In my earlier tutorial I went over how to use brush dynamics from a preset brush, but what I didn’t show you was how to actually create your own brushes. If you’re not using custom Photoshop brushes then you’re missing out on one of the best features of Photoshop that will save you a ton of time and bring some new flare to your designs. The first step is selecting what you want to make into a custom brush…

I will be creating two brushes in this tutorial. One is a cement face and  one is an image of Beelzebub from the Public Domain:

Step 1 – Adjusting your image for creating a brush

Make sure when selecting an image to make into a brush you’re using one that isn’t going to get you sued. A good place to start is images in the Public Domain that you can do what you want with! After you have the image open in Photoshop you may want to adjust the levels (cntrl + L or command + L) so that it gets the right amount of contrast you want. The way that brush samples work is very similar to that of a mask except that the darker the tone the less translucent the brush will be.

What’s that mean? What this translates to is that if something in your image that is completely black will be 100% of the brush color you select, and something that is 100% white will not put down any paint at all.

This is an important concept to grasp in regards to creating brushes because you can create brushes of ANYTHING. If you have a wispy image of hair it’ll actually create the same translucency of hair via the brush. In the image below I did 4 things to prep it for being a brush:

• 1. Normal Image cropped to a square
• 2. Bumped up the contrast with levels (cntrl + L or command + L)
• 3. Desaturated (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate) and inverted the image (cntrl + I)  because we want the black information (the only color used to make a brush)
• 4. Painted out parts of image I didn’t want to have in my brush.

This is a great way to bring texture and different variations of  smoothness to whatever project you may be working on. As you can see I’m only going to be getting the black part of the image as the brush face.

Step 2 – Select a square area around create the brush preset

Beelzebub is already prepped for brush sampling because he is black and white, so now all you have to do is select the marquee tool by hitting the m key or by selecting it on the tool palette. Hold down shift to make it a perfect square selection, and drag around the item you want to make into a brush. When you’re ready to create the actual  brush go to Edit>Define Brush Preset… A dialog will pop up asking you to name the brush. Click ok. (screenshot below)

You should now have the brush of Beelzebub selected, if not hit the b key (shortcut to select the brush tool) and it should be selected. If is still not, right click and your brush palette will open up and you can scroll to the bottom of your brushes and you should see Beelzebub there.

Step 3 – Adjusting Custom Brush size and settings

Now you should see the brush overlay and if you click you’ll see that the item you selected as your custom brush appear. If you hit the [ key the brush will increase in size. If you hit the ] key then the brush will get smaller. In this particular example I’ve used my two brushes, Beelzebub and the cement face and set their color blend mode to color dodge to get some cool color effects if I click in the same place twice.

It’s at this point that I recommend you read the Photoshop Brush Dynamics tutorial that I wrote because you can take your custom brush and scatter it around, rotate it, and have it change colors and opacity dynamically as you drag the brush around. (It can even interact with a drawing tablet)

Step 4 – Creating Brush Sets

Something I like to do after I’ve made a nice selection of brushes is to export them into a .abr file so I can access them on all of my computers as well as provide them for downloads to people who frequent the Assault T-Shirts website. To save a custom brush set you need to be using the brush tool. (at least the way I make sets you have to have brush tool selected or you can go into the brush window)

Hit the b key and then right click to bring up your brushes. Then click on the triangle in the upper right hand portion of the window and select Preset Manager…

Then use select all the brushes you’ve made that you want to go into a set by either using cntrl + click or command + clicking if you’re on a Mac like I am and then  click “Save Set..” and save the brush set somewhere on your computer.

Conclusion

This is just meant to get you going on creating brush sets. If you’d like to skip the step of making all your own brushes you can go to some of the resources below and download brush sets for free! I highly recommend giving credit to these people who made the brushes though, and if you’re selling something that uses custom brushes like we are at Assault, then I recommend you make your own brushes from your own images so you don’t get sued.

Photoshop Brush Resources:

• T-Shirts made with Custom Photoshop Brushes @ Assault
• Assault Custom Brushes from this tutorial and a few others I’ve made
• Deviantart Photoshop Brushes – Where I download the majority of my brushes
• Brusheezy – another great brush set resource
• Public Domain Image Resources – Wikipedia page with free public domain image resources
• Custom Photoshop Brush Video – If you can handle the guy’s weird voice, here’s a video that outlines the same topic.
• Another Custom Photoshop Brush Tutorial Video – if you don’t fall asleep this will work for you.

One of the staples of our t-shirt designs featured at the Assault T-Shirts website is the use of randomization and intense brush dynamics. I use plenty of other techniques in conjunction with brush dynamics, but needless to say, if it weren’t for Adobe’s incredible dynamics engine, our designs would have taken twice as long to make, and they’d be only half as tough looking. If you’d like to learn to create interesting textures, highly dynamic imagery in a short amount of time, or something similiar to what we have done with several of our t-shirts, this tutorial is for you.

Step 1 – Select a Brush Shape

The first step to getting brush dynamics going is to either use an existing brush or to create a new Photoshop brush shape based on a selection. For this tutorial we will use a simple star brush and turn it into a dynamically generated brush that changes color/size/format without doing anything other than using the tool as you normally would (by clicking and dragging) Here is what the brush stroke looks like by default when clicking and dragging

As you can see the brush is evenly spaced out and has no dynamics assigned to it whatsoever. If you’re using Adobe Photoshop CS3 then your brush dynamics are located on the brush window which you can view by going to Window>Brushes or by hitting the F5 key. Click on the label “Brush Tip Shape” to bring up the brush dynamics window. Here is what my current brush dynamics window looks like by default:

Step 2 – Shape Dynamics

Here’s where all the magic happens… In each different window there are settings for you to tweak and play with to get the desired scatter amount as well as variations in opacity, colors, (foreground and background) brightness, scaling, flow, and hue/saturation. Here’s a shot of my settings with just the shape dynamics turned on and the result that comes out of it:

Step 3 – Select a Brush Shape

If you want to scatter the stars a bit you can adjust the scatter dynamics by checking off the box and playing with the settings in that area. Here are my settings from that and their results:

Step 4 – Color Dynamics

If you want to vary the color of the brush you can do this by adjusting your foreground/background colors and then you can adjust the color dynamics. Here are my results with that:

Step 5 – Dual Brushes

My final brush dynamic that I like to use alot is the dual brush dynamic which combines the use of two brushes as if they are being used two at a time (with a layer mode specified by you) Think of it as using a marker and a paintbrush in the same hand like when you were a little kid. I’ve selected the sparkle brush and adjusted the settings on that brush to give my brush a light textured look:

My brush is begining to look alot like the Barack Obama website branding at this point, and it only took me a few minutes of experimenting with the settings to get an effect that used to take ages to complete. (You won’t find anything like this in illustrator–as of now at least)

Step 6 – Save Brush Preset

The only thing left to do now is to create a new preset for your brush and by clicking on the create new button on the brush window.

Conclusion

This is just meant to be an introduction to brush dynamics. There are limitless possibilities to what you can do with brush dynamics including using it to create randomized variations of logos like I did with the Lex & Terry T-Shirt designs as well as on the Skull Spartan Warrior Shirt. There are also other methods of dynamics that you can use such as texture, opacity, and flow. (Opacity and Flow are covered in the “Other Dynamics” Section of the Brush Window)