How to Use Liquify in Procreate: Marble Art Made Easy

Liquify might be the most fun ten minutes in Procreate. It treats your canvas like wet paint: push it, swirl it, pinch it, and watch colors flow into marble patterns you could never draw stroke by stroke.

In her Procreate Masterclass, Freya teaches Liquify through a marble art exercise, and it's the right way in: instead of memorizing nine tool names, you drop some paint blobs on a canvas and find out what each tool does to them. Her Pocket Procreate class then takes the same trick further with a marble typography piece. Both are below.

Set up your marble canvas

Liquify lives under Adjustments (the magic wand icon), second option down. But before opening it, you need something to liquify.

1. Add a new layer and pick a color. Any color, genuinely. Freya goes with green.
2. Using a Hard round brush, drop generous blobs of color onto the layer. Add a second color, then more. The one rule: everything goes on the same single layer, because Liquify only stirs what's on the layer you're working on.
3. Freya also plays with a Flicks brush to spatter smaller drops between the blobs, and sets the background to a light cream so the colors read clearly.

Now go to Adjustments and tap Liquify. A row of tools appears along the bottom: Push, Twirl Right, Twirl Left, Pinch, Expand, Crystal, Edge, Reconstruct and Adjust, with sliders for Size, Pressure, Distortion and Momentum beneath them. Nine tools sounds like a lot, but you'll spend most of your time in the first one, and the last two exist purely to undo the damage when an experiment goes sideways.

Push: the heart of marble art

Push is the tool you'll use most. Drag your pencil through the colors and they follow it.

"It's like dropping color in water and using a finger to stir it. It's pretty fun."

Freya, in Lesson 038 (Swirl & Flow: Learn Liquify by Making Pretty Marble Art), Procreate Masterclass

The sliders change how the stirring feels. Size is the width of your stir. Pressure controls how much color follows your pencil. Distortion is the one that surprises people: raise it and the colors turn runny, the whole canvas going watery and fluid. And Momentum keeps the paint flowing after your stroke, so colors drift as if the water is still moving. Freya's advice is simply to push every slider and watch, then bring them back down once you understand what they do.

The other eight tools, quickly

Twirl Right spins the colors clockwise under your pencil, and a bigger brush size means a wider whirlpool. Twirl Left is the same in reverse. Pinch pulls color in toward a center point, and Expand bloats it outward. Crystal adds trembling, wave-like edges to the colors, one of the more interesting textures in the set. Edge also squeezes color together, but along a line rather than toward a point.

The last three are your safety net. Reconstruct spreads out and softens what you've done where you paint. Adjust lets you tune the strength of everything you've applied so far. Reset wipes the Liquify session back to the start, no harm done. Between these and the undo gesture, there is no way to ruin anything, which is exactly why this tool rewards playing.

Take it further: marble letters

The Pocket Procreate exercise turns this technique into a finished piece, and it's a good template for using Liquify with intention rather than just for fun.

1. Type your word. Actions, Add, Add Text. Freya types LOVE, picks a chunky font under Edit Style, and sizes it big. Check your spelling now, because the next step is Rasterize (tap the text layer, choose Rasterize), which turns the text into paint you can no longer edit.
2. Make a marble layer on top. Same as before: one layer, hard brush, blobs of color, then Liquify until you like the swirl.
3. Clip it to the letters. Tap the marble layer and choose Clipping Mask. The marble now shows only inside the letters. When you're happy, Merge Down so the marbled text becomes one layer.
4. Liquify the letters themselves, gently this time. A light touch of Push makes the letterforms flutter, like fabric or smoke. If it goes too far, Reset and try again.

She finishes with a soft shadow: duplicate the text layer, fill the copy with a flat color via Select and Color Fill, move it below the original, blur it with Gaussian Blur, nudge it aside with Transform, then set it to Multiply and lower the opacity. For extra polish she stacks a second, blurred copy of the marble text into the shadow, so the shadow carries a hint of the letters' own colors, like light bouncing through them.

Where marble art is actually useful

Freya's list at the end of the Masterclass lesson is worth repeating: marble textures make great phone case designs, pillowcases, t-shirt prints, backgrounds and abstract pieces. The typography version adds greeting cards and lettering posts to that list. It's also simply a good warm-up when you want to make something without the pressure of drawing well. Every swirl is one of a kind, so even a five-minute session ends with something worth keeping.

Both exercises come from Freya's beginner-friendly courses, where Liquify is one small stop on the way from empty canvas to finished illustrations. If you try the marble exercise, share your swirls and tag Freya, the results are different every single time and she loves seeing them.