How to create your own valentines mindful colouring pages in Procreate

1 Feb

Self-love IS self-care and what better time of the year to work on that relationship with self, in a fun and creative way, than Valentine’s day?

Whether you enjoy mindful colouring pages as a relaxing down time activity or you want to learn how to create your own colouring pages to use as lesson resources, in group activities or with small children at home, this step-by-step guide will teach you how!

You will need:

Procreate app
ipad & apple pencil
A4 paper
printer

Step 1: set up your canvas

To prepare your colouring pages for printing you’re going to need to create a canvas that is A4 size (unless you plan to print bigger) - I recommend setting your canvas up to be 2475 x 3500px with a minimum of 300 DPI (I actually use 600 DPI but if you’re not working with an iPad Pro, this might limit your max layer count).

Step 2: sketch out your ideas

Because colouring pages are line art illustrations, creating a sketch layer will be really helpful as a base to work off for your final line art. I like to do this just as I would with paper, so using a pencil brush, in a light colour to loosely sketch out my ideas for the design on a few different layers.

Step 3: use the symmetry tool to fill out empty space

The symmetry tools in the Procreate canvas settings will be your best friend when creating colouring pages as it will allow you to create detailed lineart without manually drawing every single detail.

To set up the symmetry tools open your settings menu and tap on the ‘canvas’ settings: actions > canvas > toggle on drawing guide > edit drawing guide > symmetry.

You can then choose how you would like your canvas to be divided for the symmetry effect; to do this tap on options and choose from vertical, horizontal, quadrant or radial symmetry and make sure that ‘assisted drawing’ is toggled on. Then click done to save the settings.

With this option set up, whatever you draw in one section of the canvas will be mirrored on the other parts.

Top tip: you can turn off assisted drawing for any individual layer by tapping on the layer in the layers menu and removing drawing assist. The layers that are using drawing assist will display ‘assisted’ under the layer name in the menu.

Step 4: create your final lineart

Once you are happy with your sketch layers, group them together or merge them into a single layer and create a new layer for your final line art. It helps to reduce the opacity of your sketches so that you can see what is sketch work and what is final lineart more easily as you work.

For the lineart I recommend using the Procreate monoline brush and increasing the streamline in the settings - this will create smooth even lines for all your art work, giving it a very clean and polished finished look.

Once you are finished don’t forget to hide or delete your sketch layers.

Step 5: print!

If your iPad is connected to an air-printer you can print your designs directly from Procreate by sharing as a PDF or JPEG and selecting ‘print’ from the sharing menu. Alternatively, save your mindful colouring pages as PDFs to your icloud files and print them from another device that is connected to a printer.