When I see how Martin Guldbaek uses my Oil Impasto Photoshop brushes it is such a thrill. He brings out their sculptural qualities and gives them weight, to create forms that feel almost physical even though they are mostly just broad brush strokes of digital paint, but so perfectly placed, thanks to Martin’s superb understanding of light and volume. Continue reading Martin Guldbaek in the GrutBrushes Gallery
How to Scale a Photoshop Art Surface Paper texture to 600dpi
A customer told me that she always works in 600 dpi and wanted to put her artwork into an Art Surface and make sure it remained at 600 dpi so I made this video for her, showing two different ways to do it. There’s a text summary below the video
Method 1
Change the dpi to 600 dpi with resampling off (unchecked) Then paste your 600 dpi image into it (into the green ‘Artwork’ layer)
Then you can use the crop tool to increase your canvas size to any size you need and the background will magically fill in the paper texture seamlessly.
Continue reading How to Scale a Photoshop Art Surface Paper texture to 600dpi
Digital Pencil Portraits by Josh McCann
I have neither the skill nor the patience to draw the kind of portraits that Josh McCann does, but what makes them all the more remarkable is that he draws them with the GrutBrushes pencils! The piece above by Josh is the latest addition to the GrutBrushes gallery (Scroll down to see a timelapse video of this piece being created)
“For the most part I only use 4 [pencil] brushes (Mech Mini, Mech Mid, Maybe Sews and limbo lift.) I have saved each of those brushes out with varying levels of opacity and flow. And then I created my own mixer brush for blending. They’re great brushes for drawing!!”
Continue reading Digital Pencil Portraits by Josh McCann
How To Fix Photoshop Brush Lag
If you find your brush lags as you draw with your stylus, there are (unfortunately) many possible reasons but here are some things to try
The very first thing to do is to turn off smoothing on your brush, if it’s on. This can make it appear as if your brush is lagging but that is just the effect of the smoothing function, slowing your line down to even it out any jitters you may have as you draw. High smoothing will slow down your strokes considerably
If that doesn’t help, let’s explore some more settings in the preferences (Edit > Preferences >Performance) that may help…
Continue reading How To Fix Photoshop Brush Lag
How to Install GrutBrushes Photoshop Brushes from the Web Right into Photoshop using the plugin
Free Art Brushes Complete Black Friday Weekend Giveaway winners
Thanks to everyone who re-shared, reposted, tweeted and reblogged to enter to win the Art Brushes Complete set and 6 months of Art Brushes Membership.
The winners are:
Facebook: Shawn Brian Mack, Hana Takamura
Tumblr: @lagoonartastic and @rika35
Twitter: @KF2AT
Congratulations!…If you are one of the winners, send me an email at info@grutbrushes.com and I will send you the information on how to download your prize
First Ever GrutBrushes Black Friday Sale
Never happened before, may never happen again! Get the deals here
If you purchased any of those exact deals in the last 30 days I will honour these prices retroactively!! Just send me an email with the order numberl
How to Add Paper Texture to a Photo in Photoshop (Tutorial)
In this 2 minute Photoshop tutorial I show you how you can easily add a realistic paper texture to your photos in Photoshop using GrutBrushes Art Surfaces.
They are not just for digital painting!
All the paper textures shown in the video are now available in the shop but if you haven’t had a chance to try one yet, just click below to download.
Try One For Free!
Make sure you check out the online tips and tricks manual which includes a quickstart video!
Latest Photoshop Update Breaks GrutBrushes Plugin on Mac – (Update: Its Fixed now!)
Update 2 – 2019:
The plugin is working again! If your GrutBrushes plugin stopped working after you updated Photoshop. Uninstall it (instructions here) and then re-install it and it will work (you can download the latest version from your downloads tab in your account or get it here if you never had it)
Update 1 (23 Oct 2018): The problem seems to be affecting Mac only. I have been able to confirm that the GrutBrushes plugin still works on all 3 updates to Photoshop CC v20 that I’ve seen so far on Windows
Original Post (18 Oct): It seems the latest Photoshop update is not compatible with the GrutBrushes plugin and will cause it to stop working. The brushes still work of course, the problem is just with the plugin. I have written to my plugin developer to see if they can help, but until then it looks like updating to the latest version of Photoshop will disable the GrutBrushes plugin. Re-installing it does not seem to fix it.
I have written to my plugin developer to see if they can fix it and I will let you know here as soon as I hear back. In the meantime, be aware that if you update Photoshop to the latest version, you will lose access to the GrutBrushes plugin! (Your settings should still be there and I hope they will return if I can get the plugin working again)
If you want to keep the old version of Photoshop installed as well as the new one you can uncheck the “remove old versions” box when updating. This will install the new version and keep the old one installed.
Keep in mind this means you will have two separate versions of Photoshop on your computer,
You also have the option of re-installing older versions of Photoshop from the Adobe Creative Cloud app:
if you have already upgraded and don’t want to install the previous version you will have to access the brushes from the Tool Presets panel.
I’m very sorry for this but I had no idea Adobe would be doing this. I hope I can find a solution soon. Stay tuned. I will update you here as soon as I hear.