Lessons

Lesson Info

The Brush Panel Part 1

I'm gonna go to the window menu and under the window menu we have two panels, we have the brush panel in the brush presets panel, so let's, go take a look at the brush panel when I open the brush panel. This is what we get, and on the left side is a long list of settings that you could have, and if you notice with this long list, some of these settings have little, ah horizontal lines, uh, dividing that setting from what's below it and others don't you see that subtle cue there, and what that means is these settings down at the bottom that don't have the horizontal line between them are just simple settings there, just check boxes and that's it. You're seeing all of what's involved with those settings right here, the ones up here that have the horizontal lines in between them are categories of settings where don't usually just turn on the checkbox. Instead, you click on the name in the area on the right completely changes to show you what's involved with that setting. So your train on ...

an entire category of settings and these are those settings you're turning on so good out here to texture is not just a simple check box it's an entire panel full of sightings that you're turning on. Whereas thes down here, they don't have anything beyond the checkbox for their settings. Does that make sense? Is for us the difference? So down here, it's, fine it just turn on the check boxes, but if you turn these guys on up here usually don't turn on the check box. I just click on the name, and in doing so, it turns on the check box, and it shows me the settings if, on the other hand, all I did was turn on the check box and turn it on, but I wouldn't be looking at those settings, so let's, start off with brush tip, shape, brush, tip shape up here, the top we have some preset shapes we can use, click around on them and it's a couple different kinds were goingto start off with some basic ones. These ones here are bristle brushes and just special ones that will get into after we've covered the basics, but we'll cover these top ones, and then we might get down into these funny shaped ones to assume up so it's a little easier to see here on at the bottom with a preview of what it might look like when you paint with it, so size is the same setting that you've been adjusting when you use the bracket keys or the heads up. Brush picker that kind of stuff same thing with hardness but then there's a couple other settings in here I'm going to choose a hard edge brush just to make it easier to see and we have down here spacing the way of brushes really work is not like a normal pen or brush use in the real world instead all you have is a shape which is what you're seeing up here in your in your preset here which was round and then there's a spacing value and all it's doing is plopping down that shape moving over a certain distance and plopping down another just repeating that process in spacing determines how far does it move between one application of the brush on the next if I bring it up watch the previous the bottom you see it's starting to look not quite a smooth bringing up high enough you'll start seeing what it's really doing it's just taking the shape your brush and putting one down moving over a certain distance and putting another one down you just hope that that spacing is low enough that it looks like a continuous stroke so usually the default is twenty five which is fine for small brushes so when you paint with a small brush it just looks like a continuous brush stroke when I paint but if you get a big enough brush here's a thousand pixel brush can you tell on the edge of that thing that it looks like a serial little humps on the edge and that's because it's really just a circle being repeated over and over the spacing setting tells you how much space there is between them and when you're not a really small brush size you don't notice that the edge looks weird s o if you get a big brush whatever doesn't look right you might need to lower your spacing uh the reason why they don't have a spacing down at one to begin with is it was slowed down your computer it has put down so many of those things because it means move over one percent of the width of my brush before you put down another uh application of it that's a lot of times to put it down compared to twenty five percent which means move over twenty five percent of the width of my brush before you put another one down that's much easier for your computer todo so if you ever work with a large um brush you might need to turn on your spacing to keep it smooth over the years every time about a macintosh that's how I would test the speed at the max to ah a thousand pixel brush over the years and yeah you can you can watch it so that's a great tip yeah but quick question on these faster computers nowadays could you smaller brushes could you keep it pretty well, on a smaller brush is not gonna really matter. You're going to see that the edges it's only on a big brush where it's going to be an issue so I would more ask on a big brush. Can I get away with lower setting in? It really depends, because there are so many other settings and our brushes, more settings we turn on, the more computation there is and slower things would get so you just got to test it in the spacing once we get into fancy brushes is going to be a little bit of our throttle control where when they become overly slow, where when you paint, you have to wait for it to catch up, spacing is what you're going to need to up to make it so that has to less work. And so it's nice to know what it does. So once we get on to the advanced brushes, you'll know hey, up the spacing is going to put down fewer, uh, things that it's going to speed it up? Yeah, roundness all that issue wantto a round brush or do you want one that is an oval? Uh, it's? Just a story in the shape your brush perfectly round oval and only if you have a brush that's not round, you have an angle uh, do you want it to be at a you know, horizontal brush? You wanted a vertical brush? Uh, that kind of stuff, but that's setting is only really applicable if your rush is not round. Uh, so anyway that's how we got here these air pretty darned simple. So let's move on to other things I'm going to actually come in here and choose one of these other brushes there's to general kind of brushes I want to talk about now one is thies, little round ones and the others are the ones that are found down here. These are made out of pixels. We could make our own pixel brushes. All we would need to do to create one of these brushes like this one that's shaped like a leaf is open. A document that contains a leaf that's black on a white background. And if you go to the edit menu there's a choice called defined brush and if you did that with an image of a black leaf on a white background, you would see it within this list. So these are just ones where people have even painted these shapes and then define them as a brush or they opened a picture of whatever this looked like and they define it as a brush. So you remember the gear we made the other day well if we had that as a black year on a white background I could go to the edit menu choose to find brush and I would have a brush shaped like a gear uh so let's pick one of those I'm gonna switch through here and picked the one that looks like ah blade of grass you see the one you got right there there's also one that looks like three blades put together we can use either one I'll use the one with three blades if you don't see it just scroll through your list you should be able to get to it and now let's see how we can push this a bit beyond I'm not going to work on this image any more I'm just going to go for a simple empty document so it's easier to see what's going on and in this list of controls let's go down to a setting that is called uh scattering I'm just going to click on the name scattering it's going to show me the list and let's see what we can do if I bring up scattering look at the previous bottom now it says instead of just putting down a brush tip moving over a certain distance and putting on another in the direction that it it moves is based on where my mouse goes instead just kind of randomly scattered them around and so that way when I paint instead of getting just a very organized thing it's goingto move around if I had a normal round brush this would look like a bunch of circles that are randomly placed but I would probably need to bring up my spacing in order to see it with a circular brush. Okay, so let's see if we can do anymore with that there's a check box here called both axes if that's turned off, it only moves up and down not left and right if I turn on both then it moves both up and down and left and right so it's a little more random countess. How many of them it's going to put down? If you bring this up it can kind of put in more than you asked for going to think, but we'll leave that down and count jitter anytime you see the word jeter it means randomize this so that instead of being consistent it would vary it eso let's work on something else we got our scattering up now let's come in here and do shape dynamics and just going to click on the words shape dynamics and see what we got well, we have size jitter anytime you see the word dinner it means very the setting randomly so that means the size of my brush would change randomly so let's bring up size jeter watch the preview of the bottom and can you tell us some of them are a little bigger? Some of them are smaller than each other related to size. Jitter is a choice called minimum diameter, and that means if it can randomly change the size of my brush what's the smallest that can make it can't make it one pixel in size or not. And so if that was turned all the way down, it would have seen a more dramatic change when I was moving this because it could go all the way, varying it from zero to whatever size I've asked my brush to be so minimum is just what's the smallest dick and bring it down to sew with grass looking stuff I might want to limit that a bit to get keep the grass so it's just varying a bit from seventy from sixty nine percent to whatever I've asked for. Um, so we have that now we have an angle jitter, and that means it's going to randomly change the angle of this. So instead of having grass it's perfectly straight up and down it's going to be rotating it, so if I bring up angle geter, can you see it starting to rotate them? If I bring it up too far, though it's gonna start put him upside down and it's going to look like something other than grass, right? So I'm going to keep this looking more like grass, so I'm gonna bring it up just enough where it doesn't feel like the things we're going sideways instead it feels like they could be still grounded in the earth. There is also something called rounded nous jitter and that is going to scale our brush like squish it in one direction imagine in a circle and you made it an oval you're kind of squishing it well, just think of a picture that you squish in the same way and so that could make it so the width and height of the brush might vary a bit just so they don't all look the same, and with that we have a minimum roundness meaning how much can it squish things? I brought it way down, it could squish them a lot there's all sorts of settings like this you don't have to remember or document every single one instead it's maur important that you understand the overall concept and that is that anything with the word jeter attached means vary this set in setting randomly so how much do I want to bury it right? And so then it's more important to think what its size me it's a bigger brushes what is angle mean that's how much it rotates it right? What does roundness mean it's how much you khun squish the brush you know distorted shape and if you remember what those particular words mean then you don't have to have every single one of these settings documented or in your head you just need to know the general concepts there's also an area where you gonna find with a lot of these sightings a little poppet menu called control you see that in here a lot of these have this little poppet menu called control well that means instead of randomly varying this particular setting why don't we be able to somehow finally control it? And so let's say I turned down my size jitter instead of randomly changing it let's control the size somehow if I choose fade what that means is just slowly lower the setting have the brush fade out or in this case it would mean make the brush slowly get smaller as I paint because it's the setting I'm working with is called size but fade would mean make it fade out in this tells me how far through my brush would it take before it gets the lowest setting the higher the number I put in here the longer I'd have to paint and paint and paint until it gets down to the lowest setting lower this number I put in here the quicker it would get down to that size uh pen pressure means if I have a graphics tablet and I pressed down on that it would control the size of my brush but I could just as easily make it control the angle because down here we have the choice of pen pressure for angle it's under angle or the roundness I could make it so my pen pressure the harder I push the more it squishes my brush you know that kind of stuff so fade means just make it fade out well to this pen pressure is the amount of push down with the pen pen tilt is the angle of the pen is my pushiness is the pen straight up and down or is that a forty five degree angle to the tablet and then stylists wheel khun b like if you have the airbrush style you get different kind of pens for a graphics tablet and one of them has an airbrush shape and it's got a little uh thing on it you can move and that would mean that would control that so for most of these I'm going to leave them set toe off so that instead we're just randomly varying things were not controlling it with our tablet but that's what control means it's just we want to somehow manually or finally control this setting instead of randomly changing it and so any time you see that little control pop up menu we could do that, so I'm gonna come back to some of these and a few of these I played with last night and got changed to something other than off eso let's see what else we can do first let's see what our brushes looking like looking pretty cool so I'm going to choose green to pay with his green would be relatively appropriate for grass will choose undo a few times here um I just clicked on my foreground color going old school and pick and a green and we pain now the problem I have with our our painting is it's all the same color and grass isn't usually all the same color, right? So I'll choose on do to get rid of that and I'm going to come in here and see if we can get that to change. If you look at the list of settings for our brushes, do you see a choice called color dynamics? Well, let's click on it and we got some stuff in here foreground background jitter that means should we vary this between what my foreground color is set to and what my background color said too? So I already picked one color to paint with that green I'm gonna pop that into my background color by pressing the letter ex to exchange the colors and I'm going to choose a different green for my foreground color in this time when I choose a different green, I'll use our heads up display to be more high tech I'm going to choose a little more of a green in here and pick a a lighter, more vivid green so can you see my two little greens lower left that's what we're going to be jittering between so I have foreground background jenner unfortunately, the preview at the bottom can't reflect the color so it is not going to tell you but when it's turned all the way down we just get my foreground color she's undo if I bring this up it's going to start to vary it I just brought it up to about twenty percent you see a little bit of variation, but if I bring this up all the way now it's going to be able to vary all the way between those two colors and get everything in between them it's kind of cool think that's gonna make my grass look much better but there's more we have a huge inter hugh means basic color and this just means can I very can I go away from that green you have that you're painting with? If I brought this all the way up, then we get all sorts of colors, purples, everything, anything in the color wheel we get the basic color, but if I just bring it up a little bit it means, you know, stay close to your greens, but go a little bit towards red and blue and yellow and everything else just a little ways. So if I bring it up, maybe to about twenty now my greens won't be anywhere near is consistent because not just going between my foreground and background and the colors that would be directly in between, its varying a bit towards the purples and the oranges and everything else just not going to not strain too far. That makes sense for round back, crunchier, huge iter now we have saturation jitter, which just means, should we? Very how colorful my brushes or should we leave it what you asked for? So if I bring this way up to hundred percent, we might get some black and white brushes from grey brushes in there, along with our colored ones, because it can vary the saturation all the way up from one hundred to zero. I probably want to tell it may be very it twenty percent. So it's just going to be a little more colorful, little less colorful in certain brushes. We had brightness, jeter so you don't have to remember every single one of these, you just gotta look at the name of the thing, right, and you have to know the word human's, basic color the word saturation means how colorful the word brightness you already known so bright it isthe so if I brought that all the way up, we're going to get radically different brightness is but if I only bring it up a little it'll no hey it's okay to change it a little bit now we're getting quite the variation in our grass aren't we then finally there's purity and I'm actually not that used to purity it's not something I worked with that much, but I think if I bring purity up quite a bit we're going to end up getting much more saturated colors, more pure colors and if I bring it down with my kit the opposite of that but it's purity is not a standing I used that much, but you see how these are a little more gray scale it means chill him out and more pure colors are usually more saturated in in the middle is where you mean no change so uh interesting so I think we pretty much you're getting a grass like brush shortly so that's pretty cool so since we spend all this time creating our grass like brush ah, when we save it as a preset that way we can use in the future so I'm gonna come down here just goto brush presets and at the bottom brush he senses usually grouped in with your brushes tabs if it's not for some reason if it's not on your screen, you could go to the window menu, choose brush presets but at the bottom there's just icon just like the icon for creating a new layer or anything else looks like a sheet of paper with the corner turned down click on that grass green grass although it's not going to pick up green because when you save a brush preset, it doesn't usually save in your the foreground background colors instead it's going to pick up whatever you had you know at the time you use that brush if we want teo capture my foreground and background colors and other things, we would want to use something other than just a simple brush preset. We could usually use a tool preset because your tools I think, might be able to capture the color that's there, that kind of thing but at least we got the the general shape and that it'll vary in color. We just have to remember that we want green grass and choose those colors. Can I jump in with questions? Thanks, d'oh images by b k create a brush for their watermark yeah, and it placed it of course, as you just did in place at the end of all the brushes is there a way to move that up to the top? Sure uh if you go to the edit menu, there is a choice called it'll take me a second, find it presets and then you have the preset manager. Yes, and one of the choices is the brushes you have to click on this toe say, go manage my brushes and I think although I'm not absolutely certain you don't do this very often, you can click on whichever brush you made and you can say I like doing grass along moving at top uh that's everything and just get it done when you're done and that I let you do it if you want to delete a bunch of omer anything else like that, the preset manager will do it. I found that under the edit menu and it was just called presets and then present manager ben can ask another quick question. Simcox from loveland, colorado, asked with the paintbrush controls, opacity and flow could I set them to allow a maximum capacity of, say, fifty percent that is built up gradually with a lightweight flow? Yeah, in fact, that's how it works in general is flo and opacity work together where the way I think about it is if you have adjusted both flow and opacity, then the way I think of let's say I had it like this opacity is saying, what is the maximum I want without releasing the mouse button flow is saying how much of that maximum? What do I want when I first paint? So I'm saying, give me a maximum of fifty percent capacity? I can't, no matter what can't get beyond that without releasing the mouse button. That's what opacity of saying flow is then saying of that maximum on requesting how much of it do I want when I first start putting down the pain, so in this case I would get twenty percent of the fifty, and I'd be able to paint back and forth back and forth, back and forth it would build up, build up, build up, but it would never go above fifty until I let go of the mouse. Once they click again, it has no idea what the picture looks like, and it just says, okay, let's, do this again. We're going to get a maximum of fifty percent where you could see through my brush fifty percent of the way, but we're only gonna start off giving you twenty percent of what you asked for, ok, so that's, how those to kind of work in concert?