Found a brush pack I downloaded 3 years ago and it completely changed my process

I opened up an old hard drive last night and stumbled across a set of Kyle Webster brushes I grabbed back in 2021 for a commission I never finished. I spent the whole afternoon testing them out on a new portrait, and the texture work is so much better than what I was doing before with default Procreate brushes. Anyone else find old tools in their archives that suddenly click way later than they expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles_robinson2014d agoMost Upvoted

Dude same thing happened to me with a set of dry media brushes I found on a flash drive from like 2019. They were just sitting there and I never gave them a real shot cause the previews looked too simple. Last month I pulled them out for a landscape painting and the grain on those things is unreal, way better than the fancy expensive packs I bought later. Sometimes you just gotta let tools marinate for a few years before your style catches up to what they can do.

rodriguez.mia14d ago

The whole "let your style catch up" thing really hit me when I saw a video about how some old master painters would use the same basic bristle brush for years before they figured out all the tricks it could do. I remember reading this article about a comic artist who kept a folder of free textures from like 2008 and finally pulled them out for a graphic novel last year and said they worked better than anything new he bought. It's wild how we get so caught up in looking for the next big thing when the gold was sitting in our files the whole time. I got a set of chalk brushes from a random giveaway in 2020 and just now started using them for soft backgrounds and I'm kicking myself for all the years I ignored them. Makes you wonder how many other goodies are hidden in old downloads that just need the right project to shine.

rodriguez.mia14d ago

The trick I learned is to keep a folder called "test later" and just dump random brush packs in there. Every few months I open it up and try each one on a scrap canvas for like 10 seconds. The ones that feel weird or too specific usually end up being the most useful once I figure out their weirdness. Also don't delete anything just cause it looks bad in the preview, some of my best brushes looked like garbage until I put them on the right layer with the right opacity.

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