Master Procreate Brush Settings - Pro Tutorial

What's up everyone and welcome to the tenth and final video in the video series about how to get good at using Procreate. In this video we're going to be covering advanced brush settings. So if you haven't seen the previous video number three in the series about brushes, I highly recommend that you check that one out first before you dive into this one because it's going to be easier to get into. But if you are up to speed with the brushes then let's dive into it. All right so let's dive right into it. So we tap with four fingers to reveal the interface. Now just to show you here I'm going to be working on a separate layer but this is an image that I've composed earlier so just have that in mind. Now let's focus on the advanced brush settings. To access them you simply tap on a brush and we don't want to ruin the brush so we're going to make a duplicate of it so we can work on that. So we tap on it and now we are in the advanced brush settings and if you want to try out the brush you can always just draw inside of this drawing area right here so you can test it out essentially. So I'm going to make a little shape like this and let's go into the first setting which is spacing. Spacing is pretty self-explanatory you simply have to increase it in order to understand what it does. It creates spacing between each individual brush point. Any stroke that you perform in Procreate is composed out of multiple different brush points and this just spreads out the brush points so that you can see each individual one. Now the next one up is streamline so if I increase the streamline what you're going to notice is the brush is going to try to smooth out the curve of the brush stroke so it's going to make it really smooth and nice and it's going to kind of ignore some of the jitters that your hand might have if you have like a shaky hand. So if I make a new drawing here and try to simulate like a shaky hand you can see if I increase the streamline the shakiness kind of dissipates so it's really nice if you want to make real smooth curvy lines. Now the next one up is jitter and jitter basically does this it spreads out the brush points and gives this kind of a chaotic effect. It can be really nice for some kind of brushes but others maybe not if you want to make a smooth looking line or something like that maybe avoid this setting but if you're maybe doing something like let's say this one yeah if we take this one for example you see this one is kind of built around the jitter so the more jitter almost the better. I think I'm gonna leave it at approximately there looks good. So some brushes really do well with jitter so I'm gonna decrease that back down to like this and now let's talk about falloff. So falloff is essentially going to make it so that you run out of paint or virtual paint essentially. So you're going to be drawing something and then you see you can't draw anymore the paint essentially runs out. That's what falloff is all about it makes it so that your line can't extend to infinity. So stroke taper so if I increase the taper like so you're gonna see that nothing really changes and that's because the start and end are dependent on opacity and size. So if you increase the size like so and have a start taper to maximum you can see this nice gradual curve coming from the beginning. So it's always going to do that it's always going to start small and then grow larger. You can also do that with the end taper so the when you finish doing the stroke it should also taper off over there. So this can be really useful if you're making like tattoos or something like that where you need to have these sharp looking edges always at the beginning. So you can play around with those you can also make the opacity change in the beginning the beginning of the taper. So let me just decrease the size taper like so and here we can see this gradual curve between where the tapering starts and the tapering ends. Now let's go into the shape and let's talk about the first one over here which is scatter. Now scatter will change the orientation of your brush as the stroke progresses. So higher values will give it a messy rough feeling while low values will make it act more like a streaky brush a smooth smooth line all across. And apparently scatter is not affected by brush direction. That setting is configured with rotation. The rotation slider affects how your brush reacts to directional change. So if you move it all the way to the right you basically make it follow the stroke so it causes the shape to follow the painting direction. Think of it like the brush is always looking at the pen tip and it's always following where it's going. Now if you move it to the middle it's going to lock the shape direction to remain static so it's always going to be right side up and not really move according to the rotation of the stroke. And if we move it all the way to the left it's going to rotate inversely to the stroke direction so whenever you're going this way it's going to go that way. So you can achieve pretty cool effects with this brush right here. And now moving on to these toggle buttons right here. Now the first one randomized. When it's set to off the initial shape direction is based on the stroke's beginning. When it's on the direction is different for the beginning of every stroke. Meaning that it can kind of give each stroke a unique behavior and more organic feel. The next one up is azimuth and this is a really important one for calligraphy writers. So azimuth is used for brushes where the direction of the brush shape on the canvas should be the same as the direction of the apple pencil. So just like a calligraphy pen tip. So turning azimuth on will make the shape follow the perpendicular angle of the apple pencil. So let me show you what that means. So if I draw something like this with it on it looks like a calligraphy pen. If I turn it off it looks like garbage. It doesn't really look like a calligraphy pen anymore. That's because it's always changing the direction and it's not respecting the direction of the apple pencil with regards to the iPad. So really important one for calligraphy. Now the next one up is shape filtering. Now this is something that they literally changed while I was recording this video. So I'm gonna put this image on the page so you can see what I'm talking about. Now shape filtering basically revolves around anti-aliasing and if you don't know what anti-aliasing is, it's basically this right here. You see if anti-aliasing is turned off it's basically becomes this jagged sort of line. So if you zoom into the image a lot you can see these jagged lines but if it's turned on it creates this kind of smooth looking effect and that's what shape filtering is all about. So improved shape filtering, this one right here, basically applies anti-aliasing to your shape texture. Classic anti-aliasing mimics the filtering from earlier versions of Procreate and if you turn this off there's going to be no anti-aliasing and the shape is going to become jagged and coarse. The next section up is grain and now we're going to switch to another brush to illustrate this because the current brush doesn't really have any noticeable grain to it. So let's pick something like, I don't know, this one right here, buzz. Looks pretty good. So to illustrate what the grain settings do, we first have to understand what the grain is. So if we tap on the source, this one right here, we can see that the brushes are composed out of two images. We have the shape source and we have the grain source. The shape is essentially the shape of the brush. The grain is the texture that the brush paints out. So you can have a different texture that the shape is drawing out. So when we look at the first setting right here, movement, we can see if we move it all the way to the left we smear the grain across the brush shape and if we have it to the right it means that the brush shape is kind of revealing the brush grain as we paint. We can also scale it, so we can move it all the way to the left like so, and then we scale the size of the grain, the grain source. We can size it down and that creates this pixelated effect. Or we can move it up and that pretty much retains all the details from the grain. And now the next setting, zoom, kind of sounds like it does the same thing, right? But the difference is that if you set zoom all the way to the right, it follows the size of the brush. So the grain will follow the size of the brush. So if the brush gets bigger, like if you press hard down on it, the grain will adapt to it. So it will become bigger. So the grain is going to adapt to the size of the brush at any point in time. That's pretty cool. Now the next one up is rotation. Now rotation is very similar to grain movement. So this setting will essentially smear the grain image based on the directional stroke changes. Now grain filtering is, again, like I talked about in shape filtering, it's about anti-aliasing. So we have three settings. We have improved, classic, and none. Improved applies anti-aliasing to your grain texture. Classic mimics the filtering from earlier versions of Procreate. And none disables anti-aliasing and causes the grain to become jagged and coarse. So now we get to my favorite part, which is brush dynamics. So this is going to be split up into three different sections. We have normal, we have glazed, and wet mix. Normal will allow your stroke to build up over time and has no dynamic settings. Glazed, when selected, your brush will paint in a uniform, transparent manner and will no longer build up over time. Because of this, glazed effect behaves exactly the same as the default Photoshop brushes. The third one is wet mix. And wet mix gives your brush a wet look and it adds a number of settings that affects the dilution of the paint, how much paint is applied, and how your brush will pull paint around on the canvas. So let's take a look at the settings and start with normal. Now the first one up is opacity dynamics. So we're going to be looking into this one and the first one here is speed. Now this means essentially that the opacity will vary depending on the speed of your stroke. So if you're moving fast it's gonna show up more or less depending on what the slider is set to. The next one up is jitter, opacity jitter. Now this will mean that the stroke will vary in opacity as it is being stabbed across the canvas. So if you increase this setting you're gonna see differences in the opacity along the brush stroke. So it might become a little bit more apparent than a little bit less apparent depending on how much intensity you want in this setting right here. Now the size dynamics basically work exactly the same as the opacity dynamics but affect the size. So with the speed we're going to be talking about that the size is going to vary depending on the speed of the stroke. So if you move fast the brush will either get smaller or larger depending on how you set this up. The size jitter is going to make it so that the stroke is going to vary in size as it's stamped across the canvas. So you might see some differences in the size of the brush along the path of the brush as you're drawing it out. All right now let's move on to glazed. Now glazed has a number of settings which is unique to glazed. So the first one is accumulative. When this is on the shape is going to build up as the stroke is made. So you're going to be able to paint on the same place and the more you paint on it the brighter or darker it's going to get depending on the color that you have selected. Now if we set this to off it's only going to apply a single layer and the more you paint on it it's not going to get any brighter. You have to pick up your pencil pick pick it up pick it up pick it up and then kind of do these kind of strokes if you wanted to get any brighter or darker. So this is the difference between accumulative on versus off. So you can only apply a single layer when this is off but you can build it up if you have this on. It accumulates essentially. The flow will determine the amount of paint applied to an area every time the brush moves. So this is a setting that most photoshop users should be very familiar to. So this is only available in the glazed settings. Now I'm not going to go into too much detail about what's the difference between flow and opacity. If you are interested in that I recommend doing your own internet search. But moving on to opacity dynamics and size dynamics that's the exact same thing as we talked about in the normal section the normal rendering engine. Basically if you move the brush it will make the size smaller or the opacity smaller or add size or opacity jitter depending on what you have this set to. So let's now move on to wet mix. Now wet mix is the section that you're gonna want to use if you want your brush to mimic paint. So it has a number of settings here which you can apply. So I'm going to be sticking to oil paint to illustrate this setting. So I'm gonna make a duplicate of that in order not to destroy it. And now we're going to play around with the settings. The first one is dilution. I think the best way to illustrate what dilution is is simply by showing you this pencil. And imagine I was dipping it into water and then painting with it. That's essentially what this is trying to mimic. So if you have low dilution or zero dilution it's almost gonna resemble normal drawing. So there's no water there's not really anything happening there. But if we increase the dilution we add water to the mix, virtual water. And that kind of adds this cool looking smearing effect that just looks delicious. Look at that. Amazing. Now the next one is charts. Now charts refers to the amount of virtual paint applied to the brush. So with a very low setting we see the paint runs out really quickly. So we have a little bit of a white there and then it just turns into a smudge tool essentially. So we can increase the charts to add more paint. So imagine it's like grabbing your brush dipping it into paint and then painting on your canvas. Eventually the paint is going to run out at which point you're going to be smudging the colors around on your canvas. So this kind of simulates that and you can fine-tune this to whatever degree that you want. So if you're looking for this kind of traditional way of painting it's a really nice way to do that. Now the next setting below charts is attack. An attack is a pressure-based setting designed to be used with the Apple Pencil. So the higher your attack setting the more variation in stroke shape is going to be with pressure. So the more pressure you're going to apply the more area of your brush is going to be applied to the canvas. Just like pressing down with a physical brush. Now to illustrate this point let's take this brush for example. So what this setting is trying to do is emulating this point right here. So if you're touching the canvas just a little bit it applies a small area of the brush. But if you press down on it the entire brush touches the canvas and creates the entire brush image on the canvas. So this is basically what this setting is trying to emulate. So if you increase this setting all the way to max and draw you can see the entire brush is always being rendered on the canvas. But if we decrease it all the way and just touch very slightly we can see just a small portion of the brush shape is being applied. So you can create this cool looking streak effects with the brush. But if we press down on it the entire brush area will be rendered on the canvas. That's a really really nice setting to play around with. Now the next one up is pull. The pull feature is best used in combination with dilution and it affects how much paint your brush will pull around on the canvas. And grade supposedly will smooth out the ragged edges of your wet brush for a cleaner stroke. A minus 100% grade will result in a sharpier scratchy looking brush. So if your brush is just a little bit too scratchy I guess then consider turning this up to the right to give it a little bit more of a smooth look. And then finally we have the opacity dynamics and the size dynamics which are the same in the glazed and the normal subsections right here. So I'm not going to go into those but you know these are available here also. So I think it's time to move on to the next subsection called pencil. Now this subsection is all about the apple pencil or the supported stylus but you won't be able to have tilt in the supported styluses. Now to illustrate this I'm gonna be selecting a pencil brush. Now the first one is pressure opacity. When this is set to 0% the brush will not react to pressure changes. When this is set to max the more pressure you will make the stronger the opacity will be. When this is set to 100% inverse or minus 100% the more pressure will make the stroke transparency increase. So next one up is bleed and what bleed does is this. You see when I increase it it becomes kind of grainy. So that's because the grain source looks like this. So what it's doing is it's saying anything above this threshold of whiteness is going to get ignored when I press slightly. If I had this all the way down it's always going to show all of the grain all of the time. Now the next one up size obviously refers to the size. So if I have this all the way to the right it's going to make it so that when I tap lightly the size is going to be small. When I tap hard the size is going to get larger. Now if you do it in the opposite direction if we go all the way to the left it's going to do the inverse of that. So if I tap lightly or I draw lightly it's going to be big. When I draw hard down it's going to get smaller. Now this setting here softness is all about the pressure response. So when this is set to zero any changes in pressure will be immediately acted upon. The larger values of this when you put it all the way to the right for example will try to smooth out the pressure response. So let me try to draw this out for you. So imagine that we're drawing with a pencil and we're pushing it down. So anytime the graph shows down the pencil is being pushed down. So this setting tries to smooth out this change in pressure and that's basically all it does. Now the next section here is all about what Procreate tries to do when you tilt the brush. So a 90 degree is when the Apple Pencil is vertical exactly perpendicular to the iPad screen. So this setting here angle controls the angle of which the Apple Pencil tilt begins to affect the stroke. So zero percent is when the Apple Pencil is flat against the iPad screen. This is all pretty much a matter of preference. So I recommend changing this just based on what you think is right. I've downloaded brushes from the internet which didn't really make any sense for me because the tilt angle was not fitting to the way I draw. So play around with that to find the setting that fits your needs. Anyway the next one opacity. This basically determines the opacity of the tilted stroke. Now the next one gradation. So let me explain what this does. So basically imagine this is the brush shape. So the shape source this one right here. So imagine this is the brush shape. Now what gradation does it basically makes a gradient between where the Apple Pencil tip lies and where the stock of the brush is. So if I draw the pencil in like so. And remember we're always talking about tilt here. So when you tilt the pencil this is the effect that it has. So basically when I tilt the pencil right now we can see this gradient effect. It's brighter where the tip is and lighter where the stock is. If I decrease this we can see it becomes uniform. So there's no difference between where the tip is and the stock is. It basically becomes like that. So that's what tilt gradation does. Now again we have the same setting here bleed. This basically applies the bleed that we talked about earlier. So it applies a threshold to the entire brush which is mapped to the tilt. With high bleed a brush will have less detail and impact with light strokes. The brush detail will bleed through the canvas as the tilt angle is increased. Now the second to last setting is size and size is pretty self-explanatory. If we draw something like this and then start to tilt we can see basically it just controls the size of the tilted stroke. So we can control how big we want the tilted effect to be. Now the last setting here is tilt size compression. Now this compresses the brush size when it's tilted to simulate the behavior of a traditional pencil. It's kind of hard to describe exactly but if we draw something like this with some tilt we can see if we turn this on it kind of just more closely mimics the way that a traditional pencil would behave. Now let's move on to the general. So first one up is brush name. Pretty self-explanatory. You tap or double tap that to put in the name of the brush. There we go. Use stamp preview. This basically takes the stamp itself. So let me show you that. This shape source and it makes that the preview in the gallery view. So if we look at it here we see just this tiny little dot. And if we turn this off we can see the shape like so. Now the preview setting allows you to reduce the size of the stroke preview in the top of the menu. So this is particularly useful if you have a very large brush which can't really fit into the preview. Maybe something like this one. You can reduce the size of the preview so it fits in the screen right there. Now blend modes are pretty fantastic. I've talked about blend modes in the layers tutorial but basically what it does is it determines how the paint combines with other paint on the same layer. So you can choose between about 20 blend modes. So you can make your brush light in the image. You can make the brush dark in the image. You can paint behind the image. You know there's all sorts of blend modes which you can apply to the brush. It's pretty fantastic. I don't use this that much but it's fantastic to have this here. If you want to learn more about the blend modes I've included this slide right here which you can check out and it explains what the blend modes do. There's one exclusion in the brush blend modes. You can make it so that you can draw behind the image or behind the layer and that's one of the blend modes. But look at this. Pause the video. Check it out. Anyways moving on. The size limits. Now the maximum size is responsible for determining the maximum radius that the brush can reach. By default all brushes reach 100% radius. However if you increase the spacing value in the brush. Make the space between each brush stroke. If you make that larger you can actually make this effect bigger. So if you're having problems with the brush not being large enough try increasing the spacing value just a little bit and increasing the max size limit also. Now the min size or the minimum size is responsible for determining the minimum radius that the brush can be lowered to. So the brush can never be smaller than the minimum size. Now opacity limits basically do the same thing as size limits but it just refers to opacity. So it refers to the maximum amount of opacity that the brush can reach and the minimum amount of opacity that the brush can reach. That's basically it. Now moving on to the shape source. Now this is where the meat of the whole thing happens. Now I have a separate video about this which I'm going to link over here so you can check it out if you want. Where I go into the shape source and the grain in a little bit more creative way. But let's take a look at the settings that we have here. So here we have the shape source. Now think of it like the shape of this brush right here, this painting brush. So it's the shape source that's going to be painting the grain source to light. It's basically going to reveal the grain source. You use the shape to reveal the grain. It's kind of weird way to talk about it but this is kind of how this program works. You reveal the grain source by using the shape. Now one thing to note is both the shape and the grain are in black and white. White are the areas that are going to be painted. Black is going to be transparent. Now you can invert this by tapping with two fingers and that basically inverses black and white. Now you can also tap on the button right here that does the same thing. So you can choose to paint with it like this or you could paint with it like that. Basically it's missing something in the middle here. You can see because the black is going to be transparent. We see it's going to do this cool sort of effect. Now this may be something that you're looking for or maybe absolutely not but it all depends on the kind of brush that you're trying to create. Now if you want to swap out this shape you can do so either by tapping on the library here. These are the brush shapes that are included with the default brushes. So you can use this or you can select something else maybe this one right here and you can customize your brush shape in whatever way you want with the pro library. Now you can also use your own image. That way you can draw a brush shape that you like and actually use that as the brush. So let's do that real quick. So we tap on the plus right here and then we're going to pick square because the brush shape is square. Now we select a black color and then we simply create something like this and then we can either save it as jpeg like so and then import it into the brush or we can tap copy. So we go into here say copy canvas. So now what we can do is we go back to the brush settings and we can either tap and hold on it like so and press paste. We can do this because we copied the canvas. We can also insert photo and that just simply goes to our library and we can select it over here. Or if you tap on it like so just single tap like so then you can choose a photo from your iCloud or whatever service that you use over here in your folders. All right so let's tap on paste do this and tap on paste and now we can see the brush is imported into our shape source like so. So we can tap on it with two fingers and invert it and now we can see there we go. We have the brush ready to go. Pretty pretty awesome. Now all of the import settings that I just mentioned also apply to the grain source so you can select from the pro library, you can insert a photo from your gallery, you can paste it, you can select it from the iCloud. It's all there all available. Only thing you have to remember it's always a square. The grain source and shape source are always squares so any picture that you're going to import into here is going to get cropped into a square. Now the final thing to mention is the smudge tool because the smudge tool also has all of the brushes that are available in the brushes menu but there's one specific setting that applies to the smudginess and that is the smudge. This one right here. So the smudge setting specifies how much smudge is going to get smudged. Don't worry it smudges more than that. Okay enough of the puns. But basically it refers to how much the smudge tool is going to track the pixels around on the canvas or smudge them and that's basically it. Now I want to thank you all very much for watching these videos. It's been quite a challenge to put all of these videos together to be honest so I'd really appreciate it if you shared this video with anyone who's trying to learn how to use Procreate and maybe struggling with it then send them a link to this video and and help them out. Help me out by giving me a thumbs up on the video. Comment down below what I could do to improve. Any ideas for future videos, any suggestions, any constructive feedback is always always well welcomed on this channel. Other than that I want to thank you all very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.