Brushes

I hate to admit it, but I’m an absolute sucker when it comes to Photoshop brushes and so when it comes to free resources such as Brusheezy, I just can’t help myself. 

Now that I’ve added their RSS feed, I’m never more than a couple of minutes away from the latest and greatest brush to come about and, not only does it provide me with some more tools, it gives my imagination plenty to consume after looking at the artists preview images. 

To anyone currently not taking advantage of these resources, now would be a fantastic time to start. Not only can you create more consistent shapes than you could by hand but you can also easily impress your mates and, possibly, clients, with an image you created with a simple gradient backdrop and a smattering of the new shapes, although be prepared to be in-undated with comments along the lines of “Did you create those *insert shape here* by yourself?!” and, if feeling less than modest, you can go and claim you did, although for honesty’s sake, say “No, but my imagination led to the masterpiece you see here”… It’s a guideline at least.

There is a point to this post, I promise. After looking through various sites I thought to myself “Here’s something I can’t get enough of, maybe someone else would like to have a look at my favourite brush sites”. Well, not those exact words but when it came to writing down my thoughts, that sounded concise.

So here’s the run-down of my favourite brush sites, starting from the top *I didn’t even try to get them in alphabetical order, they’re ranked by how much I like them.

• Brusheezy – As their tagline says: stupid name, cool brushes; and I assure you, there are plenty of extremely cool brushes on offer. All the brushes here are free and user submitted and so are mostly royalty free (though check the specific brush) which makes them perfect for your own work or paid-for commissions. Not only does this site contain hundreds of brushes, it also has a range of patterns on offer which, to me at least, tops it all off.
• deviantART – Second to Brusheezy is devinatART’s brush section. The brushes here are of typical dA quality, ie, *usually* very high, as well as nearly all of them being of high resolution – perfect for those larger projects.
• myPhotoshopBrushes – A site that I’ve only found recently and is quite fantastic. Not quite as much content as that of Brusheezy or deviantART but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quailty; a very impressive showing.
• PSBrushes – Lastly on this little list is PSBrushes, another site that I’ve found useful. The content isn’t quite as nicely presented as that of the other contenders but the content’s there, and plenty of it. The previews provided also aren’t quite as good as those of Brusheezy or devaintART for example, and so it’ll take a bit more trial and error to find the gems on offer.

Well that wraps up my tiny review of Photoshop brushes that I use, but I hope it may prove useful to an aspiring Photoshopper out there or simply help pass a few hours creating a nice little piece.

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