Gouache Painting in Procreate: Thick, Thin and Blended

Gouache is having a long moment in illustration, and for good reason: it has watercolor's softness with body behind it, matte and opaque and a little chalky. On paper it's a famously fussy medium. On an iPad it isn't, because the one thing that makes digital gouache convincing is understanding what the strokes are supposed to do.

These notes come from the lessons inside Freya's Gouache brush set for Procreate, where she walks through every brush in the set and, more usefully, explains the behavior each one imitates. Even if you paint with different brushes, the behaviors are the point.

What makes a stroke read as gouache

Freya's one-line definition for newcomers: gouache is like watercolor, but the texture is thicker. The visual signature is the ridge. Thick paint doesn't fade out at the edge of a stroke the way a watercolor wash does; it piles up there, leaving a slightly darker, slightly raised rim where the stroke ends. Her thick brushes all leave that ridge, some subtle, some so pronounced the stroke looks condensed and dry, like paint dragged on a wall.

So the fastest way to judge whether a digital painting "feels" like gouache is to look at the stroke edges. Crisp ridged edges and a dry, matte interior: gouache. Soft airbrushed fades everywhere: not gouache, whatever brush was used.

One setup habit from the lessons: before any painting starts, Freya lays a paper texture over the fresh canvas. Gouache lives on paper, and the texture underneath is half of the effect.

Thick brushes: body and ridges

The Freya Gouache Thick set is thirteen brushes built around that ridge, in different personalities. Some are condensed and dry across the whole stroke. One puts a distinctly darker color along the edge, which Freya suggests is beautiful for lettering. And there are flat brushes in the set, wide and squared off, that she recommends for architectural subjects: house walls, planks, anything that wants a woody, structural stroke. The flat brushes rotate with the canvas, so turning the screen changes the stroke angle the way turning a real flat brush would.

Use thick strokes where real gouache painters use them: final shapes, foreground elements, the confident top layer of a piece.

Thin brushes: layers you can see through

The Freya Gouache Thin set keeps the ridge but drops the body. The defining trick: paint one stroke over another and the layer underneath stays visible, which is exactly how thinned gouache behaves and what makes built-up, layered paintings possible. Freya points out several personalities inside the set: a thin crisp one she'd use for calligraphy, rough raw-textured ones she recommends for backgrounds, and Freya Gouache Thin 15, a soft delicate brush she singles out for painting flowers.

Two brushes in the thin set behave like wet paint, and they respond to pressure in a way worth practicing on a scrap canvas. Press hard and they lay down new color with texture. Ease off and they stop depositing and start mixing what's already there, pulling neighboring colors together like paint that hasn't dried. One brush even shifts its color with pen pressure, a color dynamics setting Freya tuned in on purpose.

"I will take time to show this brush set because it's a brush set that I'm proud of. I feel like it's a rough style, but it gives a very good color identity. If you like rough and cool artwork, you can have it in the background."

Freya, in the Thin Gouache Brushes lesson, Freya's Gouache Brush Set

Blending: seven brushes, two tools

The Freya Gouache Blender set is where digital gouache stops looking like flat color. These brushes carry almost no pigment of their own; they exist to move the paint that's already down. Freya uses them two ways: loaded into the Smudge tool to drag existing color, or as regular brushes over a painted area.

The seven blenders sit on a spectrum, and knowing the spectrum saves a lot of trial and error:

• Rough texture, little blending (Blenders 1 and 2): they barely soften the transition but stamp a paper-and-wall grain over smooth color. Use them when a gradient looks too digital.
• Blur with pull (Blenders 3 and 4): softer mixing that drags color along the stroke. Blender 4 pulls so much that Freya just dabs with it lightly rather than stroking.
• Smooth blur (Blender 5): no texture at all, a clean soft blend for skies and gradients.
• Texture plus pull (Blender 6): grain and heavy color drag in one brush, very sensitive to how hard you press.
• Wet blending (Blender 7): her standout. It behaves as if the paint on the canvas were still wet, turning dry ridged strokes into mixed wet color where you touch them.

Across every one of them, the real control is the same thing she repeats throughout the lessons: hand weight. Press hard and a blender pulls a lot of color; relax and the effect fades to almost nothing. Her advice is literally to play, brush by brush, with how hard you press, because that pressure response is where each brush's range hides.

A simple way to practice the medium

If you want the gouache look to click, try this ten-minute sequence on a textured canvas. Block a few shapes with a thick brush and notice the ridges. Glaze over them with a thin brush and watch the underlayer ghost through. Then take Blender 7 on the Smudge tool and melt two shapes into each other, pressing hard in the middle of the transition and easing off at its ends.

That's the whole grammar of the medium: body, layers, and controlled wetness. Everything else is subject matter.

The brushes in these lessons are Freya's own Gouache set, which comes with the walkthrough videos quoted here plus painting projects to use them on. If gouache is the look you've been trying to fake with default brushes, the set page shows exactly what's inside.