The short version
- Procreate imports fonts directly: Add Text, Edit Style, Import Font, pick the TTF in Files.
- SnapFont exports a TTF, so the whole path is export, import, type. No profile needed, though an installed font works too.
- Once placed, rasterize the text and paint over it. That is where a handwriting font stops looking like a font.
- Use it for lettering layouts, captions, and the words in an illustration, not for paragraphs.
Why illustrators want their own handwriting as a font
Lettering by hand in Procreate is the point of Procreate, so a font can feel like cheating. It isn't, once you see what people actually do with it: lay out a caption, a quote, or a block of text in their own letters in seconds, then rasterize it and work into it with brushes. The font does the spacing and the consistency; the brushes put the hand back in.
It also solves the boring problem. Forty captions for a series, a product label with a paragraph on it, a comic page of dialogue. Lettering all of that by hand is a week. Typing it in your own hand is an afternoon.
Getting the font into Procreate
- Make the font in SnapFont: one printed sheet, one photo. Guide here.
- Tap Export and save the TTF to Files on the iPad.
- In Procreate: Actions (the wrench), Add, Add Text.
- Tap Edit Style, then Import Font, and choose the TTF.
Procreate also lists every font installed on the iPad, so if you installed the SnapFont profile instead, it is already in the list. Both routes are on the Procreate page.
Making it not look like a font
- Rasterize, then rough it up. Tap the text layer, Rasterize, then go over the strokes with the same brush you letter with. Even a light pass breaks the sameness.
- Nudge letters. Real handwriting drifts. Select a word and move it a pixel or two off the baseline, rotate a line half a degree.
- Vary the doubles. If a word has two of the same letter side by side, redraw one of them. Doubles are where fonts give themselves away.
- Keep the pen consistent between sheet and canvas. A font from a Sharpie sheet matches a marker brush. A font from a gel pen matches an inking brush.
A caption workflow that takes a minute
- Add Text, type the caption, choose your font, and set the size a little larger than you want it to end up.
- Set the colour to the ink you are using elsewhere on the piece so it never reads as pasted in.
- Rasterize the layer, then use Liquify with a low pressure push to bend one or two letters slightly out of line.
- Go over the strokes once with your lettering brush at low opacity. You are adding texture, not redrawing.
- Scale it down to the final size. Shrinking hides the seams and tightens the strokes.
Save the whole thing as a group and duplicate it for the next caption. After the first one, each new caption is retyping and a thirty second brush pass.
Where it is the wrong tool
A single hero word, a logo, or a piece that is about the lettering itself: letter that by hand. The font is for the text around the art, not the art.