I do so many doodles and demos demonstrating one particular brush but the real fun comes when you use multiple brushes, each with it’s own strengths and personalities. This sketch uses 3 different brushes, Gulf Stream, a broad ranged responsive ink brush, Linoleum Roll, a wide grungy textured brush and Lazy Fair, a whispy ink brush with visible bristle marks.
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‘Soggy Tail’ Photoshop Natural Media Brush for digital artists
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Brush strokes of the Natural Media Brush toolset ‘Soggy Tail’ for digital artists
A cloudy-textured brush which starts out as a soft shader with light stylus pressure but ends up very opaque at the highest pressure. The Soggy Tail natural media brush has the look of a watercolour and even bleeds a bit into the paper at its edges if you hold it almost steady in a spot, but has the opacity of an oil pastel.[/twocol_one_last]
As always, you can download it from the shop or the member’s free Photoshop brush page for free until the end of this week (May 11) when there will be a new free brush.
*Requires Photoshop cs5.5 or higher and a pressure sensitive graphics tablet. Free registration required to download.
brush stroke characteristics of Pasteup digital watercolour brush
What is it that gives a brush it’s personality? It’s a combination of your style, how your fingers move and the brush itself. Just as you have a unique way of moving your wrist to create lines, each brush has it’s own unique stylistic signatures. Whether it’s a few stray bristles, the way it holds or releases water, oil, paint and pigment, or simply how slowly or quickly it tapers from a point to a blob, if at all. All these quirks and characteristics add up to give a brush it’s personality.
The same holds true for a good digtal artists’s brush. In this visual dissection I’ve attempted to draw attention to some of the the characteristics unique to the ‘Paste Up’ Photoshop watercolour brush, some of the most prominent features that add up to create the signature look of it’s strokes.
So Konwet, the latest ink brush in the store is a runny ink brush with an edge that bleeds as if you are drawing on a wet paper towel. A variable sized allows you to do fairly detailed work at low pressure but the brush really excels at broad gestural drawing.
Painted using only the “Dense Weather” oil brushbrush strokes of the dense weather Photoshop oil brush
Here’s another oil brush. I really must put the oils together in a collection. This one has a jagged flower petal pattern shaped brush stroke. It’s a fairly wet diluted brush that can be built up to an opaque coverage. The diluted flow makes blending the surrounding tones together really easy.
This brush is used to best effect by going over and re-working an area to diminish the appearance of the individual strokes and blend the areas together. The distinctive pattern it produces when drawn in a line can be overpowering when not blended but really works to your advantage when re-working an area over a few times as the visible brush strokes maintain a painterly appearance and reduce the likelihood of all the strokes blending together too much and becoming a mushy blur so common with overuse of blender brush tools. If used sparingly you will always be able to maintain the visible strokes that will give your painting an impressionistic and organic feel.
I hope to do a tutorial on how to best accentuate the oil painting look including adding a canvas texture but for now I’ll just say, paint on an Overlay layer and your background is important. If you watch the video at the bottom of this page, you can see that I paint most of it on an overlay layer, so that the canvas texture shows through the paint. Later, towards the end, I start painting on a normal layer, though with a light touch, to add a more opaque layer of paint in certain areas.
Brush strokes painted with the ‘Dense Weather’ oil brush
You can download this brush for free until Friday! (expired)
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Dense Weather – Photoshop Oil Brush
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]‘Dense Weather’ Photoshop Oil Brush.A patchy oil brush with a widely variable flow and a loose frayed edge. With low pressure you get a very diluted low opacity brush for roughing in shapes that quickly converts to crisp layers of built up texture to create nice blended tones.[button link=”https://www.grutbrushes.com/cart/?add-to-cart=34618″]Add to Cart – $1[/button][/twocol_one_last]
Watch the brush strokes in action
painting live with the ‘Dense Weather’ Photoshop oil brush video is sped up after the beginning.
When I tell people about Grutbrushes they often say “Oh yes, I see tons of watercolor brushes on the web” Chances are they’ve seen the stencil type brushes that are made from a scan of one brush stroke that you can then stamp onto your image. You can achieve some fantastic results with those brushes if used sparingly but the big difference, and it really is big, is that Grutbrushes are dynamic and respond to the speed, pressure and motion of your stylus on your tablet allowing you to actually paint with them and achieve organic lines that resemble traditional media. This video shows a side by side comparison between the free stencil type brushes found all over the net and Grutbrushes pressure responsive watercolour brushes made for digital artists. If you haven’t already, you can download a free watercolor brush here to try it out for yourself.
