Week 10: The Best Things In Life Are Custom-Made

It’s the week before my presentation! I’ve been working on several things these days. First, finishing up and retouching all 5 illustrations. Second, getting the illustrations prepared for print and ordering prints from Staples. Lastly, making presentation slides and preparing my talk. 

Since not much new has been going on, I’ll be taking today’s post to talk a bit about the tools I’ve been using to create my illustrations. Specifically . . .   

Digital Art Brushes 

A digital art brush mimics a traditional one: you can use it to paint on your digital canvas, and it has qualities like shape, pressure sensitivity, flow, opacity, and other various terms of art lingo. How do they work? Imagine you have a stamp with a certain imprint. Now drag it across the page. That’s what a brush is like. 

Brushes are emphasized a lot in digital art since certain textures and brush shapes can elevate paintings a lot — and also help you save a TON of time. Take a look at some of my favorite details from my own paintings: I’m also not saying that you need textures to create good art. It all depends on your style and preferences, and I just happen to like textures.   

My Actual Brushes  

The digital art software I use is called MediBang Paint. It’s a free program, and I use it mainly because it’s the only program light enough to not cause my laptop to glitch. It’s brush variety is honestly not great, and it’s also near impossible to custom-make a nice brush with cool texture, but I’ve done my best with it. Here are the brushes I used most frequently in my Jane Eyre illustrations (from top to bottom, most to least used). All of them were custom-made by me, with the exceptions of the Pen, Mapping Pen (Parallel), and Oil Pastel brushes, which were default brushes with MediBang Paint. 

Here’s a couple of my favorite texture details from the Jane Eyre illustrations. I’ll give you my respect and admiration if you can list every brush that I used in each of the three images  : ) That’s all for this week! Thanks for sticking around, and I’ll (hopefully) see you at my presentation!