Top 15 'Old-Master' Art Styles to learn on Procreate for giving your digital work timeless depth in 2025 - Goh Ling Yong
Hey there, fellow artists! Let's talk about a little magic trick. In a world saturated with hyper-modern, sleek digital art, how do you make your work truly stand out? How do you give it a soul, a weight, and a sense of history that stops people in their tracks? The answer, paradoxically, isn't in a new filter or a trendy plugin. It's by looking back.
The Old Masters—those titans of the Renaissance, Baroque, and beyond—weren't just painting pretty pictures. They were engineers of light, architects of composition, and psychologists of color. Their techniques have endured for centuries for one simple reason: they work. They tap into a fundamental human understanding of beauty, drama, and emotion. And here's the best part: their entire playbook is available for us to study, and our favorite digital tool, Procreate, is the perfect modern-day canvas to practice on.
This isn't about perfectly replicating a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio. It's about dissecting their genius and borrowing their principles to infuse our own unique, 2025-era creations with timeless depth. By learning the how and why behind their styles, you can transform a flat digital sketch into a breathtaking piece that feels both classic and contemporary. Ready to turn your iPad into a time-traveling-atelier? Let's dive into 15 Old-Master styles that will revolutionize your Procreate workflow.
1. High Renaissance Sfumato (The Da Vinci Haze)
You know that soft, smoky, almost dreamlike quality in the Mona Lisa’s smile? That’s Sfumato, a technique perfected by Leonardo da Vinci. It means "to evaporate like smoke" in Italian, and it involves using incredibly subtle gradations of light and shadow to model forms. There are no harsh lines or outlines, just a seamless transition from one tone to another, creating an ambiguous and atmospheric effect.
In digital art, where crisp vector-like lines can often dominate, mastering Sfumato is a game-changer. It helps you render realistic skin, create atmospheric depth in landscapes, and give your subjects a mysterious, lifelike presence. It forces you to think in terms of volume and light, not just lines.
Procreate Tips:
- Brushes: The default "Soft Airbrush" is your best friend here. Use it at a very low opacity and flow. Also, experiment with custom smudge brushes that have a soft, textured feel.
- Technique: Work on a single layer as much as possible to blend colors directly. Use the Smudge tool sparingly and with a soft brush. Build up your tones gradually, almost like you're dusting pigment onto the canvas. Avoid pure black or pure white.
2. Baroque Tenebrism (The Caravaggio Effect)
If Sfumato is a gentle haze, Tenebrism is a lightning strike in a dark room. Championed by Caravaggio, this style uses extreme contrasts between intense darkness and dramatic, focused light. The background often plunges into near-total black, which makes the illuminated subjects pop with startling realism and theatrical intensity.
Tenebrism is the ultimate tool for creating mood and directing the viewer's eye. Want to create a piece with suspense, drama, or intense focus? This is your go-to style. It’s perfect for dramatic portraits, narrative scenes, and any artwork where you want to make an immediate, powerful impact.
Procreate Tips:
- Canvas: Start with a dark-colored canvas—a deep brown or near-black, not pure black. This sets your base mid-tone.
- Layers: Create a new layer for your lights. Use a hard-edged brush like the "Studio Pen" to block in your brightest highlights, then switch to a softer brush like the "Oil Paint" or "Gouache" to blend the transitions into the shadows.
- Color: Keep your shadow areas low-saturation. The drama comes from the value contrast, not a riot of color.
3. Venetian School Colorito (Titian's Radiant Hues)
Artists of the Venetian School, like Titian and Giorgione, believed that color and light were the most powerful tools for creating emotion. In contrast to the Florentine emphasis on drawing (disegno), the Venetians built up their paintings with layers of rich, luminous color. Their work is known for its warm, golden light, deep reds, and vibrant blues, all applied with visible, expressive brushstrokes.
Learning this style will liberate you from boring, muddy palettes. It teaches you how to use color temperature (warm vs. cool) to define form and create atmosphere. Your digital paintings will look richer, more vibrant, and full of life. It’s an approach that feels painterly and expressive, even on a screen.
Procreate Tips:
- Underpainting: Start with a warm, reddish-brown underpainting (a "grisaille" but with color). Build your colors on top of this using new layers. This base tone will unify the painting and give it that signature Venetian warmth.
- Brushes: Use textured brushes like Procreate’s "Oil Paint," "Wet Acrylic," or "Gouache." Let the brushstrokes show!
- Glazing: Simulate the glazing technique by using layers set to "Multiply" or "Color" with low opacity. Layering thin washes of color over each other creates incredible depth and luminosity.
4. Northern Renaissance Detail (The Van Eyck Method)
While the Italians were mastering Sfumato, Northern European artists like Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer were obsessed with detail. This style is characterized by its microscopic precision, capturing the texture of every fabric, the glint on every piece of metal, and the individual strands of every hair. They often achieved this using thin layers of oil paint, which allowed for incredible detail and luminosity.
Studying this style will train your eye for observation and elevate your texture game to a whole new level. It teaches you patience and precision, skills that are invaluable for creating believable and immersive digital worlds. As my mentor, Goh Ling Yong, always says, "The fundamentals of observation are what separate good art from great art."
Procreate Tips:
- Canvas Size: Work on a high-resolution canvas (at least 300 DPI) to accommodate fine details.
- Brushes: The "Technical Pen" or "Syrup" brush at a very small size is perfect for rendering fine details like hair and embroidery. For textures, explore the "Charcoal" and "Texture" brush sets.
- Zoom In: Don't be afraid to zoom way in to work on specific areas. This is a huge advantage of digital art. Use a reference layer for your sketch and build up details meticulously on layers above.
5. Dutch Golden Age Luminosity (The Vermeer Glow)
Vermeer was a master of capturing the quiet beauty of light. His style is not about dramatic Tenebrism, but about the soft, gentle way light streams through a window, diffuses across a room, and reveals the subtle textures of everyday objects. It’s a style defined by its tranquility, realism, and a palpable sense of atmosphere.
This is a powerful technique for making your digital scenes feel real and emotionally resonant. It teaches you to see light not just as illumination, but as a character in itself. By mastering the Vermeer glow, your digital portraits and interiors will feel less staged and more like a captured, intimate moment.
Procreate Tips:
- Light Layers: Paint your scene with its base colors, then add the light on separate layers. Use a layer set to "Add" or "Screen" with a very soft airbrush and a warm yellow or cream color. Build it up gradually where the light is brightest.
- Bloom Effect: After you’re done, duplicate your final image, apply a Gaussian Blur to the copy, and set its layer mode to "Add" or "Screen." Lower the opacity to around 5-15%. This creates a beautiful, subtle bloom effect.
- Palette: Study Vermeer’s limited but powerful palette, often featuring Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine) and lead-tin yellow.
6. Flemish Baroque Dynamism (The Rubens Rush)
Peter Paul Rubens was the master of motion, energy, and drama. His compositions are filled with swirling figures, spiraling action, and a sense of barely contained energy. This style uses powerful diagonal lines, muscular figures, and rich, vibrant colors to create a sense of epic movement and spectacle.
Feeling like your compositions are a bit static? Studying Rubens is the perfect cure. It teaches you how to guide the viewer's eye through a complex scene and to create compositions that are bursting with life. It’s ideal for action scenes, fantasy illustrations, and any piece that needs a jolt of energy.
Procreate Tips:
- Compositional Guides: Use Procreate’s Drawing Guides (try the 2D Grid and Symmetry tools) to plan your composition. Sketch out the main "S" curves and diagonals of your action first.
- Gesture: Focus on loose, gestural brushwork to capture the energy of the figures. The "Gesinski Ink" or "Chalk" brushes can be great for this initial sketching phase.
- Color: Don’t be shy with color. Use highly saturated reds, golds, and blues to enhance the drama.
7. Rococo Whimsy (The Fragonard Touch)
Rococo is the lighter, more playful evolution of Baroque. Think fluffy clouds, pastel colors, and lighthearted, romantic scenes. Artists like Fragonard and Boucher used soft, feathery brushstrokes and a palette of light pinks, baby blues, and creamy yellows to create a world of aristocratic leisure and fantasy.
This style is perfect for when you want to create something elegant, charming, and dreamy. It’s a fantastic study in using a limited, high-key palette and loose brushwork to evoke a specific mood. It’s great for character design, storybook illustrations, and decorative art.
Procreate Tips:
- Palette: Create a custom palette of pastel colors. Sample colors directly from a Fragonard painting.
- Brushes: Use brushes with a soft, textural quality. The "Chalk," "Pastel," and "Gouache" brushes are excellent choices. Keep your brushwork light and energetic.
- Finishing Touches: Add a subtle noise filter (Adjustments > Noise) to your final piece to give it a slightly aged, canvas-like texture.
8. Neoclassical Clarity (The David Discipline)
Reacting against the frivolity of Rococo, Neoclassicism, led by artists like Jacques-Louis David, returned to the order and harmony of classical antiquity. This style emphasizes strong, clear outlines, stable compositions (often based on triangles and rectangles), and smooth, almost invisible brushwork. The goal was clarity, order, and moral gravity.
Studying Neoclassicism is a masterclass in composition and storytelling. It teaches you how to create clear, readable images where every element has a purpose. It’s an excellent foundation for any artist, especially those interested in narrative illustration or concept art where clarity is key.
Procreate Tips:
- Line Art: Unlike Sfumato, this style embraces strong line art. Use a clean, sharp brush like the "Syrup" or "Studio Pen" for your initial drawing and keep it visible in the final piece.
- Composition: Use the Drawing Guide to create a strong grid. Place your key figures and elements along these lines to create a sense of stability and order.
- Rendering: Aim for smooth blending. The default "Soft Brush" and the Smudge tool (used carefully) can help you achieve that polished, sculptural look.
9. Romanticism's Atmosphere (The Turner Tempest)
Romanticism was all about emotion, nature, and the sublime. J.M.W. Turner, a key figure, was a master of capturing atmosphere. He dissolved form into light and color, creating epic, swirling landscapes and seascapes that were more about feeling than precise depiction. His work is a whirlwind of light, fog, and elemental fury.
This is the style to study if you want to paint breathtaking, atmospheric landscapes. Turner teaches you to prioritize mood over detail and to use color and texture to evoke powerful emotions. Your digital environments will go from static backdrops to living, breathing worlds.
Procreate Tips:
- Texture: This is all about texture. Use Procreate's "Wet Acrylic," "Gouache," and various texture brushes to build up layers of paint. Don’t be afraid to get messy.
- Palette Knife: The "Palette Knife" brushes in the "Artistic" set are perfect for scraping away and building up thick areas of color, simulating Turner's impasto techniques.
- Color Gradients: Use gradients and large, soft airbrushes to create the foundational atmospheric light of your scene before adding details.
10. Impasto Texture (The Rembrandt Relief)
Rembrandt was a master of many things, but his use of impasto—thick, textured paint that stands out from the canvas—is legendary. He used it selectively to catch the light and draw attention to the most important parts of a painting, like the gold thread in a garment or the wrinkled skin on a face. The shadows, by contrast, were often thin and transparent.
Incorporating impasto techniques into your digital work adds a tactile, physical quality that can make it leap off the screen. It gives your art weight and substance, breaking the illusion of a perfectly flat surface. It’s a fantastic way to add visual interest and guide the viewer’s focus.
Procreate Tips:
- Impasto Brushes: Procreate has excellent "Oil Paint" and "Palette Knife" brushes that are designed to simulate this effect. There are also many custom impasto brush sets available online.
- Layer Styles: A clever trick is to paint your textured highlights on a new layer. Duplicate this layer, fill the bottom copy with black, and nudge it slightly to create a drop shadow. This enhances the 3D effect.
- Bevel: Use the "Layer" > "Bevel" effect in some programs, or simulate it by hand-painting highlights and shadows along the edges of your brushstrokes to make them look raised.
11. Academic Smoothness (The Bouguereau Finish)
Academic Art, exemplified by artists like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, was the height of 19th-century technical skill. It's characterized by an incredibly smooth, polished finish with no visible brushstrokes. The goal was to create a perfect, idealized reality, especially in mythological scenes and portraits.
While sometimes criticized for being overly sentimental, studying the Academic style is an incredible exercise in rendering. It will teach you how to blend colors flawlessly and model form with photographic precision. It’s the ultimate training for achieving hyper-realism in your digital work.
Procreate Tips:
- Blending: This is all about blending. Use a combination of soft airbrushes at low opacity and the Smudge tool with a soft, textured brush.
- Value Study: Start with a detailed monochromatic underpainting (grisaille) to perfect your values before adding color. Add color on new layers set to "Color" or "Overlay" mode.
- Patience: This style takes time. Work in small sections, blending and polishing each area until it's perfect before moving on.
12. Pre-Raphaelite Vibrancy (The Rossetti Jewel)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against the Academic style, seeking inspiration in the art that came before Raphael. Their work, like that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is known for its jewel-like colors, intense detail, and romantic, often literary, subject matter. They painted on a wet white ground to make their colors incredibly vibrant and luminous.
This style is a wonderful study in color theory and detailed linework. If you want your colors to sing and your details to tell a story, look no further. It combines the precision of the Northern Renaissance with a new, romantic intensity.
Procreate Tips:
- Digital White Ground: Start on a pure white canvas. When you lay down your colors, try to keep them clean and avoid over-blending, which can lead to muddying.
- Color Saturation: Don't be afraid of high-saturation colors, but use them wisely. The "Hue, Saturation, Brightness" adjustment tool is your friend.
- Detailed Linework: Emphasize the outlines of your figures and objects with clean, precise lines, much like a stained-glass window.
13. Cross-Hatching Mastery (The Dürer Print)
Albrecht Dürer wasn't just a painter; he was one of the greatest printmakers in history. His engravings and woodcuts are masterpieces of line work. He used cross-hatching—a technique of using layered sets of parallel lines—to create value, texture, and form. The density, curvature, and direction of the lines all work together to describe the object.
Learning Dürer's cross-hatching in Procreate is an incredible skill for any artist. It improves your linework, teaches you to think about form in a new way, and gives your digital art a fantastic, handcrafted, traditional feel. It's perfect for ink-style drawings, concept sketches, and illustrations.
Procreate Tips:
- Brushes: Use a pressure-sensitive inking brush that can produce a fine, tapered line. The "Gesinski Ink," "Syrup," or "Technical Pen" are all great options.
- Line Direction: Pay attention to the direction of your hatching. Let your lines follow the contours of the form you are drawing. This is called "contour hatching" and it creates a powerful 3D effect.
- Layers: Use different layers for different sets of hatching lines. This allows you to easily erase or adjust the density without ruining the lines underneath.
14. Goya's Expressive Darkness (The Black Paintings)
Towards the end of his life, Francisco Goya painted a series of dark, haunting works known as the "Black Paintings." This style is raw, expressive, and deeply psychological. He used a limited, muddy palette, rough brushwork, and distorted figures to explore dark themes. It’s a style driven purely by emotion and internal vision.
When you feel constrained by the need for realism, studying Goya is liberating. It teaches you that art can be a powerful tool for expressing emotion, even if it means sacrificing technical polish. It’s perfect for creating horror art, expressing complex emotions, or just breaking free from your comfort zone.
Procreate Tips:
- Palette: Create a palette of dark, earthy tones: blacks, umbers, ochres, and a few muted whites or reds.
- Brushwork: Use messy, expressive brushes like the "Jagged Brush" or "Old Brush." Don't try to be neat. Let the strokes be rough and visible.
- Focus on Emotion: Don't worry about perfect anatomy or perspective. Focus on the feeling you want to convey. Distort figures and use composition to create a sense of unease or drama.
15. The Grisaille Underpainting (A Foundational Technique)
This isn't a "style" in the same way, but it's a foundational technique used by countless masters from Van Eyck to Ingres. Grisaille involves creating a complete monochromatic underpainting (usually in shades of grey, green, or brown) that establishes all the values, forms, and lighting of the final piece. Color is then applied over this in thin, transparent layers (glazes).
This is perhaps the single most useful Old Master technique for a digital artist to learn. It separates the problem of value from the problem of color. By getting your values right first, your final colored piece will have incredible depth, realism, and a solid structure. As Goh Ling Yong has demonstrated in his own tutorials, a strong value foundation is non-negotiable for impactful art.
Procreate Tips:
- Create the Grisaille: Paint your entire scene in shades of grey on one or several layers. Focus only on light and shadow.
- Color Layers: Create a new layer on top of your grisaille and set its blend mode to "Color." Now, you can paint with solid colors, and they will adopt the values from the layer below. Use multiple "Color" or "Overlay" layers to build up chromatic richness.
- Final Adjustments: Once colored, you can still adjust the original grisaille layer to easily deepen shadows or brighten highlights across the entire painting.
Your Timeless Toolkit Awaits
Whew! That’s a journey through a few hundred years of art history, right on your iPad. The beauty of these techniques is that they aren't just historical trivia; they are a living, breathing toolkit for the modern digital artist. By understanding the principles of Sfumato, Tenebrism, Colorito, and the rest, you're not just copying the past—you're learning a visual language that has captivated humanity for centuries.
Don't feel overwhelmed. Pick just one style from this list that excites you. Maybe you’re drawn to the drama of Caravaggio or the detail of Van Eyck. Spend a week or two exploring it. Do a study of a master's work, then try to apply the core principles to your own original art. You will be amazed at how it deepens your understanding and elevates your final pieces.
So, what are you waiting for? Your Procreate gallery is ready for its own Renaissance.
Which Old Master style are you most excited to try? Share your thoughts and your favorite artists in the comments below! I'd love to see what you create.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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