If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush." - Jil Sander

If we are all completely honest with ourselves, as digital artists we're all addicts.

We're all addicted to collecting new brushes.

(Hi, my name's G Force and I'm a brush addict ... it's been 3 days since my last download)

Seriously I have hundreds maybe thousands of them. Some I've probably never used! But when we find a good one we like then its, Ooooh yeeeah!

Well, while playing about with Nomad sculpting on my tablet I thought I'd create some of my own alpha brushes. To start I'm using only my Samsung Galaxy tab and the Autdesk Sketchbook app, but you can use any drawing app you choose.

For Nomad the size you want to set your canvas to 1024 x 1024 pixels.

Next I shall go to my background layer and fill this with a solid black.

Then using any brush I like I will create a shape or texture. So for this example I'm going just create some simple cross hatching.

When creating alpha brushes the rule of thumb is black is transparent white is opaque. Or in 3D terms black is flat white is raised. Simple enough. And the grey tones are the levels in-between. Then just export as a png and you're done!

So this is a great way to create textures quickly and easily.

So for example some of the textures I have are animal skins or tree bark photos. These can make really quick edits to your 3D work.

I must confess I went a bit crazy the other night and spent a few hours going through ALL my photoshop brushes and using this technique went on to create a library of about 800 alpha brushes.

(I'm G Force and I'm a brush addict ... you've gotta help me man! .... I just can't stop!)