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Ooooh. Now these are some Disney Princesses I can really like. http://jeftoonportfolio.blogspot.com/2009/02/twisted-princess.html
I'd actually just finished altering a few pictures from Disney's Alice In Wonderland actually. Decided that after four years, I should get around to customizing my mac some and make a few custom icons for my hard drive, applications folder and a couple other things. I'd put an art neuvo styled gela skin bye Brandi Milne on the outside of my mac several months ago. https://www.gelaskins.com/image.php?ImageID=119 (Wow they have a lot more skins now than they did then) and while I like Tennel drawings of Alice, they didn't make very good icons. Disney's clean cel style on the other hand works well.
Of course, this flurry of customization spawned from one of Adobe's inadequacies.
A couple of days ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pseudomanitou mentioned some free photoshop texture brushes and, because I've been annoyed with Art Rage, this sent me on a general search for Photoshop and Illustrator Brushes.
Several hours and an astounding 3 GIGS of downloads later, I had more brushes than I could ever possibly use and a new problem. How the heck do I categorize these stupid things?
I began loading them up and looking at them, sorting them into folders. That's a start, but it's not that great. It would have been nice if Adobe had provided some way to preview brushes before importing them to your brush palette. In particular, some of the paint texture brushes I got are huge and incredibly detailed. Loading that palette only to chuck it if it doesn't have what you want is inefficient. Not to mention, it either replaces your current brush set or is appended to it and there's no way to mass delete brushes from your brush set. You have to delete them one by one. Ugh.
Happily, both Photoshop and Illustrator use the Mac's built in file dialog for loading brushes and that means I can select a picture view mode and see the 'preview' image of the brush set.
So... I opened up Photoshop, Grab, and Finder. I replace my current set of brushes in photoshop, resize the brushes preview window to a reasonably square representation of the brushes in that set, then use grab to snag the chunk of photoshop's UI and then paste that into the icon for the .abs file. Similar process for Illustrator.
So now instead of 'So and So's set to 50 Paint Splatter Brushes', I have this:
It's not fantastic but it's better than nothing and will encourage me to use them.
Of course, now there's the question of how much of someone else's brush can you use before you feel like you're doing clip-art or need to attribute. There are some really neat tools for building up some rich texture experiences in my work, and I'm struggling on an internal debate of how much I can use before I start feeling like I'm taking too many shortcuts. I do make my own brushes now and then, but some of these, in particular, the painting textures and some of the lighting effects will give me a lot of boost in digitally producing stuff that has the kind of feel I want.
Funny thing of course is that I had no qualms about using the brushes that ArtRage supplied though their texture patterns were designed by someone. Nor have I ever felt like I was cheating because I used a fan or filbert brush to make trees or clouds when I was painting, though someone somewhere did design the tool. So am I overthinking things now? Dunno. I'll dwell on it a bit more.
More importantly, given the amount of time I invested on collecting and labeling these brushes, I had better use them. :)
I'd actually just finished altering a few pictures from Disney's Alice In Wonderland actually. Decided that after four years, I should get around to customizing my mac some and make a few custom icons for my hard drive, applications folder and a couple other things. I'd put an art neuvo styled gela skin bye Brandi Milne on the outside of my mac several months ago. https://www.gelaskins.com/image.php?ImageID=119 (Wow they have a lot more skins now than they did then) and while I like Tennel drawings of Alice, they didn't make very good icons. Disney's clean cel style on the other hand works well.
Of course, this flurry of customization spawned from one of Adobe's inadequacies.
A couple of days ago,
pseudomanitou mentioned some free photoshop texture brushes and, because I've been annoyed with Art Rage, this sent me on a general search for Photoshop and Illustrator Brushes.Several hours and an astounding 3 GIGS of downloads later, I had more brushes than I could ever possibly use and a new problem. How the heck do I categorize these stupid things?
I began loading them up and looking at them, sorting them into folders. That's a start, but it's not that great. It would have been nice if Adobe had provided some way to preview brushes before importing them to your brush palette. In particular, some of the paint texture brushes I got are huge and incredibly detailed. Loading that palette only to chuck it if it doesn't have what you want is inefficient. Not to mention, it either replaces your current brush set or is appended to it and there's no way to mass delete brushes from your brush set. You have to delete them one by one. Ugh.
Happily, both Photoshop and Illustrator use the Mac's built in file dialog for loading brushes and that means I can select a picture view mode and see the 'preview' image of the brush set.
So... I opened up Photoshop, Grab, and Finder. I replace my current set of brushes in photoshop, resize the brushes preview window to a reasonably square representation of the brushes in that set, then use grab to snag the chunk of photoshop's UI and then paste that into the icon for the .abs file. Similar process for Illustrator.
So now instead of 'So and So's set to 50 Paint Splatter Brushes', I have this:
It's not fantastic but it's better than nothing and will encourage me to use them.
Of course, now there's the question of how much of someone else's brush can you use before you feel like you're doing clip-art or need to attribute. There are some really neat tools for building up some rich texture experiences in my work, and I'm struggling on an internal debate of how much I can use before I start feeling like I'm taking too many shortcuts. I do make my own brushes now and then, but some of these, in particular, the painting textures and some of the lighting effects will give me a lot of boost in digitally producing stuff that has the kind of feel I want.
Funny thing of course is that I had no qualms about using the brushes that ArtRage supplied though their texture patterns were designed by someone. Nor have I ever felt like I was cheating because I used a fan or filbert brush to make trees or clouds when I was painting, though someone somewhere did design the tool. So am I overthinking things now? Dunno. I'll dwell on it a bit more.
More importantly, given the amount of time I invested on collecting and labeling these brushes, I had better use them. :)
