One of the great things about digital painting is that your canvas can be your palette. By holding down the ALT or Option key in Photoshop you can pick a new color from your current painting’s canvas and continue on. Here you can see me travel a tremendous distance from light to dark just by picking a new darker color from the crevices of my previous impasto brush strokes in Photoshop. This was painted using the new Linsee Dew Photoshop Impasto Oil brush
Here are some scratch pad doodles from the workshop of some of the brushes that are new in the shop this week. I make these when creating and testing new brushes and I am going to start sharing these here and on the blog from time to time. I think it may be a nice and perhaps useful look into what I was thinking when making the brushes and also gives a better opportunity for some of the brushes unique characteristics and strengths to shine.
Once a new Photoshop brush is ready to be published, I try to make brush stroke guides that are consistent and uniform so that you can get an idea of the mechanics of how the brush performs by watching the animated video brush stroke pop ups in the shop. These act as a kind of digital paint runway audition for the brushes and are intended to be practical tools for comparing brushes.
For the animated previews I usually take each brush through essentially the same moves; I start out with a light touch on the stylus, move to a firmer pressure, do a few turns to see how it handles circles, double back a little to show how the brush strokes act when they build upon each other, then end with reduced pressure again to show how it ramps down at the opposite end of the pressure scale and then perhaps finish with a few single dabs and a quick slash stroke or two. These are useful as benchmarks to compare all the brushes but probably not the best way to show them off, and certainly not the best showcase of what makes them special. Each brush has it’s own features and quirks that make it special and sometimes these little personality traits get lost in the uniform, regimented brush stroke guides. By sharing some of my scratch pads and showing the brushes in the wild, I hope to honour some of the brushes’ personality traits.
This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Bed Kelp” a delicously messy ink brush with a ragged edge that starts as a medium wash but ramps up quickly to a full viscous black… and I just can’t stop doodling with it, I truly love sketching with this brush. Despite it’s jagged texture and crumbling edges it has a nice continuity with the appearance of a long trailing stroke which can taper to a fairly fine tip. You can download it in the shop ( grutbrushes.com/shop ) or on the free Photoshop brush page: grutbrushes.com/freebrush
You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you. Meanwhile, for a change of pace, don’t miss out on the free Lightsaber brushes that seem to have hopped on a viral wave that has kept the website flooded with new visitors all day: grutbrushes.com/drinksaber
I added “Horse Main“, a new oil impasto Photoshop brush to the brush shop today, Free for all members, or for a small fee to the rest of you. Follow this link to see a 1 minute video of me painting this image.
This week’s free Photoshop brush is a very fibrous textured watercolour brush called Bran Chatter. You can download it in the shop ( grutbrushes.com/shop ) or on the free Photoshop brush page ( grutbrushes.com/freebrush ) If you want to download the paper texture (PSD file) just click the download button below
You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new brush.
You can watch a video of me painting this here
Here’s the scratch pad from yesterday’s brush experiments in the workshop. These are scrawlings from a number of different unpublished Photoshop brushes that I am working on. About half of them are oil impasto brushes, the rest are natural media or gouache brushes. (Visit the blog post to zoom in and explore the detail of the brush strokes by holding/tapping to magnify)
Perhaps more interesting though, the background is a paper texture (a seamless tile) that is also part of an upcoming series of papers and art surfaces that I am creating. They are PSD files that include several layers and settings to enhance the effect of the paper. The idea is to affect the appearance of the digital ink or paint, simulating real world phenomena such as surface depth, absorption and media pooling and not merely a background over which colour is applied. I plan to release the first ones for free on the site, starting soon (next week?) I will make a special page in the resources where freebies such as these will be available to download. Stay tuned to the blog for updates
Back to line drawing! This week’s free brush is an ink brush with a relatively slender line which drops off and becomes intermittent at the lowest pressure but fattens up nicely at full pressure for a nice variable taper. This ink brush has a slightly worn edge which gives it a warm feel verging a bit more on the painty side of ink. The shading in the background was done with the ‘Damp Nakpin’ watercolor brush.
You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new brush.
This one is a fixed width rough and dry Gouache Photoshop brush with the characteristics of an old house painters brush found stashed behins the basement furnace. This brush works best with a lighter touch to reveal it’s dirty dry brush sparsity but you can go full pressure for total coverage at full opacity while keeping your edges ragged.
grutbrushes.com/shop/photoshop-brushes/swash-wanted-photoshop-gouache-brush/
Sometimes a soft brush with no context, nothing to compare it to, can just appear as smudged, faded or even just out of focus. What I like about this week’s brush is that while it has a softness to it, it also has lots of sharp grainy ‘bits’ in it, which depending on the background, appear to be either paper flaws or flaky deposits of pigment. It’s digital after all so what they really are, is up to you.
You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new brush.
