I first created these brushes around January 2008. I scoured the web looking for decent and simple photoshop brushes to create that natural media look that you can get so easily in Painter.

The brushes that I found on other sites fell into two categories–rubber stamp brushes (ok for design, but not for painting), and low-res brushes (also useless for painting). So I rolled up my sleeves and created my own.

The brushes in this pack were created from vector drawings, and they were designed to create a rough-edged stroke like you would get when using a real brush. These are super-high res (2500px), but I’ve also included pre-scaled versions of each brush. You can make them larger or smaller without loss of quality. As shown in the preview image, if you play with the scattering settings, you can get some other effects than just a rough-edged stroke. They should be compatible with Photoshop CS2 and above.

These have served me surprisingly well, and I hope they are useful for you too! If you find them useful, please comment, with a link to your work.

Download the zip here

PS These brushes are free for use in any commercial or personal work. You may redistribute, as long as a link back to this site is maintained. You may not sell these brushes.

Here’s a little test movie showing a screen cap of some vector drawing. The demo mostly shows me tweaking a rought layout drawing and detailing some hair. It might be useful for somebody trying to learn to use the pen tool in AI… but mostly it’s just me trying out Adobe Captivate. I’ll try to come up with some topics for more little demos. Any ideas, let me know in the comments. Thanks!

Whether you’re drawing with a pencil or with vectors, some of the same ideas apply. In my vector drawings, I used to try to be very precise, drawing the finished lines and shapes exactly. Then, after I started learning to use brushes, I saw that I could make much more fluid and interesting shapes by following a larger and looser process. Here are a couple images to show the technique.

• First, I draw with big loose lines, defining the lines of motion, and worrying about intersection points, but not too much about end points of lines.
• I try to create relationships between different lines so that they complement each other.
• Then I add some detail to pull it together. Even with the detail, I don’t worry about defining endpoints very much. This is how a good artist would draw with a pencil, so it makes sense to do the same in Illustrator.
• Once the rough drawing is done, I copy it and start cutting, masking, and applying brushes to bring it closer and closer to a finished drawing.

That’s a big part of my drawing strategy right now. Sometimes it’s hard to sort out all those loose and crazy lines, but I think the result is worth it–a little bit of unique style and a lot of cool in-progress images!