Note: These Tool Presets are only compatible with Photoshop CS5, CS6, and Creative Cloud.

How these brushes are different

Most pencil brushes use opacity and flow to determine the strength of their mark making and density. Texture is often an afterthought and feels tacked on. My real pencil brushes have locked opacity. They use a painstainkingly tweaked combinations of texture and flow settings to create the most realistic marks possible through a range of real pencil hardnesses.

Press hard and more tooth fills in for a more opaque stroke. Press light and the stroke shows more paper. Use a harder pencil lead and it will be, well, harder to fill in the paper’s virtual tooth. Use a softer lead and the tooth fills in more readily.

I use these brushes for almost all of my Photoshop sketching and have included new “real” style red and blue layout pencil variants as well as my more artificial, digital pencil brushes as a bonus. All of this for less than the cost of a real pack of sketching pencils!

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