She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

This is…sort of…a picture of the h1n1 bug. I found it posted in a less-altered form on Boing Boing and thought, hey, this would make an excellent photoshop brush. And it does.

I made the edges more jaggy because flat edges make a brush less useful sometimes. (You can tell where the edge of the sample was. So that’s why I paint the edges white and then run around making it less uniform.)

If you would like to use this brush, just open it up in photoshop, and select all. Then go to the Edit menu (second one over on the top) and go down to Define Brush Preset. Voila! Name your brush H1N1 and have at it.

Original photo here and a hat tip to Boing Boing.

Here are some textures you can make with this brush. As you can see, it does lava/blood corpuscles, lilacs, undersea coral beds, and bubbles. I actually think this brush turned out pretty swell.

Here are the presets I used for the brush. You will find the brush palette up at the top if you have your brush tool selected. (It looks like a little folder with dots on it.) Alternately, there is a brushes palette pullout tab on the side of your docked (which looks like a jar with brushes in it.)

Have fun painting with this brush. This post was made possible by the letters H and N, and the number 1.

I’ve been experimenting with making my own custom brushes. You can pretty much make anything a custom brush, if’n you want, and so I’ve been making me some handy foliage and texturing brushes. I started off by painting a greyscale painting on a white background…and painting it fairly largely. These brushes are all from approximately 350 pixels minimum size to 700 pixels. (So I can scale to whatever I want.)

I recommend not filling your brush all the way to the edges. Leave some ragged edges for better foliage. (With the brick brushes, I leave scatter and shape dynamics off, and sorta paint swathes of brickiness, and try to fill in the gaps later with other brick brushes I’ve made. If I wanted really uniform bricks, I wouldn’t use a brush at all but just make a straight up pattern.)

Select all, then head to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Voila! A brush. Open the brushes Palette to toy with scatter and angle jitter and dual brushes. So much fun. Also kinda relaxing to make the initial brushes.

Mostly, I’m just sharing the ones I’ve made recently. If you want a fun brush tutorial, I recommend Linda Bergkvist’s brush tutorial.