How to Make Procreate Brushes

You can make your custom Procreate brushes that add unique textures and strokes to your artwork. And the best part of making your brushes is it’s so much fun and enables you to take real-world textures and shapes and make them digital. In this tutorial, we’re going to make our brush shape and texture and take you through some of the steps to make them into a brush.

Before we get started it’s good to know the version of Procreate used for this tutorial is v5.2. If you have an earlier version we can not guarantee all features will be available for you.

Draw your Texture & Brush shape

The first thing we will start with is to create our brush shape and texture. We want to make our own unique brush without using someone else’s or the Procreate collection of brushes and textures. When we are done making our own brush we are allowed to sell it as our own.

Here is a list of some things you will need:

1. Material/s for a brush shape & texture
2. White surface
3. Good lighting
4. iPad, Scanner or Camera

You could use just about any material to make unique textures and brush shapes. I used a black crayon to draw a circle for my brush shape and a square about 3 x 3 inches filled in for my texture. Make your shape and texture on a white surface for a contrast between the material and background.

Use your iPad or any camera to take a picture in good natural lighting or scan in your shape and texture with your printer. I took a picture in natural lighting with my iPad, it might not look the best but we will edit our image in Procreate.

Create a Square Canvas

We need to create a new canvas in Procreate that is square. We used the “square” canvas provided by Procreate. If your canvas isn’t square you’ll run into a problem when you start to add a brush shape or texture. Your canvas size should be 1800x1800 px or larger to make sure that your brush or texture doesn’t look blurry or pixelated when used on bigger artwork projects.

If you know you will use your custom brush on large artwork projects or print media, I recommend using a 3600x3600 px or larger canvas size.

Editing your photo

We now need to import the image of our brush shape or texture and edit them to make sure our light areas are white and dark areas are black. If your image has lighter areas in it like for instance it will show as grey. I’ll get into this more once we have edited our image.

Step 1 - Import image

Import the image of your shape or texture by going to the “Actions” panel (Wrench Icon) at the top left. Depending on how you took a photo of your custom shape and texture select “Insert a file” or “Insert a photo”. Now locate and select the image you want to use.

Step 2 - Sizing the image

We need to re-size our image to fit nicely into our square canvas. Below I’ll explain how to resize your brush shape and texture as each of these will be different we want to make sure we get the best results.

Brush Shape: Size your brush shape to fit in the center of your canvas, if it’s not centered your stroke position will be off. Make sure the brush shape doesn’t touch or go past the edges of the canvas. This will cause your brush to have cut-off edges so leave a bit of space on all sides.

Texture: We want our texture to fill the whole canvas. If we have unintentional blank spaces showing it will look messy once we apply and use it with our brush.

When you are done re-sizing your image tap on the Transformation tool (Mouse pointer)

Step 3 - Adjust the Saturation and Brightness

Now we need to make adjustments to our image to make it monochrome and get our whites brighter for more definition. If your image is already black and white with no color hues you can skip this step and move on to the next. Do this step for your Brush Shape and Texture.

Open your “adjustments” panel (Magic wand) icon on the left of your toolbar. Tap on “Hue, Saturation, Brightness” and tap on “Layer”.

Next, slide the “Saturation” toggle to None, we don’t want any color and slightly increase your brightness. 62% brightness worked for my image. Tap on the “Adjustments” icon when you are done.

Step 4 - Adjust the contrast balance

Going back into the “Adjustments” panel tap on “curves” and select “layer”, with Curves adjustment open ensure “Gamma” is selected. Adjusting the curves will make darks black and light areas white. Do this step for your Brush Shape and Texture.

For this tutorial I want as much of my darks to be black by pressing on the curve line and bragging it all the way down. To get my light “paper” areas white, I pressed on the curve line and dragged it a bit upward.

Play around with the curve until you are happy with the contrast. Tap on the “Adjustments” icon when you are done.

Note: When making a custom brush or adding texture to it Procreate will look at your Black, white, and gray areas. Grey areas will have transparency to it and this can’t be changed once we export our shape or texture. If you want full opacity, ensure you get it as close to black as possible.

Export the Brush Shape and Texture

With our editing done, we need to export our brush shape and texture as separate images. Tap on the “Actions” wrench icon on the top left of your toolbar. Tap on “Share” and select JPEG as your format and save in your images.

Create a New Brush

With our brush shape and texture size, edited and exported we can now start the process of making a custom brush and custom brush group. Go to your brush panel, on the left side you will see all your groups like Sketching, Calligraphy, etc. Press and scroll up and a bit more.

You will see a “+” tab pop up, name your custom brushes group.

Next Tap on the + icon on the top right corner to create a brush and the Brush Studio with all the settings will now show.

Add a Shape Source

The first setting we will change in the Brush Studio is the shape of our brush. Tap on the “Shape” option in the left options panel. This is where we will import the custom shape that we made for our brush.

Step 1 - Access Shape Editor

Tap on the “Edit” button next to the Shape Source wording (Landscape view) if your iPad is in portrait display simply tap on the Circle in the grey bar.

Step 2 - Import the shape

Tap on “Import”, on the Right if in landscape view, on the left if in portrait view. Select “Import a photo” from the image source options list. Locate and select your brush shape.

Step 3 - Invert your image

This step is very important so don’t skip it! Let me give you a quick explanation of why we need to invert our image and how Procreate responds. As mentioned earlier in this tutorial Procreate looks at Black, White, and Grey colors only when making a custom brush. White is where the color will be added and black is the blank space. If we don’t invert our image “making the shape white” our brush will be squared with our shape being empty.

To invert your image simply tap on it with 2 fingers and tap on “Done”.

Step 4 - Shape behavior

These settings will adjust how your shape behaves within a stroke. Use your drawing pad “Preview” window when you adjust the settings to see what changes. I didn’t feel the need to shape how my stroke looks so I didn’t change any of the settings and left it as default.

If you only want to use a custom shape brush you can skip the “Add a Grain Source”. I’ll show a few examples of additional settings and how the brush works with just a custom shape further down in this tutorial.

Add a Grain Source

In this section, we will add texture to our brush by adding a grain source. Tap on the “Grain” option in the left options panel. This is where we will import the custom texture that will be applied to our brush.

Step 1 - Access Grain Editor

Tap on the “Edit” button next to the Grain Source wording (Landscape view) if your iPad is in portrait display simply tap on the Square in the grey bar.

Step 2 - Import the texture

Tap on “Import”, on the Right if in landscape view, on the left if in portrait view. Select “Import a photo” from the image source options list. Locate and select your texture.

Step 3 - Invert your image

Just like before in our Shape source this step is very important so don’t skip it! To invert your image simply tap on it with 2 fingers.

Step 4 - Auto repeat

This is optional if you want a seamless repeat of your texture, tap on “Auto repeat”. Additional settings will display to adjust how your texture is repeated. Play around with the settings and see what works best for you and your texture. Tap on “Done” when you have finished making your edits.

Step 5 - Grain behavior

The grain behavior settings are split up into two sections, Moving and Texturized. Moving grain behavior is much like tyre treads, your texture is rolled onto your brush shape over and over again. You can consistently add strokes and build it up making the texture overlap and make it opaque.

Texturized grain behavior is imprinted and doesn’t change. Your brush strokes essentially reveal the texture and no matter how many stokes overlap it will not change.

Brush Properties and Behavior

The brush properties change the preview of your brush in the brush library, how it moves when you rotate your screen. Brush behavior sets the minimum and maximum size and opacity of your brush that you can work with.

Stamp preview:

When toggled on will show an image of your brush shape. When toggled off your preview will be a stroke.

Orient to screen:

Only applied to a brush shape with a distinct down and upstroke. When toggled on your brush will orientate itself to your screen view (Landscape or portrait) even if you rotate your canvas it won’t change.

Preview:

How big your stroke is in the preview window.

Smudge:

Determines how much a brush smudges when set as a smudge tool brush.

Additional Settings

Depending on how you want your brush to act when using it you might want to make additional settings. I’m not going to go into too much detail as there are many options and settings within each. Here are some of the options you might want to have a look at.

Stroke path:

Adjust the spacing of your shape source, make curves smoother, add scatter and fading.

Taper:

Taper your strokes, scale, and set opacity based on pressure.

Rendering:

How your strokes look when they overlap.

Name your brush

To name your brush, add a digital signature and create a reset point tap on “About this brush”. Rename your brush by tapping on the “Untitled Brush” text and add a name. Next add your information and signature (Note: This can not be changed once you press “done”). Create a new reset point for your brush. This is useful for when you made a change to your brush and want to revert it to previous settings. New reset points will erase previous ones.

Tap on “Done” in the right-hand corner when you are done making your settings to your brush.

Shape only vs Shape and Texture

Below is an example of my brush with just the shape changed and my brush with a texture. As you will see the two brushes look completely different. Now because I made my brush shape with a crayon it already has texture to it, but it doesn’t work very well as a seamless stroke. Once I added my texture to my brush I got both the shape outline and texture working together seamlessly.

We are done! There are so many different options and settings to use and you could make a whole bunch of unique and custom brushes.

If you liked this tutorial, make sure to check out some of our other Procreate tutorials like how to create a shadow brush and how to combine two brushesto make a dual brush.