Lessons

Lesson Info

Jack's Brushes & Brush Strokes

So, as an example, let's, go over here, we've got the mixer brush, I've given you these brushes as part of the free downloads for everybody a, b, c and d oil, brush one oil detail one oil blender, one solid color one so we'll go ahead and click on the oil brush one, which has the parameters that I have set up that I like is a basic one. We just go ahead and give you a little bit more where these are and what they're going to dio general oil, brush blocking in detail, it's, the one I would use first, too, to do your rough painting under painting or whatever. This one has got some more details associated in that terms it's set up to maintain finer detail. The blender brush actually is going to turn on that option of youse all layers that's what we're going to do with the tail end of our painting, and again, I'll explain this when we get to the actual painting process, but at some point in this case, we're actually gonna be doing paint on different layers give us the most control, and als...

o for another reason that you'll find out one of those secret mickey mouse club handshake reasons, but the blender is going to allow you to take all those different layers and blend them together and really sell the effect so until we get to our stage that has blending in it we really won't have a real painting but that one is a nice brush soft brush in terms of stiffness and it has sample all layers turned on this last one oil solid color is not going to be amusing colors inherent in the file either uh in terms of mixing the photograph or mixing with painters with colors below it's not going to pick up any color from the actual painting in other words, this is where you're going to say I don't care that they apple has no white speculum highlight on it I want to take a glob of white paint and go and that's what this is brush is for you get to override everything has got nothing to do with cloning she wanted just a paint from scratch you could pick up the solid color brush and it's just a good old natural media brush all of these brushes have my canvas texture is built into them and that way when they skip across the surface there are all going to have cool groovy texture associated with them they're all associated with oil painting as opposed teo watercolor paper or something else like that okay, so we're going now that we've selected that brush we're going to see my brush parameters for that particular brush and because this brush is only a I'm cloning brush let's go ahead and we will make this layer transparent and we gonna change one option on it and looking up here at our options bar we haven't gone through the roof the rest of these things here, but just to show you how these brushes work in operation, if I sample all layers up here now, it's going to and this is the the brush is meant to pick up some color I'm gonna come up here and I'm actually mushing colors from the original photograph in a second, I'll turn off the photograph, but that's why most people when they teach howto use the mixer brush are doing this, they come up here and you do the brush strokes, but you have to look at the photograph because that's, what you're doing, you're mushing the photograph so by mushing the photograph you have to see if you came up here and turned off photograph and started a paint, nothing happens, okay, but that's not how mine work, but this case I'm doing this here and now I can work on I can actually smudge something that's already here because I've got the sample all layers so you can see what the brush is doing in terms of how it is splaying and having their regular edge it's got the texture built into it, my canvas texture so you've got that turned on um we've gotta smoothing on remember the smoothing is actually because this is a vector brush smoothing can help with that you know, getting a slightly less pixelated ej im going on in here and um the transfer in terms of the jitter going on in here I don't not using any jitter there's so much irregularity built into the fact that this is a true simulation of each bristle is separate so by definition especially with a welcome stylist where your pressure is changing you know literally you've got a thousands of points of pressure in this pen um that's one of the great things about this versus eh mouse or the old brushes is that we had to put in the irregularity by things like the dual brush tip in a lots of ginger now it's built into it because by definition if I do a brush drove this way and then I do it again there's going to be slight variations on it by just because of pen pressure that will change the bristles that will change the footprint okay, but back actually to the shape dynamics while we're here I mean brush tip shape you'll notice that spacing is still an option as we talked about yesterday and so even though that this is a true three d as we're looking up here in our little three d simulation of it um true three d brush what happens is when that hits the paper it makes a footprint and then that's what it's dragging along so it's still using the concept of of spacing so if I take this out there is the footprint that it's making okay and it's by taking that spacing down is what simulates a consistent one brush stroke so it's still the same concept we don't have it where you actually have a real brushstroke in real time every bristle going on here um there's all sorts of reasons toe not quite be there yet kind of technology but as we mentioned yesterday this is where the importance of spacing comes in because at one even though that's going to give you the smoothest brush tip impossible in terms of um not seeing skipping going on it's also going to be the most copies computational e intensive and because of that that's going to be slower and less responsive and when we get into big brushes and big paintings on high resolution responsiveness isn't is an issue especially when we have sample all layers turned on so how far you can take that up before it starts looking fake would come up here now it's skipping okay no matter what I do it's not going to do a consistent brushstroke we can go over it a ton but that's obviously a sixty four that's going to be too much this brush defaults to four and even though like I said you may be tempted to do one because it will be the smoothest four percent is four times faster than one percent. You know, almost is going up exponentially just because every time you bring it up, it's it's that much less work for it to do. So I have found for my, uh, techniques that the four works fine. Okay, makes sense, texture again of shape dynamics that angle jitter again, I'm not needing it. We took touched on that yesterday when we talked about bit mapped brushes for things like the pattern stamp tool. Were that angle jitter becomes really important, you'll notice that the dual brush tip option and color dynamics isn't even an option in the mixer brush, because that's being brought in up here in the options bar in our settings there, so that is completely up to those options there. You don't need the dual brush tip in there, and, uh, and I'm not gonna get to those other ones now so we can get into a painting. They go and then these brush presets these air the same brush presets. These are the tips of the brush presets. Um, that you can use you see the tip in the resulting it of it in here I like, rather than making, um, brush presets. Is I like making tool presets that's why when you come up here and you choose the mixer brush you come up here to the upper left you don't come to find my wow brushes underbrush presets let's actually take a second and emphasize that you won't find the wild brushes in brush presets because that is going to, um just give you the brush itself and not give you any of the parameters and without these parameters the brushes almost are useless right? In terms of what they do, they're not useless they could be great, but you'd better understand you're wet and load and things like that so let's actually go through some of those elements right now so again let's go back to, um the tool presets are a brush tip all the parameters for the brush and everything in the options bar associated that where that brush is, what a tool preset is and you make a tool preset by choosing all those parameters choosing the brush tip, choosing all the settings within the brush palette, choosing all your settings in the options bar and then going back to the tool options over here and clicking the dog eared page icon and then you're gonna make it and that will include everything including the color if you like, including everything that is part of the other pal it's okay, so tool presets again, we mentioned this yesterday too presets our mind bogglingly useful not just for your painting tools but every single tool in photo shop if you want to crop tool that always is nondestructive crop eight by ten or it's not eight by ten because you do a quarter inch, you know, but around in trams so yours is eight and a quarter by ten and a quarter nondestructive crop you would set that up in by clicking on the, um, crop tool set the parameters in whatever you want, make sure that don't delete crop pixels or the same putting those parameters and then you would save it as a new crop preset. Okay, so every single tool and photo shop can have all the parameters saved is part of it. There's no reason why you should be setting any parameters for any tools over and over again, especially painting tools. Okay, we got that figured out. Okay, um coming up here to these options bar speaking with the mixer brush on here. Like I said, here is our tool presets in the upper left all the way over in the upper left so you'll always find that for every single tool in photo shop especially the mix of brush here is our brush palette for our tips this right here is the ran out of space I need more room icon that's always there and any time you see this little folder for any one of the tools and photoshopped it says I've got more options at my disposal if you'd like I'll show them to you so that is always going to show you the extended capabilities in this case it's the brush palette this right here is going to be your current brush load we're going to get into what load means but right now I've got the my brush is set up to pick up um color from what's underneath it it's going to it's a mixer brush it's using the color below so let's actually take a jump right over here and explain these two things because it becomes real important okay the wet is the how much of the color from the photograph is going to be picked up we'll use that as an example so the wet here is and we get it even explains do you right here the amount of paint picked up from the canvas your photograph is going to be on the canvas and so this is how much of the photograph your cloning a photograph so you want all of it there's no reason if you happen to have your foreground color is blood red you're not going to start your painting and want I want five percent blood red in there so you're using completely wet for cloning when we get into that brush that is, um, my last brush for painting from scratch solid color it's gonna have zero could care less what's below it. I want to paint with this load is how much of your foreground color and you can't go below zero. So load is your foreground color. Okay, so it's, kind of like the the the foreground color amount of paint that's on the brush to begin with where does it pick it up? It's going to pick it up as a default setting from your foreground color? Take down in the bottom of your of your tool palate. So for cloning again, it's set all the way to the lowest possible setting. Ok, they didn't want to make it so you could have zero, even though theoretically you could for doing cloning you could have on zero, but they'll be made sure that it does something. The mix is the mix between those two and how quickly it transitions between one and the other, so this is almost like a speed. Um, how quickly it's going to mix these two now, in this case that could be at one hundred percent doesn't need to be it would just happen to be at ninety percent could be one hundred percent in other words, I wanted to be one hundred percent of my photograph. Immediately it doesn't gradually, you know, fade from here to here because this would be zero at one percent have I had this at anything less than hundred it's going to, in a sense, run out of paint and it will gradually become in this case hero, you could do that and that's, the reason for this is you can have your paint fade, it runs out of paint. It's also related to another setting called load um, and so that is going to control the mc esther of these two um, since we're dealing with cloning, everything we're talking about is cloning eyes, how that's gonna work if you are smush ing and why a lot of people would possibly spend a lot of time experimenting with this, where what you're working on is taking some color from the foreground and some color from your photograph and mixing those together. You're going to spend more time with this for mei don't care uh, flo, I want that paint teo, I'm not doing an airbrush flow is kind of related to an airport setting where is gonna build up the flow? If I said the flow at anything less than hundred, I'm going to press down, it will not be what I actually am expecting it's, not a brush this full of paint in an airbrush sending flo would be I start it's and I actually do want it to flow or build up over time. So these work in concert with each other, on how quickly you want it to go up to this one hundred percent and whether you wanted to build up and how it's going to build up and there's, a kind of kind of imitate an airbrush. Um, for what we're doing here again, one hundred percent. I put down a paint stroke. I wanted to be a hundred percent. So that's, why these parameters are in here.