Conquering the Digital Brush Overload
If you’re working in any sort of digital program—Procreate, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Infinite Painter, whatever app you’re using—there are dozens and dozens of brushes that come with these programs. Add on top of that the tremendous number of brush packs that are available online—free, for sale, or as a bonus for signing up for a creator’s newsletter—and there’s tons of them out there.
When you open a digital drawing program, whether you’re brand new to it or a seasoned digital creator veteran, it can be kind of overwhelming trying to sort through what brushes you do like, what you don’t like, and what are actually useful. Literally, for most people, there are probably going to be 10 to 20 brushes at most that come with the program that you will actually use, and then maybe another 10 or 20 custom brushes that you’ll probably create as you go or import from other programs you already use.
Evolving the Testing Process
So how do you sort all of this out? In the past, I’ve gone through and opened a document and drawn cubes and spheres, or drawn figures out of my imagination. It occurred to me that I could have a lot more fun with it. I was about to say that’s just stupid, but it isn’t stupid; it’s an evolution. I’ve evolved to the point where I realize now what is both more fun and a very practical use of my time: doing digital studies from photo reference.
Whether it be using Line of Action or Referenceposes.com—any of these websites that have a library of images specifically for artistic drawing reference—you can work on heads, hands, full figures, or animal drawing. Whatever details you want to work on, you just put these on and set the timer for however long you want to draw.
The New Procreate Brush Engine
This is just the first pass of some new brushes from Procreate. They did an update to their brush engine and all-new brushes; I want to say it was at the end of 2025 or early 2026. This is a whole new brush pack that was created by the illustrator and brush designer Kyle T. Webster. He is very notable for working for Adobe for a long period of time, designing brushes for them.
When he broke free of working for Adobe—saying their values were not necessarily in alignment with his creative values—he joined the Procreate team to work on developing their brand new brush library from the ground up. I thought, let me just sit here and give these a try. So far, I’ve only done sketches of the first five brushes under “Pencils.” There are probably a good 10 or 15 different pencil brushes that come with this, and then you go from pencils to inks to markers to charcoal.
Narrowing Down the Favorites
I’m going through here and I already found a couple that I like just on the first page. The crazy thing is, given how great of an illustrator and designer Kyle T. Webster is, I may have the problem of having too many brushes that I like. But at least I can start by narrowing this down to the handful that I really like the most, and then maybe do a whole other set of side-by-side comparisons with those brushes to see which ones work for me the best.
Never mind the fact that I still have the main brush pack from Lane Brown that I purchased from Proko, which has been my go-to for drawing with brushes that are supposed to mimic traditional media. That’s still in play, but I want to see if there’s anything from this new brush set that I want to work into my workflow. Because they’ve revamped the brush engine, there may be settings and a feel for these new brushes that do things Lane Brown’s can’t do, simply because they weren’t built with this brush engine in mind. We’ll see where it goes, but I really, really enjoyed doing these sketches, and I look forward to testing these brushes out now as opposed to it being a form of drudgery.
How do you handle “brush fatigue”? Do you tend to stick to a reliable few, or do you find yourself constantly downloading new packs in search of the perfect stroke?