If, like me, you’ve always loved the beautiful texture made by layering and smudging oil pastels, you’ll be excited to hear that the Artifex Forge has now made this possible digitally.

I’ve had loads of fun creating these as you can see from the preview images. I spent hours experimenting with the different types of marks, which the very versatile pastel medium can create. This has resulted in a brush set that includes loads of different shapes, sizes, textures, smudges and scribbles. In other words, this pack has a brush for every drawing challenge – the chunky brushes are great for backgrounds and for large areas of texture, while the others are perfect for creating a wide range of outlines and details. Together they will make your designs and illustrations spring to life!

In order to get the best texture possible I started with real pastel marks and then vectorized them combining the best elements from the in-built Illustrator tracing engine with an amazing online vectorization program. Then, I painstakingly cleaned up each brush. The result is definitely one of my best sets yet!

Check out the video tutorial to see just how easy these are to use:

Included in this set:

The Brushes

• 10 standard pastel brushes.
• 10 scribbled pastel brushes.
• 8 rounded pastel brushes.
• 9 graduated brushes.
• 7 chunky pastel brushes.
• 9 smudged pastel brushes.
• If you are a tablet user, you’ll be pleased to know that a version of the brushes with pressure sensitivity enabled is included. (Please note that this feature only works in Illustrator CS5+).

A quick reference guide

• This will help you find the right brushes for the task in hand quickly.

Instructions

• A very thorough guide on how to load, apply and then adjust the brushes is supplied.

Software compatibility: Adobe Illustrator CS1 and newer.

This product has featured in The Dreamy Designer’s Artistic Arsenal