Custom Brushes / Textures Pack?

[Cinder]

Hey people,

I'm wondering if you guys know of any "must-have" texture or brush packs? I've done a little painting in photoshop and so on, but I've never really used any textures this far, and I really want to step up a notch and start giving my work another dimension. So I'm asking if there are any good packs of textures and brushes, or if I need to find textures online (google?) for every project I am going to work on, or make my own?

Hope I made some sense.

Cheers

[GriNGo]

I really suggest that you should try to make your own. As with brushes, it makes some good experimentation, and to make your own becomes pretty much the first thing you'll do instead of searching for hours for the "perfect" one. If you have a digital camera, just go out one day and start snapping pictures of the environment! start building your texture library that way, it's pretty fun and fast to do. If you still insist on downloading, deviantart has some good packs you can download... but nothing you can't do for yourself once you learn the basics.

Later!
GriNGoLoCo

[Ilaekae]

Another thing you can do is to spend about an hour messing with the little settings palette next to the brushes. I think it's labled "Brush Presets" or something like that. Nearly all the brushes that are standard can be converted to some sort of useful texture by selectively messing with the setting buttons.

[StupidIsAsStupidDoes]

Honestly, you really don't need that many brushes. It adds character to your work if you fool around with interesting textures and brush strokes, but most people just use the basic round brush for most of their work anyway (it gets the job done, and is very similar to working with most drawing and painting media).

Photoshop already comes with a variety of brushes and textures that you can customize to your heart's content, but it's a lot more than you'll actually need if you have good drawing and painting skills. As for textures, just do a google search, and use the Pattern Maker filter to create a tiling pattern (there are ways to create seamless repetitions, but I haven't really looked into it).

You can find extra brushes all over the net (but you do have to customize them; most of them are just the brush shape with no additional settings). Google works, there are links on the Adobe website (I'm not entirely sure where), and there's a brush sharing thread here as well. There's no "must have" set; just download as many as you can, and save the ones that work for you. Everyone has different tastes.


EDIT: Also, magazines such as ImagineFX, Advanced Photoshop, Photoshop Creative and Computer Arts usually include free brushes on the DVD that comes with the magazine.

[stoph]

i just found this set of watercolour (http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-hi-res-watercolor-photoshop-brushes/) brushes that look absolutely gorgeous. havent used them yet, but they would do well to better simulate natural media in PS