Essential Procreate Brushes for Beginners
Even though Procreate has giant and rich selection of brushes, I actually only use a few. It depends on the style of the illustration I want to create, as well as the time I have. When we apply the Pareto principle, these are 20% of my brushes that I use to create 80% of my Procreate drawings. They are super simple and easy to use for beginners.
Non-Default Procreate Brushes I am using
I initially wanted to start this blog post by stating that I am only using default Procreate brushes. Then I actually looked and.. I am not.
Most of my favorite brushes come from this awesome illustrator -->
The brushes I am going to refer to are downloadable free in here. His brushes are used by over 723,988 artists around the world. He worked as a lead artist for Plaid Hat Games, completed projects for Crunchyroll, Use All Five, and illustrated publications within medical journals (Nature Scientific Reports, Journal of Neurosurgery, and World Neurosurgery).
Here are all of them at the same page and below you can see step by step how do I use each of them.
1.Sketch - In the first layer I just sketch few ideas. Usually, I sketch the rough draft on paper before, so I come to Procreate with vague idea of what I want the outcome to look like.
2. Line Art - When I am happy with the sketch (sometimes I draw 2-3 sketches to figure out the final position), I continue with the same brush but use a darker color for line art.
3. Basic Blocks of Color - This one I create underneath the line art and sketch layer. I put the basic blocks of color with this brush. When the details need to be more precise, I use the first brush again.
4. Texture or Touch-ups - Now comes the time when I add texture to my drawings. It’s this halftone (default from procreate), sometimes the spray paint (default also).
5. Light and Dark Layer - I add these with blend mode "multiply" and "overlay" set. Usually I use white or light yellow for the highlights and dark brown for the shadows.
6. Texts - And finally I write the texts with this flat brush, because the lack of pressure sensitivity keeps the letter looking similar.
However, if you don’t want to download any new brushes, you can also use the equivalents from the default collection as you can see below.
Default Procreate Brushes I am using
1.Sketch - Really nice equivalent of the sketch brush is 6B pencil.
2. Line Art - When I used procreate for the first months I used the inking brushes for line art. This one was my favorite.
3. Basic Blocks of Color - This flat brush works nice, not only with blocks of color but also for messy looking backgrounds.
4. Texture or Touch-ups - Apart of the two brushes I mentioned above (Honeyeater and Spraypaint) I also use this one for texture.
5. Light and Dark Layer - I reuse either the sketching brush or the inking one. 6. Texts - For text writing I am using Monoline and I also created a little twisted version of it but I will talk about it in another blog post.
Another set of brushes I am not using much but I really like them. Wrapping this up, don’t be afraid to mix things up and try different brushes in unexpected ways. You will see what feels right for you and your art style. Hope you will find your perfect brush combo. And that’s it! Let me know how you like the brushes and would love to see the drawings.
-🐝
