| Adobe Photoshop Basics | |
Download this zip file for all the images you need to complete the exercises for Lesson 7. (Mac users can use Aladdin's free Stuffit Expander to extract the zip file.)
Scroll down to begin exercise #9...
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Exercise 9 - Custom Brushes
Custom brushes can really give you a great deal of design flexibility. Let's explore custom brushes by making our own set of sparkle brushes. We'll also our own create texture brushes from an existing image.
Start with a new document with a transparent background. 200x200 pixels is fine.
Next go to the brushes palette menu and choose new brush.
Set your new brush to diameter 80, hardness 0, spacing 25, angle 45, roundness 10.
Your new brush will appear at the end of the brush palette.
Select new brush again and leave everything the same, but change the angle to 135.
Repeat, this time with a diameter of 60 and and angle of 90.
Repeat once more, this time leave everything the same except change the angle to 0.
In your document, drag out two guidelines to mark the center.
Set the foreground color to black.
To create our sparkle, we need to align all our brush strokes so that they are precisely centered. For this we need precise cursors. So hit your caps lock key to toggle precise cursors on.
Click once on the crosshairs using each one of the four custom brushes you just created.
Now we have our sparkle, we just need to turn it into a custom brush.
Drag a selection marquee around the sparkle. Be sure to leave some extra space so you don't cut off the soft edges.
Photoshop 5.x: While the sparkle is selected, go to the brush palette menu and choose define brush.
Photoshop 6: While the sparkle is selected, go to the edit menu and choose define brush.
The new brush is added to the palette.
Duplicate your document and scale the brush to different sizes, defining a new custom brush for each different size.
Go back to the original and click once in the center with a soft, round brush at about 80% opacity. Define this as a new brush and repeat at various sizes.
Experiment with varying the brush size, hardness, angle and roundness to create a variety of your own brushes.
Now let's create a texture brush from an existing image. Open the texture file we used in exercise one (lesson7tex1.jpg ).
Make a selection of about 50x50 pixels, then feather the selection by 5 pixels.
Define this selection as a brush.
Have fun making custom brushes!
Here You can see several of my own that I made while working on this lesson. The ABR file is included in the zip file of images from this lesson.
Next > Exercise 10 - Blend Modes
