From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Creating custom brushes and symmetrical paint strokes - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Creating custom brushes and symmetrical paint strokes

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- [Instructor] After making modifications to an existing brush preset or when we create a brush of our own, we'll want to save those changes as a new brush in order to reuse them in the future. We'll also want to organize our brush presets in the brushes panel, and we're going to take a moment to play with the different symmetry options available when painting. So we'll start by editing a brush preset, and then saving it as a new brush preset. I've got my brush tool selected and I'm going to right click to reset the tool. Then using the brushes panel under the dry media brushes, I'm going to select Kyle's Ultimate Pastel Polusa. Now, when you drag with this brush, it looks like this, so let's make some changes. I'm going to change the blend mode so that it's set to multiply. So now, when I make more than one paint stroke, we can see that it will darken those areas. I'm also going to decrease the opacity so that I can build this brush up a little bit more slowly. And let's go in and just change the brush tip shape. I'll select this tip shape right here, make it a little larger using my right bracket, and now we can paint with this. So we've altered the brush and I want to save it to use it later. At the bottom of the brushes panel, I can click on the plus icon. I'll just name this JK and I want to capture the brush size and the preset, as well as the tool settings, which is why I made the change to the blend mode and the opacity, as well as the color. Once we save that, we can see it appears in the brushes panel, but if I want to reorganize it, I can click on the folder icon and create a group. I'm just going to call it JK brushes, and that will put it inside of the dry media brushes. I'll go ahead and put my brush right inside there by dragging and dropping. And then I'm going to put this at the top of the stack by just clicking on the folder icon and dragging it all the way there to the top. All right, now we can go ahead and close all of the other ones. So next, let's talk about creating a brush from a shape. Now, I haven't talked about shapes yet, so I just created this circle, but it could be a photograph or whatever you want. We need to select this area, so I'll tap the M key to select the marquee tool, and I'll start in the upper left of the document and then just drag down until I have that selected. Now, there are three tips to creating brushes. One, if you have color in your selection, it's going to be converted to shades of gray, because brushes can't have color in them when you define them. Two, it's helpful to have the content against white or transparency, because white equals transparency when you define a brush. And three, it's best if you define your brush at the largest size that you think you'll want it. If you define your brush really small, and then decide you want to paint with it larger, the edges can get soft. All right, so once we've selected this area to become our brush, I'll use the edit menu, and then define brush preset. We can call this JK circle, and then create our brush. So because the white areas will become transparent, we can see the preview of this looks more like a slinky. We need to deselect our selection, so I will choose to deselect, and then I can click and paint with the brush. But of course, we can make as many changes as we want. I could increase the spacing of the brush. I'll go ahead and decrease the size of it. And maybe we even wanted to flatten this. So now I've got a very different looking brush. Well, it automatically saved the brush that we defined, but let's go ahead and save this with the changes as a new brush preset. I'll go ahead and capture everything and just leave the default name. So now we have our two new brush presets and I can just move them into the JK brushes group or folder, if I want to keep them all together. All right, now just for fun, before we wrap up, instead of creating a single stroke, let's say I want to have Photoshop create multiple symmetrical strokes as I paint. Let's go to the edit menu and fill and I'm going to fill the background with white, and then I'm going to click the butterfly icon. So these are all of the different symmetry options, and the ones here at the top, they're just going to create mirrored strokes along these axes. So for example, if I choose vertical, we get a vertical axis. We can reposition this or rotate it, but for now, I'll just click done. But if I were to paint on the right hand side, we can see that I get a mirror of the paint stroke on the left hand side. All right, let's undo that using command Z and let's try out the two at the bottom. So the radial option enables us to increase the segment count to 12. And then, again, I'll click done to apply that. And then I'm just going to switch to the hard round brush, which will be easier to see. I'll get a little bit smaller of a brush. And let's change the foreground color just to make sure that we can see this, because I'm not sure that we're going to be able to see it with the blue. So I'll make this a pretty bright magenta and just decrease the size a little bit more. And when I drag, we can see that it's going to duplicate that paint stroke around all of those axes. All right, let's undo that. And this time, when I select the butterfly, I'm going to choose mandala and I'm going to increase the segment count all the way up to 10, and then click done. And this time, not only is it going to create multiple strokes, it's going to mirror them around a radial axis. So there you go. You can create and save custom brushes by customizing a preset and by defining your own custom brush. And we can use those brushes or any others with Photoshop's paint symmetry option to mirror and duplicate your paint strokes.

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