Brushes in Photoshop are an essential tool used for a variety of different things. You can paint, make sketches, combine it with layer masking strategies, and do a lot more.
Professionals often require custom made brushes to achieve their desired output, that otherwise wouldn’t be possible using regular preset brushes.
So, in this article, we’ll go over how to make custom brushes specifically by showing a demo of making a square brush. This process can be used to make different shapes and sizes of brush that you want.
We’ll start by knowing a little bit about what are Photoshop Brushes, in case, you are not that familiar or not very experienced with this topic.
What are photoshop brushes?
Photoshop brushes are preset of strokes and shapes of lines. It is used in a variety of different ways, such as painting or replicating real-life art, editing specific parts of an image using masking techniques, making custom shapes for working with specific images to add different effects.
Why do you need a square brush?
If you are working with images that have rectangular edges, such as buildings, tables, papers, etc. then having a square shaped brush can help you make a better selection. A round brush won’t be very effective in editing squared edges.
First let’s see how to use the built-in square brushes from photoshop and then we’ll make our custom square brush.
Using Built-in Square Brushes in Photoshop
Step 1: Creating a Document
Open photoshop from your desktop. There are two easy ways to create a new document.
1st: Hit CTRL + N (Windows)
2nd: Click the Create New Button
This opens a New Document dialog box. Enter the Height and Weight from the preset details. I’ll input 400 for the Height and 400 for the Weight.
Click Create and a new document with the dimension of 400×400 pixel will open. To get a better view, zoom in using CTRL + O, it will fit the document to the screen.
Step 2: Select the Brush tool
We’ll create a new brush using one of the existing brushes from photoshop. First, select the brush tool form the tools panel or hit B on your keyboard, which is a shortcut for selecting the brush tool.
Step 3: Choose the square brush
With the brush tool selected, right click anywhere on the document that will show the miniature version of the Brush Preset Picker. In newer versions of Photoshop CC, the square brush tool will be hidden by default. To find it click on the gear icon and select Legacy Brushes. It will load all the legacy brushes available in Photoshop.
From there navigate and select square brush option. Then select the brush that you prefer.
Making Custom Square Brush
Creating custom square brush is a very straightforward process. Follow the steps below and you will have your very own custom-made brush. You can use the same technique to make other shaped brushes as well.
Step 1:
First, create a new document as shown before, but this time make sure the document type is set to Pixels instead of other measurements. Then Select rectangular marquee tool. Press hold Shift and drag to make a perfect square.
Step 2:
Make sure your foreground color is Black. If foreground color is set to something different, then hit D on your keyboard to get the default setting, that is Black (foreground) and White (Background).
Now press Alt + Delete to paint the marquee selection to Black.
Step 3:
Select edit from the top menu and click on Define Brush Preset. Name the preset to whatever you prefer and hit OK. That’s how you create a custom square brush.
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