Photoshop Tutorial: Learning How to Use and Load Brushes in Photoshop

The brush selections in Photoshop are one of the main features of the digital art program. Once you become an advanced Photoshop user, you will learn how to use any brush in any way in your digital art and photos. For now we’re going to take simple baby-steps by just getting a basic introduction of how brushes work and how to alter their appearance on a canvas. By the end of this tutorial you will learn how to use and load brushes with ease.

Step One: Click the brush tool on the verticle menu bar, then click the drop down brush menu to select a brush to work with. This can be a brush you loaded yourself, or a default Photoshop brush.

Photoshop’s default brushes tend to be boring, so you can use any brush you like. If you google “free photoshop brushes” you will get tons of free and safe sites that offer free brushes for your personal use.

Step Two: First you’ll need to experiment with your brushes just for a basic feel on how they look. Open up a blank canvas, let’s say around 800×800 pixels in size.

Step Three: Start out with black and stamp the brush on the canvas to see what it looks like.

Step Four: Now that you have the basic brush look, try scrolling through the opacity option to different levels and stamp again. You’ll see this gives you a different effect depending on the percentage.

Step Five: This time we’ll change the size of the brush for another effect. Scroll through the size bar on the brush drop down menu. You’ll be able to select anything from 1 pixel to 2500 pixels. Again, stamp this on the canvas to see how it looks.

Step Six: Now we’re going to change the colors of the brushes. On the color selector, choose the color you want your brush to be. When you stamp this, the brush on the canvas will be the color you choose.

Tip: You can also try different combinations of opacities, sizes, and colors to achieve a variation of effects. Random looks much better! The same size, same color brush looks boring stamped next to each other.

Step Seven: If you feel you truely have the hang of using brushes so far, feel free to experiment with the color, mode and flow as well to achieve even more brush effects for your photos and art.

And there you have it! A quick and easy way to use brushes in Adobe Photoshop.