I’m working on a set of Photoshop cloud brushes for the new year, this fluffy cumulus brush will be given away free in this week’s GrutBrushes newsletter, in your email either today or tomorrow. Don’t get the newsletter? Sign up or Register here and you’ll be subscribed
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/
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.
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.
See how it’s done in this 45 second video:
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
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.
