Chapter 13: Photoshop Brushes

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Section 1: The Basics of Photoshop Brushes

Many, many books have been published on how to use Photoshop. Because so many good materials are already available, we are not going to delve into all of the deep nooks and crannies of the program. This is a book on digital painting, and we will concentrate on what is most important to our task at hand: brushes and how to make them do what you want.

In this chapter, you will learn and/or refresh your memory on a number of different ways to access and use Photoshop's brushes. You will learn how to make a brush behave like you want. We will go over each of the palette and menu options that Photoshop gives you to control the look and feel of individual brushes. This will be a rather lengthy chapter, as we will look at each of the options available. Have patience; if you learn how to control Photoshop's brushes now, your productivity and creativity will be increased dramatically as you create your paintings.

Remember that for the most part you may want to use only one or two brushes for any given painting. Sometimes you will use a few more brushes but almost never will you want to use everything that is at your disposal. To be able to make those decisions you need to know

• Where Photoshop's brushes are located and how to access them

• How to change the basic properties of a brush

• The brush options available to you in the Brushes palette