Photoshop Brushes - Create Your Own Custom Brushes
Written By Steve Patterson
In this tutorial, we'll learn how easy it is to make our own custom Photoshop brushes! Photoshop ships with lots of great brushes for us to use, but it's way more fun and interesting to create our own, especially after Adobe completely revamped the brush engine in Photoshop 7, adding unprecedented painting ability to what was already the world's most powerful image editor.
Since the types of brushes we can create in Photoshop are limited only by our imagination, we'll design a very simple brush here just to see how quick and easy the whole process is. We'll also take a look at a couple of Photoshop's dynamic brush options in the Brushes panel to see how we can change the behavior of the brush after we create it.
Let's get started!
Step 1: Create A New Photoshop Document
Let's begin by creating a brand new Photoshop document which we'll use to design our brush. Again, the purpose of this tutorial is not to learn how to create this exact brush, but rather to see how the process works from beginning to end. I'm going to create a new 200 x 200 pixel document by going up to the File menu in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choosing New. Or, for a faster way to create a new document, press Ctrl+N (Win) / Command+N (Mac) on your keyboard:
Go to File > New.
This opens the New Document dialog box. Enter 200 for both the Width and Height options and make sure the measurement type is set to pixels. Also, make sure the Background Contents option is set to White since we need white to be the background color for the brush:
Create a new 200 x 200 pixel document with a white background.
Click OK when you're done to accept the settings and exit out of the dialog box. A new 200 x 200 pixel document, filled with white, will appear on your screen.
Choosing An Initial Size For Your Brush
Photoshop allows us to create brushes as large as 2500 x 2500 pixels, but as they say, just because you can doesn't mean you should. At that size, you'd be painting with the virtual equivalent of a floor mop. Also, painting with very large brushes requires a lot more memory and horse power from your computer which can slow your system down considerably. For typical work, you'll want to create brushes much smaller.
The size at which you initially create the brush will become its default size, and it's important to note that brushes we create ourselves are pixel-based brushes, which means they're essentially images and behave exactly the same way as regular images when it comes to resizing them. Brushes will usually remain crisp and sharp when we make them smaller, but if you increase their size much beyond the default, they'll become soft and dull looking. The general idea, then, is to create your new brush just large enough to suit your needs, which may involve a little trial and error. The 200 x 200 pixel size I'm using here usually works well.
Step 2: Select The Brush Tool
Let's create our new brush using one of Photoshop's built-in brushes. First, select the Brush Tool from the Tools palette, or press the letter B on your keyboard to quickly select it with the shortcut:
Select the Brush Tool.
Step 3: Select A Small Round Brush
With the Brush Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document window to display the Brush Preset picker, which is a miniature version of the full-blown Brushes panel that we'll look at a bit later (and we'll examine in much more detail in another tutorial). The Brush Preset picker allows us to choose from a list of preset brushes (which explains its name). To select a brush, simply click on its thumbnail. I'm going to click on the Hard Round 5 Pixels brush to select it. If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, the name of each brush will appear as you hover over the thumbnails. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) once you've chosen your brush to close out of the palette:
Select a small round brush from the Preset picker, then press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of it.
Step 4: Make Sure The Foreground Color Is Set To Black
Back when we created our new document in Step 1, we made sure to set the background color of our document to white. The reason is that all brushes in Photoshop are Grayscale, meaning that a brush can contain only black, white, or shades of gray in between. Areas filled with white become transparent, so you won't see them when you're painting with the brush. Areas filled with black will be 100% visible, and if your brush includes various shades of gray, those areas will be partially visible depending on how close they are to black or white, with darker shades of gray being more visible than lighter shades.
If we were to turn our new document into a brush as it is right now, the entire brush would be transparent since it contains nothing but white. Painting with an invisible brush may make an interesting statement artistically, but for more practical purposes (like this tutorial), you'll most likely want a brush you can actually see, which means we'll need to add some areas of black to the document. The black areas will become the visible shape of the brush (known as the brush tip).
Photoshop paints using the current Foreground color, and as luck would have it, the default for the Foreground color is black, which means there's a very good chance yours is already set to black. You can see the current Foreground and Background colors by looking at their color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (the Foreground color is the swatch in the top left). If your Foreground color is set to something other than black, press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset both the Foreground and Background colors to their defaults:
The Foreground color is the color the brush will paint with.
Step 5: Paint A Series Of Horizontal Brush Strokes Inside The Document Window
With the small round brush selected and black as your Foreground color, click inside the document window and paint a series of short horizontal brush strokes. For added variety, alter the thickness of the strokes by changing the size of the brush using the handy keyboard shortcuts. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the brush smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. You'll find the bracket keys to the right of the letter P on most keyboards. When you're done, you should have a column of brush strokes that looks something like this:
A column of messy, random brush strokes.
Step 6: Create A New Brush From The Document
To create a new Photoshop brush from the document, simply go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Brush Preset from the list of options (depending on which version of Photoshop you're using, the option may be called simply Define Brush):
Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset.
Photoshop will pop open a dialog box asking you to give your new brush a name. I'm going to call mine "My New Brush". You'll probably want to choose a name that's a little more descriptive:
Name the new brush.
Click OK when you're done to close out of the dialog box, and that's all there is to it! We've successfully created a brand new custom brush in Photoshop that's ready and waiting to help us bring our creative vision to life. You can safely close out of the brush's document at this point.
To select the new brush any time you need it, first make sure you have the Brush Tool selected, then right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside your document to open the Brush Preset picker. Scroll down the list of available brushes until you see your brush thumbnail (newly created brushes will appear at the bottom of the list), then click on the thumbnail to select the brush. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) once you've selected it to close out of the Brush Preset picker:
Select your new brush from the Brush Preset picker.
With the new brush selected, simply click and drag inside your document to paint a brush stroke:
The newly created brush in action.
Paul's images created using this tutorial
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| Brush Style |
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| Writing with the brush |
