Relive your memories of a night out with friends as a glorious Lightsaber battle instead by adding Lightsabers to all your photos in just a few clicks with these free Photoshop brushes. Use the hashtag #drinksaber so that I can find your creations!
Continue reading Add LightSabers to Photos with the Lightsaber Photoshop Brushes
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.
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 These are scrawlings from a number of different unpublished Photoshop brushes that I am working on.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/
The November update to the GrutBrushes cheat sheets & brush stroke guide is here with about 30 new brushes added since the last update.
You can see it online and hover/tap to magnify the brush strokes (the prettiest way to preview) or download one giant Jpeg or PDF
While this is a great way to get a good overview of what all your brushes look like in one go, don’t forget the all important animated brush stroke preview that you get when you click on the red ‘play’ button on every single brush in the brush shop
You can access and see all of these on the brush guides resources page
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.
When I was growing up I was never far from a pencil and a blank piece of paper and I spent countless hours sketching, doodling and experimenting with any tool that could make a mark on paper. I used to collect the graphite shavings from my pencil sharpener and would dip my fingers into the silky smooth powder and then use my loaded finger to draw or shade my sketches with dusty fingerprints and the smudges that inevitably came with them. The Lead Thumb natural media brush is my digital tribute to those late night experiments in my pencil lab. All these years later I finally made one that won’t spill all over the carpet.
I drew this dog with the Lead Thumb brush by using heavy stylus pressure to draw the dark full textured marks and then softening up the pressure to create the gray shaded areas. When lines were to thick or too pronounced I either used the eraser to chip away at them or just used a mid tone closer to the background to draw over them and soften them.
“Lead Thumb” is available for free all this week until next Monday when as always, there will be a new free Photoshop brush of the week
