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Adobe Photoshop Brushes

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Learn about Adobe Photoshop Brushes

Collection of web sites that offer quality and free Photoshop brushes, brush tools and articles.
You don't know what are Photoshop brushes, or how they are used? Read the Photoshop brushes tutorial.

Tips on making, using and organizing brushes may be found below.

Adobe Photoshop Brush Links

Links to websites offering free Photoshop brushes

In Obscuro Adobe Photoshop brushes: All sorts of quality Photoshop brushes: pixel, vector, grunge, graffiti, paper textures, swirly, gothic, flowers, borders, objects, doodles, stamps, icons, ornaments, frames, splatter, ink, glitter, burton, symbols, wings, postmarks, barcodes, paint, lace, fishnet and many more.
Hybrid Genesis: Very creative ornamental, textured and special effects brushes for a modern look.
Fifth Muse Photoshop brushes: Special effects, lyrics and objects perfect for your ethereal, vintage and gothic manipulations.
500ml.org Photoshop Brushes: Historical, medical, animals, vintage, seasonal etc.
GetBrushes: Brush exchange site, featuring the best Adobe Photoshop brushes on the net and their authors, free PS brush downloads, as well as linking you to the finest Photoshop resources, tutorials and art communities.
graphics-illustrations: corners, Wood Leaves, Grass, negative films and slides, hair, kisses, swirls, floral and swirls, plants, textile, beads and more.
At0mica.net Brushes: Stamps, matches, leaves, splatters, film, blotches, hearts, stars, sparkles, etc.
BrushFed: Various photographic brushes.
Photoshop brushes: Characters, grunge scratches, splatters, skulls, scribbles, sketches, bar-codes, leaves etc.
Pootato.org brushes: Abstract, grunge, scribbles, swirls, text, etc.
studio brushes: Feathers, leaves, grunge, swirls, floral, stars, paper, scratches, signs etc.
vbrush: Over 160 grungy, textured and photographic brushes.
deviantART brushes: Many individual artists upload their brushes to deviantART - thousands of brush sets available!
Seishido: There almost 100 free brush sets, and paid brushes are categorized under: Angelic, Grungy, Artbooked, Japanese, Bubbled, Ornamental, Butterflies, Pixelated, Colored, Poetry, Creative, Romantic, Curly, Seasonal, Dedicated, Sparklies, Doodles, Starful, Dressed, Swirlies, Fantastic, Symbolical, Floral, Textures, Framed.
Fragiledecay Photoshop brushes: Broken, bubbles, decay, clouds, feathers, film, flourish, grunge, notes, postal, stains, swirls, tape, textures, vintage, wings, ivy, flora, shapes etc.
Miss M brushes: Swirls, lyrics, ink, splatters, denim, notes, calculus, flourishes, technical, scratches, sparkles, foliage, victorian, antique, star dust, doodles, abstract, colouds, etc.
Angelic Trust: 61 free Photoshop brush sets, plus many more in the members-only area.
Toastsnatcher: Grungy, sketchy, geometric, ornamental, splatters, hearts, swirls, leaves, electronic, textures etc.
Magurno: Old-school, "cool", kitsch, text, and generally fun brushes.
Also offering free fonts and audio samples.
Misplaced Moments Photoshop brushes: Soft masking, roughage, splatter, textures, borders, abstract, textures, books, picture frames, masking, stars, brackets, signs, polaroid, feathers, running water, geometric, mosaic, grunge, mist, fog, scratches, clouds.
Kessia Nina Brushes: A small collection of brushes: smoke, grunge, dirty, border, curls, lines, etc.
23outlet: Tribal, grunge, cards, sketch, borders, curls, crew, rope, stars, splat, script, print error etc.
Kiss My Pixels Brushes: Valentines, ink drops, butterflies, doodles, skulls, stars, snowflakes, flares, pixels, eyes, daisies, patterns, lines, shapes, statues, owls, swirls, cats, dogs, disney, hello kitty, faeries, music, chickens, wildlife, floral etc.
Papercuts: Chinese, text, swirls, vintage, flowers, border, crosses, ribbons, deco boxes, border edges, grunge, doodles, coffee paper, lines, drips, chinese, alphabet, objects, oriental, doodlings, botanics, ripped pages, chrysnthemums, etc.

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Useful tools

Websites that offer brush-related services and tools

BrushFind: A brush directory with many websites listed, and also a tag list to make your search easier.
ABRviewer: Gives the preview of a brush set without having to install it. You must have Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installed to run it.
Brusheezy: Brushes and patterns archive featuring some of the web's best resource artists.

Buy Photoshop brushes

...and other Photoshop resources

Inspirational brush making

Where to find materials and how to use them best?

As a brush designer, you might choose to define your own distinct style, or experiment with various techniques. I prefer the latter, and this way I never lack inspiration when it comes to making brushes.
You must learn is to see the potential in images. Graphics that can be applied together with other graphics make good brushes.
There are many types of brushes: ornamental, textured, abstract... some of them are very subtle and are used to improve a graphic, but some may be used alone, similar to clipart.

Here are some possible ways of creating brushes:

Photography
Photography brushes

If you own a digital camera, the world is full of details that may make good brushes. Look around you for natural or manufactured items. Take a lot of photos and examine them at home. Try desaturating them and see if you can still isolate the forms.

Drawing and painting
Photography brushes

You need a scanner or a digital camera for this.
I draw and doodle a lot. Most of this will never show up in my gallery, but why not use it for brushes? If you're in the mood for creating, but aren't confident in drawing something complex, just doodle what comes to your mind, draw vines and foliage, funny faces, fancy letters, spill or spray paint to get random shapes... After scanning the drawings, you may edit them further and get effects you couldn't with traditional tools.

Digital drawing
Photography brushes

We've seen the circular, triangular, rectangular and similar shapes, and they're boring. Go freehand! Use your mouse or tablet to draw either abstract or figurative shapes. If you can't control the mouse/tablet that well, use the Pen tool. Digital drawings will be more clean than the scanned ones.

Combination
Try combining two or all three techniques mentioned above. You can use and reuse a single motive numerous times in many different ways and always get a unique result! Look at example images shown below to see what I mean.

Photoshop-related books

Tips on organizing brushes

If you downloaded many brush sets and saved all of them in the default brushes folder (probably C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop X.X\Presets\Brushes where X.X is the version number), you will likely suffer long Photoshop loading time. In order to avoid this, it would be better to create a new folder inside the default brushes folder, and save your brushes there.

It is also possible that you can't remember where you downloaded your brushes from (in order to give proper credit), and since some brush authors don't give descriptive names to their sets, you should take care of it.

Some suggestions:

Inside your brushes folder create a new folder named website-name.com for every brush source. Save all the brush sets you downloaded there, renaming each with a menaningful name, for example vector-swirls.abr and similar.
Create a new folder named downloaded brushes or similar. Open all brush sets you downloaded from a particular site and save them as a single brush set named website-name.com.abr for each site.

Whichever method you prefer, the result is a neater brush archive.
Enjoy!