How to Draw an Iced Latte in Procreate
By Julia White — painted in Procreate with Brusher brushes · Updated August 2026
Drinks are the best way to practise translucency: the glass, the milk and the marshmallows all catch light differently, and watercolour handles that better than any other digital medium. This one is a marshmallow-topped iced latte in nine steps.
The trick throughout is layering. Every shadow and every highlight goes on its own layer as a transparent pass, exactly the way glazes work on paper.
Step by step
- 1
Sketch the glass and toppings Perfect Pencil
Draw the glass as a simple tapered cylinder, then stack the marshmallows on top as overlapping ovals. Add the straw last so you can angle it against shapes that already exist. Keep the whole sketch faint — it's scaffolding, not line art.
- 2
Block in the drink Water Bloom
Fill the body of the drink with a milky beige on its own layer. The soft bloom at the edge of this brush is what makes the liquid feel wet, so don't fight it into a hard edge.
- 3
Add the toppings in flat colour Water Bloom
Marshmallows in a warm off-white, the chocolate straw in deep brown — each on a separate layer. Separate layers matter here: the glass is translucent and you'll want to adjust what shows through it later.
- 4
Paint the first shadows Wet On Canvas
Shade the underside of each marshmallow and the inner wall of the glass. This brush leaves a visible wash edge where the stroke ends, which is precisely the thing that reads as watercolour rather than airbrush.
- 5
Deepen the shadows on a second layer Wet On Canvas
Add a darker shadow pass on a new layer rather than pressing harder on the first one. Two transparent passes give a depth a single heavy stroke can't — the same reason traditional painters glaze instead of mixing darker.
- 6
Lift the highlights Soft Wash
Bring up the light areas with a pale wash: the tops of the marshmallows, the rim of the glass, and the side facing your light source. Soft Wash stays transparent, so it brightens without erasing the texture underneath.
- 7
Make the outline translucent Base Brush
Trace the contour again, letting the line fade in and out instead of running solid the whole way round. Broken, semi-transparent outlines are what keep an illustration looking painted instead of inked.
- 8
Add cocoa and sparkle Sparkling
Dust cocoa powder over the foam and add a few sparkle marks on the glass. Decorative brushes lay down a lot at once — a light dusting reads as cocoa, a heavy one reads as noise.
- 9
Ground it with a cast shadow Very Fluid
Finish with a soft shadow under the glass so it sits on a surface instead of floating. A diffuse, fluid edge matches the watercolour treatment — a hard-edged shadow would undo the effect.
Brushes used
Painted with brushes from the Watercolor and Glass Box sets. Both are in the Brusher app, and Glass Box is also available as a standalone download. For the washes and grains used throughout, browse our watercolour Procreate brushes — wet-on-wet, dry-brush and wash behaviours, installed in one tap.
Want to build the brush yourself instead? Our guide on making your own Procreate brush includes a five-step watercolour recipe.
Frequently asked questions
How do you paint translucent glass in Procreate?+
Keep the glass, the liquid and anything behind it on separate layers, and use transparent watercolour brushes so lower layers show through. Translucency comes from stacked partial opacity, not from picking a lighter colour.
Which watercolour brushes work best for drinks?+
A wash brush for flat base colour, a wet-on-canvas brush for shadows with a visible edge, and a soft wash for highlights. A fluid brush is useful for the cast shadow underneath.
Why do my shadows look muddy?+
Muddy shadows usually mean too many passes on one layer, or a shadow colour mixed with grey. Use a separate layer per pass and tint shadows toward a colour — cool blue-brown here — instead of desaturating.
