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Building Your Brush Toolbox

Lesson 2 from: Creating Custom Photoshop Brushes

Brandon Rike

Building Your Brush Toolbox

Lesson 2 from: Creating Custom Photoshop Brushes

Brandon Rike

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Lesson Info

2. Building Your Brush Toolbox

Lesson Info

Building Your Brush Toolbox

So we have a lot of different ways to do this, and we may be doing a lot of different textures, but I kind of just want to dig into it and start getting her hands dirty and mess with this. So you guys have your sketchbooks in front of you? Um, I think you should all have crayons, right? So crayon is a really cool way to do it Now, the only real parameter that I'm gonna give you on how Teoh use this stuff. Try to do something that's gonna be able to be encapsulated inside of a square. That is where we get technical, saying to make the front, making the Photoshopped brush easier. Let's put it inside a square. So a big line isn't gonna be as useful as a square. And I'll doesn't make sense later, but let's see. Okay, so let's start with this crayon. What I want to do with this turn this sideways and I just kind of want to get a square. So I'm just gonna be light with it, and then my get Well, there's something here that's hard to see. Push hard so you can see it. So we're getting something...

there. I know that's a little bit harder to see, but so just make a square. So just go flat and pull it down and make a square. So you already have a really great photo shop brush. Um, see if you can push hard in the middle of the crayon. It makes some make a little more circular. So what happened there? I'm gonna take it around and I'll show it to you guys. Is this little area got it faded out? Naturally, it fade out organically. The edges of the crayon obviously put a hard line in there on the edges. But this little middle part, that's gold. And remember, this stuff's going in a photo shop so we can cut this out. Use that as the top bottom, middle, whatever. We can do whatever we want inside Photoshopped. This is kind of the goal that I want to a person. You have this little area here, and that's that's what you want. So when we get in, a photo shop will cut out those lines and all that stuff. But this little circle that makes a great photo shot brush. So that's a method using a crayon. We do one more of these, okay? And it's funny. Just get stuck with whatever you dio. You know? I'm saying so. Don't try and make yours look like mine. Just do whatever you end up doing, and we'll make it into a Photoshopped brush. So I'm going to say that will scan it. And later, um, here is You guys gotta brush pens still from yesterday. Okay, so in another class, we learned how to use a brush pin for lettering. Eso everybody. You know, if you're interested in lettering doing lettering with brush pin, this is a great way to do it. Another way to use a brush pin is to make textures. So what we need to think about here is that inside photo shop, um, we can invert this stuff. So what I mean is, your whole area can be mostly black, and the brush is gonna end up being the white stuff. So we're gonna invert that in that white area and that being black on the computer. So try to just fill up a square with your brush. I'm getting little white vertical lines inside mine. Yes. See that there's something fun and natural about, like doing the best you can and it being in perfect. So draw the straightest line you can, and I hope it doesn't end up straight. That's sort of the goal. I find everything I'm doing by hand. Okay, So what I'm seeing here isn't s l a a bunch of thick black lines. I'm saying just a few thin little white lines that are inside the interior of this thing. Let me scribble now, using this brush pin. Actually, the plastic is touching most of the paper, so I'm only letting the the tip touch a little bit. So now I'm getting all that the tooth of the paper there, and I'm gonna come over here and try to fill it in Michelle from online. Who says old cemeteries air full of great texture. She said she sees marble would cement lots of great stuff. That's great. Yeah, I'm finding that finding that solid part of the you know of the graves of the monument. You know, that's where you can really find all this and things. Those things have to go through all the weather and they grow moss. And in the age over time, and there's really cool things. That's a great idea. Yeah, we have Aaron, who says I'm just noticing this old piece of black fabric tape on the back of my sketch. But yes, all the warning. Lovely. That's great. That's the stuff, man. It's everywhere. It's on the bottom of cups, you know, I'm saying, like whatever the Cup has to deal with, there's a bunch of distress on the bottom of that. Um, okay, so we've got we've got crayon, We've got the brush pin. You might as well take your pencil and just try to fill in space with the side of your So those are all kind of like consistent textures and I don't necessarily want consistent textures all the time, but the very usable let me see out. Some of your stuff is turning out. Tyler's got this consistent fade on this one. It starts out a little bit darker, and it gets thin as it goes along. But like the good stuff is, when the middle gets a little darker, you know what I'm saying? That's the stuff that ends up, but you'll find is really usable as a brush. And this is this is a really good consistency. This has those little gaps and stuff, and that has more of the personality in there. And so we'll try to do this. But when this happens on when it's inconsistent, I think that ends up being a better brush, and it's gonna be more recognisable to you. The client may not always notice it, but again, you know, as you know, as we've talked about another courses like, we need to find a motivator for our work and these things can act as a motivator. So what's the coolest part of this is where they intersect. So there's something going on where they intersect. And you did a good job of like separating these lines. There's a lot of cool little other textures that are happening in here and inside. Photoshopped, weaken blur out all this stuff so we can start using it as a as a brush that doesn't really have edges, cause you kind of find edges to your brush. Kind of Ah, you don't want to like, put eight brushes over top of a piece and you see where they were. They intersected, so there were a lot of really good lights and darks on this one. So these with diagonal lines to there's just a lot of cool things and let's go about This is if it's gonna work better as vertical lines, we just rotate that side. Photo shop works metres horizontally, just rotated. Or if diagonal works, it's all you know. So again, there's nothing we can do on paper that we can't fix in photo shop. So I want you to feel like you can do whatever you want on paper and create it any way you want. Because all those little flaws that you may think or flows when you get a photo shop, just fix them if you think they need fixed, right. So Percy's got those interior white lines that are happening, and once we've asked with levels inside photo shop, we start pulling out all this stuff. Now, this is a really light way, and that ends up being really, really usable inside photo shop. So I want, you know, we can pull all those little dark, dark spots out, and I mean, the thing that's gonna end up being in photo shop is gonna kind of look completely different than the thing you make. So let me just do a little more, uh, with I'm here with the pencil that has that inconsistency. All right, cool. So these air similar to a lot of ones you guys did, and then I'll be able to scan these in, and I'll show you how we how we mess with these. So, um, let's use the watercolor. He has got everything you need with watercolor. You can use whatever color you want. I want to say, use black, but it doesn't really matter, because if you use yellow or orange or something, you're gonna get a texture out of that, too. So nothing. Like I said, I want to say nothing is the wrong way. But I would say the only wrong way is to not think about the computer a little bit and not try. You know, I think you should try to get this inside of a of a square shape, get it? Something usable, but isn't so definitive that you're going to see the repetition. Um, if you have some really, really, really significant thing in the middle of it, well, you can use that brush, but if you keep, use that brush in a repetition, you're going to start picking up the repetition which you don't want. So what I like to dio with watercolor to make a watercolor brush, and I use this a lot for, you know, vintage into stress effects. I'll have a whole other course on vintage into stress effects where we can see to how to take this stuff and actually start applying it and figure out different ways of implementing this tool. But this course is about building the tool and starting your toolbox and starting to have this arsenal of stuff that's made by you unless you just want to make a brush with your signature on it and put it on all of your work and see how your clients like that. Okay, so what I'm gonna do with this watercolor, I'm gonna get a lot of water. I'm actually gonna start with mostly water, and I Like I said before, I'm just kind of creating a little circle. And I'm only saying that because I just keep finding of these circles of the most usable when I get in there. So I just got a little bit of black. OK, now let's get a little more black. Okay, now we're letting the watercolor just do its thing, so I can artist like Jackson Pollock. It's like it's fun. Teoh, just let let it go and see how it hits the canvas. You know, it's fun to, like, lose control of it and not try to control every little detail and just let it happen naturally. So just try give yourself a variation of really dark spots, really light spots, and then figure out what you do in between. Okay, so this is mostly water. I'm gonna put one little piece of dark pig pigment in the middle of it and see what happens. We got, like, a tide I effect with that one, which could be a totally awesome brush. Oh, man, that looks sweet. So it's just dabbing the brush right in the middle of it. Okay, so now we're getting a little darker here and again. If this is mostly black, then I'm probably gonna invert this woman. Get in and pull out the whites. If you don't understand that, you will understand. In a few minutes, I want to go into the computer. Um, take Okay, now, let's try. Try to just rip this of the perforated edge here. Be careful with it. So you put it to the side, let it dry as opposed to just fold it around in your notebook. Used the whole I'm gonna go horizontal on this and I'm gonna use the whole thing and put one big blob in the whole page. What I'm trying not to do is have any defined edges when it all just kind of fade. So I already feel like I put too much pigment in. So the rest of this I'm just gonna be using water to pull this pigment down. But the goal is all the things that happened in between kind of the stuff that you can't really control. Okay, so here's what I'm left with here, but I want it toe have kind of more personality inside it. So I'm kind of going to start just dab in this stuff. So there's if I'm applying this brush over top of elements, you know, I can see all the texture of just one little units, a little texture of Bob. So it's all just gonna be a little pieces of it. So if there's a little more interest inside there. The brush will be more valuable. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna put together this toolbox of all these brushes, and you're going to find that you created 30 brushes and then you use three of those brushes, and that's totally, totally fine. I feel like I use I have four brushes that used for everything, and I have probably, you know, 200 brushes on my presets. Cool. So see, I was kind of got this little I almost want to say a tight I effect to it. But there's something else going on there. There's a little bit of, ah, a little bit of interior texture happening. So that's that's exactly what I want. You got the only bummer. Well, maybe it's a good thing, Um, making using the water colors and stuff is that if you're in a hurry, you gotta wait for stuff to dry. So, like, no matter what the deadline is, it's like that thing still has to dry. Or else you just get stuff all over your scanner, which is okay. How is that? Tyler is going in a circular motion here. So there's a lot of cool stuff happening inside. So there's like, you know, actually, this outside line is really awesome. And that could work really well for this blub, and I'll show you how a big blob also works. So a big, open, opaque blob works as well. These are all really, really, really time usable brushes here. She's got all these little interior things. She's got some dots in there. She looks like she flicked the flick the brush to get some splatters in there. She got really good spiders here. So, like inside Photoshopped, well, then we just select all the little splatters that air usable. So these spiders out here don't get used. But these ones in in the middle become this really effective brush that we can use for a lot of different stuff. So Jen has got all these interior lines and things that are just big stories that actually almost looks like a storm like this. Looks like a cloud raining down on that. Looks like I could treat, feel the trees and stuff. Will you call out of forest, don't you? A field of trees? So, yeah, she's got all kinds of cool little things that are happening So it man, this is the brush or this is the brush or whatever. You're gonna find something in there that ends up being the most usable. So, like I said, there's a technical side to this, like what ends up being usable. But here, this is where we get to just do our thing. This is this is where we just get to be artists and get to be free and make whatever you want to make. So she's got a lot of variation in the interior of this. So whatever we pull out of that is gonna be really, really valuable again. Great interior lines and the stuff that's light might even be more effective, too. So it's just really cool. So it's kind of unpredictable to see how this stuff's gonna work once we get it inside photo shop. Because I guess said just just like the other work we do with lettering or with, um, you know, with any graphics we make, it turns into something else once in the computer. So you're not you're never really tied to any specific spot that you do it. You know what I mean? Like you don't have to stay dedicated thing you originally painted. You don't have to stay dedicated to the letters you originally drew. Um, you just need to make it the best you can with ever whatever you're using at the time. So we're making the best we can do with watercolor brushes and with pencils and with brush pins and with crayons. And then once we get inside photo shop, we're gonna do the best we can with the Photoshopped tools. So one of the other things and I know that this isn't as popular, and this probably people wouldn't use this is often. But this Breyer ended up making my favorite brush. So the way I would use this prayer, and this is gonna get too messy for me. Toe. Have you guys do all this? But what I It's just the Breyer. So you can go to any art? Um, this is for block printing. You got any art store? Find one of these. I think the one that I usually use a little bit narrower than this. But this is this will work. Perfect. This is just acrylic black paint. What? I'm gonna dio I'm gonna put paint over here just a little dab and this side is really just four. This is really just for getting the paint on the roller. It's not necessary for applying it. So here, take this. Go over it. And whatever I end up doing here that maybe the brush to, um But before that, I kind of just wanna see what happens here. So there are some gnarly little wood grain looking things in there that I didn't mean to do, and it's really great. And that's the joy of the stuff is that you just do whatever ends up happening. So that's what happened with this. I'm not gonna putting more ink on this. I had hardly any pressure when I did this one, and I would put a little bit more pressure here, actually, so I can get a little more, and I'm gonna do it this way. So now we created these little tiny little things that will totally be usable. His brushes also. So let's go get this ink again. A little more ink. Yeah, I can use that. And when I start making brushes in my office, there's just stuff all over the place. So, like, you know, my other course. We talked about lettering and the different lettering things that I try to do. I'll just have papers all over the place of different things. I tried, especially from using wet paint, but it's fun that just keep on messing with it. Um, and you know, this is when we get to be a free spirit and get to just be an artist and try fun things and do whatever we feel like and have kind of no restraints. Get a little more ink and again I'll do all this stuff and I find out that's the best brush. You know, that may be the most usable brush. Yes, so this was really cool. This one's got a lot of like, great texture that, um, you know, the Nashville Hatch prints, block printing, type of texture. So it's simple. You saw a quick it happen. It's in there. It's great. So that's That's the Breyer. That's the roller with ink. Um, I kind of like So we got some, uh, we got an ink pad here. Creativelive has just given me all their random art supplies. Um, so we had an ink pad and a sponge. Let's do that. Let's just put the bad so that becomes a really, really cool brush. And it makes us feel like an artist when we just started grabbing stuff from around the house and doing stuff with it. So these are just a few methods that we can use when we're, you know, trying to make brushes. They could be made out of anything. So here we've got a stamp pad. We've got ink on a Braille roller. We've got watercolor, We've got brush pins, we got pencils and we have crayons.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Brandon Rike - Creating Custom Photoshop Brushes Working Files.zip
Brandon Rike - Custom Photoshop Brushes.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Jo Sparrow
 

Great class. Easy to follow and eye opening! I made about 30 brushes during this workshop! I followed along with the texture making and easily uploaded them and converted them into usable Photoshop brushes.

Gunay Tariverdiyeva
 

Student Work

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