Unlock the potential of your digital artwork with a deep understanding of Photoshop's brush and eraser tools. This article provides a comprehensive guide, demonstrating how to select and manipulate various brush tips, adjust settings such as roundness and spacing, use the size jitter and scattering functions, create the effect of wet edges, and utilize the mixer brush tool for color blending.
Key Insights:
- The Photoshop brush tool offers a range of brush tips and settings, such as roundness and spacing, enabling artists to create unique effects and textures. The size and rotation of the brush tip can also be adjusted for further customization.
- Shape dynamics and scattering, found in the brush settings panel, alter how the brush stamps appear and behave as you draw. For instance, size jitter changes the size of each stamp, while increasing scatter disperses the stamps away from the line of the cursor.
- Photoshop also offers the eraser and mixer brush tools. The eraser tool allows you to efficiently clear parts of your artboard, while the mixer brush tool blends colors together, and its effects can be varied with different tip shapes and settings.
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In this video, we'll be discussing brush tips as well as the Eraser Tool**. Working with my Artboard Painting Photoshop file, let's begin drawing on Artboard 5**. First, let's zoom in using the scroll wheel on the mouse, and then we'll zoom in using CTRL + Plus (+)** on the keyboard.
We'll scroll until we have Artboard 5 in our view. Let's begin painting by clicking and dragging. Unfortunately, we're not able to paint because we don't have a layer selected, as indicated by this error.
If that ever happens, simply click OK**, and as you may remember, click on Artboard 5 and add a new layer. Let's title this layer “**Brush Tips**” and press ENTER**. Next, let's make sure that we have the Brush Tool selected.
Before going any further, let's reset our brush by right-clicking on the drop-down and selecting Reset Tool**. In the last video, we went over many of these options. However, for this video, we'll focus on the Brush Settings panel. We can open this by clicking the icon with the brush inside a folder.
There are many different settings in the Brush Settings panel. We'll go over a few that may be important to you. Let's start with the Brush Tip Shape found on the left-hand side of the panel.
Brush Tip Shape gives us many different options for the shape of our brush tip. We can click on one of these options and begin clicking on our canvas to see what it looks like. Let's sample a few brush tips by simply clicking on various options.
We'll start by clicking on one of the brush tips and stamping our artboard. This brush tip happens to have leaves on it. It might be helpful for creating an image of a tree or an autumn-themed design.
Let's choose another brush tip that we can sample and modify. This one looks like a streak. We can rotate it by flipping the X or Y, which will rotate the entire brush tip.
In addition, we can double-click the angle and adjust it. I'll change mine to 90 and press ENTER**. We’ll see that the brush tip has been rotated. We can also adjust the Roundness**. Let's change it by double-clicking and typing 30%**, then press ENTER**.
As you can see, the roundness of the brush tip is much more narrow. If we want to change it by dragging, we can click on the two white circles to adjust the roundness or use the triangle to adjust the angle. One other change we can make in Brush Tip Shape is the Spacing**.
Currently, the spacing is set to 12%**. We can see a preview of this below. If we adjust our spacing to 0%**, we can see that it creates a solid brush stroke. If we increase the spacing, the brush tip appears stamped as we click and drag.
So, if we go to our artboard and click and drag, we can see that the tip is essentially being stamped. Next, let's discuss Shape Dynamics in the Brush Settings panel. We'll first cover the Size Jitter option.
This shows how much variation there is in brush size as we draw. As you can see in the preview, the brush tip will change size as you draw. If we click and drag—or click multiple times—you'll see that the size changes with each stamp.
Before we discuss Scattering**, let's erase our artboard using the Eraser Tool**. We'll navigate to the Tools Bar and select the Eraser Tool. In the Options Bar**, we’ll change the size the same way we do for the Brush Tool.
Let's change the size to about 200 pixels**. Now, dragging with the Eraser Tool on our artboard, we can simply erase. We'll erase the entire layer so we can continue drawing.
Next, we'll go back to the Brush Tool to continue painting. Let's discuss Scattering**. If we navigate to Scattering in the Brush Settings panel and increase the scatter, we can view the effect in the preview below.
As we increase the scatter, we’ll see that the brush stamps spread away from the line. If we click and drag, we’ll notice they don't follow the cursor exactly but rather scatter around its direction.
Finally, let's discuss the Wet Edges setting. If we enable Wet Edges and click and drag, we’ll see that our brush looks like it has wet, translucent edges. To observe this effect more clearly, let’s return to Brush Tip Shape and select any brush tip. I’ll select one and as I click and drag, you’ll see that the edges appear wet.
If I change my Foreground Color from the Tools Bar to Yellow and click OK**, then draw again with Wet Edges enabled, you’ll notice some transparency, even though my Opacity is set to 100%**. That’s because of the Wet Edges effect.
Finally, the last tool I want to discuss is the Mixer Brush Tool**. We can find this by clicking and holding the Brush Tool and selecting the Mixer Brush Tool**. This tool helps blend or mix colors.
If I click and drag, we’ll see that the colors mix as I paint. I can also change the brush tip and continue dragging to create different effects. With the Mixer Brush Tool, I can make many of the same adjustments as with the standard Brush Tool to achieve varied results.
Let’s save our file so we don’t lose our work by going to File > Save**. In the next video, we’ll begin applying some of these painting techniques to our artboard. See you there!