One the coolest things that came around from Photoshop was Version 7, because Version 7 introduced a brush engine. And to me that turned Photoshop into a true painting tool. The ability to go in there and create brushes to do whatever you want them to do.

I am going to go in here and create a brush. That will mean to open bridge in the background, okay. I will create a brush. I am actually going to create a brush that I created a long time ago when I was actually working on 7. I was working with a really early Alpha version of 7 and this is a painting that I did about eight months before it went Beta. And some of the 9brushes that I have created for this painting here ended up in the program. Right here, these three are mine and this brush right here. If we zoom in on this, there it is back there you see the three. That is created with a little maple leaf brush.

there is a lot of brushes that were put here. For instance here, this is just a brush that is following a path. There are all kinds of funny tricks going on here. The wood grain is just noise with a motion blur and liquefier to create all the blurs and the wood that you see here. But now let us go and create a brush. A brush could be anything, anything that you select. It could be a person’s eye. It could be anything. But keep in mind that the values in that brush will determine its opacity, okay. If you select the person’s eye, that pupil that is going to be your paint because it is black. Everything else is going to be transparent based on the value of the color in that brush. It does not matter what opacity you have set for the brush. If you have created that brush with a 50% gray and your opacity is set to a 200% that brush is still going to be 50% transparent. If you bring the opacity at 50% that brush would be 25% transparent because you originally created with a transparent color.

So, there is the leaf right there. I am going to go ahead and fill it with black, right there. And I am going to select it. See, how big I selected it. Is my brush going to be that big? Watch, when I say define brush preset it is only seeing the leaf because all that other stuff is white and wherever the brush is white it is completely transparent. So, that is why it does not see that area out there. It just sees the leaf and that little number represents the size of the brush and pixels. So, when I click okay there is my little brush. I can throw it away now.

And I will come over here and I will take my paint brush and I will select that little brush I have created. And I am not going to cheat and create that one based on what I have just created. We are just going to do that. It lays down at the tip of the time but the brush engine, this little guy right here, which I a going to pull out so we have it on screen all the time. This is where you really start to control things. Now, there is a PDF on brushes because every chapter in the book deals with the different kind of a brush. In some cases I am painting with invisible brushes that I are using layer styles to affect something to create lights and darks which are going to create doubles and damages and stone. The brush itself has no color but it is painting with light.

So, right now I am just going to create a tree. So, that is why I got this leaf. Brush preset is where you set up your brushes and you have a control for the size. Brush tip shape is where you start to manipulate these brushes. Here, you can control the diameter make it really small or make it really big. Now, you can’t see a really big brush but you can see it here. Wow! Really big! There, see! Let us bring it down. It is something normal yes about like that. I can control the spacing. If I set the spacing to 100%, I set and it lays down at tip of the time. So, at a 100% it is laying down one tip right next to one tip. They are just touching, tip at a time. And if it is more than a 100% I get a dotted line. Anything less than a 100% they start to encroach on each other. So, I am going to bring it to about like that.

Right here, I control the roundness so again flat. And here I control the angle so they dance like little rockets, see. Okay. So, that is cool but I need to randomize those tips I want every tip to be different. And that is where these guys come in. I am going to click on the word to bring me into that control. And right now something happen because I have something that is already set from before so let me just set everything back to normal and come down to scattering. I am going to jump a little ahead here. Scattering, why? Because right now it is laying down a line see. Scattering is going to spread them away from my stroke. This spreads them away. I could do it on like this so they go up and down. Let me bring everything back down to zero. Up and down or both axis in which they are going all to different directions. Now, my strokes are still randomized.

Count, it lays down at tip of the time. Count will increase the number of tips that get laid down so if I increase the count all the way to 16, I get a really fixed stroke. I will bring this down to about a two and I will do a count jitter of a 100%. What the jitter does and jitter is a randomization. Now, it is going to randomize that count. So, in some cases I will get a little clamp and some cases it will be opened up.

Now, I am going to go back to my shape dynamics. And in shape dynamics, all my brushes at the same size. I am going to set a size jitter to 100% okay when I get little tiny ones and big ones. I have a minimum diameter so that they do not get too small so I am going to bring that in a little bit. And all of these things are controllable by paint pressure, paint tilt and so on which of course is a welcome tablet. A mouse does not have pressure sensitivity but I can control that so if I want the size to be controlled by pressure sensitivity. If I press hard I am going to get a big brush. If I press lightly I get a little brush. But I am going to leave that off for now. I wanted that it will just be random like that.

So now angle that is the same thing as little rockets dancing before except here it is a jitter so it is going to affect each tip individually. So, I am going to set that to a 100%. Now, they are all going in different angles, you see they are all going in different directions. And around this it is the same thing before making a flat except here it is a jitter so I am going to set that to about like that. But I am going to set at minimum so they do not get too flat. That created that illusion of foreshortening. Now, there is a lot of other controls here but I have gone two minutes over but I am going to jump down to the one I am going to use so just this one right here, color dynamics.

Now, this one unfortunately we cannot preview but what color dynamics is going to do is going to assign a different color to each tip. So I am going to say foreground to background jitter of a 100%. Move my hue slider a little bit and my saturation and brightness a little. All right, these are going to control that each tip is going to have a different brightness and so on. If I move the hue jitter too far it is going to introduce a lot of unwanted colors. I want to just keep it light so I am just is going to—just add little subtle movements to my color.

So now that I have all these effects ready bring this back to the panel dock and I am going to select some colors here. I am going to get a nice bright green for my foreground and a nice dark green for my background color like that. And right here, I will draw a happy little tree right there, see. And I might want to throw a layer behind this and get this darker green like that. I make my brush a little smaller and I will draw some leaves in back. And then the layer between the two I can create the little branches and I got this little happy tree in two strokes.