goodly designs for the average tasteful chapMake Splatter Brushes
Watch the video?
For this tutorial you will need a place to splatter paint, cheap watery paints, and a cheap little kid paint brush, though any brush should do.
There are different methods of splattering paint.
For large blobs of paint, just pop off the cap of your paint bottle and fling it down towards your paper.
For smaller spatters, spirt paint into the palm of your hand and fling your fingers out.
For a light misting, put paint on the paintbrush and then pull back.
After the paint has dried, scan your spatters onto your computer.
As you might notice, I do use a mac and Photoshop Elements 4.0, so things are set up a little different. However, the main ideas are still the same, so hopefully you'll be able to follow along.
First, a little warning. Since I started creating brushes and adding then to photoshop, the default brushes it came with got all messed up, and I haven't been able to restore them. For this reason, the first thing we're going to do is back up the brushes Ps came with.
On my mac, I go to my macintosh HD, applications folder. I find the adobe photoshop elements folder, and then the presets, brushes. Your brush set will be different because mine are kinda messed up. In any case, click on the desktop and create a new folder. Name it Ps Brush Backup.
Click on the top brush set in the list, hold down shift, and then the bottom one. Right click, select Copy Items. Go to the folder you created, right click, paste items. Now if you feel like being extra tidy and keeping your grubby fingers away from this backup, right click on the folder's icon and select compress to make a zip file.
So there we have our back up. Keep it secret, keep it safe.
So now we get down to business. I've made a handy empty brush set for you called Blank.abr. You can download it from my website's brushes page here.
Scroll to the bottom, click, voila. Now you can go to your downloads folder, under, users, your account name here, Downloads, and fetch that file. Drag it onto the desktop for easy handling.
Now again, lets go to the photoshop brush presets folder, and drag Blank.abr in. There we go. You can close that finder window.
Open up old photoshop.
Select file open... and choose one of the images you scanned of your splatter brushes.
Lets clean up the image a tad by adjusting the levels. Apple or Control L. Move the sliders so the splatters are on a white background. Now it would have been better if my paint was darker, but its alright. I'm going to remove the color just to make sure it;ll be decently dark as a brush...Yup, thats alright.
Go over to the layers menu and double click on the background layer, what you're working on, to make things good. Click okay, this unlocks it so it can have good old fashioned transparency.
Use the lasso tool to select just the parts of the image you want for your brush. Now go Select, Inverse and delete.
Now click on the Brush tool. Check the drop down menu to see if Blank is there, and if not, click the little side arrow, load brushes, and choose it. Now make sure Blank is selected. You'll see there's one brush there, that is a brush of directions on how to make a brush, but you don't need to read it, 'cause you're watching this.
Choose edit, define brush.
Name your brush.
Your brush has been added to the Blank Brush list, but be careful! If you switch out of the blank brush list, your brush won't be saved.
Now before anything else, right click on the original blank brush and select delete. Okay. Side arrow, save brushes. Title the brush pack you are making. Save. Now to add brushes to that set, load the set you just created, define a new brush, and it will be added to the list. THEN, select save brushes, type in the same brush set name, and save it, overwriting the old version.
You'll notice the Blank.abr set has not been changed, and its ready for use another day. (We don't need to use it anymore.)
Now lets add some brushes. I'll undo the deleting of all the other spatters. Apple Z, Apple Z (cntrl Z).
Add all the brushes you want, and thats pretty much it.
Have fun.
