Wanderer Brush Pack for Procreate Quickstart

Wanderer is a set of seamless pattern brushes designed to help you break the uniformity of regular shapes and load them with vibrant organic textures to create beautifully handcrafted style compositions. Creating eye-catching graphics is made simple with Wanderer, which is user-friendly and accessible to everyone.

We know you’re impatient to get started with your shiny new brushes right away, so we won’t be taking too much time from you. We’ll just make sure you’ll get Wanderer for Procreate up and running so you can start creating promptly.

1. Installation

You can check the following quick installation guide to get your brushes imported into Procreate in case you’re not familiar with this process.

• Installing Brushes in Procreate – Watch Video

2. How to use Wanderer Brushes

You can use Wanderer brushes as regular paintbrushes. You can select a brush and start painting and drawing freely with your Apple Pencil. However, we designed this pack to be used along with Procreate’s clipping masks, which allows you to paint within other shapes.

First, create a simple shape using any basic brush, like the Studio Pen from the Inking category, included in the default Procreate brushes. Then, fill this shape with the same stroke color.

Then, create a new layer on top of your shape. Tap on this layer and select Clipping Mask from the contextual menu.

You’ll see a small arrow at the left of your layer’s thumbnail, meaning that this layer is now clipped to the layer below, and everything you draw on it will remain within the boundaries of the clipping or target layer.

Now you can select any brush from the Wanderer kit and paint freely on this layer while keeping everything attached to the target layer.

Scaling Patterns

If, for any reason, you need to change the size of your pattern. Tap on any brush and navigate to the Grain tab within the brush editor to modify its scale using the Scale slider. We recommend duplicating the brush you edit to avoid overwriting its original settings.

You can drastically change the character of your Wanderer brushes just by tweaking their Grain scale.

Demo File

Click the image above to download a Procreate file containing some shapes we used for Wanderer’s demo illustrations. As you can see, there’s nothing fancy about them on their own, just simple rough silhouettes. 

Editing shape’s colors

To change the color of the demo Procreate file, open the Layers panel, tap on any layer you wish to edit and tap on the Select option from the contextual menu to select this layer’s pixels.

With the selection still active, select a new color from the Colors Panel and, tap on your new layer. Finally, tap on the Fill Layer option from the contextual menu. You can now hide or delete the layer below.

You can repeat this process by experimenting with different shapes and colors. Notice that you don’t need to come up with complex forms. The beauty of using these brushes is that they will do the hard work for you, and you’ll still achieve extraordinary results with minimal effort.

Play around with your shape’s size, position, and rotation to generate composition ideas. This part is quite enjoyable and might lead to interesting, unexpected results.

The same approach was used to create one of the demo artworks for this pack. At first it might seem complex, but the closer you look at it, the more you realize the entire illustration only contains a bunch of random shapes put together. The magic happens when you use Wanderer brushes on these shapes. They’ll add instant organic complexity that will make any graphic look better in seconds.

3. Going a little further

The remaining elements used for that illustration are two cutout photos, nothing more. The woman’s portrait served as the centerpiece, around which we placed the other shapes to add interest to the composition. We also included a cloud to have another photographic detail in the background.

The images above are copyrighted, so we cannot share them with you. However, you can use many amazing free pictures on your professional projects from photo stock sites, like Pexels, which is our favorite here. There, you’ll find lots of useful photos of any kind.

Masking out images in Procreate

First, let’s import an image. We got this nice portrait from Pexels by Hannah Nelson.

• Go to the top menu bar and select the wrench icon
• Tap the Add tab
• Select Insert a file if your image is anywhere else than your Photos app or, select Insert a Photo if your image is in your Photos app.
• Place your image in your canvas.

Now, using the Freehand selection tool, trace the contour of your photo. You don’t need to make it perfect. A little sloppiness will add a certain handmade charm to your image.

With your selection still active, tap on your photo layer, and from the contextual menu, select Mask. Now, your photo will be isolated from its background without deleting it. In the image above, we hid Procreate’s background layer so you can see the result better.

Using the Procreate file we provided previously, we copy-paste the Cloud and Snake shapes into our document. To fill the cloud we used the FT Wind Waker brush, from Wanderer A category. For the snake shape, we used the brush named FT Dune, also from the same category.

Rinse and repeat. Keep adding shapes from the same Procreate file, change their color, paint inside with some Wanderer brushes and you’ll get to beautiful striking results in minutes.

Tip: Don’t overthink about which brush you should use every time. We’d recommend picking them up randomly for more surprising results. You can also check the brushes guide included with this pack to have a better overview of the patterns.

Of course, you are free to use Wanderer brushes without clipping layers. In the image above, we’ve added arbitrary strokes to break with the defined edges and add a distressed effect to our composition.

Alright, folks, this is everything you need to kickstart your artsy adventure with Wanderer for Procreate. This super cool set of patterns is like a playground for your creativity. It’s all about going wild with abstract shapes and colors; trust us, it will be a total blast that’ll keep you engaged for hours!