Chaos & Evolutions brushes

I made the above image in literally a few short seconds testing out the nice brush set created by David Revoy for his DVD workshop on 2D digital painting, Chaos & Evolutions, produced by the Blender Foundation. It's a great workshop resource with time-lapse painting videos and tutorials, made especially nice because every software tool he uses is free and open source.

The brush set is available here. He created the brushes for GIMP, but I spent much of yesterday evening converting them into Photoshop brushes. I couldn't retain all the functionality of certain brushes that use animated brush tips to simulate eroded strokes. On the other hand, I found some of the brushes seemed to be bending over backward to mimic behavior that Photoshop's brush system implements much more effectively. Those brushes might actually work better in Photoshop with the right settings. I like the GIMP project a lot, but I feel it is still not quite mature software, particularly in OS X. I keep testing it out, thinking I might be able to ditch Photoshop, but I get easily frustrated running in X11 and GIMP's other quirks.