Photoshop Brush Tut, Birds and AEDM-Day 16

I sketched a couple of birds in a 1994 journal that I bought at a second hand store recently. The journal doesn't have any writing in it (except my sketches) and is in pristine condition. I have decided to make it my bird journal.

Also, as promised, I will show how I made the stitch brush to simulate hand stitching on the quilt I made the other day.

File > New

Select any size you want to work with, or

File > Open

If you already have a file that you want to add stitching to. Select the brush tool and click on the brushes option in the options bar (see below). Click on the fly out menu (little arrow on the top right) and choose load brushes. Scroll down the brushes until you find square brushes and load them.

Select a square brush. The size doesn't matter because we are going to use the brushes palette to make our brush behave like we want it to.

Open the brushes palette - Window > Brushes

Click on Brush Tip Shape in the list at the left and grab the black dots on the circle in the window and drag inward to flatten the brush (see screenshot below). There is nothing magic about how flat I made mine, but I am trying to imitate machine stitching so I wanted mine flat. As an aside, if you wanted to use a brush to simulate embroidery, you would probably use a round brush and flatten it much less than this.

Next drag the slider at the bottom of this same window to space your "stitches" in a manner you like.

Next click on Shape Dynamics in the list on the left. You want to set Size Jitter and Roundedness Jitter to 0% and Control for those two to Off. As an aside, if you want your stitches to look more like hand stitches, you might want to set the Size Jitter to a small number so that your stitches aren't quite so uniform.

The really important thing to change in this window is Angle Jitter. You want to set it to 0%, but you need to change the Control to Direction. Otherwise all your stitches will be, in this case, horizontal even when you are stitching vertically. When you choose direction, the stitches are oriented in the direction you are using the brush.

After you have made any changes to brush settings, you want to try it out. I made a selection using the rectangular marquee tool and filled it with color. I then selected my brush (it will be the one you just made) and began to stitch.

HINTS: If you want straight lines click where you want to begin and then while holding the Shift key click where you want the straight line to end. For instance, I began in the top left corner. I clicked in the corner and then held down the shift key and clicked in the top right corner, then I clicked in the bottom right corner while holding the Shift key, etc until I was all the way around. If you want to make diagonal stitches, if you click in a corner and then hold the Shift key while clicking in the opposite corner, your stitches will go in a straight line between the two corners.

Here is a close up of my rectangle:

As you can see I started too low on the bottom right corner, but rather than undoing it, I thought about when I used to sew and, well, you know, sometimes frequently I did run off the corner a bit.

I sure hope this is helpful to you. For my next tutorial, I am thinking about doing more about brushes and do something like a leaf brush and show more settings in the brushes palette and what they do. Please let me know if this is something you would like to see.

Gotta go - I am working on bird ATCs, a handmade Christmas card, metal-themed ATCs for early December, and a small clipboard and UHU glue that was sent to me by UHU so that I could try my hand at decorating it.

And my SIL is coming to stay for a few days and arrives on Wednesday afternoon, so you know a whole house cleaning is in order. But for today, I am going to visit the chiropractor for a follow up visit and then spend most of the rest of the day with a different SIL to play with her new computer and help her get it set up like she wants it.

I will see you tomorrow, I hope,