Custom Brushes in Photoshop
While Photoshop has a huge number of built in brushes, and there are countless other brushes on the web, sometimes we need a very specific type of brush look and feel. For this, we learn to create customized brushes within Photoshop.
Recently, I was creating a background texture for an After Effects promotional video and the look had some curving vines with flowers that grew. I wanted to add some extra elements to the background with this feel without having to re-draw hundreds or clone hundreds of these shapes.
Enter custom brushes! For that case, I made a custom brush that altered the size and rotation based on my Wacom’s stylus pressure.
For the example below, we’ll create a simple brush that can be added to your current brush library very easily. While this one is more of an extreme case, I’m sure you’ll be able to see the potential for this.
In fact, I find myself creating custom brushes almost weekly, to fit various project needs.
Create a Shape
The first part of this creative process is to decide on what the shape of the brush will be. In this example, I drew three lines. This shape is what will be “stamped” onto the canvas when you draw.
Don’t worry about this looking weird at this point, or worry that all these ‘stamps’ will be oriented the same way. We’ll get to that later in the process.
Save The Shape to Your Brush Library
Now we’ll save this to the library so we can access it with the Brush tool. Use the selection tool and select just the black part of what we drew.
Go to the “Edit>Define Brush Preset” and select it.
Customize the Brush
Now that’s going to be one lousy brush at this stage. What we need to do is customize how the brush works. First, access the new brush under the brush menu:
We’re going to tell Photoshop how to rotate, size and alter the basic stamp based on several variables. Start by selecting the brush toolbar:
As you can see in this image, one of the first things I do is make sure the “Shape Dynamics” is checked. Under that tab, you can tell Photoshop how much to resize the brush. “Jitter” is how much variation there is in the resize.
I set this size to be driven from the pressure of my Wacom Stylus. Next, turn on “Scattering” so that your brush has more randomness to it. The Scattering will add a “turbulence” to the inkflow, so some shapes show up higher or lower than others:
Get Busy Drawing
Now, on a canvas, start playing around with your brush. Keep the toolbar open so that you can come back and tweak it. Often, I’ll tweak brush settings and save as a new brush more than once during a session, since I’ll need various looks at different points in the design process.
Once you have something you like, don’t forget to save the brush. Over time you’ll have a sizable brush library that you can pull up at a moments notice.
Its these types of libraries that will make you more efficient and creative as a digital artist.
Now go draw!
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