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 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
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.
This week’s free Photoshop brush is “Bed Kelp” a delicously messy ink brush with a ragged edge that starts as a medium wash but ramps up quickly to a full viscous black… and I just can’t stop doodling with it, I truly love sketching with this brush. Despite it’s jagged texture and crumbling edges it has a nice continuity with the appearance of a long trailing stroke which can taper to a fairly fine tip. You can download it in the shop ( grutbrushes.com/shop ) or on the free Photoshop brush page: grutbrushes.com/freebrush
You can download this week’s free Photoshop brush until next Monday when, as always, there will be a new one waiting for you. Meanwhile, for a change of pace, don’t miss out on the free Lightsaber brushes that seem to have hopped on a viral wave that has kept the website flooded with new visitors all day: grutbrushes.com/drinksaber
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.
