Ryan's Brush Set 3.1

An introduction to Ryan’s Brush Set 3.1 (CS5+)

You can download the brush set here.  Read more about it after the jump.

I’ve been making my own photoshop brushes for years now. I could never stand how disorganized and random a lot of brush sets are, so I started making my own simplified versions. I’ve been testing my brush sets on myself, my family, and my friends. and this set represents the third major revision since I started in 2009.

I have not been working in a vacuum, though. I made several of the brushes in my set, but this includes brushes from many many many other sets (I’ll try to list all the contributors at the bottom). The objective of this is to provide what many brush sets lack:

1. Organization: The biggest problem with most professional brush sets available for download is that it is nearly impossible to find any specific brush in them. What’s the point of having tons of brushes if you can’t find them when you need them? I aim to fix this by sorting my brushes into rows and columns based on its purpose and style of use. My brushes are also all labeled; so if you don’t know what something is, just hover your mouse over it, and you should get a good idea what it’s for. The list lays itself out particularly well in the default thumbnail mode.
2. Painterliness: None of these brushes are stamps. Every brush is meant to be used as part of a stroke. You will find no stamps of symbols, hairstyles, design elements, fully-formed trees, or animals. Instead, these brushes are designed to help you make your own images by drawing and painting them.
3. Simplicity: With a basic understanding of how brushes work in photoshop, you should be able to make changes to these brushes as you deem appropriate to the stroke you’re about to make.
4. Breadth: I try not to force any users into a specific style. This set of brushes should be just at home painting realistic cityscapes as it is painting anime characters or cartoony animals.
5. Brevity: This list of brushes is as small as I can make it and still maintain the breadth mentioned above. If you often work in a particular style and decide you need more of a specific type of brush, the list is short enough that you should still be able to see the default brushes as well as your additions without scrolling.

Some bits of organization apply to the whole list. View the brushes as thumbnails, and make sure that the rows have six brushes across. When viewed in this way, you will easily be able to find what you’re looking for because the first five columns in each row contains brushes tooled for painting specific subject matter.

The brushes in the far right column are meant for use with the smudge tool, and at densities 70% and up. Using the high densities makes the unique textures of the brushes more pronounced and reduces superfluous strokes. You can, of course, choose to use any of the brushes in the smudge tool and use any of the smudge-brushes as regular brushes (when using a regular brush in the smudge tool, I recommend opening the brush options, going to brush tip shape, and turning off spacing.)

Without further ado, I’ll introduce the brushes by row, starting from the top...

Basic Brushes:
These are the simplest of them all. I probably do 75% of my painting using these. They are the fastest to render and the easiest to understand and adjust.

Natural Media Brushes:
These three rows are for creating textures reminiscent of traditional media like pencils, crayons, and paint. They start dry and simple, and become more wet and textural (and complicated) as you move down the list. 

Whispy Brushes:
This row has brushes for clouds, dust, and fire.

Splashy Brushes:
This row has brushes for liquid drips, splashes, and splatter.

Grungy Brushes:
This row has brushes for rust, cracks, and scratches.

Flora Brushes:
This row has brushes for leaves, moss, and grass.

 

Fauna Brushes:
This row has brushes for skin, fur, and scales.

Techy Brushes:
This row has brushes for junk, facets, and chains.

When loading these brushes, I recommend saving your current set of brushes as a backup, and then clicking “replace brushes” and loading up my set. This will make sure that the brushes are in the correct order and arrangement when they load up. You can click “load brushes” to add your backup brushes to the end of the list.

Credit where credit is due. This list was inspired by (and many of the brushes borrowed from) Blur’s Good Brush. If you want an absolutely huge set of brushes, start there. Additional brushes come from here.

If you want more information about changing brush attributes, there is a great article here.