Author: Artofwot
Designed for: Photoshop 7
Level: Beginner
Last Updated: August 28th, 2004

What Are Brushes?
Brushes are extremely important in Photoshop. It not only affects the way you paint, but also the way you heal, clone, use the history brush tool, erase, blur, and more! Most of the features that use brushes are very important. While brushes are very basic, there are some features that aren't used as much, but are very useful.

Brushes are shapes of a simulated brush, etc. These "shapes" are not always basic, and can in fact can include complex opacity instructions.

Figure 1: A comparison of two brushes, one very simple, and one more complex.

Working With Basic Brushes
I'm going to walk you through selecting, and using a brush. First, create a new document by going File>New, and you can use the default settings. Select the brush tool by pressing "B", or by selecting it in the tool box, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Photoshop toolbox with the brush tool circled.

The options window (located on the top of your screen) should update with options on the brush tool. We want to select a brush, and change its size, so click on the button circled in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Click on the circled button to change the brush settings.

We can first change the shape of the brush by clicking on its sample. Please use the one that the arrow is pointing to in Figure 4. Really, we could have used any of the hard brushes because we're going to adjust the size anyways. To adjust the size, either slide the slider that says "Master Diameter", or enter a number manually (highlighted in yellow). Change it to around 23 px (but you can make it bigger or smaller depending on the size of your document).

Figure 4: A window where you can adjust basic brush parameters.

In the document window, you can click and drag to draw, and release when you don't want to draw. You can either draw very complex pictures with shading different colors, etc, or a very basic shape (like I did, see Figure 5).

Figure 5: A basic shape being drawn with the brush tool.

Loading Brushes
Photoshop ships with quite a few nice brushes. By default they are not displayed, you need to load them. To do this, go back to the window where we can adjust the basic brush parameters (size and shape), and click on the triangle shaped button circled in Figure 6, and then select "Load Brushes".

Figure 6: The steps to loading brushes.

A standard load file box will come up. Navigate to your Photoshop folder, and then the brushes are usually stored in the "Presets" folder, and then the "Brushes" folder. Here there are quite a few sets of brushes that you can load. Select one, and press "Load".

Creating Your Own Brushes
You can create your own brushes by painting, drawing, etc. a shape. These can either be painted in color, or grayscale. Photoshop will use the gray values to determine the opacity for that section of the brush. A black color will be completely opaque, while a white color will be completely transparent. If you paint the brush in color the color will be interpreted as grayscale colors.

Next, using the marquee tool (or selecting using the lasso tool, path tool, etc.) select the area of the document you wish to be a brush, and go to the "Edit" menu, and then "Define Brush..." (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Edit>Define Brush...

Enter a name for your brush, and then click "OK". You can now select your custom brush as you would any other brush.

Saving Your Brushes
At some point you may want to save your brush(es) for safe keeping, or distributing. You can save a single brush, or an entire collection of brushes. If you'd like to save your brushes, build a library of your brushes, and then get to the menu shown in Figure 6. Then, simply click "Save Brushes", and save the brushes on your hard drive. They can now be accessed at any time, or distributed.

Closing Words

Brushes can be used to erase and perform quite a number of operations, and they operate exactly the same way, with exactly the same brushes that you would use the paint.

I hope that this tutorial has outlined enough basic information for you to get started painting, etc.

Have Fun!

Ronald Hill
artofwot

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