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Grunge Photoshop Brushes Set

By Smashing Editorial, August 12th, 2008 in Freebies | 104 Comments | Forum

In our previous releases we focused on icons and Wordpress-themes; however, there is a variety of further tools graphic designers need on a regular basis. For instance, Photoshop brushes. We have mentioned already that grunge is becoming a trend, so a set of grungy Photoshop brushes sounded like a good idea. You can find dozens of our further releases in our section Freebies.

Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Today we are glad to release Smashing Photoshop Brushes — a free set of 74 grungy Photoshop brushes in resolution 69 — 2463px. The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET too). The brushes were designed by Silvia Bukovac Gasevic, the creative mind behind graphics-illustrations.com, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the set for free!

You can use the set for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell them — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

Large preview (0.56 Mb)
Download the set (.abr, 3.1 Mb)

Motivation behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designer herself:

“Originally conceived to be nothing but a fine retouching tool, Photoshop brushes evolved to be “point and click shape placing tool” which became increasingly popular among professionals and Photoshop enthusiast alike.

There are many categories of Photoshop users who use Photoshop brushes in their projects. Scrapbookers or professional photographers who use them to decorate photo albums. Many designers amateurs use them to design their own stuff whether it be T-Shirts, mugs, badges or web designs. Professional designers buy commercially licensed Photoshop brushes and use them regularly for they projects.

I like to play with different styles when creating Photoshop brushes. Inspiration for new shapes can be found just about anywhere. Once, with a little help from my scanner, I made brushes out of the items that were laying on my working desk, including my mobile phone. Today, we live in the era of grunge shapes and swirls which, somehow, suits me fine and as a professional designer I always wanted to have some kind of “swiss knife” brushes set. One set to serve them all. (Kind of resembles “One ring to rule them all” but that’s just me being a Tolkien fan.) So, making a free brush set for Smashing Magazine readers turned out to be a great chance to do it.

What I had in mind was to create a brushes set that would fully cover the needs for one standard blog (or other graphic design projects) with grunge-swirls look.

So here they are, 74 brushes of 69 — 2463 px resolution, feel free to use them in all your commercial or non-commercial projects with no restrictions at all. Set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 and CS3 (you can use it in Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.NET too).

More of my work can be seen on my blog at graphics-illustrations.com.

Last but not least…

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, Photoshop brushes, a Drupal theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).

Published in Freebies, August 12th, 2008
Tags: downloads, free, Freebies, grunge, set

1.

Joseph (August 12th, 2008, 1:44 pm)

First to reply cool update!
2.

Ryan (August 12th, 2008, 1:46 pm)

First?
3.

Ryan (August 12th, 2008, 1:46 pm)

d’oh second!… and third
4.

beepoll (August 12th, 2008, 1:50 pm)

You folks are just in time! I was searching for something like this and thought I’d better search smashing magazine for articles with brushes - but there was no need!
5.

bill (August 12th, 2008, 1:51 pm)

nice set of brushes! thanks…
6.

Daniel (August 12th, 2008, 1:51 pm)

Another great set. These will come in useful for my new blog design! Thanks!
Link [dtsn.co.uk]
7.

Ty (August 12th, 2008, 2:13 pm)

Wait, what? Grunge is becoming a trend? Grunge is on it’s way out. It’s been in for the last 2 years. Don’t get me wrong, love the style, but I say download and use them now, Grunge is about to go the way of bellbottoms.
8.

pickupjojo (August 12th, 2008, 2:18 pm)

Very nice set, it could be very useful!
Thanks for sharing SM. :)

Joffrey,
Link [www.geekandhype.com]
9.

Violeta (August 12th, 2008, 2:23 pm)

Cool brushes!

BTW: Keep posting this often!! My twitter is full of Smashmagazine and that’s great!!
10.

Steven (August 12th, 2008, 2:29 pm)

SM is amazing. Who agrees?
11.

Steph (August 12th, 2008, 2:34 pm)

I do!! Great brush set, tough.
12.

Daniel Whyte (August 12th, 2008, 3:40 pm)

nice guys
13.

Jan (August 12th, 2008, 3:41 pm)

Ty: “Wait, what? Grunge is becoming a trend? Grunge is on it’s way out. It’s been in for the last 2 years. Don’t get me wrong, love the style, but I say download and use them now, Grunge is about to go the way of bellbottoms.”

So true. Especially this “shield with wings and grungy shit”-motif is so outdated and is just looking plain ugly. As if it was created by a robot.
Absolutely not contemporary.
14.

Mike Tosetto (August 12th, 2008, 4:28 pm)

I seriously don’t get the rush to post first…. or second… seriously, wtf?
15.

Iseewhatur (August 12th, 2008, 5:07 pm)

The first and second are just immature kids in the bloggosphere. I used to get irritated but it’s a unsolvable problem to make people smarter
16.

Irene (August 12th, 2008, 5:15 pm)

Nice set but I’m having trouble downloading. When I click, it leads to a page with gibberish text. Is there any way to fix this? I’m using FF 2.0 with Windows XP. Same thing happens on Vista.
17.

Eli (August 12th, 2008, 5:28 pm)

Ryan: congrats, you contributed absolutely nothing worthwhile in the comments section, you should be proud.

As for myself, these brushes look like they will come in handy with collage designs, thanks for the freebie.
18.

Max | Design Shard (August 12th, 2008, 5:51 pm)

The Grunge hearts look really cool, could be very useful for some designs

Thanks Max
Link [www.designshard.com]
19.

Grant Friedman (August 12th, 2008, 6:13 pm)

Nice set! I have some cool Illustrator brushes on my site at Link [colorburned.com] they can easily be converted to Photoshop brushes if you need to.
20.

Benjamin (August 12th, 2008, 7:00 pm)

Thank you Silvia Bukovac Gasevic and thank you Smashing!

I have a softspot for Photoshop brushes.
21.

Pete (August 12th, 2008, 7:27 pm)

Great set, if you are looking for some more grunge brushes, check out Link [www.digitalrevolutions.biz]

This is one of my personal favorite packs, very hi-res.
22.

rahman (August 12th, 2008, 8:43 pm)

thanx………………….smashing
23.

gr8pixel (August 12th, 2008, 9:04 pm)

Smashing!
24.

Manuel (August 12th, 2008, 11:08 pm)

Nice!
25.

hal9000 (August 13th, 2008, 12:08 am)

the gibberish text would be your browser trying to display the abr file rather than download it. right click it and ’save as’.
either you have somehow added this as a mime type or not - i can’t remember which.
26.

+1 (August 13th, 2008, 12:11 am)

F##, man, grunge style used to be a trend, and nows it’s almost kitsh
27.

Sandie Sørensen (August 13th, 2008, 12:25 am)

Let’s keep the freebries coming! :)
I just browsed through the freebies, and found… Not so much I could use.
I love the desktop calendars and I try to join as often as possible. I’m inspired by the icons but rarely can I use them… I don’t need wordpress themes, as I don’t have a wordpress-website.
Therefor I cheered, when I saw this article.

Only… Why the restictions??
When I see wonderfull photoshop brushes and custom shapes and so on I emidiatly download them and keep them in a library. This way I don’t forget where I saw them when someday I need to use them. But with all these restictions my creativity is dying!

I can’t efford to download this freebie- ’cause I know I would violate the copyright if I did.

So pardon my french: Thanks for nothing…(?)

Or let me ask another question- how do other handle that issue?
-remebering where the great tools are or
-remembering who to credit and ask permission?
28.

mick (August 13th, 2008, 12:39 am)

“So here they are, 74 brushes of 69 — 2463 px resolution, feel free to use them in all your commercial or non-commercial projects with no restrictions at all.”

:|
29.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (August 13th, 2008, 12:57 am)

@Sandie Sørensen (#27): there are no restrictions whatsoever. I am not sure what you mean…

@mick (28): the brushes are absolutely free to use, what’s the problem?
30.

Riccardo (August 13th, 2008, 1:47 am)

A nice brush set, thanks Silvia!
31.

Cosmi (August 13th, 2008, 2:18 am)

Why always you say “first” “first” ?? It’s ugly.
32.

bruno byington (August 13th, 2008, 2:23 am)

hello,

@Sandie Sørensen (#27) - There are no copyright laws on the brush sets. You can use them for whatever you like.

If you want to sell or spread the set of grunge brushes in any way, contact smashing magazine and/or the author for more information.

- To generally memorize where tools are, I bookmark the sites where Ive got them from. (Windows: ctr D Mac: cmd: D in your browser of choice / Firefox)

- When asking for permission to use a brush set or anything art alike that someone has created, I am however not sure how the copyrights are layed out I generally look for a name. Who designed the thing. Does he have a Website? Where do I find his E-Mail. I write him an Email and get communicative. The artist will reply in most cases because you are interested on his art and its rights.

If you didnt understand anything else Sandie, just let me/us know.

cheers

b
33.

Rajnish (August 13th, 2008, 4:02 am)

Its really very nice brush set, Thanks! would be helpful in designing.
34.

Jason (August 13th, 2008, 5:56 am)

This is really useful, thanks !
35.

dindong (August 13th, 2008, 9:13 am)

AWESOME!
36.

hoschi (August 13th, 2008, 12:07 pm)

Is such a style called Grunge ? I didn’t know that . But I think its a wrong description for this kind of style. grunge was a music style in the early 90s and has nothing to do with this “fashion-victim” style which stands for commericalism. The music-Grunge never did this
37.

okykrismadi (August 13th, 2008, 6:45 pm)

cool..

download ah..
38.

Volumex (August 14th, 2008, 2:10 am)

Grunge….mmm, who named this distorted style anyway…. I reckon she’s a goner!
39.

Aida (August 14th, 2008, 10:57 am)

Well, I love it. I use it to produce fanart, and it suits my needs perfectly. I am sure everyone can find something for themselves in the resources provided by Smashing Magazine.
40.

Leigh (August 14th, 2008, 11:25 am)

Just curious - for those of you mentioning that the grunge style is going out….any clues as to what the new trend is/will be?
41.

Mike Diesel (August 14th, 2008, 3:32 pm)

Grunge was in two years ago and was cheesy and already out less than a year ago.
This style is typical and overdone.
42.

Real Design Team (August 15th, 2008, 6:01 am)

It’s very nice bruses. I like very much..
43.

Natalie (August 15th, 2008, 12:27 pm)

Well, i just love this website..
44.

Mike the Chicago Designer (August 22nd, 2008, 10:18 am)

The style is (drum roll please…………………)

Tinting or Color treatments.

For an excellent example look at Link [www.barackobama.com]

(Full disclosure: I had a little to do with the design, but I am not bias.)
45.

Karen (September 15th, 2008, 12:53 am)

Amazes me the people who gripe about something when it’s free! If you don’t like it, or it doesnt suit your tastes- move on and leave it alone…sheesh!

I love anything grunge and appreciate the time it takes to create things for our use. Thank you for sharing with us!!!
46.

tim (September 22nd, 2008, 9:29 am)

wtf, why is everyone hating something that looks really cool to some people :/
if you dont like it, go back to your prep ass shit which is WAYYY over done
47.

Ash (September 24th, 2008, 9:21 am)

Hi there… can use these to enhance my stock illustration?
48.

SA (September 24th, 2008, 9:12 pm)

Superb, as always! Many thanks. :)
49.

Aze (October 7th, 2008, 3:48 am)

Thanks. Nice one.
50.

Duane (October 7th, 2008, 6:40 am)

I’m using GIMP… How do I install & use new brushes?

Thanks!
51.

ZOUP (October 29th, 2008, 2:21 am)

Coo&ThankYou
52.

Angelica (January 9th, 2009, 12:02 pm)

Thank you so much!!!!
53.

seth (March 9th, 2009, 12:44 pm)

I have downloaded the brushed to my desktop and have opened them into photoshop but they dont appear in the brushes tablet, any suggestions?
54.

Ahmed (April 12th, 2009, 11:31 pm)

gamda gedan ya man :)
55.

Jeremy L (April 25th, 2009, 9:49 am)

Thanks a lot for this! Just what I was looking for!
56.

ola (May 5th, 2009, 1:13 am)

i just love all of dis there cool