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The last several Photoshop brush collections we've offered have all been practical collections--either recreations of natural media tools or brushes with specific purposes, such as those designed to generate hair and skin effects. This time around I wanted to break out of that and serve up some brushes that are a bit more generalized--brushes with heavy textures for generating artwork that doesn't necessarily resemble traditional media.
The brushes
This latest collection (Nagel Series 38) includes 20 such brushes. They're designed with the idea of abstract, highly textured artwork, though you may also find them useful for adding textural detail in other situations as well, such as when creating image maps for 3D geometry.
The brushes in this collection fall into five broad categories:
? Fibrous. These brushes resemble bristle brushes in some ways, but are more rough and clumped. Some also use the wet edge effect, which helps create varying textures in the interior portions of your strokes.
? Geometric. The geometric brushes are made up of angular objects that scatter across the canvas, creating complex patterns.
? Fuzzy. These have a somewhat fuzz-like appearance, meaning they look like they're composed of short, curly fibers. (These do not resemble the curly hair brushes we've posted in the past.)
? Rough. I call these "rough" simply for lack of a better term. Their appearance can be somewhat charcoal-like, and they generally have soft edges, good for producing softer textures.
? Splatter. These brushes are named more for their behavior than for their appearance. When you apply these brushes at first, they'll appear sparse, but continued application will reveal more of the brush in areas you've already painted, giving the feel of splattering paint.
All of the brushes in this collection are fully dynamic for size, scattering, color variation, opacity and other parameters. They can also be modified to suit your particular needs. Most are based on fairly large image samples, and you can adjust the base size up or down to suit your needs.
Here are some samples of the brushes in this collection. Most of these examples were produced with just a couple strokes using the "Normal" and "Linear Burn" blending modes.
Nagel Series 38 Fibrous 1
Nagel Series 38 Fibrous 4
Nagel Series 38 Geometric 4
Nagel Series 38 Fuzzy 2
Nagel Series 38 Rough 1
Nagel Series 38 Rough 2
Nagel Series 38 Splatter 3
Remember that you can find even more free downloads by clicking here.
Download and installation
This week's brush collection is compressed in a Zip archive, which can be decompressed using any Zip utility. (Simply double-click the file in Mac OS X to decompress it.) These brushes support Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS2 in Macintosh and Windows environments. They are also supported by recent versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements. These brushes will not function in Photoshop 7.
As always, this latest collection (Nagel Series 38) is free to download and use for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Download: Nagel Series 38 Brushes (288 KB)
Once you download the brush file (NagelSeries38.zip), expand it. (The expanded file will be called NagelSeries38.abr.). Then move the .abr file into the Brushes directory in your Photoshop folder (/ Adobe Photoshop /Presets/Brushes) to make it accessible from the Brushes palette's flyaway menu once you launch Photoshop.
Then launch Photoshop . Open your Brushes palette, and click on the flyaway menu at the top right. There you'll find the new brush collection, listed in alphabetical order with the other brushes in your Brushes directory. You can install this collection simply by selecting it. After you select it, the new brushes will appear at the bottom of the list of available brushes. (Note that if the brushes do not appear in this flyaway menu, you can load them manually by selecting "Load Brushes" from the menu. A dialog will appear asking you to locate the brush file manually.)
If you have any questions, be sure to visit me in our Adobe Photoshop forum at DMN Forums by clicking here. And remember that you can find our previous downloads by clicking here.
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