25 Cool Brushes for Photoshop

25 Cool Brushes for Photoshop

The Internet offers masses of Photoshop brushes to suit all types of digital project, from hand-drawn doodles and cartoon characters, paint effects and grunge textures, to vector shapes and photographic elements, and many available completely free. This post brings together 25 cool brushes, covering a spectrum of styles, with packages suitable for various applications.

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1. Aoki’s Realistic Bokeh 2

This is a really great set of brushes to add a touch of Bokeh effect to Photoshop work. Bokeh is the Japanese word, which is now used more generally as photographic term, to describe the quality of ‘being out of focus’ or ‘blurred’. It can produce some stunning effects, particularly on twinkling patches of light, and this is exactly what this set recreates.

2. Spray Set Two

A dash of graffiti art can create a grungy, urban edge to designs, and that’s what this useful set offers: 20 high-quality spray paint spots and splashes.

3. Z-DESIGN Tech brush set v5: INTERFACE

This stunning set is one of the best collection of tech brushes going, a massive selection of diagnostic diagrams and info graphics to add a techno theme to backgrounds and interfaces.

4. Glow Brushes II

These cool brushes are ideal for using for backgrounds and graphic fills, but can be used for any number of other purposes. The set features glowing, swirling smoke and water-style brushes that may be layered to great effect.

5. 50 Deadly Tron Grids

This set is unashamedly inspired by science-fiction movie Tron, with the super cool retro-futuristic aesthetic of dynamic grids, which are best when coloured with neon gradients.

6. Let’s Go Grunge

This collection presents 26 brushes with a variety of grungy and distressed textures, extremely useful for adding roughness and grime to design work.

7. 15 Vector Ink Strokes

These vector brush strokes offer a choice of stroke type and density, and include stippled ‘dab’ type marks, great for adding a ‘handmade’ look to blogs and design projects.

8. Moldy Paper

This set presents 15 fantastically mouldy, crumpled paper brushes with a choice of different rough textures.

9. Aura Brushes

Floral, spiral, circular and geometrical elements combine to make up the shapes in this set of three stylish brushes.

10. Dried Blood Splatters

This set presents a huge variety of dried blood splashes, splats and dribbles. The title may sound a little gruesome, but by changing the colour the brushes can be used for other grungy, inky effects.

11. Lost In Space Brushes

Taking images from NASA and other space photography sources, the creator of this set has made a stunning collection of 39 brushes to add stars, galaxies and other celestial bodies to designs. Used delicately, these brushes can add a sprinkle of space dust to photo projects.

12. 2Bit-Twilight Brushes

This set of 12 brushes is useful for adding abstract, two-bit twilight sparkle to design work.

13. WaterColor

Made using real watercolour scans, this set offers a range of brush marks and splashes for creating fresh painterly additions to digital images.

14. QuadGrunged

QuadGrunged presents a selection of 10 grungy brushes, particularly useful for applying to dark and grimy border designs

15. Doodle Line Brushes

This cute collection features doodle line designs, which are especially suited to borders and divisions in personal blog pages.

16. Cracked Walls

These 14 brilliant cracked wall brushes can be applied to backgrounds and abstract images, adding distressing effects for a grungy aesthetic. Each wall is high enough resolution to be used in digital, screen-based work, or for print layouts.

17. Combobrushez

This selection of vector-based brushes combines natural forms, dynamic abstract shapes and decorative graphics, perfect for blog, website, poster and flyer designs.

18. Technical Brushes 250x

This brilliant set features 250 pixel brushes offering techno-chic with circuit board, electrical engineering and science-inspired symbols and diagrams.

19. Real Smoke

Great for using in abstract digital art, web or print designs; this collection of 108 brushes are crafted from photographic images of real smoke. By applying colour gradients and transparency effects, users may achieve some superb effects.

20. Dreamon Shape Brushes 02

This versatile set of eight vector shapes can be applied to any screen or print project; this preview shows how the shapes can be applied to text, with great results.

21. Splatter Brushes

A set of 11 paint splatter brushes, all in hi-res so can be used for quality print purposes in addition to web-based projects. Digital designers can build up layer upon layer of these brushes in different colours to make expressionist painting-style creations.

22. Arc’s Rivets and Metal Brushes

This set offers 138 industrial-themed brushes including rivets, screws, bolts, wielded and riveted seams, vents and holes; perfect editions to grunge and tech-style web designs.

23. Smokey Fire Brushes

Fifty brushes are on offer in this pack, great for adding fire, smoke and swirling heat to backgrounds and abstract art projects.

24. Massive Splatter Pack

This collection of 23 hi-res spatter brushes is really useful for any artist looking to include splashes paint, blood or other fluid in digital print projects.

25. Euphoria Brushes

Finally, this set offers 24 crisp abstract vector brushes, which can be applied to a variety of projects, adding tech-textures to anything from web pages to music-related posters and flyers.

James Adams is a designer, analyst and writer for an online print cartridge supplier where he reviews products like 364XL ink and posts about design and advertising on their blog.

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