The brush creator

RobinPad includes its own built-in brush creator, allowing you to experiment with shapes and settings to create your own custom packs. As always, you can do whatever you want with them: share them freely with the community, sell them... you made them, they are yours.

In this post, I want to clearly explain how brush creation works in RobinPad.

Specifications

A brush starts from a square image with a 1:1 aspect ratio.

Black is used as the active painting element, while white turns transparent. In other words, if you want to create a circle-shaped brush that paints as a circle, the shape itself must be black or grayscale, and the background area must be pure white so that it renders as transparent.

RobinPad automatically processes the image and filters its values, keeping only what you have drawn in black or shades of gray visible.

You can design the brush shape using varying transparencies and different shades of gray.

Shapes

In any digital painting app, brushes are based on core shapes. These shapes are repeated and scattered in various ways, responding to your stylus pressure. The combination of all these variables is what makes each brush unique.

RobinPad is no different in this regard: the foundation of any brush is its shape. Where it does differ is that it gives you three different ways to obtain these shapes:

1 - Import an external shape

You can import any black-and-white shape created in another application and configure its behavior in RobinPad to build a brush[cite: 2].

2 - Create the shape with the built-in shape editor

You can paint the shape directly within RobinPad's brush editor and use it as the base stamp for your brush.

3 - Use artwork from your active workspace

Clicking the "Use current page" button will capture whatever you have painted on the active page. Just like with the previous options, you can use that shape as the starting point for your brush. Keep in mind that your workspace must be set to a square format (1:1) so that the brush shape retains its correct proportions.

Configuration

Once your shape is defined, the next step is configuring how it behaves using the sliders in the settings panel.

The best approach is to experiment with the values while testing the stroke in the live preview area. Once you achieve the desired behavior, you can create a new shape for your next brush or export the current brush as a .rbrush file to share it or save it for future sessions.

Brush Management

While you create brushes in the editor, RobinPad generates a temporary pack. That is, before you export them to a .rpad file, RobinPad detects the brushes currently in the editor and displays them as active brushes within a pack.

This allows you to test the brushes you are building directly on your actual workspace.

You can access this temporary pack straight from the brush panel using the top pack dropdown selector, or view all loaded brush packs, including the editor's temporary pack, under Settings > Resource.

To remove this temporary pack, simply open the brush editor and hit reset. This will clear the brushes from the editor. Make sure you have exported your brushes first if you haven't saved them yet, as this action will permanently wipe whatever was created in the editor.