I love pushing Procreate beyond its sketchbook comfort zone — especially when I’m designing backgrounds that need to look organic and hand-crafted but also behave reliably on the web. Creating generative-style backgrounds in Procreate is one of my favorite workflows because it blends playful experimentation (brush scattering, liquify, layer blends) with practical constraints (scaling, tiling, performance). In this piece I’ll walk you through my process for making generative backgrounds in Procreate that scale cleanly for websites, along with export tips, tiling techniques, and lightweight delivery strategies so your backgrounds look great without slowing pages down.

Why use Procreate for generative web backgrounds?

Procreate is tactile and fast. The brush engine and Layer Blend Modes let you iterate visually in ways that purely code-driven generative tools sometimes don’t. You can build textures, color shifts, and organic noise by hand, then combine them into repeatable assets. The key is to design with scale and performance in mind: create elements that can tile or be exported at multiple sizes and use web-friendly formats.

Starting point: set the right canvas and structure

I start by choosing a canvas size that balances detail with file size. For backgrounds that might be used full-bleed, I often work at a large, but reasonable, pixel dimension — then create tiled or scalable versions from that master.

Use case Canvas size (px) Export targets
Hero/full-bleed 3840 × 2160 1920w, 1280w, 800w
Background tile/pattern 1024 × 1024 or 2048 × 2048 (square) 512, 256 (tile)
Subtle texture overlay 2048 × 2048 webP/PNG 800–1600

Why these sizes? A large master (e.g., 3840 × 2160) lets you extract crisp assets for high-DPI displays while a square 1024/2048 tile is perfect for creating repeating backgrounds. Keep your Procreate layers organized into logical groups (color, texture, noise, accents) so you can toggle or export parts as needed.

Design techniques I use in Procreate

These are my go-to moves when building generative-style backgrounds:

  • Brush scattering and jitter: Use brushes with scatter and opacity jitter to get natural randomness. I like to create a few custom brushes in Brush Studio for speckle, grain, and organic blobs.
  • Layer blend modes: Multiply, Overlay, Soft Light — these help you build color depth without painting everything. I often make a flat color base and then layer procedural-looking textures using Divide/Linear Burn for contrast.
  • Gradient maps and color harmony: Gradient maps (via clipping to a textured layer) are a fast way to recolor an entire asset while preserving detail. You can shift mood quickly by swapping gradient palettes.
  • Gaussian and Motion Blur: Subtle blurs unify noisy elements and mimic depth. Motion blur can give a directional flow that's excellent for hero backgrounds.
  • Liquify and Warp: The Liquify tool is great for making tileable swirls and flows. Use it sparingly to avoid muddying detail.
  • Alpha lock and Clipping Masks: Paint inside shapes without worrying about edges by using Alpha Lock, then add texture layers on top with clipping masks.
  • Halftone and noise: For a digital-but-textured look, add halftone or grain at low opacity. It reads well across screen sizes and helps avoid flat color blocks.
  • Symmetry & randomness: Use Symmetry for structured motifs, then break them subtly with random scatter to avoid mechanical repetition.
  • Exporting layers as masks: I export texture layers separately (for overlays) so the website can combine them with CSS blend modes—this reduces the need for multiple heavy raster images.

    • Making seamless tiles in Procreate

    Seamless tiles are the backbone of scalable backgrounds. Here’s a method I use that’s quick and controllable:

  • Create a square canvas (1024 or 2048).
  • Design your texture across the whole canvas but keep heavy details away from the edges initially.
  • Duplicate the group and transform (shift) it so details cross the edges — this helps the edges have content.
  • Use the Transform tool with Snap to grid off and nudge layers so elements wrap around logically.
  • To check seamlessness, temporarily offset the canvas by duplicating and moving halves (or export and preview in a browser as a repeating background).

    • Procreate doesn’t have a built-in offset filter like Photoshop, so my trick is to manually duplicate and move halves to simulate offsetting. It’s a little manual, but it works and keeps me in the tactile workflow.

    Exporting for the web

    Export strategy is crucial because textures can be surprisingly large. I usually export a few variants:

  • Tile: 512/1024 PNG or WebP (lossless if transparency matters).
  • Hero: 1920 or 1280 JPEG or WebP with moderate compression (quality 70–80%) to balance fidelity and size.
  • Texture overlay: WebP with transparency or PNG depending on browser needs.

    • WebP (and AVIF where supported) is a great choice — smaller files at similar quality. If your background needs transparency, export a PNG or animated PNG only when necessary; otherwise, WebP with alpha is widely supported now and more efficient.

    Delivering backgrounds efficiently on the web

    Designing the asset is one step—delivering it smartly is another. I use these patterns:

  • Responsive images: Serve multiple sizes with srcset or the picture element so devices get the optimal resolution.
  • CSS repeats for tiles: Use background-repeat and background-size for tiled textures. When the tile is seamless and small, it’s a huge win for performance.
  • Layered backgrounds: Combine a subtle tiled texture with a large gradient image or CSS gradient. This reduces the need for a single huge raster that covers everything.
  • CSS blend modes: Use mix-blend-mode or background-blend-mode to composite textures and colors in the browser; this can avoid shipping multiple images.
  • Lazy loading and progressive enhancement: Defer heavy decorative assets until after the main content loads, or use a lightweight fallback for low-bandwidth scenarios.
  • SVG masks and overlays: For clean shapes or subtle cutouts, export masks from Procreate (as black-and-white PNGs) and apply in the browser as masking layers or as SVGs if you recreate them vectorially.
  • Compress and audit: Use tools like ImageOptim, Squoosh, or build-step plugins to compress exports. Run Lighthouse to check image impact.

    • Examples of use

    When I’m designing a marketing landing page, I’ll often pair a hand-painted, non-repeating hero (exported as WebP at 1920w) with a tiny repeating speckle tile overlaid via CSS at low opacity. On a portfolio site, I favor a large, subtle texture overlay (WebP with transparency) combined with CSS gradients—this keeps visuals rich but fast.

    Finally, don’t be afraid to iterate. One of the advantages of Procreate is how quickly you can remix color palettes, export variants, and test them live in the browser. Keep a library of master files and exported tiles so you can reuse textures across projects without starting from scratch.

    If you want, I can share a sample Procreate layer setup (how I name and group layers), a palette of brushes I use for generative textures, or a short checklist to follow before exporting for web. Tell me which would be most useful and I’ll put it together.