How To Create And Install GIMP Brushes For Beginners

If you're unsure about any of the basics of GIMP, you can find out about them here.

If you've found yourself on this article, you're likely to already have an idea as to what you want the brush to be. However, if you've not, simple designs often work best ensuring they're of a relatively small size.

I'll be using the following shamrock design I've created which would be perfect for St Patrick's day or any other Irish picture's needs! It's perhaps slightly more detailed than you'd want a brush to be, but GIMP comes with a bell pepper brush which besides being curious as to why they've included it (I've still no idea why!), is far more detailed than mine.

Once you've got your design, adding it to your current brushes is easy. Simply go to File->Export and locate the GIMP files. By default, this can be found by clicking on your user on the left hand panel of the export window and then the .gimp2.8 folder in the main panel if you're using the latest version.

If you're not using the latest version, you'll just have a different number after .gimp. The process should be exactly the same.

After you're in the .gimp2.8 folder, find the brushes folder and here's where you'll be saving the brush file.

However, we need to make sure that we're saving it as a brush file. To do this, click the plus button beneath "Select File Type" and select "GIMP brush" from the list. Finally, click export.

Now we have our brush in the correct folder, we need to update GIMP to reflect this. Open up the brushes dialogue by pressing Shift+Ctrl+B.

Press the refresh button in the bottom right corner of the dialogue. This synchronises all of the brush files in the brush folder with the current instance of GIMP that's running.

Once you've pressed that, you should notice your new brush amongst the rest.

Select your brush, then the brush tool and you're done!

Take note of the "Spacing" value. This value is the value in pixels between each placement of the brush. The higher this value, the more space in between each placement.

The image above shows a 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, and 150px gap respectively. You can see how it evenly separates the shamrocks which can be very useful when utilising the brushes. 

Adding a premade brush couldn't be simpler - unzip the file and add the .gbr files to the same folder as before and follow the previous steps for synchronising the brushes.

The brush I've used is available here.

If you'd like a guide on anything, please ask below!