Parametric Brushes in Bree Photo

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Note: Screenshots in this tutorial may show GIMP branding, but all menus, tool names, and keyboard shortcuts are identical in Bree Photo and the steps can be followed directly.

Bree Photo offers two main brush types:

This tutorial focuses on parametric brushes and how to use them to simulate dry media such as pencil, charcoal, chalk, and pastel.

Advantages of Parametric Brushes

Parametric brushes provide basic shapes such as circle, square, and diamond by default, and can be further adjusted through these parameters:

Compared with raster brushes, parametric brushes have sharper edges when hardness is set to 1; when hardness is reduced they are not deformed by the blur algorithm the way raster brushes are.

For better dry-media simulation, use the Airbrush Tool and configure the Tool Options as follows:

Force, Rate, and Flow are only available in newer versions of Bree Photo / GIMP.

Dry-Media Experiments

Parametric brushes combined with suitable Paint Dynamics can simulate:

Brush sizes between 8 and 64 pixels usually work best; overly large brushes tend to have soft edges.

Brush Set Download

Americo Gobbo provides a basic set of parametric brushes and matching dry-media Paint Dynamics, including:

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Elle Stone and Gustavo Deveze for help with Paint Dynamics testing and illustrations; thanks to Pat David for support with GitLab and article layout.

Source & License

This tutorial is adapted from Americo Gobbo’s Parametric Brushes, licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.