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Procreate Glazed Brushes: How and When to Use Them

The glaze settings in the Procreate brushes have a big impact on your strokes and, as a result, your art overall. It’s important to understand what glaze does so that you can adjust it within your brushes as needed.

Procreate glazed brushes impact how colors are laid down when they are at low opacity. Each stroke will have the same tone and will not get darker until the stylus is lifted and laid down on the canvas again. This is in contrast to the blending settings, which work more like traditional mediums.

These glaze settings can seem confusing, but they’ll make more sense once we dive in and get our hands dirty. It’s also important to realize that they have a bigger or lesser impact depending on the brushes and opacity levels you’re working with. 

So, buckle up, and let’s dive in. It’s not that bad, I promise.

How to Find the Glaze Settings in Your Procreate Brushes

To find your brush glaze options, click on the brush you’re using to open its settings. Look at the list of categories on the left hand side and click on Rendering. At the top of the Rendering panel, you’ll see 4 glaze options and 2 blending options.

procreate rendering mode and glaze settings

Whenever you want to adjust your glaze, this is where you’ll want to go. You’ll only be adjusting your glaze brush-by-brush so, similar to the other brush settings, this won’t create universal changes to your brushes. 

Important note: make duplicates of your brushes before you adjust any of your settings. That way, if something goes wrong, you can always delete your duplicate and quickly go back to the original.

Ok, now that we know where the glaze settings are, let’s talk about what they do, especially in comparison to the blending settings.

What the Glaze Settings Do vs. the Blending Settings

A glazed brush will lay down one shade of color for the entirety of a stroke until you pick up your stylus, no matter how many times you go back and forth over it. A blending brush will continue to add color to your stroke the more you go back and forth over it, even without lifting up your stylus.

procreate heavy glaze vs uniform blending

It’s important to remember that you’ll only notice the impacts of the glaze and blending settings when using low opacity brushes.

You won’t notice a difference at all between the glaze and blending settings when your brush is fully opaque. You need to use low opacity brushes for these settings to make a difference.

The purpose of the glaze is to lay down consistent tones. If you don’t pick up your stylus, you will create a uniform tone of color no matter how many times you go back and forth over your strokes. As long as you don’t pick up your stylus.

Once you pick up your stylus and lay it down again, that’s when it will lay down the darker shade on top of the lighter shade you had laid down with your first stroke.

The blending settings will lay down color every time your stylus moves, even if it’s in the same stroke. As you go over and over the same section, it will get darker and darker.

A quick way to know whether you need to use glaze settings or blending settings is to think about whether you want your work to look like traditional mediums. If you do, you’ll want to choose the blending settings.

To get consistent tones and avoid opacity buildup, you’ll want to use the glaze settings. This will create a “cleaner” look to your strokes and help you maintain consistency in the color shades you’re using.

Key tip: if you’re struggling with opacity buildup, be sure to read my in-depth guide into Procreate brush opacity build up and how to deal with it.

how to stop procreate brush opacity buildup
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If you haven’t already, grab your iPad and start playing around with your glaze settings.

It’s a lot easier to understand when you’re messing around with it yourself, instead of trying to imagine it.

Draw some freeform strokes and notice how the colors and strokes interact with each other and look different depending on the settings you use. See how strokes of the same color interact with each other, and then, lay down new colors and see how the glaze and blending settings impact how those colors interact with each other. 

Have fun experimenting!

And, as you experiment, you’ll probably notice something.

Glaze and Blending Settings Vary Depending on the Brush You Use and Your Opacity Level

Even though your glaze and blending settings will always function in the same way, they’ll look different depending on the brush you use and the amount of opacity you’ve applied to it.

When you open a brush’s settings, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how many things there are to adjust, manipulate, and play around with. There are a ton of them, and each of them plays an important role in making your brush what it is.

Brushes are made out of their settings.

The reason why a pencil brush looks so different than a watercolor brush is because of its settings. These settings comprise everything about a brush.

And, all of these many settings impact one another.

This can be frustrating if you’re trying to get a brush to do something specific and can’t figure out why it’s not working. There could be any number of settings that indirectly influence the settings you’re trying to adjust. 

It can take forever to figure out what’s going on, so my tactic is to abandon ship and try a different brush. 

If you switch to a new brush, it’ll have a whole host of different settings that might be more compatible with making the changes, and showing the effects you’re looking for.

So, if your glaze and blending settings aren’t doing what you want them to do, try using a different brush. You might find that a new brush gives you the effects you’re looking for.

Procreate glaze settings can be a great way to achieve consistent tones when using low opacity brushes. Play around with them and get a feel for how they work. These settings are great to keep in mind depending on the style of art you’re trying to make.

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