Oily Oil Paint with the Photoshop Mixer Brush

1. What You Can Do with the Mixer Brush: in this video, I'm going to use Photoshopped and I'm gonna use the mixer brush to paint something kind of fun. And we're going to get Photoshopped toe look a lot like oil paint in the way that it mixes colors together. And it's not gonna look so much like you to sort of graphic painting. It's gonna look more like has an oily quality to it and in fact, were even gonna pick up this light, um, canvas texture that you might be able to see in this in this image where there's sort of, ah, a cloth tooth to it. So I'm gonna show you how to use the various controls the photo shop provides with the mixer brush and, um, well, paint something that maybe from our imagination, nothing too fancy. Just that everybody feels like they can join then and have fun with it. The main thing we're gonna be doing is learning how to get photo shop, too. Behaving this very interesting oil paint like way. So if this is something that you'd like to do, then enroll and let's see how it works 2. How to Control the Mixer Brush: Okay, so I'm going to use the mixer brush now, and I'm going to try to make it look like oil paint. I've reset photo shop to factory settings by holding down on a PC, control Ault and shift at the same time while I start photo shop. There's a similar key pattern for Macintoshes. I'm sure you know what it is if you use a Mac. Um, so that's why it's got all this default stuff that I don't normally have up. I'm going to open up a new document and I'm told, without having tested it, but I've seen it on the Internet. People say that 16 bits is better to paint in than eight for this color, mixing stuff that for the mixer brush if you have the choice, so it's no harm in it. I'm gonna go with 16 bits that uses of a little extra space, but if you have the space, it's probably better to do it. Now here's the canvas and it's white. I'm going to say at it, Phil, and I'm gonna fill it with middle gray just to sort of kill that white. Give me something to paint on top off Now, the first thing that I want to do is I want to go over to brushes and down here is the mixer brush and you'll see that there is a bunch of stuff up here. I'm just gonna look at it really quickly. There is this black box here which normally has a color, and color is black at the moment. There, these two little buttons, One of them is load the brush after each stroke, and one of them is clean the brush after each stroke. Then there are these presets from dry to very wet heavy mix. And if you select one of these, it'll change. It'll change these other things here. Wet load, mix and flow and all of these presets here, that's all they do is they set thes two different values. They don't do anything special other than that. So if we look at what the brush does just on its on its own, we could say, Let's put a color into it. I'm gonna click. He noticed that this is black and so is this. So I'm gonna click here, and I could just as easily have clicked over there. I'm gonna pick a color. Let's pick up a blue. So you see, it's blue there and blue there. So this is the color that is loaded on the brush. And if we take the mixer brush and I'm going to say f five and I'm gonna choose from the brush presets, this fanned out brush like this. And I also don't like this weird brush preview thing over here, so I'm gonna turn that off right there. And so now we have a we have a a fan brush, and it's loaded with blue. So if I brush on it, I noticed very little happens. It's really difficult to, um, get anything going on there. And the reason is that has to do with how these things are set right now. So I'm gonna just temporarily just looking draw really fast. I'm gonna take it off of the mixer brush, and I'm just gonna draw right on right on the screen here. Yeah, so that'll work. Um, So there are two sorts of color. One is the load, and the other is the wet. Okay, Now, load is what's on your brush and wet is what's already on the canvas. Even though it says wet. It's really just a different color source on the color sources. What's already on the canvas? Then there's this thing called mix. Well, if I go back to the mixer brush than it's harder for me to draw on this. But But there's this thing called Mix and you could see mixed 90%. Well, that sounds like a lot of mixing. I mean, you could go to mix 100% and that sounds like even more mixing. But the thing is that, um, what mix does is it's like a fader. Imagine like a fader knob, you can slide between 0% and 100% and when it's all the way over here, you get all of one thing. And when it's all the way over to there, you get all of the other thing. And the only true mixing goes on when the when the mixture knob is somewhere in the middle like 50% and you get half of this color and half of this color. So, um, let's go back to, um, the mixer brush and put this in action. Here's the mixer brush at it, Phil. 50% gray. So now if we say, um so we do that very little happens if we say load 100%. Still very little is gonna happen, because even though we've loaded it with 100% of blue and even the wet is whatever, let's say what is zero. OK, that's actually interesting, but I didn't expect that to happen. But But, um, let's put wet high anyway because I want to talk about this mix percentage thing. So if the mix is if the mix is at 100% you get no load. It's all wet. So what I'm doing is I'm painting gray on top of gray. Now, that's why you don't see it. If the mixes all the way down to zero, then I'm painting blue on top of gray. And so there there is. It's actually like letting new color. Come on. Um, if I go back to, um mix 100% now, I'm painting blue on top of blue, but it's the same kind of, you know, pale blue, so it's not really doing much. If I say mix somewhere in the middle, then I'm letting gray get mixed with blue, and you can see that there. You know, it's starting to act like a real mixer now. So, um, there's a brush here. Noticed that when I when I I wasn't really thinking about what would happen if I took, went all the way to zero. But what's interesting is, if wet, is it 100? It does something like that wet is that 15%? It does something like that. What is at 1% it does something like that, and if wet goes all the way down to 0% it does that, which is a weird thing. But that's really what I think this dry does. If so, if you say dry, heavy load or dry light load. Excuse these of things. They're all changing or dry, just plain old dry. So if you want to put like nice, radiant sort of color onto your canvas, choose dry as one of your things. And if you don't want to choose dry as one of your things, you could just take wet all the way down to zero, and that'll that'll really give you that vibrant color. So now let's play with some more colors for second. By the way, this thing here, um, load solid colors only, or don't load solid colors only. So if you say load, load solid colors only off, then you can You could hold down. I think it's the Ault and you can sample and you can see now I've got a sample there that's half gray and half blue because I sampled it on the edge there. So if I paint with that, it's got gray on one side of the brush and blue on the other side of the brush, and that's you know that can be fine. I'll come painting half gray and half blue, and it's kind of an interesting sort of a thing, but honestly, I find it hard to control. So I always go with load solid colors only that way, if I pick a color, it fills the whole thing and it's the whole color. So if I pick another color, let's say red or magenta hot pink. One of you want to call it, and if I pick another color, let's call it green. So now if I go back to just one of my presets, let's say I go toe wet, heavy mix. So what do we have here. We've got wet is the bottom color the colors on the canvas. You're gonna get a lot of that. The color that's on your brush, which is green. You're gonna get less of that. You could put that 100% if you want to. They believe in my huge differences. Um mixes it 100%. Really? If you want mixing to go on, if you want some of each color, you gotta have your mix down somewhere in the middle and then flow. I didn't mention flow, but flotus kind turns the whole thing down. It's kind of like using opacity on some other brushes. So, um, so you can ah, you know, if you doing knocking, pushing pink into blue, they're pushing blue, pushing green in tow pink. Um, you know, these colors don't mix well on RG because they're kind of opposites, but so this gray in the middle. But, um, you get the idea now, another thing. F five, this is Another thing I want to do is I'm using this round fan brush, and I like it. But there is one particular setting here, which is thickness. That's it. 1% of defaults to that. So what should happen to go to thickness? I'm sorry, not thickness stiffness. Stiffness is at 88%. And watch what happens if I change stiffness. It starts to kind of do form the thing in a weird way. And so I actually like it when it's kind of about. I think I like it about halfway so that it that get that sort of deformation based on pressure. And for some reason it has a tremendously different effect on the quality of the brush stroke in the way that it mixes. So you see how much wetter it all looks now. I don't if you notice that, but if I go back to stiffness high, you know it's like pushing wires around. It's just you don't get a sense of that wetness. And if I go to stiffness extremely low, Um, that's okay, but I feel like somehow I just like it in the middle to play around with it. But I get what I like about it is you seem to get a lot of that brush, bristle, texture and things. I like it when it's not too smooth. I really like it when it kind of resembles oil paint in that way. So there's one other thing that you can do and that is, um, if you say layers and if you see new layer, it's almost like you dried what's underneath? Because if you put new color down and the easiest way to put it out in the notice, I've got the wet brush on with all this kind of crazy stuff, and I'm gonna put a color on which is, uh, yellow, just so you can see a different color. Now it's on a new layer. It's not down on that lower layer, so you can see that even now, the color goes on quite richly. I didn't have to go to dry. I didn't have to set wet to 0%. It goes on in a very rich way. If I say layer, flatten image than these air, all one layer again. And now, of course, you know it's all very oily and mix herbal again. You can see I got this rich hot pink color, but it's not making that much headway on the yellow. If you keep it in one place, um, then it will be wet on wet for a while and it'll start to build up and you'll get your color. So that's one way to do it. Um, another way is to then, you know, go to something dry or have another tool preset. You say window, not don't save it as a brush, but if you save, it is a tool preset. Here I have one save their jf. Those are my initials Mixer, Brush tool round Fan One You can say like to use that fan. Um, if I pick it, um, it changed a couple of things here, but I think took low to very to 50%. Um, looks it could change the size of the brush, too. But And if you take slow, very low, like I said, it's kind of like you really have to work hard to make anything happen at all. Um, because flows at 1% now, but a flow is up 100%. Then it gets very active again. So that's about it. Now, in the next video, we can doodle around tryto paint something, though, so I guess that's what is going to say with the mixer and with the tool presets is if you go to dry, it's a custom just dry and then pick a color on Let's let the color be scion something like a cerulean blue. So there goes on really vibrantly because it's in the dry thing because wet is set to zero . So if I say new tool, preset and if I say dry, vibrant color okay, include color, you could that'll include the color that's actually loaded. I don't necessarily want to do that, But yes, it doesn't matter. Well, it won't do it. Um, so now I've got mixer brush and that does that and then drive vibrant that does that. So you've got your and of course you're gonna ault and select colors off of it gonna dry. So these are really the two colors the two brushes that you need most as far as the way I work Anyway, you need something where you can lay the color down that you really want to lay down and not, you know, get any arguments about it from photo shop about Oh, well, here's a sort of a funky mixture of it. You just want the color that you want and then you want to be able to blend those colors in ways that you know makes move. Fudges was pushing with my finger on the side of the way. Come button, that's what That flashing waas Um, so you want to be able to blend these colors in ways that air painterly and leave some texture in that. But at the same time, you looked like paint, and that's the same time accomplished the blend that you're trying to accomplish because most for me anyway, most of what painting involves is laying down solid colors of the right kinds and then controlling the blend between those colors, whether it's a quick transition or a slow transition, Um, so okay, that's it for this chapter. 3. A Simple 'Oil Painting': Okay, so let's begin and actually pain something simple. First of all, we want to go to the mixer brush, and now there's a couple of things that I didn't mention where I mentioned them briefly, but it didn't really go into them in more detail. One is this button here, Um, which says Load the brush after each stroke. The other one is clean the brush after each stroke, so I load the brush after each stroke. Then let's say I unload the brush with yellow. But I think what happens is you know, I get more vibrant color from the load because every time I put it down again, it's loaded. If I take that off, then I think I get less vibrant color with each load because you see the way it's not, you know, it's it's started out yellow, and it ended up some other color. And if I say clean the brush after each stroke, then this goes clear, and I'm not really sure exactly what it's doing at that point. Um, so I think I may avoid that, and we'll to stick with um so I think, take load the brush off and clean the brush off, which is where I think I had started earlier. That way the brush kind of gets dirty year over time. A little bit doesn't load up with the new color. It's marching. That's more like what a real brush actually does. So there's that, um, next, uh, is the paper texture F five back to the brush. So under a texture here, if you have the default set up, you may find there's some ridiculous texture that looks like a gray bubbles or something like that. So you're gonna have to get over to these paper textures, and once you do, you can choose one, and you have these various ways of applying it. Like, for example, there's a blend mode and right now height, which is not really a blend mode. But it's a method of doing the paper. Height is what I've got going on now, so I think that you kind of get the tops of the textures. If you have a light touch and you get, um, it kind of fills in more. If you have a heavier touch, so right light touch, you can see that it's sort of picking up the tops of the of the canvas. And then if I press heavier, uh, I get more color. But it also obliterates the texture more. Um, there's another blend mode, which is a hard mix blend mode. And by the way, every blend mode that you choose will have its own ah, set of controls that seemed to make it work best. So you can't just flip on Lee the only the blend mode and think that you're gonna have basically the same thing. So they're scale here. Small, really huge. Somewhere in the middle seems to be pretty good. Um, brightness. The hard mix blend mode is an interesting one. So interesting. I think that I have an entire course on what you can do with it, and you'd be surprised with what you can do with it. Um, you could see that it really sort of demonstrates. I think the texture better switch do something ridiculously large so you can really see it more. There you go kind of really see it there. So that's, um, use of the kinds of things that you could do with the with the paper textures. So ah, hard mix, blend mode and the depth one cent tend to be the best I think, for bringing out actual textures of looking kind of good. Okay, So Fitz Greene, let's make this go away And it it Phil with gray. So now first thing we might do is let's say we've got a tabletop, so tabletop might be, Oh, I don't know, some color off some warm color like this. And we may want to It's gonna quickly throw that down to zero, just as a quick way of getting the color to really be what I wanted to be. Oops, not really. It's proficient with what I want to do with this. I want to move it and I have the whole thing set, you know, I reset it, so I'm a little bit out of my element here, but, um, because I reset it so that would be, ah, default settings. When I made the movie so that everybody would be on the same plate, I think I'll just do this, Um, so and let's see, maybe for the well, something like this problem, when the texture is very small, is you start to sense a repetition in it, not just a repetition. But it's like because I mean, you know, texture fabric has a repetition to it, but I'm saying it's like literally the exact same pixels over and over again. So, um, I may conceal that just by pressing a little harder in places so that you don't get a sense of pure texture of your where and then color in there a little bit of that car down here just for the heck of it. And I was trying to make a simple backdrop, something with a tooth to it, something kind of interesting. - Maybe I'll put up a ball on it. I'm gonna make a new layer, and I'm going to. They make it a so bright green ball pale green and let's see, there's my ball and it's on a separate layer, which means that I can do these sort of photoshopped tricks like lock transparency, and then I can take up a brighter color and see I could push. It won't go outside of the outline. I have locked transparency like that, so it's a convenient way of working sometimes. Then let's go with a darker blue cooler car on the other side and put the I said it to mix, see filter, not filter. Ah, window tool presets, my mixer. - So we will go quite right. And maybe we'll go saturated darker you are and now in the background, and I'm painting on the background under the under the ball now and bringing a little bit of the floor color into the ball. There is if it's kind of reflected back up and for the for the I want a much darker let's see, we're on the background now. I want a much darker sort of grounding core there and let's see layer flatten image. Now it's all I've lost my ability to separate and paint behind it again. But, um, you know, sometimes I like to, you know, because in the real painting you don't have that. So can be nice to sort of. I'm kind of painting along the edges here, grabbing the background color and painting it a little bit into the fall on. Painting a little bit of the ball into the backgrounds makes it look like it's not so pasted on which it had them pasted on. Obviously, you know, the thing is that that what that does is that It causes you to kind of changed the way that ball background is around the ball, where there is this kind of halo developing around the around the ball. But that's OK because, like I said, that's the kind of thing that happens. You know, when you're painting anyway. So part of what makes it seem like a part of the more developed parts of the painting are gonna be in the centre near the subject. And if you leave, anything undeveloped at all will probably be further away from the important stuff. Um, you know, not sure what else to do. We could maybe dark in this a little bit. It's if it's going off into the distance sort of thing. And the other thing is that since this is bright here, can be nice to, um, it can be nice to pick up some darkness on in the background there, using the dry right now and says, This is dark. Can be nice to pick up some brightness over there and go back to our mixer. I'm not trying to get to dramatic with it. I'm just trying to give a hint of lightning over here and darkening over there. Um, maybe I'll call it quits. I won't say That's a finished painting. It's not bad. So I look forward to seeing what you do with the using these techniques. Thanks a lot.