How I Designed a Brushset for Procreate on the iPad Pro

👋 Hi, I’m Gavin - a designer based out of Huntsville, AL. I founded Village Fox Media in 2014 to produce motion graphics, 3D animation, and all kinds of creative work.

I'm the kind of guy who takes a lot of notes, and my tool of choice is usually either Procreate (if i'm in a classroom setting or at a coffee shop) or the Field Notes book in my back pocket if I'm on the go. I’ve always found doodling helps things stick with me better, too. I made this brush collection to save me some time whenever I’m writing some elaborate notes or study guides and want to make my work a little more visually appealing. This brush collection was built from the ground up to make my notes more engaging, organized, and quicker to create.

• Powerful Tools. These brushes and palettes are used for giving your notes a level of visual polish and cohesion while organizing your thoughts in an aesthetically-pleasing way.
• Suitable for all kinds of notes. Write down everything, from a nursing student putting together gorgeous medical study guides to a web developer who likes to journal, these templates will make the process simple and elegant.
• Easy to use. Brushes are organized into intuitive brushsets: Titles + Headers, Backgrounds and Textures, Word Bubbles, and Graphics.

I thought I would share a bit of my process here with you on how I created these brushes and put them up for sale.

I’ve always thought True Grit Texture Supply was cool, and I’ve thought it would be fun to make and sell custom brushes. But it seemed too hard. Making a brush in Procreate is a difficult task. But in this article I will show you how to create brushes like I made, but any kind of brush or stamp. Of course, I hope you will buy my brushset and help support me. But if you’re looking to save a few bucks and want to make your own brushsets, here we go:

1. Sketch Out Your Ideas

Think about what makes a great note-taking brush for you. Is it the texture, the thickness, or maybe a specific style like calligraphy or fine tip? For me it was doodles on notepaper from high school days. Sketch out your ideas on paper or directly in Procreate. Don’t worry about perfection here; it’s all about getting those creative juices flowing. In fact, never worry about perfection .

2. Experiment with Brush Creation in Procreate

Now, open Procreate and tap on the brush icon to start creating a new brush. Procreate offers a plethora of settings to tweak, so play around with the sliders and settings under the "Stroke," "Shape," "Grain," and "Dynamics" options. Try to replicate the textures and styles you envisioned.

Make sure to make duplicate copies of any default brushes you like and try to figure out what makes them work! Remember, experimentation is key!

A couple of things to note here — make sure your background is SOLID BLACK.

Also, make sure your canvas is sized as a power of 2 — either 512x512, 1024x1024, or 2048x2048. This is a good rule of thumb for sizing any type of digital document that will be read in as a texture.

For the NoteTaker Bundle, I made the template 2500px wide and the brushes 2300px wide so the stamps could be used seamlessly with the included .procreate template.

You’ll most likely have a bit of trial and error trying to get these brush settings just right. But in no time you can master tweaking and creating your own brushes. Or again, just buy this set that I created.

3. Design Attractive Packaging

Before you think about selling, you need to make your brushset visually appealing. Design a cover and preview images that showcase your brushes at their best. Use attractive colors and layouts that reflect the style of your brushset. This is what potential buyers will see first, so make it count!

I really like this green color. I like it so much that I rebranded Village Fox to have this as our primary color.

I also think it’s bright and happy enough to catch someone’s eye on Instagram, the main market I am targeting. That’s where I tend to see Procreate brushes advertised the most, though I occasionally see them on Facebook as well. They seem to do well on Instagram, but I don’t know how well those numbers reflect reality or what their profit margin is.

For a company receiving that many likes, I’m assuming they are making a pretty high amount on their products. And of course there’s minimal expense involved with selling it, since it’s just a digital file.

I don’t have the audience nor the budget that True Grit does; I’m just one guy. But I do have a killer set of brushes to sell and notes to take.

4. Set Up Your Shop on Gumroad

Head over to Gumroad and set up your shop if you haven’t already. It’s pretty straightforward. Upload your brushset files, including the cover and preview images. Write a compelling description that highlights the features and benefits of your brushset. I set my price at $6.99. A pretty small sum for something I genuinely think is useful.

I kept consistent with my branding using the same green color throughout.

I decided to look at ad campaigns on Instagram. Were they using hashtags? About half of them.

What caught my eye? Usually for me it was seeing the Apple Pencil and the Procreate UI — if I glimpse that for 1/10th of a second scrolling by, I clock it and I oftentimes click it. I love seeing the colorful and fast paced graphics that many of these brush sellers have. I love buying a BUNDLE. Doesn’t that word sound nice? Bundle. Sounds like a good deal.

5. Promote Your Brushset

You’ve made it this far, and now it’s time to let the world know about your awesome brushset. Share it on social media, art forums, and any other platforms where potential buyers might hang out. Consider offering a discount code to early buyers or your social media followers to generate initial buzz.

I’m pretty averse to ads, but when I see something that compels me I take note. On the website for this Procreate Design vendor, they had this layout that made me felt compelled to buy. I felt well informed just looking at this layout. I also felt like it is a good deal, even though I know nothing about the brushes or the maker. The rest of the site did not instill confidence though.

However this immediately feels like you’re getting a good value. The way it more than fills up the page, the alternating text and image columns, the blue text at the top defining the category. Feels like a good value even though the rest of the page is sketch.

The add also drew my eye because an ipad with a pencil is displayed prominently — my brain immediately caught it and was drawn to it. Possibly just because I’m on the lookout for ads relating to this project, but I think I tend to notice ads with Procreate always because those are the only ads I enjoy seeing. I enjoy the way they make me feel. Creative. Professional. Organized. Aspirational.

With TrueGrit Texture Supply and VisualTimmy, they have a good feel when you open their website and their instagram profile. Consistent branding. Always have a story and a new post — they get lots of User Generated Content I imagine, that makes it easy. If I can get some UGC that would make posting to Village Fox’s Instagram much easier, I’d always have stuff to share that people made with my tools.

I like the way the Village Fox green makes me feel when I see it — that, combined with the cool, crisp visuals of the iPad Pro’s retina display and the familiar interface of Procreate make a powerful image. Also, the True Grit ads have a lot of motion in them.

I suggest we take a similar approach with the ads we make for Village Fox’s foray into custom Procreate Brushsets. But instead of the more “vintage” aesthetic, we play with a more Wes Anderson, construction paper kind of aesthetic.

So, long story short, here is what I need from The Creative Department:

1) Several mockups with a solid background showing the different brushsets in the NoteTaker Bundle.

2) More pages of notes using the NoteTaker Bundle tools.

3) Screen recording of using the NoteTaker Bundle brushset.

I always loved taking notes in college. Copious notes, in fact. I loved creating my own notebooks and then filling them with doodles, stories, and (sometimes) school notes. Unfortunately, in my junior year I started to develop carpal tunnel syndrome in my left arm, making note-taking a much more challenging experience.

I learned to write more ergonomically and tried switching to my right hand, but ultimately had to switch back to my left hand once the pain subsided. That experience made note-taking very precious to me, as every letter I wrote I viewed as one letter closer to not being able to write any more.

Now thankfully through physical therapy and finding more ways to be efficient with my writing, I no longer deal with the same type of wrist pain I did at the time. Now I once again can take my copious notes and make them beautiful and well-organized, and I created this brush pack as another way to save my wrists without losing any of the visual joy I get from a good page of notes. Hopefully they will be as useful to you as they were to me.