Kickstart your Creativity with Procreate: 20 Fun Drawings for Beginners and Beyond

A structured, low-stakes way into Procreate

This course solves a specific problem: an iPad and Apple Pencil sitting unused because the software feels intimidating. Lisa Bardot's answer is to strip ambition out of the equation entirely. Twenty drawings, each a self-contained 15-20 minute session, organized into four weekly themes: food, plants, animals, and objects. Nobody is asked to draw anything harder than an orange, a pear, or a pair of socks, and that restraint is the point. Each piece is simple enough to finish in one sitting, which means the course delivers the thing beginners actually need: repeated completion, not repeated frustration.

The teaching structure is unusually deliberate for a drawing class. Before any drawing happens, there's a proper onboarding block: setting up a 3000x3000 pixel canvas template, a full interface tour covering the color wheel, brush and smudge and eraser tools, the layers panel, undo/redo gestures, and the actions/adjustments menus. A custom Procreate file called the Progress Tracker gets introduced early too, and its use (copying artwork in with a three-finger swipe or Insert a Photo) is taught as its own lesson. This front-loading means the drawing lessons themselves rarely have to stop and explain basic navigation, which keeps the pace steady once the real content starts.

The skill progression across the four weeks is the strongest asset. Week one uses food subjects to introduce sketching, layers, clipping masks, and Alpha Lock. Week two moves into blend modes through plant drawings, most effectively in the Monstera leaf lesson, where a Multiply-mode layer darkens both the leaf shape and its vein layer simultaneously, and a Screen-mode layer adds highlights the same way. That single demonstration of how blend modes cascade down through a layer stack is worth more than most of the individual drawings, and it is exactly the kind of transferable technique a beginner would otherwise take months to stumble into. Week three tackles animals with decorative elements and recoloring a finished piece into multiple colorways (shown on a folk-art snake). Week four shifts to objects and proportion, reference-photo drawing, composition, editing a brush's maximum size setting to make thin default brushes paintable, and a basic introduction to Procreate's animation tools.

Where the course is weaker is in how much is left to imitation rather than independent judgment. Nearly every lesson is a closely guided "do exactly this" walkthrough. shapes drawn in a specific order, colors picked from specific wheel positions, brush choices dictated line by line. That's appropriate for absolute beginners building muscle memory, but it means a student who finishes the 20 drawings has practiced following instructions more than making independent choices, and will need to deliberately revisit lessons afterward (as the closing video suggests) to internalize the techniques rather than the specific outputs. The habit-building content wrapped around each week (goal-setting advice, accountability-buddy suggestions, celebration prompts) is warm and well-intentioned but pads out the runtime without teaching craft.

As a first fully guided lap through Procreate, this delivers on its narrow promise: twenty finished pieces, a working knowledge of layers and blend modes, and a nudge toward a sustainable practice. It is not a course about developing a personal style or solving harder compositional problems, and viewers who already know their way around Procreate's toolset will find most of it redundant.

What you will learn

• ·Core Procreate mechanics: layers, clipping masks, Alpha Lock, blend modes (Multiply and Screen) for shading and highlights
• ·Editing brush settings (maximum size) to make default brushes usable for quick coloring
• ·Building repeatable production habits: canvas templates, a progress tracker, and structured 15-20 minute sessions
• ·Drawing fundamentals: proportion, breaking subjects into simple shapes, composition, working from reference photos
• ·Stylistic range: converting a technical sketch into a loose sketchy line, creating multiple colorways of one piece
• ·Basic Procreate animation and exporting/sharing finished artwork