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.
https://www.grutbrushes.com/shop/photoshop-brushes/kitchen-pyle-photoshop-charcoal-brush/
This week’s free GrutBrush is a Photoshop sketching pencil called Mud Slice, it’s quite soft, equivalent to perhaps a 5 or 6B graphite pencil (seen here enlarged 200%). 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
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
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
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.
