Create with Procreate

How Farah Khan uses technology to design great art

Jewellery designer, entrepreneur, artist, author. Farah Khan Ali has worn many hats with ease over her long and successful career to create an award-winning jewellery and luxury lifestyle brand. In a male-dominated field featuring family-run businesses, Farah has carved a name for herself thanks to her boundless creativity, passion for design and conscientious work ethic.

One of the keys to her success has been her ability to embrace and adapt to ever-evolving technology for her work. An app that Farah swears by is Procreate on the iPad. Procreate is an illustration, sketching, and painting app made exclusively for Apple’s iPad by Savage Interactive, a tech startup from Tasmania, Australia.

For artists who draw, sketch, paint or create any kind of visual art, Procreate has been a complete game-changer. Designed to be used with the iPad and Apple Pencil, the app has a very similar feel to making art on paper. It gives users all the benefits of working digitally while recreating the natural experience of pens, pencils, and paint on paper. This app offers great ease, flexibility and portability and has helped artists move beyond traditional art tools or other digital drawing tablets. “As a designer I don’t get time to sit in my office and work, so I actually end up designing when I am travelling or when I am at home. I design when I want to relax. An app on a handy iPad makes things so much easier for me,” Farah recently told Hindustan Times. She has also introduced other designers like Shane and Falguni Peacock to Procreate and also her students. “The iPad and the app with the Apple Pencil has made a remarkable difference in my design career,

Procreate has become an essential part of Farah’s creative process and she’s designed entire jewellery collections with the help of this app. The natural, intuitive feel of the app makes it perfect for use by beginners as well as seasoned artists. The app offers more than 200 brushes with the ability to customise and add more. With procreate, it is also very easy to organise, share and import files from other devices and locations. With its multiple hand gestures, minimal interface and fast graphics engine, Procreate helps you develop art at a speed that can keep up with your imagination.

“Visual stimulation is so important in what I do,” explained Farah, “it began with my interest in photography and using digital cameras to express what I wanted, to iPads and apps now.” “If you want to express yourself you have to learn to express what is happening around the world today. Fashion is an expression of what you wear on an everyday basis, design is an expression of using lifestyle trends and communication skills to make it work-friendly,” Farah said. “When I design a piece of jewellery, it’s not just about the way it looks — it’s the form, the functionality, the locking mechanism for example, how it feels — it’s all of that,” she added. “For me, art is, especially the kind of design I do, artful engineering,” said Farah, “And that is why you need to be updated with different technologies.”