WELCOME BACK TO THE PIXELLIMETER PIXELNINJA ACADEMY. 

THIS...IS.....VIDEO NO. 3: BRUSHING UP ON THINGS or rather...BRUSHING UP...ON THINGS.

So this video is going to be a short intro to brushes, and how to use them. I'm not covering the details of a Wacom tablet or anything in this video, since this is a beginner course, but I do talk about that in a later video.

For those of you that don't know, a Wacom or graphics tablet is a device used as a mapping surface in conjunction with a graphics pen, to paint or draw digitally. Wacom is the most popular brand.

But for this tutorial I'll show you how to use brushes with a mouse to do a simple painting.

Ok, first thing's first. Let's bring up the two Brush windows in Photoshop. Do do this we'll go to Window > Brushes and then Window > Brush Settings.

Now, if your panel looks like this...

***COLLAPSE PANEL AND RESIZE***

just click these double arrow here, or you can drag the panel out, or you can just tear it out, however you want to view it.

you can also view the brushes in different ways in the panel. for example, if you want to see the thumbnail image of the brush, the type of brush stroke, and the name of the brush, you'd click the hamburger icon in the top right here and make sure all of these are checked.

i like to do it where i just see the thumbnail image, but you can set yours to however you'd like.

so let's select a brush

***SELECT SOFT ROUND BRUSH***

and we'll go back to Brush Settings

and let's take a look at the general settings of the brush here.

we have the size, making the brush bigger or smaller. the shortcut for that is left bracket key and right bracket key on your keyboard. we have flip on the x position and flip on the y position, which won't matter here, because it's a round brush.

we have angle, wihch changes the angle. you can click amd drag over the word of the property to scrub the values , scrubbing to left decreases the value and scrubbing to the right increases the value.

Now here's where it gets interesting. For more advanced brush settings, you'll see those in two places.

The first place you'll see advanced brush settings is the Brush Settings panel and the second is the bar at the top. This is called the tool options bar. It changes depending on what tool you're on. We're exploring the brush tool, so it's got some interesting options regarding brushes. We'll get to those in a minute.

Let's take a quick peek at our Brush Settings tab.

***GO THROUGH SHAPE DYNAMICS***

***GO THROUGH SCATTERING***

***GO THROUGH TEXTURE***

The second place you'll see advanced brush settings is here at the top, opacity, and flow. Opacity affects the transparency of the brush stroke. You can adjust the opacity by using this slider, OR pressing the number keys on your keyboard. Pressing 1 on your keyboard makes it 10% opacity. Pressing 5 on your keyboard is 50%, and pressing 0 on your keyboard makes it 100%.

So let's take a look at flow. Adjusting flow changes the intensity of brush's battle rap skills. This is different than the brush's hustle intensity. Just kidding, pixel ninjas, Photoshop brushes don't have battle rap skills or hustle. They do have flow though. So, think of flow like chaniging how much paint gets loaded onto the brush. 

If the flow is turned down, it'll give you a little bit of paint at a time, but it also has a  "build up" effect. but here's the thing: the build up effect is capped by the opacity setting to the left of it.

So the opacity is the limit of the flow.

Alright great! So now we've got down some basic brush settings, and the two places for advanced brush settings, which are the brush settings tab and the tool options bar here at the top.

So really, you can spend a ridiculous amount of time making your own custom brushes. And that can be fun.

But uh...personally I don't have time for that. So what I do is I search around websites like gumroad, and check out painters that I think are great, and see if they have their own custom brushes for free.

For example, check this stuff out by Jeremy Fenske.

***GO TO GUMROAD JEREMY FENSKE PAGE***

So obviously, this guy is really good, and he has a free brush set. So, you clicky here, and follow the instructions, and you'll get a zip file. Unzip it, and you'll see the .abr file. And all you do is double click on the file, and it will automatically load up in Photoshop.

So here's how I like to use brushes. I'll set the Opacity to 80% and Flow to 10%. This will be a small piece since this is a beginning course, but you'll soon get the idea of how you can make your own paintings.

I graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, so I'll give you a crash course in how to paint despite the fact that my fine arts colleagues will stone me for saying this, but the crash course is this:
painting is a buildup process. Ya just build paint on top of paint, and just make it look as cool as you can. Sure, there are learning curves for things like perspective, and color theory, and proportion, and composition, but this is a crash course.

So, first thing's first. We need some color. And what I like to do, because good artists borrow, and great artists steal, I like to create palettes out of paintings that I like.

So for example, I'll search around for one of my favorite painters, let's say Ken Auster, and check out his paintings and make note of the titles of the ones I like. So here, we have Ken Auster's  Been There Done That, here we have Ken Auster's Swarming.

So we'll pull these into Photoshop. And we'll make quick palettes out of them. So at the top, go to Image > Indexed Color. Then, go back to Image > Color Table. Now you'll see the palette, but then what I do is I take a screenshot. I'll hit the Print Screen button on the keyboard or, if you're on a Mac, Command ? + Shift + 3, and this will load an image of the screen into the computer's memory. You don't see it yet, but it's floating around in the computer memory. So cancel the Color palette window, and then go to File > New, hit OK, and then Edit > Paste. This pastes the image of the screen that was floating around. Now, choose the crop tool from your toolbar, and click and drag a rectangle around the color palette, and now we have colors that we can choose from.

Now, I also like the colors from the other painting, so we'll do the same thing here.

***EXPLAIN PROCESS AGAIN***

Ok niiiiize, now we have some decent colors to pull from. 

Let's start with some sky colors, keeping in mind that painting is a build-up process.

***PAINT***

AND THERE WE HAVE IT!

WE HAVE A LITTLE PAINTING!

I HOPE THIS TUTORIAL VIDEO HELPED YOU LEARN THE BASICS OF BRUSHES IN PHOTOSHOP.

 IF YOU WANT TO SAVE YOUR PAINTING, YOU'LL GO TO FILE > SAVE AS






if you have time:
03_Brushing_Up_On_Things VIDEO:

http://pixellimeter.media/PIXELNINJA_CLASS/VIDEOS/03_BRUSHING_UP_ON_THINGS/03_Brushing_Up_On_Things_opt.mp4