The most exciting tool for any artist is the paint brush. Likewise in Adobe PhotoShop® and Elements®, Brushes could take top honors as an indispensable tool for the digital artist.
Unfortunately, Brushes are also one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated tools, and very little has been written to change that fact.
This CD is the first publication ro explain PhotoShop Brushes from A-Z, a 115 page celebration of the magic hidden in this incredible tool. Painting, drawing, stamping, and compositing. There is no end to the creative possibilities when you have this tool at your disposal.
Each Chapter tackles one aspect of the magic of Brushes (see below), and each Chapter builds upon the one before. By the end of this CD, you will have a mastery of Brushes, and the way you make digital art will have been enabled, enhanced and changed forever.
Virtual Stamping 103
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Screen shot illustrations are done in Adobe PhotoShop Elements® 4.0. with explanations for any differences from the big PhotoShop Program and older Elements.
You can complete this CD using Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Versions 1.0 - 5.0, or Adobe PhotoShop versions 7-0 - CS2.
Users of Elements 3.0 - 5.0 need to work in the Edit and Enhance or Standard Edit Mode.
Using the Brush Tool - Basics
Get familiar with the Basic Brush Tool, and the use of the Brush Palette for customizing the tip to suit the job at hand. Understand Brush Sizing, and practice making strokes and lines with some of the amazing array of Brushes that are included with the software.
Freeform Painting with the Brush Tool
Use some of the program Brushes and the Airbrush Option to create a small painting from scratch.
This is a no-fail piece of art - you can’t go wrong, even if you think your drawing and painting skills leave something to be desired!
Exploring Brush Sets
We take a short tour through some of the Brush Sets included with PhotoShop and Elements, and try a few of the more interesting Brushes to see what they can do - from creating an interesting sunburst to drawing a full blown rose.
The Brush As Rubber Stamp
One of the main reasons that many folks miss the potential of digital Brushes is that they see the thumbnail brush strokes and wonder how useful that could be. Who wants to make a brush stroke of yellow rubber duckies, for example? How practical can that be?
However, if one were to just Click with the Brush instead of making a stroke, it might be another story indeed. It might be . . . like rubber stamping!
In this Chapter, we create some wintry decorative paper using one of the Brushes that comes with PhotoShop and Elements, and we learn all about resizing and varying the intensity of the ink in the process.
Creating A Custom Brush
And now things start to get really exciting because, in order to add words to our paper, we must create a custom Brush.
You may have created a custom Brush a time or two already - but did you understand where it went when you couldn’t find it again? Did you figure out how to Save it for future use? This is where a majority of people give up on the idea of using custom Brushes at all. If you can’t find them to use them, what good are they?
And, in the course of things, we also figure out how to rotate our custom Brush to any angle we need.
Creating and Saving a Custom Brush Set
Like potato chips, you can’t make just one, right? Of course not.
In this Chapter, you learn how to Save a Set of Brushes of your own - where to keep them, and how to find them again when you want them (that’s the hard part).
And we create some useful and simple geometric Brushes for your set by using Selection Tools and Stroking commands.
Designing with Simple Custom Brushes
It’s time to create an illustration using those Custom Brushes we made.
You Resize, Rotate, and change the Roundness of a Brush, save variations of your Brushes and reuse them in the same illustration.
Also learn to beef-up Brushes that become too thin through the reducing process and save them in their own versions.
All you need to do is print and you have great artwork to paint with all those coloring supplies you have.
Creating Brushes from Custom Shapes
As if all the Brushes that come with PhotoShop weren’t enough, there is another treasury of images hidden in Custom Shapes.
They are vector shapes and take a little explaining, but once you understand their nature, it is very easy to create both solid and outline Brushes from them. This is sort of like making your own rubber stamp collection!
Getting the Jitters
Another reason that some people think PhotoShop Brushes might have mental problems is their frequent manic behavior. You might choose a Brush and make a stroke and no parts of it even land in your image area. What is going on?
That crazy behavior is controlled by Jitter, Spacing, and Scatter sliders, and once you understand what they are actually doing (there is a method to the madness), you can use these options to your advantage - like creating a Four Seasons illustration, for example.
Hue Jitter and Fade sliders give you even more control over Brush strokes.
The Autumn part of the Four Seasons illustration is shown here.
Brushes from Scans and Photos
Custom Brushes aren’t limited to line art. They can be created from any raster image - scans and photographs too.
Brushes do not retain color information, but they do retain tonal information, so they are like black and white photos - which can be “stamped” in any Foreground Color.
We began learning about digital collage (compositing) in Virtual Stamping 102, but this is a different approach which guarantees color harmony in the end result.
Brushes from the Internet
The Internet is chock full of Brushes - most of them free for the downloading, but Surfer, beware. You can easily clog your program and your hard drive with tons of stuff you can never actually use in your art.
This Chapter gives you a plan for navigating the waters of Internet Brush sites, and points out what makes a good brush worth having, and sends you out to get a couple of our favorite sets - which we then use to finish our composite and apply effects to a real world handmade book cover.
The Rubber Stamp As Brush
In our opinion, the most exciting thing of all about PhotoShop Brushes is their potential to duplicate, exactly,
the art of rubber stamping.
When Brushes are specifically created along the same lines as art stamps (i.e. clean images that can be combined in intricate designs - or used alone and colored), they provide infinite creativity. And as an extra bonus, they are art stamps that can be altered, flipped, and resized to suit the project.
The PhotoShop brush is the closest digital metaphor for the rubber stamp, and hopefully, image vendors will soon realize this and offer images in this format.
In this final Chapter, we use five Brushes (provided on the CD) from Cre8it.com to create this illustration, which really suits our subject, and we learn the tricks for making great digital stamp designs.
