Procreate Gesture Controls: Shortcuts Worth Setting Up

Half of working fast in Procreate is never opening a menu. The eyedropper, QuickShape, the QuickMenu, even clearing a whole layer can all live under a gesture, and Procreate lets you decide which gesture triggers what.

In her Gesture Controls lesson from the Procreate Masterclass, Freya walks through every option on this settings screen and says out loud which ones she turns on, which she turns off, and why. This post is her setup, with her reasoning.

You'll find everything below under Actions (the wrench), then Prefs, then Gesture Controls, right next to Edit Pressure Curve.

The gestures you can assign

Procreate gives you a fixed vocabulary of triggers, and each tool on the left of the Gesture Controls screen can be mapped to one or more of them:

• Drawing itself
• Tapping the small square icon on the brush control bar (the sidebar)
• Double-tapping the Apple Pencil
• Long-pressing the screen (touch and hold, with an adjustable delay)
• Swiping down with three fingers
• Tapping with four fingers
• Scrubbing the screen with three fingers

The interesting decisions are about which tool deserves which trigger, and just as often, which combinations to switch off before they ruin a painting.

What Freya turns off, and why

Smudge: all options off. The Touch option turns your finger into a smudge tool, which sounds handy until you rest a finger on the canvas and drag a smear through an hour of work. And if the Apple Pencil option is on, she says to turn it off immediately, because it makes your pencil smudge-only, so you can't paint at all.

Erase: off as well. Mapping the eraser to the Apple Pencil turns every stroke into an erasing stroke. Try it once to see what it does, then switch it back before it costs you real work.

Assisted Drawing: she keeps this off too, though with a caveat. Mapped to Apple Pencil double-tap, it toggles the Drawing Guide on and off using your latest guide settings, which is genuinely convenient if you use guides constantly. If you don't, it's one more thing to trigger by accident.

The pattern in all three: anything that changes what your pencil or finger does mid-stroke is a liability unless you use it every day.

What she recommends turning on

Eyedropper: Touch and Hold. Long-press the canvas and the color picker appears under your fingertip. Freya calls this the most convenient option of the bunch and keeps it at the default delay.

QuickShape: Draw and Hold. This is the default everyone already has, draw a shape and hold at the end of the stroke to snap it clean. Leave it alone.

QuickMenu: Three-finger swipe. The QuickMenu is a floating ring of your chosen shortcuts, but it's invisible until you assign a trigger here. Swipe down with three fingers and it pops up. Long-press any slot to swap in a different action, and you can create and rename multiple menu groups for different kinds of work.

Full Screen: Automatic. With this on, the toolbars tuck themselves away every time you start painting and come back when you need them. Freya finds it easy on the eyes; if you like an uncluttered canvas, this one setting does it.

Clear Layer: Scrub. Scrub the screen back and forth with three fingers and the whole layer empties. It's deliberately awkward to perform, and Freya points out that's the correct design: an easy gesture here would mean accidentally wiping layers.

Copy & Paste: Three-finger swipe. This opens a small window with all the copy, cut and paste commands in one place. It's safe to map anywhere since it only opens a panel.

Layer Select: square icon plus Apple Pencil. Hold the sidebar square and touch the canvas with your pencil, and Procreate shows you which layer lives under that exact spot. In a painting with dozens of layers, this replaces a lot of scrolling through the Layers panel.

The three general settings at the bottom

The last section of the screen answers a question every beginner eventually asks: why does my canvas keep getting random marks on it?

Disable touch actions (finger painting): turn it on. In Freya's words, if your picture suddenly becomes messy out of nowhere, this is the setting you forgot. With it on, only the pencil paints and your fingers are just for gestures. Whenever you actually want to finger-paint, flip it back off.

Disable Undo and Redo: leave it off. Two-finger tap to undo and three-finger tap to redo are the two gestures you'll use more than any other; there's no reason to lose them.

Pinch to zoom: leave it on.

"There's no right or wrong way of using it. Adjust it in a way that you'll feel most comfortable while working."

Freya, in the Gesture Controls lesson (058), Procreate Masterclass

Make it yours, then stop fiddling

A good way to adopt this: copy Freya's setup exactly, work with it for a week, and only then change the mappings that fight your habits. The point of gestures is that they disappear into muscle memory, and they can't do that if you keep rearranging them.

This lesson sits in the workflow section of Freya's Procreate Masterclass, alongside the pressure curve, brush stabilization and the rest of the settings that make the app feel like your own. The free lessons on the foundation course page are a good way to see how she teaches before committing to the whole thing. If a gesture setup saves your painting from a stray finger this week, tell Freya about it. 💛