Adjusting brush size in GIMP – A guide for beginners

In GIMP you have the opportunity to quickly and effectively adjust the size of your brush tips, which significantly improves the workflow. Instead of awkwardly fiddling with a slider, you can simply change the brush size using your mouse wheel or keyboard. In this tutorial, I will show you how to optimally adjust these presets for the brush tool.

Key Takeaways

• You can quickly change the brush size using the mouse wheel or arrow keys.
• The settings are easily accessible via the "Edit" and "Preferences" menu.
• It is possible to remove or change these functions if needed.

Step-by-Step Guide

To adjust the brush size in GIMP using the mouse wheel or keyboard, follow these steps:

Start by selecting the brush tool in GIMP. Set your foreground color to black. Once you want to easily draw a brush stroke on the canvas, you should adjust the size of this brush tip. By default, the brush size is defined by a slider. Currently, the size is 34. To illustrate this, click on the area and drag to the right while holding the mouse button down to increase the brush stroke or to the left to decrease it. However, this can be cumbersome when you are in the middle of a creative process.

Now go to the settings to simplify things. Click on “Edit” and then on “Preferences”. Here you will find the category “Input Devices”. On the right side, you will see two options: Main Mouse Wheel and Main Keyboard. These two options refer to your mouse wheel as well as the keyboard. Our goal is for you to be able to change the brush size using the mouse wheel.

Double-click on “Main Mouse Wheel”. A dialog box will open. Among other things, there is the item “Scroll Up”. You can customize this to specify what should happen when moving the mouse wheel up. Currently, no action is assigned. So double-click on “Scroll Up” and another dialog box appears with various options for customization. You want the brush tool to be expanded, so click on “Tools”. Then look for “Increase Brush Size” and select it. Confirm with “OK”.

Now, it was necessary to define what happens when you move the mouse wheel down to decrease the brush size. In the same dialog box, look for “Scroll Down” and click on it. Again, select “Decrease Brush Size” under tools and confirm with “OK”. Then close the dialog box and click “OK” to save the settings. Now, when you have selected the brush tool, make a stroke and move the mouse wheel forward or backward. You will observe that the brush size adjusts dynamically without the need to use the slider.

However, if you are working with a mouse wheel that does not support this command, you can also make the same settings via the keyboard. Go back to “Edit” and “Preferences”. Now I’d like to show you how to remove the mouse wheel function again. To do this, click on “Scroll Up” and then at the bottom on “Clear”. Do the same for “Scroll Down”. Then close the dialog boxes.

Next, double-click on “Main Keyboard”. Here you will see the settings for the keyboard layout. Look for “Cursor Up”, which describes the behavior of the up arrow key in the context of your adjustments. Double-click on it and search for the same function “Increase Brush Size”. Confirm again with “OK”. Repeat this for “Cursor Down”, where you want to reduce the brush size this time. So look for “Decrease Brush Size” and confirm. Close everything with “OK”.

Now, when you draw with your brush, you can easily increase the size with the up arrow key and decrease it with the down arrow key. These adjustments make working with the brush tool significantly easier, as you do not have to constantly use the slider.

Summary – Adjusting Brush Size in GIMP

In this guide, you learned how to effectively adjust the size of your brush tips in GIMP. This allows you to work more easily and quickly by using the mouse wheel or keyboard to change the brush size as needed.