Procreate is a popular drawing app available for making art on an iPad, which can be used to make beautiful hand-drawn digital artwork for prints, zines, stickers, and more! It’s very intuitive and a lot of fun, but some extra care needs to be taken to make sure you have the best print-ready file once you’re done creating your masterpiece.
Sizing & Bleed
When making your print file in Procreate, it is important to check the size, resolution, and colour profile are correct from the start, as it can be tricky to change some of these settings afterwards. Many of the default canvas suggestions shown are not automatically well suited for printing, so it’s often best to select the ‘Custom’ option in the top right corner (indicated by the “+” sign).
For the dimensions, we recommend selecting this in millimeters, and working at the exact size you wish to get printed. Because Procreate does not have automatic bleed settings, you will also need to add this manually, 3mm on each side of the print space.
For example, when setting up an A4 print with bleed, this should be 216mm x 303mm – that’s the actual A4 size (210mm x 297mm) plus an additional 3mm on each side that will be the bleed.
Need a refresher on what bleed is, and why printers require it? Check out our What is Bleed? tech guide!
Resolution
On the same ‘dimensions’ page, you can also specify the resolution. You’ll need to make sure this is 300dpi – which is the recommendation for getting high quality prints at the size they have been designed for.
Top tip: unfortunately, resizing images on Procreate can make them appear more pixelated. For this reason it can often be best to work with a “sketch” layer first and making any adjustments to this before committing to your final artwork.
Colour
Another important consideration when creating a print file is the colour profile. You can select CMYK FOGRA39 from the colour profile drop down menu, which is the exact profile our printers use, and as such will give you the most accurate representation of how the printed colours should look.
Remember, colours on screen and in print will always vary a little bit, but selecting this specific profile should avoid any unwelcome surprises. For more info on colour profiles, take a quick read of our Colour: CMYK v RGB guide!
Concerned about how your colours will come out in print? Please don’t fret, you can order a test print to check everything over.
So, once you have a file set up to the actual print size in mm, 300dpi, and CMYK Fogra39, you’ve got yourself the ideal set up for printing from Procreate! You can create the canvas and get creating to your heart’s content.
Margins & safe area
As mentioned above, Procreate doesn’t contain some of the print-specific design features that other programs do, so previewing print margins and safe areas can take a bit of creativity.
One useful tool is in the ‘drawing guides’ tool which you can use to preview a grid. You can then edit this to make the squares a certain size. If you set these to 3mm, that can be used to preview the bleed area around the edge of your canvas.
Besides this, we also have a range of standard sized templates available, which you can import and preview how your artwork sits with the guidelines.
For Procreate, it’s best to use our PDF format templates, which retain their transparent layer so it will be easier for you to see how your piece lines up with the guides. You can also adjust the transparency of this template layer to check everything more easily.
Select drawing guide tool
Set to 3mm
Use to visualise bleed & safe area
Exporting files
Finally, when your artwork is ready, there are a few options to save the print file. We’d recommend exporting it as a high quality PDF for the best results. We can print a number of image file types, but it is usually best to avoid PNGs as these will always save as RGB, regardless of the colour profile used when making your artwork.
That’s all the basics covered, but if you have any questions please do get in touch – we’re always happy to help!
Artwork by Will Huck @huckandpen (created in Procreate)
