How to Make Gradients in Procreate: 4 Easy Ways

Procreate has no gradient tool. Photoshop refugees search the menus for it, give up, and assume smooth color transitions need a plugin. They don't. In her Masterclass gradient lesson, Freya shows four ways to build gradients with tools already in the app, ordered from most manual to most automatic, and each has a situation where it wins.

1. The Soft Brush (Manual, and It Shows)

The obvious method first. Pick the Soft Brush from the Airbrushing set, set a background color (Freya uses yellow), then choose a second color that complements it, around 25% brush size, and paint from the bottom of the canvas toward the middle while gradually easing off your hand pressure.

It works, and for small areas it's often all you need. But Freya is honest about its limits.

"However, this method might look somewhat 'handmade' if you are a beginner. Please go to the next method if you want something automatic."

Freya, in the Masterclass lesson "Practice 4 Easy Ways to Create Beautiful Gradients"

Pressure control is a skill, and until you have it, your gradients will have stripes. The next three methods don't care about your pressure at all.

2. Ellipse Selection Plus Gaussian Blur

This is the clean, automatic one. Fill the background with a color (Freya picks green). On a new layer, open the Selection tool, choose Ellipse, and drag a circle in the center of the canvas. Turn on Color Fill so the circle fills with your second color (yellow) as you draw it. Deselect, then go to Adjustments, Gaussian Blur, and slide to about 35%.

The hard-edged circle melts into a perfect radial gradient. Want a third color? New layer, another ellipse in coral red, blur again. Because each color lives on its own layer, you can move, resize and re-blur them independently until the blend sits exactly right.

Notice the housekeeping in the lesson, too. Freya renames every layer as she goes: Color 1, Color 2, Gradient 1, Gradient 2. It looks fussy on a two-layer exercise, but the habit is the reason her project files stay navigable when a real illustration hits thirty layers.

3. Random Color Pops, Blurred

Method three trades precision for play. Take a Hard Brush from the Airbrushing set, size it up, and dab patches of your favorite color scheme all over the canvas. No plan, no pressure control, just pops of color wherever feels right. Then Gaussian Blur, slid well to the right, dissolves the whole mess into a soft multicolor wash.

One fix worth knowing: heavy blur can wash colors out. Freya's remedy is Adjustments, then Hue, Saturation, Brightness, nudging Saturation back up until the gradient looks alive again.

4. Gradients Inside a Shape

The last method combines everything, and it's the one for design work. Draw a shape with the Freehand selection tool, paint several colors inside the active selection, then run Gaussian Blur while the selection is still live. The blur happens only inside the shape: crisp edges outside, smooth gradient within.

It works with geometric selections too. Freya builds a composition from two rectangles and a circle (tap and hold after drawing a selection to snap it to a perfect shape), fills each with color pops, and blurs them into glowing panels. Her finishing trick: duplicate the blurred layer to double its opacity when the colors come out too faint.

Put It to Work: The Melting Wallpaper Exercise

In her Procreate Pocket course, Freya turns method three into a finished piece you can actually use, and the whole thing takes minutes.

1. New canvas at Screen Size, background in any color you love.
2. Dab about five dots of bright color with a solid hard brush.
3. Gaussian Blur, slid right until the dots melt together.
4. Open Liquify (under Adjustments), try Expand mode with a large brush to balloon some areas, then switch to Push and drag the colors into swirls. There is, in her words, no wrong or right here.
5. Add Chromatic Aberration (Adjustments, Effects) and slide right for an iridescent rainbow fringe. It comes in two flavors, Perspective and Displace, and Freya's advice is to try both; she settles on Displace. If Displace leaves a border around the edge, enlarge the image slightly with Transform so the edge falls off the canvas.
6. Finish with a touch of Noise for a printed, grainy texture, so the result doesn't look too plain.

Then get it onto your phone: Actions, Share, Share Image as JPEG, Save Image, and set it as your lock screen from the Photos app. A gradient exercise that ends up in your pocket beats one that dies in a practice file, and the whole point of the exercise, as Freya frames it, is permission to play with color without a plan.

Which Method When

Soft brush for quick shading inside an artwork. Blurred ellipses for controlled two- and three-color backgrounds. Color pops for abstract washes and wallpapers. Selection-plus-blur whenever the gradient has to stay inside a shape.

They also stack. Freya's fourth method is really the first three combined, which is her quiet lesson here: Gaussian Blur, the Selection tool and a couple of airbrushes are ingredients, not recipes. Once the four setups feel routine, you'll stop thinking about gradients as a feature Procreate lacks and start treating them as ten seconds of setup inside whatever you're already painting.

The gradient lesson is one small stop in Freya's Procreate Masterclass, which covers the app tool by tool on the way to complete illustrations. The free lessons from the course are there if you want to see how she teaches before you decide anything. 🎨