Tutorial Creating Custom Photoshop Brushes

We have released a few free brushes over at Insight Designs Online Shop and have had a great response to all our commercial brush packs, we also had a few questions on how they are “made”.  It’s super easy and a great time saver later on.

Open up a new file, any size depending on the image and which photoshop you have…bigger is usually better you can always re size later.

Hint: You can use a colour image to define a brush but sometimes it easier to convert to greyscale.

I recently needed a stitch like brush for some fabric textures I was working on so I drew a straight line (holding down shift so the line is straight)

Rotate the line (Edit_Transform_Rotate)

Go to Edit – Define Brush Preset – name and save your new brush.

Tip: When defining a brush Photoshop automatically converts the selection to gray scale. White pixels will become transparent which means you don’t have to erase the white background.  (In my image above I have hidden the background image but it’s not necessary) Black pixels will be opaque, and everything in between will be see-through black/gray.

When you have saved your brush it will appear in the brush palette.  Below is the first image used as a brush (again holding down shift to create a straight row of lines).  The second brush was created from the first (duplicated and slightly offset).

I now have the basis for creating tartan patterns using a combination of these two brushes, a few different layer styles, colours…..

and from the plain to the warm and cosy tartan blankets.

The Tartan Winter Highland Fling Textures are available at Insight Designs Shop.