Procreate Brush Masterclass - Kickstart your Lettering Brushmaking Addiction!

1. Introduction: Ever since Apple released the iPad Pro the calligraphy community has been crazy about iPad lettering. Taking your letters digital while maintaining a natural experience has enticed all lot of people. But what really sets your digital calligraphy apart is brushes. The Procreate app offers a plethora of customizing options. Every setting is covered in the artist handbook, well, apart from how to make lettering brushes, This is where I come in. I'm Miriam, a coder, calligrapher, and complete tech node. A day after I got my iPad Pro over two years ago, I had already made a dozen custom brushes. My count is now way above 500 and I offer over 200 custom Procreate brushes on my website. In this class, I'll be spilling all the brush making secrets. How to make it perfect stamp, how to make good brushes, what settings ruin your lettering brushes, how to create the perfect brush pen, as well as some super fun effect brushes that produce multiple lines or come with a shadow boats in. I'll be sharing all the insight and take you along my journey in recreating my favorite 9B pencil digitally. Are you ready to be infected by the brush making virus? Then this class is for you. 2. Lettering Brush No Go's: All right guys, so before we start with anything else, the first thing that I want to cover is the lettering brush no, goes. So settings that I just don't want you to use in your lettering and brushes. I'm also going to show you why. So I'm going to start with creating a new square document. We will be working mostly in square documents because it's easiest to create the brush shapes on a square documents since, that's what's Procreate takes. I'm just going to work in this. So I am demonstrating this using a round brush. So I'm actually going to go and create a "New Set" called "Brush Class". I want you to work in a new set as well because it's easiest to have it all organized. So in this "Brush Class", I'm going to create a new brush. All I'm going to do is I'm going to select "Swap from Pro Library" and I'm choosing hard round shape and a square empty grain, black here. So now we have a brush. One of the things that we really do not want is a "Stroke Taper". I see a lot of people who use stroke taper, even just a little bit of taper is not something that we want in our brushes. So I'm going to demonstrate this. First let's turn on the "Streamline" because I always turn on streamline, it makes lettering so much easier. So this is what it looks like right now. I'm just going to reduce the size. So "hi" is going to be your best friend because it's easiest to test everything with this word. You can test an i dot. You can test a down-strokes are something that starts heavy and an upstroke that starts liked. So if I'm going to apply a "Start" taper to the "Max", you can see what happens right here. So this is not something that we want because now we cannot easily create adult and we cannot start something with down-stroke because procreate automatically, start at the minimum size and then increase size no matter where pressure use here. We do want to start our lines thin, but we do not want to apply it tapers to this. Same here if we apply an "end" to taper at the end taper, not as drastic, but it's still there. You can see it here. Just add this little cap instead of being rounded. So taper, no-go, never apply it. Taper, always remove this. You might want to apply a little bit of end taper if you are trying to emulate certain brushes, but never go and do a star taper because that ruins the lettering brush. It really does. The other setting is actually in the pencil settings and it's a pressure setting. By default, if you create a new brush Procreate will actually apply "Softness". Softness is something that we really do not want. I'm just going to create a grid here so I can show you this with one of my favorite brushes. We'll show you how to create a grid brush like this as well. So I have my great brush and you might have heard of my "Azim" pen. If you know me from Instagram, you know I always use this brush. So I'm going to increase the size just a little bit so that we can see this. So here is my "Azim" pen, which has an end taper actually, because I feel like a nib actually taper a little bit and this was created to fake an APP. But if you go into the pencil settings, we can see that size is applied to 100 percent there zeros softness. So I'm just going to write high so you can see what I mean. So pressure looks exactly how I wanted here. Now, let's apply softness at 100 percent. Now you can really see what the problem is with this. I'm going to work with the same amount of pressure. I am writing exactly the same, but it will look completely different. See that?. This is what softness does. Softness will not immediately translate your pressure. The thing is, we are very good with pressure in calligraphy. A lot of people painters and liked to do inking with brushes like these. They love softness because it smooths their lines out. But in calligraphy we want very drastic pressure changes. So we do not want to apply any softness. This is basically like a lag and it feels very unmatched, natural and it looks horrible. So never apply softness on your lettering brushes because you want this and not this. That's basically anything apart from that, you can do whatever you want with lettering brushes without ruining your results. So that's it. Let's talk about the next topic. 3. Perfect Stamps: I'm back in my square document now and we still have this untitled brush. I'm just going to tap that again and we are now going to transform this into a stamp. Let's rename it stamp. I'm a horrible painter so I'm just going to draw a little flower, and because I want to demonstrate something specific, I'm actually going to make this really big so it covers quite a big area. What I'm going to do now is I go into canvas, go into image and say Copy Canvas. Going back into my stamp, into the source tab. I'm going to hold him press the shapes source and then paste an invert shape. Now I just have the little flower. Now for the grain, you want to make sure that you do use the white square. I'm going to show you why by switching to the medium around here in my shape and you will see immediately how it looks. I'm going to use the stamp preview. You can already see the problem here. If I'm trying to stamp now with this, you can see that it's not always showing up, and it looks weird. That is because the grain is basically like a mask. Whatever shows up white here is what will be shown off the shapes. Basically just the middle here and then there's some fading. Because the grain moves while we write, this will cause a lot of problems. If you're working with stamps, always make sure to show it all by using the blank grain. Then another thing that happens is sometimes you get stuff like that because you wiggle accidentally. To avoid that, because stamps usually should be just one tap and not get double lines. I'm going to remove the stamp preview and you can see that it's actually creating a line here. By increasing the spacing, we can avoid that. Now whenever I tap or when I try to draw a little line, there is no overlapping and this is something that you want to make sure happens with your stamps. To make this stamp, the cool thing about having spacing so big is that this will make size limits smaller. You will be able to go up to max size and as you can see that as gigantic. This is really big and this is really nice. Having big spacing means you can go a lot bigger with your size and can create huge stamps. That is basically everything that you need to know about stamps. I like to use the stamp preview for my stamps and then put my preview down so I can see what my shape is. For stamps, use the grain source in white, increase spacing and increase size limits to max to have the biggest stamps possible. 4. Settings, the full Overview: One of the things that make a great brush maker is they do know what every single setting does, and this is something that I really urge you to figure out it is finding out what every setting does. I want to talk about most of these right now, and for that we are going to create a new brush. But first, I want to create a new shape. I'm going to clear my shape. I am dragging the color down, and I'm going to manipulate this, that it's just a rectangle, and I'm placing this in the middle. Go into image copy canvas. Now, I'm going to create a new brush by tapping a plus sign, holding in place and pasting an inverting the shape as soon as I chose. I'm going to choose the hard around source right now. Though, let's actually choose the blank source. It's a little bit easier to look at the settings at the beginning. I have this rectangle here, which is going to be my shape for just brush. Now let's just go through it and look what every single setting does. So first off, you have a preview here. You can actually write in this. But I personally like to write on my document because I feel like it's easier for me to see what's actually going on. The spacing is what moves your shape around. The shape is actually placed along the path that you write. So if we increase the spacing, there's more space between those shapes. If we go down, they basically just overlap. Again, the size of the spacing affects the maximum size that you can achieve with your brush. So if you want a solid line, what I like to do is go with my shaping up so much that you cannot really see jittering. Here you can actually see jittering. So I went a little bit too big. If I go lower, this is basically a smooth line so I can get away with 8.2 percent of spacing here. Streamline is the smoothing factor. Every lettering person loves streamlines, so this will just smooth out your line as you go. It's very helpful. If you go super fast with your line, you will no longer recognize your style. I know a lot of people who write faster like to use this streamline at about 80 percent. I personally like max streamline, but I write pretty slow. So what is jitter? Jitter basically means that your shape will be offset from the path. Again, here you can see we have our shapes along the path, and once we increase the jitter, you can see that these shift away from the path into a more randomized manner. This is really cool if you want to create some sparkling brushes. Now fall off will actually remove the opacity. Basically your brush will have run out of ink. So if we go all the way around to fall off, you can see that basically there is almost no line to be made. That's just go down with spacing. Again, you can see this really just gives you a little bit. If you apply a little bit of that, you can do that. I personally never apply fall off because I feel like it feels a little bit weird to be running out of ink. But if you create something like something that's supposed to be the realistic looking brush, you can play with it. I personally don't use it much in my brushes. Then we covered the taper before. So this applies size and opacity tapers at the beginning and at the end. We do not care about these because we do not work with them. Now for the shape here, something very interesting that's happening. So one of the thing is scatter, and if we increase the spacing again, we can see it a little bit more easily. This is different than the jitter, because instead of moving it away from the path, it stays on the path but it starts to rotate. You can see the shape rotates as I increase the scatter and sing here, rotation rotates the shapes, but in a more regular manner. Follow stroke is actually very cool with this. If you are trying to create a shape that has stripes, for example, and we are talking about this a little bit more, a little bit later, but this is basically what this does. So this will rotate the shape that is along the path. This does it and it rotates as well, but in a more irregular manner. Randomized will actually just randomize the rotation of your shape at the start of your stroke. Right here, it was rotated in this direction. Now it's in this and it just randomizes the orientation. I personally do not like using this because I like to have control over my shape. Now azimuth, azimuth is amazing. Azimuth is one of my absolute favorite things to do to brushes because this means that the shape will follow the direction of your stroke. So if I go in this direction, it looks like this. If I go in this direction, it looks like this as well. Now what I'm going to do is actually I know that this is on because this should not look like this. let's undo this. So here you can see it follows this direction and it follows this direction as well. So if you are working with a brush that needs to emulate a nib, which always spreads like this, and we'll create a straight line in the direction that you paint with your pen. Then you want to use azimuth. I use azimuth on basically all of my brushes because I feel like it makes them feel more natural and a lot more responsive. So I'm actually going to keep azimuth on. No let's actually turn it off and talk about this thing that I turned off. By default, oriented screen is turned on. You need to turn this off is if you want to use azimuth and the thing that is on top of your stroke or at the beginning of your stroke needs to be on the left-hand side of your shapes, so your shape needs to be rotated like this. You can also rotate your shape just by using your fingers and turning. But this is the way you want to have your brush shape if you are going to use azimuth. Then we have the grain and I'm actually going to change the grain to something that we can see, I'm going with the hard round, and I'm going to use the blank as my shape right now to just show you guys what grain does. First of all, you can see when I have rolling on. Now that I'm just painting around, it will have the pattern that I use underneath and then start again. But during my stroke it will always remain with the pattern and the pattern doesn't miss. This is very good for something like a grid brush. But we can also have movement and go like 20 percent or so. Now you can see that our pattern moves around. I personally usually go with rolling because I feel like it's a little bit more natural to have, if I have a repeating shape, a repeating pattern, as my grain, I want this and not to confuse anything and I don't want this to move during my strokes. Scale makes the size of your patterns so that here you can see a little bit better. What I mean was rolling. With rolling you can see the shape doesn't move, and if I have the movement turn down, you can see to shape doesn't move. It's a personal preference thing. I personally keep it at rolling. Now, zoom actually will follow either size. So if I increase the size, the size of my pattern goes up. If I decrease the size, the size of my pattern goes down as well. Or you can keep it the same. Here we have it and if I go up, should actually not do that. See sometimes I don't even know, yeah, crop this the opposite. If you have cropped, the pattern stays the same size depending no matter what size your brush is, and otherwise, you can do follow size where the percentage will be equal to the size or you can do a custom percentage. This really depends on the shape that you use, then your rotation, you can rotate your shape as well, which doesn't make always sense but sometimes it does, and then filter it, sometimes you have very highly detailed shapes, it doesn't make sense to turn filtered on or off. I usually just keep it on. Then we have dynamics and we are going to talk a little bit more about dynamics later on. But basically we have three different modes of brushes, and it probably makes most sense by creating this, taking this shape again. I'm going to turn half of this opacity down. I am selecting this turn and swipe down with three fingers. I'm going to cut and paste and reducing the opacity of this. I have a shape that is half opaque. Now I'm going to copy the canvas. I'm pasting this here and using the blank shape again. I'm reducing my spacing to zero, and now you can see at normal, this is just a black line. We cannot see anything of the opacity because we have something at 10 percent opacity and put something at 10 percent opacity to the on top of it. It creates something that's a 20 percent opacity. Since we have zero spacing, we have about a 100 or so pieces on top of each other, at least. That means that the 20 percent opacity times 20 percent is over a 100 percent, so it will look completely black. Then what you can do is we can actually change the opacity during speed and jitter. I'm not going to talk about speed and jitter right now. We are going to leave the size of the opacity that makes away for a moment. But let's look at glaze. Because glaze does something very cool, glaze will actually take the opacity of your shape and apply it to the full line. If we have something that is 20 percent of peak in our shape, the whole part of this will remain at twenty percent opacity, so you will not add the opacity up. What you can do is you can set it to cumulative. So you say it is going to add up, but you can set how much it's going to add up with the flow. When I use glaze, I usually turn a cumulative off because I feel like it doesn't really make sense to use it, and I usually set my flow to max because I want to control my opacity of the line with my shape. Then there's wet mix, wet mix will create a wet brush which considers everything around it, it doesn't mix. We are going to do a whole chapter on this, I'm not going to talk a little bit more about it. Then we have the pencil where we can set the pencil pressure reaction, we can do something like opacity. Now when I press lightly, it's not opaque and when I press more, it's going to be more opaque. The opacity reacts to my pen pressure. Bleed is a newer feature and it will basically just make this a little bit more stuck. I hadn't really figured out how it works, but it's very cool if we are going to work with pencil brushes, we will talk about that a little bit more later. Then size is something we usually do on our lettering brushes. We usually want them to react to our size so that we can do something like this. Then again, softness is the lag which we are going to remove and then it will instantly look better if I would letter correctly. Then there's tilt settings and tilt this just when you lay your brush to your side. Usually I will not apply tilts because lettering on an iPad is difficult enough. If the angle at which you hold your pen has an effect as well, that usually is a little bit more confusing, unhelpful. I usually don't use tilt much. We are going to talk about tilt at the pencil settings as well. Then there's the general tab, which is where we set our brush name, which you can set either down here or up here. We can say to use the Stamp preview, which only makes sense if we're making a stamp. We can actually control the size at which our preview will be displayed. Here is the brush behavior oriented screen. Let's talk about orient to screen a little bit more because I might have confused you at the azimuth. I have no azimuth on right now. Let's turn orient screen on. Now if I draw a straight line and I need to remove the pressure. I am setting the pressure to zero again, look at my shape. My shape looks like this right now. If I turn my iPad, it will not do that again. All right, orient screen is a little bit confusing, I used to love it and now I feel like it's not really done too well. If I have orient screen turned on, this is what my lines look like in this orientation and if I switch my iPad to use the different orientation, the portrait orientation, it looks different, which doesn't make sense because it should actually look like this. Let me check again what is going on here. But orient to screen actually means that if you change your orientation, it should actually change this as well, but it doesn't do it correctly right now. I personally turn it off, it used to work fairly well. But it doesn't seem to react the way I wanted to. I recommend turning it off because it is more confusing and unhelpful. Then the blend mode, which is familiar if you are using Photoshop , we talk about that a little bit later. Then smudge is actually use not in the brush, but if you use the brush as a smudger. The settings that are set in this smudge, is the smudging amount that you can set on your brush. If it's something that takes a lot of color with it or not. This affects the smudger. Then you can use size limits in opacity limits. I personally don't like to limit my size in opacity to much. I like to be able to control it here. If I want something that's not a peak at all, I turned it off in the opacity instead of doing it in my brush. That is basically all of the settings. Again, I will talk about some of them and how we use them in brush making, but I want you to look at them and study them and see what difference they make in your brush. Experimenting is fun but knowing what's then do is something very important, and I hope this gives you a general idea. Now let's go into actual brush making. 5. Making Grid Brushes: All right guys. The first proper brush so that I want to make with you guys, is actually a grid brush. Before we make our grid brush, we start with a monoline brush. We could also just take the monoline line brush, but I like to start with this like that. Now I have just a straight line that I can draw and a grid brush, you can do two different kinds of grid brushes. You can make the grid brushes that use the shape as a shape or as a grain. In my case, I'm going to start with the one as a shape because I personally use that more often. I'm just going to demonstrate this by using straight lines, no angle lines, and I want to start by doing a quick line. To make sure that this will repeat and create a straight line in the end, I'm going to put a finger down, and now you can see that this will just jump in the angles. Here you can see it is fully horizontal and I'm dragging the line out to create a straight line. I can modify these right now, but I don't want to. I'm just going to duplicate this and put this up here and duplicate that again, and put this a bit in the middle and I'm going to make this line thinner. Let's just pretend this is going to be our grid. What I could do now is just I merge these all, and maybe increase the size a little bit. Now I'm going to copy my canvas. Again, copy canvas, and this is going to be my grid shape, which we are going to be using for both of these brushes. Now, I'm going to apply this as my shapes. I'm pasting this, I'm inverting my shape, and this is actually already everything. It looks a little bit weird right now as an example, and you see that this can cause quite some problems. But the way you use this type of grid is actually by, I'm going to increase my size limits a little bit because I like to be able to make big grids and I'm going to use the stamp preview because it makes a little bit more sense. Now, you do the same thing that you did to create the brush. You hold it and you have created your lines. So hold and tap down with a finger, and now I need to modify this a little bit because it didn't take my beginning. Sometimes it doesn't like to do what I want. But this is basically how you would use a grid brush like this. I like to do this, I have a grid brush that does that, that looks like this, which is where I used a little bit of a more complex shape with angles and everything. I like to use this when I just create straight lines and I feel like this is super helpful. You want to make sure that this works out, all you need to do is ensure that your lines end and begin at the same point. You want them to be completely horizontal. Then the grid brush is done in like no time. Your only problem is if you want to create something like this where you use a brush as a shape, that is when it gets a little bit more complicated, then you actually need to make sure that you have a repeating pattern that works out. In my case, I have angle lines and you need that to check that this line. Let's cancel that. If you look at the shape here that I use, you can see that my angle line stops here and it will be continued here. You want to make sure that it is a seamless pattern. I personally use illustrate to this. I feel like this is a lot more trouble on an iPad to create, but this is also a way you could make a grid brush. But I personally make grid brushes like this now because I feel like you have more control with them. 6. Brush Essentials: Eraser & Brush Pen: All right. I want to show you guys my go-to eraser brush and the brush pen that I use all the time. Go back into our brush class. Let's create a eraser that is my personal favorite eraser. Problem for me is that a lot of brushes don't get big enough to erase. This is my personal favorite way of doing a big eraser brush that will be super easy to use. I just use a round brush, round shape as my shape and a grain that's like this. I don't apply any pressure to this, but I'm increasing the spacing quite drastically. You can see that this does have a little bit of this unevenness, but I don't care because I want to be able to make this super big. I can see that this really covers everything. I'm using the stamp review and I'm calling this eraser, and put the size down. This is super awesome because you can create really big circles in no time, which is very helpful if you want to create a riff or something. You can also manipulate this or you can erase a shape, something like immediately and it's gone. It's a lot faster for me than doing a clear. I don't know. I just like to be able to use a big brush that erases everything and it can go down to a super small size as well. This is the most versatile brush that I made, I think, because it helps me in brush creations so often and in erasing. This is one of the go-to brushes that I feel like everybody should have on their iPad Pro. No matter what they do on the iPad, I just feel like this is something that should be in the app by default. Then let's make a brush pen. A brush pen usually has a shape that is more like a rectangle or an oval, and oval makes a little bit easier to create some smooth lines. The grain I'm going to be using, blank again. What we do here is remove the softness and apply size at a 100 percent. Turn streamline on and then we should have a version of a brush pen that does work pretty well. But it doesn't work perfectly because I have mentioned it before. I like to use azimuth. I'm going to show you, let's turn azimuth off and let's look at me trying to write on the angle here. I'm on a new layer, and you can see that this works, but it looks a little bit off. If I'm going to go in here, remove orient your screen, rotate my shape to be upright and turn azimuth on and bright again. You can see it feels a lot more natural because these areas here follow the direction of the brush. Thus, they are a lot more natural and organic looking. I personally feel like a brush pen needs to have azimuth applied, and this is just so much better for slanted writing. Also, you can do cross strokes much thicker and then something that uses this, which is where you can see it again. It looks just a little bit unnatural and a little bit more edgy. I feel like azimuth really is something necessary to do in a brush pen. 7. Wet Brush Rundown: So one of the things I know a lot of people like to use as watercolor background effect, something that looks a little bit like this. This is just a very quick version of my brush and watercolor brushes. So let's see how this is made. I'm actually going to share the settings of the gouache brush with you, because I don't have a stern right now. But what I did was I took a watercolor brush, I took a little bit of black watercolor, and I created these splotches on paper. I put a scan there and then I used one of the default paper grains that's comes in the Procreate app, and I just inverted it so that it's mostly white. Then we can go and look at the settings. I personally do not use streamline in my watercolor brushes, because it seems to do something weird with it. Then [inaudible] again in the shape I use as a myth. In the grain, this is something that I set to rolling, I have a scale and a zoom applied that I feel it looks like it has the paper texture, a texture it in the background. It's really a lot of playing with this. In the pencil settings, I have a little bit of bleed applied, which will just make the grain stand out a little bit more and have a tiny bit of size, but not too much. I do have a little bit of angle applied here. So if I use it on an angle, it gets bigger and has a little bit more of a gradation effect. This isn't really natural in a way, a natural watercolor brush, but I liked the way it just looked, so that's what I did. It just makes for two different splotches, optically with one brush. In the general tab, we do have the precedent set and I have the blend nodes set to linear burn, which will just make the colors mix a little bit better. I have my size and then let's look at the dynamic settings. This is something that is the most important thing in the wet mix or the watercolor brushes. Here we have dilution. Let me actually copy this, duplicate this. I will share this with you guys. You should be able to find all of these brushes. You should be able to download all of these brushes. All right, so I have this and I'm going to duplicate it so we can see the different things that we do. So if I apply dilution, you can see that more water mixes into this and it creates more of a wash, so it's a lot lighter. I personally don't like to apply dilution again, the same thing that I did say beforehand. I like to use the opacity slider over here to control this. Now we have charge. What charge does is, it depends how much paint you take with you. So here's a lot of paint. Here's basically new, this is disabled, so let's put a little bit of charge in there. If we go bigger with that, it has more color. It's just a little bit more saturated, it brings more color. Actually, maybe let's try if we can see this better here. You can see that this really goes over it. If I go a little bit down with charge, it's less opaque. Then there's attack. The attack setting is something I still haven't quite figured out. So if I have zero attack and if I have max attack, I feel like you might get a little bit more mixing but you can't really see this. I just put this somewhere where I liked it. In the end, I feel like it might affect the texture a little bit. Pull is actually how much that the paint will pull from the paint underneath. So if I put pull to a 100 percent, it should take quite a lot of the pink with it and mix it. Then there's a grade, which I actually don't know what this is. I think this is actually new. So grade, I think that looks like this would be smoothing. Oh, so I see. So this will move the shape around a little bit more. Looks weird, I don't think I like this. So it will basically mix more with itself, I guess. I'm going to put this again to zero. Then you have the opacity and size dynamics, which we are not talking about. But what really makes a brush so good is, if you use it in combination with the smudge feature, and here I have my smudge set to 55 percent. But you can actually see what I mean if I'm using two different colors. So let's use it as light blue and have this pink over here. So they mixed a little bit here, you can see that. Now, what I can do is I can take this exact brush and by holding this much, it will copy the exact settings, and here you can see that you can play around and mix these colors up. Combining these together is really what makes a good watercolor brush. But I also believe that what really is the main thing that makes a good watercolor brush is your source. So I would really take a lot of time and create beautiful splotches and then just play around. I feel like watercolor brushes are a lot more luck than anything else, I don't think that you can really plan them. It is a lot of experimentation and a lot of playing around. I will share this brush with you in case you like it, and maybe you can tweak it a little bit more and look at the differences. I really feel like there's not much to explain here, it's really a lot of experimentation, and seeing what you personally like. 8. Get Creative, Stripy and Shady Brushes: Let's have a little bit of fun with some fun texture and digital effect brushes. Let's do a striped brush first. How do we make the stripe of striped brush? I would start with our Eraser brush. Create a big circle and make this into an oval that we can use. Now to make this a striped brush, what I like to do is I'm actually going to duplicate this like that. Let's make it smaller create an Alpha Lock and fill this with white. You can see that I have a little bit of a hole here right now. Now we have a shape that has this white oval in a black oval. I'm actually just going to make my white oval a little bit bigger so we really have a hole in here. This is going to be our shape. Copy the Canvas and then create a new brush with the plus sign. Cancel out. Sometimes Paste doesn't really want to work as well and then to shape as soon as you can. Then I use a Blank. I mostly use a Blank Grain for most of the things that I do. Now in the Stroke Streamline Up, I like to get rid of the spacing. Now the hole Size, of course, I'm just not going to go 100 percent. Remove Softness and now it really makes this as get rid of the Oriental Screen. Turn Azimuth on and go into Follow Stroke on the Rotation and this is how you make a striped brush. It will just follow your shape like this. Because this is slightly curved in, we have this more of a shine effect which I personally really like but if you wanted to create a proper or just a stripe, what you would do is remove that. Take a white. I always start with the white rectangle and then just make it smaller. Let's make something like a double stroke so take that canvas. Copy our canvas. Let's actually just duplicate this brush and paste our shape and then use black. Here I can see our striped brush. It's really easy to make striped brushes. They're a lot of fun. You can experiment with that and have so much fun with this and if you actually turn Azimuth off, you will have a more beautiful stripy look but I still prefer the Azimuth applied because I feel like it looks better, I prefer the look of this, but if you turn Azimuth off, you want to rotate your shape like this and then turn on Oriental screen and it will create this where your lines follow your stroke. But it can result in something like this that looks a little bit awkward. This is how you create striped brushes. The next thing is one of my big secrets. It's making a shadowing brush. A brush that creates a shadow of itself while it's being written. The secret lies once again in the shape so let's use our Eraser again, create a round brush and make this an oval. Then what we do is we duplicate this oval, place it somewhere a little bit lower. Place some Gaussian blur to it. Try not to blur it so much that you can see some cuttings so no cropping and then I'm also going to reduce the Opacity just a little bit. I literally create an oval that has this shadow here. Then we go into Copy Canvas. I'm just grouping this again and I'm creating a new brush, pasting my shape. Again, grain is just the white, the blank, and then invert the shape. Again, I'm going to be using Azimuth so remove Oriental Screen, apply some Size, Pressure settings and use Azimuth and then in the Dynamic setting, change this to Glazed. Glazed is what we used before to show that this here has less opacity and then we can look on it. It doesn't look perfect yet so I like to reduce the spacing on the shadow brushes quite a bit and then reduce the size. Look on it. I do like it but I feel like the shadow is on the wrong side so let's try turning if now we'll fix it, that fixes it but I do not like that this shadow is so subtle. I want to see it a little bit more, so I go back into my shape and I move this down a little bit more and what I'm actually going to do is I take my group, make it smaller. I want doing this, these to be scaled the same way but then what I'm going to do is apply more Gaussian blur because I want us to be a little bit more faded. The reason why I go down is I do not want any of this gradation here to be cut because you will see some of this if there's some cropping of this shape so this is why I made it smaller. I'm also going to reduce the opacity a little bit and I'm going to move it down just a little bit more to make it a little bit more dynamic looking. What I'm trying to do is I look at the shape. What is really helpful is if I group this and choose the selection, I want to make sure that the middle is somewhere in the middle because this shape is what we'll use with our brush. If we have this off centered, it's going to be hard to use. So I want to center this quite well and I mostly want to center this oval so that top and bottom is about the same apart. So that this is about the same size as this, which is not the case right now. This should do it pretty much. Maybe move it just a little bit down. Now, copy the Canvas and I'm going to duplicate this brush so you can see the difference then I'm pasting my shape in. Now let's look at it again. All I did was change the shape and it already looks so much better. This looks a lot more like what I want. This as you can see looks more dynamic. You can see that there's more spacing here and the shadow just looks more interesting. It's also easy to see where that the shade will be placed. That's basically all there is to shadow brushes. It's really not that big of a deal. A lot of people think it's magic, but it really isn't. It's really just making sure that you actually create a shadow of your shape and then use the Azimuth and remove the Oriental screen and that's basically all you need to do. 9. Process: Making a realistic Pencil Brush: All right guys. So before we talk about the class project, I want to talk about creating realistic brushes of actual pens that you like to use. As an example, I want to show you how to make a realistic pencil brush. The problem is, to create a pencil brush, we can't just go into procreate and create a pencil brush. Like this, like we created all of the other brushes because before we can create something realistic, we need to analyze what the realistic thing is and how it works. Goodbye procreate. Hello, real world. We're going to analyze how a pencil works. All right guys, so before we start we actually need to choose what type of pencil we want to create because there's so many different pencils. Here are some of my favorites. This is the default HB pencil, and this one is actually quite light if I paint with it. Then there's the black ring pencil which is a little bit softer and a little bit darker. Then we have the caran d'ache grafwood in a 9B, so this is a super soft one which is super dark. To show you guys what I want to, how I create a realistic brush. I'm actually going to choose this pen here because I don't think there's a default n9B pencil in procreate. Let's go and create this. How do we create a realistic brush? We start by making some strokes. The first thing you want to do is create a fast stroke, then a slow stroke, then a slow stroke, and then do a light pressure, heavy pressure. Then some fliching, which doesn't make too much sense with a pencil but it does make sense with something like a brush. Then create do something with low angle and high angle. Then do a little bit of writing. Let's do that. If I hold my pen in that like I know what it would like, I would also hold my apple pencil. Creating a fast stroke looks something like this, creating a slow stroke looks like this and I do have the same normal default pressure here. If I go in and do a light stroke like I would do a hair line, it will look something like this, and a heavy stroke looks something like this. Then if I flick, it look something like this. So there is a taper, disclaimer. You do need taper sometimes. Now if I have a high angle, I do have quite a high angle per default, so my writing is at quite a high angle. But if I really go super high, this is what a line looks like. If I go low, this is what a line looks like. So they look pretty similar. I will not apply a tapper to them until it setting to this. But what I can do is I can go super low and I can create something that looks like this. This is something that a pencil brush in my opinion should be able to do. So if I create a pencil brush, I want to be able to tilt it and create these shading lines. If we look at this shading line we can see that this is darker and then it fades out. Then let's do a little bit of writing. If I do stubbling, if I stubble, this is what it looks like. But the thing is that the shape of my pencil does depend on how I've written before. This is something that's a little bit more random. This is something special with the pencil brushes. If I do some writing at pressure, I can actually create quite a weight difference. Let me just go in a little bit closer. Let me bring you closer so we can see this a little bit better and let's refocus. If I have a pencil like that, there is definitely size variation and there is opacity variation. Now we need to figure out what are the properties of this that we want to translate into a brush? Let me zoom out a little bit more again. This is more of a playground sheet. Now here I have the stuff that I tried out. Let's figure out what to brush? For this, I usually like to create a new page. So take a new sheet of paper, and then I'm going to start writing. Speed. How is my speed? When I go slow and fast. Fast and slow. There's not that much difference. I am not going to include speeds. So no speed settings. Nothing that reacts at a speed. Then how's pressure? Pressure is, light pressure is pretty transparent. Heavy pressure is definitely bigger, quite drastically bigger about 4-5 times the width and definitely more opaque. So pressure is something that I definitely need to include. Then there's tilt, and with a pencil brush, I need this tilt. This is something that we want to include as well. Then we need to think about what we need as a shape and as a grain. Because a brush lives or dies depending on what settings you use and the shape and the grain. What is the shape exactly? If I create some stubbling, you can see that there's a whole lot of variety as to what the shape looks like. But it's always something a little bit like this. What the grain looks like? You can really see the grain once you do this tilted shading. So there is some variation, but it's mostly very noisy, it is a little bit streaky. So, let's try and make this digital. We basically have a plan of what we want to create. We know our pen now, so let's translate this into procreate. So here we are back with our pencil brush and just going to quickly choose something that will work. So, I remember that there was something that looks a little bit like a paper texture, in here or something that's noisy. So here we can see this is noisy and then there's sketch paper, and I feel like sketch paper might actually work really well, for a pencil brush. So I'm going to choose sketch paper, but I'm inverting the grains, so it's a little bit wider and has a little bit less textures and more of the actual color will show when we write. Then, let's talk about the shape that we need to create. For the shape, I'm actually going into my eraser, and then what I'm going to do is, I will look at my paper. Here is what I created. So it looked a little bit more of a random blob, a shape that is resembling an oval. So, I'm going to start out with an oval. Because I know that an oval works well for lettering. This is going to be my main inspiration for my shape. Now, go down with the size and put a little bit of variation to this. So, let's do something like this and then fill this black, and what I like to do now is make this look a little bit more natural. So what I'm going to do, is Alpha lock this, and then apply a little bit of noise to this, actually apply a lot of noise. So this is noise and the problem with the noise is that this one is colorful right now. So I'm going into the color balance, non of the color balance to hue saturation and brightness, and put my saturation down and maybe increase my brightness just a little bit. So you can see that this is quite noisy now. What I can do, as well as maybe apply little bit of Gaussian blur. So that my noise all looks a little bit like it has a little bit more different areas, and not so tiny dots. Now, I can remove Alpha lock and actually apply a little bit more Gaussian blur just to blur out the edges a little bit because I feel like that usually results in more realistic looking pencil brushes. So just as my shape now, it's like just random blob inspired by, what we created with an actual pencils. So let's see how it looks. Let's go into my pencil brush and paste my shape in here, Invert shape. Now, I'm going to apply my streamline. I have a little bit of spacing here, and first thing I need to do, is go in and create a glazed shape here. A pencil is usually fairly small. So I test this at a small size, and then again, I like to use my azimuth. Remove oriented screen and apply a little bit of size variation and remove the softness. So does that look realistic? It doesn't really in my opinion, so something seems to be off. If we create a shape based on this paper texture. But for things that might be off is, may be it might be our grain. May be rolling is not the best idea. If we apply a little bit more rolling, it looks a little bit better. Now let's go in here and maybe apply a little bit of bleed and apply some opacity because it does get lower or less opaque. It still looks a little bit weird. So what makes the pencil brush more realistic now? So, if I'm going down the size, it feels more natural, but maybe the dynamics settings aren't quite right yet. So maybe accumulative will help. Cumulative will create more peak shape ,and this feels already better. That's too much. So it's getting a lot darker already, which I personally like. But it's maybe a little bit too big. So let's go down with the flow again. But this definitely feels more natural than it did before. Because sometimes a cumulative we'll just give you more opacity without removing some of the textures that come with the glazed feature. So this is not bad, but I still don't really like it. So, I'm going to tweak it more. So maybe the bleed was a little bit too big. Now, what we also do, is we want this to tilt. So I'm going to work on that tilt settings. So first of all, what is the angle that we need? So what I'm going to do is actually go size with max. So we can see when that are tilt is applied. So our tilt is applied about here. So the angle is too high. So let's go down. Actually lets go. We need a lower angle. I want this is about right. This should be the right angle at about seven degrees. Now what is really something that makes a pencil brush's gradation. That looks right, but it still feels off. Let's go and put some bleed on there. Degradation is maybe a little bit too much, maybe lets do it more like that. Here you can clearly see our textures and our grain is definitely still off. Maybe let's go in and do something that's a little bit different. This feels maybe a little bit better, but it's still off. Here you can really see how trying to create something realistic has a lot of tweaking. This feels just wrong. Maybe I'm on the wrong track with my shape because I cannot get this to look how I want. What could I change to make my pencil brush more realistic? I need to consider that, maybe I can't take the shape of this pen because there's certain things that I can't fake with this. One of the things that seems to be really hard is degradation part with this solid massive pen, the oval shape. Maybe it would be better if I took a pencil line, and instead of trying to create something like this. I went ahead and did something that looks a little bit like this. Maybe something that looks already like a gradation might be better off. How could I do that? I have something like that. Something like this. Maybe this is a secret, using it at a tilt already. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to scan this in, and try this out. Maybe also I could create an oval with a pencil and scan this. Oftentimes if you want to create something realistic, it helps to experiment with the pen itself and try to come up with something that might look realistic. Maybe I tried to create something that has radiation so that it's more opaque at top and less a peak at a bottom and try to apply this shape to it. Maybe if I do something like this, that might look good as a shape. I'm scanning all of these in and then I'm going to try them out. I decided to go with this shape and I placed it in my square, copy the canvas and then placed it in here. You can see that it already looks a lot different because I used the settings from before. Definitely looks too light right now, if I try this out. All this settings that I used before, but it feels too light right now. What I'm going to do is go back into dynamics and increase the flow. I'm actually going to remove my spacing, and it feels a lot more realistic already, which is weird because again, sometimes it feels like. Let's go and do the tilt again. But this feels right. Doesn't look exactly like the realistic brush, but if I go and create more vague gray as my shape, it looks quite nice. A little bit too thin probably. I might actually have to do a minimum size of like two percent or so. Yeah, that looks better. If I have a minimum size and if I reduce my maximum size, because a pencil really has just a smallish range. This looks actually quite good. If I go thin and thick, that looks pretty much like my settings on here. But maybe the shape is a little bit too smooth. Let's look if maybe we have something that's a little bit coarser because I feel like it might be better. If I go look into the pro library, I can actually see charcoal 6B. Maybe that will actually help. Actually looks already better. But I feel like I might have to increase my scale to see more of the texture. Now it looks a lot better if we zoom in, you can really see there is quite a lot of texture now, and that makes me really happy. Now the question is, how are we going to do it tilt? As you can see I did remove the tilt. I'm going to restart it. Again, we say about seven or eight degrees. Now what's definitely going to happen is the size. I'm going to increase my size. That looks actually quite good already, but maybe apply a little bit of bleed, to make it look a little bit more. Then some aggregation, and that actually looks pretty damn close. That actually makes me quite happy. I'm going to increase my size just a little bit. This looks actually, exactly how I want it look. If you can see that this looks really similar to what I did back here. This makes me super happy actually. This definitely feels like a realistic pencil now. You can see that even though this is not the shape, absolutely not the shape that we had defined in our paper. By combining what we wanted for our tilt and combining what we know about the shape that we need, we were able to create something that looks like this, which looks like a mess at first, to be honest. But this mess is what helps us create a realistic brush. This is really something that I wanted to do to show you guys that even though if you don't know what exactly you need, you will be able to figure it out by really thinking, what does your pen do that you want to imitate, and what do you need to do in the settings to figure it out? It really is not easy, I'm going to be honest, creating a realistic brushes is so much harder than creating brushes that are crazy and something like shadows or stripes is a lot easier to figure out than something that looks realistic. But creating realistic brushes is a huge challenge that is really going to help you understand the settings better. I definitely urge you to try it one time. 10. Class Project: As your project, I want you to take one of your favorite real world pens and analyze it and then translate it into procreate to create a realistic brush and then I want you to share with us all, I would love to see you guys figuring out what the pen does how it works. I will try and put together a template to make it a little bit more organized than this, but I really urge you to try, create a brush out of a real pencil. A charcoal pencil is actually one of the hardest brushes to make but how about you try to create something that imitates a fair brush pen by really trying to take the exact pressure sensitivity directly into procreate and I would love for you guys to share what you come up with.