Brush up on your Brushes

First off, let me say that the brush has many hidden secrets which may be unknown to various Photoshop users. Ever wanted to make grass, stars or leaves? I will cover all of the custom brushes first, and then play around with their properties.

So lets get started,Create a Document, 7 inches in width, 2 inches in height.

Click on your brush tool, , and a menu will show up around the top.

The settings as is, are set to be the Brush size: 1 pixel. Mode: Normal. Opacity:100%. Flow:100%.

So lets go over the first tool, which is in shape of a brush. What is it useful for? Well simple, it saves your brush settings.

So lets save our first brush, click on the dropdown menu for the brush . You should see three different brushes or so, and two buttons at your right, , as shown in the below menu.

The three brushes we have here are pretty useful, but for now, we will leave them there. Press the new tool preset, , and it will ask you for a name, giving you as default, Brush Tool Hard Round 1 pixel 1, change the name if you'd like, I wont, and press save.

Now you should have four menu items, so whenever you get a brush you might like, and don't want to search down that nasty dropdown menu for brushes, simply press save, and your settings will be saved.

Now, we will move on to the second option in the brush menu, the types of brushes.

Its extensive dropdown menu will make it slightly complicated for you to find some brushes, but guide yourself by the dropdown bar.

The button in this case, will create a new brush if you have a custom Master Diameter and Hardness set, but I will teach you about making brushes later in this tutorial. For now, concentrate on the types of brushes.

The first brushes in the drop-down which aren't just soft/hard and large/small brushes, are these:

Again, guide yourself by the scroll bar to try and get there. Please try these brushes out, and save the ones you like. This will make it more accessible and less tiring for you.

Now I will scroll down to the Top 5 favorites perhaps, not in any specific order, just 5 brushes I found that were pretty cool.So go here:

These are by far the coolest brushes you will find in my opinion, so after selecting the grass tool, change your colors to:

Now, brush around! How awesome is that!

Play around with it, and before you change brushes, save it!

Feel free to play around with the other brushes, they look like this:

As you can see, its pretty simple to make some brushes, but please remember some brushes use foreground and background colors, so change both colors to get an even cooler effect.

Here we have the remaining part of the brush menu. The mode is fairly "odd" for perhaps new users to Photoshop, because at time you may be using a mode which makes the brush white and you may not be able to see anything, or some may not do anything at all, It may not be as useful if you are using black as a color, but just try them out every now and then, and you might get pretty awesome results.

The Opacity obviously changes the strength of the brush, while the flow, well, changes the flow of your brush

Now, we will open a very useful setting for brushes. You will go to Window > Brushes. Or Press F5.

I will be using the star, so, lets start with what Shape Dynamics can do. Remember, select the Brush, Select the Star. Now uncheck all the settings it had preset, as we will go by them one by one.

The Shape Dynamics rotate each star you make. You can play with the Size Jitter, the smaller you make it, the bigger the brush. In contrast, the minimum diameter, the bigger you make it, the bigger the brush. The Angle Jitter will rotate your stars, as you may notice, when you change it from 100%. I recommend leaving Roundness Jitter at 0, as with a brush you may not receive the best of results, but feel free to use it if you retrieve a result you like, Enjoy :)

Then comes one of the most useful tools, the Scattering.

Here you can't really play with much but how much you scatter, and Count is how many you wish to scatter. I don't recommend a High Count as, unless you have a really large document, it won't come out as you please. This tool is really one of the most important. Creating a scatter effect truly makes the brush fun to use, but also grants you a cool effect for the image.

Now, you have texture.

Personally, I didn't find this that useful, but when I used the texture above, the brush came out pretty cool. I guess due to the checkerboard 3d effect, the brush looked pretty neat. Remember, play with your Scale, as it configured how big the image you have will be in one/all the 'stars' you brush into the document :P.

Now, Dual Brush is one you must pay attention to.

its pretty understandable feature, the dual brush, puts one brush, into another. For instance, have your stars ready to draw, but check the dual brush, and choose lets say, the 19px brush. Now when you draw, you will see the stars, but in a 19px diameter. The stars will follow the dual brush's properties, as you can see, when you chose the 19px brush, the Diameter changed to 19px. You can vary this to whatever you want, so that if you wish to put stars in a specific area, because they were spreading out too much, now you know how :)

Last but not least, the Color Dynamics, this is what made the grass turn out in different tones of green ;).

Adjusting the Foreground/Background Jitter is what will define how much foreground/background within the brush. So lastly, for a fun and enjoyable activity, put everything in Color Dynamics to 100%, and out of all your properties, only select Scattering and Shape Dynamics.

Colorful Brush eh?

Making a Brush

Now I will teach you how to make a brush using an image.

Since I'm quite the fan of Coca-Cola, I will make a brush with their logo.

Create a new document, 289x289 Pixels, using the below logo (or a document with the size of whatever you want your brush to be)

Now, go Edit>Define Brush Pattern.

This will bring up a screen where you can choose its name, mine is named Coca-Cola.

Now find your brush (its the last one on the scroll bar) and save it for easy access.

Try it out, play with the sizes, I have found this feature really useful when I want to put a logo into a shirt, it turns out really useful.

For the one below, First > Use the brush and make a red logo. Then > Use the brush and make a blue logo right on top. Then, go to the Filter Gallery, and do some Glowing Edges.

It comes out pretty cool:

Thanks,

Until next time.