Yup it's a real animated brush.
Last year I tried my hand at making an animated cursor for stardock.
The process was a mystery to me ( and I couldn't have that) anyway the brush is using the same method as cursors and animated UI's .
Its a string of separate png's strung together using AniUtil.exe that are rearranged into one long png.
I used a plain black and white version of the original.
Unfortunately. the brush, instead of looking something like this... ....


gets mutilated and turns into the cross hatching as seen in the smiley face.
Here is the output I used as the brush from AniUtil which I have taken the transparency out of and blurred, it's a hack job I know, but it was just a test.. ....
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( looks a bit spooky out of context, sorry about that , its the spinning mode ( BUSY )of the above critter).
....anime loads and compresses in space all the frames to one image
which produced the cross hatched look, but somehow the extra data(whatever that is) makes the frames cycle is retained and read.
This was a long shot all along and I was surprised to see anything happen.
Still, even if this is a dead end, the cross hatched look is interesting and could be useful.
I think a little more experimentation might be on the cards, perhaps by someone with half a clue about this.
Oh yeah if you want the cursor it's smaller than the example, it's called microzoa by chuckeye (me)
http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx? ... 2&libid=25
or, but you'll have to get tha app from stardock (free)
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it does all sorts of stuff depending on your task , it will even start mitosis if left to its own devices and was made with anime.
I load it up with the old version-cursor xp not the new- cursor fx - freeware version.
I find the old one works better ,could be a registry issue on my own machine though.