4 Great Sites for Photoshop Brushes

If you’re like me, inspiration is sometimes no more than a new brush away. Sometimes I just like to poke through different compilations of Photoshop brushes and find a new set that I find interesting. It’s hard sometimes to know where exactly to look.

Today I’m going to compile a short list of sites that you can go to find all sorts of new and interesting brushes. Spark inspiration, find that finishing touch, or maybe just play around. Whatever you use brushes for, here is a few sites that you can go to find brushes.

Brusheezy.com - This site is a fantastic site to find brushes of all kinds. Grunge, holiday, objects, you name it. Here you will find hundreds of brushes all neatly organized in various categories. It’s simple and easy to search or browse for a new set of brushes. It is the first place I always look when I’m searching for a new brush set to use.

DeviantArt.com - This is another great site for brushes. It takes a little bit of work though to find what you want, but if you’re not opposed browsing, then this site won’t be too hard on you. The brushes are not very organized, but there is a lot of them in varying levels of quality. It is a community of artists that submit all kinds of different artwork, including Photoshop brushes. In addition to the brushes, you can also get inspiration from user submitted works of art in many different formats.

Myphotoshopbrushes.com - This is a somewhat new site to me. Until today, I did not know that this site existed. It is neatly organized, with the ability to browse through various categories. There are several hundred brushes available here.

psbrushes.net - This site has just over 500 brushes sorted into various categories. The site is neatly organized and offers some really nice brushes.

There are many other sites out there for Photoshop brushes. What are some of your favorite sites for brushes?

March 30, 2009 at 11:14 am | Design | No Comments »

Easy Atmosphere Effects Tutorial

Man has always been fascinated with space and everything in it. Planets, stars, black holes, solar systems…these objects have been the subject of many forms of art. With Photoshop, designing space art has never been easier. Today’s tutorial is actually quite simple.

I’m going to show you how to create an atmosphere that one might see around a planet. Keep in mind that this technique can be used to create a really nice glow effect for a lot of different projects as well.

To start off, create a new photoshop document. Make it 1000 pixels wide by 1000 pixels high.

Set your foreground color to black and with the paint bucket tool, fill the current layer with black. Create a new layer, and call it Planet.

Select the Ellipse Marquee tool and holding down the shift key, drag a fairly good sized circle. Fill it with black. You won’t see the circle because we’ve got a black circle on a black background. If you look at the layers window, you can see that there is indeed a black circle.

Now click on the Layer Styles button. Use the values in the screen shots below to add an Outer Glow and an Inner Glow.

Right click over the FX icon in the Planet layer and click on Create Layers. This takes the effects that we added and makes them into separate layers so we can more easily manipulate our atmosphere effects.

Add a Layer Mask to each of the effect layers, and remembering the rule “white allows, black suppresses” mask out a portion of the glows as shown.

Congratulations, you have successfully created a dark planet with atmosphere. There are other things you can do such as adding texture to the planet or creating a star field that can be placed behind your planet to give it a more natural setting. In the one below, I toned down the outer glow a bit and created a textured planet that looks more natural.

For more tutorials and other design tidbits, check back often!

March 27, 2009 at 9:37 am | Design, Tutorials | 3 Comments »

Things I learned about Design from the Terminator

With the new Terminator Salvation movie in full advertising mode, preparing for a (hopefully) triumphant release this summer, there are articles popping up everywhere. One article I read talked about the Terminator as a metaphor on life. (source)

I got to thinking, what can you learn about design from the Terminator? I realized that you can learn quite a bit. And so, in light of that, I give you:

Things I learned about Design from the Terminator.

• If a design doesn’t quite work the way you want it to the first time, change it up and try again. If it doesn’t work right the second time, try again. In fact, no matter how many times it just doesn’t work…try again and again until it DOES work. T-100, T-1000 and T-X are just Skynet’s way of trying again…and again…and again.

  You don’t have to change the actual design itself. Maybe you need to change the playlist of music you’re listening to in order to see or feel out a different angle. Go watch a movie and come back to the design, maybe you’ll be inspired by an event in the movie. If all else fails, scrap it and start over.

• Learning something new is always a good thing. Terminators always seemed to know exactly what to do in every situation. In design, learning a new method of doing something that you have always done a particular way. This can help you be much more versatile.

• Using the right tool for the right job is always a great idea, but sometimes you can use a different tool to get the same effect. Terminators always seem to have just the right tools available to complete their mission. If all else fails, try the big semi truck!

  Using the layer effects tool can often achieve quick and easy results on a given project. For example, using the Layer Effects toolbox you can achieve really nice light and shadow effects. But you can achieve the same effects by using additional layers and the brush tools. It might take you a little more work, but sometimes you can get better results through the use of your brush tools.

• When designing for a client, getting additional and more specific information is always a good idea. In the first Terminator, Arnold had to look through a phone and systematically terminated every Sarah Connor on the list. Despite the script, if Skynet had done it’s homework and gave Arnold additional information, the job could have been a lot more successful.

  If you don’t have all the information from the client, your job can be a lot more difficult that it needs to be.

• Contracts. Every Terminator knows exactly what it’s supposed to do and what it is responsible for. Make sure you know what you are responsible for before you even start on a project, and get it in writing. When you have a well written contract in your possession, it’s hard to be surprised when the client says, “But you didn’t tell me I had to provide all the content.”

• “Nice Jacket” Don’t be afraid of criticism, good or bad. Being able to take criticism and turn it into something that you can learn from is always handy. Too many people don’t take bad comments very well. The idea is to learn from what people like and don’t like.

  At the same time, don’t be afraid to give good criticism. Knowing how to give good comments is just as important as being able to take it. When you tell someone ‘That looks like crap’ you’re not really helping anyone.

  Instead, give them an idea of what you think makes or breaks that particular design. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like that shade of blue goes with that shade of yellow. Maybe you could try a different shade of blue?’ This goes over a lot better for both you and other designer.

What things have you learned from watching the Terminator?



March 24, 2009 at 1:41 pm | Design | No Comments »

A short and neat tutorial on Light and Shadows

The tutorial is not of my design and demonstrates how to create light and shadow using the Feathering tools in Photoshop. Go over and take a look!

Creating Light and Shadows in Photoshop with the Feathering



March 23, 2009 at 1:51 pm | General | No Comments »

T-shirts at ModernTee.com

I created a design for a line of T-shirts on ModernTee.com. If you like my design, please take a minute to go over to their site and vote for me.



Follow this link to my design


*Edit* Apparently my design has not been approved just yet, hopefully it should be up soon.



March 20, 2009 at 10:40 am | General | No Comments »

Create a Custom Photoshop Brush

The concept of creating a custom brush in Photoshop is quite simple. Most of the work involved is nothing more than creating your brush! What I’m going to show you today is not going to be fancy, nor time consuming. So without further adieu, let’s do this thing!

Create a design in Photoshop that you would like to be able to easily replicate or that you would like to use as a brush. There are a couple things to keep in mind here:

• 1. Brushes retain transparency. If your brush design has any transparency whatsoever, this will translate into the final product.
• 2. Brushes do not retain color. If you create a multi colored design that you would like to turn into a brush, the colors will translate into various states of transparency depending on the color and what’s in the background. For this reason, it is generally best that you stick with a greyscale theme. You can create a color design, but the chances of the transparencies translating incorrectly are pretty high

Ok, so open a new Photoshop Document. Set the size to 500px wide by 500px high. We want the resolution of this brush to be really good, so set the resolution to 300 pixels/inch.



new document

Now fill the current layer with white, and then create a new layer. Create your brush design in blacks and different scales of grey, depending on what portions you wish to have transparent. I went with a simple zombie style smiley face in black and white with no transparent pieces.



braaaains!

Now comes the fun part. Click on Edit > Define Brush Preset. In the window that pops up, give your brush a descriptive name, then click OK.



Name it something good!

Now your brush is set. Go to your brush tool and you can now select the new brush that you created. Feel free to play around with it in a new document.



select the brush, and use it!

Finally, we want to be able to use our new brush later and just in case we override our current palette of brushes, we need to save our brush set. So open your brush palette, and open up the brush menu, in the screenshot the brush menu is opened by clicking the circle with a black arrow in it.



save the brush!

In the brush menu, choose Save Brushes. Name it something that you’ll remember and click Save.

Congratulations! You’ve created a custom brush and saved a brush set. You can now create many more brushes that you can use anytime you need.

Thank you for going through this tutorial. Please check back often for more fantastic Photoshop tutorials.



March 19, 2009 at 9:25 am | Design, Tutorials | No Comments »

Developing for the Google Android Phone

A professional group of friends that I know have been developing for the iPhone and Google Android phone for several months now and have been fairly successful.

I gotta say, the market for these phone applications is ripe and people are making a good living by developing for them. He’s got a short article laying out some good books that may help for those out there interested in getting into this growing market.

http://www.kphizzle.com/?p=100



March 17, 2009 at 10:42 am | General | 3 Comments »

Designer’s Commandment: Thou shalt not destroy pixels!

I learned early on the value of preserving pixels. Often I would be working on a project, carelessly adding elements into a piece only to discover that I wanted to go a different direction. What I failed to realize at the time was that unless you are consciously using pixel saving methods, it is very difficult to go back. With Photoshop, you generally only have up to 20 history points that you can go back to. (you can set this value higher in Edit > Preferences)

So if you are doing a lot of digital painting or drawing, or you’re messing around with blending options…those 20 spots of history can go really fast. This is why the art of preserving pixels is so important. There are a few methods you can use to preserve your pixels, and if you’re of a mindset to use them often, it can save you time and keep your original materials from being destroyed if you were to accidentally save over them.

In today’s tutorial, I’ll go over the methods that I use the most.

1. Save a copy. This method is literally the easiest possible way to preserve your original pixels. If you are working with original .jpg files, open the original and immediately save it as a photoshop document (.psd). This can help to prevent data and pixel corruption of the original files. The down side to this method is that it can start to take up a lot of space on your hard drive. With the size of hard drives growing rapidly, this is rapidly becoming a null issue.

2. Snapshot tool.




The snap shot tool


When you click the icon, Photoshop takes a snap shot of the current state of your project. Keep in mind that unless you use this tool often, it won’t do a whole lot of good for you. However, if you wanted to try out a few different things on a particular project, this is a great way to set a starting point. Simply click the icon and atop the history window, you’ll see a new ‘history layer’ appear. If you work on your project for a while and decide that maybe you didn’t want to go that direction on it, just click the new ‘history layer’ and it will revert back to the state it was when you created a snapshot.

3. Masks
This is perhaps my most favorite pixel saving method. There are a few different ways to go about using this particular tool. The simplest mask is a Layer Mask and is located as you see in the screen shot.




The tool is located in the bottom of the screen shot.

When you click the button, Photoshop places a blank mask layer on the same layer that you were working with. As you can also see in the screen shot, there is a white rectangle located next to the current layer you were working with.

Keep in mind a very simple rule when working with the Layer Mask tool:
White Allows. Black Suppresses
When you implement a Layer Mask, it automatically selects the mask portion of the layer. If you have doubts, check that there is an extra box around that white rectangle, and not the original layer. If you click once on either layer, you can see how it shows the selection with a thin white rectangle.

Now to begin using the Layer Mask, select a brush and start painting over the portion of the project you wish to hide. Remember the rule? White Allows. Black Suppresses When you paint in BLACK it will cover over the layer you are working on. When you paint in WHITE, it will reveal whatever you have painted on.



Mask Example

You can see here how I’ve used a Layer Mask to paint over the castle in the picture. I’ve also used the layer mask to get rid of some jagged looking white edges when I took out the sky background in the picture seen below.



You can see the jagged white edges here.

I used the layer mask to preserve the entire picture so that I could go back at any time and not have to redo everything all over again. The white jagged pieces as well as the original sky background is still there. It’s just hidden from view.

You can do this with adjustment layers (the 2 tone circle button next to the Layer Mask button) as well to adjust or change colors in a given layer without destroying the pixels of your original materials.

These techniques can really save you a lot of time and preserve the original materials you may be working on. Keep checking back from time to time, there is a LOT of different techniques and tools in Photoshop that can make your life that much easier.



March 17, 2009 at 10:27 am | Design, Tutorials | No Comments »

Saw Watchmen this evening…

It was a very well done movie. I was quite pleased with the overall movie and shall most likely purchase the DVD when it arrives. I felt most drawn to the mysterious character Rorshach. The whole concept was very well done. At any rate, I felt inspired to create a wallpaper based on that character. Enjoy!



what do you see?

Here is a link to 1650 x 1050 size (widescreen)



March 14, 2009 at 11:54 pm | General | No Comments »

Bonus!

I found a few minutes during a break today to create…take a look!



Dream in Color...

Download a 1028 by 768 size for your desktop!



March 12, 2009 at 3:51 pm | General | No Comments »

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