Basic Brushes Deep Dive: Normal, Ink, Pencil & Pixel Art in Brinimate
A detailed look at Brinimate's four Basic brushes — Normal, Ink (China Ink), Pencil, and Pixel Art — with use cases, technique tips, and animation applications for each.
LuisOA
Brinimate Team
Basic Brushes: The Essential Four
Brinimate’s Basic brush category contains four fundamental stroke types that cover 90% of professional illustration needs. If you master these four alone, you can create everything from comic panels to UI mockups to traditional-looking animation.
🎯 Normal — The Everyday Workhorse
Technical profile: lineCap: round, lineJoin: round, opacity: 100%, tension: 0.4
The Normal brush produces a solid, smooth, anti-aliased stroke. The tension setting of 0.4 gives it a gentle curve-smoothing effect — your hand-drawn lines are automatically slightly smoothed to reduce shakiness without losing expression.
Best for:
- General illustration and sketching.
- Clean lines in character outlines.
- Any situation where you need predictable, consistent strokes.
- Beginners learning the editor (start here before exploring other brushes).
Animation use case: Character outlines on every keyframe. Its consistency means frame-to-frame differences look intentional, not like brushwork mistakes.
🏮 Ink (China Ink) — The Cartoonist’s Line
Technical profile: lineCap: round, lineJoin: round, opacity: 100%, tension: 0 (no smoothing)
The Ink brush is identical in appearance to Normal but with tension: 0 — no smoothing whatsoever. Every wobble in your hand shows up exactly in the stroke. Experienced artists use this intentionally for the raw, expressive character of traditional ink work.
Best for:
- Comic and manga style art.
- Bold outlines for characters meant to look hand-drawn.
- Calligraphy-style text in animation titles.
- When you want your imperfections to read as style.
Difference from Normal: Draw a wavy line with both. Normal will softly correct the waves. Ink will render every tremor faithfully. For storyboarding and rough animation, Ink is king.
Pro technique: Use thick Ink strokes for character outlines and thin Normal strokes for interior details. The difference in sharpness creates a subtle sense of depth even in flat illustration.
✏️ Pencil — Soft and Organic
Technical profile: lineCap: round, opacity: 65%, widthFactor: 0.85, tension: 0.2
The Pencil brush synthesizes the look of graphite on paper: semi-transparent, slightly thin, gently smoothed. Layer multiple pencil strokes and they build up — this opacity stacking behavior creates rich, multi-tonal areas without complex blending tools.
Best for:
- Sketching and rough animation passes.
- Cross-hatching and texture building through layering.
- Soft character concepts and underdrawings.
- Storyboards meant to feel exploratory and human.
The layering trick: Draw a shadow area. Draw over it again with a slightly different angle. Repeat 3-4 times. The opacity builds to 65% × 65% × 65%… creating a natural dark gradient that mimics graphite shading. No fill gradients needed.
Animation use case: A “pencil test” animation — the classic animation reference technique done entirely with the Pencil brush, giving the animation an authentic hand-drawn feel even on screen.
🕹️ Pixel Art — Sharp, Square, Retro
Technical profile: lineCap: square, lineJoin: miter, opacity: 100%, tension: 0
The Pixel Art brush disables all smoothing and uses square line caps and miter joins — giving strokes a deliberately blocky, angular quality that mimics the look of pixel grid work despite being rendered as a vector.
Best for:
- Retro game asset creation.
- 8-bit and 16-bit aesthetic characters.
- Icons and UI elements with a blocky “game” feel.
- Creating technical diagrams where clean square corners are needed.
Key insight: Pixel Art is the only Basic brush that avoids all anti-aliasing-style smoothing. While Normal and Ink both use round caps (softening stroke endpoints), Pixel Art’s square caps create clean, hard termination points that look precise and mechanical.
Animation use case: A retro game-style animated character sprite — deliberately chunky, angular, with the nostalgic quality of a classic arcade game brought to life in vector form.
💡 Pro Tip — Brush Combinations by Style:
Style Outlines Detail lines Clean cartoon Normal Normal (thinner) Comic / Manga Ink Ink Painted Pencil Pencil (layered) Retro game Pixel Art Pixel Art Mixing brushes in one illustration is also valid — Ink for outlines, Pencil for hatching — but be consistent within each element type for a coherent visual language.
Ready to explore more expressive brushes? Check out the Artistic Brushes guide for Watercolor, Chalk, Oil, and Hair/Fiber.