Perfect brushes in Photoshop

Make the most of Photoshop’s powerful brushes – create exciting new ones and a personal brush library.

Since Adobe introduced the Brushes palette in Photoshop 7 it has provided massive scope to experiment with mark making, colour and texture. Brush libraries can be created for drawing or sketching, for cartoon images or illustrations that mimic traditional painting. Alternatively, you may wish to create a library that easily caters for all of these. Some artists rely on one or two favourite brushes for most of their work, while others might use hundreds of different brushes to produce just one illustration.

Photoshop enables you to swap between saved brush libraries quickly and easily while you are working on an image. I have several libraries, which I either load or tag together depending on the brief. In this tutorial, I create unique brushes and save them all in a personal library. I’m working in Photoshop CS. There are some differences between the brushes palette in Photoshop 7, CS and CS2, so I take a look at many of the common features and how they can be used to my advantage for producing an illustration.

I’ve developed an illustration for this tutorial that’s based on a meeting between a troll and a shepherd. The setting is the edge of a forest. I thought the subject matter and the surroundings would challenge me with the various textures and surfaces and give lots of potential for developing an appropriate brush library. I wouldn’t normally create a whole new brush library for each illustration, but in this case it helps me to explain the features of the Brushes palette.

Click here to download the full workshop for free (PDF) Click here to download the support files (14.11Mb)