Oil Painting in Procreate: Make It Look Like Real Oils

Real oil paint has two qualities most digital brushes miss. It sits on the surface in thick, visible strokes, and it stays wet, so colors keep mixing long after you lay them down. Freya built her oil brushes around exactly those two behaviours, and the habits she teaches alongside them are what make a Procreate painting pass for the real thing.

This guide pulls together what she teaches in three lessons: Freya's Oil Introduction (the full tour of her 99-brush oil set), the oil brush walkthrough that opens Landscape Painting in Procreate, and the impasto lobster platter exercise from the Style Discovery Masterclass.

Start with a canvas texture layer

Before any paint goes down, Freya adds a layer of canvas texture. Add a new layer, pick a grey (light or dark, your call), and paint across the whole canvas with one of the Freya Oil Canvas brushes. Then set that layer's blend mode to Linear Burn so, in her words from the introduction, "the color will look fresh and not gloomy." Multiply works too if you prefer a moodier tone.

The oil set includes ten canvas textures and the landscape set adds four more, some woven like raw canvas, some shaped like dried brush marks with visible clumps of paint. Every stroke you make afterwards inherits that surface, which is half the realism before you've painted a single object.

Wet or dry decides your style

The two core groups in the set are Freya Oil Dry (14 brushes) and Freya Oil Wet (18 brushes), and the names are a little misleading. Both behave like wet oil paint. The difference is how much of the stroke survives the blending.

Dry brushes lay down color that pops immediately, then melts into the neighbouring color as you keep working it. They suit realistic painting, and Freya names her own favourites: No.5, which pulls the previous color along the direction of your new stroke, and No.13, which she uses with a deliberately shaky hand for backgrounds and abstract pieces.

Wet brushes never fully surrender the stroke. They drag surrounding colors along in visible strips, so however much you blend, the brushwork stays on show. Freya recommends them for impressionist work over realism. From No.15 down they turn into palette knives: chunky marks with edge lines that read as layer upon layer of thick paint.

"The main feature of oil painting is that it doesn't dry quickly. We can still blend the colors whenever we want."

Freya, in Freya's Oil Introduction

That is the test to hold every stroke against. If your colors sit next to each other untouched, it reads as digital. If they pull into each other where they meet, it reads as oil.

The supporting sets, briefly

• Freya Oil Tip (7 brushes) exists because most oil brushes lose their texture when you shrink them. These keep the clumpy, slow-drying feel at detail sizes. Tip 1 gives dense color in one stroke; the others build up gradually.
• Freya Oil Old Brush is modelled on a disheveled brush set from Freya's college years. These are for large areas and backgrounds: No.3 blended in circular motions gives a soft, dreamy look she uses on skin, and No.4 and No.5 are made for far-away clouds.
• Freya Oil Blender (8 brushes) blends with more texture than the Smudge tool, which she says feels more like rubbing the colors. Blender 3 is her pick for smoothing skin in portraits; the last few behave like a palette knife smearing everything sideways.
• Freya Paint Stamp holds 27 one-tap textures for shapes no brush stroke can make, and Freya Oil Topcoat (6 brushes) recreates the shine of light hitting wet paint. For the topcoat, add a layer named Topcoat, paint white only where your light source lands, then drop the opacity. Her warning: don't cover the whole piece, or the shine turns into mess.

How an impasto painting actually builds up

Brush choice is only the start. In the lobster platter lesson from Style Discovery Masterclass, Freya paints a full piece with her Impasto brushes, and the build order is the real lesson.

She fills base colors stroke by stroke rather than using ColorDrop, because gradual filling "gets the most texture out of the brush." Strokes always follow the form: the lobster tail is painted as overlapping short bands so the texture itself describes the shell.

Then values go on in five separate passes, each on its own layer: shadow, middle tone, light, accent, highlight. Before starting the shadows she sketches a tiny sun in the corner as a light-source reminder (it gets deleted later). Middle tones get their own pass because, as she puts it, they soften the harsh contrast between dark and light and make transitions look natural. Accents and highlights shrink with every pass: short strokes, then shorter, then a few white dots where light hits hardest.

After each pass she nudges the layer with Hue, Saturation, Brightness, usually pushing saturation up somewhere between 40 and 75 percent. The adjustments look subtle in the moment and add up to a piece that glows.

And she is explicit that neatness is optional: impasto is meant to be a little loose, and the thick, imperfect marks are what carry the oil feeling.

The short checklist

If you only take four habits from these lessons: paint over a canvas texture layer set to Linear Burn, choose dry brushes for realism and wet ones for visible brushwork, build values in separate passes that follow the form, and finish with a restrained topcoat where the light lands.

The brushes do a lot of the heavy lifting, but every habit above works with whatever oil-style brushes you already own. If you want the set Freya paints with, the 99 brushes from the introduction live on the Freya's Oil Brush Set page, together with the two painting exercises she recorded for it. Try a fruit, a sky, anything small, and see how far the wet blending carries you. 🎨