What are your most used , go-to drawing tools ?

[D.T. Nethery]

In addition to the default drawing tools in TVPaint , there are so many choices of excellent drawing tools shared here in the Contents Sharing forum ... the challenge (especially for new users) becomes sorting out the brushes that you will really use the most and then making a custom tool bar with only a dozen or so selected pencils/brushes and perhaps a couple of erasers (full 100% eraser and soft pressure "kneaded" eraser). Even as a long-time TVPaint user I have too often fallen prey to the TMB (Too-Many-Brushes) dilemma. I'll find myself switching from brush set to brush set , searching for that elusive "perfect brush" (I have the same issue in Photoshop ... there are thousands of brushes available , most are just slight variations. It's easy to get distracted with too many choices.) Sometimes playing around with brush variations can be fun , and I think sometimes it's a good drawing warm-up exercise to change the tool you're working with (say, from a "soft pencil" to a "sharp steel nib pen" to an "ink brush" ...) but for the most part I think I am most productive if I purposely try to narrow down my "most used, go-to drawing tools" to a few brushes/pencils and erasers. I keep everything else stored in the left storage drawer and try to only occasionally dip in there.

Would anyone else care to share their favorite, most used brush/pencil tools ?

Lately , I've been using a few from the brush set made by Fran Krause. I have also recently rediscovered Sewie's Azimuth Pencil set (augmented by Peter Wassink) , so that one usually stays open as a floating tool bar in my workspace. There are some good ones in this "Crayons" set posted by Elodie Moog that I have added to my go-to set of pencils , and also one of the soft kneaded erasers in the Crayons set. I should also mention Hilere's Pencils (with variations by David Meslin), and Chad Essley's Tilt Pencils.

Most of what I do in TVPaint is animation with "pencil brush" tools , but I have separate custom tool bars with favorite ink pens and favorite paint brushes. For "ink" I love the Chinese Brush set (posted years ago , but still works fine in TVPaint 11.5) and a Brush Set posted not long ago by Peter Wassink. Also some "Wobbly Ink pens" shared by Chad Essley and Fabrice Debarge in this topic : https://www.tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic ... k&start=15 , and Chad Essley's "Perfect Ink" pen from his Drawing Media set.

By mentioning those specific brush tools that have become favorites of mine, I don't mean to exclude any of the numerous other excellent brushes shared by other users over the years. (I think I have most of them ! I just have to limit myself to the ones that I use the most , so I don't fall into the Too-Many-Brushes trance) I appreciate the time and efforts of everyone who has shared their custom brushes. Something I've noticed often with my students or with TVPaint tutoring I've done for other professionals is that many people who have TVPaint rarely or never visit the TVPaint Forum , so they are unaware of the number of fantastic custom brushes available. (not to mention the many useful custom tools and scripts). I think by having topics like this to discuss favorite brushes it might help people who are searching for "TVPaint Brushes" in a search engine to find this forum. I think one of the reasons we frequently see people asking: "Is it possible to import Photoshop brushes into TVPaint" is because many new users (or potential users, trying the Trial Version of TVPaint) think the only brushes are the default brushes in the main Tool panel and the ones in the Tool Bin v3 panel. I still think adding the ability to import Photoshop .abr brush files into TVPaint would be a worthwhile feature to add to the NextGen version of TVPaint (as in apps like ProCreate, Clip Studio Paint , Krita, GIMP) , but there are some great brushes available for TVPaint in this Contents Sharing forum that I think are under-utilized.

For reference, here are some of the custom tools I mention above. (some of these are altered from the originals with additions copied & pasted by me from other panels, so if you download these they may look somewhat different when you first open them). These are not my pared-down sets of only my most-used tools, but these are the sets I'm selecting from for the most part:

(click image to view it larger)

[slowtiger]

I don't use any of the default tools, except the fire effect which comes in very handy. My favourite brushes are half a dozen I made myself: one pencil, two or three different outline brushes, five colouring brushes (mostly watercolour). I mostly use noisy_hard as paper texture, plus half a dozen I made myself from photographs.

[niamul21]

You can use the fire effect to set the work done.

[D.T. Nethery]

You can use the fire effect to set the work done.

Could you elaborate on what you mean ? Are you referring to this fire brush in the TVPaint Tools --

TVPaint_Fire_Brush.jpg (41.83 KiB) Viewed 8294 times

What do you use it for ?


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