Livebrush is a new and innovative drawing program. It’s not a full vector application like Illustrator®, nor does it have the myriad features of Painter® or Photoshop®. Livebrush creates graphics with a simple stroke of a “motion-enabled” brush, which means it responds to your mouse’s movement to modify the line and apply different styles. That’s the “live” part — no two strokes are the same, and each can have infinite variations. This unique brush is what makes Livebrush fun — and addictive.

Downloading Livebrush

Livebrush is better understood once you jump right in and try it. It’s a free download and will run on most modern computers and operating systems. Livebrush is an Adobe AIR application. It’s not made by Adobe, but rather runs in Adobe’s AIR framework. When you install Livebrush, AIR will be installed as well (if you don’t already have it).

The Interface

When you first open Livebrush, a new “project” is started by default. The Livebrush interface contains six basic elements: The “paper,” or drawing area, the Project Bar and Tool Bar, plus three panels: Styles, Tool Settings and Layers.

Drawing

Let’s get right to the fun part — drawing. Make sure the Brush tool is selected, then choose a style from the pre-sets in the Styles panel. Here, I’ve used the Floral Basic style. Paint a line with the brush to get a feel of it.

As you can see, Livebrush adds a new layer in the Layers panel for each stroke. These layers can be turned off and/or deleted. You can also change the color of the locked background layer by clicking on the swatch at the top right corner of the panel.

Tool Settings

Take a look at the Tool Settings panel. Under the Behavior tab, there are settings for Velocity and Friction. These are the two basic settings which determine the behavior of the live brush

Velocity: Adjust this slider to set the “speed” of the brush when drawing. A higher setting will let the brush keep moving after you’ve stopped drawing.

Friction: Sets the “resistance” of the brush. A higher setting slows the brush while drawing. With no friction at all, the brush would keep moving indefinitely. Try different combinations of velocity and friction to see how they interact.

Mouse Up Complete: When checked, the brush will stop immediately (regardless of the velocity or friction settings) when you release the mouse click.

To get a sense of how each brush will behave, you can click the Preview icon (an eyeball) at the bottom of the Styles panel. Click through the styles to see a demonstration of each. You can change the color of the preview background, by clicking on the swatches menu in the upper left corner, or you can just delete it.

While in preview mode, you can change the settings of each style and get live, updated previews. You could spend all day doing this! For example, preview a simple smooth brush, then as it’s previewing, change the color, the opacity, the line type, etc.,

Decos

You’ll notice that some brushes add swirls, leaves or other flourishes to the line as you draw. These are called decorations, or “decos,” for short. The decos are not part of the line, but are small graphic files that are added to it, based on the settings of the given style. Decos can be GIF, JPG, PNG or SWF files.

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