Artists, go forth and Procreate, without leaving a mess

This Aussie app takes the mess out of creating great art. But will it make you the next David Hockney?

The Ace of Spades. Digital painting in Procreate app by Jason Gagliardi.

Mention “Procreate” and Tasmania in the same sentence and most people will roll their eyes and steel themselves for the inevitable incest joke. Unless, of course, they are fans of one of the great Australian app success stories which leads the world in digital painting for the iPad.

Procreate, birthed by James Cuda and wife Alanna, along with computer programmer Lloyd Bottomley and graphic designer Cameron Newton from a bedroom office in Hobart, has become the go-to app for digital painting and sketching, and has legions of illustrators and painters putting down their brushes and picking up their iPads and Apple pencils, including this newspaper’s very talented Eric Lobbecke and former Fairfax cartoonist and painter of stunning Sydneyscapes, Rocco Fazzari.

David Hockney may have been the biggest name to make an art world sensation on the iPad using an app called Brushes, but it’s Cuda and his team who have elevated digital painting to, well, an art form.

It won’t turn you into Picasso if you don’t have any talent, but it’s a great entry into the world of art if you think you might have what it takes and it certainly makes art more accessible for budding artists. There are three great features to Procreate and digital painting as opposed to traditional methods: the undo button, which can undo up to 250 brushstrokes, and the lack of mess to clean up when you are done and the absolute portability of the process.

I discovered Procreate early in the piece, after a fascination with iPhone photography and the ­exploding universe of filters and digital manipulation apps led me back to a childhood passion for painting.

I have tried pretty much all of the apps that aim to bring the ­experience of splashing paint on canvas to the digital realm and while some come close, nothing touches Procreate.

It’s simply a joy to use. Everything you need is at your fingertips (colour palette, preset or custom canvas dimensions and brush size and opacity sliders), a huge variety of customisable brush styles, being added to by the day by an army of aficionados, lightning fast processing speed with zero lag, and the ability to output very high-resolution JPEGS, PNGs, photoshop PSD files with layers intact, and fascinating stroke-by-stroke videos, which show your masterpiece taking shape.

I printed out some of my paintings quite large on canvas (up to 1.5m by 1m) for a recent exhibition at The Shop Gallery in Glebe, and the reproduction was vivid and razor sharp.

One of Procreate’s features is the ability to work in layers, akin to Photoshop but with none of the tortuous, counterintuitive rigmarole a foray into the Adobe universe entails. This allows the building up of layers of varying opacities, similar to glazes and tints in an oil painting (I used about 20 layers in creating the weird reflections in my painting of longtail boats in a Bangkok canal).

You can also apply various blur ­effects (Gaussian, motion and perspective) to separate layers, great for creating motion effects. I found this very useful in a rare attempt at portraiture, when I was moved to paint the late, great “ugliest man in rock”, Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, throwing a pack of cards towards the viewer.

Cuda says his team decided it didn’t need to move to Silicon ­Valley or to take money from venture capitalists to get their start-up off the ground, deciding to remain in a house in Hobart’s Old Beach and “just concentrate on making something really good”.

The app wasn’t an instant hit upon launch in 2011 and took about a year to blast off, mainly through word of mouth. Since then, it has won over more than a million users, has become available in 39 countries ($9.95 in the Australian App Store), and is No 7 in art apps in the US.

Cuda’s company, Savage Interactive, has won an Apple Design Award for the app. He doesn’t rest on his laurels either. Another great feature of Procreate is its ­online forum, where Cuda’s team interacts with users and puts out new improved versions of the app, which are free to those already using it.