KevProject: How to Make Photoshop Brushes

How to Make Photoshop Brushes

Brushes are a time saver. It also helps accomplish details onto things whether it is a matte painting, textures, or sculpting. I will go over some fun techniques that you can do with brushes in both Photoshop and zBrush (my tools of choice) and leave you to decide what you can do with it artistically.

Photoshop Brush

This is a very simple tutorial. But the things you can make out of it is endless. I'm going to go ahead and make random shapes in Photoshop and turn it into a brush just to show you how the whole thing works. I'm doing this on a new layer.

photoshop screen shot

So there's my random shape. Now all I have to do is convert it into a brush by going to Edit > Define Brush Preset.

Just edit the name of your brush then there you have it! Your first brush! Things to keep note of: the value of your brush will depend on the image so if the brush had a darker tone then the value of the brush will be darker. Oh and size matters. You can't have it too big or the tool won't run. Make sure you keep it at a reasonable size! You can change it's color as well.

photoshop screen shot

You can really quickly paint something and make a brush out of that as well as long as you have it on a separate layer.

You can do this on images you find online as well. Here's a city I found that I had cut out from its background.

It doesn't end there! There are tons of preset brushes you can use in Photoshop. Just right click while you're in brush mode to access them. You can change the size of your brush if you press [ to decrease and ] to increase.

If you hit F5 it will open up the brush options where you have an enormous amount of options with brushes! There's an infinite amount of things you can do!

Experiment experiment experiment!

If you have any questions, please contact me via email.