Custom Brush Manipulation

This tutorial is in two parts - The first part is just a run through of the Photoshop shortcuts you should try and learn, they really do make life a lot easier and speed up your workflow no end as most of them can be performed with your free hand.

The second part covers making and manipulating a custom brush (or any other brush for that matter).

If you are serious about producing art with Photoshop then you really do need to get yourself a Wacom type
graphics tablet. The possibilities available with a graphics pad just aren't there for a mouse. Check the following image, this type of thing would be virtually impossible to produce with a mouse but with a graphics pen it's just a single stroke -




Shortcut Combinations.

The following Shortcut/HotKeys will come in very handy and speed up your workflow.

Ctrl+N = New Document.
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N = New Layer.
Ctrl+J = Copy Layer or Selection.
Ctrl+S = Save.
Ctrl+Shift+S = Save As.

B = Brush Tool
E = Eraser Tool
T = Text Tool
P = Pen Tool
G = Gradient/Bucket Fill Tool
M = Marquee Tool
L = Lasso Tool


Holding down Alt while using the Brush Tool will turn the cursor into the Eye Dropper Tool (color sampling tool). Very handy when you want to pick up a color that is already on your canvas, or when you want to blend two colors together.

Holding down the Space Bar will turn the cursor into the Hand Tool. Comes in very useful when you are zoomed in and you want to move the canvas around.

Hit Tab to show/hide all open palettes.
Hitting F will toggle your screen view between three different modes - normal, full view with menus and FULL screen mode.

The following shortcuts are very useful when using the Brush Tool -

Pressing ] will increase the size of your brush.
Pressing [ will decrease the size of your brush.

Holding down Shift and pressing [ will soften the edge of your brush. (round brushes only)
Holding down Shift and pressing ] will harden the edge of your brush. (round brushed only)

Use 0 - 9 to control the opacity of the brush you are using. i.e. Pressing 4 on your keyboard will change the opacity to 40%. Pressing 44 will change the opacity to 44%. 0 = 100%.

Making and Manipulating a Custom Brush.

You can create a custom brush from a number of different sources - scribbles you make on a canvas, a photo or picture, part of another brush etc. etc. I'm going to use a section from a painting I did.

What I've done here is used the Lasso Tool to select the area I want to make into a custom brush, then I copied and pasted it onto a new document that’s a little larger than the selected area -



Because color information isn't saved in Photoshop brushes its best to de-saturate the selection you are going to use for your custom brush -




The next thing I'm going to do is adjust the light/dark contrast to give the brush a bit more texture -



When you are happy you can save it as a custom brush - Edit>Define Brush Preset.... give it a name and hit OK -



Now to do some jiggery pokery with the Brush Presets Palette, hit F5 to bring up the presets palette and select your new custom brush from the bottom of the brushes list. What I've done here is opened a blank canvas and put the basic brush shape in the corner so you will be able to see the difference the alterations make. I'm also using a graphics pen for the brush strokes -



The first thing I'm going to alter is the Shape Dynamics. I've set the Size Jitter to around 36% and the Control to Pen Pressure, I've also changed the Angle Jitter to about 32%. As you see, just using this one control has made a big difference to the brush stroke -



Next up I'm going to add a bit of Scattering. This control, as the name suggests just scatters the brush stroke around a bit, or a lot - depending on what you dial in. I've just set it to around the 100% mark. Again there is a marked change to the brush stroke - almost thunder cloud like -



Next control to alter is Texture. To my mind, this along with Shape Dynamics are the most useful of all the controls -



The dual brush control takes your custom brush and makes it the same shape as the brush you choose in the Dual Brush section. Here I've made my custom brush the same shape as a standard Photoshop chalk brush -



Color Dynamics is a handy control to use for painting earth, rocks, foliage etc. You just set the two colors you want to use as you Foreground & Background colors and adjust the Foreground/Background Jitter to around 50%. As you paint the colors will alternate either automatically or by Pen Pressure -



Other Dynamics give you the option to control the Flow and/or Opacity with your graphics pen etc.
Here I've set the Opacity to Pen Pressure -



That’s about it really, the best way to get to grips with the brush controls is to learn what each control
does and then experiment. If you are one of these people that scour the World Wide Web looking for grunge brushes etc. then I'm here to tell you that there is no need to do that, you have everything you need to make an infinite number of custom brushes right here in Photoshop - and they will be your brushes, not someone else’s.

Here are a few examples of one of my brushes with some textures added -



To finish off, this is the kind of thing that’s available with a standard Photoshop Brush, a graphics pad and the Color Dynamics Foreground/Background Jitter control set to Pen Pressure. Try that with a mouse.