The simulation of natural media is always a tricky prospect when working digitally.
There are endless filters and niche applications out there that promise convincing results. However, quick fixes and prefab effects often result in disappointment. When painting digitally, the old saying, ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’ comes to mind, and this is exactly what you’ll learn to do in this chapter. Photoshop may not be the first application that you think of when you’re setting out to paint. However, taking a closer look at what Photoshop has to offer in terms of paint tools will reveal that everything you need is there.
Equally as valuable when it comes to painting, are all of the image compositing tools at your disposal. A successful painted result relies not only on actual brush strokes, but also on the way that the image is carefully constructed within Photoshop.
The Brushes palette is an excellent resource for crafting convincing and customized brush looks. Whether you want to simply tweak a preset brush tip, or create something entirely new to paint with, everything you need is there.
Layers are invaluable tools when painting too, as they allow you to separate the applications of paint, giving you the flexibility to edit specific painted regions and colors without affecting the rest of your image. In addition to editing advantages, layers also allow you to easily and gently build up brush strokes within your file, resulting in a beautiful and authentic appearance.
The Brushes palette is a bottomless pit of options and flexibility when it comes to painting
in Photoshop. There is a little something in there to suit any user or simulate almost any artistic style. In this chapter, rather than predictably going through every single feature within the
brushes palette like a list, you will focus more on establishing a logical method of working, as well as explore the techniques involved in building up a realistic looking painted file.
When it comes to working, Photoshop nicely addresses the issue of translating your traditional tools from within the tactile realm into their digital counterparts.
The swatches palette can be thought of as your artist’s palette, allowing you to store all of the colors you’re going to use.
The tool preset picker is a fantastic place to store your brushes as you create them, allowing you to switch back and forth between your own custom tools instantly. When you decide to use Photoshop as your digital paint tool, you’ll never run out of paint or canvas, you’ll never misplace your favorite tool, and you’ll never have to worry about cleaning your brushes at the end of the day.
1. Open up the sketch.jpg file. Starting with a sketch is an essential part of the process when painting in the tactile realm, and working in Photoshop is no exception. The main difference here is that in this case the sketch is scanned rather than being drawn directly onto the canvas. Once you’ve opened up the sketch, select the brush tool. In the brushes palette, enable the smoothing option at the left. that your brush strokes contain nice, smooth curves. And that is an essential quality when you want your painting to look convincing.
Although Photoshop is equipped with a plethora of excellent brush libraries, we’re going to focus on some simple default
brushes capable of producing exceptional results 
- The Spatter brushes may not look like much within a
vast list of presets, but these simple clusters of spots arevery useful. There are a number of different tips and sizesto choose from. Regardless of which option you go with, anyspatter brush gives the effect of using a brush with somestray dry bristles sticking out around the edges. Painting overtop of colored regions of the canvas with a spatter brushallows you to create a bristled, tactile effect.- The chalk brushes are denser than the spatter brushesbut equally as useful. Strokes created with chalk brushesdo not have any stray bristles sticking out the sides, but theydo provide a nice rough effect at the beginning and endingof each stroke. They are ideal for establishing basic, yetconvincing, colored regions within your painting.- The Dual Brush option is an excellent tool that allows youto combine two different brushes within a single tip. Why dowe point out this single feature amid a sea of others? Well,using the dual brush option allows you to quickly and easilycombine two brush tips to create a new one. We’ll explore thisfeature in detail using custom brush tips .
2. Now, the next thing we’re going to do is establish the swatches palette as our paint palette and fill it with our own set of colors unique to this painting. By doing this, we can return to the swatches palette and select one of our custom colors at any point later on. Choose
Edit>Preset Manager from the menu. Choose swatches from the Preset Type menu. When the swatches appear, click on the first swatch and then shift-click on the last swatch. This will target all of the swatches. When all of the swatches are targeted, click on the delete button. After they’re all deleted, click on the Done button to exit the Preset Manager and you’ll notice that Swatches palette has been emptied.
3. When the swatches palette is empty, click on the foreground color swatch in the toolbox to access the picker. Select a new foreground color from the picker and click OK. Move the mouse over the empty area of the swatches palette. You’ll see it temporarily switch to a paint bucket. When you see the paint bucket, click to add the new color to the swatches palette. Name your new swatch when prompted and then click OK. After naming, the new color is added to the swatches palette. Use this method to add a variety of colors to the swatches palette. This is an excellent way to exercise a little forethought, establishing a pre-defined color scheme to work within before you begin painting.
Saving swatches When you hit upon a combination of swatches you like, it is possible to save them for use at a later date. Simply choose the save swatches option from the swatches palette menu. This allows you to name, and then save your swatches as a library file. Save this file anywhere you like. You can always reload your saved swatches by choosing the load swatches option from
the swatches palette menu and navigating to your saved preset file. If you place your library file in the presets/swatches folder within the Photoshop program folder, the library will appear within the list at the bottom of the swatches palette menu, next time you launch Photoshop.
Brush angles The chalk family of brush presets are a perfect example of presets that are ideally suited to right-handed people. Generally, right-handed people paint from bottom left to top right, or from top right to bottom left. The angle of the chalk tip presets ensures that right-handed painters working in the typical manner get the majority of available brush width from each stroke. If you’re
left handed, try rotating the angle in the brushes palette. You can specify any angle you like and this will likely vary from preset to preset. Try starting somewhere between 37 and 45, and experiment from there. Besides rotating the angle, you can enable the Flip X option instead. This flips the brush tip horizontally, creating a mirror image of the brush tip. 4. After selecting the brush tool, choose the largest chalk brush preset from the brushes palette. In the brush tip shape section of the brushes palette, increase the diameter of the brush. You want a large brush here because first, we want to cover most of the background with color, giving us a new base color other than white. Leave the spacing option enabled but reduce the amount to 1, so that there is no stepping or spaced brush marks present within your strokes. Choose a foreground color from the
swatches palette and click the create a new layer button in the layers palette.
5. Target your new layer in the layers palette and begin to paint a series of strokes on the new layer. Focus on the areas indicated by the sketch that are the background. Just start painting some strokes, don’t cover the line work of the sketch on the underlying layer, and allow a little white to show through between strokes here and there. Also, increase and decrease the brush diameter in the brushes palette to accommodate different regions on the canvas. For open areas of background, use a very large brush diameter, for tighter regions, like between the small figure’s fingers, use a much smaller diameter.
6. Choose a different color from either the picker or one of your own custom swatches and paint the background area at the bottom of the canvas. When you’re finished, choose a black foreground color and create a new layer in the layers palette. Target the new layer and use the brush to begin tracing the black outlines of the underlying sketch on this new layer. Reduce the opacity of your brush in the
tool options bar to 50%, so that there is a translucent effect as you paint small strokes over top of each other.
7 Return to the brush tip shape section of the brushes palette often use this area to vary the angle of the brush as you paint. You’ll need to tweak the angle often when painting around areas like the heads of these creatures. If you don’t adjust the angle at times, there will be areas where the brush strokes appear too thin compared to others. Click on shape dynamics in the brushes palette to enable shape dynamics and then click on the angle jitter control menu to view the options.
8. Choose the direction option from the control menu, but leave the angle jitter amount set to 0. This causes your brush to base the angle of the brush tip on the directions of your stroke as you paint them. Because we still want a somewhat smooth edge to the strokes, the amount is set to 0. The more you increase the amount, the rougher the edges of the strokes will appear. By simply enabling the shape dynamic function, we can save ourselves the trouble of having to constantly adjust the angle as we paint. Finish painting the black outline
9. Reduce the opacity of your brush to 25% and then open the tool preset picker at the far left of the tool options bar. Click on the create new tool preset button. When you are
prompted, name the tool ‘Chalk Blender’. Disable the include color option and click OK. This brush is now added to the preset picker with all of the brush palette options and dynamic functions intact. You can access it directly from the preset picker from now on. Create a new layer in the layers palette and ensure that it is targeted.
10. Use your current brush, set to 25% opacity, to blend the background fill colors together on the new layer, this is precisely why we named the preset ‘chalk blender’. Start by painting strokes over the areas where light and dark colors meet. Paint dark strokes over light areas and vice versa. Go back and forth painting like this until colors begin to blend together. Change the direction of your brush strokes as well as the size of your brush tip often. Also, if using an opacity of 25% is not allowing you
to get a blend effect that is as smooth as you’d like, try reducing it when necessary.
11. Now add different colors from the swatches palette into the
background here and there using the same brush on the current layer.
Try initially adding them using a higher brush opacity setting, then
blending them into the background using lower opacity settings. A quick
way to work is to alt(PC)/option(Mac)-click on areas of the canvas to
sample color rather than always returning to the swatches palette. This is
especially useful when blending as you can sample ‘in-between’ colors. If
you happen to sample a foreground color using this method that you like,
feel free to add it to the swatches palette so that you can access it later.
12. In the brush presets section of the brushes
palette, select the spatter 59 pixels brush tip preset.
Now, in the Brush Tip Shape section of the brushes
palette, adjust the angle of the brush tip until you’ve
achieved the roughest looking stroke possible. In the
tool options bar, set the opacity of the brush to 35%
and set the flow value to 15%. Save this new brush
as a tool preset and name it Spatter rough.
13. Create a new layer and use your newly created tool preset to paint over areas
of the canvas on this layer. Increase or decrease the opacity as required and use
colors from the canvas or the swatches palette. The goal here is to paint with the
new brush over areas that look very smooth. Because of the brush tip and very
low flow setting, the resulting strokes will add a rougher, more textured feeling to
the areas you paint. Using large brush strokes and bold colors will pronounce the
rough effect. Use this effect sparingly as it can tend to overpower an illustration
14. Open up the brush1.jpg file. Choose Edit>Define Brush Preset from the menu. Name your
brush and return to the working file. Choose your new custom brush tip from the end of the list in
the Brush Presets section of the Brushes palette. In the Brush Tip Shape section of the brushes
palette, set the spacing to 1. In the tool options bar, set the opacity to 50% and the flow to 15%.
Save this brush as a new tool preset. Use this same method to open up brush2.jpg and brush3.jpg
and save them as new tool presets, using the same spacing, opacity, and flow settings
15. Now that you have added three new custom brushes and a new dual brush to the tool preset picker, use them to paint some rough strokes on this layer. Just because the presets contain embedded settings for opacity and flow, that doesn’t mean that you can’t change them each time you use them. Use a variety of colors, brush sizes, opacity and flow settings, to introduce some very real and tactile
feeling brush strokes on the current layer. Again, ensure that you do not overdo it as
these new brushes, which produce such distinct strokes, can visually overpower the softly blended background quite easily.
16. When you’re finished, target the top layer and then shift-click on the layer directly above the background layer in the layers palette. This will target all of your paint layers. Choose
Layer>New>GroupFrom Layers from the menu to add them to a group. Because we’re going to start painting the other image components, this grouping of layers will help us keep things separate and organized. Create a new layer for the base color of the figures. In the brushes palette, choose one of the default chalk brush tip presets. Ensure that smoothing is enabled and in the brush tip shape section of the palette, reduce the spacing amount to 1.
17. In the tool options bar, set the opacity of the brush to 100 and set the flow
to 50. Add this brush to the tool preset picker and name it ‘base color’ as we’ll be
using it to create a flat, colored base, for the figures and stars. Use this brush to
add flat color on the new layer in all empty regions of the figures and the stars.
Choose colors from the background via the eyedropper or select them from the
swatches palette. Increase or decrease the size of the brush tip as necessary
18. Create a new layer and select the chalk blender preset that you created earlier from the tool preset picker. As you did earlier with the background, blend the colors beneath this layer, together with the chalk blender preset on your new layer. Hold down alt(PC)/option(Mac) to quickly sample colors
from the canvas and then paint with your newly sampled colors in the appropriate areas until sharp areas of color begin to blend together on this layer. Feel free to alter brush size and opacity as required. Also, feel free to add new areas of color on this layer to indicate the highlights and shadows
19. When you are finished adding colors and creating a blending effect on this layer, create a new layer and target it in the layers palette. Select your spatter brush preset from the tool preset picker. Now use the spatter brush to paint some light, yet rougher brush strokes over your recently blended areas on the new layer.
Use colors sampled from the canvas or from the ever-growing amount of custom
swatches in the swatches palette. Vary the brush size and opacity as needed.
You probably want to leave the flow setting fairly low, so that the bristles remain pronounced in each stroke.
20. Now use your three custom brushes as well as your dual brush to really add a sense of roughness to the figures and the stars by painting with them on the current layer. Vary size, color and opacity
as needed. Also, if you feel like experimenting, yet are worried about making a mistake on your current layer, go ahead and create another layer to work on. This way, if you like the effect you can keep the layer.
If you don’t like it, you can always delete the layer or even reduce the opacity to lessen the effect.
21. Now, the painting techniques that you’ve used so far are certainly successful in creating a realistic painterly effect. However, when painting digitally, no matter how convincing your brush strokes
are, it is the smooth and perfect surface that ruins the authenticity you’ve tried so hard to achieve. In order to remedy this, it is often helpful to involve something genuine. Open up the painting.jpg file.
This is a desktop scan, in grayscale, of a section of an oil-painted canvas. We’re going to add this to our painted file to make use of the canvas texture and the cracked paint effect
22. Use the move tool to click on the painting. jpg canvas and drag it into your working file
as a new layer while holding down the shift key. Holding down the shift key ensures that it lands
in your file in the proper position. Ensure that the new grayscale paint layer is at the top of the
layers palette and change the blending mode of the layer to color burn. Reduce the opacity of
the layer to 14% and you’ll see that a surface texture effect is beginning to take shape as the
colors on the underlying layers become darker and more saturated.
23. Now duplicate your painting layer by dragging it onto the create a new layer button at the bottom of the layers palette.
Change the blending mode of your duplicate layer to vivid light and increase the opacity to 35%. Finally, duplicate your current painting copy layer and then change the blending mode of the recently
duplicated layer to soft light to intensify the surface texture effect within the image.
