From the course: Learning Digital Painting

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Brush tips: Variations on a theme

Brush tips: Variations on a theme

From the course: Learning Digital Painting

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Brush tips: Variations on a theme

I'm going to be using the term brush engine throughout this chapter. By this term, I am referring to the chain of structural software components that come together to create expressive painterly strokes. Let's begin with the end. Specifically the business end of the digital brush. The brush tip, also refered to as a dab or stamp, that is used in a brush engine, is responsible for a significant degree of the expressive quality of the brush. You can think of it as a removable component that can be swapped out for another tip, kind of like a cookie dough press. Now, one of the most common versions of this is typically a gray scale image and if we go into Photoshop here and open up the brush palette, you can see all of these stamps. These are what are basically the tips of the brush and I'm just going to take this one right here, and you can see that it actually shows up in the cursor as we paint and you can see it does a good job. It's taking those little dots that are part of that…

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