How to Make a Hair and Fur Brush in Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Denise use and I'm an illustrator. Today in this class we're going to look at how to create a brush in Photoshop that you can use to digitally paint fur or hair. So what's included in your project? Well, it's made up of two parts. Firstly, you'll learn how to make a Photoshop brush, which we can use for fur or hair. And then the second and main part of your project will be to put your brush into practice and have a go at painting this hair sample here. And there's a copy of this in the project and resources section for your reference. So first of all, we're going to create the brush itself. And then I'm going to teach you how to use the adjustments to make it just perfect. Well then experiment with your brush, painting hair in two different ways to try and get used to the brush and how to create the hair texture. And then we'll move on to the main part of your project and use what we've learned to paint this. Of course, you can take this technique and use it to create lots of brushes. And they'll all be slightly different. So perhaps you can specify them to particular painting that you want to make, a particular type of firm that you want to digitally paint. Right? Let's get going. 2. How to Make a Hair and Fur Brush in Photoshop: In this bite-size Photoshop class, I want to show you the process of making your own Photoshop brushes, specifically a brush for digitally painting fur or hair. We're going to start with the 100 millimeter by 100 millimeter canvas at 300 DPI. This is the Canvas where we'll create the brush tool. I'm using a happy HB brush from Kyle's drawing box, which is available on Adobe. But it will work with a variety of other brushes. So feel free to experiment with what you have. We're going to use our brush to place random dots of varying sizes onto our Canvas. And we're going to place them in this diamond shape. Each one of these dots will become a strand of for once we've finished making it. I'll also show you the transformations that you can make in the settings to make the brush work well or not. When you're placing the dots, just place them randomly. Have a variety of sizes and also have a variety of opacity. You can see I'm doing some very faint ones and some ones that are very solid. And I'm trying to stick to this diamond shape with the point at the top and bottom. I don't really like that one. I'm going to take that one out. It was a bit it wasn't very round. Wasn't a proper round shape. Okay, that's better. So carry on adding your dots and try to stick to that diamond shape that we spoke about earlier. So now we need to define this canvas of docs as a brush. And to do that we go to Edit, then Define Brush Preset and a dialog box will pop up asking you to name your brush. So I'm going to call this brush, brush one. Press. Okay? And your brush will now be selected. And if you go up to the brushes panel, you can see it in the brush menu. Now it's time to try out your brush. Open up a new document. I've chosen an A4 landscape with a white background at 300 DPI. Let's try out our brush and see what alterations we might need to make. So you want your brush to be set at normal and the opacity to be taken down to about 20 per cent. Okay? So you'll notice that the brush at the moment gives you a series of dots like a sort of stippling effect. And that's not quite what we're after. So we're going to make a few simple alterations which will transform the brush into a more flowing line. You need to go to Window and then down to brush setting. The brush settings panel allows us to make adjustments to our brush. And first we're going to take the spacing, write down. What this is doing is reducing the space between the corresponding dots on our brush is quite difficult to explain what this function does. But if I increase the spacing, you can see for individual brush stamps if you'd like. And as you decrease the spacing, more brush stamps are added until they are so close together that they all blurred into one line. Let's see what that tiny adjustment has done to our brush. That's looking a lot more like hair or fur, but we can make one more adjustment to improve it. What I want to improve on is how the line ends at the moment, the ends of the hair look rather blunt. A piece of hair or fur naturally tapers towards the ends. And I want to try and replicate that. We can alter this by double-clicking on transfer in the brush settings panel to make sure that control setting is on pen pressure. Right? Let's give that one a go. You can further alter the softness of the line by altering the percentage underneath the control button. If we put the percentage up, the line becomes denser towards the ends. If we lower it right down, it's much fainter and softer and tapers off more. I like this soft effects. I'm going to stick with nought per cent. So let's try out our brush with a color. So I'm going to pick this brown and I've still got the opacity down at about 20 per cent. And you can see that if we just overlap the hair, the brush marks, we're getting all these lovely strands of hair overlapping one another and it gives a lovely density to the piece. Now I'm just going to darken my color slightly and I'm going to start making pieces of hair that are perhaps overlapping the others. Because, you know, hair falls like that, doesn't it? It it overlaps each other. I'm just making a little curl at the bottom here. So here's the base of it. We can start working into it. Now I'm putting in lighter colors on the top and thinking about where the light might hit the hair. So this is a more sort of Orban color on the top. And I'm going to go even lighter now. And just put my opacity up a little bit to make that color standout. So I'm going over the top of what I've already painted here just to give it a little bit of reflection, a little bit of light on the top of the hair. I think the light is coming in now from the left. So I'm going to work in some dark areas now. Underneath just across the top there. I'm just where the hair comes in on the edge there. That's got two more yellowy color. And add to these highlights. I'm not using very much pressure on my pen as I'm drawing these. I just want it to be quite faint. Adding some more highlights here. And then even going to white to really layer up those highlights. You can see it's starting to take some shape. Now. Pick out a darker brown here and use that to fill in the gaps between those pieces of highlighted hair just to give it a bit more density. Now you could continue developing this drawing and keep working into the layers. But I think that gives you some idea of how to use your brush once you've made it. But there is another way that you could use it. And I'm going to quickly go through another technique that you can use. Your brush on. This involves putting down some underpainting first. So for this, I'm using a hard round brush on for density. And I'm just blocking in some very dark brown. Probably think of it as the darkest shade in whatever the hair is that you're painting. And then I'm just going to use the same color with our brush that we made to soften the edges going over the top of it. Just to soften those hard edges of the brush that we used. First of all, that's a bit better. Then what we can do is we can work on top of that. Take the opacity down with a lighter color, we can start building into it. So we're now going from dark to light, if you like. So I'm choosing a bit of a lighter color here because that wasn't quite strong enough. And I putting in those highlights and perhaps some waves in the hair. Slightly more yellowy color here. I'm layering that in. Instead of adding the dark as we were going, we've added all the dark initially and use that as a base and then worked into that. But now I'm going back in with a much darker color or a really dark brown. I'm just picking out little bits, um, where perhaps the strands of hair or leaving a gap in the hair, which is creating a shadow. Then what you do is you're just keeping, layering up the highlights. I'm going lighter as you go. But still probably keeping your opacity down a bit so that you get that nice layering effect so that you can see the strands of hair underneath one another. 3. The Main Project Underpainting: So now we're going to start on the main project. You've made your brush, you've experimented with it a bit. And now we're going to take this photograph, which you can find in the projects and resources section and try and paint it with the brush that you've created. So here I have the photo next to it. I have the document that we're going to use for painting, and it's 200 mm by 200 mm at 300 DPI. So when you have a look at this photograph, you'll notice that there are some very dark areas on here. And also one here to here. Let me just outline this dark area. And I want you to take special note of those because those are the areas that we should under paint. First of all, before we do anything else. So I'm just going to pick a color, sort of mid tone color from this halfedge graph. And I'm going to sketch lightly the shape of the hair so that I've got some reference point. It's going to open up a new layer. So I'm just working with around soft brush at the moment. Just want to get to you in some of the shape. At this festival. We have this line which is quite prominent. So I'm going to try and put that in. So that's a good line to start off with. That will sort of anchor the whole drawing. This line here. Now I might try to do this line here. But putting these lines and you give yourself a framework which you can then work around. It doesn't have to be perfect at this stage at all. Doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to give you the general feel of what is happening in the hair. I'm going to look at this side and I'm interested in this line that's cutting off that corner and then coming back down towards the left. Then I'm going to try to achieve that line there. It might be a good idea to try and put this line in as well. This shape, you see how this band of hair is coming down in one piece. I haven't quite got that, right. Yeah. So let's try that. Okay, so that gives us some sort of a framework to work with. Now what we're going to do is add these areas of underpainting. I'm going to do that on a separate layer. I'm going to add a layer underneath the sketch. So let's call that sketch. And we'll call this underpainting. So the underpainting is underneath this layer that we've already painted. Let's pick out these really dark colors. I'm literally just going to use my eyedropper tool to pick up those colors. And I'm going to use just a hard round brush. No, I'm not. I'm going to use a soft round brush and I'm going to put the opacity up a bit. My see, there is this shape here, which is here, follows up that curve a little bit. It kind of comes all the way across that line there. Then I can say, I'm not the patient is where it comes down here. Just get that into this. The dark tones and first, we will be painting on top of them. So don't worry what they didn't like right away. Then I can see there's a bit more dark up here. Here. Oh, bit further over that is, isn't it? Because you see there's not there's not much gap between the light hair on the edge of the paper and I've got a much bigger gap. So I need to just adjust that a little bit. I think. Where I've gone long, say commons in a bit more here. There's some really dark areas here, which I want to pick out. A bit darker, still. Titin down to black. Actually do like when I'm painting to get my contrast in really early. So I like to get light and dark tones in pretty quickly. Now picking out the mid tones, just adding where I can see that this is all sorts of mid-tone range around here. Down here. This is mid tones at this. This is fairly mid tone moving to lighter tones. But I'll put the mid-tone in first. So I can't stress how important the underpainting is. I realized this doesn't really look anything at the moment. It's just a bunch of brown shapes together. But it will give you a foundation for your hair painting. Let's pick out the very lightest of colors that we've got here and start adding those in. But also there you've got some quite dark areas. One of those yeah. I don't want to forget about those. I want those to be visible underneath. And it can really help just to stand away from your drawing and have a look. If the tones are right. If you've got them in the fatty right areas. And whether you're happy with those times, he certainly doesn't have to look perfect. It is only underpainting. Now I want you to get your brush that you made. We find mine. Once you've got your brush, you want your opacity around about 1%. And she wants to be working on a new layer called mine hair. And I've deleted the sketch layer. So now we just have a layer called the underpainting layer and the white background. I'm going to open up the brush settings. And we need to take the spacing right down again. Click on transfer. Check that the pen pressures on and we liked it on zero, didn't we? That should be right now. I'm going to close that and start to paint. I picked a fairly mid tone color. I'm just going to start following the way that the hair is growing and flowing. I'm just going to start by following the line of the hair. So keep going like this. Until you've got all the dark areas blending in nicely with the mid tone and lighter areas. I'm going to keep going like this. And I'll come back to you once I've done that part. 4. The Main Project Painting the Hair: Now I want you to get your brush that he made mine. So once you've got your brush, we want your opacity around about 1%. And she wants to be working on a new layer. I called mine hair. And I've deleted the sketch layer. So now we just have a layer called the underpainting layer and the white background. I'm going to open up the brush settings. And we need to take the spacing right down again. Click on transfer. Check that the pen pressures on and we liked it on zero, didn't we? That should be right now. We're going to close that and start to paint. I picked a fairly mid tone color. I'm just going to start by following the line of the hair. I'm going to pick out one of the darker colors and what back into that area there. So make my brush a bit smaller. So keep going like this. Until you've got all the dark areas blending in nicely, the mid tone and lighter areas. We're going to keep going like this. And I'll come back to you once I've done that part. Okay, now I can see some gaps in the hair here where the light is shining through and also here. It's fine here. But down here we need to lighten these areas a little bit. So I'm just going to take my brush, but sorry, typed my eraser, turn my opacity down a bit and remove some of this from the underpainting. Little bit more. Little bit here. A little bit around the top of the head. Here. I'm going to go up to the hair and remove a bit more. You can see an underpainting there and then hair straight Claire on the top. If I take away the underpainting there, That's what you're left with. The two of them together. And what's daunting to look a bit more shaped like the hair itself. But we need to make these colors really pop. I can see some real highlights here. We haven't quite got those in yet. Let's keep working on the hair color though. That's too dark. I'm going to choose a slightly different brush now, offer brush and then I'm gonna go and just choose a happy HB. Do some individual hairs. Hair that runs across here. Then I'm gonna go back in with my hair brush that I made, that we made earlier. I'm going to choose an almost white. Really put some highlights in The whole section, whether light is sitting on the hair shaft all the way down here and up to here. I'm just going to lighten all of this. Then I'm going to pick a yellow because there is quite a lot of yellowy highlights in this hair. A very subtle, they are still there. Especially down in this area. Change my brush back to the happy HB. I'm going to use this as another layer. The detail. I'm just picking out some single strands of hair. The hair silhouetted a bit. Just a few more highlights here. That's a nice highlight piece that comes all the way down. Just want to make sure I've got that in. Really, it's up to you how far you go with this. You can keep going until it looks just like the photograph. But I'd like it to look a bit different than the phage golf bit fresher, maybe a bit more hand-drawn. So I think I'm ready to stop. This is always difficult knowing when to stop, but I thought I think I'm happy with that. 5. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on completing this class. Your project was twofold. Firstly, you learnt how to create a brush in Photoshop which could be used to paint fur or hair. Then we experimented with this brush to get the feel of it before going on to the second part of the project, which was to challenge yourself to digitally paint from an image using the brush that you had created. Please remember to share your project with the rest of the class. I always enjoy seeing your work and I know other students do too. To show your work, go to the Projects and Resources section in the class details, and click the Create Project button. Here. You can give your project a title and tell us about your experience of taking the class. You could show the steps that you took and you could upload a screenshot of your brush design and your finished project. You could even add a video. At the bottom, add some relevant tags so that your project can be found. And finally, click Publish. I hope this project is giving you the skills to create a Photoshop brush and also the confidence and knowledge to use it.