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.