Right now the brush will look really ugly and repetitive. This brush will now be at the end of your brush list on the brush drop down menu. I am using CS2, so the wording may be different in other versions, but basically anything that says 'Define brush' will work. To make this into a brush, go to Edit>Define Brush Preset. I painted out some of the lines in the top left of the picture. Now you can go back and add another layer on top of the photo and fix any parts that may cause problems or repetition. On the layer with the photo, change the layer properties to something that looks good. Drag the sliders around until you get some high contrast within the photo and then click ok.Ĭopy and paste the photo into the document with the brush we started making.

Once you have a photo, convert it into grayscale and then go to Image>Adjustments>Levels (or ctrl+l). In this case I used a photo of my sister's dogs just to show that you can use any subject matter and still get a cool looking brush. It doesn't really matter what kind of photo you use. Now that I am happy with my shapes I am going to open a photo to use as a texture overlay.

I lay that down and then start drawing and erasing on top of it. Sometimes what I like to do is use a custom brush that I have already made as a starting point. Try not to make anything too symmetrical, as this will make your brush look weird and fake. Let's start making a custom brush by putting down some random shapes and lines. It also allows you to learn how to paint different textures using the same brushes, instead of relying on a brush to paint a texture for you. This also helps to improve your speed, since you do not have to look around and try and decide which brush to use next. I like to stick with just a few of my favorite brushes when painting. I find that most of the time there are too many brushes to choose from, and most of them are just plain gimmicky. These are the brushes I use, although a majority of all my illustrations are painted using primarily the two brushes circled.

When painting the figure I normally use the standard brushes and save my custom brushes for textures and for backgrounds. Usually when I paint I only use a few brushes, most of which are just Photoshop presets with a few tweaks to the brush settings. A lot of people ask me what kind of brushes I use and how I made them.

Make custom brush photoshop