Types of Painting Brushes in Procreate
By the Brusher team — brush-makers & digital artists · Updated April 2026
Procreate can mimic almost any traditional painting medium — but only if you pick the right brush. Oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and pastel each behave differently, and reaching for the wrong one is the fastest way to make digital work look flat and generic. This guide breaks down the main painting brush families, explains how each one behaves, and shows you when to reach for it, so you can build a painting kit that actually matches the look you're after.
How painting brushes differ
Before the individual families, it helps to understand the two properties that separate every painting brush: opacity and texture. Opacity determines whether a stroke covers what's beneath it (opaque, like gouache) or lets it show through (translucent, like watercolor). Texture determines whether a stroke is smooth or carries the grain of bristles, canvas or paper.
Those two dials explain almost everything about how a medium behaves. Watercolor is translucent and soft; gouache is opaque and matte; oil is opaque and heavily textured. Once you can read a brush in those terms, choosing the right one stops being guesswork.
There's a third factor worth naming: how the brush layers. Translucent media like watercolor build colour by stacking transparent glazes, so you work light to dark and let the layers mix optically. Opaque media like gouache and acrylic cover what's beneath, so you can work in any order and paint light over dark. Knowing whether a brush layers transparently or opaquely tells you how to approach a whole painting.
How a painting brush is built
Under the hood, every Procreate painting brush is made of two images: a shape source (the silhouette of the mark) and a grain source (the texture that fills it). A round shape with a canvas grain reads as a bristle brush; a soft shape with a paper grain reads as pastel. Knowing this helps you understand why brushes behave as they do — and lets you tweak them.
The settings in Brush Studio then control how that mark responds: how spacing affects a stroke, how pressure changes size and opacity, how much the grain moves as you paint. You don't need to master Brush Studio to paint, but understanding that a brush is shape plus grain plus behaviour demystifies the whole library and makes it easy to duplicate a brush and adjust it to taste.
Oil brushes
Oil brushes lay down thick, blendable strokes with visible bristle texture, and the best ones pick up the colour already on the canvas so edges mix the way wet oils do. They're ideal for rich, painterly portraits and landscapes where you want to see the marks of the brush rather than a smooth, licked finish.
Reach for oils when you want depth and physical presence — impasto highlights that stand off the surface, expressive directional strokes, and colour that blends on the canvas. They reward a fat-over-lean approach and a willingness to leave your brushwork visible.
Acrylic & gouache brushes
Acrylic and gouache brushes give flatter, more opaque coverage with a slightly dry edge. Because the colour is solid, you can paint light shapes straight over dark ones and correct freely as you go — the opposite of watercolor's careful light-to-dark discipline.
Gouache dries to a matte, chalky finish that suits bold, graphic illustration, while acrylic can go glossier and thicker for more texture. Both are perfect when you want punchy, poster-like colour and clean, deliberate shapes.
Watercolor brushes
Watercolor brushes react to pressure with soft, bleeding edges and translucent washes, building colour through layered glazes rather than solid coverage. They're the medium for loose, expressive, atmospheric work — florals, dreamy portraits, quick colour studies.
The key to using them well is to work light to dark and let the layers do the mixing. Flooding a watercolor brush with opaque colour kills the effect; restraint and a little controlled bleeding are what make it sing.
Pastel & chalk brushes
Pastel and chalk brushes add grainy, matte texture that catches the tooth of the paper, great for soft blends, vintage looks and hand-drawn warmth. Soft pastels blend readily for atmospheric work; oil pastels are waxier and hold their marks for bolder pieces.
They shine when you want a tactile, analog feel — leave the grain showing rather than blending it flat, and work on a toned background so the soft colour has something to sit against.
Blending and finishing your painting
Whichever medium you choose, blending ties it together. Procreate blends through the Smudge tool, which borrows whichever brush you have selected — so smudging with a textured oil brush keeps grain, while smudging with a soft brush gives seamless gradients. Match your blender to your medium rather than reaching for a soft airbrush every time, which flattens detail into a plastic haze.
Finish by adding texture back. A light pass of a grain or paper texture over a smooth painting restores the tactile, hand-made quality that heavy blending can sand away. Keeping structure, mid-tones and highlights on separate layers throughout gives you the freedom to adjust the finish without repainting.
Do you need paid painting brushes?
Procreate's built-in painting brushes are genuinely capable, and our free sets add dependable pencils, inkers and a painting brush to learn on — so no, you don't strictly need to spend anything to start painting well. Fundamentals like value, colour and edge control matter far more than which brush you own, and those are best learned on a small, familiar set.
Where premium painting brushes earn their place is authenticity and range: brushes tuned so oil truly blends on the canvas, watercolor carries real wet edges, or gouache lays down that exact matte coverage. When you've decided on a medium and want it to behave like the real thing, a specialised pack is what gets you there. Start free, commit to a medium, then invest in depth.
Which painting brushes should you use?
Match the brush to the finish you want, not to habit. For realistic, painterly rendering, oils give you blendable depth. For bold, illustrative colour, gouache and acrylic give clean opaque shapes. For loose, luminous work, watercolor. For soft, nostalgic texture, pastel and chalk.
You don't need all of them at once. Pick the one medium that fits your current project, learn how it behaves, then expand. A focused painting kit of two or three brush families you understand deeply will always beat a library of hundreds you never really learn.
And don't feel bound by tradition, either. One of the joys of painting digitally is that you can combine media freely — a watercolor wash under a gouache detail, an oil highlight over a pastel base — without the physical incompatibilities that would make those combinations tricky on real paper. Keep each medium on its own layer, lean on its strengths, and let the flexibility of Procreate do what analog can't.