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Brush up your photoshop..

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Feeling like your artistic endeavors are falling flat lately?  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.  Whether it’s adding flourishes to invitations to give them an elegant touch or creating a collage brushes make it easy.  All it takes are a few simple steps to get yourself going, here’s the rundown:

1.  Hop online and start looking for “photoshop brushes”.  You’ll be confronted with a huge list of sites that provide downloads to all kinds of brushes.  Make sure you check the permissions for each brush and note them.  Some folks are willing to let you use their brushes for any type of application, others have restrictions on commercial use.  Remember to play nice, these folks are sharing their hard work with you, give credit where credit is due.

2.  Create a folder somewhere handy like your desktop and save your brushes to that folder.  The files that you download will usually be in .zip format and we’ll need to extract them later to use them.  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.  Extract your brushes.  I usually highlight, right click and use winrar to “extract here”  that way most of the brushes will end up in one folder.  You can then sort by file type to select all your brushes.  You’ll be looking for the .abr extenstion.  Highlight, right click and copy.

4.  Open up your Adobe PS Program Folder and look for a folder called Presets and then Brushes.   Paste your brushes into this folder and we’re ready to go.  We are just pasting into the Brushes Preset folder for the sake of simplicity, you can load them from any location.

5.   From photoshop:  Create a new image, let’s say 1000×1000 to play around with.  Select the brush tool, and you’ll see your brush options on the top toolbar.  Select the pull down next to the brush & the button on the top right of that window.  You will see all of your brushes that you downloaded.  I’ve gone through and renamed most of my brushes, you can do so by changing the file names in the Presets/Brushes folder.  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.