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Discover the tips, tricks and techniques that really work for concept artists, matte painters and animators. Compiled by the team at 3dtotal.com, Digital Painting Techniques, Volume 1 offers digital inspiration with hands-on insight and techniques from professional digital artists. More than just a gallery book - within Digital Painting Techniques each artist has written a breakdown overview, with supporting imagery of how they made their piece of work. Beginner and intermediate digital artists will be inspired by the gallery style collection of the finest examples of digital painting from world renowned digital artists. Start your mentorship into the world of digital painting today with some of the greatest digital artists in the world and delve into professional digital painting techniques, such as speed painting, custom brush creation and matte painting. Develop your digital painting skills beyond the variety of free online digital painting tutorials and apply the most up to date techniques to your digital canvas with Digital Painting Techniques for Animators. * Mentor with some of the greatest digital artists in the world and delve into professional digital painting techniques, such as speed painting, custom brush creation and matte painting. * Inspiration and technique in one digital painting book! Be inspired with a gallery style collection of the finest examples of digital painting from world renowned digital artists and explore the step by step tutorials that explain the digital painting techniques. * Develop your digital painting skills beyond free digital painting tutorials and apply the most up to date techniques to your digital canvas with this complete guide to digital painting
Chapter One custom brushes

Any artist will tell you that the link between their thoughts and ideas and the actual paintings they produce are the tools they wield. From a traditional standpoint these have been the canvas and in particular the brushes. These are no less important in a digital context; the increasing array of brushes available and the freedom to create customized versions is paramount to the quality of digital painting today. This chapter provides an insight into the value of using custom brushes, and shows how they can be created from scratch and tailored to suit your subject matter.

Organic Custom Brushes from Ink, Water and Salt Experiments

By Brian Recktenwald

Introduction

Like a lot of other digital artists out there, creating custom brushes is not only a key step in creating the art, but a heck of a lot of fun all in itself! The default Photoshop brushes are quite awesome, and I use them frequently, especially in the blocking phase, but I always end up integrating one or two custom brushes as well, for control and a personal touch. I've created custom brushes from just about anything I can find, including pictures, textures, doodles and digital scribbles. But my preference is to add an organic feel to my brushes, so 90 percent of my custom brushes come from high-resolution scans made up of crazy experiments with ink, water and salt on drawing paper (Fig.01).

Step 01

Here I pull different selections from the scanned image and mess with them using Levels and Filters and painting over them with other brushes until I get an ideal base image for a new custom brush (Fig.02).

Step 02

In this example, I'm going to create a brush for use with the Smudge tool. I want a more stippled pattern, like a dry brush would give, to help add texture as I blend. After bringing contrast into the image by clamping the Levels, I begin experimenting with some filters to further pronounce the shapes (Fig.03).

Step 03

Then I duplicate the original texture a few times and place them on top of the filtered version. Finally, I play with different blending modes until there's a good texture/shape balance (Fig. 04).

Step 04

Once I have my base brush, I flatten my layers and possibly resize the image. It's better to save your brush at the highest native resolution possible. However, the higher you go, the slower the drawing performance. To save this image off as a brush, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, and hit OK after giving it an appropriate name (Fig.05). Now you can access this brush at any time in the Brushes window.

Step 05

It's now time to set up the Smudge tool brush settings for use with our new brush. We'll be able to pull a lot of mileage from this brush simply by adjusting the Shape Dynamics, Scattering, and Other Dynamics settings, without having to swap out a new brush image. Another important value to adjust and tinker with as you go is the Strength setting. An example of this brush in action starts with a canvas of broad brush strokes (a default round brush with Strength and Hardness of 100) and then a Cutout filter applied (Fig.06).

Step 06

I now select the Smudge tool and load our new brush image (Fig.07). For rapid, first pass blending I want speed and spread ability, so at this stage I'll use a smaller brush size with just the Shape Dynamics and Other Dynamics settings adjusted (Fig.08a – b).

Step 07 – Final

At this stage I'm constantly changing the strength and sometimes turning off the Other Dynamics setting. After some cross-hatching to bring out some tonal gradation, I change my brush settings to bring a softer, yet still textural, quality to the strokes by turning on the Scattering (Fig.09a – b). The rule of thumb here is that the higher the scatter, the softer the blending. Also, the higher the strength, the more the texture will come through. Adjusting the brush accordingly is also important at this stage.

To show you an example of our new brush in action, the custom brush made in this tutorial, and the variations mentioned, have been used exclusively in creating this painting of an old woman (Fig.10).

How to Create Brushes from Animal Textures

By Carlos Cabrera

Software Used: Photoshop

The first thing we need for this tutorial is a couple of pictures to create the texture that we will be using in our brush. In this instance, I have chosen to use two photographs of my dog and cat (Fig.01a – b).

The next step is to completely desaturate the two pictures. With both images on one layer, we can achieve this simply by going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. We now need to place each picture in a different layer. Select the top layer and change the properties of the layer to Difference (Fig.02a). By doing this, we will have both layers combined in one to create a new and interesting texture (Fig.02b – d).

Now let's flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image) and search for some original shapes within the texture to use for our new brush. Fig.03 shows a unique shape, which I've circled in red. We will need to select it with our Lasso tool (Feather = 20%), and then cut and paste it onto a new document (CTRL + C + N + V).

You will see that the new document that we just created is a potential custom brush. Now, let's duplicate the layer where our brush is (CTRL + J) and rotate it by 90 degrees (CTRL + T) at any angle. We need to change the properties of this new layer, once again to Difference, and then repeat this step two or three times until we manage to create a textured border (Fig.04).

Our new brush is now almost done; we just need to tell Photoshop to start using this new image as a brush from now on. So, go to Edit > Define Brush, and voila! We have just created a new custom brush. We can now go ahead and change the settings in order to make it even better (Fig.05).

Go to the Brush tab and try out the following settings:

• Brush Tip Shape – Spacing 22% (Fig.06)

• Shape Dynamics – Size Jitter 0% and select Pen Pressure; Angle Jitter 100% and select Pen Pressure (Fig. 07)

• Scattering – Scatter 104% and select Pen Pressure; Count 7, Count Jitter 50% and select Pen Pressure (Fig.08)

• Texture – Select a random texture and change the mode to Hard Mix (Fig.09)

• Other Dynamics – Opacity Jitter 0% and select Pen Pressure; Smoothing > On (Fig.10)

And that's it–pretty easy, don't you think? Here are a couple of examples of this new brush at work (Fig.11 – 12). You now have the skills to create your own custom brushes for your projects, so get creative and have some fun with them!

You can download a custom brush (ABR) file to accompany this tutorial from www.focalpress.com/digitalartmasters

Custom Brushes

By Daarken

Software Used: Photoshop

A lot of people ask me what kind of brushes I use and how I make them. Usually, when I paint, I only use a few brushes, most of which are just Photoshop presets with a few tweaks to the brush settings. When painting a figure I normally use the standard brushes and save my custom brushes for textures and backgrounds. These are the brushes I use, although a majority of all my illustrations are painted using primarily the two brushes circled in Fig.01. I find that most of the time there are too many brushes to choose from, and most of them are just plain gimmicky. I like to stick with just a few of my favorite brushes when painting. This also helps to improve your speed, since you don't have to look around and try and decide which brush to use next. It also allows you to learn how to paint different textures using the same brushes, instead of relying on a brush to paint a texture for you.

Let's start making a custom brush by putting down some random shapes and lines. Try not to make anything too symmetrical, as this will make your brush look weird and fake (Fig.02). Sometimes what I like to do is use a custom brush that I have already made as a starting point. I lay that down and then start drawing and erasing on top of it. Now that I am happy with my shapes I am going to open a photo to use as a texture overlay. It doesn't really matter what kind of photo you use (Fig.03); you can use any subject matter and still get a cool–looking brush. Once you have a photo, convert it to grayscale and then go to Image > Adjustments > Levels (or Ctrl + l) (Fig.04). Drag the sliders around until you get high levels of contrast within the photo, and then click OK when you're ready.

Copy and paste the photo into the document with the brush we started making. On the layer with the photo, change the layer properties to something that looks good. In this case I used Overlay (Fig.05). Now you can go back and add another layer on top of the photo and fix any parts that may cause problems or repetition (Fig.06). For example, I painted out some of the lines in the top left of the picture.

To create your brush from the image, simply go to Edit > Define Brush Preset; I'm using CS2, so the wording may be different in other versions, but basically anything that says Define Brush will work (Fig.07). This brush will now be at the end of your brush list on the Brush drop down menu. Select your new brush and give it a try. Right now the brush will look really ugly and repetitive (Fig.08) – but don't worry, we're about to fix that.

Next we're going to change the brush's settings by opening the Brush Settings window. To do this, either click the Brushes button, or go to Window > Brushes (or simply hit F5 on your keyboard). You'll now be able to get a good-looking brush by playing around with these settings (Fig.09). I would advise you to spend some time dragging all the sliders back and forth so that you can get a feel of what each setting does, and find which ones you like.

For this particular brush, click on the first setting, called "Shape Dynamics". This will bring up different options on the side. By selecting Size and Angle Jitter we can break up some of the repetitive shapes that are found in the original brush (Fig.10a – b). Now click on the second option: Scattering. This will take the basic shape of the brush and spread it out so that you're painting with several instances of the same shape, instead of all of them being in the same line. You can also control the density of the brush here (Fig.11a – b). To add some more texture to the brush you can click on the Texture button. Clicking on the picture of the texture brings up a dialog box where you can select which kinds of textures you want to use (Fig.12a – b). Finally, click on the Other Dynamics option. This controls the opacity of the brush based on pressure sensitivity. This is a little sample of what the new brush looks like after changing the settings (Fig.13).

Here are some examples of other custom brushes in my collection (Fig.14):

Brush A & B: This rectangular brush has some nice texture to it that I like to use when painting skin. I usually use this brush as the base layer to get the main shapes in, and then I come in on top of it with other brushes (Fig.15a). I use this brush a lot because of its versatility. When used at a very small size, you can get some really sharp lines, while at larger sizes you can get a lot of texture (Fig.15b – c).

Brush C: This is another brush that I use mainly for creating texture in the background (Fig.16a – b).

Brush D: This speckle brush is really good for painting things like dust, hair, dirt, pores, etc. (Fig.17a – b).

Brush E: I usually use this brush for creating texture in the background (Fig.18a – b).

Brush F: The brush I use the most is the default round brush. Even though it has no texture attached to it, I can still get a lot of variety with this brush (Fig.19a – b).

You can also rotate your brush in order to get brushstrokes in different directions. Just go to the Brush Tip Shape options and drag the circular slider around (Fig.20).

Creating Custom Brushes to Save Time

By Marc Brunet

Software Used: Photoshop

Using Photoshop, we have all had this thought at one point: "Man, wouldn't it be great if there was a brush that could do all this, instead of me wasting my life on it?!" Well, in this tutorial, I will explain how I create my own custom brushes and how I use them in order to save me an incredible amount of time when I paint.

We will first try to mimic the stroke of a pencil – one of the main brushes I used to paint Sky Machina, along with a textured dry brush. At first, the brush creating process seems a bit tedious, but as soon as you get the hang of it you'll pretty much fall in love with it. You can create a brush out of everything you paint! So first, let's open a new file of about 500 by 500 pixels and draw whatever you want (let's draw dots for the sake of this tutorial). Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset (Fig.01 – 02). And that's it! Well, that's not exactly it, but following that the only things left to do are to rename your brush (Fig.03) and tweak it to get the effect you want, in the Brushes tab on the top menu.

(Continues...)

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