Custom brushes are extremely handy when it comes to digital painting. While the brushes that are packed into Photoshop are pretty decent, they often feel stale and unnatural. With your own custom brush you can add some great texture to your strokes, which will create a painterly feel to your digital paintings.

Let's Begin

First, take some paper, brush and ink (a dark paint will also do) and run a few strokes on the page. Doing more than one will of course give you more choices. I then pick out the one that I feel has the best texture but doesn't have too many white spaces.

Scan and Clear the white spaces

Scan the stroke you selected. Scan it in as Grayscale and make sure it's somewhere between 100-200 dpi depending on the level of detail you want from your brush. 100 dpi is just fine for most cases, but if you are going to be using this brush on a painting with a large resolution, go with the higher dpi.

After scanning in the stroke, adjust the levels by going to Image>Adjustments> Levels. Or you can hit CTRL-L (CMD-L on the Mac). Adjust the sliders so that you have a nice crisp contrast. Clean up any dust or smudges by painting them white. If you need to, crop the image so that you don't have too much white space around the stroke.

Next, switch over to Channels in your Layers panel. CTRL -click on the thumbnail image for the Blue channel. This will put a selection around your stroke.

Next, go back to Layers. Your stroke layer will still be locked so double click on its name (will still say 'Background') then hit ok on the "New Layer" popup.

With your stroke layer still selected, hit DELETE on your keyboard and that should clear up all of the white space.

Home Stretch

Finally, hit CTRL-A (CMD-A on Mac) to select all. Then go to the Edit Menu and select "Define Brush Preset…" Give the brush an awesome name and hit ok. Your brush should now be selectable at the end of your Brush drop-down panel. Now paint away with your sweet new custom brush.

You can download the finished brush from this tutorial below.

Download Brush
gda-custom-brush.zip - 74kb

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