I’m delighted to add this new piece by Keve Kepes in the GrutBrushes Gallery today. Thanks very much for sharing this Keve! To see more of Keve’s work visit his Artstation portfolio.
Have some artwork created using GrutBrushes that you’d like to share? Submit your best today (if you don’t want to share it, send it anyway and let me know it’s not to be published, I love to see what you’re making)
I added this wet inky Photoshop wash brush to the shop this morning. Start slowly with a soft stylus pressure and build on it by drawing back and forth to add more soggy ink until you have as much ink pooling as you need. Take care not to lift your stylus until you finish your stroke if you want to avoid overlapping edges. It’s edges sometimes look better in general with a bit of softening using either a blender or an eraser.
This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Scatter Mat” a gritty wiry natural media brush that starts with a relatively uniform mid toned line but ends in a powdery mess at the highest pressure range. This brush brings a chimney sweep’s broom to your sketchbook. As always, you can download it on the free brush of the week page until Monday when there will be a brand new free Photoshop brush to download.
Taking a quick break from working on the cloud brushes to play around with some new splattery ink and paint brushes in the workshop. As usual, the goal is to make brushes that behave naturally; staining, splattering and ‘soaking’ into the paper as you draw, these are not stencil stamps. Here you can also see how using one of my paper templates enhances the organic look (take a look at the lighting in the darkest spots for example)
This Free Photoshop sampler set of 10 free Photoshop brushes and tools for digital artists is yours for free to celebrate 1 full year of giving away a new free Photoshop brush of the week for 52 weeks straight! https://www.grutbrushes.com/sampler If you’re using Photoshop CC 2014/15 Download it with the free GrutBrushes plugin panel for the full effect or simply use them in your Tool Presets panel. This image was created using only the tools in the GrutBrushes sampler on a paper background with no post processing.
This week’s brush is “Hatch LeeScritch” a A dense cross hatcher with a heavy fingerprint that ramps rapidly to clear on the edges. The pattern of this cross hatch brush is mostly opaque and thick stroked but the individual hatches taper to a sharp point. In this video I install the brush from inside Photoshop using the GrutBrushes plugin but you can also download it from free brush of the week page and load it in manually like any other Photoshop tool preset (see the included pdf)
50 straight weeks of free Photoshop brushes with no repeats, in two weeks it will be one full year of giving away brushes!
This week I’m giving away ‘Thicken Think’ a natural media Photoshop brush that acts a bit like a pastel airbrush if such a thing were possible. You can download it all week from the free brush of the week page or in the shop.
Sometimes people ask me which brush I used to do the shading in this painting and when I tell them it’s the ‘Ocean Liner‘ brush they usually don’t believe me and I really don’t blame them because this is the stroke most people get when they use the ocean liner brush:
The fact is that most Photoshop brushes have a wide range of looks that you can get simply by varying the pressure of your stylus and sometimes you can find some of the most interesting effects at the very low end of the pressure scale.
By charging the brush size slightly from 20 to 45 pixels and stroking ever so lightly, and lifting my stylus between strokes (this part is important!) I can begin to build up this nice texture.
[baslider name=”lowstyluspressure”]
Now I probably wouldn’t set out to create this with this brush but the point is to not accept your brushes at face value. Experiment and investigate how they behave at the very lowest stylus pressure ranges and you may discover that they, like you, have hidden talents.