Custom Brushes Tutorial

Intention

Along with the brushes already included, you can create custom brushes using three methods. Simple shapes are created using th button labelled New at the bottom of the brush selection dialog. Complex black and white brushes can be created by saving a grayscale image as using the .gbr file extension. The content of such a brush is treated line an alpha-channel. This means that any pixel that is pure white is treated as transparent. However, in this tutoria we will be creating brushes that use pictures with colour and this brush will also have multiple images.

Step 1

Draw A Paint Brush

Intention

So, we want to create a nice paintbrush image with GIMP. This tutorial can be a bit complex and I think it is better for a bit more advanced GIMPer. If you want to learn the basics, a good way to do so is to get one of the many GIMP books written. If I must pick one to recommend, I think it would be Grokking The Gimp, it is pretty good. But I am sure many of the others are great too, check a few out at your bookstore!

Step 1

Create Custom Photo Brushes

Step 1

Open Photoshop and open a photo to use as a brush. It should be something that would work in a pattern, where the content of the photo is obvious as various sizes. I’m using this “blue angel wing” I found on iStockPhoto. IT should be relatively large, perhaps 1000 pixels for both width and height. If you create a brush at a small size, setting the brush to a larger size than originally created will cause it to lose resolution. But making it smaller is no problem, just like resizing a photo.

 

© ISTOCKPHOTO/DON WILKIE

Optional: You can download this file to use at http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=130023 or use a similar one.

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