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I am sure that by now, you have seen what brushes in Photoshop can do for you. It is a pretty handy tool to create good looking backgrounds and wallpaper. But brushes are way more than just clicking here and there, there are a lot of options for brushes. You can scatter your images all over your canvas area or even make them change colour. Here is a slightly more advance brushes tutorial.

I will start by creating a simple leafy kind of background. This is what I have created.

1. Start Photoshop and create a new image. You should choose a area big enough to accomodate a certain number of elements, so choose something bigger in size like 640×480 or more. It will not look that good on a small picture. The things you should also consider is the background color, I have chosen white because it is the easiest to deal with. You can experiment with other colours later if you choose to.

2. Now let’s choose the Brushes option on your left-hand side tools palette. It looks like a small brush. I have shown it below.

It looks nearly the same as the pencil option, so becareful. Alternatively you can use the Shift-B key to toggle the Brushes or the Pencil controls. After you have done that, you will be able to see the Brushes Option Properties on the top or since it is dockable, you can have it anywhere. If you don’t see it, goto Window and tick Options to enable the Option properties.

This is the part we would like to take a closer look at. From here, click on the pull down option next to the Brush type. You can see they have the Master Diameter, Hardness and a little scrolly thing for you to choose the brush type. For this short tutorial, we will take a look at the Leaf brush only. So ahead and choose the Leaf brush type for your brush. Now you can play around with it. See how well it “scatters” and “tilts” when you click on the canvas? You can create a beautiful leafy background with it.

But in order to undestand the brush command, we need to go deeper into the brush option. So stop playing with the brush, we have things to learn. Yes, stop now.

3. We now go more into detail with the brush option. Click on the Brush tab (usually on the right top of your Brush option properties panel) and you will be shown a list of optons for you to choose.

Go ahead and untick all of them for this tutorial. We will go in step by step and see what each of these options do.

4. Now tick on Shape Dynamics and then click on it (the name) again. You will be presented with an array of options and drag/slider bars.

-  Size Jitter is simple. It randomly changes the size of the brush image. So if you set a high value, the brush images will vary a lot in size. Try it by sliding the bar and then clicking on the canvas. You can choose to control how the size jitter will effect your images.  

- Angle Jitter is exactly like Size Jitter, just that now it controls the angle of the image. It really looks cool if your images are all in random rather than looking like a neat stack of cards. But of course, it depends on what you are creating.

- Roundness Jitter is less obvious in our case. It is more to using normal dot(or round) brushes. What it does is control the roundness of your brush image. So if you set your roundness jitter to a high value, you will get more images which look flatten or squashed. It affects only the vertical height.  The below image shows the difference, the top image doesn’t have any roundness jitter while the bottom image has.

5. The next one is Scattering. One of the coolest feature you can find in the Brushes option. It sort of creates a wide area of the image scatter according to your preference. I like it a lot. So tick  the Scattering option and then click to go into it’s options. Again, we find options and slider/drag bars.

- Both Axes option. Well, to make it easy to understand, it scatters a bigger area in all directions if enabled. If not enabled, it only scatters in one direction. You would thought that it would create a wider area but instead it looks sort of clumped together if enabled because the scattering is in more directions. I was a bit confused initially but now I realize that it makes sense.

- Scatter.  Simple, the more scatter you provide, the wider the area of scatter. Depending on your image size, you may need to control the area of scatter.

- Count. The amount of images. So if you set a high value here, you will see that there will be more images being “scattered” all over. For a dense area, I would usually choose a high count value and a low scatter value. You will then get  more images scattered in a smaller area.

- Count Jitter. It controls the amount of images so that each instance will produce a more random number of images. If you set your Count Jitter value high, you will get a more random and varied look for your image. You should play around with all these values in the scatter option as they do a good job so that your images won’t look like a fixed pattern.

What I normally would do is to create a large image size, then set the brush scatter value, count value and count jitter value high to create a beautiful background easily without too much clicking. Sure you get less control, but the “randomness” of the image is good and you can always touch up afterwards. Of course, as I said before, this is dependent on what you are planning to create.

6. I will skip Texture and Dual Brush. This will be covered a later tutorial because doesn’t really affect much in our current tutroial. Now we go to the Colour Dynamics Option. So do the same thing, tick in and click on it to show the options.  This option allows you to control the colour of the brush images (for both background and foreground).

You can adjust the slider according to what you need. The very interesting option is the purity option. It deals with the saturation actually, and if you are looking to create a different variety of”darkness” and “colours” for your brush images,then you should set it high. If you only want minimal changes of tone colour, then you should set it low. Oh, you should also increase the values of the Hue, Saturation and Brightness values too. If you set them too low, the purity slide is of not much use to you anyway.

And you should experiment with all the sliders and try to get a good mix of colours for your image.

7. Okay, now let’s go to the Other Dynamics Option. Tick it and click on the Other Dynamics name to show the options. What will be as usual several sliders and options for you to fiddle around with.

- Opacity Jitter. A very powerful tool to create more randomness for your image. It is to control how opacque your brush images will be. Sort of like whether an image is a “see-through” kind or not. So if you set the Opacity Jitter high, you will get a number of “translucent” images which actually looks quite good.

- Flow Jitter. This controls the flow rate of your movement or stroke. You know like when you brush a stroke, you will usually get a continuous stroke but sometimes you will have missing “areas” on that stroke. So if you set the flow jitter high, you will see gaps in that stroke.

You can view a example here: Simple Sites

Well, that’s end end of this tutorial. Hope you guys know a little more about Photoshop’s brushes. I think you will definitely enjoy toying around with this powerful tool. You can even create paintings from it. But this is best left to another time. Ciao for now!

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The best way to improve on something is to practice. And so, in order to improve my photoshop skills, I have done a little poster called Animal Farm. It’s done on Photoshop CS and is mainly with brushes and some text. It’s nothing impressive but I think it highlights the usefulness of brushes in Photoshop to create good and very elegant looking backgrounds. It’s also very simple to do. I think this poster came out okay, considering that I am someone with pathetic skills in Photoshop.

If you would like a simple walkthough on creating this poster, please keep on reading. It involves just simple brushes.

1. Okay, Start your photoshop software and create a new image, I chose 640×480 size, color mode RGB Color and background White. Next I go Layer->New->Layer to create a new layer for my animal prints.

2. The next step is to use brushes to create the paw prints of the animal. I use just 4 “dots” per print. 3 small ones and 1 big one. So I start brushes by going to the Tools Palette and choosing the brush command. It is usually on your left. Or you can just use Shift-B (twice if needed) to toggle to the brush. Make sure you are at the brush command instead of the pencil command. At the brushes properties, you can choose the size of the brush. If you look carefully, you can see that the bottom paw prints are slightly faded than the ones on the top. You can use the Hardness option to change that. if you would like it to be blur, that reduce the Hardness value. You also need to change the color in the color palette (usually on your left as well).

3. So now, go ahead and start doing your 4 dots (3 small and 1 big) per paw print. If you need 5 paw prints, then you need 15 small dots and 4 bigger dots. Remember to choose the Hardness level as needed. I use it to make the appearance that the bottom paw prints are further away than the top paw prints.

4. Now, let’s create the text. You can see that once you choose the text option (that’s also on the left menu) or just Shift-T and click and draw onto the area you want to write the text, you will have created another layer as well. You can type whether you want on the text box. You can choose the options like size and font type from the text properties. The Color Palette (same as the above) is for you to choose the color of your fonts. If would like to add other text boxes, you can do it here as well.

5. Next let’s choose the rectangle marquee tool (or Shift-M) and drag an area covering about 20% of bottom from the left to the right of the entire drawing area. The choose the color from the Colors Palette and the click on Paint Bucket Tool (Shift-G) to fill that area with a certain color. And you are about done. The next few steps are just repeats of what I have done previously.

6. Blood Splatter Brushes. You can see from the finished poster that there are several blood splatter which looks pretty realistic. I use VexingArt’s Blood Splatter which works really well. All you need to do is to download the zip file, uncompress it with some unzipping software and than double click on the .abr file. Next you will have to copy the .abr file to the Photshop directory, the preset and brushes folder. The brushes will then be loaded with you restart Photoshop. Next, you need to goto the Brush tool, choose Brush preset picker, then goto options and choose the new brush. That’s it. And you are done and can start to play with blood splatter.

Hey, good luck and have fun. If you don’t enjoy playing around with Photoshop, you shouldn’t be doing graphic design. For this poster, I think what it needs is to change the colour of the blood to a more reddish (bloody) type. Perhaps add a hand at the bottom so that it looks like it has been ripped apart by some animal.  Yes, I have a lot of ideas but no time and no skill.

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