Did you know you can set up gesture controls in combination with Apple Pencil’s hover touch technology to change brush size and opacity in Procreate on the fly?

Important Note
Procreate’s Hover feature requires iPadOS 16.1 or later. The device must be either a 13- or 11-inch iPad Pro accompanied by a second generation Apple Pencil (with Hover and Gyroscope).

Before you can take advantage of Hover Touch, you’ll need to switch it on.

Here’s how:

  1. In Procreate, click on Tools (Action) menu | switch on Brush cursor toggle.
  2. In that same menu dropdown, click on Gesture controls | Hover section | toggle on Touch.
  3. Now you can give these gestures a try in one of your Procreate projects.

Adjust Brush Size

The key to using hover is making sure you are hovering your Apple Pencil’s tip close to your iPad screen. It needs to be close enough that you see the cursor showing of the brush’s shape right below the tip.

  1. Hover over the screen until you can see your brush cursor.
  2. With two fingers touching the screen, making a pinching motion. Pinching closer lowers the brush size. Pinching wider increases the brush size.

You’ll know it’s working when you see the brush cursor changing size. The slider (if you have it enabled) will also show the change in size.

Adjust Brush Opacity

  1. Hover over the screen until you can see your brush cursor.
  2. With a single finger touch on the screen, slide left or right (or conversely up and down) to increase or decrease the opacity of your brush. Down or left will increase and up or right will decrease opacity.

You’ll know it’s working when you see the brush cursor changing opacity/transparency level.
The slider (if you have it enabled) will also show the change in opacity.

Speed Up Your Workflow with Gesture Controls

Gesture controls keep you more focused on the task at hand. You won’t have to stop what you are doing to adjust the slider bars on the far edge of your screen. You can stay put and make adjustments without moving your hands, Pencil, or attention away from the area of your canvas you are painting.

It can take a bit of time to get used to gesture controls and to memorize how to make tool adjustments with them, but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Every little bit helps, right?

Happy painting!

 

Check out CreaFlow Hub’s Procreate Resource Guide for quick access to more Procreate articles and tutorials as well as further information and resources from external sources.