Brush up on your Brushes <Updated>

I was suggested by GPNS @ Good-tutorials that a Brushes tutorial might be useful, so, inspired on that, I decided to make one.

This tutorial was last modified on January 3rd, 2008.

First off, let me say that the brush has many hidden secrets which may be unknown to various Photoshop users. People truly underestimate its uses, as they possibly do with hundreds of Photoshop features, and don't use them to their full potential. If you ever wanted to make hundreds of different objects, this 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 arent 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 youhr 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 bothcolors 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 recieve 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 QUICK LOGO, TO ADD IT TO BRUSHES

Now, I used the following text settings to write an S, in order to make a small Start Photoshop logo:

Write an S in caps lock, as shown below:

Make it really close to the edges, but also make sure there is still some white spacing between the letter and the edge.

Now, add a P with the same settings, and put it in the bottom right corner.

Now, you probably have three layers, two text layers, and the locked background, erase the locked background.

Now, you will rasterize both text layers, do this by right clicking on the layer, and choosing Rasterize Type, as shown below.

Do this with both layers, and then MERGE the layers. This is done by right clicking on any layer, and pressing merge visible, assuming both your rasterized layers are visible.

You should only have one layer now.

Now, with the layer selected, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, choose the name you want, I labeled it as shown below:

Now, if you go to brushes, the last one should be your brush. If you still wonder why this could come in handy, grab a blank t-shirt you wish to design, and adding the logo should be one click away! It can be amazingly handy to use images as brushes at times. I highly recommend this magnificent Photoshop feature.

Ill take 2 of those please. (The simple white shadow effect is done by using a white colored brush and then a black colored one, a little to up and to the left, makes a cool shadow effect)

Hope you enjoyed it ,

until next time,

matadorqk