How to Use the Smudge Tool in Procreate to Blend Colors

You can create beautiful artwork with blended colors using the Smudge tool in Procreate. Make gradient color blends or add depth to your artwork using brushes made for blending. In this tutorial, I’ll show you different examples of blending brushes using this Procreate Blender Brush pack by Seamless Team.

Step 1 - Lay your shade colors

Start with adding your highlights and lowlights to your artwork. Add your shade colors in the general areas that you want, it doesn’t have to be precise. We will use our Smudge Brush to blend and push our colors into areas that we want them.

Step 2 - Get Blending Brushes

Selecting a smudge brush that is intended to be a blender brush will help a lot. Most brushes are intended for adding to your artwork so normal brushes won’t work well to blend colors. You can choose between all kinds of blending styles with these brushes, from standard smudge blending to textured and soft blending.

Step 3 - Select a blending brush style

To Select your blending brush tap on the Smudge tool (Pointer Finger Icon) top right next to the brush icon. Select the brush style you want to use in your artwork. I’ll give you a quick look at 4 styles of blending and you can see how each brush behaves when blending colors.

Standard Blending

A standard blending brush is usually round and requires you to smudge (push) your colors into each other to get them to blend and could leave streaks.

The brush used in the example: B1

Soft Blending

Soft blending brush shapes are usually grainier or have blurred edges that help to blend colors gently together creating a soft even blend.

The brush used in the example: B2

Textured Blending

Textured blending brushes are a great way of adding a nice blend and adding texture to your artwork for added character.

The brush used in the example: B23

Blotchy Blending

Blending brushes that act erratically I call them blotchy blenders. These brushes act very differently from the others. You’ll have a lot of texture and your color mix is hard and very noticeable.

The brush used in the example: B28

Step 4 - Settings for better blending

Getting blending brushes is the first key step to have better color blending. But, there are a few settings and extra steps you can take to achieve better blending in Procreate. These settings will help with more controlled blending and keeping your artwork tidy in the process.

Brush size

Using a smaller brush size will help with areas that require precision. The bigger the brush size the more blending will occur on a large scale. Keep the size relevant to your project.

Brush strength

Lowering the brush opacity will help with how “strong” your blending is. Setting the opacity to 50% and lower will give you more control over your blending strength and you can build up your blending for more precision.

Work in Layers

This is only relevant to projects that have multiple elements, segments, or pieces. Creating separate layers for each section will stop your blending from bleeding into each other. All example images above use separate layers for the Lemon, stem, and leaves.

Enable Alpha Lock

Keep your blending within your base element by enabling Alpha Lock on your layers. This will help to prevent your colors from blending over and past your artwork, and keep it tidy. We have a tutorial on How to Use Alpha Lock in Procreate if you aren’t sure how to enable it.

That’s it! I hope you found this tutorial handy and if you are looking for a drawing tutorial to test your blending skills have a look at our How to Draw a Butterfly in Procreate tutorial.