How to use Procreate to Plan your Quilt Colours

I'm not usually a planner. My favourite kind of colour in a quilt is all scrappy or two-tone. That way I can dive in and have a fair idea of what it's going to look like finished. My Lavender & Twine quilt isn't so straight forward. While featuring a fun bouquet of scrappy diamonds, it also has repeating shapes that I want coloured in the same - kites for the stems and squares for the little 'berries'. For this kind of quilt, colouring in the provided colouring sheet in the PDF pattern can help explore different combinations of feature colours before I dive into the quilt. You can print it out and colour with pencils, but if you have an iPad and Apple pencil, colouring in on the app Procreate is fast and fun. Let me show you show I do it!

Procreate is a digital illustration and painting app only available for iPad and iOS. You might have seen it crop up around social media, used by surface pattern designers to create beautiful fabric patterns. I like it because it's really easy to colour in the colouring sheets from my PDF patterns, and because you pay for it once rather than use it on a subscription basis.

I don't use Procreate for mock-ups with designer fabric. I just use it for testing colours. All the mock-ups I've coloured in below look like they might be made from solids, but I tend to use scraps that match the colour closely. If I just want to use a single fabric for one colour, I'll try to find a solid or one of Rashida Coleman Hale's Speckled fabrics that is a close match.

Note! I am not a Procreate expert! Not even close! I'm the kind of luddite that learns to use tech just enough to get the job done. I look up tutorials when I get frustrated and think, 'there must be an easier way!' I rarely watch tutorials to find out what else could be done. So this tutorial will be super simple. If there are easier ways to do it than I've shown here, or if there are helpful ideas I don't know, feel free to share them in the comments!

If you have the right model iPad and an apple pencil, I highly recommend buying Procreate and having a play!

Ok, there might be cleaner, more elegant ways to do this, but my way is easy! To get the quilt colouring sheet into Procreate:

1. Open the PDF pattern on your iPad and scroll down to the colouring sheet. 
2. Screenshot the colouring sheet (power and volume up button at the same time)
3. Open Procreate. It should be open at Gallery. If not, select Gallery in the top, left corner.
4. Click Photo in the top right corner
5. Select the screenshot of the colouring sheet.

Procreate comes with a couple of included colour palettes that are lovely but limited. Last year, while making my book, I created a palette that felt like my scrappy quilts so that all of my mock-ups and diagrams would feel cohesive. I use it all the time now! You can use it too by downloading this file and adding it to your saved palettes. 

1. Download the file below to your ipad (it's a Google Drive link).
2. Open Procreate, click on the colour circle in the top right corner and select Palettes.
3. Click on the + and select 'New from file'.
4. Select the Quilty.swatches file and open it.

Now the fun begins! My favourite things about Procreate is the colour-drop feature. Procreate detects the black and white lines in the photo so when you click on a shape, it fills it with your chosen colour! Here's how to set it up to be smooth and fun. 

1. Touch the colour circle in the top right corner with the Apple Pencil and hold. 
2. Drag the colour to the shape you wish to fill.

I've had in mind for a while to make a Lavender & Twine Quilt with red berry squares. And I wondered if this quilt was my chance to use some of my black fabric that I rarely buy but have because it's come in fat quarter bundles. They might make a fun support structure for my posies? I started with the black and red and then coloured in the diamonds in a random, scrappy manner. I do this by choosing a colour, and then selecting a 'spray' of diamonds in the quilt to get a good spread. Then I choose the next colour and the next until my diamonds are full. 

Once I'd finished colouring in, I wasn't too excited about my black and red idea. To try a variation, you don't need to start from scratch! Simply: 

1. Return to the Gallery.
2. Click Select in the top right corner.
3. select the quilt you've been working on.
4. Select Duplicate.
5. fill the shapes you don't like to test different colours.

Procreate has a layer function which could work well too, but I like using a new file so I can see and compare my layouts in the Gallery. 

I tried a few different colour combinations. My favourite was this one: