[Evolvyn]

Im curious to see what people use. I'm still fairly new to the whole digital painting thing, so this is kinda my shameless way of learning.

Say what brush you use, and program you use it in!


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For me, I use Chunky Oil Pastel on Corel Painter.

[Piekarski]

Hi there. I tried Corel Painter and Art Rage, but since I'm no good when it comes to traditional media, even the Real Brisle brushes were of no use to me (some day I will work on that, but now I have no time). For vector drawings I use Inkscape's Calligraphy tool (far better then Illustrator's Brush, gives you control over the thickness of the line right away), for bitmap illustrations I set the Gimp's default brush to hard edge and make it change opacity and size depending on the pressure applied with my Wacom stylus. To make smooth transitions, I use the Smudge tool set to 15% opacity.

[JJacks]

In Photoshop, to paint with, I just use the regular hard edge brush and the speckled brush with spacing set to 10% if I want something nicely blended.

I also make custom brushes for texture and patterns.

It matters little what brush you use. Nothing can substitute proper understand of the basic elements of art.

[wahay]

I only use a hard brush that avoids that annoying circle sampling thing the standard Photoshop brush does. I rarely use anything other brush, since I'd prefer to apply texture with stray lines instead of custom brushes.

[Evolvyn]

hey! Anymore people wanna say what their favorite brush is?

[Blindrat]

I alternate between photoshop and GIMP, but generally use the same brush.
Basically it's a oval at about 25-30% roundness, so it looks a bit like the real brushes I use for painting on boards. However as I'm just now transitioning completely to photoshop I made a texture for my brush using a scan of a board I gessoed awhile back. Set the opacity to pen pressure, and make it so the brush rotates depending on the direction I'm using made it feel a bit more like using my actual flat bristle brushes.

[Nickillus]

Originally Posted by Evolvyn

Im curious to see what people use. I'm still fairly new to the whole digital painting thing, so this is kinda my shameless way of learning.

Say what brush you use, and program you use it in!


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For me, I use Chunky Oil Pastel on Corel Painter.

I always use the soft oil pastel in Painter if ever I resort back to that (my first favourite software). Tends to be in combination with the round tip pen for line, large chalk with various papers for texture and layers of tinting brush work for shadows and nuances. Just Add Water is the best blender around so that's a must too.

But Painter 10 (don't get on with version 11 - slower and less stable on my system than version 10!!!) has become my fall back position as I said, as I find ArtRage and Sketchbook Pro more suited to my drawing style (coming form 20 years real media waterclour). They are much easier and less cluttered - and both have pencil tools that you can pick up and use without the endless tweaking that Painter always seemed to require for me).

Pencil tool is great in both - always use that.

SKB - various custom brush heads ( a doddle to make in SKB 2010 and 2011) for textural painting and a tweaked version of the paintbrush, with increased pressure response for general painting.

ArtRage Studio Pro - Chalk tool for blocking in (using 'settings' and papers to vary the look) - watercolour brush on various layers for added colour, shadow and all sorts. Wet Blender Palette Knife (pretty damned good now and has all sorts of controls).
Stencils are pretty darned useful in AR too - but can't really call them a brush - but great for painting through to bring texture in.

For me it's as much about using overlaid layers to build washes with whatever brushes I use as anything else. Must be that watercolour background of mine.

[Lazerus_reborn]

The brushes i use depend entirely of the mood of the piece, i constantly toy and change them, right now i have these set out in PS cs5.



Most people will work in greyscale before adding colour to a image so i find brushes with alot of noise help with getting the basic image blocked out. Afterward smudge and square rounded at a lower opacity and just work it over.

[jezandu]

Well like you I'm just starting out with digital art, and brushes have been my biggest headache! I use photoshop, and found that I settled myself on certain brush types after much experimentation and suggest you try the same as our art maybe very different. For the record I tend to colour fill using soft brushes and sometimes wet flow brushes. I add texture using the chalk and splatter brushes. It seems everyone has a different approach!

[charfade]

like most I agree with you. Brushes have always been a challenge to find really good ones. Eventually I came up with my own brush pack.
Half of them I barely use... but about 10 of them I cant seem to ever live with out. I put the pack up for download if anyone wants to try them out. Some of them I mix with other brushes.

Oh yeah its a .abr file for photoshop

Link to pack

[andrecastelo]

I use Photoshop and I've grown quite attached to Blur's GoodBrush, but I still find the Hard Round to be quite versatile.

Link to GoodBrush: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_...?story_id=5152

[eight6visual]

I use the default Photoshop hard edge circle brush and
the flat 'calligraphic' brush. both set to 0% spacing. I use them with opacity and flow linked to pressure sensitivity... and Im still on cs2!

[ALEE-S]

I stumbled across this thread. I'm always interested in experimenting with new brushes and resources, so this was a big help. Thanks guys