75+ Best Illustrator Brushes: Free & Premium

January 18, 2021

As you feel creative and inspired, you need proper tools to bring your ideas to the canvas. This may be pens and pencils for the paper. Or Illustrator brushes for the digital — hopefully, here we've got plenty of them!

There is something magical in choosing brushes, paper, and paints in an art shop — whether for your next creation or just to replenish supplies. And what is more fascinating is that with the development of digital art, this process maintained its charm. However, with a single "but", the variety is sometimes so striking that you've no idea what to end with.

It's hard no to be nostalgic, as we followed digital drawing year by year, affining our own skills and doing our best to provide resources of extreme quality to the artists. And now we have lots of great Illustrator brushes to offer, both free and premium. And we also have a long list of our favorite creators who make vector tools for creative professionals. Just to mention Guerrillacraft, Retro Supply Co., The Artifex Forge and many more.

In this selection, you will find Adobe Illustrator brushes available on Pixelbuddha, as well as lots of great freebies and premiums from other creators. We've made a particular emphasis on bringing some rare solutions that you might have overlooks. Popular tools are good, but it's always nice to find something new and beautiful, ain't it.

 

Spray & Hatch Illustrator Brushes

The package has everything any illustrator needs: 10 hatch and 10 spray free Illustrator brushes to deliver them textures in the most realistic way! Create volume, shadowing, highlight details, and point out composition elements with ease.

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Woodcuts Illustrator Brushes Set

Our favorite Guerillacraft has carried out 55 no-stretch brushes for Illustrator and also 15 woodcut patterns with free tiff textures as a bonus. For your best comfort, there're multiple versions of the brushes, like the mirror ones — or two basic versions: clean and rough.

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Eclectica Stipple Brushes Studio for Illustrator

Prepare to onboard your most nostalgic illustrations with a collection of 27 Illustrator brushes. With their help, you'll easy magnet the appreciation of your community to your artworks. There are 9 brush types, each available in three styles: stroke brushes, stipple brushes, and shader brushes.

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Memento Illustrator Brushes

You get to work with 12 free Illustrator brushes, with their own distinctive features and purposes. The first one adds a wrought look to any picture, giving it messy hatches. Shader brushes speak for themselves, adding authentic imagery by darkening the chosen areas.

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Patts Illustrator Brushes

Patts Illustrator brush set contains 50 no-stretched brushes and 60 seamless patterns! All the elements are not only good looking but time-saving and customizable. With a few clicks, you can make simple but beautiful illustrations.

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Lighthouse Liner Brushes for Illustrator

There are 24 ink, 32 pat, and 16 dot Illustrator brushes, along with drawing lines, waves, dashes, hatches, asterisks, dots, squares, zigzags, crosses, and more. But don't rush into closing this toolkit once you try out all the brushes: there are 20 seamless patterns made with the same inky liner to suit the flawless style of your composition.

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Preppy Art Illustrator Brushes

Get armed with 29 vector brushes, having canvas textures and a half-dried paint effect. They create a beautiful dynamic effect in your illustrations and attract more attention to the details. Use this collection to create amazing pictures, decorate your banners, or carry out website elements!

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The Fairy Illustrator Brushes

Turn to these 38 hand-drawn Illustrator brushes & 9 patterns, containing all sorts of strokes you must love (straight and rough outlines, dots, and dashes, stippling, hatching) on your images, dreamy motives of fir trees, moose, giraffe skin, and high-flying birds.

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Flow Brushes For Illustrator

The pack contains 68 brushes for Illustrator, seasoned with a clean, modern style of contemporary illustrations. Even though they're no-stretch, the lines turn out to be soft and clean anyway, which adds a handicraft feeling.

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Magic Lands: Vintage Map Creator

Don't be afraid to plan every single path of your long trip. There are 65 elements in the pack to choose from, including celestial bodies, vessels, and other objects. When you finish placing them, take care of the background and edges: we've included 15 Illustrator brushes and 15 patterns.

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Shader Brushes for Illustrator

Seize the moment 'cause it's gorgeous and unique! You get to work with 28 grunge brushes for Illustrator included in the set, divided into 4 groups. As a bonus, discover 12 textures to wrap up your composition before revealing it to the world.

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Le Decorateur Ornamental Brushes Collection

The collection brings 23 hand-drawn Illustrator brushes in two versions, and they recreate the original frames and borders used in print of the 1890s-1940s. Just pay attention to the vintage vibes they convey, the amount of time they save, and all these tiny details!

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Fabric Kingdom Illustrator Graphic Styles

Just pick one of 280+ fabric Illustrator brushes, set the color and the size, and drop the boldest and creative lines you can imagine! Or, just use the included action with any layer you want to create a beautiful stitch outline.

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Artista Brushes for Illustrator

The true artista doesn't need millions of digital brushes to switch between during the process: the 60 Illustrator brushes in the kit will do their job perfectly. There's just everything in this kit: hatch, texture, grunge, sketch and spray brushes.

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Floral Pattern Illustrator Brushes

This set of 25 floral vector brushes to update your toolbox and save you some time! You can apply these brushes to any vector object and create unique floral wreaths, borders, laurels and even stunning typography compositions.

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Gouache Shader Illustrator Brushes

Luckily, now you can use the same brushes that Adam Grason and so many other illustrators use in their work. Be sure to look carefully at the brush previews to see how the brushes are used and the diversity in the pack.

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Vector Brushes: Free

Sometimes it's just impossible to make hatching and texturing look light and natural, it's so annoying! Take a deep breath and look at what we've got: hand-crafted free Illustrator brushes made right for the purpose!

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The Retro Comic Book Tool Kit

As the previews show, this highly versatile toolkit is great for more than just comic book or graphic novel themed projects. Why not try all of 84 cartoon-style brushes out for yourself and see the impact they can give your projects!

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Vector Watercolor Brushes

Set of Adobe Illustrator watercolor brushes. The main folder contains .ai and .eps files. All brushes were hand-drawn with watercolor on paper and then carefully scanned and converted into vector brushes.

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"Paper Tooth" Line Brushes

Have you ever wanted your vector artwork to look like it's been printed already? Then these free Illustrator brushes are just what you're looking for. Applying the strokes will give your vector artwork a "jagged edge" printed look, simulating ink creeping into the "tooth" of the paper.

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Sweater Weather Vector Brushes

Introducing Sweater Weather Vector Brushes! This enormous set of 290 brushes, 10 patterns, and tags includes a cozy winter theme, but also includes a ton of shapes and flourishes you'll definitely use year-round.

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24 Marker Pen Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

Easily apply bold hand-drawn effects to your illustrations with a free Illustrator brush set of 24 marker pen brushes. Authentically sourced from real pens, they provide a variety of nib styles and sizes, ranging from thin outlining strokes to thick and messy scribbles.

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TransferTone | Illustrator Swatches

TransferTone is a tribute to the mesmerizing world of rub-on products. The team of Retro Supply Co. researched dozens of patterns and tints sold back in the 1970s and 1980s and made pattern swatches inspired by the era. Totally tubular, right?

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Ink Pen Brush Vector

These ink brushes for Illustrator are all brushes hand-made, from start to finish, from real ink strokes. The brushes are great to use for simple black-and-white sketches and graphics or they can also be used to give a handcrafted feel to the illustrations.

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Essential Vector Brushes

This is a collection of 150 premium and free hand-drawn Illustrator brushes for CS3 and higher. Inside you will find high-quality brushes that bring an organic hand-painted feel to your projects. They are great for using in illustrations and as separate design elements.

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The Stipple Brushes Kit

Stippling is a classic method of using dots and very small dashes to create an illustration. The use of different-sized dots and the way they are spaced gives differing effects. This is the brand new set of 12 high resolution and vector format stipple brushes to shade your illustrations quickly.

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Free Painted Canvas Brushes

Get the feel of beautifully textured paint into your illustrations with 67 free Illustrator brushes, sourced from real painted canvas strokes which give them a natural look that it's hard to believe you can't feel the texture. Use it to create digital art or to give your designs an eye-catching edge.

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Grain Shader Brushes For Illustrator

Featuring a diverse selection of authentic textures, the Grain Shader Brush Set is ideal for adding everything from bold, grungy shading and drop shadows to subtle speckle accents and finely detailed grain overlays.

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Aged Borders for Adobe Illustrator

To recreate the look of old print publications and newspapers can be a long and tedious process, especially when it comes to borders and outlines. So here comes a pack of Adobe Illustrator brushes to save a tone of time when creating this look!

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Free Vintage Shading Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

Give your illustrations an old etched or engraved appearance with a free Illustrator brush set. These brushes feature a variety of hand-drawn line patterns in horizontal, vertical, diagonal and cross-hatched orientations that can be used to apply shading to your digital drawings.

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Rip It Up! — Torn Edge Brushes for AI

Torn edge graphics has been available for a long time but it can be a fiddly task implementing them well with your design. That's why here comes the flexible Rip It Up!. So, you can pose and adjust torn edges quickly and easily to suit any project.

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Free Japan Brushes for Illustrator

This professional Illustrator brush set contains 39 high-quality digital, ink brushes perfectly imitating Asian calligraphy. These are intended for professional designers, illustrators and artists passionate about classic drawing.

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Snow & Winter Brushes

With these brushes, you can make snow and ice textures easily. Just draw over your graphics to add chilly winter details. You can choose between the one-color brushes and multi-shades and create the finest Christmas cards or winter party posters.

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Free Treasure Map Maker for Adobe Illustrator

Discover this free Treasure Map Maker to create fun artwork for party invitations, storybook imagery, wall art and more. It includes vector graphics, brushes and patterns that can be quickly combined to build a fictional landscape.

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VectorSketch | Illustrator Brushes

Traditionally, if you want to create authentic charcoal and pencil effects digitally, it happens in Photoshop. The only problem is that such artwork can't be resized — that's why here goes VectorSketch. It's a deluxe package of 40 charcoal and graphite-based brushes.

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Free Spray Paint Stipple Brushes for Illustrator

Here's a set of completely free stippling brushes in .ai format for vector stretchers and pixel pushers. The idea was to make a set of brushes imitating a spray-paint cap called a needle cap. So here they are, great for adding some life to your vector illustrations!

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Outstanding Oil Paint Brushes

This authentic-looking artist's tool kit is the result of hours of experimentation, discovering the diverse textures that can be made using oil paint. There were brushes, palette knives, cloths, scraps of cardboard and even fingers — so the resulting brushes are the closest you'll get to real oils in Illustrator.

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80 Dry Ink Illustrator Brushes

Meet your new favorite dry ink brush pack for Adobe Illustrator! Ink N' Grime includes 63 dirty and grungy ink strokes made with 8 different brushes and 4 types of paint and ink, and also 18 scatter brushes to give your retro designs a more realistic look.

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Free Linocut & Woodcut Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

These 25 free Illustrator brushes will help you carve your own designs digitally while achieving the linocut and woodcut look. Choose from a range of brush shapes, including tapered strokes, texture fills, split brushes and edge shading to construct your illustrations with realistic techniques.

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Ornamental Vintage Design Elements

The set includes all sorts of design pieces to enhance your vintage-inspired project. All these elements were based on antique designs, but recreated with smooth, clean lines. Find included Illustrator brushes, Photoshop shapes, bonus hi-res png versions of each brush, shape and frame.

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Engraving Vintage Brushes Vector Pack

This engraving brush vector pack contains 110 free Illustrator brushes, each and every packed with detail and different strokes, stains and imperfections that make the use of a single brush almost unnoticeable.

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Modern Woodcut Brushes

Welcome this essential toolkit to allow you to create clean and eye-catching 21st-century woodcut designs quickly and easily in Adobe Illustrator. Over 100 brushes are included, and they contain a vast range of shapes, sizes, and varieties. There's a brush for every task!

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Free Wax Crayon Effect Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

There are 12 Illustrator texture brushes in total, 3 of which are solid, while the others feature two color shades that retain some of the detail from the original crayon marking scans. Apply the brushes to strokes, or paint directly with the brush tool to add irregular outlines to your artwork.

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Sailor Mate's Rope Brush Collection

If you need a perfect Illustrator rope brush, this kit is right what you need to create themed illustrations and artworks. It includes 261 hand-drawn and easy to use rope brushes and some bonus objects.

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Free Illustrator Brushes for Retro and Vintage Effects

What about high-quality Illustrator brushes for creating retro and vintage effects? When it comes to vector brushes, options are decidedly thinner on the ground. So here comes this collection of the best free Illustrator brushes — plus one ultimate bonus option you have to pay for (but it's worth it).

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Tattoo Style Art Brushes

This complete tool kit contains a variety of brushes that work harmoniously to create stunning inked art. The outline brushes undulate the inconsistency of real ink while the scatter brushes build up interesting, stippled texture and shading.

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Free Stipple Shading Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

Do you admire stippling, where fine vector textures are added to build up tones and shade in areas of darkness? So download this free pack of 8 stipple shading Illustrator brushes to easily paint grungy details onto your artwork with Illustrator's brush tool.

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Liquid Style Brushes

Over 80 brushes are included and they contain a vast range of shapes, sizes and varieties. There's a brush for every task! If you are a tablet user, you'll be pleased to know that a version of the brushes with pressure sensitivity enabled is included.

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Three Adobe Illustrator Brushes

If you love testing new things, this free Illustrator brush set is a nice piece for your experiments. You will get an illustrator file (.ai) that contains three brushes. The cat from the preview is just for showing what they are capable of.

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Doodle Brushes

Giving your art that loose, naive feel can be harder than it looks. The Doodle Brushes make this very easy as the line inconstancy and scribbled feel built into each brush. The pack includes zigzag, scribbled, wiggly and other doodle brushes for Illustrator.

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Ophelia Grain Vector Brushes

This curated collection of 10 noise and grain Illustrator brushes is the perfect add-on to your toolbox. The brushes come in two styles: organic and geometric. Feel free to use them in different sizes and colors.

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Small Wonders

Small Wonders contains a whole lot of texture elements in TIFF files. They are easy to use in Adobe Illustrator and this technique of texturing your work is much more memory saving than using the real vector textures.

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Illustrator Pencil Brushes

This set includes 44 hand-drawn Illustrator pencil brushes, created using various pencil techniques. To use the brushes, simply choose a brush, select the brush tool and draw. The color and width of the strokes can be adjusted easily.

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Free Linocut Brushes for Illustrator

If your ancient linocut style can't leave you alone, you can use these free vector brushes in Illustrator to simulate a lino printing (or linocut) effect and embody your passion. Please note, that the set is for personal use only.

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The Brush Studio

Welcome to The Brush Studio, where you'll find a delightful variety of resources to help you create designs in Adobe Illustrator with an authentic, decorative, hand-lettered look! Created with chalk, pencil, and ink, these amazing assets will give you everything you need for your next digitally "handmade" design.

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Fine Liner Brushes & Patterns

Pleased to present this authentic and versatile tool kit, which includes a huge range of different pen mark brushes for Illustrator — straight and rough outlines, dots and dashes, stippling, hatching, zigzags and more.

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1950s Artist Brushes for Illustrator

1950s Artist Brush Pack contains 19 seamless pattern brushes and 20 art brushes for Adobe Illustrator. Inspired by 1950s illustrations, these brushes were drawn with ink, old brushes and fingers. You can use these brushes for vector paintings and line art too.

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The Master Engraver — Brushes

Level up to master engraver with the most thoroughly thought out vintage Illustrator brush set available! It includes 59 authentic-looking engraving brushes and a bonus vintage paper texture for more creativity.

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Free Outline Brushes — Illustrator

Do you find yourself spending precious time adjusting the stroke widths and end shapes of your Illustrator brush marks to make the perfect shape? If so, then these brushes will be ideal for you. The set speeds up the drawing process giving strokes varied thicknesses and a more life-like look.

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Incredible Impressionism | Brushes

This complete Illustrator brush pack was inspired by the beautiful pointillist paintings of the late 19th century. Whether you want to create classic impressionist style artwork or add some truly original texture shading to your designs, this pack gives you the tools for the job.

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Mid-Century Mixed Media Collection

Whether you want to create simple cartoon outline illustrations or rich, deeply textured children's book artwork, this Illustrator brush set has the right tool for the job. It includes loads of classic and unusual ink outlines, pencil doodles, halftone and pastel shaders.

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Free Scribble & Scrawl Brushes

Scribble & Scrawl Brushes for Illustrator are ideal for primitive art illustrations, naive childish drawings, scribbly text or just for adding an extra bit of texture to a design! They're are massively versatile and almost everything you see in the preview images was made using them.

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Finest Vintage — Illustrator Brushes

Meet these exceptional anti-stretch pattern brushes for Illustrator! They seamlessly repeat a tile along the stroke rather than stretching one image along the line. This means that you won't need to change brushes so often, leaving you more time to perfect those authentic-looking designs.

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Free Vintage Banner Brushes

These handy brushes are ideal for creating vintage banners in Illustrator and Affinity Designer. They were designed to work in harmony with other Artifex Forge tools and are the perfect extra shortcut when putting together vintage designs and illustrations.

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Single Weight Line Art Lab

Save yourself hours with this handy design shortcut and start drawing single weight line art today! This huge and diverse selection features over 100 Adobe Illustrator brushes. And there are also over 100 decorative patterns are included.

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Rodeo: Hand Drawn Rope Brush

The next freebie is this awesome hand-drawn rope brush for Adobe Illustrator CC. You can apply this brush to any path, as well as change the width and color of the rope. So perfect for your illustrations, embroidery and logos!

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DryGoods | Chalk Brushes for AI

Meet the Chalk Brushes for Illustrator inspired by the early 20th-century drygoods stores. The DryGoods set equips you with 23 chalk Illustrator brushes. These brushes were created using a variety of different chalks.

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Smoke — Illustrator Brush Pack

Get yourself 10 new Adobe Illustrator smoke brushes — so good for backgrounds and things that smoke, steam, or mist. If you play around with the opacity and blend modes in Illustrator, you can get some really nice effects.

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Neon — Realistic Brush Set

If you can't have enough neon effects, then this is the perfect set for you. With these brushes, you can really give your design the wow-factor. Indeed, they are so true-to-life, flexible, fun — and coming with multiple highlight options.

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Free Illustrator Brushes — Natural Sketch Doodle Lines Set

The Illustrator brushes in this free set are varied and versatile, allowing you to create a hand-drawn sketched look, as well as decorative borders, curls and doodle style illustrations. Hope you'll get as much use out of these as we do!

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Watercolor Brushes

Meet a set of naturalistic Adobe Illustrator watercolor brushes! This versatile pack features a huge range of authentically textured strokes that were sampled from real watercolor for maximum authenticity. Why not use it to take your digital art to the next level?

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Child's Play Crayons – Free Illustrator Brush Set

Bring loads of fun to your artworks with 12 free Illustrator brushes. They precisely imitate crayons and colored pencils as they were scanned from actual strokes. Please note that this free brush set is for personal only.

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Vintage Vector Edge Brushes

It's easy to find fantastic textured folds, creases and edges when browsing in second-hand shops, and they really add to the aesthetic of a design. Now, you can easily add on the years to enhance the retro realism of your work with this set of hyper-realistic brushes for Illustrator.

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Free Wax Crayon Brushes

These authentic crayon strokes are perfect for adding naive charm to your Illustrator and Affinity Designer artwork. Every attempt has been made to retain the life-like qualities of the original wax crayon source material to bring only the best texture to your work!

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50 Authentic Etching Brushes

Are you looking for an easy way to create etching in vectors? So here's a bundle of 50 handmade etching brushes for Adobe Illustrator! They were created from real 16th century samples, that have been scanned and transformed into brushes, for the most authentic result.

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written by

Ksenia Pedchenko

Ksenia is our Audience and Plus membership curator. Getting in touch with Pixelbuddha? The possibility you’re talking to Ksenia is extremely high. Also, Ksenia is a regular author in the Pixelbuddha Journal, where she shares fresh news of the industry.