Painting brush strokes

Use the Paint Brush Tool to apply brush strokes to your design.

Pixel painting example

Applying brush strokes to color scanned line art.

Painting

The Paint Brush Tool and other brush-based tools can be used to add brush strokes to your image for creative or corrective reasons. An impressive selection of categorized brushes is available for use with these tools in the Brushes panel. Each category in the panel contains brushes of varying properties and characteristics.

The appearance of brush strokes are determined by a combination of the chosen brush tool, the Brushes panel and the tool's context toolbar.

Paint Brush To paint brush strokes:
  1. Use the Layers panel to select the layer that you want to work on, or create a new layer.
  2. From the Tools panel, select the Paint Brush Tool or other brush-based tool. (See tip below.)
  3. From the Brushes panel, select a brush thumbnail of your choice. (See tip below.)
  4. Adjust the context toolbar settings.
  5. Select a stroke color from the Color panel.
  6. Drag on the page in the direction that you want the brush stroke to follow.
Undo Brush Tool To undo painted modifications:
  1. From the Tools panel, select the Undo Brush Tool.
  2. Paint over pixels which you want to return to their original value.
Erase Brush Tool To erase brush strokes after you paint:
  1. From the Tools panel, select the Erase Brush Tool.
  2. Paint over areas of your brush stroke.
To use opacity quick keys:
  1. Select a Brush tool.
  2. Press a numerical key, or two numerical keys in quick succession, to set the opacity. For example:
    • Press 4 for 40% opacity.
    • Press 0 for 100% opacity.
    • Press 4 and 5 for 45% opacity.
    • Press 0 and 7 for 7% opacity.

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