Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: As a digital brushmr, my role oftentimes is to translate the traditional
media onto a screen. So I capture the
essence, the texture, the look and feel of
a traditional media, and then bring them either on iPad or into a computer screen. So when an artist tells me my brushes feel like
the real thing, that means that I have
done my job well. Hi. My name is Esther Nariyoshi. I am an illustrator myself
and also a brushmr. I am the creator and the owner behind professional
digital brushes.com. In this class, I will walk you
through my general process of creating a digital brush from the beginning to the end. We will get started by collecting all the materials
that we will need, and I will show you how I make marks and
source my textures. And then we will
move on to capturing the paper textures
onto a digital screen. And then we will use
the marks that we have made and turn them
into a digital brush. This class is designed for
beginner illustrators who are ready to dip their toes into
the brush making process. And it's also great for people
who are just curious and the want to peek
over my shoulder and to see how the
sausage is made. This class is not meant to
be exhaustive or exhausting. So I hope you can sit back and
learn something new today. I'll see you in class. This one accidentally
have a smiley face. I just love it. I did not pun for
this. This is awesome.
2. Materials Overview: Also, glad you're here. In this lesson, I will show you all the materials that I will need for this
particular brush. We will make together
in this class. So over here, we have
some art supplies we can play with for this class. By no means, you have
to have everything that I show you in this video
in order to get started. Basically, the idea, the
core idea is to have some blanket piece
of paper and have something around you that
you can make marks with. And that being said, if you are a hobbyist
and you have a lot more art supplies
in your arsenal, feel free to bring them over. It will just increase the
combination possibilities, and it will make the
journey a lot more fun. All right, so let's
see what we got here. On the left, we have a brayer. So this is basically a rubber roller that will
help me to roll the ink flat. And this is a surface that
I use to roll the ink on and together with the roller, we have water based acrylic ink. I like the opacity of it
and the rich texture. Over here, I have a tiny
stick that I can use to stir the ink and to basically spread
the ink onto the roller. And in addition to that, I also have a ink pen. This one has a very unique
nib that I'm going to use. You can also use
a brush for that. This one is paired with a
darker kind of Indian ink. And over here, we have
a watercolor brush. It doesn't have to be flat, it can be any shape, and later I'm going to pair this one with the
watercolor ink. Over here, we also have
some printer paper, and we're going to
make our marks on it, but the quality doesn't
have to be high. So the cheapest you can
find will be great. Just remember to grab
more pages than you think you would need because
once we get started, your hands are
going to be messy, your surface going to be messy, and it's not the best time
to handle clean paper then. In this little container, I have a regular pencil
and a sponge. And eraser. This is not for erasing, but mostly for
step shape making. If you have hand carved
shapes like this one, you can use those as well. And on the right, we
have some paper towel. This help us to clean things
as needed on the fly. And these are wet wipes. I have a couple of those here. This helps me again
clean things as needed. This is the basic supplies that I will use for this class, but feel free to
improvise as you see fit. In addition to what I have
over here on the table, since we're making
brushes for iPad, you will need a iPad and
ideally Apple pencil and with Procreate
app installed. It will be really cool
if you have a scanner that will help you to
capture the textures, the ink marks really cleanly. If you don't have one, I will also show you how
to take pictures and capture those
textures to the best of your ability
with a smartphone. Now, take a minute to gather your supplies and I will
meet you in the next lesson.
3. Making Textures and Brush Shapes: All right. I hope you have something in hand to get messy. In this lesson, we're going
to make some marks together. Alright, I hope you're ready. So now let's grab
our first supply. In my case, I'm going
to use this ink. It's gonna be messy,
and let's dive in. If there's like specs and
stuff that fall on paper, don't worry because you can easily get rid of
them digitally. So the idea is to have some
basic strokes on your paper. I'm just going to lay down
some ink on the surface. You can also do
it on the roller. It's not a whole
lot, which is okay. I'm just testing it right now. Actually, I'm going
to do it here, so you can see it better. We want this to be even. Looks like there is a
empty belly in the middle. That's because my surface is not completely flat,
which is okay. We're not looking
to be perfect here. The more interesting texture, the more unevenness you have, the more interesting your
background is going to be. I'm just going to
move this little pastel over to a different spot. Okay. Now if you
look at your brayer, it's evenly coded, more or less. This is what we want. Now I'm going to move
this over just to make a stroke all the way across. You can tell it's not even. Like I said, this is perfect
because we want textures. Otherwise, we would have just colored it flat
digitally, right? Feel free to add more
ink as you see fit. The idea is that
you want to make a variety of ink marks
while you're at it. Basically, you want to have more imprints than what
you think you might need. This one is pretty interesting. I'm just going to move
it away for a minute. T. So all the things
that all the ink marks that I'm making on
paper have two potential. One is that they could become
the background of a brush, which is the texture part, or they themselves
could be the brush tip. So this process is just for us to get messy
and don't overthink it. We want to make
some ones as well. I'll make some of
these downloadable through the class resource. If you don't have
the exact supplies, you can still
participate in the fund. I'm going to roll on top
of this a couple more times so that I
have some overlap. I don't quite know what
I'm going to use this for. But like I said, this is
not a time to overthink. Just have fun with the ink. I'm going to add a bit more
to the roller directly. And just like that. Okay. I'm
going to make another mark. Okay. I'm going to te
this several times. In your process, you want
to vary the ink mark. For some application, you can see it's more
dark than filled in, and this one, our very
first ma is transparent. This type of variety
will provide you more possibilities as you go into the digital
part of the process. As you put them away, just make sure they are not stacking on top
of each other so that the wet ink don't get stuck
on the back of another paper. All right. I think we're almost done with the
inking part of it. All right, I think we have
enough with this type of mark, and we can move on to the next. For the next texture, I'm going to use the watercolor. This one is liquid watercolor. Ideally, it will be
great if you have black, but I don't have it on that set, so I'm just going to use brown
because it's going to be rendered black and
white when we go into the digital phase of the
brush making process. Having some color
that is less than black will give us more
variety of transparency, and it will make the mark
a little bit softer, which I think is a good
attribute to have. So with just the dry brush, you can dip it into water if you want more water down mark, but I'm just going to
let my brush soak in. And As you can see over here, instead of covering
a large area, right now, we're focusing
on the brush tip shape. So we are basically making small dots and
shapes on this page. Add a bit more. And I'm going to make a flat
version as well. I'm going to keep drawing
until it's really really dry. I can even draw on top of that. This is a really cool
texture over here. That's my watercolor
rendition of the brush tip. For the next part, I'm going
to move on to Indian ink. For this part, I am
going to use my nib. This is a calligraphy inking
pen that I really love. The tip is basically a cage
that holds a lot of liquid. This will make really
interesting marks. You'll see in a second. I'm just going to
dip deep enough so that I can have some ink inside. I'll just like these
smaller marks. Instead of covering
a whole area, I am going to just
draw little marks. They don't have to be
any prescribed shape. They can overlap, they
can make hatch marks, they can be bigger or smaller. Basically, if we're thinking, your drawing area like square, which it will make
sense when we go into the digital phase of the
brush making process. But basically, these things
fit into the squares and they are going to become
the shape of the brush tip. And I'm going to move
on to this pastel. This one is oil postel. If you look closely, you will see it's not completely black
like the mark above. This one has a bit
of gray in it. I'm going to make some random circles and just a couple more. You might not end up
using that you produce, but it's always good to
have something on hand. My goodness, this one
accidentally have a smiley face. I just love it. I did not plan for
this. This is awesome. All right. Be mindful that some
inks might be still wet, and also this pastel
is highly smudgable. So even if you just touch
it for a quick second, you end up having some
pigment on your skin. So just be aware of that. If you want certain
surface to be protected, you want to wipe your hands. So this little wet wipes
is very, very handy. Okay. All right. I think we have a good amount
of actually, you know what? I'm going to use
the sponge as well. It's going to be a bit messier. Let me move this to
a safe spot first. And of course, I need
to close this in. And maybe in on top as well. You want to take care
of your art supplies to the best of your ability. Okay. Over here is our
ceramic plate earlier. I'm just going to mix some watercolor drops
together with this ink, and I will just roll it. I have no idea what this one is going to make,
what kind of mark. But uncertainty is
part of the fun. I'll rest my brayer there, and I will use sponge to just absorb some of
the ink right here. And then just apply it
on paper. Can be a dab. I'll add a bit more ink and just apply it on paper. You can see the
second application is very different from the
first, which is great. Again, I'm going to
make another one. Okay. All right, this should give
us enough things to play with for
the next lesson. I will see you in a bit.
4. Brush Making in Procreate Part 1: Here we are inside
per create iPad. I'm going to get started
with creating new Canvas. Type on the plus icon
and type on new Canvas. I want to create a document
that is large enough, but also a square. I'm going to go with 3,000 by 3,300 DPI and hit Create on
the upper right hand corner, and that will take you
to a brand new document. I have already downloaded the scanned images
to my library. I am going to just insert
them from P create. And just a quick reminder, if you haven't gotten a chance to create your own
texture just yet, you can grab the
sample images that I have uploaded to the
class resource area. As long as you use it only
for personal projects, you're free to use them. I'm going to tap on
this ranch icon on the upper left hand corner
and insert a photo here. This will take me to
my local photos app. At the very top, you can see some background and some scanning images
of the brush tip, as well as my kids wonderful
drawing of butterflies. I'm going to start with
the brush tip first. I will pick this guy right
here and just hit select. Boom. Here it is. Since the image
is also a square. I fit into this
canvas quite nicely. You can see that
the whole thing is automatically selected
from the get go. The first thing
I'm going to do is to make it just a
tiny bit smaller. If you want, you can turn
on the snapping that will make the movement
more crispier. I don't know what's the
professional term for it, but I do like when
things snap into place. Over here, you can tell my image is just ever so
slightly smaller than my canvas. The reason behind that
is not for the size, but for the color correction. You might be very, very subtle. If I zoom in here, you can tell the background
of our canvas is white, but the background of our scanned image is
actually light gray. What I'm going to do here
is to get rid of the gray or make it lighter so that
this whole thing is cleaner. What I'm going to do
is to make sure I have this brush tip
scan image selected. Then I want to go to the
adjustments and then curves, which is the third option. From there, you're going to
play with the gamma curve. I want to go to the middle
first and then just to raise it just ever so
slightly on the bell curve. And to the upper right
hand corner dot. I want to move it
in horizontally, just along the upper
edge a little bit. You can see as I do that, the background of my
brush tip become lighter, and you can barely tell
the border anymore. You can also adjust the node on the lower
left hand corner. Going to move it in, scooch it it in to the right so that the black is
more prominent. I'm happy with that. I'll just
tap outside and hit apply. From there, you might be able to tell that I have a lot of specs that happened when I was moving my pages and
things get smudged. I want to clean this up a bit. I'm going to tap on this eraser icon and adjust
the sides of my eraser. Then just clean it
up just like that. The idea is that I want the brush tip to be in
a concentrated area, and for the specs around it, which is not part
of the brush tip will not be considered
as we make brush. Depending on what's your
vision for the brush, you can even clean up the edge
a bit when it gets closer. Depending on the shape and the quality of your
scanned image. Sometimes you're able
to pick up the black pixels very cleanly from just using the
automatic selection. What I mean by that is when
you hit this ribbon icon, at the very bottom, the
first tab says automatic. You want to make sure you
have the head selected, and then you can
tap on the black, which will add specific
areas into your selection. It can be a little tricky, especially when your tip
has a lot of texture. Say, I'm happy with that. I'm just going to hit copy
and paste at the very bottom. And from there, if I just toggle the visibility
off on the first layer, you can tell this is the result from the
automatic selection. Now we have a brush tip. What I'm going to do next is to save this image into my gallery. Hit the icon and JPEG
and then save image. And from there, we
can already get started with the
brush making process. I'm going to tap on
this brush and go to the brush library and hit this plus sign to create a new brush. From there, you can see a bunch
of taps on the very left, and we're going to go to shape. By default, you will have a very clean white circle sitting on top of the
black background. I'm going to replace that with the new brush tip we just made. I'm going to hit at it. And import and import a photo
and select the first photo, which is the one that
we just export it. Ideally, we would like
the brush tip to be in white and for the
background to be in black. To reverse the colors, you can use two fingers, just tap on this canvas, and that will reverse
the color and hit done. From there, you can already tell our brush preview
is very different. I'm going to just
out of a good habit. I'm going to hit
done because that will memorize my progress. It's the equivalent
of hitting save. Then I will tape on our brush again to go back to
tweak our settings. One of the first things
I'd like to do is to adjust the distance
between the stems. If we increase the
spacing all the way up. You can see pretty much let me just increase
the preview size here. A digital brush to its
core is a bunch of steps. All the work that we have done
is to create a clear step, and from there, we can use the brush studio to
adjust the settings. I want to change the spacing
and for the second slider, add a little bit of jitter. This will move my steps up and down from the
trajectory of the line. I also really like
to go to shape and scroll down and then
increase the scatter. This will make my steps rotate
to different directions. This is a natural
way to add textures. From there, maybe I want to
decrease the spacing a bit. And decrease the tuter because the brush itself is
very textured already. Right now, my brush is monoline. No matter how much
pressure that I'm using it still appears
at the same width. To change that,
you want to go to Apple pencil and on
the first slider, you want to increase the size. This allows you to have pressure as one of the input for
the size of your brush. If I just hit the drawing
pad and I can clear the drawing pad where I
can just test my brush. Right now I'm using different
pressure as I draw. You can see there's
thicks and thins. By default, procreate also has a pretty extensive
built in library. If you go to shape, and tap
on at it and go to import. You will notice that
under the drop down menu, you can also hit
this source library. This will take you into a pretty extensive library of different brush tips that
you can use for your work. These are the basic
steps on how to create a customized brush tip
for your digital brushes. Remember all the inky
roly messy images that we have made
in previous lesson. I'm going to use those for
the textured background, which is also green. By default, over here, you can see it's
completely white, and we're going to add more
visual interest into it. I will see you in
the next lesson.
5. Brush Making in Procreate Part 2: In previous lesson, we have made a pretty interesting brush. It has a pretty rich
texture and it looks fuzzy. I think it will make
a really good liner. In this lesson, I'm going
to show you how you can even add more texture
into the brushes. I'm going to go back to
the brush we have just made and go to the grain, which is the number
five tab on the left. By default, we have a
flat white background, and we're going to change that. You want to hit at it and import Notice that we also have a extensive source library
built in to procreate. From there, if you don't have any other texture options
that you made yourself, you can choose what Procreate
has offered you already. All these things are
pretty fun to use depending on what texture
that you're looking for. I'm going to use
the texture that I have made in previous lesson so that you can know
the general steps of customizing the
texture by yourself. I'm going to import a photo
and hit one of those images. In this case, I'm
going to use this one. Automatically, it fills
up the whole screen. But over here, I know this image is not
infinitely repeatable. It's an automatic
function that will make the repeating tile look more seamless
against one another. You can actually use your finger on the texture to
move it around. My goal over here is
to hide the edges. For example, this option, I can clearly see the edges, where the square ends
and where does it begin. This is not a good position.
I'm going to move it down. So that the harsh
edge disappears. You can also change the grain scale and
all these fun sliders. You can also change
the mask hardness, which can be really helpful. Once you're happy with that, you can hit done I like to play with the
sliders inside the grain tab. If you want to see
the grain better, you want to increase the scale. As you can see on the
preview on the right, I can see the inky texture a lot better as I
increase the scale. You can also change
the rotation, especially if your
background is directional. This can be really interesting. Half of the fun is creating
the texture itself and the other half is to
play with the sliders. I think I'm going
to leave it there. Once you are super happy
with how a brush works, I recommend you to tell Procreate to remember
the setting. In order to do that, you want to go back to the Brush
studio and then tap on about this brush and you can create
a new reset point. Congratulations. You
just made a brush.
6. Final Thoughts: All right. It's a wrap. Congratulations. I am so glad you took this class and
watch until the end. And I hope you enjoyed this process and maybe
make a brush or two. I will see you in
the next class.
Esther Nariyoshi, Teaching Illustrator based in the US
