Someone commissions an illustration. You use a brush pack you bought on Gumroad. You deliver the file, they print two thousand copies, and somewhere in the back of your head a small voice asks whether you were allowed to do that.
Almost always: yes. But the reason it is almost rather than always is worth understanding, because the exceptions are specific and they cluster in places you would not guess.
This is a plain-language explainer, not legal advice — we are not lawyers. For anything with real money attached, read the actual licence and ask someone qualified.
What you buy when you buy a brush
Not the brush. A licence to use it.
That distinction sounds like lawyer noise and it is the whole thing. A brush pack is a file containing textures and settings that somebody authored. You are buying permission to use that file in a defined way — and the definition is the licence, not the price.
Which means the important question is never “did I pay for this” but “what did the payment permit”.
The line that matters
Nearly every brush licence in existence draws the same line, and once you see it you can read any of them quickly:
Output is yours. The brush is not.
Make anything you like with the brush and sell it — prints, client work, merchandise, a book, an album cover. That is the point of selling brushes.
What you cannot do is pass on the brush itself. Not resell it, not bundle it into your own pack, not upload it to a Discord, not include the file in the “source files” you hand a client.
That last one catches people. Delivering a layered working file is normal practice, and if a custom brush is embedded in it you may be distributing the brush without meaning to. Most licences do not care about a flattened export; several do care about a project file containing the brush data.
The three clauses actually worth reading
Skip the rest, read these.
1. Is it per-seat or per-person? A one-person licence covers you. If you have a studio, or you hand the pack to a contractor, most licences want a seat each. Free packs are frequently person-limited in a way paid ones are not, which is the opposite of what people assume.
2. Does it survive the subscription? This is the big one for anything sold monthly. If your brush access is a subscription, does a piece you made in month three stay licensed after you cancel in month five?
A licence that lapses with the subscription means your back catalogue becomes legally ambiguous the day you stop paying — including work already printed and sold. Read this clause before you subscribe to anything, not after.
3. Is AI training excluded? Newer licences increasingly forbid using the textures as training data. If you are doing anything in that direction, assume it is prohibited unless it says otherwise.
The awkward middle: “free” brushes
Free packs are where licensing gets genuinely messy, for a simple reason: lots of them have no licence at all.
A file on a forum with no accompanying terms is not public domain. It is unlicensed, which legally is closer to “no permission” than “all permissions”. In practice nobody is going to sue you over a stamp texture. But if you are building a commercial workflow on a foundation of files with unknown provenance, that is a real if small exposure, and it compounds the more your work is worth.
Also worth knowing: a meaningful fraction of “free brush packs” circulating on aggregator sites are repackaged paid packs. Downloading one does not give you a licence the original author never granted.
The one that surprises people
You usually cannot sell the artwork as a brush. If you use a purchased texture brush to create a new texture, and sell that texture as a brush, you have made a derivative of the thing you were specifically not allowed to redistribute. Most licences name this explicitly.
Same logic applies to selling “brush packs” assembled from other people’s stamps, which is a surprisingly common thing on marketplaces and a surprisingly reliable way to get taken down.
What Apex Olira’s licence says
Since this is our journal, here it is directly, and you should read the actual terms rather than take this summary as the agreement:
- Every pack, free and Pro, carries a commercial licence for the artwork you make with it. Prints, client work, merchandise, published illustration — no separate licence, no revenue ceiling, no attribution requirement.
- The licence never lapses, because nothing here recurs. Every pack and palette is a one-time purchase — there is no subscription to cancel, so there is nothing that could reach backwards into work you have already sold.
- Files you downloaded stay yours. They are files on your disk. They do not phone home and they do not expire.
- You may not redistribute or resell the brush files themselves, or ship them inside a pack of your own.
The second point is the one we would push you to check on any subscription brush service you use elsewhere. It is the difference between renting tools and renting the right to have used them — and it is the reason Apex Olira does not sell brushes that way: buy a pack once, and there is no clause to check, because nothing recurs.
The short version
Sell the art. Do not sell the brush. Check whether your licence survives cancellation. And if a free pack came with no terms at all, treat it as decoration rather than infrastructure.