We’ve written quite a bit about Photoshop here on MakeUseOf before, and as always, we’re willing to supply you with as many free creative tools as you need to get your work out there. As you may know, brushes are a key element for constructing Photoshop compositions. To your advantage, there are other creatives on the Internet who have made a few of their own so you can download them for free.

Below, we have four sites of Photoshop brush creators (rather than huge compilations) that offer high quality brushes that are pleasing to look at. Seeing that these are made by individuals as opposed to mass groups, you’ll see a personal touch with the work. Furthermore, that personal touch should hopefully carry over into your own creations.

BrushPortfolio

BrushPortfolio is the home site of Susan Libertiny. Libertiny creates most of the brushes you’ll find here, but every now and then she’ll feature other great artists. For the record, these brushes are amazing. The site is full of brushes useful for all sorts of different styles and different eras. Furthermore, you can see that Libertiny takes great pride in her work.

As a reminder, this site has different licensing terms for different brushes, so pay attention to those.

Red Moon Studios

Red Moon Studios is one of those sites that makes you want to listen to post-India Beatles the entire time that you are browsing. Featured on the site are handmade-creations-turned-brushes that are readily available for you to download. By the way, there are a lot of brushes on here. What I liked about this site was the fact that it featured many different styles utilizing different art mediums.

For whatever your project may require, you’ll find a tool to help complete it here. Once again, may I mention how awesome the vibe of this site is?

Fractured Sanity [Dot] Org

Fractured Sanity is another non-commercial site, but provided are some beautiful, fun brushes for your personal use. However, if you want to pull out the big guns and make a profit, the creator is willing to make a deal. Just to be honest, the pickings are quite impressive! The best way to describe these brushes are “dainty”, and I don’t mean this in an offensive way.

From what I saw, they are great for light-hearted works that may or may not involve cotton candy and bluebirds.

BrushFed

There’s nothing much to look at on BrushFed, really. The site is pretty much a grid with several brush downloads for your personal usage, and that’s that. There are no fancy blog posts, bells, or whistles, and honestly, that’ s just the way I like it. As far as this site goes, I would look at it as a home for graphic elements. Although there a few Photoshop brushes that are good for textures on here, I doubt you would be using them much.

By the way, the creator apparently reserves these brushes for non-commercial work. However, there is a note on the site that if you ask, you will likely be allowed to use them free of charge. Furthermore, there a virtual tip jar for beer money if you like the fonts.

Conclusion

Please be wary when reading the brush-related article prior to the one that I wrote. Readers have stated that the first link may have some malicious content.

As a note, I actually checked each and every one of these sites with Google’s safe browsing service. Fortunately, none of them have malware or viruses or any other nasty things. (Just insert “http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=” before a URL, and that should do the trick.) With that said, feel free to download from these sites and be creative.

What other sites do you use to find free Photoshop brushes? Have you used any of the ones shown here?

Image Credit: Flutterby