The Alternative Tools: the Paint Shop Pro Brush Tool!

For the most part, Paint Shop Pro is an alternative digital art program that seems to compete with Photoshop. At least, that’s how I remembered it when I first started doing 2d digital art. Paint Shop Pro was a cheap alternative at the time!

The main difference between the two products is that Paint Shop Pro supports both vector and raster type images whereas you will need to buy Adobe Illustrator to do some vector art of your own.

If you are unfamiliar with those terms, raster graphics are exactly what you see on the screen. It is simple pixel based graphics. Vector graphics, on the other hand, uses mathematical shapes and calculations to draw.

Regardless, you can always do some research on your own on this topic!

1. Finding the Paint Shop Pro brush

As soon as you open up PSP, you will find that the way the items are arranged similar to Photoshop. That is, the tool bar to paint with is on the left while the rest are positioned on the right.

First of all, we are going to locate the Paint Shop Pro brush tool:

If you look at the center, you will find an icon that looks like a paint brush. On the default settings, it should be set to the paint brush. If you hold down on the icon, you will get two other brushes: the airbrush and the warp brush.

For the most part, you will use the paint brush or the airbrush. The main difference between those two types of brushes is that the airbrush has an extra option called ‘rate.’

This means it acts just like airbrush by firing paint on to the digital canvas at a given rate specified.

The warp brush is something you want to consider if you want to smudge specific areas in your digital painting. Otherwise, I hardly ever use it as there is already a dedicated smudge tool built into the program.

2. The Paint Shop Pro brush options

Once you selected the brush tool, you will get a set of options to manipulate the brush to behave however you want. The options in Paint Shop Pro are very simple, easy to understand, and very user friendly.

All your options will be on one long bar. For screen resolution reasons, I have cut the bars into two parts and placed them on top of each other to show the options:

As you can see, the descriptions are intuitive. One thing to note are the two options: continuous and wet look paint. Before you paint, make sure that the continuous box is checked!

If you don’t do that, then the brush strokes will act as different layers on top of each other. That means the brush strokes will not interact with one another very well and will cause a few headaches when you try to correct the brush strokes to blend with one another.

3. Know the blend modes!

However, you can get special effects when you start to paint with the blend modes. Try to experiment with as many as you can and see if you can understand each own particular blend mode.

The best way to learn these is to use the Paint Shop Pro brush tool and paint with a given blend mode on an existing picture. That way, you can see how the pixels are manipulated.

On the Paint Shop Pro brush tool, the blend modes are as follows:

Do most of them seem familiar? If you have worked with Photoshop before, you will realize that the only thing that is missing from that list is Pin Light and Hard Mix. Other than that, it’s identical to Photoshop’s list of blend modes!

Of course, there is one addition to the list which is called Paint Behind. This means that you can paint underneath existing colors so long as no other color exists in that area.

4. Practicing the Paint Shop Pro brush tool

Of course, you will learn the best from a lot of practice!

Again, you need not use every single setting or blend modes available. Stick with normal or a few that you like from simple experimentation. The object of PSP is to be user friendly and intuitive. Keep it simple for yourself as well!

As you are using the Paint Shop Pro brush tool, you will often need to switch different levels of opacity.

Just as a refresher, opacity is how transparent you want to make the brush. Setting it below 100% will allow your brush to build up a color. This will allow you to work with a range of values with a given color.

Other than that, if you have chosen Paint Shop Pro as your digital art program of choice, be confident in it as it is a great program to use with its own unique settings! As well, keep up the motivation to learn more about 2d digital art!

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