Photoshop Masterclass: Brushes

[Music] [Music] [Music] well gang here we are and I am today replacing the one and only Paul because he's having the day off as he very much deserves because he works hard and I want that man to take a little time to breathe so we're going to do a master class today focused on Photoshop brushes which is something I happen to know a little bit about and what I wanted to do today was talk to you all about several basic things but they don't want to get into some of the nitty-gritty there are plenty of tutorials you could find on YouTube or elsewhere that explain really the ins and outs of how a brush is made I'll cover some of that basic ground but I do want to go into some things that a lot of people maybe have never discovered before such as the importance and usefulness and the power of things like color dynamics and mixer brushes and some of the other brush modes we could talk about as well so let's dive right in and get to it all right so thanks again for joining me today I'm excited to do this this is something I'd love to talk about a lot as many of you probably know I want to check in really quickly with the chat make sure everyone's doing okay today we see Michelle hi Michelle hi Austin re hi Steve nice to see you Monica Cindy and tunc and Jane hey all right we are ready to get going all right so let's do this so to kick things off I want to start first explaining what a Photoshop brush is exactly we call them brushes but actually what's happening when you draw with a brush might be a mystery to you and you might be wondering what exactly is happening with behind the scenes when I'm drawing so if I were to just go and open up one of the general basic most basic brushes of all in Photoshop such as the hard round brush in the general brushes category and then start drawing with it all right what's actually happening is I want to show you something here I'm going to open up the brush settings panel we're going to talk a lot about this panel during this session because it's one of those things that people look at and it's overwhelming they see a bunch of words that don't necessarily mean anything to them they see a bunch of shapes they see sliders and doodads and whistles and bells and you know what most people say okay I don't even want to bother with that I'll just try and find some brushes I like and paint and draw with them but let's take a little look under the hood so to speak and see what's actually happening here so now this is the most basic of brush brushes you could ever build if you wanted to build one and the weight brushes work is the very first ingredient you need to make a custom brush to make any Photoshop brush is a stamp and what I mean by that is simply a graphic okay an image of any kind and in Photoshop these images are grayscale images they are not RGB images what we're dealing with here with this brush is a simple circle now when I tap with this circle and you'll notice that the color for my foreground here is actually black right so if I were to show you my my color picker for a moment okay the color I have is black but you look at this brush and you notice that by me simply tapping once I'm not even using my stylus I'm just tapping with the mouse BAM I'm not getting a full black circle and the reason for this is because the flow of the brush the flow setting is not set to 100% so one of the other things we have to understand about working with brushes in Photoshop is the many settings that come along with them that you can change on the fly that change the behaviors of those brushes as you're using them now coming straight out of the box this brush is going to look like this BAM black circle okay now if you look up here I adjusted the flow to 100% I want you to think about flow in a very different way from opacity people get these confused sometimes what flow is is essentially the rate at which the pigment that you're using if you could think of it natural media terms the rate at which it is flowing out of the stylus so if there were a low flow imagine that as you're drawing only some of the medium that you're using whether it's charcoal or pencil or crayon or watercolor or oils whatever it happens to be is flowing very slowly down onto the page which means you're not depositing very much of it at the time that you're using it okay in one single stroke however if you increase that flow up to 100% which is its maximum value then what's actually happening is that medium that color is rushing out of the brush at full speed and so you're gonna get 100% opaque marks now we're going to get into this a little later but you can actually control flow with your stylus okay and that's what the pressure that you're using you can also control it with other things such as tilt I'll talk about all those when we get to the brush settings for shape dynamics for scattering and texture and all these things but just to stay with the basics when I do this and I make a circle on the page okay what you're seeing is the shape that is that this brush is comprised of however when I do this what's happening is I'm taking that shape and I'm telling Photoshop to stamp it on the canvas in quick succession and every time that I stamp it okay that same circle is being deposited one pixel or so next to it one pixel over in the direction that I'm moving my stylus and what you get is the illusion of a line like you're drawing a line but that's not actually what you're getting you're just getting the stamp and it's being repeatedly stamped along a path that you draw to create this illusion of a line it's important to understand this because it's going to explain for you much better what is happening when you make custom brushes and why they have the appearance and the behavior that they have when you understand this very basic principle now I'll just clear this away for a moment I want to show you something here we open the brush settings the very first thing I want you to look at is up here we have brush tip shape okay I'm not gonna fiddle with any of these other settings for the moment I just want you to look at this brush tip shape and to the right you're going to have a library of shapes okay these are all the many shapes that I currently have loaded into Photoshop now if you look down here okay we have the size slider you can adjust the diameter of that brush okay that's very easy to understand but here comes at a very important thing that people don't always pay attention to and that is spacing now as I've just explained what's happening when you draw with a brush I want you to notice that the shape the spacing here says 5% without getting too technical and you don't have to deal with thinking about this in terms of math and all that but I do want to explain that what it's telling me is that whatever the diameter of the brush is let's say the diameter is 100 pixels if I tell Photoshop I want the spacing for this brush to be 5% I'm telling it that I want every successive stamp that is being applied to the canvas as I draw along a path to be stamped at a distance of 5 percent of the total width for a diameter of that brush okay so right now because 5 percent is a mere 5 pixels of the size being if it were 100 I'll just make it a hundred right here okay so every 5 pixels it's going to stick another circle there all right now because that's such a tiny distance we're still getting the illusion of a line watch what happens when I increase the spacing okay and here I'll just pull that slider over now we're exposing the workings of the brush now we're really seeing how Photoshop is doing this all right if I expose a little up can somebody help me with my language please I haven't had enough coffee today if I go down to 100% ok what that means is every 100 pixels since that's the full diameter of the brush I'm going to make a new stamp and so what you get is if I were to zoom in here you get these circles touching each other at a one pixel distance okay so now we understand what's happening when we're drawing with a brush okay instead of seeing this we're seeing something like this because those stamps are so close to one another this also explains why sometimes you get lag with a brush imagine you have a very large brush Dam so it's a big graphic and maybe it's got some changes in opacity all right you apply a texture to that brush and then you apply all kinds of other settings like color dynamics and scattering basically Photoshop is having to compute and understand that brush with every single stamp that you're making and if it's in a really tight space then the processing power that's required to make that line and make all the behaviors look correct is pretty intense right so that's explaining why you sometimes get lag we can talk about ways to reduce lag and the very first thing I'd mentioned to you is if you do have a brush that's relatively complex and you're getting lag with it go ahead and try and bump the spacing up a little bit and see how much you can bump it up to where you still get a decent looking line but you're increasing the speed at which you're able to draw so that would be my first expert tip there okay all right so now we understand the basics so how do you make a brush look interesting how do you make a custom brush do some cool stuff well let's start with the most important ingredient which is the stamp all right so the circle is fine right and there are lots of things I can do with a circle for example let's dive into shape dynamics now I'm going to open up the shape dynamics panel and there's a confusing thing about this for people which is that the very first category you have here's size jitter it makes people think that they're going to by adjusting size jitter they're going to create some kind of a random behavior so really what this should be called is size as a category and then underneath it there should be sub headers for size jitter and some other things okay but that's just not the way it is so I can be confusing I want to show you here where it says control what this means now I'm using a Wacom stylus I'm drawing on a Cintiq 22 HD s my still my favorite model they ever made although all the latest ones they've made are great but I still love to use this one it's a little older than some and I can use to select pen pressure to control the size look at my brush stamp preview down here alright let me just turn that off for a moment here's the brush behaving as normal alright the moment is assigned pen pressure to control it look what happens to my brush stamp preview it's showing me that I now have a range right between SiC too thin for the line that I draw and I'm telling it that I want to control that with pen pressure so with lighter pressure I'm going to get a thinner line and with heavier pressure it's going to get fatter and then so on okay and the reason for that is I'm setting the minimum diameter of the brush down to zero which means I want it to go all the way down to one pixel okay and that's gonna change as I slide this around so if the minimum is half of the total diameter and of course the smallest mark I can make would be fifty pixels and the largest will still be a hundred all right so now we're getting into some of the things you can do with even just a simple brush like a round brush to make an interesting interesting stroke why don't we take it a step further let's go back out to our brush tip shape where we started I'm going to increase the spacing a little bit and by increasing it a little see I'm getting a bumpier line well that's because now what's happening is as I'm drawing that stamp is getting spaced farther apart from each stamp that came before it let's take it as another step further and look at size jitter now size jitter is a real thing and what it means is that by increasing the value here I'm gonna tell Photoshop that I want I'm gonna increase it all the way up to 30% I want there to be a 30% variation range of variations that I can apply to this stamp in terms of how big the sizes inside the range that I already assigned for the minimum and maximum diameter well since I have a full range here for the might diameter from 0% to 100 if you see right here right then 30% of that there can be a 30% shift in the size that I'm drawing with as I drag now look what that does again changes the qualities of that so that now we have even more variation in the stroke all right now I'm not going to talk about angle jitter because we have to use a brush that isn't a perfect circle to make that work but I am going to talk about roundness jitter just below it this is one that a lot of people don't experiment with and there's a lot of power to be taken from this setting now with roundness jitter what you're actually telling Photoshop is that because you have a perfect circle for the stamp they come out here can look at this this little preview here is showing us that we now have currently the roundness setting for this stamp at 100 but if I tap on one of these circles here and drag I can create more of an oval see that I can pinch it down like that now that automatically is going to change the quality of the brush as well now I'm drawing with an oval and if I increase the spacing you'll see what's happening behind the scenes right this is what's happening as I draw so I'm getting the size jitter I'm getting the variation in the size based on the pressure that I'm using with my stylist right and I'm also basically distorting that original brush shape by turning it into an oval by squishing it from the top at the bottom but let me show you something interesting if we come back to the shape dynamics here under roundness jitter you probably figured out by now understanding what jitter is which is that variation right that random variation that you're adding I could increase the roundness jitter for the brush in the same way that I do with the diameter so what I'm going to do is assign this to pen pressure for a moment okay and I'm going to do my minimum roundness all the way down to 1 now what this is going to do is with very very very light pressure it's going to take that perfect circle that I would normally be drawing with and squish it down to an oval that is only one pixel high okay it's essentially doing this if I were to take this here it's squishing it down to this a roundness of 0% which is a single pixel okay in height stamp so now look what that does as I draw okay now why is this useful well for inking people take advantage of this to get themselves far more control and a much snappier line on the thinner strokes by cheating Photoshop basically into taking their stamp and squishing it down with tight spacing if I bring my spacing deck down down to something like five percent okay and I'll do my minimum at about twenty percent here I'll be able to get a much broader range of strokes and look how nice and fine these lines can be and snappy when I draw with them and I've still got all that Jer going on if I were to reduce that jitter and even get my spacing tighter down to like two percent bring the minimum roundness down to about 15 now I'm getting these really fine lines with light pressure because I'm squishing that stamp into an oval but there are other applications for this as well now we didn't talk about jitter jitter is that random value that you can have popping in and out if I increase that to say 50% look what happens to my line similar to size jitter okay I'll actually make my brush stamp a little smaller and I'll it slightly look I'm going to take this and angle it slightly right completely different kind of a line so for those people who like to ink in Photoshop all i've done is taking the basic round brush and i've applied a few things to adhere and now the quality of the line I'm drawing with is quite different from where we started just by making these several adjustments so this is the tip of the iceberg all right now scattering let's move on to that and just briefly touch on what this does scattering is going to take your stamp and imagine I'm drawing a path in this direction well if I tell it to scatter let me just increase the spacing so you can see what happens here and I'll turn off some of these other things so it's not too much going on there we go all righty now normally you can see what's happening the stamp will follow the path that I draw along a perfect line right so if I draw to the left it will follow if I draw up it will follow no matter what I do is going to follow along however with scattering what I can do is say look here's the path I want to draw all right but I'd like for the stamp occasionally to jump off of that path either to the left or to the right all right so I'm just going to do this now look at my brush stamp preview down at the bottom right here and watch what happens as I increase the scatter see so now if I draw the same line as before even though this is the direction I'm moving my stylus right with scattering on it's going to take those individual stamps and it's going to shift them off that path by a few pixels right now of course you can go nuts with this so I can increase it up to like four hundred ninety percent and it's just going to push those much farther away from the path where I'm drawing well you can start to imagine why this would be useful for certain kinds of custom brushes like spatter for example and there are other applications for it as well which I'll show you but this is a very powerful thing not only can you increase the distance okay that the stamp is moving away from the path that you're drawing but you can also increase the instances of that stamp the number of times that stamp is applied in a single pass so instead of doing one stamp followed by another stamp followed by another stamp as you're drawing you can actually tell you tell Photoshop I want two stamps applied in that one pass not one so two stamps two stamps two stamps and I want those stamps to be in different locations from one another still following along that path look at my brush stamp read you hear all right down here at the bottom as I go from one instance of the stamp to two I'm increasing the count see one to two and then two three so now when I draw with this brush this is what I'm getting so you can imagine if I increase decrease the spacing a little bit okay and come back to my scattering and increase to about four account of four now I'm getting a much more textured kind of a line right but what's really happening is I'm creating that random texture line with four different instances of the same stamp being applied every single time all right and that's what's creating that variation so if you're looking for a way to create lines that are not repetitive in any way where there's no evidence of the stamp being really obvious and feeling like it's it's just repeating itself one image at a time this is one of the tricks you can use to do that especially good for any kind of natural media emulation such as charcoal or chalk crayon good for lettering artists who don't want to expose that stamp that they're using but do want some variation in the line that they're working with okay I'm going to check the chat here for a moment I just wanna see if we have any questions because I know I'm covering a lot of ground here as quickly as I can all right let's see great I'm glad you're I'm glad you're enjoying this Jessica yeah basic stuff is important to know we'll jump into some complex stuff here in a minute let's see here general round brush yes that's what I'm using at the moment nothing fancy just yet this is not the mouse Steve I'm using a Wacom Cintiq 22 HD let's see here good effects thank you yes Inari yes you can change basic settings for pressure at the driver level with a Wacom Cintiq so you open that in your system preferences and then adjust from there yeah the Kirby the Kirby brush that's key thanks for mentioning that that is one of the brushes that I made and this is how I did it was using a different count okay and a bigger scatter and this brings us to our next topic which is controlling the scatter II sometimes you don't want to be totally random well look you can control the scatter width and pressure amazing so with very light pressure look at this nothing now look what happens as I use heavier pressure and then back to light pressure right so we'll reduce the count increase the scatter increase the spacing slightly and look what this does so now I can do a line like this increase the pressure and then decrease the pressure all with the same brush so of course this is very powerful and there's just a ton you could do with this all right now we're still just working with this very simple basic round brush alright I'm going to turn off the scattering for a moment come back to our basic line I'll turn off the size jitter and now we're just going to decrease that spacing so we have again a pretty standard basic brush to draw with alright nothing too fancy we do have shape dynamics turned on for pen pressure to control the diameter of the brush already next I want to show you some texture all right now Photoshop does come with some basic textures built in and these are some of them here I have some of my own here I actually have a vast library of about 8 or 900 textures maybe more much more than anybody needs but I had to create those to create all the custom brushes that I made with the Adobe brush library I just got a brand new laptop so what you're seeing here is really just nothing apart from one or two textures that I've made in the past few weeks and but I wanted to take one of those textures and show you how textures work when you apply them to a brush so this one right here is a grainy texture now by simply taking the brush and saying look I want to apply a texture to it all right nothing's going to happen you have to decide how you want that texture interact with the brush all right so what I'll show you is this here the very first one and the most useful one that I find is using height now I want you to imagine it this way the texture is a grayscale image alright and the areas that are pushing towards black are going to be like the areas of a piece of a canvas okay that are raised the bumpy bits alright and the areas that are white are the areas that are moving down towards the flat surface that the bumps are sitting on so this is like receding away from you so whatever is coming up pushing upwards and making contact with your stylus those are the darker areas of the grayscale image and the areas that are lighter are the ones that are going to be pushed away from you now this means you can create very realistic textures textured effects with your brushes by imagining that for example if I were painting on canvas and used very light pressure what would happen well the paint would be applied to the bumpy raised areas of the canvas right or if I was drawing on some very toothy paper and using charcoal then the charcoal would be deposited on the toofie bumpy areas and then the receding areas the areas that are recessed okay would not be picking up all that medium right I want you to think of it that way and so the mode that I've assigned here for the texture is height and that's that's telling it that we want to recognize that relationship between dark and light and the texture being I raised or lowered and I'm going to change the depth by lowering it and here I need to give myself some control so texture each tip has to be on for this alright we're not going to get into all the reasons for what that means just try this at home and look at where it says control I'm going to assign pen pressure look what happens to my brush stamp preview down here okay my stroke preview I got to turn that off again here's what it looks like when nothing's assigned now I'm going to control it with pen pressure okay so I'll take the scale of my image this the image that I have is about 300 or 400 pixels square I believe it's an it's a tiling pattern that is seamless and you can create these with plugins the one I really love is this one right here it's from orange box it's the FX box and you can create seamless tiling textures with that it's wonderful there are other ways to do it as well and you can look up tutorials on that so back to the texture now that I've assigned pen pressure I'm going to make sure that we're at a hundred percent of the size not that it matters but with light pressure watch what happens see that it's picking up that texture because with light pressure I'm grazing the surface or the dark areas the black areas and the very deep dark grey areas right as I use more pressure I get into those grooves and as I use less pressure I just touch the surface so I hope that's making sense I'm gonna zoom in a bit so you can really see what's happening here light pressure darker pressure heavier pressure excuse me and then light pressure so you want to build some kind of a pencil II kind of a brush we'll look here you are you're off to the races right great way to start if I were using a canvas texture and a brush that was more painterly I would apply this there's a lot more you can do a texture but I want you to notice that this is the most I think useful for most digital artists is to have the texture be working in such a way that you control with pen pressure how much of it is exposed however there are other ways to use it if you use it in a mode for subtract which I'll show you now you can actually decide to have that texture be shown through I turned off texture each tip for this but look as I increase that then every stroke I make is going to show me that texture no matter how much pressure I'm using all right zoom in on that and as I come over it over and over and over and over eventually I get to a point where very little of it shows through okay but that's after many many passes okay so that's another useful mode for some people to use texture it's good for watercolor brushes where you are trying to emulate watercolor in Photoshop and you want there to be a texture that's always visible to a degree but there are also good ways to use that for painting with a pattern and an example of that would be halftone brushes where you just want to have a blanket a blanket an image with a very solid halftone however the halftone brushes that I designed that are responsive to pen pressure for example I believe I put a few of them in the spring 2019 here we go here's one this will react to pen pressure to reveal more or less of that halftone pattern same here okay and that is just taking advantage what we already looked at of under texture the height settings tied to pen pressure alright so more for you to noodle around with there okay so it's one o'clock and it's time for me to move on to some more advanced stuff look up some of these other things for yourselves to get in but I wanted you to expose the basics of how to control these things now I want to skip ahead and go to some really cool features about brushes that you might not be aware of first things first if you have a Photoshop CC plan of some kind any kind of Creative Cloud plan where you've got Photoshop come over here to the top right corner of your brush settings panel brushes panel part of me right here and you'll notice there's an option to get more brushes when you tap on that it's going to take you to the login page okay right here if you sign in with your Adobe ID you will get to a page where there are over 1,800 brushes for you to download and play with and I promise you these will take care of whatever it is you need some of them are already loaded here and I want to show them to you today and the reason I've loaded the mega pack which is right here is because it has so many different categories of brushes we can talk about that expose some of these little-known ways to use brushes in Photoshop and I want to start with a category unto itself mixer brushes that a lot of people have never played with now if you look over here on my brushes if I long tap on that you'll see I have the brush tool but at the bottom I also have this brush the mixer brush tool and what our mixer brushes well in the mega pack I'm going to open up the real oils category okay and I'm going to show you a couple of things about mixer brushes I'm going to start with one of my favorites which is the goody all right now I'll just grab a color and I'm gonna paint with this brush notice right away that there is a texture associated with it and that's a canvas texture right now we know how that's happening because we just covered this sure enough if I go to my texture I see that height is right there only in this case pen tilt is controlling it now we didn't talk about pen tilt but if I just hold my stylus up here for you to see imagine this is the surface I'm drawing on if it's perpendicular I'm using the stylus at a perpendicular angle then that is normal tilt but as I tilt away from vertical alright so I'm moving from a 90 degree angle to like a 60 or a 45 I can actually have the angle at which I'm holding the stylist control different aspects of the brush all right you can actually use it to control the size of the brush when we talked about size jitter you can do it for scatter you can even do it for texture now here I'm exposing a lot of the texture the reason for that is I'm actually drawing at a very steep angle like this okay hope that's I hope it's clear what I'm showing you here so I hold the pen up and if I were to lay it down flat okay so we're horizontal with the surface and then take it up just slightly and essentially like you're shading with a pencil on the side of the pencil that's what I'm doing with my stylus right now and that is how I'm exposing all that texture so that's a neat thing but the reason I wanted to show you this brush is because it is in the mixer brush category when you open mixer brushes you'll notice something you're the bar appear at the top of the screen right which is the properties bar for the tool that you're using is going to show you different options than what you normally have for a standard Photoshop brush and over here we have different options for the kind of brush that you're using in terms of the way it works with paint alright I have dry heavy load as the option right now but you can play around with these and you'll notice that what it's going to do is control the settings here for wetness the load of the paint and how much it mixes watch what happens when I grab another color and paint with this brush well that's not something you see every day with regular Photoshop brushes if you can tell the paint is actually mixing with what's already there in the surface okay so I'll put some yellow over here there you go grab this darker color here and as I push it into the yellow look what happens all right so it's mixing with that paint so mixer brushes do allow you to do naturalistic paint mixing effects in Photoshop but there's another very little-known secret about mixer brushes that's pretty amazing and that's what I want to talk about today a lot of folks know yes okay I can mix paint with mixer brushes and that's all well and good all right but there's another cool thing you can do and to do this I'm actually going to use a different brush because it really shows it off beautifully and that's the cake brush go over here to the cake brush alright now put some color down alright no big whoop when I paint over it you'll notice it's not mixing at all the cake brush by default does not have any mixing because if you notice the mix that mixing value is set to zero and the wetness value is also to zero okay but here's the interesting thing I'm gonna zoom in for a moment here is an area that has some yellow and it has a few pixels there where the canvas is showing through where the black paint is still visible now if you've ever used Photoshop to paint and draw you know that you can use the shortcut of your option key to sample color from your document at any time well look over here we have our own color swatch from mixer brushes separate from the color swatch that you use with your color picker and if I tap on this little arrow here I have options one of which is load solid colors only well that is how you would normally expect any brush to work in Photoshop by simply holding down my option key and tapping on the canvas look what happens I'm going to select orange because that's the color I happen to be hovering over at that moment but watch this I'm going to turn that off now I'm going to come back over here hold down my option key and just tap right there now look at the color swatch completely weird right what did it do well it actually selected okay pixels in the same dimensions as the brush so if it's a 200 pixel diameter brush it's going to sample 200 pixels all right of space on the canvas but whatever is on the canvas it's gonna sample it all at once so what happens the next time I paint a stroke look see that it's painting with all those colors at once so holy cow this opens up a whole world of possibilities for people who like to do naturalistic oil painting and other effects in Photoshop so let's say for example I want to paint with a sort of a reddish orange color but I don't want the paint to look so flat right well look I'll just take another color that's close by in analogous color and I'll graze over the surface a little bit here and there and then I'll take another color that's similar to that color and a little darker okay so I'll come down this way and just make a few strokes here and there like that now if I sample this area I've got all those colors mixed together and look what happens as I paint so now I can see every brush stroke that I put down one after the other because I'm painting with multiple colors at once now you can do this with any mixer brush and you can sample literally anything from the canvas alright so as a weird example of how this would be fun pull up my brushes here for a moment and I'm going to go to the effects box here oh sorry not the effects box my mistake come back to the real whales oh you know what it's in the concept art set which I don't have loaded that's what we need we'll hang on a second let's go ahead and load those brushes okay this will go import brushes come over to Dropbox we'll go to brush sets there we go concept brushes here we go they're with me folks I want to show you how this could be useful for y'all so just chit chat in the chat chat while I do this or if you want tell each other some dad jokes because usually for my other drawing show I do the dad joke thing and I don't have any good ones for you today all right here we go all right now concept brushes here's what I wanted to show you look right here this is a brush that has a very unique stamp and that stamp is the shape of a few leaves right but look at my color swatch I know it's really tiny but you'll notice they're a bunch of different colors in there watch what happens when I paint with this brush look at that beautiful so this is a fall leaves brush now what's amazing about this is I'm using this one stamp right but because of what we talked about earlier with all the settings that you can adjust right shape dynamics and scattering and things like that I'm able to make really different stamps and I'm taking advantage of multiple colors at once because of that multi color swatch that you can create with a mixer brush and then you get effects like this so really there's just so much you could do to play with this and make weird stuff the example I always like to give is a fun one is I just take the basic round brush in Photoshop we go to our general brushes and we're just going to go to our brush tool here's that hard round brush alright now I'm going to paint a blue circle very exciting right and hang on don't do another one there we go alright and I'm gonna lock the layer transparency right down here so I can paint inside of it right take that soft round brush and just shade that a little bit and then I'm gonna make a little highlight up here in the corner all right nothing too fancy but there's this sort of a sphere that I've painted right now if I go back to my mixer brush for a moment all right now it's this crazy brush right watch this I am going to go to my brush settings turn off all the silliness and I'm gonna make my brush camp just a basic circle eye but remember I'm working with a mixer brush now make this circle big enough to cover this entire circle that I've painted all right now going to go here and say I want to load solid colors only no no no no that's off because if I come over here and hold down my option key look what I've done I've just sampled that billiard ball okay so let me go to a new layer still got that on my brush let's make sure that our spacing is nice and tight okay and watch what happens when I paint with this how cool is that I'm creating this tube which is just you you can't even believe how many things you could do with this imagine if you want to paint some kind of metal piping in your painting right and you would just create that one stamp or you want to paint some other kind of object that as long as there's a repetitiveness to it that you can drag and in paint you can do all kinds of really weird crazy things with this so I just love to give that example of the possibilities of what you can do with a multicolored stamp and varying your spacing and whatnot look what happens if I increase the spacing and then I actually turn on shape dynamics okay and we'll do this all right so now I could do a series of like little beads or something right completely different so lots to play with mixer brushes are a completely interesting category that needs to be explored more and I highly encourage you to try them out all right another thing I want to tell you about that a lot of people don't take advantage of and it's a really wonderful thing is color dynamics and what our dynamics well let's go back to that example we were using with our basic brush for just a moment because it's the easiest way to explain what's happening so I'll go to my general brushes and just use that hard round brush again so here we are back in familiar territory we're painting with this not too exciting right let me show you something interesting I'm going to increase the spacing first okay so we can see this very clearly now normal brush is going to paint with one solid color we know now that mixer brushes can use multicolor stamps which is also very interesting but let's talk about color dynamics I'll turn that on for a moment now to start with I want to ignore this control for pen pressure I'm going to turn that off because I just want to show you the basics of color dynamics first we have sliders for hue saturation and brightness okay people call them HSB sliders some people say HSV for hue saturation and value right look at the huge hitter now that's me this means that I'm going to apply a jitter in the same way we did with size jitter or scattering right to the hue which is the color I'm using so let's say I grab a nice orange alright and the hue jitter is set to zero nothing's happening right now well this is what I'm gonna get when I paint right you know I have increased spacing which is why I'm getting this dotty look there's a reason for that cuz I want you to see what happens with huge itter I'm gonna increase the huge itter to 20% now watch what is happening we are telling Photoshop that if you were to look at a color wheel right whichever place I drop my color picker onto whatever that color is I want you to have a range along the color wheel in either direction okay either to the right to the left of 20% of the total circle of color right so you have that circle for the color wheel and that's going to go from whatever color you land on around the rainbow and back to that same color right but in this case we're just giving it a range of 20% which means you're going to get analogous colors all the way through well this is very very powerful not just for a silly decorative part streamer that you want to make like this because if you want to think about this in painterly terms a lot more you can do with it let's just for a moment to look at what would also be happier we have a saturation jitter so this is going to tell you that the color is either going to be bright and saturated or it's going to be more dull okay what happens if I increase that to a really really high number we're getting some colors that are if I were to just select that on the color wheel and look on the color picker this is pretty desaturated when compared with this right so we're increasing that range right there what else do we have we also have brightness jitter let's bump that up now look very interesting all right and a combination of all of these is gonna give me a pretty crazy range of colors all right so why is this useful for painters I'll show you why let's go into the mega pack again I'm gonna go to a paint box brush called gooey there we go here it is so the gooey brush takes advantage of color dynamics and scattering and brush spacing in an interesting way so that when you paint with it what you get is the look of a sort of impasto kind of application of the paint like thick paint all right now let me use a slightly lighter color so you can really see this coming through there I'm just gonna kind of scrub on the canvas with this you can see this zoom in a bit so you see what's happening here every time I paint right the strokes that I'm making you can actually see them layering on top of one another which is not normal for Photoshop brush behavior normally you just get flat color and that's what you get but what we're doing here is if I expose the color dynamic settings we have a huge itter of only 1% but we have a brightness jitter of 6 now that's just enough that the stamp I'm using if we look at this brush tip shape let me just increase the spacing here there's the stamp that's being exposed okay the stamp that I'm using and you can see it as I'm painting to this stamp is being applied with a slightly different brightness and a slightly different hue with every single time it's being deposited on the canvas right but because it's subtle then the effect that you get winds up being just decrease that spacing again the effect that you get is a nice kind of a thick paint look right really really lovely and the other reason this is working is because of scattering we have three counts of that brush stamp being applied all at once right let's use something slightly brighter hopefully you can see this there we go three stamps right and they're all being scattered by just 7% so if they're offset by just a hair here and there right it's enough to give us a line that we can still control I can still paint in the direction I want left to right right to left okay paint a circle but if I come in and look at that there's all this color variation and lovely brushstroke action in there okay I've also used transfer now transfer is where you can control the opacity or flow and/or flow with pen pressure pen tilt whatever you like right so if I set that range really high let's say that I want to have pen pressure to control the opacity all the way down to zero right now watch watch what happens when they use light pressure is almost nothing and as I build up I can get to a full stroke their full opacity right so I had that set somewhere around 60 I can't remember I can always reset the brush by simply tapping on it yeah 69 20 and zero so look at that I do have some control now if I use slightly less pressure what I'm able to you is get less of that color dynamics effect coming through and that's because I'm you the colors that are there and I'm drawing on top of what's there and it's just blending the two together and you're not gonna see as much of a sharp contrast okay but that's one good way that you can use this in a painterly kind of way but I want to show you a step you could take further which is really cool and that's to use under color dynamics that's to use foreground and background jitter now foreground and background colors have been in Photoshop for many many many many years and people use them for different reasons but painters use them in a really specific way that I think is fascinating and that is this I can actually paint with both colors at the same time using foreground and background jitter and I can say look I want pen pressure to control this so let's say I want to paint a sort of a violet color well I would first have a reddish color on my brush okay and then what makes violet red plus blue so I'll go ahead and grab a blue color as well there now I've got a red and a blue now because I have pen pressure set to control the foreground background jitter what that means is heavier pressure is going to apply more of the foreground color while lighter pressure will apply more of the background color and so if I use a medium amount of pressure I'm going to basically get a color that's kind of in between the two so watch this this is me painting with medium pressure now using those two colors this is me painting with heavy pressure this is me painting with very light pressure okay now why am I getting more of a violet color with light pressure the reason is because of transfer because I already have it set so that with light pressure I'm gonna get very little flow we see 20% here and opacity has already been reduced right by a little over 30% well I have to use slightly more pressure to get a mark at all which means I'm going to bring some of that red in if you don't want that you simply turn off transfer altogether right so now my brush settings have no transfer effects which means no opacity jitter no flow jitter so heavy pressure gives me red light pressure gives me blue actually I'll turn off shape dynamics because I have to make sure that I can see the mark there we go all right now heavy pressure light pressure heavy pressure light pressure look how crazy this is and everything in between this is me here let me just for a moment paint so that you can see what happens if I just use varying pressure along the way as I go very weird right so for painterly effects there's just so much you can do with this now one example is just quickly show you I'm going to open up the spring 20/20 brushes and go to the mushy brush the mushy brush is a kind of a watercolor wash kind of a brush and I want you to see that it has applied to it with color dynamics pen pressure controlling the foreground and background jitter but it also has wet edges what are wet edges well what edges allow you to create this effect that you've seen with watercolors one and then when they dry sometimes the edge of the shape you paint is slightly darker it kind of has like an outline around it that's that's what happens with this brush so watch the combination of the texture the wet edges and the color dynamics allows me to do things like this I can paint heavy with the red lighter with the blue all in the same stroke and I'm still getting this wet edge effect so this is amazing for naturalistic painting because if I want to just paint one stroke next to another right I can do that now why is it getting darker here well look brush modes are entering into our equation and just like you have layer blending modes over here you also can do the same thing with brushes and because this is set to multiply every successive stroke is going to darken the color of what's already there it's gonna multiply with that color I can always change these I can go to normal right and certainly how it's not gonna be as dark when I paint over it but here's the crazy thing I want everybody to know about photoshop brushes any brush except for mixer brushes but any brush can be an eraser by setting the brush mode to clear so look let's say I have this splish-splash brush okay this is in the spring 2020 set really fun to paint with okay I'm gonna do some splishy-splashy stuff on the page right I say okay now I want to erase with that brush but I don't have an eraser like that don't worry come over here and go to clear under your mode and look instant eraser and know I'm not painting with white I am clearing away pixels from the canvas using all the properties of that brush so any brush thousands of brushes can instantly be made into an eraser by simply changing the brush mode to clear so gang thanks for hanging out I know it's a lot of territory I covered I hope I expose some cool interesting things you've never seen before and I hope you'll try these out I'll do more of this I'm gonna have a master class in illustration starting very soon here at Adobe Live and I hope you'll join me for those classes I'll keep you informed about that on my Twitter feed and hopefully we'll make an announcement as well anyway thanks everyone I hope to see you again soon and take care enjoy the weekend everybody stay safe stay healthy take care of each other and above all remember to be kind I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 24,819

Rating: 4.8984127 out of 5

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Id: _1bdGXUm7IQ

Length: 56min 31sec (3391 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020