Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Procreate and the cutting room floor

One thing I really like about Procreate is that it creates cutting room floor material.

In Show Your Work Austin Kleon talks about sending out a dispatch of in-progress work:

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.

I was recording a sketching session for illustrating this week’s newsletter issue and shared that time-lapse:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-m-cFlHVGl/

There are a couple cutting-room-floor-related things that I love about Procreate:

  • Time-lapses are on by default. I can pull up any drawing in the entire time I’ve used Procreate on any one iPad and then watch the timelapse for it. I can export those and speed them up or slow them down however I want.
  • There’s always layers to share. Any sketch longer than 5 or so minutes always leads to a few different layers. If I want to share a sketch, I can usually toggle layers on and off and share different stages of a drawing. None of it is great on its own but they’re a little more interesting together.

Some day, when I actually know how to draw, I’ll be ready to explain the drawing process better. In the meantime I’ll keep sharing the cutting room scraps.

iPad

This setup worked really well while writing issue #4 for my newsletter, The Listener.

It looks like I actually can finish a newsletter in one sitting. A couple things that worked really well in this writing session.

1. Using the iPad Pro — this is mostly me just justifying buying a new iPad every year. I do think that because I’m slower in iPadOS for most things, I’m better at focusing on writing when I’m supposed to be writing.

It’s really really great (as mentioned in that newsletter post) for making a notecard right when a visual comes to mind while writing instead of filing the idea away or, worse, switching from my laptop to my iPad to draw. (I love AirDrop, but it’s still a few extra taps.) Inevitably in that situation I’ll get distracted by… something. This week I was really inspired by this post by Neville Medhora: Why Images Are Greater Than Text In Marketing (In Many Cases).

2. Using a Gymboss timer — maybe this will be my one weird trick. I’ve used Bit Timer for years and use it any time I do a kettlebell workout. It hasn’t worked as well when writing or doing other kinds of work at a computer. I think it’s because using a timer on my phone just leads to me procrastinating on my phone. Having the physical vibration just worked well right now.

I tried 25 intervals at 1-minute and… stopped like 4 rounds in. Too quick to really get anything done. I switched it to 7 intervals of 3-minutes and that worked much better. Three minutes is good for a chunk of writing and then I could keep it moving. Three minutes is also a good amount of time to draw something worth sharing in a post. (And another three if I want to do a little bit of animation on it.)

Can’t wait to send you all my free bonus PDF. HIIT WRITING – THE 3X7 ROUTINE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE.

Thing #1 that I did with my iPad Pro: Drew short animations for this blog (March iPad Journal)

I thought it’d be good to try writing out the iPad Journal segments as blog posts so that I can plan things out in pieces. So I’ll just start them as text blog posts with some drawings. My current outline…

Things I did with my iPad in March

Things I did with my ipad in march

  1. Made short animations for my blog (That’s what this post is)
  2. Switched it up from the 2018 11” to the 2020 12.9″
  3. Used it while on the treadmill (the quarantine emergency purchase): the iPad/iPhone writing while walking combo
  4. Made a GoodNotes template in Figma (desktop browser support + mouse support)
  5. Wrote on the treadmill… on the couch.. in portrait mode (different accessories – MX Master 3, vertical stand)…

Bonus: when all else failed…

Starcraft

  • … used it to hold the phone while playing Starcraft

Oh yeah the animations

  • I’ve been using Procreate—Can’t overstate how much of a value Procreate is. Plenty of drawing apps but I keep coming back to it and now that it’s so popular there are just so many more videos of people showing how to do things on it than there are for the other apps.
  • You can set a background layer and a foreground layer—I think this is something new with the latest version of Procreate. I used to go through a pretty tedious process making copies of notecards under each frame and merging them.
  • Two animations for the price of one—When you make the frame by frame animation you also still have the time-lapse animation. Also worth noting that you always get the timelapse animation. Which is why I draw in Procreate primarily. There’s always time-lapses I can pull from when I need an animation. And I don’t need to remember to turn it on before drawing or anything like that.
  • I set the radial menu up for animation—Actually it’s pretty much just one change. I add “Duplicate layer” so that I can make the next frame quickly without needing to tap on it in the timeline. It’s a small change but it offloads cognitive load each time I look at the frame time bar and try to think about which one is the current one and try to tap the (relatively) tiny rectangle.

That’s that. Here’s an animation I made with the older Procreate where I added individual frames as background frames.

Tedium

And this is one I made when I thought that drawing on photos I took was going to be like, the thing that I was going to do with my free time. I forget exactly why I got away from that. But now that I’m on day 13 of not leaving the apartment, it’s starting to seem like a good thing to pick back up.

Robot

The plan now is that I’ll write 4 more of these posts and each of them will be turned into a one minute video segment that I compile into a 5-7 minute iPad Journal video.