Blog

I've been writing up a rather long blog post about my process with some screencaps, but I haven't quite polished it up yet. In the meantime, I thought I'd write about some of my favorite Photoshop brushes and share detail shots of my brushwork.  I've collected a small sample of my most used brushes and included them in an .abr file for anyone interested.  Some are standard Photoshop brushes and some are from other collections.  I wish I could remember exactly where I've gotten them all, but I have so many that it's difficult to keep track of where these specific 14 came from. 

By far, my most used brushes are hard rounds, like 1 and 2.  I start with them to block in color and I don't change to another brush until I'm nearing the stage where I need to add textures. Changing the opacity and color-picking constantly helps me get a lot of mileage out these brushes, especially in the first half of my painting process.

Soft rounds don't get nearly as much use from me. I like the textures that layering hard edges creates and I've found that if I use the soft brushes too often, my paintings start to look airbrushy.  However, big soft brushes are great for heightening washes of dark and light in large areas.  If I'm applying color in brush mode other than normal, I often use the soft brushes to keep the effects subtle as well.

4 is a new favorite of mine.  It has a nice toothy texture and works well to emulate pencil strokes.  It's also a nice alternative to hard rounds, when I want a less mechanic stroke.  The calligraphic angle helps add an extra variant to my strokes, so it works well with a lot of organic shapes.

6 is a rough round bristle brush which works great for smeary textured shapes.  It is my go-to cloud brush guy.  Upon discovering it, I found that painting clouds became about 10 times easier for me. This alone makes it one of my favorite brushes, but it is a great texture brush even without considering its awe-inspiring cloud powers.

7, 8, and 9 are a few of my favorites for texturing images. I have a ton of these kinds of brushes and they make up the bulk of my collection.  These three are some of the more commonly used ones.  I especially like 9 if I'm trying to make things look a little more painterly.

10 works great for wood boards, but I mostly use it for clothing.  When I cross hatch with this brush, it works well for creating a cloth texture and it's really good at building up believable form on fabric.

11 and 12 are hair and fur brushes.  I usually start with something like 11 to softly brush in the general forms of the hair and then I work details in with 12. 12 works great on a high-strength smudge brush when combing out hair as well.

I use 13 and 14 mostly as smudge tool brushes.  I don't use the tool a lot, but occasionally I need to soften up the edge of an object or blend skin tones.  13 works great around 5% strength in a small size for blurring effects.  I lightly smudge with the brush, by outlining around the form to soften edges. I find that it works better than using the blur tool, especially with really large canvases.    14 works best with a high strength (75%+) smudge.  It blends colors while adding texture.  It's tempting to take a shortcut and use it to blend everything, but overuse seems to muddy colors too much.