Make Custom Brushes. Written by Steve Patterson. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how easy it is to make our own custom Photoshop brushes! Photoshop ships with lots of great brushes for us to use, but it’s way more fun and interesting to create our own, especially after Adobe completely revamped the brush engine in Photoshop 7, adding unprecedented painting ability to what was already the world’s most powerful image editor.
Since the types of brushes we can create in Photoshop are limited only by our imagination, we’ll design a very simple brush here just to see how quick and easy the whole process is. We’ll also take a look at a couple of Photoshop’s dynamic brush options in the Brushes panel to see how we can change the behavior of the brush after we create it. Let’s get started! Step 1: Create A New Photoshop Document Let’s begin by creating a brand new Photoshop document which we’ll use to design our brush. Go to File > New. This opens the New Document dialog box. Step 2: Select The Brush Tool. Brush Dynamics Options. In a previous tutorial, we learned how to make our own custom Photoshop brushes, and it can be lots of fun to design the initial shape of a brush, officially known as the brush tip.
Where things really get interesting, though, is when we start controlling the behavior of a brush as we paint with it, dynamically changing things like the brush’s size, angle, roundness, color and opacity! We can add a texture to the brush, scatter multiple copies of it along each brush stroke, combine two brushes together, and more! Adobe calls these options Brush Dynamics, and they’re just as amazing now as they were when Adobe first introduced them back in Photoshop 7. They also happen to be our topic for this series of tutorials! There’s six main categories of brush dynamics – Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, Dual Brush, Color Dynamics, and Other Dynamics – all of which (as we’ll see) are found in Photoshop’s Brushes panel.
Step 1: Select The Brush Tool Step 2: Open The Brushes Panel. Shape Dynamics. As I mentioned in the introduction to this series of tutorials, all six of Photoshop’s Brush Dynamics categories share similar types of controls so once we’ve taken a look at how the Shape Dynamics work, which we’ll do in a moment, we’ll already have a good understanding of how the rest of them work.
Unfortunately, controls are not the only thing they share. As we’ll see, the way the controls are laid out makes understanding them a bit more of a challenge than it should be. Don’t worry, though. We’ll figure it out. To access the Shape Dynamics options, click directly on the words Shape Dynamics on the left side of the Brushes panel. Click directly on the words Shape Dynamics to access the controls. As soon as you click on Shape Dynamics, the controls for the various Shape Dynamics options will appear on the right side of the Brushes panel. The controls for the Shape Dynamics options appear. The Shape Dynamics section is divided into three sections – Size, Angle and Roundness. Size Fade Angle. Scattering Options. In the first tutorial in this series, we learned how we can dynamically control the size, angle and roundness of our brushes as we paint using Photoshop’s Shape Dynamics, one of six Brush Dynamics categories found in the Brushes panel.
In this tutorial, we’ll look at the second set of dynamic brush options, Scattering, and how it allows us to scatter multiple copies of our brush tip along each brush stroke, creating the illusion that we’re “spraying” the brush inside our document! To access the Scattering controls, click directly on the word Scattering on the left side of the Brushes panel. Clicking inside the checkbox to the left of the word will turn the Scattering options on but won’t give us access to any of its controls, so be sure to click directly on the word itself: Click directly on the word Scattering to gain access to its controls. As soon as you click on the word, the Scattering options appear on the right side of the Brushes panel. Let’s take a closer look at each section.
Texture Options. So far in our look at Photoshop’s powerful and amazing Brush Dynamics, we’ve seen how we can dynamically control the size, angle and roundness of our brushes as we paint using the options found in the Shape Dynamics section of the Brushes panel, and how we can scatter multiple copies of our brush tip along each stroke with the Scattering options. In this tutorial, we’ll look at the Texture options, which give us the ability to add a texture to our brush, perfect for creating the illusion of painting on a textured surface like paper or canvas, or just for adding more interest to the shape of our brush tip!
To access the Texture options, click directly on the word Texture on the left side of the Brushes panel. Just as with the Shape Dynamics and Scattering sections that we looked at previously, we need to click on the word itself to gain access to the options. Clicking inside the checkbox to the left of the name will turn the Texture options on but won’t let us change any of them: Mode Depth. Photoshop Brushes - Color Dynamics. Everything we’ve looked at so far as we make our way through Photoshop’s various Brush Dynamics options has had one thing in common. They’ve all had something to do with the shape of the brush. We’ve seen how to dynamically change the brush size, angle and roundness with Shape Dynamics, how to scatter multiple copies of the brush tip with Scattering, how to add a texture or pattern to the brush with the Texture options, and how the Dual Brush options allow us to blend two different brushes together!
In this tutorial, we move away from the shape-related features and into the wild world of color as we learn how Photoshop’s Color Dynamics allow us to control the hue, saturation and brightness of our brush as we paint, and even how to randomly swap between our Foreground and Background colors! To access the Color Dynamics, click directly on the words Color Dynamics on the left side of the Brushes panel: Click directly on the words Color Dynamics to access the options.
Foreground/Background. Other Dynamics. In the previous tutorial, we looked at how Photoshop’s Color Dynamics options allow us to dynamically change and control various aspects of our brush’s color as we paint. In this tutorial, we’ll look at the sixth and final Brush Dynamics category in the Brushes panel, the one with the least descriptive and interesting name – Other Dynamics!
Just as with Color Dynamics, the options found in Other Dynamics have nothing to do with the shape of our brush. Instead, they allow us to dynamically control the opacity and flow of our brush’s color! What do “opacity” and “flow” mean, and how are they different from each other? The Options Bar Whenever we have the Brush Tool selected in Photoshop, the Options Bar along the top of the screen shows us various options that affect how the brush works. With the Brush Tool selected, the Opacity and Flow options appear in the Options Bar. Opacity Opacity controls the translucency of the brush color as we paint. Lowering the brush opacity down to 25%. Flow.