Greetings fellow painters!
This tutorial will be all about brushes. How to get them, how to install them and, most important, how to create your own perfect brush, fitting your style.
I currently use the most recent Photoshop version available, Photoshop CC, but these tips and tricks should work on most versions of Photoshop.
Get your brushes
The standard brush pack in Photoshop is great for beginning digital artists who want to get the hang of using virtual brushes instead of real ones. However, after a while, I wanted to personalise my art style more, and in my opinion these standard brushes weren’t getting me the textured looks I wanted to create. So I started to look for different brushes. Now, you could just google them, but here are some of my favourite brushpacks.
Daroz Deviantart – Mar-ka Deviantart – DanLuVisiArt Deviantart – fox-orion Deviantart –Cubebrush – Ross Tran – Loish
Deviantart offers free brush packs but be sure to follow the policy of the artist that made them. Cubebrush, Ross Trann and Loish offer a great variety of brushes but ask a small charge in return. If you are a beginning digital artist, I would advise you would dowload a free brush pack. When you are a more advanced painter, consider a brush pack of the artist that inspires you most (and yes, that means I own all three brush packs).
Install the brushes
Easy peasy, but I will walk you through it anyway. Photoshop brushes are saved as .abr files. Download the pack you want to install and open Photoshop. Open your brush preset picker as shown below.
Then make sure you open the menu on the top right of the brush preset picker and choose the ‘load brushes’ option.
Now you can pick your downloaded brushset and add them to your collection!
Told you it was easy.
Customise the perfect brush
Ah well, perfection doesn not exist, but you can get pretty close. I just recently discovered this trick and it finally made me realise how the digital masters got all these cool brushes I could never find. It is because they blend two brushes into one and BAM! New cool brush. I will show you how to do this.
First of all, pick your standard brush. For this example I used a simple round brush you can find in all versions of Photoshop.
 A simple round bursh will give your drawing a smooth and refined look.
Open the Brush menu, which shows you many options to alter brushes. I highlighted my chosen brush.
First thing I usually adjust is the maximum diameter of the brush, found under shape dynamics: should it end in a fine line or do you want a thick stroke? Demonstrated here:
This wil have its effect on a painting; with a small minimum diameter you can paint details, with a large diameter the first strokes will go much faster.
Now, to add texture to a brush you can simply click on the texture option; however, I found the following method much more pleasing: click on dual brush and choose a rough brush. This will blend the two brushes together, thus creating a new brush!
Now your options are endless; create whatever brush you like with your own presets and define you artstyle, stand out!
I hope you found this tutorial usefull! Comment below if you have any questions left or you have a suggestion of what my next tutorial should be!
Love, Eve
Eve Hartman 