I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them.
Firstly, what you need are
— CUSTOM BRUSHES —
Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:
For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):
This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu
You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once
This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME
Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:
– under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15%
– under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.
– If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your backgrounds
The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
— PATHS —
But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.
Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:
Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.
Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:
Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years
You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.
I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’:
Here is another photoshop tutorial for you all. This was requested by @simsthatsparkle , thank you for the suggestion! Also a huge thank you to @ridgeport for creating the stunning sim! Keep reading to go to the tutorial.
Kyle T. Webster shared a small pack of free Photoshop brushes!
if you’re using an older version of Photoshop, you may have to convert the .abr file using abrMate. you can also use abrMate to export the brush tips as .png files for use in different programs, but you’ll have to fine-tune all the brush settings yourself, and many programs, like Clip Studio Paint, lack some features such as Dual Brush so they won’t behave quite the same as they do in Photoshop.
These are some quick notes. If you’ve got questions about shading/colors lemme know I’ll edit the original post.
When making a piece I always want to make sure the overal rendering is good. Eyes are drawn to contrast. When you pick your colors make sure there are enough pleasant hues, enough contrasting values, and ENOUGH SATURATED AND DESATURATED COLORS
When you choose to do high saturated flat colors make sure your shadows and lights are desaturated. If you make your lights warm make your shadows cool. For values always check if your piece still looks appealing under a black and white gradient filter. If not, bump up those values! If your piece looks fine in black and white but trash in color HANDLE YOUR SATURATION.
as a former yearbook editor and designer, let me explain this further
if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well
BUT
please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality – this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.
this has been a public service announcement
I’ve replied to this once before but I see it’s doing the rounds again.
This is all utter bullshit.
I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here – if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:
JPEG is a lossy format. It is suitable for web imagery because it sacrifices detail for reduced file sizes, but in doing so it introduces artifacts that weren’t in the original; if you load a JPEG for editing, then save it as a different JPEG, then you’re adding more artifacts formed from those first artifacts. Do this often enough and you end up with a horrid glitchy mess that looks like a puddle’s reflection after a stone’s been thrown in. You’ve seen those memes that have 3 or 4 different “found at” tags along the bottom, that look like fingerpainted copies of the original? That’s why.
PNG is a lossless format that comes in two primary flavours, PNG-8 and PNG-24, which use 8 and 24 bit colour respectively. 8-bit colour is what you have in GIFs, a limit of just 256 different colours in a predetermined palette, usually automatically chosen by your software when saving. These files will look the same as GIFs, potentially with large patches of solid colour instead of the usual gradual shading seen in 24-bit imagery. This is usually better for small banners or pixel art, as it can yield smaller filesizes than GIF format. (There is an animated version called MNG but it has very little web support, hence the continued use of GIFs.)
PNG-24 is great for larger images where detail is as important as colour depth, as well as printable RGB images and (if supported by the client) full colour images with gradient transparencies. It most certainly does not make “the quality of the image pretty shitty,” as it preserves every nuance. File sizes can be smaller than JPEG for small images, or significantly larger for large images.
PDF is a container file, whatever you put into it will be pretty much preserved as it was, so you gain nothing but lose nothing.
TIFF is what you need to be using for archival or print-quality imagery. It has support for multiple layers, multiple colour channels (RGB as well as CMYK, which is essential for accurate print rendering), and everything is preserved exactly as it was seen on-screen when being composed. There are compressed versions available, they use similar methods to PNG in order to maintain detail without sacrifice; next to whatever your graphics program uses natively, this is the most interchangeable format available for professional use.
DPI is important only when used in combination with image dimensions; in and of itself it serves no purpose. If you make a brilliantly detailed 640×480 image & set it to 300dpi, you’ll receive a brilliantly detailed 2 inch x 1.6 inch print. This is great if you want to make a postage stamp, but not if you’re creating an A4 flyer! Determine the image’s dimension then set the DPI accordingly; 72dpi isn’t hideous especially for text-heavy work (it’s ~3 pixels per millimeter), and 150dpi can be suitable for many images. Unless you’re interested in photo realism, 300dpi is usually overkill – for our hypothetical A4 flyer, you’d need a file of 2490×3510 pixels for edge to edge printing, with a correspondingly high memory requirement and filesize even if using a compressed format.
Keeping the layers intact is utterly unimportant for print work unless you want to use a separated colour print method that requires multiple passes to lay down each ink. If you send a file with all the layers, masks, etc. off for printing you’re liable to get it sent back unactioned, as they won’t want to take responsibility for choosing the wrong elements for printing. Save your work with everything intact, then save a flattened copy especially for printing purposes – this is one of the reasons Save Copy As… is a common option in graphics manipulation software.
This has been a Public Service Rebuttal.
FUCKING THANK YOU
As a designer who’s worked a few years for a newspaper, I cannot begin to tell you how much OP’s post (edit: response, technically) made me cringe. I would have killed to get a photo as a TIFF for once instead of having to tear apart PDFs only to find a 50x100px 72dpi shitty JPEG inside for the 5 millionth time…
JPEG and PNG are best suited for web formats (and it is perfectly fine to save your web version as JPEG, that’s what it’s goddamn for). You will make a designer cry if you send a web-safe JPEG for print, however. And if you have a vectorized logo saved as EPS (or even better, AI), you will make that designer’s year.
Reblogging for artsy people that follow me. Also a lovely name for a program.
I WAS JUST WANTING TO DRAW SOMETHING WITH MY NEW TABLET BUT I COULDN’T BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE A PROGRAM TUMBLR IS READING MY MIND!!!!
I’m really fond of this program so far. It may be a bit over-simplified – I’ve had trouble figuring out some really basic things – but it responds really well to my tablet, which is the most important thing.
It launches fast. Works well on Windows AND Mac. It’s perfect for fast or derp doodles and screencaps. It has guides which are awesome for helping with drawing perspective and uniform direction lines It even shows you pretty artwork in its dialogue window at startup for inspiration. IT’S AWESOME.
For those who don’t know:
THE ALPACA HAS LEVELED UP
-Has an Animation Mode (OnionSkin mode) using the layers as frames -Reference Window -Advanced Brush settings and editing -New Filters such as “Invert”, “Extracting Lines”, “Cloud”, and “Sand” -More snap tools, including a 3D perspective function
And the younger sister software, Medibang Paint Pro, is a more robust version that’s usable on not just Computers, but Android and iOS systems as well
-You can save your preferences, workspace, brushes, palettes, and materials if you have a Medibang.com account, and you can export/import them across different computers if need be. -Medibang is a lot like Pixiv or DeviantART, except you can become a published illustrator and/or Comics/Manga artist, regardless of where you’re from in the world -Medibang allows you to upload directly to their site as long as you have an internet connection -You can collaborate with others on illustrations or comic projects using the cloud saving system -Free brushes, screen tones, and background images available for download from the cloud, for use in your artwork
Testing with WINE after download. Will update soon.
Update: Wine can handle it quite reasonably if my inexperienced ass does say so itself (yes, I did actually test it, but none of the animation or intensive features), so fellow Linux people? HAVE FUN!
test 