Drawing Brushes for Photoshop

So they say it doesn’t matter what brush you use in Photoshop you can achieve almost anything with any brush if you know how. I have heard this from just about every artist that works in digital art I’ve listened to. I agree it is not about the brush. It won’t make you better. However, I also agree with the idea that you need the right tool for the right job. When I first started working in Photoshop and trying to sketch in it because I love to sketch, I had a difficult time honestly because I was using brushes that came with Photoshop and getting hard dark lines. This messed with me as I like to draw lightly and gradually build up my values or go over a line and make it a bit darker when I like it. Having nothing but dark lines they all blended together and I had a hard time reading them and knowing where I wanted to go in my drawing.  So I looked around for brushes online and kinda found something I liked. It wasn’t the best but it worked for me well enough so I used it but still sketched mostly on paper then scanned it in to get a good drawing.

Then my computer got stolen and everything I had with it including all my software, digital portfolio and of-course my brushes in Photoshop. So I went about putting it all back, as much as I could anyway. I couldn’t find the drawing brushes I had been using or maybe they just didn’t feel right anymore or give me what I wanted. So I just drew with whatever but didn’t really use it for anything serious.

I then took an ink brush from an ImagineFX tutorial and changed its settings and got a drawing brush I liked. Then I changed them a bit more and liked it even more for sketching and shading. Here is a one minute life-drawing sketch I did with the light drawing brush.

 I use them set to about 5 pixels to draw with. If you leave it at that or around there and shade with the light drawing brush it will give you some texture as well making it seem more like an actual pencil drawing. The regular drawing brush I use mostly for dark lines that I want to bring out if they need it or with bolder paniting. I have these set so you can do a full range with the settings at 100% opacity and right now I am at 50% flow. The drawing below was done with just these 2 brushes no change in the settings 100% the whole time just control of the pen pressure.

I found that holding the pen straight up and down is good for the dark and hard lines where holding it as far to the edge as you can to shade like a pencil gives a very light stroke from barely perceptible to as dark as you want without having to lift or layer over an area to build up the gradation. You can go over an area though, with this same technique and lightly fill in the potential gaps left on your first pass depending on how fast or wide you made your strokes originally much like doing a smooth atelier drawing.  In-fact these are the brushes I used to draw and paint the “Valkyrie” piece I previously published here as I like to handle my painting like drawing in colour and be able to blend softly. I also used them in this piece section to draw in the flowers here and to put in the light colour in the background mountains behind them.

Now the really interesting part of this is I decided to use my light drawing brush for my eraser setting as well. And just like using it to draw I can lightly fade out an area or with more pressure erase an area all together in the same stroke. This is much more natural to me and I am loving it. I don’t have to set the eraser to a low setting and hope I don’t overlap making one bit of an area stronger than another because of that and then trying to blend it back in. I can just erase like I normally would on paper with a real eraser.

So, here are the brushes for you to enjoy because it sucks trying to find something good to draw with and get a natural media feel.

Alright, apparently I am having an issue uploading them here so if you want right now you can email me and I will email them out to you or you can wait and I will try to get them up ASAP.

Here is the link now to the brushes - http://www.mediafire.com/download/2m4p2qd5el93ctm/Ryan_Arms_Drawing_Brushes.abr