Procreate Blend Modes Explained (With Painting Examples)

Tap the little N on any Procreate layer and a long list of strange names unfolds: Multiply, Color Burn, Vivid Light, Overlay. Most tutorials either dump the whole list on you or skip it entirely. In her Masterclass, Freya does neither. She groups the modes into families, then shows the one technique she actually uses them for: controlling light and shadow without repainting anything.

Where Blend Modes Live

Open the Layers panel and tap the N on the right side of any layer. That N stands for Normal, the default mode, and tapping it reveals every other option. A blend mode changes how that layer's colors interact with the layers underneath it, which is why the same grey stroke can become a shadow in one mode and vanish in another.

Before teaching anything, Freya prepares a set of sample color swatches and flips through the modes so you can watch each one transform the same colors. It's worth copying her setup: paint a few blocks of color on one layer, something colorful on a layer above, and scrub through the list. Two minutes of that teaches you more than any written description of what Multiply does.

The Three Families

Rather than memorizing every mode, Freya sorts the list the way it's arranged around Normal.

The darkening group. One side of Normal holds a group of modes that each offer a different style of dark shadow. Multiply, Linear Burn, and Color Burn live here. Paint with a mid-tone and these modes push whatever is underneath darker.

The light group. Past that come the light modes, running from soft light to hard light, up to the ones that show the brightest color, like Vivid Light. These do the opposite: they brighten and intensify what's below.

The color adjusters. The rest of the list adjusts colors in different ways rather than simply darkening or lightening. Freya's honest take is that this group is for playing: there are many options and no map, so scrub through them on a duplicate layer and watch what happens.

"There are no fixed rules about which one you should use. It depends on each person's style and preference. But I'll be sharing with you my personal techniques. I like using the Color Blend Mode to control the light."

Freya, in the Masterclass lesson "Light, Shadow & Texture: Exploring Blend Modes in Procreate"

Freya's Shadow Technique

Here's the workflow she demonstrates on a finished painting, step by step.

1. Add a new layer and rename it Shadow. Renaming sounds fussy, but Freya does it every time, because a stack of unnamed layers gets confusing fast.
2. Pick a grey color.
3. Choose an Airbrush and set the brush size to match the object you're shading.
4. Paint over the areas you want darker. Don't worry that flat grey looks wrong on top of your art. It's about to change.
5. Tap the N on the Shadow layer and choose Color Burn. Multiply or Linear Burn work too; each gives a slightly different flavor of dark, and Freya says to do it the way you like.
6. Reduce the layer's opacity until the shadow blends in. Darker and smoother, no repainting.

The point of doing this on a separate layer is freedom. Your original painting is untouched underneath, so you can erase, repaint, or dial the whole shadow up and down at will. As Freya puts it in the lesson, you won't get tired from shading. The airbrush plus a burn mode does the work.

Then Add the Light

The light pass mirrors the shadow pass exactly.

1. Add another layer and rename it Light.
2. Choose white and the same Airbrush.
3. Paint where you want the light to hit. Think about one direction the light comes from and keep your strokes on that side.
4. Set the layer to Overlay. Soft Light gives a gentler version, Hard Light a stronger one. Again, no fixed rule.
5. Adjust the opacity to taste.

When she finishes, Freya toggles the Shadow and Light layers off and on to compare. It's worth doing every time: the before and after shows you exactly what the two layers added, and whether you overdid either one. In her demo she also goes back in after the mode change and airbrushes a bit more light onto the front of the object, which works fine, because the layer keeps blending live as you paint on it.

A Bonus Mode Trick: Invert

In the neighboring lesson, Freya covers a related one-tap color tool: Invert, which flips every color on a layer to its complementary. Green becomes red, black becomes white.

You'll need Invert if you ever make your own brushes (Procreate's brush shapes work on inverted images), but Freya also uses it as a design trick: duplicate your artwork's layer, tap Invert, and suddenly you have the same drawing in an opposite color theme. She copies the two versions, arranges them into a checkerboard pattern, swaps the background color, and a single drawing becomes a whole new design.

Her reason for showing it is bigger than the tool: small techniques like this change the way you look at your own work, and that's where new ideas come from.

Which Mode Should You Use?

If you want a rule of thumb from Freya's own practice: grey airbrush on Color Burn for shadows, white airbrush on Overlay for light, opacity slider to taste. That pair covers most paintings. Everything else in the list is variation, and the fastest way to learn it is to duplicate a painting and scrub through the modes to see what each family does to your colors.

This lesson is one stop in Freya's Procreate Masterclass, which goes on to use these light and shadow layers in full painting exercises, from simple shapes through realistic texture. If you want to see the blend modes working inside an actual artwork rather than on a test blob, that's where she shows it 🎨