Transcripts
1. Multi color brushes in Photoshop Introduction: Hello and welcome
to this course; create and paint with multi-color brushes
in Adobe Photoshop. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 270 courses
here on Skillshare and over 160,000
student enrollments. In this class,
you'll learn to make multi-colored brushes
in Adobe Photoshop. Now this is not something that Photoshop can do out of the box, but it is something that with a little bit of knowledge
and creativity, we can bend Photoshop
to our will and make it paint with brushes
that are multiple colors, and which have some edge
texture to them as well. In this class, you'll
learn the secret of making these brushes
and also see how to control how a brush paints by using a path to do
the work for you. By the time you
finish this class, you'll have developed some
handy Photoshop skills, and you'll have the ability
to make and paint with your own custom
multi-color brushes. Without further ado,
let's get started.
2. Pt 1 Make a multi color brush: To get started with
our exploration of multi-color brushes
in Photoshop, let's have a look and
see what the problem is. The problem stems from
the fact that brushes in Photoshop are just
grayscale objects. They might be solid black
or they might be grayscale. But you can't have multi-color brushes in this
brushes area in Photoshop. If I have a brush here, I've got a star brush, I can paint in a single color, so I can go and paint in red. I could paint it
in multi-colors, if I set the brush
up with a hue here. Let us just go to Color
Dynamics and let's go and set a foreground
to background jitter. I'm going to spread my
brush shapes apart a little bit so that they're going to
paint in individual stars, and let's choose another
color to work with. Now, I can paint multicolored. Well, right now I'm painting different colors
with each stroke, but if I go to Color Dynamics and set this to apply per tip, then I can change the
star colors as I paint. But it's still not a true
multi-colored brush. We don't have a multi-colored
star, for example. I'm going to get rid
of this document, let's start again with
a brand new document. My document is just 1,000
pixels by 1,000 pixels, but yours can be as big
or as small as you like. I'm going to add a
brand new layer. I'm going to build up this brand new multi-colored
brush which is going to paint in multiple
colors here in this layer. I'm going to start
with a rectangle, and it's going to be a
very small rectangle. I'm looking at the guides
as I'm drawing it out because this is going to tell
me how big my rectangle is. Mine is about a 125 by about 25. That's going to give me roughly five colors
to make a square. I'm going across here to the swatches panel and I'm just going to use my RGB swatches. I have found that
it works better if these colors are not
together in the middle, so I'm actually
going to start with the aqua color, that's
light-blue color. It's my foreground color. I can fill this selection
with that color by holding down the Alt key and pressing backspace on the PC, that's option Delete on the Mac. Now, I'm going to copy this, so I'm going to the Move tool. I'm going to hold the
Alt and the Shift key on a Mac that would be Option
and Shift as I drag down. That just moves
this square down. Let's go and get another color, this time a contrasting color. It's red Alt Backspace
will fill that shape. Again, Alt and Shift
or Option Shift on the Mac, drag it down. Choose a different
color, Alt, Backspace. I'm going to repeat
this until I have a square shape with
mixed colors in it. Right now we're not too wedded to the exact colors
and everything, we're really just having
a look and saying how this actually
it's going to work. I still have a
selection visible here, so I'm going to choose
"Select" and then "Deselect." You could press
Control or Command D. We now have the
colors that we can use for our multi-colored brush. The tool that we're going
to use, is the mixer brush. So you're going to
the brush here, you're going to click this
little fly out and you're going down here to
the mixer brush tool. Now, the mixer brush tool, we're going to want to paint
with a fairly solid brush. Now, there are some hard brushes in what we call the
legacy brushes. They are the brushes
that were installed with previous versions of Photoshop. If you haven't
installed them already, go to the little flyout
menu here and choose. "Legacy brushes." Then just click "Okay" to add the Legacy
Brushes back in here. Now, if we go to Legacy
default brushes, we're going to find
the solid brushes. This is a solid,
a circular brush. At the moment it's 125
pixels and it's hard. Now that we've set up
the type of brush, it's a hard round brush, we want to make sure that
we're using dry heavy load. So click this
drop-down list which might say anything right
now on your machine, but just go down and
choose dry heavy load. We're going to sample this block here to
fill our mixer brush. Because the way the
mixer brush can work, is it can paint on
something that you have selected almost
like a clone stamp tool. I'm going to hold
down the Alt key and select over this brush here. Now, if you see what
I'm saying here, that my brush isn't
showing the full size, these are a couple
of things to check. One of them is that you don't
have caps lock enabled. Now I've got caps lock enabled, so I could show you that. This is what it
should look like. If yours doesn't look like that, even though you have
disabled Caps Lock, go to your preferences, that's Edit and
Preferences on a PC, that is Photoshop and preferences on a Mac and
you're going to cursors. Here, you want to
make sure that you have full size brush tip enabled and that will give
you a full size brush tip. Now, I want to scale
this brush down a little bit because
it's a little bit big. So I'm going to press the open square bracket
just to make sure it's a little bit
smaller and it will cover my little
color block here. I'm going to position my brush and hold
down the Alt key, and click once with
the left mouse button. I've sampled the color. You can see up here that
the color has been sampled. Let's see how our
brush's painting. Well, it's painting multicolor, but it's not really quite the brush that
we want it to be. The reason is that we've got individual little
brushstrokes here. Let's go here to the brushes panel and
let's set the spacing. For that, we're going to brush tip shape and we're going to bring the spacing
down to 1 percent. Now when I paint with the brush, it paints a colored brush. We're on our way. It's not really great, but it's a something and
we've proven that we can paint with multicolor
brushes in Photoshop, provided we use the mixer
brush that we make our colors, and then we set up
the brush correctly. So with this
information in hand, let's go and experiment with some more sophisticated
uses for this brush.
3. Pt 2 Multi color text brush: For our next multicolor brush, we're going to do a type effect. I'm going to start
with a document that is the same size as I was
working with previously, 1,000 pixels by a 1,000 pixels, yours can be as big or
as small as you'd like. Now we're going to
the Type tool and we're going to create
a piece of type. It doesn't matter too
much what font you use, you just don't want it
to be particularly big. I'm just going to click here
and type the word dream. I'm going to drag it
into the work area. Now I want it to be
a different color, so I'm going to go
back and select over my type and I'm going
to make it a navy blue. For my type effect to work, I need a border around my type, so what I'm going to do is
convert this to a shape. In the last pallet, you'll have your type layer. I'll right-click this and we can choose here convert to shape. When something is a shape, we get to put a
dotted border on it. Well, that's what
we're going to do is put a dotted border on it. With the text layer selected, it's actually a shape layer now, you're going to
select a shape tool. You can choose the
custom shape tool or you could choose a
path selection tool. It doesn't really matter which, because what you
want to do is to kick in these effects up here. You want to be able to set the fill and you
want to be able to set the stroke because it's the stroke that
we're interested in. I'm going to set here
a stroke and I'm going to make it a pale blue. Let's go and get
some pastel colors, let's go and find a
pale blue to use. I want it to be
wider than it is, so I'm going to make it probably
about somewhere between seven and 10 pixels
and I'm going here to the style of the stroke and
I'm going to make it dots. All I want here is an effect
that we can see right now. I'm pretty happy with that, I might drop it down just
a little bit in size, but this will do just fine. This is our piece
of type that we're going to use as a brush, but we need a brush to use and the circular
brush that we've used last time really isn't
going to work because this is a big word of type. Let's add a brand new layer and let's go and make a brush. I'm going to the Rectangular
Marquee tool here. I'm just going to select that, we're on a brand new layer, so we're well away
from this text effect. I'm just going to
drag over it to make a rectangle that's going
to cover this text. We already learned in Photoshop
that brushes are black or grayscale so I'm going to press the letter "D" if I
haven't already done so, so that I go to
the default colors which are black and white. Black is my foreground color, I have a selection in place so I can hold
down the "Alt" key, press the "Backspace" key to fill the selection
with black. On a Mac, of course,
that would be Option and then Delete. This is a brush while
it can be a brush, so it's still selected here, so I'm going to choose Edit, and then Define Brush Preset. I'm just going to
make this dream brush to indicate that it's size
to go over my word dream. Now I'm finished
with this layer, I can just drag it
onto the trash can. I don't need that
brush any longer and I don't need my
selection so I'm going to select and deselect or press
"Control" or command "D". Now I need some to paint so I am going to add a
brand new layer. I'm going to the mixer brush, so make sure that you select your mixer brush and
then we'll open up the brushes panel here and
go down to the very end, which is where you'll find the brand new brush
that you just created. You're going to click
on that to select it. Make sure here that you have obviously selected
Dry Heavy Load. Now you'll also
want to come over here and select sample or layers because we're working
on a layer right now that has no content
in it at all, and we want to sample the
layer below the word dream. I'm going to select Sample
All Layers and for now, I'm also going to turn off
the background layer so I don't get white in the
way, just for a minute. I'm going to "Alt"
click on my text, so I sample it and you can see it's here in this
little box here, you can see that the
word dream is appearing. At this point, I can turn my
background layer back on, but I do want to
make sure that I'm targeting this layer here. Let's just go and paint. Well, we've got the
same problem as we had last time and it's painting individual strokes that are too far apart to get
a seamless look. I'm going to undo
that and I'm going to the brushes panel here and we're going to Brush Tip Shape, and we're going to bring the
spacing down to one percent. Now, this is the
effect that we get. We're painting our text effect
onto our document, again, using this mixer brush to get a multicolored
effect and of course, our texts could be
any color we like, dots could be any
color that we like. They could even be multicolor
if you want to color them individually and
you're going to get the spaghetti look if you like. That's another application
for this brush. But what happens if you're
not very good at drawing? What happens if you
get a wiggly path? Because there is
no stabilizer on this mouse that I'm using and even if you're using a tablet, you might still wiggle a
little bit as you go along. Well, it's possible to get a smoother effect and
we're going to have a look at that in
the next video.
4. Pt 3 Smooth painted text: To be able to smooth
out our line, I'm just going to continue to
work on the same document, but I I'm going to undo the
work that I've done so far. Just that stroke. Let's go across now to the path palette because
what we're going to do is we're going to draw
a path for our text. I'm going to the
dreaded Pen tool. It's really simple to use so don't worry
about this at all. Go up here and make sure
that you have Path selected. That's really important. You don't want
this to be a shape and you certainly don't want
it to be filled pixels. For our path, we're
going to do this. We're just going to click
and drag to the right. Click and drag. When you've got a
nice little line here with your Pen tool, a nice little set of
horizontal handles, let go of the left mouse button. Then we're going
to come down here and we're going to
click and drag to the right again. That's it. So right now, I'm still going with the Pen
tool to stop it. I'm just going to
tap the Escape key. If you don't see the
rubber band effect, that rubber band as you
draw with the tool, you can go here to
this little gear at the top here and make sure
that you set rubber band on. The rubber band is
that effect that does this where you can see
where you're going. I'm just going to undo that. I'm just concerned with this
path that I've created. I'm going to go to the path selection tool now and I'm going to select my path. Now I'm going to select
my mixer brush because my mixer brush is already
loaded with my type, it's all ready to go, and I've got a nice
little path here. Now I want to send
my brush down. What I'm going to do
now is go here to these little icons underneath the path and the path palette, and the second one
along if I hover over it says stroke
path with brush. If I click on that, what's going to happen
is that my path is going to be stroked with
the brush I just created. Now it's not in the right place, so let's just wind that back. Let's go and get our
path selection tool. Let's move our path
across a little bit. We'll go back and make sure that we select the mixer brush. I've got my path selected, I've got my mixer
brush selected, and I'm going to click
here again on this icon. This time my texts goes a little bit better
into the page. Now you can continue
to work with that and position it exactly
where you want it to be, but using a path will allow you to apply your mixer brush, your multi-colored brush to a path to get a
nice smooth effect. Of course, that
begs the question as to what more can we do? We know how to get
text to follow a path. Now we know how to make
multicolored objects. Can we do something even a
little bit more creative? The answer of course
is yes and we'll see that in the next video.
5. Pt 4 Piping effect brush: For the final multi-color
brush effect, we're going to put a lot of different pieces
together and we're going to use some brand
new techniques as well. I'm going to start with a
rectangular document file new. Mine is going to be
1920 by 1080 in size. I just want a
document that's going to fill the screen because I'm going to use
some texts and I want plenty of room for my text. Now, this time the brush
that we're going to create, we're going to create
the colors and also the brush in
a specific shape. They're going to be
the exact same shape. We're going to start using
the shape tools here. When you click on
the "Shape Tool", you're also going to make
sure that you have shapes selected from this set
of three options here. You don't want path, you don't want pixels, you do want shape. We're going to select
this polygon shapes. Make sure that you
click on it and click once in the document to get
the Create Polygon dialogue. This allows us to set up the polygon the way
we want it to be. If you're working with
similar dimensions to me, I've got a document 1920
by 1080 pixels in size. Then a 100 by a 100 pixels for the polygons
going to be perfect. You can use whatever
size you like, but if you want to
follow along with me or 100 by 100 is going
to work really well. The number of sides is 12, and we want to flat style, so I don't want it
to be really pointy. I want it to be more
flat around the edge, so 80 percent is a
good setting for that. That's going to give
us a flatter star. I'll click, "Okay". Here is our star shape. It's filled with the
current fill color. I'm going to the
past selection tool. I'm going to drag it up
here out of the way. We don't need to resize it. I know it's quite small, but that's just fine. I'm going to select the zoom
tool and just drag over the shape so that we can see it where we can work with it. Might also move it out of the way a little
bit because I think it's going to run into a
dialogue in just a second. With one of the
shape tool selected. It doesn't matter which of
the shape tools is selected. You just need to have access
to these options up here, which are only going
to be available if you have a shape
tool selected. We want to make sure that
our shape is selected and we want to make sure
that the stroke is set to nothing at all. That's already done here. Then I'm going to
fill and I want my fill to be a gradient. This can be a little bit weird in this version
of Photoshop, I've had a bit of a problem
setting up my gradient. I'm going to show
you where I ran into problems in case you do too. I'm going to choose my pinks. These are built-in
gradients in Photoshop, you you use any combination you like it doesn't
really matter. But I'm going to use
this one here that has what looks like a lighter
pink and a darker pink. I'm going to set the gradient to radial because I want to push this dark color to the very
edge points of this star. If your colors are going
the other way so that you've got dark in the middle
and light on the outside, just click here and
that inverts them. Here's where I ran
into problems, was trying to get my colors
to push out to the edge. I'm going to show you what's
going to potentially happen. When I click on this color here because I want
to duplicate it. Typically with gradients, if you click on this color
to target it, you can click again inside
this gradient strip here to apply that
color a second time. But what's happened here is that this one's pink
and this is white. I don't know why
Photoshop is doing this. But I'm going to
double-click on it, and I'm going to make it
a little bit more pink. Then by adjusting this, I can force the color
into the tips of my star. Most of my star here is this lighter pink
color and the tips, the point of the star
are colored with this darker color using
this radial gradient. That's pretty good for now. I'm going to click away from
this and there is our shape. I'm going to press "Control
and "Zero" to zoom back out. These are going to be the
colors for our brush. Now we're going to make a
brush that's going to be the exact same shape
as the colors. This is not
technically required, but it is a good opportunity
for us to look at the finer points of making
brushes in Photoshop. We're going to go ahead
and make this brush, and our brushes going to be the exact same shape and
size as this shape is here. I'm going to allow this palette. I'm going to add another layer
so that we make sure that this next shape that
we're going to create is going on a layer all by itself. Just make it a
little bit easier. We're going back to
the polygon tool, making sure that this
up here says shape and making sure that black is our foreground color
because this time, because we're going
to create a brush, we do want it to be solid black. Let's go back to
our polygon tool, make sure it's selected. Click once in the document. Now the settings that we set
up previously are sticky, so they're going to be in this dialogue,100
pixels by 100 pixels, 12 sides, zero corner radius, and a-star ratio of 80 per cent. Click once and
there is our shape. This is going to be
the shape that we're going to use for our brush. I'm going to select it with
the path selection tool here, and I'm going to edit and
then define brush preset. Now, this is an alert to you. This is not what it
should look like. This looks like it's
a 591 pixel brush with a little star
in the middle. That's not going to work. Let's get rid of that. What's happening
is that Photoshop is picking this
shape up as well. Let's go into this polygon. Let's right-click and lets
rasterize this layer. Because that's going
to make it a raster shape and that's perfect for us. We'll hold down the Control key, that's Command on the Mac
and click on this thumbnail. When you control-click on a thumbnail or Command
click on a thumbnail, you select the shape here. Now we've got only
this shape selected. When I go to Edit,, Define Brush Preset, things are going to
look very different. You can see that we've
got a brush that's 101 pixels wide and it's all black and it's
filling the screen, so it's a nice good size brush. It's not bringing a whole
lot of empty space with it. I'm going to call this star. I'll click, "Okay". I can get rid of this line
now because I don't need it. Control or command D to
deselect my selection. Let's see how this is
going to work now, I'm going to add a brand
new layer to the document. I'm going to select
my mixer brush, and go and select my star. My star brush is going
to be at the very end, so just click on
that to select it. We want to make sure that its
size to its original size, 101 pixel pitch should
be a perfect size to line up over the shape that we've got that's
filled with color. Dry heavy load,
sample all layers. Now we already know that we need to set the spacing
for this brush. Let's come in here
and let the spacing to one percent because we
know that we have to do that. Now I'm going to zoom
in to this shape a little bit so I can line
my brush up perfectly. Let's go to the mixer brush. Let's hold it over here
where we can see it. Get it perfectly in alignment
and Alt Click on it. That sample the color
into the mixer brush. We can see it's up here. Press "Control" or
"Command Zero", to zoom back out and let's
paint with the brush. Now we have something
that's painting with little bit of
dimension on the edges. I think I'm getting that white through it because I
have a white background. Let me wind that back. Let's go to layers and let's turn off that
background layer. I'm going to zoom in again to the top part
of this document. Go back to my mixer brush. You can always re-sample it. Position it nicely. Alt, left-click to sample the shape. Now I can put my background back in because I haven't
sampled it into the brush. Let's see if it
paints a little bit differently this time. It is. Turning off that
white background is really going to help you. We've got a mixer brush now that is painting with some
dimension along the edge. You can see here that there's
a little bit of dimension. It's giving us this
more piping look. In the next video, we're going to make a path
for this to travel on. We're also going to see some things like how to
finish off the path, and also what to do because this brush right now it
looks a little bit big. But there's a very simple
process for making it smaller.
6. Pt 5 Draw a path: Now if you remember when
we use the word dream, we put it along a path, well we've now got a piping
effect brush that we could set along a path and if
our path was a word, then we would get a piping
effect along a word. What we're going
to need is a font that's going to work
well for this effect. You You a font ideally that is free for
commercial use and this one, it's called Pecita and it's
available from 1001 Fonts. I'll give you the download
link for this font because it is a handy
little font to use. You will use it in
particular if you're not really good at drawing words yourself and I'm not
particularly good at that so I prefer to use
a script font. There are thousands
and thousands of script fonts available, but I'm going to
use Pecita today. So you'll want to download it and install it on your computer. Now it's downloading again here, but I don't need it again. I'm going to get rid of the brushstrokes
that we have already. I want to keep my
shape because I need to sample that later on. I'll add a brand new
layer in here just so that everything is
clean and tidy. I'm going to get
my type tool and I'm going to select
my Pecita font. I'll click in my
document and I'm just going to type a word. For argument's sake, I'm
using the word beauty, so I'm going to
select over it and I'm going to make
it nice and big. If I hold the Shift key, it's going to be constrained
to its original proportions. Now I'm a little bit concerned with this type effect
that there are two characters that
are a little bit spread apart for my liking. I'm going back to the Type tool, I'm going to select
over the u and the t. I'm going to this
character panel up here. You can also get to it by choosing Window and
then Character. Now there are a couple
of options that you can use for spacing things out. One is the kerning option which applies between
two characters, but you can also use this one which is just
adjusting the spacing, and I'm going to use that. I'm going to reduce
the spacing so I'm trying to go down
here a little bit. I don't want to close
it up all the way, but a little bit of the
way will be better here. I also think that the t and the y are a little bit
close to each other, so if I take these
two characters, I could increase the
spacing here a little bit. I'm relatively happy
with the word as it is. Of course, we're not going
to use the word per se, we're just going to use it
to help us trace things. The next step is to go and to
trace this word as a path. I'm going to the pen tool and in this case I want to make sure
they have path selected. That will allow me
to create a path. I'm going to step through
drawing this out as a path. Now it's going to
be a two-part path. There's going to be this part of the word and then this part
is going to be a second. Actually, it's a three-part
part because I need the line across
the letter t here. I'm going to start here
by clicking and dragging. I'm going to come down to this
point and click and drag. At the same time before I let
go the left mouse button, I'm going to hold the
Alt or Option key to swing this little handle around, so now I'm headed
in this direction. Now it doesn't need to
be a very big handle, you want to be careful that you don't make your handles too big. I'm going to come across here to this point and click and drag. We'll come down here,
click and drag. I'm going to head back up
over here, click and drag. You don't have to be
100 percent accurate. All we're looking for here
is the shape of the word, so we don't have to do
it ourselves basically. Let's just go and get this. I'm going to use quite a few anchor points just because it's
going to be easier, click and a little drag
to make this curve. Now here I need to
make a decision because I can't go in
two directions at once, but what I'm going to
do is I'm going to go over and I'm going to come back. I'm going to come here to
go over and click and drag. Because I want to come back at the same time and I'm
changing direction, I can't let go of the
left mouse button, I'm just going to hold
down the Alt or Option key as I swing this handle around, so I can go back the
direction I came in. I don't want to go
over this line here. That's going to cause
me a few problems, so I'm going to make
sure I stay clear of the line as I'm traveling back. Now if you make a mistake, you can just keep ongoing
and you can fix it later on. I'm going to make
a mistake here, so I'm going to click and drag and forget to go back the other way by swinging
this handle around. Let's just make
this a mistake and I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to focus
on the bits that I can control which is the
direction I'm headed in now. I'm up here, Alt or Option, change direction,
come down here. Let's make this a little handle. We're going to change
direction up here again. Alt or Option to swing around. Oops, I lost that entirely. Let's just come here and
we'll worry about that. I'll press "Escape". I'm going to zoom into the problem areas. I'm going to the
direct selection tool because that will let me
change individual points. I've got a point here which
needs a bit of adjustment, I've got a point here
that needs adjustments, so I'm going to Alt, drag this point down
to make this shape, and just check and make
sure that everything else looks fine which it does. We've got the first
part of our word. The important thing
at this stage is once you've adjusted it
and got it looking right, not to lose it, because it's really easy to do. So let's come to the
paths palette here and this is called the
Work Path right now. What I can do is select it and from this
drop-down list here, I can choose Save Path. I'm just going to
call this B-E-A-U, the first part of beauty. Now when it's saved
not as a work path, it's not going to disappear. So life is going to be
a little bit easier. I'm clicking away from
it and now I'm going to continue with the
rest of the word. Let's go to the Pen tool, let's go and create the
letter t. This time totally ignoring
the bar on that t because we're going to do
that separately in a minute. Being aware that here we're
going to change direction. So when I click and drag, I'm going to want
to swing round, so I'm heading in
the right direction. Click and drag. Change of direction here. Click and drag up and then
swing my handle around. Then come down to here, swing this out a little bit. Another one here. Again, we're not worried about adding
too many anchor points. It's probably more anchor
points than we need, but provided it works for you, that's really all that
matters. Press "Escape". Now we've got the rest
of the word and you can look and see if you need
to tidy anything up. Mine looks pretty smooth, so I'm pretty happy with this. I'm going to select
my work path. I'm going to click
here and save path. I'm going to call it T-Y. So that's the second
part of my effect. I'm going to click
away from it and now I'm just going
to do this bar. Now I'm just going to click
and drag here and click and drag here to create the rest of my shape
and press "Escape". Again, this is a work path. Again I'm going to save it and so I'm going
to call this bar. Now you can build up
complex shapes this way. It just sometimes
makes it easier to have separate paths
because it means that things are separate
and you're not going to be running into things that
you've done previously. It's really easy to
stick them all together. So I'm going to grab
this bar here and I'm going to grab it with
the path selection tool. Let's just go and make
sure it's selected, and I'm going to press
Control or Command C, that's the copy command. I'm going to E-A-U-T, and you can see
it's selected here, and I'm just going to paste
with Control or Command V. If you have a look
in the past panel, you'll see that
this little bar has now been applied into this path. Let's go and do the same
thing with the T-Y. Here is the T-Y, just make sure it's selected. Copy it, Control or Command C. Go to the rest of
the word beauty and Control or Command V. So now I have a path
that is everything. I'm going to
actually rename this because now it is the
full word beauty. I don't need these other
two paths because I've used them up and so I
can just remove them. When I click on this, I can say that I have
selected my entire path. Because I've got a path, I can now apply my brush to it, and we're going to do
that in the next video.
7. Pt 6 Make the piping text: We're now ready to go and
apply our brush to our path. I've gone ahead and
saved this file. Whenever I spend a
lot of time doing something like tracing
a path like this, I want to make sure that I save the file so I can't lose it. I'm also going to come
in here and remove this text object because I
don't need it any longer. All I need is my path. I'm going to add a new layer because that's where
we're going to put our effect onto. I'm going back to my mixer
brush and let's just test it. Well, it's working because I had it already loaded
with that color. If you didn't have it
loaded, for example, if you've gone away and
come back a few days later, then you would
just go and reload it the way that we
did previously. You'll select your mixer brush, make sure it's sized
to a good size for the color shape that
you're working with. Let's just go in here. Let's go and pick
up our mixer brush. We're going to
position it over here. Make sure it fits to turn the background
layer off for us so that we're not
sampling white color. Option click Alt, click on a PC, turn our background back on Control or Command
0 to zoom back out. Now our brush is
painting perfectly. What we're going to do is go to our path's palette and make sure that we have
our path targeted. I'm going to the
path selection tool, make sure this path is targeted. Make sure then that the
mixer brush is selected. We'll go here and apply the
mixer brush to our path. It's been applied to the
path and it looks okay. I'm a little bit concerned
because this bar here appears to be behind
the rest of the text. I'll probably want
to fix that up. I also want to fix up the
brush size because it looks to me like it's
a little bit too big. I'm going to press Control or Command Z
to just undo this. I'm going to select that bar. Let's just go to the
direct selection tool and let's select this bar. I'm going to choose Edit, Cut. Then I'm going to
choose Edit, Paste. Let's select everything all over again with the path
selection tool. Let's target the mixer
brush tool and let's click on the stroke path with brush. This time you can see that the bar is in front
of everything, and so the bar is being
painted last of all. That's a better effect. I'm going to just undo
everything because as I said, the brushes are a
little bit too big. Well, the really
good thing about these mixer brushes is that you can actually scale the brush down once it's filled
with the color. You want to fill it with the
color at the right size. But now I'm going to press the open square bracket key to shrink my mixer brush down. When I paint it,
you can see it's just painting at a smaller size, but we haven't lost
any of their effects. It's shrunk the brush rather than cropped
it if you'd like. We're still getting all
the colors that we want. Let's go back path selection
tool, select everything. Select the mixer brush
so that we target that. Now click here to apply
the brush to the stroke. Now we have our path
stroked with our brush. What I'm thinking
of here now is that my color isn't nearly
intense enough. Let's go back, undo everything, and let's go back to our brush. Let's zoom into it. Because this is still a shape, we haven't changed its nature. It's still a shape here and
we can change the fill on it. The problem is that right now I can't get back into
this fill option. It is a known problem
with Photoshop. I'm going to the properties
panel because that will work. When I open up the
properties panel, I can get back to my fill and so I'm going to choose or adjust the fill that
I'm using here. Let's just go and get this fill. I think it's too
light in the middle, so I'm going to choose a
better pink color if you like, a bit more pink. I'm also going to copy this
color because that will allow me to paste it in
here again as well. I pasted the same
color in click Okay. Let's go here. I'm going to paste the color in, although I don't want to use it, but I do want the
same base color. Now I can just
drag across to get a much darker version of it
for the tips of my brush. Let's have a look at that. I'm going to click
away from my shape. I'm going back to my mixer
brush, select on it. Let's select this layer where we can work with
our mixer brush. We knew that the size
was supposed to be 101. Let me just take it
up to the right size. Here it is at 100. That'll be near enough. Turn off the background
layer so we're not sampling any white, Alt or Option and click on the
brush to sample the color. Turn our background back on. We're going to
re-select our path. Make sure to re-select the mixer brush at this point
and remember it's too big. At this point, we
can scale it down. Go back to our paths palette, and just apply the paint to it. Click away so that we
can see the result. As you could see, I can
probably go even darker with my colors and still
have an acceptable result. I'm going to do that
and we're going to come back in the next video to see how we're going to
fix up these end bits.
8. Pt 7 Finishing touches: To darken up our shape, let's go and re-select our shape and just adjust the fill of it. I think my colors
are way off here. They're not nearly dark enough. So I'm going to take this color
and I'm going to sweep it all the way up to
really really dark. I'm going to turn off
my background layer. I'm going to add a brand
new layer for my text. I've got my beauty
text here on a layer, but I'm just going
to hide it for now. We need to go back
to our mixer brush, make sure that we have
our brush selected. Make sure that we size it up to the right
size to sample it. Alt or Option,
click on our shape. We can bring our white back. We can resize our document. We'll go back to
the Paths palette. Go back to the Paths
selection tool, make sure that the
path is added, and you see here that just
this element is selected. So I'm going to make sure
that everything is selected. Now I want to fill the
path with my brush, so I'm going to make sure
that the brush is selected. We know that the brush
at this size is too big, so let's just scale it down. It's a better size. Then we'll just click here to fill the path with that brush. I'm happier this time, I think the color
is a bit better. I think that having that really contrast look is giving us really the
scale of these letters. What I'm concerned about
is these three points, because they're not finished off particularly attractively, so we're going to look
now at how we would add a little pipe effect to
the end of these elements. We're going to do this with everything else
turned off for now. Let's just turn off the beauty layer and
add a brand new layer, so we can work on this layer. My mixer brush seems to
have lost all its color, so let's go back
and fix that up. Of course, we're going to turn
off the background layer. We're going to zoom
in so that we can see the shape that
we're sampling. Make sure that the
mixer brush is at the correct size,
which it's not. You'll make sure that caps
lock is not turned on so I can see it to sample it. Then I'll click on
it to sample it. Go back and turn the
background back on again, Control 0 to zoom back out, and let's just test it. It's working perfectly. What we want to do on this
brand new layer is to add a larger version
of this brush. I'm going to make
it, in my case, about 300 pixels in size. I'm just going to click here to apply the brush to my document. I'm going to add a
brand new layer, because I want to do the next
step on a brand new layer. I'm going to sample
this pink color, because I want to use it. I'm just using the
eyedropper tool, and clicking on it to make
it the foreground color. I'm going to the
triangle tool here, so I'm going to target
the triangle tool. I want to make sure that
I have shape selected. That'll just give me a
bit more flexibility and getting the right shape
at the right size. I'm just going to
drag out here to create a long triangle. It can be much and should be quite a bit bigger
than this shape here. Let's see what it looks like. I'm going to position it in position and I want the tip of the triangle to be about
in the middle of my star. Thinking this is a
pretty good size. But what I want to do is to
start the triangle over here. We're going to
target the triangle, and we're going to
press "Control T", that's "Command T" on the Mac. That brings up these
transform tools. I'm going to click here on the top most of these
nine little boxes, the top middle one. Because that then is
the rotation point. This angle here I'm going to set to 15 degrees because that is half of the rotation that we need to use to get all the
way around this shape. That's positioned this triangle
right over this point. Absolutely perfect. Now I'm going to target my
layer and I'm going to choose "Layer," "New,"
"Layer Via Copy." That adds a new layer. Without doing anything more, I'm going to press
"Control" or "Command T" to get back into the
transform controls. This time I'm going to transform around this top point here. I'm targeting the top right
of these nine little boxes. This time my rotation is
going to be 30 degrees. You'll see that this bar here, this triangle is landing right over the point on this star. Perfect. Let's just click
this "Confirm" option. Without doing anything more, hold down "Control
Alt and Shift", that's "Command Option Shift" on the Mac and press
the letter "T", and continue to do that until you get all the way
around the circle. Now, you may have
noticed if you've used this command before
in Photoshop, it used to create brand
new layers for everything. It doesn't anymore,
but that's fine because we don't
want it to anyway. I'm going to click
on these two layers. The one that has most
of the triangles and then the one that's
got the starter triangle. I'll "Right-click" and
choose "Merge Shapes." So we've just got
one layer here. I'm going to go one step further because I'm also going
to rasterize this. I'm going to
"Right-click," and I'm going to choose
"Rasterize Layer." Because we don't need it to be a shape once we've
actually created it. Now that I've got everything
pretty much lined up, I can just move the
composite shape here, to make sure that it's right
in position over my star. Then what I want to do is
to crop the excess bits. I'm going to go back
here to my star. This is this one underneath. I'm going to "Control"
click on the thumbnail. That's "Command"
click on the Mac. You can see that
I've got a selection that is this shape here. Well, I'm going to go now
and target the triangle. I'm going to choose
"Select" and "Inverse," so that now what is selected is everything
that's not the star, and because I've targeted
this layer up here, when I press "Delete,"
I'm going to get rid of everything that is
not part of the star. Now I've got something
that is beginning to look like a little
piped rosette. These two layers are separate, but I want them to be together. So I'm going to
"Right-click" this layer and choose "Merge Down," so that
now I have one element, which is this shape. I want to make it a spiral, so the tool I'm going to use for this is going to be
the liquify tool. I'm just going to get away
from having that selected. Now with this layer
targeted over here, I'm going to choose "Filter"
and then "Liquify." Now I've been in this
dialogue before, so I'm just going to show
you what I selected. I'm choosing twirl clockwise. Now I'm making sure
that my brush here is about the size to sit
over the top of my shape. It's a little bit big, so I can use these square
brackets to make it smaller. I'm just going to try
and see what happens. If I click, it's going
to spin quite a bit, if I think it's gone too far, I'm just going to press
"Control Z" and try again. Now you can control the
pressure here and the rate. So they might help you
to get a good twirl. I'm pretty happy with something that looks
about like that. I'm just going to click "Okay." Now we have the twirl, and let's just turn
our word back on. The twirl is much too big, but I did that
deliberately because once we create these effects the large size and
shrink them down, I think they're going to
work a little bit better. I'm going to "Control" click on the layer thumbnail so
that I have this spiral selected and then press
"Control" or "Command T." Now, something's
happening here. I've got some bits here
that didn't belong. Let me just get rid of those rectangular marquee tool and select and delete those. That might make life
a little bit easier. Now, let's "Control"
click on this, go "Control" or "Command
T", that's much better. Now, I can just hold the
"Shift" key to size it down. What I'm looking for is
something that's going to fit really nicely over
the end of my letter. Control or Command D to
deselect the selection, and let's zoom in. Well, I made it a little
bit big, so that's fine. I can just scale it
down a little bit. You can see that
everything's lining up pretty well with the
shape underneath. The only thing that's not working right now is the colors, but that's a really easy to fix. Let's locate where
everything is. This is my little pipe spiral. Well, I'm going to use an
adjustment layer above it. With this layer targeted, I'm going to choose
"Layer," "New Adjustment Layer," and
I'm going to use curves. I'm going to show you how to use curves to fix this problem up. Well, the first thing we want
to do is to make sure that our curves adjustment only
affects this shape here. We're going to click here on this icon and that
creates a clipping mask. Now we're going to change this dark red and make
it a bit lighter. We do that by dragging on
this end of the curve. If I drag it up, you'll see that it's going
to get a little bit lighter. Just ignore what's happening
to the lighter areas. We're just looking for a
reasonable match here. Then I'm going to drag
down on the curve. I'm just going to
manipulate this end of the curve until I
get something that is going to be a more
seamless blend between my shape and the
rest of the element. I think that that's a
pretty good result. Having achieved that,
I can blend that in. So I can just
"Right-click" this layer. Let's just get the layer
and not everything else. Right-click it and
choose "Merge Down." That's now merged
into this shape. Now that we've got our shape, we can Alt or Option, drag a duplicate of it and
put it over this element, and then we need one
at the other end, Alt or Option drag and
put one over here. Let's zoom back out. Let's turn off our brush layer. This is our completed text. We've got our piped effect, our multi-colored brush
created here in Photoshop, and we've got our little
pipette end to our brush. Of course, the brush
color could be anything, we could combine the yellow
and red or blue and green, whatever we want to do.
9. Pt 8 Two More Examples: Before we finish up, I want to work through
another example with you, but I also want to show you
something as we go along. This was a beach ball image
that I used for my brush. This is the colors that
I used and this is the result I got when I
applied it to a path. Now, I was a bit concerned
that I had too much red here. Let me show you version 2. In this instance, what
I did was I carved out a little bit of yellow inside this ball and made
that my brush. You can see here that I've got a smaller element
along the side. The red has been broken up. It's a nice effect, and I also use the beach ball
shape here as my end bits. Let's have a look at version 3. In this case, I created
this shape as my end bits. I've got a slightly
different ending on it. I just created a circle that had these
little pieces in it, and then I twisted it very
little using the liquify tool. That's how I got these effects. But let's have a look at another approach
that you could take, going to choose File, New and just create
a larger document. Now, I'm going to create
some circles here. I'm just going to bring out a circle using the circle tool. I'm going to create a
brand new layer for this, and I'm going to
Alt Backspace to fill it with my first color. Now, I'm going to the
selection tool and I'm going to Alt-drag another
circle down here. If I add the Shift key, it's going to be in a
perfectly vertical direction. Now, this is still
selected so I can go to the swatches panel and
quickly add another color. I'm going to use
this swatch here, so I'm going to do the pink. Because it's selected
all Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. Going back to the
selection tool, back to my Alt key
or Option on a Mac. Drag down and I'm going
to create a third circle. It's still selected
so I can target yet a third color and Alt Backspace
Option Delete on the Mac. Now, I've got this as my brush, but the thing is going to be, how am I going to create a brush that is exactly the right size? Well, this is how
you're going to do it. You're going to Control-click on the layer thumbnail here, so you select all the shapes. They're on the same layer, just makes really good sense. I'm going to add a
brand new layer to the document just temporarily. I'm going to press D to
get my default colors, and then because all these
elements are selected, if I press Alt Backspace
or Option Delete, I'm going to get a
filled section that is exactly the same size as
these dots underneath. I'm going to choose Edit,
Define Brush Preset, and I'm going to call this dots3 because I've got quite a
few of these dots brushes. But you've got to make sure
that you're going to use the exact brush that you created so the dots
are correctly spaced. Let me just get that saved. Let me trash this and let
me add a brand new layer. Now, we're going to
the mixer brush. We're going to select the
last brush that we made, which is this dots3 brush. I'm going to turn
off my background. I'm going to place my brush
right over my shapes here, and I'll Alt left-click
to sample these colors. Let me just go back to this. This is still selected,
so I'm going to have to unselect them to get
my brush to paint. There's also a way
that you can get some cool paths to use. I'm going here to the
custom shape tool, and I have the old paths, all the legacy default shapes, but you could use other
shapes that you find. I'm just going to grab
this bent arrow here. I'm going to draw out this
bent arrow as a path. You can see I've got
paths selected up here. It's important that it's a path because we know that
we can stroke paths. Let's go to the path. I've got my path selected. I'm going to go to
my mixer brush. Now, I've got a mixer brush that I can apply to this path. Of course, it's much too big, so let's shrink it down in size. Then let's click to
apply it to the path. What we get is our path that has had our three-stroke
brush applied to it. There are lots of creative
ways that you can create your brushes and then apply them even to custom shapes
here in Photoshop.
10. Project and Wrapup for Photoshop Multi-color brushes: We've now completed the video
portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your class project
will be to create and paint with a multi-color
brush in Photoshop. Post an image of your completed work as
your class project. As you are watching
these videos, you will have seen a
prompt asking if you would recommend this
class to others. Please if you enjoyed the class and learned
things from it, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend
this class to others. And secondly, write just a few words about why
you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help
other students to see that this is a class that they
might enjoy and learn from. If you see the Follow
link on the screen, click it and you'll
be notified when my new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a
question, please do so. I read and respond to all of
your comments and questions, and I look at and respond
to all your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. I really hope that you've enjoyed this course and
that you've learned things about Photoshop of which you were previously unaware. I look forward to seeing you in another graphic design for lunch class here on
Skillshare in the future.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
