There are two types of brushes: logical and physical. A logical brush is a description of the ideal bitmap that an application would use to paint shapes. A physical brush is the actual bitmap that a device driver creates based on an application's logical-brush definition. For more information about bitmaps, see Bitmaps.
When an application calls one of the functions that create a brush, it retrieves a handle that identifies a logical brush. When the application passes this handle to the SelectObject function, the device driver for the corresponding display or printer creates the physical brush.