Selling Procreate brushes as downloads: the brush that has to behave on someone else's iPad

Most downloads are judged on what they look like. A brush is judged on what it does under someone else's hand. The buyer is not opening your file to admire it — they are pressing an Apple Pencil to a canvas at their pressure, their tilt, their canvas size, in the middle of a drawing they already care about. A brush that sang in your demo can stutter, stamp too hard, or vanish at small sizes on their iPad, and they will not blame their settings. They will blame the brush, and the listing that sold it. A brush seller's whole business is whether a tool tuned on one desk behaves on a desk they will never see.

A brushset is not a picture of a brush: state the file and the version

Start with the unglamorous facts, because they are the ones that decide whether the product works at all. Procreate brushes arrive as individual .brush files or grouped as a .brushset, and the two import differently and land differently in the library. Say which one you are selling, how many brushes it contains, and name each brush the way it will appear after import — the name inside Procreate, not just the prettier name on your listing.

State the version you built and tested in, plainly, and what that means for older versions. Brush behaviour depends on the brush engine, and a set tuned in a current version can import into an older one and behave like a different, worse brush — or fail to import at all. If you only tested in one version, sell it as tested in that version. "Works in Procreate" is a promise about software you do not control, made to buyers running versions you never opened.

Say what is not included with the same clarity. A brush set is not the artwork in the preview, not a canvas file, not a colour palette unless a palette file is actually in the download. Buyers buy the picture in their head; your job is to make the file in the download match it before money moves, not after a refund request explains the gap.

Show the stroke, not just the artwork

Finished artwork is the worst evidence for a brush, because good artwork hides the tool. A skilled hand makes almost any ink brush look decisive, and a buyer cannot separate your drawing from your brush in a polished illustration. What they need to see is the stroke itself, isolated and unretouched.

Show a test sheet and treat it as a specification. For each brush: a slow line and a fast line, a light line and a hard-pressed line, a line that starts thin and swells, and the brush used at small, medium, and large sizes on a stated canvas size. Stamp and texture brushes need their mark shown at the spacing a buyer will actually use, not tiled into a pattern that flatters it. Lettering brushes need real words, with the joins visible — a lettering brush is its connections, and a preview alphabet with no joins has hidden the only thing that matters.

Label every swatch with the brush name and the size you used. An unlabelled beauty sheet creates a second failure: the buyer loves stroke three, imports forty brushes, and cannot find it. That search, repeated across a library of hundreds, is how a good brush set gets a review that says "couldn't find anything" about brushes that were there all along.

The settings are the product: say what you changed

Anyone can move sliders. What a buyer is paying for is judgement — which shape source, which grain, how much taper, how the pressure curve answers — tested across real drawings. That judgement is invisible unless you document it, and undocumented settings cannot be restored when a buyer resets a brush, duplicates it, and edits the copy into something unrecognisable.

Include a short settings note per brush, in plain language: what it is for, what it does under pressure, what it does on tilt if tilt matters, and the one or two settings a buyer may safely adjust — size limits, opacity ceiling, a taper amount — versus the settings that are the brush, where changing them means they are no longer using the thing they bought. A buyer who knows the intended working size will not judge a detail brush at poster size and conclude it is broken.

Be honest about defaults you left alone. "Built from scratch" is a claim, and a set that began from a built-in brush with a changed grain and a tuned curve is a perfectly sellable set — as what it is. Buyers who draw daily will find the resemblance themselves, in the first session, and the only question is whether your listing told them first.

Install is part of the product: write the landing, not just the download

For many buyers this is the first brush set they have ever bought, and the distance between "download complete" and "brush in my library" is where sales are lost. The file arrives in Files, not in Procreate. The import is a tap on the file or an import inside the app, the set lands at the top of the brush library as its own group, and every step of that is obvious only to someone who has done it before.

Write install steps for the buyer's actual path: download on the iPad if you can, find the file in Files, tap the .brushset, wait for Procreate to open and import, then where to look in the library — including that individual brushes arrive one at a time and a large set takes a moment. Name the common failures and their fixes in the same document: a file that downloaded as a zip and must be unzipped first, a set that imported as separate brushes, a download done on a phone that now has to reach the iPad. Put these steps inside the download as a readable PDF and on the delivery page, not only in a listing a buyer has closed.

Test the install from the file you sell, on a clean library if you can. Export, upload, buy or download your own product, and import that file. The brushset that installs is the one in the download, and a set that worked in your library and exports with a missing grain is, to the buyer, simply a brush that does not work.

Bundles: organise for a library of hundreds, not a listing of twelve

A single set is easy to organise. Buyers do not live with a single set. They live with every set they have ever bought competing in one library, and a bundle of eighty brushes with playful names and no order is a bundle that gets used twice and forgotten — not because the brushes failed, but because finding one cost more effort than reaching for a familiar built-in.

Prefix or group with intent. Keep a set together under a group name that states its job — ink, dry media, lettering — and order brushes inside the set in the order a drawing uses them: sketch, line, fill, texture, finishing. Name brushes by what they do at the size they do it, not by in-jokes only you understand. If a bundle collects earlier sets, say which brushes are duplicates of sets a past buyer may already own, so a returning buyer is not paying twice for the same brush under a new bundle name — or, if updated versions replace the old ones, say what changed and whether the new version overwrites or sits beside the old.

Restraint is a feature you can state. Forty tuned brushes with no filler will outsell, in reviews and repeat buyers, a hundred and forty that include every experiment. If a brush is a variation, label it as a variation of its parent and say what differs in one line. A buyer choosing between Ink 1, Ink 2, and Ink 3 with no guidance chooses none of them, mid-drawing, every time.

License the work made with the brush, not just the brush file

Brush licensing confuses buyers because there are two different things to license, and most listings only name one. The brush file itself must not be shared, resold, or redistributed — that part is simple, and you should say it simply. The harder question, and the one a working illustrator actually needs answered before purchase, is the artwork: may they sell work made with your brushes, use them in client work, in a book, on merchandise, in work that will be printed at scale?

Answer that question on the listing, in plain tiers if you offer them: personal use, and commercial use with whatever boundary you actually intend — and define the boundary by the work, not by vague size words. "Commercial" that silently excludes client work, or merchandise, or work for sale at all, is a licence the buyer discovers after they have built a product line on your lettering brush. If an extended licence exists, say what it adds and how a buyer upgrades; if everything is included, say that just as plainly, because illustrators accustomed to traps will assume one is present until told otherwise.

What a licence can never honestly promise is exclusivity or ownership of a style. A brush sold to everyone makes marks available to everyone. Sell the tuning, the testing, and the time saved — those are real — and never let a listing imply a buyer is purchasing a look no one else can have.

Updates and compatibility: a brush set is a living file

Procreate will change under your product. A new version can alter how a grain renders or how a pressure curve answers, and a set that was honest at launch can quietly become a set that behaves differently than its own preview sheet. Plan for that at launch, not at the first confused email: keep your source settings documented, keep the original shape and grain images, and decide now what an update means — free to past buyers, delivered as a new brushset version, with the version number in the set name or the delivery note so a buyer can tell v1 and v2 apart in their own library.

When you add brushes to an existing set, treat it like the update it is. Tell past buyers what was added, whether to delete the old set before importing (and what happens to favourites and renamed brushes if they do), and never silently replace a brush under the same name with different behaviour — a buyer's ongoing comic is drawn in that brush, and consistency across months of pages is worth more to them than your improvement.

State your support boundary with the same directness. You can support your file and your settings; you cannot support a buyer's iPad, stylus, or app installation. Saying so kindly, in advance, with the install and troubleshooting note doing the heavy lifting, is what keeps a compatibility question from becoming a one-star review about software neither of you made.

Launch checklist for brush sellers

1. File type, brush count, in-library names, and tested Procreate version are stated on the listing.
2. Every brush has a labelled test sheet: slow, fast, light, hard, and at three sizes on a stated canvas.
3. A settings note says what each brush is for, what pressure and tilt do, and what may safely be adjusted.
4. Install steps cover the Files-to-library path, zipped files, and where the set lands — tested from the sold file.
5. Sets are grouped and ordered by job, duplicates across bundles are disclosed, and variations say what differs.
6. The licence answers the artwork question — personal and commercial, defined by the work — before purchase.
7. Sources and settings are archived so a Procreate update can be answered with a versioned update, not an apology.

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A note on delivery, stated plainly: this guide is about the brush file and the buyer's library, not about any one delivery tool. FileFreight is one option for the delivery step — flat-rate download delivery with licence keys, where you connect your own payment account and pay a flat monthly price instead of a per-sale cut — and it is worth stating what it does not do: it does not handle tax or act as a merchant of record, it has no Procreate or brush-file importer, and it is not a Shopify app. The test sheet, the settings note, and the install steps above are your work, whichever delivery tool you use.