Full tutorial: Borders and textures using brush dynamics
This is my first post, and I'm starting with a rather epic tutorial! This is for Photoshop 7 about the use of dual brushes (and other brush effects), something you don't see very often, but that can give great results and help you create borders and texture effects like these:
Cross-posted to my icon journal,
not_a_painter
Firstly, I am going to show you how to make the most of your brushes by using the leaf brush as it's one of my faves, and is standard with PS7.
This is the colour and usual outcome of using the standard 74px leaf tool:
People tend to avoid this brush as it's pretty huge and difficult to control, especially for 100x100 icons. However, by playing with the brush setting in the top right-hand corner of your screen, it's easy to make it do whatever you want.
First of all, let's show you the basics of the leaf brush. Select it from the brushes menu:
Then click on the tab that says "Brushes". This is where you'll spend most of your time during this tutorial!
You'll see this:
As you can see, several boxes are ticked up the left hand side. First thing you do is untick all those boxes:
That takes you down to the basic brush and gives you this effect:
So if all you want to do is use that brush, you can now do so quite simply. However, let's now add some effects that make it a little more interesting.
I like to start with a simple rounded brush, and I like the wet sponge look, so selected the following:
Now click on "Dual Brushes" on the Brushes drop-down, and choose your second brush. This will combine the effects of two brushes:
Here you can see I've circled where "Dual Brushes" is, and also circled the preset effects of the wet-sponge brush ("Wet Edges"), so that you can see what effects already exist on that brush. By choosing the leaf brush on the drop-down menu as shown, you get the following effect:
Already a bit more interesting. Now it's simply a case of playing with the settings to get the look you want:
By dragging the "Scatter" tab, you can space out the leaves more like so:
And by increasing the "Count" make an even more stylised effect:
You can also click off the "Wet edges" effect:
And increase the scatter to create a different look:
Now you can play with the size of the leaf, to stylise the look a little more:
Have a play with these settings, experimenting with different combinations of brush, to see what you like. Some other combinations of brush are below - including some of my own brushes, but it illustrates how a simple-shaped brush can be enhanced by the dual brush option:
Then you might like to play with the colour settings of the brush to give it some variation. Click on "Colour Dynamics" as below:
And play with the Hue/Saturation etc. settings:
Which will give you a variety of effects:
If you do it more extremely, you can get really different effects. This effect below is on a single brush, and then on the scattered example below that it's on a dual brush. There the primary shape is the flower and the second brush is a very soft edged one, giving it that faded-out look. I've also played with shape dynamics to give the flowers that tilted look:
Next you can experiment with Scattering and shape dynamics, although this has more impact if you're using a brush other than the simple round sponge I selected (for instance, when used on the flower shape above).
As you can see, by playing with the "Scatter" brush, you can stop the edges clipping (although I quite like the clipped effect!)
And if you take off the "wet edges" settings again:
Now, to apply this to 100x100, the first thing I would do would be to shrink the leaf size right down and play with the scattering, making sure it's not too crazy:
Then simply drag it along the edge of your 100x100px canvas and decorate it as you wish. I decided on the following:
This technique is pretty much limitless. If you create your own brushes, you can make as many combinations as you want. By using the following setting of brush:
Set to a smaller size, as you can see. And then selecting the grass brush in the brush effects drop-down:
And playing with the settings, you can make a border like this:
By layering a couple of different effects on top of this, you can get a really funky textured look:
I sometimes use these as borders and sometimes I use them as a very pale/dark colour and set the layer to overlay, so that you do get the benefit of the contrasting textures. It's just a bit more interesting than using the standard brushes to do so.
Hope this has been helpful - it's really the sort of thing that's massively simple but that most people don't really experiment with - and yet for all its simplicity, it gives really complex-looking effects.
I've made some borders/textures using this:
ETA 2 - Let's try this again. To download the .abr click here. To download the .zip click here. YouSendIt is the only way I can do this that (hopefully!) works, so sorry about the limited download thing.
If you take them, please creditnot_a_painter and if you want you can check out this post for some examples on how to use the borders. All the icons there feature them.
Hope you enjoyed!
Cross-posted to my icon journal,
not_a_painterFirstly, I am going to show you how to make the most of your brushes by using the leaf brush as it's one of my faves, and is standard with PS7.
This is the colour and usual outcome of using the standard 74px leaf tool:
People tend to avoid this brush as it's pretty huge and difficult to control, especially for 100x100 icons. However, by playing with the brush setting in the top right-hand corner of your screen, it's easy to make it do whatever you want.
First of all, let's show you the basics of the leaf brush. Select it from the brushes menu:
Then click on the tab that says "Brushes". This is where you'll spend most of your time during this tutorial!
You'll see this:
As you can see, several boxes are ticked up the left hand side. First thing you do is untick all those boxes:
That takes you down to the basic brush and gives you this effect:
So if all you want to do is use that brush, you can now do so quite simply. However, let's now add some effects that make it a little more interesting.
I like to start with a simple rounded brush, and I like the wet sponge look, so selected the following:
Now click on "Dual Brushes" on the Brushes drop-down, and choose your second brush. This will combine the effects of two brushes:
Here you can see I've circled where "Dual Brushes" is, and also circled the preset effects of the wet-sponge brush ("Wet Edges"), so that you can see what effects already exist on that brush. By choosing the leaf brush on the drop-down menu as shown, you get the following effect:
Already a bit more interesting. Now it's simply a case of playing with the settings to get the look you want:
By dragging the "Scatter" tab, you can space out the leaves more like so:
And by increasing the "Count" make an even more stylised effect:
You can also click off the "Wet edges" effect:
And increase the scatter to create a different look:
Now you can play with the size of the leaf, to stylise the look a little more:
Have a play with these settings, experimenting with different combinations of brush, to see what you like. Some other combinations of brush are below - including some of my own brushes, but it illustrates how a simple-shaped brush can be enhanced by the dual brush option:
Then you might like to play with the colour settings of the brush to give it some variation. Click on "Colour Dynamics" as below:
And play with the Hue/Saturation etc. settings:
Which will give you a variety of effects:
If you do it more extremely, you can get really different effects. This effect below is on a single brush, and then on the scattered example below that it's on a dual brush. There the primary shape is the flower and the second brush is a very soft edged one, giving it that faded-out look. I've also played with shape dynamics to give the flowers that tilted look:
Next you can experiment with Scattering and shape dynamics, although this has more impact if you're using a brush other than the simple round sponge I selected (for instance, when used on the flower shape above).
As you can see, by playing with the "Scatter" brush, you can stop the edges clipping (although I quite like the clipped effect!)
And if you take off the "wet edges" settings again:
Now, to apply this to 100x100, the first thing I would do would be to shrink the leaf size right down and play with the scattering, making sure it's not too crazy:
Then simply drag it along the edge of your 100x100px canvas and decorate it as you wish. I decided on the following:
This technique is pretty much limitless. If you create your own brushes, you can make as many combinations as you want. By using the following setting of brush:
Set to a smaller size, as you can see. And then selecting the grass brush in the brush effects drop-down:
And playing with the settings, you can make a border like this:
By layering a couple of different effects on top of this, you can get a really funky textured look:
I sometimes use these as borders and sometimes I use them as a very pale/dark colour and set the layer to overlay, so that you do get the benefit of the contrasting textures. It's just a bit more interesting than using the standard brushes to do so.
Hope this has been helpful - it's really the sort of thing that's massively simple but that most people don't really experiment with - and yet for all its simplicity, it gives really complex-looking effects.
I've made some borders/textures using this:
ETA 2 - Let's try this again. To download the .abr click here. To download the .zip click here. YouSendIt is the only way I can do this that (hopefully!) works, so sorry about the limited download thing.
If you take them, please credit
not_a_painter and if you want you can check out this post for some examples on how to use the borders. All the icons there feature them.Hope you enjoyed!