Create Brushes For GIMP With Inkscape

As I mentioned earlier, it is foolish to start a digital painting on a large canvas with a small brush. If you are working on a project that requires a canvas of A4 size and 300 dpi, then the resolution in pixels would be 2480 x 3508 or 3508 x 2480 depending on the layout. And if you are not having Photoshop, and need to work with GIMP, then it can be a daunting task.

Update 21-Oct-2007: Creating brushes just for the size reasons, is not a reason anymore after the GIMP 2.4 release that has scalable brushes. But you can still use this tutorial to make custom brushes of different shapes.

In Photoshop you can easily increase or decrease the size of the brush (with the [ and ] keys - I think). But in GIMP you need to choose from a brush palette. And over that, the largest round brush provided by default GIMP installation is around 19 pixels wide. Can you not have larger brushes in GIMP?

Yes you can. And here, I will explain how you can create a simple custom sized round brush with the help of Inkscape for GIMP.

Before we start, let me explain why I used Inkscape for creating the brush. GIMP actually allows you to create brush out of any type of image, but use of Inkscape - a vector graphics editor - allows you to get perfect and symmetric results.

Open Inkscape and you will be presented with a new blank document.

Select the circle/ellipse tool.

Draw a perfect circle.

Use the [Ctrl] key to get it to be symmetrical. Set the fill and stroke color to black.

With the circle selected, press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+E. (Or you could alternatively choose File > Export Bitmap). Select the height and width to the size of the brush you want it to be. It can be 30 pixels, 50 pixels, or anything. I have a series of different sized brushes for flexibility. Save the file by any name. (It will be saved in the PNG format).

Open the file in GIMP.

Flatten the image by selecting Image > Flatten Image. This will remove the transparent background and replace it with a white background. Next, you need to change the mode to grayscale. To do this, choose Image > Mode > Grayscale.

Save the file as <filename>.gbr

It will give an option to choose spacing. I use the default and save the file. (You may choose to experiment with this option).

You have now created a brush file. Place this in the GIMP profile’s brush directory. In windows, it will be <windows user directory>/.gimp-x.x/brushes.

Restart GIMP or click on ‘Refresh Brushes’ in your brushes tab - the newly created brushes will become visible and would be ready for use.

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