GIMP 2.8 users, how do you use your brushes ?

[JONOR]

2.8 is a bit of a jump to me, not quite like gnome 3 has been mind
For the meantime i've decided agaist making new brushes in favour of
simply resizing the set offerings using a memorized progression of sizes.
Tripple clicking the size mantissa and dialling in a number from a memorized progression seems the best method to me,
but i'd be very interested to know what others do for their GIMP 2.8 brushes ?

[DBelton]

There are numerous free brushes available online for Gimp. And all you have to do is to copy them into your ~/.gimp-2.8/brushes folder. You can also copy brushes over that you created in previous versions of gimp.

But, for most things, the standard set of brushes that come with gimp do a nice job. You can adjust the size/properties of the brushes enough to get the standard brushes to do just about anything. About the only reason I can see for creating a custom brush in gimp would be if you had to have a particular odd shaped brush.

[JONOR]

I can imagine there being a lot of pre-2.8 users who would have been more than satisfied with
simply using the fuzzy circle and (hard) circle presets which came in a range of sizes and could be further easily scaled.
Why else would they have been so prominent ?
Those ranges have now gone. The first thing i did with 2.8 was to try to roughly replicate them as they were so useful.
However to work with them one needs to also click the button "reset size to brush's native size"
(and for other brush shapes possibly a couple of other reset buttons too).
Having to remember to do that seems to make them more cumbersome than working from one brush and constantly resizing it.
Is this a common reaction i wonder ?

[DBelton]

I too have had a learning curve in using the new brushes layout.

As you mentioned, there previously were several presets for some of the brushes, and I could just tap it with my stylus and go about my editing.

Now it's a little more involved, but still usable.

But for the record, I preferred the old way for some of the brushes. Some I prefer the new way. It does give more flexibility, but at the cost of being a little more cumbersome.

[JONOR]

The 2.8 documentation doesn't seem to have been updated yet to the new type of sliders that have a split function,
top half (upward pointing single headed arrow for coarse control) and bottom half (sideways pointing double headed arrow for fine control), with the mouse pointer.
Having now got used to it, i find using the mouse works quite well too provided the size slider itself is
not sized too small by making the dock/dialogue too narrow and also provided the size slider is fairly
central on the screen i.e not on a dock at the edge of the screen as that restricts the bottom half function of the slider.

[DBelton]

It appears they haven't updated quite a few things in their documentation yet. From what I can tell, they went through and did a global replace on the version numbers, so it specifies Gimp 2.8, but instructions and images are from an older version.

I am certain that once I use it more here, I will get used to the new sliders and other things. But until I do, it's just... Well.. Different