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Hard Pencil Photoshop brush

 

Download _HardPencil brush preset in .abr format here

This is a photoshop brush I made to solve a common problem sketching pixel art and low res textures. It uses a solid white texture in the brush settings to produce a harder, solid edge, similar to anti-aliased pixel art.

I discovered this texture trick a few months ago and have used the brush a ton since — it’s not perfect, but it’s saved me a bunch of time.

Some notes due to weird photoshop Texture behavior:

  • The brush cannot produce uniform, clean blending. Instead of a consistent transparency value the blended edges will have a random noisness to them. You shouldn’t use the marks produced by it in pixel art without a little manual cleanup.
  • For the same reasons as above, thin lines seem to depend a little bit on the speed of your stroke.
  • Due to the way photoshop scales/interpolates Textures, you can’t make a 1px line at 100% flow settings — try 20-30% flow if you want to make a single line. I find 23% to be the magic number for shift + clicking lines.

Otherwise this can do everything a regular photoshop brush can do — it’s great for sketches and first passes on pixel art, it’s a solid painting brush for more of an oekaki or painterly style with hard marks, and it’s great for painting textures for 3d assets. Almost anything you would have painted with a soft brush and then scaled down or applied an unsharp mask to, you can get a better result raw with this brush.

So, check it out, and let me know what you think of this brush on twitter!