Free Photoshop Brush Pack for Digital Character Painting

Download these free PSD brushes to create detailed characters and magical scenes for incredible digital illustrations

A diverse brush set is an essential part of any digital illustrator’s toolkit, giving you all kinds of opportunities for experimentation. You can play around with different brushes to add various effects to your paintings—both realistic and magical.

An illustrator and visual artist who’s worked in both the movie and gaming industries, Georgi Georgiev (@goshun) uses Photoshop to design characters and environments inspired by beautiful paintings, people’s stories, and emotions.

In this download, he shares a set of free PSD brushes. With smoke and silk effects, skin texture, smudges, scattered dots, and more, add these brushes to your library to enhance your own digital paintings.

How to use the brushes, plus quick digital painting tips

In his Domestika course, Georgi teaches you how to create magical scenes, guiding you through the steps of bringing an authentic character to life from start to finish using a stylized, comic approach.

Here, he shares some quick tips to get started with digital illustration in Photoshop, and some of the main tools he uses:

1. Start small! Rather than getting lost in a huge digital canvas, Georgi recommends starting with a small canvas for your illustration, explaining that you can always increase the size later if necessary.

2. Take the time to play around with different brushes. As all of the brushes have different effects, Georgi advocates experimenting with all the brushes in the pack to see what suits your style. For example:

- Georgi uses the Ellipse brush most regularly, as he finds it useful to quickly build up shapes.

- Similarly, he recommends the chunky Quick brush for easily drawing out basic shapes, that you can later form into something.

- To add details to characters later in the drawing process, he finds the Skin brush useful for creating realistic skin textures.

Other brushes in the kit include pastel textures, graphite pencil, air particles, and more.

3. Experiment with the Smudge tool for a magical effect. Georgi highly recommends using the Smudge tool to blend different colors, materials, and values to add more shape and softness to your painting.

In his brush set, you’ll find the Main Smudge, which he uses to create a smooth blended effect (he suggests keeping the strength at 100%).

The pack includes other brushes intended for use with the Smudge tool, all of which have different effects. His advice? “Try them out and see which one works for you.”

Download a free Photoshop Brush Pack for digital character painting

After clicking on the download button below, you’ll find a ZIP file titled Free Photoshop Brush Pack for Digital Character Painting, by Georgi Georgiev. You’ll need to use free software like WinZip to unzip the file.

Sign up for Georgi Georgiev’s course, Character Digital Painting: Creating Magical Scenes. There, you’ll learn to create unique digital paintings from scratch filled with light, color, and a touch of magic in Photoshop.

Discover more digital and character illustration resources

1. Looking for painting inspiration? Discover these websites for 1,000s of free vintage images and illustrations to inspire your creative projects.

2. Learn how to draw accurate and proportional faces, hands, and bodies in pencil, watercolor, and Procreate with these ten free tutorials for drawing the human body.

3. If comics and cartooning are more your style, draw inspiration from great illustrators and animators with this list of five top reference books to learn how to draw characters.