Discovering While Making Something: Silhouettes and Custom Brushes

Brushes, brushes, everywhere.

Hunting for a good brush and tuning the settings is a familiar problem. First I recall playing with digital brushes that could do both physical media simulation and special effects was using Painter by Fractal Design in Windows 3.11.

Now I've been working in Clip Studio Paint using the built-in brushes plus bought the Frenden pack of 800+ brushes. I have so many brushes to choose from it's a bit overwhelming. I can get choice paralysis even with 5 to 20 options. Also worth noting there's even more options close at hand. CSP offers downloadable brushes you can browse and install within the app.

Such a pile of choices, who needs a custom brush?

Most of those brushes are all simulating natural media. If you need a marker, pen, watercolor, oil, chalk, or other tool you'd find for making marks on canvas you'll most likely find it if you look long enough.

The special effects and patterns kinds of brushes are also findable, but less common. Here's where I think about making my own custom brushes.

Clearly custom brushes are possible and something I could investigate more. I've made a handful of workable brushes in the Procreate painting app on my iPad. My favorite was a sci-fi looking building greeble. It worked well enough where I thought it'd be worth revisiting at some point.

So this week as part of my cool down painting routine I've been dabbling with making custom greeble brushes in CSP. As I get a little more practiced I'll share what's been working for me.

Happy place observation: discovering, sense making, while making something.

Not sure if it sounds odd to be doing a cool down relaxing drawing/digital painting and have it also be learning something new. Those goals don't always work well together but when they do it's a great feeling. If I give it a try and things are frustrating I have lots of options to choose that are lower risk and stress.

If I'm creating in an unfamiliar space lost enough to be discovering while making sense and making something of it, that's a happy place to be for me.