A great way to make your art totally unique!
There are so many beautiful brushes available to use in the Procreate App and it’s very easy to spend a lot of money adding to your brush library.
But did you know it’s possible to make your own brushes?!
While the brush studio can look daunting to start with, there are only a few things you need to know to make a simple texture brush.
In fact it will take you about 15 minutes tops!
Why make a texture brush?
One thing I love about making my own brushes is that you know they are totally unique to you. Nobody else will be making art with the same brush.
If you create a particular brush or set of brushes you like and you use them consistently in your work it can help you to develop your signature style and allow people to recognise your work.
Texture brushes are great brushes to start with as texture can really elevate your art. Whether you are creating an illustration or a repeating pattern, they add interest and depth and stop the work looking flat.
So with that said, let’s get creating!
Step 1:
Find a texture you like. (I mean a real life texture, perhaps in your garden or in your home.)
In the example above I like the texture of this marble kitchen unit. But other ideas could be the wood grain on a table, some mud splatters, or the woven texture of a sofa or item of clothing.
When you’ve found a texture you like, take a picture of it with the camera on your ipad.
Now, one thing to note here is that the more even the light is when you take the photo, the easier it will be to make your brush. You don’t want any shadows on it from your ipad, and you don’t want it to be dark on one side and light on the other.
Step 2:
When you’re happy with your photo, open Procreate and create a new canvas at 12x12 inches. (It’s very important that it’s square!)
Import your photo into the canvas and enlarge it slightly so it fills the whole canvas.
Step 3:
Now we need to change some of the colour settings so we are left with a black and white image.
Firstly go to the adjustments tool (the magic wand at the top left) and select Hue, Saturation and Brightness. Slide the Saturation slider down to zero. If there was any colour in your texture this will take it out.
Secondly go to the adjustments tool again and this time select Curves. Slide both the bottom and top blue nodes as close to the centre as possible. This should take out any grey areas so you have a black and white image.
TROUBLESHOOTING: If at this stage you have a canvas filled with mostly black or white or a lot of black or white in one corner you may need to take another photo or try a different texture.
This can happen if the lighting of your photo is not even, or if the texture you chose doesn’t have enough contrast. (It can still make a cool brush but it will be harder to make it seamless. It might work better as a textured stamp brush!)
Step 4:
Before we start creating the brush, we need to make the texture seamless.
This is actually an optional step, depending on how you would like to use your brush.
If you are going to use your texture brush to add small strokes of texture to individual elements of your art or as a stamp brush, you may get away without making it seamless.
However, for maximum versatility I would recommend making it seamless at this stage as it just means you can use it for larger sections without a line appearing in the texture. (You can give it a try without making it seamless and see what I mean!)
You can also do this step in the brush studio itself, but I think it turns out better if you do it yourself at this stage of the process.
So, to make your texture seamless you need to create a repeat in the same way you would make a basic repeating pattern in Procreate:
Duplicate the texture layer so you have four identical layers.
With snapping and magnetics on, drag each layer to the four corners so it snaps in the middle (The line will go orange when it is in the right place). Merge the four layers together into one layer again.
Now with another brush you need to patch up the broken vertical and horizontal lines. Simply add white and black parts over the broken line to smooth it out. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to hide the repeat.
TROUBLESHOOTING: Correcting the broken lines is going to be a whole lot easier with some textures than others! If you have a texture like wood grain with lines going through, it may take a bit longer to match them up.
Also, if the lighting wasn’t even and you have very dark edges next to very light edges it may also prove to be difficult.
If it looks too tricky to 'merge' the four sections together and hide the repeat, it may be a good idea to go back to the photo stage and try and take a photo in more even light or try a different texture.
Step 5:
Once you’re happy with your repeat copy the image. I like to do this by swiping down with three fingers and pressing Copy All.
Then go into the brush library and choose a brush folder you'd like to add your new brush to. Create a new brush by pressing the plus icon which you'll find to the right above the brushes.
This will take you into the brush studio. If you haven’t explored the brush studio before it can look a bit overwhelming to start with as there are so many options.
Don’t panic though, when you create a new brush it comes with all the basic settings and for this brush we are only going to be tweaking a few things!
Click on Grain on the left menu.
There should be a big white square under the title Grain Source. Just above the square on the top right corner clik Edit.
In the top bar click Import and then paste.
Now you should see your lovely texture take the place of the white!
Click done, which will take you back to the Grain Source tab.
There's one thing you can experiment with here before exiting the brush studio:
Under Grain Behaiour there are two options - Moving and Texturised. Both of these options will give a different effect on your texture brush and it's worth trying them both.
For now, keep it on Moving and exit the brush studio by clicking done. (You can come back into the studio later and change it to Texturised to see what difference it makes!)
Step 6:
On a new canvas you can now test out your brush!
Here are some ways I like to use texture brushes:
Add interest or shading to elements of a pattern or illustration. You can use the opacity slider on the left hand side if you feel the texture brush is too strong. This will make it more subtle.
Use your texture as an overlay to all the motifs as I have done on the pattern below.
To do this the motifs all need to be on one layer. Apply your texture brush on a layer above the motifs then on the texture layer select clipping mask. Then it will show up only on the foreground elements. Again, if you feel it is too strong, adjust the opacity by clicking the N in the layers panel and sliding down the opacity scale.
You can use my your new texture brush to create a seamless background texture for your repeating pattern.
What next:
Experiment! If your texture brush hasn’t turned out exactly as you wanted, try again. Try a different texture or different lighting for your photo and see what difference it makes.
There are so many more features to discover in the brush studio and lots more ways to make texture brushes. It’s so fun to experiment and see what new brushes you can make.
This tutorial is only a small snapshot of what is possible in the brush studio. Let me know in the comments if there are other types of brushes you’d like to know how to make and I’ll get some more tutorials up!
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