Customize Pen Pressure in Digital Art Apps

It’s pretty easy to understand that pressing harder with a pencil makes a darker line on paper. That’s just how it works. Why does it seem to work differently on a digital tablet? How do you make it work how you want it to? And what is this thing? Who put MATH in my art?

Heya! My name’s Mt Kanjon and I want to show you some cool tweaks you can make in digital art apps to make drawing easier. Not an artist yet? Anyone can learn: check out my channel and subscribe for more! I’m currently starting up a course on learning digital art tools called Digital Dabbles. Check it out!

Pressure curve: what is that? You might have stumbled across it in your digital art app. It looks something like this. You can usually find it in your app’s settings, or your digital tablet’s settings. If you change it in your tablet settings, you don’t need to set it for every app. I’ll be showing Procreate and its pressure curve settings today. To take this in we need to use a little bit of math.

Don’t worry, I’m terrible at math, so let’s make this easy. This is a graph that you can adjust to change how your art app “sees” your pen pressure. On this bottom axis, we have how hard you’re pressing your pen down. On the left, you’re not pressing at all, and on the right, you’re pressing as hard as your tablet will register. On the vertical axis, it’s still pressure, but it’s how much pressure you want the app to see. Input pressure, output pressure.

What the heck does that all mean. Let’s try this another way. If you’re using a brush that uses your pen pressure to change its size, we can change the labels here. The bottom is still how hard you’re pressing, but the vertical axis is now how big your brush is. With a line like this, it’s pretty plain: press harder, bigger brush. You can also swap out size for opacity, flow, or any combination: check out this video to see more.

Cool… what do we do with this? I’ll show what I usually do, and then we’ll look at some other choices. First, I like to drag the top part of the curve right here, to about 3/4. This means that I only have to press down 75% to have my app use the biggest size of my brush. This also means that pressing down harder than 75% does nothing, but at least with my tablet, that’s pretty dang hard, and I don’t like pressing down that hard.

So I’ve made it so that I can press more lightly on my tablet, nice… let’s also do this. Woah, it curved. That’s right, this doesn’t have to be a single straight line. Whaaat does this mean? Have you ever tried to press really lightly on your tablet, and it still felt like a lot of the brush ended up on the canvas? That’s what this is for. This makes it so that those light brush strokes need a little more pressing to really “fade in”, and I find that it helps with sketches or lightly shading. It gives you more breathing room.

That’s actually all I do! Two things, easy to set. If that clicks for you, try it out too: I’ve seen a lot of folks use a curve like this one. But your tablet might be different, and how you like to draw might be different. Here are some other curves I’ve seen: A super light curve! I see people recommend this a lot, but it’s too tricky for me personally. It’s like setting your gaming mouse up to an insane speed. A heavy curve! If you really like to mash your stylus down, this will do it. But… please be careful on your tablet surface. Backwards! …wait, who put this here?

Not every app has these settings, but if yours does, try changing them a little bit and see if you can find something that feels nice. If your app doesn’t let you change this, don’t worry, it’s mostly personal preference. You’ll get used to your app’s pressure dynamics over time, and then it won’t matter much at all. Got your own pressure settings? Leave a comment, we’ll all learn something new. Send this video to your friends and compare what you have. Thanks for watching, enjoy your practice today, and draw for passion.