Brushes

An ArcBrush brush is a full definition, not a size and a hardness slider. It has a tip (a procedural shape or an image), an optional grain texture, a stroke path (spacing, jitter, scatter, taper), and dynamics that map pressure, speed, direction, and randomness onto size, opacity, angle, and color.

Two panels manage them. The Brush Library (Window > Brush Library) is your collection. Brush Studio (Window > Brush Studio) is where you build and edit one. Both apply to the Paint and Mask Paint nodes.

One current brush, app-wide

There is a single current brush shared by the toolbar, the bracket-key size and hardness shortcuts, the Brush Library, Brush Studio, and a node’s Make Active action. It is not stored per node.

Clicking a brush in the Library makes it current immediately, with no separate Apply step and no need to select a node first. Selecting a different Paint node no longer changes the size, hardness, or color you are painting with. Painting a stroke is what records a brush into that node. The current brush is saved into your document and restored when you reopen it.

The Brush Library panel

Every saved brush appears with a thumbnail, name, and tags. Brushes are grouped by category under collapsible headers: the built-in categories first, your own categories after them alphabetically, and brushes with no category last under Uncategorized. A toolbar button switches to one flat list instead.

Filters stack on top of each other:

Filter	Narrows to
Search box	Name, category, or tag
Source	Native (built here), Imported (from a pack), Generated, or Document
Tool	Brushes scoped to Paint, Mask, or Eraser (an unscoped brush matches every filter)
Star button	Favorites only
Tag chips	Click to toggle each tag

A brush has exactly one category, which decides where it sits in the grouped view, and any number of free-form tags for search. Set both from the brush’s Edit dialog, Brush Studio’s Properties section, or the Save As New dialog. The Category field offers existing categories in a dropdown, or type a new name to create one.

Right-click a category header for Delete Category…, which removes every brush in it at once after a confirmation naming the category and the exact count. The catch-all Uncategorized group does not offer this, since it is where a brush lands by default rather than a category you chose.

The same menu offers Export Category (N)…, which writes exactly that category to one brush pack. The count in the label is the real number of brushes in the category, so an active search or tag filter can never quietly narrow what gets written.

A brush’s right-click menu offers Edit in Brush Studio…, Edit, Duplicate, Export, and Delete. Going the other direction, Brush Studio has a magnifying-glass button that reveals the current brush’s row back in the Library.

Brushes already in your document

Switch the Source filter to Document and the panel lists every brush in use by a Paint or Mask Paint node in the open file, including brushes painted with but never saved. Each row offers Add to Library, so a brush that only ever lived inside one document can be promoted into your permanent collection with one click.

The node’s own Brushes list

A Paint or Mask Paint node’s Parameters panel has a Brushes section listing one row per distinct brush that node has painted with: a preview swatch, the name, how many strokes use it, and its approximate size. A totals line at the bottom adds it all up, matching what the Clear All button would reclaim.

Each row has a single … menu:

Make Active copies that brush into your current brush, for picking up a brush you used earlier without hunting for it in the Library.
Save to Library writes it straight to your Brush Library.
Restyle these strokes re-renders every stroke that used this brush with your current brush.
Delete these strokes removes every stroke painted with it, undoable with Ctrl+Z.

Strokes painted before brush definitions existed are grouped into a single Legacy strokes row with no swatch and no menu. They are not a selectable brush and no restyle or delete action touches them.

Restyle Strokes

Painted with the wrong brush? Make the brush you want current, then restyle. A single row’s Restyle these strokes re-renders just that brush’s strokes. The section’s Restyle All Strokes… button opens a confirmation broken down by tool (Paint, Erase, Clone) with a checkbox and stroke count for each. Paint is checked by default; Erase and Clone are not, so a Restyle All click never silently changes how your erasing or cloning looks.

Either way the popover previews exactly what the strokes will become, and the whole thing is one undo step.

Brush Studio

Brush Studio always edits your one current brush, in isolation: a preview pad for test strokes, plus grouped sections for Tip, Grain, Stroke Path, Taper, Dynamics, Rendering, and Properties. Clicking a node, a wire, or empty canvas never changes what the Studio is editing, so a stray click mid-edit cannot yank it out from under you.

Section	What it holds
Tip	A procedural shape (round, ellipse, square) or an image. An Alpha Mask is a grayscale stamp tinted with your paint color; a Color Image is stamped exactly as authored, ignoring your paint color; a Lightness Map is recolored to your paint color while keeping the source’s own light-and-dark pattern.
Grain	A texture laid over the stroke, either moving with each dab or fixed to the canvas like real paper grain, with scale, rotation, offset, strength, and invert.
Stroke Path / Taper	Spacing, jitter, scatter, and how a stroke thins at its ends.
Dynamics	Maps an input (pressure, speed, direction, random, and the pen sensors below) through a curve onto a target (size, opacity, angle, roundness, color, and more).
Rendering	Flow, Opacity, and Blend Mode.
Properties	Name, source, and, for a library preset, category, tags, favorite status, and tool scope.

Blend modes

Every brush has a Blend Mode with the same choices as the Layer and Composite nodes, applied once per whole stroke. A stroke never darkens itself where it crosses its own path, but separate strokes and the content below blend for real. The built-in Chisel Marker uses Multiply this way, so its crossings darken like real marker ink. (A Multiply brush is invisible on a black canvas, just like a real marker on black paper.)

Generating grain

No grain image handy? Click Generate… in the Grain section. The Grain Generator bakes a seamless procedural texture from a curated list of looks: Paper, Stone, Fibers, Swirl, Clouds, Mottle, Speckle, Fine Grain, Cells, Cracks, and Craters. It is driven by an overall Look, a Scale for the texture’s own feature size, a Detail slider for looks that support layering, and a Seed with a dice button.

The preview and the test stroke behind the window both update live, so you can see how a texture reads under paint before committing. Once generated, the button relabels to Edit…, which reopens the same window pre-filled with the recipe that produced it, so a generated grain is never a dead end.

Grabbing a tip or grain from a node

Any node in your graph can become a brush tip or grain texture. Click From Node in the Tip or Grain section, then click a node in the graph. That click is consumed by the grab and does not change which node is selected; Esc or a right-click cancels. The node needs a cooked single-image output, and the Studio tells you why if it cannot be grabbed.

The grab goes through the same conversion an ordinary import does: a 32-bit node’s output is baked down to what you would actually see on screen first, then downscaled if it exceeds the 2048x2048 asset cap. The result is embedded into the brush like any other image, with no live link back to the node, so a brush built this way still saves and shares as a self-contained file.

Color dynamics

Three Dynamics targets shift your paint color as you paint, all in real units:

Hue Shift rotates hue in degrees and wraps around the wheel, so +190 and -170 land on the same color. The authoring range is -180 to +180; you can type up to ±360 for a ramp that needs to sweep past the wrap point.
Saturation Delta and Value Delta add or subtract HSV saturation and value in absolute percentage points, clamped to 0-100%. A +25% delta adds 25 points wherever the color started; it is not a relative multiply.

Multiple mappings on the same target add together before the color changes, so two +20 degree Hue Shift mappings make one +40 degree rotation. An unavailable sensor (Pressure with a mouse, for example) falls back to 0, meaning no shift at all, rather than some arbitrary color.

A Random-driven mapping can draw a fresh value for every dab, giving confetti-style multicolor scatter, or one value that holds for a whole stroke, giving a hand-mixed-paint look where each stroke is a slightly different shade but stays consistent along its length.

Which tips respond: a procedural or Alpha Mask tip’s tint shifts directly. A Lightness Map tip shifts hue and saturation on its tint, with value applying on top of the map’s own pattern. A Color Image tip is stamped as authored, so color dynamics do nothing until you turn on Recolor Source Pixels in the Tip section. Clone Stamp always paints the sampled source color and ignores color dynamics entirely.

A brush paints the same way whether your document is 8-bit or 32-bit and whichever working space it uses: the shift happens against your paint color as you picked it, before any color-space conversion.

Stabilization

A Stabilization control smooths hand jitter as you paint. While a stabilized stroke is in progress, a guide line connects the cursor to the trailing brush tip, and the stroke ends exactly at the tip rather than snapping forward. The built-in Brush Pen ships with extra stabilization.

Clone Stamp paints with the whole brush

Clone Stamp now uses your full brush definition, exactly like Brush and Eraser. An image tip’s shape, grain, taper, stroke path, and dynamics (including pen pressure) all apply. An image tip contributes its shape to a clone stroke; the color painted down always comes from the sampled source.

Alt+Click sets the clone source. The offset between source and brush is established by the first stroke you paint after that and then stays locked, so every later stroke samples from the same fixed offset no matter where it starts. Alt+Click again to pick a new source.

Pen pressure, tilt, and twist

A brush’s Dynamics can map pen pressure onto size, opacity, angle, and more. Switching your stylus to its eraser tip (or pressing a tablet’s dedicated eraser button) switches the active Paint node to erasing automatically, and back the moment you flip to the pen tip.

Beyond pressure, three more pen sensors are available as Dynamics inputs, and a tip’s own Rotation setting can follow two of them directly so an asymmetric tip turns as you angle or roll the pen:

Tilt X / Tilt Y / Tilt Elevation / Tilt Direction: how far the pen is leaned over, and which way.
Twist: barrel rotation, for styluses that report it.
Tangential Pressure: a side-pressure or thumbwheel axis some specialty styluses expose.

Platform	Pressure and eraser tip	Tilt	Twist
Windows	Full support, any Windows Ink-compatible tablet	Yes	Yes
macOS	Full support, any Cocoa-recognized tablet	Yes	Not read (no public system API)
Linux	Not supported in this release	Not read	Not read

Tangential pressure is not currently reported by any supported platform. The input exists so that a brush authored with it keeps working unchanged if future hardware adds support.

Wherever a sensor is unavailable, whether that is a mouse, a pen that does not report it, or an unsupported platform, the mapping falls back to its authored fallback value (or Rotation falls back to Fixed) exactly as if it were disabled. On Linux, drawing works normally with constant, non-pressure-sensitive input; nothing breaks, the pen simply behaves like a mouse.

Tablet Diagnostics

When a pen is not behaving the way you expect, Help > Tablet Diagnostics shows a live readout of what your tablet is actually sending, so you can tell a brush setting apart from a hardware or driver problem. It reports:

Which input mode the tablet is using (Windows Ink or Wintab, for example).
Whether the tip currently in use is being read as the pen or the eraser.
A capability table separating what your hardware is reporting right now from what your pen has actually been seen doing this session. An axis your driver claims but your pen never sends, most often barrel twist on a standard stylus, reads as “no variation yet” rather than a misleading yes.
Live dials for tilt and twist, plus bars, ranges, and history for pressure, tilt, and twist.

A Copy report button puts a plain-text summary on your clipboard for pasting into a support message. The report covers the device and its capabilities only; it carries no cursor position or other personal content.

An image tip or grain texture you add is embedded into the brush by default. Its pixels travel inside the .arcbbrush file, inside a pack, and inside any .arcb document that uses it. Send a document or a pack to someone else and everything it needs comes along. There is a hard cap of 2048x2048 pixels per asset, and ArcBrush warns when an embedded asset grows past a comfortable size.

File	What it is
`.arcbbrush`	A single brush
`.arcbbrushpack`	A collection, with author, license, and tag metadata attached

Use the toolbar’s import button, or drag a file onto the panel, to bring in either one. The export button next to it packs every brush currently matching your search, tag, and source filters, so filtering to a tag first is the quickest way to export a themed subset.

Some brushes produced by tools outside Brush Studio link an image to a file on disk instead of embedding it. A linked brush carries a visible warning wherever you edit it, because a document using one genuinely is not self-contained. If a linked file cannot be found when a stroke needs it, the stroke renders as a reproducible checkerboard placeholder in the shape the real tip would have occupied, and the node shows a warning badge, so a missing asset is obvious rather than silently painting the wrong thing. A linked asset also watches its file: edit it in another app and save, and every stroke and thumbnail using it re-renders within about a second.

Importing Photoshop brushes

The same import button and drag-and-drop accept Photoshop brush preset files (.abr). Importing opens a review dialog listing every brush the file declares, each with a preview rendered by ArcBrush from the converted brush (never a Photoshop-authored preview image) and an honest compatibility label, never a percentage:

Label	Meaning
Core settings transferred	The brush’s defining shape and settings came across with no known behavior difference.
Approximate	Usable, but at least one visible behavior differs. Computed round and square tips are always Approximate.
Tip only	Only the raster image came across, as an Alpha Mask tip. None of the source brush’s settings applied.
Not imported	Malformed, or nothing usable survived.

Click any row to expand its own list of what transferred, what was approximated, and what was left out and why. Every entry gives a stable reason rather than a vague “some settings didn’t import”. Tip-only entries and anything with a defining loss are unchecked by default, so a batch import does not flood your library with brushes that lost their shape. Re-importing a file ArcBrush has already seen is detected and skipped, leaving your first copy’s name, category, and favorite untouched.

A Category field above the list assigns one category to every brush the import publishes. It defaults to the file’s own name with its extension removed, and you can retype it or pick an existing category first, so a themed pack lands already organized.

What transfers

Tip size, angle, spacing, flow, opacity, and a sampled tip’s own raster shape; the brush’s own name matched to its own settings, even in packs of hundreds; pen-pressure size and flow response when the source used Pen Pressure as its controller; Count and scatter amount (approximated, since ArcBrush has one perpendicular scatter axis rather than two); and basic hue, saturation, and brightness jitter converted into ArcBrush’s own units, always labeled Approximate. Pen tilt and barrel rotation dynamics come across disabled rather than guessed at: open the brush in Brush Studio and enable the mapping to turn it on.

Never claimed, and shown as a labeled omission instead: a sampled tip’s procedural roundness and hardness (the raster is the shape), per-dab opacity or grain-strength dynamics, Texture Each Tip and texture depth, foreground/background and Purity color jitter, stylus wheel mappings, dual brush, Photoshop’s own smoothing (never mapped onto ArcBrush’s stabilization despite the similar name), and wet-edge or airbrush build-up.

A brush authored for one of Photoshop’s specialized tool engines (Mixer, Smudge, its own Clone Stamp, Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Blur, Sharpen, Bristle-tip, Erodible-tip) imports as Tip only, or Not imported when it has no raster at all. ArcBrush never silently converts one into an ordinary paint brush, because the tool’s real behavior has no equivalent here.

Version support

Version	Status	Notes
1.x, 2.x (old format)	Supported	Computed and sampled brushes, raw and compressed rows, 8-bit (16-bit on sampled tips)
6.1, 6.2	Supported	Sampled tips only, 8- and 16-bit
10.1, 10.2	Supported	Sampled tips only, 8- and 16-bit
Anything else	Not supported	A clear message, never a guessed read

Importing GIMP brushes

GIMP brush files (.gbr) import the same way, with the same batch Category field. What transfers is simple and predictable:

The tip’s own raster shape at its original resolution. A non-square tip is padded to a square canvas with transparent pixels, never stretched.
The tip’s spacing, converted from GIMP’s percent-of-width convention automatically, so a portrait-oriented tip needs no retuning after import.
The brush’s name.
A color tip imports as a Color Image tip and a grayscale tip as an Alpha Mask tip, with no conversion prompt to answer.

GIMP version 1 files record no spacing value, so ArcBrush uses GIMP’s own 25% default. The experimental “version 3” variant is not supported; re-export as version 1 or 2, or export as .abr or a PNG image instead. Parametric brushes (.vbr), patterns (.pat), animated brushes (.gih), and Krita’s own preset and bundle formats are not supported, and dropping one gives a plain message rather than a silent failure.

The built-in brushes

ArcBrush seeds your library with 29 brushes across seven categories, each a group header in the default view:

Category	Brushes
Basic	Hard Round, Soft Round, Hard Round Pressure
Sketching	Sketch Pencil, HB Pencil, 6B Pencil, Mechanical Pencil
Inking	Ink, Technical Pen, Brush Pen, Calligraphy Nib, Chisel Marker
Painting	Watercolor Paper, Watercolor Large, Flat Brush, Gouache Round, Gouache Large, Soft Wash
Airbrush	Soft Airbrush, Spray Paint
Dry Media	Charcoal, Charcoal Rough, Chalk Pastel, Chalk Rough, Wax Crayon
FX	Ink Spatter, Glitter, Confetti, Star Sprinkle

Every textured brush except Charcoal was made with the Grain Generator and carries its recipe, so opening Edit… on one shows exactly how it was built. Five brushes use an image tip: Ink Spatter and Star Sprinkle carry generated tips that are worked examples the same way, while Watercolor Large, Gouache Large, and Charcoal Rough ship hand-authored artwork, embedded as a few KB of pixels because no procedural recipe reproduces it faithfully. Nothing here is a shipped image library, so the whole set adds very little file size.

The four pencils are tuned to step evenly from finest to broadest and to respond gradually to pen pressure, so a light hand leaves a genuinely faint mark and full pressure still reaches solid black.

Edit or delete any of them freely. Nothing else depends on them, and a deleted built-in stays deleted rather than returning on a later launch. If you change your mind, the Library toolbar’s ”…” menu has Restore Missing Built-in Brushes (re-adds only what you deleted) and Reset All Built-in Brushes… (returns every built-in to factory settings after a confirmation, re-adding deleted ones too). Neither touches brushes you created or imported, and a reset keeps each built-in’s favorite star and any tags you added.

While a Paint or Mask Paint node is active, the toolbar shows a compact thumbnail and name for the current brush beside the quick controls (size, opacity, color, hardness). Click the chip to open the Brush Library; click the Brush Studio button next to it to edit the current brush’s full definition.

See Keyboard Shortcuts for the size, hardness, and tool keys.