How to Make Your Own Brush in Procreate (From Scratch)

Most Procreate artists buy brushes for years without realizing every brush is just two images: a shape and a grain. Once you know that, you can turn anything you can photograph into a brush, including a blob of real watercolor on real paper. Freya teaches exactly this in her Procreate Masterclass, and the whole process takes minutes.

What a brush actually is

Open any brush in Brush Studio and you'll find a Shape (the stamp that gets repeated along your stroke) and a Grain (the texture inside it). Both are plain greyscale images. White areas paint; black areas stay transparent. Making a brush from scratch means supplying those two images yourself.

Make a brush from real watercolor

Freya's from-scratch method starts away from the iPad: paint a piece of paper with watercolor, one side for the shape, the other for the texture. Then:

1. Create a 3000 x 3000 px canvas at 300 DPI, go to Actions, Add, and Take a photo of your watercolor shape. Enlarge it to fill the canvas.
2. In Adjustments, pull the Saturation all the way down to grey.
3. Open Curves and push the contrast until the background is pure white and the shape is pure black. Paint over any leftover smudges with white.
4. Tap the layer and choose Invert, so you have a white shape on black. Share the canvas as a JPEG and save it.
5. Repeat steps 1 to 3 with the texture side of your paper. For texture, the steeper you make the curve, the more distinct the grain gets, so ease off if you want something subtle. Save it as a JPEG too.
6. In the Brush Library, tap +, go to Shape, then Edit, Import, Import a photo, and pick your shape image. Do the same under Grain with your texture image.

That's a working brush, made of your own paint.

"The most important thing is to ensure that the background color is completely black, and the color for the brush should be a pure white. This is because it will affect the transparency of the brush."

Freya, in Lesson 026 (Create Your Own Solid Stamp Brushes), Procreate Masterclass

Stamp brushes: one tap, one drawing

The same idea powers stamp brushes, where a single tap places a whole flower or tree. In the Masterclass, Freya builds a set of 13 landscape stamps this way. The drawing part is simple: a 1000 px square canvas with the background set to black, shapes painted in pure white with the Syrup inking brush, one shape per layer (she turns on Page Assist to manage them), each one centered with Fit to Canvas and scaled slightly smaller so nothing clips. Export all layers at once as PNG files.

Then each PNG becomes a brush. Import it as the Shape source and dial in these settings, which Freya uses for the whole set:

• Stroke Path: spacing around 70%, so stamps don't pile onto each other mid-stroke.
• Color Dynamics: a little Hue jitter (about 7%) so repeated flowers vary in shade.
• Apple Pencil: Pressure size around 60% so pressing harder stamps bigger, and opacity at 0% so pressure never makes a stamp translucent.
• Properties: turn on Use Stamp Preview, and raise the maximum size to 300%.

Here's the time-saver: set up one brush, then duplicate it for every other shape and swap only the Shape source. Thirteen brushes, one round of settings.

The rubber stamp trick

A later lesson pushes this further into something that looks like a real inked rubber stamp. The design (Freya uses her logo plus a frame and sparkles) gets merged onto one layer, then eaten away with a layer mask: painting black on the mask with a rough Industrial brush like Rusted Decay knocks chips out of the ink, and white strokes with the Copperhead brush add spread-ink texture back around the edges.

Copy the canvas, paste it in as a new brush's Shape source, then finish it off: a paper grain (she imports Stained Paper 2 from the Source Library at 22% scale), Wet Edges at maximum and blend mode Multiply under Rendering, and stamp preview on. Stamped in pink on a hand-drawn envelope, it genuinely passes for the real thing.

Keep your brushes organized

One last habit from the course: make a brush set for your go-to brushes. Tap + at the top of the Brush Library sidebar, name the set, then duplicate your favorites and drag the copies in. Freya's own default-brush picks are a useful starting lineup: Peppermint for sketching, Technical Pen for shapes, Tamar and Hard Brush for painting, Eaglehawk for details.

A whole set exports as one file (tap the set name, then Share), which is also how you send brushes to a friend over AirDrop or a Drive link, or sell them. To bring brushes in, tap + at the top of the Brush Library, choose Import, and point it at the file. And before you close Brush Studio on anything you've made, set a reset point under About This Brush, so future experiments can't destroy the version you liked.

What the full course adds

Importing a shape and a grain is the easy part. What makes a brush feel right is the settings, and the Procreate Masterclass has ten dedicated lessons walking through every Brush Studio tab: stroke path, shape behavior, grain movement, wet mix, color dynamics, pencil response. Freya's own advice in the from-scratch lesson is to watch those before tweaking anything, and after making a few brushes this way, you'll see why.