It's in this dialog you choose what brush you want to use, and the settings you want to apply to the brush. The dialog displays all the available brushes. You may also notice some unusual brushes, like colored brushes (pixmap brushes), brushes with a red triangle in the right corner a so called "Image House" brush , brushes with artistic text, little flourishes or doodles, etc.

All of those brushes are relatively easy to create in Gimp and save them in the appropriate format. Gimp also provides you with a brush editor where you can create and edit brushes (you can only edit brushes that are created in the brush editor).

Preview and Brush Information

You will see that some of the brushes in the dialog has a little + sign. The + sign is indicating that the brush preview is scaled to fit, i.e. the brush is larger in reality. To view the real size of the brush, click and hold on the brush square and the real size brush will appear (and disappear when you release the mouse).

When you choose a brush the name and the size of the brush will appear in the brush dialog. The brush size is measured in pixels.

Settings

Spacing is the distance between your brush marks. If you set the spacing to 100 the brushmarks will be like a bead of pearls. If you set the spacing to zero, the brushmarks will create a solid, brush-shaped line. If the spacing is higher than 100 the brushmarks will form a dotted line. Note: It is mostly not useful to set the spacing to zero since the brush (most notably fuzzy ones) will look unnatural.

Pixmap Brushes

Pixmap brushes are small images (with or without color) that can be used as a brush. Since the brush is a image you can't alter it's color, i.e the color setting in the toolbox will not apply to this image. Note: That if you use color as a pressure sensitivity when you paint you will be able to change the color of the pixmap brush. For information how to create and save a Pixmap Brush please see the Gimp Pixmap Brush page.

Image Hose Brushes

The Image Hose brush is a specialized pixmap brush, you will notice that the brush is a Image Hose by the little red triangle in the bottom right corner. The difference between a Pixmap brush and a Image Hose is that the Image Hose contains one or several Pixmap brushes.

The preview of an Image Hose is also a bit special, since an Image hose is built up of several Pixmap brushes you will see all brushes displayed as a small animation when you invoke the preview function (press and hold on the brush preview).

Since the Image Hose is built up of several Pixmap brushes there are functions to control which of the brushes you will paint with. The functions are incremental, angular, random, velocity, pressure, xtilt and ytilt. To give you an idea say that the Image Hose is built up of several arrows and has angular as control function. Then you will be able to paint arrows that follows your movements when you draw. Note: That you can't edit those function they are built into the Image Hose brush file when it was created. For further explanation of how to create Image Hoses please see the Gimp Pixmap Brush page.

New, Edit and Delete Brushes

You can create new brushes by clicking on the new button. This will bring up the Brush Editor dialog where you can create your brush. You can edit brushes created in the brush dialog, invoking edit on brush of that type will once again bring up the Brush Editor dialog where you can alter your brush. Naturally you can also delete brushes created in the Brush Editor, just click on Delete and they will vanish.

Additional Information

Default Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+B

Index