brush stroke characteristics of Pasteup digital watercolour brush
What is it that gives a brush it’s personality? It’s a combination of your style, how your fingers move and the brush itself. Just as you have a unique way of moving your wrist to create lines, each brush has it’s own unique stylistic signatures. Whether it’s a few stray bristles, the way it holds or releases water, oil, paint and pigment, or simply how slowly or quickly it tapers from a point to a blob, if at all. All these quirks and characteristics add up to give a brush it’s personality.
The same holds true for a good digtal artists’s brush. In this visual dissection I’ve attempted to draw attention to some of the the characteristics unique to the ‘Paste Up’ Photoshop watercolour brush, some of the most prominent features that add up to create the signature look of it’s strokes.
I get quite a few requests to share the backgrounds in my demos. I do plan to release a set of seamless papers, canvases, cards and other backdrops for digital artists. It’s in the works I promise, but in the meantime, here’s the watercolour paper used in many of my digital painting brush demo videos. Continue reading Watercolor Paper Background
digital oil pastel drawing brush strokes created with the ‘Papaya Grind’ Photoshop Pastel Brush toolset
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responsive pastel brush for Photoshop
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]‘Papaya Grind’ Photoshop Oil pastel Brush.A thick starchy oilk pastel brush with a fine clingy texture and a fadeable edge. With a very fine tip at light stylus pressure it also spreads to a wider tip and comes on relatively strongly with slightly heavier pressure, though it still requires a few passes to cover your image surface completely.[button link=”https://www.grutbrushes.com/cart/?add-to-cart=44452″]Add to Cart – Free[/button]Free download ends 03/06[/twocol_one_last]
So Konwet, the latest ink brush in the store is a runny ink brush with an edge that bleeds as if you are drawing on a wet paper towel. A variable sized allows you to do fairly detailed work at low pressure but the brush really excels at broad gestural drawing.
Painted using only the “Dense Weather” oil brushbrush strokes of the dense weather Photoshop oil brush
Here’s another oil brush. I really must put the oils together in a collection. This one has a jagged flower petal pattern shaped brush stroke. It’s a fairly wet diluted brush that can be built up to an opaque coverage. The diluted flow makes blending the surrounding tones together really easy.
This brush is used to best effect by going over and re-working an area to diminish the appearance of the individual strokes and blend the areas together. The distinctive pattern it produces when drawn in a line can be overpowering when not blended but really works to your advantage when re-working an area over a few times as the visible brush strokes maintain a painterly appearance and reduce the likelihood of all the strokes blending together too much and becoming a mushy blur so common with overuse of blender brush tools. If used sparingly you will always be able to maintain the visible strokes that will give your painting an impressionistic and organic feel.
I hope to do a tutorial on how to best accentuate the oil painting look including adding a canvas texture but for now I’ll just say, paint on an Overlay layer and your background is important. If you watch the video at the bottom of this page, you can see that I paint most of it on an overlay layer, so that the canvas texture shows through the paint. Later, towards the end, I start painting on a normal layer, though with a light touch, to add a more opaque layer of paint in certain areas.
Brush strokes painted with the ‘Dense Weather’ oil brush
You can download this brush for free until Friday! (expired)
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Dense Weather – Photoshop Oil Brush
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]‘Dense Weather’ Photoshop Oil Brush.A patchy oil brush with a widely variable flow and a loose frayed edge. With low pressure you get a very diluted low opacity brush for roughing in shapes that quickly converts to crisp layers of built up texture to create nice blended tones.[button link=”https://www.grutbrushes.com/cart/?add-to-cart=34618″]Add to Cart – $1[/button][/twocol_one_last]
Watch the brush strokes in action
painting live with the ‘Dense Weather’ Photoshop oil brush video is sped up after the beginning.
Video of digital ink drawing done using the ‘Tremble Stem’ Photoshop Ink Brush toolset
“Tremble Stem” Photoshop Ink Brush – Free until Jan 26
A Photoshop ink brush with a dry felt tipped pen appearance at low pressure but gives fully opaque coverage with a fuzzy edge at full stylus pressure.
