Chapter 8 - Brush Engines

While we went over some of the general settings for the brush editor in the previous chapter, we didn’t really spend much time digging deep into each brush engine. If you start reading this chapter and get confused how to find something in the brush editor, make sure to study the Brush Editor Overview chapter. That provides a good foundation on how the brush editor is organized and functions.

There are a lot of powerful brushes that come with Krita—and even more brushes that you can find elsewhere. If you cannot find a brush that you are looking for, or want to make some tweaks to an existing brush, you need to learn more about the brush engine.

Each brush engine has its own behavior. Some engines are easier to understand like the Shape engine, while others take more explaining like the Pixel engine. We will look at each brush engine one by one to see what they can do. This chapter is not exhaustive on the brush engines. An entire book could be written on this area.

For each section, we are going to see some examples of the brushes in action. We can then dig a bit deeper and see what makes each engine unique. As we slowly peel away the properties, you will see that they aren’t as scary as they might look.