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Your own brushes and textures

Brush tips and paper grains are plain image files. Drop your own into one folder and they appear in Brush Properties next to the ones that ship with Am_sketch.

Tips and papers

A brush can use two images (see Brush settings → Texture):

  • a Tip — the shape of each stamp, like the end of a real brush;
  • a Paper — a surface pattern the stroke is filtered through, fixed to the screen so every stroke shows the same grain.

Adding your own

Put your images in your Documents folder:

Documents\Am_sketch\brushes\
├── tips\      your brush tips
└── grains\    your paper grains

Create the brushes, tips and grains folders if they are not there yet, then restart Am_sketch: your files appear in the Tip and Paper lists, marked (mine), after the shipped ones.

Not in the program folder

Do not put files in the brushes folder next to Am_sketch.exe: an update replaces that folder. Documents\Am_sketch\brushes is yours and is never touched.

Making a good image

  • Formats: PNG (best), JPG, BMP, TIFF or WebP.
  • Brightness is ink: white paints, black paints nothing. Colour is ignored — the image is read as greyscale — and so is transparency, so draw on an opaque background.
  • Sizes: square, power-of-two sizes such as 256 × 256 or 512 × 512 work best. A tip may be wider than it is tall (a chisel, a wedge).
  • Grains must tile seamlessly. A paper repeats across the screen; if its left edge does not continue its right edge (and its top its bottom), you will see a seam in every stroke. Use your painting program's offset or make seamless filter.
  • The file name becomes the display name: paper_rough.png shows as Paper Rough.

A file with the same name as a shipped one replaces it, for you only.

What ships

Tips Grains
Round Soft · Bristle Fan · Chisel Flat · Charcoal Block · Spatter · Ink Wedge · and three Sootline tips Paper Fine · Paper Rough · Canvas Weave · Watercolor Press · Concrete · Sootline Stucco Wall · Sootline Weathered Plaster · Sootline Vellum Tooth

A brush from any picture

Right-click the brush list → Import texture... and pick an image. Am_sketch turns it into a tip — light parts paint, dark and transparent parts do not — and makes a new brush named after the file, ready to draw with. This one does honour transparency.

Where brushes are stored

Brushes you make are small JSON files in Documents\Am_sketch\presets:

Folder What is in it
presets\custom\ Brushes you added with Add brush or Import texture...
presets\saved\ Your Save current settings changes to existing brushes
presets\textures\ Images made by Import texture...

Copy the presets folder to move your brushes to another PC, or to back them up. Delete a file in saved\ to put that brush back to how it shipped.