I know that I'm about to open a can of worms here!

And I ask this question "What are the essential brushes to have?" Due to recently installing GURM. Now up till now I had been just dumping the brushes in to the brushes folder care free and now there is no way to sort or tell what goes with were for a good portion of them. So I zipped up what I have and moved them off to my NAS drive to start fresh.

Now I know different folks have different brushes for different styles and this is ok! Never know when you'll need that particular type brush. I started to thumb through Deviantart.com and OMG the endless amount of brushes was over whelming! So this is why I ask the question!

And as always thanks for your help and support!

Well, firstly let me tell you the brushes you most likely will not need: brushes shaped like green bell peppers. You can get rid of those right away.

Anyway... firstly, there's the basics - round brushes of various sizes, hard & fuzzy.

Then, there's directional brushes, but with the brush engine update that's coming with 2.8 where I think you can make any brush directional with the dynamic settings these will be pretty much obsolete.

And then there's all kinds of textured brushes, like watercolour, paint splashes, cracks, grunge brushes, foliage, clouds, etc. These are useful for various purposes.

These are the ones I use most often, but of course it also depends on what kind of things you do.

In my opinion, the only thing you will really need is in the GPS (Gimp Paint Studio) addon: http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/

My essential brushes are:
- Round, 100% hard, 1 - 75 px diameter
- Round, 75% hard, 2 - 42 px diameter
- Round, 50% hard, 4 - 42 px diameter
- Round, 0% hard, 4 - 99 px diameter
The above brushes replace GIMP's default round brushes
- A small assortment of grunge brushes, both static and animated
- Several blurry line brushes - much softer that 0% hard round

All my other brushes and brush sets are in another directory structure, with examples of each brush or brush set so it's easy to pick the brush(s) I want. When I want to use some special brushes, I move (copy) them into a special brush folder that is only used for temporary-use brushes.

I also have another brush folder for testing new brushes. That way I don't have to worry about accidentally deleting my 'standard' brushes when I'm finished testing (and usually rejecting) the new brushes.

As you might have guessed, I don't use GURM. I'm comfortable with playing with the filesystem and prefer to shuffle brush files around on my own.

I have the standard brush sets (mine and GIMP's) backed up in separate directories so I can easily recover from any mistakes.
Also, everything is periodically backed up onto an external hard drive.

There are a lot of interesting brush sets out there. I like to pick and choose my brushes. (One from here, three from there, two from another place...)

Have this installed .. although were I made my mistake was not putting those brushes into folder named GPS Brushes and they got all inter-mingled with what I already had.



I use GURM not so much for the sake of organization although that's second on the list. I found that it takes a fantastic load off of Gimp both loading and what's being held in memory!

Could well be wrong but as I understand it, the green pepper 'useless brush' is a license thing.

Almost since they were posted, I dump the original brushes and use these

http://filsd.deviantart.com/art/GIMP-po ... t-92263636

Generally ok for everyday use, the odd script requires an original 'circle(1)' or a 'circle(5)'

Plus of course, lots and lots accessible through GURM, but not that often.

1) Parametric hard round brush
2) Parametric fuzzy round brush

I.e. the default brushes you can define yourself in GIMP's brush editor. The size you change with keyboard shortcuts (I have a tutorial on this). Those are all you really need - the rest are just icing on the cake. Also, the hard edge brush is optional.
I have however been known to be more and more minimalistic in this sense over the years. GPS is nice for offering a nice default extended setup.
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Griatch

A lot depends on your background and what you want to do.

I learned to paint with real brushes and pigments, so I have an assortment of sizes and types that pretty closely match my collection of real paint brushes. Plus some "grunge" brushes that approximate the effects of various non-brush paint application techniques.

I keep my set of active brushes pretty lean because I have and old machine with very limited memory. I do have a large inventory of brushes to call upon, but they sit on the shelf until I need to add them to my brush cup and afterwards they go back on the shelf.

One of the brushes I consider essential is one I made for myself. A nice big square brush I can use for coloring long straight edges. If you use the circle brush, it sometimes leaves a very small ripple on the edge. I also use it for similar straight edges if I'm trying to erase something.

You don't need several circle or fuzzy circle sizes cuz you can resize them using a script just like resizing patterns. I would have to dig around to find them but I'm sure someone here has it handy.

I agree there is no need for different-size brushes. But no script needed either - resizing brushes is a part of GIMP's normal functionality.
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Griatch

My bad. I got confused thinking about orientation. I forgot that you just set up preferences to use the scroll wheel on your mouse to change the size. Thanks for pointing that out.

One of the first things i do after installing a new version is to setup the input controllers for mouse wheel - scroll up and scroll down.

Remember also you can use anything in the clipboard as a brush.
Just select clipboard in the brushes dialog.

Personally when it comes to brushes i think that totally depends on what type of art you do.
If you do mostly touchups you could have an arsenal of clone brushes handy.
What i would like to see in the gimp dynamics is a preview of what the brush looks like while you create it.