Get Photoshop Brushes for Free

Get Photoshop brushes

How do you get Photoshop brushes? Photoshop comes with a variety of Brushes that you can use for design work and Illustration. However, these brushes are fairly limited, and if you want to achieve a certain style or look then you will want to find other Photoshop Brushes that can help you achieve new styles. I personally have been working on creating a painterly style, a sort of digital impressionist style, and it has been a great side project to develop. So how do you get more Photoshop Brushes for free? Let’s talk about it.

Download more Photoshop brushes and how to install them

Getting the brushes is the easy part. Learning how to use them properly can take years. But to get these brushes, in Photoshop, go Window >  Brushes this will open the brush panel. On the upper right-hand side of this panel, you will see a little burger menu icon. Click that and it will open a side menu. Near the bottom of this menu you will see ‘Get More Brushes…’ click that and you will be taken to an Adobe Brushes page. These brushes were made by an incredibly talented artist called Kyle T Webster.

Each of these packs is free to download and use in Photoshop. They can also be used in  Adobe Fresco which is a painting app available for free on desktop and iPad. To use them just click download on the pack that you want, then once it’s downloaded then double click the downloaded file and it will automatically load into the Brushes Panel in Photoshop. As easy as that!

Drawing Tablets

To get the very best out of your new brushes you should really be using a drawing tablet. This gives you complete control over the pen pressure and angle that you are drawing at, which you just can’t replicate with a mouse. That’s not to say you can’t make incredible art with a mouse. Just that you will benefit from having a digital pen in your hand, and the digital drawing experience will become something you will really enjoy. I have used primarily Wacom Tablets, the medium-sized ones I find to be perfect as they give a little space for your hand and wrist to rest while painting, which can be a great thing when painting for a few hours.

I have used the large versions and find that your arm gets tired a lot quicker as the movements you have to make are broader, but if you are looking to create more gestural art then perhaps this could be for you.  I have also used the Cintiq screens from Adobe and although these are great because you can see what you are painting and interact with it as if it were on a canvas in front of you, I found that the sitting position often led to my arm getting tired far faster than if I were using the Medium size Wacom Tablet. This is all personal preference and there are many other brands out there. So I will leave it to you to find the one that suits you!

Brush Library

If you are like me, you have just downloaded hundreds of Photoshop Brushes and feeling pretty happy with yourself. But here’s the thing. You probably only need a handful to get the look and feel that you are after. I would highly recommend going through the brushes and putting the ones you like into a folder. This way you have your Go-To brushes on hand whenever you need them.

If you go to your Brushes Panel, Window > Brushes. Then at the bottom right, you will see a folder Icon. Click that and rename it to something that makes sense to you. I go through phases with the brushes I use, and every few months I add a few or delete a few depending on what I think I need.

Now make a really large canvas. Something like 4000px x 3000px. Essentially you will now go through each brush you just downloaded and scribble with it. Just make any mark you want to see what it looks like. If you think it’s interesting or useful, then put it into your new Brush folder by dragging the brush in the Brush Panel from the folder it’s into your folder. Depending on how many brushes you have just downloaded this may take minutes or hours.

But it’s one of the best tips you can do because when you are designing or painting something, the last thing you want to do is be hunting around for brushes.

For my brushes, I have one pencil for sketching out and then five other brushes to paint with. At some point, I will make my brushes available for download via my newsletter. So sign up for that if your interested in the brushes I have used to create the paintings above.

Export Brush Library

The next thing I would do is to export your collection of brushes so that you have them saved on your hard drive or in the cloud. Just in case your Photoshop needs to be uninstalled and you lose your collection which you just built. So select the brushes that you love the most, and tap the upper right burger menu and go Export Brushes. Save them and keep them safe!

Brush basics

Some basics of using brushes in Photoshop are as follows.

Change brush Size:

Change the size of a brush using the [  ] keys on the keyboard to increase and decrease the brush size.

Erase Quickly

To erase I would recommend using the Tilda key on your keyboard. This is the key that’s just above Tab and next to the number 1. The great thing with this shortcut is that as you paint, you can hit this key and it will automatically turn your current brush into an Eraser as you hold down the Tilda key. When you let go it goes back to being a brush. This makes it so much faster than switching tools into the actual Eraser tool.

Smooth Lines

Let’s say you are creating a detailed pencil drawing in Photoshop but you don’t want to use the Pen Tool to create smooth line work. With the brush selected, at the top of the Photoshop Panel, you will see Smoothing 0%. Put that percentage to 70% and now draw. You will notice your brush feels really slow and that the line it draws is really smooth. The higher the percentage, the smoother and slow the linework will be. Perfect for getting really great line work.

Real Oils

Something fun to play with is a Brush set called Real Oils. They give you the ability to smudge between colors that you paint down. Whether you use this type of brush really depends on the style that you are going for.

10 Minutes to Better Painting Series

I have found that Marco Bucci on YouTube has some great tutorials on how to paint and what to look out for. He has a series called 10 minutes to better painting which has some really great information, so check it out here.

Using paintings as Patterns

A great pairing of techniques would be to use your digital paintings as part of a pattern in Photoshop. You have probably seen this kind of work before in all sorts of products from Dishware to Notebook covers. It’s pretty simple to do, here’s a tutorial on it!