A GIMP Milestone: Scalable GIMP Brushes!

(Note: as you have known, the screen shots and the lesson plans on this site were based on the older version of GIMP, namely 2.2. However, most of it is still applicable to you as a digital painter.)

The incorporation of scalable brushes is what’s going to give you more freedom when you are painting.

For example, the advantage of having scalable brushes is that it allows you to paint on a larger canvas. This leads to better details and better print resolution. On top of that, you don’t need to deal with customizing your own sized brushes.

Another neat feature is that you can still create custom GIMP brushes, in which it becomes automatically scalable!

1. Changes in GIMP 2.4 and above

First thing that you notice is that it has a nicer looking interface and a few more tools for you to play with in the main tool box.

Compared to before, new introductions include the foreground select tool, the alignment tool, the healing brush, and the perspective clone brush.

To be honest, as a digital painter, you won’t be using most of these new tools. The reason is that these tools have very little to do with painting.

For now just scan around for the painting tools you are used to. Again, what we are interested is the new scaling option available to these digital brushes.

2. The scale scroll bar

For a while now, it was a struggle for digital painters to use GIMP effectively due to the lack of scalable brushes. Scalable brushes were probably one of the most desired features that artists want from GIMP.

But in this new version, when you click on any brushes, you will be treated to a scale scroll bar. It is located just right underneath where you would choose your brush type.

Now, you also get a new option called jitter. What this does is that it allows your brush to not paint in a continuous line. The more jitter you have, the more the brush will ‘jump’ to a new path.

Aside from this, everything else remains the same.

3. Using scalable GIMP brushes

Continue to set the brush type and behaviors as you normally would and start to paint. When it comes to deciding the brush diameter, you can use the slider to choose your size, selecting the arrows to the desired size, or type in the desired size.

Now, when you’re working faster, sometimes it’s too cumbersome to always go back into the tool box and selecting the brush scales.

There is a shortcut, however. As you are painting with your main hand, the other hand will usually be on the keyboard. To select the desired size, hit and hold the ‘[’ or ‘]’ keys on the keyboard. Hitting ‘[’ will scale down the brush while hitting ‘]’ will scale up the brush.

This works with custom made GIMP brushes as well.

Simple enough, right? Trust me; it will save you a lot of time!

4. Conclusions

GIMP 2.4 answers a lot of prayers for a good digital art program. Just the introduction of scalable GIMP brushes paves the way for more digital artists interested in painting on their computers.

Regardless of this huge milestone, GIMP still has one more thing worth improving: better hardware support.

This is a rather big deal because as a digital painter, you depend on your stylus to draw. Some artists have their tablets working as soon as it’s hooked up. Others aren’t that lucky and may require a bit of fiddling.

You may need to look around on the Internet for the support you need to get the tablet to work correctly. Whether it is from the GIMP developers or the manufacturers of the tablets, hardware support needs to be addressed.

For now, I give a toast to GIMP for providing the much needed scalable GIMP brushes that digital artists need!

Return from Scalable GIMP Brushes to Digital Art Tools.
Return from Scalable GIMP Brushes to the 2d Digital Art Guide.