This Photoshop Charcoal brush with a lot of hand made paper fiber texture is new in the shop today. The lines at the top left are pure unadultarated ‘as is’ strokes whereas the rest have been shaped and carved with erasers.
Some Photoshop Gouache brushes that I am working on. I like to work on a few different brushes of one type at a time so that I can see how they work together before I publish them. This is an attempt to get some kind of cohesiveness and continuity within a series of brushes. It’s not easy and I lose that battle more often than I’d like to and while there will always be an outsider brush or two (three?) within a set, by fine tuning them in small groups in the workshop I hope to minimise that.
If one Gouache brush is working for you on a project, but to finish up that last section you need a brush that is just a tad drier, perhaps one that shows a few more bristle marks for a grander dramatic flourish, well I hope to have you covered.
I’ve added a new oil impasto brush to the shop tonight ‘Sugar knife‘ Although it applies much like a traditional brush, the texture is more Palette knife-like with it’s layered flat slabs of paint. I promise a break from the oil brushes tomorrow when I will be adding the first pencil in what seems like forever. I hope to get out a set of various pencils within the next month or so.
Here are some of the new brushes added to the shop in the first two weeks of December. These are all free to GrutBrushes Art-Brushes Multi-Set owners still in the free trial period and of course, all Art Brushes complete members.
If last month was a charcoal brush month, this month may be a bit heavy on the oil Impasto brushes but I can’t keep them in the workshop much longer and they are really best when you use a bunch of them together in a painting. Variety of strokes as well as actual brushes presets is the secret to using the Impasto brushes to good effect. The four here now make a total of about 6 oil impasto brushes in the shop. By the end of March I hope and expect there to be about 20 or so available.
Not forgotten, I also added Molt Vinyl and Timpany Dee, both watery ink and watercolour brushes. Molt Vinyl is this week’s free Photoshop brush of the week so grab it while you can
This week’s free GrutBrush is “Molt Vinyl” A thick ink that just won’t sink in. Like painting with ink on stone, this Photoshop ink brush applies thickly, but spreads across the surface, staining slightly and leaving pools of fingerprint sized smudgy ink stains. You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you. grutbrushes.com/freebrush
Q: George asked me in an email: “Is there any way to use these brushes as an eraser?”
A: Yes! If you’re painting or drawing in Photoshop using a brush that has a nice organic brush stroke and you want to correct or erase part of your painting using an eraser that has the same look and feel of your brush instead of the default Photoshop erasers there are a number of ways to do so in Photoshop.
Perhaps the easiest is to switch your brush mode from ‘normal’ to ‘clear’ which will essentially turn your current brush into an eraser, with all it’s settings in tact. But what if you have switched brushes or recently changed the settings of your brushes and want to go back to a previous brush? There’s an easy way to do that as well. With your eraser tool selected, just open the brush preset panel and you will see the history of the last seven brushes you used in order. Simply select the one you want to use and your eraser now takes on almost all the properties of that brush.
This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Will Do” a cottony soft charcoal brush that can build to a full, more textured fill. This brush is a good soft shader when used with a light touch as it has a powdery softness and can be used to build up tones quite lightly.
A cat seemed a fitting subjects and I attempted a drawing of my old friend Charlie, who through my clumsy stylus work seems to have turned from a grey 18 year old (at the time of the reference photo I used) into a bit of a calico kitten, but no matter, I think his essence is still in there. You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you at grutbrushes.com/freebrush
This week’s free GrutBrush is “Crag Ribble” a digital meld between an ink and a watercolor with a bit of pastel thrown in. Only in digital can you mix the properties of wax and water. You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you. grutbrushes.com/freebrush