School of Design – Brushes 101 4

Welcome back to my final post of my month-long series on brushes.  Over the past few weeks, we talked about how to load, resize and color brushes; how to use brushes as stamps; and how to use your brush tool to manipulate and create clipping masks using your brush supply.  And today I’ll finish up by sharing some final uses for brushes that you may not have thought of before.

Let’s start by using your basic brushes to draw lines:

Step One: Select a hard round brush.  I set mine to 6 pixels.

Step Two: Open up your brush palette and select Brush Tip Shape.  Click on Spacing and drag the slider all the way to the left until the value reaches 1%.

Step Three: Create a new layer.

Step Four: While holding the shift key down, click and drag out until your line is the length you want it.  (The shift key keeps the line straight.)

How might you use this, you ask?  Well, you might use it to underline journaling like in this layout:

or this one:

or to create your own journaling box like in this layout:

or this one:

Or to frame your photos like in this one:

and this one:

Similarly, you can increase the spacing to create a dotted line like I did on this page:

Or to create a butterfly trail:

The possibilities are endless.

Now let’s move on to another brush tip:  Customizing Fonts.

There are a number of ways to make the following enhancements to your text.  You can erase, lock your pixels and stamp on your text, or you can add a layer mask.   I will discuss with you each way.

Select a big, fat font.  I used Impact.  Type out your text.  Right click and select Rasterize.  You will no longer be able to edit it, so make sure you didn’t misspell anything!

Using the eraser tool: If you are able to, take a snapshot of your layout before you use the eraser tool so if you mess up, you can easily go back to where you started.

Select the eraser tool and a hard, round brush. I set mine to 10 pixels.  Scribble over your font and watch your designs appear!  If you happen to be fortunate enough to have a pen tablet, even better!

Or, you could select a pattern or grunge brush and stamp on your font with your eraser:

Circle Cluster brush by Karla Dudley from Digi Essentials

Grunge Brush Set by Erica Coombs

**Keep in mind that this is erasing your text, not painting white on it.  So the layers below it will show through.**

Using a layer mask: This is my preferred method because it is non-destructible, so you can add and subtract until you find the look you are going for!

Using the brush tool: First you need to lock your pixels.  With your text layer highlighted, click on the checkerboard next to the word “Lock” on your layers palette.

A lock appears next to your text layer in your layers palette indicating the layers are locked. 

Now, whatever you stamp onto this layer will be contained to the text only.  Here is where you can stamp on it in white so the layers beneath don’t peek through, or you can introduce some color!

Flower brush from Familiarity by Karla Dudley.

This technique leads me to the final point I’d like to discuss, which is selectively coloring parts of a brush.  This can best be illustrated using a wordart brush.

Step One: Stamp out your wordart.  I stamped mine out in a soft aqua color.  However, I’d like to use a contrasting color on only part of the brush.

Wordart brush from Everyday Sentiments by Karla Dudley.

Step Two: Lock your pixels following the steps outlined above.

Step Three: Select a different color and a basic round brush.  I selected a raspberry pink color and a hard, round brush of 150 pixels.  Paint over the part of your brush you want to recolor.  I chose to recolor the middle word, “Mother’s.”

So, there you have it:  a plethora of new ways to breathe life into your brush supply.

I hope this blog series has given you a greater appreciation of the beauty of brushes and I look forward to seeing what gorgeousness you create with your newfound knowledge!  As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask away!

Happy scrapping!