Digital artists will never enough with the default brushes offered by GIMP. The brush collection offered by GIMP is very limited. You can’t even find a cloud brush at all. If you often use Paintbrush Tool when working with GIMP, you can install new brushes as many as you want.

GIMP itself recognizes three file types as brushes: the ones available with the extension of .vbr, .gbrand .gih. In addition, GIMP also recognizes file with the extension of .abras a brush. In case you didn’t know, .abris the file extension of Photoshop brush. This is one of the forms of compatibility of GIMP with Photoshop.

While finding original GIMP brushes can be time-consuming, you can download Photoshop brushes which is way easier since there are a bunch of websitess that provide free Photoshop brushes.

By the way, if you use GIMP on Windows 10, here is how to install new GIMP brushes in Windows 10.

Assuming that you already have the file of GIMP brushes you want to install, simply copy those files to “brushes” folder under the installation folder of GIMP. Usually, with the following path.

C:\Program Files\GIMP version\share\gimp\GIMP version\brushes\

If the file of GIMP brushes you want to install is available in an archive file, don’t forget to extract it first before copying. If you want to install the original GIMP brush files (.vbr, .gbror .gih), it would be better to create a new folder to put together all of the new brush files.

The difference between the original file of GIMP brushes and Photoshop brush (.abr) is that every single file of original GIMP brush contains only a single brush while every single file of Photoshop brush can contains several brushes.