How to Fix Shaky Lines in Procreate with StreamLine

Shaky lines are the first thing most people notice when they move from paper to an iPad screen. The glass is slick, the pencil glides too easily, and every small tremor in your hand ends up in the stroke. The fix isn't practice alone. Procreate has a whole set of stabilization settings, and Freya covers them across her Masterclass, the Take Off challenge and her Pocket course.

Here's the short version: one slider called StreamLine does most of the work, and the smartest place to set it is inside the individual brush, not in the app-wide preferences.

Duplicate the brush first

Before touching any slider, Freya's habit is worth copying: swipe left on the brush and duplicate it, then adjust the copy. If you push a setting too far, the original is untouched. In her lessons she experiments on a copy of the Marker brush from Procreate's Inking set, and in the Pocket course, on a copy of the Hard brush from Airbrushing.

Tap the duplicated brush to open Brush Studio. The settings you want live in the Stabilization tab (in Procreate Pocket and older versions you'll find StreamLine under Stroke Path instead; it's the same slider that moved house between versions).

StreamLine: the slider that fixes wobble

StreamLine smooths your stroke as you draw it. Push it up and the line follows your pencil with a slight lag, ironing out the shake while the stroke still lands where you aimed it. It has lived in Procreate for years under different menu placements, which is why older tutorials point to a different tab; the slider itself hasn't changed.

The feel is what Freya keeps coming back to in the Masterclass lesson: with StreamLine the line gets "a little viscous", more stable and smoother, but it still reads as a hand-drawn line. That's the balance you're after. This isn't about making the app draw for you; it's about removing the jitter the glass added.

How high should it go? In the Pocket lesson she gives an actual number:

"You can adjust it as much as you like. It's totally up to you. In my opinion, around 70-80% is the way to go."

Freya, in the How to Stabilize Your Brush lesson, Procreate Pocket for Beginners

That 70 to 80% figure is for inking-style line work, where clean confident strokes matter more than tiny wiggles of expression. For looser sketching you'd sit much lower. So the whole fix, start to finish, looks like this:

1. Duplicate the brush you want to stabilize.
2. Tap the copy to open Brush Studio and go to Stabilization (or Stroke Path in Pocket).
3. Raise StreamLine, around 70 to 80% for inking, lower for sketching.
4. Tap Done and test it against the original brush, a row of strokes with each. The difference is obvious immediately, and Freya does exactly this comparison in the Pocket lesson before moving on.

Stabilization and Motion Filtering: the stronger medicine

Below StreamLine in the same tab sit three more sliders, and Freya demos each one so you know what you're signing up for.

Stabilization goes further than StreamLine. Where StreamLine smooths, Stabilization visibly bends the line toward an idealized curve. Freya's honest take: compared to StreamLine alone it doesn't help her much, but some artists like running both together. It makes curved lines even curvier and more deliberate.

Motion Filtering pushes into a different style entirely. Turned up, it straightens and simplifies your strokes until they feel geometric. If your work leans graphic, clean curves, poster-like shapes, this is the slider that gets you there.

Motion Filtering Expression intensifies that effect. At high values the line keeps adjusting itself after your pencil has moved on, which Freya describes as feeling like bending a metal wire, with the app drawing the line for you. She turns it off because she wants natural lines, but if you like stiff, designed-looking strokes, it's there.

A useful warning from the same lesson: if you update Procreate someday and every line suddenly behaves like bent wire, come back to this tab. An accidental setting here is almost always the culprit.

Per-brush beats app-wide

All of these controls also exist globally under Actions, Prefs, Pressure and Smoothing, and it's tempting to set them once there. Freya recommends against it, and her reason is a good one: the global setting affects every brush, and you don't want every brush to feel the same.

Your inking pen should probably run heavy StreamLine. Your sketching pencil should keep its wobble, because that wobble is texture. A watercolor brush needs its own personality again. Setting stabilization per brush, on duplicated copies, gives each tool the right amount of help.

(Worth knowing: every brush in Freya's own brush sets ships with StreamLine already tuned, so if her lines look effortless in the lessons, that's part of why. You can still open any of them and push the slider up or down to taste.)

When the lines behave

Stabilization solves the mechanical shake, and it does it in about two minutes of settings work. What it can't do is decide where the line should go, and that's a hand-and-eye skill Freya trains deliberately in her Procreate Masterclass, with line-control exercises, pressure practice and full drawings built on confident strokes. The free lessons on the foundation course page include settings walkthroughs like this one, so you can try her teaching style before starting the full course. Once your adjusted brush is set up, draw something with it and share it, Freya loves seeing the before and after. 🎨