Mixer Brush
The Mixer Brush is the Smudge Brush with paint on it. A plain smudge only drags what is already on the surface; the Mixer Brush also carries a load of colour, lays it down as it drags, picks up the colours it passes over when it is wet, and runs dry as the stroke goes on — the way Photoshop's Mixer Brush behaves. Pick the Smudge Brush in the Paint mode's tool row, open Brush Settings in the sidebar and tick Mixer Brush.
Turning it on
Mixer Brush appears in Brush Settings only while the Smudge Brush is the tool. Ticking it swaps the Smudge Brush's own rows — Mode, Smudge strength, Wet mix and Colour rate — for the Mixer Brush's controls below. Untick it to go back to an ordinary smudge.
The Mixer Brush works on Color / Albedo only. Everything else about the brush — radius, falloff, spacing, pressure, masks — works as it does for any other tool.
The paint on the brush
At the top of the Mixer Brush rows is a bar showing the paint the brush is carrying right now: it is filled with the brush's current colour, and the filled length shows how much of the load is left. Watch it during a stroke — on a wet brush the colour drifts toward what you are painting over, and the bar shortens as the load is spent. An empty bar is a clean brush.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Load Brush | Fills the brush with the Color / Albedo colour from the sidebar, to a full load. |
| Clean Brush | Empties the brush. A clean brush only smears until it picks up paint again — and if it is wet, the first colour it passes over becomes its paint. |
| Load the brush after each stroke | Refills the brush with the Color / Albedo colour at the start of every stroke. |
| Clean the brush after each stroke | Empties the brush after every stroke. |
With both of the last two on, every stroke starts with fresh paint. With neither, the brush keeps whatever it has from one stroke to the next — dirty paint picked up from the canvas, or none at all — which is how you carry a mixed colour from one area into another.
Wet, Load, Mix and Flow
Four sliders set how the paint behaves. Each is a percentage, has a reset button beside it, and can be typed into with a double-click.
| Control | What it does | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wet | How much the brush takes in from the canvas. At 0% the brush is dry and paints only its load. Higher, the paint picks up the colours it passes over, and the canvas shows through what is laid down (by Mix). | 0–100% | 50% |
| Load | How much paint the brush holds — how long a stroke it paints before it runs dry and only smears. | 1–100% | 50% |
| Mix | Once the brush is wet: of what it lays down, how much is canvas and how much is its own paint. Has no effect while Wet is 0%. | 0–100% | 50% |
| Flow | How strongly each dab lays paint — and how fast it spends the load. | 1–100% | 50% |
Load and Flow pull against each other: a high Flow empties the brush quickly, a high Load makes it last longer. With both at 100%, a full brush lasts roughly two hundred dabs; lower Flow stretches that out, lower Load shortens it.
Tips
- For a clean, opaque stroke that fades out like a brush running out of paint, set Wet to 0% and turn on Load the brush after each stroke.
- To blend two colours already on the model, Clean Brush, raise Wet, and drag from one into the other: the brush picks up the first colour and carries it into the second.
- Lower Mix when a wet brush washes out too much — more of its own paint stays in what it lays down.
- Raise Load for long strokes across a large area; lower it for short, dragged-out touches that dry up quickly.