Making Brushes In Photoshop

Brushes are easy to make and can be indispensable basics in your clipart making endeavors. For example you might find that you need flowers quite often in your projects. You might want them as borders or to decorate frames. You might want bunches or posies or clusters of them to decorate your pages or projects.

So you download some clipart but very quickly you find your projects are looking fairly similar, which is fine if you are doing a themed project. What about all the other things you want to do with flower elements? What a hassle to find all that stuff.

One way to make your clipart unique is to make your own brushes. For the above example of flower posies make drawings of single flowers or single stemmed flowers.

TIPS:
* Start with a white background. You want the best clarity for making your brushes.
* Use black to draw with to achieve the greatest contrast.
* Make your image. The most versatile way for a project like this would be to make your images as outlines, so you can group and colour to suit your other projects later on.

EXERCISE:
1. Draw a page of single flowers
2. Scan the page
3. Open the page in Photoshop

In order to make new sets of brushes from now on you'll have to do the following once'

PREPARING TO MAKE A BRUSH SET:
* Save the existing brush set as 'new'. The file will be called 'new.abr'
flower brushset

* Load the 'new' brush set
* Delete all brushes except one. This one brush is just a placeholder. This is your 'template' for new brush sets. Each time you want to make a set load the 'new' brush set. Once you've made your brushes, delete the placeholder and save remembering to rename the set.

MAKING THE BASIC BRUSHES:
* Select each flower with the square marquee tool and turn into a brush (you may need to resize down) (Edit/Define Brush)
* Save your new brush set naming it something unique like 'MarysFlowers1'

Here is a basic brush set of flowers I made using this method. It has come in handy time and time again for my projects. Don't let their simplicity fool you. You can make extremely complex brushes with just a basic set like this.

Article and image Copyright Mina Keenan