PHOTOSHOP BRUSH SETTINGS….One of the more popular questions I get is whether or not I use slef-made custom brushes. The answer is “no”. I just use whatever is there in the version of Photoshop I happen to be using. I do tend to favor the “harder” edge brushes vs. the soft “airbrush” ones, as it lends more to the grittier outcome I am aiming for as a painting.

To tell the truth, I am still learning a whole lot about the program, and am actually a little bit behind in the whole thing. Most of my hardcore intitial learng of PS came between versions 5.5 and 6.0. Then, all of a sudden, Adobe sort of “rocked my world” when they made major changes with 7.0. I was very confused and frustrated with a lot of the settings, as they seemed more complicated. When they came out with CS, they seemed to fix all of the things that bothered me about 7.0.

But I must confess- I do not do much exploring of the capabilites of this program. I find something that seems to work, and I sit complacent on that for a while, even if I do not understand it’s function 100%. For example- I still don’t understand the importance of the “flow” and “opacity” settings at tthe top… I just leave them alone, both at 100%. Call me naive, but remember, I never went to school for this stuff, and have pretty much “winged it” with success up to this point!

Only recently have I started to experiment a little outside of the traditonal hard edge/ soft edge brushes. I stumbled on th e”spatter” brushes, and messed tith the “scatter” settings, found that it made great realistic skin detail on photo-real portraits.

But all in all, I particalarly enjoy sketching with a hard round brushh the most. The smallest I usually have the brush set ot is “2″ or “3″, on a canvas that is anywhere from 7″ x 5″ at 150 dpi to 8″ x 10″ at 300 dpi, the latter being my most frequent.

ABOVE: Highlighted in yellow are my current favorite most used brushes.

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