What is a secondary color in Procreate?

What is a secondary color in Procreate? 

A secondary color in Procreate is essentially a color you have set aside. This color is dormant, but it can be used in two main ways. Sometimes it is used for cool brush effects, sometimes it is used as a shortcut to quickly switch colors. Let me elaborate on this. 

First, let’s look at the picture below. 

As you can see, there are two boxes with different colors. The first one is your active color. The second box is the secondary color. Tapping on this box will change it to your active color and also allows you to change the color of it. (If you want to change the color but still have it be the secondary color, change the color, then click the other box.)

What does the secondary color do? Let’s go through the first option, which is brush effects. Every brush has a color setting that will allow that brush’s color to change from the active color to the secondary color. There are many ways to determine how much the brush is in the active color and how much is in the secondary color. An example of a brush with this type of setting is one of our watercolor brushes from our watercolor set.

This brush changes from the active color to the secondary color based off of pressure. When the active color is blue and the secondary color is pink, a change of pressure creates a stroke like the one below. 

The second way many people use the secondary color is to switch back and forth quickly between two colors. As I mentioned earlier, if you click on the secondary color box that color becomes the active color. This makes it easy to switch deftly between two colors. 

Thank you for reading! Make sure to check out our other blog posts and our digital brushes for Procreate. Don’t forget to sign up for our email list too!