Paint Effects includes hundreds of saved brushes called brush presets. These are stored in the your mayapath/brushes folder. You can also create your own brush presets and store them either to a shelf or to a Content Browser subdirectory.
When you select a brush preset, its settings are copied to the template brush where you can tweak them before painting your stroke. If you do not select a brush preset before painting, the next stroke you paint uses the current settings for the template brush.
To select a brush preset, so one of the following:
If you select the brush preset in the Content Browser, the icon is highlighted with a yellow border, indicating that the brush settings were copied to the template brush.