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How to Combine Two Brushes to Make a Dual Brush in Procreate
In this tutorial you'll learn how to combine two brushes in Procreate to make a dual brush.
You don’t have to just make single brushes. Procreate offers an easy way to take two brushes, combine them and make the perfect dual brush. A dual brush is great for mixing different brush shapes and textures and easily edit them without having to design a complex brush. Before we get started, make sure you have read our in-depth guide on creating your own Procreate brushes.
This guide will show you the process of making a brush shape, using Grain Source, and much more.
In this tutorial, we are going to create a dual brush in Procreate by combining two brushes. Check out the top 10 Procreate brushes available in the Design Bundles Plus Membership!
Please note: we are using the latest version of Procreate 5X. If you do not see the features mentioned below, ensure your Procreate is up-to-date.
Step 1 - Combine two brushes
To make a dual brush we will need to first combine two brushes into one. You will need to have your brushes made and ready to use in Procreate. To save time we aren’t going to go into detail on how to make a custom brush from scratch.
If you still need to make the brushes you can refer to our in-depth guide linked above.
Select your two brushes. To do this, select one brush and swipe right on the second brush. Next to the wording “Brush Library” you will see the (+) symbol is replaced with “Combine” and “Delete”.
Tap on “Combine” and then tap on the combined brush.
Step 2 - Dual brush settings
After tapping on your combined brush, the Brush Studio will appear. As you can see the Brush Studio still looks the same and has all settings you can find when editing a single brush.
The biggest difference to note is under “Brush Studio” wording you can see the two brushes you combined.
You are able to edit each brush individually and have a preview of how it will look. For this tutorial, I want to have a standard line brush that has stars cut out from it. I’ll only make changes to my stars brush to get the effect that I’m looking for.
Combine mode:
The first setting you’ll want to change is the blend mode of the brushes, in other words how the 2 brushes react with each other. To change the blend mode, Tap on a brush to select it.
Tap on it again to display the blend modes. Tap on the “Normal >” indicator you will now see a list of all blend modes available, we want our brush to be on the “Difference” blend.
Rendering:
I want to change how my combined brush renders. To do this we will need to edit each brush in the “Rendering” section. We are going to work on our Primary brush rendering and then make the edits on our secondary brush.
Make sure you have your top (Primary) brush selected, and in the sections tap on “Rendering”. I’m going to keep my Rendering mode to “Intense Glaze”. The next set of settings I’ll make is under “Blending”.
I went ahead and set the flow to 29%, with a 60% wet edge and max burnt edge to achieve the look I wanted. Play around with the adjustments and find what works for you.
Now we need to edit our secondary brush. Tap on your Secondary brush and go to “Rendering” again. For my secondary brush, I want the “Rendering mode” different, so I’ve set the mode to “Heavy Glaze”.
Under “Blending” you will notice that there is only 1 adjustment you can make compared to the Primary brush. I’m going to go ahead and set my flow to 68%.
Properties:
Keeping my Secondary brush selected, I’m going to make one last edit adjusting the size of the secondary brush. To do this go to “Properties” and under “Brush behavior” I’m adjusting the Maximum size of my brush. This will make my secondary brush a bit smaller than my primary brush.
You can make additional changes where needed, once you are done with all your edits tap on “Done”.
Step 3 - Testing the brush
We have made our dual brush, adjusted settings in the Brush Studio and now we can test our brush out. If you feel like your dual brush isn’t exactly how you want it to go back into the Brush Studio and adjust your settings.
I’m happy with how my dual brush works. I like the effect of the wet and burnt edge on my strokes and the secondary stars brush adds a perfect touch.
There are many fun and cool ways you could make dual brushes. If you want to learn how to make other types of brushes check out our How to make a Procreate Rainbow brush, and create a Shadow Brush in Procreate tutorials.
