Transcripts
1. Texture in Drawings in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class. Create whimsical textures for drawings in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at some texture drawing effects that we can create in Photoshop. We're going to make a series of brushes and we're going to look at some ways that we can add some visual texture to our drawings. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, say yes when you are asked if you would recommend this class. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave 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 of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating texture and drawings in Photoshop.
2. Pt 1 - Create the Drawing: Before we get started, I just want to show you what we're looking at. This is an image from somebody who blogs under blog.thisisgold.co.uk. It's an English artist and one of my students actually sent me an image by this artist and said, could we look at how she does it. What I'm particularly interested in are these elements that look hand-drawn. But they don't have to be because we could create those in Photoshop. Now this is not peculiar to this artist, there's a whole series of artists who are using this effect in their drawings, this sorts of little texture elements. So what I want to do is have a look and see how we can get the look of elements that are hand-drawn in Photoshop and we're going to do that using brushes. We're going to do it on a letter of the alphabet, but you could do it on, of course a drawing of your own. So that's what we're aiming for, so let's get started back in Photoshop. Now we're going to need an image to work with, so I'm going to choose File and New. I'm making an image big enough to print at high resolution, mine is 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels at 300 pixels per inch resolution, white background. Your image just needs to be big enough that you won't have to scale it to do whatever it is that you want to do with it because of course we're working with bitmaps in Photoshop. I'll click Okay. Now I already have the blue color that I want to use for my background selected. It's my foreground color, I'll press Alt backspace option delete on the Mac to fill the background layer with that color, springing out the layers pallets so we can see it. Next thing we're going to do is use the pen tool. So I'm selecting the pen tool and don't worry because you don't need to be good at the pen tool, in fact you don't want to be good at the Pen tool. From the three options up here, I want to choose path. If you're working on an older version of Photoshop, you'll have icons here, but just make sure that you select path. So what we're going to do is just draw roughly the outside of a thick letter A or whatever it is that you want to apply this effect to. I'm just doing a letter of the alphabet here. I'm just clicking and dragging, click, drag, let go of the mouse, click, drag in the direction I want to go in each time. Click, drag headed in the direction I want to go in, back to the starting point. If you don't like what you've done at this point, you can go to the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool and you can just select on a point and move it. If you select the whole thing, you are going to move the whole thing, but you just want to select points and of course you can adjust the little handles there as well. But you don't want anything to be perfect because the idea of this was to create something that was quirky and perfect is not quirky. Then again, back to the direct selection tool just to tweak any of these anchor points but hopefully not the entire shape that I want to tweak. Again, looking for quirky, not for perfection, because that's not what we're here for. We're going to paths palette. If you'd like to say the paths palette, you can choose window and then paths to see it. Now you'll see something probably that looks like this. So the hole is not working right now, but the hole was the last thing that we drew. So what we're going to do is we're going to path selection tool and we're going to target the hole. Then up here, there is a series of icons and you'll look for exclude overlapping shapes. When I click that, you can see that now I have the letter A with the hole cut out. So I've got the letter A that I want to work with. I'm going to the new layer icon, I'm going to click once to add a new layer. I'm going to make white my foreground color, because that allows me to click here to fill the path with my current color. But before I do that, I need to select the hole path. I'm just going to drag over both of these paths, the inside one and the outside one then click here. So now I have my letter A, I'm just going to click to add a new path. So I just turn off the letter A path and now we're into the decoration. So at this stage you may want to save this and we're going to open up a new file, file new. We're going to make this about 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size, because it's time for us to go and make a brush. Now if you add a white background to this, that's fine because white is never included in your brush. So we're going on the next video to make the first of our brushes.
3. Pt 2 - Pen strokes brush: For the first of our brushes, we're going back to the pen tool, I think just because it's going to give us a better result. Again, we want to make sure that we're on path. What I want to do is to draw out a shape that's going to be my little line. In fact, we're going to use this for a few things. I'm just going to draw out something that looks a little bit like an exclamation mark without the point at the bottom, so a little bit heavier at the top, a little bit lighter at the bottom. That's the line or the mark that you could make with a pen. When you press a little bit heavily at the top, you get a little bit of a rounded thicker top and then by the time you finish off the stroke, it's thinning out at the bottom. I'm just going to adjust this. Again, I want it to look rough but I also want it to be the shape that I want it to be. This is looking pretty good here now. I'm going to set my colors to the default, so I'm going to press the letter D and that makes black the foreground color. I'm going to select my entire path with the path selection tool, we're checking in here. The path that we're seeing here in white is the area we want to fill with black. We're just going to click here on this icon to fill the path with our color. Just click out of the way. This is going to be our brush stroke. All we need to do is choose "Edit", "Define Brush Preset", and just click "OK" and the brush is done. Let's go back to our letter A. At this stage, I'm going to put everything on a new line just because it's going to be easier to move it around. Now, I want a foot on my letter A and I'm just going to put some dashes in there. I'm actually going to use the Lasso tool because the Lasso tool is handy. I'm just going to draw a shape here that covers the foot of the letter A. It's this line that I'm interested in because this is the only thing that's going to be left at the end of this process. Now I'm going to go and find a color to use. I'm just going to use a dark blue. Dark blue is my foreground color. I have my shape selected, I have a brand new layer. I'll Backspace, Option Delete to fill that layer with that color. Let's go back down now to our letter A and let's go to the Magic Wand tool. This is the best tool for the job here. What we want to do is click just outside the letter A but on the letter A layer. What that does is it selects everything around the letter A but not including the letter A. Now if we go back to this layer and just press "Delete", we're going to clip the shape that we had on that layer through the shape of the letter A, and then Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now I have an area of a different color and I'm going to put my brush strokes over this. I'm going to the brush tool and you'll find that your brush, the one that you just made, is going to be the last in the panel here. I want to do this in a gray. So I'm just going to click a dark gray here. Let's just test this brush. It's absolutely terrible. Let's undo that, brand new layer. Let's go to the brush options, and you can get to those too by choosing "Window" and then "Brush". What we have to do is do something with this brush so it paints more like a set of funky pen lines and less like this. The first thing we're going to do is increase the spacing because we want these strokes to be individual strokes. That's actually a pretty good spacing for me. I'm pretty happy with that. The size is probably a little bit big, so I'm going to bring the size down, maybe increase the spacing a little bit. I'm just pressing Control Alt Z after every brush stroke that I make so that I'm just looking at it saying, "Yes, that's okay," or I want to do something else with it. Control O say to remove it, go and make my changes. I'm going to Shape Dynamics at this stage. What I want to do is I want to turn size jitter on. What size jitter does is it changes the size of the brush so the strikes aren't now any longer the exact same size. We've got too much of a jitter there. I don't think you need very much to get that effect without making it look really obvious. Mine stand at about 18 percent. I also want a very slight angle jitter. These are not all going to be directly up and down, they're going to be at an angle a bit but that's probably too much jitter even that. I've got it down to about three percent. You can also adjust the roundness jitter. That's going to smoosh them up a little bit as well. Again, they're not going to be all identical. I think I just want to increase my spacing a little bit. Now for scattering, you don't want a lot of scattering. But I think a little bit of scattering is really good. Let's have a look at this. See how this is painting with the top line pretty smooth? Well, if we start adjusting and scattering a little bit, the top of that line is going to be broken up a bit. Again, it's giving us that look of being hand-drawn. I think you probably do want a little bit of scattering. I've just got about 44 percent, it's not a lot. Now what I want to do is paint here but I want to paint on an angle and my dashes are all going upright. I'm going back to my brush tip shape and I'm just going to alter the angle a little bit. Now I'm going to make sure that I'm on my empty layer and I'm going to click with my paintbrush and hold down the Shift key and click again to paint extensively in a straight line. But because our brush is a little bit wobbly, we're getting this wobbly look even though we're painting in a straight line. Now, I want my pattern to be outside of the color. If you want to work just inside it, that's just fine too. But I'm going to show you how I'm going to crop this in a minute to the right size. We're just going to click Shift Click. I want this very uneven look to it as if it could be drawn with a pen. All my paint strokes are on this top layer. What I'm going to do is go to the blue layer, the foot of the letter A. Again, to the Magic Wand tool, it's going to be your best friend in this particular class because it's just such a good job because we're working on layers that just have one shape in them. I've selected everything that is outside this blue shape, come back up to my pen lines and just press "Delete" and that's just removed all the excess pen lines that are outside this shape. Now once I'm finished with that, I'm going to press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Because I used gray as my fill, I can come down now and blend in these strokes into the layer below. I'm just selecting a blend mode and then on Opacity, I'm just going to press the down arrow key to work through all these blend modes. If I were on the Mac, I would be selecting a tool that is not a brush tool. We don't want to be in the brush tool anymore. Something like a marquee tool is an ideal tool to select. Then once you've selected the first of your blend modes, you can press Shift plus or Shift minus to scroll through them. You can say that things like Screen are actually turning these gray strokes into almost white or light strokes and Color dodge. You have a lot of options here if you're actually using a blend between these two layers to re-color the brush if you like. Now, if you like the brush strokes but you really do want another color, say you wanted a pale blue, then you go back up and choose "Normal". You're going to lock the pixels on this layer. Then you're going to select the color you want to use. Now, for argument's sake, just so you can see it, I'm going to make them red. It's not going to be like that in the final illustration. But I've got my color I want, I've got my layer selected, I've got the transparent pixels locked, and I'm going to press Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, and that fills all the non-transparent pixels, in other words, everywhere where this brush is with the color that we selected. So you can change the color if you want to.
4. Pt 3 - Brush with Dots: Next up, we're going to make another brush for our design. Again, I'm going to choose File, New. I'm just making these fairly small brushes, 200 pixels is just fine. I'm going to zoom in and I'm going back to the Pen Tool, but this time I'm going to use the Freeform Pen Tool. This is a tool that is drawing in a way with the pencil tool in Illustrator, but it's just a freeform tool. You can just drag around to create your path. Making sure I've got path selected, what I'm going to do is draw out a circle and you'll find that this tool gets rid of most of your points. It's really a simplifying tool, but it does give you a little bit of a quirky hand-drawn look. You can always go to the Direct Selection Tool, and reshape any of these points if you want to. If you think it's not quirky enough, go to the Add Anchor Point Tool and just click it to add an anchor point, then with the Direct Selection Tool, you can just finesse that anchor point. Then you do want a little bit of space around the edge. You don't want your path to be hard up against the edge of the document here, that's not going to work. Now, we want to select a brush. Right now, I still have selected the brush that I created, and I really like that brush. But I also want to use it here, but I don't want to lose this, but I want it to look very different here. So the way that I can have my [inaudible] tool if you like, is to create a brush preset. From the drop-down list here, I'm going to choose New Brush Preset, I'm going to call this, hand drawn dashed line. I'm going to capture the brush size in the preset, but I can change that later on if I want to and click "OK". That means that whatever I do to this brush now to change it, to add an edge to this particular shape, I can still get back to the old look of this brush by opening up the Presets. Forgot a brush presets, here is the preset for that brush. So you can choose any brush you like anytime you want to go back to this brush and it's setting lists is here in the Brush Presets panel. Just a handy way of saving your settings, and particularly for something like this where that is pretty important. I'm going back to my default colors, press letter D. I'm also going to reset this brush. I want to Reset All Locked Settings here and in this case, I want this brush to paint pretty much in a solid line. It's just a little bit big, let's give that a try. With these shapes selected here, this time I'm just going to click here on Stroke a path with brush. It's way too thick, so I'm just going to undo it. May want to change my shaped dynamics a little bit and just try and get a little bit of an interesting edge into the brush, and certainly, the size is a little bit too big. So let's try that again. Well, that's a better shape and size. This is going to be our next brush. I'll choose Edit, Define Brush Preset and this is going to be a circle and I'll click "OK". It's going to choose another tool temporarily. Let's go back to our original image, and now let's go and create a shape that we're going to use that new brush on. I'm going to choose the Lasso Tool here and I'm just going to carve out a shape to use. This is going to be a semicircle. Go and find my layers palette which is walked, make sure I'm on a brand new layer here, going to pick a color to use. I'm going to fill this with the color by pressing alt backspace option delete on the mac. I'm going to the letter A, I'm going to use the Magic Wand Tool to select the letter A. I'm going back up to the layer I was working on here and I'm just going to press delete because that's going to crop that shape to the shape of the letter A. Press control or command D to deselect the selection. Going to add a new layer. This time I want to paint probably with white dots, I'm thinking white dots would be good. I'm going to my Brush Tool, and by default in the most recent versions of Photoshop, the brush that you just created is going to be the last in the panel and it's going to be selected. In older versions, it's going to still be the last in the panel, but it may not be selected. You might have to go and do that yourself. Obviously, spacing has to be increased on. Just check on the size, that's looking pretty good right now. Shape dynamics again, I want some variety in the size, and I want a little bit of a change in angle and perhaps a bit of a change in roundness. With scattering the same thing, I want it to scatter a little bit, so it's not all straight up and down. I'm pretty good with the brush right now, so I've got that pretty well set up. But what I want to do is I want to brush around in a series of curves. Well, I can do that using the Pen Tool. I'm going to the Paths palette, I'm going to click to add a new path, and I'm going to just use the Pen Tool. I'm just going to click and drag to create a series of pen lines here. When I finished the first one, I'll press escape and now I'm going to go and create a second one. I just want a series of lines that are going in the direction that I want my brush to go in. Escape at the end to turn the path or the pen tool off, so I can go and create a new shape. Of course, you can say that these shapes are coming well outside the edge of my letter A. Now, I've got a whole series of lines here, I'm going to the Path Selection Tool and I'm going to select either all of those lines, and make sure that I'm working on a layer here that has nothing in it because I want again, these brushes to be separate to everything else in case they just don't look good. I can turn them off or I could recolor them later on. Let's try this out by clicking here on Stroke Path with Brush. That actually looks pretty good. If I didn't like it, I would just press control alt Z, and I would go back and change my brush so I get the brush to do something a little bit different. But I'm actually happy with that, so I'm going to go back and just stroke the path with the brush. But of course, I've got dots outside of my design and I would like them to be flush with the design. What I'm going to do is go and again get my letter A, so click the letter A layer, click with the Magic Wand Tool outside the letter A, go back up here and select the layer that has these dots on them. Now, one thing I do want is I just want a little bit of over space. I just want these little white dots to be a little bit outside. Since I've got my selection in place, I'm going to choose Select, Transform Selection. I'm going to move my selection just over a little bit, then I'm going to click the check mark here, and now I'm going to press delete. Because I offset the letter A selection just a little bit, I've still got some white dots just outside the shape. Again, that's an aesthetic consideration. Press control or command D to deselect the selection. It's going to target the Marquee Tool, so I don't have that cross cursor in front of me. You can see here that we've built up a different pattern and because I wanted to, I've got a few extra dots over the edge. If you don't want partial dots over the edge, well, these are just bitmap shapes. You can go to the Eraser Tool, go and select a hard edge eraser so you want to make sure that it's perfectly hard and it's a fairly small size. Then you can just come in here on this layer, make sure that you're on the right layer and just erase the bits that you don't want to see. You may want to just leave full size circles over the edge, but none of the cut off ones. It's entirely up to you but that would be a possibility as well.
5. Pt 4 - More brushes and wrap up: At this stage, you've pretty much got the basics of how you're going to actually decorate something like the letter A. I just want to go over a couple of other styles of brushes that you can do. A couple of ideas for the kind of brushes that you can create. One of them is going to be like a knitting stitch. Again, I'm going to the pen tool making sure that I'm working on a path. I'm just going to draw out something that looks like a sort letter V. I might just come to a double bump at the end. Again, you can see that being good at the pen tool is really not a requisite for this at all. If you want to finesse what you've done, just go to the direct selection tool and just go and adjust the shape. By selecting on the individual anchor points, you can adjust the handles and of course you can remove any that you don't want. When you're happy with the basic shapes that you've got, select the path with the path selection tool. I'm going to press the letter D to get my default colors. Then I'm going to fill the shape with the foreground color, which is black. This is now going to become my brush. All I need to do is to choose Edit, Define, Brush, Preset, and click "Okay." Let's have a look and see how this brush is going to paint. So I'm going to the brush tool. Let's make sure that we're on a new layer while we're messing around with this brush, increase the spacing, decrease the size. This brush tools going to give you the look of knitting. Of course you're going to want to do the same thing with this tool as you've done with the other brushes. You're going to want to change it a little bit. You want to use some shape dynamics to get a bit of variation in size and perhaps a little bit of variation in angle, but just a really small amount, little bit of roundness. Perhaps in the scattering you might want just a little bit of scattering so that your brush doesn't paint evenly, but you just get a little bit of a quirky feel to it. I've just taken my scatter down to five percent. I think at anything higher, it's probably a bit too high for this brush and with this one I'm just starting in the same place. Click "End" and then shift-click immediately under it to get this knitted look. Another style of brush that you can create is just a simple little cross-stitched brush. This is just going to be an X shape. So in this case I'm going to draw the two bits individually and then just put them together afterwards. I'm going to draw one X or one arm of the X. Then go ahead and draw the second arm. These brushes probably have to be a little bit thicker than you think they need to be. They don't want them to be too thin because otherwise they're just not going to show up on the drawing. Unless, of course, that's what you want and you really do want a thinner look to your brushes. Again, I'm going to look for something. Here I want to move this entire shape up. I'm going to the past selection tool. There's actually two paths here so I can just readjust their positioning relative to each other. When I'm happy with them, I'm just going to look in the path palette to make sure that what I'm seeing is what I want to see, as shape that is an X shape. I have black as my foreground color, fill the shape with my foreground color, Edit, Define, Brush, Preset, and here is my cross stitch brush. Let's see how that's going to paint, again back to the brushes here. In most recent versions of Photoshop, your brush is going to be immediately selected for you. In earlier versions, you'll have to go down and find it. It's at the bottom of the palette there. I'm going to brush tip shape, spacing all the time. You'll probably want to increase your spacing, your size, and then of course, same thing shaped dynamics and a bit of scattering. Once you've got it looking the way you want it to look, you can also, of course, save it as a brush preset. You're going to click here and choose new brush preset and you're going to save it so that you can get to it very easily later on. Other brushes that you might think of making as a simple heart brush. You might also want to make a filled circle with bumpy edges that you could use as dots. There are lots of things that you can make in terms of brushes that you can then use to embellish the character or the letter of the alphabet or whatever it is that you're drawing here in Photoshop. I'm going to speed the video up as I complete a couple of extra elements on this drawing. One of the things that I'm going to do is create a path. I'm going to stroke that path with a brush to get an interesting little stitch effect around the edge of a shape. I'm going to use the knitting brush as well, but I'm speeding the video up and we'll come back when I've completed the artwork. Your project for this class is going to be to make a series of brushes and to either draw a cute animal or a piece of fruit, or a letter of the alphabet and embellish it using the style that we saw in that art that I had on Pinterest. I'm actually going to give you a link to that Pinterest board just so that you can go and have a look at the kind of art that we're looking at. You can get some ideas as to how you might use this in your own art. Of course, adapting it to whatever it is that your aesthetic would tell you that you'd like to do. Post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about photoshop that you didn't already know. If you did enjoy this class and if you're asked if you would recommend it to others, please answer yes and write in a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help others to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. 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 of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
