Hi. I’m Spencer, one of the designers here at Design House Digital. I also happen to be married to the wonderfully talented Jen Allyson, aka the Project Girl, hence my title Mr. Project. I like to tinker and explore new things.
While rummaging through some of my old art supplies the other day, I discovered these awesome marker ink bottles that I bought off an old college professor of mine for 25 cents a bottle. Killer deal. They come in different shades of gray.
My plan was to make some awesomely grungy splatter patterns that I could then turn into textures and brushes to use in my design process. I’d never done this before, so i figured I’d need a decent cardboard box. Luckily, we’re big amazon shoppers and I had just the right sized box lying around our place.
I took the box and taped the flaps together so that they formed a good barrier against splashing. I wouldn’t recommend doing this over a carpeted area, but it was cold outside and I had to give it a shot. I had some special paper in my stuff called Marker Paper.
Some of you may have used it, but if you haven’t it’s special because it doesn’t bleed that much, which is nice when using large quantities of inks and other chemicals to get splatter patters.
I also had some rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, and salt on hand. I’m sure if you wanted you could use other chemicals too. Just be careful not to pass out from any noxious fumes that result from reckless experiments.
The next part was fun. I stood on a chair and dropped some ink into the paper in the box. The result was beautiful and unique grunge splatters. I tried a few different things like sopping up excess ink with cotton balls, dripping more alcohol on after I let it dry, soaking the papers in alcohol and then applying ink, and letting the papers hang to get runs.
It was definitely a massive and messy experiment. I then let the papers sit, rest, and dry for a long time before scanning them in and turning them into brush kits. All in all, the process yielded some awesomely useful brush kits in the shop. Be sure to check out the Garage Line of brushes right now available in the Design House Digital Shop.
So now what? A brush is no good if you can’t import it. The Kits come with .abr files so that the brush palettes can be imported into photoshop or photoshop elements with ease, or be used as a photomask.
This is a fairly easy process. 1. click on the brush tool. 2. click on the arrow to expand your brush menu, 3. click on the “load brushes…” option.
That will open up a dialog box where you need to find and choose the .ABR file and select “LOAD”.
Once loaded your brushes will show up in the expanded brush menu like so:
Where you can choose a brush and get to it. The best part of brushes is that they can be recolored so easily. Just choose a color in your palate and you are good to go.
Hopefully this opens a whole new world of using all sorts of brushes. I know that I couldn’t live without them.
Related posts
Tags: Photoshop, Photoshop Brushes, Photoshop Elements, Spencer Nugent, Tutorials
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Spencer Nugent, Ryan McGinley. Ryan McGinley said: RT @dailysketches: RT @designhousedigi Loading Brushes in Photoshop Elements : Design House Digital http://ow.ly/1mMKrG [...]
I made a mist brush also. Here’s how it looks colored white:
http://www.scrapinstyletv.com/portfolio/view_layout.php?layout_id=197250&user_id=1620
Spencer you are awesome! I would have had no idea this is how you created these…thanks so much for sharing!
That is soooo cool! I love what you did with the ink! You are amazing!
Having tried this myself, I have to say, you are much more talented than I at getting cool, grungy looks & brushes! Loving them
How cool! I’m glad you got to have fun getting messy and experimenting while creating these! I’m glad I get to use them as a brush and NOT get messy too! Thanks for the extra bit about how to load the brushes!
Spencer, this is AWESOME! I love learning how you make your cool grungy splotches (which I know I’ll be using a lot!) Thanks for sharing the process and the PS tips too.
Thanks! It was really fun messing around and coming up with some cool brushes.
great job spencer! i have done this before with watercolors and its a mess! but great fun!
I figured watercolors would work too but I just didn’t have any paper. If I did have some watercolors though, I could have used some salt to get some cooler effects. Looking back too, maybe I could have used some bleach too