I’m a big fan of small sites that provide free quality content just for the love of creating various items for people to use for their own design purposes. Before I provided a list of thousands of free Photoshop essentials from patterns, to brushes and gradients. Here’s some lesser known sites and designers and their awesome brushes. Quantity may vary with these smaller sites, but the quality is remarkable!
Photoshop Brushes
Studio Brushes – Nikki Jeske has provided a small but decent collection of various photo realistic brushes as well as a sampling of swirly brushes. My favorite? “Paper & Ink“.
Luxa – Luxa is a community of Photoshop users that provides video tutorials, step by step instructions, a small sampling of brushes and a digg-like article voting system. Favorite brush set? “Astral Flora”.
Encre – Encre offers a couple dozen brush sets of all different varieties – from floral, swirls, grunge, scratches, abstract and more. Favorite? Brushes 14 (second on page).
100×100 brushes – 100×100 brushes at Livejournal. I mentioned brush addicts at livejournal.com before as one of my favorite resources, and this is another great one. Tons and tons of brushes to download from very talented artists, most sized to work well with 100x100px dimensions – great for icon design.
Celestial Star – Celestial Star has tons of free brushes ranging from grunge, photo-realistic, illustrations, glitter, and more. Lots to choose from.
Beautiful-Sin – Small selection of some nice grungy – abstracty brushes. Nice sized brush packs, I hope they add some more!
Bedazzling – Bedazzling has several Photoshop brushes in the grunge and icon brush categories. Favorite? “Textured Wind”.
Misprinted Type – Older site, small selection – insanely useful and high quality grunge brushes. Definitely grab brush packs #2 and #4. Unfortunately no previews of brushes before downloading – but have no fears you won’t be disappointed!
deviantART Photoshop Brush Goodies
XxMortanixX – XxMortanixX provides two really random and quirky brush sets via deviant art. Really good stuff for oddball art and designs.
IHEA – Another talented artist who stocks deviantART with their fantastic content, IHEA provides us with plenty of vector-style brushes. I’m digging Vector Linedots Vol II.
SummerAIR – SummerAIR adds to the deviantART Photoshop brush collection with two packs of floral and swirl type brushes.
Trisste Brushes – Phenomenal eyelash and hair brushes, along with a few other packs such as wounds and decay. In the (very quickly thrown together) example above I’ve used the lovely Sarah Michelle Gellar to demonstrate one of the eyelash brushes.
InvisibleSnow – offers several random packs of brushes – my favorites being the hand drawn sketches like Urban Scrawl 2 and Sketchbook Scribble Brushes.
Tazni – Tazni has made a bunch of brush packs that come overflowing with brushes galore. Definitely check out the Tech and Grunge packs.
I could got on and on with more deviantART favorites but this sampling should keep you busy for at least a little while
