Here's Exactly How To Create Your Own Procreate Plaid Brush

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This step by step guide will help you create your own Procreate Plaid Brush. Give yourself some artistic freedom by designing a well designed Procreate brush that can save you a lot of time when it comes to any fall projects, clothing, accessories, fashion art or even backgrounds. This brush is so versatile, it’s sure to become one of your favorites!

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You will learn about the two main parts when it comes to creating brushes in Procreate; the first one is designing the actual grain or shape of the brush and the second one is integrating the shape or grain into the new brush along with adjusting the brush settings to tailor your taste and artistic style. Looking for outstanding resources to elevate your artistic skills?

This post is all about how to create your own Procreate Plaid Brush.

Designing the grain of the brush

Before you tap the plus button to add a new brush in Procreate you need to design the grain or shape of the brush, in this kind of brush the shape is not as important as the grain, the shape is just the tip of your pencil so just keep it simple for this one. With that being said, this brush can be functional with just a circle shape, (like the monoline brush in the calligraphy section included in Procreate).

Begin by opening a 2048 x 2048 or a 3000 x 3000 square canvas in Procreate. Remember that the bigger the size is, the better the resolution, however the less layers you can have on your project. Some plaid patterns are more complicated than others and will take more layers. The grain of this plaid brush is beautiful yet very simple to accomplish, it takes only 6 to 8 layers.

Before you start filling up with color and shapes make sure your Snapping tool is toggled on. You do this by taping on the Transform tool (arrow icon on the top left menu). This tool helps when designing Procreate plaid patterns, because it keeps objects aligned and in proportion when you move them or change the size showing yellow and blue visual guidelines.

The grain of this brush will have four squares (one black, one white, and two gray). Also, two horizontal stripes and two vertical stripes.

Open the color menu, at the top right corner of the Procreate interface. Pick the color black, either by taping twice on the circle or by typing the hexadecimal code #000000. Fill the whole layer with that color by dragging the color from the color icon to the canvas. The first square (black) will be located at the top left corner: Resize and place this black square on the top left corner of your canvas. In Procreate you resize using the transform tool (arrow on the top menu). This will make a cut line with dots appear around your square, grab the bottom right corner dot and shrink until you see the guidelines (yellow and blue). The guidelines tell you when the square is in the right place.

Duplicate that layer three times. You duplicate layers by taping the layers menu, select the layer you want to duplicate, slide to the left and tap on duplicate. Repeat until you have 4 layers.

Hex color codes and placement of shapes

Tap on the second layer, fill with gray color (#a2a1a2), and drag it to the top right corner of the canvas. Tap on the third layer, fill with white color (#ffffff), and drag it to the bottom left corner of the canvas. Finally, tap on the fourth layer, fill with gray color(#a2a1a2) , and drag it to the bottom right corner of the canvas. You are almost done!

Now it’s time to make the stripes of your Procreate plaid brush! You just need to create one and then duplicate that layer three more times (we need two black horizontal stripes and two gray vertical stripes).

Begin by opening a new layer (tap on layer icon, then tap on the “+” icon). The easiest way to create a simple stripe in Procreate is by filling up the whole layer and then reshaping it to a stripe, so go ahead and fill the layer with white, then tap on the transform tool (arrow on the top menu) select “freeform” on the bottom menu and drag the blue dot on the right side (if you grab the corner it will not reshape as rectangle. Once you have reshaped your square into a stripe you are ready to duplicate the layer. Place the two vertical white stripes over the two left squares (black and gray).

Make your life easier by duplicating layers

For the last part, you need two horizontal black stripes. You will duplicate one of the layers with the white stripes twice and fill those in two with the color black. To make them horizontal all you need to do is tap on the transform tool (arrow on the top left menu), and tap on rotate twice to make them turn 90 degrees. Once this is done just drag them over the two bottom squares (the two black stripes are also crossing the two white vertical lines you previously did).

The last step is to change the transparency of the four layers that contain the stripes, to do this first tap on the layer, then tap on the letter (that represents the mask setting), since we have not change the mask you should see the letter “N” (for normal). Once you tap on the letter you can adjust the transparency on the slider to about 80%.

Creating and setting the brush.

To create your brush you have two choices, you can either start from scratch or duplicate one of the simple and plain brushes you already have. Open the brush menu and find the monoline brush inside the calligraphy category, slide to the side and tap on duplicate. Now that you have basic settings the rest is easy, you can tweak anything you want inside the settings menu.

Copy the grain you just created by taping on Actions (the wrench key icon on the top left), then tap on “copy canvas”. Now we are ready to integrate the grain inside the brush settings.

Settings inside the brush studio

Enter the Procreate brush studio by taping on the duplicated brush. Since you didn’t start this brush from scratch we don’t need to visit every single setting, and must are already the way we need them to be. On the Procreate Brush Studio menu tap on “Grain”, then tap on “Grain Source”, now tap on “Import” and “Paste”. You can then invert the brush by taping with two fingers over the image. Specifically with this brush it won’t make a big difference on the way it will look, however for other Procreate Plaid Brushes does make a big difference on the final results.

Tap on “done”, right there inside the grain menu set the Scale to about 18%. If you feel it’s too small or too big to your taste you can always come back and change it! Set the zoom to about 79% and bring Depth all the way to max. Keep brightness and contrast on 0%.

What is the Zoom setting and how does it affects your Plaid brush?

Right there inside the Grain menu you will see the Zoom slider. If you slide this all the way to the right (cropped), the size of the grain or pattern will stay the same even when you change the size of the brush (out on the main interface). On the other hand, if you slide all the way to the left (follow size) the size of the grain or pattern will change along with how big or small you make it on the interface. My preference is to set it all the way to the right (cropped) when it comes to Procreate Plaid Brushes. If the pattern of the brush is too big for your project, you can always go in the Brush studio, go in the grain menu, and adjust the Scale to the way you need it.