A Guide to Using Special Effects in Procreate

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through some of the special effects tools within Procreate. We’re going to take a look at what they are, what they do, and how to use them. Procreate is a great app – available for iPad – which can be used to create a wide array of digital art, from realism, to edited photos, to graphic design.

The app contains various tools which can be used to enhance or add to your artwork, keep reading to check these out!

You may also want to check out our Guide to Procreate’s Colour Adjustment Tools, as the article you’re reading is a continuation of this one.

To access the tools which we’re going to explore, you’ll need to tap on the magic wand tool, which is the second icon on the top left-hand menu in Procreate. Let’s get started!

Gaussian Blur

This is a beautiful tool that blurs your elements, it’s particularly useful for creating gradients or ombre effects. I use this adjustment a lot for sunsets; overall, it’s great at smoothing out colours and harsh lines to give a blended effect.

In the below, I’ve drawn four rough lines using the soft airbrush. There are no adjustments made yet:

In the next picture, I’ve used Gaussian Blur, and you can see that the colours have all blended together nicely. To amend the amount of blur, swipe your stylus from left to right across the screen; the higher the percentage, the more blur you’ll see.

Motion Blur

Our next adjustment tool is Motion Blur. This does exactly what it says on the tin – it will make your element blur as if it’s moving. This can be great if you want to add dimension and the feel of movement to your work. Below, we’ll show you an example of what it does.

On this image, we’ve drawn three solid lines with the soft airbrush.

We’ve then added Motion Blur (use this in the same way as you use Gaussian Blur), the first image is set to 27.1%, and the second to 53.8%. You can see that our green lines (Northern Lights!) have been given the appearance of movement.

Check out this tutorial if you’d like to explore Motion Blur more and create your very own Arctic-inspired Northern Lights scene!

Perspective Blur

Our next option, Perspective Blur, allows you to choose a point on your canvas or element from which to blur from. As you can see below, we’ve used the positional option which means that the blur will take effect from our positioning circle, outwards.

If you tap directional, you can choose the direction in which the blur happens. You can see this subtly in the below; but this tool is great, again, to give the illusion of movement.

Noise

We all know what noise is – even if you don’t think you do! It’s the dreaded TV screen of black and white squiggles which makes a terrible sound! There’s an option to add this to your images in Procreate, in the below, we’ve added this to a photo of Lady Liberty.

You have the option to choose clouds, billows, or ridges – these denote the shape of the noise particles (grains).

You’re also able to change the size of the grains, by using the slider underneath scale.

The octaves slider changes the complexity of the noise, and turbulence alters the positioning.