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Free Brush of the Week #54 – “Spent Pestle” Specialist Brush

Painting with eth Spent Pestle Photoshop brush
Painting with the ‘Spent Pestle’ Photoshop brush (paper texture added)

This week’s free GrutBrush ( grutbrushes.com/freebrush ) is a specialty brush which mostly means that it doesn’t quite fit perfectly into any of the traditional media categories like charcoal, ink, watercolour, etc. Nor does it quite fit into my catch-all category “Natural Media” where I normally place brushes that behave and look like traditional media. This is what I call a ‘Specialty’ brush. Tthey tend to have a look that is quite unique that makes them suitable for one particular tasks rather than general drawing or painting. you wouldn’t chose a specialty brush to take a message while on the phone or draw a map to your house.

Making this image

To create this drawing I alternated between black and white a lot (using the ‘x‘ key shortcut) and used the white to carve away at the black lines, sometimes shaping them into finer points than the brush weight allowed. When I was done, I turned the layer into an overlay, over the paper texture and toned down the white parts of my drawing using hue/saturation to the point where it is still just slightly visible, almost as if it’s a faint water stain, like wet sand off a shoreline. I then added a tetxured overlay of the paper on top of the black areas to give it a more ‘lived in’ look and integrate it a bit more with the paper backing. A flat layer of colour on a natural background always looks too artificial to even be a part of it’s own background, nothing in real life is one single colour or tone.

Having more fun with the brush of the week demo doodles

This drawing is also the start of a bit of a departure from the usual demo images, not in the content or style, which is my usual doodley sketch style, but in the rules I set for myself when creating it and it’s something I hope to be doing more of from now on. For the past year, I usually set myself pretty tight rules on how I present the demo images, I try to make sure I only use that one brush, ‘as is’, I don’t change the width, I don’t manipulate the appearance of the lines, I used to stick to only one that brush for the whole piece. In the beginning I even tended to restrict myself to black and white to present what I felt was the most accurate depiction of what the lines look like so that you know exactly what you’re getting when you download the brush. This year I am going to try (spare time permitting) to relax my self imposed rules and have a bit more fun with the brushes for a few reasons:

  1. You can always click through to the brush page on the website and see all the technical details there including an animated preview showing exactly what it’s like to draw an unadultarated brush stroke in black on a white background.
  2. It’s a free brush, so I am not sure why I feel like I’m doing a bait and switch just because I used an eraser to tidy up a splotchy area of one line or added a texture, or changed the line width. I realise that I shouldn’t shy away from showing unconventional uses of the brushes the point is to show you what you can do with an art tool, and part of that should be to get creative with it, I’m not making a schematic for a medical device!
  3. The final reason is mostly for me. While following strict rules may be a reliable way to immediately showing what the brush looks like, that’s not very conducive to creativity or fun. I always tell myself “Just stick to using the brush as is, consider this drawing a product demo and then later you can have some fun with it and do something more creative” but in reality, later never comes. Making the brush of the week is often the only time all week that I actually do any doodling so If I don’t use the ‘free brush of the week’ in a creative and fun way when making the demo image, I may never get to it again! It does me good to remind myself that I started making these brushes was a way to add creativity back into a stressful work life, and I hope I can share some of the benefits with you.
    So from now on I’m going to try to be a little looser with the brushes and play around a bit more. Hopefully I’ll take advantage of my relaxed rules and start having a bit more fun with the brushes, and Im sure you’ll forgive me if I add in a few flourishes with other brushes and take a few liberties with the technical details. I promise that the images will always be primarily driven and inspired by the brush I am giving away.
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Free Brush of the Week #53 – ‘Scatter Mat’ Natural Media Photoshop Brush

Painted with the Scattrer Mat Photoshop brushe (wash with 'Moth Wing' brush)
Painted with the ‘Scatter Mat’ Photoshop brush (wash with ‘Moth Wing’ brush)

This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Scatter Mat” a gritty wiry natural media brush that starts with a relatively uniform mid toned line but ends in a powdery mess at the highest pressure range. This brush brings a chimney sweep’s broom to your sketchbook. As always, you can download it on the free brush of the week page until Monday when there will be a brand new free Photoshop brush to download.

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Making a Mess Again in Photoshop

Photoshop Ink and paint splatter brushes
Splashing about with Ink and paint in Photoshop

Taking a quick break from working on the cloud brushes to play around with some new splattery ink and paint brushes in the workshop. As usual, the goal is to make brushes that behave naturally; staining, splattering and ‘soaking’ into the paper as you draw, these are not stencil stamps. Here you can also see how using one of my paper templates enhances the organic look (take a look at the lighting in the darkest spots for example)

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GrutBrushes Plugin & Sampler Set of 10 Free Brushes and Tools

10 Free Photoshop Tools for GrutBrushes Photoshop plugin users
10 Free Photoshop Tools for GrutBrushes Photoshop plugin users

This Free Photoshop sampler set of 10 free Photoshop brushes and tools for digital artists is yours for free to celebrate 1 full year of giving away a new free Photoshop brush of the week for 52 weeks straight! https://www.grutbrushes.com/sampler If you’re using Photoshop CC 2014/15 Download it with the free GrutBrushes plugin panel for the full effect or simply use them in your Tool Presets panel. This image was created using only the tools in the GrutBrushes sampler on a paper background with no post processing.

It Includes: 1 Impasto Oil Brush • 1 Watercolor Brush • 1 Charcoal Brush • 1 Photoshop Pencil • 1 Gouache Brush • 1 Cross Hatching Brush • 1:1 Square Crop Toolset • Sharp Eraser Tool • Graph Paper Tool •

Use it with the free plugin:
grutbrushes.com/plugin

For a new free brush every week:
grutbrushes.com/freebrush

To get Every single Artist’s Brush from GrutBrushes without waiting 180 weeks click here!

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Free GrutBrush of the week #51 – Hatch Leescritch Cross Hatching brush

This week’s brush is “Hatch LeeScritch” a A dense cross hatcher with a heavy fingerprint that ramps rapidly to clear on the edges. The pattern of this cross hatch brush is mostly opaque and thick stroked but the individual hatches taper to a sharp point. In this video I install the brush from inside Photoshop using the GrutBrushes plugin but you can also download it from free brush of the week page and load it in manually like any other Photoshop tool preset (see the included pdf)

You can get a new free Photoshop brush every week here:
grutbrushes.com/freebrush

and the plugin here (Photoshop CC2014/15 only)
grutbrushes.com/plugin

 

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Free Photoshop Brush of the Week #50 “Thicken Think” Natural Media Brush

Painted with the Thicken Think Photoshop brush (on a textured paper PSD)

 

50 straight weeks of free Photoshop brushes with no repeats, in two weeks it will be one full year of giving away brushes!

This week I’m giving away ‘Thicken Think’ a natural media Photoshop brush that acts a bit like a pastel airbrush if such a thing were possible. You can download it all week from the free brush of the week page or in the shop.

Free Photoshop Brush of the Week 50 - Thicken Think Natural Media Brush
Free Photoshop Brush of the Week 50 – Drawing with the Thicken Think Natural Media Photoshop Brush
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Getting The Most out of Your Photoshop Brushes – Exploring The Low Pressure Range

http://grutbrushes.wistia.com/medias/lpubpnx945?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1020

Sometimes people ask me which brush I used to do the shading in this painting and when I tell them it’s the ‘Ocean Liner‘ brush they usually don’t believe me and I really don’t blame them because this is the stroke most people get when they use the ocean liner brush:

Brush stroke with average pressure applied
Photoshop Brush stroke with average pressure applied

The fact is that most Photoshop brushes have a wide range of looks that you can get simply by varying the pressure of your stylus and sometimes you can find some of the most interesting effects at the very low end of the pressure scale.

By charging the brush size slightly from 20 to 45 pixels and stroking ever so lightly, and lifting my stylus between strokes (this part is important!) I can begin to build up this nice texture.

[baslider name=”lowstyluspressure”]

Now I probably wouldn’t set out to create this with this brush but the point is to not accept your brushes at face value. Experiment and investigate how they behave at the very lowest stylus pressure ranges and you may discover that they, like you, have hidden talents.

 

 

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Free Photoshop Brush of the Week #49 “Re Cc” Pencil

Sketching in Photoshop with the free Photoshop brush of the week #49 a hard carbon pencil

This week’s free GrutBrush is the “Re Cc” pencil. It’s a hard Photoshop pencil with an intermittent line reminiscent of the marks you get when scratching with a hard point through carbon paper (thus the CC in the name) You can get it all this week on the free Photoshop brush page or in the brush shop.

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Free Photoshop Brush of the Week #48 ‘Rag Blather’

Painted in Photoshop with the 'Rag Blather' Natural Media brush
Painted in Photoshop with the ‘Rag Blather’ Natural Media brush

This was sketched in Photoshop with this week’s brush of the week ‘Rag Blather‘ which is available for free all week in the brush shop or on the free brush of the week page.

 

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