Create Your Own Photoshop Shapes to Develop Brushes that are Right for Your Needs!

Creating Photoshop shapes for your brushes is important because there will be instances where the default Photoshop shapes for your painting is not enough! Plus, you can save time and make potential income selling your own brush packages. Here's how!

For this lesson, there are two ways to create these brushes: drawing it or creating it from an existing picture.

We will go over the two methods for your own knowledge and future reference. As an artist, this information is invaluable for your development because it creates brushes that are in sync with your workflow as well as gives you an opportunity to create an artistic package that you can apply to other paintings.

Now, the initial size of the brushes will depend on the size of the canvas or how much is being selected with marquee tool. So when you're ready, start up a new canvas and let's begin the learning!

1. Photoshop shapes: drawing it

For the first part, just sketch out some random shapes to be test brush. Make sure to do this on a new layer though. That way, there shouldn't be any problems in terms of recognizing and defining the brush shape because of the transparency of the object!

That means it won't count the background as part of the drawing. Of course, the thickness of the object will determine the types of textures you can get from defining the Photoshop shapes.

As you can see, I have cleverly written ‘test' as the brush shape I will be defining.

The next move is to define the brush. You can either choose the whole canvas or just parts of the canvas to define your brush. Use any type of selection marquee that you like. Generally, I choose the rectangle marquee to select it.

Note: if you're selecting from a picture that is not on a separate layer, it's best to use a marquee that selects specific shapes rather than something general like the rectangle marquee.

Excellent resource:

2. Photoshop shapes: defining it

After that, the next procedure is to define the custom Photoshop brushes. From the top menus, you need to go to Edit > Define Brush Preset… in which a box will appear for you to name your newly created brush.

Just pick a name for it for easy reference. The number right below the custom Photoshop brushes indicate the original size of the brush. That means that the 485 you see in the diagram actual width of the brush in pixels.

Since I did the brush on a 500 pixel canvas, from end to end, Photoshop automatically resizes it to 485 pixels to define the brush shape.

If it's done correctly, this brush will show up on your Photoshop brush window on the side! I recommend saving any shapes that you have created because you don't want to lose it!

Not only that, if you build enough useful shapes, you can create a package that other artists might want to purchase because you are saving their time as well as your own!

3. Photoshop shapes: pictures

Sometimes, to save time, it's a good idea to learn how to create custom brushes from existing sources like picture files. The reason is that there are some textures that you want to use.

To change the picture into a viable brush definition, the first thing you need to do is change it into a grayscale tone. That way, you can emphasize the dark and light areas.

The option to change it to grayscale can be found in Images > Adjustments > Desaturate.

Once the picture has been removed of all colors, the next stop is to emphasize the light and shadows. Basically, any whiten areas become picked up by Photoshop as not being part of the brush while the darken areas do.

The best method for finding this difference between light and darken areas is going into Images > Adjustments > Curves… and adjust the balance in there.

Finally, after all that is done, can you go to Edit > Define Brush Preset… and define the brush you need!

Excellent resource:

4. Working with Photoshop shapes

As you can probably guess, creating your own Photoshop shapes are great for creating certain textures for you to paint with.

As mentioned, once you created the custom brushes, it is automatically located in the brush presets panel of the program. From there, you can change the parameters of each brush as though it was a default brush found in Photoshop!

So when do you need custom brushes? Those with experience in Photoshop have noticed that the brushes aren't that great for doing foliage or rust stains.

Moreover, the default brushes are compressed rather than spaced out evenly. While you can use the scatter option to increase spaces between each brush point, it seems very mechanical.

That means you will need to create custom brushes to paint for tree foliages, rust stains, clothing materials, etc. for a more natural look.

All this really points out that customizability is a key ingredient in 2d digital art even on an advanced graphical editor like Photoshop!

In the meantime, have fun with exploring the options available as you created your own custom Photoshop shapes!

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