Procreate is a powerful and versatile app that can be used for a variety of creative projects. In this blog post, I will show you how to use Procreate to create a beautiful digital scrapbooking layout. I will cover how to set up a layout, add embellishments, and create shadows so that your layout isn’t so flat. So whether you are a beginner or a seasoned pro in digital scrapbooking, you will find something helpful in this tutorial.

So why Procreate?

As much as I love Photoshop, I know that not everyone wants to pay a monthly subscription to Adobe to use it. I have also seen many people say that as we have moved more and more to even more portable electronics they don’t even think that they can do digital scrapbooking. The number of times I have been asked about how someone can scrapbook using something like an iPad instead has been numerous. All of that brings me to the answer to the question of, “Why use Procreate?”

Procreate is a one-time purchase app exclusively for iPads. It can be used with and without an Apple Pencil, though many of the brushes work best with one. The one-time cost is only about ten US dollars which is often a much more accessible amount than Photoshop’s $20.99/month. Photoshop on the iPad is also not quite as easily navigable as it is on a desktop or laptop, so if you only have an iPad, this is definitely the better choice of the two.

I love finding more and more ways to use scrapbooking supplies on my iPad, so this has been a topic that I have been working on for a while to try to find the easiest and most efficient way to present the tutorial to you all, so I am so glad to finally be able to do so!

The full tutorial can be watched here where I have broken it up into some basic steps, information, and some handy tips and tricks.

A few things to remember when creating a digital layout on your iPad in Procreate:

It is pretty important to try to keep your scrapbooking supplies in one set area so that you can easily find them. If you have a computer you can download and organize them there and then use the iCloud feature to then use them on your iPad. If you don’t you can set up a folder in your documents for them making sure to download them to there.
Scrapbooking supplies can take up a bit of room, so I would recommend just getting what you know that you will use. Often when it comes to working with them on my iPad I tend to stick with Traci’s sticker, journal card, traveler notebook papers, and paper packs instead of the entire collection. Also, if you are backing them up to your iCloud, it is totally safe (and I recommend) to delete the supplies from your iPad after you have used them. You can always grab them again from where they are stored on your iCloud.
Procreate does NOT give you unlimited layers. I go over this in the tutorial, but I wanted to clarify what I mean when I say elements that are in a similar layer position. This means that if you were to see the physical items stacked on top of each other these would be relatively the same in the amount of stuff overlapping or under them. In the photo below you see a purple paper with two stacks of stickers. The first has a house, the orange circle sticker, and the candy corn. The second has the pumpkins, the pumpkin circle sticker, and the candy corn.

This shows you the layers tab with those things.

The layer positioning of these things on a physical paper layout would be:

Layer one - the purple paper
Layer two - the house and group of pumpkin stickers
Layer three - the orange circle and pumpkin circle stickers
Layer four - the candy corn stickers

So when selecting layers to merge together I would put the ones on the same layer positions together, such as the candy corn stickers as you can see here: