Custom brush builder for vector artists

An illustrator scans a real ink texture, a piece of crumpled paper, or a dry-brush stroke and wants to turn it into a working vector brush. Every major vector app has a 'create brush' function. Every one of them produces results that regularly fail — the asset isn't read correctly, the tiling is wrong, the pressure curve is flat, or the result looks nothing like the source material. Users report directly that 'the create your own brush function doesn't read the brushes very well' and that 'the brush and eraser do not respond well and strokes or erasures are imperfect.'

The reason this gap persists is structural: building a brush creation workflow that handles the full range of input assets — raster textures, scanned strokes, vector shapes — is genuinely complex and sits at the edge of what vector apps are architecturally designed to do. These apps are built around bezier paths, not texture synthesis. The brush creation tools are secondary features bolted onto a precision drawing engine, and the teams maintaining them have to prioritize the core drawing toolchain. Nobody inside Adobe or Serif is going to rebuild brush creation from scratch for the illustration minority.

What's missing is a standalone workflow that takes a scanned or photographed source asset, processes it intelligently (cleans up noise, identifies repeat elements, normalizes pressure response), and exports a correctly formatted brush file for a target app. Artists currently do this manually in Photoshop, then re-export, then troubleshoot import — a process that can take an hour for a single brush.

This is a business because every artist who works with custom textures hits this problem repeatedly. It recurs whenever they want a new brush, a new style, or when a client hands them raw assets to incorporate. The time cost of the current workaround is concrete and high.

What to build

Build a web app where a user uploads a raster image (scan, photo, or PNG), adjusts tiling, pressure mapping, and edge softness in a live preview, then exports a ready-to-install brush file in the format of their chosen target app (Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or Procreate).

Where to start

Start with Affinity Designer export only, marketed directly in the Affinity community forums and subreddit, where users are especially vocal about brush creation being broken and where there is almost no commercial tooling targeting them specifically.

The hard part

Getting the brush preview to accurately reflect how the exported brush will actually render inside the target app is technically hard — small differences in how each app interprets brush metadata mean the preview can look good but the installed brush behaves differently, which destroys trust immediately.

How it makes money

Free tier for up to 5 brush exports per month, paid tier at $9/month for unlimited exports and multi-format download (get the same brush in Illustrator and Affinity formats simultaneously).