Any good Bristle Engine brushes and how use them?

[tachiko]

I just discovered how setting brush tool to weighted let’s me use the Bristle engine.
Are there tutorials that find a good use for this bristle engine? Like any particular art techniques can be achieved?
In a way it kind of achieves a ribbon like effect.

I wonder if the devs could add smudge to the engine.

[dreamkeeper]

@tachiko

I wonder if the devs could add smudge to the engine.

It kinda does that already… If you activate ‘Soak Ink’ in the Ink Depletion section, you can smear the paint. Unfortunately it can only do one thing at a time, either ‘soak’ or paint. Also, transparent sections will ‘soak’ and smear black. The cool thing however is, that ‘soak ink’ obeys the brush blending mode - which isn’t the case with the smudge engine (yet).

Some more tips:

Use fairly low bristle density if you want to see clear bristle marks - also gives a lot better performance. From my experience the higher densities aren’t really useful anyways.

Strokes with sparse bristles can be beefed up with e.g. a halftone filter, set to alpha mode with an appropriate pattern - giving the impression of uneven paint application. I only wish, there’d be an option to post-filter each stroke automatically…

The ‘Threshold’ setting in Bristle Options sort of maps the value of brush tips to the bristle length. So, in dark regions the bristles will ‘touch’ the canvas when applying low pressure while the lighter regions come in only at higher pressure. With a very ‘noisy’ brushtip, this can be used to get an almost random bristle pattern, depending on pen pressure.

This image was done exclusively with a bristle brush. Some post processing with edge detection filter.

For this one I used some fairly extreme settings. It’s comprised of maybe 10 ‘strokes’ or so (don’t recall exactly) with some filter trickery (or was it layer styles…? ).

I’d happily share the brushes, but I change settings so often while painting, so there’d be nothing more than a very simple basis. I highly recommend doing your own experiments - the bristle brush engine is well worth it. Hopefully it will get some developer love in the future - there’s a lot of potiental imho.

[dreamkeeper]

To illustrate the use of halftone filter: Here are 2 strokes at different densities with a simple rectangular brush 300x100 pixels (I wanted sorta a ‘nailbrush’ kind of brush.

First is the raw strokes:

Second is with a halftone filter mask in alpha mode, using the ‘15_texture-rockB.png’ at transform scale of 50% and postprocessing hardness of 50%:

(Putting a blur filter before the halftone can make the effect stronger.)

Using oilpaint filter is another option to avoid the digitally-looking bristle marks - though that should be used as a filter layer on top.

(with just a hint of edge detection)

[tachiko]

Very nice, i quite like the texture-rockB mask brush stroke.

I’m playing around and i like how you can quickly block out canvas as though using a pencil as shown here(with sharpen filter a little):

I would like testing out some of your brushes.

[CrazyCatBird]

@dreamkeeper Is this from a default brush, or is it a brush you made? Looks interesting.

[dreamkeeper]

@tachiko

I would like testing out some of your brushes

OK, I’ll make a small bundle later.

@CrazyCatBird - these are made with my own brushes.

[dreamkeeper]

So here is the bundle. Let me know if it works.

Again, those are meant as starting points. You may not get the same results as in the pictures above without some tweaking and further processing. Enjoy!

EDIT: The browser may give a safety warning for the download. Rest assured, it’s safe!

[tachiko]

Thanks, they work great. Ill use them to study. so far i like how they blend. I also use masks like you did with great success. The one with geometric mean blend works nice too.