Today, we are giving away free, large, high-res Photoshop brushes of the gods and monsters featured in our free WordPress theme with the same name. You can use them to create your own gods and monsters spin-off theme, for web graphics, or even screenprinted t-shirts, stationery, collages, and more.

Gods and Monsters is a free WordPress theme we created a couple months ago, and it’s been well received by the community so far. Gods & Monsters is an image-rich, two column, grunge theme adorned with Medieval gods and monsters. There are lots of details, such as a stylized search box, interesting presentation of the date, and great illustrations like flying fish and fighting gods and monsters. You can download it and find out more about the Gods and Monsters theme at the WordPress demo site.

Gods and Monsters WordPress Theme

The theme’s images are derived from an old 16th century map of North and South America we stumbled across recently. The brushes that came from the map are incredibly fantastical and surreal. They make me want to create hand-drawn replicas of the maps. Or be a cartographer in the Middle Ages, drawing out the frontier lands. Maybe the internet is the next frontier. Or is it the last? There is a correlation if you stretch it enough: 16th century cartographer mapping out unknown worlds where gods and monsters abound, 21st century web designers mapping the internet, ripe with spiders and trojans. Hmmm……

The brushes were created from the images’ original sizes, so some of them are smaller than others depending on what size the artist intended them to be. However, because the images were originally done in pen and ink, you can easily use a sharpen filter to get rid of any blurriness you may experience if enlarging. You can also use the brushes on a new canvas, drag them from Photoshop into Illustrator, and manipulate them there to achieve less rasterization and blurriness.

How to Install Brushes in Photoshop

After you’ve downloaded and extracted the brush file, you will see that it is an .abr file, which is Adobe’s shorthand for a brush file. Dump it into the Brushes folder under the Adobe Photoshop Presets folder. In Windows, you can find this in your C: drive under Program Files => Adobe => Adobe Photoshop => Presets => Brushes.

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