Porter's
Famous Custom Brushes
Here are various brushes that Porter has graciously provided for all to use. To use them, you need to download the files of your choice, extract the JBR file from the ZIP and place it in your PSP\Brushes folder. They should show up as custom brushes on your tool palette, under Brush Types, the next time you open PSP. If they don't, you might have a corrupt Brushes.jpc file and need to delete it from your PSP7\Cache\ folder. This does no harm and is rebuilt the next time you access the brushes.
Choosing Custom in the Brush Types menu box as shown above, brings up the following Custom Brush dialog box.
Left click once inside the window where you see the arrow cursor above and you will see all of the brushes available, as demonstrated below.
As you can see, the brushes are numbered and you can use the scrollbar on the right to scroll through all available brushes.
The 4 options on the Custom Brush palette are Create, Edit, Delete and Edit Paths, as demonstrated below.
To Create a brush, you create an image as shown on the left and then use a selection tool to fully select your brush. They are pretty easy to make. Porter's example image, Bullet Shatter was made using black on a white background, which makes selections with the magic wand very simple. You can download Porter's example 43kb PSP image here. Custom Brushes can be made from selections with a width and height of up to 255 by 255 pixels. When your selection is complete, you can bring up the Custom Brush dialog box and left click Create to immediately add it to your brush collection.
You can create your own JBR files by enabling a second or third Brush File Location and temporarily disabling your other paths. (see below) Then simply follow the instructions above. When you click Create, a new file named UBrush.jbr will be created in your enabled folder. Additional brushes that you create will be added to that UBrush.jbr file. You can then rename the file to anything you wish, like MyBrushes.jbr and move it to your primary brush location(s) where it will be available with the other custom brushes.
Choosing the Edit Paths button brings up the File Locations dialog box on the right. The example shows the default location on my installation of PSP7. You can save brushes and JBR files in up to 3 different main folders and their sub folders. To do so, make sure you have the appropriate boxes checked in the dialog box.
Clicking Edit brings up the Custom Brush Edit dialog box on the right which allows you to input a value from 1 to 100 for the brush step size.
Clicking on Delete will remove the custom brush, that is currently selected and showing in the window where the arrow cursor is, from the JBR file.
Here are the brushes that are available for download in ZIP file format. The link is below each of Porter's sample images.
Ferriswheel brushes 52kb
bones-erasers.zip 128kb.
bullethole.zip 12kb.
Bullethole.zip is a UBrush.jbr file that I made from Porter's example PSP image that I earlier referenced. Just extract the JBR file and rename it.
Here are Porter's Soft Selections brushes, soft.zip 6kb
Many thanks to Porter for these brushes!
For her generousity, here is her green-eyed hunk. :-)
Kerry Pierce
This page was created on July 12, 2002.