Photoshop for Illustrators II: Using and Creating Brushes

1. Trailer: Hi. I'm Matt Kaufenberg, a freelance illustrator from Minnesota. I'm kicking a three-part Skillshare series titled, Photoshop for Illustrators, and this series is going to take you through the fundamentals of Photoshop concentrating on the tools that illustrators would use. In the second part of the series, I'm going to be focusing on the Brush tool. I'll cover the basics of brushes including loading brush sets, modifying existing ones and saving them, and also more advanced techniques such as creating your own custom brushes and tool presets. I'll also take you through my process of sketching and inking in illustration, and you'll follow along to create your own illustration. This series is specifically tailored for artists who are just starting out and want to learn how to use Photoshop from an illustrator perspective. 3. Working with Brushes: Welcome to the second class in a three-part series that I'm doing called Photoshop for illustrators. In the first class, I took you through the basics of Photoshop, the tools, the workspace panels and we just kind of went through and got a basic understanding of how all that works. In this class, I'm going to take you through working with brushes. So, I'm going to take you through brush tool settings, creating your own brushes, different brush techniques for sketching in inking, and then we'll finish it off with just a few tips and tricks. So, I want to take a few minutes and just talk about some brush resources. Now, throughout this course I'm going to be using mainly brushes that I have bought from Kyle Webster. You can see a site here gumroad.com/KyleTWebster, and Kyle's brushes have just been invaluable to my workflow. I'm going to be mainly using brushes from his mega pack, which you can see right here. It's a paid pack, but it is worth every penny. If you're serious about illustration I highly recommend that you buy these brushes. The only thing about it is I believe you need CS5 or newer to use these brushes. So, if you don't have that then don't worry about it I'll include some links to other brush resources that will work they won't be quite as nice as these brushes but you'll still be able to use them and go through this without any problems. So, definitely, check out Kyle's website, he has a lot of different cool brushes this- the new runny inchors ones right here are just my new favorites. I'm really having a lot of fun experimenting with them and that's actually what I'll be using to ink the project that we're doing. We're going to take an object, whether it's something from your home, your office or wherever or just some inanimate object such as this blue toy race car that I found. I picked this just because I really like the shape, the colors, I was thinking ahead trying to figure out what would be fun to ink? So, when you're looking for an object, just make sure that it's not going to be something that you're going to dread drawing. Makes sure that it's something that when you see you get a little excited maybe even an idea of what you're going to do and for the final project we're not going to necessarily create it to look just like the photo, we're going to use it as inspiration. After we go through some inking techniques and sketching and everything then eventually we'll have something more like this, that in the later class which is color and texture, we can bring in and we can color it and have some fun with it. So, find something that you really want to draw, that you're going to have fun drawing, get it into the computer somehow, take a photo of it, scan it in, however you'd like to do it and then we're going to bring that into Photoshop, and I'm going to show you how we can use that to create an illustration. So, let's get started. 5. Brush Control Panel Part 1: All right, before we start in on Brush Tool Settings, let's create a new file. So, new and let's do 11 by 8.5, and make sure it's 300 and click "Okay". All right so now we've got our new file, so then let's look at some brush settings. Right over here are your brush settings, we want to make sure first of all our brush is selected over on the left hand side under the tools. So, I'll make sure that's selected and we want to make sure it's brush not pencil, and another way to get the brush settings dialog box to pop up, is by clicking it right here. So, we've got brush and brush presets, and what we're going to be working with are these brush options. So let's go into our brushes and what I should first show you is how to load your brushes in case you don't know. So, I'm going to reset the brushes. All right so now I only have these many brushes and this is depending on what version of Photoshop you have, this is what you're going to see or something similar. You won't see if you've got an earlier version of Photoshop, you might not see some of these new brushes, but you'll definitely see something like this and like this. All right so, if you'd like to see more brushes, you can see that we can click this little icon here, this little gear icon and go down and we have a sorted brushes, basic brushes and so on. So, depending on what you have, let's just select basic brushes. Append just means that it would add to these to the brushes that we already have. So, we're going to just click "Okay" to replace the brushes. Okay, and so that's what we get, just the basic brushes. Now, if we were to load some assorted brushes and append it, then we've got these brushes added. So, feel free to add as many brushes as you'd like. Now, if you need to actually load them and not just pick them from the side here, you can go "Load Brushes" and then you can navigate to wherever you've saved the brushes. I'm going to hit "cancel", but if you have some of the brushes that I've included in the brush resource section, if you've saved those, you can click and navigate to those and then click load after you select them, and I will load them into this brush panel. So then, you can either replace them or you can add them to your brushes. All right, so let's talk a little bit about customizing these brushes. So, I'm just going to select one of these brushes. Now for all of this class and I mentioned it in the first class but, I'm going to be using a Wacom cintiq to run you through this process and if you don't have a tablet or a cintiq. You're not going to really get the most out of it just because you're not going to get that more traditional feel that you get from using a pen or either drawing on a tablet or drawing directly on the screen, it's just not going to be the same if you're using a mouse. You can still follow along and some things will still work for you, but if you can borrow a friend's tablet or pick up just a cheap tablet even that is going to help so much more than just using your mouse. So, let's get started, let's create a new layer and choose whatever color you'd like to draw with, and let's open up the brush panel. Now, there are two ways you can open it up, you can either go to the side and if it's not over here, this window, brush or if you have the brush selected which we need to and we want to make sure it's brush and not pencil. So, make sure that's selected. Then up here in the options, we can click on this button right here and that will also open up the brush panel. Now here's where we're going to be able to customize our brush. So, make sure that brush tip shape is selected, you can change the angle of your brush, the hardness, the spacing. I recommend putting a spacing all the way down to one percent just because your brush is going to look a lot better. The hardness is going to change, it's going to look more like an air brush. If you put the hardness to zero. So, depending on what you want, you can change it like that. So, those are just the basics we can flip the x and the y. Now, let's go to Shape Dynamics. So, before I do that right now if I draw with this, and first let's zoom in just a little bit. Zooming in is going to give us a lot more control when working with the brush tool. I'm going to zoom into 100 and I'm going to move the window just a little bit. So, now if we draw with this, we've got this just kind of dull thick line, no variation to it, no thick, no thin, just one width. To change that, what we need to do is go up to Shape Dynamics and we're going to click "Shape Dynamics" and then we also have to make sure we click on the name so that we can see all the options. Now, if we change the jitter, that's going to make it a little bit more of a rougher brush not much we can add texture later. But I'm going to add a little bit of that. If you're using a stylus, then you want to have pen pressure on right here, depending on how hard you press with your stylus, you're going to get a thicker or thinner line. So, later on we can change the angle and jitter but let's just stick with this for now and just see what this does. That's not bad, we get kind of a thick to thin line, depending on the pressure, so not too bad. A little bit of a roughness to the stroke itself. Now, if we add scattering, we're going to click on it so we can see the options. Now it's going to be even and I'm going to change my size and my brushes a little bit. You can change the size of your brush, either by going here, by clicking on this icon and changing the size, or you can use the brackets that are to the right of the letter P on the keyboard. Those left and right brackets will change it. I have a shortcut key on my cintiq so that's what I use, so you'll see it kind of go and get a bit larger and smaller pretty fast, and so that's why. So, I'm going to take this. We've got now scattering on it so it's a little bit even more rougher than it was before and that's kind of a fun line. Much more than this. You got more of our natural looking brush stroke now, rather than this very digital clean stroke. So if we want to scatter that more, we can hit this and you can see it's starting to break apart down here, and now if we drew with that, it's going to look a lot different. So, we still have thick to thin, but now it's all these little dots and we can build on that and make this kind of more of a texture like that. Now, we can also apply count. So that way, it looks like that without having to keep drawing it. So we've got thick to thin and a lot more texture going on here. Now, we can hit the Eraser tool which is down here, if you have a stylus, you can flip it over and I actually have mindset. Let's see, I want to eraser ink, this so you can choose your eraser just like you can choose your brush. You can have a soft eraser or a hard eraser, and so you can see how you can manipulate the brush stroke after you've created it using the eraser tool. So that's nice. 7. Brush Control Panel Part 2: We go back to our brush tool and just look at a few other settings that are in here. So, we can add some texture to the brush and let's maybe take down the scattering of bit, the count and how much it scatters. Actually, let's just take off scattering for right now because we're going to play with texture now. So, if we click on the Texture, you can already see that we've got a different texture on there. There's some preset textures that come with Photoshop, you can add some to this. You just load patterns, so you can find a lot of those online to use. You could also load some of the preset. I'm going to click okay. Now, we've got a couple of different options. So, those are just default textures we can get. Now, if we play with the scale. Lets try this one. I'm going to erase some of these and play with the brightness. You can see down here what's happening to the brush, so maybe I just want a little bit of roughness to that brush. So, I'm going to put the brightness down a bit. Contrast and that's going to depend on the brightness. Let's put that down a bit more. Depth. Now, you can see what that does. I'm going to put that right there and you can just play minimum depth. You're going to see this fading away the tips and I like that so let me play with that and then depth jitter is going to be cool because it'll add a little bit in at the tips. So, it's not perfect. So now, we've got this line and that's a fine textured, kind of a blobby inks line. Again, depending on how hard you press, you're going to get either a much thicker line or a much thinner line. What's nice with the brush is we don't have to keep changing sizes to do a thin line. So, if we can just lightly press on it without trying to get thick to thin and just press lightly, we can get a very thin line or we can get a thicker line by pressing really hard. So, it's really nice because we don't have to be switching sizes while we're drawing. It just depends on how hard we press down with the stylus. So, that's really fun. Now, dual brush, that's going to add another brush to it. We can even add even more texture. So, we got a very messy line right now. Change of spacing. Click that, got to uncheck that. We've got color dynamics, foreground background jitter, so you can see that's going to bring in some of the white background. Now, I'm going to choose a different color for the background just to be able to see this a little bit better and you can see it's bringing in some of the Orange. Let me just play with this a little bit. We've actually got really weird colors going, really huge or not so much. You can see that you can do weird things with color. I'm going to clear this. Ctrl+A+Delete and then Ctrl+D will deselect it. I have a shortcut key again for that so I can clear it pretty fast. Transfer is nice and with transfer you can play with the opacity. So, we've got that jitter going on depending on what we want to do, maybe we don't want it that much. I'm going to uncheck transfer for now and we're going to skip brush pose. Noise. Again, I will just add a little bit of noise, wet edges. Now, these don't actually have options that we can change. I don't use these too much except for smoothing is always checked. So, the ones that we ran through are the ones that you're going to use primarily when editing your brush. So, now that we have this brush and maybe let's go up and make the texture a little bit more, maybe add that dual brush to it. So now, I'm going to clear this again Ctrl+A will select all of it, Delete and then Ctrl+D will deselect. So, we've got this brush that we've created and we want to add it to our brushes. So, we can go to this little icon up here in the top right corner of the brushes panel and we can hit New Brush Preset and we can name it rough inker. You can see capture brush size in the preset. So, this is going to start it off at seven. If we didn't do that then it would have started off whatever brush size you have at the moment. So, we'll leave it on seven for now. If we go up here and we hide the brush panel, we go down, we can see our brushes right down here. So, I'm going to go back to the brush I originally had which was nine, that's 19 I mean, which was there. Now, if we go down to our saved brush, we've got that brush. So, if it's a brush that we really like using, obviously you want to save it and you can always come back to it, so that's really nice. Now, the thing you have to remember is we have that brush saved but if this was to somehow get reset, then you would lose this fresh. So, what you need to do is you need to save this entire brush library. So we're going to go to Save Brushes, right here go down to Save Brushes and name it whatever you'd like and save it. So now, if it does get reset, we can always load that back and still have our Brush Preset. All right. So, let's move on to creating your own brushes. 10. Brush Creation Methods: All right. So, let's delete any layers that we had on our 11 by 8.5 document. So I'm going to delete that, and then let's go ahead and save it, Control S, and I'm going to call it Sketches because this is where we're going to start our illustration. You can save it to the folder of your choice, makes sure on the dropdown it's PSD, a Photoshop file, click Save, and then we're going to close that. Okay. Now, in this last lesson I showed you how to modify a brush and then save it, but we were using an existing brush and we're just tweaking the settings. Next, I'm going to show you some different methods for creating your own brush. We're going to talk about using the Brush Tool, so we can use other brushes to draw shapes that will become a brush. We can use the Shape Tool to create brushes, and you can also do some scanning of textures to create brushes. So, let's start off with using the Brush Tool. We're going to create a new file and let's do five by five at 300, click okay, so we've got this. All right. So, we're going to create a new layer and we're just going to use our plain brush here. What we can do now, is just create a weird shape. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. Now, you can use the Magic Wand tool, so long as contiguous is selected. We can go up to Select, Modify, Expand, and I'm going to type in four here. I'm going to do that again because it wasn't quite enough, so I'm going to put it in eight here. Okay, and that's perfect. Now, I'm going to hit Alt Delete and fill it in. So, that's just a quick way to fill in a piece that you're drawing. We'll be talking about coloring and texture in the next class. But just so when you're making this you know a fast way to fill in a shape, that's the easiest way to do it. All right. So, we've got this, I'm going to add a little bit more to it. Maybe I'm going to add a little bit of sketchiness to it. So, I'm just going to- and actually for that part, what I'm going to do is switch to the brush that we created because I liked how rough that was. So, I'm just going to do this a few times. All right. So, I've got this shape. I'm just going to add a little bit more to it. So, something like this. We're going to hit Control A. So, once you have your shape, hit Control A, and then we're going to go up to Edit, Define Brush Preset. Now, we have this dialogue box and we can name our brush and save it. I'm going to de-select, control D. I'm going to hide this layer and create a new one so that we can draw on it. Now, you can see right away it selects that brush. Now, if I click once, we've got that brush as it was created. If I undo that, I can change the size of it, I'm going to make it smaller, and now we've got this weird textured brush. It doesn't look that great right now, but you can see that we've got some kind of texture going on. So, you can play around with your brush just to see what it looks like at this stage. So, that's one way to create the brush shape. We'll go into editing it a bit later, but first let's go through a few other options for creating your brush. So, the next way we could do it is by using Shape Tools. So, we've got either the Custom Shape, the Rectangle tool or any of these. So, I'm going to create one using the Ellipse tool. Again, we want to make sure that it's black, if it's gray or anything it's going to be transparent, it's not going to work well. Make sure that it's black. All right. So, I'm going to draw a shape. Again, I'm holding Spacebar to move the shapes around. We talked about shapes in the last class. So, I'm just going to create a splatter brush type feel. Now, what I could do is select the Move Tool and again, I think I've mentioned it before but if I haven't, that popup that you saw right here is from my Cintiq pen and it has some shortcut keys. So, I try not to use it, sometimes I do it by habit and I selected the Move Tool there. So, you just go up here or click V on the keyboard and that's the shortcut key to select the Move Tool. So, I've got the Move Tool and I'm going to hit Alt, which Alt is going to duplicate some of these shapes. So, I'm going to take some of these so I don't have to keep drawing the same one over and over again, and just create a few little shapes like this. So, something like that. Now, I'm going to, I've got auto select on with the Move Tool, so I can click and drag. Since these are vector, I can resize this. So, I'm just going to resize it to fit the window. Alright. So we've got this texture. Depending on what you did, it might look different. But we're going to hit control, E and that's going to collapse all these layers. So, now you can see we have all these layers into one layer. Now, we could actually still edit this because it's vector. But we're just going to leave it as is. We're going to hit Control A. Because we use vector you could define a custom shape, define a pattern but we're going to define Brush Preset. I'm just going to put inky, click okay. Now I'm going to deselect. I'm going to create a new layer. We have to go down and select that, and that's our new brush. Now if I click like this, we're just going to get that shape we created. Now if I'm drawing with it, we've got a little bit different shape going on there. We can fill it in, and we've got this weird texture going on. Again, it doesn't look that great, but you can see the beginnings of the brush, just by drawing it like this. So, let's delete that layer, and talk about the other way to create brush. Talk about the other way to create your own custom brush. All right. So, now I'm going to show you how to create a custom brush using either a scan of a texture, so you could paint some oils, wash whatever you need. Oils would be a little messy, so I wouldn't recommend that. But anything that would be a cool texture, whether it's something that you drew on paper, or even a texture that you took a picture with your phone. Anything will really work to create a brush. Before I do that, one thing I forgot to mention was, you don't actually have to select the canvas. I'm used to doing it that way because a lot of times I'll be grabbing brushes from a document that has a lot of different stuff on it. Since we've created our own document for this and there's nothing else to get in the way, we don't actually have to select it before defining the Brush Preset. So, just something to keep in mind. All right. So, like I said you could scan something in, you could take a photo of a texture. I found one online that was for commercial use, so, I'm going to use that as an example. You always want to make sure that the license for any textures that you find online, say that they can be used for commercial use and not just for personal use. So, we're going to take this water color, and we're going to drag it over. We can close this. Then I'm going to resize this. Control T to fit within our box here. So, I'm just going to resize it, and make sure everything is within the five by five area. Then what we want to do is, we want to change it to just black and white. So, we're going to go to image, adjustments and go down to black and white. You can just these, depending on what color it is. So, I want it to be a little darker like this. We don't want much gray in there. Keep a little bit. If we really want it to look like watercolor, then we would keep more of this texture in here. I don't want it to look like watercolor, I'd just want that unique outer shape for it. So, I'm going to do something like that. Then with it selected, the layer that we just created, we want to do control L, which is going to bring up levels. I'm going to move this down a bit, so that we get rid of these extra black lines around it. I'm just going to go in until they're gone. Click okay. Then I'm going to take the Eraser tool and I'm going to erase some of this stuff. I want to keep a few of these dots. Well, we don't need everything. So, I'm just going to go in here and erase a few of these. So, that we have something like this. Now we can go and define our brush. So, Edit, Define Brush Preset, name it. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to hide the layer, create a new one so that we can draw on it. I'm going to change the color to this more brown color. There we go. We have a textured brush now. So, that's really cool that we can create custom brushes. All kinds of different ways in Photoshop. We could even do some more of this, and then create one based on that shape depending on what it look like. So, let's go ahead and start modifying how these brushes work. 12. Adjusting Your Brushes: Okay. So let's take one of the brushes that we created and start to modify its properties, so that acts more like the brushes that were used to. So, I'm going to use this kind of watercolor one that I created. I'm going to create a new layer. If you have a layer that you drew on, you can delete that. So we'll go up to our brush panel again like we've done before, I'm going to resize the window just so we can see them next to each other. Now, I'm gonna change this to black for now and just like we did in the other lesson, we're going to change the shape dynamic, scattering texture, so really this is all about just playing with it and getting the result that you would like the brush to be. So, I'm just going to play around with it a little bit and we'll see what happens. So, I'm gonna do "Shape dynamics". So that's going to be able to thick to thin and I don't want it too much. Perhaps if I want to do this more as an inking brush, then I will want to put that diameter down a bit and I'm going to zoom in just so we can see this a bit better. So right now, we're getting this texture and it's all right but it's not ideal. So, what we want to do is "Scattering" and maybe adjust the jitter a little bit count and then if that's too much, we can always uncheck it and not use scattering. So let's try "Angle Jitter" instead and the "Roundness Jitter". So now that's a better brush right there and it's not perfect yet, but you can see that it's starting to be a lot more fun than what the original brush was. So then I'm going to do "Transfer" and maybe a little bit of "Texture". Let's do the "Flow Jitter" just a little bit. Actually, I'm going to put that down to zero, but I'm going to change the opacity just a little bit. I'm going to put "Pen pressure" on this so that the transfer is dependent on how hard I'm going to be pressing on the pen. So if I'm pressing light, we've got this nice little brush, actually looks pretty good and if I'm going to press harder, we're going to get a darker line. So that looks pretty good, I like that. Then what we're going to do is we can play with the "Opacity" up here, the "Flow", so if I'm going to take the flow down a little bit. Even if we're pressing hard, we're not getting quite as dark of a line, but I wanted to stay kind of like this maybe a little bit down. Like that, that looks pretty good. Then if we want, we can also have a layer mode, a blending mode on here, so that it gets darker faster, depending on the effect we want. I'm not going to put that, I'm going to put that on normal. I'm gonna clear this layer and just make sure that this is what I want. So I like that brush. Let's just see what dual brush does. That does kind of a nice brush too. So we could play around with the settings from the dual brush, change the spacing a little bit, depending on what you like. I'm gonna take that off to see what scattering does a little bit with the count. That's maybe a little too rough. So I'm going to uncheck that and maybe just stick with what we have here. So what I'm going to do is go over to this icon on the options with the brush selected, and this is, if we roll over it here, this is the tool preset. So we're going to save it to the tool preset and that way we can save these as a group of brushes once we've created them. So I'm going to do new tool preset, and just call this rough brush 01 and save it. So now, when we go back and we just choose a brush here, okay we've got an amount. Now I'm changing the opacity and the flow back to normal so now it's just solid black. Now if we go and select our brush, you can see that the opacity and the flow both changed and that's what's awesome about making it as a tool preset because it will keep those options in there, unlike if we just saved it over here, how we saved the other brushes in the other lessons. This way, all of these features are included in that brush once you save them. So now we can go back and we've got that brush again. So I did the same thing for the other two brushes that we created, and what I'm going to show you now is how to export them as a group. So, if we have 10 brushes or so and we want to save them, first we have them all here. So, we have a few others that were in here that I'm going to delete because we don't need them right now. So, I've got three custom brushes here. They all have different settings and we want to export them as a group of brushes. So, we're going to do "Save Tool Presets", and I'm going to just call them Skillshare Brushes and save them. Now if we replace this, so now we have no tools to find here for this. So if I want to bring it back in, I can load "Tool Presets" and go "Skillshare Brushes" and here we have our brushes. All right, so let's move on to the next part of this class 14. Sketching with the Brush Tool: All right. So, I'm going to go ahead and open up the photos of the object that I'm going to be illustrating which is this blue race car. I'm just going to open them both up and resize the windows a little bit so that I can use them as a reference while I'm sketching. You can really use as many photos of the object that you'd like. I wanted a few different, just slightly different angles so that I could choose how to render it as well as see some of the detail more. I also have the car in front of me so if I really need to, I can pick it up and look at it, but that's distracting so it's nice to have it just right here to the left of my sketch. So, I'm going to select the brush tool. I zoomed in to about 50 percent and I'm using Kyle's brushes for this. The one that I prefer for sketching is actually called ballpoint pen which you can see right here. There's a whole bunch of good pencils that he has right here, but I prefer the ballpoint pen. So, I'm going to pick that one. The default for that is blue so I'm going to change it to black and then I'm just going to start sketching out shapes. Now, these don't have to be perfect. Don't get frustrated that it's not looking like the object that you're trying to draw. Try to envision the shapes in your head. Things that stand out about it. For me, it's the round cockpit, the windshield, and that round front with a very hard-edged back to it. I like those shapes working together. So, I'm just trying to find a balance between all of those and still not trying to keep it too realistic. I want this to be a little bit cartoony. I want to have a little bit of character. So, it's not going to look exactly like the car it looks. My final is going to look a little bit different but you'll still get the feeling of the racecar. Just being really messy with everything. Trying to find that pleasing shape. I'm going to speed it up here just so that the sketching part doesn't take too long. Now, I lowered the transparency there and create a new layer and I do that a lot while I'm sketching and sometimes four or five times, I'll sketch it out, I'll lower the opacity, sketch over the top. I'll flatten those a lot of times together so I still see some of the light sketching underneath and then I'll lower the opacity on that. Then I'll continue sketching on another layer. So, I'm just trying to find shapes that I like, the grid here, trying to find that rounded shape for the hood. Again, I'm not trying to be exact with it, I'm trying to be a little stylized. So, I'm just experimenting, seeing what works. So, I'm going to lower the opacity on this one and a lot of times, I'll duplicate the bottom sketch before I merge it with the newer sketch just so I can go back to it because it usually gets faded down to nothing after I do it three or four times of merging each one down. Again, merging layers is "Command or Control E", and that will merge the layers for you. So, I'm just going to start over and try a different angle. I've got an idea. Now that I've been sketching a little bit, I've got ideas for how I like certain shapes and I'm going to try little shapes, try to experiment and use those shapes in a different way. Maybe this angle is going to be a little sharper so that I can see a little bit more of the car going behind the windshield. The other angle was just butting up right against the windshield and I wanted something that shows it go a little bit behind right there, and that shape is not too bad right now. It looked a little bit like it was broken in half. So, I'm going to try something else but stick close to that original shape of the hood. I'm liking how that part is turning out. I'm going to start adding a little bit more detail to these sketches now that I have them, and here, I'm just going back and forth trying to see the differences of all the sketches trying to find stuff that works, stuff that doesn't. There's something, during each sketch phase, I usually find something that works better than the other way and then when I go back, like that hood, those shapes I was experimenting and none of them worked good but I had to at least try it out. I like the smaller back. I've got an idea of the shape I want just from doing that and I'm going to again start over from scratch. Don't be afraid to completely start over and try new things even if it doesn't seem like it's working out for you, keep going with it, keep sketching over it, be messy. Here I'm using the Transform Tool, "Control+T", to just play with the shape a little bit more and then again, I lower the transparency of the older sketch. I'm creating a new layer on top of the old sketch and sketching again. So, it's just layer upon layer of sketches until I start seeing the shapes that I know are going to be in the final drawing. I really like how the headlights look on this car, those lines. So, I'm going to make sure that I incorporate that into the final. Now, for this, I really am having fun drawing the exhaust pipes or the engine pipes I guess, because it seems like that's what they are. So, I'm adding those a bit more. I like that I could do maybe round at the top and very skinny cones for the base. That's a fun shape, I should probably push that a bit more. So, I'm drawing those in there, trying to figure out that shape right there isn't quite working for me. I do like how the hood shape works right there, that one is one of my favorites so far. For the numbering in the back, I'm just blocking it out right now, just getting a feel for how it would sit on there. I'm going to try to keep this pretty close to the original car just because I really like how this windshield is encased in this frame. So trying out some more of the pipes. Trying to get that back to work well and I think this, I really like how that small bumper on the back is. Instead of having a lot of room in the back, I'm keeping that part short even though the actual car itself has a much longer back. I've noticed now as I'm drawing it that I like that tiny bit behind the wheel and there's not much behind the wheel for the actual car I guess. So, that works quite well. Excuse me. So now, I'm just trying to figure out how that air vent type shape is going to fit in there. That one's actually been giving me a lot more trouble. Get the wheels done, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep those wheel wells in there. They might not make it to the final stage, but we'll see. So, I like how this is going and I'm just going to use this original shape. I was trying other shapes just to see and looking back, it's just not quite working. I like the original shape I created so I'm going to stick with that and then what I want to do, I'm going to experiment a little bit. There's just a little hint of a rear-view mirror in the pictures of the toy car, but I think I'm going to leave that off and what I want to do is experiment with the transform tool which is "Control+T", and I'm going to duplicate some of these layers just so I have them in case I need to go back to them, but I'm holding down "Alt" to edit these points like this. You can also do that by right-clicking on the image. So, I'm here, I'm just looking to see if any of that works. Maybe we can "Control+T", and I'm right-clicking on it and I'm using the warp tool instead. This tool is really great for trying to see if there's a way to push your shapes if that's going to work without having to re-sketch it. So, I like to the shapes I had, but I also want to see if I can push them further. So, I'm just experimenting with the handles and the warp tool and this is a really handy tool for when you want to do that. Now, I like how that front looks, but I also like how the old windshield curves and the back looks, a little bit longer. So, what I want to do is, I think and I'm doing this back and forth just to make sure that I know what I want and I'm going to cut this out here. This is why it's good to have the duplicate layers below it, just because I can go in there and now erase part of the longer one and then add the shorter hood to this and merge the two ideas together. So I'm just going to erase this. So, I'm using the eraser tool. You could use a selection tool and erase this, but when I'm sketching a lot of times, I don't focus on that, I get into more of just using the pen and that's it. So, I do need to resize this a little bit "Control+T", and just resize it enough to fit to line up with the older shape. I really like how this is turning out and I'm going back, "Control+Shift+Z" to go back and then I'm hitting just "Control+Z" and what that does is shifts from the last version I had to the one before I started erasing. So, I'm going to save this as racecar. You can save it as what you'd like and I think I'm going to take this to inks because I really like how this is turning out. 16. Inking with the Brush Tool: Okay, so first of I took a screenshot of an earlier sketch that I kind of liked the hood of. So, I have that as a kind of inspiration, and I'm going to save this file as race car inks. So, do Ctrl+shift+S, and that's going to save as or go down to File Save As, and save your sketch file as inks. Now, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to select all of the layers except for the background layer, and hit Ctrl+E, and then I'm going to hit Ctrl+T, and I'm going to resize the sketch to fit the paper. So, like that, and then I'm going to take the opacity down a bit, and create a new layer above it, and that's going to be our inks layer. So, the sketch will be underneath and will be inking over the top. Now, I'm going to use another one of Kyle's brushes. This is Blot Bot Bonus from his Runny Inkers, and I'm going to select that one. So, I'm just going to start in on, and I'm going to change, make sure my colors have black. I'm just going to start in sketching, inking from the sketch. I'm going to stay pretty close to the actual sketch, but I may change a few things. During the sketching stage, don't be afraid to refine your sketch a bit, that's why I keep my sketch a bit loose just so that I'm not tied down. Otherwise if you do that, you lose some of the fun of the inks if you adjust tracing. So, you kind of want to have fun at this stage, just like you did when you were sketching. So, I do a lot of drawing, and undoing, and drawing again trying to get that perfect line. Sometimes it happens right away, and sometimes it takes me a while to keep drawing it. Now, the trick is to go past where you want to draw, and then just erase the extra like I was just doing. Now, I've spread this up just a tiny bit, so that these inks don't take so long, because I believe it was 20 minutes. So, I've spread it up a little bit, but at least it gives you an idea of inking over a sketch. So, I'm just working out these shapes, trying to figure out if that works, and this is the part that's given me trouble is that little bit right there, and don't be afraid to completely undo a big chunk of your inks, and even erase. So, that's what I'm going to do here because I'm not happy with how those are turning out. So, I'm going to try drawing them again maybe a little farther down so that we can see a little bit, and this might be too far over because this isn't really lining up. So, you see it doesn't line up with that, the other pipes right there. So, I'm going to redo that, get a little bit closer, and maybe make that a little thinner. I liked, from the sketch when it was pretty thin. I'm losing a little bit of that during the inks but that's all right. So, I'm going to come down, come around. Again, you can see that I just keep undoing, and trying it again until I get that good stroke, and I'm just going to tweak this a little bit more. Something like that. If I can't get the hang of something, like these numbers, I'm just kind of trying it. I'll probably just undo this, and come back to it, and again I'm not quite sure if I'm going to keep the wheel wells. Just because I want it to be a little bit more cartoony, and that extra detail just kind of gets in my way. So, don't be afraid to subtract some detail from the original that during the inking stage to make it look better. Again, I'm not following, you can see I'm not following the sketch totally, because I kind of want have fun with this shape especially during the inking stage. So, I want to nail this shape, and I want to have fun with those lines based on that one right to the left, that sketch, that earlier sketch that I had done, I liked that piece that's on the hood of the car. It's not, I was going to keep it kind of pointed, but I think I'll try to round it just a little bit more, and I like that shape. Play with it just a little bit and that looks a lot better. I really like that this door only goes down halfway, and then the five is covering up a lot of it. So, I'm just erasing, I'm doing this all on one layer. Sometimes you can do it on another layer so that you don't have to erase some of the lines you've already drawn, but I kind of prefer doing it on one layer, and that wasn't quite working out. Again, so that one was kind of giving me a little bit of trouble, so I'm going to move on to a different part. Here I'm just checking to make sure that I'm retaining the quality of the sketch, and so I'm going to redo this windshield that was a little too rounded. I wanted it round, but not that round, and it's still just not quite right. So, again, don't be afraid to just erase your inks and keep trying. The more you try, the more often than not you're going to find the shapes that you really love that you wouldn't have seen if you hadn't gone back and erased and tried it all over again. I just want to keep that hint of that side of the car going behind the windshield. I was going to try this detail, but it kind of just looks off since I want to keep a flat wheel. If I was doing more depth to the wheel, I would maybe keep that, and again, that wheel well it's not really working well. So, I think I'm going to close this up just a little bit more. Just like that, that's good. I'm not trying for perfect wheels. That looks pretty good, and now you can see it doesn't look exactly like the object that I'm using here. This line I'm just really trying to have some fun. So, that line doesn't really go like that, but I like that kind of shape. So, I'm going to fudge it to use that shape, just because I think it's more interesting than a straight line across. I'm going to try these numbers again, and really I should just draw them normal, and then skew them, which I think I'll do that. Yeah, I'm just going to, especially the nine because it's kind of obscured by the pipes. So, I think I'm just going to take this and erase all these, undo it, and I'm just going to draw it first on its own, and then I'm going to transform it to that spot, and then re-sketch it, because this is really the look I'm going for and it's so hard to get it at that angle. So, again, that's Ctrl+T, and I'm just editing it, fitting it in there so, that I can lower the opacity, and I just locked the sketch layer because I kept accidentally hitting it. So, if you'd like to, feel free to lock your sketch layer. So, I'm just drawing this in, and this nine tends to give me a little bit of trouble just because I've stylized that back. Normally it would work, but I've stylized the back so much that it doesn't really fit in there as well, but that's all right. Just try something like that. All right. So, this is pretty much done, and I think I'm going to call that good for the inks. What we'll do is we're going to take this in, and I'm just going to show you a few tips and tricks for working with line art. So, let's move on to the next lesson. 18. Tips and Tricks: Okay. So, if you don't have it open, let's open up the file that we just inked. So, race car inks, and if you have any, if you have multiple layers besides this, I'm going to hide this sketch layer, and I'm going to take the inks and I'm going to hit Control E just so that the inks are on one layer. Now, just a few tips and tricks for working with inks. Now, if we're in the next lesson, in the next class what we're going to do is, go through coloring techniques and texturing techniques. So, when we're in there, what we want to do is not have solid black lines, but actually have colored lines. So, maybe a really dark blue to go with the blue coloring, and what that's called, is color holds, and to get that is really simple, and you use one of my favorite options in the Layers palette which is over here, and that's the Lock Transparent Pixels which I've talked a lot about in other classes. So, we're going to click the Lock Transparent Pixels, and first I'm going to just draw, I'm going to select. I'm going to load some brushes here. All right, and I'm just going to select one of these. Any brush, any hard brush will do, and now if I take this dark blue, let's say this one, obviously I can't call it this lines. It's not working, but if I hit the transparent pixels, what I can do, is start coloring in these lines. Now, there's a couple different ways we can do that. Over here, we can take the paint bucket tool and do that. I'm going to just zoom in so you can see. Another way would be to hit Alt, Delete and that's going to fill it in. So, that's how you could fill in the majority of the lines, and then if we wanted to, we could give, like the windshield by using the pen tool, we could give the windshield a little bit more of a translucent type line, at least the look of one. So, we could do something like that, might not work to do it with this one just because this line is there. So, that's a little bit harder. We can kind of undo that and see how that looks later. What color holds are really nice. So, if I want more of a dark orange for what's going to be this line down here, and if I want to erase something like this little tick on the end, I have to uncheck Lock Transparent Pixels, and then I can go ahead and erase that. Then, I'm going to lock it again, and this is a lot easier to do if you have a stylus again. I'm just looking at the car for reference. Now, this is a little bit harder to do because we have a full line here, but this works for now. We can always change it, that's the nice thing about this. If you didn't really like it, grab the color, hit Alt, Delete and fill it back in. All right. So, that's a really simple way to do color holds. I think I want to do maybe a dark, let me do a dark purplef on this to see what that looks like once we color it. So, I'm going to save that. Now, I mentioned this at the beginning of the first class which was the basics of Photoshop, and that was that you can get a vector inked feel in Photoshop without using Adobe Illustrator, and I'm just going to quickly show you how to get those thick looking Cartoon Network lines that almost look vector. I get a lot of people asking me if my work is vector when I work in that style, and it's all done in Photoshop. So, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to lower the opacity and use this as a guide, and now one of the tricks is zooming way in. So, I'm going to choose one of Kyle's brushes. I'm going to do probably the nib, and try that, and I'm going to make it a little thicker just to get that thick line. Okay, so that works, and I'm going to start it here and I'm just going to go like this. Then, I'm going to not press down quite as hard. So, I get more of a thin line, and the trick here to get some sharp lines like this, is to go way past it and compass it again, and then go back and erase. So, I mean that's kind of counterproductive, but it works for this style, and I have more fun with it rather than drawing it in a vector line. So, I'm using the same size brush 25, and I can get this thick line or if I'm pressing lightly with the pen, I can get this really thin line, and it's pretty smooth right now, and that's because I'm zoomed in, and if I zoom in more, I'm even going to have more control over this. This doesn't have to be perfect, but something like that and then I'm going to go in here and erase again. If you erase too much, you can just slightly go in there, and that's why you can get some hard edges and some vector looking lines. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but it gives you an idea of how to get, especially when zoomed out those vector looking lines. So, that looks, cool like that, if you want to ink your illustration like that, that's totally cool, I'm going to change this up like I'm not following it as much as I should, but I just want to get this, and this line comes down here but I'm just going to bring it up like that, maybe erase first, and come back down like that. We got a thick line there. I'm not afraid to compass it. We can just erase it and get that hard edge again. Then inside now, one trick to this is I'm going to create a new layer and since I'm just working on the inside lines, now I can lower the brush, the size of the brush a little bit, and I'm working on my new layer just trying to get a fun shape, not necessarily following it exactly. Now, if we're going to do this on one layer, we have to be careful because we have to erase around this line. But since it's on its own layer, we don't have to worry, and we can get that lined budding right up there nicely. So, I'm going to do that for all these lines. So, something like that. You can just erase those, and go past it like this. I'm just going to erase these, and even with this shape, may we do, for the inside of this, do another layer that I can quickly do these lines with. I think I'm going to do that line first right now, and then I can go in here and erase this without worrying about messing up the other line, and then I could hit Control E to merge them. So, now they're on the same layer again. So, I don't want a ton of layers. All right. So, something like that. You can see this other style. I think this is kind of fun to do it in as well. So, again, if you want to work in this style, if you want to use really rough brushes and keep it really messy, that's fine. The style that you choose to ink in is really up to you, and I'm really excited to see what you guys do. 21. Closing Remarks: All right, so really that's the basics of using the brush tool. We went through modifying existing brushes, creating your own brushes which I think is a ton of fun, loading brushes from other people. Again, I especially love Kyle Webster's brushes, so definitely pick those up if you can. Again, CS5 and above I believe, that you need to use those brushes. But, I'm excited to see what you guys do. Don't be afraid to try different things, maybe even use your own brushes to ink this project. If you're going to be following me to the next class, we're going to be talking about coloring and texturing this piece that we drew for this class. So thanks so much for being a part of this. If you have any questions or comments on the video or anything else or you notice I might have missed something, just please let me know and I will answer you in the questions and answers section of Skillshare. Thanks.