Ever wonder how designers create those cool vector looking abstract designs or get really cool grungy textures in photoshop?

example:

They don’t create custom patterns and they don’t create custom shapes. They use brushes. The above example is using a couple of free brushes found at qbrushes.com and a couple of transparent effects. You can find hundreds of free brushes that give you as little as primitive vector shapes all the way to fully developed images that you can use at variety of sizes. Brushes are cool because you can use a handful of them to create really cool original artwork or abstract patterns. You can also create your own brushes very easily. A lot of brushes are original black and white artwork that is scanned into Photoshop and then converted into a brush.

If you are interested in using Photoshop brushes, I would recommend checking out qbrushes.com to get a jump start. They have a pretty big directory of really cool brushes.