Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Defining a New Brush

For some seriously creative fun, try making your own brushes. You can make them out of anything—a stroke that you’ve drawn with another brush, your logo, even an image that you’ve scanned into your computer to use as texture (like a leaf). Some folks call brushes that you create yourself sampled brushes because you sample part of a pattern, object, or image to create them; in other words, you have to create a selection of the pattern, object, or image you want to base the brush on.

The first step is to create the paint dab—a dab of paint that will form the shape of the new custom brush tip (see Figure 12-30, left). You can create a paint dab in a variety of ways, which range from quick to incredibly involved. The basic premise is to create a 300 x 300–pixel document and then use a variety of brushes at various opacity settings to create the dab. You can even add texture to it—the more irregular and messy the dab, the more interesting your brush will be. To turn the dab into a brush that you can use to apply color, you have to create it using black and gray paint at 100 percent opacity (that’s the Options bar’s opacity setting). When you paint with the brush later, the 100 percent black areas will create opaque color and the gray areas will be semitransparent.

Figure 12-30. Left: You can create this paint dab by starting with one of the small, soft-edged brush presets. ...