Procreate Perspective Grid: the Drawing Guide, and a Better One

The Procreate perspective grid lives inside the Drawing Guide, and for many drawings it is all you need. This guide sets up the Procreate perspective tool, explains what it cannot do, and shows the two-tap way to bring in a camera-accurate perspective grid for Procreate when you need one. The official reference is the Drawing Guides chapter of the Procreate Handbook; this is the version for people who draw buildings.

Setting up the Procreate perspective grid (Drawing Guide)

Open Actions (the wrench) → Canvas → turn on Drawing Guide, then tap Edit Drawing Guide. Along the bottom choose Perspective. Tap anywhere on the canvas to place a vanishing point; tap again for a second and a third. Drag a point to move it; tap it and choose Delete to remove it. The colour, thickness and opacity sliders control the guide lines. Tap Done.

With one point you have one-point perspective, two points on a level give two-point, and a third above or below gives three-point.

Assisted Drawing

Turn on Assisted Drawing in the guide screen, and every stroke snaps to whichever vanishing point matches its direction. You can also enable it per layer: tap a layer → Drawing Assist. Snapping is what makes Procreate's guide worth using; it turns freehand strokes into ruled lines.

What it cannot do

The Drawing Guide has no idea what lens it represents: the vanishing points are wherever you tap. It cannot rotate a scene, cannot show a frame or letterbox, and only draws straight lines from each point, so there are no equal-spaced ground squares to measure with and no curvilinear option. For quick sketches that is fine; for matching a photo or a film frame it is guesswork.

Importing a lens-accurate perspective grid into Procreate

Set up the shot on one of the grids here, then bring it into Procreate as a layer.

1. Open the 3-point grid (or 1-, 2-point or curvilinear) in Safari on the iPad.
2. Drag to set the rotation, choose the lens, turn on the frame if you want one.
3. Tap Copy to clipboard. (If Safari refuses, tap Download PNG and import from Files instead.)
4. In Procreate: Actions → Add → Paste. The grid arrives as a transparent layer.
5. Set the layer opacity to 30–40% and lock it.

You can still turn on Procreate's own guide and place its vanishing points on top of the imported grid's points, so you get snapping and a correct lens together. Find the points by following the red and green lines to where they converge.

Related

Clip Studio's perspective ruler · 1-point vs 2-point vs 3-point · how to draw perspective