Discover illustrator Joel Santana's favorite Photoshop brushes for character design
Using Adobe Photoshop for digital illustration is one of the most common applications of this software, which allows artists, creatives and designers of all levels to build characters, scenarios and objects out of their imagination. The use of custom brushes can also give extra character to our drawings and illustrations.
In the following video tutorial, character designer Joel Santana (@themaddhattr) shares his favorite Adobe Photoshop brushes for digital painting. Santana uses them for creative tasks ranging from sketching to color application, and they give a good example of the wide variety of textures offered by Photoshop custom brushes. Find out below:
1. Loish's Oil Pastel
"It gives you a really nice textured effect. Changing the flow and the pressure of your hand, you can get different effects: from hard strokes to very, very soft shapes".
2. Loish's Hard Round
"This one has a softer edge, but it still will give you a lot of texture, and you can use it to build up nice forms. It gives you some interesting blending, too, even taking into consideration its soft edges".
3. Kyle's Drawing Box Animator Pencil 2
"You get some nice variety and different lines, and it always feels very, very natural. I do love to draw on paper, but with this brush, once you get used to it, it really feels that something that you drew on paper. It's great for blending, the lines feel very smooth and organic...".
4. Kyle's Drawing Box Perfect Pencil 2
"It's a really nice brush if you're trying to blend. It's great for shading, looking like charcoal or graphite on a real paper. Together with the Animator Pencil, these are the ones I prefer when sketching".
5. Kyle's Paintbox Gouache a Go Go
"With this one, it is easy to blend your different colours. The transitions are subtle and the colors blend really nicely".
6. Lynn Chen's Soft Texture
"A nice texture that really feels like pastel painting, with a softer blend but just a very subtle texture edge to it".
Did you enjoy this tutorial? If you want to learn how to breathe life into a character sketch through color and light with Adobe Photoshop, check out Joel Santana's online course ‘Digital Painting for Characters: Color and Light’.
- You may be interested in:
- Domestika Basics: Introduction to Adobe Photoshop, 5 courses by Carles Marsal.
- Domestika Basics: Adobe Photoshop for Illustration, 6 courses by Gemma Román.
- Brushes and Pixels: Introduction to Digital Painting in Photoshop, a course by Patricio Betteo.