Shiny New Grease Pencil Texture Brushes

The Blender 5.2 LTS release brought extra treats for Grease Pencil users. Powered by the new Online Assets and Grease Pencil material settings we were able to add something long awaited: A set of textured brushes created by Blender Studio artists in collaboration with the Grease Pencil Blender Developers and community contributors!

Drawing with Style

When you open Blender you will be greeted by an extended and reworked selection of brushes directly in the Asset Shelf. This set was created and curated by artists and is directly available to download. Big thanks to Daniel M. Lara (Pepeland) for working on the original brush pack.

The selection ranges from fine strokes for lineart, big textures for surfacing, and patterns for scattering. These can also be used as a starting point for making your own brushes!

Tip

If you cannot see them you most likely don't have Allow Online Access enabled. Go to the Preferences -> System -> Network and you should find the toggle there.

Here is some monkey drawings by Vivien using a few of the new brushes:

Breakthrough Grease Pencil Features

The much anticipated new features of Blender 5.2 LTS that made these brushes possible are most importantly new material settings for:

• More control over the distribution of textured dots along the stroke
• More sliders for randomization

Previously you could only distribute textures on the points of the stroke. This limitation has been entirely removed by letting you distribute dots along the entire stroke. This greatly improved performance and made it easier to sculpt and edit the strokes after drawing them.

Check out the release notes to get more technical insight on how these features work.

Massive thanks to Blender devs Casey Bianco-Davis, Falk David and Clément Foucault for working on these features!

Online Assets

Another great new feature that made this possible are online assets. This completely eliminated the issue of keeping the Blender download size small and providing only the most essential features & assets.

Now Blender can offer official assets for more specific use cases. If you need any of them, they are ready to be downloaded any time!

The selection of assets in Essentials library also includes various base meshes for sculpting human characters, procedural materials and compositor nodes provided by Blender Studio.

Even more to come!

Currently texture brushes are exclusively available for Grease Pencil, but Blender Studio will work on more assets for Texture Paint, Vertex Paint and Sculpt Mode.

For now please also note that the process of creating and saving your own brush assets is not perfectly intuitive. This is an ongoing development topic and we will work towards making the process easier in the future.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!