Hello artists and creatures! It’s time for more digital art. I last showed you these cool two-edge brushes I’ve been using. Comet brushes! They’re great for all kinds of shading and stylistic purposes. I have the pack up for download below in the description. But today, I’m going to show you how to create your own comet brush, just as I have.
My name’s Kanjon and I talk about the motivations and struggles of learning to draw in today’s crazy world. You’re watching a mini-series I’m making called Digital Dabbles, where I describe the techniques of digital art. If you’re interested, earlier on in this course I show you how to go from sketch to finished piece, explaining things like layers, clip masks, and blending modes along the way. In this episode I’m going to show you that it’s not so scary to make your own digital art brushes. Once you find the right buttons, you unlock a whole world of possibilities for making your art truly yours with your own private custom brushes. Let’s go!
I’m going to start with a plain square canvas. The comet brushes I showed you in the last video were 2000x2000 pixel stamps, which was probably overkill, so we’ll just do 1000 square. We’re going to be working exclusively in grayscale, and for Procreate specifically, I’m going to make the background black, and our brush stamp will be white.
Most other apps will do this the other way around, with a white background and black stamp. If you mess this up, no big deal, every app has a way to invert the colors.
I’m going to pick an existing round brush with a mostly hard edge. I’m not going for a hard pixel look myself, and if I make some mistakes with this brush when using it I don’t want it looking toooo bold. Without trying to get this perfect, I’m just going to smack a huge dot onto the top half of the canvas.
Really, you don’t need to be perfect about this: you’re going to be using the brush by dragging it around on the side, and symmetry isn’t going to matter much. Here, I’ll even mess mine up a little bit.
That done, I’m going to erase a curve off the top to give it some definition. Then we get to get into some fun. Grab a smudge brush of any shape. It can be a soft airbrush, or a paintbrush shape, really anything. I’m gonna use this and just start pulling this blob down. I’m going to make tons of smudge strokes! I have one main goal: to get a decently smooth gradient of value from the head of the brush to the tail I’m creating. I want this to taper off quite quickly, because when the app starts stamping this together on a canvas, even those faint ends add up fast.
OK. Now I’m looking at the ends of the brush to make sure nothing’s touching the edge of the canvas, because that will be very easy to notice when this is used to paint. I’m using an automatic selection, sometimes called magic wand select, and picking the empty space to see where there might be something lingering. There’s a little bit to clean up here, so I’m going to gently erase some of this away, clean up a bit more, and check again.
If you mess this up, don’t panic, you can edit everything about the brush later. Technology!
I’m now going to copy what I’ve got, because it’s time to hop into the brush editor. I think we’ll start from scratch: I’m going to create a brush, go right over to this Shape tab, Edit, Import, and we have some options here. Now… I didn’t save my brush anywhere, but I can paste! There it is. We’re going to start looking at a few more settings, and I’m going to intentionally ignore most of everything else – there’s a lot here.
You will find similar buttons and knobs in other art apps too, this isn’t going to be specific to Procreate. However I will note that when we start talking about Flow, you’ll find that you can’t save that into the brush itself when using a Photoshop-based brush engine. That’s because Photoshop has you set your Flow while you’re painting, instead of as a part of the brush.
Anyway, still on this Shape tab, I’m going to turn this Rotation slider all the way up to 100%, and it’ll just say “Follow stroke”. This makes the shape we made bend with the line we’re drawing, which is what really makes this useful. I can also tell Procreate that I’d like it to move with the tilt, or “azimuth”, of my brush here, and I can go ahead and try that out. This lets me use the brush in other orientations, which can be useful if I want to use it as a smudge brush or eraser later. Because I’m using an Apple Pencil Pro, I can also tell it to use “barrel roll”, and I can spin the stylus too. Not at all necessary for this brush, just some added fun.
And hey! If you’ve been casually watching along, I do a lot of art videos of this sort. My channel’s about convincing you that anyone can learn to draw and pursue a creative skill. Hit that subscribe button, and if you really like this stuff, I take tips on Ko-fi to further grow this channel and its free resources.
Next up, Rendering. This brush looks pretty bold, right? We want it to taper off. One thing to play with in Procreate specifically are these glaze options. You won’t see these in other art apps, but it’s not critical for this. Still, it’s got some buttons to push, and this Uniform option seems to work well, so why not. The main thing you will find across art apps is this Flow option. Right now it’s set to max, which means it’s really aggressively stamping the brush onto the canvas, but we don’t want that. I’m going to turn this down a lot and try it out. Much better already.
Lots of trial and error in this, and you’ll also see that the brush has some weird jagged edges where it curves: that’s because the brush is being spaced out. If I go over to this Stroke Path tab and turn the spacing down, that makes it better, but also brighter, so it’s a juggle of finding a good balance of spacing and flow to make a brush that looks smooth and yet not too blended.
Right, now it’s time to make this work with pen pressure. In Procreate, that’s the Apple Pencil section, because, well, that’s almost always what you’ll use on an iPad. In other apps this will probably just be pressure or stylus settings. We can see that this is already set to max opacity: if I turn that down it actually means that the pressure doesn’t affect the opacity at all, and everything’s too bright! So I’ll turn that back up. We want to do the same thing with Flow, so, easy enough: turn that up too. Now we can work marks in more easily.
I also adjust the specific pressure curve of my brush here, but not all art apps let you do this. This is just another convenience thing: you’re not missing out on how the brush works if you can’t set this; but you may want to play with the Flow slider of the brush as a whole to limit how bold the stamp gets.
One more thing I want to do is change how big the brush can get; in Properties I can drag this max size up and play around with it. Procreate has a quirk where the max size is limited by the brush spacing, for some reason, so if you can’t make the brush huge here, try turning your spacing up just a tiny tiny bit.
I’m not actually sure why that’s the case, other apps don’t have trouble with this. See, not everything about Procreate is perfect. I could certainly go on and on about Procreate’s rather weak layer support, how groups aren’t as useful as they could be, why it can’t seem to preserve off-screen pixels on a layer and–
Anyway, let’s save this brush and try it out. I’m going to hide this layer, make a new one, and play around with it. Hey, feels pretty nice. Still a bit strong, but decently smooth and fun to use. But let’s make some changes. I still want this to be a little less bold. Going back to my shape layer, I’m going to fade this out even more, giving it a nice ghostly appearance. Lots of fiddling with the shape, really you could spend hours doing this. Here’s a good spot I think. I’m going to copy the layer again, and open my brush back up: no need to create a totally new one. Shape tab, Edit, Import, Paste. Oooh, that’s nice, I like this one a lot.
And there’s a brush. That was a lot to talk through, so let’s cover what we just did. We used a shape to make a brush stamp, and then told the app to rotate the stamp with the stroke of our stylus. We adjusted flow to make the brush less bold, and then stamp spacing to smooth things out. Then we told the app to use our pen pressure to affect the flow of the brush too, which gives us finer control. We messed with a couple other settings too, but those were less important. And a reminder, if you’re using Photoshop or some similar apps, you won’t find flow or sometimes even pressure settings inside the brush itself, but instead you’ll see those up on your toolbar as sliders while you’re painting, next to your brush size and such.
- Stamp
- Rotation
- Flow
- Spacing
- Pressure
I’d love to see what kind of brush you make and what art you create with it! Tag me on Bluesky or something – I think YouTube still likes to delete comments that have links in them, and I don’t really have control over that. Also, I can try showing this process in another art app too if folks want: leave comments with what you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do if there’s a lot of demand. Anywho, thank you for watching, be sure to subscribe for more and share with your friends! It’s a busy holiday season here so my videos have slowed down a bit. I hope you’re having a nice time too and can find some space for friends and art. Thanks for watching, go chase that passion.
| Production Info | |
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| Music | Camden Calling by Dusty Decks; Evolve by Teeklef; Good Time by Teeklef; Over by Teeklef |
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