Draw

Brushes & painting

The natural-media paint engine — 30 tuned brushes across seven families, real wet edges, paper tooth, bristle streaks, and a full brush editor.

Kreativus paints with a real natural-media engine: pressure, speed and stylus tilt all resolve into every dab, wet edges pool pigment at a stroke’s boundary, and paper tooth stays pinned to the canvas so overlapping strokes reveal the same grain — the way real paper behaves. Pick the Paint tool (B) on a raster layer (one is created for you on the first stroke if needed) and choose a brush.

The collection — 30 brushes, seven families

Presets set the brush’s behavior, never your color or size — switching brushes mid-drawing keeps your ink. Each family leans on a different part of the engine:

• Basics — Ink Pen, Pencil, Watercolor, Spraypaint, Crayon, Charcoal. The original six.
• Pencils & Graphites — Studio 6B (velvety, rich coarse tooth, rolls onto its side for shading), Drafting 2H (pale and precise — the low opacity ceiling is the 2H), Carpenter’s Flat (a chisel that follows the stroke), Litho Crayon (greasy china marker that slowly exhausts its load).
• Inks & Calligraphy — speed is the soul here: fast flicks starve and taper, slow passes pool. Sumi Master (whips thin at speed, pools wet at rest, runs dry into feathered breakup), Broadpen 3mm (a fixed-angle italic nib — width comes entirely from direction), Kabuki Liner (confident comic inking), Thirsty Reed (runs out fast; every stroke re-dips).
• Oils & Impasto — Butter Knife (a palette knife that smears what’s already there and leaves a ridge), Hog Bristle Flat (the workhorse — bristle streaks, colour pickup, a thinning load), Dry Scumble (broken colour dragged over the tooth), Turps Glaze (transparent tinting layers that melt into what they cross).
• Watercolors & Washes — Bloomfield Wash (pigment pools hard at the boundary, paper granulates through the middle), Granulator (sediment settles into the paper’s valleys), Wet-on-Wet Bleeder (edges feather and wander), Paper Skip (dry brush sparkling over rough paper).
• Pastels & Chalks — the most tilt-driven family: tip for line, broadside for weather. Soft Pastel, Oil Pastel, Vine Charcoal (airy, made for gesture), Compressed Charcoal (the deep blacks), Conté Crayon.
• Gouache & Acrylics — Velvet Gouache (dense poster-paint matte), Acrylic Shader (crisp directional strokes with body ridges), Plakat One-Stroke (the sign-painter’s loaded flat).

Save your own with Save as Preset — they appear under Your Presets.

What the engine actually does

These aren’t texture stamps — they’re behaviors, resolved live along your stroke:

• Pressure drives size and (per-brush) flow, through an editable response curve — flat bottom-left is a light touch barely painting; steep top-right is a hair-trigger.
• Velocity — a fast flick narrows the dab and starves its flow, the way a loaded ink brush whips thin.
• Tilt — rolling a stylus onto its side widens the dab up to +140%, lightens it and roughens the grain: the side-of-the-stick shading stroke.
• Depletion — the brush carries a finite load that runs out with distance; a graining brush breaks up dry at the stroke’s end. Every new stroke re-dips.
• Wet Edges — pigment pools at the stroke’s boundary while the interior dries lighter — real watercolor behavior, computed against the paper under the stroke so overlapping dabs can’t wash it out.
• Paper Grain — the tooth is pinned to canvas coordinates with a fixed seed: light pressure catches only the peaks, heavy pressure fills the valleys, and two strokes crossing reveal the same paper. Tooth Size scales it.
• Streak — stretches the grain along the stroke’s travel: hog-bristle drag, dry-brush lines that run the length of the stroke.
• Wetness — each dab picks up the colour already under it: oils’ wet-into-wet mixing.

The brush editor

Open the editor for the full desk: Spacing, Scatter, Size Jitter, Grain, Grain Jitter, Smoothing; the natural-media four (Wet Edges, Depletion, Velocity, Tilt); a Dual Brush (a second, smaller tip’s texture showing through each dab); the pressure Transfer curve; and Multicolor — a per-brush palette with Color Jitter, so one pass lays down several colours (pastels picking up neighbour flecks, spray cans with attitude). The nib itself has Roundness and Angle, with Follow stroke for calligraphy. Opacity is a hard per-stroke ceiling and Flow is how fast you build toward it — the Photoshop split, done properly.

Every brush renders through the same engine at any size — big brushes ride the GPU, and the live preview strip in the panel is a real stroke, not an icon.

The other paint tools

The Paint flyout holds the whole pixel family, all acting on the selected raster layer:

• Eraser (E) — same dab engine, punches alpha.
• Clone Stamp — Alt-click a source, paint a fixed-offset copy. A source preview fills the brush circle so you can register the graft before it lands.
• Healing Brush — clone that matches tone: the source’s texture with the destination’s own colour and brightness, so the patch has no edge.
• Burn / Dodge / Sponge — darken, lighten, de/saturate, with a continuous Shadows↔Highlights Range dial instead of a three-way switch.
• Blur / Sharpen / Smudge — soften, crisp, or drag colour along the stroke.
• Color Replace — repaints hue while keeping the shading and texture underneath.
• Liquify — push, bloat, pucker and twirl the pixels themselves; see Raster tools.

Everything respects an active selection — painting inside one clips cleanly at its (possibly feathered) edge — and everything mirrors under a symmetry guide.

Recipe — convincing watercolor in three strokes. Bloomfield Wash at big size for the wash (watch the edges pool), Granulator for the mid texture, then Paper Skip fast and light on top for the dry sparkle. Same paper tooth under all three — because it’s the same paper.