Learn digital illustration to finished Procreate pieces in six months
Six months on an iPad — about 45 minutes a day building a brush vocabulary and finishing pieces — gets a beginner with basic drawing skills to polished, shareable illustrations. Roughly 130 hours total. You will not be a working illustrator. You will be able to take a sketch from idea to finished colour piece without freezing at the colour-flat stage.
6 months · ~130 hours · finish 12 illustrations from concept to flat colour to rendered piece
1.iPad + Apple Pencil + Procreate
Procreate is a one-time $13 purchase that has dominated digital illustration since the iPad Pro launched. The interface is minimal, the brush engine is the best in any consumer app, and almost every working illustrator on Instagram uses it. Any iPad released in the last four years runs it well. If you already own an iPad and a Pencil, your software cost for the next year is thirteen dollars total.
$13 one-time; iPad and Pencil ~$450+ if you don't have them
Procreate →2.Aaron Rutten — YouTube fundamentals
Rutten teaches Procreate the way a working digital illustrator actually uses it — layers, alpha lock, clipping masks, brush settings, reference layers, export workflows. Start with his "Procreate for Beginners" series, then his stylized character and lighting tutorials. Replicate every video on the same canvas dimensions he uses. Skip the gimmicky "make a glowing portrait in 60 seconds" videos elsewhere on YouTube.
Free
Aaron Rutten on YouTube →3.Bardot Brush — brushes and a finished-piece habit
Lisa Bardot's brush sets are the closest thing to industry-standard packs on the App Store and the included tutorials show you exactly how working illustrators use them. Buy one set ($18, the "Essentials" or "Gouache" pack), then commit to one finished illustration per week from then on. Use Pinterest reference, post the result somewhere public, and don't keep starting new sketches. Four finished pieces a month for four months is the curriculum.
~$18 per brush pack
Bardot Brush →If this doesn't fit you
If you don't own an iPad and don't want to buy one, install Krita on a Windows or Mac laptop with a Wacom Intuos tablet (~$80). Krita is free, professional, and has the best free brush engine in desktop software. Aaron Rutten covers Krita on his channel too. You'll save hundreds of dollars at the cost of a steeper interface and no Procreate-specific community.
Why this path
Digital illustration beginners almost always overspend on courses and underspend on volume. Procreate's gentle interface lets you skip the months of friction Photoshop requires, Rutten's free videos cover everything a $200 Skillshare course teaches, and a brush pack with included demos prevents the "blank canvas, no idea what brush to pick" paralysis. Drawing fundamentals matter; if your traditional sketches are weak, do faculté's drawing path first.