Create Custom Procreate Brushes in Minutes!

What's up everyone and welcome to Art and Design. My name is Torke and today we're going to be checking out how to do a custom brush in Procreate with a little creative twist. Let's check it out. All right so to create our custom brush what we're going to do is we're going to go outside and gather some materials. Then what we're going to do is we're going to take pictures of the materials and use that as our baseline reference for the brush. Let's check it out. All right so essentially what we're looking for here is something that has an interesting texture to it. Something that we can use as the foundation for the brush. Now the foundation is essentially comprised out of two things. The brush shape like this leaf over here. We could use the leaf as the brush shape and then the brush background and that could be like the grass or for example the soil over here. We could use the soil as the brush background and there are infinite possibilities. Anything can become a brush background so long as it has a uniform texture to it. But what I'm thinking about doing for the brush shape is to use the veins from a leaf like this big leaf over here. It has these nice veins underneath it which go all across and what I'm thinking about doing is to take a picture of this leaf and use that as the brush shape. Now that could be interesting. Now let's check that out. So the first thing to do is to sync up the photos from the camera or the phone to Google Photos and then download the photos to the iPad. So what I'm doing here is I'm going through the Google Photos that I took that day and I'm selecting the leaf which I took a picture of and now I'm looking for something that I could use for the brush background. And what I'm essentially looking for here is something that has a uniform texture all around the image. So I'm not looking for something that is very complex, something that changes a lot like the grass and the leaf and the or the moss and the stone. I'm not looking for sharp edges. I think I'm going to stick with a leaf theme. So I'm going to choose these leaves right here, this leaf pile as the brush background. And now I'm going to download these photos, both of these photos to the iPad in high resolution and then I'm going to import these photos into Procreate and kind of work with them there. So the first thing to do is create a square canvas. Now that's very important because that's how the brushes essentially work. You have to have a square canvas otherwise it gets stretched. So we insert the photos, we choose first the leaf and then we import the leaf pile. So we do that, all right. So the next thing to do is we're going to rotate this like so and then deselect it and start working on the leaf. Now what we're going to do with the leaf is essentially we're going to expand the image so that it covers the entire edge of the canvas. We don't want the white to stick out on the edges over there so we're going to have it just so. I think I'm pretty happy with that. All right, so the next thing to do is to desaturate this image because the brush shape doesn't have any color. So we desaturate it and we bring down the brightness a bit like so. What we're looking for here is to have blacks between the lines. We don't want gray areas in between the lines. We want just kind of keep these cool looking lines, the lanes intact. All right, so I think I'm pretty happy with this. There's this gray area in the top left corner which we could get rid of. I'm thinking since it's in the top right corner it won't be a problem because what we're going to do next is we're going to remove all the edges of this shape. So if you were to export this shape as it is right now it's not going to look good when you start painting with it because the brush shape itself is essentially a square. So we need to get rid of the edges of the brush shape by going through with it with the eraser tool and just kind of get rid of the edges. Just erase, erase, erase like so and let's see is there any particular areas that I need to focus on. I'm actually pretty happy with this. So the next thing we'll do we're gonna export this and there we go. Export it to PNG and we're gonna do the same for the brush background. Now the only difference between the brush shape and the brush background is essentially that we're not gonna remove the edges of the brush background. All right so now we've exported the brush background to a PNG. Now becomes the fun part. We get to create the brush itself. So we tap on the plus icon in the top right corner and we select insert photo. Then we choose the brush that we created, the brush shape and then we do the same for the brush background. We select that, insert photo and select that and essentially that's it. We've created our first brush. Now that's fantastic and all but if we try it out in the brush preview we see that it really doesn't look that good. The brush shape itself really doesn't show very well. So now what we need to do is we need to configure the brush to look the way that we want it to look. I'm just going to show you the settings that I used in order to create the brush that I eventually was kind of happy with. Now I'm just going to speed up through this process so you can see the final result. Now if at any point you are interested in seeing exactly how I created the brush you can simply pause the video and see which settings I used in each property panel. All right now let's give it a spin, see what it looks like. Okay I'm actually pretty happy with this. You see it has these nice looking details but still has this kind of interesting texture on a larger scale and that that has to do with the brush background. So to finish off this video I'm going to show you a time lapse of me drawing an image from A to Z and I drew this image in about 20 minutes or so and what I'm essentially doing is I'm only using the brush that I created in this video and apart from one exception which is the eraser tool. So I want to thank you all very much for watching. Don't forget to comment, like and subscribe on this video if you did like it, if it did help you out. Without further ado I'm going to show you the final image. Thank you and I'll see you in the next one.