains I drew as I watched the first video and got familiar with layers.

I need to go back and create the artwork in the rest of the series but I was so excited by the coverage of animation in part four that I started playing around with it. Here's my silly dog:

And an alligator:

(These two-frame animations remind me that my daughter and I created a “flip o'rama” inspired by Super Diaper Baby but I can't find it at the moment.)

I decided to recreate an animation from a Calvin and Hobbes strip from 1995. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I texted my brother and said the onion skin feature reminded me of how we used to make animations on our Amiga computer using Disney Animation Studio in the early 90s.

In addition to the tutorials, I'm finding myself dipping in and out of the Procreate YouTube channel. I watched a video about Katsuya Terada and it struck my how he works from anywhere: outside, in a cafe, wherever. Somehow I made my way over to a video about Doug Chiang who only talks about Procreate at the beginning but then goes on so show some really neat art he has made over the decades when working on Star Wars.