Drawing and Painting Brushes

All right. So let's go ahead and start talking about the different types of brushes that you'll be using when it comes to Photoshop or probably pretty much any digital painting software. There's almost an infinite amount of possibilities for brushes that you can use. So we're going to talk about three main broad categories of brushes, drawing and painting brushes as one category texture brushes is another category, and special effects or unique brushes is a third category. So this one, we're going to focus on drawing and painting brushes. So the reason why those are kind of grouped together is because a lot of times really those are pretty much the same thing. You're just going to be changing the size and shape of your brush. So let's come up here. We're going to pick one here and the first one we're going to go with. This is just a basic standard Photoshop brush that you should have in pretty much any software for digital painting. It's a hard round brush with the pressure opacity on. So we're going to come over here and grab a let's do the let's do the pencil 1/1. Actually, the sketching one. We're going to take this brush. And for me personally, I like having it so that the bigger the harder I push, the bigger my brush get. So I'm just going to turn on the size jitter. And we'll turn it down some as well. This way, when I'm drawing, I can get opacity and size changing for me. So we're going to do a little quick assignment. We're going to use all the different types of brushes that I just talked about to just create a quick little sort of simple tree. So I'm going to start with for my Leinart, a kind of dark, reddish orange brown color. And I'll pull up some reference here for myself where I paint a quick tree. So let me set this down and I'm going to bring my brush size down nice and small, because we're going to be drawing. I have a new layer on top of my background. I like drawing on a mid tone gray for my background or some sort of mid tone color. So we have a new layer here and we're just going to start sketching in this tree. So as you go, if you need to make your brush size smaller or bigger, you totally can. And we're just going to work our way through this tree trunk. You'll be able to download this resource and follow along as well. And as you go, if you need to switch back and forth between your razor, you can always do that. Clean up your lines. At the very end, we'll do a quick pass as well to clean up our liner just a little bit. Make it a little bit neater. I recommend setting up using either a hotkey or setting up some way to access your eraser quickly. It will make painting a lot easier if you can quickly switch back and forth between your brush and your eraser tool. All right. And then we'll get back to our brush here. All right. And I'm just kind of suggesting a little bit more texture and detail in here now that we have the overall shape. If you take any of my courses before, you've probably heard me say to always start loose and then work more detailed. And that's going to apply here as well. Just start with the main overall shapes and then slowly start to work your way to slightly more refined and detailed areas. Have a few of these little branches kind of sticking off here that maybe some of the leaves break off or something. All right. It's looking pretty good. Uh, and we're gonna. We can do some leaves in here really quick, too. We're actually going to be doing the leaves with our special, unique brush. But in order to help us make sure that we don't paint off the canvas, we can paint them in here to give us an idea of where they're supposed to go. So let me go ahead and scale this down just a bit. So we have room for that. Okay. And then we're just going to block out just real roughly the basic shape of where these leaves are going to go, so that when we paint them in later, we'll have a little bit better understanding of where we want to place them. All right. That's going to be plenty good enough for what we're doing. All right. So that's our line, Art. Now, let's talk about painting brushes. So like I said, it's going to be pretty much the same thing. I'm going to make a new layer. We're going to move this layer underneath our drawing layer here. And I am going to just go back into my settings like I had done before, and I'm going to turn off the size control so that it's just one uniform way all the way across. And I'm going to get a nice, rich brown color to start here. Typically you want to try and start with a bigger brush. Like I said, you want to start loose and work tighter. So the bigger the better in the beginning and get a little bit more orange there and really start pinching in. Earlier we talked about flow and opacity. This could be a good time for you to kind of mess with those settings. So for me, I'm going to turn the flow down maybe about a little more 40%. I like keeping the opacity all the way up. Cool thing about digital painting is there's not necessarily one right or wrong way to do it. This is just my particular process. But as you paint and go through this course and try out different styles, you might find ways that you prefer more or they get you the results you like better. And that's totally okay to try your own thing after you've learned some basic techniques. So. So with this brush we can get some nice blending techniques. We can push harder or softer to lighten or darken areas. And then in a second here, once I kind of block this all in, we're going to come in with a few other colors so that we can sort of add some color variation. And this painting brush will give us some nice blend. I'm not going to really worry about painting the trees because like I said, we're going to do that with a special brush. I'm just going to make sure that our branch goes up enough into the foliage that when we paint it later, it's going to go all the way through and cover it up with the leaves that we see the background coming through, though, where there should be trunk. Okay. All right. That looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and get a little bit lighter. Let's go darker for a second where we go darker, a little bit more towards the green spectrum and a little bit more desaturated. This is what we're going to. Darker than that, even. I use this for our shadow area. And that up into the trees is going to be a shadow as the foliage kind of casts a shadow down onto the limbs of the tree itself. So I'll preemptively paint that shadow in there, even though there's nothing to cast it quite yet. You can see I'm going outside the lines a little bit. That's okay. We can just come in real quick here in a second with your razor tool and we'll clean this all up and make it nice and tight. All right, then when I go a little darker, a little more desaturated and. In here. All right, let's do our lighting now. So I'm going to bring it back closer to yellow. Yellowish orange. And I can bring my brush size down just a little bit. Start getting a little bit finer lighting in here. And then now I can start using my eyedropper tool to kind of blend in between these two. All my different values on here, just make it a little bit smoother. I'll be able to bring my brush size down here in a second. We can start maybe popping out a little bit more of some of these highlights. Trying to make sure that I don't just have perfectly smooth highlights. I'm breaking it up with a little bit texture so that doesn't feel like this tree is just made out of plastic. All right. And then let's just grab our eraser tool. We can come back in here and we can clean up these edges here a bit. Go ahead and use a bit of a harder brush there. All right, excellent. And then let's do the same thing for our line Art. We can clean that up just a little bit as well. In my research tool, we we didn't paint these in, so I'm just going to erase them. We don't need them anymore. Just pick up any of these little stray marks here. They're kind of sticking outside the silhouette. And there we go. So that's it for this lecture we did the sketching and painting brushes, and in the next one we'll go ahead and start working with our texture brush. So I'll see you guys in the next one.