The Holy Grail of Procreate.
After scouring the internet, I’ve come to the conclusion that the holy grail of Procreate is believable watercolor brushes. They are a challenge to find and even more of a challenge to create. It’s possible the Procreate team will add this feature shortly, but until then, we’re left with really complicated ways of executing this beautiful medium.
I took a crash course in watercolor, trying to engineer a way to deliver a believable and easy way to achieve this elusive technique in Procreate. There are ways of getting amazing results, but they’re kind of elaborate and time consuming to execute. I was more interested in a method that was easily accessible, easy to do, and didn’t involve jumping through hoops pull off. Efficiency and immediacy are essential in my workflow, so the method had to be easier than most I’d found online. I’d already created one brush I thought was adequate, but I thought I could do better. (You can download that brush for free here: https://gum.co/freejuicebox). So it was back to the drawing board.
Testing and Testing…
I don’t know how many brushes, textures, hours, and tests I’ve gone through to arrive at a result I was happy with. It took a while, but I’ve finally arrived at a result that I’m thrilled with. I think in capable hands it could even look more believable and realistic than my examples. Best of all these brushes don’t require any additional files to work right out of the box. They’re still short on some features, like the edge watercolor creates as it bleeds out, but I had to make some compromises to keep the set concise. The set is meant for quick sketching so I didn’t want to overcomplicate it. I may come back and create a pack just for watercolors in the future that include this feature and more.
An Affordable Sketching Brush Pack.
These brushes are part of the SketchBox pack for Procreate and are meant for urban and day-to-day sketching. The SketchBox Procreate brush pack will be available soon! If you want to be the first to download, get notified of freebies and new packs releases, sign up here: Subscribe.
I’ll also be providing a video tutorial soon on these watercolor brushes for Procreate, so stay tuned.
Adding a nice watercolor paper texture to your final work helps to sell the look even more.
