When I say 'brush' (I'm sure I'm off on my terminology here :-D) I'm speaking of a collection of properties that a tile, or sprite, could have, such as color, alpha, blending mode, 'midhandling', and other properties that would need to be controlled by the engine itself, such as rotation (for fans and the likes). Say, you place a tile where you like it, or even a number of tiles, you then create a 'brush' with an alpha value of around .4. You could then apply the 'brush' to those tiles, so changing any of the properties of those tiles would be as easy as changing one 'brush'
Per-pixel-lighting? Su-weet!
Per-pixel-lighting? Su-weet!