Feeling like your artistic endeavors are falling flat lately? Â Need a little pickup?
If you haven’t already started exploring the wonderful world of brushes you’re missing out on a world of possibilities. Â Whether it’s adding flourishes to invitations to give them an elegant touch or creating a collage brushes make it easy. Â All it takes are a few simple steps to get yourself going, here’s the rundown:
1. Â Hop online and start looking for “photoshop brushes”. Â You’ll be confronted with a huge list of sites that provide downloads to all kinds of brushes. Â Make sure you check the permissions for each brush and note them. Â Some folks are willing to let you use their brushes for any type of application, others have restrictions on commercial use. Â Remember to play nice, these folks are sharing their hard work with you, give credit where credit is due.
2. Â Create a folder somewhere handy like your desktop and save your brushes to that folder. Â The files that you download will usually be in .zip format and we’ll need to extract them later to use them. Â If you don’t already have it, you should consider getting WinRar (rarlab.com) it’s a handy free tool to compress and extract a number of formats.
3. Â Extract your brushes. Â I usually highlight, right click and use winrar to “extract here” Â that way most of the brushes will end up in one folder. Â You can then sort by file type to select all your brushes. Â You’ll be looking for the .abr extenstion. Â Highlight, right click and copy.
4. Â Open up your Adobe PS Program Folder and look for a folder called Presets and then Brushes. Â Paste your brushes into this folder and we’re ready to go. Â We are just pasting into the Brushes Preset folder for the sake of simplicity, you can load them from any location.
5. Â From photoshop: Â Create a new image, let’s say 1000×1000 to play around with. Â Select the brush tool, and you’ll see your brush options on the top toolbar. Â Select the pull down next to the brush & the button on the top right of that window. Â You will see all of your brushes that you downloaded. Â I’ve gone through and renamed most of my brushes, you can do so by changing the file names in the Presets/Brushes folder. Â You may also want to select Large Thumbnails to get a better idea of what your brush is going to look like.
 Thanks Roxo89 for the Tribal Kittehs Brush.