Making Your Own Brush Set Icons

Custom brush icons make brush sets look more professional and pleasant to browse. The post compares them to favicons, recommends either resizing a square image or drawing at the pixel level, and says the second approach usually looks better.

Reading notes

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• Custom icons make a brush set look more professional and pleasant to see lined up in SketchBook Pro.
• A brush icon can use the brush “stamp” as a preview, but custom icons are another option.
• Brush icons are treated like favicons: square, tiny, and often best made by resizing a large square image or editing pixel by pixel.
• For lower definition screens, 40×40 can work, but 80×80 pixels is strongly recommended.
• If the imported image is larger, the app downsizes it; if it is smaller, the app leaves it unchanged.
• PNG, JPG, and TIFF are supported, but PNG is recommended for transparent backgrounds.
• Icons can be drawn in SketchBook with a large square canvas, careful use of negative space, and separate layers for the handle, bristles, and shadow.
• A large canvas, such as 1,000×1,000 px, helps keep the icon crisp when it is reduced.
• Photoshop, Pixelmator, and Piskel are suggested for pixel-level icon editing, and a Photoshop template is offered for download.