Photoshop Brushes Part two - Let’s make our own.

In the concluding part of his coverage of Photoshop tools (read Part 1 here), Paul Morton shows how illustrators can create their very own unique brushes. 




The first point to remember is that any mark made on the screen can be turned into a Photoshop brush. Even a photograph can be captured and ‘stamped’ into your artwork. You can type text, convert it to paths and then use that text image as a brush.

TIP - This can be handy when used to ‘stamp’ your copyright details, contact details etc onto an image to save time actually typing out the words. 

So, to save a mark as a new brush shape always follow these steps.

Picture 1 - Rather than draw my new shape, I’ve used the path tool to create a shape called ‘single hair’. Once it’s made active and filled with black you can then save as a brush... (pic 2)

Menu / Edit / Define Brush preset ... 

Name your brush, I’ve called mine ‘fuzzy’ (pic 3)

 You’ll now see ‘fuzzy’ listed as the final brush preset in the drop down list, (pic 4) and like we learnt in part 1, it isn’t of much use until you start tweaking the settings. First of all open up the spacing (pic 5) so that when you ‘paint’ the single hair shapes are nicely spaced (pic 6).

Then using these settings to multiply the single hair shape (pic 7) you will begin to see just how versatile your brush is becoming. With a rusty red foreground colour and brighter orange as the background colour, we start to get some interesting marks.

We can further exploit the settings by usefully controlling the direction of the fur strokes, (pic 8) and thus, we can paint a pom-pom shape.

Mixing colours and controlling flow and opacity, plus switching to a black background, gives us this. (pic 9)

TIP - Another amazingly useful function I’ve not yet mentioned, is that any brush can be used to stroke along a path. So if you need a particular shape, but don’t feel confident drawing freehand, create a path, and then ask PS to stroke it with your new brush. It could be a single line (pic 10) or an elegant shape that would be impossible to control by hand (pic 11). 

But of course you don’t need to restrict yourself to the initial single hair, especially if you’re after realistic fur. Pic 12 shows a brush created from a collection of random shapes and the resulting effects achieved.

 Your brush shapes can be saved, exported, emailed to a friend etc.

TIP - There are thousands of useful free brushes online, made available by the community of generous PS users. 

 I’ll briefly show you one final “Hair and Fur” brush. I downloaded this and tweaked it, and you should still be able to find it online. Although you’d never guess from its peculiar single-dab brush shape (it’s that white squiggle on the blue square) this is one of the most realistic brushes around for painting hair, and many artists have used it to great effect. Take a look at my settings (pic 13) and then how I gave myself a quick 10 minute hairy makeover in pic 14.

 TIP - Rather than resort to expensive and difficult to master 3D programmes, I’ve instead been using various hair and fur brushes for a number of years now.

 Fellow SCBWI illustrator Mike Brownlow includes various PS brushes amongst his array of illustration tools and techniques. He says, “Brushes can be great when used judiciously, and are really useful. I just wish I could work out a better way of organising them.” Here’s how Mike employs his subtle craft, carefully using fur brushes, and others, in his successful Boris the Troll books.

Obviously all the considerations and the settings that I’ve mentioned so far in connection with fur and hair, can equally be applied to any other texture or effect that you’re after. Without going into details here’s a collection of my own foliage brushes, (pic 17) the actual brush shapes are shown at the top along with the resulting effects.

 And in this jungly/forest book illustration, you’ll see how I’ve made good use of a few of them.

Finally, let me show you how to create a textured pastel/chalk brush. (pic 20) In the vignetted oval we can see the actual brush shape, and below, the settings used to achieve these soft pastel-like marks.

TIP - The background is a scan of pencil on cartridge and the texture used in the brush settings aims to emulate this so that the colour sits on top of the cartridge, unless more pressure is used, and then the colour sinks into the texture. 

And below, these soft, watercolour-like marks in pic 21 were made with the 3 brush tip shapes at the top.

TIP - Your original brush shape needn’t be filled with 100% black. Remarkable effects can result from faded softer brush shapes. 

 One final thought, having created a favourite brush, don’t limit yourself to ‘painting and drawing’ with it. You can deploy your brand new brush as an eraser or as the smudge tool for some further exciting effects.

 I’ll leave you with another image from Mike which cleverly demonstrates his adept use of textural brushes to great effect.

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Paul Morton lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, from where he runs Hot Frog Graphics illustration and design studio. 

Photoshop Brushes Part 1

Photoshop is one of the cornerstones of digital art, so ubiquitous there can be few illustrators who've not experienced the software at some stage in their career. Paul Morton this week offers the first of two features on customising brushes in Photoshop to create unique textures. 

Anyone who has used Photoshop will know that it boasts some great illustration tools. Its basic set of brush tools allows you to airbrush very convincingly and if you care to dig a little deeper, you'll find the natural (and unnatural) media brushes that are provided in the package. With perseverance you can learn how to customise these tools and create your very own, resulting in virtually unlimited possibilities - such as the ability to paint with grass, cloak a creature in fur, paint foliage on a tree, airbrush wisps of smoke, snakeskin, glitter, barbed wire, etc etc. 

Take a look at the illustration that heads this article. Click to enlarge. Every mark you see on there has been created using a customised brush. I'm going to show you how to achieve this and I'll also give you the settings for some of those brushes, so that you can try them for yourselves. 

First let's check out the most basic of brushes and get a grasp of their functionality. There are hard edged and soft edged brushes, and a variety in between. Typically, pencils are hard edged with no anti aliasing (ie. no soft edges) 

(I find it useful to view my onscreen brush tip as 'normal size' or 'full size'. Then, as you're working, you see a ring indicating roughly the size of the tip you're dealing with. Much clearer than the standard cross-hair cursor. To do this, go to Photoshop preferences and choose 'Display and Cursors').

It's also useful at this stage to appreciate how important it is to use a graphics tablet and stylus such as Wacom, in order to master the natural look of each brushstroke. It's understandable for newcomers to be a little cautious at first, but try signing your signature on screen using a mouse. Then with a stylus. There's no contest. 

With the brush tool selected, go to Window/brushes (or F5) which opens the 'Brush Palette'. Let's choose, for example, a fairly large, hard edged brush. 

Picture 1 - shows our Hard Edged Brush stroked firstly with a mouse then with the tapered elegance created by using a stylus. 

 With the Brush Palette open it's here's where you can choose the size and style of brush from the drop down list. Make sure you take note of the mini palette called 'Brush Presets' as this is where all the brush alchemy takes place. 

 With 'Brush Tip Shape' selected, look at the bottom of the long palette and you'll see controls for brush spacing, brush size, softness and brush angle controls. To squidge the shape and angle of the brush (not terribly useful but you may as well know how) use the cross hair control. 

All the changes you make get a mini dynamically updated window at the base displaying your current brush stroke. 

Picture 2 - shows how the round brush has been squidged, more obviously apparent when painting in various directions. 

As you paint with any brush, Photoshop spits out a series of dots of 'paint' at regular intervals. Lots of frequently emitted dots equals a solid line of paint. But if you slow down and control the frequency of the dots you'll get...a dotted line. 

See Picture 3 Painting with regular dots at regular intervals is OK for regular graphic and decorative work, but if we're striving to get 'natural,' then we need to mix it up with a few random factors. Let's make our rows of squashed dots become random sizes. 

Picture 4 - shows how 'Shape Dynamics' gives precise control over the min and max size limits of our dots, with 'Size Jitter' mixing them around between. 

And rather than keep these random dots flowing in one continuous line lets disturb their flow. 

Picture 5 -shows how 'Scattering' allows the dots to fall either side of our continuous line and using blue and green as foreground and background colours, we can also randomise the colour of our dots by using 'Colour Dynamics'. 

All we've done here is ask for blue and green to alternate as each dot is painted (jitter at 100%) But if the jitter was set at 30% for example, we'd get various tones of blue through green as we 'sprayed' with colour. Additionally if we turned on 'Hue Jitter', we'd get complementary colours thrown into the mix. At its most extreme, we could paint with rainbow coloured dots. 

The total control over this randomness, which affects the scattering, the intensity, the direction, the opacity, the purity of colours and more, can all be further influenced by the pressure sensitivity of our stylus. As you draw on the tablet, a change of pressure can alter most of these effects, as can the initial direction that you begin to paint in. It's bewildering, but now that you've got so far you ought to have a grasp of the fundamentals. 


But who wants to paint with dots all the time? (latter day digital pointillists maybe) Because no matter how much we mix up these variations, our dots are still dots. But if we pick one of PS media brushes such as chalk, pastel, crayon, etc then it starts to look a whole lot more natural and very practical for 'real' illustration work. 

Let's choose one of the chalk and pastel brushes. At the bottom of my list of brushes I've adapted and customised one of PS pastel brushes and re-named it 'best new pastel'. Picture 6 - If we zoom in and inspect a single brush 'dab' (created with a single click of the mouse) instead of a dot, it looks like this… 

In the next article I'll show you how to create such a brush from scratch, but for now we'll experiment with my 'best new pastel'. As you can see in the brushstroke window, it's pretty useless until we start refining the control settings. 

Picture 7 - after a few minutes experimenting, that very same brush now looks fairly convincing as a soft chalky pastel and uses colours that interact with each other. 

Picture 8 - shows the settings I used to replicate the pastel effect of Picture 7 

 You'll notice that the control for 'Texture' is now also active. Via that Preset, there are 100s of possible textures to try out. The size of the texture along with its depth, plus subsequent pen pressure, can determine if the colours 'bleed' into the texture, sit on top of it or completely obliterate it. 

 Picture 9 - the final picture in part one of this feature shows our pastel brush laid over a few different textures of various sizes. The 'mesh-like' strokes top left are achieved by using 'Dual brush' controls which I'm not going to explain in this beginner article, but basically, it allows 2 brushes to mix and interact with each other. 

You should now be able to explore any brush and make some reasonably useful marks with them. Once you have experimented and found your perfect pastel, or emulated your favourite Karismacolour pencil, charcoal, ball-point pen, etc etc, don't be surprised that it's not in your brush palette next time you open up PS. If you don't SAVE your new brush, I'm afraid all the experimenting and refining has been for nothing. So it's crucial to regularly go to Brushes then, using the tiny right-facing arrow top right of the palette, you'll see a drop down list. From that list choose 'New brush preset' and name and save your new creation. 

Next time we'll create our own unique brushes and see how they can be, and have been, used in children's book illustration.

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Paul Morton lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, from where he runs Hot Frog Graphics illustration and design studio.

Itsy-Bitsy Book Cover

By Lynne Chapman

Remember the issues we had with Waterstones not liking the yellow cover which I originally designed for Baby Goes Baaaaa!? Well, I thought we had sorted everything with the new duck-egg blue cover, but I suddenly remembered something...

On the inside, there is this illustration of Nana Croc reading to Baby Croc. Now, whenever possible, I include my own books in my illustrations. Cheeky, but why not?

I thought for Baby Goes Baaaaa! is would be sweet if, instead of one of my other books, Nana Croc was reading the actual book she was in! Clever eh? Except trouble is, that book no longer has a yellow cover... Uh-oh.

Remember the patch I made for Baby Croc's bare bum on the cover of Baby Can Bounce!? Yep, you guessed it: 

It was so very tiny, it was a bit of a nightmare to do, but quite cute, I think you'll agree. When it was finished, I scanned it in and pasted it over the professional scan of Nana Croc from repro. Then, in Photoshop, I tinkered with it until it fitted like a glove. What do you think?

Noah's Ark

Here's my recent sample piece that I have sent to Brights my agents. It was illustrated it in photoshop and painter. I wanted to concentrate on the emotions in this piece as well as a sense of depth and perspective - hopefully I've managed this, although it's probably a little too small to see much detail!