Pixlr Tutorials

[03] finding brushes for pixlr

If any of you have used Photoshop before, you may know that you can actually download brushes from outside resources and put them into your brush library. You may not know this, but you can do the same thing with Pixlr. The only difference is that the files end in .pbr for Pixlr and .abr for Photoshop.

The best resource, as far as my own experiences, has been Deviantart. Many artists have created many different brushes just for Pixlr.

What I do is go on Deviantart and search up something like "Pixlr Brushes" and scroll until something meets my liking. Once one does, I click on it then I press download.

Now, once you do that, then what?

Usually, before I bring it into Pixlr, I move the file out of my Downloads folder and move into a folder I named "Brushes."

Next, you may notice that the file is in fact not a .pbr, but instead a .zip or .rar file. You MUST unzip/extract these files before you can do anything.

Make sure that these files are now .pbr (you can delete any others that say "read me" or are previews, they aren't needed). If they are .abr files, you CANNOT use them. Those are explicitly for Photoshop uses only.

Once that's been done, open Pixlr on your computer and select the Brush tool. Go up to the top options bar where it lets you select the brush type/size. Click on that drop down arrow. Once the window opens, go to the right of the box where it says "Load Set".

From there, navigate your folders until you find where you put the brushes you've downloaded. You can then select it and press Open. After that, they should show up in the Brush library!

If for any reason the brush does not load in, you may want to go back into that folder and make sure you pressed the correct one. If it still fails to load it may be broken and will not work anymore.

Hope that helped!