I was watching the Studio Trigger YouTube channel the other day, and I noticed that quite a few of the artists there use the iPad and Procreate. One of them is Yoh Yoshinari, who directed Little Witch Academy and did the character designs on Cyberpunk Edgerunners. It occurred to me that he doesn’t use any custom brushes, just relying on those which come with Procreate. This led me to the question, what if my own custom brushes are resource heavy, taxing the CPU, and this causes my iPad to get hot?

Naturally, I did some testing, using the default brushes Yoshinari-San favors, and I think I noticed a difference, but I can’t be sure. Also there are other factors that come into play, such as the time of day, the temperature outside, and whatever might be running in the background. (like my music) On top of that, I felt like his brush choices were just plain harder to use. Sure, this is probably because I’m not used to them, but also because I made my custom brushes for a reason. I made them to be exactly what I need. More testing is warranted, because these heat issues can lead to other problems.

In the past, if my iPad got too hot, I could shut it off, for a while, and jump on my laptop. I could write something on this site, go through my art reference library for inspiration, or watch drawing videos on YouTube. Now, with my laptop gone, if I think to write on this site, I’d be writing on the same iPad that just overheated. I suppose one could argue that it could still cool off while writing plain text, rather than drawing high resolution images, but the sad reality is that now, when the iPad gets too hot, I have nothing to use. Over time, I realize just how much I miss that laptop. I may have to think about getting a cheaper Macbook Air just to have something.