Pixel Art With Procreate

The brush problem

I have tried many brushes to draw pixel art on Procreate and it doesn’t really work out of the box. The main problem I had was that if you click in between pixels it draws on several pixels at once. And this causes the lines you draw to be thick and ugly.

The problem

What I want

I’ve downloaded free pixel brushes from the internet and none solved that problem for me so I had to create my own.

My pixel brush

You can ⬇ download this brush for free

I created the brush with the Brush Studio (inside Procreate), if you want the exact settings I used you can download the brush and inspect it. Basically every settings is at 0 or disabled.

The main trick to getting this working is to change the shape source. The shape source I use is a 6×6 square image with a transparent background and only the center 2×2 pixels colored white. I tried different canvas size and padding and found this works best for me. A fully white image would paint pixel next to the targeted one, an image with a transparent padding too wide would sometimes not paint at all.

Display the grid

It helps a lot to show the pixel grid and you can do that easily in Procreate.

Open the settings, select Canvas, enable Drawing Guide, and click Edit Drawing Guide.

Then select 2D Grid and choose a Grid size of 1px.

You now have a nice grid. You can change the opacity, thickness and color (the color is changed by clicking the color bar at the top of the Edit Drawing Guide page).