Building Up: Experiment with Custom Brushes in Procreate’s Brush Studio

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to building up experiment with custom brushes in Procreate's Brush Studio. The second part of the Procreate Bush Studio Mini classes series. I'm Emily, and I will be your guide in these next steps into your brush creating journey. In this class, we take what we learned in the first class and build our skills up by creating our own images for shape and grain. If you have not watched Part one of the series, I invite you to do so now because I'm not going to repeat the steps we took to get here. Instead, we are going to dive right into creating your own images to modify an existing brush from the Procreate brush studio. The link to the first class of this series is in the class description in the about tab underneath this video. Ready? Let's dive in. 2. Your Project: So you have now learned how to choose an existing brush from the Procreate brush studio and tweak its shape and grain attributes to modify it without changing anything else. Picking up where we left off. In the last class, we are going to build up on that and do the exact same thing, but we are going to use our own photos instead of the Procreate library images. Sounds exciting. I believe it is. Your project for this class is quite simple. First, you are going to create your own brush shape and your own texture. Then you will take pictures that you will tweak directly and procreate. Next, you will import set photos to the brush studio to modify the shape and grain of an existing brush. And lastly, you will create a brush sample of your newly customized brush. For the class you will need your iPad with Procreate installed and a working knowledge of the app. A few pieces of ordinary paper, a big dark marker. I don't have a black marker on hand right now, so I'll use an old violet alcohol marker. Remember that this class is part two of a series, and you should really have watched P one before taking this class because I will not be repeating the steps from part one here. We are simply adding to them instead. As always, feel free to upload the steps to the project's gallery. It's always fun to share the process with fellow students, and I would love to see what you've been working on for the class. Meet me in the next lesson to start working on your images. See you there. 3. Working On Your Drawings: Hal, good to see you here. In this lesson, we'll work on the images that will become the shape and grain of our brush. I'll show you one method, but remember that once you know the principles behind it, you will be able to play around and try different things. Let's start with the shape. The brush shape is described in the Procreate handbook as the container for the texture of a brush, and I like to keep this in mind while I work on my shapes. Something that works really well for me is making marks on white paper with a dark marker. So that's what I'll demonstrate here. Be paint or any other material, really. But one good guideline is to have contrast. It will come in handy later on when we'll edit the image for the brush studio. Don't be afraid to have some texture and leave areas untouched in the shape because these quirks will look great and give personality to your brush. Also, don't forget that when you will have done a few of these, you'll have a better sense of when a contained shape will work best or when scattered marks might work better. Here's an idea. You could work on a few different shapes, as I am doing now, edit them all and choose what works best later on. In any case, do not judge the result. We're just playing here. Once your shape or shapes are created, it's time to take a photo. For simplicity, I'll take the photos with the iPad directly. I try my best to have a bright even lighting of my paper to make things as simple as possible. Also, I'm careful to have a neutral angle, meaning there is as little distortion as possible in my image. For this, try to have the lens of your iPad directly over the shape you are shooting parallel to the paper. Now we can move on to the texture. Texture can come from anything, really. As long as you keep in mind that it's easier to work with a regular pattern and that again, lots of contrast in your image will be helpful later. You could use paper or fabric that has a marked texture. It could be a drawing or even food, such as grains of salt on contrasting background. For this example, I'll keep on working with markers on white paper. I work in a square format that I roughly mark on my paper and fill the square by making random marks. The only restriction is to create an all over relatively regular pattern. When this is done, it's time to take a photo. Earlier, I mentioned that it was best to have a good even lighting for the photo of the shape. But let me stress that it is crucial when taking a picture of your texture. If you don't have even lighting, it will cause you quite the headache when you get to the brush studio, especially if you're working with an organic texture such as fabric. But also, don't forget that we learn from our mistakes. So don't be afraid to try things out, readjust, and try again. Here, I have the ideal situation, because my texture has high contrast already. So even if my photo isn't perfect, it's going to work great later on. I really encourage you to try this method first. And when you understand the principles better and are more at ease, then switch to more complicated textures. In the next lesson, we are going to edit the images. See you there. 4. Editing Your Images: Hello, back. Let's keep going by editing our images. Now that the pictures are taken, let's switch to Procreate and create a square document of three by 3 " at 1,200 DPI. This will ensure good resolution for our brush shape, especially if we need to zoom in the image later. In this document, we import the shape photos. Take a moment to adjust the size and center the image as much as you can. If you don't want your photo to get warped and keep its ratio, don't forget to tap the uniform setting in the Transform tool. We now need to edit our photo to tell Procreate which part of the image will print and which will not. For this, we need a black and white image in which white means on and will put color to the canvas, and black means off or nothing will print. Remember this as it will guide your process for the future. Okay? Alright. Also, note the following steps because they will be the same when we get to the grain of the brush, and I will not go over them again. Because we worked with dark marks on white paper, what we need to do is reverse the image. Why? Well, remember 2 seconds ago when I said that white means on and black means off, that's it. We want the shape that we trace to be on and everything around it to be off. So we need to reverse the image. In the adjustments menu, choose gradient map. You may have different gradients set up here, so we'll create a new one with the little plus sign on the right. By default, it should be a black and white gradient, but if it isn't, no worries, we'll change it. Just tap the first color on the left and make it white, and now the color on the right, we make it black. The result we are looking for in the image is a black background and a white shape. So whatever you do, aim for this. I want perfect contrast in my image. So what I need to do here is grab the black square and drag it a little towards the center until all of the background is black. If your shape isn't pale enough at this point, grab the white square and drag it towards the center too. What this does is it gives your image less tones between the white and black parts, creating more contrast. You can experiment with this as much as you like. And when you have just enough detail and you are satisfied with the results, tap the adjustment icon to accept changes. You can always go back with a two finger tap anyway, so don't fret it. Okay, now we are going to export this as a photo. Go to the Actions menu, tap Share and JPEG. The easiest from here is simply to save the image as a photo in your gallery right here. Now, we fall back to what we learned in the first class, starting with a brush that you like, access the brush studio and go right to the shape attribute. Tap edit, and here comes the difference. When tapping Import, you will import a photo instead of importing from the source library. The image you have just exported should be right here. Tap done, and now you can test out the result. If you're satisfied, tap done again, and what up? The editing steps are the same for the texture. The difference really is that you should aim for regularity and the pattern. I'll import my own photo here and see what I can do. Remember that the possibilities are endless and with the same shape and grain, you could get many different brushes by using different settings. But let's not get too much into that. Just know that when working on your texture, you can fiddle with the settings as much as you like, either in the auto repeat tab or in the grain behavior tab. Try them out one by one, like I'm doing now and see what works for what you have in mind, or just what you like in the moment. For example, you could scale up the grain and move the image to a part that looks more even. I like to use a very intuitive approach, and I encourage you to do the same because we're just playing. When you're satisfied, tap done and test out your texture. The only thing left to do is to make your sample card and post it to the project's gallery, just like we did in the first class. I cannot wait to see what you come up with. Thank you so much for joining me in this super short and sweet class. If you have questions, don't hesitate to post them, and I will answer to the best of my knowledge, always. See ya.