B For Brush Tool (Part 2)

Llast post I told you about some of the options you might find useful using the brush tool and today we will continue by talking a little bit about Scattering and Shape Dynamics among other options and we will learn how to create a brush

Lets start by pressing B on the keyboard to select the brush tool then open the Brushes palette by clicking on the icon indicated in the image below

When the Brushes palette opens you’ll see a list of different options you can use to further customize the behavior of your brushes , my two favorites are Scattering and Shape Dynamics

1-Scattering allows you to control and set the scattering of your brush using a number of options like Scatter , Scatter count and count jitter

2- Shape Dynamics allows you to control pen pressure for the brush tip and the rotation using Angle jitter among other options as well

3- Other Options include settings for Color Dynamics Texture, air Brush and other options as well, Mess around with the options and fiddle with the setting , experiment a little and you’ll find that a few tweaks can make you use brushes more efficiently

CREATING BRUSHES

We’ll start with something simple just to give you an idea , lets start by opening a new document , press Ctrl+N on your keyboard to open a new document 5x5 pixels with transparent background as shown below

Now zoom in till you can clearly see a square with 25 squares , it will be easier for us to draw now , select the pencil tool by clicking and holding the brush tool in the tools menu

Now using the pencil tool draw two lines passing through the centre (One horizontal and one vertical) to form a cross, make sure the size of tip if the pencil is only 1 px (Most of what applies to the brush applies to the pencil as well)

Now to create a brush from the shape we drew, Go Edit > Define Brush Preset , in the new window that pops up you can change the name of your brush , of course you’ll notice that the size of the brush is shown as 5px , this is because we chose the size of our document as 5 x 5 px …. Rename your brush “cross” and press OK

You have just created your first brush now lets go find it and use it , open a new document of any size , say 100 x 100 px and choose the Brush tool and then change the brush tape to the brush you just created , if you are finding it hard to find , switch to text only view and look for it by name , mess with it a bit , play with scattering options and shape dynamics

Photoshop is an exciting program that always has a new thing to teach you so you should always experiment and be curious , I hope this post was as helpful as I hoped it to be and I will be continuing this series next week as we see what the letter C on your keyboard does in Photoshop!!

One final note is something I have learned writing this post is that B selects any of the tools you have selected in the brush option and that includes wither of the pencil tool , the Brush tool or the color replacement tool , whatever you selected last will be selected again when you press B