ALL 4 Methods for Creating Custom Brushes in GIMP | ALL Brush Types Explained

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in this tutorial I'll be going over the four different methods for creating custom brushes in I'll also be covering the different types of brushes in just so you guys have a fuller understanding of the various brushes that are found in how they work and how that relates to the types of brushes you want to create I'll be using to point ten point eighteen for this tutorial which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies Media design.com as always I have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as my book of layers and and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my Kim 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and I also have a brand new fundamentals of photo editing in darktable course and I'll link the discount link in the description of the video for this course you can also enroll in any of my skills show classes by visiting game school comm or you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design your own premium membership includes access to things like my Help Center app ebooks like my book of layers and exclusive content not found on YouTube you can start your Premium Membership off with a 7-day free trial and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so let's start by briefly going over the four main types of brushes found in the first type of brush is called the ordinary brush most of the brushes found in are going to be this brush type and it uses what's called apex map in order to paint your brush strokes that pixmap is displayed as a black and white picks map inside of your brushes dialog if you have no clue what I'm talking about let me show you so I'll start by coming over here and opening up my brushes dialog I can get there by going to windows dockable dialogs and we'll go with brushes so here's your brush tab a lot of you will have this tab open by default if you're using the default setup for I've customized my user interface so some things are rearranged some things are closed down but a lot of you will have the brushes dialog opened here already so here you'll see what a pixmap is the pics map is this little black and white representation of the brush so each one of these brushes here can have the black that you see in replace by whatever your foreground color is set to so in this case we're set to blue and let me demonstrate this I'll start by coming over here going to file new to create a new composition let's change this to 1920 hit the tab key 1080 you know click OK so we have our composition open I'll come over and grab my paintbrush tool by the way another way to get to the brush editor if you don't want to use the Windows menu is you can come over here and click on the brush you have selected and then down here at the bottom you'll see a little icon when you click on that that will open up the brushes dialog so right now this is now set to a softer brush we can go with this hard brush so I am using a pen tablet for today's tutorial you guys can just use your mouse if you don't have a pen tablet but I have my pen tablet mapped out for and I just put out a tutorial on that subject so definitely check that out if you haven't already I'll link it to this video so I can increase the size of my brush using my tablet or the left and right brackets on your keyboard if you're using a mouse so again this is an ordinary brush and when I paint with an ordinary brush the portion that is black will be replaced by whatever your foreground color is so most of the brushes in will have this quality for example I can choose a textured brush and when I paint with this brush that's going to paint that blue as well and if I hit the Delete key that will delete all of the brush strokes I've done so far on my canvas ordinary brushes are saved as dot gbr files and any time you create a new brush and you save it you're going to want to save it into your brushes folder we're gonna do that here as we start to create our custom brushes later in the tutorial but the second brush type found in is called the parametric brush these brushes are going to be created using the built-in brush editor in this is just a simple user interface the team has designed to make it easy to create simple brushes directly inside again we'll get into using the brush editor here momentarily but once you're done designing these parametric brushes will automatically save them as a dot VBR file type in your brushes folder so this is one of the easier ways to create brushes in not the easiest way but definitely one of the easier ways parametric brushes are also ordinary brushes and I know that's kind of confusing but the reason for that parametric brushes use that pixmap system where it's going to create a black brush and then the black from that brush is going to be replaced by whatever foreground color you have selected so all parametric brushes are ordinary brushes but not all ordinary brushes are parametric brushes hopefully you follow that logic the third type of brush is called a color brush this is most useful whenever you want to take a picture and turn it into a brush the reason being that the color brush can take on any RGB color values so it's not going to use any foreground value you have said it's going to use whatever RGB values are originally found in the brush or in the image that you're using as a brush so for example if I come over here to this image this is an RGB image obviously so if I come back to our composition I've actually turned this RGB image into a color brush so I'll show you how to do that later on but here you can see it in action so that's what a color brush looks like you'll notice it's not taking on the color of our foreground so I'll hit control Z there are some built-in color brushes in including the infamous pepper brush so this brush is a color brush this will not take on the colors of your foreground color it's just going to stay this green color and this is upside down right now I like control Z color brushes can be created by saving images as gbr files into your brushes folder of course we'll get into that but the last brush type is my favorite brush type and that is the animated brush so this type of brush allows you to create multiple brush heads for the same brush and as you paint the brush head is going to alternate between however many brush heads you create so this creates a more dynamic brush head as opposed to a more static brush head and it just opens up the possibilities a bit more especially considering that allows you to create four dimensional brushes I'm not going to get too much into the multi-dimensional brushes for this tutorial but it is possible so I'll come over to my brushes dialog and you can tell which ones are the animated brushes because they have this little red triangle in the bottom right corner so if I click and hold this you'll see it's going to animate through the various cycles the various cells of the brush that's a concept we'll get into but you can see there are three different brush heads for that particular animated brush and now if I paint with this animated brush you could see it's going to be a bit more dynamic here I have the same version of the brush it's not an animated brush this is just a static brush with a single brush head so if I paint with that you can see the difference so animated ordinary and I did point out the red triangle denoting the animated brushes inside the brushes like there's a couple of other icons here and I'll go over what those mean real quick so the plus icon just means the brush is larger than the thumbnail that's displaying here so anytime you have a plus sign and you click to preview it clicking and holding of course you'll see that the preview is going to be larger so there's a lot of plus signs here especially since my icons are smaller right now as I just pointed out the red icon is going to mean an animated brush and finally the blue triangle icon in the bottom right corner denotes a parametric brush so you can see there are several parametric brushes here that come with by default all right so those are the various brush types found in let's move on to actually creating our custom brushes so just like there are four types of brushes in coincidentally there are four ways to create brushes in so the first method for creating a custom brush is just by copying something to your clipboard so to do that you just use ctrl C command C if you're on a Mac or a go to edit copy in the main menu and you can use this for anything so we could use it right now in this image if I hit ctrl C that's going to copy this to my clipboard and if you come over here you'll see that this is now a brush here so the first brush is going to be my clipboard image you'll see this is going to max out at 1024 by 1024 that's the largest size these clipboard brushes can be it'll also create a black and white version called the clipboard mask so when I click and hold that it looks the same right now because this is a black and white image but if I did this for a color image so I'll hit ctrl C you'll see here we have a color version and here we have a black and white version and as I mentioned you can also go to edit copy here that's another way to copy this to your clipboard and create a brush from it so now that I have this image copied I'll come over here let's hit the Delete key to get rid of those brush strokes it's a pretty huge brush because it's a pretty big image you can see this is set to 1024 let's decrease it and go with our clipboard image and right now I have my brush dynamics turned on that's why this is sort of changing in size as I'm moving around me decrease that size again so now as I paint this is going to paint the area that we copied to our clipboard hit control Z that's the first way to create a brush and by the way brush is created by copying them to your clipboard are just going to be temporary brushes they're not going to be permanently saved to your brushes library there's a bit of a process to do that which I'll go over in a second but the second type of brush you can create in is a brush you create from an image so let me come back over here to my photo of the dice and what I want to do with this image is I want to crop it and scale it down first that way it's a bit more manageable as a brush so grab my crop tool and I'm gonna come over here to the fixed aspect ratio let's change this to 2 : 1 and now when I click and drag my crop tool that's gonna crop this with a two-to-one aspect ratio you know click in the center to crop it now let's scale it down so I'll go to image scale image and I'm gonna scale this all the way down to 400 by 200 and I'll click scale so again we can hit ctrl C to copy this and add it as a new brush and because this is now smaller than the 1024 max size for a brush you'll see the entire image is now going to be copied here to our clipboard as a brush and let me just grab my paintbrush tool again come over to our composition and here you can see it's painting the entire image so I'll hit the Delete key come back and let me cycle over to my zoom feature zoom in a bit and cycle back to my brush if I wanted to permanently save this as a brush not just have it copied to my clipboard I have to export this to my brushes folder so first we have to figure out where is our brushes folder we can do that by going to edit preferences and click on folders to expand it and then scroll down so the first folder here is the brushes folder I'll click on the first one so this is the location we want to use this first one this is where our user brushes need to be stored and what I like to do is come over here and click on this icon and just navigate inside the brushes folder there and once I've done that I'll click OK that's just going to store that as a recent place so I can easily access it later you can also just remember this series of folders that you need to go to but now just come over here and click OK so now we know where our brushes folder is in next let's save this image that we have here as a brush and to do that we're just going to save it as a dot gbr file so I'll come over here and go to file export as and we'll name this dice and we'll change this to dot gbr maybe we'll go dice image so now if I come to recently used you should see a folder here that says 2.10 so we'll click on that and now you'll see we're taken to the first few steps in that folder there to get to the brushes folder now we'll just go inside the brushes folder here you can see some of the brushes I've already created so now we're going to save this dice image as a gbr brush file and hit export so with GPR file is the options it gives you is to add a description this description is going to be what shows up at the top of the brushes dialog here once you click on that brush so once you click on a brush to select it and let me bring up this little dialog again so the description shows up here at the top the spacing is going to be the space between each instance of the brush stroke each instance of the brush head so in this case I'll go with the default which is 10 and hit export so it's not going to show up here quite yet this dice brush is the same brush we just created but I created it earlier I can always remove brushes just by clicking that X and then hit delete but now I need to refresh my brushes here so we can have that new brush we just created show up so I'll click that refresh button there and now you'll see our dice image if I click and hold the thumbnail you can see a preview there of the full-size brush so come over here and now when I paint with this brush it's going to paint that dice image so now if I were to close down and reopen it in another session or if I were to copy something else so for example if I copied this mess we just created here that changes these brushes here but this brush is here to stay so the third method for creating a custom brush is through giimpse built-in brush editor and I can get to the brush editor by clicking on one of these brushes let's just go with this first parametric brush here and now if I come over here you'll see there's an option I can edit this existing brush or what I'm gonna do is I can click here to create a new brush so when I click on that that's going to bring us to the brush editor so as I mentioned towards the beginning of this tutorial all the brush is created inside of this brush editor are called parametric brushes so for starters you can change the name of your brush up top here I'm going to name this custom para one so that's our first custom parametric brush so this is just a preview of what your brush looks like and the first option here is we could change the shape so by default it's going to be a circle the second option is the radius that allows us to change the size so you can see by increasing the radius we're increasing the size it does top out there so you can't really just infinitely increase this so there we have a circle brush it's fairly large in size we can also change this to a square brush there or a diamond shaped brush so if you do have a square or diamond shaped brush you can use the spikes option and that's just going to change the shape of the diamond or the square so if I come back to the square you'll see now it's a bit more like a star shape if I come back to the circle brush that doesn't apply here although if I bring it back down to the minimum value you'll see it does sort of increase the size of the brush here so it has some effect on here but it doesn't create spikes like it does for the square or the diamond shape but the next option is hardness so right now this is a soft brush a fairly soft brush because the edges are fuzzy I can increase the hardness though and that will make this have Edge's so more defined edges as you could see there if I decrease the softness the edges won't be quite as defined there'll be much softer so that just creates more areas of partial transparency giving that brush a fuzzier look so let's go with maybe we'll go with around 50% hardness the next option is going to be the aspect ratio so at one point oh this will be a perfect circle but if I change the aspect ratio you'll see that I'll narrow this down it'll sort of squish it and that applies to the square and the diamond shape the angle just allows you to sort of rotate this so if I click and drag the angle slider you'll see that I'll rotate that finally the spacing is just the space in between each instance of the brush so I can actually test this out in real time here this is what our parametric brush looks like right now and if I increase the spacing I'll just make each instance further apart as I paint whereas if I decrease the spacing of course each instance would be closer together so let's just go with a bit more spacing on here once you're done with this you don't need to do anything all you have to do is close out the brush editor so I'll click close tab and now we have a brand new parametric brush here and if I click and hold this you'll see there's the new brush I'll hit the Delete key to get rid of that parametric brushes use a dot VBR file type and these file types are going to be automatically created by the brush editor in so you don't have to do anything to you know save this or export this to your brushes folder is going to do it automatically that's what makes making parametric brushes a bit easier and you may have noticed here as I was painting it took on the color of the foreground tool here so if I change the color let's go something like red it will take on that color also as I paint faster you'll see it's making this smaller if I go faster larger if I go slower that's because this is using the brush dynamics I have set up for this so parametric brushes will use your brush dynamics and it'll also take on all of the tool options that you can here inside of your brushes tool options so I'll hit the Delete key and now get rid of that so the final way to create custom brushes in is going to be to paint your own brushes this method to me is the best method for creating custom brushes because it gives you more creative freedom it gives you more flexibility when it comes to designing brushes so let me show you how you can do this you could start by going to file new and here you're going to create a composition based on the size you want your brush to be remember the max size is 1024 by 1024 a good size to me is 180 by 180 and I'll click on the Advanced Options you actually want to fill this with transparency you don't want it to have a background color so I'll click transparency and click OK now we can paint whatever we want here as our custom brush I'm going to start by coming over here and grabbing a nice hard brush and I'll use the little size wheel on my pen tablet here to decrease the size of my brush and let me just reset so I want my color to be black that way this can act as an ordinary brush and anywhere that I paint black will show up the foreground color when I'm actually using this tool so remember I have my basic dynamics turned on here and what I did the first time I created this brush was I just created a bunch of random dots and then I made the dots a bit more dense as I got closer to the center here and then I can even just straight-up paint black here so that's full opacity like that alright so I finished designing this brush the next thing I want to do is export this to a dot gbr file gbr stands for brush this is just going to ensure that this is an ordinary brush which is that first brush type but one last thing I need to do before I can export this is I need to convert the color mode of this image to grayscale so go to image mode right now it's set to RGB switch that over to grayscale this ensures that when we're using our brush as an ordinary brush it will convert the black colors we're using here to the foreground color that we want to use once I've changed the color mode of this to grayscale now I'll go to file export as and so here we are still in our brush's file and I am gonna keep this name I typed this earlier so this is pointed dots and take two because I already did a point of dots version of this when I was testing out the tutorial so name this whatever you want just make sure it ends in dot gbr to save this as a brush and i'll export so this little dialog will pop up this description is what's going to show up up top here whenever we click on our brush I'm okay with leaving that the same and then the spacing I'll leave by default that's just the space in between each instance of the brush stroke so I'll hit export there once we've done that I'll come over here to our composition our blank composition let me reset my colors here at a black and white so over here in the brush dialog you won't see the brush we created just yet so I'll have to click this little refresh button and now right here you'll see here is the point of dots take two so you'll see there's a plus sign there that means this is larger than the thumbnail so if I click and hold there's the full size version of our paintbrush and under here here's our tool options make sure you do have your paintbrush selected here and you'll see that this is taking on our basic dynamics so as I move my brush around you'll see if I press harder it'll paint harder if I go lighter it'll paint lighter so I'll hit the Delete key to delete that so I'm just painting with black right now but I can come over here and I can change this to whatever color I want so let's go with red so I hit the Delete key so that's how you create a brush by painting it manually so you're designing it manually but we just did a simple brush what I want to do is create an animated brush from this so I can do that by coming back over here and right now we only have the single layer what I'll do is hold the shift key and just click on the new layer icon that'll create a new transparent layer again shift and click on this one more time so now we have three different layers and I'm gonna click and drag these layers below the original layer and you can double click on this to rename it so we can go with brush one name this brush two and this will be brush three so brush one is completed let me hide brush one come over to brush two and we'll come back to our hard brush here that we used before and I can zoom in let me also cycle between my menus here on my tablet I'm going to use the touch ring on my tablet to decrease the size of this you can also use the left or right brackets on your keyboard and I'll come over here reset this back to black and white so now I'm going to just do the same thing I'm just gonna paint little dots here and because we're painting random dots it's gonna be different than the first time we did this so even though it's going to be similar it will look slightly different as we get towards the middle we're gonna increase the amount and then once we get in the center I'm actually not going to paint it quite as much this time so it's a little different so there's the second brush so first brush second brush and now let's do the third brush just using that same technique and this one we will paint a bit more solid in the middle just like that so shift-click here's all three together so now we can save this as an animated brush and that's going to ensure that as we paint it's going to cycle between these three different brush heads we created so to do that all I need to do is go to file export as like we did before but now instead of saving it as gbr we're gonna save it as g IH g IH stands for image hose that is just another term for an animated brush they also use the term image pipe I'm not really sure why all the technical names here so GIH and now we'll hit export and here you'll see the menu option for your animated brush or your brush pipe again a bunch of different technical names for this but once again at the top you have the description that shows up top here when you have your brush selected spacing this time it's displaying as a percent so this percent is based on the diameter of your brush so the spacing is going to be 20 percent of the total diameter between each brush head here the cell size is just the size of each instance of your brush so in this case we have three different cells and each cell is going to be the entire size of this layer so that's going to give us three cells total and I'm going to do an example after we're done with this example where we actually split the image up into multiple cells instead of doing a single cell per image or a single cell per layer which is what we're doing right now and you can also create multiple dimensions as I believe I alluded to earlier I'm just going to stick with a single dimension just because it is a bit more complicated to get into multi-dimensional brushes but down here under ranks this just basically determines the order in which cells are painted as well as how dimensions factor into which cells are painted so in this case it's only one dimension so we only have one row here for the ranks you can have up to four dimensions for your painting in but if I click on this drop down here this gives you a variety of what's called selection modes so these are the ways in which your cells over here are painted so incremental just means it's going to paint the first brush here first and then the third brush last angular is going to be useful whenever you have multi-dimensional brushes in this case it's not going to be useful so this is basically based on an x-axis a y-axis as well as a z-axis so this comes in handy when you have two or more dimensions random just means it's going to randomly paint all your brush heads here there's no particular order velocity means it's going to paint certain brush heads based on how fast or slow you are moving your paint brush pressure same thing except it's going to be based on how hard or softer you are painting with your pen tablet and then X&Y tilt has to do with whether or not your pen is tilted in a certain direction so I'm not going to get into those really I'm just gonna stick with incremental which is basically the default option or it should be anyway so that's just going to start with the first brush and go down to the third brush and just cycle that way every time three ranks just means there's three different things that's got to cycle through so now I'll come down and click export so now we have an animated brush and let's come back over to our little testing environment it hasn't shown up here yet technically my older brushes I made did show up but let's refresh so this is going to be the new brush we just created so this is the animated brush and you can see this one has the little red icon in the corner so if I click and hold that you'll see it animate there and now when I paint with this brush it's going to cycle between those three brushes and that gives us a more dynamic brush as we're painting it's just a bit more of an exciting brush as opposed to that first one we created which only has a single brush so I hit the Delete key and let's do a direct comparison there's the first one and here's the animated one so much better brush there and of course I can change the color so let's go with that red color or a red color so we can also change the color I'll hit the Delete key so I'm also going to show you guys how I designed this crosshatch brush but first let me just demonstrate something there with the cells so here is that image we were working with earlier and when we created that animated brush just now each layer was its own cell we had three layers we had three cells those three cells are animated as part of the entire brush animation in this case so we only have a single image but what happens if we want to break this image up into multiple parts and therefore have multiple cells that exist within this one image what we can do is we'll export this like it's a brush like we were doing before so file export as you know go over to recently used and choose brushes again so here let's change this to dice image and we'll go animated once again this is GIH so image hose and now I'm going to hit the export button so same options here as the last animated brush we did but now instead of having the cell size being the entire size of the image if I decrease the cell size here so I'll go 100 by 100 and let me move this stuff out of the way because you guys probably saw some guides were created here so the guides are showing us where the cells are on our image and so each cell size is 100 by 100 this is a 400 by 200 image so 100 by 100 fits in this fashion where now we have four columns and two rows so now when I come over here under number of cells it now says 8 and display as is showing two rows of four columns on each layer so we only have one layer but this layer is going to have two rows four columns as is divided by the guides here and because this is a single dimension brush again I'm not going to get into multi dimensions there's only one rank and it's showing us that there are eight cells total so we could change how those cells behave based on the way we paint or based on the selection mode here and once again I'm just gonna go with incremental which means it's going to cycle through 1 through 8 and when it comes to having multiple rows and columns the order is typically the top left cell first and then it'll go to the right and then I'll go down to the bottom left and go to the right so that's the typical order when you go with incremental of course you can also go with any of the other options we discussed earlier I'm just going to keep this set the way it is and hit export of course I created this earlier and so let me just delete the earlier version I did of that but now let's come back to our testing ground hit the refresh button there is our animated brush and now you'll see as I draw with this brush it's cycling between those eight different cells we created so there's eight different brush heads as we move with this brush I'll hit the Delete key all right now I'm going to create that crosshatch brush just to give you guys another example of an animated brush so let's come over here file new and I'm just going to go 180 by 180 and click OK so this composition I accidentally gave a white background let me just create a new layer and we'll fill this with transparency it's named brush that's fine I'll click OK and let's delete the background layer you don't want to background and we'll also go to image mode and just make sure this is set to grayscale so now what I'll do is I'll come over here and I do want to note that you can use any of the paint tools when it comes to designing your brushes you can even use the my paint brush tool which has a variety of texture brushes so I'm gonna go with the pencil tool and come over here and go with this little pixel here so this is going to paint this as a single pixel but I also have the basic dynamics on so it'll be a bit more dynamic than the usual pencil tool would be but now what I did here for this is I just created let me hit control Z make sure my foreground color is set to black so I just created some lines like that so there is a nice cross brush but this is only one single brush head I actually want to do multiple since I want to do and animate it so hold shift and let's click on this twice that's going to create new layers based on these settings I had before so that's just a quick way to create new layers so let's hide that brush and let's just do another one and this time let me increase the size a bit here so once again do a random cross-hatching here hide that one and for the last one let's go in between do the same thing all right so there's our brush if I come back over here shift-click that'll unhide the other two brushes so this is the three combined now I'll go to file export as making sure we're in the brushes folder I'll do crosshatch take to make sure it's ending in GIH and export so in this case once again I'll leave the spacing at the default the cell size I will leave the full size because I want each cell to be the size of a single layer that gives us three cells total one dimensional and for the ranks we're going to set this we could do incremental or random I don't really care either way I'll just go with random for the sake of demonstration and click export now let's come back here to our testing ground hit the refresh button here is our new crosshatch brush so crosshatch take two and now when I paint with this you'll see that gives us a really cool texture brush and it's pressure sensitive and it's responding to those dynamics so as I paint faster it paints it thinner and I'll come over here let's change this to a blue color hit the Delete key and so now our brush is blue one last thing I want to note before I let you guys go is that usually these custom brushes that you create by designing them yourself painting them yourself will not respond well to all of the tool options so for example brushes like this they will respond to size aspect ratio and angle and spacing as well actually but when it comes to hardness if you make this a softer brush this isn't really going to turn out right you can see there it just looks sort of like a blob so it's not really gonna work well with that softness setting and I'll hit the Delete key here let's reset the hardness back to 100 and the force it's not even gonna let us do so you'll see that not all tool options are available for these custom brushes but in my opinion this is still my favorite way to create a brush and the best way to create a brush inside of alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media designed don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can also check out all the links to my resources in the description of the video so thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 11,174

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, custom brushes, GIMP 2.10.18, design a brush, GIMP brush design, create brush, parametric brush, color brush, animated brush, image hose brush, image pipe brush, color custom brush

Id: o5a_9NUCLo0

Length: 34min 56sec (2096 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020