Trail-off brushes

Many thanks for your reply Stephen.

Those settings are really nice but I was looking for something a bit more rough, organic looking. Like these brown leaves:

Ideally I'd like a nice, textured/grainy brush, with a random looking tail off, as in this image (Benji Davis illustration)?

Many thanks, Andrew

Hi Stephen,

Thank you so much for all of this. I will have a play around with these brushes and settings tomorrow, and let you know how I get on.

You really are very kind and it's much appreciated.

Andrew

Hi Stephen, I've had a play around with the settings you provided. I've made comments on the image. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks indeed, Andrew

Yes, I can help with that...sorry been a bit heads-down the last couple days but I'll see if I can get a few suggestions together for you in the next couple of days.

Ok let's start with Thick Paint. Here's a screenshot showing the selected brush and the settings changes..mostly in the RealBristle panel. Note that I am using a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium. Also note that turned off the 3D look by double-clicking on the thick paint layer and changing amount to Zero.

Lastly, note that the dab profiles make a nice difference in this brush...you can see in the box in the lower right corner, a change to the medium profile makes the mark more broken up.

Next up is the Dynamic Speckle...i was really happy how close I could get with this brush! Note all the panels I opened and their relevant settings.  This brush is really fun to paint with.

It's a bit oily, so if you want you can increase Resat to 100% and Bleed to zero to eliminate the blending.

Note how it responds differently to the selected paper texture! This will give you even more control of the 'breaks' at the edges of the brush.

Stephen,

These are fantastic - thank you so much. You've really gone out of your way here and I really appreciate it. This has improved my workflow tremendously.

One last thing if you don't mind - I'd like to have the option to show bristle marks too. I tried increasing the Thick Paint Layer to 1 - 5% but the bristle lines are too thick (shown at bottom of image). It's more a thin, realistic bristle mark I'm after (shown at top of image), combined with the trail off and edges that you've shown me. That's the last thing - promise!

So glad I could help!

Ah yes...some bristling without thickness...well that's possible as well! Go to Window > Brush Control Panels > Color variability. Add some saturation and value variability. You may need to play with these settings a bit to get the right balance. You can consider adjusting the smoothness and hue variabtility as well, but I find the first two typically provide the most natural looking results. :-)

Excellent Stephen, thank you so much. Really, really appreciated!

Hey, Stephen ~ Thank you so much for all of your excellent help! I am wondering if there is any way to do a trail-off with the pattern pen brushes?  

Hi Sunburst,

Hmm, hard to imagine the look and feel you are trying to get with pattern brushes...are you using one of the patterns that are included with Painter or are you using a custom one? Are you aiming for a traditional looking brush similar to Andrew45 or something different?

There is the I find that playing with "damping" helps the stroke taper a bit...for example on my setup around 70% damping helped the stroke pinch nicely at the end.

But perhaps there is another kind of brush technology that would suit you. For example adding a dab stencil to the dynamic speckle could create some very intricate patterns/textures AND have the nice falloff control.

A bit more info would be helpful...