The Problematic Brush

As I mentioned previously, Adobe has not really understood the needs of those of us used to working with real paints and brushes. In all of the brushes that Photoshop CS3 comes with, there is not one that will give you the effect of real paint being brushed onto a board. Sadly, all that's available in the default selections are hard brushes to give solid flat colour, soft brushes that have diffused edges like an airbrush, and an assortment of textures that work like moving rubber stamps, not serving artists so much as providing a novelty for the crafts enthusiasts. (Sorry for my blunt opinion, but that's the way I see it.)

And so, I was rather delighted to find a custom brush that caricaturist Court Jones uses extensively in his art (like the sample pictured below of The Beatles) that he describes how to make in a tutorial he posted on the NCN forums some time ago. I've recreated it here to show what a neat effect it can give you:



Step 1): Using the circle selection tool, fill a circle with a bunch of random, unevenly drawn horizontal lines drawn with a small hard round brush. Then, under "Edit", choose "Define Brush Preset". This will then add your new brush to the collection of existing Photoshop brushes. But it still needs some more work...

Step 2): In your brush settings, select "Brush Tip Shape". Then set the "Spacing" slider to between 15 and 20%.
Next, select "Shape Dynamics". Make sure that under "Size Jitter", the control is set to "Pen Pressure". Then, under "Angle Jitter", set the control to "Direction".
Finally, select "Other Dynamics" and make sure both controls are set to "Pen Pressure".

Don't forget to save it as a "New Brush Preset". Then, just for safety's sake, quit Photoshop and relaunch it. This will make sure that the brush is saved in the event of a crash.

Assuming you have made all these setting adjustments, the brushstroke thumbnail in the bottom of your brush settings should resemble the hairs of a round watercolour brush - soft horizontal lines that converge into tapered ends. Once you start making some marks with it, they should look like the samples here when at full 100% opacity and flow.

Step 3): When used at full strength, the brush strokes look a little harsh. But if you reduce the opacity to about 30% or less, you can start getting some nice creamy blends just like real paint. You also want to get in the habit of using the eyedropper tool to choose surrounding colours to further blend with, ending up with what looks like the sample I've sketched here.

Now, ideally, everything should be working well for you at this point and, with much experimenting and practise, you may be able to paint nearly as well Court Jones. Not an easy feat, I'll grant you :)

However, if you're using an iMac like me, you may run into a snag. I've found that this particular custom brush will sooner or later cause Photoshop to crash, leaving the message, "Photoshop has unexpectedly quit". Although, after it happens several times, it isn't so unexpected any more. The culprit, as I mentioned in the earlier post, is the "Direction" setting. I'm convinced that is what is problematic for the iMac, anyway. I've mentioned the problem to several Adobe tech support people but they all seem to play dumb, claiming that they've never heard of this happening before. Yeah, I'll bet.

And so, I continue to dislike virtual art media when compared to the real thing. Forever the traditionalist, that's me...

More Photoshop Frustration!

In addition to the problems I'd been having with the computer itself, I was also encountering a snag with Photoshop. As I mentioned in a recent post on how I'm hoping to learn some digital painting skills, I can't see it being very successful using only the default set of brushes. Unfortunately, I don't think that Adobe has ever really come to terms with the fact that much of their clientelle includes illustrators, not just photographers, and have really not created brushes that behave like natural sable or bristle brushes in order to satisfy our requirements. However, they have now opened things up a bit by allowing for artists to create "custom brushes", either by adjusting the settings of existing brushes, or creating something from scratch.

Not long ago, I had read on the forums of the National Caricaturist Network, a tutorial by the brilliant Court Jones (sample art shown at left), showing how to construct custom brushes in Photoshop that would behave similar to real brushes. I followed his directions to create one and, not long after starting to use it, Photoshop just crashed, disappearing and leaving the message, "Photoshop has unexpectedly quit". Several attempts later and it was causing Photoshop to crash every time. Many phone calls to Adobe did not help to resolve the problem, and they were convinced it couldn't be their program, that it must be my computer. I might have believed that, were it not for the fact that the same thing has happened on the iMac that was having the power problem (as detailed in last post), the new iMac Apple gave me in exchange, and also the 24" model that I insisted on upgrading to. Therefore, the glitch is in Photoshop itself, or at least something that is incompatible with the iMac.

My Google search into the matter turned up some interesting discussions on various creative forums, though. Seems that many graphic artists who have experienced the same problem have come to the conclusion that the trouble lies with the setting of "Direction" under the "Shape Dynamics" function. This setting is essential for enabling the virtual "hairs" of the brush to follow in the direction that you move the stylus. Seems that this is problematic on a lot of computers, causing some conflict between software and hardware, resulting in a crash at some point. I find it very frustrating, and it also reinforces my personal belief that virtual media is still no match for real brushes and paint! Fact is, I haven't yet been able to totally control making even a simple, smooth line using Photoshop. Yet it is a simple matter for me to create a line with real brush and ink that is a thing of great beauty. Why should I have to fight with percentages of opacity, flow, brush size and pen pressure settings in order to do what I can so easily accomplish through intuitive pressure and angling of a well crafted Winsor & Newton sable brush?

However, one good thing that has come out of all of my exploration was finding a tutorial on how to make a custom brush that feels pretty much like a nice soft pencil for sketching with. I found this great little tip on the blog of concept artist/designer, Paul Lasaine. All it involves is taking one of the default brushes and tweaking the settings a bit to make something more practical for the artist. I've tried using Sketchbook Pro on a friend's computer, and this custom brush created on Photoshop feels much the same as the Sketchbook ones, as I recall.

These are a couple of Photoshop doodles I just did to play with this virtual pencil. There is a nice freedom to using this modified brush and I can see myself getting some good use out it. These two samples started out as sketches directly using the new brush, then adding a layer on top, selecting the "Multiply" feature, then adding colour just using the soft round brushes full strength and going back to blend some areas with some gentle airbrushing. They look similar to the results I would achieve if using coloured markers on a photocopied pencil sketch. Great for visual concepts, if nothing else, although I don't want to rule out this approach even for a fresh looking piece of final art.

Photoshop Frustration!

I must admit, I'm still pretty leery of digital artwork. Up to this point, all of my artwork generated on the Mac has been of the hybrid sort: drawn and inked traditionally by hand, then scanned in and coloured up with Photoshop. Notice I said "coloured" as opposed to "painted". You see, I don't consider what I've achieved thus far to be digital paintings - at least not in the truest sense.

Here's a recent example which explains why not. This actually just started out as a test to see if I could create something using the Paths function on Photoshop. Frankly, I've never been able to figure out how to use that nefarious Pen tool, with it's Bezier Curves function. Being a right-brained kind of guy, I just couldn't make sense of those weird little handles. However, one of my students this year at Sheridan, Lawrence Lam, was kind enough to give me a basic tutorial on the different aspects of the Pen tool. I hadn't been practicing since then (about March), so it took a lot of messing around with it a couple days ago to figure it all out again. Fact is, it took me several hours to achieve what l did, so I'm going to have to work with this a lot more to get up to speed!


First of all, I needed some subject matter to practice on. Let's see now, what should I draw? Hmmm...hey, how about a CUTE GIRL! Fortunately, I'd been downloading pics of The Toronto Sun's daily "Sunshine Girl" for just such an occasion, so I had quite a collection to draw from. Though these pics are all relatively small, I wasn't in great need of visual clarity, as I am not attempting to achieve a perfect caricatured likeness of a specific girl. Anyway, I liked the sunny look of this cute blonde with her ponytails, plus the pose was appealing, so I went with her.


So here is my pencil sketch, starting out with a rough blue underdrawing, then defined on top with a dark pencil outline. (Are you paying attention, Sheridan students?) Like I said, I'm not trying to get a true likeness of this girl like I would with my celebrity caricatures - I'm just trying to capture her essence and using her pose and facial type as a starting point for what will be a much more cartooned interpretation. You can see how I've pushed the pose more, exaggerating the tilts and angles. For some reason, I have no idea why, I just gave her a single ponytail in the back instead of the two that the model has. Anyway, I only spent less than 20 minutes on the drawing, as it really was just for the purpose of this test with the Paths tool.


So after creating individual Paths for her flesh, hair, skirt, top, lips, eyes, etc. etc., I was finally ready to start adding colour. Initially I just filled each area with flat colours using the Paint Bucket tool, then started some fairly simple rendering in each area. I did want to try to get away from just using the Airbrush tool, so I used a custom brush that I learned how to make from an online tutorial that gave a more textured sort of rendering, similar to pastel. That, plus some softening here and there with the Airbrush seemed to result in a piece that was fairly appealing. I kept my pencil sketch on a transparent layer on top, lowering the opacity of the linework so it didn't overpower the colour. However, here's where I feel rather handicapped by my minimal knowledge of Photoshop and digital painting.


Here is the same artwork with the pencil sketch layer turned off so that just the colour is visible. As you can well see, it doesn't work like this, as it needs the pencil line to pull it all together. Ideally though, I would like to develop my Photoshop skills enough to attempt a real digital painting, using just tonal rendering to create the form, though perhaps using a bit of accent linework to strengthen it here and there. Recently, I've joined the National Caricaturist's Network (NCN), and have been studying the wonderful work of such talented folks as Joe Bluhm, Court Jones and Paul Moyse, just to mention a few. All of these guys are exceptional talents working with both digital and traditional media, but it's their digital work that I'm really trying to learn from. These guys are truly digital "painters" in the very real sense - something that I currently can only aspire to. If anyone can recommend any good sites for simple and clear Photoshop painting tutorials, please feel free to post them here in the comments section. Thanks!

Digital Cheesecake!

For a long time now I've been trying to figure out this digital painting stuff with Photoshop and finally I seem to making some headway. I went through pretty much all of the Photoshop brushes, trying them out in various ways to see what I could do with them, but I find most of them rather unsatisfying. However I did stumble upon this one that, after lots of messing with, I found I could get some nice painterly results. I also had been studying the work of fellow caricaturists, Court Jones and Paul Moyse, both of whose abilities I admire greatly, in order to analyze how they're using the medium so well.

So then I decided to experiment and see what I could accomplish with this initial amount of Digital knowledge, as little as it was. I started out sketching this girl right on the screen using a brush I'd created from a tutorial that gives a nice soft pencil look. Then on a separate layer, I jumped in with both feet and started to paint it. I must confess that I got very frustrated along the way, nearly giving up a few times, but I persevered just to see what I could learn from the experience if nothing else. For this first attempt, I do wish I hadn't painted the background so close to the colour of her hair, though I do kind of like the way her hair melds into it at the back.

The more I worked with it, the more it started looking like a cartoonier version of the type of pin-up paintings I've always loved by Gil Elvgren, with a rich, creamy, oil paint feel to it. Since I didn't really know what I was doing most of the time, it took me hours longer to do than it really should have, but this was just a learning experience and hopefully I'll be able to accomplish things more quickly as I get more proficient with it.

For this second attempt I used several vintage 50's pin-up photos as reference, combining elements from each and making stuff up as well. This time, however, I drew her in pencil on paper the way I normally do, then scanned in the sketch. After making it into a transparent layer in Photoshop, I painted in the main areas on a separate layer underneath, first in flat colours, then adding a bit of modeling based on the lighting in the reference photos. Above is the rough sketch with quick colour added. It's actually a fun and satisfying technique in itself, and warrants more exploration sometime.

Once I had a rough colour sketch I was happy with, I merged the two layers together and started into the "oil painting" technique on top. Though I was having an easier time of it since my first attempt, the difficulty with digital painting is knowing when to stop and leave an area alone. I tried to keep the whole thing progressing at the same rate, but it's always so tempting to start embellishing it with details too early in the process.

Seeing the finished artwork, I'm still not sure about some things. In my opinion, there could still be more tonal definition, as I feel that some areas look too soft, especially when compared back to the colour sketch. Doing narrow, smooth lines is not easy in Photoshop, and I therefore have a hard time with detail in the hair, as well as the eyelashes, and any areas where I've used a bit of soft darker outline to help accentuate some of the form. Here's where a good sable watercolour brush still beats the heck out of computer technology, in my opinion. (Yes, I remain a traditionalist at heart!)

Anyway, these are just a couple of initial attempts to learn the digital painting process. I keep on studying the work of artists I like in order to pick up additional skills, but I know it's a long road ahead of me.