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How to create brush presets in Photoshop? Well, I have preferred methods of how I create anything and I’ve learnt those methods from others.
Experimenting with my doodles is practice for improvement or tweaking learned techniques to suit me. I'm sharing a snippet with you on how I created my brush presets and also how I used them.
It’s somewhat like cooking a meal: there’s so many ways you could fry chicken (my favorite, by the way, and I really shouldn’t accept for compensation). I have a process for frying chicken the way I like it. I have a process for illustration.
The header of this blog is a barn in Minnesota (an early addition to my portfolio). I used two brush presets with varying differences to each.
Outline like any other way to begin an illustration: with a pencil! I needed to create a 'brush' that would mimic a pencil - it started off looking somewhat Rorschach-esque in appearance. This is because I needed to view it on an enormous scale, or as if it was under a microscope. Believe it or not, some software (even Adobe!) don't offer a pencil that's quite pencil enough for some fussy artists.
If you can't wait to start outlining your digital drawings, you can find brush presets. Such as Harrison Luke's charcoal creations on pixelsurplus offered for free!
I then shadow and highlight (essential for 'tricking' the eye to see what you want it to see: depth, shape, perspective). I intermittently vary opacity, transfer and pen pressure throughout the process. Then adding color was no guessing game for this particular project because I wanted to emulate the photo of the barn as close as I could. Directly from the reference (image) I eyedrop the RGB hex code, but I needed to do this intermittently too. Because a digital image is made of dots of color, the 'red' barn is all shades, hues and saturation of reds, browns, and more!
Every artwork is an experiment, and my only advice is: be patient. If you're anything like me (lacking in patience!) walk away before you get really frustrated. Do something else for a little while and then come back to it.
