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[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

This is basically a magic trick to make the photoshop hard round brush Not As Bad.

Video, explanation, & download here.

[ProgramGamer]

Neat.

Purist haters gonna purely hate tho

[DXimenes]

It looks nice Do you have a bigger illustration made with it? I would definetely like to see that. Bet it looks great too.
The little automatic AA it does gives it away, thogh.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Thanks guys, hope you check it out and find it useful.

DXimenes, I don't have any illustrations I've made with it in specific, no. It's become a very core part of my toolset, basically everything I pixel now has some involvement with it, either to mix colors I'll later mark over or do an underdrawing. It actually feels super nice to illustrate with, because the mark is so chunky. Like pressing an oil pastel down really hard on the paper so it marks solid -- but nothing I've made lately benefits from that rendering style.

[DXimenes]

I like the results a lot. It's harder than the 100% hardness brush in Photoshop.
Doesn't feel like cheating to me because it doesn't really look like pixel art, though seems to be a great starting point for a pixel art piece.

[stringkiller]

This works nice with indexing colours also. Sometimes when illustrating I feel that the hard brush in photoshop is not enough and I end up doing a lot of color level adjusting stuff, this thing really does the trick! thanks a lot for sharing!

Edit -- I did an illustration using this brush and then tried to get rid of unnecesary colors manually. It turned out that last part was really tedious and didn't find any way to do it quickly without manual editing so It's not the pinacle of colour reduction xD, check it out:

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Good! Glad to see it's comfortable for you to use. Reducing colors: You should be able to limit the palette by exporting to an indexed format, or adjust it manually fairly quickly with magic wand selection or non-contiguous fill tool. Unfortunately you will always get tons of junk variation in transparency levels because of photoshop's limited control of Textures.

[stringkiller]

Have you made an eraser brush in the same way? I ended up using a lot of white for clearing stuff up

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Have you made an eraser brush in the same way? I ended up using a lot of white for clearing stuff up

Yes! I didn't want to make the video overlong, but this brush is my standard eraser for most tasks now.

[JamesK]

I watched your video and you stated that this was mostly useful for sketching and that you'd have to go over it with other pixel art brushes.   Do you have any recommendations for what those other 'pixel art brushes' are? 

When searching on my own, all I'm seeing is a bunch of brushes that are pretty much just stamps of pixel sprites characters and creatures.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

I watched your video and you stated that this was mostly useful for sketching and that you'd have to go over it with other pixel art brushes.   Do you have any recommendations for what those other 'pixel art brushes' are?  

When searching on my own, all I'm seeing is a bunch of brushes that are pretty much just stamps of pixel sprites characters and creatures.

Oh hey, absolutely: Pixel art in photoshop is usually done with a combination of the Pencil tool with a 1px or round tip, the various selection tools (with feathering and anti aliasing disabled) and the fill tool (also with anti aliasing disabled.) Derek yu's classic photoshop tutorial touches on this: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/42648699708/pixel-art-tutorial

[JamesK]

Ah, thanks. I'll look over that.   For some reason I was thinking you meant some other specialized brushsets.  But what could be more of a pixel brush then a square single pixel brush? :D

[DragonDePlatino]

This looks really good! I'm a PixelJoint-raised purist, but I think this really works well. The color reduction isn't perfect, but it's not something I think a player or artist would notice without very close scrutiny.

Overall, this looks like it'd work well for background art or larger pieces like stringkiller posted. You've captured the crispy essence of pixel art with none of the time-consuming manual AA placement. And with some manual color reduction (something easy to do in ASEprite) the finished product could be indistinguishable from completely hand-drawn pixel art.

[Keops]

I´ve been using this brush in my recent pixels and it works wonderfully! And any undesired aa artifact can be tweaked later on so no big issue. I love it. Thanks for sharing Catguy!